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Steve Benen got this one exactly right. As he noted after Mitch McConnell flew off to have a closed door meeting with the Wall Street elites and Candy Crowley asked him what was said at those meetings "the conservative Kentuckian was evasive -- imagine that -- and instead of answering the questions, he talked about scrapping the legislation altogether".
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Photos That Make Teabaggers Shit Blood:
And what's not to love about the picture? The skinny, bearded white guy who seems to be holding a not-at-all agitated Walker back? The face of the goateed old guy, who looks like he's ready to vomit out some acid mixture of fear and confusion in his gut, wondering who let the Negroes in to ruin their perfectly fun cross-burning?
Oh, sweet goateed old guy, Walker didn't want to harm you. He didn't want to cut your throat or your Medicare. He wanted to pierce your thick coat of nutzoid shellac, a rigid shell made of Glenn Beck's semen, Sarah Palin's spit, and Republican cash money.
People With Nothing Better to Do Descend on Virginia and DC:
A bunch of fucking insane closeted homosexuals have gathered in Virginia for today's festival of latency. Calling it a rally to "Restore the Constitution," it's all about open-carry of loaded firearms on the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. But, really, it's just an excuse for a bunch of pansy-ass motherfuckers who are afraid of fucking their Bud-butt-buddies to walk around with ludicrously large penis substitutes and call it "freedom." God fucking bless America, man, God fucking bless us.
Enough with the jokes about "ooh, gun=penis=closeted gays." The whole effort is so ludicrous. Marching in support of the right to bear arms in this country is as useless as having a march to keep ice cream cold. It's a lie, it's a scam. It's like everyone organizing everyone of these bullshit "whip up the yokels" marches or rallies or tea parties or facefuckfests or whatever are just Glenn Beck wannabes who have seen how much cash can be made from old-time hucksterism and exploitation.
Because Obama ain't gonna do a damn thing about gun laws. But that doesn't change the perception, fomented by vile con men, like televangelists of a couple of decades ago, swindling the spare change from the purses of the imbeciles because they think a black man must wanna take away the weapons they wanna kill him with. He doesn't.
The saddest part is that, should any of these little groups of fucktarded terrorist wannabes actually attempt anything, they would be wiped out by the cops and the feds. It wouldn't even be close. And they know it. It's all bluster and nonsense. Timothy McVeigh was a little bitch who ran away from the truck and didn't make a stand of any sort. He got lucky. And that was as brave as they get.
So let the mini-McVeighs have their punk-ass rally where they can compare gun sizes.
Arizona Cracks Down Hard on Illegal Immigrants
Food supplies dwindle, all construction halted.
REMINDER
Don't text and drink and talk and eat while driving.
Tea Party More Diverse Than Once Thought
They're only 98% elderly white right-wing anti-tax cranks.
Revealed: Sarah Palin Demands Huge Speaking Fees, Pre-Screened Questions
And no high school graduates in audience.
Study: Health Insurers Invest Heavily in Fast Food Corporations
Did somebody say “claim denied?”
Self-Administered Test Can Identify Dementia Early On
You're asked to ask yourself a battery of questions, which is a sign of dementia.
Scientists Developing Computer Based on Cat Brain
When completed it will ignore all human commands.
They don't trust government. They don't trust politicians. They don't trust science or scientists. They don't even trust an official birth certificates when they the issuing state provides a photocopy.
You know who I'm talking about. So exactly how do this growing movement, broadly described by the moniker, Tea Party, intend to govern, should they get their way? Like all radical far left or far right populist movements through out history, they don't even trust one another, at least not entirely.
No you'll hear nothing about any of that at a Tea Party rally. But why? In normal times such outrages would be the rocket fuel of a populist movement. Instead the radical right has ceded all those core populist issues to the left, which the right then demonizes as “socialists" for even pointing any of this out.
It kinda makes my head hurt trying to figure out exactly what it is the right wants. And, what kind of country we'd end up with if they ever got what they say they want.
If they succeeded in repealing gun laws all they'd get for their trouble are communities in which the full rich panoply of humans are walking around carry the very tool needed to instantly satisfy a temper tantrum. Road rage will go from fender benders and fists, to high-speed shoot outs. And becoming a police officer in such an America would be like becoming police chief of Juarez, Mexico. I'm all for the right to own a gun or several guns. But I find it hard to believe that turning America 2010 into Tombstone, Az, 1840, would be any kind of an improvement.
Which brings me back to my original questions: Do these people actually know what they want? And do any of them wonder why the things they are told they should want are suspiciously similar to what America's corporations and the plutocrats who run them want?
Will it ever dawn on Tea Party folk what's really happening here. That they've allowed themselves to become little more than dancing monkeys at the end of the organ-grinders' chain?
Significant concern remained, however, about the dangers posed by the clouds of volcanic ash being spewed out of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano. A senior U.S. official told Reuters news service that glass buildup from the eruption was found in an engine of a NATO F-16 fighter plane, underscoring dangers to aircraft flying through the ash cloud.
Airports in Portugal, Spain, the Balkans, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey were open for flights on Monday, the Associated Press reported. But officials in Britain, France, Germany, and the Netherlands -- home to four of Europe's five largest airports -- said their air space was still closed.
The tentacles of the crisis have already stretched into the global supply chain. Auto factories in China that use electronic parts flown in from Germany faced a sudden halt in shipments. A logjam forming in the international diamond trade threatened to delay the shipment of necklaces and wedding rings if flights are not resumed between cutters in India and dealers in Antwerp, Belgium.
Even if flights to European hubs including London and Amsterdam, home to the world's largest flower market, were to resume immediately, Kenyan flower industry officials said there would be a temporary oversupply that could push prices down for the next week.
With the volcano still erupting, there was no telling when the ash clouds over the region could clear. But the airlines were clamoring for aviation authorities to roll back the bans anyway.
A handful of carriers have run test flights to determine whether ash particles were dense enough over Europe to cause engines to fail.
Still, KLM acknowledged that it conducted its test flight when there was a gap in the clouds containing the heavier concentrations of ash. The other airlines conducted their tests at lower altitudes.
[...] Unlike many of his fellow officers in Zhari district, and many of the troops under his command, Ellis really believed in counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine.
He still does, but he's more skeptical now. The past four months in Senjaray have taught him how difficult it is to do COIN in an area that is, in effect, controlled by the enemy — and with a command structure that is tangled in bureaucracy and paralyzed by the incompetence and corruption of the local Afghan leadership. Indeed, as the struggle to open the school — or get anything of value at all done in Senjaray — progressed, the metaphor was transformed into a much bigger question: If the U.S. Army couldn't open a small school in a crucial town, how could it expect to succeed in Afghanistan?
Actually, the elders — as opposed to the people of Senjaray — seemed more interested in the irrigation canals than anything else. In fact, the two most important leaders — the rather flaccid local warlord who was named Hajji Lala, and the police chief, whose 40 cops were dedicated to the protection of Hajji Lala — were interested in one specific canal. Unfortunately, it was not the canal Ellis wanted to refurbish on the poorer, north side of town. It was on the south side. [...]
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[...] Well, as it happened both Hajji Lala and the police chief owned farmland just south of the proposed canal. [...]
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"It turned out, the situation was more complicated than I figured," Ellis says now. In fact, it wasn't a case of local corruption at all. Within days, intelligence collected from multiple sources revealed that several of the town elders had driven across the border to Quetta, in Pakistan, to clear the canal project with the Taliban leadership." [...]
It was now apparent that almost any development project the Americans tried in Senjaray would end up benefitting the Taliban — except one: reopening the Pir Mohammed School.
But the logistics were a killer. To reopen the school, Ellis needed to purchase some of the adjacent land to build an access road and the police station he had proposed. Hajji Lala, the local warlord, insisted he had that covered. "I kept asking him for the names of the landowners," Ellis says. "He kept saying, 'No problem.' " But it was a problem. Most of the property in the Zhari district is owned by absentee landlords. When Ellis pressed Hajji Lala for names yet again in late February, he was told, "You're going to have to find out who owns that land yourself."
Ellis was crushed. The operation was scheduled for March 10. He had a week, at best, to purchase the property. "But I got it done," he says. "The thing is, the people really wanted the school opened and they helped me find the owners." There was one pair of owners who demanded $20,000 for their land. "I told them $2,000 max," Ellis said, but ultimately the owners — after checking around — changed their minds and decided to offer the land for free. "They said, 'We'll give it to you, but could you beat us up a little and make it look like you seized it? The Taliban don't want this to happen.' "
We sat on thin rugs, beneath one of the balconies. Ellis took off his helmet and deftly, gently, always smiling, questioned Rahman. He didn't ask anything very direct, like how Rahman — who said he was 17 — earned a living, and the boy didn't volunteer any information. Ellis asked who the most powerful person in town was, and Rahman answered, "Hajji Lala." He asked who the most powerful Taliban in town was, and the boy said he didn't know. "Yeah, I wouldn't know, either, if I were you," Ellis said.
Later, as we headed back to the outpost in the gathering darkness, Ellis said, "Well, at least he knew we were Americans. Some of them still think we're Russians.
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It would be the volcano's first major eruption since 1821, since when it has lain dormant and anonymous to most of the world. Yesterday it made headlines when it transformed swaths of western Europe and Scandinavia into an unprecedented no-fly zone.
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Is it too much to hope that we may see some of the banksters doing time?
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Klein: I did a little bit of research...I looked up the definition of sedition, which is conduct or language inciting rebellion against the authority of the state and a lot of these statements-- especially coming from people like Glenn Beck and to a certain extent, Sarah Palin--are right up close to being sedition.
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From a 2010 TV Show. John and Marty on the song John wrote with Steve Goodman
From yesterday's NY Times/CBS News poll on the Tea Party movement and its 18 percent of supportive Americans, the bad news -- in fact, I'd say worst news -- was that they reject the idea of a conservative base-dividing third party. Drats. They're smarter than we thought.
The good news was that ... actually, there was no good news (except perhaps a dollop, noted at this column's end), but the old news was that the movement's supporters on average are "white, male, married and older than 45" -- you know, the sole surviving face of modern Republicanism, or, as political historian Rick Perlstein put it yesterday, in the Times' "Room for Debate," "they are the same angry, ill-informed, overwhelmingly white, crypto-corporate paranoiacs that accompany every ascendancy of liberalism within U.S. government."
They are trapped in nostalgic whimsy; they long for the era of 19th-century American smallness -- yeoman farmers and apprentice artisans, that sort of thing, real rugged (and mostly white) individualist stuff -- which of course will never return. And in that sense their movement parallels that of 1930s' populist demagoguery, as Perlstein's fellow political historian Alan Brinkley so marvelously traced in his 1983 work, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression.
"The real issue," continued Brinkley, and rather indisputably, I think, "is a sense among white males that they are somehow being displaced, that the country is no longer 'theirs,' that minorities and immigrants are becoming more and more powerful within society. And, of course, they are right about that. They just fear it more than many other Americans."
That's your party, you Tea Party guys -- the corporate-backed, corporate-catering, corporate-financing-and-financed Republican Party. It loves the idea of J.P. Morgan buying the next election on behalf of bigger and bigger corporate bigness in the service of middle-class displacement. Do you?
And then there's that little matter of your GOP fighting financial reform, what with its argument amusingly housed in the Luntz-tested, crypto-corporate Big Lie of "permanent bailouts."
You see, folks, you're not so much stupid as you are just plain duped.
DALY CITY, Calif. – Medical marijuana users near San Francisco lit up Saturday at the opening of the two-day International Cannabis and Hemp Expo, where vendors displayed bongs, vaporizers, hash brownies and other marijuana-related products.
Organizers of the event at the Cow Palace said they insisted on having an onsite medicating area before holding the expo. Under a white-canopied courtyard, young adults in baggy jeans and baseball caps smoked alongside aging hippies.
The expo, and others like it, will help develop the multibillion dollar pot industry, said Bucky Fisher, national sales manager for Medical Marijuana Inc., which sells hemp-related products and provides services to ensure marijuana dispensaries follow the law.
"It makes the industry more of a community, more visible, more powerful," he said. "This country is definitely in need of a homegrown industry, and this could be it."
God's Plan By Chris Hillman and The Desert Rose Band - Chris Hillman was one of the original Byrds - He has an amazing musical history as the pictures show - every band he was in was great-at least in my opinion - This is a Great song with wonderful lyrics - I hope you enjoy it
The International Cannabis and Hemp Expo at the Cow Palace in Daly City has opened its doors.
Organizers say the two-day event, which began Saturday at 10 a.m., is intended to showcase the state's multibillion dollar pot industry and educate people about the drug's uses.
It is open to the public from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. Organizers say vendors connected to the industry will be on hand. There will also be an area where medical marijuana patients can smoke.
Bob Katzman, chief operations officer for the event, said organizers insisted on having an onsite medicating area before holding the expo.
The event comes as California voters head to the polls in November to decide whether to legalize marijuana.
Ex-Blackwater president indicted on firearms charges
On Tuesday, Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, called for the abolition of municipal fire departments.
Firefighters, he declared, “won’t solve the problems that led to recent fires. They will make them worse.” The existence of fire departments, he went on, “not only allows for taxpayer-funded bailouts of burning buildings; it institutionalizes them.” He concluded, “The way to solve this problem is to let the people who make the mistakes that lead to fires pay for them. We won’t solve this problem until the biggest buildings are allowed to burn.”
To understand what’s really at stake right now, watch the looming fight over derivatives, the complex financial instruments Warren Buffett famously described as “financial weapons of mass destruction.” The Obama administration wants tighter regulation of derivatives, while Republicans are opposed. And that tells you everything you need to know.
So don’t be fooled. When Mitch McConnell denounces big bank bailouts, what he’s really trying to do is give the bankers everything they want.
[...] {Molly} took (Abe Rosenthal, editor of the NYTimes) to a party at Dave and Ann Richards' house and the future governor of Texas answered the door dressed as a Tampax. [...]