Headlines - Tuesday June 14

 

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Maybe ...

You should just shut the fuck up.

Real nice of President Obama to put in his two cents on the whole Anthony Weiner issue. For a man who can't take a stand on anything to do with policy matters, who keeps his mouth shut when Republicans drag it in the dirt, this is the issue he chooses to take a firm stand on? Sometimes I wonder about this fucking guy. If he would have been this determined during the health care debate, we might have something resembling single-payer right now. The man has no balls when it counts, but he's sure willing to kick his own when they're down. Clown.

 

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Yet when we compare these people to the Taliban, we are mean, over-the-top and trafficking in hyperbole? "For the past week, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) has been roundly criticized by religious and LGBT groups alike for inviting other governors to join him at an anti-gay prayer event hosted by stridently bigoted American Family Association. Not only has Perry courted the radical wing of the religious right for years, he has a history of bucking responsibility for tough problems by invoking God. For instance, while Texas was facing a historic drought and rash of wildfires, Gov. Perry extolled Texans to "pray for rain," as he tried to cut funding for the agency battling the wildfires. ... As Perry is poised to sign the most draconian state budget in recent history that slashes essential services for the poor and middle class while potentially laying off 100,000 teachers, Kyle Mantyla of Right Wing Watch Kyle digs up this gem of an interview from May in which the governor sheds some light on his motivations. During an appearance on James Robison's Life Today television program, Perry says he sees a silver lining to the devastating recession that has cost millions of families their jobs, homes, and livelihoods: it will return America to "Biblical principles" and free us from the slavery of big government."

 

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Joe Lieberman isn't camera shy. Why is it so hard for a reporter, any reporter, to simply ask him why he wants to raise the Medicare age when all evidence shows that it would be a disaster? And then don't let him just say "aww shucks" with his sideways shit-eating grin. Why is that so hard? The facts are right there. Why won't anyone in the media do it?

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$6.6 billion missing in Iraq

If they can't properly follow money like this, chances are good that there is a lot more waste where that came from. Where's the accountability in the Pentagon?

 

The outright theft of billions, billions more given in no-bid contracts to Halliburton and KBR, the wholesale squandering of the entire Clinton-era surplus to pay for George W. Bush's wars -- wars without end that Barack Obama feels somehow obliged to continue.

When I draw the verbal picture of billionaires pointing our attention at the poor while they're lifting the last few bucks out of our wallets while we're distracted, this is exactly what I'm talking about.

 

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If Clarence and Ginni Thomas were liberals, he would have already been impeached, convicted and imprisoned. "Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's wife Virginia "Ginni" Thomas has a new job in conservative journalism that keeps her involved with the recent focus of her political activism and business dealings -- the tea party movement. ... As a part-time special correspondent for the Daily Caller, Thomas plans to tap into the movement, according to emails sent this month to top tea party organizers around the country, to build a list of "leaders from the grassroots in each state ... who have their ear to the ground" and are willing to be surveyed weekly by two "prominent pollsters." The results will be published on the Daily Caller website. ... Thomas's involvement with the tea party and the conservative movement in general has been a continuing source of controversy both for her and her husband. ... Ginni Thomas's 2009 creation of a tea party non-profit group for which she raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in undisclosed contributions, as well as her subsequent creation of a tea party consulting firm last year, has become the basis for allegations by some liberals that her husband's impartiality has been compromised. ... And her attendance at an annual summit of major conservative donors organized by the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch - revealed in a recent speech by a federal judge and Thomas family ally - can be expected to draw even more scrutiny."

 

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IOKIYAR -  It always is.

 

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News?

Heterosexual men with the most anti-gay attitudes, when asked, reported not being sexually aroused by gay male sex videos. But, their penises reported otherwise.

Homophobic men were the most sexually aroused by gay male sex acts.

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You have have lost your job in the Goldman Sachs Depression, you may be hanging on by the skin of your teeth to your home, but the scum-sucking bottom feeders that are calling you fifty times a day to try and get blood out of your financial turnip want not only what you can't pay them, they want to be loved, as well.

Debt collectors lare well aware that they are not a sympathetic lot. But now they are saying enough is enough. The trade association that represents them is engaged in an unlikely charm offensive to change their lowly image, while also trying to shape the rules that govern them as they face the prospect of a tough new regulator.

Screw ACA. I love their crap that they are "trying to help debtors", for that is about as far from the truth as it is possible to get.

 

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FBI's new rules on investigations

 

The shorter version: "We can investigate anyone we damn well please for any reason that suits us and there is not a frakking thing that you can do about it."

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is giving significant new powers to its roughly 14,000 agents, allowing them more leeway to search databases, go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention.

Civil liberties: They were fun while we had them.

 

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GOP priorities: Poor women and their children can fuck off and die, and do it quickly before they cost any money -- but Azaleas, now there is a vital spending priority. "This week, the House plans to vote on the fiscal year 2012 Agriculture appropriations bill, which provides funding to, among other agencies, the Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (the nation's commodities market watchdog). House Republicans have been crowing that this bill cuts agriculture funding by nearly $3 billion from last year's level, and is coming in $5 billion below President Obama's 2012 budget request. ... "This legislation reflects hard decisions to cut lower priority programs, reduce spending in programs that can be scaled back, and target funds where they are needed most so that our nation continues on the path to fiscal recovery," said House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-KY). Evidently, the House GOP finds nutrition assistance for low-income women and their children to be a "lower priority program," as the bill cuts the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) to such an extent that 325,000 to 475,000 currently eligible women and children will be denied help."

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Someone will have to go to jail eventually, right? Please tell us we're right... "New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has targeted Bank of America, the biggest U.S. bank by assets, in a new probe that questions the validity of potentially thousands of mortgage securities and their associated foreclosures, two people familiar with the matter said. ... The investigation, which began quietly in recent weeks, is part of a larger inquiry that is scrutinizing whether mortgage companies and Wall Street firms took the necessary steps under New York state law when creating mortgage-backed securities, these people said, who requested anonymity because they weren't authorized to speak publicly about the probe. ... Court testimony and independent studies have raised questions over whether banks and other financial firms passed along the required documents to trusts, the independent entities that oversee securities for investors. In some cases where trusts moved to seize borrowers' homes, judges have determined the trusts lacked legal standing due to faulty documentation. ... The inquiry could prove explosive: Wall Street's great mortgage securitization machine took millions of home loans and bundled them into securities for sale to investors. If the legal steps that guide securitization -- like taking mortgage documents from one party to another, a critical step under New York law -- were not undertaken, then the investors who bought the bundled loans could force the companies to buy them back, compelling them to eat enormous losses. ... New York state investigators could also find that those securities aren't valid financial instruments at all and take action under state law."

 

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Tennessee Law Bans Offensive Images Online, Entire Internet By Extension

 

 

The state of Tennessee is not very interested in their 9.6% unemployment rate, but legislators made time to write a law trying to force all the offensive people on the Internet to be nicer. Don't they know that this is the entire reason people use the Internet, to insult one other? Gov. Bill Haslam signed a bill last week imposing a $2,500 fine on anyone who "transmits or displays" any image, anywhere online that upsets a single person. This is now the best/only reason to move to Tennessee for the next six or so days until this dumb unconstitutional law is immediately struck down.  Go and file complaints against every person in Tennessee who posts thirty pictures a day of their pets on Twitter. Also, pictures of Sarah Palin where she is not making a stupid face. Actually, whatever, pretty much everyone's images should now be banned, except Rod Blagojevich, because who doesn't want to look at that, for hours.

From TGDaily.com:

The new law adds images to the list of communications that that the Volunteer State can throw you in the slammer for, involuntarily of course.

However, for image postings, the "emotionally distressed" individual doesn't even have to be the intended receiver. Anyone who views the image is a potential victim. If a court thinks you "should have known" that an image you posted would be upsetting to somebody who sees it, you can face months in prison and thousands of dollars in fines.

And on and on until the Internet is cancelled in Tennessee, if it isn't already. [TGDaily.com]

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The Land Of The Best And Most Expensive Health Care

Facing a life-and-death struggle with kidney cancer, Rita Moore took her prescription for a new kind of chemotherapy pill to her local drugstore.

She was stunned when the pharmacist told her the cost for a month's supply would be $2,400, well beyond her income.

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Saving endangered animals is not something poor nations can afford - Bangladesh deserves the world's help with this. "Bangladesh is setting up a special force to save the critically endangered Royal Bengal Tiger and other animals. The 300-member force will be deployed mostly around the Sundarbans mangrove forests, one of the last refuges of the tigers. The decision came months after they seized three tiger skins and a large quantity of bones, the biggest haul of illegal tiger parts in decades. The Sundarbans forests stretch between Bangladesh and India. Around 400 tigers still live in the area. Until now poaching has not been considered as the chief threat to the tiger population in Bangladesh. But the arrest of a poacher with tiger skins and bones earlier this year raised fears that an organised poaching group was operating in the mangrove forests. Officials admitted they did not have enough manpower, resources and training to counter the poachers, who they said were using increasingly sophisticated techniques to trap the tigers. Minister of Environment and Forests Hasan Mahmud said that the setting up of the new wildlife force was long overdue. "The forest department staff in Bangladesh need more training, because now the poachers are very sophisticated," he said."

 

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Debate highlights! - "Herman Cain promised not to appoint any Muslims who want to kill Americans to his cabinet. Michele Bachmann supports states rights on gay marriage, but also supports a constitutional amendment outlawing it. Newt Gingrich faults big government for the lamentable absence of manned stations on the moon. Rick Santorum wants to "a system of discipline" to "punish" gay soldiers, which suggests that his problem with pornographic Google results is not likely to abate. Tim Pawlenty views Iraq as "one of the shiniest examples of success in the Middle East." (Daily Beast)

Saddle-up another goat! - Successful baby-mill operator and noted American History scholar Michele Bachmann last night announced her intention to run in the 2012 Goat Rodeo Thank you Jeebus for this gift of snark we are about to receive! (The Ticket)

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WTF?

I'm sure Rudy Giuliani would approve:

DETROIT -- A Brooklyn man kicked off a flight at Detroit Metro Airport for swearing was considering suing the airline Monday.

Robert Sayegh, 37, said that he and other passengers on the Atlantic Southeast Airlines flight to Newark, N.J., were made to wait for 45 minutes at a gate before boarding the flight, The Detroit News reported.

Once he was on the flight, he said, a flight attendant overheard him saying to a passenger next to him, "What's taking so f-----g long to close the overheard compartments?"

The plane taxied to the runway, but it soon returned to the terminal, where police boarded and escorted Sayegh off, the newspaper reported.

'Sayegh'. That sounds suspiciously Middle Eastern. I'm sure they were well within their 9/11-granted rights to kick the guy off the plane.

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Lioness tries to eat baby at the zoo

 

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If you missed the Republican debate last night on CNN, you essentially missed every Republican candidate telling us that the states and the private sector can do everything better than the federal government — even though the federal government landed a man on the moon, defeated the Nazis and Imperial Japan at the same time, preserved the Union, provided a safety net for senior citizens, and has a pretty solid track record of making sure a Happy Meal doesn't contain asbestos.

The states? They can barely pave roads or avoid bankruptcy. And the private sector shoved us to the brink of the Second Great Depression and is currently responsible for nine percent unemployment. Let's hand them the keys to the economy!

Meanwhile, the moderator, CNN's John King, was as robotic as usual. Nothing overly challenging. No real insight into the issues. And he asked the candidates various "this or that" questions. For example, he asked Newt whether he liked American Idol or Dancing with the Stars (Newt prefers Idol). He asked Herman Cain, the founder of Godfather's Pizza, whether he preferred thin crust or thick crust. Very serious.

We're facing some of the most critical times in the history of the United States and the world — much of this due to the policies of the Republican Party, and we're asking them whether they like iPhones or Blackberries? Unfeakingbelievable. They all stood up there repeating the same myopic conservative bumper sticker solutions that created the recession — Reaganomics, supply side, deregulation, tax cuts, and all the rest of it. And CNN treated it like a game show.

Now, in CNN's defense, when Fox News Channel hosts a debate, the theatrics will be more ridiculous and the topics a thousand times more silly.