ALBANY — Fresh off an announcement that jolted the New York political world, Steve Levy, the Long Island Democrat who abandoned his party to run for governor as a Republican, is working to secure endorsements as he tries to gain an edge in the contest for the nomination.
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Fux Nutwork host’s military charity a scam
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The entire debate has been about making you afraid of some imaginary (or even real) person who'd make you feel like a fool for trying to take care of him, because that's the real lizard fear of the supposed middle-class, feeling like you got taken. Feeling like you played by the rules and somebody else didn't, and he's better off and you're fucked.
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Does the Republican Party have a secret "Stupid Farm" where it breeds and raises senators?
Lt. Dan Choi, the openly gay Iraq war veteran who has been an outspoken opponent of the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, was arrested Thursday after chaining himself to a fence at the White House.
The Advocate reports that Choi, along with former Army infantryman Jim Pietrangelo, was arrested after chaining themselves to the fence following a rally in Washington for repeal of the policy, which bans gay men and women from serving openly in the military.
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Great numbers all around. Serious deficit reduction. Donut hole closure. Medicare solvency. Bunches of people covered. And, it's all paid for. It's time for Blue Dogs to get off the damn fence and every other Dem to get out and sell this thing.
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First off, let's just say that Baier interviewed a president like a president ought to be interviewed, with the news person as an aggressive antagonist and questioner, not taking what the president says at face value. Truly, honestly, Baier was at least in the ballpark of how, say, BBC journalists talk to their leaders. And however irritating Baier's interruptions were, Obama recognized, at the end, that this was the way it's supposed to go. "That's OK. That's your job," Obama told him after Baier apologized for doing so.
Of course, any time a reporter from anywhere dared to question George W. Bush with the same persistence that Baier used with Obama, it was an outrage, like a midget had punched Bush in the nuts. Remember when Irish reporter Carol Coleman took apart Bush and the White House actually lodged a formal complaint with the Irish Embassy? Now, of course, it's totally okay to confront the president repeatedly, and the right will gleefully cheer it on, as if yelping, "Yeah, make him your bitch, Ailes." [my em]
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Activists staged "competing rallies" outside of Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy’s (D-OH) district office yesterday, in a noisy, often confrontational attempt to influence the undecided congresswoman’s vote. At one point, a man with a sign saying he has Parkinson’s disease and needs help sat down in front of the reform opponents. Several protesters mocked the man, calling him a "communist" with one derisively "throwing money at him." "If you’re looking for a handout you’re in the wrong end of town," another man said. Watch it (at approximately 0:51):
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Remember how John Edwards used to say there were two Americas? This is the other one. And they are always pissed off when anybody else gets something they don't have. Even if they don't need or want it. You know the types.
... Awesome. He’s got brass balls so big, they have their own gravitational field ...
Dear Texas: Please shut up. Sincerely, History
Never doubt America's irrefutable greatness, kids. Our prison system, for example, is the finest in the world. Also, dirty Mexican people had no role whatsoever in the Civil War or U.S. history (except as troublesome immigrants, yuck), hip-hop music is in no way, shape or form to be considered a significant cultural movement -- unlike totally awesome Country & Western, and the War on Drugs is going spectacularly well, thanks to our fine military, numerous Afterschool Specials and the deep love of Jesus -- who, if you look really closely at those old photographs from the Bible, is clearly wearing a U.S. flag pin on his robes to go along with his friendly, competely legal sidearm. God bless America.
These irrefutable facts -- and many more just like them -- are brought to you by the Texas State Board of Education, packed like a jug of rancid tartar sauce with intellectually numb simpletons who smell like ignorance and taste like fear. The TSBE: We make revisionist brainwashing fun!™
(CNN) – Prominent conservative commentator and RedState.com editor Erick Erickson will join CNN as a political contributor, appearing primarily on CNN's new show John King, USA¸ the network announced Tuesday.
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State Assemb. Jose Peralta (D-Jackson Heights) won a commanding victory Tuesday night for the state senate seat once held by Hiram Monserrate, who was expelled following a domestic violence conviction.
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California has been very, very good to Toyota. It is one of the largest markets in the world for the popular Prius hybrid. Nearly 18 percent of all Toyotas sold in the U.S. are sold in California. The state has showered the company with benefits, including large-scale infrastructure improvements for its operations and millions of dollars for worker training. California is one of the key reasons that Toyota is the wealthiest carmaker on the planet.
Toyota is paying the state back with the foulest form of ingratitude.
The company is planning to shut down the assembly plant in Fremont, Calif., that makes Corollas and the Tacoma compact pickup. The plant closure will throw 4,700 experienced, highly skilled and dedicated employees onto the street during the worst job market since the Depression, and it will jeopardize nearly 20,000 other jobs around the state.
Those who are trumpeting the alleged fact that the recession is over should consider that the unemployment rate in California in January (the last month for which complete statistics are available) was a mind-numbing 12.5 percent. That was the fifth worst in the nation. In eight California counties, the jobless rate — not the underemployment rate, mind you, but the official jobless rate — was higher than 20 percent. Those counties are suffering through a depression.
The human toll behind such data is of no apparent interest to the fabulously wealthy Toyota operation.
Rove: Obama ‘let a cowboy president…violate a fundamental principle of the Constitution.’
Conservatives Who Demanded We ‘Listen To’ And ‘Stand Behind’ Gen. Petraeus Now Disregard Him
This study finds that a denomination's demand for devout allegiance to its Christian creed overrides any humanistic message. By demanding such devotion to one specific and dogmatic Christianity, a denomination only encourages its members to view outsiders as less worthy.
--- Let's read that conclusion again: "Only religious agnostics were racially tolerant." Why would religious agnostics be more humanistic and less racist?
Religious agnostics would be people who combine a religious/spiritual attitude in living life with a humble admission that they don't know if their approach is the only right way. Religious agnostics are pluralistic -- they have no problem admiring how different people can enjoy different religious paths. And it is precisely this lack of dogmatism which permits humanistic values to shine through. Religious exclusivism defeats humanistic universalism, but religious pluralism enhances humanistic universalism.
[...] Revere your own religious path, but also respect and revere others' ability to devote themselves to a higher good in their own way. It is precisely that kind of universal respect for all paths which can reduce prejudice.
... It's rather difficult to maintain the fiction that only fringe Israel-haters see the connection between our support for Israel and Muslim hatred toward the U.S. when two of America's most respected military officials (responsible for U.S. troops in the region) are making that case explicitly ...
Howard Kurtz has an interesting piece today about how some Fox News employees seem to think Glenn Beck taints their brand. Isn't this sort of like the madam in a brothel worrying about her reputation for virtue? The real shock in this story is that there are people at Fox News who still consider themselves "journalists" - funny, considering how they must already work within the ideological confines of Roger Ailes' famous daily memos ... [my em]
‘Alaskan chillbilly’ smartest GOP leader since W.
"The good Lord has smiled on us," said Carlton Bolton, the president and CEO of Hallelujah Press, a subsidiary of Halliburton, which received an exclusive no-bid contract to manufacture the new Bibles.
AUSTIN, Texas - (PTSD News) - Fresh from their recent success in passing laws to rewrite school history textbooks to drop discussions of FDR and unions in favor of what they called conservative intellectuals such as George W. Bush, Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber, the Texas Legislature passed a law that all Bibles in the state must be updated.
"The Bible was obviously written by Jewish liberals from New York," said Candace Sue Burnham (R-Plano). "So it's time we Christians take our Bible back to stress true family values such as hating gays, illegal Mexicans, Muslims and especially hating illegal gay Mexican Muslims."
"The current version of the Bible is riddled with communist propaganda about Jesus helping the poor," said Wayne Plugg (R-San Angelo)."That's obviously hogwash because if Jesus loved those poor people so much, he would have made them rich."
"Everyone knows that the gay agenda was to make sure the Bible left out all the gospels that our merciful Lord's greatest pleasure was to smite homosexuals," said Reverend Chuck Amer of the First Church of the Exploding Pentecost of Palestine, Texas. "So we're putting all that stuff back in."
The newly approved Bible, 'Bible: King James Dobson Version,' named after the founder of the popular Focus on the Family broadcasts, also adds the following passages: Anyone voting for Democrats must be stoned to death, global warming is Satan's favorite lie, greediness is next to godliness, people who don't speak English should be banished from the kingdom, and that slavery is not so bad if it can keep those people off the streets.
The hollowed out Bible also comes with a handgun inside.
Right-wing blogger Dan Riehl: "Isn't It Time To Euthanize Reid's Wife?"
By 1960 he was insisting that conservatism's traditionalist and libertarian camps were indeed in fundamental agreement, yet each -- and this is the relevant key -- was so self-righteously cocksure of what it alone postured as philosophically "decisive," a self-destructive "distortion" set in; which is to say, each side took its dogma to exclusive extremes, refusing necessary compromise and accommodation -- necessary, that is, if ultraconservatives were ever to gain electoral dominance.
Thus, wrote Meyer, "Conservatism, to continue to develop today, must embrace both: reason [libertarianism] operating within tradition [old-school Burkeanism] ... It can only be achieved by a hard-fought dialectic ... in which both sides recognize not only that they have a common enemy" -- that being modern liberalism, glibly conflated by Meyer with communism -- "but also that, despite all differences, they hold a common heritage."
And achieve it they did; [...]
And now, it's all unraveling -- the primordial fault line between, loosely, conservative traditionalists and economic libertarians has reemerged. A half-century of conservative unification appears shaky at best.
As Politico reported last week, "the evangelical Christian right ... [has] begun to express concern that tea party leaders don’t care about their issues" -- and that, friends, is a colossal understatement. More than "concern," they're at each other's throat, just like the good old days of a half-century past, those conservatively disunified days of self-righteous cocksuredness which denied accommodation's admission.
The right's reemerging divisions range from the delicately stated to the deliciously ugly: "There’s a libertarian streak in the tea party movement that concerns me as a cultural conservative," said Bryan Fischer, of the American Family Association; said another social conservative leader, "As far as I can tell [the libertarian tea party movement] has a politics that’s irreligious. I can’t see how some of my fellow conservatives identify with it" as well as their "incivility" and "name-calling"; and said the ubiquitous Tony Perkins, of the Family Research Council, "They’re free to do it, but [the libertarians] can’t say [their economic platform] represents America. If they do it they’re lying."
What's more, there now runs a kind of tributary fault line among evangelical Christians, as much a generational as philosophical rift: "I don’t think younger Christians are all that interested in the tea party movement," wrote a "younger evangelical" leader to Politico. Yet he framed his dissent in a most curious way -- one that expresses even greater discontent with his evangelical elders: His generation, he said, is "increasingly dissatisfied by a myopic Republican party that seems unwilling to tackle important social justice issues" (my emphasis). And that's an in-house argument less with the 15-minute-stardom of Glenn Beck than with Tony Perkins.
Can they regroup? [...]
Supreme Court Upholds “Under God” in Pledge of Allegiance
Drops “with liberty and justice for all.”
Conservatives on Texas School Board Approve New History Curriculum
Lone Star State third graders will soon learn about American heroes Father Coughlin, Joe McCarthy and present-day heroine Ann Coulter.
The Board refused to require that “students learn that the Constitution prevents the U.S. government from promoting one religion over all others.”
BUSINESS
Toyota Luring Buyers Back With Incentives
Competitors complain offering Chinese “comfort women” goes too far.
Fed Official: Economy Won't Revive Until 2013
According to Mayan Calendar.
Poll: 82% Ask God for Advice Before Making Decision
Then place order for Paris Hilton sex tape.
Investigators looking into corruption involving reconstruction in Iraq say they have opened more than 50 new cases in six months by scrutinizing large cash transactions — involving banks, land deals, loan payments, casinos and even plastic surgery* — made by some of the Americans involved in the nearly $150 billion program.
Some of the cases involve people who are suspected of having mailed tens of thousands of dollars to themselves from Iraq, or of having stuffed the money into duffel bags and suitcases when leaving the country, the federal investigators said. In other cases, millions of dollars were moved through wire transfers. Suspects then used cash to buy BMWs, Humvees and expensive jewelry, or to pay off enormous casino debts.
Some suspects also tried to conceal foreign bank accounts in Ghana, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Britain, the investigators said, while in other cases, cash was simply found stacked in home safes.
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Another example of why the Republicans try so hard to remove regulation, oversight and enforcement. With those in place, none of their friends can make any money.
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Such questions are becoming common across the nation as water and sewer systems break down. Today, a significant water line bursts on average every two minutes somewhere in the country, according to a New York Times analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data.
In Washington alone there is a pipe break every day, on average, and this weekend’s intense rains overwhelmed the city’s system, causing untreated sewage to flow into the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers.
State and federal studies indicate that thousands of water and sewer systems may be too old to function properly. [my em]
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I am a big Joe Biden fan. The vice president is an indefatigable defender of U.S. interests abroad. So it pains me to say that on his recent trip to Israel, when Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s government rubbed his nose in some new housing plans for contested East Jerusalem, the vice president missed a chance to send a powerful public signal: He should have snapped his notebook shut, gotten right back on Air Force Two, flown home and left the following scribbled note behind: “Message from America to the Israeli government: Friends don’t let friends drive drunk. And right now, you’re driving drunk. You think you can embarrass your only true ally in the world, to satisfy some domestic political need, with no consequences? You have lost total contact with reality. Call us when you’re serious. We need to focus on building our country.”
Netanyahu said he was blindsided. It’s probably true in the narrow sense. The move seems to have been part of a competition between two of Netanyahu’s right-wing Sephardi ministers from the religious Shas Party over who can be the greater champion of building homes for Sephardi orthodox Jews in East Jerusalem. It is a measure of how much Israel takes our support for granted and how out of touch the Israeli religious right is with America’s strategic needs.
This health care thing has driven people crazier than Johnny Depp in a Max Fleischer cartoon on acid. Pro or con, your rhetoric better be cranked up to eleven and soaring past the outer orbit of Neptune, or you're going to be as invisible as a tax collector with a soggy paper plate full of Swedish meatballs sitting next to the deceased at a wake.
Eric Massa, the New York Democrat who admitted grabbing a staffer's staff, embarked on a media based whining tour charging he was hounded out of office by the White House and smeared because of his opposition to health care reform. But even though he was willing to speak ill of the Administration, Glenn Beck washed his hands of Tickle- Me- Eric, after the former Congressman trotted out some intra- personal top bunk Naval snorkeling documentation. When a pissed off Democrat is too far gone for Glenn Beck, things truly have escalated into kooky Kabuki terrain.
Meanwhile, in another part of town, Senator Orrin Hatch railed that if Democrats try to jam a health care bill through Congress it will destroy bipartisanship. Oh no. Not that! They're killing the dodo. Apparently this guy is more worried about a dead fantasy than sick Americans. Then Senator Mitch McConnell ratcheted up the exponential wackiness by warning Democrats they face Electoral Armageddon in the fall, which isn't fair; like regaling 6 year old girls with tales of the hairy spiders that live under their bed before saying "sleep tight."
Obama, his own self, can be found careening around the country like an over- caffeinated Chihuahua engaged in a last ditch effort to sell the bill to what you might call his hesitant posse. Yeah. Recalcitrant Democrats. What are the odds? Like calling a flash flood- irksome. Hell, at this point Obama would be happy to pass anything. Health care. The jobs bill. A hook pattern. Kidney stone. Toyota Prius.
The overwhelming discombobulating apprehension is the President isn't just piloting his own kamikaze fighter into the carrier of health care, he's sending vulnerable troops on the same suicide mission. One that will make Gallipoli look like a weekend pass at an Istanbul brothel. After all, its not his butt on the re- election line this fall, and the GOP strategy to stall proceedings has frothed Democratic incumbents into such a lather, the sweat dripping off their faces is shorting out microphones all across this great land of ours.
She said it would accept donations from various sources -- including corporations -- as allowed under campaign finance rules recently loosened by the Supreme Court.
As the Church Lady would say, "how conveeeeenient."
Now the revisionist floodgates have opened with the simultaneous arrival of Karl Rove’s memoir and Keep America Safe, a new right-wing noise machine invented by Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz and the inevitable William Kristol. This gang’s rewriting of history knows few bounds. To hear them tell it, 9/11 was so completely Bill Clinton’s fault that it retroactively happened while he was still in office. The Bush White House is equally blameless for the post-9/11 resurgence of the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Iran. Instead it’s President Obama who is endangering America by coddling terrorists and stopping torture.
Could any of this non-reality-based shtick stick? So far the answer is No. Rove’s book and Keep America Safe could be the best political news for the White House in some time. This new eruption of misinformation and rancor vividly reminds Americans why they couldn’t wait for Bush and Cheney to leave Washington.
But the old regime’s attack squads are relentless and shameless. The Obama administration, which put the brakes on any new investigations into Bush-Cheney national security malfeasance upon taking office, will sooner or later have to strike back. Once the Bush-Cheney failures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran again come home to roost, as they undoubtedly and explosively will, someone will have to remind our amnesia-prone nation who really enabled America’s enemies in the run-up to 9/11 and in its aftermath.
If we are really to keep America safe, it’s essential we remember exactly which American politicians empowered Iran, Al Qaeda and the Taliban from 2001 to 2008, and why. History will be repeated not only if we forget it, but also if we let it be rewritten by those whose ideological zealotry and boneheaded decisions have made America less safe to this day.
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The study used a picture-based vocabulary test to estimate the IQ of participating teenagers. Seven years later, the same people were asked about their religious and political beliefs.
People who later admitted to being "not at all religious," and who classified themselves as "very liberal" politically had higher IQ scores as teenagers than those who were "very religious" and "very conservative."
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