Monday, March 15, 2010

Headlines - Monday March 15

My brother and his wife are sailing around the world. They have a fun blog where you can read of their adventures www.sailingtooblivion.com , and they have recently added a cool new feature called Random Act of Kindness:

This is your opportunity to do something good for someone you don't even know...we'd like to call it the "Random Act of Kindness" fund. Donate to this fund and we'll see that your money gets into the hands of someone who really needs it. Crayons and paper for school children. Food for someone who needs it more than you do. A soccer ball or baseball glove for a kid. Or send us an email and tell us specifically how you'd like us to share your hard-earned money. We'll go out of our way to make someone's day for you. If you like, we'll send you an email to tell you what we did with the money. Help us make the world a better place a dollar at a time! The Oblivion Crew

So if you've got a couple of bucks, click the piggy bank button on the bottom of their page and they'll make a difference in someone's life. They have in mine. Smooth sailing.

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"I adore all the new citizen patriots who are rising up across this country. I have felt called to the front lines with you, with my fellow citizens, to preserve what made America great and, at the same time, to scarf up some of that corporate dough my husband made possible by his vote on the Supreme Court."
 
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Frank Rich - The New Rove-Cheney Assault on Reality.
 
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Paul Harris: Progressives Choke on Their Pretzels as Karl Rove Rewrites History
It has been fun watching the man known as 'Bush's brain' squirm on the TV talkshows as he tries to sell his self-serving memoir

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Anyone who thinks Clarence Pubic Hair Thomas will recuse himself from cases involving corporations that have donated to his wife's freshly-minted teabagger organization hasn't been paying attention.

If his mentor, Nino Scalia, wouldn't recuse himself from the energy commission case right after he went duck hunting with Cheney, do we honestly think Thomas would not follow in lockstep?

"Fuck judicial codes of conduct."

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Keep America Paranoid


Keep America Paranoid
Image © Austin Cline
Click for full-sized Image
More Propaganda Posters

Liz Cheney is such a mixed blessing. On the one hand, she says and does things which reveal the truth of what so many Republicans really believe; on the other hand, her tactics are effective, which means she causes real damage to American politics and culture. It's like she's revealing a cancerous tumor, then before it can be cut out, she feeds it so that it metastasizes and infects the rest of the body politic.

What Liz Cheney does best is inspire fear. She doesn't inspire anyone to reach higher, to be better, or to improve the world around them. All Liz Cheney preaches to the public is that they need to be afraid of anything and everything around them. Her latest efforts, the "Keep America Safe" ads, are designed to specifically inspire fear that the Justice Department employs lawyers who represented the legal interests of human beings held by the government in Guantanamo Bay.

How insecure does a conservative have to be in order to genuinely fear the possibility that people at the Justice Department strive to serve the impartial interests of the law, the Constitution, and Justice for All?


Even Some Conservatives...

Although the conservative movement and Republicans have an impressive degree of "message discipline," there are still a few issues which reveal some of the fault lines between conservative factions or interest groups. Liz Cheney's "Keep America Safe" ads have become one such issue: some conservatives are striving mightily to justify what she's doing while others — mostly lawyers — are objecting strongly on principled grounds.
 
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This is a charming email from Alan Grayson's daughter Skye explaining the origin of her name. The more I hear about Grayson the better I like him.

Dear xxxxx:

Hi - Skye Grayson here. My Daddy is Congressman Alan Grayson. He gave me a special birthday gift to me when I was 10 years old. He told me why my name is Skye.

Before I was born, Daddy read a touching oral history about the children of American servicemen and Vietnamese mothers. These children grew up in Vietnam after 1975. They were living symbols of a hated war. Many of them were beaten and cursed, just for being who they are.

One of them was able to leave Vietnam and go to America while she was a young girl. The author asked her, "what do you like most about America?" She answered, "the sky." He said, "why? There was a sky in Vietnam." She replied, "I know. But I was so ashamed of myself, I never looked up."

Like that girl, I'm the child of an American father (Congressman Daddy) and an Asian mother. On my 10th birthday, Daddy told me that he named me Skye to remind me that no matter what happens to me in life, and no matter what other people think about me, I should always have the courage to hold my head high, and look up.

And I do have that courage. Thank you, Daddy.

Best wishes, Skye

And speaking of Grayson, he just said the 'Alaskan chillbilly' is the smartest GOP leader since W.

Pure gold.

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Apple and other advertisers have abandoned Fox because of Glenn Beck.

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Christian leaders urge Congress to ignore misinformation on abortion provisions and pass health reform. 

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Looting ...

The evaporation of American dollars into the sands of Mesopotamia (and into the hands of Bush allies) is astounding.

Investigators looking into corruption involving reconstruction in Iraq say they have opened more than 50 new cases in six months by scrutinizing large cash transactions — involving banks, land deals, loan payments, casinos and even plastic surgery* — made by some of the Americans involved in the nearly $150 billion program.

Some of the cases involve people who are suspected of having mailed tens of thousands of dollars to themselves from Iraq, or of having stuffed the money into duffel bags and suitcases when leaving the country, the federal investigators said. In other cases, millions of dollars were moved through wire transfers. Suspects then used cash to buy BMWs, Humvees and expensive jewelry, or to pay off enormous casino debts.

Some suspects also tried to conceal foreign bank accounts in Ghana, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Britain, the investigators said, while in other cases, cash was simply found stacked in home safes.
As Montag says: Another example of why the Republicans try so hard to remove regulation, oversight and enforcement. With those in place, none of their friends can make any money.

Indeed.

*I wonder how many new sets of fake tits are technically owned by the U.S. government.

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Just look at Rome ...

And you'll see the same 'similarity of decline' here as you did in the waning years of the Empire:

Such questions are becoming common across the nation as water and sewer systems break down. Today, a significant water line bursts on average every two minutes somewhere in the country, according to a New York Times analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data.

In Washington alone there is a pipe break every day, on average, and this weekend's intense rains overwhelmed the city's system, causing untreated sewage to flow into the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers.

State and federal studies indicate that thousands of water and sewer systems may be too old to function properly. [my em]

I guess Norquist was wrong about one detail. The great conservative plan of the last four decades wasn't to drown government in a bathtub, it was to drown all of us in feces and storm runoff.

That half trillion dollars plus we are spending on the military could probably come in handy. As could those tax cuts that fueled the awesome "growth" of the Bush era.

When a society can't fix its basic infrasructure, the fall is well on its way.

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"I understand you built this with your very own Erector Set. Awesome! Your pal, Bobby"

                                                                                 It reminds me of this: 

                                                                 Israeli children sign their missiles 'with love'

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Glenn takes on the #dickwhisperer:

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank dresses up in idiotic costumes, and the overriding attribute of his commentary is adolescent, above-it-all snideness, and he's thus deemed a wild, unpredictable, creative "contrarian" in Beltway media circles. In reality, he's one of the most cliché-ridden purveyors of conventional Washington widsom one can find, as he demonstrates yet again in his column today, where he venerates Lindsey Graham and his quest to statutorily implement a system of military commissions and indefinite detention…

All in all, a pretty solid effort from Glenn, but I am going to have to ding him for failing to mention Milbank's epicly embarrassing Dear John letter when he finally fell out of love with Mean Old Man McCain. That was so ridiculous and syrupy and revealed so much about Milbank that it simply can not be left out of the record.

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Why are the media not touching this story?

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Pandering to the gun nuts is going to potentially cost the state of West Virginia 3 million bucks:

Speaking of vetoes, Manchin will be put in a quandary over a bill passed Saturday to have a sales tax holiday on firearms in October (HB4251).

Offering a tax-free weekend on gun sales potentially could get West Virginia booted out of the Streamlined Sales Tax agreement—an agreement between about 20 states, and retailers within those states, to collect and remit sales taxes on purchases (mainly via the Internet) that otherwise would go uncollected.

For West Virginia, that arrangement currently brings in about $3 million a year, which could be forfeited if the state violates the agreement by allowing a gun tax holiday, expected to save gun buyers only about $25,000 in sales taxes.

Legislators who voted for the bill not only picked up brownie points from the National Rifle Association, which was pushing the bill, but also knowingly put Manchin into a position of losing popularity points with some voters if he is obligated to veto the bill.

Can anyone explain why we ever would need a sales tax holiday on guns?

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Rielle Hunter Dishes On Gross Sex Affair With Gross Failed Presidential Candidate John Edwards

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Jefferson, Ted Kennedy, Others to be Assassinated From Texas School Book Depository: http://brilliantatbreakfast.blogspot.com/2010/03/jefferson-ted-kennedy-others-to-be.html

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The senator trying to rewrite the nation's financial industry rules is dropping plans to create a stand-alone consumer financial protection agency and give a single regulator the power to oversee all banks, according to people familiar with the evolving proposal.

Backing away from the proposal he offered four months ago, the chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee is now incorporating GOP ideas, and yet not one Republican senator is coming along so far.

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funny pictures of cats with captions