Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Headlines - Wednesday April 21

Tonight on PBS: Through a Dog's Eyes.
 
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Sarah Palin's 'Christian Nation' Remarks Spark Debate.
 
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"Federal taxes last year when down for 98 percent of people, but when asked about this, only 12 percent of the Teabaggers thought this was the case. 88 percent of them had it wrong. And a spokesman for the Teabaggers said, 'We don't want to just be taxed less. We want to be taxed less by a white guy." – Bill Maher
 
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"The other day, the Leader of the Senate Republicans and the Chair of the Republican Senate campaign committee met with two dozen top Wall Street executives to talk about how to block progress on this issue. Lo and behold, when he returned to Washington, the Senate Republican Leader came out against the common-sense reforms we've proposed. In doing so, he made the cynical and deceptive assertion that reform would somehow enable future bailouts - when he knows that it would do just the opposite." - Obama, attacking Mitch the Bitch - finallyLink 
 
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There Will be Blood - Right Wing Rhetoric is Dangerous  

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Tigers - An Endangered Species
 
 
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Wisco: It's springtime for Goldman Sachs.
 
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The Supreme Court has overturned a 13-year ban on "crush videos" saying the ban violated freedom of speech. Never heard of crush videos? Me neither. It turns out some heterosexual men are thrilled by the sight of women crushing small animals to death with their stiletto heels or bare feet. And they'll pay to see it.
Chief Justice John J. Roberts Jr., writing for an eight-member majority, said the law was overly broad and not allowed by the First Amendment. He rejected the government's argument that whether certain categories of speech deserve constitutional protection depends on balancing the value of the speech against its societal costs. "The First Amendment's guarantee of free speech does not extend only to categories of speech that survive an ad hoc balancing of relative social costs and benefits," Roberts wrote. "The First Amendment itself reflects a judgment by the American people that the benefits of its restrictions on the Government outweigh the costs. Our Constitution forecloses any attempt to revise that judgment simply on the basis that some speech is not worth it." [snip] Animal rights groups and 26 states had joined the Obama administration in support of the 1999 law. They argued that videos showing animal cruelty should be treated like child pornography rather than granted constitutional protection. But Roberts said the federal law was so broadly written that it could include all depictions of killing animals, even hunting videos. He said the court was not passing judgment about whether "a statute limited to crush videos or other depictions of extreme animal cruelty would be constitutional."
 
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I guess Fox wasn't biased enough for wingnuts.
 
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Here's a no-brainer: When fewer planes are in the air, there are less carbon emissions!
 
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Teabagger Marco Rubio, who's looking like a lock to win the Florida Republican primary against Charlie Crist, has some explaining to do. 

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Your modern GOP at work:

The Arizona House on Monday voted for a provision that would require President Barack Obama to show his birth certificate if he hopes to be on the state's ballot when he runs for reelection.

The House voted 31-22 to add the provision to a separate bill. The measure still faces a formal vote.

It would require U.S. presidential candidates who want to appear on the ballot in Arizona to submit documents proving they meet the constitutional requirements to be president.

Phoenix Democratic Rep. Kyrsten Sinema said the bill is one of several measures that are making Arizona "the laughing stock of the nation."

Stay classy, Arizona!

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You've got it back asswards

One of the answers to making America healthier isn't to add more subsidies for farmers markets and the like, it is to simply END the subsidies we're handing out to big agribusiness and farmers already, particularly grain. And then if you want, go a step farther and stop our foolish sugar policies, and maybe food producers will start using more sugar instead of the heavily subsidized corn syrup, which tastes like shit by comparison and fools the body.

On top of these obvious and immediate benefits, we would also have more power negotiating trade agreements and a greater ability to demand more open markets abroad.

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The RNC and the DNC. Of the money they raise, the RNC spends 68% on "costs", the DNC spends 59%.

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Why did Obama personally put a microchip in this lady's anus? And is Georgia the new Texas?

In the history of dog-whistle politics no one gets close to Texas. Until today. The nuts who are agitating to get an election bounce using Obamacare to ratchet up the crazy in Georgia has sunk to a whole new level: they introduced a law to prevent that Kenyan usurper to the White House from micro-chipping citizens: http://www.mockpaperscissors.com/?p=32651

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Just as the Bush family made their fortune off of the Nazis, the Koch family made their fortune off the Bolsheviks.

The Kochs are of course the bankrollers behind the Teabaggers.

Empowering dictators is just another GOP tradition.

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Maryland foster agency won't allow Muslim mother to foster a child.

Texas' cruel push to prevent same-sex couples from divorcing.

Even Lindsey Graham doesn't deserve this.

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Leave Wall Street alone!

Oral Snatch suspicious of this socialist lawsuit against America's company, Goldman Sachs.

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Sarah Palin's ignorant imperialism

Caribou Barbie is a moron, says journalist/historian, most of Planet Earth.

She's been going around to Tea Party rallies, invoking the spirit of revolutionary Boston and castigating Obama for failing to exalt American power and punish our adversaries. She seems blissfully unaware that the imperial arrogance she's preaching isn't how the American founders behaved. It's how the British behaved, and why they lost. Palin represents everything the original Tea Party was against.

British hawks responded exactly as Palin now recommends: by focusing on ego, power, and dominance. There was no America , as a nation, until Britain foolishly behaved as Palin now wants America to behave. Her advice is a prescription for superpower suicide. If she understood the Boston Tea Party as more than a slogan anything, she'd know that.
There, FIFY.

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The Rude One on tea parties: What we do think is patently absurd is that they are marching and threatening and yelling about shit that's just not factually true. An example? When gay rights activists interrupted President Obama yesterday over his inaction on repealing the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" rule, that was protest over something real. When town hall screamers last summer were getting red-faced with their members of Congress over "death panels," that was about a lie. Now, was anyone dragged out of a town hall meeting because they insisted on repeating a lie and getting an answer about it? F**k no. Speak more, good teabaggers, because you sound like dumb f**ks.

We don't want violence. Jesus, we might get caught in the crossfire while we counterprotest, which we're allowed to do, sometimes in greater numbers than the actual supposedly massive tea party movement.

So, no, march and dissent away, motherf**kers. It's your right to stand in public and be an idiot who parrots the lies of those who are actually f**king up your lives. It's our job to figure out how to tap into that mass reserve of American stupid power and use it for our objectives. We just haven't figured out how to degrade ourselves enough to do it yet.