It’s The Ron Paul Family Cookbook!

Not a hoax, apparently this is a real thing. You gotta love a cookbook that includes a chicken recipe submitted by a vegetarian. What could possibly go wrong?

Mrs. Sciulli, despite being a vegetarian, contributed to the 2009 edition Golfer’s Chicken, a dish made of chicken parts coated with powdered onion soup mix, salad dressing and apricot jam. “You have to fall off the wagon now and again,” she said.

I think I just threw up in my mouth.

Or this:

For the traditional White House Super Bowl Party, what about Spicy Crackers? The cookbook says they are simple: Empty a box of saltine crackers into a jug, add 1½ cups of oil, 3 tablespoons of crushed red pepper flakes and a package of dry Ranch dressing mix. Roll the jug around to mix the contents, “allow the crackers to set for several hours and then, enjoy!”

I’d love to but I’m still trying to figure out how to get the damn saltines inside a jug.

This cracked me up:

Peggy Paul said some Ron Paul supporters have told the family they framed their cookbooks. “But then,” she said, “how would you use it?”

Indeed! Then again, the executive chef of Washington’s Ritz-Carlton hotel told the Wall Street Journal he tried a few of the recipes and thinks the book is better framed on the wall than used for meal planning.

The Honest Rape

On Friday night Ron Paul, the great Libertarian hype hope for America, told CNN’s Piers Morgan that a woman who is the victim of an “honest rape” should have access to certain services:

Piers Morgan: You have two daughters, you have many granddaughters. If one of them was raped — and I accept it’s a very unlikely thing to happen, but if they were — would you honestly look at them in the eye and say they had to have that child if they were impregnated.

Ron Paul: If it’s an honest rape, that individual should go immediately to the emergency room, and I would give them a shot of estrogen.

This is what passes for the “moderate” abortion position in your modern Republican Party. Pre-Susan G. Komen uproar this would have been taken as just another piece of stupid falling out of the mouth of just another anti-woman Republican. But yesterday my Twitter feed was filled with outrage, blog posts were furiously attacking Ron Paul, and right on cue the Ron-bots rushed to defend this idiot, claiming he didn’t say what we all heard him say and he didn’t mean what he obviously meant.

[Let me add: they do this all the time. Ron Paul’s not a racist, he had no idea what went into years and years worth of newsletters bearing his name! (except he did. Oh yeah, and then there’s this stuff.) You guys just have zero credibility. STFU.]

But back to the topic at hand. I’m trying to figure out what an “honest” rape is, and who gets to determine that. Should we convene a panel to decide if the rape was “honest,” something like the FISA court? Would women need to show a certain amount of bruises and broken bones for the rape to be sufficiently “honest?” Should we evaluate her clothing to see if she “asked for it”? What if the rapist was the woman’s husband, would that still count as “honest”? What if the woman is a prostitute?

Is it an “honest” rape if a black man rapes a white woman? But if a white man rapes a black woman, it’s not? Sorry, I have to ask.

And haven’t we decided this stuff already? Haven’t there been, like, fifty gazillion Lifetime movies aired about these topics? Don’t we already have that “shot of estrogen” available to women at any drug store, a pill called Plan B? Didn’t you people just fight tooth and nail to make sure women can’t access it over the counter?

This is the difference between the phony “pro-lifers” of the Republican Party and the pro-choice side. The phony “pro-lifers” — the people we call “forced birthers” — are trying to roll back the clock to that time pre-Gloria Steinem when men could still decide these issues for women, when modern medical advances hadn’t wrested that control from their hands. When women’s sexuality was still something to be afraid of. They’re fighting stuff that’s already been decided by the culture and trying to pretend that the solutions modern medicine and the pharmaceutical industry have created don’t exist. This strikes me not just as delusional but pathological.

Ron Paul is 76 years old. He went to medical school in the late 1950s. He’s of a generation where it’s okay to question a woman about whether she was “honestly” raped, you know, as opposed to just “making it up” the way we ladies like to do in our hormone-induced hysteria. In his world a woman “honestly” raped needs to go to the emergency room for treatment, and all that implies, as opposed to picking up a pill at the corner Rite-Aid.

Meanwhile on the other side we have a generation of women (and men) raised with the mantra “no means no” and women have direct access to information and safe solutions that didn’t exist in the 1950s. Those bells won’t be unrung, much as the other side pretends they can be.

It’s over, we all know it. If the pro-choice movement heretofore looked sufficiently unmotivated during these repeated attacks on women’s healthcare — stuff like fetal ultrasound legislation and anti-coercion signage and such — it’s because no one is really interested in refighting a battle that we’ve already won. I think the Susan G. Komen flap woke a bunch of people up, though.

Here’s the reality: cultural change can’t be undone. You’re not going to undo civil rights and women’s rights and gay rights. You can’t undo the fact that we live in a post-Christian society.

These things were decided long ago. These are battles you either lost or weren’t part of when they happened a generation ago, and they won’t be re-litigated.

Ron Paul Is Still A Racist Crackpot

I’m glad the national news media has finally, after nearly 20 years, decided to notice Ron Paul is a racist crank. Kinda took them long enough, but whatever.

I wrote about the racist newsletters causing Ron Paul so many headaches now waaay back in 2007. That post generated a slew of angry comments from Rondroids bent on proving that their savior was not batshit insane (unfortunately, all of my old comments got lost when I moved from Blogger to WordPress, which is a shame, because some of them were truly awesome).

Anyway, revisiting that old post from my blog’s earliest days, I was able to call up the Houston Chronicle’s original reporting about these racist newsletters. This story first surfaced when Paul ran for Congress way back in 1996; his Democratic opponent, a lawyer from Austin named Charles “Lefty” Morris, uncovered the racist newsletters and released them to the press. Morris lost that election, amazingly, and Ron Paul has been unleashed on the American electorate ever since. Despite running for president numerous times and despite his son Rand’s Senate campaign and the attention his negative comments about the 1964 Civil Rights Act received , the national political media is just now noticing Pater Paul’s malodorous racism.

So let’s revisit that Houston Chronicle story, shall we? Here are some excerpts from the Ron Paul newsletter:

Under the headline of “Terrorist Update,” for instance, Paul reported on gang crime in Los Angeles and commented, “If you have ever been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be.”

And:

“Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5 percent of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty and the end of welfare and affirmative action,” Paul wrote.

And:

Paul also wrote that although “we are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, it is hardly irrational. Black men commit murders, rapes, robberies, muggings and burglaries all out of proportion to their numbers.”

And:

He added, “We don’t think a child of 13 should be held responsible as a man of 23. That’s true for most people, but black males age 13 who have been raised on the streets and who have joined criminal gangs are as big, strong, tough, scary and culpable as any adult and should be treated as such.”

Paul is now claiming that he did not write these statements, even claiming that he didn’t pay close enough attention to who was writing for the Ron Paul Report. To which I say: bullshit. That’s a very different spin on things than what he told the Houston Chronicle back in 1996:

Paul, a Republican obstetrician from Surfside, said Wednesday he opposes racism and that his written commentaries about blacks came in the context of “current events and statistical reports of the time.”

“The time” being 1992. Ancient history, you know! Way back in the bad ol’ days when the Uppity Negroes were so much more uncivilized. Riiight.

Note, there was no mention of “ghost writers” and apologies that he should have policed the content of his newsletters more. Nope, when it was just the Texas media paying attention to this stuff, Ron Paul was all, “have you read the papers lately, people?!”

Liberal bloggers have known about this stuff for years. The liberal media, of course, doesn’t pay attention to us. I’m wondering if my name were Andrew Breitbart how long it would have taken CNN to figure out Ron Paul is a racist old crank.

The New York Times Finally Notices Ron Paul

I just don’t know what to say to this:

IT wasn’t quite the slip-up (or slip-down, as it were) most people expect during a presidential campaign, but whatever happened to Ron Paul’s eyebrows at Tuesday night’s debate certainly caught some viewers’ attention.

For those of you not yet riveted by the Republican race, Mr. Paul, the dark-horse libertarian with equally dusky brows, was a victim of hot lights, faulty adhesive or merely a devilish optical illusion when his right eyebrow seemed to dip toward the stage at Dartmouth College.

Seen on television, Mr. Paul appeared to have a second, thinner brow under the one headed south, creating a delicate X over his right eye.

There’s a picture at the link.

So this is what it’s come to. I almost feel sorry for the New York Times. This is how they compete with the foul-mouthed bloggers now? Ron Paul, on the other hand, should be thrilled that the esteemed newspaper is finally paying attention to his campaign.

Mixed Message

Bless their hearts, the Ron Paul Sign Brigade is back in business. However, just a tip: you guys might want to consider your message placement a little more carefully. I’m confused: are you for Ron Paul in 2012, or trying to stop him?

>Ron Paul Is To Ralph Nader As …

>I knew all of those “Google Ron Paul” signs would eventually amount to something:

Ron Paul to announce presidential endorsement plans

WASHINGTON (CNN) – Texas Republican Rep. Ron Paul will call on supporters to back a third party candidate for president Wednesday, rejecting his own party’s nominee and offering equally harsh words for the Democratic candidate.

Paul, who unsuccessfully sought the Republican presidential nomination, will tell supporters he is not endorsing GOP nominee John McCain or Democratic nominee Barack Obama, and will instead give his seal of approval to four candidates: Green Party nominee Cynthia McKinney, Libertarian Party nominee Bob Barr, independent candidate Ralph Nader, and Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin, according to a senior Paul aide.

Change–any change–is change we can believe in! Far left, far right, hell it doesn’t matter: as long as it’s different!

(h/t, Kleinheider.)

>Memo To Ron Paul Supporters

>You can take your signs back now.

Sorry for the double post earlier. I am still unable to see my blog except for the current post, and am unable to see comments. I only have this problem at home; everything is fine if I use the WiFi somewhere else. If anyone knows anything about the internet, let me know. My ISP says they aren’t having any server troubles.

Sigh.

>Now THAT’S Ironic

>I guess he was saved by the free hand of the market:

HOUSTON (KTRK) — A Continental Airlines flight carrying former presidential candidate Ron Paul and six other members of Congress to Washington, D.C., made an emergency landing in New Orleans on Tuesday after a loss in cabin pressure.

The seven congressmen, all from Texas, were trying to get back in time for a Tuesday night vote on an aviation safety bill when the flight landed without incident, a spokesman for one of the representatives said. No injuries were reported among the 128 crew and passengers.

Good thing there weren’t any pesky government safety regulations to get in the way of their safe landing.

>About Those Primaries Last Night

>No, not the Democratic primaries. I’m sick of the Democratic primary! I’m talking about the Republican primary, and some pretty strange election results.

Last night was also the Republican primary in Indiana and North Carolina. John McCain won of course, but Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul and Mitt Romney still collected a large percent of votes –large considering two out of those three aren’t even running anymore.

In Indiana, Huckabee collected 10%, Paul 8% and Romney 5%. In North Carolina Huckabee received 12%, Paul 8% and “No Preference” 4%.

What this tells me is that 25% of Republican voters are dissastisfied with John McCain as their candidate and wanted to “make a statement” with their primary vote. Either that or they’re so hopelessly ill-informed and out of touch that they thought Huckabee or Romney were still in the race. Hey, we’re talking about Republican voters here, so anything is possible.

I kid, I kid. I kid because I love.

No, not really.

Anyway, I think this is an issue for the Republicans. McCain has had the Republican nomination sewed up for weeks, and yet a quarter of the Republican voters still aren’t wowed by him? I don’t for a moment think that this 25% could be brought to the Democratic side of the aisle but I do think unless the Republican Party is able to inspire these voters with one of their famous “wedge” issues, a lot of them are going to stay home in November. They’re just not that into him.

And can we put an end to discussion about Rush Limbaugh’s ridiculous Operation Chaos? Hillary Clinton won Indiana by 2%. Hardly a decisive victory.

And finally a word to Ron Paul: can we take those damn “Google Ron Paul” signs down, already? I admire the Paulistas for their enthusiasm; they can hammer up a poster like nobody’s business. But give it a rest already. The revolution didn’t happen.

>Oh, The Irony

>Memo to all the folks furiously hammering their “Vote Ron Paul” and “Who Is Ron Paul” signs to every public utility pole and every square inch of public right-of-way in Davidson County: let me point out that if Libertarians had their way, you would be trespassing, because there would BE no public utility or public right of way under a Libertarian world view. Someone would own that grassy corner or utility pole and it is they, not you, who would have the say-so over the messages posted on their land.

That is all.