Saturday, October 22, 2011

Headlines - Saturday October 22

 
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Denied immunity, Obama Pulling Troops From Iraq by End of Year
 
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Qaddafi's Death: Barbarism and Hypocrisy
 
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The entire paid New Hampshire campaign staff of noted insane theocrat and sucessful baby-mill operator Michele Bachmann have quit. (TPM)

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The Programming Wizards (Grand Wizards in sheets and stuff? Yes) at Fox News have added two more debates to the 2012 Goat Rodeo. Because the low-information voters of the pig people really need to see the paste-eating, mouth-breathing, drooling fucknuckles yet two more times. (The Cutline)

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The world's largest family. A view of Ziona's 4 storey house in Baktawng village in the northeastern Indian state of Mizoram.  Ziona is the head of a religious sect called "Chana," which allows polygamy and was founded by his father Chana in 1942. Ziona has 39 wives, 94 children and 33 grandchildren. He lives in his 4 storey 100-room house with 181 members of his family. The world's population will reach seven billion on 31 October 2011, according to projections by the United Nations. Picture taken October 6, 2011. Photo/Adnan Abidi

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Mario: Closing down the Iraq war.

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Funny Somewhat Topical Ecard: Harold Camping predicts the apocalypse the same way I predict when I'm going to start getting in shape again.

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The Uterus of the United States of America

From the party of smaller government…

Rick Santorum:

"One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country. It's not okay. It's a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be"

"[Sex] is supposed to be within marriage. It's supposed to be for purposes that are yes, conjugal…but also procreative. That's the perfect way that a sexual union should happen…This is special and it needs to be seen as special."

Herman Cain:

I support life from conception. No people shouldn't be free to abort because if we don't protect the sanctity of life from conception, we will also start to play God relative to life at the end of life.

Michele Bachmann:

I am 100 percent pro-life. I've given birth to five babies, an I've taken 23 foster children into my home. I believe in the dignity of life from conception until natural death. I believe in the sanctity of human life. Our Declaration of Independence said it's a creator who endowed us with inalienable rights given to us from God, not from government. And the first of those rights is life. And I stand for that right. I stand for the right to life.

Rick Perry:

"I'm proud to fight for and was proud to sign a budget that defunded Planned Parenthood in Texas. Our obligation is not only to protect life and bestow freedom on future generations, but it's also to instill character."

Conservatives and Republicans are the people who will tell you that government has no right to force health insurance upon you but it does have the right to tell you with whom you can have sex with, when you can have sex and the manner in which you do so.  Further, many of them will tell you that should a woman become pregnant and regardless of the manner in which it happened (consensual, rape, incest…doesn't matter), she must give birth to that child.  Americans, they insist, must live their lives by the moral and religious standards set forth by the likes of Santorum and Bachmann.

In essence, as the illustration above suggests, Republicans and conservatives are on a campaign to shrink government to the size that fits into the uterus of every woman in America.

Tell me that these people are not mad.

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Krugman: Party of Pollution

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Koch brothers accidentally fund study that proves global warming

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Here are some relevant numbers on the world's costliest cakewalk:

8 years, 260 days since Secretary of State Colin Powell presented evidence of Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program

8 years, 215 days since the March 20, 2003 invasion of Iraq

8 years, 175 days since President George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln

4,479 U.S. military fatalities

30,182 U.S. military injuries

468 contractor fatalities

Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation 

2.8 million internally displaced Iraqis

$806 billion in federal funding for the Iraq War through FY2011

$3 – $5 trillion in total economic cost to the United States of the Iraq war according to economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Blimes

$60 billion in U.S. expenditures lost to waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001

0 weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq

Happy End To The Eternal Iraq War That Is Not Really Ending: from Spencer Ackerman's excellent report at the Danger Room:

But the fact is America's military efforts in Iraq aren't coming to an end. They are instead entering a new phase. On January 1, 2012, the State Department will command a hired army of about 5,500 security contractors, all to protect the largest U.S. diplomatic presence anywhere overseas.

The State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security does not have a promising record when it comes to managing its mercenaries. The 2007 Nisour Square shootings by State's security contractors, in which 17 Iraqi civilians were killed, marked one of the low points of the war. Now, State will be commanding a much larger security presence, the equivalent of a heavy combat brigade. In July, Danger Room exclusively reported that the Department blocked the Congressionally-appointed watchdog for Iraq from acquiring basic information about contractor security operations, such as the contractors' rules of engagement.

That means no one outside the State Department knows how its contractors will behave as they ferry over 10,000 U.S. State Department employees throughout Iraq — which, in case anyone has forgotten, is still a war zone. Since Iraq wouldn't grant legal immunity to U.S. troops, it is unlikely to grant it to U.S. contractors, particularly in the heat and anger of an accident resulting in the loss of Iraqi life.

It's a situation with the potential for diplomatic disaster. And it's being managed by an organization with no experience running the tight command structure that makes armies cohesive and effective.

"Potential" is probably putting it kindly. We would go with "absolute certainty." [Wired/PBS/The Nation]

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Jackson: GOP House Has Averaged One Vote Every Day To Gut EPA | In today's Los Angeles Times, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson calls for House Republicans to end their "assault on our environmental laws." She points out that since the beginning of the year, the Republican-majority house has averaged one vote per day on a bill to undermine the Environmental Protection Agency, including a bill last week Republicans pushed through that eliminates several pollution control requirements for industrial boilers and incinerators. "How we respond to this assault on our environmental and public health protections will mean the difference between sickness and health — in some cases, life and death — for hundreds of thousands of citizens," Jackson writes.

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Just spank me when they've gone so I can come out.

Eric Cantor Wimps Out On Speech After Hearing Peasants Might Attend

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NJ mayor has no idea how rentboy got sexy pictures of him

These kids and their photoshopz!

Ah, the old "probably it was some guy who broke into my hotel room and took pictures of me sleeping in my underwear" excuse. Medford, New Jersey mayor Chris Myers is here to fill the weekly news slot reserved for the outing of one or another garden variety self-loathing, escort-loving closeted Republican politician with a weak claim that he is totally clueless as to how a California rentboy got all those photos of Myers and his magical Superman-sized briefs asleep in a hotel bed (along with pictures of his IDs and his cell phone number). Or, uh, Photoshop maybe? Probably it was the terrorists with their Photoshop. READ MORE »

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