The right-wing extremist group, Focus on the Family, plans to spend $4 million on Super Bowl ads. That would be as opposed to helping the sick or hungry.
Fun fact: they also gave $1.25 million in cash and services to the anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 campaign in California, just days before they announced they were laying off 20% of their employees.
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Bloomberg The Mayo Clinic, praised by President Barack Obama as a national model for efficient health care, will stop accepting Medicare patients as of tomorrow at one of its primary-care clinics in Arizona, saying the U.S. government pays too little. More than 3,000 patients eligible for Medicare, the government's largest health-insurance program, will be forced to pay cash if they want to continue seeing their doctors at a Mayo family clinic in Glendale, northwest of Phoenix, said Michael Yardley, a Mayo spokesman. The decision, which Yardley called a two-year pilot project, won't affect other Mayo facilities in Arizona, Florida and Minnesota.
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Palin/Beck in 2012? Happy New Year!
I know your first reaction is probably the same as mine: Is this a joke? Wishful thinking? The answer is, No. La Cuda has actually proposed the idea seriously, and on no less a Prime News Outlet than Newsmax.
In an interview with Newsmax, Sarah Palin floated Fox News host Glenn Beck's name as her running mate for 2012. Palin said, "But Glenn Beck I have great respect for. He's a hoot. He gets his message across in such a clever way." Apparently, Palin's qualifications for a running mate include that they be a "hoot."
Palin chuckled when asked about the possibility of a Palin/Beck ticket and said, "I can envision a couple of different combinations, if ever I were to be in a position to really even seriously consider running for anything in the future, and I'm not there yet. But Glenn Beck I have great respect for. He's a hoot. He gets his message across in such a clever way. And he's so bold – I have to respect that. He calls it like he sees it, and he's very, very, very effective."
Sarahcuda describing Todd's...equipment
I know. I started pumping my fist in the air and praying to the Great Spaghetti Monster immediately. This is practically a starved-for-entertainment liberal's wet dream. It's Obama-porn - or would be if the Democrat party had a clue that this isn't 1993 any more, which it doesn't. They're still stuck back on Planet Gingrich, so it's unlikely they'll figure it out, but for those of us chained to reality this would be better than Spiderman and Avatar combined.
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A story to remind us that most people aren't churlish dickheads - a Safeway in Rosemont, California accidentally left the doors unlocked on Christmas Eve, and when the police arrived in response to a call about people in the store after hours, they found people shopping and leaving the money for their purchases on the counters. No theft. No vandalism. Just the honor system at its finest.
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Atrios writes:
This may be nothing new - just new to me - but I was surprised to hear Odierno react with such strong language to the news that the case against those (allegedly) involved in the Blackwater massacre was thrown out. On NPR he said that innocent people had been killed and that he feared the ruling would inspire a backlash against the troops and contractors.
Keep reading: http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/technicalities-by-digby-atrios-writes.html
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First, there was Rod Parsley saying that Satan has been messing around with his bank accounts and needs a massive infusion of cash to fight his demonic plan, here. Now, fellow Evangelical pastor Rick Warren has asked for roughly a million dollars from his faithful due to a few end of the year shortfalls in cash flow. Given these calls to the faithful, I wish to add my own discovery of a demonic plan to deny me of ready cash and call upon everyone on this blog to send me money immediately to fight for righteous and redemptive blogging.
Keep reading: http://jonathanturley.org/2010/01/01/laying-hands-on-the-faithful-pastor-rick-warren-calls-for-a-million-dollars-from-the-faithful/#more-18953
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Gee, ya think?
BAGHDAD — Iraqis seeking justice for 17 people shot dead at a Baghdad intersection responded with bitterness and outrage Friday at a U.S. judge's decision to throw out a case against a Blackwater security team accused in the killings: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/01/iraq-outraged-as-blackwat_n_409212.html
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Dem lawmaker smacks Cheney.
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What those new-fangled airport full-body screeners can really do: http://www.americablog.com/2010/01/what-those-new-fangled-airport.html
How does anyone react to this kind of sentiment:
Step (1): Return all Gitmo detainees to Yemen.
Step (2): Use Predator missiles to strike the baggage-claim area 20 minutes after they arrive.
Just an idea.
As Greenwald notes, even the Bush administration conceded that around half of the "worst of the worst" Yemeni prisoners at Gitmo were completely innocent of any charges and imprisoned by mistake. Maybe some have been radicalized by years of Gitmo imprisonment. But the answer to that is not to ensure that this kind of mistake does not happen again but to kill all the victims of that mistake in a missile strike to incinerate them instantly?
This post appeared in National Review. It was written by someone who was once a defender of human rights, the rule of law and spreading the idea of democracy. Now he endorses rounding up even innocent prisoners and murdering them all in one spot as a "bipartisan" proposal for the US.
This is a neo-fascist sentiment. And it is a function of surrendering to barbarism, not fighting it.
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Simply not a credible news organization
This made me laugh out loud:
And then you read the article, and the Democrats calling for her resignation are some state Senator somewhere and former Lieberman aide Dan Gerstein. This is not a news organization, it is the propaganda wing of the GOP.
In related news, Steve Benen notes that Breitbart's clowns at Big Government dropped the ball again, and wonders why they don't have a better fact checking system and states "they never learn."
The answer, of course, is simple. They don't care about facts. They care about narratives and spreading propaganda. It doesn't matter if they have completely made things up, it will be conventional "wisdom" with wingnuts that Bertha Lewis was at the White House. And crazy as that sounds, they are remarkably successful at spreading bullshit and making people believe it- see the ACORN nonsense from this summer, which has now turned out to be absolutely nothing. The last I checked, the beltway stenographers were all upset that they didn't investigate harder.
Breitbart and Big Government learned, all right. They learned that it doesn't matter what you make up, if you can get enough people repeating it, you can convince our investigative journalists that it is true. It's a huge joke and I wouldn't be surprised to learn every political reporter in the country has been taken by a Nigerian email scam.
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Conservative talk radio show host Rush Limbaugh said Friday that tests show nothing wrong with his heart after chest pains hospitalized him earlier this week.
Limbaugh said at a Honolulu news conference that he was being released from The Queen's Medical Center, where he was rushed Wednesday during a vacation. Doctors said he did not have a heart attack or heart disease.
[snip]
Limbaugh couldn't resist a few political comments in the short press conference at the hospital. He said he got the best health treatment in the world "right here in the United States of America."
"I don't think there's one thing wrong with the United States health system," Limbaugh said.
Shorter Rush Limbaugh: I got mine....so f**k you.
You know, I really tried to take the high road here. I didn't post anything, I didn't comment on other blogs that I wished Rush Limbaugh dead. The closest I came was to consider commenting elsewhere to blast the idea that Barack Obama should for some reason show up at Limbaugh's bedside to "take the high road" against this worthless piece of human dung who would probably put a bullet into Obama's head himself if he weren't too big a chickenshit to hold a goddamn gun. But I didn't. What I hoped is that Limbaugh just might think about how you're no longer immortal when you're fifty-eight years old and that maybe it wasn't too late for him to realize that being a selfish, craven, greedy, venal, hatemonger is no way to spend a life.
But when I read things like this, I wonder if perhaps I should have joined the deathwishers. Because Rush Limbaugh is quite simply an evil, evil person. And there's no sin in wishing ill on evil.
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Another day, another suicide bombing in Pakistan. "At least 88 people have been killed by a suicide bomb attack at a volleyball court in the troubled north-west of Pakistan, local police say. Police chief Ayub Khan said the bomber drove towards a field where people were watching a match, before detonating a load of high-intensity explosives. The attack happened near Lakki Marwat, close to North and South Waziristan. The Pakistani army has been conducting a campaign against the Taliban in the tribal areas since October. The number of people killed in militant attacks in Pakistan is fast approaching 600 in just three months. Militants have attacked both "hard" targets, including army or intelligence offices, and "soft" ones such as markets or the crowd that was hit in Friday's bombing. The latest attack killed more people than any other since a bombing at a market in Peshawar left some 120 people dead on 28 October."
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Glenn Greenwald: Craving terrorist melodrama
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Wall Street ready to claim billions in tax breaks on bonus payments
2009 closed with the stock market rebounding 61 percent from its March lows, and "Wall Street is ready to pat itself on the back for its huge gains with big bonuses," potentially surpassing the record payouts of 2007. Analysts estimate that Wall Street's 2009 bonus pool could total $200 billion — led by Goldman Sachs' $23 billion — as the New York Times reported today, the return to big bonuses will also allow Wall Street banks to claim billions in tax breaks:
Many American banks already pay minuscule federal income taxes, because of various deductions and clever tax planning; the payout-related breaks will reduce their tax bills further in coming years…Altogether, the top three Wall Street banks — Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley — will gain nearly $20 billion in tax breaks based on their employee compensation this year.
Compensation related tax deductions will total about $80 billion across Wall Street, according to New York City tax analyst Robert Willens. In 2008, Goldman Sachs paid an effective tax rate of just 1 percent thanks to a variety of deductions and keeping profits offshore.
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