This guy isn't Fred Phelps. Fred Phelps is a joke, and has no followers outside his family. This guy can, apparently, build a flock, control those people and spread his message of hate. Hell, the number of people listening to this creepy fucker mushroomed from about fifty to fifty million - perhaps a couple of billion, given the international attention he has attracted - by taking a radical position he knew would spark outrage and get a lot of attention.
He is preaching hate and doing the most vile, disgusting thing that he could think of for the television cameras because he has an end-times delusion. He thinks he can hasten the second coming and bring about armageddon. Appeals to this man to please stop this madness because it will increase violence and cause a bunch of people to get killed. To this guy and other apocalyptic fetishists like him, that's a feature not a bug.
My hope is that the local authorities stop this nonsense on the grounds that the burn permit was denied. As soon as he breaks out the blue-tips and the lighter fluid, they ought to bust out the handcuffs and stuff him and any followers who get froggy in a paddy wagon.
If what he has planned isn't Disturbing the Peace, on every level imaginable, I don't know what is.
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If you aren't rich, and you vote for republicans You are a f**king imbecile. When republicans rule, the rich get the goldmine and you get the shaft. When Democrats govern, the gap between rich and poor narrows.
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A whistleblower who worked for a company that holds contracts worth over a billion dollars to supply translators to the military in Afghanistan has come forward and spilled the beans: over 1/4 of the translators the company has provided can't speak the Afghan languages, but were sent to the battlefield anyway.
For the entirety of the war in Afghanistan, civilians have done the bulk of the translating. I know what you're going to say...Don't we have DLI (the Defense Languages Institute) for that? Well, we're supposed to. But apparently during the Bush regime, someone saw an opportunity for a friend or relative to get in on the war-profiteer bucks that seemed to flow non-stop, even as troops in iraq had to up-armor their own Humvees with scrap metal and bulletproof glass that they scavenged from landfills and Rummy told them to fuck off, they were the army we had, not the army he wished he had.
A good interpreter is as important as a weapon that doesn't jam and sturdy body armor. Without a capable interpreter, soldiers can't glean information that might keep them alive. The whistleblower relates instances of messages being passed off to soldiers as they make their way through a settlement or village that there is an ambush waiting for them up the road that they walked right into because their interpreter couldn't interpret.
That is outrageous. It is inexcusable. And it is exactly the sort of war profiteering that is costing you and me, as taxpayers, billions of dollars. Maybe the deficit hysterics ought to look at the military contracts that have been bleeding the treasury dry for the entire duration of the wars.
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Sounds like Blair can't run away from his own history. First he was pelted with eggs and shoes in Dublin then he canceled an book signing event in London. Now that protesters discovered he was preparing for a party at the posh Tate Modern in London, he canceled his showing there as well.If we can't get the war criminals to The Hague, maybe we can keep them under "house arrest". At the very least, give them something to think about before they leave the house.
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(By the way, as far as General Petraeus saying that Pastor Yosemite Sam shouldn't exercise his right to free speech because it might endanger our troops in Afghanistan, oh, sweet General, what endangers our troops in Afghanistan is having troops in Afghanistan.)
Take a moment and learn about hands-only CPR. One thing the video doesn't mention: the recommended rate of 100 compressions per minute is approximately the same rhythm as "Staying Alive".
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John Cole: We could probably use those jobs
NY Times is full of great news tonight:
Now, Changsha and two adjacent cities are emerging as a center of clean energy manufacturing. They are churning out solar panels for the American and European markets, developing new equipment to manufacture the panels and branching into turbines that generate electricity from wind. By contrast, clean energy companies in the United States and Europe are struggling. Some have started cutting jobs and moving operations to China in ventures with local partners.The booming Chinese clean energy sector, now more than a million jobs strong, is quickly coming to dominate the production of technologies essential to slowing global warming and other forms of air pollution. Such technologies are needed to assure adequate energy as the world's population grows by nearly a third, to nine billion people by the middle of the century, while oil and coal reserves dwindle.
But much of China's clean energy success lies in aggressive government policies that help this crucial export industry in ways most other governments do not. These measures risk breaking international rules to which China and almost all other nations subscribe, according to some trade experts interviewed by The New York Times.
Can someone explain why we, the United States, feel free to act like a rogue nation in basically every other regard- we torture, we'll bomb and invade whoever we want, when we don't ignore the UN we are telling them what to do, etc., but we draw the line here?
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Mission Accomplished - the never ending series
We're Winning! We've won!! The last combat troops have left....except for a few more leaving in boxes.
Two U.S. soldiers were killed yesterday and nine were wounded in a firefight outside an Iraqi Army base north of Baghdad. They were the first casualties since President Obama announced the end of combat operations in Iraq last week. Two days earlier, U.S. soldiers helped Iraqi soldiers push back "a highly coordinated attack by insurgents" in Baghdad.They died protecting our
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Sarah Palin wishes you a very happy Jew Year!
"I trust in the American people's capacity to get beyond all this nonsense and focus on is this somebody who cares about me and has a vision for the future?"- Obama, proving what a terrible politician he really is, Link
Barack, have you ever paid any attention to American politics?
Voters are total tools - they have no brains at all.
They vote for the guy they'd like to have a beer with.
In 95% of presidents, they voted for the taller dude for Christ's sake.
Between John Kerry and Monkey Bush, voters think Bush was the war hero.
Voters in Carolina this year thought they were voting for Al Green, the Gospel singer.
Bush won primaries in 2000 because voters thought they were voting for his dad.
Bush "won" Florida because the Jews there "voted" for goddamn Pat Buchanan.
One fourth of America thinks you are a MUSLIM FROM KENYA
and you claim voters are smart? Are you f-ing kidding me??
How can such a smart man be this naive?
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The Guardian: Rupert Murdoch's UK newspaper widely used phone tapping.
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