Would you believe it? The Shroud of Turin is a fake. Really!
Yep. Of course you already knew that. Way back in 1988 scientists, using radiocarbon dating, proved it was made sometime in the 13th or 14th centuries. It is a hoax! That did not, of course, dissuade "true" believers who are not bothered by facts or the truth.
You probably also know that this faux shroud is supposed to show "a crucified man, complete with blood seeping out of nailed hands and feet, and believers say Christ's image was recorded on the linen fibers at the time of his resurrection." (AOL News).
Hee, hee. All this from a man who most likely didn't exist in the first place!
Just recently, a team of scientists led by a chemistry professor at the University of Pavia in Italy, were able to duplicate the shroud using a variety of processes (materials and methods available in the 14th century).
In fact, the shroud was "discovered" somewhere around 1360. A French knight had possession. Hmmm. Where had it been before that? No one knows. It just appeared out of thin air.
Now the Vatican, that repository of ignorance and superstition, keeps the shroud locked away and brings it out only when it needs to entice a bunch of people to Rome to fill its coffers with Euros. It was last displayed in 2000 and over a million of the ignorant faithful showed up to pay their respects (pun intended).
The Roman Church has since its inception created phony saints, phony bones, and god knows how many other relics to keep the ignorant and superstitious in line and give them reason to continue to bow and scrape and send money.
These are people who "believe," and science be damned, they're gonna keep on believing the shroud is real.
But one wonders about this god in which they believe. Why couldn't he or she have put a name tag on the damn thing saying "Jesus was buried in this garment"? If god is omnipotent as the Roman church claims, that would have been a piece of cake.
Or, when the legendary Yeshua walked out of the tomb, why didn't this omnipotent god have some non-believing artists available who could have touched him and talked to him and drawn his portrait, noting on their work the date and time? The Roman authorities could have recorded the incident like they recorded every other incident. That would have better served to verify the resurrection than some old raggedy shroud that was created out of whole cloth in the 14th century!
Maybe Jesus didn't exist. Or maybe the Roman god is not really omnipotent. Maybe he's impotent.
The brainless Michele Bachmann is back pretending to know something. What she pretends to know, is once again not true. Rick Sanchez, bless his heart, takes her to task for being just plain stoopid!
The commentary is from Crooks & Liars.
SANCHEZ: One of the things that we like to do in this segment is shine a light on lawmakers who gaffe or don't exactly tell the truth all the time. We begin "Fotos" today with Michele Bachmann.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BACHMANN: The bill orders these clinics protect patient privacy in student records. What does that mean? It means that parents will never know what kind of counsel and treatment that their children are receiving.
And, as a matter of fact, the bill goes on to say what's going to go on. Comprehensive primary health services, physicals, treatment of minor, acute, chronic medical conditions, referrals to follow up for specialty care -- is that abortion? Does that mean that someone's 13-year-old daughter could walk into a sex clinic, have a pregnancy test done, be taken away to the local Planned Parenthood abortion clinic, have their abortion, be back and go on home on the school bus that night? Mom and dad are never the wiser.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
SANCHEZ: If could, if could -- Bachmann is a Republican, by the way. And to be clear, we looked into this. Nothing that she is alleging in that sound bite you just heard is actually true, nothing. We checked.
School-based health clinics, or as Bachmann terms them, "sex clinics," have been around for some 30 years in the United States. And as far as we've been able to discover, not one of them has ever referred a student to an abortion provider without the knowledge of a parent, never happened. The actual bill that Bachmann is citing stipulates that school-based health clinics comply with all federal, state and local laws governing parental notification and parental consent.
So, why would she say that? She is right, by the way, that as of last Wednesday, none of the three bills explicitly ban school-based health clinics from referring students to abortion clinics. And for the record, neither does it ban kids from being shipped to Mars, either.
There is one other note: there is now an amendment to specifically bar all public school-based health funds from being used for any such medical needs.
Paul Broun is a certified christianist loony-toon from Georgia. He's the one who wants to censor what our military overseas can read. In other words, no Playboy magazines! God told him to do it!
Watch the video and read the commentary by Crooks and Liars below. Does not this come close to treason?
From the Rachel Maddow Show Oct. 5, 2009. Rachel reiterates this report from TPMDC--The GOP's New Foreign Policy: Undermine American Diplomacy:
An interesting pattern has been emerging in the Republican Party's handling of foreign policy: Individual GOP officials are now making a regular point of not only formulating an alternative foreign policy, to be presented to the American people and debated in Congress -- they're acting on it too, and undermining the official White House policies at multiple turns.
• Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) is visiting Honduras in order to support the recent military coup against a leftist president, which has been opposed by the Obama administration and all the surrounding countries in the region. (Late Update: DeMint's office says he is not taking sides during his visit to the current Honduran leadership, denying the New York Times reports that this was his intention.)
• Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) will be going to the upcoming climate change conference in Copenhagen, bringing a "Truth Squad" to tell foreign officials there that the American government will not take any action: "Now, I want to make sure that those attending the Copenhagen conference know what is really happening in the United States Senate."
• House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) traveled to Israel, where he spoke out against President Obama's opposition to expanded settlements. He also defended Israel on the eviction of two Arab families from a house in east Jerusalem, which had been criticized by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
• Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL) boasted in June that he told Chinese officials not to trust America's budget numbers. "One of the messages I had -- because we need to build trust and confidence in our number one creditor," said Kirk, "is that the budget numbers that the US government had put forward should not be believed." Since then, he has declared his candidacy for U.S. Senate.
Anyone remember this statement by Trent Lott when some Democratic Congressmen dared to visit Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion?
Lott raps U.S. congressman in Iraq:
Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Washington, who is one of three House members visiting Iraq to urge Iraqi officials to avert war by allowing U.N. weapons inspectors back in, has acted irresponsibly, Lott said.
"For him to be in Baghdad, the center of one of the most dangerous dictators in the world, with all kinds of weapons of mass destruction, to be questioning the veracity of our own American president, is the height of irresponsible," said Lott, R-Mississippi. "He needs to come home and keep his mouth shut."
Or these attacks on Nancy Pelosi for going to Syria? Pelosi's Syria Trip: Media Advancing Right-Wing Spin.
As always, IOKIYAR.
Update. Transcript below the fold.
MADDOW: As Republicans search for meaning in the political minority, as they try to beat a path out of the political wilderness, an increasing number of Republican leaders seem to be trying to compensate for their relative lack of power at home by flexing their muscles abroad. Republicans have been traveling to other countries to try to undermine the policies of the United States. You might call it anti-diplomacy.
We first reported this phenomenon in June when Illinois Republican Congressman Mark Kirk bragged that on a trip to China, he had met with Chinese government officials and told them to not trust the American government on matters of the budget and the deficit.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. MARK KIRK: One of the messages I had-because we need to build trust and confidence in our number one creditor-is that the budget numbers that the U.S. government had put forward should not be believed.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MADDOW: Don't believe the U.S. government, China. Congressman Mark Kirk's great idea for building trust and confidence is to tell China to definitely not trust us.
But a little over two weeks ago, Republican Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma made an announcement. He said that he was going to go rogue overseas himself. He says he plans on attending the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this December and it's because he thinks that global warning is a hoax.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. JIM INHOFE: All these problems, it just didn't happen. In fact, the IED rate.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MADDOW: Well, that's not at all-what was interesting part of what he said. What he said was, "I'm going to go ahead and announce now, I'm going to go to Copenhagen. I think someone needs to be there as a one man truth squad." A one man truth squad.
Senator Inhofe says the mission of his little one man truth squad will be to tell other countries not to believe what the United States says when our government negotiates on climate change and carbon emissions. And, you know, when it was just Mark Kirk going to China to tell the Chinese not to trust us, that was weird. Then when it turned out to be Mark Kirk plus Jim Inhofe, when it happened twice, sort of seemed like it might be a coincidence.
But when something like this happens three times, I think it's called a trend-which makes Republican Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina officially the trend-maker. Senator DeMint is now back from meeting with the de facto government of Honduras, the government that the United States does not recognize.
Mr. DeMint called the meeting with the military government that ousted their president there, quote, "very productive." Adding, "We saw a government working hard to follow the rule of law, uphold its Constitution, and to protect democracy for the people of Honduras."
Senator DeMint is referring to a government that ushered its country's democratically-elected president out of the country in his pajamas, a government that until today allowed police and soldiers to break up public meetings, arrest people without warrant and restrict the news media.
Then today, remarkably, three more Republican members of Congress went to Honduras and visited with this government that we, as a country, supposedly do not recognize. Thereby jumping on the "go abroad to undermine American foreign policy" even though you're an American bandwagon -- this creepy, creepy bandwagon.
Once again it becomes very clear that one need have no brain to become a member of the United States Congress. Michele Bachmann, the brainless bimbo from Minnesota so qualifies!
Just when you think the wingnuts can't get any crazier, they get a lot crazier.
I got this from Media Matters for America who got it from John L. Perry at Newsmax. Newsmax, of course, is so far right it's falling off their flat earth! And Perry is one of those extremists who believes any means justifies the ends, so long as they are his "ends." He is also a liar of great magnitude, crying that Obama is a "Marxist," who is trying to remake the United States into a Marxist state!
Well, if you think that is insane crapola, read the following. Methinks you'll begin to get a sense of the danger our country is in from the rightwhitewingnuts!
Perry starts his article by noting that what's he's talking about is not "unrealistic," and although he may be suggesting it's a great idea, he's not advocating it!
What is "it"? A military coup by which our generals and admirals take over the United States government.
Oh, not to worry, says Perry, we're not a Third World country, so such a coup would be civilized. His scenario goes like this:
"'...patriotic general and flag officers [will] sit down with the president, or [notice here the attempt to portray Obama has a mere pawn in a Marxist scheme] with those who control him, and work out the national equivalent of a 'family intervention,' with some form of limited, shared responsibility."
"Imagine," says Perry, "a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars. Having bonded with his twin teleprompters, the president would be detailed for ceremonial speech-making.
"Military intervention is what Obama's exponentially accelerating agenda for 'fundamental change' toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama's radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible."
That's the gist of Perry's tirade. Here we have subversion and treason wrapped up in some unrecognizable form of "patriotism" and "constitutionalism" but is actually the reverse of anything remotely associated with patriotism! It is nothing more than advocating the unconstitutional overthrow of our democratically-elected government.
In fact, what Perry is describing is very similar to the methods by which the commies took over the Soviet Union or the the fascists took over Germany.
Which does not mean he's a commie or a nazi, but it does mean he's either crazy or he's a subversive and a traitor! Hell, I think he's all three: crazy, subversive, and a traitor!
Where the hell are the cowardly bunch of pussies who make up the Democratic leadership in Congress?
Finally, we get a Democrat with some intelligence and guts who has the good sense and the nerve to call out the Repuglicans for what they are -- nogoodniks who don't give a damn about the American people -- and when the Repugnicans start whining, the Democratic leadership is nowhere to be found.
Alan Grayson, whom I'm proud to say is from Florida, made a wonderful comment about the Repug health care plan as being a "blank piece of paper." Then he said, "If you get sick, America, the Republican health care plan is this: Die quickly. That's right, the Republicans want you to die quickly if you get sick."
Heh. Heh. Right on, Alan!
Oh, the poor Repugnican hypocrites! Weeping and wailing all over the place! "Apologize, apologize," they cried in unison, tears falling all over their custom-made $2,000 suits (paid for by corporate America).
Grayson wasn't dining at that table! No sir. He went on to say, "I would like to apologize...I apologize to the dead and their families that we haven't voted sooner to end this holocaust in America."
Can you hear me clapping and cheering? According to the latest research, which Grayson cited, almost 45,000 Americans die each year because they do NOT have health insurance.
Now the Repugs, feigning outrage, want Grayson to apologize, saying that he's doing the same thing as Joe Wilson did.
How stupid do they think we are? Joe Wilson heckled the president of the United States calling him a liar. The heckling was bad enough. Calling him a liar was worse. And the fact is, it was not the president who was lying, it was Joe Wilson, who evidently had not read the health care bill.
So, the Repugs are drafting a "resolution of disapproval." Hah. Hah. These Repugs are the same assholes who claim that Obama's health care contains death panels. The moronic senator from Iowa is still claiming that the government might "pull the plug on grandma"!
Why aren't the Repugs putting together a "resolution of disapproval" against Grassley?
Michael Steele claims Grayson's remarks are a "smear" against the GOP. God, I hope so! The GOP needs to be smeared. The GOP is no longer a political party, it has become a group of Jesus freaks controlled by international corporations and their lobbyists.
Go Grayson! And the rest of you Democrats in Congress better back him up! 'Cause many of us out here in the hinterland are getting mighty sick of you pussies caving into the ugly Repugs every time they wag a finger at you!
