People Who Need to STFU Today

That’s Robert Canoles of Porterdale, GA who is probably better known as the assmonkey who held his new neighbors at gunpoint with a semi-automatic rifle in some concept of “protecting” his community from homeowners changing their own locks.

The idea of calling the police and letting them come and handle it? Well, he did, and the police arrested the homeowners, but that’s all sorted out and now Canoles is rightfully charged with aggravated assault, false imprisonment and criminal trespass because he wasn’t on his own property and had no right to do what he did.

And now he’s whining.

Listen, Bobby, vigilantism may feel good to pumped up he-men with semi-autos, but it’s against the law. The Second Amendment doesn’t give you the right to train a weapon on anybody you want to, just because you think you should. I’m gonna give you free advice that hopefully your lawyer has already imparted: STFU!

That odious little tidbit came from Sanford, Florida city commissioner Randy Jones upon Sanford’s refusal of the resignation of police chief Bill Lee. Followers of the blog recognize Sanford, FL as the location of the killing of Trayvon Martin and Chief Lee as the head of the police department that so botched the investigation the Department of Justice had to step in.

This little racist morsel of dreck, however, takes it to a whole new level of ugly.

Randy, you shmuck, STFU.

That’s ultramega bigot and, apparently, illiterate Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) blathering about college debt, and explaining why she has “very little tolerance” for people who have even $80,000 in student loans on their back when they graduate. Why doesn’t Foxx tolerate it? Because everyone can just work their way through school (taking up to seven years) like she did!

That’s leaving aside the fact that Foxx’s seven years were at a public university, the Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where taxpayers subsidize tuition, enabling student costs to be held down. We’ll also leave aside the fact that Foxx’s seven years were 1954 - 1961, when tuition was assuredly not more than $20,000 per year for North Carolina residents. And yes, that’s subsidized.

What’s most terrifying is that Foxx was, once upon a time, president of a community college, someone who should’ve recognized the increasing cost of higher education (even during her tenure which was ‘87 - ‘94) considering that community colleges have long sold themselves on their value in holding college costs down because that’s a known issue.

Virginia Foxx, for your ignorance, for your intolerance, for your ongoing habit of opening up your mouth and letting completely counterfactual crap fall out (usually in places where you won’t be challenged, like this gem which was on the G. Gordon Liddy show, of all places) you are heartily welcomed to STFU. All weekend long.

That’s U.S. Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) explaining how people who cannot afford contraceptives can magically get them by typing “I can’t afford birth control” into Google. As one will find if they do that, it’s “easy” to get if you have $200 and a subsidized/Title X clinic nearby and enough time to wait. Senator Johnson apparently thinks that Google is an acceptable substitute for the much maligned Affordable Care Act and the mandate for preventative healthcare, including contraceptives, to provided to the insured without co-pay.

You’re just wrong, Ron. Just stand there in your wrongness being wrong, because you’re wrong. And while you’re standing there, STFU.

Willard, Willard, Willard, what the fuck is wrong with you? Last night, you dropped this gem from your healthcare policy on Jay Leno, which is simply to say: you think that for the millions of uninsured Americans, this is all a game. A game that you can determine the rules of, can determine who’s playing fairly, and can kick people out of at will having changed the rules after they already started “playing.”

Only a man who could never lose everything, never have to file bankruptcy, never have to have a spaghetti dinner or put water bottles in pizza shops and convenience stores to pay for his care, never face a door slammed in his face because he doesn’t have the cash up front could ever dare be so fucking glib about people’s access to healthcare which means, quite plainly, people’s lives.

Mitt, STFU. STFU and GTFO, you elitist, smug, self-centered, willfully ignorant son of a bitch.

In his first (and last) appearance, that’s Operation Rescue head Troy Newman, beating his utterly dishonest drum that doctors who provide abortion care are a bunch of charlatans who regularly harm their patients. Are there cases of malpractice in abortion care? Yes. Are there more malpractice issues in abortion care than in any other area of medical practice? No one has ever proven that. And in fact, rather the opposite.

But that hasn’t stopped Newman from putting out a $25,000 bounty on the heads of any abortion provider who has a mercenary staffer willing to “blow the whistle” on any violations in the provider’s practice — rather than taking those concerns to the provider, or if necessary, to the authorities who license and monitor clinics and doctors. It’s just more in his campaign to harass and harm abortion providers, because his gang of terrorists can’t accept that abortion is legal in this country.

Troy, for the first time and binding forever, let the command be heard from coast to coast: STFU!

That’s Pennsylvania state representative Babette Josephs (D-Philadelphia) getting her gender cluelessness on in an effort to shame other women in the state legislature who are signed on as sponsors of Pennsylvania’s mandatory transvaginal ultrasound bill.

Rep. Josephs, some men have breasts. Some women don’t. It has nothing to do with how someone will view this odious bill. This was offensive and unnecessary and utterly insensitive to trans* and gender nonconforming people.

Rep. Josephs, go buy a clue. Until you do, STFU.

Newt Gingrich, trying to make something where there isn’t something. How dare President Obama notice the long history of young black men dying violently? How dare he notice that Trayvon Martin looked like him, like his own son would look? How dare this black man note race in any way, shape or form? He must be trying to start the RACE WAR!

This is how the GOP addresses race: they don’t. We can’t discuss race, in GOPland, because race “doesn’t matter” and if we bring it up, especially if we (that is, us black folk) bring it up, it’s always because we’re trying to start something or worse, assert that racially motivated crimes against us are a problem, or something…

This is the first time, but it’s likely not the last time I say Newton Leroy Gingrich, SHUT THE FUCK UP.

That’s Judith Martin, aka Miss Manners, suggesting that a young woman’s preferences, her agency and her knowledge about a boy don’t matter, if he asks her to prom, she has to say yes or she’s rude and unacceptable. She went on to say that the important issue here is that the boy never have his feelings hurt, and concluded with the straight up lie that the unpopular boys from high school magically turn into the most desirable adult men, implying, apparently, that girls should get in on the ground floor by accepting their invitations to prom. (And that the only reason why a girl might say no to a boy is because he’s insufficiently popular…)

An “advice” column is easy pickings for a blog like this, because so often the advice is silly, but this was actually jaw droppingly bad. The idea that girls and women are obligated to do whatever men demand of them and must ignore their own feelings and interests in order to fulfill the desires of men is an idea well past its sell-by date. Though Judith Martin may not realize it, no one is obligated to do something, especially not something as involved (and costly) as attending a prom just to spare someone else’s feelings. This is a horrible message to give to young women (and their parents) and could have potentially devastating results. Judith Martin should be ashamed.

And while she may feel it’s the absolute dernier cri of lacking etiquette, I must say: Miss Manners, STFU.

Welcome to the new era of STFU Today. Right this minute this goes from an angry quote-and-rant blog to a full fledged political blog because this utter wankery privileged FULLY FALSE nonsense from Virginia’s governor (and GOP VP hopeful) Bob McDonnell deserves a full-fledged debunking. And here it goes.

Let’s start with his assertion that the “war on women” is nothing more than “political theater.”

• In the first six months of 2011 alone, more than 162 new laws were enacted with further restrictions on reproductive healthcare access. That’s only the laws that were actually passed, hundreds more were introduced, on both the federal and state levels. 2010 and 2011 were both record years in terms of legal challenges to reproductive healthcare.
• In 2012 for the first time since it was introduced, the GOP is dragging their feet on the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act on purely political grounds.
• A legislator in Georgia compared women with nonviable pregnancies to pigs and cows on the farm. A legislator in Minnesota said that women needed to just “find their old reasons for loving” their domestic abuser. A legislator in Idaho thinks that women have “rape issues.” The governor of Pennsylvania says that if we don’t “want to see” images from a forced pre-abortion ultrasound, we merely need to “close our eyes.” And all of that is just in the last two weeks.

And what’s that about President Obama’s “record on jobs?” We’ve all seen this, right?



Spending, the debt and the deficit. Let’s talk about spending, shall we — leaving aside that budgets don’t come from POTUS, they come from Congress, let’s talk about what’s important about spending. The GOP would have us believe that spending is a bad thing, and that increases in government spending on a priori wrong.

But that’s just not true. In reality, here’s what’s actually important about government spending:

• Where the money is going
• Why the money is going there
• Where the money is coming from

Having said that:

• When George W. Bush took office in 2001, there was a budget surplus and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicted we would continue to have such surpluses, to the tune of $850 billion through to this year, 2012. Then 9/11 happened and triggered a short recession, then we were mired into a decade of war, and financial malfeasance created and burst a real estate bubble that caused another major recession and a bounce-back shorter follow on recession. By 2009 when President Obama took office, the forecast was, instead of a surplus, a $1.215 billion deficit.
• The New York Times analyzed this roughly $2 trillion change in our fortunes, and determined:
  • 37% was caused by the recessions and the business cycle
  • 33% was caused by policies enacted by President Bush
  • 20% was caused by policies enacted by President Bush and supported or extended by President Obama
  • 10% was caused by new policies of President Obama

But the GOP and its mouthpieces like McDonnell continue to paint our current financial picture as solely and wholly the responsibility of the POTUS. Seem a little shady yet? Oh, and let’s look a little further:



That’s from last summer, but it shows whose policies and spending grew the debt more pretty clearly. Remember last year when everyone was talking about the cost of war and the Bush tax cuts that we needed to let expire, at least for top wage earners, and how the GOP nearly let the government shut down over those tax cuts, because how dare we say that the top 1% of earners not keep their breaks? (The origin of the 99%/1% idea.)

Here’s another nice viewpoint:



Note that recession (the gray area) in 2001? We never fully recovered from it by the time the recession of 2008 rolled around. In no small part due to having tax cuts and wars at the same time. Note that sharp uptick of recovery down there at the bottom of the trough starting at the end of 2009 and continuing through this day despite the GOP led house and their failure to pass a budget? Who do they think is responsible for that growth? The magic money fairy?

The Republicans have held the House of Representatives for 444 days, and there has not been one bill to come out of the house to increase job growth, to reduce the debt or deficit, and for more than a year they haven’t even been able to fulfill their primary duty of creating a workable federal budget.

It’s not this President who can’t talk about these things on the merits of his own record.

And energy? In current Republican parlance, that means gas prices, which they’re trying to blame on President Obama, ignoring the role of unchecked investor speculation (and in fact trying to lessen regulation on speculative energy markets) ignoring the whole of the wider world economy, ignoring the role of the uncertainty of the Iranian situation.

To say that this President does not have a good energy record would require us to forget that the mantra of the GOP was and is “drill baby drill,” require us to look past their desire for unchecked tar sands exploitation, dangerous marcellus shale drilling (aka “fracking”) which is implicated in groundwater contamination everywhere and a series of earthquakes in Ohio, ignore that they’ve repeatedly held legislation hostage to a demand for a giant transnational pipeline that would be environmentally dangerous.

It would require us also to note that despite the vast Republican opposition, this President has held the domestic oil industry in check yet domestic oil consumption and production are up, and consumption of foreign oil is down — in fact, overall consumption of oil is down, in no small part due to increased CAFE standards which this POTUS champions while the GOP universally opposes, and domestic energy use decreasing thanks to a home weatherization program that was part of the Obama Stimulus, higher efficiency appliances and lighting which, again, the GOP universally, inexplicably opposes (remember Michele Bachmann’s almost bizarre fixation on the phase out of incandescent lightbulbs?).

The Republicans keep trying to turn their failures around on this President. (They’re even suggesting now that the Democrats are the ones waging a war on women, somehow.) It’s not going to work. The only way to do it is to lie, to obfuscate and to rely on the media to not be willing to refresh Americans’ notoriously short political memories.

In short, Bob McDonnell (and friends)? You liars, just STFU

Y’all remember Chuck “Rape Issue” Winder from yesterday, right? Well, he’s back, and trying to clarify what he was meaning to try to say about the rape issue thing and failing again.

Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, for fuck’s sake, stop talking. STFU Chuck. Just STFU.

Where do we even start? This is Chuck Winder, a Republican state senator in Idaho, trying to explain something about rape and abortion.

Chuck was explaining something about why there isn’t a rape/incest exception in the mandatory DOUBLE ultrasound bill that just passed in Idaho, but goodness knows what. He apparently thinks that only married people can be raped, or maybe that only married people get pregnant? Or that people are confused about when they’ve been raped? Or that being asked by the doctor about rape makes a difference when his bill offers no exemption from having to have two separate ultrasounds (one done by anti-abortion activists) in order to access abortion care?

I don’t think Chuck knows.

I think Chuck’s a big old ball of ignorant, arrogant, assumptive nonsense.

And I know that Chuck needs to STFU.

In his first (but surely not last) appearance, here’s Mitt Romney mansplaining with a glib non-answer and a waved hand about his plan for reproductive healthcare access. What’s interesting is that for him, it’s all about “freedom.” But what he’s not saying is this: he’s pledged to both defund Planned Parenthood and repeal the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) which will leave people without insurance and without much money with very little if any choice whatsoever for getting healthcare. They could go “wherever they’d like” for their care, but they wouldn’t be able to pay for it. But that’s something that a lifelong millionaire like Romney just can’t seem to understand.

So let me explain it to you, Mitt. You cannot take away the means of access to healthcare and affordable insurance from people then expect that they’re now more free, more able and better cared for. It just doesn’t work.

So Mitt, here’s a hint from me to you: Shut Your Glib, Lying, Facile, Mansplaining Mouth. STFU Mitt. STFU and maybe, maybe, try thinking about the end results of the policies you’re promoting, you assmonkey.

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett netting a return visit to the blog with so much wrongness it’s mathematically impossible to quantify the level of his wrongness. No precinct in the Commonwealth has ever had a 112% election return. If they did, it would trigger an automatic recount. As the Maddow Blog points out, Tom just flat out made this up. It’s a pure, indefensible lie.

So Tommy Boy, I know you’re a politician and lying is as natural as saying your name, but behalf of all Pennsylvanians you’ve just disenfranchised with this Voter ID bullshit that has no actual substantiated proof of fraud to support it? STFU. A lot.