Screwed up Republicans

Don't get me wrong - there a re crooks and crackpots among all politicians, all over the world. What make the Republicans such an easy target is their constant assertion that they are the party of morality: anti-abortion; anti-birth-control; anti-gay-rights; party of the Religious Right; etc. So when they DO screw up, it is all the more delicious...

From Crooks and Liars

Paul Ryan Intern Charged with Stalking

Um, Republican family values?

Adam Savader, reportedly a former intern for Paul Ryan, was arrested and charged with Internet extortion and cyber stalking by the FBI on Tuesday. Savader apparently sent anonymous text messages to 15 women saying he had nude photographs and threatening to distribute them unless he was sent more photographs. If convicted, he faces a maximum of five years in prison.

FBI:

    A 21-year-old Great Neck, New York man was charged in a criminal complaint in the Eastern District of Michigan with Internet extortion and cyber stalking, announced United States Attorney Barbara L. McQuade.

    Joining in the announcement were Special Agent in Charge Robert D. Foley, III, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Chief John Seto, Ann Arbor Police Department.

    According to the affidavit, from May 2012 through February 2013, Adam Paul Savader sent anonymous text messages using Google Voice numbers to 15 women stating that he had nude photographs of the women and threatening to distribute the nude photographs to the women's friends and family members unless the women sent him more nude photographs of themselves. Savader sent some of the victims links to a photo-sharing website where nude pictures of the victims had been posted.

Too many Christians set the wrong priorities in life.

Righteousness

The righteous often sound so good - but their righteousness is only for other people.

Lecturing on family values

Real Family Values

Real family values include an empathy for others and a progressive view of the world - or some statistics would suggest.

Can it be? One of the oddest paradoxes of modern cultural politics may at last be resolved.

The paradox is this: Cultural conservatives revel in condemning the loose moral values and louche lifestyles of "San Francisco liberals." But if you want to find two-parent families with stable marriages and coddled kids, your best bet is to bypass Sarah Palin country and go to Nancy Pelosi territory: the liberal, bicoastal, predominantly Democratic places that cultural conservatives love to hate.

The country's lowest divorce rate belongs to none other than Massachusetts, the original home of same-sex marriage. Palinites might wish that Massachusetts's enviable marital stability were an anomaly, but it is not. The pattern is robust. States that voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in both 2004 and 2008 boast lower average rates of divorce and teenage childbirth than do states that voted for the Republican in both elections.

From the J-walk blog.

Republican Family Values Charade

From Acerbic Politics

"Well said" words of the day

From Joshua Holland at Alternet

But consider for a moment the bizarre reality a liberal-minded American like me faces these days. Those who we're told pose this dire threat to traditional marriage are June fucking Cleavers -- all they want is to make a good, loving home and have a life far too dull for me to even contemplate. And here we have these other folks who have anointed themselves the defenders of traditional marriage, and fought like Hell to keep June Cleaver from making that nice home for Ward and the boys (or Wanda and the boys, as the case may be), and they turn out to be a bunch of depraved bullies bent on nothing but their own, often perverse gratification. And year after year, scandal after scandal, they just seem to leave behind an almost endless string of broken homes and smoking wrecks of marriages.

The dissonance is so great that perhaps it's time to ask ourselves if we should keep calling these people "hypocrites." The charge is premised on the idea that religious conservatives are, in fact, "pro-family" in the first place. Given how frequently we hear of these tales of "hypocrisy," perhaps it's time to consider the possibility that being an amoral libertine is simply a facet of modern social conservatism -- a feature, if you will, rather than a bug.

Republican Home Away From Home

From Acerbic Politics

Family Values

From Acerbic Politics

The Porn Consumers

I don't see anything wrong with pornography - there's a place for it and an audience for it. I hate censorship in most forms. So, I support the right of people to download, watch, enjoy, share and have fun with their adult entertainment. Everyone should have a choice.

But sometimes the hypocrisy about porn and sexual misconduct makes me laugh. This is one of those times. From Boing Boing...

According to a new Harvard Business School study, eight of the top ten states in terms of online porn consumption were ones where McCain won in the presidential election. Professor Benjamin Edelman analyzed anonymised credit cards receipts from a large online porn company. Based on their limited data, the largest consumer is Utah.

Church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays – a 1% increase in a postal code's religious attendance was associated with a 0.1% drop in subscriptions that day. However, expenditures on other days of the week brought them in line with the rest of the country, Edelman finds.

Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don't explicitly restrict gay marriage.

States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement "I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage," bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference emerged for the statement "AIDS might be God's punishment for immoral sexual behaviour."

Bush Family Values

George H. W. and George W. discussing their vision for running the United States Government...

Republican Fear Tactics...

...and as I understand it, divorce rates and infidelity rates are much higher in the red states. Who has got the worst family values?

Vitter's Family Values