Friday, March 12, 2010

The rampaging Calvinists . . . .


This is what happens when reality-denying ideologues are put in positions of power.
Texas Board of Education cuts Thomas Jefferson out of its textbooks.

The Texas Board of Education has been meeting this week to revise its social studies curriculum. During the past three days, “the board’s far-right faction wielded their power to shape lessons on the civil rights movement, the U.S. free enterprise system and hundreds of other topics”:

♠ To avoid exposing students to “transvestites, transsexuals and who knows what else,” the Board struck the curriculum’s reference to “sex and gender as social constructs.”

♠ The Board removed Thomas Jefferson from the Texas curriculum, “replacing him with religious right icon John Calvin.”

♠ The Board refused to require that “students learn that the Constitution prevents the U.S. government from promoting one religion over all others.”

♠ The Board struck the word “democratic” from the description of the U.S. government, instead terming it a “constitutional republic.”

As the nation’s second-largest textbook market, Texas has enormous leverage over publishers, who often “craft their standard textbooks based on the specs of the biggest buyers.” Indeed, as The Washington Monthly has reported, “when it comes to textbooks, what happens in Texas rarely stays in Texas.”

Let the fall of the American Empire begin.



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Fox News -- angry sorority girls . . .?

Jon Stewart has been on an inspiring tear lately. While I'm of the view that the mainstream media as a whole entity is broken and untrustworthy, FOX News is at the top of the heap for their blatant conservative propagandizing and deceitfulness. Therefore it's only fitting that Stewart end this week with a surgical strike at the heart of Murdoch's "Fair and Balanced" green zone.

Thanks for keeping us reality-based viewers sane Jon.


The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Health Care: The Ultimate Last Final Push
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show
Full Episodes
Political HumorHealth Care Reform




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Thursday, March 11, 2010

His Rudeness speaketh, you listeneth . . .


The Rude Pundit channels 5 years of krazee's blog rantings into one short treatise. It's well worth the read and fucking dead, spot on.
3/11/2010
Al-Qaeda, Liz Cheney, and American Failure:

It's hard to pinpoint, this general feeling of anxiety and apprehension that has afflicted Americans. Joblessness, Congressional paralysis, airwaves filled with bickering phantoms all day and all night, it's all so very hard to take. But for the Rude Pundit, there's one thing that overwhelms him more often than all the rest. He's tired of us being such pussies about terrorism. Or, to put it more precisely, it's exhausting to see politicians and citizens toss away our rights, our freedoms, our Constitutional guarantees, all because a couple of goat fuckers learned from the CIA how to blow shit up. He's tired of surrendering to the thugs. Lately, in America, every day is like getting your lunch money stolen by the bullies.



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Wanted: Mental Health intervention for Glenn Beck . . . Contact Rupert Murdoch


Beck: Fox News executive told me ‘you are the key’ to surviving ‘a global economic holocaust.’

Beck truly is delusional -- to the point of being psychotic. And quite frankly I would have to say I have the same assessment of anyone who follows and believes in him.

**UPDATE**: More evidence that Glenn Beck is in dire, dire need of mental health support.

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Makes sense to me . . . .


The best damn professional liar and coverup artist that money can buy.
Tiger Woods has reportedly hired former Bush adviser Ari Fleischer to help reform his image following recent scandals.

Just saying . . .



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Your Liberal Media Hard at Work . . . . . (cough - bullshit!)


Steve Benen at The Washington Monthly steamrolls the media hypocrisy and double standards surrounding political sex scandals. And like I've been saying for 10 years -- LIBERAL MEDIA MY ASS!

Printing Benen's piece in it's entirety. [Link Here]

March 11, 2010

WHERE'S OUR ENSIGN FRENZY?.... Matt Yglesias highlights an important double standard: "sex scandals aren't interesting when they involve Republicans."

Interestingly John Ensign, like David Vitter but unlike Elliot Spitzer or Eric Massa, hasn't yet been driven from public life.

I continue to find the trend fascinating. Sen. John Ensign (R) of Nevada is caught in a truly humiliating sex scandal -- and remember, the media generally loves political sex scandals -- involving a shameless hypocrite, who ran on a "family-values" platform, committing adultery with one of his own aides, who happens to be married to another aide. The scandal involves the immediate affair, plus alleged ethics violations, hush money, and official corruption.

And yet, no media frenzy. No reporters staked out in front of Ensign's home. No op-eds speculating about the need for Ensign to resign in disgrace.

I know how tiresome it is to hear "imagine if a Democrat had done this," but in this case, it doesn't take much imagination. Spitzer got caught in a sex scandal, and he was forced to resign. Massa's controversy appears to relate to sexual harassment, and he was forced to resign. John Edwards hasn't served in public office in any capacity for six years, and yet the interest in every imaginable detail of his sex scandal continues to get an enormous amount of attention.

Then consider the folks on the other side of the aisle. Ensign sex scandal, which appears to include possible criminal misconduct, hasn't interfered with him remaining a Republican senator in good standing. Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), another right-wing, "family-values" hypocrite, got caught with a prostitute. Not only did he stay in office, but he's seeking re-election -- and polls show him winning. Gov. Mark Sanford's (R-S.C.) sex scandal got plenty of coverage, but note that he's still the governor. Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons (R) found himself in a sex scandal, but like Vitter, he not only stayed in his job, but he's running for another term, too. Former Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) was caught up in an especially humiliating controversy, but he didn't resign before the end of his term, either.

This is, by most measures, backwards. For decades, Republican candidates at every level have emphasized the GOP's moral superiority on "family values." If you want to protect the "sanctity" of marriage, the argument went, it's incumbent on you to vote Republican. There's a culture war underway, Americans have been told, and Democrats just aren't as reliable on these issues as the GOP.

Republicans, in other words, have demanded higher moral standards of all of us, while failing to meet these standards themselves -- and failing to ostracize the guilty from their ranks.

It's quite a racket, which the media encourages by playing along.

Yep -- quite the racket indeed.


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Night of the Living Beck . . . .

Demonstrating what a buffoon Glenn Beck is could hardly be described as being an arduous task. But quite honestly - Jon Stewart just makes it look like child's play. What an exquisitely beautiful takedown of the idiot right-wing scream queen Beck and his zombie followers.


The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Sour Gropes
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show
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Political HumorHealth Care Reform




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Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Limpballs -- on the record . . .

Have I mentioned lately that Rush Limbaugh is a disgusting piece of racist shit? In case I haven't --- Rush Limbaugh is a disgusting piece of racist shit.

LIMBAUGH: Are you sure that Paterson appoints or is there a special election?

CALLER: I am reasonably sure that Paterson will be appointing the replacement, assuming that he, you know, doesn't resign in the next 60 or 90 days.

LIMBAUGH: Let's assume you're right. So, David Paterson will become the massa --

CALLER: Yes.

LIMBAUGH: -- who gets to appoint whoever gets to take Massa's place. So, for the first time in his life, Paterson's gonna be a massa. Interesting, interesting.





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Tuesday, March 09, 2010

U.S.A. (United States of Advertising) . . .

Brilliant, yet depressing short film (16 minutes) exploring America's rampant illness of obsessive/compulsive consumerism.






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Monday, March 08, 2010

The Neverending Story . . . .


I stand by my assessment that organized religion has been a blight on human progress and will likely be the catalyst for the, at some future date, war to end all wars.

By JON GAMBRELL, Associated Press Writer Jon Gambrell, Associated Press Writer – 42 mins ago

DOGO NAHAWA, Nigeria – The killers showed no mercy: They didn't spare women and children, or even a 4-day-old baby, from their machetes. On Monday, Nigerian women wailed in the streets as a dump truck carried dozens of bodies past burned-out homes toward a mass grave.

Rubber-gloved workers pulled ever-smaller bodies from the dump truck and tossed them into the mass grave. A crowd began singing a hymn with the refrain, "Jesus said I am the way to heaven." As the grave filled, the grieving crowd sang: "Jesus, show me the way."

At least 200 people, most of them Christians, were slaughtered on Sunday, according to residents, aid groups and journalists. The local government gave a figure more than twice that amount, but offered no casualty list or other information to substantiate it.

An Associated Press reporter counted 61 corpses, 32 of them children, being buried in the mass grave in the village of Dogo Nahawa on Monday. Other victims would be buried elsewhere. At a local morgue the bodies of children, including a diaper-clad toddler, were tangled together. One appeared to have been scalped. Others had severed hands and feet.

The horrific violence comes after sectarian killings in this region in January left more than 300 dead, most of them Muslim. Some victims were shoved into sewer pits and communal wells.

Sunday's bloodshed in three mostly Christian villages appeared to be reprisal attacks, said Red Cross spokesman Robin Waubo.

Nigeria is almost evenly split between Muslims in the north and the predominantly Christian south. The recent bloodshed has been happening in central Nigeria, in towns which lie along the country's religious fault line. It is Nigeria's "middle belt," where dozens of ethnic groups vie for control of fertile lands.




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Bug-shit crazy crook Tom DeLay opens his mouth and shit comes out . . .



Tom Delay: People Are Unemployed Because They Want To Be
Sam Stein – Sun Mar 7, 11:06 am ET

Former (Republican) House Majority Leader Tom Delay called Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) "brave" on Sunday for launching a one-man filibuster of unemployment benefits, arguing that they dissuaded people from going out and finding work.

And what better expert to expound upon the subject of human "bravery" than Tom "Bug Killer" DeLay. This is the guy who at the 1988 GOP Convention when asked by a reporter why neither he or Dan Quayle fought in Vietnam "bravely" replied --
"So many minority youths had volunteered…that there was literally no room for patriotic folks like myself."
DeLay embodies your modern day conservative Republican -- a heartless, selfish, phony patriot ideologue whose pomposity is only upstaged by the stench of his own cowardice.

I realize I'm a liberal who is purportedly supposed to eschew feelings of hate towards other human beings -- but when it comes to people of DeLay's ilk -- I really do hate fuckers like him and I feel pretty good about it and will not apologize for it.



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