And Here I Had Convinced Myself...

that Montana was a pretty cool place. From teh Dailykos: (get More Dwarf)

Last week I heard about a woman in Great Falls, Montana, who went to her local, privately owned pharmacy, Snyder Drug (NOTE: this pharmacy is not part of the the larger Snyder Drug/Katz corporation), to fill her birth control prescription. When she went to the pharmacy counter, she received a slip of paper signed by the pharmacy owners (Stuart Anderson, Kurt Depner and Kori Depner) stating that the pharmacy would no longer fill birth control prescriptions.

Adding insult to injury, the note goes onto say that they pharmacy will "continue to serve your prescription needs with utmost care and trust." The customer, who happens to be a 49-year-old woman who is unable to conceive and uses birth control for a medical condition, called the pharmacy and asked one of the owners why the pills were being discontinued. The owner told her that birth control pills are dangerous for women.

Here's the note:


What with Jon Tester and Brian Schweitzer, and the great time I had around Glacier last September, Montana was looking up in my mind. But with this...

I know I can't judge the whole state on this one asshole pharmacy. Heck, we have our share of misogynist, racist, Christianists where I live too. This just makes me hate them that much more.

Hate Congress; Hate Executive Branch More

Congress is a spineless sack of shit. Those worthless gasbags who voted to send yet another blank check into the endless meatgrinder that is our war of choice should resign their positions and seriously consider taking pistol to brain. They don't deserve to represent the American people any longer. They are utter failures, and our military's blood is on their hands.

That said, the Bush Junta is a bigger and more immediate threat. Dems, I'll still vote Democratic, but you can be sure as fucking hell that I will work tirelessly to defeat you in our primaries and kick your spineless asses out of office. We need real leadership and real representation. This week only clarified your catastrophic lack of either.

You won't be the first up against the wall (metaphorically) in our revolution; the fascists in the executive branch are more pressing. But don't think we've forgotten your failures here this week.

I Have Made It

Yes! My first word on Urbandictionary.com is the Word of the Day!

nonpology May 23
An insincere apology or expression of regret, often blaming the aggrieved party for being offended or bringing up an irrelevant topic to distract.
"Did you hear Don Imus' nonpology the other day? Like his racist remarks are actually the result of rap music."

"I really get tired of politicians' nonpologies. All they're really saying is they're sorry they got caught."

Le Squee!

That is all.

Catch-22 of Punishing Women for Careers

This needs to be spread wider, even though it's only in a comment at Pandagon. Posted by LisaKS:

no matter what you, fertile woman of childbearing age does, you are just so, so WRONG. It’s almost beautiful in its circular totality. You:

1. Get married, get pregnant, have a baby, stay home to take care of it. Leech! Lazy!
2. Get married, get pregnant, have a baby, put in in daycare and go to work. Uncaring! Unmaternal!
3. Get married, get pregnant, have an abortion. Immoral! Murderer!
4. Get married, choose to never get pregnant. Selfish! Unnatural!
5. Don’t get married, get pregnant, have a baby, stay home and take care of it. Slut! Leech!
6. Don’t get married, get pregnant, have a baby, put it in daycare and go to work. Slut! Uncaring!
7. Don’t get married, get pregnant, have an abortion. Slut! Murderer!
8. Don’t get married, choose to never get pregnant. Unnatural! Ugly! (cause the only reason a woman would ever be in this situation is cause no man wants her, of course)

Christian Terrorists

Wow. I had no faith in the sanity of Liberty University students before, but now, well...

Campbell County authorities arrested a Liberty University student for having several homemade bombs in his car.

The student, 19-year-old Mark D. Uhl of Amissville, Va., reportedly told authorities that he was making the bombs to stop protesters from disrupting the funeral service. The devices were made of a combination of gasoline and detergent, a law enforcement official told ABC News' Pierre Thomas. They were "slow burn," according to the official, and would not have been very destructive.

"There were indications that there were others involved in the manufacturing of these devices and we are still investigating these individuals with the assistance of ATF [Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms], Virginia State Police and FBI. At this time it is not believed that these devices were going to be used to interrupt the funeral services at Liberty University," the Campbell County Sheriff's Office said in a release.

This is terrorism just as much as those who bomb abortion clinics or blow up buses in Israel. Terrorism. Why won't the media report it as such? Because Christians can't be terrorists, apparently. At least, the news whores won't call them terrorists.

(h/t Ed Brayton)

Tear Public Schools Down? WTF?

I see the crazy free marketers have shown up over at PZ's place. I'll reproduce here what I said over there.

The major benefit of public schools is they attempt (imperfectly, but better than the invisible handjob which attempts the opposite) to break down class barriers.

In short, if the Libertarians get their way, poor kids will have poor educations which get them low paying service and labor jobs, and rich kids will have the best educations that give them the best salaries, and such a system will transform America into an impenetrable aristocracy in less than a generation. When we guarantee that everyone has an average (and always striving to be better) education, we break the positively reinforcing caste structure inherent in capitalist systems.

Saturday Slacking - Grog Blog: Lunar Ale

Hey hey! So it's Saturday, and as I promised, here's my Grog Blog about Boulevard's Lunar Ale. It's late, but I'm ready to have more beer. I'm watching The Lost Room on DVD now, but you deserve my beer ramblings. Head down to More Dwarf.




Poured out in the glass, it's a nice, cloudy brown color. Almost more of a dark orange color, with a head of foam that holds up, but isn't an impenetrable barrier.

First sip - There's a bitterness that quickly diminishes. It's a full taste, high up in the front of the mouth.

It's a nice brown beer, but nothing special.

Five out of eight beers. On the Microbrew scale, it's probably a Mike.

Grog Blog: Delayed

Sorry, ya'll, no grog blog tonight. I was out way too late with roommate and his podcasting buddy Tee Morris, crawling the bars. Tomorrow, I'll put up a review of Boulevard's Lunar Ale. Here's something to tide you over. Whoever's reading this.

Lolcat Meme

Curse you, Blake Stacey!!

Libertarian Punchlines

I had to share this joke:

What did the Libertarian say to the kid who took a shortcut through his lawn?

KABOOM!! Hey, he initiated the force...

FBI Bullies Palm Beach Sheriff

How much more fucked up can our system of justice get? From C&L:

Conservative pundit Ann Coulter has been cleared of allegations that she falsified her Palm Beach County voter's registration and voted illegally — this, after a high-level FBI agent made unsolicited phone calls to the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office to vouch for Coulter.

The caller wasn't just any G-man. According to PBSO documents, he was Supervisory Special Agent Jim Fitzgerald, of the FBI Academy's Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico, Va. — the closest reality gets to the serial-killer catchers on CBS' Criminal Minds.

Un-fucking believable. No, wait. It's not unbelievable. IOKIYAR.

Big Let-Down

I got my hopes up, and then they were crushed.
From Crooks & Liars. CNN just put up the wrong caption for Lapdog Blair. Boo.

Rudy Snubs Poor Iowa Farmers

America's Nutjob, Fear-Mongering Mayor really fucks it up in Iowa. From Talking Points Memo and the Des Moines Register:

Deborah VonSprecken had looked forward to having former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani photographed with Jack of Diamonds, one of the Texas Longhorns on her family's 80-acre farm near the eastern Iowa town of Olin.

Instead VonSprecken and her husband, Jerry, feel they received a bum steer from the Republican presidential candidate...Deborah VonSprecken said Giuliani's campaign backed out of the event at her home after deciding she and her husband did not fill the bill for the candidate's talk about the so-called "death tax."

"They checked our assets, and since we're not considered millionaires, they canceled," she said.

Rudy Giuliani is a neurotic, flip-flopping, mobbed up joke. Even with being first in the nation, Iowa doesn't matter much, but it's indicative of who really calls Rudy's shots (hint: it's the super-rich). Paris Hilton and the rest of the worthless rich are the only ones who'll get relief by throwing out the estate tax, and the middle class and poor will be taxed more to make up the dough.

ThemTube: Silly Walks

Friday Grog Blogging: Breck's Vanilla Porter

Welcome to Friday Grog Blogging, the time of the week when I buy beer, drink it, and ramble. This week I'm enjoying Breckenridge Brewery's Vanilla Porter, an "ale brewed with real vanilla beans". Continue on for More Dwarf.



First Impressions: There's a strong aftertaste of vanilla. Which is good, because it's supposed to. It's dark and warm, but not too heavy. A mild beeriness spreads out over the top of the mouth, and then hits like a thud in the gut. The vanilla really mitigates the growliness, which sets it apart from other porters. After about a bottle and a half, it's really starting to fill me up.

A decent porter with a strong finish of vanilla. Six out of eight pints.

The Space Pope!

Hooray for the robit!

Friday Grog Blogging: Great White

Welcome back to Friday Grog Blogging, in which I buy a new brand of beer, drink it, and then describe it. This week, May 4, is a wheat beer from Lost Coast Brewery that they call Great White Beer. Let's go to More Dwarf, eh?


Impressions: poured out in a glass, it's almost as clear as Bell's Lager. Hrm. It claims to be an 'unfiltered beer' but we're approaching American piss-water in color.

What the hell, down the hatch. It's aboust a light as last week's, but it has a fairly strong aftertaste of lemon. Really helps sell the 'wheat beer' branding. More accurately, it's a taste of generic citrus, but lemon is the generic citrus, so that's what it tastes like.

There's not much foam, and it quickly disperses. Starting on my second bottle, I have to revisit my statements on its clarity. While it's not as opaque as a belgian or even Blue Moon, it's sufficiently translucent as to be a passable wheat.

It's a beer, alright, but the only thing that stands out is the citrus. No snarl, no hops or barley, just a 'delicate citrusy flavor'. What a coincidence - that's just what the bottle says.

I'm starting a new scale for ranking that will triple the available scores. Since I know I could never give out either a rating of zero, one, or four pints, that only leaves me with giving out two, three, or some fraction thereof. That's an unacceptably small window.

So starting tonight, I'm going to rank Friday Grogs on a scale of eight, eight being the perfect beer (strongbow about 7.5), and 0 being unspeakably vile (miller light, etc about 1).

On this new and improved scale, Great White Beer ranks about 5 1/2 pints out of 8.

Obama Thinks You're a Worthless Pile of Shit

I'm not competent to testify on the legality of this move, but the sheer Dickitude of Obama's campaign is astounding. Micah Sifry lays it all out for us (h/t MyDD)

In November 2004, Joe Anthony, a paralegal living in Los Angeles, started a unofficial fan page for then-newly-elected Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) on MySpace.com. Inspired by Obama's keynote address at that summer's Democratic convention, Anthony had never been politically active before. "I was just blown away," he told me. He put time into the site every day, answering emails from people wanting to "friend" the page, pointing them to voter registration information, and, once Obama threw his hat into the ring, telling them where to find out more detailed positions taken by the candidate.

By the time of Obama's official campaign announcement in late January, Anthony's Obama profile--which had the valuable url of myspace.com/barackobama--already had more than 30,000 friends, well more than the other contenders. Over the following weeks, it continued to grow at a rapid pace, generating lots of headlines about Obama winning the "MySpace primary." Yesterday, the profile had just over 160,000 friends. Today, that url has only about 12,000. And it's under new ownership. Joe Anthony, one of the super volunteers of the Connected Age, has lost control of the page he started to the professionals on Obama's staff.

For someone who's touting themselves as 'a new kind of politics', this just smacks of 'meet the new boss, same as the old boss'.

Joe Anthony had 160,000 friends on the unofficial MySpace page, and was coordinating with the Obama campaign very closely, even going so far as sharing the password with them so they could correct inaccuracies.

Obama eventually decided he needed direct control of the unofficial MySpace page, so Obama's campaign put forth the suggestion of a one-time consulting fee. Joe put forward a figure of about $50k, and (rather than negotiating like normal people) Obama's people told him 'we have no money', stabbed him in the back and stole the site out from under him. Hell of a way to treat a long-term, high-performing activist, jackass.

Maybe it was too much money for his effort (but where the hell is that Q1 $26 million going?), but I bet you none of Obama's exorbitantly paid consultants came even close to getting a list that large or that engaged.

To put all this in perspective, go read Chris Bowers' excellent treatise on the One-Way Flow of Progressive Money. We the netroots give and give and give to get these people in office, and our institutions give us nothing but scorn and derision in return. Unlike Wingnut Welfare, in which any proto-fascist who can string two words together gets piles of money and book deals constantly shoved down their pie-hole.

Fix your Fuck-up, Obama. Now.