Go to hell. Go directly to hell.

According to this recent Gallup poll,

About one-third of the American adult population believes the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally word for word. This percentage is slightly lower than several decades ago. The majority of those Americans who don't believe that the Bible is literally true believe that it is the inspired word of God but that not everything it in should be taken literally. About one in five Americans believe the Bible is an ancient book of "fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by man." [...]

Some denominations hold the belief in a literal Bible as a hallmark of their faith. The statement of "Faith and Mission" of the Southern Baptist Convention, for example, states that: " The Holy Bible was written by men divinely inspired and is God's revelation of Himself to man. It is a perfect treasure of divine instruction. ..."

Nice - and profitable - scam you've got going there, Pastor Steven Anderson.

In trash news, Caribou Barbie Junior Miss - Bristol Palin - takes on Margaret Cho by snarking about KD Lang and Indigo Girls. The whole WTF? 411 here.

Dancing with the Duds

When Andy Warhol said this, did he anticipate it would apply to critics as well as performers?

In the gun-toting US this guy gave in to an action that many viewers could only imagine.

[A] 66-year-old Wisconsin man was arrested after he allegedly became so angry watching Bristol Palin on "Dancing with the Stars" that he fired off his shotgun at his television, leading to a 15-hour standoff with state police. According to the criminal complaint, [...] "Steven was upset that a political figure's daughter was dancing on this particular show when Steven did not think she was a good dancer."

Some might opine that Bristol is not particularly skilled at promoting abstinence either. And also.



This awkwardly choreographed message may succeed in promoting abstinence, thanks to the clumsy dialogue, zero chemistry and fake charm of its two chromed-to-the-gills 'stars'.

One antidote against this cloying PSA might be "porn-in-a-cup".

And now for something completely different ...

In the hoohaw leading up to the G-8/G-20 spectacle and photo opp for Stevie Spiteful, we missed a delicious little tempest in a teapot about $arah, Bristol and a US political satirist.


This is what set off the fury of Palin's groupies - a blogpost and a cartoon for Florida's Sun-Sentinel.

Back during the 2008 presidential campaign, when Sarah Palin and her family were introduced to America in all their homespun glory, I couldn’t help but imagine what the Republican spin machine would have done had Joe Biden’s daughter been the one to get pregnant out of wedlock as a teenager.

Because it was Sarah Palin’s daughter, however, the pregnancy became a celebration of life and an affirmation, somehow, of the emblematic American family. Hypocrisy is a commodity that has never been in short supply in American politics. The latest, most titillating case is that of U.S. Congressman Mark Souder of Indiana, a fierce protector of traditional family values (with all the usual anti-gay riffs), who just resigned from office.

Not only did he have sex with a staffer, but he even sat for a video interview with her touting the virtues of abstinence.

Well. The usual mob of fundamentalist religious rightwing zealots went ballistic, deliberately obfuscating the point of Lowe's observations (Bristol Palin marketing herself as a 30K per-appearance motivational speaker? that's a nifty mash-up of political opportunism and greed) while spinning it as an attack upon the sacred $arah and her holy progeny. This is typical:

Every parent viewing Lowe's cartoon should be outraged at his salacious, left-handed effort to demean Bristol Palin and to encourage America's daughters to embrace immoral practices.

As we've often observed when writing about Bible Spice and her traveling freak show, we just couldn't make this sh*t up.

"... a reputation for being extremely vindictive."

That was from Levi Johnston's statement, in opposition to keeping court proceedings closed.

An Alaska judge has ordered the proceedings in Bristol Palin's child custody case to remain open, the Anchorage Daily News reports. [...]

Bristol's attorney Thomas Van Flein said in court filings that Bristol seeks full legal and physical custody in the "best interest of the child," while allowing Johnston visitation rights.

[...] the judge has ordered the proceedings to be open, as Johnston had requested, rather than closed, as Bristol's legal team sought.

"I know that public scrutiny will simplify this matter and act as a check against anyone's need to be overly vindictive, aggressive or malicious, not that Bristol would ever be that way, nor that I would," Johnston writes in his affidavit, according to the Daily News. "But her mother is powerful, politically ambitious and has a reputation for being extremely vindictive."

Let the shrieeeking from the Sarah Palin sycophants, acolytes and uncritical admirers begin.

Although Palin has expressed admiration for mama grizzlies' reaction when their cubs are threatened.

You must remember this

A kiss is just a kiss.


And sex minus condoms often equals unintended pregnancy.


Bristol Palin was quoted this week:

"Girls need to imagine and picture their life with a screaming newborn baby and then think before they have sex. If girls realized the consequences of sex, nobody would be having sex. Trust me. Nobody."

Funny how Sarah Palin blows hot and cold about the exploitation of her family. If she does it, that's okay, right?


But anyone else? Yep, yep, you betcha, pitbull with lipstick time. David Letterman was able to apologize in the nick of time; Sarah was all set to suck the marrow from his cadaver.


More here about why Sarah Palin's family is a growth industry.

She Says, He Says.

Do you hear the sound of dueling banjos in the background?

She says: "Regardless of what I did personally, I just think that abstinence is the only way you can effectively, 100% foolproof way you can prevent pregnancy." Asked how she squared her own experiences with her new campaign, she said, "I'm not quite sure, I just want to go out there and promote abstinence and say, this is the safest choice.

He says: "Abstinence is a great idea, but I also think you need to enforce, you know, condoms and birth control and other things like that to have safe sex. I don't just think telling young kids, you can't have sex, it's not going to work. It's not realistic."

Do as I say, not as I did - so that's Bristol's message. Right. One snarky candid media source used this headline: "Bristol Palin favors oral contraception: Just say no." That goes to the truth of the matter; fundamentalists religious rightwing conservatives view sexuality as a battleground in the war between women and men. They uphold the notion that women are in control by withholding sex; yet undercut that by providing men with control over everything else.

Sarah Palin's 15 minutes of fame, over and over again.

In 1968 Andy Warhol said: "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." Sadly, Warhol did not anticipate how media would become viral and that a few individuals would have such 15 minutes looped to the nth degree.

Sarah Palin for example. The basis for her 'fame' has melted away - how many former vice-presidential candidates can you name? - yet stories about her have become the staple of shlock and even semi-serious media. She is a Slushee - a tall, cool sugared drink of empty calories, quickly consumed yet addictive.

Just in case you were wondering, Huffington Post scoops up the latest slurp on Palin - a frothy mixture of insider political and Faux-News gossip with a dash of serious analytical journalism.

There is something absolutely bizarre and troubling going on in the political netherworld of Sarah and Todd Palin, Greta Van Susteren and her wannabe-queen-maker hubby, John Coale. At best, it's a clear case of journalistic conflict-of-interest on behalf of Van Susteren; at worst, it's a sleazy, national power play by a couple of practitioners of Scientology - the controversial cult that Time magazine described as "a hugely profitable global racket that survives by intimidating members and critics in a Mafia-like manner." ...

While there's something ironic about Alaska's most famous evangelical Christians pallin' around with a couple who believes that 75 million years ago an entity named Xenu brought billions of people to Earth in spacecraft ... It was Van Susteren who made Bristol Palin a public figure, who pulled her out of her privacy with her child, and who played the ratings game with Bristol's private life. Not once did Van Susteren acknowledge that fact, reflect on it, nor express any regret for doing so. Not once. So much for insight and compassion.

Thanks to the evident fascination/obsession that Van Susteren and Coale have with Sarah Palin and her nuclear family, expect more in the way of brain freeze over the next few years.

Wedding is off.

Few may be surprised by this turn of events, but it appears as though the Bristol Palin / Levi Johnston engagement is over.

Mercede Johnston claims the 18-year-old daughter of Alaska's governor dumped her brother, Levi, an out-of-work high school drop out. The sister claims Bristol Palin, who took her beau to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., has made it tough for her brother to spend time with his 2-month-old son, Tripp.

"Levi tries to visit Tripp every single day, but Bristol makes it nearly impossible," ... "She [Bristol] tells him he can't take the baby to our house because she doesn't him around 'white trash'!" she said.

In December, Levi Johnston's mother, Sherry, was arrested in an undercover drug sting and charged with six felonies involving the pain killer oxycontin.

It always seemed to me that the announcement of their plans to marry, which coincided with the news shortly after Sarah Palin was named McCain's running mate that her daughter was pregnant and unwed, was merely a tactic to silence critics.

If those teenagers had been madly in love and wanting to spend the rest of their lives together, the wedding would have been scheduled to take place before the birth of Palin's grandchild, preferably during the presidential election campaign to take advantage of MASSIVE media coverage.

In fact, it reflects well on Sarah that she didn't pressure the young couple to tie the knot ASAP and let them wait it out to see if their marriage would actually happen.

Bristol Speaks!

And she's smarter than her mother.

The Alaska governor's 18-year-old daughter expressed some startlingly unconservative views to her mom's good friend at Fox News, Greta Van Susteren, on her show Monday night.

She told Van Susteren that teaching sexual abstinence to teenagers is "not realistic at all."

Bristol Palin said, "I hope people learn from my story. It's so much easier if you're married, have a house and career. It's not a situation you want to strive for."

She speaks in complete, intelligible sentences, too!

Maybe that Palin12 campaign should be amended to Palin44.

What a Tripp!

From the LA Times Blogs:

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s daughter Bristol Palin and her boyfriend Levi Johnston are proud new parents of a baby boy, according to People.

His name is Tripp Easton Mitchell Johnston, says Colleen Jones, Bristol’s grandmother’s sister.

. . .

Just mentioning: This week, Levi mother, Sherry Johnston, was charged with six felony counts of misconduct involving a controlled substance, described by an Alaska State Troopers spokeswoman as being "Oxycontin."

Her arraignment is set for Jan. 6.

Let the funny remarks begin.

Teen pregnancy: no longer shameful, still a concern.

It may be that the intense media visibility awarded to Bristol Palin’s unintended pregnancy will bring about a shift in public attitudes towards teen’s sex education.

Sarah Palin’s extreme and fundamentalist views on sex education, rape, and recently, on bombing abortion clinics have given these issues prominence in the US presidential election campaign. A successful fund raising initiative for Planned Parenthood in the US was launched by email. Thousands of thank you cards were sent to the Republican VP candidate in acknowledgement of her pivotal role in provoking US citizens to donate to Planned Parenthood.

Shortly after Palin’s nomination, e-mails began circulating suggesting that pro-choice women make donations to Planned Parenthood in her honor. As of this week, Planned Parenthood has received more than 40,000 donations in Palin’s name, totaling more than $1 million.

And tabloids reported that Jamie Lynn Spears may have unintentionally become pregnant again. Regardless of whether the rumour is founded or not, the public reaction seems to indicate that nobody believes in that quaint saying ‘Ignorance is bliss’ any longer. Even the young yet wise-cracking Juno took responsibility for her mistake and took charge of her choice.

A sensible, well-informed young woman observed the media frenzy around the Palin and Spears unintended pregnancies and wrote a well-researched article about concerns regarding adolescent sexuality.

Every year in the U.S, over one million teenagers become pregnant. Most recently, pregnant teens have flooded Planned Parenthood health centers. Last year, Planned Parenthood centers provided sex education to 1.2 million teens and adults. This year will yield roughly 750,000 pregnant teenage girls, which is a number 12 times more than that of people diagnosed with AIDS in 2008, as well as the total number of persons expected to die from some form of cancer this year.

In regards to percentages, this averages out to about 11 percent of all U.S. children being birthed by teens this year. By the time a teen has reached the age of 19, seven in ten teens have experienced at least one sexual encounter. … It is important that sex education be definitely enforced within schools and should not only approach the idea of sex and teens from an abstinence-only standpoint. According to an analysis of more than 115 studies researched by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy (NC), teen sex education programs proved ineffective when including only abstinence-only material, by which teens were neither encouraged nor influenced to abstain or delay sex until a more age-appropriate time.

According to Cecile Richards, President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, effective sex education is based on “medically accurate information” that is both abstinence-based and also teaches contraception and proper sex initiation, which has proven to be more effective in preventing unwanted pregnancies. Richards argues that for the past eight years, roughly $1.5 billion or more of taxpayers’ money has been “wasted” on ineffective abstinence-only programs. Richards also demands that education and initiation of sex education must change with the next administration because the current policies have proven unsuccessful. “When it comes to sexuality education, there should be no debate. The only way our children can be prepared is to be informed; this isn’t about ideology, it’s about the health and safety of our kids.”

First posted at Birth Pangs

PREVENTION as well as Devotion

We recently learned that Levi Johnston, who got Bristol Palin in a family way, attended the Republic National Convention with a new tattoo to flash. As proof of his devotion it is said that he had the name Bristol permanently inked on his left ring finger.

Unfortunately, the reality of Bristol’s pregnancy demonstrates that Abstinence-only sex education often fails. Perhaps Levi should also get the word condom tattooed on his johnson.

As a reminder of his devotion, of course.

First posted at Birth Pangs.