Thursday, October 14, 2010

Headlines - Thursday October 14

Is this how Sarah Would Run The Government? Amid rumors about her 2012 intentions, Sarah Palin raised $1.2 million for her political action committee in the last three months and spent just under $1 million, mostly on political consultants and fundraising expenses.
 
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The Pot Calling The Kettle Black
 
MSNBC host Joe Scarborough (who had a dead intern in his office) penned a bruising takedown of Newt Gingrich on Tuesday—accusing him of getting "rich off political hate speech" and "spewing childish political insults." Scarborough's feisty tone was a bit surprising considering his political and historical ties to Gingrich. In 1994, Scarborough, a freshman Republican, was swept into office during the Gingrich-led Republican Revolution. To this day, he speaks glowingly of Gingrich's success reforming welfare and cutting taxes. "But 15 years later, Newt Gingrich's political career is anything but impressive," Scarborough bristles.
 
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Helen Thomas: You Cannot Criticize Israel in the US and Survive

It may be that one cannot survive telling the truth about anything now. (Like Orwell said: During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.)

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It's enough to make you eat nothing but raw vegetables for the rest of your life:

New York City-based artist and photographer Sally Davies . . . bought a McDonald's Happy Meal back in April and left it out in her kitchen to see how well it would hold up over time.

The results? "The only change that I can see is that it has become hard as a rock," Davies told the U.K. Daily Mail.

She proceeded to photograph the Happy Meal each week and posted the pictures to Flickr to record the results of her experiment. Now, just over six months later, the Happy Meal has yet to even grow mold. She told the Daily Mail that "the food is plastic to the touch and has an acrylic sheen to it."

I'm going to go vomit now. BRB.

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The Right thing To Do Is Nothing

Former military personnel wearing 'Fired under 'don't ask, don't tell' tshirts 

It's a situation where the most consequential move may be doing nothing. Yesterday, U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips issued an injunction barring the enforcement of the military's policy of "don't ask, don't tell." As a result, that policy is -- for all intents and purposes -- dead. It can't be enforced here, it can't be enforced overseas, and -- one would assume -- it can't be applied to astronauts in space. We now live in a universe where the US policy of DADT cannot be applied. Not surprisingly, some are having trouble accepting this new reality.
http://griperblade.blogspot.com/2010/10/right-thing-to-do-is-nothing.html

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The Jews made gay club owner Carl Paladino homophobic

The gap between cosplay and drag is very very thin

Have you ever gotten into an argument with someone about, say, racial relations, and halfway through it the dude is all like, "Really, anything terrible I say about the blacks is totally not racist because MY SISTER DATES A BLACK GUY AND I'M TOTALLY FINE WITH IT"? This is an annoying but sometimes effective rhetorical technique that maybe New York gubernatorial candidate/crazed maniac Carl Paladino should take in regards to the gays. You see, it doesn't really matter if he gave some mean speech about them brainwashing America's youth, because he totally was a landlord to a couple of gay clubs, back in the '00s! Wait, what? READ MORE »

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Jesus' General: Dolly Parton Played A Whore.

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Another Bizarre Lie From Sarah Palin

Speaking to an quivering teabagger audience in Montgomery, Alabama, Sarah Palin said this:
"I tell Bristol, I am texting her and say 'Bristol'...and I wasn't kidding, I thought that this was a practical thing to do...'How about if Todd and I we load up all the kids in our motorhome and drive down, park on Rodeo Drive and we come to see you.' And I honestly didn't think that it was an unusual thing to suggest, that's what you do, a road trip. (...) But anyway, that's what we did, though, we parked a little bit further away from Rodeo Drive, and we got to watch Bristol."
Palingates did some fact-checking, noting that the 3375-mile drive from Wasilla to Los Angeles would take forever. And unless the Palin motorhome has a jet engine, there's no way she could have been in Los Angeles a mere two days after being photographed at her home in Alaska. Aaaand there's the pesky little fact of being seen on an Alaska Airlines flight to from Portland to Los Angeles on the day before the show. Oops!

Palingates makes the obvious conclusion: "The 'road trip' only existed in Sarah Palin's crazy mind - she shamelessly used this made-up story to impress her audience in Montgomery." 
 
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QOTD
"It's just not relevant to voters." Mark Halperin on the Chamber of Commerce allegedly using secret foreign money to help finance its political advertising

Yeah, why would voters care whether or not foreign money is shaping American elections, and, subsequently, government policy? Peh. Lame!

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Led by the Republican party and its irresponsible leaders, right-wing hate and fear-mongering has now led to this.

Slices of bacon were laid down on a brink walkway to the Florence Islamic Center in Florence, S.C. on Sunday in a manner that spelled out "PIG CHOPS."  The incident — evidently aimed the center because of the Islamic dietary restrictions against pork — is just the latest in a string of anti-Muslim episodes around the country.

This is not going to end in a nice way.

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Your morning hot Carl

More Paladino porn emails have surfaced – no horses in these, but they're graphic. They're accompanied by a quote from the speech written by Carl's rabbi and delivered by him, ""We must stop pandering to the pornographers and the perverts who seek to target our children and destroy their lives…"

In other Carl news, his gay nephew says that he's "very offended" and has stopped showing up for work on Carl's campaign, and his rabbi withdrew his support over Carl's non-apology apology.

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"After November, Republicans will feel more responsible and may offer serious proposals and work with me in a serious way.  Hmmm, these paint fumes are sure making me feel funny."

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Hearts and Minds, Baby. Hearts and Minds... "A former US soldier in Iraq has come forward with video of his fellow soldiers subjecting Iraqi detainees to what he describes as "mental, emotional, degrading" abuse. ... US Army Specialist Ethan McCord was a member of Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry, the same unit that was involved in a 2007 helicopter attack in Baghdad shown in a leaked video released last April by WikiLeaks. ... "I started to 'acquire' these videos and some pictures once I realized that what we are doing in Iraq is wrong," McCord wrote on Wednesday in a blog entry at MichaelMoore.com. "These videos are of detainee abuse. Not the type of abuse that's physical, but the mental, emotional, degrading type." ... In the three brief clips, soldiers are shown harassing a handcuffed and blindfolded detainee in a variety of ways. In one, a soldier repeatedly orders a detainee to hold his hands up and then put them down again -- a sequence which McCord says went on for 45 minutes."

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Needs more cowbell, please. And make it loud. Really loud. And often. Like constantly throughout the piece. Because really loud and annoying crap will be believed by SOMEONE if just loud enough and frequent enough.

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Who are these people? 

Pathetic fellow citizens, that's who:

BLOOMBERG NATIONAL POLL: Would it make "you more likely or less likely to support a particular candidate …. [if that] Campaign was aided by advertising paid for by anonymous business groups"? More likely: 9% … Less Likely: 47% … Would Not Matter: 41% … Not Sure: 3%.

(Politico)

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Here is a reality check on the Chamber of Commerce "Today, a new report by the nonpartisan campaign finance watchdog Campaign Money Watch found that more than 1.4 million jobs were outsourced since 1994 in the nine states in which the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is spending significant money. The group also found that more than 184,000 jobs were lost to outsourcing in the 22 congressional districts in which the Chamber has spent $4.8 million on political ads in the same time period."

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Because what's the lives of planeloads of people when weighed against airline profits? http://brilliantatbreakfast.blogspot.com/2010/10/because-whats-lives-of-planeloads-of.html

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The Texas-based attorney Harry Whittingon – most famously known as the man whom Dick Cheney shot while on a hunting trip – says that the former vice president has never apologized. The Washington Post reports, "Nearly five years on, he's still waiting for Dick Cheney to say he's sorry."

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The American Dream

Christine O'Donnell's ex-neighbors wish she didn't have sex so loudly

About what you'd expect for her.

According to people who used to be Christine O'Donnell's neighbors, she was sort of odd but nice, perhaps as one would expect. "She would lounge on her front porch in her pajamas some weekends, smoking cigars and drinking wine with a girlfriend." But she also had a man over her house all the time, and a neighbor complained about this, because "the walls upstairs are very thin." Surprise! Christine O'Donnell seems to be sexually active and now seems to live with a her new boyfriend, who is described as "a heavy-set Christian rocker with a pudding-cup beard," that man at left sitting sexily on a tiny tractor. And a neighbor says she never showed up at the local Catholic Church until she was running for office. So basically she is a hypocrite on every point of her platform, which according to the media is being against sex and for Jesus. READ MORE »