A Rape Question

Question: How many extra votes would Obama get from independents, women, minorities, Northerners, and people who appreciate balls, if he charged the Republicans in the Virginia legislature with conspiracy to commit mass rape?

Bonus Question: How many more people would learn about what the Virginia legislature has done who would not have otherwise known?

Bonus Question 2: Would Obama be able to handle the hellstorm of feces that would descend on Washington from across the Potomac, as millions of angry white men don their grand- grand- grand-pappies Civil War rags, KKK robes, and suicide vests, slowly mount their arthritic, diabetic, and otherwise-addled frames atop their noble Medicare HoverRounds, conceal their personal arsenals of automatic weapons in the folds of their skin, and ride, ride, ride to Washington, to the house of the Devil himself, on a horrible wave of mutilation!?

Discuss.

Press freedom isn't enough. Joe Lieberman needs to stop talking.

From the latest Glenn Greenwald posting, comes this important quote from the newspaper business in Australia: 

It is the media’s duty to responsibly report such [classified] material if it comes into their possession. To aggressively attempt to shut WikiLeaks down, to threaten to prosecute those who publish official leaks, and to pressure companies to cease doing commercial business with WikiLeaks, is a serious threat to democracy, which relies on a free and fearless press. 

 I was struck by the phrase "free and fearless." The "free" part is obvious. Democracies need a free press. Any schoolchild knows that. (At least I don't think the bastards have prohibited teaching about press freedom. It does have a well-known liberal bias.) However, the "fearless" part is critical. In the U.S., our Constitution enshrines press freedom in the First Amendment. Unfortunately, our politicians can threaten to do whatever the fuck they want on the evening news, including threatening journalists, and the evening newsman won't challenge said politicians because said newsman doesn't consider himself a journalist. So U.S. journalism, and now international journalism, is living under fear. And if not fear, then at least they feel hassled. This is bad. The press needs to be fearless and unhampered. They need to know that anything short of placing the U.S. under imminent danger (the standard adopted in the Pentagon Papers case) is fair game for publishing.