Headlines - Monday July 23

Businessweek: How the Mormons Make Money

 

###

 

Juan Cole writes about the individual in U.S. Government who actually IS tied to the Muslim Brotherhood -- and her name is "Michele Bachmann".

###

 

 

###

 

With regard to the recent massacre at a movie theater:

"What we're seeing here is evidence of, I think, some calculation and deliberation," [Aurora Police Chief Daniel] Oates said.

Tell me, Chief, how long did your detectives have to work on the case before you came to that conclusion?

 

###

 

The freakazoids will use anything to push their death cult "To put it mildly, the Christian conservatives were eager to exploit the tragic violence in Aurora yesterday, blaming the murders on, among other things, the absence of state-sponsored prayer in public schools and government-endorsed Ten Commandments displays."

 

###

 

Fuck these people.

 

###

 

###

 

Huffington Post reports:

The Palins have never been known for being particularly gay-friendly -- and unfortunately, it seems as if the youngest member of the family is following in the footsteps of his elders. A newly-released clip from the Lifetime reality series "Bristol Palin: Life's a Tripp" shows Tripp Palin uttering a homophobic slur when mom Bristol and aunt Willow won't let him visit the swimming pool. The Palin sisters gasp, and then giggle, when three-year-old Tripp's temper tantrum culminates in the tot calling his aunt a "faggot."

All in the family

 

###

 

Charles Pierce:

We interrupt our regularly scheduled concern for the embattled middle class to point out that poverty is getting worse in America.

The ranks of America's poor are on track to climb to levels unseen in nearly half a century, erasing gains from the war on poverty in the 1960s amid a weak economy and fraying government safety net.

Whoa there, pilgrim. It is received political wisdom in this country that a) Lyndon Johnson's "war on poverty" did not lift anyone from poverty but, rather, did incalculable damage by fostering a culture of dependency and creating a space in which poor people could fuck on the couches in their trailers without the permission of David Brooks and, b) that the "welfare reform" of the 1990's was a stunning bipartisan policy success of a kind of which we could use more in these terribly polarized times, when Dick Morris shrewdly advised Bill Clinton to go along with Newt Gingrich and throw the poors under the train so as to lock up those critical "independent" voters who were fed up with the poors and their mooching and their non-authorized fucking on couches. Nobody denies this.

The Associated Press surveyed more than a dozen economists, think tanks and academics, both nonpartisan and those with known liberal or conservative leanings, and found a broad consensus: The official poverty rate will rise from 15.1 percent in 2010, climbing as high as 15.7 percent. Several predicted a more modest gain, but even a 0.1 percentage point increase would put poverty at the highest level since 1965.

The difference, of course, is that, at the conservative "think tanks," they popped the bubbly and threw a parade. 

###