Archive for January 30, 2012
Michael Steele Lies: Florida’s Primary is a “Grass Roots” Effort
Figures made available to The Associated Press showed Romney was spending $2.8 million to air television commercials in the final week of the Florida campaign. In addition, a group supporting him, Restore Our Future, was spending $4 million more, for a combined total of $6.8 million.
By contrast, Gingrich was spending about $700,000, and Winning Our Future, a group backing him, an additional $1.5 million. That was about one-third the amount for the pro-Romney tandem.
Only nine more months to go!
* It isn’t like me to refer to the former head of the Grand Old Party (i.e., the GOP) as the “former Republican party leader.” But given that 50% of Republicans have no idea who the GOP is, I’m thinking it’s a good idea to refer to Republicans not as the GOP, but as Republicans. I mean, if I have to hold their little hands so they’ll know what their party’s up to, I’ll do it.
Remember When Voting Was Thought of as a Sacred Right?
Remember when Iraq held its first election after the U.S. invasion and all of us, including conservatives like Bill Bennett, held their breath hoping the elections would be “free and fair?”
Let’s see many Americans color their right index finger purple in solidarity for the people voting in free elections in Iraq. Americans should watch closely the voting in Iraq.
I think it will do us all good to see democracy in action.
We watched from a high and mighty place back then because after all, we were the United States of America, where everyone has a voice, everyone has a vote and voting is sacred and respected above almost all other rights.
Well, that was then, this is now. Since then, the people in Bill Bennett’s Republican party have pushed through extraordinarily repressive voting rights laws in several states and now the international community is focusing attention on one of our most deeply held rights and traditions:
A wave of restrictive laws passed in Republican-held state legislatures will mean that a disproportionate number of ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, the elderly and the young, will find voting difficult and in many cases impossible.
Among the legislation is a requisite that aspiring voters present a state-issued photo identification card to cast their ballot. That would affect around 21 million people who do not have the ID.
The apparent reason for the ID requirement is to prevent voter fraud, yet an extensive analysis by the US Justice Department.found that incidents of vote fraud are exceedingly rare and that the new laws would not solve the eligibility issues.
Some analysts say the restrictions would have a severe impact on the country’s presidential vote in November, favouring the Republican candidate.
Al Jazeera’s Rob Reynold travelled to the state of Wisconsin, where he spoke to one woman whose right to vote may have been stripped by the new restrictions.
(Via.)
Fundamental rights in the United States are under assault people. We are facing an emergency.
Newt Gingrich attended a rally in The Villages, Florida yesterday and he said something about how he isn’t going to stand around while President Obama presides over America’s decline. Time to look in the mirror Newt.
Romney’s “Schlock Patriotic Presentation”
Regular visitors to this site know I love Matt Taibbi. Nobody cuts through the bullsh*t like he does and today he’s out with another masterpiece:
How the GOP Race Became a Showdown Between a Walking OCD Diagnosis and a Flatulent Serial Adulterer
But [Romney] couldn’t do it. Less than a week after New Hampshire, Romney committed a series of gaffes that revealed his crucial character flaw: He’s a hypernervous control freak who flips out if you try digging around below the paper-thin veneer of his schlock patriotic presentation. The robotic Mormon financier looks like a walking OCD diagnosis, a trim coil of tightly wound energy with perfect coif and tie, seemingly living in permanent terror of a single hair falling out of place. For this type of anal-retentive personality, the messy chaos of South Carolina was a phobic horror. Faced with actual opposition, he lost his grip on everything. At a time when a quarter of the population has zero or negative net worth, when outrage against the financial elite is at an all-time high on both sides of the political aisle, Romney, it turns out, is so weirdly tone-deaf about his status as a one-percenter and bloodsucking corporate raider that any question in that direction sends his eyes pinwheeling. As his electably boring-mannequin act began to crumble, his carefully concealed true self – a deluded gazillionaire nitwit – was suddenly thrust naked onstage for all of America to gape at.
The only problem is, [Newt's] a bloviating, egomaniacal hog clinging to a third marriage who suffers from incurable diarrhea of the mouth and, according to polls, is one of the most intensely disliked politicians in America, making him an utterly absurd choice for the general election. If Gingrich ends up winning the nomination, Obama will essentially be running against the political version of Gilbert Gottfried or raw garlic – strong tastes that some like quite a lot, but many more can’t stand to even be near. If that happens, every Democratic flack from Leon Panetta to Obama himself will have to wear restraints to keep from publicly crying out in joy.
You go Matt!
If you have time, read the whole thing. Taibbi’s sarcastic sense of humor alone makes it worth it.
Sarah: Have You Ever Heard of a Pot Calling a Kettle Black?
Sarah, you’re kidding right?
Palin’s self-awareness is just stunning, isn’t it?
Seems like just yesterday that Palin was the “grifter” who hadn’t “been properly vetted.”
Geezus.
Global Warming — The Video
No wonder Republicans want to do away with government. It produces hippie, socialist videos like this that rely on hocus pocus, commonly referred to by pot smoking liberal tree huggers as “science:”
The global average surface temperature in 2011 was the ninth warmest since 1880.The finding sustains a trend that has seen the 21st century experience nine of the 10 warmest years in the modern meteorological record. NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York released an analysis of how temperatures around the globe in 2011 compared to the average global temperature from the mid-20th century. The comparison shows how Earth continues to experience higher temperatures than several decades ago. The average temperature around the globe in 2011 was 0.92 degrees F (0.51 C) higher than the mid-20th century baseline.
How Loving Owners Transport Their Dogs
Surely you’ve heard about the time when Mitt Romney and his family were on vacation and they strapped a crate containing their Irish setter, Seamus, to the to top of the car and then set off on a 12-hour trip from Boston to Canada.
Mitt Romney explained the incident to Fox’s Chris Wallace like this:
This is a completely air-tight kennel mounted on the top of our car. He climbed up there regularly, enjoyed himself. He was in a kennel at home a great deal of time as well. We loved the dog. It was where he was comfortable and we had five kids inside the car and my guess is he liked it a lot better in his kennel than he would have liked it inside.”
If it was an air-tight kennel, how could the dog breathe? Why did the dog “regularly” climb on top of the car? Whose dog does that? Why was he in a kennel a “great deal of the time” at home? Probably because he hadn’t been potty trained and/or trained not to tear stuff up.
Anyway, Mitt, this is how a loving owner transports their dog:
(Photo via.)
Love the Smell of Bacon Cooking
I’m making Dean & Deluca’s Cabbage Soup with Paprika, Kielbasa, and Raisins (but I’m leaving the raisins out and I’m amping up the paprika, using smoked paprika (so good!) instead of sweet paprika).
The first step in the process is to brown six slices of bacon, which I’m doing now. A few minutes ago I yelled out to Mr. SayItAin’tSoAlready that I love the smell of bacon cooking! He joked that I should see if there’s such a thing as bacon air freshener and lo and behold, there is!
I’m sure it smells terrible but hey, given that I’m a bacon person, I couldn’t resist spreading the word.
;)
Mitt is So Rich, He’s In the Top 0.0025%
Per the 1%er’s newspaper — the Wall Street Journal — Mitt Romney is unfathomably rich:
Mitt Romney’s income last year of $21.7 million clearly makes him rich. But how rich?
So rich, that he makes the one percenters look like the 99 percent.
According to a calculation from Emmanuel Saez, the economist at the University of California at Berkley, who has become the top expert on top incomes, Mitt Romney’s income of $21.7 million puts him well above the 1%.
In fact, his income puts him in about the 99.9975% income bracket. Put another way, Mitt is in the top 0.0025%.
Don’t forget folks, Romney’s net worth isn’t $21.7 million. That was his income for one year.
Ever Seen an Albino Ruby-Throated Hummingbird?
Wow. I’ve never heard of an albino bird much less an albino ruby-throated hummingbird:
These shots of an extremely rare albino ruby-throated hummingbird were photographed by two Virginia teenagers and two preteens: Marlin Shank, 16, Shaphan Shank, 14, Darren Shank, 12 and Allen Shank, 9.
The Shank brothers spotted the rare bird with their father Kevin Shank, who runs Nature Friend Magazine with his wife Bethany.
The Shanks heard about sightings of the rare bird at a feeder at the home of Ed and Nancy Lawler of Staunton Virginia back in August.
“When we heard through a listserve that some birders were watching a rare albino ruby-throated hummingbird come to their feeders only 30 miles away, we took the drive,” Kevin Shank told Discovery News.
As he wrote on on his web site: “The thoughts rolling through my mind were several. For one, this might be the only day in our lives when the boys and I would have the opportunity to photograph an albino hummingbird. Obviously we would prefer the photos ‘turn out.’”
The Shanks set up cameras, including a Canon EOS1D Mark 4 with a 600ml F4 lens, in different spots. And each took turns shooting between August 12 and August 27. All of these shots were taken on August 26. More photos of the bird can be seen here.
More photos can be seen here too.
This is what a “normal” ruby-throated hummingbird looks like:
Photo: Jerry Green
Afghan Man Murders Wife For Giving Birth to a Girl
I guess Laura Bush’s mission to lift Afghani women up and out of the Stone Age failed.
This is horrible:
Afghan man strangles wife for having baby girl
An Afghan man killed his wife for giving birth to a third daughter rather than the son he hoped for, police in Afghanistan’s northern Kunduz province have said.
The victim, 28, known by the one name of Storai, was strangled by her husband, a local militia member, and his mother on Saturday “in revenge” for bearing the couple’s third daughter three months ago in Mohasili village, police said.
