Saturday, September 3, 2011

Headlines - Saturday September 3

A block of ice four times the size of Manhattan has split off from a Greenland glacier and melted--an event so dramatic that it's shocked the scientists who study the area...The scientist said no similar event has happened in Greenland since recorded observations began in 1876.
 
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Common Dreams: U.S. Awash in Oil and Lies, Report Charges
 
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Day of Rage
 
 
On the 17th of September, we want to see 20,000 people to flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months. Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices and we will not leave until that demand has been met. Like our brothers and sisters in Egypt, Greece, Spain, and Iceland, we plan to use the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic of mass occupation to restore democracy in America. We also encourage the use of nonviolence to achieve our ends and maximize the safety of all participants.
 
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pictured: joe walsh in an earlier fox news appearance this year. 
Tea Party Congressman And Deadbeat Dad Joe Walsh Plans To Boycott President Obama's Jobs Speech
 
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Rep. Duncan Hunter has failed several times in legislative attempts to thwart the repeal of DADT. Now he wants to pass a bill making it legal for straight troops to harass gay ones. SRSLY.
The draft bill prepared by Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran who served as a Marine Corps officer before being elected to Congress, does not prevent repeal of the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy by the end of September, but it would require the services to "ensure that a member of the Armed Forces under their jurisdiction is not pressured to approve of another person's sexual conduct if that sexual conduct is contrary to the personal principles of the member." Essentially, this would mean that military people have to accept the presence of gays in the military but they would not have to like it, said an aide familiar with the legislation.
And by "not have to like it," he means "totally free to abuse gay soldiers without fear of reprimand from superiors."
 
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Focus On The Family warns women that the "emotional porn" of soap operas and romance novels only sets them up with unrealistic expectations of how men should behave in real life. Don't expect real men in the real world to be emotionally available! Really!
Just as wives rightly complain when compared to the artificially created women of Internet porn, men should complain when compared to the artificial men of daytime television. In the real world where real men burn through a lot of emotional battery life to make a real living, being expected to behave like men who don't exist is more than wrong. It's cruel. Emo-porn creates caricatures in the minds and hearts of wives. Most men just aren't and cannot be that attentive, especially in marriage where responsibilities to provide weigh heavy upon them. Husbands are quietly deemed unresponsive and uncaring when compared to emotionally dexterous hunks of daytime lore, chat rooms, celebrity rags, and romance novels. Thus a secretive and snowballing form of marital discontent is born and nurtured.
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Mario: Rick Santorum's bigotry
 
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At least one Wingnut out there is willing to say what the rest of them aren't even though they're all thinking it.

Conservative columnist Matthew Vadum is just going to come right out and say it: registering the poor to vote is un-American and "like handing out burglary tools to criminals."

"It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country — which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote," Vadum, the author of a book published by World Net Daily that attacks the now-defunct community organizing group ACORN, writes in a column for the American Thinker.

"Encouraging those who burden society to participate in elections isn't about helping the poor," Vadum writes. "It's about helping the poor to help themselves to others' money. It's about raw so-called social justice. It's about moving America ever farther away from the small-government ideals of the Founding Fathers."

Letting poor people vote is un-American? Only if you view America through a prism of fascist fantasy.

While these are horrible things to say, they aren't at all out of line with what most conservatives really think, and this person obviously has no problem saying what no one else is willing to.

And you don't need to take my word for it. You can simply view conservative legislative history, as virtually nothing they have passed for the least 30 years did anything to help the less fortunate among us and plenty to harm us.

You don't have to go back very far either. The Paul Ryan Path to Poverty, which all of the Republicans voted for, would radically redesign the nation in favor of the rich. More in favor than it already is, anyway.

I have no problem with these accusations that President Obama wants to "zealously" register people to vote or that he wants to pursue an agenda of "raw" social justice. That's great. Shout it from the rooftops! Mister Vadum is deranged enough to think that's a bad thing so let him repeat it ad nauseam.

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Ari Berman has an explosive article in Rolling Stone on the national assault by the Republican Party on voting rights that is going on around the country. Berman documents a number of schemes intended to make it harder for people of color, young people, and the elderly from being able to vote. Not coincidentally, these are all demographics which typically vote for Democrats.

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An email went out to Obama supporters yesterday about "jobs." The email bashed congress, all of congress, and didn't mention once the word "Republican."

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Cool prehistoric animal news of the week. 'A woolly rhino fossil dug up on the Tibetan Plateau is believed to be the oldest specimen of its kind yet found. The creature lived some 3.6 million years ago - long before similar beasts roamed northern Asia and Europe in the ice ages that gripped those regions. The discovery team says the existence of this ancient rhino supports the idea that the frosty Tibetan foothills of the Himalayas were the evolutionary cradle for these later animals. The report appears in Science journal. "It is the oldest specimen discovered so far," said Xiaoming Wang from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, US. "It is at least a million years older, or more, than any other woolly rhinos we have known. It's quite well preserved - just a little crushed, so not quite in the original shape; but the complete skull and lower jaw are preserved," he told BBC News. The rhino was found in Tibet's Zanda Basin. The area is rich in fossil beds, and this specimen was unearthed along with examples of extinct horse, antelope, snow leopard, badger and many other kinds of mammals. It has been put in a new species classification - Coelodonta thibetana .... Although the extinction of the Pleistocene beasts, such as woolly mammoths and rhinos, great sloths and sabre-tooth cats, has been intensively studied in recent years, much less is known about where these giants came from and how they acquired their adaptations for living in a cold environment. The argument made in the Science paper is that perhaps they got those adaptations on the Tibetan Plateau. "When this rhino existed, the global climate was much warmer and the northern continents were free of the massive ice sheets seen in the later ice ages," Dr Wang said. "Then, about a million years later, when the ice age did hit the world, these Tibetan woolly rhinos were basically pre-adapted to the ice age environment because they had this ability to sweep snows. They just happily came down from the high altitude areas and expanded to the rest of Eurasia." The Los Angeles-based researcher concedes that many more fossil finds will be required to underpin the Tibetan hypothesis."

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Jon Stewart: World of Class Warfare - The Poor's Free Ride Is Over

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"I've never seen anything like this ever"

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Clean air is socialist

Obama Calls For Smog Death To Please GOP (They Still Aren't Pleased)

government-issue pollution masks are also socialist. go buy your own, hippies!

Barack Obama is still diligently working his way down the GOP's War on Christmas wish list of giant white corporate castles built from the skulls of welfare recipients and two-headed glow in the dark ponies riddled with toxic-sludge-filled DNA, and oh look, here's another one: the White House ordered the EPA to withdraw a proposal for tighter smog regulations, so that America's children might have less oxygen flowing to their brains on their way to school. Merry Lung Cancer Death, everyone! The AP article then gives a little "journalistic context" by listing off the hundreds or possibly thousands of other ways in which Barack Obama's administration has capitulated to John Boehner's hollering cabal of corporate-owned Earth rapists in just the last few months, for fun. Did John Boehner at least say thank you for all of America's presents paid for in human suffering?  

Haha, of course not.

From the AP:

The withdrawal of the proposed regulation marks the latest in a string of retreats by Obama in the face of Republican opposition. Last December, he shelved, at least until the end of 2012, his insistence that Bush-era tax cuts should no longer apply to the wealthy. Earlier this year he avoided a government shutdown by agreeing to Republican demands for budget cuts. And this summer he acceded to more than a $1 trillion in spending reductions, with more to come, as the price for an agreement to raise the nation's debt ceiling.

A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, had muted praise for the White House, saying that withdrawal of the smog regulation was a good first step toward removing obstacles that are blocking business growth.

Come on, John Boehner, this was one of the most expensive ones:

But perhaps more than some of the other regulations under attack, the ground-level ozone standard is most closely associated with public health — something the president said he wouldn't compromise in his regulatory review. Ozone is the main ingredient in smog, which is a powerful lung irritant that occasionally forces cancellation of school recesses, and causes asthma and other lung ailments.

What will Obama give to the GOP next to never win their love? [AP]

Toxic Avenger Applauds President Obama's Decision to Scrap New Air Quality Standards

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The Tea Party is the Enemy – Make no Apologies

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Fresh off of downgraded US debt, S&P is back to giving a AAA rating to subprime mortgages!

That's enough awesome to last me through the long weekend.

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The Justice Department today announced that brothers Brian Wallis, 21, and James Lee Wallis Jr., 25, pleaded guilty to committing a hate crime by intentionally attempting to intimidate African-American students who were attending Beekman Junior High School in Beekman, Morehouse Parish, La. Tony L. Johnson, 30, previously pleaded guilty to the same offense.

During their respective plea hearings, each of the three defendants admitted that they hung a dead raccoon in a noose from a flagpole located in front of Beekman Junior High School. They each further admitted that they were angered by the school's new busing policy, which had increased the number of African-American children attending the school, and that they wanted to scare the children into leaving the school.

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Job growth has stalled since Boner's GOP tea party took charge

1. Job growth under stimulus when Democrats controlled Congress; 2. Job decline under Boehner and GOP tea party anti-growth obstructionism

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