More information is available on the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities website:
Silverman's assault on Catholicism is just another example of HBO's corporate irresponsibility. Time and again, if it's not Bill Maher thrashing the Catholic Church, it's one of his guests. There is obviously something pathological going on there: Silverman's filthy diatribe would never be allowed if the chosen target were the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem and the state of Israel.
Here's a reality check for Silverman: the Catholic Church operates more hospitals and feeds more of the poor than any private institution in the world. It also saved more Jews during the Holocaust than any other institution in the world.
Factcheck time, Bill!
In America, as of 1999, 13% of all hospitals were religious (totaling 18% of all hospital beds); that's 604 out of 4,573 hospitals. [6] Despite the presence of organized religion in America, the Church has managed to scrape together only a few hospitals. Of these 604 hospitals many are a product of mergers with public, non-sectarian hospitals. Not all of these 604 hospitals are Catholic; many are Baptist, Methodist, Shriner (Masonic), Jewish, etc.
Despite the religious label, these so-called religious hospitals are more public than public hospitals. Religious hospitals get 36% of all their revenue from Medicare; public hospitals get only 27%. In addition to that 36% of public funding they get 12% of their funding from Medicaid. Of the remaining 44% of funding, 31% comes from county appropriations, 30% comes from investments, and only 5% comes from charitable contributions (not necessarily religious). The percentage of Church funding for Church-run hospitals comes to a grand total of 0.0015 percent.
Oh, and Catholics and the Holocaust? It was complicated. The Vatican dragged its feet for years; they could have done so much more.
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GOP claims Olympia Snowe was born in Kenya
Just moments after she broke with fellow Republicans and voted in favor of health care reform, Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) came under fire from the GOP for allegedly lying about her nation of birth.
"This vote is going to raise suspicions, once again, that Sen. Snowe was born in Kenya," said GOP Chairman Michael Steele. "We demand that she prove, once and for all, that she is definitely not Kenyan."
Orly Taitz, leader of the so-called "birther" movement, said that Sen. Snowe's vote was "textbook Kenyan" behavior: "She's putting her tribe first."
Elsewhere, the Rev. Moon married 10,000 people, putting him slightly ahead of Liza Minnelli.
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People mock plastic bag bans, but in China it has already saved them 1.6 million tons of oil.
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Creationist archaeologists are abuzz with the discovery of remains that appear to belong to the first person to write extensively about the necessity for a literal reading of the Bible's Book of Genesis and its story of how the world was created.
Samuel Halevi, a Jew living in Spain in the late 11th and early 12th century, was a scholar who wrote several essays examining many books of the Bible. Halevi believed the Book of Genesis was to be read literally, that the world was created in six 24-hour days by God. Halevi maintained that the creation of the world occurred in 3952 B.C., and that the Earth could not have existed before then.
"We know this to be true," Halevi wrote. "We know it as one knows something without a doubt, such as the fact that they are a human being. We know that God created the Heavens and the Earth in a very busy six days, and on the seventh day, he rested. This is easy to understand, because it is logical and sensible. If I had spent six days creating the entire Heavens and the Earth, I would also rest."
###Call it Plan B for dealing with Iran, which recently revealed a long-suspected nuclear site deep inside a mountain near the holy city of Qom.
Looks like the country is tired of spineless Harry Reid.
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Among the many tasks carried out by our soldiers in Iraq has been protecting private property.
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10 simple things we should all say more often:
http://www.dumblittleman.com/2008/12/ten-simple-things-we-should-all-say.html
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After having being delayed for over 2,000 years, the Parousia turned out to be something other than what had been expected. Instead of Christ the Judge, there appeared Jesus the Hippie (aka "The Nazz") whose only concern seemed to be that the fewer fingerprints of Tony Scalia and Clarence Thomas on the Constitution, the better.
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Public Health Before Wall Street Wealth
Wonderful. The 13 Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee get one faintly rational Republican to join them in a meaningless stab at health care reform and it throws the media into a titillated frenzy about what it all means. It means very little.
The main thrust of the proposal is to forcibly submit even more customers to the tender mercies of the insurance industry while doing nothing significant to cut costs. Insurers will now pretend that the burdens on them are onerous and will demand concessions to make this an even bigger boondoggle for the medical profiteers than George W. Bush's prescription drug coverage initiative. http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/10/14
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"I think the administration has just put Olympia Snowe in the driver's seat - it's very disconcerting" http://www.americablog.com/2009/10/i-think-administration-has-put-olympia.html
This is just plain crazy. Why should ONE woman in the opposing party have so much power over our futures, just because Obama has a "bipartisan" fetish? This is about offering a protective cover to Blue Dogs; I get that. But man, it's galling that everything gets pulled down to the lowest common denominator by a woman who's been on taxpayer-funded healthcare coverage for a very long time.
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The early news from Goldman Sachs was bad. The Citi energy traders were worse. Now JP Morgan is rubbing it in our noses. What part of "they don't get it nor do they care" are people in Washington missing? The world saved them but you would never know it by the way they act. Apologists continue to cut everyone slack but it's hard to believe people who were working in this field such as Geithner and Bernanke were foolish enough to ignore proper restrictions and controls. If anyone should of known how Wall Street would react it was them. After this swindle, how interested will people be in saving banks (which had to be done) the next time? The Guardian:
JP Morgan Chase signalled today that City firms are preparing to make huge bonus payments after it kicked off the US bank reporting season by smashing profit expectations.
The bank revealed it had set aside $7.3bn (£4.6bn) in the third quarter to pay staff, taking the total remuneration pot for the first nine months of the year to $21bn, 23% more than at the same time last year
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Time is running out to get serious
The GOP finds the entire debate to be a joke. They're also running scared from the loonies who control the party. You know, the ones who think climate change doesn't exist and that Jesus walked with dinosaurs. AFP:
The Arctic ice cap will disappear completely in summer months within 20 to 30 years, a polar research team said as they presented findings from an expedition led by adventurer Pen Hadow.
It is likely to be largely ice-free during the warmer months within a decade, the experts added.
Goodbye polar bears.
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No, we will not have a serious discussion about the death penalty. In fact, if you want to be exceptionally horrified, check out this Kay Bailey Hutchison statement referencing Rick Perry's actions:
"As hard as Rick Perry's office and his campaign may try to divert from the issue, this is not about one man or one case. The issue is Rick Perry's heavy-handed politicization of a process and Commission established by the legislature to provide critical oversight. First, Rick Perry delayed the formation of the Texas Forensic Science Commission, then he tried to ensure it didn't have funding and when all else failed, he fired everyone he could. The only thing Rick Perry's actions have accomplished is giving liberals an argument to discredit the death penalty. Kay Bailey Hutchison is a steadfast supporter of the death penalty, voted to reinstate it when she served in the Texas House and believes we should never do anything to create a cloud of controversy over it with actions that look like a cover-up."
She's not concerned that an innocent man might have been killed by the state. She's concerned that evil liberals might get in the way of killing more people.
And she is the "moderate." These people are fucking sociopaths.
It isn't a few bad apples with the GOP. The whole damned barrel is rotten to the core.
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TNC on the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham:
The death penalty promotes our sense of order—it offers assurance that those who savagely violate our most cherished morals will be harshly penalized. The question, for me, is what will we tolerate to preserve that assurance? What I hope will come out of this case is a more honest debate about the death penalty. I strongly suspect that Rick Perry—at this point—knows that something went badly wrong in Willingham's execution, and yet still believes in the death penalty. What I hope will emerge is death penalty advocates honest enough to admit that no system of state-sponsored execution can be infallible, because people are fallible. I want them to come out and say what's clear—innocent people will be executed. I want them to stop treating us like children, and make the argument.
Unfortunately, this is not what will happen. Death penalty advocates will simply argue that we can't say for sure that Willingham was innocent and so on. The burden of proof will shift, or has already shifted: it now must be proved, beyond reasonable doubt, that an innocent man has been executed.
Americans' support for the death penalty is not isolated. It is of a piece with Americans' (negative) attitudes about evolution, just to cite one example (I'm sure I could find others but I find the topic depressing); that is to say, it has more to do with superstitions and conceptions of good and evil than with reason. Probably the most we could ask for right now is to have the people administering the lethal injections dress as pimps so that in the event of another wrongful execution the New York Times and Washington Post treat it as an important story.
I think it's important to highlight what happened in Texas, both with the conviction and with the cover-up. Because—not but—when it comes to reversing attitudes about the death penalty, it's a long, long road.
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Shrill harpy forms torture club
Liz Cheney, whose father asserted that the president had the power to invade countries, torture prisoners, ignore habeas corpus and suspend the Constitution, is starting a new group to oppose Prez Obama's "radical" policies.
Bonus: with neocon mental midget Bill "Always Wrong" Kristol, who's been wrong on everything.
Bonus 2: The Keep America Safe, You Socialistfascistcommie Homos website, Cheney said, would feature memos by Bush misadministration lawyers justifying waterboarding and other forms of torture to make the case that they aren't actually torture.
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Operation Radioactive Rabbit Shit
Mary Landrieu said on MSNBC that the reason people say they support the public option is because they think that means it's free. And then she said that she's sorry there's been this whole "unfortunate debate" about the public option because we should be talking about public private partnerships and cost containment not a free lunch.
Last night, Fox News host Sean Hannity hosted a panel that debated the merits of President Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize. After complaining about Obama's goal of eliminating nuclear weapons and claiming that the Nobel is undesirable because Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat receieved it, Hannity suggested an alternative recipient for the award — former President George W. Bush:
HANNITY: [Yasser Arafat] got the Nobel peace prize. Excuse me, a terrorist got the Nobel peace prize. Some people deservedly so. You know who else deserved it? Ronald Reagan. And frankly, I would've given it to George Bush.
The greatest news for America last week was that unstable, obese radio junkie Rush Limbaugh had snuck his way into a group of investors fixing to purchase St. Louis' NFL team, the Rams. What a straightforward way to piss off an entire major city! Upon hearing the news, black players in the league were like, "Ah, well, we look forward to never playing for that team or even visiting that city again in our lives." The problem there is that black players tend to be the ones who are good at football. And so Rush's investor "friends," backed by a nervous NFL leadership, have dropped him from the bid. He is not expected to say gracious things about the NFL on his radio show, after this. [ESPN/AP]
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Teabaggers go on safari
For the right, the only mistake is in working outside a rigid ideological fence. As long as you stay within this fence -- no matter how badly this restriction is hampering you -- you're golden. Move outside that fence and you become a "Republican In Name Only" or a RINO. If you're a moderate, you're a RINO. If you're an ideologue on all but one issue, you're a RINO. If ever in your life you've been forced to accept reality and acknowledge global warming or the failure of unregulated capitalism or the healthcare crisis, you're a RINO. It's funny, but people on the right like to see themselves as rugged individualists, but expect every one of their increasingly shrinking coalition to be exactly the same. You can be as individual as you want to be, so long as you think the same things and believe the same things as all the other rightwingers. Have an independent thought, conclude that what you're trying isn't working, and they fire you out of the coalition in a cannon.
You know who else lied and spread propaganda?
Whinging ubermaniac Glenn Beck compares the WH's disgust with Fox Noise to the Holocaust:
'When they're done with Fox, and you decide to speak out on something. The old, "first they came for the Jews, and I wasn't Jewish."'
"Oh, for the love of GOD. Obviously he'll go on Fox. He has done that before. He will do it again. I can't give you a date because, frankly, I can't give you dates for anybody else right now.
'But what I will say is that when he goes on Fox, he understands that it really is not a news network at this point. He's going to debate the opposition. And then we'll see about Gitmo. Mwaahahahahaha.'
"Where do these people come from? And wtf is wrong with them???"
Michael Moore adds:
The simple fact that he was elected was reason enough for him to be the recipient of this year's Nobel Peace Prize.
Because on that day the murderous actions of the Bush/Cheney years were totally and thoroughly rebuked. One man -- a man who opposed the War in Iraq from the beginning -- offered to end the insanity. The world has stood by in utter horror for the past eight years as they watched the descendants of Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson light the fuse of our own self-destruction. We flipped off the nations on this planet by abandoning Kyoto and then proceeded to melt eight more years worth of the polar ice caps. We invaded two nations that didn't attack us, failed to find the real terrorists and, in effect, ignited our own wave of terror. People all over the world wondered if we had gone mad.
And if all that wasn't enough, the outgoing Joker presided over the worst global financial collapse since the Great Depression.
So, yeah, at precisely 11:00pm ET on November 4, 2008, Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. And the 66 million people who voted for him won it, too. By the time he took the stage at midnight ET in the Grant Park Historic Hippie Battlefield in downtown Chicago, billions of people around the globe were already breathing a huge sigh of relief. It was as if, in that instant, one man did bring the promise of peace to the world -- and most were ready to go wherever he wanted to go to achieve that end. Never before had the election of one man made every other nation feel like they had won, too. When you've got billions of people ready, willing and able to join a cause like this, well, a prize in Oslo is the least that you deserve.
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