For Germany, WWI finally ends on Sunday
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Lying to a reporter in order to lure her onto a boat under false pretenses, then secretly recording her reaction to being confronted in an enclosed, unfamiliar environment by a strange man with handcuffs and sex toys, all while disparaging her as a "bubble-headed-bleach-blonde," is not a "stunt." It is the vicious, misogynist act of a twisted person whose 15 minutes should have expired long ago.
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Everyone knows I live in Southern California and it's supposed to be this liberal haven of the country. I've been rehabbing my nerve damage so I can't move around too freely, but my car hasn't had an oil change in a very long time. There's a Goodyear dealership that did a good job the last time I went there. Plus I can actually walk home from the place while the work's being done. So I went to get the long-awaited service. I was helped by the owner of the place and after we chatted about what I needed, we went inside so he could write up the order as my car was taken inside and put up on a lift.
As we were at his computer, finishing up the input of our transaction, I saw that Fox News was on his TV and I jokingly said, "Oh, you have Fox News on?" He said, "I didn't put it on, but so what? What's wrong with it?" I said, "It's a propaganda network." He asked, "People can tell what the truth is, so who cares even if there is only ten percent of the truth?" I pointed out that for most people, it's hard to know which ten percent is the truth. That was my first mistake. There were a few other customers behind me, but that didn't faze the owner, as he then launched into a profanity-laced tirade against politicians and of course, the cancer of our society, the unions.
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Boone looked young and fit at 76, with his perpetual tan and stay-press hairdo. As I approached the stage, he was singing the song he'd written for the occasion — the first-ever "Beverly Hills Tea Party" rally.
Most of the people in the crowd were middle-aged or older, white and very angry in a Libertarian way about taxes and government spending. Several speakers and attendees said the movement isn't a Republican or Democratic thing; it's about the fact that political leaders are out of touch elitists, and the political process is broken and bankrupt.
Joe Clark complained about how the overtaxing, overreaching government is determined to decide what car we drive, what doctor we see and what foods we eat. He doesn't trust either party, he told me. But his sign left no doubts about his preference.
"Teach A Man to Fish, The Democrats Lose a Vote."
The level of discourse, in other words, was not always clever or scholarly. UCLA's Bruin Republicans had a refreshment stand with a life-size cutout of Ronald Reagan, a curious choice at a small-government shindig, given that spending grew astronomically under Reagan, and the deficit exploded.
"Because it's a piece of ..."
And she looked like such a nice church lady.
I asked, perhaps ill-advisedly, what drew her to the rally.
"I'm an American," she said, foaming. "I'm a patriot. I'm a constitutionalist. I believe in the Founding Fathers."
OK, I think I've got it. And dare I ask what went wrong in the country?
"The progressives," she said, claiming the country had been given over to socialists, communists and fascists.
Another thing I don't understand is how, if our individual liberties have been stolen, it's possible to stand in a public park and in the name of God call the black president of the United States a liar, a racist and a communist.
"I'm a beginner political activist," said former "Saturday Night Live" star Victoria Jackson, who took to the stage with a ukulele and sang "There's a Communist Living in the White House."
I thought either Jackson was satirizing the movement or that she was doing a Porky Pig impression. [...]
This is the thing: You gotta double check, as you age, as you move through, as you settle into certain habits and rhythms, that you're not blocking out fresh, invigorating information simply because it doesn't fit with what you're comfortable with, what you're used to, the way you think it's supposed to be.
I find it sort of mandatory, in other words, to defy the onset of the ugly conservative mindset, increasingly inflexible and limited, unable or unwilling to be pleasantly surprised, revitalized, renovated. This way pain lies. This way intolerance lies. This way curmudgeonry and angst, mistrust and Fox News. I have no need to fit in with the skateboard crowd. I have plenty desire to avoid turning myopic and bitter.
If you want to know about God, you might want to talk to an atheist.
Heresy? Perhaps. But a survey that measured Americans' knowledge of religion found that atheists and agnostics knew more, on average, than followers of most major faiths. In fact, the gaps in knowledge among some of the faithful may give new meaning to the term "blind faith."
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"These are people who thought a lot about religion," he said. "They're not indifferent. They care about it."
Atheists and agnostics also tend to be relatively well educated, and the survey found, not surprisingly, that the most knowledgeable people were also the best educated. However, it said that atheists and agnostics also outperformed believers who had a similar level of education.
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I am about done with comfortably situated loudmouths like this talking smack about the few people in America who've managed to hang on to the pension that used to be considered the due of hardworking men and women. Teachers, bus drivers, janitorial staff, all these people get ridiculed for still belonging to unions that have some power and are willing to fight to keep it. We say, "I don't get a pension, so why should you have one?" instead of, "You get a pension, so why don't I have one?" A pension used to be a middle-class reward for having destroyed your knees on a dock, your eardrums and hands on a factory line, your health in the classroom teaching the feral dingos spawned by your neighbors. It used to be an expectation.
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...Just buck up.
I'm not sure how we turned out to be the targets, but it looks like we're officially on notice. No more complaining about frivolities!
The people still without jobs? Quit yer whining.
The ones on food stamps? You, too.
Your house is being foreclosed on? What a buncha whiners. Shut yer piehole!
Those of you living in your cars? Be grateful you still have cars!
Sleeping on your friend's couch? Beats a cardboard box, don't it?
You can't afford to see a doctor? You'll be able to do that in 2014. You can't wait just four more years?
And they actually wonder why the base isn't motivated.
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It appears that we are about to hear Rahm Emanuel is about to announce his departure as White House Chief of Smack.
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Essentially what they are saying is that at American airports if the government finds someone's behavior "suspicious" they have a right to detain them and search them for evidence of terrorism. If they don't find evidence of terrorism, but they still find the person "suspicious" they can then call in police, who will look for evidence of non-terrorist related crimes. What constitutes suspicious behavior? Only the "specialist" knows for sure. And if you demand to know why they are calling the police, that constitutes "escalating behavior" which gives them cause for further inquiry.
This is how the creeping police state slowly takes over. They use the excuse of national security to chip away at the constitutional constraints that prevent the government from abusing its authority. The citizens are in a constant state of paranoia, worried that what they know is innocent will "look" guilty and afraid of asserting their rights because the act of asserting them is considered evidence of something to hide. There are thousands and thousands of people in every aspect of American life now granted the authority to do this in the name of anti-terrorism. [my ems]
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President Obama was on edge.
For two exhausting months, he had been asking military advisers to give him a range of options for the war in Afghanistan. Instead, he felt that they were steering him toward one outcome and thwarting his search for an exit plan. He would later tell his White House aides that military leaders were "really cooking this thing in the direction they wanted."
Gates grumbles about perks and posh quarters—generally defended by senior officers as a reward for decades of stressful family moves every couple of years—but those are not his real targets. The defense secretary’s deeper complaint is about what he calls “brass creep.” Roughly translated, it means having generals do what colonels are perfectly capable of doing. Generals require huge staffs and command structures: three-star generals serving four-stars, two-stars serving three, each tended by squadrons of colonels and majors. This sort of elaborate hierarchy may have been called for in Napoleon’s day, but in an era of instant communication, Gates thinks the military could benefit from a much flatter, leaner management structure.
Gates is also looking to cut the Pentagon’s civilian bureaucracy, which has added a thousand new staff since 9/11. Around the time of the attacks, Rumsfeld reckoned that 17 layers of officialdom lay between him and a line officer. A recent internal study, Gates says, found that “in some cases the gap between me and an action officer may be as high as 30 layers.” (In 1948, when the Cold War began, the secretary of defense had a deputy and a staff of three supervising 50 employees; today, he has 26 political appointees running a staff of 3,000.) The outcome, says Gates, is “a bureaucracy which has the fine motor skills of a dinosaur.”
In the spring of 2007, Gates read a newspaper story about the Marines using mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles known as MRAPs. Gates was impressed to learn that the MRAPs had sustained 300 attacks without a single lost Marine. The secretary of defense inquired, “Why is the Army not doing this?” The response, says Gates, was that the MRAP “wasn’t part of the Army’s program, and if they spent money to get the MRAPs then they might have to sacrifice something else that they were going to get 10 years from now, maybe. And that just made me crazy.” So he intervened: “We had zero MRAP all--terrain vehicles in Afghanistan in January ’09. Now we have over 5,000.”
Gates became unusually exercised when he recalled his efforts to make sure soldiers wounded on the battlefield in Afghanistan were evacuated in what doctors call “the golden hour”—the time when the badly wounded may be saved if they can get to a doctor. “The standard for medical evacuation [from the battlefield] in Iraq was an hour,” says Gates. “Everybody had to be ‘medevaced’ within an hour. But Afghanistan is a lot tougher terrain. And so it came to my attention that they had settled on two hours. And I said: ‘Bulls--t. It’s going to be the same in Afghanistan as in Iraq.’ And the medical guys, the medical bureaucracy, pushed back on me and said: ‘No, no, it really doesn’t matter.’ And I said: ‘Well, if I’m a soldier and I’m going out on patrol, it matters to me.’ And so we sent a bunch of new helicopters, three new field hospitals, a whole bunch of stuff. And so now we have the ‘golden hour’ in Afghanistan.
Inserted from Think Progress
People, what Agent Orange is telling us is that we all need to be good little sheeple and trust Big Brother Boner to take care of us, because we’re not smart enough to handle the solutions. Well I know plenty about Republican solutions. I went through eight years of Republican solutions and I’m still trying to find O rings on sale to repair the damage that Republicans’ tender mercies did to my nether orifice.
What this lying son of a bitch is really saying is that he lacks the courage to tell us what Republican plans are. He does not want to talk about tax cuts for the rich, deregulation for criminal corporations, dismantling the safety net for which we have all paid with our taxes and social security contributions, and cutting back services, except for the rich. America opposes his real plan and rightly so. With all their faults, most Democrats try to represent everyone. Republicans govern exclusively for the benefit of criminal corporations and the richest 1%. Your vote matters!
Communist China's 90th Anniversary Film Sponsored by Cadillac
“Official limousine of the Chinese Communist Party.”
Larry Summers Going Back to Harvard
Surveying economic wasteland he helped create, prolong, says “My work here is done.”
59% Say Palin Unqualified to Be President
But that wouldn't stop them from voting for her.
Forbes 400: Richest Increase Wealth by 8%
Much of it being spent to support extending Bush tax cuts.
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When Jerry Falwell opposed Sandra Day O'Connor's nomination to the Supreme Court in 1981, he said "every good Christian should kick Falwell in the nuts." He criticized the military's ban on gays, told the GOP to lay off Clinton. He wanted to legalize medical marijuana. He did not want to be associated with the new right of the Republicans. In 1989, he stated the Republican party had been take over by a :"bunch of kooks." (if he only was alive today!). In 1994 he said to the Washington Post:When you say "radical right" today, I think of these moneymaking ventures by fellows like Pat Robertson and others who are trying to take the Republican party and make a religious organization out of it. If that ever happens, kiss politics goodbye .
Finally Barry Goldwater said to Bob Dole during the 1996 campaign "we are the new liberals of the Republican Party."
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"We promise to what we said we would do in 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004 and 2006, but we never got around to doing in the years that we controlled the Senate, the House of Representatives and the Presidency. But this time you really can trust us. Would we lie to you?"
Republicans have unveiled their 21-page "Pledge to America" but there is one pledge that the next potential House Speaker won't make. When asked several times Sunday, John Boehner refused to say that he would put an end to all earmarks if Republicans take over the House.
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