Thursday, May 5, 2011

Headlines - Friday May 5

New Petition Favors Replacing Congress with SEAL Team Six
 
###
 
Well, we got Osama bin Laden, the #1 threat to Democracy. Now time to turn to the next greatest menace: Antonin Scalia. - Will Durst

###
 
 
###
 
"Osama bin Laden's death has been in the news all day. Leftish stations are going, 'President Obama saves the world.' Stations on the right are going, 'Obama kills fellow Muslim.'" –Craig Ferguson
 
###
 
 
###
 
Don't blame American appetites, rising oil prices, or genetically modified crops for rising food prices. Wall Street's at fault for the spiraling cost of food.
 
###
 
Get over it: Onondaga Nation Leaders Blast 'Geronimo' Codename for Bin Laden
 
###
 
You're the last one to talk about "pussyfooting around," Snowbilly. You can't even find shoes that fit:


Paul Morigi/Getty Images for The New Yorker

TPM's Brian Beutler notes:

It's unclear why she thinks photos of bin Laden's corpse will scare suicidal terrorists.

Heh. Indeedy.

That's what these guys thought too:

According to the AP, the photos, from the print edition of the magazine, show Corporal Jeremy Morlock from Wasilla, Alaska, grinning as he lifts the head of a corpse by the hair. The images are just a handful from a collection of 4,000 images and videos.

###

Ashcroft knows about as much about ethics as he does about singing.

[John] Ashcroft will head Xe's (Blackwater) new "subcommittee on governance," its backers announced early Wednesday in a statement, an entity designed to "maximize governance, compliance and accountability" and "promote the highest degrees of ethics and professionalism within the private security industry."

How does the Onion stay in business with this competition? 

###

###

4,452 soldiers killed in Iraq; 1,570 in Afghanistan.

###

Tea Party Founder Objects To Obama Interrupting The Apprentice For Bin Laden Announcement and Wanted Bin Laden Wrapped In Pig Fat

###

Even after the release of his long-form birth certificate, 30% of polled Republican douchebags say they don't believe the president is a U.S. citizen.

They're racists. That's the only explanation left.

###

The AP delivers the harrowing news:

The ice of Greenland and the rest of the Arctic is melting faster than expected and could help raise global sea levels by as much as 5 feet this century, dramatically higher than earlier projections, an authoritative international assessment says.

The findings "emphasize the need for greater urgency" in combating global warming, says the report of the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP), the scientific arm of the eight-nation Arctic Council.

No one gives a flying shit about this issue. And they won't until the water is flooding in all around them and Wingnut Florida is mostly underwater. Even then, the far-right will suggest that the best way to fix the flooding and massive loss of life in places like Bangladesh will be, of course, tax cuts and deregulation. Nope, I'm not feeling particularly hopeful.

###

And now we return you to our regularly scheduled programming of Republican misogyny.

### 

How do you f--- up the PR around KILLING OSAMA BIN LADEN????

First he had a gun, then he didn't, first he grabbed a woman as a human shield, then he didn't. First they shot him twice in the head, then they didn't.

And now we find out that the extended firefight wasn't a firefight at all.  The only shots fired were from a courier at the beginning of the raid.  Osama didn't have a gun like we were told he did and neither did the other guys. 

Also, it wasn't a $1 million dollar mansion, it was a $250K one.

###

Justice ...

In America. It's for those who can't afford it.

Goldman Sachs finds itself under investigation once again but, at this point, as
our pal Montag says, we know how that's gonna turn out:

...

As I noted in the beginning, normally Goldmine Sachs would find itself in deep shit. In these times the DoJ under AG Holder prefers to go after medical marijuana users and online pokers players. The idea of applying the law and taking down one or more of the Masters Of The Criminal Universe is alien to his job description.
If you or I swindled our neighbors for $10,000, we'd be sitting in a federal prison for a few years. These guys will be running the Treasury and the Federal Reserve in a few years.
 
###
 
Nothing to see here ...
Move along.

You know, with all the hubbub around the killing of one man, the big, bad terrorist with super powers, we happily lose sight of the fact that 90% of the terror attacks in this country come from far right wingnut country.

Thankfully,
this character's trace has been purged from the gene pool:

FAIRVIEW — A man killed in a shoot-out with FBI agents and other law enforcement officers Wednesday afternoon was wanted in connection with the 2010 bombing of a Florida mosque, according to the FBI.

...

He was wanted in connection with the May 10, 2010, bombing of the Islamic Center of Northeast Florida in Jacksonville. The attack occurred at night prior to evening prayers. No one was injured in that explosion.

...
And remember when Homeland Security pointed this out? The whining and crying of the big tough Republicans was deafening. "We're being persecuted!" Wait until some teabagger decides to blow one of them up because he wasn't "conservative enough". You'll see checkpoints at every street corner.

###
Hey Mexico, do you want Texas back? You can have your drug war there!
 
Teacher in Texas smirkily tells 9th grade Muslim student: "I bet you're grieving for Uncle Osama." 

###

###

Jurassicpork: The Comedy of Terrors 

###

This morning, Harry Reid was out jogging when suddenly he was hit by a car. Reid was taken to the hospital and he'll be okay, so the assassination plot failed. But the most devious part of this story is that the car was just sitting there parked. We're not sure how one is injured by a stationary car, but it sounds absolutely harrowing. 

###

Wonkette: Delightful Airport Restroom Graffiti Proves You're In Alaska

'know that a lot of what I say has been lifted off of men's room walls. Maybe I've crossed the wrong rivers and walked down all the wrong halls.'

Our men's room correspondent in Anchorage sent this wonderful picture of the bathroom wall at Ted Stevens International Airport. We guess this is what they call "publicly funded art" in Alaska, as everyone up there gets those "oil welfare" checks.

But what does it say? Here is the transcription of the main message, followed by the replies from the liberal peanut gallery:

OBAMA'S The problem
30 caliber Hollow poiwt
is the answer

Racism dies a slow death

It's okay to be conservative.
It's a pity to be stupid.

Go back to Wasilla

So, the person who wrote this graffiti in the Anchorage airport thinks Obama is "The problem," and wants to kill the president with what Fox News calls "cop killer" bullets. We guess that is normal for a state that very briefly had a governor who would later put bulls-eyes on pictures of her pretend enemies such as elected lawmakers from another political party.

The first response, "Racism dies a slow death," is less than clear. We can only guess that it's a comment on the racism of the original graffito, even though there's no indication that racism is anywhere close to receding, especially in a state that recently elected a bigot governor who referred to Barack Obama in public as "Sambo" and smiled approvingly when her idiot followers shouted "nigger" whenever Obama was mentioned.

As for the person who thinks it's "okay" for people to want the president to be murdered with "cop killer" bullets — you know, being "conservative" — the real problem is neglecting to punctuate the end of the graffiti scrawl with a period. So this free-lance copy editor adds a period to the end of the second sentence, but not the first sentence ("OBAMA'S The problem"), and the random use of upper- and lower-case letters along with the extremely bad spelling/penmanship resulting in "Hollow poiwt" is simply ignored. "Stupid" is relative in Alaska.

The most succinct commentary on the Obama death wish is "Go back to Wasilla." Thanks to Wonkette operative "Bill S." in the AK.

###

War on Planned Parenthood guts other health and nutrition programs for women and children.

###

Income inequality in US worse than Ivory Coast, Pakistan, Ethiopia

As ThinkProgress has repeatedly noted, crucial services and public investments for Main Street America are being gutted as taxes on the richest Americans are the lowest they've been in a generation. Yet many Americans may not know exactly how unfair this is, as the country has grown increasingly unequal at the same time. Using data from the CIA Factbook based on the Gini coefficient — a measure of income inequality within a society — ThinkProgress has assembled the following graph, which demonstrates that the United States is now about as economically unequal as Uganda and more unequal than countries like Pakistan or the Ivory Coast:

Income inequality in the United States is actually higher than at any other time in modern history since the Great Depression. There is also a tremendous amount of inequality even in life expectancy, with the American Human Development Index reporting in 2010 that there is now a 6 year gap in average life expectancy between Mississippi, in the Deep South, and Connecticut, in prosperous New England." As ThinkProgress previously reported, one of the major factors in this hike in income inequality has been the decline of unionization in America.

No comments: