You’d like to kill somebody and you’d prefer to do it legally. No problem — it’s easy.

Move to somewhere like Florida. Hunt your target down and make sure there are no witnesses. Shoot that person dead. Then say you feared for your life.

Chances are, you’ll never be charged. Thanks to National Rifle Association lobbyists, nearly half of all states have a law just like Florida’s, which makes it difficult to prosecute the neighborhood vigilante who stalked and fatally shot a black teen last month. (New Jersey isn’t one of the states.)

http://blog.nj.com/njv_editorial_page/2012/03/travyon_martins_shooting_by_ge.html

NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre is a right wing extremist Republican.

http://www.washingtonspectator.org/index.php/Blog/entry/the-nra-big-badass-and-flush-with-cash.html

At the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington in February, LaPierre promised that his organization will help make Barack Obama a one-term president.


As the NRA is a Republican Party ancillary organization, it should be no surprise that a Republican state rep, Dennis Baxley, who is a lifetime member of the organization sponsored the stand-and-shoot bill seven years ago in Florida.

All about Eve: The Christian roots of the GOP war on women

By Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite

The Senate has defeated the “Blunt amendment,” the controversial bill named for Senator Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) that would have that would allowed even non-religious employers to opt out of health care coverage they disagreed with on “moral grounds.” This defeat is not an end to the GOP’s war on women, however. It is merely a skirmish in what looks to be a protracted struggle for women’s freedom and dignity in this country. This attack on women is, and I am grieved to say it, driven by a particular Christian theological perspective that denigrates women and holds them responsible for sin, particularly sexual sin. GOP politics today is, in fact, all about Eve.

The GOP war on women will continue precisely because of the conservative Christian theology that drives wedge politics in a campaign season has a fundamental contempt for women and their equal dignity and worth. The real underbelly of these views of women as the sexual temptress “Eve” was on display in a recent Rush Limbaugh statement. Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown University student whom House Republicans would not let testify at the Issa hearings, a “slut” and a “prostitute” for wanting to testify of the need for birth control to be covered by insurance. It is clarifying for the intensity of this denigration of women to remember that Fluke’s testimony for birth control was about a friend who is a lesbian and needs the pill for medical reasons.

But mark my words, the GOP’s war on women will not end because the Republican party has shackled themselves to a theology that sees women as ‘all about Eve.’

The entire article is here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/guest-voices/post/all-about-eve-the-christian-roots-of-the-gop-war-on-women/2012/03/01/gIQAymq0kR_blog.html

This is an old opinion article (2007), but it was so interesting, I decided to post it here for discussion.

It's a critique by Jeff Fecque of an article written by Dave Zinczenko, in which Dave Zinczenko explains to women why men don't open up. The critique is rather humorous. I wonder which one is correct, Jeff or Dave?

Are men and women very different genetically with regard to communication skills and communication behavior? Or are there bigger differences between individuals than between men and women?

http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2007/12/men-want-to-talk-they-just-dont-want-to.html

Here's an excerpt:

Dave:

Further up on his want-to-do list after arriving home: 14 percent of men want to check email, 12 percent are looking for a little private time in the bathroom, and 10 percent simply want to eat dinner. The common theme here: After they’ve spent a day serving the needs of others, they want to take care of themselves a little.

Jeff:

You know, not for nothing, but there are quite a few women coming home at the end of a ten-hour day of serving others, and they may want some private time of their own. Or they may want to decompress by talking to, I don’t know, their life partner or something. Similarly, men may actually want to tell their significant others about their day, or they may need some quiet time to think about it. This may vary, incidentally, from day to day, and from person to person.

Dave:

Rather than talking about how he “feels,” often a man would rather express his love by changing her oil, or bringing home a flower, or relinquishing control of the remote. And when men do talk, they’d prefer to talk about actions rather than emotions. For instance, a lot of guys would choose to express their long-range faith in a relationship by talking about next summer’s vacation plans, not by launching into a soliloquy about undying love.

Jeff:

Unga unga, me Jeff. Me no want talk about my life. Me go kill mastadon now. Shut up, woman! Me no want talk! Seriously, can we just, please, once and for all stuff the “Men are all about action” motif? Please? Because for the love of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, if men are uncomfortable talking about their feelings, the answer isn’t just to say, “Well, that’s how men are! He bought you a diamond ring, that means he loves you!” Some men are more comfortable with action than words. Some women, too. And the opposite is true.

I can't take it any more. I think people with voicemail recordings saying, "I'll get back to you at MY earliest CONVENIENCE" have no idea that what they're actually saying is, "Leave me a message, but be warned that I'm only going to respond to you whenever I darn feel it's convenient for me, so too bad!"

Has anyone else run into these voicemail recordings before? Is it a sign of the times, bad etiquette, or just a bout of illiteracy?

That's what a right winger said to me yesterday, and he actually said this with a straight face! I'm not kidding. Why on earth would this right winger lie this way? Or, more terrifying, what if he truly believes this, and sees Newt Gingrich as moderate? If that's true, what exactly does he see as right wing lunatic fringe? Scary.

But that's not all he said.

"He has some good ideas for the country," this right winger said about Newt Gingrich. Really? What good ideas? The same old tired ideas that got our country in the disastrous economic shape our country is currently in are suddenly good ideas. What exactly do they want to turn this country into? A third world nation?

He also said, "there are many jobs in this country that can't be filled because people are unwilling to get further training." WHAT? Where are these jobs, please, because last I looked, the Sunday paper in my city had almost NO jobs, and those available were part-time positions, or menial jobs. And what's worse, I know people who got sold that bullshit, and went back and got more training, or got a second degree, and still they couldn't find a job.

Are right wingers living in meth houses and doped up beyond all capacity to think, or what? What the hell is wrong with these people? Were their brains were sucked out by extraterrestrials?? Their eyes were yanked out and they can't see?

My reaction to comments like those of this right winger are never good. I don't suffer from an excess of patience, and I will indeed fly off the handle when I consider someone is pulling my leg, and to be perfectly honest, I spend half my life thinking Repukes are pulling my leg, because, really, how could people be that stupid???

It's close to impossible to locate women friends from school or childhood, because marriage annihilates their name. The dissolving of the woman's name upon marriage is encouraged and associated as somehow being a romantic act.

Men can be located easily because they change nothing when they get married. They remain themselves.

Easier in Europe, where everyone keeps their last name when they get married.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=gingrich

Verb/Adjective, the act of abandoning your extremely sick wife on her hospital bed while you fuck the shit out of your mistress, whom you later marry and cheat on with a third woman. Coined after serial adulterer/giant hypocrite Republican Newt Gingrich.
Person 1: Man, did you hear that Larry Gingriched his wife Cindy?
Person 2: Wait, you mean he cheated on her, married the mistress, then cheated on the mistress with a third woman?
Person 1: Yup. And poor Cindy was dying from brain cancer, too!

A person who accuses someone of doing something immoral while doing the same thing him or herself; as in, Newt Gingrich accusing Bill Clinton of immorality while he was boinking his mistress. AKA: GIGANTIC hypocrite.
My boss called me to make sure I wasn't goofing off - but he was calling from the golf course - what a Gingrich!

And from the Sarah Ibarruri Dictionary:

noun/verb/adjective. Corrupt. Marked by perversion. Behaving in perverse ways.

Origin:
2011-2012; variant of hässlich ficken grinch (ugly fucking pervert)

You stole my money! How could you be such a gingrich?
His cousin tried to gingrich his parole officer, but failed and had to serve 3 more years.
Ted Bundy sure had a gingrich way of talking!

Synonyms: bigot, bluffer, casuist, charlatan, cheat, con artist, crook, deceiver, dissimulator, faker, fraud, malingerer, phony, poser, pretender, quack, std-carrier, swindler, trickster, two-timer.

Here's part of the interview of the pig:

“I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office,” Gingrich said, his outrage dialed all the way to 11. “And I am appalled that you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that.”

“Is that all you want to say, sir?” King asked.

Not by a long shot. “Every person in here knows personal pain,” Gingrich said. “Every person in here has had someone close to them go through painful things. To take an ex-wife and make it two days before the primary a significant question in a presidential campaign is as close to despicable as anything I can imagine.”
http://www.smh.com.au/world/gingrich-blasts-vicious-media-over-infidelity-question-20120120-1qaco.html

Personal pain? Despicable? REALLY, NEWT? Questions about your perversions are DESPICABLE? I'll tell you what, pig, YOU are despicable for your sick, evil behavior, that's what.

I've read the studies showing that Republicans are people who are led by fears, who love authority, who don't feel comfortable unless there is an enemy. However, there's another school of thought about why people whose very life is precariously balancing on a high wire choose to vote for those who persistently destroy American life for the poor and middle class, and ensure they never get out of the hole. It is this: that poor and middle class Republicans don't like being made to feel stupid.

The argument kinda goes like this:

Republicans talk on the same level as people who don't have a great deal of education. They don't bother people with statistics, with numbers, and they engage in a good amount of name-calling. They also use a lot of "us versus them" (them being the enemy, of course), which makes the poor and middle class Republican feel important. The argument also poses that Democrats use statistics, numbers, and tend not to name call. Democrats tend to the label groups as the enemy far less than Republicans do. As a result, poor and middle class Republicans feel less important, and less intelligent when listening to Democrats, and think of them as elitist.

But this brings me to another question:

HOW did poor and middle class Republicans come to regard education as elitist? WHEN did education become something to be despised, rather than something to be strived for? WHY did ignorance become something to be proud of? I grew up in a family within which EDUCATION AND KNOWLEDGE were things to be sought after, admired, desired, ideals, not things to be envied and to hate someone for if they employed that intelligence.

WHY NOT HERE? Why must intelligence be hidden and relegated to a lower level? Why do poor and middle class Republicans feel that lack of education is desirable?