Headlines - Thursday May 31

 

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Republican super PACs and other outside groups shaped by a loose network of prominent conservatives – including Karl Rove, the Koch brothers and Tom Donohue of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – plan to spend roughly $1 billion on November's elections for the White House and control of Congress, according to officials familiar with the groups' internal operations.

 

So how many lies can you get for a bilion dollars?

 

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"A new biography came out that says that in high school Obama was a huge pothead … Mitt Romney had to respond to this and said, 'It is appalling that Obama spent his teenage years goofing around and smoking pot when he should have been pinning down gay kids and cutting their hair." –Bill Maher

 

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Benny the Rat Attacks Media
Typical Rethug when he gets caught

"This is not funny - stop laughing!"

Link

Pope Benny the Rat angrily denounced what he called false media coverage of a leaks scandal shaking
the Vatican over the worst crisis in his papacy. In unusually blunt remarks at the end of a general audience
in St Peter's Square where he repeatedly referred to personal suffering, the 85-year-old rape ringleader said
recent events had caused sadness in his heart.

"Suggestions have multiplied, amplified by some media which are totally gratuitous and which have gone
well beyond the facts, offering an image of the Holy See which does not correspond to reality," Benny said
of a scandal that has seen his butler arrested for stealing secret documents.
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Get ready to pony up even more to fly thanks to Congress. Not only will you have the pleasure of risking cancer with the porno-scanners and handing over your personal privacy to a system that is not known to be effective, but you will now pay more for it.

Only Congress and porno-scanner producers could think this is a good idea.

A Senate committee has approved a plan to double the fees charged to airline flyers to help fund the Transportation Security Administration.

Every flyer pays a $2.50 federal fee each way to help fund the TSA.

The proposal that just passed out of a US Senate committee would make that $5 each way or $10 per round trip.

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Birthers claim that the Constitution states that both parents must be natural-born citizens of the United States in order to be president. The Philadelphia Convention must have written that clause in invisible ink, because nowhere in Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the Constitution does it state that. The Constitution states that the candidate must only be born here (check), must be at least 35-years-old (check), and be a US resident for at least 14 years (check).

What makes the second thinking so hilarious is that under Birthers' very own logic, the GOP's 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney is also ineligible to be president - his papi was born in Mexico.

Mitt's dad George Romney was governor of Michigan for two terms, and even unsuccessfully ran for the presidency in 1968. But spanning his life back a few decades, today's anti-Mexican Republicans might be a little upset to know that George was born in present-day Chihuahua, Mexico, after his grandparents had fled the United States' pesky anti-polygamy laws a few decades earlier (now there's some family values). It might be interesting to ask Birthers where they were when George Romney was running in 1968, since his Mexican birth would seem to violate the whole "natural-born" clause thing.

Oh, that's right: He's white.

That aside, it would seem that under their very own logic, Mitt Romney is also not eligible to run for president, having only one parent who was a natural-born citizen. After all, it's what they claim about Obama, since his father was born in Kenya. Yet there seems to be no Birther faction questioning Mitt's citizenship and eligibility - they say he's qualified. In fact, Mitt is so qualified to be a US citizen, that he's even qualified to be a citizen of Mexico.

Yes, GOP, your current nominee could be a Mexican.

Mexican law states that Mexico-born parents can register their US-born kids with the Mexican consulate, thus making them dual citizens of the US and Mexico, with full rights from each nation. George Romney was born in Mexico, so Mitt can be a Mexican citizen. This might not poll so well with a party willing to "joke" about electrocuting Mexicans in order to stop them from getting into the country. Of course, it won't make Mitt so popular with the Mexican side either, after Mitt kindly asked them to self-deport last year.

It's clear Birthers are willing to forgo harassing the white guy about his ineligibility, the same ineligibility they've already clearly defined for the Black one. But these are the same people who think the president grabbed Doc Brown and transported via DeLorean to 1961 in order to place his own fake birth announcement in Hawaiian newspapers, so there's that. But it's too late, GOP. Mitt is officially your guy. So turn the channel to Telemundo and start campaigning to make Romney el presidente. La Casa Blanca will never be the same again.Read the rest of this post...

 

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Oklahoma Doctor Refuses to Provide Emergency Contraceptive to Rape Victim on Basis of Religious Conscience

 

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Erik Kain and Digby are sitting in for Kevin Drum at Mother Jones. Digby's post on the Catholic Bishop's call for civil disobedience to preserve their inalienable right to not pay for contraception made me laugh:

The bulletin insert reminds Catholic parishioners that the bishops have called for "A Fortnight of Freedom"—which they have described as "a special period of prayer, study, catechesis, and public action"—to take place from June 21 to July 4.

Those fuckers are so goddam ancient and out of touch that this is the catchiest marketing slogan they can dream up. I wonder how many Catholics will go a few furlongs out of their way to preserve this special freedom from something almost all of them have used. And will this help us forget the scores of kids raped under their watch? Unless we've all partaken of a few gills of intoxicating spirit, methinks not.

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Hey guys, remember that time when the little tyke got up into the pulpit and sang "Ain't no homos gonna make it to heaven"? Me Neither!, but anyway Pastor Jeff Sangl from Indiana's Apostolic Truth Tabernacle Church has received death threats, leading him to abruptly leave for vacation with his wife. (TPM)

 

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Now JC Penney is just rubbing their openmindedness and tolerance in the faces of the haters and bigots After the religious right failed to intimidate the department store chain into dumping Ellen Degeneres as their spokesperson, the company is following up by featuring an real-life gay couple in their fathers day ads.

 

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The re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act, new funds for the U.S. highway system, and a bill to prevent interest rates on student loan debt from doubling are all stuck in Congress with no clear path out.

 

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In Churches Across The Country, Far-Right Pastors Preach Anti-Gay Hate And Violence

 

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Soaked With Oil Cash, Republicans Block Military's Push To Use Clean Energy

 

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Rick Scott bravely purges 91 year old war hero criminal from voting rolls 

 

 

Oh look, there they go again! By "they" we mean the Democrats, always crying about voter suppression. Look, is it our fault that their supporters are all vicious thugs, pot smokers, illegal immigrants, white slavers, people whose names end in vowels or "z," vicious illegal immigrant thugs, and liberals? Only Rick Scott is man enough to delegate to various bureaucratic state agencies the important task of removing these scumbags from the voter registration database, leaving Democracy in the hands of the people who invented it (white people, for the most part). And now the liberal media in liberal Miami are pouncing on one of the purge's greatest successes — the removal of an admitted criminal from the voting rolls — like it's a bad thing!

READ MORE »

 

 

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NC developers working hard to prevent scientists from making sea level forecasts

North Carolina science people have determined that coastal sea levels are expected to rise 1 meter by 2100 — far more than they've traditionally risen, due to the expected impacts of climate change. But developers in 20 coastal counties, see, have determined that such a rise would be bad for development prospects. So they've lobbied the state to lower that forecast to only 15 inches instead, because why not? Fifteen's a nice number. Arbitrary, sure, but can't the scientists just shut up already? READ MORE »

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Headlines - Wednesday May 30

Romney warns of a weakened military under Obama

Mitt Romney warned Monday that the "world is not safe" and cast the upcoming election as a choice between a nation that is weakened militarily versus "a strong America."

 

Dissing Obama's "weakened military" who assassinated bin Laden. Why is he opening that door?

 

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"I mean, Mitt Romney comes from a Mormon background. I don't know how many wives he has. I'm not saying that I believe in that, I'm just saying he was born on a Mormon compound. I'm not a 'Wifer' but for some reason he's never shown his original marriage certificate." – Bill Maher

 

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So after The Willard Mechanism continued to express support for short-fingered vulgarian The Donald, Trump continued to serve up steaming, fresh Birther nonsense. And when someone takes the time to sober up Peggington Noonnington after a three-day binge to put her on the TeeVee machine to speak out against Trump, well, can the end be far behind?

 

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Christian Love: It's apparently an actual song and not only did they teach it to a four year-old, they proudly brought him up to the pulpit to perform it, generating whoops and a standing ovation from the congregation. Praise! Glory! Hit the link for the video if you can bear it.

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This is comedy gold.

BLITZER: Donald, you're beginning to sound a little ridiculous, I have to tell you.

TRUMP: You are, Wolf. Let me tell you something, I think you sound ridiculous, and if you'd ask me a question and let me answer it.

BLITZER: Here's the question, did the conspiracy start in 1961 where the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and the Advertiser contemporaneously published announcements that he was born in Hawaii?

TRUMP: Many people put those announcements in because they wanted to get the benefit because of getting so-called born in this country. Many people did it. It was something done by many people even though they weren't born in the country. You know and I know it.

Video of the exchange here.

We're only hours away from Birther-a-palooza in Las Vegas with The Donald, Newt Gingrich, and Mitt Romney. It should be a sight to behold.

Has there ever been a presidential candidate as devoid of dignity and decency as Mitt Romney?

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More tax free Christian love: Kansas Pastor Wants Government To Kill All The Gays (AUDIO)

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The ocean food chain in action.

Across the vast Pacific, the mighty bluefin tuna carried radioactive contamination that leaked from Japan's crippled nuclear plant to the shores of the United States 6,000 miles away — the first time a huge migrating fish has been shown to carry radioactivity such a distance.

"We were frankly kind of startled," said Nicholas Fisher, one of the researchers reporting the findings online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The levels of radioactive cesium were 10 times higher than the amount measured in tuna off the California coast in previous years. But even so, that's still far below safe-to-eat limits set by the U.S. and Japanese governments.

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That's just embarrassing. Humiliating, even. Current, sitting US Representative Thaddeus McCotter not only didn't turn in enough signatures to get his name on the August primary ballot to keep his job, only 244 of the 2000 signatures were valid. Some pages of signatures were photocopied and inserted multiple times, occasionally changing the name of the signature gatherer. It was so eggregious that the Secretary of State has turned it over to the Attorney General for possible criminal charges forthcoming for blatant violations of Michigan state election laws. McCotter, of course, is undetered, and announced on Tuesday that he will launch a write-in campaign, since he won't be on the ballot.

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A gift for the obvious, wouldn't you say? The Pope says that the whistleblower butler who blew the cover of the Vatican banking scam "betrayed him." Well, duh. That's what whistleblowers do. They betray the trust of bad actors who violated it to begin with by their actions. In the case of the Pope, he violates the trust of faithful, practicing Catholics every day by sullying the office he occupies by behaving as nothing more than an opportunistic, criminal, predator and thug in a pretty dress and big fancy hat.

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Spell check would be helpful for Rmoney's team:

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According to a new report from the Office of Research at the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the U.S. has one of the highest rates of child poverty in the developed world. Of the 35 wealthy countries studied by UNICEF, only Romania has a child poverty rate higher than the 23 percent rate in the U.S.

Also:

There are no states in this country where a 40-hour workweek at minimum wage can pay the rent of a two bedroom apartment:

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But just this one

House Republicans locate lone instance when equal rights apply

House Republicans have at long last identified a segment of a woman's existence when they feel she deserves federal protection against discrimination: the six or so weeks between when the sex of a fetus can be determined and when it reaches the fetal viability mark past which abortion is limited in most states. Sorry, lady readers, your window for equal rights has already closed! Enjoy your pay gap. The House will vote this week on the "Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act," a productive use of everyone's time that promises to slap up to five years of prison time on doctors caught performing sex-selective abortions in a quest to improve upon the scary levels of "zero statistical evidence" that U.S. parents in general prefer male over female fetuses. Bonus: the Republicans get to call Democrats girl-baby eating monsters! READ MORE »

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Hot travel prospects

Who's pumped to spend a week with Republicans, in Tampa, in the summer? 

There is nothing more titillating than the possibility of spending a week with wingnut delegates and Mitt Romney in plastic neon boretown Tampa, Florida, the city where oppressive humidity was invented, in August. It's everything overweight fair-skinned reporters have always dreamed of! And the Tampa Bay Host Committee has released a teaser trailer to help you boner up for all the exciting events they've got planned for Republican National Convention week: explosions, explosions, and more explosions! Maybe a lil' politics on the side too? Tampa's the place to be, in August. READ MORE »

Headlines - Tuesday May 29

 

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Eugene Robinson: Romney's pants on fire

 

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Jill: I'm waiting for the Republicans to start branding war veterans as lazy slackers

 

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During the NATO Summit, the Chicago cops were crashing into people's apartments, terrorizing the residents and searching them. Without probable cause. Without warrants.

It seems that since the cops were there to search the apartment of some political activists[1], they cops took it upon themselves to go search the neighbors' apartments. For no goddamned reason whatsoever.

The Chicago police department has a long and bloody record of acting as though they were transplanted, en masse, from a police state. They often don't seem to care about fuzzy hippie concepts such as "civil rights" and "the Constitution".

One hopes that the city of Chicago is now going to have to cough up a few million dollars to settle the inevitable lawsuits.

 

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President Obama is personally overseeing "the shadow war with Al Qaeda," spearheading "the 'nominations' process to designate terrorists for kill or capture."

 

Could we please stop the killing?

 

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While Mitt Romney was "running the Olympic games he had been investing in a company that was making performance-enhancing drugs banned by them, and he had been for almost a decade."

 

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Here we go again - Notable orange person and Speaker of the House Weepy McDrunky plans to hold the credit worthiness of the United States hostage again this summer. So... how did it work for us last time? It almost derailed the recovery, that's how! And this time could be a lot worse. (Bloomberg)

 

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MSNBC reports:

Although gay rights and anti-hate groups responded with outrage when a North Carolina pastor called for gays and lesbians to be fenced in so they eventually die off, he was greeted with a standing ovation by his church members when he approached the pulpit, the Hickory Record reported. "I appreciate all the support," Pastor Charles Worley told the 100 or so congregants at Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, N.C. on Sunday, according to the Record. Several members stood and spoke out; others threw up their hands in support of their pastor. "I've got a King James Bible," Worley said, according to the Record. "I've been a preacher for 53 years. Do you think I'm going to bail out on this?"

A formal request has been filed that the IRS consider revoking Pastor Worley's tax-exempt status.

 

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More evidence in convenient chart form that President Obama isn't the big government spender the Republicans are claiming he is.

By the way, one way to infuriate your Republican friends when they tell you they didn't like George W. Bush's spending either, mention to them that Reagan tripled the debt. It was $994 billion in 1981, and rose to $2.8 trillion in 1989. Stand back and watch the "uhhh, but, uhhh."

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A forlorn and still-self-pitying Randy "Duke" Cunningham is asking for his right to bear arms back when he leaves prison later this year. But the judge in his case had an ironic reply for the former congressman sent up for bribery. Ryan Reilly has our report.

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SEC reportedly decides against any enforcement action against former executives of Lehman Brothers for the collapse that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis.

 

Headlines - Monday May 28

They died for this?

 

As we head into this year's Memorial Day, a day when we remember those who gave their lives in the service of what this nation is supposed to stand for, the whole exercise seems somewhat hollow. Oh, there will be parades tomorrow, and veterans will march, and people will attend the parades, and my little neighbor next door, who loves all things military, will wave his flags and try to get his parents to let him sell cups of water to raise money for the soldiers. And the guy at my local post office yesterday who was in the Army band in World War II and feels terrible saying that he has no idea what we're doing in Afghanistan, and if we can't figure it out we should just leave will also attend the parade and remember all the guys he served with long ago who never came home.

But most people will skip the parades. They'll go to Best Buy and pick up a new air conditioner, or they'll pick up a new bathing suit at the mall, or get the tomatoes planted. They'll catch up on housework, or spend one last hot humid day at the beach before heading back to work. But there's one thing they won't do, and that's think about how the stage is being set for this November's election to be a sham, a banana republic election that Saddam Hussein would have been proud of, one in which everyone that Republicans can't rely on to vote for them will be prevented from voting, either by rigging the voting machines, or providing inadequate machines to precincts, or by voter ID laws, or simply by purging people from the voter rolls for no reason. This latter tactic was perfected by Republican hero Jeb Bush in Florida in 2000, and convicted criminal and now-Governor Rick Scott is continuing Jeb Bush's grand tradition of disenfranchisement:

Maureen Russo was born in Akron, Ohio. For the last 40 years she's operated a dog boarding and grooming business — Bobbi's World Kennels — with her husband in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Maureen is 60 years old and has been a registered voter in the state for the last four decades. She regularly votes at the church around the corner from her home.

Two weeks ago she received a letter from the State of Florida informing her that they had received information that she was not born in this country and, therefore, was ineligible to vote.

She was given an option to request "an administrative hearing to present evidence" disputing the determination of the State of Florida that she was ineligible to vote. Unless Maureen returned a form requesting such a hearing within 30 days, she was told, it would result in "the removal of your name from the voter registration rolls."

She immediately sent off a registered letter to the State with a copy of her passport. She hasn't heard anything back.

Florida will be stolen again through voter roll purges of anyone who is a threat to vote Democratic. And so will Pennsylvania and Virginia -- three swing states that could decide November's election. Funny how DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is utterly silent on this, as are all the other Democrats, even after Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004, which leads me to ask the question: Do the Democrats WANT to lose, or they simply that fucking stupid? This is how democracy ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper.

 

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Afghan Family of Eight, Including Six Children, Killed in Nato Missile Attack

 

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The goal of the EU policies was to boost farm growth so that the region was less reliant on outside food sources but the end result has been a bird population that has been cut in half since 1980. The Guardian:

Indeed, according to a new survey, the chances of encountering any one of the 36 species of farmland birds in Europe – species that also include the lapwing, the skylark and the meadow pipit – are now stunningly low. Devastating declines in their numbers have seen overall populations drop from 600 million to 300 million between 1980 and 2009, the study has discovered.

This dramatic decline represents a 50% reduction and is blamed on major changes in farming policies enforced by the EU over the last 30 years.

In order to boost food production across Europe, the wholesale ripping up of hedgerows, draining of wetlands and ploughing over of meadows has robbed farmland birds of their homes and food. Numbers of linnets, turtle doves and lapwings have crashed as a result.

 

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Maine New Hampshire House Majority Leader D.J. Bettencourt is super sorry he is such a lying shitweasel, and also so very lazy and slothful and piggish (all three). And in Maine New Hampshire, apparently, making up 11 weeks worth of detailed entries for the law internship you only actually spent one hour on is enough to get you dragged screaming from your lofty perch in the Maine New Hampshire leadership! At least when the law internship is with J. Brandon Giuda, a fellow Republican who, weirdly, does not resemble the crusty old coot we imagined when picturing the kind of Mainer New Hampshirite who would force a fellow GOPpy to resign from the House over pathologically lying his way through a little paperwork. Anyway, Giuda saw a Facebook picture of Bettencourt graduating from law school, and he had himself a righteous holy snit. FACEBOOOOOK!!!! He demanded Bettencourt resign from the House for "personal reasons," and then fink on himself to the law school; instead of placing blame on himself and his "personal problems," though, Bettencourt blamed the resignation on his upcoming wedding. Giuda was not nearly satisfied with such a weaselly resignation, one that sought to hide how "dishonorable" he was, and made Bettencourt resign again. READ MORE

 

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Mitt Romney has announced that he will not be canceling his hot Las Vegas dinner date fundraiser with washed-up nut sack Donald Trump just because Donald Trump has been having birther "episodes" in the press — this time that he "knows" Barack Obama was born in Kenya — again. What is Romney supposed to do, go around discriminating against mentally ill people? That is not fair. He will just take their money, like any decent person.

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Hey Americaphile, what's new in Jersey? Anything interesting going on with respect to driving tests at whatever New Jersey calls the DMV? Could you please answer in the form of everything in bold and ALL CAPS?

Republican Sens. Gerald Cardinale of Cresskill and Michael Doherty of Warren/Hunterdon offered a bill to require both portions of the examinations for personal licenses – written test and skill test – to be administered only in English.

THIS MEASURE WILL MAKE ENGLISH AVAILABLE TO ALL AND BE A STRONG BULWARK AGAINST BIGOTRY AND RACISM!!!!

That is intriguing indeed! We did not understand the first word in your link back to your previous post about how "English-only" driving tests protect against bigotry and racism, so we will just have to take your word for it. Maybe because all the gross foreigners will be gone, so nobody can be racist against them? Yes, that makes the most sense by far. (At least more sense than Ireland and the Klan what?) But is there something crazier you would like to tell us, maybe what this English-only driving-test bill by these two American heroes has to do with Popery? READ MORE »

Headlines - Sunday May 27

In yet another sign of a completely dysfunctional economic system, public company CEO pay has gone up yet again. They will argue that the reason is because profits are up, which is accurate. At the same time, there's a problem when the financial upside is always about the select few. What ever happened to thinking about a company as a whole rather than just the CEO or his close network?

For all of the griping by Baby Boomers about how narcissistic today's youth can be, they should step back and look at this culture of greed and selfishness. The problem has been growing since the Gordon Gekko 1980s Wall Street days. Each decade it gets worse and corporate culture becomes more self-centered and all about greed.

This trend has to stop if we're to have a future. It's not just about a handful of people yet that's what we see year after year from public companies. Why is it so socially acceptable to fire by the thousands (ahem, Meg Whitman) yet when companies keep employees, the executives make less?

There continues to be something profoundly wrong with the modern corporate world. If this is the best modern capitalism can offer, we have no future.

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The Butler Did It!

 

Will it never end? Will no one high in the Vatican every pay for their crimes?

Note: The arrestee is a whistleblower, not the original (alleged) corruption perps, and the cops making the bust are Vatican, not Italian, police. Of course.

 

The Guardian: 

The pope's butler has been arrested by Vatican police on suspicion of leaking a large number of confidential letters addressed to Benedict XVI which have lifted the lid on alleged corruption and nepotism at the Holy See. ...

The arrest comes a month after the Vatican gave an investigative team led by Cardinal Julian Herranz, a member of Opus dei, a full "pontifical mandate" to join Vatican police in rooting out the perpetrators of what has been dubbed Vatileaks. ...

Among the most serious leaks published this year are in a letter from Carlo Maria Viganò, the deputy governor of Vatican City, denouncing inflated contracts with friendly companies, false invoicing and missing cash.

Further revelations were published this week in a book by a journalist, Gianluigi Nuzzi, who described how an unnamed whistleblower sent emissaries to sound him out before they held secret meetings in an unfurnished, rented flat near the Vatican. "I wore a USB round my neck for six months with the leaked documents on it," Nuzzi told the Guardian. "It was like something out of a film." In the book, the source says he was coming clean because "hypocrisy within the Vatican goes unchallenged and scandals multiply". ...

There's more; this is Ratzinger's Vatican. The list of allegations in the article is stunning.

Inflated contracts? Missing cash? Gay smears? And for good measure, this:

Letters depict collusion between the Berlusconi government and the Vatican over how to avoid EU pressure to make the Catholic church pay tax on its properties.

How ... secular.

UPDATE: Howie Klein adds this, "What Is It With Child Rape And Organized Religion?" at Down With Tyranny. It isn't just Catholics who cover crimes to protect "their own."

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The "objective morality" gotcha

There is a common line of attack Christians use in debates with atheists, and I genuinely detest it. It's to ask the question, "where do your morals come from?" I detest it because it is not a sincere question at all — they don't care about your answer, they're just trying to get you to say that you do not accept the authority of a deity, so that they can then declare that you are an evil person because you do not derive your morals from the same source they do, and therefore you are amoral. It is, of course, false to declare that someone with a different morality than yours is amoral, but that doesn't stop those sleazebags. Keep reading.

Or as Blue Girl writes: "If your religion is the only thing stopping you from raping and killing, then I don't want to be around when you have a crisis of faith."

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Coal Industry Pays Fake Activists $50 To Wear Pro-Coal Shirts At Public Hearing

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Washington is filled with people making other people's arguments for money. Anyone trying to do anything of good purpose is in a constant struggle to keep from drowning in the river of steaming bullshit served up by lobbyists and politicians and pundits and PR firms. They bend statistics, they do impressions of people who believe what they say, and all the while the country burns. And it is the height of arrogance to decry what's happened to our politics when you are a bonded practitioner of what's happened to our politics.

You want to be a pitchman for warlords? You want to carry the Devil's water in Washington? Go for it. But just don't tell me how to fucking talk.-former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett on Lanny Davis and the "both sides" meme

Well said, and indeed, some of the most turned-to names in politics are neck-deep in generating the problems of Washington while also being consulted on how to fix the problems in Washington. And they'll say we need to "stick to the issues" while ensuring that the issues are never resolved.

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Headlines - Saturday May 26

The bad news: CO2 emissions continue to rise, reaching a record 3.2% increase in 2011. This is bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.

The good news: most of the rise is attributed to China, offsetting reductions in the US and elsewhere. As a result, China will spend $27 billion "to promote energy-saving products, solar and wind power and accelerate the development of renewable energy and hybrid cars." My question to the "climate change is a hoax" crowd; there's obviously a market for dealing with CO2 -- real threat or otherwise -- does it make sense to sit this market out and let China dominate it, just to satisfy your religious belief that liberals are always wrong?

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Former GOP Rep. Connie Morella isn't a fan of today's Republican Party or its War on Women. As to the base's RINO-hunting, she says that moderate Republicans have become "an extinct species."

 

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Bigoted Church Member Defends Pastor Worley

 

 

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They rape kids in Philadelphia

They had 37 rapist priests and did NOTHING. Link

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While Americans are losing their homes without any leeway or help, one of the financial players most responsible for the economic collapse and recession is getting off without being brought up on charges by the SEC.

The agency has been grappling with the case for more than three years amid questions from lawmakers and investors as to whether Lehman misrepresented its financial health before filing the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history in September 2008.

Under a heading reading "Activity in Last Four Weeks," the undated document reads, "The staff has concluded its investigation and determined that charges will likely not be recommended."

According to the Republicans, the Obama administration is the most anti-capitalist team since whenever. Right? Right.

 

 

 

Headlines - Friday May 25

 

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Missouri House "spent more than $1,100 in taxpayer money on a security camera to keep watch over a new bronze bust of conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh." The small-government conservative talk show-host was inducted into the Hall of Famous Missourians during a closed-door ceremony last week. He joined the ranks of "President Harry Truman, Walt Disney and former Cardinals baseball star Stan Musial."

 

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What comical attempts at cliché villainy do we have out of New Jersey's ranks of local crony politicians today? Here's one: the FBI has hauled off West New York's Democratic mayor Felix Roque and his son on charges of hacking into a website associated with a movement to recall the mayor and then calling up the website's owner to notify the person that "everyone would pay for getting involved against Mayor Roque." OOOOOH– ha ha, just kidding. Sarah Palin makes better threats to her own in-laws. READ MORE »

 

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It's been a fun few years, but now Levi Johnston, once and future sperm gifter extraordinaire, has joined every other 22-year-old in America and become broke and a tenant in his mother's home. According to a report in US Weekly, Levi has already ("already") squandered his $1 million winnings from being Mr. Playgirl Winter 2010 on guns, ATVs and other beacons of manhood. This has caused him to cease paying child support to Bristol Palin for Tripp, allegedly, but has not prevented him from naming his impending second child after a gun. But IS IT ANY WONDER a boy-man with not really that much money, in modern B-list terms, has lost it all years before he even becomes ineligible for his parents' health insurance plan? One person, at least, is excited about this: HIS MOMMY. READ MORE »

 

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Mario: Fox News – Ignorance With Intent

 

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Richard Grenell is the openly gay conservative hack political consultant Mitt Romney hired to be his national security spokesman. After one week on the job, Grenell resigned over pressure exerted by homophobes within the Republican party. Here's what he had to say in a piece he wrote in the Wall Street Journal titled Marriage, Gay Republicans and the Elections.

The claim that gays should be barred from conservative activism is not only bigoted but is a bipartisan view. The intolerant assault comes from the far right, who object to Republicans who are gay, and the far left, who object to gays being Republicans. When the extremists on both sides are the only ones speaking up, the majority suffers.

What a load of crap. This 'both sides do it' bullshit is getting tiresome.

First of all, the intolerance is not coming from the "far right." It's coming from the mainstream part of the Republican party. Intolerance, bigotry and homophobia are required staples for anyone hoping to attain office as a Republican. Grenell's own choice for the White House is a guy named Mitt Romney who has pledged to support a constitutional amendment making same-sex marriage illegal.

I believe we should have a federal amendment in the Constitution that defines marriage as a relationship between a man and woman, because I believe the ideal place to raise a child is in a home with a mom and a dad.

Polls also indicate that Democrats and liberals favor same-sex marriage by a huge percentage over Republicans and conservatives.

You got that, Grenell? Seven out of ten Republicans hope you are never able to marry your partner.

And lastly, liberals have no objection to gays being Republicans. The LGBT community can support any party they wish. Liberals are simply asking why the hell would any sane gay person vote for a party that hates their very existence and views them as sexual perverts? A political party that strives to deny them the same civil rights afforded heterosexuals? Why would anyone want to do that to themselves?

Bottom line is that Richard Grenell is simply another conservative who needs to justify his party's indefensible policies by spreading the blame over to liberals and Democrats.

Not this time buddy. On this issue, as on most issues, the assholes are all on your side.

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Will Mitt Romney's running mate be a climate skeptic? You can count on it.

…we can already say with near-100 percent certainly that it'll be someone who's skeptical about the climate crisis and doubts that it's significantly driven by human activity.

This is because virtually all high-level Republicans are skeptical about the climate crisis, at least judging by their public statements and actions. To find a Republican who believes that we ought to do even a little something about global warming, Romney would have to wade into the garbage bin of GOP politics and consort with losers and has-beens like Charlie Crist and Jon Huntsman. Fat chance.

In their own words.

The [climate] debate, so far, has been dominated by 'experts' from the University of Hollywood and the P.C. Institute of Technology. … Any dissident voice is likely to be the target of a fatwa issued by one Alatollah [sic] or another of the climate change theocracy, branding the dissenter as a 'denier' for refusing to bow down to the 'scientific consensus.' -Mitch Daniels – Indiana Gov.

Actually, no…the non-debate has been dominated by the American National Academy of Sciences and every other major scientific body of every industrialized nation in the world. And no one is asking anyone to "bow down" to scientific consensus. All they're asking is that they accept the science because…well, because the people studying the scientific data are the world's leading climatologists while people like Daniels are idiot politicians bowing down to an idiot base who have been sold a false and contrived narrative by self-serving corporate entities who have a single goal – making money no matter what the costs to the planet and future generations.

I'm a skeptic. I'm not a scientist. I think the science has been politicized. I would be very wary of hollowing out our industrial base even further … It may be only partially man-made. It may not be warming by the way. The last six years we've actually had mean temperatures that are cooler. -Jeb Bush

Jeb is right on two counts: a) he's not a scientist and b) the science has been politicized. What he's not admitting is that the politicization is the work of people like himself and the Republican party serving the greedy needs of the fossil fuel industries.

So there is climate change, but the reality is the science of it indicates that most of it, if not all of it, is caused by natural causes. And as to the potential human contribution to that, there's a great scientific dispute about that very issue. -Tim Pawlenty

No, there is no "great scientific disupute" over "that very issue." The reality is that 97% of published climate scientists believe global warming to be caused by human activity.

The climate is always changing. The climate is never static. The question is whether it's caused by man-made activity and whether it justifies economically destructive government regulation. -Marco Rubio

How many times do we need to say it? The reality is that 97% of climate scientists believe global warming to be caused by human activity! Unless Rubio and others are climatologist with data that proves otherwise, they're talking nonsense.

Unfortunately, the reality is also that politicians like Romney and Pawlenty were accepting of man-made global warming until they realized that they didn't have a future in a political party that is too often willing to trash science in favor of serving the needs of the corporations that feed the party's coffers. The day that Jon Huntsman spoke the following words was the day he forsake any chance of becoming the Republican presidential nominee.

The minute that the Republican Party becomes the party – the anti-science party, we have a huge problem. We lose a whole lot of people who would otherwise allow us to win the election in 2012. When we take a position that isn't willing to embrace evolution, when we take a position that basically runs counter to what 98 of 100 climate scientists have said, what the National Academy of Science – Sciences has said about what is causing climate change and man's contribution to it, I think we find ourselves on the wrong side of science, and, therefore, in a losing position.

The wrong side of science.

The wrong side of social issues.

The wrong side of economic issues.

The wrong side of decency, honesty and intelligence.

The wrong side of humanity.

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Republicans don't support the troops

Last week, the Republican-led House Armed Services Committee proposed a new Pentagon budget. Tucked away inside it was a provision that would prohibit the DOD from buying any alternative fuels that cost more than conventional fossil fuels. TPM has the story.

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Headlines - Thursday May 24

 

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Rev. Mark Sandlin proposes sending donations to LGBT causes in the name of North Carolina's Pastor Charles Worley.

 

Not only will it be a wonderful opposing response to Pastor Worley, but it does several other wickedly beautiful things. One, it helps fund organizations who are actively working against this kind of exclusion and bullying. Two, it puts Pastor Worley on their mailing lists!!! And, three, it can really show Pastor Worley and others what creative, non-violent resistance looks like – and that's biblical.

 

 

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Maureen Dowd: Father Doesn't Know Best

 

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Someone had to do it? - Senators Bernie Sanders and Barbara Boxer have introduced a bill that would forbid Bankster Bastards from being on the board of the Fed, where they get to regulate themselves, and give themselves low-interest loans. Currently, the bill is not up for debate in the Senate. Jeebus, Harry Reid...(Politico)

 

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The Republican Lie About Carbon Dioxide, And The Idiots Who Believe It

 

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It turns out spending large sums of money to purchase grossly-offensive billboards along the Eisenhower Expressway in Chicago which compare those who believe in climate change to terrorists is not the best way to convince people that climate change is a hoax, nor is it the best way to manage your not-unlimited funding. And in the case of the Heartland Institute, it may have cost them their entire operation.

During his closing remarks at the Heartland Institute's Seventh "International Conference on Climate Change," Heartland President Joseph Bast revealed that the group has no plans to hold another conference and is struggling to pay its staff following the defections of corporate sponsors in the wake of the disastrous Unabomber billboard campaign and Deniergate document dump.

"I'm not a good fundraiser," Bast admitted to the crowd today in Chicago as the gathering wound down.

Bast appealed directly to the crowd for donations, saying that "if you've got a rich uncle" [ask him to donate to Heartland].

I won't call this a victory because climate change denial is a very big problem and some of the biggest deniers are sitting members of congress, but in a world where an increasing number of people are convinced that climate change is real if for no other reason than witnessing radical weather themselves, this kind of outrageous smear campaign is going to become not just ineffective but also a liability to climate change deniers.

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Free Guns (Honestly!)

No, really. This is both unintentionally hilarious and horrible.

via Media Matters

Right-wing news site The Daily Caller has come up with an innovative new method of attracting people to sign up for their email updates: Each week through Election Day new registrants will be eligible to win a free handgun. And not just any handgun; the weapon in question is "engraved with the Bill of Rights."

The gun's manufacturer, Jim Pontillo, has attacked American progressives for supposedly seeking to promote communism in America and claimed that "people calling for secession" are not "fanatics who hate America" but are instead acting "in the Founding tradition."

This ad is currently running on the website's NRA-sponsored "Guns and Gear" page

In exchange for signing up for Tucker Carlson's email newsletter, you'll be entered to win a free handgun, inscribed with the bill of rights, manufactured by a man who believes threatening to secede from the union is a "founding tradition." Yeehaw!

Of course these newsletters contain all manner of hyperbolic assertions and language designed to incite hatred for the government, so pairing that with a free "2nd amendment remedy" makes sense.

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Mitt Romney debuted a fresh line of bull today, promising 6 percent unemployment by the year 2016. The only problem is the Congressional Budget Office has already projected a 6 percent unemployment rate by 2016 under the current administration's policies.

Mitt Romney, who often chides President Obama for presiding over unenployment rates above 8%, told TIME that he would get that number down to 6% as president.

Oddly enough, that's almost exactly where the Congressional Budget Office predicts unemployment will be at the end of the next presidential term. While hardly the most reliable number this far out, CBO's latest report sees unemployment dropping to the low-sixes in 2016 en route to about 5.5% unemployment by the end of 2017.

You can always count on Mitt Romney to dream big and take the first step into explored territory. To boldly go where other men have gone before.

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Wash Post:

So the Pakistani guy who tried to help catch bin Laden is in jail, but the Pakistani guy who helped Libya try to get the bomb, and may have done the same for Iran and North Korea, is free.

Glad to see our billions spent every year on Pakistan are going to good use.Read the rest of this post...

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The Iowa Democratic Party Hispanic Caucus on Wednesday urged Republican National Chair Reince Priebus to publicly denounce Rep. Steve King (R-IA) for comparing immigrants to hunting dogs. Read More

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Down with Tyranny:

For those who keep track of this sort of detail, Barbara Lee (D-CA) introduced an amendment (Friday) to end the occupation of Afghanistan. Cosponsored by John Conyers (D-MI), Walter Jones (R-NC), Peter Welch (D-VT) and Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), Lee's amendment would have ended the war in Afghanistan "by limiting funding to the safe and orderly withdrawal of U.S. troops and military contractors from Afghanistan." It failed 113-303. Most Democrats-- 101 of them-- voted YES, to end the pointless occupation. They were joined by 12 Republicans. But 79 Democrats crossed the aisle to voted with Boehner and Cantor. Any interest in knowing which side your congresscritter was on? All the names are listed on the link above.

Thanks, Jim Matheson!

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New reports reveal George Zimmerman's close connection to the Sanford police department. Zimmerman went on patrol rides with police officers, went to police department picnics, and even went back to the police station three days after he killed Trayvon Martin and wandered around unaccompanied.

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Colin Powell is one of many prominent leaders who have followed President Obama's lead in supporting the freedom to marry for all families.

Of course, I don't give a f**k what he thinks after this:

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Awesome American Airlines Pilot Puts Abortion Slut In Her Place

Well, there has been a big ro-do! Some "lady" decided it was perfectly acceptable to fly on an airplane in a whorish T-shirt about how if she wanted the GOP in her vag, she'd fuck one! But luckily a hero airline pilot had her pulled aside as she was disembarking the flying can and explained that whores do not get to fly on airplanes if their political slogans offend the airplanes' pilots. So after he kept her there awhile, lecturing her as is proper and appropriate, she missed her connecting flight! But that was ok: he had called ahead to the other gate to warn them she was coming … and not to let her onboard if she was still wearing the disgusting terrible T-shirt about wombs. So they didn't. American Airlines is a HERO! Keep reading.