Saturday, March 14, 2009

Headlines - Saturday

The FBI tells two out of every three Freedom of Information Act requesters that it can't find the records they asked for — a failure rate five times higher than other major federal agencies, a private study has found.
 
###
 
Another culprit in the the housing meltdown - those bleeping Homeowners Associations: http://www.teambio.org/2009/03/13/another-culprit-in-the-housing-meltdown-those-f-homeowners%e2%80%99-associations/
 
###
 
Racing Dogs to Death

Imagine running four marathons a day for 11 days straight. Throw in biting winds, blinding snowstorms and sub-zero temperatures. Unthinkable, isn't it? Yet that's exactly what dogs in the Iditarod will be forced to do in the next few weeks.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/03/13-11

###

Glenn Beck reveals that conservatives are mentally deranged psychopaths                                                                           http://godly-fumigation.blogspot.com/2009/03/glenn-beck-reveals-that-conservatives.html

###

Will Big Love cause white flight from heaven?



Sonja Eddings Brown
Media Specialist
Southern California Public Affairs Council

Dear Mrs. Brown,

Thank you for the warning us about HBO's Big Love. I, too, am incensed that they would show one of the actors wearing temple garments.

That said, I don't think you considered your audience while
writing your email. The sacredness angle is for gentiles*. It distracts them from the implications of requiring women to don beehive state burqas, men to dress up like "clean room" workers at a bio-warfare facility, and the silliness of putting little green fig-leaf aprons on both genders.

But gentiles aren't your mail list's audience. We're Mormons, and as such, we're more motivated by embarrassment than sacredness. You should have crafted your message around that.

You know after the show is aired, smirking coworkers and acquaintances are going to ask us about the garments (that is if they can get the words out between suppressed laughs). How do we respond to that? Do we tell them God wants us to dress up in 19th century masonic garb?

And what if Big Love shows more than the garments? What if it shows the endowments? We're going to be inundated with requests from people wanting us to teach them the secret handshakes that'll get them into the Celestial Kingdom. I can hear them now, "Come on JC, show us that "
Sure Sign of the Nail, please. I want to see Jesus' face when I give him the ol' celestial fistbump and get in on a technicality."

Keep reading: http://patriotboy.blogspot.com/2009/03/will-big-love-cause-white-flight-from.html

###

Why did Obama keep this guy on?

Leftover US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates learned some important lessons from Shrubya's Iraqi Quicksand:

"The lessons learned with the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction and some of the other things that happened will make any future president very, very cautious about launching that kind of conflict or relying on intelligence," Gates told PBS television in an interview.

Any future president is "going to ask a lot of very hard questions and I think that hurdle is much higher today than it was six or seven years ago," he said.

Oh come on, lessons learned? Maybe he was an idiot, but anybody with half a brain didn't believe for a second the attack on Iraq had anything to do with faulty intelligence and everything to do with Wrong-Wing hubris and idiocy.

The only 'lesson learned' is Republicans are douchebags and shouldn't hold higher office.

###

Palin bellies up to the earmark buffet

Alaska's earmarks include $1.2 million for an airport on Akutan Island, population: 800…but hey, you can almost see Russia from there!

Sarah Palin, who tried to deny soliciting pork barrel funds for Alaska during her ill-fated run for the vice presidency under John McCain, has taken a new crown: Earmark Queen. Mother Jones:

Alaska will receive more money, per capita, than any other state

…Alaska will receive more money, per capita, from the bill's earmarks than any other state. (Alaska will pocket $209.71 for each state resident.) One hundred earmarks in the bill, worth a total of $143.9 million, are tagged for Palin's state.

…Palin introduced herself to America by declaring she was a foe of wasteful spending who had "championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress." She claimed that she had said "thanks, but no thanks" to America's most infamous earmark, the Bridge to Nowhere. During the presidential campaign, McCain railed incessantly against earmarks, at one point thundering that if he made it to White House, "I will take an ink pen and I will veto every pork barrel earmark spending bill that comes across my desk."

In trying to beat back the omnibus spending bill, McCain denounced earmarking as a "corrupt practice." And he employed the timeworn tactic of publicly mocking silly sounding appropriations…

The earmarks that Palin apparently will accept could also be ridiculed in a McCain-ish fashion. They include $475,000 to construct a "heritage center" in the Chilkat Indian Village…$200,000 for investigating and prosecuting bootlegging; $200,000 for researching the king crab; and $855,000 for building fairgrounds. The Alaska earmarks also include $1.2 million for construction work on an airport on Akutan, a tiny island that relies on seaplane for contact with the Alaskan mainland. (The Coast Guard handles medical emergencies.) The island has roughly 800 residents. Could this be dubbed the Airport to Nowhere?

### 

Well this can't be good news .....

The animals have had about enough of us, I guess. The latest weird story of animals attacking:

An Indonesian villager had to be rushed to hospital after a horse bit off one of his testicles during a freak attack.

The 35-year-old man was unloading sand from a horse-drawn cart at a construction site in Sulawesi earlier this week when the attack occurred, Indonesia's state-run news agency Antara reported.

A witness said the animal suddenly lunged at the man, sinking its teeth into his crotch.

Shocked bystanders loaded the man into a car to take him to hospital, before one noticed a piece of flesh on the pavement.

"Luckily the horse did not chew up or swallow his testicle, but spit it onto the pavement," the bystander was quoted as saying.

That last little detail just hammers home the contempt that horse had for the human.

### 

John Dean: Cheney could be guilty of murder if Hersh's claims are true: http://rawstory.com/news/2008/John_Dean_Bush_and_Cheney_neutered_0313.html

###

The Pope, who used to be a Hitler youth and just reinstated a bishop who denies the holocaust, will not visit the holocaust museum when he's in Israel: http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/03/10/pope.visit/index.html

###

Well here's a shocker

Exxon making a play for Iraq oil deal: http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/WTARC/2009/me_oil0215_03_13.asp 

###

The more things change

The more they don't really at all:

The Obama administration said Friday that it is abandoning one of President George W. Bush's key phrases in the war on terrorism: enemy combatant. But that won't change much for the detainees at the U.S. naval base in Cuba — Obama still asserts the military's authority to hold them. Human rights attorneys said they were disappointed that Obama didn't take a new stance.

The Justice Department said in legal filings that it will no longer use the term "enemy combatants' to justify holding prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

"This is really a case of old wine in new bottles," the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has been fighting the detainees' detention, said in a statement. "It is still unlawful to hold people indefinitely without charge. The men who have been held for more than seven years by our government must be charged or released."

###

Nickel and Diming the Unfortunates

This time, the fees charged to unemployed people by states who give them debit cards. Both the states and the banks are making money from this.

This is just as evil as the states who set up arrangements with telephone companies to charge unconscionable fees for collect calls from prisons. In both cases, it is profiting from those who are down on their luck.

Those black-hearted thieves who dreamed up both ways to fuck over the unfortunates in our society should have their souls blasted.
 
###
 
Martha Stewart and the financial meltdown: http://eb-misfit.blogspot.com/2009/03/martha-stewart-and-financial-meltdown.html
 
###
 
Rove should be in jail, but he continues to make money by lying on Fox

Last night on Fox News' The O'Leilly Factor, Rove brazenly claimed that he never used his White House position to threaten anyone.

Loofah Man caught Rove off-guard with this question: "Now in the Bush White House, did you guys ever threaten anybody who disagreed with you?" Rove hesitated, sputtered, and responded, "Not that — not that — you know — not that I recall." O'Reilly pressed the point:

O'REILLY: So you never threatened?

ROVE: No.

The smirk on Rove's face suggested that even he had a hard time believing his own answer.

Note to Karl:

- Punished Iraq war whistleblower Joe Wilson by outing his wife Valerie Plame, who was an undercover intelligence agent

- Drove a politically-charged prosecution of former Democratic Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman

– Orchestrated the political firings of U.S. attorneys

– Threatened the late Michael Connell and demanded he "take the fall" for election fraud in Ohio

– Pressured the Texas Secretary of State to fire an attorney in his office for making comments that reflected poorly on him

All this does not even include Rove's alleged role in the Swift Boat smears against John Kerry, the whisper campaign against Ann Richards that questioned her sexuality, and the attacks on John McCain's mental health in South Carolina in 2000.

In 2007, Rove also issued this public threat against House GOP congressmen who dared to criticize Bush on Iraq. "Nobody can risk looking disrespectful to the president without paying a price, and they need to understand that," he said.

###

John McCain may not have been able to get Congress to balance the budget by eliminating $7.7 billion in earmarked projects, but… but John McCain is very important, still. He took another important stance just yesterday in fact! At a confirmation hearing yesterday for the *deputy Secretary of the Interior*, the biggest responsibility of which is to run around national parks and pick up cheeseburger wrappers, McCain threatened to block the nominee for having once mentioned Ronald Reagan in a moderately unflattering light in a 2006 article. It is a matter of ETHICS. http://wonkette.com/406989/john-mccain-takes-bold-stance-against-nomination-of-deputy-interior-secretary-who-once-insulted-reagan#more-406989

###

Donald Trump, the host of the 'Apprentice' who has really bad hair and has filed bankruptcy for his casinos, is being sued by buyers who lost millions of dollars in deposits on a failed hotel-condo in the Mexican border city of Tijuana: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/13/donald-trump-sued-by-buye_n_174912.html

He should be fired.

###

We killed another 24 in Pakisan with a drone! http://news.antiwar.com/2009/03/12/us-drone-strike-kills-at-least-14-in-kurram/

 

No comments: