A proposed Tennessee law would make following the Islamic code known as Shariah law a felony, punishable by 15 years in jail.State Sen. Bill Ketron, R-Murfreesboro, and state Rep. Judd Matheny, R-Tullahoma, introduced the same bill in the Senate and House last week. It calls Shariah law a danger to homeland security and gives the attorney general authority to investigate complaints and decide who's practicing it.
I don't know about you, but I think this is brilliant. I certainly can't imagine a better way to defend American constitutional principles than to put people in jail for the free exercise of religion in their own homes. And even better, it's absolutely critical that government be given the power to investigate every single American to see if they are engaged in illegal religious acts.
In fact, the only real problem with this legislation is that fifteen years really doesn't seem like enough time. And jail might be too soft a punishment. Perhaps a ritual stoning would make more sense. The good news is that if we wait long enough, a Republican will surely come along and propose just such a measure. Thank God.
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Okay, I want everyone to
do your best *facepalm* on the count of three...
Former President George W. Bush has canceled his planned Saturday visit to Denver after learning that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange would be speaking at the same conference he was to attend.
"Six months ago, President Bush accepted an invitation to speak to the YPO Global Leadership Summit in Denver on February 26, 2011. This week, upon learning that Julian Assange had recently been invited to address the same summit, President Bush decided to cancel his appearance," said Bush spokesman David Sherzer. "The former president has no desire to share a forum with a man who has . . .
Wait for it . . . .
" . . . willfully and repeatedly done great harm to the interests of the United States."
You just can't make this shit up.
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Boehner kills jobs, focuses on abortion, but chides Obama for ignoring jobs with 'divisive' DOMA shift.
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Oh, Jeebus, thank you for this gift we are about to recieve:
Although I doubt anyone is surprised by this...
Lee's sudden exit took many people by surprise. Hadn't other members of Congress admitted to worse than an unconsummated, PG-13 flirtation and managed to stay in office? It turns out Lee may have had good reason to step out of the spotlight so quickly: It wasn't just women that the Craigslist Congressman was hunting for on the Internet.
...
But if Lee was using the Internet to meet up with transgender women, it now makes a lot more sense why he would have decided to resign so quickly: Lee may have thought if he quit the House immediately, he'd be able to avoid having his "secret" exposed and spare himself any further embarrassment. No such luck.
Republicans really don't understand how the intertoobz works, do they?
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(CBSNews) WASHINGTON - Keeping American weapons from getting into the hands of Mexican gangs is the goal of a program called "Project Gunrunner." But critics say it's doing exactly the opposite. CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson reports on what she found.
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"In using psyops on visiting politicians, we have invented the world's first Perpetual Motion War Machine. And we're really pretty proud of that."
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Truth. Pass it on.
I'm serious. Start telling everyone who will listen the truth (from David Cay Johnston) about the Wisconsin state workers and their benefits:
When it comes to improving public understanding of tax policy, nothing has been more troubling than the deeply flawed coverage of the Wisconsin state employees' fight over collective bargaining.
Economic nonsense is being reported as fact in most of the news reports on the Wisconsin dispute, the product of a breakdown of skepticism among journalists multiplied by their lack of understanding of basic economic principles.
Gov. Scott Walker says he wants state workers covered by collective bargaining agreements to "contribute more" to their pension and health insurance plans.
Accepting Gov. Walker' s assertions as fact, and failing to check, created the impression that somehow the workers are getting something extra, a gift from taxpayers. They are not.
Out of every dollar that funds Wisconsin' s pension and health insurance plans for state workers, 100 cents comes from the state workers.
How can that be? Because the "contributions" consist of money that employees chose to take as deferred wages – as pensions when they retire – rather than take immediately in cash. The same is true with the health care plan. If this were not so a serious crime would be taking place, the gift of public funds rather than payment for services.
Thus, state workers are not being asked to simply "contribute more" to Wisconsin' s retirement system (or as the argument goes, "pay their fair share" of retirement costs as do employees in Wisconsin' s private sector who still have pensions and health insurance). They are being asked to accept a cut in their salaries so that the state of Wisconsin can use the money to fill the hole left by tax cuts and reduced audits of corporations in Wisconsin.
The labor agreements show that the pension plan money is part of the total negotiated compensation. The key phrase, in those agreements I read (emphasis added), is: "The Employer shall contribute on behalf of the employee." This shows that this is just divvying up the total compensation package, so much for cash wages, so much for paid vacations, so much for retirement, etc.
The collective bargaining agreements for prosecutors, cops and scientists are all on-line.
Read the whole thing here. The media will not tell your conservative, and even your not-paying-attention friends this truth. You have to.
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Hey, it's everyone's favorite adulterous grifter, on the Twitter. What is Newt up to these days? "Great visit to the academy of natural sciences in philadelphia today-love the dinosaurs and the historic collection," he wrote Tuesday. When some librul jokester tweeted back, "Come on, you don't really believe in dinosaurs," Newt responded with the tweet above. Is it legal to keep a dinosaur's skull in your office? Probably not. But if Newt does it, it is. And then Newt tweeted "@OneTokenBlack" for no apparent reason. READ MORE »
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Since Newt Gingrich almost destroyed the GOP by stumbling into the impeachment fiasco and actually managed to lose seats to the president's party during a huge sex scandal, you know it's going to go well for him this time since he's now stumbled into saying Obama should be impeached too.
His press team is now trying to clean up the mess.
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It's really not every day a foreign ambassador in Washington stands outside his embassy, calls his head of state a war criminal and hoists a different flag over the embassy. But that's kinda what happened today when Ali Aujali, the man who is now technically the former Libyan Ambassador to the United States, since he just resigned. He didn't do it at the Embassy. He stood outside the official residence of the Libyan Ambassador, denounced Qaddafi and raised the pre-Qaddafi Libyan flag. Our Ryan Reilly was there and filed this report -- with video.
