Headlines - Sunday October 17

Hauntingly beautiful hubble images.

 

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Stop Supporting Fox News or You'll Have Blood on Your Hands

In a letter released today, Tides CEO and founder Drummond Pike called on advertisers to stop supporting Fox News.

 

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Practicing For Theocracy - by digby

One of the hallmarks of the arguments against using hyperbolic terms against our fellow American theocrats is that they aren't actually doing the crazy things that other pre-modern theocrats do, so it's unfair to compare them. Except --- they are. They just let their repressive, destructive flag fly in other countries: http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/practicing-for-theocracy.html

 

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President, Democrats cut the deficit 

So, fine, the 2010 deficit was around $1.294 trillion.

But it's actually $122 billion less than Bush's 2009 budget deficit.

...the $122 billion improvement on the deficit "is the biggest one-year nominal drop in the deficit that has ever occurred." We probably won't see headlines blaring, "U.S. achieves biggest one-year deficit reduction in American history," but that just happens to be the case.

Of course based on the silence from the Democrats, they're not interested in ballyhooing the fact that they're more fiscally responsible than the Bush administration's last budget.

Total silence. Ugh. Come on, people. Wise up.

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Worst Person in the World

Sarah Palin, who attacked the First Lady in a word salad speech yesterday.

Yep. The same Sarah Palin who exploits her children on reality television shows and cheers as her daughter grinds on Dancing with the Stars. Classy.

I'd love to hear what Pat Tillman's brother Richard has to say about Palin mentioning Pat's name.

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Oh great. Two of the most wickedly awful corporations have joined forces.

A report by Jeremy Scahill in The Nation revealed that the largest mercenary army in the world, Blackwater (now called Xe Services) clandestine intelligence services was sold to the multinational Monsanto. Blackwater was renamed in 2009 after becoming famous in the world with numerous reports of abuses in Iraq, including massacres of civilians. It remains the largest private contractor of the U.S. Department of State "security services," that practices state terrorism by giving the government the opportunity to deny it.

So Blackwater and Monsanto, eh? Nice. This way, instead of subcontracting its thuggery to McDowell & Associates, Monsanto has an internal goon squad to intimidate and harass farmers. Convenient.

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Louis CK on being white.

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What a business model. What other industry can get away with increases like this during the worst economic period since the Great Depression? It's a relief to Big Insurance that the White House folded on the public option. But hey, don't let that stop the industry from calling him a socialist and anti-business. Yes, like Wall Street they wanted even more and will stop at nothing until they get it.

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RSVPs - Sam Alito, the Supreme Court Justice and tacky Capa de Monté statuette, says he will not attend the State of the Union Address. You may recall, President Carebear hurt his feelings calling out the outrageous Citizens United decision.(AP)

 

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A south Florida police chief who found himself under fire for sending numerous racist and otherwise offensive emails -- including one lamenting that President Obama wasn't shot by his security detail -- has been forced to resign.

But it wasn't Police Chief Richard Perez's abusive emails that cost him his job. According to news reports this week, Perez was given an ultimatum -- resign or be fired -- after an internal investigation at the Wilton Manors, Florida, police department found Perez had been paid for time off he hadn't reported.

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Sarah who? Two days in a row Sarah Palin headlined rallies in California, and two days in a row Carly Fiorina and eMeg Whitman made it a point to be miles away from the Hate-filled Snow-billy from Wassilly.

 

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Those intent on gay-bashing and cyberbullying of gay people will have to find a venue besides Facebook "Facebook is working with a gay-advocacy group to reduce the amount of hate speech and bullying on the online social hub. ... Anti-gay bullying has been in the spotlight recently after the suicides of several gay teenagers, including Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementi, garnered national attention. According to police, the 19-year-old jumped off the George Washington Bridge after his roommate secretly recorded him with another male student and distributed video online. ... The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation said it reached out to Facebook last week after Internet bullies flooded a page set up to honor teens who recently killed themselves in response to anti-gay hate."

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Brand me a liberal

 

Last week, Kevin Drum mused about the conservative success in creating and perpetuating a "brand" of politics that has become conventional wisdom, and the failure of liberals to do the same.

So our brand is never going to be as strong as theirs. Sure, egalitarianism will always be at its core, but that expresses itself in different ways in different times. It's opposition to slavery in one era, support for women's suffrage in another, and a push for national healthcare sometime after that. These may all spring from a roughly similar impulse, but their political manifestation is so different that it's hard for most people to see that.

So today's liberals want to fight global warming, something we didn't even know existed 50 years ago. We're for reproductive rights and gay marriage, things we didn't care about a century ago. We support more humane immigration laws, something that wasn't even on anyone's radar screen two centuries ago. There's just no way to take a history like this and turn it into a timeless brand. Yes, we're generally for the have-nots - though even that's been suspect over the past few decades - but beyond that I'm not sure there's much more long-term branding we can do. For good or ill, adaptable but fuzzy might just be part of the package.

Someone took him up on the challenge:

Bob Somerby thinks that liberal branding isn't as hard as some of us think:

For ourselves, we think it's very easy: The people, not the powerful! You have to explain where things go from there, of course.

Yep. You have to explain where things go from there. But that's the whole problem, isn't it?

Actually, I think that's exactly what liberals have been missing: 8 short, punchy syllables that will fit on a bumper sticker in readable-at-60-mph font size.

And it covers everything. You don't even have to know what the issue is: if the powerful are for it, liberals are against it.  If the powerful are against it, liberals are for it.

Yes, it's simplistic. Name a GOP brand meme that isn't simplistic.  Simplistic wins. It's also easily misinterpreted by morons - in liberals' favor. Win again.

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Glenn Beck brings Exxon-Mobil-linked religious front group to tell christians not to believe in climate change