So, you know, we have some principles when it comes to proper treatment of our four-footed cohabitors of Earth ... but evidently these are not universal principles.
Behold Iowa Representative Steve King: Here's the YouTube,
http://youtu.be/...
and there's more over the orange Itzl print ...
During a town hall meeting in late July, King remarked that people should be able to watch animals fight, comparing dog fights to watching wrestlers or boxers in the ring.
"When the legislation that passed in the farm bill says that it’s a federal crime to watch animals fight or to induce someone else to watch an animal fight, but it’s not a federal crime to induce somebody to watch people fighting, there’s something wrong with the priorities of people that think like that,” King said at the meeting. “It’s wrong to rate animals above human beings."
As reported at Think Progress, King has a lengthy record of anti-animal voting (
pdf here):
Of course, there is a very good reason we ban dogfighting and other similar forms of cruelty: animals don’t have a choice in the matter. Manny Pacquiao chooses to step into the ring. Michael Vick’s dogs did not. Similarly, when a human boxer loses a fight, he is not ritually executed after the fight. The same is not always true in dogfighting.
Unfortunately, King is a longtime advocate for legalizing dogfighting, cockfighting, and other forms of animal torture. Most recently, he fought legislation that would make it illegal to bring a child to an animal fight. He has also set aside his love for states’ rights in order to forbid localities from enacting anti-animal torture standards.
King's definition of "human beings" turns out to be a bit selective too --
he apparently doesn't think much of fully-born human beings either, at least when they're not likely to donate to his campaign (note: or vote, though apparently that's something else this Republican isn't crazy about extending). A hard-right winger, he's voted against bringing home troops from Iraq. He's also anti-abortion, anti-veteran, anti-illegal-immigration, anti-peace, pro-war, pro-corporation (although, funnily enough, he's anti-shareholder -- note his vote with regard to shareholder control of CEO salaries) and anti-poor people.
That he's anti-Obama goes without saying, but he says it anyhow:
On March 7, 2008, during his press engagements to announce his reelection campaign, King made remarks about Senator and Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama and his middle name, saying:
"I don't want to disparage anyone because of their race, their ethnicity, their name - whatever their religion their father might have been," I'll just say this: When you think about the optics of a Barack Obama potentially getting elected President of the United States -- I mean, what does this look like to the rest of the world? What does it look like to the world of Islam? I will tell you that, if he is elected president, then the radical Islamists, the al-Qaida, the radical Islamists and their supporters, will be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on September 11 because they will declare victory in this War on Terror. Additionally, his middle name (Hussein) does matter. It matters because they read a meaning into that in the rest of the world...If he were strong on national defense and said 'I'm going to go over there and we're going to fight and we're going to win, we'll come home with a victory,' that's different. But that's not what he said. They will be dancing in the streets if he's elected president. That has a chilling aspect on how difficult it will be to ever win this Global War on Terror." [31]
Turns out King was wrong about that -- as President Barack Hussein Obama's battle against Al-Qaeda has been no less effective than GOP darling George W. Bush's was; indeed, there's been no repeat of the 11SEP01 disaster, let alone no repeat of a foreign power capturing and disassembling a US spy aircraft and holding hostage its crew. Oh, and there's that little matter of Osama bin Laden being dead now, too.
Then on March 10 [2008], King defended his comments to The Associated Press, saying "(Obama will) certainly be viewed as a savior for them.... That's why you will see them supporting him, encouraging him."[32]
Wiki quotes / cites the following about this proud backwardist who
voted not to allow the evacuation of pets during disasters like (including) Hurricane Katrina.
From the Wiki article on this loathesome example of what a Representative of the American people serving in Congress should NOT be:
King is considered an outspoken fiscal and social conservative. After winning the 2002 Republican nomination, he said that he intended to use his seat in Congress to "move the political center of gravity in Congress to the right."[8]
He's objectively pro-war,
anti-veteran, and anti-US GI:
King has continuously voted for Iraq War legislation, and has supported surge efforts and opposed a time table for troop withdrawals.
He dances to the tune of James Dobson:
[King] was the only Representative from Iowa toscore 100 percent on the joint Family Research Council Action/Focus on the Family Action Congressional Scorecard in the second session of the 109th Congress. In the 109th United States Congress, and again in the 110th Congress.[12]
He's anti-choice (of course):
Representative King scored a 100% rating with the National Right to Life Committee, indicating a pro-life voting record. King also voted no on allowing human embryonic stem cell research.[14]
From the NRLC site:
King co-sponsored Sanctity of Human Life Act
Declares that:
the right to life guaranteed by the Constitution is vested in each human and is the person's paramount and most fundamental right;
each human life begins with fertilization, cloning, or its functional equivalent, at which time every human has all legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood; and
Congress, each state, and all U.S. territories have the authority to protect all human lives.
The terms 'human' and 'human being' include each and every member of the species homo sapiens at all stages of life, beginning with the earliest stage of development, created by the process of fertilization, cloning, or its functional equivalent.
Ironically, there's no exception here for post-birth members of the species homo sapiens who happen to be female, GLBT or non-Caucasian, so we can safely assume King holds this tenet only partially sacred.
He's openly anti-brown people, anti-woman, and anti-GLBT, as wiki notes:
King opposes race based quotas and affirmative action. King has stated: “There’s been legislation that’s been brought through this House that sets aside benefits for women and minorities. The only people that it excludes are white men...Pretty soon, white men are going to notice they are the ones being excluded.” [16]
Want more proof of his racism?
Steve King said on the floor of the House on June 14, 2010 that racial profiling is an important component of law enforcement: "Some claim that the Arizona law will bring about racial discrimination profiling. First let me say, Mr. Speaker, that profiling has always been an important component of legitimate law enforcement. If you can’t profile someone, you can’t use those common sense indicators that are before your very eyes. Now, I think it’s wrong to use racial profiling for the reasons of discriminating against people, but it’s not wrong to use race or other indicators for the sake of identifying that are violating the law."[17] As an example of profiling, King described an instance when a taxi driver would stop for him before he had to hail a cab, just because he was in a business suit.[18]
More proof of this inhumane individual's broad-spectrum bigotry:
On April 3, 2009, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that a state ban on same-sex marriage violated the Iowa constitution.[19] King soon commented that the judges "should resign from their position" and the state legislature "must also enact marriage license residency requirements so that Iowa does not become the gay marriage Mecca." [20] King, along with others, mounted a campaign against the retention of all three Iowa Supreme Court judges who ruled on the gay marriage case. King bought $80,000 of radio across the state calling for Iowans to vote "no" on the judges. Subsequently, all three judges were not retained.[21]
Not content with his own lack of understanding of the Constitution and his success in foisting his bigoted views on the entire state of Iowa, King set out to stop Medicare and Medicaid payments fo what he called
"recreational drugs".[22] King also has voted against
each stimulus billin the U.S. House of Representatives, saying, “Our economy will not recover because government spends more. It will recover because people produce more.”
Of course, it's tough to produce more when you can't get a job, but King's a five-time Congressman, so he has no worries. His pension's guaranteed him for life, and it's a substantially more comfortable income than that available to many of the impoverished Americans whose "entitlements" he further wishes to gut. Wiki notes he first earned national prominence as one of 11 Congressmen voting against the $52 billion package of Katrina aid. King's own district newspaper, The Sioux City Journal wrote the following about King's vote:
"In September, we took our congressman, Steve King, to task for voting against a $52 billion aid package for victims of Hurricane Katrina. King - who was just one of 11 members of Congress who voted against the package which passed both houses and was signed by President Bush - based his vote on the need for "fiscal responsibility." He said the federal government needed to develop a comprehensive plan for spending aid dollars, including input from members of Congress, before more money was appropriated. He earlier had voted for a $10.5 billion emergency aid package. Well, after reading an Associated Press story about a report that details how perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars in Katrina disaster aid have been misspent, it appears we were wrong and King was right about his vote on the $52 billion."
Oh, and he's anti-good-examples, too: King not only advocatesholding dog fights and allowing them to be spectator sports,he thinks it's good for kids to come watch such travesties.
Here's a fun fact: "A three-year study by the Chicago Police Department found that 70 percent of animal offenders had also been arrested for other felonies, including domestic and aggravated battery, illegal drug trafficking, and sex crimes."
I suppose that King is really only sticking up for the 30 percent of animal offenders who are merely sadists. Either way, "during consideration of the 2012 Farm bill, King led an unsuccessful effort to defeat a McGovern amendment to make it a crime for an adult to attend or to bring a child to a dogfight or cockfight," because it's obviously best to introduce people into these environments when they are but whelps.
So it's not just Mitt Romney's dog these alleged national leaders cannot understand the need to treat properly. It's ... well, all animals not just like the one peering back out of the mirror at these barbarians.
