Sunday, July 19, 2009

Headlines - Sunday

 
NSA and the Mormon church
 
The National Security Agency is building a 1 million square foot data center outside of Salt Lake City, Utah. Putting the facility there allows the NSA to do two things: Toady up to a politically powerful Senator (Orrin Hatch) and tap into the linguistic skills of Mormons who have completed their overseas missionary tours.
NSA officials, who have a long-standing relationship with Utah based on the state Guard's unique linguist units, approached state officials about finding land in the state on which to build an additional data center.
Put nothing into an e-mail (or, for that matter, say on the telephone or put into a fax) that you would not mind seeing printed on a billboard alongside a highway in your home town. Those bastards are trolling through the telecom and internet traffic of everyone.
 
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NY man awarded $125K after being forcibly sedated for a cavity search  Tunde Clement was arrested in the Albany bus station and taken to a hospital for a cavity search and sedated so a doctor could stick a camera up his ass and have a look around.  No contraband was found, and no charges were filed.  The final insult was getting a dun from the hospital, so he sued.  The settlement comes from Albany County, New York and Albany Medical Center.  I, for one, hope against hope that the medical 'professionals' who performed an invasive procedure with neither consent nor a court order faced their licensing boards disciplinary panels, and I hope they faced criminal charges for assault at least.
 
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Happy days are here again

Larry Summers, notorious for suggesting that men are smarter than women (at least at Harvard and coincidentally the former head of Harvard University), has declared that the Great Recession is now over, because fewer people are searching for economic depression on Google than at the beginning of the year. Yay!

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U.S. military spokesman:  "We condemn the use of this video and the public humiliation of prisoners. It is against international law."

In a newly released video, an American soldier who is being held captive by the Taliban in Afghanistan says he's "scared I won't be able to go home." Two U.S. defense officials confirmed that the man in the video posted Saturday on the Internet is the captured soldier, but the Defense Department has not released his name. Local Taliban commanders had previously threatened to kill the soldier. Asked by his interrogators to give a message to the American people, the captive soldier said: 

"To my fellow Americans who have loved ones over here, who know what it's like to miss them, you have the power to make our government bring them home," he said. "Please, please bring us home so that we can be back where we belong and not over here, wasting our time and our lives and our precious life that we could be using back in our own country. Please bring us home. It is America and American people who have that power."

More: http://thinkprogress.org/2009/07/19/captured-soldier-video/

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Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) is ratcheting up his anti-Obama rhetoric. On a call with right-wing activists yesterday afternoon, he proudly proclaimed that he aims to "break" the President by defeating health reform. He also said recently that he prefers to cause "pain" to his fellow legislators rather than working on reform. And while promoting his new book on the G. Gordon Liddy show yesterday, DeMint agreed with Gordon — who ironically has a history of expressing sympathetic views to Nazis — that Obama has created a government like that under Hitler:

LIDDY: But there's something else that I remember because I'm a lot older than you are and it's called national socialism and that's where the government allows private people to continue to own industrial capacity and what have you but tells them what they may — must do with it. You know, you will make Messerschmidts, etc. That was national socialism. That seems to me the way we're going.

DEMINT: You're right we've got national socialism, national paternalism and our form of socialism seems more benign than the classical form that we noted in Europe.

This isn't the first time DeMint has used this incorrect analogy. As Matt Yglesias previously wrote, "Look, comparing your domestic political rivals to Nazis is a time-honored tradition. But confusing the Nazis and Germany's Social Democrats is a scandal. The Social Democrats were the main source of opposition to Hitler at a time when the Communists were bizarrely maintaining that there was no difference between the two and the mainstream parties of the center-right decided that it made sense to form a tactical alliance with Hitler. Social Democrats stand for a generous welfare state and active labor market policies. Nazis try to conquer the world and send people to the gas chamber."

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Ahh, T minus ten days until human TwitterBerry Sarah Palin stops holding back and starts GETTING REAL 4 REAL.  

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Mark Sanford: It's God's fault I'm a lying, cheating asshole

It must be great to have god hanging around just waiting to be used as your all-purpose excuse.  Invading pissant countries, torturing innocent detainees, condemning poor children to starvation and death ... it's god's will!  Don't blame me!

I mean, how totally cool is a god so eager to help you avoid all personal responsibility that it even takes the rap for your adultery.

"It's in the spirit of making good from bad that I am committing to you and the larger family of South Carolinians to use this experience to both trust God in his larger work of changing me, and from my end, to work to becoming a better and more effective leader," (Gov. Mark Sanford) wrote (in an op-ed.)


And how much does god really, really, really love Mark Sanford that it not only forgives Sanford for repeatedly violating one of the Big Commandments, but is dropping everything else to fix a guy far more deserving of a lightning bolt to the gonads.

Senate Minority Leader John Land, also frequently at odds with Sanford, doubts the governor can change or knows how to compromise.

"If he didn't get his way, he'd take his balls and go home, so he left a lot of things on the table," the Manning Democrat said.

"You don't all of a sudden have a mid-life crisis and suddenly get along with people."


Well, obviously Land is one of those horrible members of the reality-based community, a big meanie who doesn't understand that the only one Sanford has to get along with is his own very personal invisible sky wizard.

"Some of you may be wondering about the $468,000 I have spent on travel over the past six years. Look at it this way: when you are on a mission from God, you go where the Lord leads you. And he's lead me to Paris, Beijing, Stockholm, Munich, and London, as well as all over South Carolina and the United States."

"You left out Buenos Aires, Governor." 

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That real drug war on our southern border is getting scarier and scarier.  It was bad enough when the drug gangs were killing one another and innocents were caught in the crossfire.  Now, La Familia seems to have come out on top, and they are challenging the police and the Army, attacking their facilities in broad daylight with grenades and machine guns, and they have even murdered an Army General.  Now they are bold enough to call in to public affairs shows and tell the nation that they are 'open to dialogue' with the government.  After I read the article linked, I was more convinced than ever that we need to just decriminalize drugs.  Everyone who wants to get high is already getting high, and a whole hell of a lot of them perfectly respectable, upright citizens who would prefer to not consort with drug dealers. Just by decriminalizing marijuana alone we could make a pretty good down payment on health care!  

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Retired Major General joins litigation over Obama's birth status   

http://jonathanturley.org/2009/07/19/retired-major-general-joins-litigation-over-obamas-birth-status/#more-12895

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Remember how the climate change deniers have been saying the world has been been on a cooling trend? Perhaps they should tell the global oceans which just registered the warmest ocean surface temperatures ever recorded for June. Perhaps it's time for them to revisit how deeply in denial they are.

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Several months ago, we witnessed a tragic spectacle in the news: a nine-year old Brazilian girl was raped, became pregnant, and got an abortion…and the Brazilian Catholic church responded by excommunicating all the participants. One cleric in Rome, Monsignor Rino Fisichella, said the church had been insensitive, but no one in the hierarchy stepped forward to outright condemn the heartlessness of the church's stance and the unfairness of the policy.

We now have an official document from the Catholic church clearly stating their position. Anyone involved in an abortion for any reason is to be automatically excommunicated, no exceptions. They've actually hardened their position.

That includes nine-year old children raped by their stepfather. It includes any doctors who act on sympathy for a maltreated child. Of course, all the rapist has to do is demand that his victim bear his child, and he will be welcomed in the bosom of the holy church. The church is standing firm on principle.

…there is a more important principle at stake. "We have laws, we have a discipline, we have a doctrine of the faith," the official says. "This is not just theory. And you can't start backpedaling just because the real-life situation carries a certain human weight." Benedict makes it ever more clear that his strict approach to doctrine will remain a central pillar to his papacy, bad publicity be damned.

I see. Dogma is more important than reality, and most surprisingly for representatives of a religion that claims the moral high ground, it is more important than human needs.

Everyone should simply leave that evil institution — tell them they can keep their bricks and their real estate, their gold chalices and their gilt robes, their layered assemblage of celibate perverts, meddling old men, and fearful brides of Christ, and let that human element walk away, free of their superstitions. The church doesn't want that human weight, anyway.

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Virgin Mary seen in bird poop! http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=8112209 

poop_mary.jpeg

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Abraham and Isaac: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqC73omSk4o&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fscienceblogs%2Ecom%2Fpharyngula%2F&feature=player_embedded

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Remember this?

President George W. Bush signed into law Thursday the first major piece of legislation of his presidency, a $1.35 trillion tax cut over 10 years.

Of the six senators begging President Obama to slow down health care reform, four of them -- Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Ben Nelson (D-NE), Olympia Snowe (R-ME), and Susan Collins (R-ME) -- voted for those huge Bush tax cuts.

Their votes were cast on May 26, 2001. Bush signed the tax cuts into law on June 7, 2001. Here we are in mid-July, eight years later, struggling to get health care reform passed by the end of the year.

So whatever these four foot-draggers are saying about why they want health care reform slowed down (and Nelson, for one, was all over the place yesterday warning against "rushing into this"), it's not really about wanting to be more deliberative or avoid ballooning the deficit. All you have to do is look back to 2001. Their records speak for themselves.

 

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