Why aren’t Conservatives funny? Why don’t they ‘get’ comedy? Why are their attempts at it so bizarre? Comedy Autism. It’s the dread disease that afflicts those who support Sarah Palin, swear Barack Obama was born in Nairobi, or think George W. Bush is really smart. It’s a serious thing, but it causes them no pain. And it fascinates us.

So, here we go. Here’s our latest review of examples of Comedy Autism. We look at the political cartoons of right-wing professionals and we scratch our heads: why the spastic likening, the mixed metaphor, the backfiring irony? Why can’t you guys draw Barack Obama? It is a deep mystery.

As usual, we start with Eric Allie.

There she is, seeing Weinergate online. And there Weiner is, in front of her, also. And there’s a guy with a notepad. Why? Because autism is mysterious. Nice Jew-nose, incidentally. Moving along . .

Here, Allie pokes great fun at Obama’s controversial immigration legislation. Do you, by any chance, know what it is? Me neither. But Latinos would hate it, I bet. Speaking of burning issues . .

. . there’s this. Damned National Labor Relations Board. And that other thing. Totally! Good job re-purposing a tragedy that killed hundreds of people, btw.

Brian Farrington:

There’s no alternative to waterboarding. That’s why we lost World War II.

Ok, switch to Ken Catalino. This guy’s so bad, I did an entire edition on him.

Statue of Liberty. We put that 15-foot masterpiece where again — downtown Cleveland?

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Ghosts in your machine:

“Dr O’Connor said ‘Karen what are you doing? Your hand’s undressing you’. Until he said that I had no idea that my left hand was opening up the buttons of my shirt.

“So I start rebuttoning with the right hand and, as soon as I stopped, the left hand started unbuttoning them. So he put an emergency call through to one of the other doctors and said, ‘Mike you’ve got to get here right away, we’ve got a problem’.”

Karen had emerged from the operation with a left hand that was out of control.

“I’d light a cigarette, balance it on an ashtray, and then my left hand would reach forward and stub it out. It would take things out of my handbag and I wouldn’t realise so I would walk away. I lost a lot of things before I realised what was going on.”

Ghosts in your junk:

“The male escort hired by anti-gay activist George Alan Rekers has told the Miami New Times the Baptist minister is a homosexual who paid him to provide body rubs once a day in the nude, during their ten-day vacation in Europe. Rekers allegedly named his favorite maneuver the “long stroke” — a complicated caress “across his penis, thigh… and his anus over the butt cheeks,” as the escort puts it. ‘Rekers liked to be rubbed down there,’ he says.”

Lucien decided to come clean, after a friend explained to him, the extent of Rekers’ harmful anti-gay activities. “It’s a situation where he’s going against homosexuality when he is a homosexual,” Lucien says.

No control, what a nightmare.

In no particular order.

–What the hell is Jared Loughner’s story? He appears to be a paranoid schizophrenic. Schizophrenia is a disease that first appears in the late teens or early twenties.

Loughner dropped out of high school in nearby Marana after his junior year, according to the school district. He got into the community college through a program aimed at helping high school dropouts transition to community colleges, Pima’s president told CNN.

His dropping out would’ve have been consistent with either becoming increasingly unglued, or — worse — having his first psychotic break. If his family merely tried to tough it out and convalesce him at home, as opposed to getting him long-term psychiatric support and medication, that might explain his later exhibiting the sort of chronic behavior that unnerved or terrified virtually everybody that he came into contact with.

–Why do paranoid schizophrenics kill people? That’s a mystery for the ages. Some combination of vulnerability and agitation. A need to make things right, somehow? Or a need to change things? Or a need to make public their perceived extra-worldly powers? You can see, when someone keeps saying they can control others’ thoughts and feelings, even their religious beliefs, as Jared did, that they feel like supermen. Being ignored or laughed at might be too much to take.

–How did he manage to shoot so many people so quickly? Other than some obvious answers — he used a semi-automatic handgun, a Glock 19, which is easy to conceal and to use — how is it that the numbers of dead and wounded were so high? A key: he purchased a high-capacity magazine for the attack. Using that, he could squeeze off 30 or more shots as fast as he could pull the trigger. That’s how he could hit 20, killing 6, in a matter of a few seconds.

–Those high-capacity magazines aren’t illegal? Not any more. They were previously illegal under Clinton’s Assault Weapons Ban of 1994. No new magazines of more than 10 round capacity were allowed to be sold in the U.S. When the law sunseted in 2004, under the Bush administration, the NRA got their wishes. Senator Lautenberg of New Jersey wants to re-enact the ban: I think it’s a good idea. Who the hell really needs to get off 30, or 33, rounds in a matter of seconds? Loughner was disabled after he emptied the first clip and reached for his second. That may have saved lives. If he were forced to use a 10 or 15 round magazine, even more lives could’ve been saved.

–Where the hell are his family? Why didn’t they do something to get this guy some mental health support? They weren’t in court today — who knows if they’ll ever show up? And you probably already know why: how could they do so little to help out their schizophrenic son? If you’re familiar with how schizophrenic family members are perceived, you know that nobody was more keenly aware of Jared’s massive problems with society, his co-hort and reality than his parents and siblings. They knew painfully well that Jared was severely mentally ill, but they apparently did little of consequence about it: his chronically frightening and inappropriate behavior across years bears that out. I’d say his suffering demonstrates a contempt for the well being of a precious family member and for society at large. Stay tuned as the media, while the days mount and the anger rises, find it convenient to hunt down the family members and grill them. Can’t say the family haven’t earned it. Can say that dealing with a severely ill son or brother is brutally difficult, and the Loughners should be treated with some dignity. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Fox go after them pretty directly.

Dr. Andrew Wakefield, British former surgeon and author of a famous Lancet paper that purported to link autism to MMR vaccines, drew his harshest professional criticism yesterday. The British medical journal BMJ, relying on the latest work by noted investigative journalist Brian Deer, alleged that his autism study “was in fact an elaborate fraud.” Wakefield denied the allegation, decrying the claim an “attempt to crush any attempt to investigate valid vaccine safety concerns.”

This allegation by BMJ is the latest of many calling into question both the study’s science and the doctor’s credibility. The 1998 paper in Lancet linked childhood autism to the MMR vaccine by way of a hypothetical gastrointestinal inflammation that occurred immediately after MMR administration. Wakefield theorized that the inflammation systematically released gut proteins that then attacked the children’s brains.

Growing scientific criticism and Deer’s original investigative report on the study in 2004 resulted in almost all the doctor’s co-authors retracting their conclusions. Deer showed that Wakefield had been in the substantial pay of lawyers with an interest in suing over an alleged vaccine/autism link, a revelation that the editor of Lancet called “fatal conflict of interest.” Wakefield denied that his being paid or that refusing to disclose payments were problematic. No credible, large-scale study has supported Wakefield’s theory of the autism/vaccine link.

Deer’s latest work, which relies upon medical records, alleges that the 12 children Wakefield based his study upon either did not subsequently become autistic, did not have GI inflammation, or had it before the vaccine. In other words, the vaccine –> inflammation –> autism theoretical cascade was a virtual impossibility from the beginning because the 12 cases were wildly different: they didn’t or couldn’t suddenly develop inflammation and autism. The only conclusion is that Wakefield falsified the patient data to make them fit his hypothesis. [via]

How bad was the deception?

First of all, in order for this all to make sense, the children had to have what is known as “regressive autism”. In other words, they had to have been fine — normal, in fact — and then get much worse after the MMR shot, developing autism. Children who obviously weren’t right from the start would have had something wrong already, and not have autism caused by the MMR vaccine. In Wakefield’s paper, he described 9 of the 12 children as having regressive autism. Mr. Deer’s investigation found that three of the 9 children he reported as regressive autism were not. Moreover, an additional 5 of the remaining 6 could not be proven to have regressive autism. So — at best — only 6 of the 12 children in the study had regressive autism; more likely, only one did.

Next, Wakefield’s paper alleged that a colitis brought on by the vaccine is what led the shot to become so damaging. In his paper, he reported that 11 of 12 of the children had a nonspecific colitis. What did the records show? That only 3 of the 12 had nonspecific colitis. The other 6 cases were falsified.

And, of course, the final piece of the puzzle was that symptoms needed to start not long after the vaccine was given. In Wakefield’s paper, 8 of the 12 patients reported symptoms days after the MMR. Mr. Deer’s investigation confirmed that for 10 of the 12 children, this was false. For the other two it was unknown. So — at best — 2 of the 12 children showed symptoms near the vaccine. At worst, none did.

BMJ continues:

Furthermore, Wakefield has been given ample opportunity either to replicate the paper’s findings, or to say he was mistaken. He has declined to do either. He refused to join 10 of his coauthors in retracting the paper’s interpretation in 2004, and has repeatedly denied doing anything wrong at all. Instead, although now disgraced and stripped of his clinical and academic credentials, he continues to push his views.

Last year, Wakefield was stripped of his ability to practice medicine in Britain, and Lancet took the extraordinary step of retracting the paper, citing falsifications and unethical medical practices. Wakefield now operates an autism-oriented facility in Austin, Texas, called Thoughtful House Center for Children. His currently heroic status as a fighter for autistic children can be directly traced back to the original Lancet study and the immediate and long-lasting press he’s gotten for supposedly establishing the link:

At a press conference held by the Royal Free medical school, London, in conjunction with the publication, Wakefield recommended separating the three components of the injections by at least a year. The paper, press conference, a video news release, and resulting media coverage were linked to a steep decline in vaccination rates in the United Kingdom.

It also led to declines in vaccinations in America, too. The hangover from the fraudulent study is twofold: vaccines are still baselessly viewed with fear, and childhood cases of measles and mumps continue to rise in both countries. Deaths have resulted.

In Britain, immunisation rates collapsed from 92% before the Lancet paper was published, to 80% at the peak of Britain’s alarm. Measles has returned as officially “endemic”.

With less than 95% of the population vaccinated, Britain has lost its herd immunity against the disease. In 1998 there were 56 cases reported; last year there were 1,348, according to figures released last week that showed a 36% increase on 2007. Two British children have died from measles, and others put on ventilators, while many parents of autistic children torture themselves for having let a son or daughter receive the injection.

“There’s not a day go by I don’t cry because of what happened,” said the mother of a severely disabled 12-year-old girl. “I shouldn’t have took her [for the MMR], and you know everyone will say, ‘Don’t blame yourself’, but I do. I blame myself.”

In Rare Cases, Pope Justifies Use of Condoms
RACHEL DONADIO and LAURIE GOODSTEIN | New York Times

. . The pope’s statement on condoms was extremely limited: he did not approve their use or suggest that the Roman Catholic Church was beginning to back away from its prohibition of birth control. In fact, the one example he cited as a possibly appropriate use was by male prostitutes . .

In the book, Benedict said condoms were not “a real or moral solution” to the AIDS epidemic, adding, “that can really lie only in a humanization of sexuality.” But he also said that “there may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility.”

Talk of responsibility? You must be joking.

People began to die of AIDS in 1978. The CDC picked up on it in 1981. US deaths in 1988: 5,000. 1990: 20,000. 1993: 40,000. Deaths worldwide as of 1997: 6 million. Infections: 22 million. Infected as of 2007: 33 million.

Hey — whaddya say we talk about responsibility now? Why not? Millions have died and tens of millions are permanently infected, so let’s talk about it. Okay, good.

Catholic male prostitutes may now use condoms. But women, all women, can’t tell their men to use condoms because that’d be immoral. Women must eternally be willing to get pregnant and bear children. Even if they’re prostitutes. And if they contract AIDS and die, oh well. Apparently, it’s all part of the wonder of God’s plan. It’s God’s unstoppable plan for maximizing pregnancy rates and spreading a murderous epidemic.

Actually, it’s only part of the wonder of the Pope’s plan.

Belatedly, Egypt Spots Flaws in Wiping Out Pigs

“The problem is clear in the streets,” said Haitham Kamal, a spokesman for the Ministry of State for Environmental Affairs. “There is a strict and intensive effort now from the state to address this issue.”

The pigs used to eat tons of organic waste. Now the pigs are gone and the rotting food piles up on the streets of middle-class neighborhoods like Heliopolis and in the poor streets of communities like Imbaba…