West Side Story? Nah...

Great Video c- This Thought Had Crossed My Mind As Well...

Colbert On NOM

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Colbert Coalition's Anti-Gay Marriage Ad
colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest

Great Words - Humor

"This is coming out today: Rush Limbaugh’s dog says he hopes Obama’s dog fails."
---David Letterman

Political Ad Parody

Panicked, Sweat-Covered Pope Reverses Longstanding Ban On Abortion

The Onion reports...

VATICAN CITY—Overturning 2,000 years of religious doctrine, an out-of-breath and visibly flustered Pope Benedict XVI announced Sunday that the termination of unwanted pregnancies was now "completely and perfectly acceptable in the eyes of God."

The divine proclamation, which contradicts prior teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, was reportedly made by Pope Benedict after a late night phone call to his Vatican residence. According to witnesses, His Holiness was seen pacing back and forth, nervously wringing his hands, and cursing at himself in a hallway mirror before coming to the sudden decision.

Click here to read the entire article...

Election Do-Overs

In the wake of AG Eric Holder dismissing all charges against Alaska Senator Ted Stevens because of misconduct of Bush appointed Attorneys, Sarah Palin called for a new election for Alaska Senator. Do note: The fact that the charges against Stevens were dismissed is not evidence of the fact that the guy wasn't a crook - he probably was still crooked as Lombard Street in San Francisco. But Daily Kos had a great post on all of this. I'll get you started, but click the link at the bottom of this post to read it all...

In the spirit of the demand by Sarah Palin and the Alaska GOP that there by a do-over of November's U.S. Senate election, here's the top 10 elections that should have been done-over:

10. Gore-Bush, 2000: Because even though Gore won, Bush somehow became president.

9. Kerry-Bush, 2004: Because the media didn't grow a spine until Hurricane Katrina happened in 2005.

8. FL-16, 2004: Because voters didn't know that Mark Foley was into underage pages.

Click here to finish the list.
.

Some Thoughts On Our Banking System

We, as a nation, have allowed our banks, investment firms and corporations to get too large. They feel no patriotism, no connection to the people they serve. They are all about making obscene amounts of money for no other purpose than to make money. It is almost nothing more than a contest. They fire the lowliest of workers at the drop of a hat in tough times because they feel no connection to those who support them. And they do everything they can to avoid supporting the very system that helped create them.

From Down With Tyranny (click on the link to read more).

Well, I wish I could report that the primary author of the worldwide economic meltdown, political hack-turned-Swiss bankster, Phil Gramm, has been arrested and carted off to prison but... rarely is there that much justice in the world. Instead we find out that the company he worked for and helped to rip off the U.S. government to the tune of billions of dollars, UBS, has agreed to pay a fine of $780 million for "facilitating" American criminals-- wealthy corporate ones-- avoid taxes on billions of dollars. And the first of UBS' crooked clients, Steven Rubinstein, has been arrested. Set-ups like UBS-- which was caught smuggling diamonds in toothpaste tubes for rich Americans clients-- hold as much as $10 trillion shielded from the tax man.

Gay Bashing

This is an interesting take on bigotry, and in particular, gay bashing.

Bigotry is the heaping of one man's insecurity on to another. Sexism, racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-Islamism, anti-immigrantism, really all come from the same place--cowardice. In his history of lynching, Phillip Dray notes that mob violence against black men wasn't simply about keeping black men in their place--it was about keeping white women in their place. Lynching peaked as white women went to work outside the home in greater numbers, developing their own financial power base. White men, afraid that they couldn't compete with their women, would cowardly resort to lynching. I am not saying that the anti-gay marriage crowd is a lynch mob. But in tying opposition to the sexual revolution what you see is, beyond a fear of gay marriage, a fear for marriage itself. A fear that their way of life can't compete in these new times. It's ridiculous, of course. But bigotry always is.

Click here to read the whole article.
.

God Bless Religion

The religious hold themselves out as more intelligent - more rational - more righteous - than the rest of the population who are 1) not of the same religion, 2) not as deeply involved in the religion, or 3) not religious. But if this is true - if there really is a God guiding the religious - why does this happen?

Members of One Mind Ministries drew little notice in the working-class Baltimore neighborhood where they lived in a nondescript brick rowhouse.

But inside, prosecutors say, horrors were unfolding: Answering to a leader called Queen Antoinette, they denied a 16-month-old boy food and water because he did not say "Amen" at mealtimes. After he died, they prayed over his body for days, expecting a resurrection, then packed it into a suitcase with mothballs. They left it in a shed in Philadelphia, where it remained for a year before detectives found it last spring.

Click here to read more.
.
.

These are the people American's are dying to lose their lives for. What a waste...

From the Progress Report
April 3, 2009

WOMEN'S RIGHTS -- AFGHAN PRESIDENT UNDER PRESSURE TO REVOKE LAW LEGALIZING RAPE:

In a transparent effort to "appease Islamic fundamentalists" ahead of elections in August, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan pushed through legislation on March 31 that legalizes marital rape. The Shi'a Family Law "negates the need for sexual consent between married couples, tacitly approves child marriage and restricts a woman's right to leave the home." The bill, which does not apply to Sunnis, states, "Unless the wife is ill, the wife is bound to give a positive response to the sexual desires of her husband."

After remaining "suspiciously quiet " on the matter, U.S. officials are now asking Karzai to turn back the offensive legislation. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton confronted Karzai during this week's conference regarding Afghanistan at the Hague. "My message is very clear. Women's rights are a central part of the foreign policy of the Obama administration," Clinton said. That sentiment was echoed by State Department spokesman Robert Wood, who said, "We urge President Karzai to review the law's legal status to correct provisions of the law that limit or restrict women's rights."

NATO head Japp de Hoop Scheffer "said the planned laws violated human rights and were unjustifiable when Nato troops were dying to protect universal values." However, the bill is a "big tick in the box" for Karzai among Shi'a clerics and the Hazara ethnic minority who comprise important voting blocks for the "increasingly unpopular" president. As the head of women's affairs at the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission said, "Because of the election I am not sure we can change it now. It's too late for that."

Great Words - Humor

From Political Irony - click the link to read more...


"I have a plan to end the war in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Here's what we do. We bring all our soldiers home. We send in our investment bankers. They'll screw up the place in six months. Six months!" - Jay Leno

"How many watched the President's news conference last night? He got a little testy there, you know. When he was asked why he waited three days to speak out against the AIG bonuses, President Obama said he likes to know what he's talking about before he speaks. So, yet another reversal of the Bush policies." - Jay Leno

"A construction worker from Queens, New York, used Bernard Madoff's prison number to play the lottery and won. The guy won $1,500. Bernard Madoff, of course, is in prison for luring money from rich people in a giant scam that promised to make them richer. But don't confuse him with the state lottery, which lures money away from poor people in a giant scam that promises to make them richer." - Jay Leno

"Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is writing a book about his role in the Bush administration during the economic crisis. It's weird, the book starts on Chapter 11. That's odd." - Jimmy Fallon

"George W. Bush, who was our president before Barack Obama, recently signed a deal to write a book for $7 million. And it makes sense because when you think George W. Bush, you think book. Don't you, really?" - David Letterman

"In the book, George W. Bush will discuss his 12 toughest decisions, like 'should I heed Al Roker's warnings about Katrina?' That would be one tough decision. 'Should I let Cheney carry a loaded shotgun?' That would be another." - David Letterman

Some Straight Talk For AIG Execs

This is from Gawker and it really struck my fancy. Click on the link too read the whole thing.

Jake DeSantis, an executive vice president in AIG's Financial Products Division, is doing a very good thing: He's donating his $742,000 bonus—that's after taxes, so the real number is well north of $1 million—to charity. He's also quitting AIG in a huff because he's upset that his boss, Edward Liddy, didn't do enough to defend the catastrophic failure of the company's hard-working and preposterously wealthy employees.

We sympathize with DeSantis. He says he didn't engage in any credit default swaps nonsense. He says his business unit was "consistently profitable" for the company, that he was working for a $1 annual salary, and that he's been spending "10, 12, 14 hours a day" trying to save the company. He even lost "a significant portion" of his life savings and "personally suffered from [AIG's] controversial activity—directly and indirectly with the rest of the taxpayers." He was repeatedly promised a gargantuan bonus in exchange for these hardships, and now his employer has abandoned him and attorneys general are demagoguing him. So he's washing his hands of the whole thing.

What he doesn't understand is that the blood-boiling rage that's been aimed at him and his colleagues isn't just about the money and the failure—it's about the vast and bottomless sense of entitlement that well-heeled Wall Streeters can't seem to shake. When he describes the AIG retention contracts as "ethical and useful," and when he compares himself to a "plumber" being "cheated" of his payment because an electrician burned down the house, he seems to be discovering for the first time that life is not fair. Also, he fails to understand that in this case, the humble plumber works for the electrician who burned down our house.

Most people who earn less than $700,000 a year have understood for some time that life is not fair. It's a hard lesson to learn, and it's generally a good idea to speak out in the face injustices large and small. But when the economy is cratering because of the company you work for, and unemployment is heading to double digits and everyone is scared out of their wits, to complain about how hard you work and make a show of being wealthy enough to turn away $742,000 is not the note you want to hit. You are not a plumber, Mr. DeSantis. You are a fabulously wealthy and fortunate man, and you ought to appreciate that and give your money away, if that's what you want to do, without aggrandizing yourself in the process.

Michelle Bachmann - More Proof that She's A Fruitcake

How the hell does she get elected? Are her constituents as batshit crazy as she is?

Keith Olbermann Makes Sense - Bank Bailouts

More on greed from the bankers and Republicans...

The Big Break

Some landmark decisions made by the Republicans back in 1999 may have had a profound effect on the ability of the banks and investors in the US to drive the international economy into the ground - and it was all in the name of greed. Never forget that.

From The New York Times (Friday, November 5, 1999) via Boing Boing...

Congress approved landmark legislation today that opens the door for a new era on Wall Street in which commercial banks, securities houses and insurers will find it easier and cheaper to enter one another's businesses.

The measure, considered by many the most important banking legislation in 66 years, was approved in the Senate by a vote of 90 to 8 and in the House tonight by 362 to 57. The bill will now be sent to the president, who is expected to sign it, aides said. It would become one of the most significant achievements this year by the White House and the Republicans leading the 106th Congress.

''Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st century,'' Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers said. ''This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy.''

The decision to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 provoked dire warnings from a handful of dissenters that the deregulation of Wall Street would someday wreak havoc on the nation's financial system. The original idea behind Glass-Steagall was that separation between bankers and brokers would reduce the potential conflicts of interest that were thought to have contributed to the speculative stock frenzy before the Depression.

And this is significant...

''The world changes, and we have to change with it,'' said Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, who wrote the law that will bear his name along with the two other main Republican sponsors, Representative Jim Leach of Iowa and Representative Thomas J. Bliley Jr. of Virginia.

As is this...

But consumer groups and civil rights advocates criticized the legislation for being a sop to the nation's biggest financial institutions. They say that it fails to protect the privacy interests of consumers and community lending standards for the disadvantaged and that it will create more problems than it solves.

And Talk about prognostication...

'I think we will look back in 10 years' time and say we should not have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930's is true in 2010,'' said Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota. ''I wasn't around during the 1930's or the debate over Glass-Steagall.

Out Of Work

From Acerbic Politics

The Right Teaches How To Handle A Tree-Hugger

From Acerbic Politics

The Secretary Of State Speaks

From Acerbic Politics

Chey - Hero Of The Far Right

From Acerbic Politics

New Bush-Lovers T-Shirt

From Acerbic Politics

The Bush Library

A Message Of Hope

From Acerbic Politics

Beck Is Bonkers

From Acerbic Politics

The Way It Works

From Acerbic Politics

Countdown Commentary On Bank Bailout

Oh, The Poor, Poor Bankers!

Gawker reports on an article in the Wall Street Journal...

When administration officials began calling them to talk about the next phase of the bailout, the bankers turned the tables. They used the calls to lobby against the antibonus legislation...

The banks' message: If you want our help to get credit flowing again to consumers and businesses, stop the rush to penalize our bonuses.

And Gawker adds to the argument, rather sarcastically...

If the president wants bankers to accept the billions of taxpayer dollars they need, he's going to have to accept their outrageous demands, like bonuses forever. Wait, what?

American bankers are sitting on trillions of dollars in troubled mortgage securities they can't sell without admitting their banks are nearly worthless. So they need billions of fresh dollars from the government.

But the government has been trying to take away their precious bonuses, as if they're not excellent at running banks. So the bankers are being dicks, to the president.

Stopping the Flow Of Ideas

The Republicans have proven to the world what they really are - spoiled brats. If they can't have their way, they're going to take their toys and go home. Down With Tyranny does a great story on this...

The GOP has no governing strategy and no alternatives-- other than the hair of the dog-- to offer voters. Instead, they are sitting back and hoping Obama fails. Well... not exactly sitting back. They are obstructing everything he wants to do, filibustering every single piece of his program, watering down the parts they can't stop. This morning Politico ran a devastating feature that, in effect, condemns the Republican leadership-- or what passes for leadership of the Grand Obstructionist Party-- as sore losers rooting for America to fail.
...
Mitch McConnell comes across very clearly as a villainous character who would rather see American families go through further pain than see Obama succeed in rescuing the economy.

“With all due respect to the new president and the enhanced majorities in the House and the Senate, governing is tough business,” McConnell said at the time. “It’s hard. It’s very difficult to govern and not create issues, make mistakes, and I’m optimistic that the landscape in 2010 for my party will be very different than it was in ’06 and ’08.”

David Letterman - Bill's Reply To Ann

Scary Pakistan

Mother Jones reports on an interview with David Kilcullen, an Australian military advisor...

Pakistan is 173 million people, 100 nuclear weapons, an army bigger than the U.S. Army, and al-Qaeda headquarters sitting right there in the two-thirds of the country that the government doesn't control. The Pakistani military and police and intelligence service don't follow the civilian government; they are essentially a rogue state within a state. We're now reaching the point where within one to six months we could see the collapse of the Pakistani state, also because of the global financial crisis, which just exacerbates all these problems. . . . The collapse of Pakistan, al-Qaeda acquiring nuclear weapons, an extremist takeover -- that would dwarf everything we've seen in the war on terror today.

Serious Issues

Boing Boing is reporting on continuing issues of major consequence with America's electronic voting machines. Maybe someday we'll get it right...

Even the audit log system on current versions of Premier Election Solutions' (formerly Diebold's) electronic voting and tabulating systems --- used in some 34 states across the nation --- fail to record the wholesale deletion of ballots. Even when ballots are deleted on the same day as an election. That's the shocking admission heard today from Justin Bales, Premier's Western Region manager, at a State of California public hearing on the possible decertification of Diebold/Premier's tabulator system, GEMS v. 1.18.19.

--------------------------------

The Kentucky officials arrested and indicted today, "including the circuit court judge, the county clerk, and election officers" of Clay County, have been charged with "chang[ing] votes at the voting machine" and showing others how to do it!

The Re-Swear

From Acerbic Politics

You Just Quit It, Now

From Acerbic Politics

Cheerleader

From Acerbic Politics

Rush Takes Charge

From Acerbic Politics

The Comeback

Is this for real? It sure looks like parody to me.

From Acerbic Politics

Headz-Up Weekly Cartoons

The Big Takeover

I really like Matt Taibbi's writing - he seems well organized and well thought out. I've quoted him before - and now he's just publishing another great article in Rolling Stone. Click the link if you want to read all of it - but here's a few quotes...

It's over — we're officially, royally fucked. No empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.
...
In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).
...
So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream.

More Hypocrisy From The Right Wing

It wouldn't be hard to build a blog around nothing but documenting the hypocrisy of the right-wing in the American political system. It's almost funny, but it's hard to get past the fact that their lies and misleading statements are so destructive. Somehow or other relatively well-spoken folks who are as dumb as bricks manage to sell their message to those with the most to lose. They blow smoke up the asses of the poor and the stupid - telling them that, although they don't pay any taxes and get heaps of governmental assistance - that the Democrats' plan to tax and help out the poor won't be in their best interests.

I can't imagine how they get away with it and win as much support as they do.

Crooks and Liars posted some interesting information a week or so ago. Not that this is new - I've seen similar studies in the past - but given our economy this seems particularly relevant again.

Palin (R-AK) and Mark Sanford (R-SC) joined Texas' Rick Perry, Mississippi's Haley Barbour and Louisiana's Bobby Jindal in announcing they would reject some of the federal stimulus funds allocated to their states. But as the steady one-way flow of tax dollars and earmarks spreading the wealth from Washington to their states shows, de facto red state socialism is alive and well.

Great Words - Humor

From Political Irony...

"What I find so amusing about all of this is that Obama's been in office 45 days roughly, and the public is blaming this all on him. It's the Obama Recession, which is kind of true, because if McCain had won, Sarah Palin would still be buying clothes." - Bill Maher

"No wonder Obama has gray hair. That was the big story in the paper yesterday, Obama has gray hair. Wow, now his hair isn't black enough." - Bill Maher

"The economy is so bad O.J. had to shut down the DNA lab he was using to find the real killers. That's how bad." - Jay Leno

"The economy is in bad shape. In fact, the economy is so bad, even people who don't like Barack Obama aren't paying their taxes." - Jay Leno

"I'd love to give you some good economic news, but here's what I got. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett said that our current economic crisis is as bad as the attack on Pearl Harbor, but still not as bad as the movie 'Pearl Harbor.'" - Jimmy Fallon

"Well, in a stunning announcement, Citigroup showed a profit and had its best quarter since 2007. They made $8 billion in profit. That just goes to show you, you give a company $45 billion in government bailout money, and they'll show you how to turn it into $8 billion. See this is capitalism!" - Jay Leno

"Finally, Esquire magazine just released its list of the best dressed men in the world. Barack Obama was number four. Coming in first? Hillary Clinton." - Jimmy Fallon

"And former President George W. Bush says he'll start a national speaking tour soon. You know, as soon as he learns how to speak." - Jay Leno

"In North Korea, they're grooming President Kim Jong-il's son to take over for him. You know, we should let the of people in North Korea know, this doesn't always work out the best." - Jay Leno

The Rich May Pay A Lower Tax Rate Than You Do

From Acerbic Politics

Republicans Making Up Their Own Truth

From Acerbic Politics

Republican Solution

From Acerbic Politics

They Were Stealing Our Rights

From Acerbic Politics

Rush Limbaugh Spews Forth Hatred

From Acerbic Politics