Monday, January 24, 2011
50% Approval And Rising
"And while we’re on the subject of why not a single Republican has announced a presidential candidacy yet … isn’t the answer obvious? It’s because they all know Barack Obama is as good as a shoo-in in 2012. Unless something cataclysmic happens, the only reason for any Republican to run is either as a vanity candidate or to get practice for 2016."Kevin Drum
Today is the four-year anniversary of Barack Obama announcing his run for President.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
You're Thinking Of Jesus
If Jesus ever lived.
Much easier for the haters to love a metaphor from the Bronze Age than to actually live by the teachings associated with “him”.
Sitting Supreme Court Justice's Income Tax Evasion
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas failed to report his wife's income from a conservative think tank on financial disclosure forms for at least five years, the watchdog group Common Cause said Friday.
Between 2003 and 2007, Virginia Thomas, a longtime conservative activist, earned $686,589 from the Heritage Foundation, according to a Common Cause review of the foundation's IRS records. Thomas failed to note the income in his Supreme Court financial disclosure forms for those years, instead checking a box labeled "none" where "spousal noninvestment income" would be disclosed.
Virginia Thomas also has been active in the group Liberty Central, an organization she founded to restore the "founding principles" of limited government and individual liberty.
In his 2009 disclosure, Justice Thomas also reported spousal income as "none." Common Cause contends that Liberty Central paid Virginia Thomas an unknown salary that year.
Failed to report once, maybe it's a mistake. Failing for five years is deliberate income tax evasion.
Large, unidentified contributions paid to the wife of a Supreme Court justice, then not documented. Imagine if this happened to a liberal judge?
Friday, January 21, 2011
How Goldman Sachs Games The System: The Month That Never Was
Do you remember, back at the end of 2008, when Goldman Sachs switched its status from investment bank to commercial bank? This provided it with various benefits that allowed it to avoid imminent destruction, and as long as they were doing it, the Goldman partners decided to switch their fiscal year from one that starts on December 1 to one that starts on January 1. Because of that, December 2008 was part of no fiscal year at all, and
Goldman cleverly booked huge losses that month that never showed up on any of its annual reports.
But that's not all. The New York Times reported today on a vast trove of stock options that Goldman granted recently to its partners, and guess when they were granted? Felix Salmon:
There’s much more to be said on this matter. For one thing, the monster option grant took place during Goldman’s notorious orphan month, meaning that it would never appear in an annual report. And for another thing, it was very expensive even at the time....Add it all up, and the various stock-related grants given in one month of 2008 (we’re not including annual bonuses here) were worth $1.9 billion at the time, and are worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $7.6 billion now.
Remember that December 2008, when Goldman made these grants, was the worst month in the company’s history: it lost $1.3 billion, and was mired in the depths of the financial crisis. Yet many partners will have received stock and options awards that month which are worth hefty eight-figure sums today. Not bad for a month’s work.
Ain't life grand? It sure is if you work on Wall Street, where planet-annihilating financial crises are a problem only for the little people.
via motherjones.com
Wonder who was President in November 2008? Obama was sworn in January 2009.
Exactly? Do You Know What That Word Means?
“Barack Obama won’t show us his birth certificate,” says Steve, a Connecticut resident and small-business owner, while he’s shoveling his walk. “He’s a Muslim terrorist. And you know what really bothers me? He is doing exactly what Hitler did.”
A hardworking fellow and family man in a postindustrial factory town of a blue state, Steve does not come across as fanatical. Yet his adherence to raw belief—a position unassailable by factual counter-data—is more than an inherently dangerous American mind-set. It is a deadly challenge to the aim of humanism.
Exactly what Hitler did? No hyperbole here. Proceed.
“You’ve got to shoot them in the head.” - Glenn Beck
“You’ve got to shoot them in the head.” - Glenn Beck
Glenn Beck video surfaces from six months ago. Violent rhetoric on Fox. How redundant can you get?
If Sarah Palin Were Black
"If Sarah Palin were black, her daughter’s out of wedlock, “baby daddy drama” would have been presented as an example of both pathological behavior and a dysfunctional family that is symbolic of the social problems in that community. If Sarah Palin were black, never would the poor decision making by the Palin family be marked off as challenges overcome, or deeds to be valorized. If Sarah Palin were black, her neo-secessionist husband would have been the death knell for her political career, because as we all know you can’t trust “those people.” If Sarah Palin were black, her lack of intellectual curiosity, willful and cultivated ignorance, and lack of grace both written and spoken, would not be taken as “folksy.” Instead, Palin would be viewed as unqualified for any public office. If Sarah Palin were black she would be tarred and feathered as an “affirmative action baby."
Just goes to show how far Palin’s whiteness can take her. Zero intellect, two high school drop-outs, an unwed teen mother, a quitter of the one major job she had. Master of hateful coded language targeting opponents as not “real Americans”. Belongs to a church outside of the mainstream.
Still a top GOP candidate.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
9 Things That Make You an Asshole on Evolution
1. You talk openly about how diseases are becoming stronger. You found a way to argue that disease has become more resistant to penicillin yet you also claim there isn’t solid proof of evolution. Bravo! That alone takes talent.
2. You eat corn. This may be hard for many of you to believe but corn is completely man-made. It DOES NOT occur in nature and never has. Without humans, corn would cease to exist in only a few years. Even the smartest of you might not even be aware that corn isn’t a “Natural” food. Please look this up.
3. You own a dog or at least acknowledge that dogs exist. I know you might not be aware of this, but dogs were also created by man. They do not occur in nature. Wolves, foxes, jackals, coyotes do but they aren’t the same thing as a household pet. I know you like to imagine little herds of teacup poodles roaming the lands in packs but it just never happened.
4. You think that people believe that man came from monkeys. To keep it simple: No. It didn’t happen and funny enough, at no point in the history of mankind has anyone claimed this other than people trying to debunk human evolution. The Scopes “Monkey Trial” is probably a big reason this idea took off. We came from apes. How do we know? Because Human Beings are apes. An ape is not an animal itself but a classification of Hominoid. If you are an adult and don’t know and understand this you should be ashamed.
5. You think that walking upright proves something. It doesn’t. It is learned. If you could leave a baby on an island and come back 20 years later, it almost certainly wouldn’t be standing. The process of balancing on 2 legs not only needs to be learned but also (concerning the method in which we do it) takes some brain power and evolution to even allow its possibility. Our physiological sense of Equilibrioception went in a different direction compared to other apes.
6. You have a skewed idea of time. Imagine a friend missed your birthday by one day. How about one week or a month? What if they had your age wrong? These things can happen right? What about if they missed it by 100 years? 1000 years? 100,000 years? What if they missed by one million years? You have to agree that it is virtually impossible for someone to make this error. Over 60 million years happened in between the end of the Dinosaurs and the beginning of what would become modern Humans. So, it isn’t as simple as saying that humans and dinosaurs didn’t live together. Even the consideration of it as a possibility should show just how horribly uneducated and wrong someone can be. It is also very hard to grasp gradual change over time. Aside from average height (more because of improved diet) and foot size (diet & possibly better footwear), you cannot notice anything different between Humans today and thousands of years ago.
7. You use air quotes when saying that evolution is only a “Theory” and not proven. This can also fall in with thinking evolution is a “belief” as well. Do you believe in gravity? That is a theory. Do you talk about climate change? That is also a theory (barely). What about thinking that germs are what cause disease? Theory. A theory has been tested and virtually proven. I say virtually because it can be expanded. If an idea was proposed and not tested, it would be a hypothesis which is an unproven theory. Calling Creationism a hypothesis is almost a stretch. It does not even have the ability to be tested. It is a belief.
8. You don’t understand that Darwin wrote The Origin of Species and not the Origin of Life or Man. Darwin stayed away from speculating at all at how man came to be or about how life began. If you picked up the book and read it the possibility that you might begin to understand it increases. From knowledge like this, you could attempt to form valid ideas and opinions.
9. You missed the memo that every person on Earth is not identical. I know you may think that I am oversimplifying this but hear me out. Imagine every single person on Earth was raised the same, experienced the same exposure to nature, ate the same food etc. They would not look the same as they grew older. They would still maintain variations in skin color, eye and hair color, epicanthic folds (eyes) as well as many other racially defining characteristics. A no-brainer right? If there is no evolution, how do we explain individuality? How could there be any difference from person to person at the genetic level? How could those simple things converge or diverge at all without evolution?
To be honest, it makes me a little sad that even one person could have a viewpoint which counters anything on this list. I like the idea of at worst, those people researching these things in an attempt to prove me wrong. Research is the path to understanding.
Weiner Gives ‘Half Time Report’ In Debate Over Health Care Repeal
Weiner Gives ‘Half Time Report’ In Debate Over Health Care Repeal (via AskAnthonyWeiner)
“The Republicans first start by making things up, you kind of have to wonder if any of them actually read the bill…’130,000 new agencies’ - NOT TRUE…’New IRS Death Panels’ - NOT TRUE…’Members aren’t covered’ - NOT TRUE…’No Torte Reform in it’ - NOT TRUE…
You know, I want to just advise people watching at home playing that now popular drinking game of ‘you take a shot whenever Republicans say something that is not true’, PLEASE assign a designated driver, this is going to be a long afternoon!” ~ Anthony Weiner (D-NY)
Weiner is a bad-ass. Calling out Republicans is a full-time job.
Stud.
An Unshakable Persecution Complex
Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.), a freshman, railed against the individual mandate provision -- which was a Republican idea, by the way -- which he considers unconstitutional. "As Virginians, we did not accept the chains of George the Third," Griffith said. "Nor will we accept the chains of Obamacare."
This is obviously very silly rhetoric from a right-wing politician who's trying too hard, but it fits nicely into a larger pattern of Republicans with a deep-seeded persecution complex. Greg explained that GOP officials have a "comical" tendency to "compare their current situation to that of history's leading victims of oppression, persecution, and genocide."
After noting several recent examples from prominent far-right voices -- including the "blood libel" and "pogrom" incidents from last week -- Greg added, "It's hard to know what motivates this kind of thing. It's almost as if these folks are suffering from what you might call a world-historical inferiority complex. They're desperate to imagine themselves as actors in an ongoing drama that rivals the most momentous struggles and conflicts in human history. So they just play-act the part.... It's all so pathetic and adolescent."
It's the Glenn Beck style of cherry picking tidbits from ancient Rome, WWII Germany, a little Herbert Hoover from 1931 or Woodrow Wilson from 1918, all of which have little in common with the complexities of a global 2011, and weave a dubious narrative of how old white people are fucked.
King George III, living in the 1700's, has what to do with modern health insurance options? Exactly.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Lawrence O’Donnell Thoroughly PWNS (R) Rep.Trent Franks
via brooklynmutt.com
The "children of god" robot talking point is the dog whistle for the Right because you know god and Jesus would want you to have unlimited bullets.
The Elite Media Criticizing The Media
JON STEWART, on Sarah Palin loudly proclaiming “They’re not going to shut me up,” on The Daily Show.The author of two best-selling books, a highly-sought after and paid speaker, a reality show star, Facebook / Twitter addict, and commentator that got a news network to build her her own studio in her house, defiantly says she will not be silenced!
…There’s no form of communication your views don’t come from! I’m afraid to turn on my HAM radio! Or watch your new semaphore show! In fact, from what I can tell, not only do people want you to show up and talk, they’re begging you to show up! You’re the one who refuses to go on all these (news) outlets that keep asking you to join them for a conversation!
"
Even though she has a third-grader's intellect, Palin is elite among the TV and media personalities. To then target elites, while at the same time, promote to cut programs for the less fortunate, takes a special kind of evil, dysfunctional person.
Define "Respected"
In a piece on the health care fight, the New York Times tells readers today, "As floor debate on the repeal measure opened on Tuesday, Representative Paul Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin and chairman of the Budget Committee, who is a respected voice on fiscal issues, declared that the health care law would 'accelerate our country's path toward bankruptcy.'"
There's a couple of problems with the sentence, most notably the fact that the second half helps debunk the first half.
Obviously, a law that's projected to reduce the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars in the first decade, and a trillion dollars in the second decade, necessarily can't move the country closer to "bankruptcy." Anyone who thinks this way probably shouldn't be "a respected voice on fiscal issues."
Which is precisely why it's irksome when major news outlets make assertions like this. It creates a hard-to-shake public image, widely embraced by reporters, based on nothing but bogus perceptions.
"Ryan voted for then-President Bush's tax cuts in 2001, then argued for extending them last year. Those tax cuts have had rather significant fiscal consequences. Is Ryan deserving of this praise because, though he fights for tax cuts that lead to massive deficits, he acknowledges (but doesn't do anything about) the fact that not all tax cuts pay for themselves? Ryan supported the Iraq war and voted for Bush's Medicare prescription program, too, both of which contributed significantly to deficits." - Jamison Foser
The Right Wing fantasy continues: Increase deficits, cut taxes for the rich, never name a spending cut.
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