Comments on: TOM THE DANCING BUG: Use Your Republican Decoder Badge To Find Out Their SECRET MESSAGES!

By: MrEricSir

MrEricSir — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 23:14:00 +0000

What’s up with those hats anyway? Don’t they realize they should be dressed like Native Americans?

By: dioptase

dioptase — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 15:41:00 +0000

Remember, you’re talking about the Federal Constitution. States have leeway on what isn’t in the Federal Constitution. Which is Santorum’s point. The debate is over what is or isn’t in the Federal Constitution. I would prefer that privacy be explicit rather than inferred. I infer it, you infer it, SCOTUS has inferred it. But some things are too important to be left with any chance of misinterpretation.

Long ago, privacy was so normal, it wasn’t even assumed. It just was. Things change, that social norm is over. Time to codify the protection.

By: princeminski

princeminski — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 15:04:00 +0000

“He tampered in God’s domain.”

By: princeminski

princeminski — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 15:03:00 +0000

That’s a Captain Midnight Code-O-Graph at the upper right. A modification of the 1945 design, when they were still made of (cheap) metal. Excuse me, I have to go kill myself now.

By: d3331892828

d3331892828 — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 09:11:00 +0000

Decoder BADGE?

I believe that should be Decoder FLAG PIN.

By: Catbeller

Catbeller — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 04:04:00 +0000

Let me put it better: a woman has a right to NOT be held down by cops to force her to become pregnant, which, ultimately, is what making birth control illegal really means. If you disobey the law, people will come and hold you down and drag you away, and if you try to escape, they will kill you, eventually, if you try too hard. A woman has a right to not have laws enacted to specifically target and torture her, just because a lot of people really really want to do it.

By: Catbeller

Catbeller — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 04:00:00 +0000

The Constitution does not grant us rights. The rights exist independently of the paper they are written on. The 9th amendment makes this clear: rights exist that are not explicitly stated, and the explictly stated rights do not preclude the existence of other rights that we deem we have.”The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

I understand, somewhat, that they were clearing up confusion on the power of the Federal Government, and that the Courts have restricted the meaning of the amendment to such things. But, screw Scalia and the other Federalist apparatchiks – the thought it expresses is clear and is true. You have a right to privacy. It is a human right not to be watched like a turtle in an aquarium. To think that two hundred twenty-something years ago some men in wigs needed to write it down explicitly so we can be free from perpetual surveillance is ludicrous. A woman has a right to not get pregnant, and peering into Madison’s mindset on the matter is irrelevant. Corporations aren’t even mentioned in the Constitution, yet those immortal rulers of our world have far more rights than any human being. If those can claim new undocumented rights, then so do we.

By: PrivatizeThis

PrivatizeThis — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 03:38:00 +0000

I love that the kids are all hanging out in their socks.

By: An Infinitude of Tortoises

An Infinitude of Tortoises — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 02:53:00 +0000

Wait, this thing doesn’t work — all I get out of it is some gibberish: “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn”!

By: ScarletVarlet

ScarletVarlet — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 02:50:00 +0000

More like “the Moral Majority from Polite White Society of Salem, 1692″

By: Amanda Harrington

Amanda Harrington — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 02:28:00 +0000

Be sure to drink your Kool-Aid.

By: eyebeam

eyebeam — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 23:39:00 +0000

”Privacy” is based on the idea of a “reasonable expectation” of what is socially accepted to be private. Thus, it is important to convince people that they have no expectation of privacy.

By: zyodei

zyodei — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 22:40:00 +0000

In our current political climate, neocons ARE moderates.

They believe in a large and central government, like the democrats.

They believe in doing absolutely anything for the state of Israel, like the democrats.

They believe in more and more wars, like the democratic leadership seems to.

Sad but true.

By: sean

sean — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 21:53:00 +0000

Thanks for the heads-up! I KNEW there was more to some of those statements than meets the eye!

By: SofaKing

SofaKing — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 21:37:00 +0000

I think the literal translation is ‘uppity negro’.

By: millie fink

millie fink — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 20:57:00 +0000

“Job creator” = “rich person (who actually won’t hire more people if her taxes are cut)”

http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2011/12/09/143398685/gop-objects-to-millionaires-surtax-millionaires-we-found-not-so-much

“death tax” = “estate tax”

“death panels” = . . . “end-of-life counseling”

“terrorist” = “Muslim/Arab”

By: InsertFingerHere

InsertFingerHere — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 19:26:00 +0000

Sadly, some people don’t need actual decoder rings, they have them built-in to their brains… helps them decide who needs killing.

By: dioptase

dioptase — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 19:16:00 +0000

Sadly, he may have a point. It’s hard to point to an explicit right to privacy in the constitution. SCOTUS inferred a limited one some time back, but there isn’t much to prevent even that from being rethought. And the ramifications go far beyond contraception.

If we were a bit smarter, we’d amend the Constitution to add the explicit right to privacy. Now how to phrase it in 25 words or less without making filming cops illegal and/or cops investigating crimes?

By: John Aspinall

John Aspinall — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 19:09:00 +0000

“He’s a nice guy but he’s in over his head” means “He can’t regulate Wall St., because we don’t think he understands it. No one understands it, except us. And we aren’t going to explain it to you. So give us your money to play with. And shut up.”

In other words it’s an attempt to portray a desire for accountability and transparency as “meddling in areas beyond his competence”.

When you run it backwards through the decoder ring to Gingrich-ese, you get “Chris Dodd and Barney Frank should be in jail.”

By: glaborous_immolate

glaborous_immolate — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 18:55:00 +0000

As a point of fact, Santorum explicitly doesn’t want to make contraceptives illegal. He just doesn’t think that there exists a constitutional privacy right that would trump a state that wanted to do it, and the supreme court saying there is was baseless.

By: spejic

spejic — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 18:51:00 +0000

Does anyone have the decoder? Could you tell me what Romney’s “He’s a nice guy but he’s in over his head” means?

By: IronEdithKidd

IronEdithKidd — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 18:38:00 +0000

That’s interesting, Cow. I view them that way from inside the US.

By: Cowicide

Cowicide — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 18:07:00 +0000

Archie Bunker’s Place

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_Bunker%27s_Place

By: Cowicide

Cowicide — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 18:05:00 +0000

Dangerous Minds has an excellent post on “How they see our anti-intellectual republicans from another country”

http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/how_they_see_our_anti_intellectual_republicans_from_another_county

By: SofaKing

SofaKing — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 17:37:00 +0000

also when they say ‘this president’ or ‘this administration’ what they mean is ‘the negro in the white house’
socialized medicine = affordable medical care that we (GOP congressmen) don’t get a cut of
weak foreign policy = not starting never-ending wars that we can’t afford for no apparent reason
job-killing regulations = common sense rules to protect the environment, workers and consumers

By: MrsBug

MrsBug — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 17:33:00 +0000

You’re right because one go round of the 80s just wasn’t enough! Double the fun.

By: Just_Ok

Just_Ok — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 17:21:00 +0000

burma shave

By: kringlebertfistyebuns

kringlebertfistyebuns — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 17:18:00 +0000

“DON’T FORGET TO DRINK YOUR OVALTINE.”

“Ovaltine? A crummy commercial? Son of a bitch.”

By: Navin_Johnson

Navin_Johnson — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 17:17:00 +0000

“A crummy commercial!?”

By: Roy Trumbull

Roy Trumbull — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 17:15:00 +0000

The decoder badge was a staple of Ovaltine. They were first offered on the “Little Orphan Annie” radio program and later on the “Captain Midnight” radio program. While they went through a number of designs they were essentially a ring of letters and a ring of numbers. You had to lock the two rings together at a key given on the program like H-23 in order to decode. That sort of simple code is said to have dated to the days of Julius Caesar.