Say What??

Proving yet again that only one state could have produced a buffoon like George W. Bush, Texas is now conducting sting operations and arresting drunks….in bars.

Huh?

From Reuters:

Texas has begun sending undercover agents into bars to arrest drinkers for being drunk, a spokeswoman for the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission said on Wednesday. 

The first sting operation was conducted recently in a Dallas suburb where agents infiltrated 36 bars and arrested 30 people for public intoxication, said the commission’s Carolyn Beck.

Being in a bar does not exempt one from the state laws against public drunkenness, Beck said.

Next thing you know, they’ll be arresting people in bedrooms for violating laws against public nudity.

Study: Whiny Kids Become Republicans

From the Toronto Star:

Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative.

At least, he did if he was one of 95 kids from the Berkeley area that social scientists have been tracking for the last 20 years. The confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals.

The study from the Journal of Research Into Personality isn’t going to make the UC Berkeley professor who published it any friends on the right. Similar conclusions a few years ago from another academic saw him excoriated on right-wing blogs, and even led to a Congressional investigation into his research funding.

But the new results are worth a look. In the 1960s Jack Block and his wife and fellow professor Jeanne Block (now deceased) began tracking more than 100 nursery school kids as part of a general study of personality. The kids’ personalities were rated at the time by teachers and assistants who had known them for months. There’s no reason to think political bias skewed the ratings — the investigators were not looking at political orientation back then. Even if they had been, it’s unlikely that 3- and 4-year-olds would have had much idea about their political leanings.

A few decades later, Block followed up with more surveys, looking again at personality, and this time at politics, too. The whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity.

The confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests. The girls were still outgoing, but the young men tended to turn a little introspective. [emphasis mine]

As a person with siblings and scads of cousins, who then became a mom and aunt, I can say that most whiny kids are whiny because they want attention and security. They demand their parent(s) attention by whining – because it’s the only thing that works.

And, since adults who stick rigidly to traditional roles and ideas tend to do so in order to have control over their environments, it makes sense that whiners grow up to be Republicans who want control and attention.

Two Fun Contests

Over at Another Goddamned Blog, jurassicpork’s running a fun contest. And there’s even a prize!

Submit your punchline either via email or in the comment section here and your blog can host the infamous Assclowns of the Week. That’s right, I’m hosting this contest because I’ve been kicking the idea around in my head for months. It was just a matter of how to go about doing it. Then this great setup line popped in my head yesterday: How do you know when a Republican’s dead?

The winner will be judged by yours truly and the author’s punchline will be announced the weekend after next, along with a link to your blog. Not only that but, if you’ve been a good boy/girl and have been washing behind your ears, the link may even be posted in Mike’s Blog Roundup on Crooks and Liars, which will guarantee at least a couple of thousand hits for your site.

The second contest is from RJ Eskow at HuffPo:

The operative condition for the 21st Century American “conservative” is false indignation. They’re always pretending to be outraged about something. This high-pitched whining has the convenient effect of limiting public discourse, making it harder to discuss critical issues openly and rationally. It’s worked, too, even when it should be embarrassingly obvious what they’re doing and why.

Yet people still fall for it (and by “people” I mean the media).

[snip]

I figure the best way to end this pattern of artificial indignation is by exposing it to the ridicule it so strongly deserves, so I’m holding a new contest – ‘HuffCon: Pick Your Favorite Phony Conservative Outrage.’ […] Unlike my ‘Guess Bush’s Nickname For Abramoff’ contest, where unfortunately nobody got it right, I promise this contest will have a winner, a runner-up, and a third place finalist (aka ‘win,’ ‘place,’ and ‘show’).

Contestants will be judged on originality, writing flair, and the absurdity of the conservative ‘outrage’ chosen for ridicule. It’s important to name the outrage, illustrate its flaws, and describe why the phony indignation’s being mustered.

Helen Thomas on ‘The Situation Room’

Crooks and Liars has a clip up of Helen Thomas neatly turning the tables on Wolf Blitzer on CNN’s ‘The Situation Room’ today.

Helen also offers blanket amnesty to all Bush shills in the media who are willing to come back and become journalists once again, instead of water carriers.

BLITZER: Tell our viewers what you are up to nowadays. How you feel and what your goals are right now?

THOMAS: My goals are to seek the truth wherever it leads me. And I do think that’s the goal of journalists. And I think we fell down on the job.

BLITZER: The news media in general? That we weren’t — what?

THOMAS: Come back. All is forgiven.

BLITZER: You are going to forgive us? You are part of the news media too.

THOMAS: Right.

Pro-Life or Anti-Women?

Ampersand has a great post up at Alas. With a table graph for illustration, it’s very clear that the pro-life movement’s stance against abortion, contraceptives, and the HPV vaccine (among others) are contradictory if they’re equating abortion with murder.

However, those positions line up perfectly if the reason behind them is to punish women for having sex.

A lot of people who favor forced childbirth for pregnant women say that they believe that an abortion, even early in pregnancy, is identical to child murder. Have an abortion, shoot a four-year-old in the head; morally, it’s the same. Or, anyhow, that’s what they claim to believe.

In contrast, pro-choicers tend to think that the abortion criminalization movement is motivated by a desire – perhaps an unconscious desire – to punish women for having sex. I used to reject that latter view as a pointless ad hominem attack. Nowadays, I’m not so sure.

Although I’ve met some rank-and-file “pro-lifers” whose policy preferences were consistent with a belief that a fetus is morally indistinguishable from a child, those folks usually have policy preferences which are totally out of step with the abortion criminalization movement as a whole.

In contrast, the leaders of the abortion criminalization movement have consistently put their political weight behind policies which make little or no sense if they genuinely think that abortion is identical to child murder. And those same leaders routinely endorse policies that make a lot of sense if their goal is to penalize women who have sex. And they’ve done so with the apparent backing and blessing of the vast majority of the rank and file. [emphasis mine]

Check it out here.