News Roundup for 9/29/09

Oh boy, here comes your incredibly disappointing cheescake calendar!

-Headline of the day-
"Get 'Em While They're Hot - 2010."

The right wing anti-abortion Clare Luce Booth Policy Institute has come out with their 2010 hot conservative women calendar. Hubba-hubba! If you go to their website, you can watch a "behind the scenes" video of the calendar shoots, too!

OK, I'll admit I didn't see the video, but judging from the portraits, I can tell you what this "behind the scenes" action looks like. First, you take a minivan full of prominent female crazies to Walmart, where some guy in a smock takes an exposure for each. Then you take the resulting prints back to the office, scan them, run them through Photoshop to drain almost all the color out of them and add a border you've scanned from a tablecloth you got at the Dollar Store, then print them up and staple them together.

Et viola, art.

And, hoo-boy, there's a babe for every wingnut's kink. If you like batshit-crazy babes, there's Shelly Bachmann:



If your tastes run more toward the brainless, there's the female version of Joe the Plumber, Carrie the Beauty Pageant Lady:



And finally, if you like both batshit-crazy and brainless -- in ladies three days older than the invention of matter -- there's longtime wingnut favorite Phyllis Schlafly:



Hey, hey, hey... Keep it in your pants, fellas. (Right Wing Watch)


-Lies, damned lies, and [Republican] statistics-
During the markup of healthcare legislation, Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) didn't like data that showed American healthcare sucks. Specifically, he balked at the numbers because they include deaths from auto accidents and gun violence. This was unfair, he argued, since these were "cultural factors" unique to the United States -- the only nation on Earth that has guns and cars.

"When you take into account cultural factors -- the fact that we drive cars a lot more than any other country; we are much more mobile," he said. "If you take out accidental deaths due to car accidents, and you take out gun deaths -- because we like our guns in the United States and there are a lot more gun deaths in the United States -- you take out those two things, you adjust those, and we actually better in terms of survival rates."

OK, so we like cars and guns, so those shouldn't count. We also like cheese and red meat and eggs, which means heart disease figures should be out too. Ditto for skiing accidents, alcohol-related deaths, and smoking, because those are a blast too. Take all those out, then US healthcare is freakin' awesome.

The weird thing is that he said it with a straight face, which must've been a real challenge. If the effort would've killed him, I think we could count that one. It couldn't have been any fun. (Think Progress)


-Chuck Grassley Twitters again!-
Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, the Senate's Stream of Consciousness Twitter Poet Laureate, has a message for those of you that make fun of the way he spells:

"Those of u who abhor the use of shorthand 'skool' for'school' ought to try to Tweet a message in 140bytes," he twittlepates. "Pls complain to Twitter."

It's not "skool" that's bothering me, Chuck. It's spelling "characters" B-Y-T-E-S. I don't think that's Twitter's fault.

In related news, Sen. Grassley demands that you get off his lawn. (Wonkette)