On Wisconsin
ESL editing project scheduled for tomorrow morning, so here’s what I’ve got on the recall elections:
Chris Bowers are why the races are close
7 things you should know about the recall elections
Jessica King pulls ahead of Randy “I sleep with my staff” Hopper [more]
If you live in Wisconsin and can vote, do so. Taking the Senate away from Scott Walker would be like kicking McConnell and Boehnerer in the balls (sorry, you have to wait until primary season to kick Obama in the ass).
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I had cause to go back and look through some of my old posts and after some consideration I do admit to wondering if I don’t perhaps suffer from some form of political Tourette’s disease.
There is much about this country right now that is obscene and it seems no power on earth can get our Congress or courts or agencies to examine these obscenities. I should regret some of the language I use but the harder I think about the issues and events that trigger my language, the more heartfelt my f-bombs become.
The right continues to be, not unable or incapable, but unwilling in the absolute to consider facts not of their own invention. The Center for American Progress has come up with ten [10] charts that prove the USA is a low-tax nation. Good luck getting a wingnut friend to look at them, let alone study them or give them any kind of consideration. Fox has its own charts and graphs so that’s that and hey, isn’t it time we shut down the government again?
Drunken white teens in Mississippi set out to hurt a “black person” and succeed, laughing as they did so. Two are facing life sentences but another has now had the murder charges against him reduced to aggravated assault (driving over the victim’s head with a Ford 250 pickup truck) while several other teens are not being charged with any crime.
Yes, I did describe that crime and link to it without swearing, but to what purpose? We live in a world so foul that the NYPD had to resort to misconduct charges to get a cop who raped a woman imprisoned (the cop beat the rape charges but not in a way that made anyone with half a brain think he hadn’t raped the woman). Worse, I can’t convince myself that this cop is significantly more evil than the TSA scumbag who confiscated a pregnant woman’s insulin and ice packs despite her having a properly vetted note from her doctor.
I linked to Mike Masnick’s coverage of the outrageous ways in which DOJ terrorists hooked up with Cisco thugs to ruin Peter Adekeye’s life, but it turns out that Obama’s DOJ has dropped a new indictment on Adekeye for the crime of trying to do business without Cisco’s permission. I literally cannot remember the last time I read any story about the DOJ in which they were not fucking an innocent person half to death OR covering up for Republican lawbreaking. And no, I don’t know how to write about a story like this without swearing, and I suspect real journalists have the same problem since almost none of them have written about Adekeye.
But I’m just cherry picking tales of outrage. The biggest scandal of the past decade is how banks screwed everyone yet no one went to prison. Yves Smith writes about that at Salon without swearing once, putting my potty mouth to shame. Hell, I can’t event think about that shit without cursing.
Because we have no laws we choose to enforce, American citizens who were tortured by government forces have been reduced to suing Donald Rumsfeld for damages. How guilty is our government? Its own judges are letting the civil suits stand.
Not to fucking mention Rupertfuckinggate, Barack fucking Obama, Blue fucking Bunny ice cream, Rick fucking Scott, John fucking Boehner’s lies, the cunt-faced prick-hearted bastards who want a corporate tax holiday, or your fucking coworkers. Let alone the fucking war in Afghanistan, the Supreme fucking Borks, ALEC, Viet fucking Dinh, Verizon, did I mention Obama yet?, Kris fucking Jordan, or Antonin fucking Scalia.
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Otoh, House pages are losing their jobs because the House leadership decided the risk of another scandal was too great (and given how many freshman GOoPers they have, too likely by far)
The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza profiles Bachmann but for the shorter version, City Pages cribbed five interesting revelations (meh, when it comes to Bachmann stories, the tinfoil bar is raised pretty high) [see also Michele's reading list] [Marcus's closet]
Whether 10,000 or 15,000 Texans showed up for Rick Perry’s prayerfest is moot; that same day over 100,000 Texans made it to a convention center seven miles from The Response prayer rally to get some of the free school supplies being handed out [and no, let's not speculate how many of them were Katrina survivors who got bused to Houston and are still trying to find a job]
Leaks from Mercede Johnston’s (Levi’s sis] Playboy interview will be sure to piss off Mama Grizz
There is a reason, btw, why white conservatives believe that there is a crime epidemic in our inner cities. It’s because going through an inner city scares them half to death and since they’re not cowards (enlisting in wars where you get to shoot at bad guys from helicopters proves they’re not afraid of anything) so the only logical conclusion is that scary things are happening.
Mostly that would be the fact that inner city residents look back at them. Poor people do not much care for people who drive through their neighborhood visibly quaking, which, frankly, they should be since only fools drive through the ‘hood with a Bush-Cheney bumpersticker laminated on their rear bumper.
Theirs is a world in which a Forbes columnist just wrote about stripping the vote from public servants and welfare recipients. Bill Flax also wants voters to prove they’re literate, and can pass a test about basic constitutional concepts. If that strikes you as sensible, yes, you are exactly the kind of person inner city thugs love to beat senseless, most of their work in that regard having been done long ago.
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Not to mention money:
The Downgrading of a Debtor Nation
Confusing financial markets with the economy
Late night update: Asian markets plummeting.
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Etc.:
Ron Artest is a Celine Dion fan? (this is like finding out that the Queen Mother listens to Old Dirty Bastard)
Thanks to Howard Stern I watched Super 8 last night (good Spielberg except for the parts when the action happened and he turned the volume up to 14 — seriously, I live next to two high speed rail lines and fourteen sidings and trains are not half as loud as Spielberg thinks they are but hey, making movies that can’t be watched in apartment buildings proves you’re an auteur)
Tild on su-su-su-su-sugar town valley
The mimeograph turns 125 years old today, and it would be scary to know how many of you still know how to use one (yes, my hand is up)
200,000 bittorrent users sued, and I’m not one of them despite publicly confessing to my piracy almost every fucking day (see second item in this section, and yes, what I did is punishable by a $150k fine which I don’t happen to have which is why I’m free to keep “stealing” even as people with jobs fork out the moolah)
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Dr. Daily’s work took on a special urgency with the 2005 publication of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, which was developed under the auspices of the United Nations. This report found that recent and rapid human-caused changes have produced a “substantial and largely irreversible loss” in the diversity of life on earth and that two-thirds of the world’s ecosystem services were declining.
“The loss of earth’s biodiversity is permanent,” Dr. Daily said. “And it is happening on our watch. We need to convey with compelling evidence the value of nature and the cost of losing it. I find it stunning that until the next asteroid hits the planet, it is humanity that is collectively deciding the future course of all known life.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/09/science/09profile.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=todayspaper