Headlines - Tuesday November 15

 

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Some rich person decided to buy this ugly painting for $4.3 million instead of letting it trickle down.

 

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So BofA Dropped Their Debit Card Fee -- You're Still Being Screwed

 

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Gay people are destroying marriage! Gay people are destroying the family! The Blessed Virgin Mother, Jesus H. Christ, God and four more white people agree, gay people are sick deviants! (Psst, wanna see my 4000 photos of hot young prepubescent kids?)

 

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The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops have launched a new "marriage defense" website. And in a speech excerpted on Think Progress, Prop 8 mastermind Bishop Salvatore Cordileone vows that the Catholic Church will support the upcoming anti-gay bills in Minnesota and North Carolina. (We've already seen that in Minnesota.)

In the midst of these various challenges, we continue to be mindful and pray for those efforts seeking to protect the definition of marriage. These include the constitutional amendments protecting marriage in Minnesota and North Carolina, the continued efforts to do the same in Indiana, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and efforts to repeal the redefinition of marriage and New Hampshire and Iowa. To all our brother bishops and efforts to protect marriage in these states, thank you for your courage and witness, please count on our continued support and prayers.

The above-linked site includes Sexual Difference, an instructional video on why the Blessed Virgin Mary wants you to hate gay couples. It also includes a bilingual prayer for God to smite those unholy dirty queers. Or something. And of course, as the Catholic Church is now an officially-sanctioned subsidiary of NOM Inc, there's a lengthy scream about being oppressed at the hands of homofascists.

RELATED: I looked and looked but could not find any mention about a Godly mission to feed the poor, house the homeless, tend to the sick, or not fuck young boys in the ass.

 

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Scalia and Thomas dine with healthcare law challengers as court takes case.

 

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Those "job-killing" regulations the Obama Administration has supposedly presided over and really failing to impress me with the number of jobs they've presumably killed.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) asks executives to report the biggest reasons for layoffs. Data released last week showed that out of 1,870 layoffs, only six — or about 0.4 percent — in the third quarter of 2010 were due to "Governmental regulations/intervention." That number dropped even further in the first two quarters of 2011.

By comparison, almost 35 percent of layoffs were due to business demand.

"Based on the available literature, there's not much evidence that EPA regulations are causing major job losses or major job gains," Richard Morgenstern, a former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) official who now works at the nonpartisan think tank Resources for the Future, told The Washington Post.

Only 0.4 percent?

As Americans, shouldn't we expect more killing power out of our supposed "job-killing" regulations? This is an outrage! False advertisement!

Meanwhile, 35 percent of layoffs can be attributed to a lack of consumer demand, and do you know who is absolutely adamant about not lifting a finger to stimulate demand? Republicans.

They're still expecting the supply-side fairy will sprinkle us with jobs if we just coddle the "job-creators" a little while longer. That's despite the complete lack of evidence to suggest that will ever happen.

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Your corporate welfare recipients — sucking off the government teat:

ThinkProgress noted that the top four recipients receive more than half of all tax subsidies.

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Jill: Just who's being violent here? 

 

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The Catholic Church is seeking to cloak trying to use the law to discriminate against people as "religious liberty".

They're probably kicking themselves in the ass because they didn't think of that argument as a way of stymieing investigations into their kiddie-raping priests.

Funny thing how Catholicism and the Dixie version of Christianity gets themselves all in a tizzy about gays marrying. But all of that stuff that their Savior preached about caring for the poor and the sick and the lame doesn't seem to matter to them. And all the stuff about how being rich is a great hindrance to being saved because people tend to care more for the trappings of being rich than the people around them, that gets shrugged off.

When I listen to the words of the self-styled evangelical politicians, it seems to me that I have rarely heard a pack of people that were more hateful and judgmental than those birds.

 

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The next Xian who whines to us that they're oppressed is going to catch hell. "According to just-released statistics from the FBI, 1,528 hate crimes were committed against people because of their sexual orientation in 2010, up from 1,436 in 2009. As Instinct Magazine points out, a similar number of hate crimes were committed based on religion (1,552), but only 7.2 percent of them were attacks against Christianity. This undermines the self-victimizing claims of groups like the National Organization for Marriage, who claim that anti-equality Christians are more significantly oppressed."

 

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If insider trading sends people to jail, this ought to send politicians to the gallows. "Washington, D.C. is a town that runs on inside information - but should our elected officials be able to use that information to pad their own pockets? As Steve Kroft reports, members of Congress and their aides have regular access to powerful political intelligence, and many have made well-timed stock market trades in the very industries they regulate. For now, the practice is perfectly legal, but some say it's time for the law to change. ... The buying and selling of stock by corporate insiders who have access to non-public information that could affect the stock price can be a criminal offense, just ask hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam who recently got 11 years in prison for doing it. But, congressional lawmakers have no corporate responsibilities and have long been considered exempt from insider trading laws, even though they have daily access to non-public information and plenty of opportunities to trade on it. ... In mid September 2008 with the Dow Jones Industrial average still above ten thousand, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke were holding closed door briefings with congressional leaders, and privately warning them that a global financial meltdown could occur within a few days. One of those attending was Alabama Representative Spencer Bachus, then the ranking Republican member on the House Financial Services Committee and now its chairman. ... While Congressman Bachus was publicly trying to keep the economy from cratering, he was privately betting that it would, buying option funds that would go up in value if the market went down. He would make a variety of trades and profited at a time when most Americans were losing their shirts."

 

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A judge issued a Temporary Restraining Order this morning allowing protesters to return to Zuccotti Park after police evicted them in a midnight raid, but Mayor Michael Bloomberg appears to be ignoring the court order. At a press conference this morning, Bloomberg defended the move, saying that "the final decision to act was mine." The judge will hold a hearing on the matter at 11:30 a.m.