Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Headlines - Tuesday April 20

 
###
 
"They cannot stand being called racist. Another thing they cannot stand is black people." - Bill Maher on birther/tea baggers.
 
###

###

Morford: One sandwich to kill you all.

###

Graphic video shows why everyone would be vegetarian if slaughterhouses had glass walls.

###

60 percent of SarahPAC donations went to consultants
 
Matthew Mosk reported that "Palin spent more than $400,000 from her political action committee during the first three months of 2010, using the money donated by supporters to pay her team of advisers and cover the costs of stays in luxury hotels, flights, and even to de-ice a private jet that was shuttling her to a campaign rally."
 
###

No, I'm not making this up:

Sydney, Australia (AHN) - A publisher in Australia has reprinted 7,000 copies of a pasta cookbook after it realized an error in a recipe calling for the use of "freshly ground black people."

###

*facepalm*

###

NYC Mayor Mike "Richie Rich" Bloomberg Wants to Charge Rent to the Homeless

Once again I feel have to explain that this is not, despite all appearances to the contrary, a joke. According to the Daily News, Bloomberg wants to charge rent to any homeless person who sleeps in city-run shelters. What a good idea! It's time these layabouts had to face reality, the Deputy Mayor explains.

###

Wisco: National Day of Prayer ruled unconstitutional - time for the religious right to get stupid

###

Ohio death row inmate Darryl Durr has filed a novel challenge to his scheduled execution: he claims to be allegic to the anesthesia used in lethal injection.

###

Catholic Bishop: It's All Because Of Porn 

Bishop Felipe Arizmendi is blaming the Catholic church's global pedophilia scandal on television and internet porn.
"With so much invasion of eroticism, sometimes it's not easy to stay celibate or to respect children," Bishop Felipe Arizmendi said during an annual meeting of Mexican bishops near Mexico City on Thursday. "If on television and on the Internet and in so many media outlets there is pornography, it is very difficult to stay pure and chaste," said Arizmendi, an influential bishop from the colonial town of San Cristobal de las Casas in southern Mexico. "Obviously when there is generalized sexual freedom it's more likely there could be cases of pedophilia," he added. The bishop was in charge of the formation of priests for two decades in Mexico but said that loose morals in society had made it difficult to keep seminarians committed to the faith.

###

Republican governor Bobby Jindal a year ago mocking volcano monitoring: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-eBqthOvi0&feature=player_embedded

Still think volcano monitoring is something to be mocked, there, Bobby? Here's something around which your greedy little Republican mind can perhaps wrap itself.

###

The Ornery Bastard: Apparently sluts cause earthquakes.

Here he weighs in on the CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch.

###
 
Paranoia and anger in the age of Obama

.You know it's just a matter of time before someone gets hurt at one of these things.

Daniel Almond, a three-tour veteran of Iraq, is ready to "muster outside D.C." on Monday with several dozen other self-proclaimed patriots, all of them armed. They intend to make history as the first people to take their guns to a demonstration in a national park, and the Virginia rally is deliberately being held just a few miles from the Capitol and the White House.

Almond plans to have his pistol loaded and openly carried, his rifle unloaded and slung to the rear, a bandoleer of magazines containing ammunition draped over his polo-shirted shoulder. The Atlanta area real estate agent organized the rally because he is upset about health-care reform, climate control, bank bailouts, drug laws and what he sees as President Obama's insistence on and the Democratic Congress's capitulation to a "totalitarian socialism" that tramples individual rights.

"The founders knew that it is the tendency of government to expand itself and embrace its own power, and they knew the citizenry had to be reminded of that."

It's no surprise that these mental midgets would use the Constitution to justify their adolescent penchant for carrying guns openly in public.  It's gotten to the point where anyone who can read the back of a Fruit Loops box can now deem themselves constitutional lawyers, free to use their interpretation of the Constitution to fuel their rampant paranoia.   Glenn Beck makes it look so easy.

When right-wing fringe groups with mottos like "Not On Our Watch!" show concern for violence, it might be time to be concerned.

Oath Keepers, which in a year has grown to 20,000 online members, signed on early as an event sponsor but abruptly pulled out on April 12. "It had gotten to the point that it would be dangerous to attend," said board member Rex McTyeire, citing an escalation of threatening rhetoric online from some participants. "There are people out there willing to do anything to create chaos in an uncontrolled situation, and [the event] is wide open for disaster."

####

Black Mountain - Eyjafjallajökull Eruption by orvaratli

It may be causing severe travel disruptions, but the photos are fantastic.
 
###
 
Lloyd Blankfein Explaining to Congress Why
Take the Money and Run Is His Favorite Movie
 
 
###
 
The best friends the banksters ever had
 
The Republican Party.

So the Republicans are going to go to the mat to stand up for the interests of the banksters, the same people who pumped up the housing bubble and then deliberately popped it, so that they could try to make money on both sides of it?

Let's refresh, shall we? The banksters created the "liar loans", the mortgages where the only thing that it took to qualify for a large loan was a pulse at the closing table. It was so bad that the mortgage brokers could basically take a homeless dude, give him a shower, a shave and a haircut, dress him in a suit and get him a half-a-million dollar mortgage. The banks then packaged all those mortgages into securities, got the rating agencies to label them as triple-A grade investments and then sold them on the bond markets.

So all of those bonds rested on the ability of that formerly homeless dude to make his $3,500 per month mortgage payment, which he could do provided that he was able to pick up 70,000 discarded soda bottles each month. And the banksters professed surprise and shock that the homeless dude couldn't make his payment.

They say they have learned their lesson. But history teaches us otherwise. They all said that regulations should be lifted from the savings and loans because the lessons of the Great Depression were learned. It took less than seven years for them to fail massively. Then the banksters, though their personal Senator, Phil Gramm, got most of the bank regulations lifted in the 1990s. They got the rules forbidding banks from operating as investment houses lifted and within eight years, several large banks were teetering on the edge of failure and were absorbed by even larger banks, when then almost collapsed.

The people who set all this up took home huge amounts of money and then stuck everyone else. It's not just the bailouts (the only thing that the Republicans are faux-angry about), it's the millions of people who were thrown out of work. It's the employers who went out of business because they couldn't get operating capital or whose customer base evaporated or a mixture of both.

But now the banksters say they have learned their lesson.

Bullshit. The next group will be just as greedy as these guys. They will realize that they will also be able to take the money and run. It has all happened before, repeatedly and without strong regulation and the regulators to enforce them, it will happen again.

Which apparently suits the Republicans just fine, which is why they are carrying water for the banksters.
 
###
 
Why gay marriage matters
 
To prevent assholes like the unmitigated douchenozzles who run Sonoma County, California, from taking the assets of a gay couple by pretending that they are "just roommates."

The bureaucrats of Sonoma County responsible for this outrage should be frog-marched down to the beach and buried in the sand, up to their necks, just above the low-tide mark.
 
###
 
How David Gregory gets his guests on Press the Meat

April 11, 2010: The fact checking on This Week debuts at Politifact.com. David Gregory tells Howard Kurtz that it's an "interesting idea" that Meet the Press will not be adopting . "People can fact-check 'Meet the Press' every week on their own terms," Gregory says.

…and thus Gregory assures us a rich assortment of crackpots and GOP spinmeisters. But I repeat myself.

Nothing like inviting people into your living room to lie to you.

###
 
Here's CNN's most comical idiot saying that Iceland is "too cold" for volcanic eruptions, because of course volcanoes depend upon the surface air temperature to heat the lava and ash deep below the Earth's crust. That's why a "long words" like Hawaii — with just one more syllable than "Iceland" — have so many volcanoes all the time, it's just so warm! YouTube
 
### 

A Picture of 9/11 Is Not a Thing to Put on Your Truck

Toyota recalled millions of its vehicles just because the brakes didn't work. Yet this truck with a picture of 9/11 on it is still on the streets. Photo via Reddit

###

And then Corker starts making moderate noises and refuting the lie that the "resolution fund" would lead to permanent bailouts. "Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) took to the Senate floor today to repeat the false assertion that the pending financial reform bill will lead to further taxpayer-funded bailouts. A number of other Republicans  -  including House Minority Leader John Boehner  -  have repeated the false right-wing talking point. ... The language originates from the advice of pollster Frank Luntz, who has urged Republicans to frame the final product as filled with bank bailouts. Republicans have thus asserted that the proposed resolution fund, negotiated by Sens. Bob Corker (R-TN) and Mark Warner (D-VA), amounts to a "50 billion dollar bailout fund." The resolution authority, of course, has the opposite purpose: It is designed to eliminate too-big-to-fail institutions, not prop them up. It would raise $50 billion "from the largest financial firms" to provide for the orderly unraveling of big, systemically important institutions in the event it is needed - without forcing taxpayers to cover the losses. ... Today on the Senate floor, Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) debunked his conservative colleagues' talking point, saying that the fund "is anything but a bailout.""