Sarah Palin, Richard Cohen and today’s sad, sad GOP. I’m getting a lot of attention, even outside the wingnut blogosphere, for explaining on MSNBC that Sarah Palin’s equating the national debt with slavery is another example of “the white grievance industry” manufacturing and peddling new widgets of rage to the GOP base. I’m not sure what’s noteworthy there. Palin is indeed part of a vast white right-wing anger machine mostly run out of Fox News, though its unrivaled leader is Rush Limbaugh. It’s powered by the paranoia among too many Republicans that white people are somehow oppressed by our first black president. You’re forgiven if Palin is on your ignore list.
Railing against Democrats’ luring voters with offers of “free stuff” (like healthcare), Palin went on: Our free stuff today is being paid for today by taking money from our children and borrowing money from China. Palin is ignorant, but she’s not entirely stupid. The problem with what Cohen wrote is that he seems to share the “gag reflex” of those “conventional” voters. Dick Cheney, one-man zombie apocalypse | Ana Marie Cox. Rationally, I realize that the reappearance of Dick Cheney in the media landscape is tied to his promoting his new book, Heart: An American Medical Odyssey.
And, with equal clear-mindedness, I know that his publisher no doubt timed the book's debut to capitalize on the roll-out of the Affordable Care Act – Cheney has gravely insisted in interviews that the ACA would limit the technological innovations that allow his own survival. A more primal part of me simply sees "Cheney", "heart" and "Halloween" and I clutch my own chest in fear. The Republican party has even more to fear than I do. Cheney – never very shy with advice – has used his book tour to continue his relentless campaign on behalf of torture and totalitarian tactics.
And he's using it, paradoxically, to insist that he and his daughter Liz (now running for Senate in Wyoming) are allies of the Tea Party and that he supports their cause. My understanding is that Dick Cheney is not very religious, and certainly not superstitious. George W Bush's new 'crusade': converting Jews to Christianity | Andrew Brown. Some people think George W Bush did as much as he could to bring about Armageddon with his earlier interventions in the Middle East. But not the man himself, apparently. He has signed up for a fundraising event for the Messianic Jewish Bible Institute, an organisation which aims to promote the second coming by converting Jews to Christianity, and will speak today at their fundraiser in Irving, Texas.
Such "Messianic Jews" – who accept that Jesus was the promised Messiah – are loathed by most other Jews, and regarded with great suspicion by mainstream Christian denominations. If Jesus really was the promised Messiah, this would restore much of the traditional basis for Christian anti-semitism, which most Christians have struggled against for the last 50 years. But a belief in the necessary conversion of the Jews still flourishes on the wilder shores of American Christianity.
God is raising up an army of believers to defend Israel, especially in these times more than ever. Fox News PR Used Fake Accounts To Push Back At Negative Commenters. Fox News Anchor Anna Kooiman Falls For Parody About Obama Funding Muslim Museum. Jon Stewart lashes Fox News with expletive. There’s a debate over class and privilege playing out in the media over the government shutdown. Today on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Sam Stein of the Huffington Post engaged the argument of conservative commentator Bill Kristol that the events of this week are not so dire, as broken down by Mediaite’s Evan McMurry.
“The Republican House can move on a genuine human emergency. But a one- or two-week shutdown is not going to be the end of the world,” said Kristol. “Unless you are on nutritional assistance,” said Stein. Clearly Kristol didn’t brush up on his government-shutdown basics. The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart addressed the same theme in his show last night, ripping Fox News for making light of the shutdown’s consequences. Addressing himself to Starnes’ comment about protein and fruit-flavored drinks, Stewart went profane: “I know that for you, potted meat and Tang is shorthand for [expletive] you wouldn’t possibly imagine eating unless there was a catastrophe.
Cuccinelli: 'My opponent is flat out lying' Family Research Council: “Nothing more Christian” than kicking 4 million people off food stamps. Keith Alexander: In Best Interest Of U.S. To 'Put All The Phone Records' Into A Searchable 'Lockbox' National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander said the NSA wants to collect more phone records, even after being the subject of recent public unease.
Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) asked Alexander if the NSA wants "the phone records of all Americans" during a congressional hearing Thursday. "I believe it is in the nation's best interest to put all the phone records into a lockbox that we can search when the nation needs to do it, yes," Alexander replied. Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) reminded Alexander of Americans' distrust in the NSA since Edward Snowden disclosed documents on previously secret U.S. internet and phone surveillance programs in June. "A lot of Americans have lost trust in what you're doing," Warner said. During the same hearing, James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, said he would consider limits to ease concerns raised by disclosures of NSA's bulk collection of Americans' phone and email data. Matt Sledge contributed to this report.
Also on HuffPost: The Old Extreme GOP vs. the New Extreme GOP: Whoever Wins, We Lose. | Richard (RJ) Eskow. They're back - and they're more extreme than ever. GOP House leaders John Boehner and Eric Cantor are still pushing economic ideas disproved a century ago, peddling deep spending cuts that would inflict more misery on the already-beleaguered majority. But that's not enough for the even more extreme right, for the politicians named Cruz and Paul and Lee, for the groups with names like "FreedomWorks" and "Club for Growth," and for the moneyed interests who fund them all. The new Republican right is a tangled nest of snakes.
Legislators and observers reach into it at their own risk. But however beyond the pale these new forces may seem, remember: The fact that their enemies are extreme doesn't mean that Boehner and Cantor aren't. Hostage of the Week Boehner and Cantor are once again preparing to use procedural gimmicks to hold the US government hostage to their pro-billionaire, pro-corporate agenda. That bill never came. Rewriting History The Old Guard Not good enough, says the Tea Party Right.
NSF cancels political-science grant cycle. Alex Wong/Getty US Senator Tom Coburn (Republican, Oklahoma) helped to insert language in a law that restricts federal political science research funding. US political scientists are usually busy in early August, polishing proposals for grants from the US National Science Foundation (NSF). But not this year. Less than one month before an annual mid-August application deadline, the funding agency has scrapped new political-science funding for the rest of 2013.
The NSF declines to explain its reasons for eliminating the grant call, one of two that typically take place each year. But leaders in the field are blaming Congress, which on 21 March passed a bill requiring that NSF-funded political-science research benefit either national security or economic interests. “It’s hard to imagine that it’s not a factor in the decision,” says Michael Brintnall, executive director of the American Political Science Association in Washington DC, who describes the funding cut as “troubling”. The Story of the Tsar Bomba. The Tsar Bomba, or “Big Ivan” as the Soviets nicknamed it, is the single most powerful man-made explosive device in human history.
But why was such a device even made? Well, for similar reasons as to why the U.S. once thought it would be fun to nuke the moon- basically, the bomb was little more than Russia demonstrating its military might and ingenuity; it was simply too massive to be easily deployed in regular warfare, particularly nearly impossible for the Soviets to effectively deploy against the U.S. The bomb itself was so powerful that the survival rate for the pilot and crew aboard the plane that dropped it was estimated at 50%, and they were 10 km (about six miles) in the sky and 45 km (28 miles) away when the parachuted bomb detonated at an elevation of about 4 km (2.5 miles).
And this is after they reduced the total yield of the bomb by half. So surely such a device was tens of months, if not years in the making, no? If you liked this article, you might also enjoy: Bonus Facts: The United States Once Planned On Nuking the Moon. Today I Found Out the United States once planned on shooting a nuclear bomb at the moon.
If you presumed that the reasoning behind such an act was “because we can”, you are absolutely correct. That is exactly why the U.S. wanted to do it, in order to one-up the Soviet Union, who were perceived as leading the space race at the time. The project was labeled “A Study of Lunar Research Flights” or “Project A119″ and was developed by the U.S. Air Force in the late 1950s. It was felt that this would be a relatively easy thing to do and would also boost public perception of how the U.S. was doing in comparison to the Soviet Union in terms of the space race. According to one of the leaders of the project, physicist Leonard Reiffel, hitting the moon with an intercontinental ballistic missile would have been relatively easy to accomplish, including hitting the target with an accuracy of about two miles.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy: Bonus Facts: Expand for References: 10 Most Absurd Things Conservatives Have Said About Sex Around Texas Abortion Battles. Texas Governor Rick Perry speaks during an address to the 39th Conservative Political Action Committee February 9, 2012 in Washington, DC. Perry announced Monday he will not seek re-election next year, while leaving open the prospect of launching a second presidential bid. July 17, 2013 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. The horrible battle over abortion in Texas, which most recently resulted in the legislature passing a bill that would close down 37 out of 42 clinics, has revealed to the nation just how serious conservatives are when they say they want to eradicate safe, legal abortion. 1) Rick Perry mansplains to women how they should feel about their own rights.
Perry also misunderstands the realities of abortion. 2) Peggy Noonan calls 50-year-old woman a “young woman.” 3) Speaking out for women makes you a terrorist. His poor grammar does make one wonder if he meant “a terrorist”, i.e. My Experiences up Close with the People Who Bombed a 700-Year-Old Civilization into Dust.
July 18, 2013 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. I learned firsthand about the realities of executive branch power 40 years ago, when I discovered that a handful of U.S. executive leaders from both political parties, liberals and conservatives, had secretly destroyed the 700-year-old Plain of Jars civilization in northern Laos without congressional or public knowledge, let alone consent. The Executive and Congress: Craven Fear I learned then that one key to executive power is its secrecy and deception.
Back in D.C. on April 22, 1971, I saw an executive branch representative, former U.S. I knew Kennedy knew he was being lied to. In the fictional democracy many pundits think we still live in, Kennedy would have sworn Sullivan in and indicted him for perjury for lying to Congress. But even 40 years ago, one of the Senate's most powerful legislators did not dare seriously challenge what he knew was unaccountable executive mass murder.
Dear ABC: Putting Jenny McCarthy on “The View” will kill children. Jenny McCarthy, a former model and comedienne, is set to be the next co-host of ABC’s “The View,” a popular morning talk show with an all-woman cast. She is replacing Elisabeth Hasselbeck, who recently jumped ship to Fox News, cable’s longtime home of attractive women who specialize in reactionary sneering. McCarthy certainly has a more pleasant, or at least less confrontational, television style. Really the only problem with hiring her is that her life’s mission at this point is the advancement of dangerous fictions about vaccines. She devotes a great deal of energy to promoting the untrue belief that vaccines lead to autism, and it seems possible that she now views her career as a television personality and prominent celebrity as a means of carrying out her mission to spread what she believes is the truth about autism.
Vaccines don’t cause autism. Vaccines, instead, prevent disease. And some outlets have taken it much, much further. Not everybody shared Walters’ delight. Fox News Spends 6 Minutes Describing Why Mr. Rogers Was An 'Evil, Evil Man' More GOP Idiocy: 'The Incidence of Rape Resulting in Pregnancy Are Very Low' Metropolitan Police Department to give Cybercrime Lessons. Metropolitan Police Department is planning to setup cybercrime classes for investigators at a local police station to avoid any kind of wrong arrest and misunderstanding. The classes are planned to avoid unusual circumstances like last year when four innocent men were arrested for spreading virus, later it was discovered that their computers were hacked and used as zombies to conduct criminal activities by someone else.
Department claims that all lectures will be up to date and given by highly skilled IT professional trained at MPD. In December 2012, police had arrested four men focusing on the IP addresses during investigation and not going out of the box, while the real hackers were thinking way out of the box. To avoid such situation again, we have decided to provide proper and updated education to our investigators, Report said. Lectures at MPD will include an in depth knowledge of how internet protocols work, how computers can be accessed remotely and how wireless LAN is hacked. Noam Chomsky: Ronald Reagan's Secret, Genocidal Wars. June 6, 2013 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. On Mother’s Day, May 12, The Boston Globe featured a photo of a young woman with her toddler son sleeping in her arms. The woman, of Mayan Indian heritage, had crossed the U.S. border seven times while pregnant, only to be caught and shipped back across the border on six of those attempts.
Most of the border crossers are from Central America. The main perpetrator, Gen. Then, 10 days later, the case was overturned under suspicious circumstances. Rios Montt’s forces killed tens of thousands of Guatemalans, mostly Mayans, in the year 1982 alone. As that bloody year ended, President Reagan assured the nation that the killer was “a man of great personal integrity and commitment,” who was getting a “bum rap” from human-rights organizations and who “wants to improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans and to promote social justice.”
But truth was unwelcome. Red States Get More Extreme -- How America Is Splitting Apart Without Bothering With Civil War. June 10, 2013 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Conservative Republicans in our nation's capital have managed to accomplish something they only dreamed of when Tea Partiers streamed into Congress at the start of 2011: They've basically shut Congress down. Their refusal to compromise is working just as they hoped: No jobs agenda. No budget. It's as if an entire branch of the federal government -- the branch that's supposed to deal directly with the nation's problems, not just execute the law or interpret the law but make the law -- has gone out of business, leaving behind only a so-called "sequester" that's cutting deeper and deeper into education, infrastructure, programs for the nation's poor, and national defense.
The window of opportunity for the president to get anything done is closing rapidly. But the nation's work doesn't stop even if Washington does. On the other hand, the biggest controversy in Kansas is between Gov. Pat Robertson Blames Suicide on "Demonic Games" Like Dungeons and Dragons. Creation Museum Adds Zip Lines And Other Secular Fare, As Ticket Sales Decline. Nissim Yeshaya, Israeli Judge, Says 'Some Girls Enjoy Being Raped,' Resigns Amid Outcry. Welfare for the Wealthy. How liberals saved California. Northern Ireland Is Building a Fake Town (With Government Money) to Make It Look Like Austerity Works - Matthew O'Brien.
Patrick Mercer 'offered Commons security pass' 'Greed Is Good': Top 7 Most Piggish Commencement Speeches. Gun Control Polls Reveal Frustration With Both Parties, High Ongoing Support For Background Checks. Republicans Altered Benghazi Emails, CBS News Report Claims. FWD.us Backers Face Progressive Pressure To Drop Support For Mark Zuckerberg Group. 'Life-Preserving' Law In Oklahoma Raises Questions For Doctors.
GOP reprises ’90s scandal playbook. 7 Weirdest Conspiracy Theories Now Taken Seriously by GOP. Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Writes A Remarkably Political "Dissent" To Willie Manning's Stay Of Execution. The Top 10 Most Inhuman Henry Kissinger Quotes. A Gosnell Amendment? Jennifer Rubin Plays Doctor and Legislator—and Fails. School science: Lack of kit 'means pupils miss out' Louisiana Science Education Act Repeal Fails, Keeping Door Open For Teaching Of Creationism. Pat Toomey: Background Checks Died Because GOP Didn't Want To Help Obama. Lamar Smith, GOP Push Politicization Of Scientific Research. CIA Bribes Karzai: Millions In 'Ghost Money' Paid To Afghanistan President's Office, New York Times Reports.
Texas Plant Explosion Reveals Wide Gaps In Workplace Safety Laws. Reinhart, Rogoff... and Herndon: The student who caught out the profs. Peter Hansen, New Hampshire Lawmaker, Calls Women 'Vaginas' In Email To Colleagues. The Darker Side of Margaret Thatcher: From Austerity to Apartheid. Margaret Thatcher Funeral: Trenton Oldfield Urges Protesters To Use 'Guerilla Tactics' One Direction's Earnings Criticised By Vince Cable As 'Gross And Immoral' Big Tobacco, Koch Brothers Planned Tea Parties a Decade Before They Hit American Politics.
Why Can't Negroes Understand How Awesome the GOP is? The Christian fundamentalism behind Ron Paul's home-schooling curriculum | Sarah Posner. Orthodox Jew Covers Himself In Plastic Bag On Plane To Remain Pure If He Flies Over A Cemetery (PICTURE) 11 Actions That Prove Republicans Are Intent On Making 2013 A Terrible Year For Sex. Margaret Thatcher Was a Privatization Pioneer, and This Is the Story of How Her Agenda Did Nothing But Make Life Worse for Millions of People.
The Southern State Fast Becoming Ayn Rand's Vision of Paradise. At Least 4 People Have Been Shot by Toddlers Since Last Weekend. Meet the GOPer Who Worked With Monsanto to Sneak the "Monsanto Protection Act" into Law. 5 Juicy Tax Breaks That Corporations Enjoy That the Public Can't Touch. Cyprus to sell gold reserves to help fund bailout. Ramesh Patel: Finally! Exposed! The Deficit Myth! So, David Cameron When Are You Going to Apologise? 'Missing In Action': Congress Ignores America's Poverty Crisis. Cut in top rate of income tax to 45% comes into effect. North Carolina GOPers Reach New Heights of Nuttery by Proposing State Religion. The Christian Right Is Panicking Because They Know They Are Losing. Chair of House Spending Panel Says NIH Grants Violate Rules Against Lobbying. Has Canada's government been muzzling its scientists? Tim McDaniel, Idaho Teacher, Explained 'Vagina' In Sex Ed Class, So He's Being Investigated.
Five Ugly Extremes of Inequality in America -- The Contrasts Will Drop Your Chin to the Floor. Why Washington won’t break up the banks — yet - Ben White. NYPD on Trial: Police Say They Are Forced to Harass Kids in Order to Meet Quotas. Why Is Socialism Doing So Darn Well in Deep-Red North Dakota? Secretly Collected HIV Test Results Used in Criminal Prosecutions. Train Derailment Spills 30,000 Gallons of Oil in Minnesota -- Was it Tar Sands? Cyprus: We apologise for any inconvenience... George Zimmerman’s Brother Goes on Racist Twitter Tirade. 13 Most Offensive Things Antonin Scalia Has Said About Homosexuality. Outrageous: David Cay Johnston Explains How Big Corporations Withhold Your Taxes and Then Pocket Them. Boris Johnson accused: 'you're a nasty piece of work' – video | Politics. 4 Absurd GOP Efforts to Look "Inclusive" and "Tolerant" Totally Undermined by Their Policies.
Iraq: The Spies Who Fooled the World. The Lyndon Johnson tapes: Richard Nixon's 'treason' The 5 Worst Things About The House GOP’s New Budget.