In New Zealand the Marriage (Definition of Marriage) Amendment Bill, introduced by Labour Party MP Louisa Wall (the lovely Māori woman in the rainbow coat) passed with 77 votes to 44. On receiving Royal Assent from the Governor-General, the bill will become law and same-sex marriages will be available in New Zealand from mid-August.

When the bill was passed, this happened:

Kia ora to all my Kiwi friends (particularly the lady in the fabulous hat).

Pōkarekare ana, ngā wai o Rotorua
Whiti atu koe hine, marino ana e
E hine e, hoki mai ra, ka mate ahau i te aroha e.

Tuhituhi taku reta, tuku atu taku rīni
Kia kite tō iwi, raruraru ana e.
E hine e, hoki mai ra, ka mate ahau i te aroha e.

Whatiwhati taku pene, kua pau aku pepa
Ko taku aroha, mau tonu ana e.
E hine e, hoki mai ra, ka mate ahau i te aroha e.

E kore te aroha, e maroke i te rā
Mākūkū tonu i aku roimata e.
E hine e, hoki mai ra, ka mate ahau i te aroha e.

The waves are breaking, against the shores of Rotorua,
My heart is aching for your return my love.
Oh my beloved girl, come back to me, I could die of love for you.

I have written you a letter, and enclosed with it my ring,
So your people could see it how much I’m troubled for you.
Oh my beloved girl, come back to me, I could die of love for you.

My poor pen is broken, my paper is spent,
But my love for you endures, and remains forever more.
Oh my beloved girl, come back to me, I could die of love for you.

The sun’s hot sheen won’t scorch my love,
Being kept evergreen by the falling of my tears.
Oh girl, Come back to me, I could die of love for you.

I do love me some birthers – Ted Cruz birthers, that is.

What does that say about the list the authors put before you as “cleared for take off?” Both Jindal and Haley’s parents were Indian citizens and the Indian constitution makes their children citizens of India by BIRTH! See permanent residents are not required to renounce their former citizenship as naturalized citizens are, so the laws of India apply to the children of Indians born in the United States.

Cruz was born in Canada to an American mother and a Cuban father. Cruz is a great man, a true conservative but he is ineligible to be President, because the law of Canada made him a citizen of Canada by BIRTH. His citizenship comes from Title 8 of the United States Code.

Rubio has perhaps the best claim of them all to show that at the time of his birth he only had allegiance for the United States. The 1940 Cuban Constitution which was in effect at the time of his birth states, Those born in foreign territory, of Cuban father or mother, by the sole act of their becoming inhabitants of Cuba (become Cubans by Birth.) Here Rubio would need to perform a positive act to claim Cuban citizenship as he would need to migrate to Cuba and take up residence there. However, the Supreme Court has ruled that a natural born citizen is one born in the United States to citizen parents, and until that is changed by the Supreme Court of the United States Rubio will be on shaky legal ground.

All across the Nutweb they are springing up, like tiny phallic fungi, poking their heads up through the bullshit strewn around them. Watch now, as the slightly less insane representatives of the right, recognising (perhaps) that their party has fruited something unpleasant, poisonous and inconvenient, watch as they try to stomp the tiny little birther mushrooms into mush.

Eliana Johnson at the National Review Online. Stomp. Stomp. Stomp.

Some question whether the Canada-born freshman senator is eligible for the presidency (hint: he is).

The homepage of the website Birthers.org is currently devoted to making the constitutional case against Cruz’s eligibility. He is lauded for representing his state “with a passion not seen in Texas since the Alamo” and cheered for being “one hell of a Senator,” but Birthers.org’s denizens emphatically conclude that he cannot be president “because the law of Canada made him a citizen of Canada by BIRTH.”

On ObamaReleaseYourRecords.com, alongside the latest news about the president’s fraudulent birth certificate and his close ties to Islam, anonymous authors blast the media for propagating the “myth” that the Constitution permits a Cruz presidency. “What complete madness to suggest someone born in another country is a ‘natural born Citizen’ of the United States and eligible to be POTUS,” one of them argues. “It is complete rubbish and they know it.”

Donald Trump, who in 2011 hounded President Obama to turn over his long-form birth certificate and kept the birther movement in the national news for months, has yet to look into Cruz’s eligibility. “I like him,” Trump tells National Review Online, but says he has “not studied his situation.”

“Obviously, I have everybody calling me wanting my support,” he claims. Nonetheless, he considers Cruz’s case “very different” from the president’s because Cruz “has been very candid and open about his place of birth and his background.”

Ken Blackwell and Bob Morrison at the American Thinker, stomping their little hearts out. Stomp. Stomp. Squish. Watch the mycelium fly!

Can conservatives seriously believe that any of these otherwise qualified American citizens should be barred from running for president? We thought as conservatives we are opposed to assisted suicide. But reading the Constitution in such a strained and absurd way would render us politically dead.

Some people, unfortunately, are maintaining that anyone whose parents were not yet fully naturalized U.S. citizens are ineligible. That’s because, they say, only the children of U.S. citizens can be “natural-born citizens of the United States” under the Constitution’s requirements for being elected president (Art. II, Sec. 1). They say that because of this iron-clad condition, Florida’s Sen. Marco Rubio, and possibly even South Carolina ‘s Gov. Nikki Haley and Louisiana ‘s Gov. Bobby Jindal may all be ineligible to serve as president.

Marco Rubio was born May 28, 1971 in Miami, Florida. Bobby Jindal was born on June 10, 1971, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Nikki Haley was born January 20, 1971 in Bamberg, S.C.

The Fourteenth Amendment says this about being a U.S. citizen: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Last time we checked, Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina were all part of the United States. And all these bouncing 1970s babies were subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.

So we think the silly season in presidential politics should be closed down, early. We believe that Cruz, Haley, Jindal, and Rubio are all eligible to serve as president. Now, this is not the same thing as endorsing any one of them. But, it’s a safe bet than any one of these worthies is capable of being a better president than the one we now have.

Greg Conterio at the Western Free Press, whatever the fuck that is… bringin’ out the big guns.

Much of this nonsense is due to the fervent desire of many people on the right to “prove” Obama is not qualified to hold the office of president, and their willingness to twist themselves into knots in pursuit of this belief. The truth of the matter is actually really easy to find if anyone bothers to take a few minutes to do a quick Internet search, and then read what they find.

There are a couple of common arguments cited in support of some of these fanciful definitions of natural born citizen. One such argument is that English Common Law is actually the controlling authority, another is that Section 1 of the 14th Amendment to the constitution somehow does the trick. Not quite.

While it was the source and inspiration for much of the code law in the United States, English Common Law is not any sort of legal controlling authority, and bears no weight whatsoever in determining what is and is not “legal” in the United States. The 14th Amendment was a part of the flurry of legislation following the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, and the purpose of section 1 was to prevent the former slave states from denying citizenship to one-time slaves, and to cut the legs out from under the onerous Dred Scott ruling of 1857. Apart from establishing that EVERYONE born on U.S. soil is a natural born citizen, it does not address with any specificity the meaning or definition of the term.

The constitution, in Article II, section 1 lays-out the qualifications required to serve as President thusly:

No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty-five years, and been fourteen years a resident within the United States.

The illusion of ambiguity created by this lack of a constitutional definition is what leads to so many crack-pot theories as to what exactly a natural born citizen really is, but in reality the matter is not ambiguous at all. The definition can in fact be found in U.S. Code law, specifically Title 8, Subchapter III, section 1401.

Blam! Squish!

And yet, in the corners, little primordia, little buttons, more little mushrooms, sticking their caps up through the bullshit. Nasty things grow on bullshit.

Grow little mushrooms, grow.

[Image: Jan Fyt (1611-1661) - Mushrooms - Oil on wood - Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels.]

[This post was edited after posting to include the first quote, which is from birthers.org.]

First, I’m popping out the oldies with Lenny Bernstein’s slick version of Exultate Jubilate. The recording is very Lenny – a big church filled bombastically to the formerets with an orchestra consisting of every single fucking person in Bavaria who can play an instrument (cute violinist alert at 5.04) and a deathly silent audience, stunned into submission by the music and the stark staring terror that they might cough and Lenny would gut them with his baton. However, Arleen Auger’s voice is lovely, and this recording is the one I hear in my head if I happen to think of Lenny. It was playing one night at one of his parties, and he was serving drinks and bopping around like he usually did when he got to hear his own performances, like a drunk bullfrog that has been connected to the mains, and at the height of one particularly spastic conniption he managed to tip an entire jug of margaritas over Nancy Reagan, so it always makes me laugh. The recording of the Great Mass in C minor that goes with this on CD is a cracker, by the way.

Next, following on from Cole’s mustard abduction, a charming little story by Theodore Sturgeon called “Yesterday Was Monday” which was pointed out by KBS, and which explains everything.

Random food blogness: Fat Yu, who apparently IS FAT YU! (and also a tiny little bit racist on the Japanese), but who writes otherwise entertainingly of his eating exploits around Shanghai.

If you like a bit of tentacle in your tale and can “Ïa! ïa! Shub niggurath!” with the best of them, you might enjoy Innsmouth Mazazine. I have been working my way through them very happily, even if they do give me odd dreams.

Last, and then I am off to bed in my upside-down down-under bed, I suggest you go and see the website of sculptor Thomas Doyle to see the coolest things ever.

Goodnight my dears. Sleep well and dream of Ted Cruz slowly slipping down a slavering and drool-bespattered maw. Ïa! ïa! Cthulhu fhtagn!

I’ve been here in Australia for about six weeks, and if it hasn’t been been piss-steamingly hot, it has instead been dumping cockloads of cold rain on my head. I was shat on by a koala that looked more stoned than I did. I had to go to a cocktail party attended by both Rose Fucking Porteus [Youtube] and Gina Bitchface Rinehart. Thankfully they kept them on opposite sides of the ballroom, pointed Rose at the gin buffet and distracted Gina by waving Fairfax share certificates at her. I went to dinner at Parliament House, all done up in my best soup-and-fish, and got stuck next to Christopher Pyne – the stupid person’s idea of a clever poodle. [Also Youtube]

Now there’s going to be an election. In September. Which will be all the media here will talk about for the rest of my stay.

What a fucking country.

Anyhow, I realised that I have fallen down on my duty to you all. It has been a long time since I last fished a gleaming urinal cake of stupid out of the piss trough they call the Corner, and then held it up for your delectation. Thus, I remedy my fault.

For today’s bagetelle, I thought I might use Obamacare Punishes Smokers: Why not the Promiscuous? By Wesley J. Smith, in which Wesley J. Smith responds to an AP story which reports that health insurers will be able to charge higher premiums to smokers buying individual policies.

Living unhealthy lifestyles has become the new Scarlet Letter. That’s what happens with centralized health care. But once we go down that road, it won’t end there. Smokers today, the obese tomorrow.

This financial stick is entirely political. Notice we never hear experts wanting to “punish” the promiscuous for the cost burden they inflict on the health care system. Yet people who sleep around, like smokers and the obese, cost the rest of us plenty–what with promiscuity leading to sexually transmitted diseases, some cancers, HIV, unwanted pregnancies, mental health issues, etc. Why isn’t what is good for the goose also good for the gander?

That won’t happen because society celebrates promiscuity and the popular culture glamorizes licentious lifestyles the way it once extolled smoking. Consider: Girls. We applaud basketball players who sleep with 20,000 women. We ooh, and ah over Reality TV celebrities, with no talent other than living provocatively before the camera, who sleep around and get very publicly pregnant. We even tend to think something is wrong with virgins who are older than 18.

If we are going to outlaw underwriting, it should apply across the board. But if we are going to punish unhealthy lifestyles with higher insurance premiums, that too should apply across the board. After all, “equality” is the new buzz word, right?

Now, the title had promise and, aside from the fact that Wesley J. Smith and I agree that penalty pricing insurance is wrong, there’s a lot of stupid in there to mock. However, most of it boils down to a smug and slightly sweaty man in his basement typing “hoors” over and over again with one palsied hand. Which is disappointing.

However, let us forge ahead, for today, today it is in the comments that the real gold lies.

In the comments, JohnC posts a pretty good rebuttal of Wesley J. Smith’s contention that centralised healthcare necessarily leads to punishment of unhealthy lifestyles.

JohnC • 4 days ago

“Living unhealthy lifestyles has become the new Scarlet Letter. That’s what happens with centralized health care. But once we go down that road, it won’t end there.”

I know of no evidence for this assertion. Australia and Britain have different kinds of centralized health systems, but neither penalizes people by either differential access or higher payments based on lifestyle. Do you have any examples to support your claim?

A very good question. Now, it may have been better if JohnC had linked to some material comparing healthcare systems, or an article or two about Australia, or even acknowledged that the situation is a little more complex than he painted it. For example, as you can see from the links above, in Australia the proletariat and (surprise!) the insurers would be up for stoning smokers in the street if it saved them a dollar or two, but are being held back, for the moment at least, by a government of allegedly leftist hue.

However, that information on Australia was accessible with a simple google search, and when dealing with wingnuts one must use broad strokes, and the sword, not the scalpel, so all in all JohnC did a pretty good job.

Enter Griffonn.

Griffonn • 2 days ago

Major pet peeve of mine – I hate the “what you’re saying isn’t true until you prove it is true” argument.

It automatically nullifies any argument until and unless the person making the original assertion wastes a lot of time proving something to meet an arbitrary standard of proof (one that the original poster usually exempts himself from).

Instead of two assertions, each carrying equal weight – he says X, you say Y – we now have a situation where you have “corrected” him, and you are implying that if he doesn’t come up with some hard proof he must be guilty of at best ignorance (at worst bad faith).

The problem is that, even if he is right, it’s still an unnecessarily time-consuming demand to expect him to provide whatever standard of proof you decide is acceptable.

Especially given how you haven’t actually proved anything yourself – how do you know Australia and Britain haven’t penalized people by differential access or higher payments based on lifestyle?

Proof is a leftist time-wasting device. All assertions are equal, and should not be subjected to an arbitrary standard of truth.

A nugget of purest, lemon-scented, damply-dripping wingnuttery.

Watch it gleam.

[Alice Springs Country - Albert Namatjira]

Well kiddies, it has been a while. I plead temporary insanity – of our country, not of me.

Endless bleating that Hagel is the suxxors because he hates all Jews everywhere, or because he did and said some stupid shit in the 90s (I remember the 90s, and we all did and said and wore some pretty stupid shit in the 90s) or because he doesn’t have a big D bedazzled onto his vagina.

Endless threads derailed by people who think that the suicide of a gifted yet misguided young man is their opportunity to call him names and gloat hell-fire-and-damnation style about how he deserved to be punished, rather than an opportunity to ask whether punishment should be the sole purpose of our criminal legal system.

We (the blog and the country) seem descended upon by an army of gun nuts and open carry weirdos, wingnuts and no-nuts and just plain-ol’ nuts, godbotherers, trolls, self-appointed rape inspectors, racists and ranters and self-talkers, all bereft of empathy, compassion or good sense. Dickheads everywhere, and the screeching! Jesus.

Never mind. Presents!

First, to get you in the mood, some music:

Next, Wodehouse, always such balm to the soul. I’m linking to a story called Ruth In Exile – a lovely little snip of a thing which will more than repay fifteen minutes of your time. If you have never read beyond Jeeves, then there is a world of joy awaiting you in Wodehouse’s short stories. If you have never read Jeeves? Well, get the fuck away from me until you have. Weirdo.

Then, my obsession for the last weekend – last year’s competition papers from the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad. I do admit that lingusitics puzzles might not be everyone’s idea of fun, but they kept me thinking, or at least cheating and pretending I knew the answer all along, for a good number of hours.

Food – I am going to point you to this caraway seed cake recipe from Hugh Fffernly Whiffingstable in the Guardian. It’s ludicrously easy to make. I tend to leave out the mace, substitute candied peach or apricot for the candied orange peel, and then ice the whole thing with an icing made by stirring together 2 cups of icing sugar, some grated orange rind and a big spoonful of sour cream. It’s a lovely cake – soft but with some weight, a crunchy top and that glorious anise and citrus tang of the caraway.

Finally, if you haven’t read it already, the Kitten Setting in which Mr Scalzi tells us of his inspired manner of dealing with trolls. One can dream.

ETA: Bonus!

I do not know what the Democratic Party spent, in toto, on the 2004 election, but what they seem to have gotten for it is Barack Obama. Let us savor.

– Peggy Noonan, “So Much to Savor”, Wall Street Journal, November 4, 2004

And now we dance…

H/t to Mike

Peggy Noonan:

We begin with the three words everyone writing about the election must say: Nobody knows anything. Everyone’s guessing. I spent Sunday morning in Washington with journalists and political hands, one of whom said she feels it’s Obama, the rest of whom said they don’t know. I think it’s Romney. I think he’s stealing in “like a thief with good tools,” in Walker Percy’s old words. While everyone is looking at the polls and the storm, Romney’s slipping into the presidency. He’s quietly rising, and he’s been rising for a while.

Dick Morris:

We’re going to win by a landslide. It will be the biggest surprise in recent American political history. It will rekindle a whole question as to why the media played this race as a nail-biter, where in fact I think that Romney is going to win by quite a bit. My own view is that Romney is going to carry 325 electoral votes.

Michael Barone:

Bottom line: Romney 315, Obama 223. That sounds high for Romney. But he could drop Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and still win the election. Fundamentals.

Brian S. Brown:

Romney wins the Electoral College with room to spare — somewhere around 300 electors. All four marriage votes in the deepest of blue states (Washington, Maryland, Minnesota, and Maine) will be won by traditional-marriage supporters. This will happen even though supporters of same-sex marriage have outspent us by gargantuan amounts.

In a fair and just society, political pundits who got things this fucking wrong would never be listened to again. When their names were mentioned, people would mutter embarrassedly and try to change the subject. If they ever tried again to appear on television or write a column about politics, people would point and laugh at their cluelessness until stuff came out their noses. Children would throw turds at them in the street and pin “Kick Me” signs to their backs. The sheer shame engendered by their own stupidity would trap them at home forever, dressed in the tattered rags of their reputations, wearing only one shoe and constantly revisiting the rotted ruins of a table laid with celebratory cake and Romney/Ryan How to Vote cards.

Assholes.

However, I need to come out of my temporary exile to remind you that, in addition to some kind of Presidential election, Tuesday also brings votes on gay rights in Minnesota, Maryland, Washington and Maine. Gay rights are human rights, so get out and vote.

I’ll leave the bulk of this post to Chris Kluwe, who becomes sexier and angrier and more erudite with every day. Here he is, with his final posting at the blog of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, condemning the paper’s editorial which claimed to present a neutral view of both sides of the marriage amendment, and railing against lies and bigotry, with the gnashing of the teeth and the lamentation of the women. It is indeed righteous.

How does this piece lie? It lies in statistics. “Some argue that as a practical matter there seems to be less interest by same-sex partners in actually being married than in redefining what marriage is. In Iowa, for instance, Wikipedia reports, that only 815 same-sex couples married in the first year after legalization.” It’s unfortunate that the editorial board does not comment on the fact that the actual link in the Wiki article leads to a page not found.

This is not journalism. This is cherrypicking “facts” you hope no one has the inclination to look up, because if one looks up the actual facts one would see that 815 marriages equates to 20% of the same-sex couples in Iowa choosing to marry that first year, a not insignificant amount. If one looks up actual facts, one would find that 13.6% of all marriages in Iowa in 2010 were same-sex marriages, another not insignificant amount when you consider the gay population of the United States is estimated at only 3.5%.

How does this piece lie? It lies in every mealy mouthed, “Love may be love, but even now there are any number of prohibitions around marriage between consenting (heterosexual) adults.” Name them. Oh that’s right, you didn’t. It lies in every five sentence vote yes argument compared to a one or two sentence vote no stance. It lies by juxtaposing “It is a decision both about what the definition of marriage should be, whether it is about children and the biological family or about consenting adults”, as if gay parents can’t raise children as well and all they want is to have sex with each other.

How does the piece lie? It lies, oh how it lies, when it talks about supporters of traditional marriage being bullied, being painted as victims, weeping and moaning about the “members of the (vote no) movement are aggressive”, wailing and gnashing teeth over “For those who hold traditional beliefs about marriage, increasingly the force of law will be brought to bear on matters of education, speech, and practice”; all the while not mentioning a single gay person denied THEIR right to be treated as a human being, silent on the issue of gay children bullied in school, completely quiet about a gay support group forbidden to march in Anoka.

How does this piece lie? It lies, most simply, in this sentence, “the Pioneer Press is not endorsing one way or another.”

You have made your endorsement, gentlemen. You chose your side. What you did not choose, what you refused to face, was the courage to stand for your convictions, to attach your names to the position your actions claimed. That is why I will no longer associate with you, why I decline to give you page views and ad revenue any longer. The only reason I’m posting this piece here, and not somewhere else, is because I said I would, and I believe that one’s word is not something to be given lightly.

I will not stand for the continual eroding of society. I will not tolerate the presentation of a biased argument under a thin coat of presumed neutrality. I will not contribute to the cheapening of discourse and thought that decays every single news as entertainment outlet in this country. I absolutely will not compromise my ethics and morality, ideals that lead me to treat others with empathy and honesty, to demand truth not only from myself but from those around me.

I reject you, and I encourage others to do the same – to you, and to all others like you. To those who perpetrate deception and fraud. To those willing to hide the truth of their beliefs. To those who value flash over substance, short term gains over long term consequences.

Without honesty, we have nothing.

Farewell.