Headlines - Wednesday October 19

 

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Lawmakers are planning on ending the $5 Billion farm subsidies, but giving the money to the big corporate farmers who grow commodity crops, anyway. Sorry little family farmers! (NYTimes)

 

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Wisco: Corporate Parasites and the Failure of 'Trickle Down Economics'

 

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Yesterday the Courage Campaign flew the above banner over a California GOP golf tournament fundraiser attended by House Speaker John Boehner.

 

 

We hope that overgrown Orangesicle John Boehner enjoyed the joyful noises of a group of chanting protesters who showed up to his golf tournament in the Republican fortress of Orange County, California, since this is probably something John Boehner had hoped to avoid when he left Washington for a few days. Funny, isn't it, how those people seem to be everywhere? AND THEY'RE GETTING CLOSER: one protester even managed to get inside the golf club to deliver a petition with 26,000 signatures asking Boehner to pass Barack Obama's jobs bill. Naturally, Boehner fled from the man. READ MORE »

 

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Francisco Franco and the Catholic Church, echoing the Argentine dirty war, stole babies from 'undesirable' families and sold them to families that kept up better on their church donations and Party dues. Apparently collaborating doctors helped arrange the theft and then told a lot of parents that their kids had died.

After Franco the Church kept selling babies for money through the 1980's and maybe through the mid-90's.

Another great PR moment for Vatican City…

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The New Yorker mocks the 1% with an Occupy Wall Street cover. Beautiful. Click to see

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Media Matters ( @MMFA ) had assembled all the anti-Occupy smears in one place For the love of all that is holy, put on full biohazard gear before going in.

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Blatant voter suppression efforts by Conservaturds.

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We hope that they go under and this time next year, Lloyd Blankfein is panhandling while wearing a barrell. "Goldman Sachs Group Inc lost $428 million during the third quarter, only its second quarterly loss as a public company, hurt by sharp declines in the value of investment securities and customer trading assets. ... The largest U.S. investment bank lost 84 cents per share, compared with earnings of $2.98 per share a year earlier."

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According to a new analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice, if Herman Cain's 999 plan was in effect today, "the richest one percent of taxpayers would each pay $210,000 less in annual taxes on average, while the poorest 60 percent of taxpayers would each pay about $2,000 more in annual taxes on average, than they do now."

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Americans becoming too sick and fat to work anymore

Another big score for "the best health care system in the world," hooray: a new study by Gallup shows that 86% of full-time employed Americans are missing 450 million days at work due to being either obese or having chronic health problems or both, which doesn't even count days workers feel ill and don't take time off. The furious little number crunchers announced that this also means $153 billion a year in "lost productivity" so that business people will take notice and stop hiring fat and sick people, but the joke is on them since it is now basically everybody. Hope America is having fun spending those 13 days of vacation a year they get feeling like shit! READ MORE »

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Charles Pierce smacks down David Brooks here. The whole thing is beautimous.

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While discussing whether or not the United States should be cutting aid to Israel during the CNN, Las Vegas GOP debate, Michele Bachmann was adamant in her defense of continuing to send Israel money, but she didn't share that same sentiment when it came to our occupation of Iraq or intervention in Libya.

COOPER: Time. Congresswoman Bachmann... [...] Should we cut foreign aid to Israel?

BACHMANN: No, we should not be cutting foreign aid to Israel. Israel is our greatest ally. The biggest problem is the fact... that the president -- the biggest problem with this administration in foreign policy is that President Obama is the first president since Israel declared her sovereignty put daylight between the United States and Israel. That heavily contributed to the current hostilities that we see in the Middle East region.

Cutting back on foreign aid is one thing. Being reimbursed by nations that we have liberated is another. We should look to Iraq and Libya to reimburse us for part of what we have done to liberate these nations.

Now, I need to add something on this issue of negotiating for hostages. This is a very serious issue. For any candidate to say that they would release the prisoners at Guantanamo in exchange for a hostage would be absolutely contrary to the historical nature of the United States and what we do in our policy. That's naive; we cannot do that. The United States has done well because we have an absolute policy: We don't negotiate.

While the main point of this post is the lovely bit of idiocy that Bachmann thinks that Iraqis should be so grateful for being invaded and occupied under false pretenses, seen more than four million citizens displaced, over 100,000 civilians dead and the country destroyed that they should be willing to pay us back for our troubles, I can't let this little bit of flaming pile of bovine excrement go unchallenged.

The biggest problem is the fact... that the president -- the biggest problem with this administration in foreign policy is that President Obama is the first president since Israel declared her sovereignty put daylight between the United States and Israel. That heavily contributed to the current hostilities that we see in the Middle East region.

Maybe Bachmann would be surprised to hear that it was not all peace and rainbows in the Middle East region prior to the Obama administration taking office. In fact, I'd say that the hostilities in that region have existed for quite some time--generations even--before Obama set foot in the Oval Office. And if Avigdor Lieberman, Bibi Netanyahu, and Tzipi Livni have no complaints about the relationship they have with Obama, what's Michele's beef? Maybe I'm just too tied to that whole reality sphere.