truman, have you ever noticed how the same teabaggers who HATE the government always seem to be the ones wanting to run for political office?

Where were these FoxFiends when Dubya was pressing states to “teach to the test” through the majority of his administration? Students weren’t necessarily learning to “think” (as young Mr Young would have us believe occurred before Common Core); they were being tested and tested and tested, all in the name of diverting PUBLIC money to PRIVATE schools.

I think Dr Emanuel should consult an attorney and see if he has any recourse over Kelly’s BLATANT LIES. I believe he should, at the very least, be able to sue for “defamation of character” from “taking his words out of context to reframe them in a blatantly distorted fashion.” I’m no lawyer, but I do believe there is cause for action (even if the courts have given FoxNoise the go-ahead to lie and pass off their lies as “news,” that shouldn’t allow the network to take someone else’s words—especially someone who doesn’t work for the company—and edit them in such a grossly twisted manner).

truman: The only problem with that idea is that “Porky’s II” came out in June 1983. O’Reilly would turn 34 just 2 months after the film’s release. Most men become pretty mature sexually after they graduate college. I could understand O’Reilly’s sexual maturity being that of the Porky’s gang if he was a college fratboy but he wasn’t. (Interesting side note: Most of the young male stars of the “Porky’s” films were in their mid 20s, playing high school seniors, when the first film came out. And BillO was about a decade older than the leads in the “Porky’s” series.)

Here’s a question for Ms Bream: Do you support the circumcision of newborn baby boys? If a fetus can allegedly feel pain at just 20 weeks, then certainly a newborn infant would feel the pain of having a part of its body barbarically removed for NO MEDICAL REASON. And yet, many so-called pro-lifers support circumcision, especially when required as part of a religious (ie, Jewish or Muslim) ritual but they also find it acceptable to do on ALL boys for “hygiene” reasons (ie, mom and/or dad will be too squeamish to teach their sons how to clean the uncircumcised penis).

And if you do support infant circumcision, then how do you justify THAT pain (which WILL be accompanied by definite vocalizings—ie, screams—unless the infant is anesthetized, which can result in death if the anesthetic isn’t given properly) while claiming that fetal pain is cause enough to ban the MEDICAL practice of abortion?

Hypocrisy, thy name is right-wing nut.

Charlie, you need to send in your copy of the comment so your right-wing astroturfed teabagger group can pay you your 25 cents.

As for the “meanest, rudest, vindictive people” comment, well buddy, just take a good hard look in the mirror baby, if you want to see what a REAL “mean, rude, vindictive” person looks like.

And anyone who actually writes “conservative/libertarian/constitutionalist” as a single point and refers to himself as one, merely proves that he has no concept of what REAL conservatism, libertarianism OR constitutionalism actually is. He’s merely bought into the modern right-wing redefinition of all three terms. What you really are, blockhead, is a fascist, corporatist authoritarian.

Go troll somewhere else, if you don’t mind. I hear you can find some great new pics of Sarah Palin and Megyn Kelly at the FoxHos website. (I think the lesbian action shots are photoshopped, but why don’t you check them out and get back to us on it?)

For all the hype, marijuana really is NOT any more dangerous than tobacco. And since she was in the Netherlands—where marijuana is legal—there’s no “there” there.

Hell, I live in Alabama and I used to work at a convenience store. In Alabama, to buy tobacco products, you have to be 19. It doesn’t matter what state issued your driver’s license or what state you live in, if you haven’t celebrated your 19th birthday, you canNOT legally buy tobacco products in Alabama. (I’m not sure what the policy is on military bases; of course, you have to have a valid military ID to shop at the base exchanges in the first place—a civilian ID won’t cut it. But I digress….) One year, I was working during Georgia’s spring break, and the city where I was living at the time was a prime “refueling” point for Georgia college students heading to Panama City. Anyways, Georgia’s legal age for tobacco is 18 (or it was when I worked at the c-store) and I had to turn away a lot of business from Georgia college students who didn’t see why their Georgia driver’s licenses wouldn’t allow them to buy cigarettes or chewing tobacco at the store. I tried pointing out that it didn’t matter where they were from—they were, at that point, in Alabama and subject to Alabama’s beer and tobacco laws. (Now, of course, I didn’t follow the absolute letter of the law and refuse to allow their older friends to buy packs of cigarettes—technically, state law could be interpreted that way. Personally, I can’t stand smoking but it’s not like these kids were coming in for beer and getting their friends to buy for them so I let the tobacco deal slide. The kids knew they couldn’t buy beer and most of their friends weren’t old enough either but since most of these kids smoked the same cigs as their friends did, I had no way of proving that one kid was buying two packs for himself or a pack for him and a pack for his buddy or two packs for his underaged buddy—all I could prove was that a customer was legally old enough to buy cigs and that he had the money to pay for them and that I’d checked ID; what he did with the cigs wasn’t my business. DOYC knows if I had to poke my nose in a tobacco buyer’s business, I wouldn’t have been selling as many cigars as I did—I’d say about 90% of all cigars wound up having the tobacco scraped out and pot stuffed inside, considering all the cigar innards I had to sweep up in the parking lot.)

Anyways………..

Bill needs to get over this. He is really looking less like a “concerned (grand)parent” and a lot more like the guy you’d expect to see walking around in a raincoat on a bright and sunny day or the guy you see hanging around the public restrooms who seems to “disappear” around the side of the building whenever he sees a teenaged girl or young woman (or “follows” a teenaged boy or young man into the men’s room—even though he just came out 5 minutes ago).

You know, maybe THIS is the reason why so many people don’t really give two bits of a rat’s patootie about FoxNoise’s “War on Christmas” blather.

We are INUNDATED with “Christmas,” seemingly beginning earlier and earlier every single year. A co-worker told me that she’d gone into Wal-Mart ON HALLOWE’EN night, and the store already had CHRISTMAS displays up—candy and toys and gift wrap. We’re already reading how more and more of the Big Retailers are going to open at 6PM on Thanksgiving Night to start their big “Black Friday” sales. Online? We’ve been getting e-tailers advertising “Christmas deals”—even before the glorious “Cyber Monday.” And for crying out loud—we just celebrated Veteran’s Day a couple of days ago and Thanksgiving is still two weeks away, and these FoxNoise jackasses are concerned that there’s a “War on Christmas?”

What does it really matter if a retailer wants to embrace a diverse consumer population by having their clerks and greeters wishing a fairly generic “Happy Holidays” instead of the more exclusive (by which I mean, exclusionary) “Merry Christmas?” The first rule of business is “Keep a customer happy and spending money in the store.” If that meant that retailers could boost profits by hiring only hot male and female employees and having them wearing nothing but speedos and bikinis, they’d do it in a heartbeat. (And if it meant having their employees offer some more, um, personal service to the customers, they’d do that too.)

Hell, I’d be willing to bet that if a store serving an overwhelming Hispanic clientele chose to wish customers “Feliz Navidad” that the FoxNoise folks would raise a fuss over that as well, simply because the sales clerks wouldn’t be using the actual word “Christmas.”

And as for that whole “reason for the season” crap, please. People were celebrating the Winter Solstice long before the mere notion of Jesus came along. The Romans, in fact, held Saturnalia around the Winter Solstice, and it’s amazing that Saturnalia endured in the Roman Empire well into the 3rd and 4th centuries—right about the same time that Christianity was taking hold of the Empire (heck, the last days of the festival included gift-giving—I wonder why that sounds familiar?). Then, too, there’s the fact that NO ONE knows when Jesus was actually born. The early Church, in fact, believed Jesus to have been born in the early Spring (when shepherds would watch over their flocks by night) but the date was changed because of the conflict with Easter (the much more important Christian festival for the Church—even up to the 18th century; in fact, the Church considered Easter to be SO important because the earliest known written Christian stories revolve around the Passion—not to mention the fact that only one of the Gospels goes into any significant accounting of Jesus’s birth and only one other even makes note of anything before Jesus started his ministry). And the Church decided, “Well, we’ve got the great Easter ceremony near the Spring equinox, and it’s really uncomfortable in summertime, and the Savior’s birth doesn’t really fit into a harvest theme at autumn, but, you know what? A bunch of pagans have parties and feasts at the Winter Solstice, celebrating the Sun’s getting longer, so what say we co-opt THAT holiday and call it Jesus’s birthday? I mean, sure, people have been celebrating His birth for centuries whenever they feel like it, but it just seems like we’ll be more, oh I don’t know, official if we have just ONE day to be THE day, but we can go ahead and let the festivities run a week or two beyond. No objections? Well, then, good. So be it. Now….what should we call it? It needs a good name. All suggestions will be considered.”

Priscilla wrote, “(Ah, the old socialized medicine thingie that Merkan patriots fear and loathe)”

That should read “(Ah, the old socialized medicine thingie that Merkan patriots fear and loathe—except when they benefit from it. Like the Medicare that the Tea Party folks demanded Washington Obama keep his hands off.)”

I would like to know who paid for Palin’s last pregnancy and childbirth. You know, the one she went through while Governor of Alaska? I do know she wasn’t paying for all those trips to the Lower 48 out of her own pocket so I kind of doubt she paid for that last pregnancy out of her own pockets.

Barbara, I’m so sorry that you’ve been so bamboozled with this whole “this country was founded on religious roots” malarkey, because it’s simple NOT TRUE.

The FIRST English settlement in this country was founded on a COMMERCIAL basis—the Jamestown colony in Virginia? Does that ring a bell with you? While the colonists may have been religious people, they didn’t exactly care about religious principles when they set up the colony. (For what it’s worth, the previous attempt—the “Lost Colony” of Croatoan—was made for purely geopolitical reasons; it was founded as an English balance to the Spanish settlement in San Agustin, the modern-day Florida city of St Augustine. And its failure has some ties to the Spanish Armada’s attempted invasion of England—the relief ship intended to resupply the colony was delayed because of the Armada. Even then, the settling of Jamestown was largely based on the same geopolitical reasoning.)

As to Plymouth and the Pilgrims, they weren’t the least bit interested in “religious” freedom. All they wanted was THEIR religious freedom. Non-Puritans were NOT welcome. Even Puritans who dared to challenge the church’s authority were driven out to prevent the spread of “heresy.” Check the history books for mentions of what the Puritans did to Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson—two prominent Puritan dissidents. Roman Catholics were widely discriminated against in the American colonies—with the lone exception of Maryland (which began as a haven for Catholics in the English colonies). The ONLY colony established under the principles of TRUE religious liberty for ALL people, regardless of their faith (or even their lack of same) was Pennsylvania; the Quakers faced levels of persecution in England but with the establishment of the colony, they not only had a land in which to practice their faith in their fashion but they were gracious enough to allow the same attitude to other people coming to the colony. By the time of the American Revolution, virtually all the colonies had official churches. Sure, people who belonged to other churches weren’t rounded up and tarred and feathered and exiled any longer, but they were required to pay taxes to support the established state church if they wanted to actually have a say in the running of the government (this was at the heart of the Danbury Baptists’ letter to Jefferson). If you couldn’t prove you’d paid this tax, you couldn’t vote (even if you met all the other requirements) nor could you serve on a jury (and you might not even be able to press a lawsuit depending on the whims and religious temperment of the court officials—so if you felt you’d been cheated but you couldn’t prove you’d paid your “tax,” you might not have any recourse). Your children might not be allowed in the local schools if you weren’t part of the State Church (even if you HAD paid your taxes) and even if they were, most of their lessons would be taught through the State Church’s lens (imagine being a Roman Catholic and your children were forced to use a Protestant Bible as part of their lessons-or vice versa).

Fox Noise’s “War on Christmas” is all the proof any ever needs that there’s no such thing as God or Jesus. If God and/or Jesus existed, He (or They) would come down and smite all these self-righteous, smug, hypocritical Pharisees using His (or Their) name as a weapon against others.

Aria, the flip to the “Obama funds the cure for cancer” story would be Fox Noise whining about it taking sooo long. (Since, you know, Obama should’ve cured it within 90 minutes of being inaugurated.)

Actually, Mr schade, I’m aware of that. It’s just that apparently certain modern “Christian” “advocacy” groups are NOT. Or they’re under the mistaken impression that their theocracy would somehow be more beneficent than a secular government or some other theocracy (such as one run by principles of Shariah law), especially to people of differing religious faiths, or no religious faith at all.

I have to wonder just how much closer the election would’ve been if a couple of other factors had been in play?

First off, Christie’s decision to hold that “special” election to fill Lautenberg’s Senate seat. I thought people were furious at Christie for charging taxpayers for the special election, just a couple of weeks before the Gubernatorial election. It’d have been interesting to see how many Dems would’ve voted for the Dem candidate for Governor when they were also picking the Dem candidate for US Senate. (It’s entirely possible that Christie’s picking up that 1/3 of Dems is solely because there weren’t as many Democratic voters in the first place.)

Secondly, Christie’s “reluctant” decision to not pursue a court fight against same-sex marriage. I knew when the court ordered the state to begin same-sex marriage that Christie was going to be caught between a rock and a hard place. IF he’d started pursuing a court fight, it wouldn’t have begun until after the election was over and the possibility would’ve existed that there’d be a new governor who wouldn’t fight the courts. And I’m pretty certain that if Christie had planned to fight it in court, he might have quite easily seen a lot of his “big win” turn into a devastating loss; the share of women and Dem voters would’ve most certainly been lower (his narrow win of Hispanics might not have shifted too much—maybe a very narrow loss—but likely even a tiny shift would’ve been enough to swing the vote the other way).

I do have to commend this crazy lady for allowing her boys to play “good guys vs bad guys” with their toy guns. I just have to wonder, though, who determines who’s the “good guy” and who’s the “bad guy?”

And how’s she going to feel in, oh let’s say, 10-15 years when her “widdle pwecious” decides to STOP playing “good guys vs bad guys” and starts acting it out for real? Personally, I kind of hope that her little darling picks up a real gun, mistaking it for a toy (as kids are so wont to do, ya know) and shoots her in the freakin’ face.

I don’t think the person writing in about “Social Security fraud” understands the process. Social Security pays SURVIVOR benefits to widowed individuals (perhaps the person should speak with Congressman Paul Ryan about survivor benefits). Furthermore, it doesn’t matter where the recipient lives—plenty of LIVING recipients of Social Security live outside the US.

Sounds to me more like the letter-writer has issues about his “dad’s wife” (I’m guessing the woman is not the writer’s mother) and her Social Security benefits are just a small part of the matter.

Graham is a disgrace to Jesus (who is supposedly the guy that Graham believes to be his Lord and Savior).

I wish someone would remind Graham that lying is one of the biggest sins (it’s usually how the old “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor” is interpreted/translated by almost every single Biblical scholar).