John Raese: West Virginia’s Next Senator?

How come Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle are getting all the publicity? They’re stealing valuable media coverage from some of the other wackjobs running for the Senate.

Take John Raese (please!) Robert Byrd will be spinning in his grave if this dildo takes his place in the U.S. Senate. True, he isn’t a witch like O’Donnell, and unlike Sharron Angle he hasn’t urged people to take “Second Amendment Remedies” against Democrats.

But he wants to abolish the minimum wage. And he recently bragged on a radio talk show that “I made my money the old fashioned way. I inherited it.”

And now he wants to take Ronald Reagan’s delusional “Star Wars” defense to a whole new level. He says we need a thousand lasers in the sky (not to be confused with “a thousand points of light”) to protect us from Communists, terrorists, homosexuals, government bureaucrats, or whatever it is he’s so terrified of.

“If there is a rogue missile aimed at our country, we have 33 minutes to figure out what we're going to do. We are sitting with the only technology in the world that works and it's laser technology. We need 1,000 laser systems put in the sky and we need it right now. That is of paramount importance.”

“Paramount importance” — are you sure you don’t mean Paranoid? Twitchy little bugger, isn’t he. If you snuck up behind him and yelled “Boo!” how high do you think he’d jump?

In the same speech where he talked about protecting our families with lasers, he also said:

“Weak people breed weak nations. If we are going to be weak, we are going to lose the nation, aren't we. Are we going to be weak? I don't think so ... We're not going to be weak and we're not going to lose our nation. We have two election cycles. We have got to git-r-dun.”

Believe it or not, Laser Boy is actually running ahead of his opponent, West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin.

YOU could be Sued by RightHaven

I’m too pissed off about this to even rant about it. First off, Hat Tip to Jolly Roger at Reconstitution, where I first read about this.

RightHaven is a gang of lawyers with one mission: Scouring the Internet to look for any website or blog that contains ANY written content that originated in the Las Vegas Journal Review. It doesn’t matter whether an entire article was copied, or just a sentence or two. And it doesn’t matter that the blogger or webmaster linked the quoted sentences back to the Las Vegas Journal Review.

Needless to say, search your own site for ANYTHING quoted from or linked to the Las Vegas Journal Review; and delete that post, or at least remove the “offending” text.

This is RightHaven’s M.O.: When they find a sentence or paragraph somewhere on the Internet that was quoted from a Las Vegas Journal Review article or column, RightHaven buys the copyright to that particular story. Then RightHaven threatens the offending blogger/website operator with a federal lawsuit for copyright infringement.

RightHaven has filed over a hundred of these lawsuits so far. More often than not, the website operator is too intimidated to go to court so they pay a few thousand dollars in shakedown fees.

There’s nothing political about this. Nevada’s favorite tinfoil hatter, Sharron Angle, was sued by RightHaven for $150,000 because her website contained some text from a Las Vegas Journal Review article About HER.

The Las Vegas Review Journal is RightHaven’s only client — so far. But they reportedly are looking for additional customers.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is observing and monitoring RightHaven’s activities, but hasn’t taken any action yet.

Here are some more links to RightHaven.

GOP to Rape Victims: “Stop Whining and Give Birth to That Baby! And What Were You Wearing???”

This isn’t part of the official Republican Party platform, of course. But a lot of extremist Republican candidates have said they want to ban ALL abortions, with NO exceptions for rape victims or when a woman’s life is in danger.

Every time a Republican Spanish Inquisitionist spews out this garbage, the outburst gets a brief mention on a liberal news site, and then falls off the public radar. And now Rachel Maddow has tied all of these Republican bilge-spewings into one screaming red flag.

This is another issue the Democrats could be using, in case they’re actually concerned about the November elections.

Rachel Maddow said:

“The Republican Party is, without actually talking about it, this year nominating a group of candidates for top-of-the-ticket races that are more extreme on the issue of abortion than any other slate of top-of-the-ticket candidates in any other year.”

This extreme no-abortion-ever-under-any-circumstances position is held by three senate candidates who call themselves Libertarian: Sharron Angle, Rand Paul and Ken Buck (Colorado). Rightwing schizophrenia strikes again. Government should be small enough that you can drown it in Grover Norquist’s bathtub, AND simultaneously, huge enough to monitor the personal lives of 300 million Americans and make sure that every pregnancy is carried to term. Why aren’t these schizoid sickfucks confined to a mental facility under heavy sedation, instead of being allowed to run for the U.S. Senate?

Or as Maddow puts it, these three:

“…small government conservatives believe that government should be big enough that it can monitor every pregnancy in the country to ensure that every single woman who becomes pregnant is forced by the government to carry that pregnancy to term. ... This is a position that was beyond the pale even in fringe anti-abortion politics not very many years ago, but apparently those days are over.”

She also says:

“They're not trying to run on this as a national issue. I can understand why. But maybe Democrats should be making this a national issue.”

Earth to the Democrats — anybody out there???