Thursday, December 27, 2012

December 27


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Seems like they could have timed this better for more exposure:

The Times on Tuesday released about 1,200 previously unpublished files kept by the Boy Scouts of America on volunteers and employees expelled for suspected sexual abuse.

The files, which have been redacted of victims' names and other identifying information, were opened from 1985 through 1991. They can be found in a database along with two decades of files released by order of the Oregon Supreme Court in October. The database also contains summary information on about 3,200 additional files opened from 1947 to 2005 that have not been released publicly.

Together, the material in the database represents the most complete accounting of suspected sexual abuse in the Scouts that has been made public. All of the material was obtained as a result of lawsuits against the Scouts by alleged abuse victims or by media organizations. The Boy Scouts kept the files for nearly a century for internal use only, to keep suspected abusers from rejoining.

Seems like the Scouts should spend less time fainting over possible gay members and scout leaders and start looking into the pedophiles they have known about for decades.

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The NRA Has Asperger Syndrome

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The Craziest Republican Legislative Proposals Of 2012

It used to take the best part of 24 hours to travel by train from Beijing to the southern boomtown of Guangzhou. But as of Wednesday, when the world's longest high-speed rail line opened for business, the 1,428-mile journey has been cut to a mere eight hours. The trains travel at an average speed of 186mph, passing through five provinces as they tear through the countryside.

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Via Huffington, here's a selection of people on Twitter who love their human-hunting AR15s:

More here. This is the Gun Culture. It's a disease that needs to be stricken from the American DNA.

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Why Did Dick Armey Leave FreedomWorks?

Because he's batshit crazy.

The partnership came to a crashing end when Armey marched into FreedomWorks's office Sept. 4 with his wife, Susan, executive assistant Jean Campbell and the unidentified man with the gun at his waist — who promptly escorted Kibbe and Brandon out of the building.

"This was two weeks after there had been a shooting at the Family Research Council," said one junior staff member who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media. "So when a man with a gun who didn't identify himself to me or other people on staff, and a woman I'd never seen before said there was an announcement, my first gut was, 'Is FreedomWorks in danger?' It was bizarre.' "

[...]

Armey appeared out of touch and unsure of how FreedomWorks operated when he took over that Tuesday morning, according to interviews with more than a dozen employees on both sides who witnessed the takeover. Sitting in a glass-walled conference room visible to much of the staff, he placed three young female employees on administrative leave, then reversed himself when they burst into tears; his wife lamented aloud that maybe they had "jumped the gun."

Dick Armey literally staged an armed coup, and it failed. After it failed, he was paid to leave so he would not have an opportunity to run the organization into the ground. And if he was using an armed guard to escort people out of their jobs, someone could have been killed.

Of course we use the term "crazy" relatively, because FreedomWorks is no slouch in that department. With that said, Dick Armey's attempted coup was obviously too much even for them.