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Saturday, July 29, 2006

Minimum wage hike ok'd by pickled fucker's Walton Massas

Republicans saw combining the wage and tax issues as their best chance for getting a permanent cut to the estate tax, which produced powerful lobbying by farmers and small-business owners and superwealthy families such as the Walton family, heirs of the Wal-Mart fortune.

"This is the best shot we've got; we're going to take it," said Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio.

Hey, he's trained, maybe he can try the monkey chow diet

No, wait, isn't he on a liquid diet?

What bullcrap

How Hating Jews Transformed Into Hating Americans

Do left-wing groups hate Americans as an acceptable alternative to anti-Semitism? According to this op-ed article from Paraguay's Ultima Hora, this philosophy, which got its start as the scapegoating of Jews for all of the world's ills, has become the motivating ideal of Islamist and anti-democratic forces alike.
By Hugo RubinTranslated by Emma Peitx ClúaJuly 21, 2006Paraguay - Ultima Hora - Home Page (Spanish)

Why do I wonder if the fucking CIA or fucking Mossad wrote this article?

Alternet DrugReport

(If you're looking for the DRUDGE REPORT you're in the wrong place, buh bye, tah tah, C-ya)


I liked this book, "Breaking Rank" by Norm Stamper. I especially liked the chapter on de-militarizing the police.

Click on "Alternet Drug Report" to read an article that Mr. Stamper wrote for Alternet. I found the comments on the article very interesting.

laugh

FCCFU



Then go laugh at the description of this outfit . It's spot on and it made me laugh out loud, although I have no idea who's in it. Usually I don't care which celebrity is out and wearing what kind of fashion nightmare, or even what the "press" reports are their latest shenanigans. I might pay attention to Brangelina because of their work in Africa, but he rest of 'em? Eh, pfffftt, who cares?

Friday, July 28, 2006

Bankers Fear World Economic Meltdown
By GABRIEL KOLKO
On June 15 we published Gabriel Kolko’s essay on the enormous instability of the world’d financial system. In the ensuing weeks Professor Kolko has enlarged his analysis, and here we offer our readers his updated version. AC / JSC
There has been a profound and fundamental change in the world economy over the past decade. The very triumph of financial liberalization and deregulation, one of the keystones of the “Washington consensus” that the U.S. government, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Bank have persistently and successfully attempted over the past decades to implement, have also produced a deepening crisis that its advocates scarcely expected.

Exxon Mobil makes more than $10 billion
No. 1 U.S. oil company earns $1,318 a second - topping forecasts - but comes in just shy of a record.
By Steve Hargreaves, CNNMoney.com staff writer
July 27 2006: 4:27 PM EDT


Robber baron (industrialist))
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Historical Estimates of World Population
(Population in millions. When lower and upper estimates are the same they are shown under "Lower.")

World population

Thursday, July 27, 2006

Diebold Profit Falls By 46%



Diebold profits are down?


SYMPATHY IS IN BETWEEN SHIT AND SYPHILIS IN THE DICTIONARY .

This is pathetic

This was in my mailbox:

Thank you to everyone who contacted their senator asking that they vote in favor of the Lautenberg-Menendez Teen Pregnancy Prevention amendment to S. 403. Sadly, yesterday the U.S. Senate rejected this important amendment by a vote of 48 to 51. As you recall, the amendment would have funded programs to prevent teen pregnancy and help parents talk to their kids about tough topics like sex. Yesterday's vote shows that Majority Leader Bill Frist and others are not interested in realistic approaches to preventing teen pregnancy or protecting young women in difficult circumstances. That is the only reason they could to reject more funding for teen-pregnancy prevention programs.
Please take a few moments to call or write your senators and thank them if they voted YES or express your disappointment if they voted NO. To see how you member voted click on this post's title.

It's all the same old usual suspects, the ones I want to thump over the head with their own damn bibles to knock some sense into them.


Do they pay attention to the abortion rates of their constituents? Do they have any clue that this will just make the death toll go up?


Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Rapture whackos allowed a voice in the MSM

And....they call liberals crazy? Unhinged? Moonbats?

Do not adjust your screen. Do not get your eyes checked. Do not attempt to have a rational discussion with these people, either, you'll be wasting your breath and your energy.


Peace out.

Note: A Rapture Whacko can be identified by frequent use of the word Armageddon, and a strange, frantic, desperate, but disconnected look in their eyes.


Greg says nope, it's about oil profits, again.

Blood in Beirut: $75.05 a BarrelPublished by Greg Palast July 26th, 2006 in Articles
The failure to stop the bloodletting in the Middle East, Exxon’s record second-quarter profits and Iran’s nuclear cat-and-mouse game have something in common — it’s the oil.
By Greg Palast The Guardian
I can’t tell you how it started — this is a war that’s been fought since the Levites clashed with the Philistines — but I can tell you why the current mayhem has not been stopped. It’s the oil.
I’m not an expert on Palestine nor Lebanon and I’d rather not pretend to be one. If you want to know what’s going on, read Robert Fisk. He lives there. He speaks Arabic. Stay away from pundits whose only connection to the Middle East is the local falafel stand.
So why am I writing now? The answer is that, while I don’t speak Arabic or Hebrew, I am completely fluent in the language of petroleum....

Related Posts
Why Palast Is Wrong - And Why the oil companies don’t want you to know it

3 stories caught my eye today



















more on Net Neutrality from MyDD

I had to laugh as I read this because I recently got a call to switch my long distance carrier. I told them to call back when they could help me save some money on local calls, which amounts to 80% of the bill, not the other 20%.


American Masters (PBS tonight) Walter Cronkite

I'm looking forward to watching this.


Uncensored news reports from the Middle East
Mosaic Link TV

Is it me, or does it seem like "murdered" and "martyred" translate into English as the same word?

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Depleted uranium in Lebanon and neocon plans from 1996


Did you know that "The delivery of at least 100 GBU 28 bunker busters bombs containing depleted uranium warheads by the United States to Israel for use against targets in Lebanon will result in additional radioactive and chemical toxic contamination with consequent adverse health and environmental effects throughout the middle east."?

Did you know, from uruknet.info

اوروكنت.إنفو
informazione dall'iraq occupato information from occupied iraq
أخبار من العراق المحتل

And they planned this crap?

1996. Neocons deliver report to Israel: Remove Saddam

The "Clean Break" report, from IASPS

AAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHH! wtf is WRONG with these creeps? No, nevermind, wtf is human about them, wtf is right about them?

Monday, July 24, 2006

Ain't it sad

That our citizens have to retain a lawyer to forward the goal of fair and legal elections?

Paul Lehto Retained By Election Integrity Advocates In San Diego
Breaking!
Guest blogged by Emily Levy of the California Election Protection Network and the CA-50 Action Committee
Attorney Paul Lehto, who specializes in cases involving election law, business fraud and consumer law, has been retained for work on the issues surrounding the illegal election conditions in San Diego County.
Lehto came to the attention of BRAD BLOG readers when he filed a lawsuit in Washington state against Sequoia Voting Systems Inc.
He has also appeared as a guest on The BRAD SHOW of April 23, 2005. To listen to that interview, click here.
More details will be posted when they become available.
(DISCLOSURE: Paul Lehto is also a legal advisor for VelvetRevolution.us, a Voting Rights and Election Reform organization co-founded by BRAD BLOG's Brad Friedman.)

And that the

U.S. Could Take Lessons from Mexican Voting Process
Published on Saturday, July 22, 2006 by the Madison Capital Times (Wisconsin)
by Norman Stockwell


And that Americans are misinformed, disinformed and uninformed about the rest of the world, and, in particular, the Middle East
Jul. 21, 2006 - 1:46 PM
Amateur Hour
The Fog of Cable
Lawrence Pintak
Napa Valley, Calif. -- As someone who lives and breathes Middle East politics and media, I have had the bizarre -- and frustrating -- experience of watching the current conflict play out on U.S. cable television, and I am reminded once again why many Americans have such a limited -- and distorted -- view of the world.
I run a center for television and new media at The American University in Cairo, which puts me at the crossroads of journalism in the Arab world. For me, monitoring a crisis like this would normally mean the voracious consumption of Arab and U.S. media -- television, newspapers, Web sites and all the rest.
But for the first week of the war, I was on vacation in California with my family. That has meant catching glimpses of the conflict in bite-sized snatches on cable television between forays to Disneyland, trips to the beach and aquarium tours -- much, I suspect, like many other Americans this summer.
At times, the coverage has seemed as much a fantasy as Disney's Space Mountain, and the level of Middle East knowledge on the part of some television anchors only a few notches higher than that of the tattooed biker couple waiting in line for the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.
Take, for example, a CNN interview with an American high school student who had been visiting his father's relatives in Lebanon when the conflict broke out. With his tearful American mother in the studio, he was asked by phone whether he was frightened. No big deal, he replied, explaining that he was north of the Christian port of Jounieh, far from the fighting. Betraying her woeful ignorance of Lebanon's geography and politics, the anchor replied that he sounded like a typical "macho" young man who didn't want to worry his mother.
The anchor might have looked at a map before going on air.
Hype abounded. "This could be World War Three!" more than one reporter was heard to say. The same dramatic images were endlessly repeated, as if on a loop. Rumor was elevated to fact -- and the networks seemed proud of it. One CNN promo showed an unedited sequence in which a nameless photographer told Anderson Cooper, in northern Israel, that there was a rumor of rockets on the way. Cooper then turned to the camera and authoritatively reported, "The police say more rockets are coming."
So much for checking sources.
To be fair, there was also a fair share of solid, informed reporting. Yeoman's work has been done by Nic Robertson in Beirut, Matthew Chance in Gaza and Christiane Amanpour on the Israeli border, as well as CNN anchor and Beirut veteran Jim Clancy, NBC's Martin Fletcher on MSNBC and the handful of others who are based in, or spend significant time in, the region. The problem comes with those -- like Cooper -- who have parachuted into the Middle East with little grounding in the region, and the anchors back in the studios in London and the U.S. The errors of the uninitiated embeds in Iraq have been endlessly repeated.
One example: CBS refugee John Roberts, now CNN's senior correspondent, eruditely pointed to pro-Hezbollah demonstrations in Syria as evidence of a Sunni-Shiite split. The only weakness in that analysis is that Syria is a Sunni nation, so the demonstrations point to exactly the opposite -- Sunni-Shiite unity on the issue of Hezbollah's actions.
Over on Hardball, NBC correspondent Dawn Fratangelo's discussion of potential dangers to American evacuees quickly disintegrated into confused talk of Hezbollah rockets in northern Israel. That's the other direction, Dawn.
There was little effort to identify the politics of many of the pseudo-experts who were trotted into the studios. Right-wing Lebanese Christians and representatives of Israeli-backed think tanks -- both with axes to grind -- were offered up as independent analysts. Anchors and reporters, meanwhile, frequently wore their politics on their sleeve. When an American woman trapped in southern Lebanon decried Washington's failure to stop what she said was Israel's brutal killing of civilians, CNN anchor Tony Harris snapped back, "That's not the view over here," and cut her off, saying he didn't have time to debate the issue.
As is so often the case these days, celebrity reporters themselves frequently became the story. Anderson Cooper spent more time on-camera than the protagonists in the conflict, and MSNBC endlessly looped an outtake of Richard Engel repeatedly flubbing his on-camera standup as Israeli bombs fell behind him, much, I suspect, to his embarrassment. A failure to remain cool under fire is not something to be proud of.
NBC anchor Brian Williams made much of the fact that when he went on a helicopter flight with an Israeli officer to take a look at the fighting, "We got closer than we intended." Turns out that some shells landed in the distance. War is Hell, Brian.
Even more troubling was the fact that the Williams segment, along with reports by several other NBC correspondents, ran on Scarborough Country, an overtly politicized talk show, further blurring the line between news and opinion and muddying the waters of cable journalism.
Amid segments from such stalwart NBC correspondents as Martin Fletcher, there was Scarborough describing Hezbollah as an "Iran-backed terror group" and throwing former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak softballs like, "Why is it the more Israel is willing to give up to the Palestinians, the more your country comes under attack?" Meanwhile, conservative iconoclast Tucker Carlson, sans bowtie, has been out there "reporting" from the Israeli border, asking real NBC correspondents such leading questions as, "Do we have any idea whether this city was targeted by Hezbollah because of its Christian population?" (This isn't just about "good" Christians and "bad" Muslims, Tucker.)
There is plenty of room on cable television for politicized talk shows of all stripes. But in allowing -- or, rather, ordering -- its respected news correspondents to appear on such shows, the networks are trading credibility for ratings and cementing their transition from purveyors of news to citadels of infotainment.
Lost in the fog of hype and self-aggrandizement on the cable segments I saw was much of the subtle complexity of the conflict. Instead, it was too often reduced to the black-hat/white-hat characterization that has guided U.S. policy toward the region.
My view was one slice of the coverage. I did not see the main network evening newscasts or the morning shows. What I did was what so many Americans do these days -- I grazed cable news in fits and snatches. And I came up hungry.
Lawrence Pintak is the director of the Adham Center for Electronic Journalism at The American University in Cairo. A former CBS News Middle East correspondent, his most recent book is Reflections in a Bloodshot Lens: America, Islam & the War of Ideas. He can be reached at lpintak ~at~ aucegypt.edu.

The BRAD BLOG : What is San Diego County Registrar of Voters Mikel Haas Hiding—Besides the Truth?


Welcome to the 50th Congressional District.

Sunday, July 23, 2006

Nice


Navy Orders TB Tests for 6,000 on Aircraft Carrier
Crew members and civilians aboard the Ronald Reagan will be screened after a sailor is diagnosed with the disease.
By Tony Perry, Times Staff WriterJuly 23, 2006
SAN DIEGO — The Navy has decided to conduct tuberculosis tests on all 4,800 crew members and 1,200 civilians who were recently aboard the aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan after an initial round of tests showed many crew members tested positive for the disease, officials said Saturday.The first round of tests was ordered after a sailor was diagnosed with active tuberculosis. The ship returned to San Diego on July 6 after a six-month deployment to the Persian Gulf. Officials tested 776 crew members and civilians who were thought to have had contact with the sailor. Positive results showed up in 4.4% of them...


There are 3 million people in this county.

And these guys came back
July 9, 2006
After six months at sea, thousands of San Diego based sailors return home after being aboard the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan. KUSI's Paul Bloom gives an in depth look at the historical homecoming, as well as, the mission out at sea.
Story Created: Jul 12, 2006 at 4:35 PM PST

It's treatable, and not life-threatening in most cases. If that's all they're bringing back from cruises, we're all gonna be A-OK. I just wish they'd test them before they dump them off the boat.

Bush approval 50 State survey now

Bush approval survey State by State

Pay close attention to the Ohio and Florida approval rates now, compare them with current approval ratings of blue '04 States and tell me the election wasn't stolen.

I dare you.


Oh, Jurrassicpork is fun-neee today and when you're done with the pitchurs & the laughs, read the rest .