Apparently, Jon Stewart agrees with me on McCain-Clinton ‘08.
You heard it here first.
As Clinton loses the Democratic nomination by trying everything except calling Barak Obama John McCain’s illegitimate black baby, her transformation into a Republican will be nearly complete. The process is well underway already. And there’s only one place it can lead, unless she grows a conscience and gives up.
Obama made a comment that correlated gun- and religious advocacy with parts of the country that are being devastated by our new modern economy. Clinton, seemingly overnight, has become one of the righteously indignant hordes, holding her bible and guns up for all to see. How dare Obama tell the truth. He has no right. It’s downright insulting, it is.
It’s like in the movie Contact, where Anne Arroway tells the truth, and Drummond gets the job because he cites ‘God’ as his co-pilot on the trip to wherever.
So this is where it will end up. McCain will get the nomination for the Party of GOP, and someone will suggest a "unity ticket" — an attempt to unify Democrats and Republicans by putting together the two most polarizing figures in the race, who, in fact, agree on almost everything anyway — corporate control, perpetual war, and power for themselves above all else.
I will say this — I haven’t given money to Obama yet because he refuses to hold BushCo accountable for their crimes. But I will never vote for Clinton. I’d rather vote Green if she steals the nomination. And if so, I predict one of the lowest voter turnout elections in history, as millions of Americans choose between a bloated puppet who has figuratively sold his soul for a shot at the big prize, and a jaded puppeteer, who apparently never had one to begin with.
See RealityPrime for the details…
That headline is not an actual quote from Senator Buttars, but it might as well be.
Here’s the increasingly awkward regression of events for one Utah Senator who has obviously passed his sell-by date:
Of a bill he didn’t like, he started this latest ruckus by saying (yes, out loud, on the record),
This baby is black. . . . It’s a dark, ugly thing…
When chastised by the NAACP, with whom he failed to meet to apologize or even see the many pictures they brought of extremely cute black babies,
[He Told] The Salt Lake Tribune on Monday that he has become a target of a "hate lynch mob" because of e-mails he has received condemning his remarks.
Ouch. Lynch-mob. But it gets even worse for Buttars:
"Lynch mob is a Western term. You wouldn’t find one person in 10,000 in Utah that thinks that’s a racist term," Buttars said in a phone interview Tuesday evening. "That’s not a racial term in my opinion. How do I know what words I’m supposed to use in front of those people?"
Ouch again. Well, those people are not happy. And the Senator is fresh out of feet to put in his mouth. I guess what he’s trying to say is that Utahans are equal-opportunity lynchers.
I wonder, is it too late to give the whole state back to the savage Indians? Can anyone help me out here? I’m trying to think of one good thing that came from Utah. I can’t think of a single one.
Please Utahans, show that this idiot doesn’t represent you and recall his saggy white ass.
…so much for saving our democracy.
I could look beyond some racist comments in Ron Paul’s newsletter from way back because he a) didn’t write them and b) disavows them now. It’s not clear how much editorial control he exerted at the time, but saying stupid things and correcting them later is a mark of growth, not an automatic rejection for me.
But I can’t look past a candidate’s views that the theory of evolution is not correct. That’s a sign of mental incompetence, especially to be a doctor and not understand how genetics works. It’s one thing to say that God created the universe to function as it does, evolution being a natural part. You could even claim that God created the universe 6000 years ago to resemble one that evolved over billions of years (God only knows why?).
However, to simply reject the theory is simply retarded. No more money from me, Doctor.
Here’s a clip of him saying it pretty much directly.
Crooks and Liars » Countdown: Senator Chris Dodd On The FISA Victory
Victory is defined as "standing up to leading Democrats to prevent them caving into Bush for the Nth time." Well done. Now, if only the other 80% of Democrats would grow a spine.
The issue: Why should Telecom companies who broke the law, spied on their customers, turned the data over to the government without probable cause, without due process, and without a warrant be granted a free pass to do it again?
If the companies broke the law, they should pay a price. That’s how it works. Will they go to jail? No. Of course not. They’ll pay a fine and have a black mark, and maybe some executive will be fired for being so short-sighted with their investor’s money. Is that the most horrible thing they can imagine? Is that worth Bush vetoing the bill, to save his friends a few million bucks and some job security? Apparently so.
Prediction: This episode will result in the first invocation in the history of the world of Clemency or a Presidential Pardon for a Corporation, a non-living legally fictional entity. Bush will get his way no matter what ridiculous precedent he has to set.
Afterthought: If you watch the video to the end, I’m not sure I like the idea of Chris Dodd and his team giving the poor anchorwoman "a nice ride" on his warm, fun bus. Unintentionally creepy moment of the day.
Many thanks to Peter for pointing out a solution to the age old question of what happens when you attach a piece of upright buttered toast (which always falls buttered side down) to a falling cat (who always lands feet first):
Murphy’s law application for antigravitatory cats - Uncyclopedia, the content-free encyclopedia
Still, I can’t see how one could extract useful energy from the cat-toast phenomenon if it must be in free-fall the whole time.
A more likely perpetual motion machine is to rig a holy cross to a rigid harness, some fixed distance from a known vampire, such that vampire is repelled but can’t get away, and thus the whole apparatus begins to spin, powering a turbine. Viola! Electricity.
I wonder….Is the rotational energy released inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them? Who can say? The physics of vampires is still relatively understudied. How close the cross can safely come to said vampire (and therefore this what is the maximum power output of this contraption) is left for future work.
FISA: More Than You Want to Know - Swampland - TIME
In which TIME’s Joe Klein admits the article he published about the FISA bill was probably clueless. But what the hell — it’s not important anyway (though important enough to write an article in the first place). He protests that he doesn’t have the time or skills to determine the facts, which his readers happily hand-feed him, along with his hat.
It’s almost as if the bill’s authors had written as if for a 5th grade reader, "Nothing in this bill shall ever be construed to require a court order to conduct foreign intelligence operations. Cut the crap, Klein."
So I guess the question for TIME is, what do you do when a reporter or editor gets it wrong? Do you shrug and move on? Or do you issue a correction and/or pink slip when the reporter or editor refuses to get it right?
Does TIME have any journalistic credibility left, or is it destined to be another vapid wall of fog along with Faux News in the national bastion of shame?
The Raw Story | US now allowing feds to track Americans by cell phone
Is that a cell phone in your pocket, or are you just happy to be under surveillance? That’s the question we need to ask, after Feds are more regularly using our own cell phones to track us. It’s not hard to do. They can ‘ping’ us and see which cell phone towers are nearest. By triangulating the response times, they can pinpoint us to within a few feet.
The problem is that courts are routinely granting requests by Feds without also requiring probable cause. And if they’re doing this, who knows what else they’re getting away with in the name of stopping terrorism or crime?
Did you know, for example, that your cell phone could be turned into an active listening device? With a minor software change, your phone can be made to dial out or receive a call without informing you. Did you know that companies like AT&T and Verizon have basically admitted that they gave (or give) your caller information, your circle of friends, to the government without requiring a court order?
And for those of you who say, "if I did nothing wrong…" well, tell that to the guy who got "rendered" to Syria and tortured for months for doing nothing wrong. Tell that to the guy who tried to legally emigrate to the US but got sent home because his relative reported him as a terrorist. Tell that to any victim of our famous "no fly lists" who are routinely persecuted at airports because their last name showed up on a list, though they themselves did nothing wrong.
Until the government can show enough responsibility to investigate crimes without violating our civil rights, I’d much rather see law enforcement work overtime to do its job with handcuffs on than give up the essential freedoms that they claim to be protecting.
