Quote of the Day

Our pal Montag:

...

So the next time you are in line at the gunshop and Osama bin Laden is in front of you with a full shopping cart, remind him to use the cash back card because he is not allowed to use the frequent flier miles.

Reverend Rentboy Redux and Uncut

El Rude-o on 'Reverend Rentboy' Reker. Links at site:

So here's how Dr. George Rekers, prominent anti-gay activist, professor of psych at the University of South Carolina, and founding member of the Family Research Council (motto: "George Rekers? We don't know any George Rekers"), apparently wants us to think it all went down:

Just set your drink down and go...

Update:

Don't pick up that drink just yet.

Anti-gay psychiatrist needed male callboy to help him ‘hoist his sack’

Oh my sides, they hurt...

George Will's wind energy claims are for the birds

Following up on Fixer's post, here's some figures on bird deaths from Media Matters in the wake of George Will's asinine 'statistics' about wind farms:

Number of bird deaths from wind farms relatively small compared to other causes. According to the most recent figures provided to Media Matters from the American Bird Conservancy, whom Will cited in his Newsweek column, the number of birds killed in the United States every year because of striking windmills is relatively small compared to other causes:

CAUSE - BIRD DEATHS

Building strikes - 100 million - 1 billion

Car strikes - 200 - 300 million

Communication towers - 4 - 50 million

Power lines - 75 million

Cats - 365 million (1 million per day)

Wind farms - 100,000 - 300,000

Gee, they left out Thanksgiving and Christmas. And chickens. And ducks, geese, pheasants, and other game birds.

By the way, the way birds get killed by power lines is they shit on them and get electrocuted up the arse. The last nanosecond of life must be a doozie!

I will add to those figures if I ever get my hands on that damn screeching Steller's jay that hangs around here. Since he can fly and I can't, fat chance.

Related:

Democratic Underground

Massive Windspill Reported In Southern California

I'm-- I'm so sorry if this is disjointed (WHOOOSH) or confusing (WHOOSH), but-- I find myself the middle of a disaster of unprecedented proportions (WHOOOSH) and -- oh the humanity -- I'm having a hard time understanding how we progressives (WHOOOSH) (WHOOOSH) could ever let this happen!?

You see, I live in Southern California... just north of the Tehachapi Pass Wind Farm... and this morning a lipstick lesbian biker gang lost control of their motorcycles and CRASHED into one of the turbines and now...

THERE IS (WHOOOSH) FUCKING WIND (WHOOOSH) EVERYWHERE!!!!

More. Heh.

"... Two Sore Losermen and a closet case ..."

Jill has an excellent takedown of the firm of Lieberman, McCain, and Graham:

...

That these guys are continuing to beat the waterboarding-and-torture drum, while Faisal Shahzad is singing like a canary even AFTER having his Miranda rights read, just shows that for them, the whole Bushian torture-and-military-tribunal thing isn't about our safety, it's about a bunch of impotent old men being able to feel that they can still get it up.

...

It's OK If You're A Republican ...

Part A Billionty Two:

Surprising absolutely nobody, repuglicans decline to charge fellow rethug who lied, cheated, stole, and abused his office, family, and constituents in order to satisfy his illicit and pathetic adulterous lust on the taxpayer dime.

...

A Dem would be in Gitmo by now ...

New VoteVets ad ...

On clean energy:



And just an aside, about 11,000 birds are killed every year by existing U.S. wind farms. Electric wires, cars, and domestic cats kill over a million.

Semper Fi-re one up, Rasta man

LATimes

For three decades, former Marine-turned-Rastafarian Joseph Diliberti has lived on his three acres of paradise deep in rural eastern San Diego County: building clay dwellings, playing his flute, reading Thoreau ("I went into the woods because I wished to live deliberately") and radiating peace and harmony.

But six years ago when the local fire district sent him a bill for $27,552 for cutting down what firefighters characterized as fire-prone weeds on his property, he declined to pay, just as Thoreau refused to pay his delinquent poll taxes.

Go read.

Shorter: Fuckin' with an old hippie. Fire suppression is important in California, but this is bureaucratic government interference of the worst kind, from sending a private contractor onto someone's land to threatening him.

I guess sometimes, just sometimes, the teabaggers are right about government.

ICops

LATimes.

IPhone raid puts high-tech enforcement squad in spotlight

"It's the iPolice," said Steve Meister, a former Los Angeles County deputy district attorney. "This whole thing appears, rightly or wrongly, to be law enforcement doing the bidding of a private company."

Verrrrry interesting, Ja?

Headline of the Day

Christian leader caught with male escort says he needed help with his luggage

Bangin' some baggage off his chin's more like it.

Top Ten Ways That Jan Brewer Will Celebrate Cinco de Mayo*

*Cinco de Mayo: Sort of a Mexican St. Paddy's Day, except that while everybody's Irish on St. Paddy's Day, Anglos don't want to be Mexican on Cinco de Mayo. Another excuse to populate the roads with an excess of amateur drunk drivers.

Welcome Back To Pottersville

# 10) Ceremonially renaming Arizona "Aryan Zone" for May 5th.

# 9) Hispanics Only race across the Rio Colorado with the finish line in San Luis, Mexico.

# 8) Free passport and birth certificate inspections.

# 7) Signing an executive order renaming the holiday "The Fifth of May" for the ease of English-language residents.

# 6) Imploring Arizona residents to avoid Mexican restaurants so more Hispanics can take the day off.

Actually, that could be any restaurant.

# 5) Live law enforcement demonstrations of tasers and aluminum batons.

# 4) Will preside over a seminar teaching Latinos fun and creative ways to carry and display their passports and birth certificates.

# 3) Reminiscent of guessing the jelly beans in a jar, will hold a Cinco de Mayo-only lottery named, "How Many Mexicans Does it Take to Fill the Grand Canyon?"

Three more than it takes to fill a Ford Econoline?

# 2) Asking Arizona Diamondbacks principal owner Ken Kendrick to order players to wear home jerseys reading, "Nonracists."

# 1) Will introduce a bill in the Arizona legislature giving the Pilgrims of the Mayflower retroactive American citizenship when they invaded native American land to co-opt its resources.

¡Viva Los Suns!

Dave Zirin on one sports team's reaction to 'Show Me Your Papers':

This battle has also been joined in the world of sports. On one side is Major League Baseball’s Arizona Diamondbacks. Owned by state Republican moneyman Ken Kendrick, the team has drawn protestors to parks around the country. On the other side, we now have the Phoenix Suns. On Tuesday the news came forth that tomorrow on Cinco de Mayo, the team would be wearing jerseys that say simply Los Suns. Team owner Robert Sarver said, after talking to the team, that this will be an act of sartorial solidarity against the bill. Their opponent, the San Antonio Spurs have made clear that they support the gesture.

I don't know a damn thing about basketball other than it seems to be a game played mostly by tall black guys, but here's hoping Los Suns kick those Texass's asses!

In case you missed it

Keith Olbermann, obviously a regular reader of the Brain, expands on Fixer's post.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Us lefties have been busy...

David Corn at Politics Daily:

Meanwhile, Limbaugh and other right-wingers also went cuckoo over the failed car-bombing in New York City. "I wonder if [the] SUV had an Obama sticker on it?" Limbaugh said. "Notice how quickly they got it out of Times Square before anybody could hop and maybe see an Obama 2012 bumper sticker on the damn car." Referring to suspect Faisal Shahzad, he added, "Of course, he's a Democrat. Who knows how many times he voted and where." Anything to tie the president to terrorists, right? And before Shahzad's arrest was announced, several conservative bloggers suggested the NYC plot was the work of leftists looking for a big May Day blast, with one writing, "So, we have the suspicious explosion of an oil rig in the gulf that happened the day before Lenin's birthday (Earth Day) and now we have an attempted attack on May Day, another day celebrated by left wing communists." What a busy week for the left: destroying the Gulf and attacking New York City.

Five minutes. I want five minutes naked in a steel cage with Limpbaugh. I need five minutes because I'll be laughing at his weenie for four. I'll use the fifth to turn him into a physically spineless jellyfish, though I'm afraid it's beyond me to make him as smart as one.

You vill comply ...

You little retard, or ve vill zap you again! Late for work but this is truly disturbing:

Some may say this is the result of poor training but the reality is that the Judge Rotenberg Center and places like it, are not there to help the kids, they are warehouses. Places the families can leave their problem kids when they no longer want them. Titticut Follies for kids.

Quote of the Day

John Cole via Res Ipsa:

... You would think that someone who spent half a decade in a cage with no rights whatsoever in the defense of this nation and our laws and legal tradition and way of life, would have the slightest bit of respect for the rule of law. You would, of course, be wrong.

Update:

And my pal Creature's QotD is related.

Shit ...

Being I've looked across the DMZ more times than I can remember, I hope cooler heads prevail:

...

It is not too off the mark to state that the North Koreans are batshit crazy. I also suspect that in any sort of military exchange, North Korea has less to lose. A conflict won't do any good to the South's economy, while the North is about as poor as they can get. The North Korean Army could fire off a bunch of shells from their emplaced artillery and wreak havoc in Seoul, which is within artillery range.

...

Nothing can be gained from another war on the Korean Peninsula. If the South wants to retaliate for the sinking of their ship, they should put pressure on the Chinese, who are the North's sole life support at this point. Our pal Misfit is right, the North has nothing to lose anymore. Our 7th Cav and 51st Wing, along with any Marine Corps units we have there would be nothing but a speed bump to North Korean infantry and artillery, hopefully able to be stopped before they reached Pusan (read the history of the Korean War). The civilian casualties would be horrendous.

Quote of the Day

Digby:

... If these ... are the smartest people in the world and the only ones who can save us, we are in much deeper trouble than we know.

The stench of hypocrisy ... Part Eleventy Billion

I'll post this little quote and you can guess the rest:

The pictures on the Rentboy.com profile show a shirtless young man with delicate features, guileless eyes, and sun-kissed, hairless skin. The profile touts his "smooth, sweet, tight ass" and "perfectly built 8 inch cock (uncut)" and explains he is "sensual," "wild," and "up for anything"—as long you ask first. And as long as you pay ...

Great thanks to Mr. No Parking for the link.

The Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Will Wreck Your Pathetic Ideology

Click to embiggen

From Slate.

The Rude One:

Tell you what, motherfuckers, when dead people are left to rot in the sun because of the incompetence of the federal government, when corpses are floating in the streets, when the President passively ignores the pleas of the governors of Gulf Coast states, when entire neighborhoods have been physically destroyed, when the federal government strands tens of thousands of people without food or water, when the federal government starts to blame the local governments, when the President praises the work of a failed, incompetent bureaucrat while a major city rots, then you can say that this is Barack Obama's "Katrina."

But until this happens, good, sweet conservative bags of fuck who need so desperately to drag this president down, the Gulf of Mexico oil leak is a corporate-created disaster, and it actually serves to demonstrate, starkly, and with a semen-like sheen, as if the ocean floor is in the midst of a prolonged sweet crude ejaculation, the utter failure of deregulation and the bullshit notion that capitalistic enterprises can police themselves when it comes to safety and environmental standards, whether it was, in this case, BP or Transocean or whoever. In other words, once again, as with so many things, this is about your ideology belly-flopping, much like, you know, when Katrina showed how years of neglect of the levees would lead to a nightmare.

Yes, some day soon, a man with his Gulf Shores timeshare, probably a proud and loyal teabagger, will look out over his balcony during the two weeks a year he takes his family on vacation and see the bits of black that are rolling up onto the shore. And he'll wonder, even if they do everything they can, why the feds couldn't clean it up sooner. Then he'll go inside and watch Hannity or listen to Limbaugh tell him that his taxes are too high and that business, not Washington, can solve all his problems.

Not to mention that Libruls caused this spill to make a point.

That was from Part 1 of an RP trilogy on this deal. Part 2 is here.

And BP? Those fuckers (and the oil rig operator, Transocean) benefited like corrupt cops at a whorehouse in the way they abused the ludicrous, worthless self-regulation system. Does the phrase "police themselves" actually have any meaning? Because, see, if the Rude Pundit were to police himself, he'd say, "Well, gee, RP, as long as you only have just a little pot, coke, and ecstasy on hand and the goat you sacrificed for the blood orgy didn't suffer much, we can overlook it all. Don't kill any people, and we're good."

Part 3 will no doubt be along when the pot, coke, and Ecstasy kick in. Or the goat.

Nat E. Pickles

Jenna Bush Outs Her Mom as 'Secret Rastafarian'

Which brought up a truly awful visual of Pickles in the kitchen as seen in the video below

How do I get rid of dis awful ting in my head, mon? De overproof rum? No, no, no, no. De heroin? No, no, no, no. Ahhhh, GANJA! Ya, ya, ya, ya!

Thanks to earthweek.