"Fuck off! That's what I would have said." Michael Moore, asked what he would have said to Glenn Beck he had been in Van Jones's place. Link
Instead, Obama acted like Glenn Beck was his boss so he fired Jones, showing his eagerness to surrender.
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David Sirota: Like Bush, Obama Moves to Bury Bad Economic Data.
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The Cost of War: Disturbing Story of Fallujah's Birth Defects.
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Michael Cannon, Director of Health Care Policy Studies at the CATO Institute:
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Stupak Willing to Kill Reform
Ah, that's the way to show your pro-life values, keep millions of people uninsured if you can't force poor and middle class women to resort to illegal abortions.
WASHINGTON (AFP) – A top Democratic US lawmaker said Thursday abortion foes are ready to kill President Barack Obama's huge health overhaul unless it meets their demands to block funding for the procedure.
"I want to see health care, but we're not going to bypass some principles and beliefs and we feel strongly about," Representative Bart Stupak told ABC television.
Stupak said he and roughly a dozen Democratic allies "are prepared to take responsibility" for scuttling the sweeping legislation if they do not get their version of a ban on what they view as federal subsidies for abortion.
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This is special: HarperCollins is giving her another chance to con the 23 Percenters out of more money:
"The book will include selections from classic and contemporary readings that have inspired her, as well as portraits of some of the extraordinary men and women she admires and who embody her love of country, faith, and family," according to a release. "She will also draw from her personal experience to amplify these timely (and timeless) themes."
So now she can add "plagiarizing" to her list of accomplishments.
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What the hell is wrong with the south?
Red Dawn: The Golden Years
The office of Sheriff Larry Deen of Bossier Parish [Ed.: no pun], near Shreveport in the northwest part of the state, last month selected for the program 200 local residents -- mostly ex-law-enforcement personnel -- and began training them in "defensive techniques in the event of a struggle," reports the Shreveport Times. The plan calls for the new recruits to be sent to protect food from grocery stores, gas from gas stations, and other crucial local resources, should the situation demand it. A Louisiana sheriff plans to arm volunteers with shotguns, riot shields, batons, and a .50-caliber machine gun mounted on a "war wagon," as part of "Operation Exodus," a program to provide security in the event of a terrorist attack or civic unrest. "It's a calling," he says.
Who they think they are:
In reality:
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Passing the plate for pedophiles
Bishop Denis Brennan (Bishop of Ferns in Ireland) is being criticized for asking parishioners to help to pay for compensation claims linked to sexual abuse damages. The diocese has already paid 8 million euros to settle 48 civil actions arising from decades of sexual abuse by priests. An additional 13 actions are pending. http://jonathanturley.org/2010/03/04/passing-the-plate-for-pedaphiles-bishop-criticized-for-asking-parishoners-to-help-pay-for-abuse-damages/
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The Glenn Beck drinking game.
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The first atheist blogger? http://unreasonablefaith.com/2010/03/04/the-first-atheist-blogger/
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The climate of hatred and racism in this country is nauseating.
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Argue with this, teabaggers!
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then this one is worth a gazillion words. For all the crying, screaming and ranting by Republicans, conservatives and teabaggers, here's the bottom line. The first Bush tax cut for the rich added 1.4 trillion to the deficit. His second tax cut for the rich added another 400 billion to the deficit.
In comparison, the health care bill passed by the Senate, will cut the deficit by over 100 billion. These number are from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. So what does this tell us about teabaggers and conservatives going on about fiscal responsibility? Easy. It says they're either completely clueless or completely full of crap. In many cases, they're both.
If there was a shred of honesty in these people and if their concern was genuine, then they would have been protesting back in 2001 or soon after. They didn't. Why? Because Fox News, Republicans, conservatives, Glenn Beck and FreedomWorks didn't ask them to protest. There was no need to. The guy in the White House at the time was a Republican…and white.
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Vatican hit by gay sex scandal! http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/04/vatican-gay-sex-scandal
Remember this the next time the Pope gives us all a lecture.
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So long, and sorry about how we fucked up your country."Suicide attacks in the central Iraqi city of Baquba have killed at least 31 people and injured dozens more. Two car bombs exploded within minutes of each other near government buildings in the capital of Diyala province, 60km (40 miles) north of Baghdad. A later third blast targeted the city's main hospital, where victims of the first attacks were being treated. The attacks come just days before parliamentary elections, the third since the US-led invasion in 2003. Nearly a million military and police personnel have been placed on the highest alert ahead of Sunday's polls, defence officials have told the BBC, amid fears the country could slide back into sectarian conflict. Baquba, a predominantly Sunni Arab city, has been the scene of frequent fighting between insurgents and US-led troops since Saddam Hussein was ousted."
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Healthcare Schizophrenia
Before the president goes out and finally throws down the gauntlet demanding a vote on health care reform from a badly-divided and no longer fearful-of-him Congress, shouldn't you have the votes lined up first? Yes, it was comforting to see Obama get a little tough with the rhetoric yesterday, but his tone showed a man who still does not know how to lead and demand things of Congress. For some reason, some lunatics in the White House thought it would be smart politics to accept some GOP ideas at the last minute as if that was supposed to . . . . . accomplish what, exactly? The GOP will still never vote for any Obama initiative; the conservative House Dems have seized on using abortion as the excuse to not vote for the bill (and keep collecting industry money in the process); and now the progressives, who have seen this administration take them for granted and toss aside the public option now say the bill is objectionable as well.
This is easily the most schizophrenic legislative strategy I've seen from a White House in a long time. Simply put, you decide early on whether you are going large on health care (the true believers and progressive choice), or going small and incremental (the Rahm Emanuel and get-something-done option). You don't do both. If you are going large, then you work from your base outward, and not against it. You have a disciplined and aggressive messaging machine and a Truth Squad operation that battles the GOP and the media sloppiness every day. And you never negotiate away a public option or Medicare-for-all unless you really have to, in order to get a good policy bill at the very end.
Or if you are going the Rahm, piecemeal, go small-and-build approach, then you work from the middle outward and don't count on your base but rather the naive "new kind of politics" bullshit that works in a campaign but is lethal in governance. Doing this avoids allowing the DINOs like Stupak to kill it on red state issues. Either way, make a choice and stick with it, building your timing around that choice.
And yet this White House has done neither, and fourteen months into its tenure is forced to do crazy shit like this, looking weak and appealing to both ends of the party, when your strategy from the outset should have been built on one or the other.
No public option. No consumer protection agency to stop Wall Street from abusing Main Street. No accountability for Bush administration lawbreaking. Yet the progressives are supposed to get in line behind a supposedly Democratic administration. Good luck with that.
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Morford: The truth about your immense weirdness.
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The gunman who shot two Pentagon police officers was heavily armed and spent weeks driving to the Capital area from the West Coast, authorities said Friday. Resentment of the U.S. government and suspicions over the 9/11 attacks have surfaced in writings by the Californian identified as the man fatally wounded in a hail of return fire.
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Christian hate group 'Repent Amarillo' terrorizes Texas town, harassing gays, liberals, and other 'sinners'
An evangelical Christian hate group called "Repent Amarillo" is reportedly terrorizing the town of Amarillo, Texas. Repent fashions itself as a sort of militia and targets a wide range of community members they deem offensive to their theology: gays, liberal Christians, Muslims, environmentalists, breast cancer events that do not highlight abortion, Halloween, "spring break events," and pornography shops. On its website, Repent has posted a "Warfare Map" of its enemies in town.
Keep reading: http://thinkprogress.org/2010/03/04/texas-taliban/
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