The Rude Pundit

Why Ann Coulter Is a Cunt, Part 439,803 (Violence Equivalency Edition):
These days, it's almost sad to see and read Ann Coulter. So long the standard bearer of right-wing ignorance expressed with a savagery that is mistaken as "wit," now, in the wake of the heights of bugfuck insanity that Glenn Beck reaches every time his spike-topped bloated head of doom appears on TV, Coulter's brand of cuntistry seems quaint or used up. She's essentially the oldest whore in the brothel, cooz and asshole so worn out from use that fucking her is like tossing a roll of pennies down a wishing well. Oh, sure, sure, the occasional regular like Sean Hannity will show up at the joint in order to give her a charity screw. But mostly, she's just sadly tramped-up eye candy, which, pathetically, is all she ever was.

However, often her writing contains nice, nutzoid summaries of the memes that make the email rounds and get teabaggers all hetted up. It's one-stop shopping to get a sense of the conservative zeitgeist, like signs with better spelling. In her latest "column" (if by "column," you mean, "a moldy piece of bread found under the refrigerator"), Coulter attempts to make the case that liberals are violent "treasonous" thugs who routinely physically attack conservatives while the Tea Party members and other right-wingers are peacefully and non-racist-ly exercising their First Amendment rights. You hear this all the time from Limbaugh and Beck and Hannity and Ingraham and the rest of 'em. "No video exists proving that black congressmen were spat on by protesters" or "Mean looking black people in Black Panther drag made white people unhappy" or "Tea Partiers ain't racist. It's just a few bad apples that bring the racist signs or say racist things. By the way, that MoveOn ad sent in by a single individual to an open contest that compared George W. Bush to Hitler proves all liberals are crazy. But, hey, isn't Obama just like Hitler?"

Let's do this the easy way:

Coulter says, "Last fall, a conservative had his finger bitten off by a man from a MoveOn.org crowd in Thousand Oaks, Calif."
The Rude Pundit says, "James W. von Brunn."

Coulter says, "In the fall of 2008, Obama supporters Mace'd elderly volunteers in a McCain campaign office in Galax, Va."
The Rude Pundit says, "Jim David Adkisson."

Coulter says, "One Obama supporter broke a McCain sign being held by a small middle-aged woman in midtown Manhattan before hitting her in the face with the stick."
The Rude Pundit says, "Scott Roeder."

Coulter says, "In separate attacks, a half-dozen liberals threw Molotov cocktails at McCain signs on families' front yards in and around Portland, Ore."
The Rude Pundit says, "Joseph Andrew Stack. And Byron Williams. And Richard Poplawski." Murder and mayhem after murder and mayhem, real and wannabe.

Let's just say that the scales weighing recent political violence are tilted quite a bit to the right, which perhaps gives us a reason to fear groups of armed, agitated conservatives gathering to vent.

And when Coulter asserts that she's listing only "a few acts of violence from the left too numerous to catalog," the only thing to say, the "Shut the fuck up" to her is one word, repeated as a chant, "McVeigh, McVeigh, McVeigh."

The Anti-Moratorium Rally Ate Our Oily Souls:
There the Rude Pundit was, in the Cajundome in Lafayette, Louisiana, a week ago, in the media section, right in front of the stage, for the Rally for Economic Survival. The rally, sponsored by local businesses, but mostly those that are oil-related, was to send a message via the media that most of Louisiana opposes President Obama's six-month moratorium on new deepwater drilling, as well as the suspension of operations on 33 wells currently being drilled (which is less than 1% of the deepwater wells in the Gulf). Everywhere you went in town, you could see signs telling people to go to the rally. Businesses shut down so their workers could attend, some even providing buses for them to get there. And, indeed, the Cajundome, which has a Justin Bieber concert coming up, was pretty much filled with over 11,000 people.

Behind the Rude Pundit was the staff for the Attorney General of Louisiana. Two seats back was Senator David Vitter, the Republican whose affairs with diaper-changing hookers do not seem to matter to the supposedly good Catholics and evangelicals who vote for him. Oil executives were all around. Walking through the Cajundome, you could identify people by their shirts - who worked for Halliburton, who worked for Shell, who worked for every small oil company, who was there for the local Tea Party. Most were the workers whose jobs could be affected by the halt of drilling, although one suspected that they were acting like it was a blanket moratorium and not one so specifically targeted.

A few observations:

1. Lieutenant Governor Scott Angelle is one of those old school politicians who can whip a crowd into a frenzy. Frankly, he's the guy Republicans should be grooming for the future, not Governor Bobby Jindal. The Rude Pundit's mom, who was his "photographer" for the event, found him absolutely thrilling.

2. Bobby Jindal is one of the goddamned worst speakers. His whiny little speech, which featured him saying that "We don't want a check from BP," climaxed by his lame-ass attempt to get the crowd to chant "Let us go back to work," which he approached with all the enthusiasm of a man forced to go to a John Mayer concert with his girlfriend. The crowd clapped a bit and confusedly tried to chant, but it was aborted before it reached its first trimester.

3. Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser is not your roly-poly friend anymore. Oh, how we all loved this man of the people when he appeared on our magical Anderson Cooper show, railing about BP's despoiling of his people's land. But now he mocked President Obama and demanded an end to the moratorium on the very drilling that wrecked his parish's marshes and coasts. He's an old oil guy, so he knows where the big money comes from. It ain't shrimp.

4. Speaker after speaker said that this was a "war" that had to be won. The war was with the federal government, which was criticized (to cheers and boos) constantly in a way that BP was not.

5. The Cajundome and rally organizers did not allow people to bring signs, not inside, not in the parking lot. One imagines it was a way to avoid anyone showing up with an Obama/Hitler or witch doctor poster. But there was a barely contained rage towards the President that popped out every now and then when someone would yell, "Stop Obama." Or when oil lobbyist John Hofmeister started to talk about the "three evils" affecting South Louisiana. He was talking about the evils of what he called "misinformation" in various forms, but dozens of people called out "Obama" or "Obama is evil."

6. Yes, there were black people there. Yes, the vast majority of the crowd was white. No, the representation of non-whites was not in proportion to the truly diverse population of the region.

7. No Democratic politician spoke nor was in the audience. Not Senator Mary Landrieu. Not Representative Charlie Melancon. They both oppose the moratorium, too.

The Rude Pundit felt disgusted by the entire thing. Because you know what? They were right. South Louisiana is bought and owned by the oil industry. In the last century, it has raped the Louisiana landscape like a Russian mobster with a new shipment of hot Ukrainian women who thought they were immigrating for modeling jobs. The state is now the oil industry's willing whore, doing anything it can to please Chevron or ExxonMobil because that where the jobs are.

You drive down, for instance, Highway 90 from Lafayette to New Iberia, and you pass the pipe fitters, the heavy tool operators, the boat repair shops, the undersea explorer offices, the truck rental places, business after business after business, every single one of them, every single person in them, every single restaurant nearby, every single motel and hotel that puts up business travelers, all of them serving the oil corporations. And all of those jobs and all of those sales and service payments make up a huge part of the tax base of the state.

So, yeah, even with just 33 rigs down, that's thousands of jobs that are directly affected. And BP ain't gonna pay it all. And it's kind of a joke to get all upset about the ruined marshes when the canals and paths that have been carved out of the Louisiana landscape have shredded the wetlands for decades, with little attention beyond activists who wave their hands uselessly.

We're fucked. That's the conclusion the Rude Pundit reached. We are so very fucked by oil. Because the cost of weaning this nation off it is astronomical. Last month, when Bill Maher said, "Fuck your jobs" in favor of the environment, it was a fine rhetorical flourish, but so, so very naive, in a way he usually is not. But not because he dreams big. Liberals are dreamers. It's what we do.

We are fucked because every job lost is a family we all gotta help. It would cost trillions of dollars to extricate ourselves from the claws of Big Oil. And we are simply no longer a nation that thinks in such ways any more. That's why the Rude Pundit walked out of the rally angry, sad, and despairing. Unless we are willing to sacrifice as a whole, unless we are willing to shift our entire economy to saving the earth and the air, you may as well let 'em drill.

Photos That Remind the Rude Pundit of How Very Long the Road Is:


While we discuss about how the Shirley Sherrod story once again exposes our inability to articulate the complexities of racial relations in the United States, sometimes we need a little nudge, a little something that makes us say, "Oh, goddamnit. Really?"

For the Rude Pundit, while home in Lafayette, Louisiana, it was this sign on Pinhook Road, a main drag in town. Lafayette is not some podunk rural burg. It's a city of over 200,000 people. It's the heart of the oil industry in South Louisiana. People from all over the world visit and study there.

But there it was, this billboard for Eddie's BBQ, which reads "Ah likes da ribs." The Rude Pundit doesn't know how good the ribs are at Eddie's because, well, the restaurant's motto is born of either racism or stupidity or, as usual, the piquant sauce of both mixed together, and he'd rather give his money to the Southern Poverty Law Center or something.

By the way, the Rude Pundit pointed the billboard out to others, locals, who all said, "Oh, huh. Never noticed."

Andrew Breitbart Shows the Media the Way to the Egress:
While the Rude Pundit was on vacation, watching while everyone was using the Shirley Sherrod story as another of a million opportunities for (mostly white) navel-gazing about race, while the Obama administration crumbled like Barney Fife facing down the Mafia, and while the mainstream media saw another opportunity to get all indignant about them internets, all he could think was, "Man, that Andrew Breitbart is fuckin' P.T. Barnum, man, and he's got these suckers wrapped around his snot-and-coke-coated little finger."

Andrew Breitbart may be a skeevy coprophage who gobbles shit with an enthusiasm that'd make a dung fly say, "Whoa, leave some for the rest of us," he may have sucked off Matt Drudge as hard as a Hoover set on "deep pile," and he may be a self-aggrandizing whore who buffs his shaved balls so they're nice and shiny for Sean Hannity, but that motherfucker knows how to sell a lie. He lies like lies are bullets and the truth is a mob of hungry zombies.

Breitbart, along with Drudge, have reversed the equation on the credibility of a media source. See, they only have to be right once, they only have to have a single real scoop, and all of a sudden the rest of the old school media are stumbling over themselves to break anything that they have to say, no matter how untrue or unverified the stories may be. So Breitbart and his mighty Final Cut Pro of doom can put together whatever nonsense they want and because there's a chance Breitbart is correct and someone one the left will look bad, Fox "news" will bite immediately. Matt Drudge never has to have a genuine scoop again because he's the guy who broke the Clinton blow-job story. And Breitbart, who, as far as the Rude Pundit can tell, has never had an "exclusive" story or report turn out to be true, is treated the same way.

The Sherrod story is extra pathetic because, almost immediately after the story hit Fox, Shirley Sherrod was told to resign (or, in the popular parlance, "fired") by someone in the fucking Agriculture Department who was afraid of Barack Obama seeming blackilicious. No investigation, nothing. Just running scared from Fox and Andrew Breitbart, a man who must have been passed over for a job because of affirmative action at some point because that son of a bitch hawks the myth of reverse racism like a lame white rapper who can't get a recording deal.

The success of Breitbart and the right-wing liars is that they have so distracted the media with their sad little stories of ACORN and Sherrod's supposed "racism" that other, more important stories have gotten lost. The ACORN nonsense infected the health care debate. The Sherrod affair stole the fire from the financial reform bill and unemployment benefits bill passage. When Breitbart appears on the air or in a speech to smugly defend his stories, he's actually saying, "Gotcha again, suckers." He's a media terrorist, making the news networks run scared because of the threat that he might be right this time.

There's something almost admirable about so Machiavellian a liar. Almost. Breitbart is an awful wart of a man, a wannabe power player, a trash can-licking gossip monger whose hatred and disdain of anyone who dares to point out that the egress is just an exit is just another part of the long con to make him rich.

The Rude Pundit on This Week's Stephanie Miller Show (and Some Thanks):
Huge, huge thanks to this week's designated rudesters, who blew the roof off the dump with their posts on LGBT issues: Will/Wolf of Back2Stonewall, Pam Spaulding of Pam's House Blend, Jim Burroway of Box Turtle Bulletin, Michael Petrelis of Petrelis Files, Monica Roberts of Transgriot. Make sure you regularly check out their blogs o' awesomeness. And scroll down to see their work here.

The Rude Pundit got to rest his brain and he's ready to kick out the jams and jam it up some asses. Or at least return to regular blogging. He's got a thing or two to say about Andrew Breitbart, and he attended a huge anti-moratorium rally and was two seats away from David Vitter.

Until Monday, enjoy this past week's liaison with Stephanie Miller:

Tired Of Being Invisible


I get the honor of closing out this LGBT Week of posts here at the Rude Pundit. It has been an interesting week of commentary from some of the leading bloggers in the LGBT blogosphere.

Guest posting stints like this remind me that even though I don’t consider myself an ‘A’ list blogger, other people and my blogging peers think the TransGriot is all that and three bags of chips, and I thank The Rude Pundit for the invite.

So let’s get to what’s on my mind today.

I spent Tuesday and Wednesday attending the 2nd Annual Texas Transgender Nondiscrimination Summit on the Rice University campus. One of the conversations I was engaged in during our lunch break on Tuesday was the lack of visibility for African descended trans people.

The overwhelming narrative for transpeople in this country since Christine Jorgensen stepped off the plane from Denmark in 1953 has been disproportionately a vanilla flavored one despite the fact that trans people are found on every inhabited continent on this planet, including Africa.

And contrary to that vanilla dominated narrative, we’ve played some key roles in the shaping of the trans community in the United States.

*The first trans specific protest was a 1965 sit in at Dewey’s Lunch Counter organized by African American transpeople in Philadelphia.

*The first client of the now closed Johns Hopkins gender program was an African American transwoman named Avon Wilson.

*Miss Major was one of our African American trans Stonewall veterans.

*An African American transwoman named Marsha P. Johnson played a key role along with Sylvia Rivera of setting up and organizing the proto organizations that led to the modern GLBT rights movement.

*When then Senator Obama made his historic acceptance speech at the 2008 Democratic Convention in Denver, in the stadium that evening was Dr. Marisa Richmond, the first African-American transwoman elected as a delegate to a major party convention..

African descended transmen have also stepped up to the plate to provide leadership such as NBJC Board Chair Kylar Broadus, the late Alexander John Goodrum, the late Marcelle Cook-Daniels, and Louis Mitchell just to name a few.

But you wouldn’t know that if you peruse the trans history narratives being written, the melanin free White House LBGT receptions and congressional hearings, and the leadership ranks of trans organizations devoid of African American talent.

We even get ignored in our own community, when our fellow African American SGL people put together leadership lists purported to be inclusive of the entire community, but end up having no transpeople of African descent on them.

When they get called on it, they offer the weak excuse that ‘they don’t know of any African-American trans leaders.'

Oh really?

That bull feces needs to stop, especially when we along with our Latina sisters are taking the brunt of the anti trans violence casualties.

We’re not just ‘tragic transsexual’ victims, we are beautiful and talented people in our own rights. We are ready, willing and more than able to provide quality leadership for the entire TBLG community if just given the opportunity to do so.

The point is that this is the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, and we're beyond sick and tired of being sick and tired of this situation.

You have a choice. It's either take the steps to correct this 'illusion of inclusion' situation, or suffer the consequences for your lack of visionary thinking.

Labels: African American, guest blogger, transgender issues

A high number of people with AIDS (PWAs) take drug cocktails to keep the HIV viral load down and boost the immune system, and extended use of the medicines can lead to a side effect known as lipodystrophy, which is the body fat rearranging itself in several areas of the body.

When lipodystrophy affects the face, deep creases and crevices in the cheeks appear, and this was once known as protease face, but has since evolved into poz face.

Other ways lipodystrophy changes the body is when the back of the neck enlarges to the point of a buffalo hump shape, while the stomach expands into a protease paunch, which derives from one key ingredient to the drug cocktail. For some reason, this last term has not devolved to poz paunch.

I'm living with poz face, buffalo hump and protease paunch, and I'm lucky enough to have public insurance and access to top-notch doctors and researchers. The reason why I'm mentioning all this is to, you'll pardon the expression, put a face to what it is like to be a PWA in 2010, after more than a decade of being on ever-evolving cocktails.

I consider my poz face to be one of character, and won't be getting the facial filler treatment to puff up my cheeks. The looks of sadness, obnoxious emails from adversaries and occasional instant rejection when people on the street realize I'm a pozzie, are things I can live with.

Sure, it ain't pleasant to have these and other side effects to contend with, but I know how blessed I am to be alive and able to take the medicines, while too many PWAs perished before the development of these powerful, and expensive, drugs. Oh, what the dead would give to be here facing the weird body changes.

And when I get the temporary blues about my poz face, I think of Mick Jagger. He does not have AIDS, nor is he taking a cocktail, but these days he has the classic poz face and he doesn't seem to want facial filler or other surgery to deal with his facial creases.

I reserve the right to change my mind about the options available to me, but for the time being, my poz face remains the same. The important thing to remember is my inner strength and the love of my friends and family, no matter what changes my body goes through because of AIDS and the drugs.


[Guest blogger Michael Petrelis shares his views on gay and AIDS issues at the Petrelis Files.]

Last Friday, in a cruising area in Branch Brook Park in Newark, NJ, an unarmed black man who may have been engaged in sexual activity was killed by an undercover cop who has not been publicly identified. The dead man, DeFarra Gaymon, an Atlanta-based credit union executive married to a woman and the father of four children, was in New Jersey for his 30th high school reunion.

It wasn't until a few days ago that many in the gay community learned about this tragic killing, and questions are being raised by a few gay activists and the Gaymon family, challenging the official police version of what led to the fatal shooting.

The Newark Star-Ledger reports on why law enforcement agents were in the park on July 16:

The two detectives were conducting an undercover investigation after complaints from residents about people engaging in sexual acts in public, authorities said. Sheriff’s officers have made more than 200 such arrests in the park over the last 18 months.

Hundreds of arrests in less than two years, for consensual adult sexual activity in a public park? Questions must be asked why valuable police resources were spent on this undercover sting operation. I doubt that Newark's violent crime rate and major drug problems have been reduced to the point where law officials had to target men gathering for sexual liaisons.

One important component missing from this still-unfolding story is the condemnation of national gay political orgs. The Human Rights Campaign, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, and Lambda Legal have said nothing about the sex sting operation of a well-known gay cruising area and the arrest of hundreds of men.

Are these orgs afraid to condemn the Gaymon killing because they don't want to address the location and circumstances of where the death took place? Is defending the right of gay men, and men who have sex with men but don't identify as homosexual, to gather in a park and not contend with police officers with loaded guns?

I am aware of three advocacy orgs that have issued statements about all this - Garden State Equality, Gender Rights Advocacy Association of New Jersey and the Anti-Violence Project of New York City.

The NJ orgs requested the following, among several demands, from the prosecutor and sheriff:

First, we ask you immediately to inform us and our colleagues in Newark – including the LGBTQ Advisory Committee, City of Newark, and the Newark Pride Alliance – whether the killing was part of a sting operation in the park targeting gay men specifically or LGBT people specifically. If so, we ask you to cease and desist such operations in Branch Brook Park, and any others like it in Essex County.

Steven Goldstein, the head of Garden State Equality, shared this note today:

Yesterday, as you know, [we] sent a letter to the Essex County Sheriff, Armando Fontoura, asking to meet about the case, among several other requests we made in the letter. Sheriff Fontoura just called me and has agreed to meet with several of us "within the next week or so." We will keep you posted.

I am pushing Goldstein and his org to plan a public action, be it a press conference or picket line, in Newark about the Gaymon killing, the investigation thus far and the year-and-a-half sting operation, because such visible actions will do much to educate the general public about this tragic case. I hope to soon blog about Garden State Equality organizing a demonstration over Gaymon's death.

At the same time, we need the national gay orgs to speak out about this case, if only to counter some of the outrageous homophobia and sex-hysteria out there on the web over Gaymon, his life and men on the down low.

Click here to read some of the hateful remarks being made in a thread titled "NJ Cop shoots gay Atlanta CEO after bending over and getting a surprise in his ass."

We cannot accept silence from our advocacy orgs in this matter.

(Michael Petrelis blogs at the Petrelis Files, a site dedicated to covering gay and HIV/AIDS issues.)