RussBLib - what the ....

Insider trading?

2012-01-30T22:31:00.001-06:00

I can't believe that "insider trading" by the U.S. Congress is still legal! For some reason, I assumed it had been outlawed when most other forms of "insider trading" had been outlawed.

But nooooo, it's going to take a new law to "...require members of Congress and high-ranking staffers and federal employees to abide by insider trading rules that apply to everyone."

Link

That doesn't sound too good. Making Congress obey the same laws that everyone else has to!!?? Where will it end?!

Surely there must be some rules already in place? Ethics, conflicts of interest?

Skype/Google/Qik

2012-01-29T22:28:00.001-06:00

Do you Skype? The wife and I have just recently signed up for the service. You can make Skype-to-Skype video and audio calls for FREE. Now, I know that this is not exactly a new technology. We're not first-adopters. We let the technology get settled and refined before we dive in.

We hooked up with my nephew, his wife, and their 3-month old baby girl recently. We were in Arkansas, they were in D.C. The immediacy of a live video signal is pretty cool. That was a decent video signal, and we weren't really on a very high-speed internet signal. Now, back at home, we clock at 25Mbps, and the signal should be much better.

Do I know you? Do you Skype? E-mail me. We might just be tempted to pay them a few bucks to be able to have a group video.

The only real drawback to Skype that I see is that it is ultimately owned by that ultimate of sleazebags, Rupert Murdoch.

Alternatives are Google Talk (all you need is a Gmail account and a webcam) (and of course a high-speed internet connection) ...

and Qik Video (an Android app), also free and they don't benefit Republicans. (I think)

Award-winning carrots?

2012-01-29T22:13:00.002-06:00

Hey, this is kinda cool. It just "might" get me to visit the Rodeo this year. Might. I know that our carrots are awesome. Hmmm...

Fundraising opportunities

Do you think you have the best collards around or maybe your carrots are just outstanding. Here is an opportunity to prove to the world what you already know. The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo has added a horticulture competition to their event and they are inviting gardeners to enter their best fruits and vegetables. This is a new competition with cash prizes. 1st place $1000, 2nd place $750 and 3rd place $500. You can find the rules and entry form here. The rules for the cut edibles (vegetables and fruits) are still being written so don't worry to much about what is in the rule booklet. What is listed is a copy of the floral arrangement rules. Entry deadline is Feb 3, 2012. Please send questions to Linda.

And they're off!

2012-01-27T15:54:00.001-06:00

Funny and strange

2012-01-26T22:56:00.001-06:00

The creativity continually bubbles up from humanity in different places and different forms

Ken Lay's condo

2012-01-26T20:11:00.001-06:00

A couple of years ago, Swamplot, a Houston real estate blog, started a series of posts about Ken and Linda Lay's condo penthouse that had gone on the market for sale. This choice piece of real estate was the last of 18 properties that Ken and Linda owned. Poor babies.

The asking price was a lofty $12.8 million. That's a lot of coin for me, but not for the 1%. They held a "private sale." Perhaps not surprising, it didn't sell.

The price was soon cut to $11.9 million. Then to $10.25 million.

Then it disappeared from the real estate listings. What happened? Did someone buy it?

Nope. It just reappeared on the market, now listed at $6.395 million. Whatta bargain!

What's not to like?

Some highlights of the property:

360-degree skyline views
4 corner balconies
12,287 square feet
5 bedrooms
4 full bathrooms
5 half bathrooms
6 elevators
10 parking spaces
$10,182 monthly maintenance fee
The entire 33rd floor of The Huntingdon, a condo hi-rise at 2121 Kirby Dr.

A little rich for me, still. Is there any lesson to be learned?

See the entire real estate listing here, and read the entertaining and informative posts about it on Swamplot here. Ken better be dead.

SOTU

2012-01-25T21:28:00.001-06:00

Yes, I watched President Obama's State of the Union address last night. Stepping back a bit, I have a hard time seeing how anyone can disagree with much of anything he said last night. The opposition to Obama's policies has simply become reflexive, no matter what Obama might say, and this is an absurd thing to be doing.

President Obama has bent over backward further and more often trying to compromise with "the other side" than any President I've ever seen, but all he gets in response is vitriol and the back of the hand. It's so mindless, it leads me to believe that a lot of it must be because the man is "black." He's really only 1/2 black, but even that leaves no room for Republicans to compromise.

The text of the entire speech can be found here. It's a good read, and reading it this way makes the speech a whole lot shorter than being interrupted 50 times by cheers, jeers, and standing ovations.

Or, you could watch the whole thing ....

Immediately after the speech, I heard a couple of Republicans mindlessly repeat, "Obama is taking the country in entirely the wrong direction." The wrong direction? Stupid fucks. WTFU. Here's a short snip:

Let's remember how we got here. Long before the recession, jobs and manufacturing began leaving our shores. Technology made businesses more efficient, but also made some jobs obsolete. Folks at the top saw their incomes rise like never before, but most hardworking Americans struggled with costs that were growing, paychecks that weren't, and personal debt that kept piling up.

In 2008, the house of cards collapsed. We learned that mortgages had been sold to people who couldn't afford or understand them. Banks had made huge bets and bonuses with other people's money. Regulators had looked the other way, or didn't have the authority to stop the bad behavior.

It was wrong. It was irresponsible. And it plunged our economy into a crisis that put millions out of work, saddled us with more debt, and left innocent, hard-working Americans holding the bag. In the six months before I took office, we lost nearly four million jobs. And we lost another four million before our policies were in full effect.

Those are the facts. But so are these. In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than three million jobs. Last year, they created the most jobs since 2005. American manufacturers are hiring again, creating jobs for the first time since the late 1990s. Together, we’ve agreed to cut the deficit by more than $2 trillion. And we've put in place new rules to hold Wall Street accountable, so a crisis like that never happens again.

Poor Mitt

2012-01-25T19:29:00.001-06:00

Stephen Colbert

2012-01-24T21:52:00.001-06:00

This guy is a genius. A comic genius too.

Mitch Daniels

2012-01-24T20:25:00.001-06:00

Hey, I forgot all about Mitch Daniels serving in Duhbya's OMB. D'oh!

(snip) from Consortium News article by Robert Parry...

A New York Times’ article about the choice of Daniels noted that “the sight of Mr. Daniels on national television is sure to raise wistful ‘if onlys’ in a Republican establishment that had put the governor at the top of its wish list for a White House run.” But that article – like others about Daniels – leaves out a salient fact about his alleged “fiscal conservatism”: as President George W. Bush’s original budget director, Mitch Daniels helped create today’s fiscal mess.

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels

Daniels oversaw the federal budget as it was making its historic reversal from a $236 billion surplus – then on a trajectory to eliminate the entire federal debt in a decade – to a $400 billion deficit by the time Daniels left the Office of Management and Budget in June 2003.

Plus, because of proposals developed on Daniels’s watch – such as tax cuts favoring the rich and unpaid-for projects, including the invasion of Iraq and a new prescription drug plan – the fiscal situation of the federal government continued to deteriorate over the ensuing years, becoming a trillion-dollar-plus annual deficit by the time Bush left the White House in 2009.

Read the rest here.

Year of the Dragon

2012-01-24T10:30:00.002-06:00

Newt wins S.C!

2012-01-23T21:29:00.002-06:00

Click the pic to make it larger.

Revisionist History

2012-01-22T22:00:00.000-06:00

I've been wondering if someone was going to address the pure fabrications that I hear coming from the pieholes of the GOP presidential "candidates." Do they think they can just say anything in the world and not have it questioned? Can you just make up any old shit you want, regardless as to whether or not it's true?

GOP Campaign Trail Filled With Revisionist History

by Peter S. Goodman

I've just returned from a sojourn in an alternate historical universe, which is to say I've been in South Carolina, listening to the Republican presidential candidates.

These people have managed to distill modern American times down to a deliciously accessible account that goes something like this:

In the beginning there was Ronald Reagan. He was so awesome! He slashed taxes and fired pencil-necked bureaucrats, whose sole function was to antagonize salt-of-the-earth business folk. Money rained from the sky. Then Barack Obama arrived and screwed up everything. He wrote new rules designed to tie the economy in knots and kill jobs so he could realize his true aim, expanding food stamp dependency, as part of his plot to turn America into a socialist, nanny state-governed Loserville.

If you're wondering what happened to those years when the country was run by a pair of guys named Bush (and someone else named Clinton in between), they have been airbrushed out of this updated Republican history. So have a few seemingly pertinent events connected to their tenures: the dismantling of key financial regulations (particularly by Clinton), a massive redistribution of wealth to the richest households engineered by George W. Bush, and a failure to address stagnating wages and lost job opportunities for most workers all along the way.

Oh, and a nearly apocalyptic financial crisis that arrived on W's watch, prompting taxpayer bailouts of behemoth Wall Street firms while delivering the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

On the Republican campaign trail, none of these little details have been making it into accounts of recent times, because they collide with the narrative guiding the proceedings. Though Romney, Santorum, Gingrich and Perry (before he dropped out) have been sniping about all sorts of tedious little things, in the main they have been reading from the same script: Everything bad that ever happened resulted from too many taxes and too much regulation. Everything good comes from deregulation, and handing gobs of money to rich people and corporations.

If you think I'm exaggerating, you have clearly been intelligent enough to occupy your hours watching something more enlightening than the Republican debates (a list that might include both "Jersey Shore" and reruns of people smacking other people with chairs on the "Jerry Springer" show). But my cartoonish account is really only a little more cartoonish than the things Republicans have been saying about what has happened to our economy as they wander South Carolina in pursuit of votes.

The other day, at a candidate forum in downtown Columbia, the state capitol, Newt Gingrich looked out at a room full of business people and boasted about the supposedly key role he played in forging supply-side economics, the school of thought that says tax cutting is the answer to every policy question. He burnished this "credential" by noting that he had been right there alongside Reagan and Arthur Laffer in the engine room of supply-side thinking.

This is a little bit like saying that you were the guy on the deck of the Titanic, hollering, "Full speed ahead!" long after the iceberg loomed. Laffer is the economist who popularized the notion that cutting taxes increases government revenue, a doctrine that has stood the test of time about as well as drowning people to find out if they are witches.

Rare is the credentialed economist who still asserts that cutting taxes generates additional revenue, an idea so patently at odds with common sense that only someone with a doctorate could have suggested it. Greg Mankiw, a conservative economist who served in the George W. Bush administration as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers (and who is now an adviser to Romney), uses a chapter of his widely assigned economics textbook, "Principles of Economics," to challenge the idea that lower taxes produce higher revenues.

But never mind the theory. Take a look at actual history, as distilled in a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Reagan, leaning on advice from Laffer, slashed marginal personal income tax rates by 25 percent between the fall of 1981 and the summer of 1983. Tax revenues subsequently dipped, and the federal deficit expanded. During the sweep of Reagan's presidency -- an era now held up as a paragon by the same crop of candidates who claim to be fierce deficit hawks -- federal spending outstripped revenues by more than $1.4 trillion.

Taxes and deficits are not the only subjects that have come in for wholesale revision in the Republican account. Four years after speculative excesses on Wall Street nearly brought down the financial system, the candidates appear to have forgotten all about it. How else to explain their repeated vows to immediately repeal Dodd-Frank, the financial regulatory reform law adopted in an effort to prevent a repeat, while offering no alternative?

Rick Perry and Gingrich, the candidate Perry endorsed as he dropped out of the race on Thursday, have both made repealing Dodd-Frank a primary talking point. Romney has said he would do the same, though he has expressed some desire to retain portions of the law.

Like perhaps every piece of enormous legislation to emerge from Congress, Dodd-Frank is a fat mess of a law, one seemingly understood by no one in its entirety. It is filled with contradictory provisions inserted by one lobbyist or another, presenting federal agencies with a dog's breakfast of regulations that must be written to implement it. The law will not prevent another crisis, because it is so mind-bendingly complex that the financial industry will game it to suit its proclivities.

But does anyone not paid to do so seriously maintain that Dodd-Frank is so flawed that the circumstances that existed pre-crisis would be better? Do we really want to double down on market fundamentalism and let Wall Street have another go in the casino, unsupervised, while playing with taxpayer money?

Don't ask the Republican candidates, because they have eliminated the crisis from historical memory, skipping all the way back to Morning In America, when everyone worked, no one was poor, the stock market only went up, and taxes existed only in the Soviet Union.

Original.

Golden Loves Guitar

2012-01-22T21:25:00.003-06:00

Ah, the silly things they put on YouTube these days.

Chris Bonno

2012-01-21T10:53:00.000-06:00

Chris Bonno is an old college buddy of mine from my days (years) at the University of Houston. We had a lot of fun running Channel 6 on campus. I have some fond memories of one of our shows called, "Sex on Six."

After graduating, Chris moved to Hollywood, where he began a stand-up comic career. He's been traveling lately with Hal Sparks. Chris is also an artist, has created several short films, had some bit parts in TV shows, and now, a lead role in a movie, "Guns Don't Kill People."

Guns Don't Kill People Trailer from Ivan Ehlers on Vimeo.

Hooray Jessica!

2012-01-20T19:54:00.005-06:00

Hooray for Jessica Ahlquist of Rhode Island! She protested a "prayer banner" hanging in her high school, and won!

And so we see yet again what happens when someone stands up for separation of church and state. They get screamed at, insulted, and threatened. It would seem that church people are just not comfortable enough with their own religiosity; they insist on openly displaying their religion and ramming it down everyone else's throat, too. Sounds to me like they are insecure in their own faith. They don't have much faith so they insist on outward displays of belief. It's pathetic.

And what part of Matthew 6:5-6 do they not understand?

The Freedom From Religion Foundation warmly congratulates 16-year-old Jessica Ahlquist, whose federal challenge against a prayer banner hanging in her high school in Rhode Island prevailed when U.S. District Judge Ronald Lagueux ruled the banner must be removed immediately. The banner is titled “School Prayer,” addresses “Our Heavenly Father” and ends with “Amen.”

Lagueux not only ruled in Jessica’s favor, but noted in his decision that she “is clearly an articulate and courageous young woman, who took a brave stand, particularly in light of the hostile response she has received from her community.”

The petite Jessica, a shy teenager with backbone thrust into a huge controversy, was named FFRF’s Thomas Jefferson Student Activist awardee last year. She wowed and charmed the 34th annual national FFRF convention in Hartford, Conn., on Oct. 8, when she accepted her $1,000 scholarship in person and recounted her experiences. (Read or listen to speech, “Teen stands fall for First Amendment,” November Freethought Today.)

In her speech to FFRF, Jessica noted that many students and parents reacted angrily from the start to critics of the school’s unconstitutional prayer banner. When she and others spoke up again the banner at several meetings, reactions ranged from angry glares and murmurs to gasps when she identified herself as an atheist. “Someone’s trying to destroy God,” was one reaction. Classmates would scream “God Bless You” in her face if she sneezed, and she lost some former friends. When her town’s mayor, at an unrelated event in the school auditorium, pointed to the prayer and said, “I would like to see that prayer stay exactly where it is,” the entire auditorium erupted with ovations, cheers and applause. “I sat there and tried not to cry,” she recalled. One day she and a friend were removed from class after rumors of violence. Another day she remembered, “I went home crying.”

Jessica noted that despite the hostile climate and the fact that “people don’t want to be associated with me,” last fall she started a secular student club.

Lagueux ended his decision:

“Over the many years of its history, the Supreme Court has turned to the words of the Founding Fathers and the framers of the Constitution to support varying interpretations of the Establishment Clause. Many chapters have been devoted to Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington and even Abraham Lincoln, and what their expectations were for the public religious practices of this nation. This Court has tried to resist the temptation of injecting lofty rhetoric into this opinion, but nonetheless was moved by the words, as quoted in Schempp, of Roger Williams, the founder of our state, who left the Massachusetts Bay Colony in pursuit of religious liberty.

There goes many a ship to sea, with many hundred souls in one ship, whose weal and woe is common, and is a true picture of a commonwealth, or human combination, or society. It hath fallen out sometimes, that both Papists and Protestants, Jews and Turks, may be embarked on one ship; upon which supposal, I affirm that all the liberty of conscience I ever pleaded for, turns upon these two hinges, that none of the Papists, Protestants, Jews, or Turks be forced to come to the ship’s prayers or worship, nor compelled from their own particular prayers or worship, if they practice any."

“We warmly congratulate Jessica for standing up for our Constitution. This is a lawsuit that should not even have been necessary. What Jessica endured in order to bring an end to this obvious First Amendment violation shows how essential it is to keep religion out of our public schools, where it creates only mischief and divisiveness,” said FFRF Co-Presidents Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor.

It's Viral!

2012-01-19T21:00:00.002-06:00

Romney's tax returns

2012-01-18T21:28:00.002-06:00

Gee, what COULD Mitt Romney be hiding by not releasing his tax returns? The final proof that he is of, by and for the 1%, perhaps? Or something even more nasty?

King of Bain

2012-01-17T22:21:00.002-06:00

This video is "paid for" by the "Winning Our Future" PAC, which backs Newt Gingrich. Pass the popcorn!!

Click here. The entire video is only 28 minutes.

I'm glad to see Romney getting tarred with the 1% tag. He deserves it.

Carlsberg

2012-01-12T23:19:00.002-06:00

Arian Foster

2012-01-11T20:33:00.001-06:00

Yes, I have been caught up in "Texans Fever" like many fellow Houstonians. I haven't watched this much football since I was a kid growing up in East Texas, when we idolized the Dallas Cowboys.

One vivid memory from that time is sitting impatiently through church on Sunday mornings (brainwashing!), knowing that we were going to jump in the car as soon as services were over and head to Dallas to watch a game live in the Cotton Bowl. Those were the longest sermons in history!

Here's a nice profile of Texans running back Arian Foster. Sounds like a really cool guy.

Texans' Foster proves he's no ordinary NFL player

by Steve Campbell

Arian Foster arrived in the NFL almost unnoticed, with a point he was willing to go to great lengths to prove. One of the telltale signs that Foster was well on his way to proving he wasn’t the crazy one for believing he could flourish at football’s highest level came during a December 2010 game against the Baltimore Ravens.

Undrafted out of college, relegated to the practice squad for much of his first professional season, Foster was on his way to leading the league in rushing. During the second quarter of a Ravens victory at Reliant Stadium, All-Pro linebacker Ray Lewis cornered Foster to say, “I love the way you play the game.”

The two struck up a friendship at the Pro Bowl and met up again at the ESPYs award show, talking for hours afterward. They have gone back and forth on the phone this week, knowing full well they’ll meet again on Sunday when the Texans face the Ravens in an AFC divisional playoff game.

“H’s driven by a different burning inside,” Lewis said. “He was an undrafted guy with a lot of talent, so he’s fueled by something different. Any time you add that type of fuel with talent, you get Arian Foster.”

Many sides to him

It turns out Foster, 25, is fueled by something different to be something different than the cookie-cutter NFL star. Here’s a former University of Tennessee philosophy major whose name is an abbreviated form of Aquarians. Foster is half African-American, half Mexican-American, and he dabbles in poetry and writing song lyrics. He is an unmarried father of a 2-year-old daughter, Zeniah, whose mother speaks German. He embraces yoga and New Age teachings, bowing after touchdowns as an ode to Eastern culture.

When the Texans had an open date in November, Foster visited New York to examine first-hand the Occupy Wall Street movement. He raised some eyebrows during an offseason talk with high-school students when he told them, “There’s always going to be somebody who says you can’t do something. Usually that somebody didn’t do what they wanted to do with their life. I tell kids all the time, ‘Don’t listen to adults.’ ”

He frets about the perils of conformity, yet his chosen profession – the one a seventh-grade teacher mocked as too unrealistic to contemplate – is one that frowns on free thinking and individuality.

“There are laws you have to abide by, and I acknowledge those laws,” Foster said. “But more often than not, people let the laws define them rather than really asking questions and pushing the limits. That’s how we grow as people, as a human race, really: We push limits of those boundaries.”

Tweet’s the word

Arian Foster is a Twitter devotee, reaching out to more than 130,000 followers to initiate discussions that can range from lampooning fantasy-football fanatics to discussing the meaning of life or the importance of money. When Foster did a reenactment of the “Dream Shake” move of Rockets icon Hakeem Olajuwon to celebrate the Texans’ first touchdown of the playoffs, it was the result of a discussion he’d had with his Twitter followers earlier in the week.

“There’s really not one thing you can describe him as,” said Foster’s brother and personal trainer, Abdul. “He’s not just a football player. He’s not just a father. He’s not just a brother. He’s not just a hard worker, a creative mind and spirit. He’s all of those, and some more. He’s not just bound to the football field, those 100 yards. That’s why I say he’s a great human spirit.”

Just don’t mistake Foster for some sort of float-through-life gadfly who stands for or commits to nothing. When somebody in the Twitterverse asked last week what the key is to success, Foster offered this answer: “Defining what success means to you, then being willing to die for it.”

“People think I’m joking when I say I’m willing to die for it,” Foster said. “I’m not joking. I’ll literally run until my heart stops. My training, my preparation, it doesn’t seem that serious to somebody else. But it is to me. The name on my back means something to me – the legacy I want to leave not just on the field, but off the field.”

Texans offensive coordinator Rick Dennison describes Foster is studious and inquisitive in team meetings, saying, “To say Arian is a quick study is an understatement.”

That would be the same Foster who one day alarmed receiver Andre Johnson with an unexpected text-message. Figuring there must be something serious at hand, Johnson got treated instead to a picture of Foster feeding some ducks.

Some people say he’s different,” Johnson said. “He’s a cocky guy, but I don’t think he’s cocky in a bad way. He has always had a chip on his shoulder because he wants to prove he’s a great player. I think he’s doing that.”

The Twitter profile of @ArianFoster offers a succinct summation of the many layers to him: “I am an aspiring human being. I don’t take life too serious, none of us make it out alive. Understand the universe, you’ll understand me.”

Foster has more than 2,300 tweets to his name, offering glimpses as to the assorted place his minds go. Sometimes he’ll hint of the inner struggles of trying to make a name for himself in the NFL: “I have such an addictive personality. I’m either all in, or all out. What a beautiful curse.”

Embracing the city

Four days before the first playoff game in franchise history, Foster tweeted: “Houston, you’ll never know how much love I have for you. You’ve changed my life forever. And I am forever indebted.” Houston is where Arian Foster, who once saw his divorced mother pawn her wedding ring to feed the family, began to make a name and place for himself.

“I’m a believer in spreading a lot of positive light,” Foster said. “Some people, I feel like are put here to help out other people. I’m in a fortunate position to have people’s eyes and people’s ears on a small scale. Any chance I get, I just try to spread any kind of positive light I can.”

steve.campbell@chron.com
Twitter.com/CampbellChron

Original.

Founding Fathers

2012-01-10T20:36:00.000-06:00

This country is not, nor I hope will it ever be, a "Christian" nation. All these religious extremist Christian fanatics need to just STFU.

5 Founding Fathers Whose Skepticism About Christianity Would Make Them Unelectable Today

Thomas Jefferson believed that a coolly rational form of religion would take root in America. Was he ever wrong.

January 10, 2012

by Rob Boston

To hear the Religious Right tell it, men like George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were 18th-century versions of Jerry Falwell in powdered wigs and stockings. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Unlike many of today’s candidates, the founders didn’t find it necessary to constantly wear religion on their sleeves. They considered faith a private affair. Contrast them to former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (who says he wouldn’t vote for an atheist for president because non-believers lack the proper moral grounding to guide the American ship of state), Texas Gov. Rick Perry (who hosted a prayer rally and issued an infamous ad accusing President Barack Obama of waging a “war on religion”) and former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum (whose uber-Catholicism leads him to oppose not just abortion but birth control).

There was a time when Americans voted for candidates who were skeptical of core concepts of Christianity like the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus and the virgin birth. The question is, could any of them get elected today? The sad answer is probably not.

Here are five founding fathers whose views on religion would most likely doom them to defeat today:

1. George Washington. The father of our country was nominally an Anglican but seemed more at home with Deism. The language of the Deists sounds odd to today’s ears because it’s a theological system of thought that has fallen out of favor. Desists believed in God but didn’t necessarily see him as active in human affairs. The god of the Deists was a god of first cause. He set things in motion and then stepped back.

Washington often employed Deistic terms. His god was a “supreme architect” of the universe. Washington saw religion as necessary for good moral behavior but didn’t necessarily accept all Christian dogma. He seemed to have a special gripe against communion and would usually leave services before it was offered.

Washington was widely tolerant of other beliefs. He is the author of one of the great classics of religious liberty – the letter to Touro Synagogue (1790). In this letter, Washington assured America’s Jews that they would enjoy complete religious liberty in America; not mere toleration in an officially “Christian” nation. He outlines a vision of a multi-faith society where all are free.

“The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for giving to Mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation,” wrote Washington. “All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens.”

Stories of Washington’s deep religiosity, such as tales of him praying in the snow at Valley Forge, can be ignored. They are pious legends invented after his death.

2. John Adams. The man who followed Washington in office was a Unitarian, although he was raised a Congregationalist and never officially left that church. Adams rejected belief in the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus, core concepts of Christian dogma. In his personal writings, Adams makes it clear that he considered some Christian dogma to be incomprehensible.

In February 1756, Adams wrote in his diary about a discussion he had had with a man named Major Greene. Greene was a devout Christian who sought to persuade Adams to adopt conservative Christian views. The two argued over the divinity of Jesus and the Trinity. Questioned on the matter of Jesus’ divinity, Greene fell back on an old standby: some matters of theology are too complex and mysterious for we puny humans to understand.

Adams was not impressed. In his diary he wrote, “Thus mystery is made a convenient cover for absurdity.”

As president, Adams signed the famous Treaty of Tripoli, which boldly stated, “[T]he government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion….”

3. Thomas Jefferson. It’s almost impossible to define Jefferson’s subtle religious views in a few words. As he once put it, “I am a sect by myself, as far as I know.” But one thing is clear: His skepticism of traditional Christianity is well established. Our third president did not believe in the Trinity, the virgin birth, the divinity of Jesus, the resurrection, original sin and other core Christian doctrines. He was hostile to many conservative Christian clerics, whom he believed had perverted the teachings of that faith.

Jefferson once famously observed to Adams, “And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.”

Although not an orthodox Christian, Jefferson admired Jesus as a moral teacher. In one of his most unusual acts, Jefferson edited the New Testament, cutting away the stories of miracles and divinity and leaving behind a very human Jesus, whose teachings Jefferson found “sublime.” This “Jefferson Bible” is a remarkable document – and it would ensure his political defeat today. (Imagine the TV commercials the Religious Right would run: Thomas Jefferson hates Jesus! He mutilates Bibles!)

Jefferson was confident that a coolly rational form of religion would take root in the fertile intellectual soil of America. He once predicted that just about everyone would become Unitarian. (Despite his many talents, the man was no prophet.)

Jefferson took political stands that would infuriate today’s Religious Right and ensure that they would work to defeat him. He refused to issue proclamations calling for days of prayer and fasting, saying that such religious duties were no part of the chief executive’s job. His assertion that the First Amendment erects a “wall of separation between church and state” still rankles the Religious Right today.

4. James Madison. Jefferson’s close ally would be similarly unelectable today. Madison is perhaps the most enigmatic of all the founders when it comes to religion. To this day, scholars still debate his religious views.

Nominally Anglican, Madison, some of his biographers believe, was really a Deist. He went through a period of enthusiasm for Christianity as a young man, but this seems to have faded. Unlike many of today’s politicians, who eagerly wear religion on their sleeves and brag about the ways their faith will guide their policy decisions, Madison was notoriously reluctant to talk publicly about his religious beliefs.

Madison was perhaps the strictest church-state separationist among the founders, taking stands that make the ACLU look like a bunch of pikers. He opposed government-paid chaplains in Congress and in the military. As president, Madison rejected a proposed census because it involved counting people by profession. For the government to count the clergy, Madison said, would violate the First Amendment.

Madison, who wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, also opposed government-issued prayer proclamations. He issued a few during the War of 1812 at the insistence of Congress but later concluded that his actions had been unconstitutional. As president, he vetoed legislation granting federal land to a church and a plan to have a church in Washington care for the poor through a largely symbolic charter. In both cases, he cited the First Amendment.

One can hear the commercials now: "James Madison is an anti-religious fanatic. He even opposes prayer proclamations during time of war."

5. Thomas Paine. Paine never held elective office, but he played an important role as a pamphleteer whose stirring words helped rally Americans to independence. Washington ordered that Paine’s pamphlet “The American Crisis” be read aloud to the Continental Army as a morale booster on Dec. 23, 1776. “Common Sense” was similarly popular with the people. These seminal documents were crucial to winning over the public to the side of independence.

So Paine’s a hero, right? He was also a radical Deist whose later work, The Age of Reason, still infuriates fundamentalists. In the tome, Paine attacked institutionalized religion and all of the major tenets of Christianity. He rejected prophecies and miracles and called on readers to embrace reason. The Bible, Paine asserted, can in no way be infallible. He called the god of the Old Testament “wicked” and the entire Bible “the pretended word of God.” (There go the Red States!)

What can we learn from this? Americans have the right to reject candidates for any reason, including their religious beliefs. But they ought to think twice before tossing someone aside just because he or she is skeptical of orthodox Christianity. After all, that description includes some of our nation’s greatest leaders.

Rob Boston is senior policy analyst at Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Original.

8.5%

2012-01-06T10:45:00.000-06:00

The national unemployment rate has dropped to 8.5% after 200,000 jobs were added in December. Oh, no! That's 11 months in a row of jobs being ADDED! Republicans want to go BACK to the good old days of Bush when the U.S. was LOSING HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF JOBS PER MONTH!

One can only imagine how much better the economy MIGHT be if Republicans didn't try to thwart every single thing that Obama has tried to do.

And then you have the issue of Obama finally using recess appointments to fill the new Consumer Protection agency and the National Labor Relations Board. Obama did this before the Republicans could set up a "pro forma" session in the Senate. But of course we had Bush using recess appointments when the Democrats actually HAD a pro forma session in place, but Bush made the recess appointments anyway! Did Democrats threaten to sue? Not hardly.

Geez, I don't think I've EVER seen a more despicable group of people than the current-day Republican elected "leaders."

Kale chips

2012-01-05T19:04:00.000-06:00

And now, one of the awesome recipes from the wife. And a special thanks to D&J for originally finding this on GardenAndGun.com

Kale Chips (or whatever)

Ingredients:

1. Olive oil

2. Lemon pepper

3. Raw leaves torn into “chip” sized pieces.. any of the following will work but curly kale is the best.

Kale

Broccoli

Brussels Sprout

Chard

Beet Greens

Place torn leaf pieces into large glass bowl. Add enough olive oil to cover the leaves. Add lemon pepper liberally and toss around to make sure all the torn leaves are covered with oil & spice.

Place on a large cookie sheet or pizza pan. Make sure the pieces aren’t touching as this will make them soggy. Bake at 350 – 375 degrees for about 15 minutes. Halfway through the cooking, turn the pieces over & continue baking. This will make them nice and crispy.

Enjoy!

Death!!

2012-01-05T08:52:00.000-06:00

Ain't religion grand?

On this date in 1527, heretic Felix Manz was drowned under sentence of the Zurich city council. As an Anabaptist, Manz was killed for believing in baptism for cognizant adults rather than in infant baptism.

Link.

Iowa nice

2012-01-04T20:55:00.002-06:00

I'm not from Iowa, but I know some nice people who are from there.

New Yorker toon

2012-01-04T16:29:00.000-06:00

Beyond elections

2012-01-04T16:26:00.000-06:00

You know he's right.

Beyond Elections: People Power

by Mark Bittman

The presidential election may be grabbing headlines, but the true rallying cry for 2012 is to struggle and organize around those issues that a president might take seriously, to stake out positions that would benefit what used to be called the working class (and now goes by “the 99 percent”) and to garner enough political will and power to pressure the president and Congress to move resolutely on the issues that matter.

Tall order, and one that’s of more than passing interest to those who think of themselves as part of the food movement.

Or the environmental movement. Or the Occupy movement, or the foreclosed homeowners movement, or the indebted students movement, or the unemployment movement, or pretty much any movement you can name that implicitly or explicitly acknowledges that there is a class war in this country, one that the wrong side is winning.

It doesn’t matter what you call the movements, or the people behind them. What matters is forcing the government to act in the interests of the sometimes-silent majority rather than its corporate paymasters. That struggle, probably as old as representative democracy itself, most notably dates from the consolidation of corporate power that began after the industrial revolution.

It’s a struggle that’s causing more and more Americans not just to see that something’s wrong with the system but to find the will needed to change it. Again, these people go by a variety of names, though it’s interesting that a recent Pew poll found that just about half of all young people now have a more positive view of “socialism” (whatever that is) than “capitalism” (we know what that is), as do nearly a third of all Americans.

Whatever. We should be able to agree on this: there is an oligarchy in this country, one that uses financial strength to gain political power, one that fights and bullies for its “right” to make money regardless of the consequences to the earth or anything on it. Exxon will do all it can to prevent meaningful climate change legislation; Cargill and Pepsi will fight any improvement in agriculture or diet that threatens their profits; Bank of America would rather see homeowners go under than discuss changes in financial structures. And so on.

There are two ways to fight this oligarchy: by making personal and local changes that counter its power, and by joining mass movements that protest that power. The first can be as simple as light-bulb changing (which Republicans famously detest) and salad-eating [1], though obviously it can be far more involved. The second begins with voting, but it takes more than a president, however well-intentioned, to bring about real change. Does anyone believe that Lyndon Johnson wanted to combat racism, or that Richard Nixon cared about American troops or Vietnamese citizens? No: they were forced, respectively, to support civil rights legislation and to begin ending the Vietnam War. Forced by masses of Americans marching, yelling, demonstrating, sitting in and more — Americans driven by their conscience, not by profits.

Only if there is collective action by large numbers of citizens will politicians — even principled ones — have the support they need to resist the power of corporate lobbyists. It’s not an easy process, and it’s one that’s often met by violence.

I focus on the effect the oligarchy has on the food system — and in turn on our health and that of the environment, farm laborers, animals and so on — but in 2011 I was most inspired when thousands of people sat in front of the White House to protest the approval of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which the climate scientist Jim Hansen called the “fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet.” More than 1,000 people were arrested, but the pipeline’s approval, supported by the State Department and taken for granted, was subsequently delayed, possibly forever.

Why? Certainly not thanks to the pipeline’s 234 supporters in the House of Representatives, who collectively pocketed $42 million (Speaker John A. Boehner’s office alone took in more than $1 million) from the fossil fuel industry[2]. No, it was delayed because President Obama was responding to pressure from normal people, rather than pressure exerted by the energy industry.

A system that allows what amounts to direct payments to congressmen from corporations may be technically legal, but as the journalist and activist Bill McKibben — one of the organizers of the Washington Keystone protest — said to me last week, “Not only does it offend the notion of fairness, it leads to irrational outcomes.”

The most “irrational outcome” is permission to poison air, land, water and living things in the name of profits and without penalty: a hefty subsidy for the products of both the fossil fuel and big food industries. The relatively paltry sums these corporations pay to members of Congress are nothing compared to their profits. (Because $42 million isn’t much when you consider that the total profits of Exxon, for example, were more than $30 billion in 2010.)

That’s oligarchy in action, and the lesson of Keystone is as old as protest itself: only by uniting people who are willing to fight for a cause can we change things. (Do I need to bring up Egypt, Tunisia, and the American and French Revolutions?) And whether the food movement finds a representative issue of its own (food safety? the casual poisoning of the earth or our bodies?) or it joins with other movements of people victimized by the oligarchy, it will take dedicated protest — lots of it, by lots of us — to compete with corporate dollars.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] I can’t find evidence that House Republicans are anti-salad but I feel in my heart that it’s true. We know that they’re anti-compostable serving plates.
[2] I’ll do the math for you: about $180,000 per “representative” (they’re not representing you or me), with the implied promise of more to come.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Please visit my blog and join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter.

Original.

New year chuckles

2012-01-03T10:15:00.000-06:00

Happy New Year, everyone. In the first day of work in the New Year, speaking with co-workers I heard of a murder-suicide, an ugly death by a very aggressive cancer, and a car crash. It sorta takes the wind out of the "Happy New Year!" wish. As usual.

Amidst all the good cheer will always be some bad news, and among the bad news are some who are just having a great time. New Year, SOS.

But on the lighter side.....

Wine Does NOT Make You FAT

It Makes You LEAN..

Against Tables, Chairs, Floors, Walls and Ugly People.

Have a wonderful day and laugh often.

Another new Illness to watch out for... Anal Glaucoma

A woman calls her boss one morning and tells him that she is staying home because she is not feeling well.

"What's the matter?" he asks.

"I have a case of anal glaucoma," she says in a weak voice.

"What the hell is anal glaucoma?"

"I can't see my ass coming into work today."

January Stargazing

2012-01-01T10:12:00.003-06:00

Moon Phases

First quarter - Jan. 2, 12:15 am
Full - Jan. 9, 1:30 am
Last quarter - Jan. 16, 3:08 pm
New - Jan. 23, 1:39 am
First quarter - Jan. 30, 10:10 pm

Apogee: Jan. 2; Perigee: Jan. 17

Stargazing Information

Venus, Jupiter, and Mars — three of our four closest planetary neighbors — adorn the evening sky as the new year breaks. Venus is the dazzling “evening star” in the west at sunset, with only slightly fainter Jupiter high in the south at the same hour. Orange Mars rises by around 11 p.m. as January opens, but about two hours earlier at month’s end.

This Week's Stargazing Tips

January 3, 2012
The Quadrantid meteor shower is at its best tonight. It typically reaches peak rates of about a hundred “shooting stars” per hour. The peak typically lasts no more than a couple of hours, though, so it’s a tough shower to watch.

January 4, 2012
Sun and Earth are closest for the entire year today. Earth is at a point in its orbit called perihelion, which means “closest to the Sun.” We are about 1.5 million miles (2.4 million km) closer to the Sun than average.

January 5, 2012
The Moon stares into the face of the bull tonight — the V-shaped pattern of stars that outlines the face of Taurus. It is below the Moon as night falls. The brightest star in the V is Aldebaran, the bull’s orange eye.

January 6, 2012
The expanding cloud of debris from an exploding star is to the lower right of the Moon this evening, and the Moon sits almost directly in front of it a couple of hours before sunrise. It is known as the Crab Nebula because its outline resembles a crab.

January 7, 2012
The story of Jason and the Argonauts is retold in the stars in the fragmented remains of the constellation Argo Navis. Parts of the constellation are visible from the United States just above the southern horizon on winter evenings.

January 8, 2012
The Moon is full at 1:30 a.m. CST tomorrow, as it lines up opposite the Sun in our sky. The full Moon of January is known as the Old Moon, Wolf Moon, or Moon After Yule.

January 9, 2012
The Summer Triangle, formed by the brilliant stars Deneb, Vega, and Altair, shines in the wintertime as well. In January it lights up the northwestern sky in early evening, then reappears in the northeast before sunrise.

January 9-15
Water Worlds. Earth is known as the blue planet because of its oceans. But water is abundant throughout the cosmos. We'll talk about the water on Earth, on Mars, and around a newborn star, plus much more.

January 16-22
Space Rocks. The man who made meteorites fashionable was born 125 years ago, and we'll have details. We'll also talk about what scientists today know about these bits of cosmic debris, plus much more.

January 23-29
Ripples in the Universe. Some of the heaviest and fastest objects in the universe send "ripples" through space and time. We'll talk about gravitational waves, and the difficult task of finding them..

January 30-February 5
Stellar Opposites. The brightest star in the night sky has a companion that's a bare cosmic ember — a stellar corpse known as a white dwarf. Join us for brilliant Sirius, its faint companion, and much more about white dwarfs.

January Program Schedule: http://stardate.org/radio/calendars
Find an Affiliate: http://stardate.org/radio/affiliates

News From the Observatory

NASA Mission, Texas Astronomers Collaborate to find Goldilocks Planet, Others
Recently NASA announced the discovery of the first planet located in the "habitable zone" around a star — the "just-right" orbit that's not too hot, nor too cold for water to exist in liquid form, making life as we know it possible. Astronomers from The University of Texas at Austin's McDonald Observatory involved in this and other Kepler research presented their findings recently at the first Kepler Science Conference at NASA's Ames Research Center.
Read more: http://mcdonaldobservatory.org/news/releases/2011/1205.html

Pair of black holes 'weigh in' at 10 billion Suns; most massive yet
A team of astronomers including Karl Gebhardt and graduate student Jeremy Murphy of The University of Texas at Austin have discovered the most massive black holes to date — two monsters weighing as much as 10 billion suns and threatening to consume anything, even light, within a region five times the size of our solar system.
Read more: http://mcdonaldobservatory.org/news/releases/2011/1207.html

Cosmic Explosion Explained Just in Time for Christmas
An explosion far across the universe rattled astronomers in 2010 on Christmas Day. Called a gamma-ray burst (GRB), it incited a flurry of activity from telescopes in space and on the ground, including the 2.1-meter Otto Struve Telescope at The University of Texas at Austin's McDonald Observatory. This year, just in time for Christmas 2011, astronomers say they now know what happened — and it requires a new model for the origin of at least some GRBs.
Read more: http://mcdonaldobservatory.org/news/releases/2011/1130.html

Much more here.

100 Years

2011-12-31T11:12:00.001-06:00

Oliphant/Fiore

2011-12-29T23:37:00.001-06:00

I don't know how these guys consistently come up with ideas for their toons.....first, Pat Oliphant

...and the year-end wrap-up from Mark Fiore. Click here.

Mark Fiore is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and animator whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, and dozens of other publications. He is an active member of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and has a website featuring his work.

Shatner Rules

2011-12-29T23:24:00.001-06:00

Just finished reading William Shatner's latest work, "Shatner Rules: Your Key to Understanding the Shatnerverse and the World at Large." It's a quick, funny, highly enjoyable read. Another highly recommended book. It's been a long time since I read a book that I didn't enjoy. I guess that, if I don't like a particular book, I quit reading and don't finish it, and so I wouldn't recommend it anyway. Hmmmm....

I'm noticing that a lot of writers start off their books with a "Congratulations for buying this book, because....." etc etc. Haven't any of these writers figured out that a lot of people read their books that they have checked out of their local library? Shoot, if I bought all the books that I read, I'd be broke!

Give generously

2011-12-28T12:32:00.000-06:00

In this holiday season, I hope that all of you have taken some time to reflect upon how fortunate you are simply by being an American (ok, most of you). Granted, this nation has its share of problems and troubles, none of which cannot be overcome.

We should all be mindful of how unfortunate many others in the world are. Whether the victims of war, poverty, drought, natural disasters, greed, or whatnot, quite a number of people in the world could use some help.

This time of year is the perfect time to lend a hand. There are so many good organizations deserving of your support. Be sure to spread the wealth where you can. One way to be sure that the money you give is going to those who truly need it is to refer to the Charity Navigator. You can get to them by clicking here.

Wishing a happy holiday season to all, and may 2012 be the best year yet. Yeah, I know, a longshot.

Mike Luckovich

2011-12-27T15:37:00.002-06:00

Intolerance

2011-12-25T21:03:00.002-06:00

December Solstice

2011-12-21T23:42:00.000-06:00

The REAL reason for the season.

December Solstice

StarDate
December 21, 2011

Seen from most of the United States, the Sun is a pretty wan companion at this time of year. It stays quite low in the south, never climbing more than a third of the way up the sky for most of the country. And it’s in view for fewer hours than at any other time of the year — as few as eight for those in Minnesota and Maine, and even fewer in Alaska.

In fact, today is the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere — the winter solstice. It marks the beginning of winter.

Yet it’s also a turning point. After the solstice, the Sun slowly begins to work its way northward. The days get a bit longer, and the Sun scoots a little higher across the sky.

We won’t actually feel the difference for a while, though. In part, that’s because there’s still a lot more darkness than daylight. And in part it’s because the Sun is still so low in the sky that its rays have to pass through a thick layer of atmosphere to reach us. Most of the Sun’s energy is going to the southern hemisphere, where the Sun stands high in the sky.

So it’ll take a few weeks more for the days to start to get warmer, working from south to north.

Incidentally, the word “solstice” means “Sun stands still.” It indicates that the Sun rises and sets at the same points on the horizon for a few days. It takes a while to notice that it’s starting to move again — headed back toward our half of the world. It’ll reach its northern standstill — the summer solstice — on June 20th.

Beam us up.

Robert Ingersoll

2011-12-21T10:32:00.000-06:00

Today, the day before the Winter Solstice (12/22/11), is a good day to celebrate the words and wisdom of one of my personal heroes, Robert Green Ingersoll. In the passages below, he speaks of Christmas.

As an atheist myself, I have been occasionally struggled with celebrating Christmas while divorcing it from "Christ." Ingersoll reminds us that the Winter Solstice and Christmas is a perfectly natural cause for celebration, without the trappings of religion.

I urge everyone to read any of the books and writings published by Ingersoll. If you know of someone who is unhappy and dissatisfied with modern-day religion, have them read some Ingersoll. It will help them to shed that religious straightjacket and come into the light of day.

Chances are good your public library has a collection of Ingersoll's work. Or, click here for an online version of the collected works. I have found no modern-day equivalent to Robert Ingersoll's beautiful and simple command of the English language.

The good part of Christmas is not always Christian--it is generally Pagan; that is to say, human, natural.

Christianity did not come with tidings of great joy, but with a message of eternal grief. It came with the threat of everlasting torture on its lips. It meant war on earth and perdition hereafter.

It taught some good things--the beauty of love and kindness in man. But as a torch-bearer, as a bringer of joy, it has been a failure. It has given infinite consequences to the acts of finite beings, crushing the soul with a responsibility too great for mortals to bear. It has filled the future with fear and flame, and made God the keeper of an eternal penitentiary, destined to be the home of nearly all the sons of men. Not satisfied with that, it has deprived God of the pardoning power.

And yet it may have done some good by borrowing from the Pagan world the old festival called Christmas.

Long before Christ was born the Sun-God triumphed over the powers of Darkness. About the time that we call Christmas the days begin perceptibly to lengthen. Our barbarian ancestors were worshippers of the sun, and they celebrated his victory over the hosts of night. Such a festival was natural and beautiful. The most natural of all religions is the worship of the sun. Christianity adopted this festival. It borrowed from the Pagans the best it has.

I believe in Christmas and in every day that has been set apart for joy. We in America have too much work and not enough play. We are too much like the English.

I think it was Heinrich Heine who said that he thought a blaspheming Frenchman was a more pleasant object to God than a praying Englishman. We take our joys too sadly. I am in favor of all the good days--the more the better.

Christmas is a good day to forgive and forget--a good day to throw away prejudices and hatreds--a good day to fill your heart and your house, and the hearts and houses of others, with sunshine.”

— "The Great Agnostic" Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899), "A Christmas Sermon," Evening Telegram, Dec. 19, 1891

Happy Birthday, FZ

2011-12-21T09:38:00.000-06:00

On this date in 1940, Mothers of Invention musician Frank Zappa was born in Baltimore, and moved at age ten with his family to California. His father was a Sicilian-born meteorologist. Zappa became a rock icon as bandleader, guitarist, composer, satirist and political commentator. His children were memorably named Valley Girl Moon Unit, Dweezil, Ahmet and Diva. The London Symphony Orchestra performed "Zappa Volume One" and "Zappa Volume Two." Zappa won a Grammy for "Jazz from Hell," an instrumental album. He released more than 50 albums before his untimely death at 52 from prostate cancer. D. 1993.

“Anybody who wants religion is welcome to it, as far as I'm concerned--I support your right to enjoy it. However, I would appreciate it if you exhibited more respect for the rights of those people who do not wish to share your dogma, rapture, or necrodestination.”

— Frank Zappa, cited by Warren Allen Smith in Who's Who in Hell
from FFRF.

Speeding Ticket?

2011-12-20T21:59:00.001-06:00

Thanks, sis.

Two Texas Highway Patrol officers were conducting speeding enforcement on Highway 77, just south of Kingsville, Texas. One of the officers was using a hand held radar device to check speeding vehicles approaching the town of Kingsville. The officers were suddenly surprised when the radar gun began reading 300 miles per hour and climbing. The officer attempted to reset the radar gun, but it would not reset, then it suddenly turned off.

Just then a deafening roar over the mesquite tree tops on Highway 77 revealed that the radar had, in fact, locked on to a USMC F/A-18 Hornet which was engaged in a low-flying exercise near it's Naval Air home base location in Kingsville.

Back at the Texas Highway Patrol Headquarters in Corpus Christi the Patrol Captain fired off a complaint to the US Naval Base Commander in Kingsville for shutting down his equipment.The reply came back in true USMC style:

"Thank you for your letter.

You may be interested to know that the tactical computer in the Hornet had detected the presence of, and subsequently locked on to, your hostile radar equipment and automatically sent a jamming signal back to it, which is why it shut down.

Furthermore, an Air-to-Ground missile aboard the fully armed aircraft had also automatically locked on to your equipment's location.

Fortunately, the Marine Pilot flying the Hornet recognized the situation for what it was, quickly responded to the missile system alert status and was able to override the automated defense system before the missile was launched to destroy the hostile radar position on the side of Highway 77, south of Kingsville.

The pilot suggests you cover your mouths when swearing at them, since the video systems on these jets are very high tech.

Sergeant Johnson, the officer holding the radar gun, should get his dentist to check his left rear molar. It appears the filling is loose. Also, the snap is broken on his holster."

Politifact, R.I.P.

2011-12-20T10:09:00.000-06:00

from Paul Krugman's blog:

Politifact, R.I.P.

This is really awful. Politifact, which is supposed to police false claims in politics, has announced its Lie of the Year — and it’s a statement that happens to be true, the claim that Republicans have voted to end Medicare.

Steve Benen in the link above explains it, but let me just repeat the basics. Republicans voted to replace Medicare with a voucher system to buy private insurance — and not just that, a voucher system in which the value of the vouchers would systematically lag the cost of health care, so that there was no guarantee that seniors would even be able to afford private insurance.

The new scheme would still be called “Medicare”, but it would bear little resemblance to the current system, which guarantees essential care to all seniors.

How is this not an end to Medicare? And given all the actual, indisputable lies out there, how on earth could saying that it is be the “Lie of the year”?

The answer is, of course, obvious: the people at Politifact are terrified of being considered partisan if they acknowledge the clear fact that there’s a lot more lying on one side of the political divide than on the other. So they’ve bent over backwards to appear “balanced” — and in the process made themselves useless and irrelevant.

Way to go, guys.

Original.

Happy Birthday, BP!

2011-12-18T22:53:00.001-06:00

On this date (December 18) in 1963, Brad Pitt was born in Shawnee, Okla. Two credits shy of a college degree from the University of Missouri, Pitt dropped out and headed to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career. Working as a limousine driver for several months, Pitt enrolled in an acting class and then accompanied a classmate to an audition as her scene partner. The agent signed Pitt instead and he began work in television, including appearing on episodes of "Dallas," "Another World" and "Growing Pains."

In spite of appearing only a few minutes on screen, Pitt's big break came from his role as a hitchhiker in the classic female buddy story, "Thelma and Louise" (1991). With some failed films over the next few years, Pitt established himself as more than a sex symbol, showing off his acting prowess in "A River Runs Through It" (1992), "Kalifornia" (1993), "Interview with the Vampire" (1994), "Legends of the Fall" (1994) and "Seven" (1997). He received critical acclaim and some award nominations and wins for his work in "Twelve Monkeys" (1995), "Babel" (2006) and "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (2008).

Year after year, Brad Pitt's celebrity continues to rise, due to his high-profile public romances (including to partner Angelina Jolie), sex symbol status and award-winning acting abilities. "When I got untethered from the comfort of religion, it wasn't a loss of faith for me. It was a discovery of self. I had thought that I'm capable enough to handle any situation. There's peace in understanding that I have only one life, here and now, and I'm responsible," he said to Parade Magazine in 2007. Pitt told BILD.com: "I'm probably 20 percent atheist and 80 percent agnostic" (July 23, 2009).

“I don't have a chance [on being elected Mayor of New Orleans]. I'm running on the gay marriage, no religion, legalization and taxation of marijuana platform.”

— Brad Pitt, in an interview with Ann Curry on "The Today Show," Aug. 13, 2009

New cabinets!

2011-12-17T15:54:00.018-06:00

We recently hired Valso, the manic Brazilian that built the fence around the Midtown Community Garden, to build some new cabinets for our dining room.

Long ago we ran out of storage space in the kitchen. Now, it will take awhile, but I'm sure we'll fill it up again. We always seem to expand to fit the space we have.

The structure spans the entire eastern wall of our dining room, a full 11' wide. (If you click each pic, they should open to a larger view.)

One of the only things I insisted on including was at least four large drawers into which I plan on putting all of the stuff that we recycle. It's too much hassle to walk everything downstairs to the garage when we have another piece of plastic or newspaper, and piling stuff up in the corner just wasn't very, uh, esthetic. These large drawers can also be used for a myriad of other things.

Valso noticed that we tend to drink a fair amount of wine, so he suggested we add a wine rack to the structure. It wasn't in the original plan, but, hey, good idea. And the three racks also pull outward, so you can see the label. A nice touch.

He also added a space to hang wine glasses from. We basically gave him the master design and let him loose on it.

A close-up of the granite counter-top. It's very similar to the granite in the kitchen.

Eight new waist-high drawers will take some time to fill. Six glass doors for the upper portion...

Valso added some special little design flourishes, no charge.

We used pine, a pretty soft wood, and so it is best to use a "wood conditioner" before staining.

We love it. Merry Christmas to both of us! From both of us! And to all of you too.

Tony Auth

2011-12-16T16:15:00.000-06:00

...one of my favorite "comics."

More.

I Can't Get Behind That

2011-12-15T22:26:00.003-06:00

William Shatner and Henry Rollins, circa 2007.

Gene Lyons

2011-12-14T18:54:00.000-06:00

Hmmm...."smart conservatives"...are we sure this is not an oxymoron, Gene?

Why Smart Conservatives Suddenly Hate Newt
by Gene Lyons

Newt Gingrich is the Jimmy Swaggart of American politics, a confidence man so transparent as to test the faith even of True Believers. Paradoxically, that’s precisely why the disgraced former speaker looks a good bet to secure the GOP presidential nomination.

Not seeing through Gingrich’s bare-faced mendacity requires an effort of the will so profound it can only be accomplished with the aid of strong countervailing emotions — essentially the envy, resentment and fear that right-wing media have fomented among the faithful ever since the election of President Clinton and the 1994 “Contract With America.”

Metaphorically speaking, Gingrich’s candidacy is the love child of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, with Fox News throwing the baby shower.

This only makes the horror of intellectually inclined conservatives at the prospect of Newt’s ascendancy more remarkable. Where have they been all this time? Back in 1994, Gingrich and Frank Luntz circulated a list of hurtful words conservatives should always call liberals. "Traitors” was at the top, also some that sound particularly ironic today: “waste,” “corruption,” “self-serving,” “greed,” “cynicism,” “cheat,” “steal” and “patronage.”

To the Washington Post’s resident Tory George Will, Gingrich “embodies the vanity and rapacity that make modern Washington repulsive.” To his colleague Charles Krauthammer, it’s Newt’s faculty lounge-lizard side — his half-baked intellectual pretentiousness — that’s most disturbing.

Not himself a particularly modest fellow, Krauthammer writes that “Gingrich has a self-regard so immense that it rivals Obama’s — but, unlike Obama’s, is untamed by self-discipline.” He finds Newt’s “[t]hinking of himself as a grand world-historical figure, attuned to the latest intellectual trend” downright comical.

Will too lampoons Gingrich’s “intellectual hubris” and “enthusiasm for intellectual fads.” He levels the ultimate insult, correctly asserting that Newt “would have made a marvelous Marxist, [believing] everything is related to everything else and only he understands how.”

To his credit, Will focuses upon what’s perhaps Gingrich’s single most despicable moment, a 1994 election eve attempt to blame a South Carolina mother’s drowning of her children on Democrats. Never mind that Susan Smith allegedly turned out to have been abused by her Republican stepfather. Politics had nothing to do with the tragedy.

What Will calls Gingrich’s “grotesque opportunism — tarted up as sociology” has been his entire stock in trade for years. He made similarly absurd observations about the 1999 Columbine High School tragedy. To him, two teenagers who massacred 13 of their classmates with automatic weapons became somehow the fault of liberal Democrats.

And so it goes. In 2010, Gingrich wrote a book arguing that the Obama administration “represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.” Earlier this year, he told a Texas church gathering that he feared his grandchildren would grow up “in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.”

Because the president of the United States, of course, is secretly a radical Muslim whose “Kenyan, anti-colonial” views lead him to seek revenge on behalf of the African father he hardly knew. Newt said that too.

Two thoughts: First, it’s a straight line from this kind of intellectual promiscuity to the other kind Newt’s also famous for — serving divorce papers on Wife 1 while she was hospitalized for cancer in favor of Wife 2, whom he subsequently abandoned for the bejeweled Callista, his mistress of the Clinton years, who, as Wife 3, hovers over him relentless as a bird of prey. A 68-year-old Catholic convert, Gingrich once blamed his misbehavior on too much hard work motivated by patriotism. They practically dare you to laugh, those two.

Second, the Chicago Tribune’s estimable Steve Chapman captured the essence of Gingrich’s appeal to the GOP’s propagandized base: “Demonizing adversaries is what he does best. Some on the right don’t want a conservative so much as they want a hater. Gingrich is their dream come true. Romney shows no flair for irresponsible hysteria and crude smears — and many count that as a serious flaw.”

All three columnists agree that Newt would prove a fatally flawed candidate in the general election. “Even if Gingrich can win over most Republicans,” Chapman writes, “he is bound to repel everyone else.”

Indeed, faced with him as the nominee, many conservatives would privately hold their noses and vote for Obama. “Bigfoot dressed as a circus clown would have a better chance of beating President Obama than Newt Gingrich, a similarly farcical character,” one anonymous Republican told Washington Post blogger Jonathan Bernstein.

Certainly welcome, this principled scorn comes a bit late. Few on the right have been willing to confront the reality that conservatism in the classical sense scarcely exists anymore in the United States. It’s long been replaced by the Yahoo dogmatism of a huckster like Gingrich, and it looks increasingly as if we’re all going to have to live with the consequences.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at eugenelyons2@yahoo.com.More Gene Lyons

Original.

Invented People

2011-12-13T08:40:00.000-06:00

Steve van Zandt

2011-12-12T18:30:00.000-06:00

No, this isn't a post about Bruce Springsteen's band and Steve van Zandt, Bruce's guitar player. This is an actual post by Steve van Zandt, who takes a much stronger interest in politics than I knew, which I guess is not all that surprising, considering Bruce's interest in politics.

Here, Steve makes eminent sense. He comes up with the same answer that countless others have realized. The real problem becomes HOW to make it happen. It is achievable, certainly.

Let's put this another way. If even rock-and-rollers can see the problem, we need to do something.

There is Only One Issue in America

I was obsessed with politics in the '80s. I've recovered and I'm feeling much better now thank you.

By the time I realized, as interesting as it was, I'd better stop this stuff and try to earn a living, I had discovered many of our social problems and quality of life issues could be traced to the same political source: our corrupt-by-definition electoral system. The solution to the problem was as easy to discover as the cause: The elimination of all private finance in the electoral process.

I was working doing most of my research in the area of our foreign policy since WWll, whatever fell under the umbrella of international liberation politics, but I examined and analyzed a fair amount of local issues as well.

I wanted to know how things work? Where's the power? Who's pulling the strings?

The economy of the world came down to the unholy trinity of guns, drugs and gasoline -- military industry, drugs (legal and illegal), and energy -- and now I would add agribusiness as the fourth controlling commodity, and always with the enabling bankers never too far out of sight making their profits far too often from wars and slave labor.

While that readily explained the suffering of the Third World, it didn't immediately answer why in America it was possible for so many people to be unhappy with our government's decisions, both foreign and domestic, when we're supposedly living in a democracy.

A quick analysis of our electoral process revealed the obvious answer. The simple fact is we do not live in a democracy. Certainly not the kind our Founding Fathers intended. We live in a corporate dictatorship represented by, and beholden to, no single human being you can reason with or hold responsible for anything.

The corporation has but one obligation, which is to increase profits for it's shareholders by any legal means necessary by the next fiscal quarter.

They have no moral, patriotic, social, environmental, generational or even sustainable responsibility. They have only a short-term economic mandate and their only responsibility to society is to stay within the law to accomplish it.

This doesn't mean corporations shouldn't exist or even that their directors are evil by their very DNA. It has been a legally acceptable basic flaw in the form of our capitalist system that allows corporations to operate without a moral compass or obligation to society -- but that's a discussion for another day.

The law is rarely a problem because the corporations' legal obligations are pretty much designed first and foremost for their maximum profit by the legislation created by the legislators belonging to our two national political parties, both of which are wholly bought, sold and controlled by Wall Street. The banks and the corporations. In other words the game is rigged. Feel like a sucker? We all do because we all are.

The manipulation, aided by a very willing media also owned by the corporations, has made things easier beginning with what has become the amazing Orwellian staple of every newscast, selling the public on the lie that the Dow has somehow become America's scoreboard!

We're all hypnotized, rooting for them like they're our home team at a football game, cheering for THEIR scoreboard mindlessly forgetting WE'RE THE AWAY TEAM!!

You think your congressman is working all day to get you a job? He may want to. He or she is probably not a bad person. They probably want to do the right thing. But they can't. Long-time Capitol Hill staff and campaign strategists tell me the average legislator spends one-third of their time (or more) every day raising money or on activities related to raising money.

Yes, they are "elected" which creates the mass delusion of democracy to keep the masses from rioting, but congressional races are costing millions of dollars and some Senate seats are going for tens of millions each, and they're predicting well over one billion dollars for the next presidency.

That's some democracy we've created there, isn't it?

Of the people?

By the people?

For the people?

What people?

Democracy in America is a sick joke and the masses aren't laughing anymore.

Yes, we can demonstrate. We can march. We can write and sign petitions to our Representatives. We can occupy.

And we should because it's healthy to vent, and we don't feel so all alone. But the truth is, other than the value of venting, we're wasting our time. It is naïve to expect political results from any of these activities.

Our representative can give us lip service. A lot of sympathy. Empathy even. But we don't pay their media bills, gabeesh?

We need to eliminate all private finance from the electoral process.

And let's not be distracted by "reforms." Let's spare ourselves the unnecessary discussions about transparent disclosure, or the conflict of interest of foreign countries buying favorable treatment, or protection after protection being gutted by dangerously diluted regulations, or trying to impose this limit or that limit, etc., etc., etc.

Campaign finance doesn't need reform. It needs elimination.

To accomplish this we must overturn Buckley v. Valeo, one of the two or three worst decisions in the history of the Supreme Court.

The ruling makes the extraordinary decision that money is protected by the First Amendment.
Presumably Chief Justice Gordon Gekko presiding!

These smartest guys in the room actually decided that spending money is the equivalent of free speech. You might wonder why no one in that smart room stood up and said wait a minute, if money is speech, isn't lack of money lack of speech?

You know, as in the rich get to talk, and the poor don't? How are the non-moneyed classes represented by this decision?

I guess nobody stood up then, but it's time to stand up now.

In fact, I am now introducing a new pledge to be signed by our legislators. Of both parties. Indies too. Everybody's welcome.

THE PLEDGE FOR A DEMOCRATIC AMERICA

(We'll need someone more educated than me to draw it up, or we can copy Grover Norquist's anti-tax pledge, but it would go something like this.)

I, The Undersigned, pledge to overturn Buckley v. Valeo and eliminate all private finance from the electoral process, thusly restoring America to it's democratic principles. I may take corporate, PAC, SuperPAC, or Chinese money to get elected or reelected (martyrdom accomplishes nothing), but upon my election I will make campaign finance elimination one of my immediate top priorities.

Now somebody should be starting a new Third Party whose platform is dedicated to this one idea. Twenty-five years ago that's what I'd be doing right now.

But the need for a Third Party aside, this idea applies for everyone. Just as much for the Tea Party on the right as the 99 Percenters on the left (the corporate oligarchy actually has no Party affiliation, it just looks Republican).

Both groups should adopt this issue. The Occupiers need not agree on anything else, because frankly nothing else matters, and a bit more focus on the root of our problems for the Tea Party certainly wouldn't hurt them either.

Let's see who's serious about representing the "people."

And you know what?

We might be pleasantly surprised at how many congressmen and senators sign this thing who would rather be doing something more dignified with their lives than spending half their time begging for money.

Original.

More Toons

2011-12-09T23:57:00.003-06:00

Greg Palast

2011-12-09T22:14:00.005-06:00

BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast came through town recently for another benefit for KPFT while promoting his new book, "Vulture's Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores." From Greg's talk Thursday evening, several people running free belong in jail, and I believe it. Justice in this nation has become warped.

The Occupy movement could be seen as an outgrowth of the kind of muck that Greg has been raking over the past 8 years and 3 books. The 1% fucking the 99% fits Greg's narrative to a "T." Somehow, we have to remove the corporate shills that currently infest Congress, but that's only one piece. The US is already far down the rathole.

You can download or read online Chapter 1 of Greg's new book by clicking here. It certainly leaves you wanting more. The Vulture's Picnic site is here.

OK, just one thing we learned Thursday evening from Greg: two years prior to the Deepwater Horizon "accident" (Greg calls it a "homicide"), BP experienced a catastrophic failure on a rig in the Caspian Sea, and the equipment that failed in the Deepwater Horizon was the same kind of equipment that failed in the Caspian Sea. BP said they'd never seen anything like what happened to Deepwater Horizon. Lying sacks of shit.

And I had one other revelation Thursday evening. It wasn't anything that Greg said exactly, but I suppose listening to him helped to trigger it...

We all know that powerful interests have been funding climate change skeptics, prominent among them Exxon and some "think tanks." Let's just say "Exxon" for brevity. So, Exxon has been paying people to actively dispute the findings of climate scientists, sowing dissension in the country and in the Congress, paralyzing those who could be and should be taking action, actions like limiting greenhouse gasses or aggressively switching to alternative energy sources.

It is in Exxon's interest to paralyze Congress. It's not that Exxon doubts that climate change is real and happening, they just don't want anything done about it. Exxon employs many engineers and scientists who know the science is accurate. They know that increased greenhouse gasses will continue to warm the atmosphere and melt the ice caps, revealing brand-new sources of oil, but without that pesky ice pack, it's easier to drill for oil.

So they are willing to let the ice caps melt (and sea levels rise, whatever) so that they can more easily access the oil in the polar regions. If that's not short-sighted and damn near suicidal, tell me what is.

That may not be any kind of revelation to you, but somehow it all became clearer to me last night. Greedy, cynical bastards. And so far they're getting away with it.

John Lennon

2011-12-08T06:40:00.000-06:00

We were going to DEPORT John Lennon. What a fucked-up country we have been, can be, but don't have to be...

Giant solar farms

2011-12-07T21:40:00.006-06:00

So, how many giant solar farms do we have in this "land of the free, home of the brave" nation?

Harnessing desert sun to power Europe

It is a beguiling idea - harvest sunshine, and a little wind, from the empty deserts of North Africa and the Middle East, and use it to produce clean power for the region and for Europe.

Desertec, a group based in Germany with heavyweight commercial backers including Siemens and Deutsche Bank, says the scheme would also bring the regions around the Mediterranean closer together, while providing jobs and stability for the countries in the south.

It has chosen Morocco, which is embarking on its own ambitious solar programme, for its first "reference" project - a plant meant to show that its grand vision is feasible.

Desertec expects to see the first electricity flowing through undersea cables from Morocco to Spain as early as 2014.

But its stated goal - using desert power to supply up to 100% of local needs and up to 15% of European demand by 2050 - has attracted critics who question whether such a vision is possible, or even necessary.

'Nothing unrealistic'

No-one doubts the physical potential of the desert to generate renewable power.

According to a study by the German Aerospace Centre (DLR), a state agency that provided data used by Desertec, less than 1% of suitable land in the North Africa and the Middle East would be needed to cover the current electricity consumption of the region, as well as Europe.

Many countries with intense sunshine also have large tracts of uninhabited land.

But creating a power network presents a series of formidable problems, from nomads stealing solar components to the technological and political challenges of transporting and delivering electricity over such a vast area.

Paul Van Son, the Desertec Industrial Initiative's chief executive, stresses that his group has no detailed blueprint, but aims instead to create the broad conditions for a solar network to be developed.

"There is nothing which is unrealistic," he says.

"It's already happening today, there are installations in the deserts, solar installations, wind parks - it all works.

"There are electrical grids from Tunisia, Algeria for instance and Morocco to Spain and Europe. It's possible to transport electricity over long, long distances."

Desertec points to a pair of cables already installed between Morocco and Spain - though for now these are carrying power from north to south.

It says it will work closely with Medgrid, a French scheme to enable the construction of a Mediterranean transmission system.

What Desertec vision requires

Solar farms across Middle East and North Africa

Undersea High Voltage Direct Current cables

Estimated $400bn of financing over 40 years

Political stability and security in southern states

Integrated and liberalised energy markets

Read the rest here.

Silly Christians

2011-12-07T21:32:00.003-06:00

Thanks to Dave, thanks to the Friendly Atheist, and thanks to all of those quick-witted, fast-acting atheists out there. Happy Holidays! Hahahaaa!

Thanks to Christians, Atheists Displays Will Flourish in Loudoun County

Posted on December 1, 2011 by Hemant Mehta

For the past couple of years, there has been a battle in Loudoun County, Virginia over which displays, if any, should be allowed in front of the county courthouse.

Last year, the courthouse Grounds and Facilities Committee wanted to ban all displays, while the county Supervisor and other community members wanted to continue to allow all displays — including atheist ones. (Both options would’ve been legal.)

Even the state’s notoriously conservative Attorney General Ken Cuccinelliweighed in on the matter because he wanted to see nativity scenes in front of the courthouse:

… it is my opinion that a local governmental entity is never categorically compelled to prohibit holiday displays, including those incorporating recognizably religious symbols, because governments enjoy considerable discretion in accommodating the religious expression of their citizens and employees and in their own recognition of traditional seasonal holidays. It is further my opinion that displays depicting the birth of Jesus Christ are permissible provided the government ensures appropriate content and context.

Of course, the only legal way to allow nativity scenes at the courthouse is to allow non-Christian displays as well.

After all the discussion, the county decided to continue allowing all displays. The rules were as follows: 10 displays would be allowed on the courthouse grounds and applications would be considered on a first-come, first-served basis.

Cuccinelli and his allies wanted to open the door for nativity scenes… but it turns out they kept the floodgates open for atheists.

Of the ten displays this year, only three of them are Christian: two nativity scenes and a “letter from Jesus.”

The rest? Well, just check out this list:

A sign showing a picture of the Easter Bunny, Santa and Jesus Christ with text that states, “Myths for Young and Old,” a quote from Thomas Edison and information about the Loudoun Atheists, submitted by Leesburg resident Emmert Elsea.
…
A banner with the text “Celebrating our Constitution” and language about keeping church and state separate, submitted by Leesburg resident Rick Wingrove. The banner comes from American Atheists and NOVA Atheists.
…
A banner promoting “reason in the holiday season,” submitted by Lansdowne resident Larry Mendoza.
…
A holiday display that will either be a Tree of Knowledge or a holiday message sign, from Sterling resident Lydia Rice.
…
A sign about the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, submitted by Leesburg resident Ken Levesque.
…
Another sign from the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, this one with a holiday message, submitted by Matthew Courtney of Reston.

Oh. And there’s some art work featuring Santa on a cross to show “society’s materialistic obsessions and addictions and how it is killing the peace, love, joy and kindness that is supposed to be prevalent during the holiday season.”

How amazingly blasphemous and wonderful is that?!

If that’s not awesome enough, it turns out that one of the display spaces may be out of commission… meaning the county would have to cut the number of displays down to nine. That means axing the last application that was approved… which would be one of the nativity scenes

This is actually the second year atheists have taken advantage of this let-all-displays-flourish policy — last year, they had six displays as well.

Thanks to Ken Cuccinelli and all the Christians who supported the idea of allowing all displays on the courthouse grounds! It backfired on you, completely, but the holiday season just got better for the rest of us.

Original.

Notes from the Trail

2011-12-06T13:36:00.005-06:00

Bullshit: More Damaging to the Atmosphere Than Cow Farts?
By Steve Bhaerman

"The media has inundated us with so much toxic B.S. that our skeptic system has overflowed, and we end up swallowing huge ironies whole. So here is an irony supplement to munch on: We need a totalitarian police state to preserve our freedom." -- Swami Beyondananda

Those who insist that all of America's industries have been outsourced have missed an important one. No, not medical marijuana, although that is clearly one of our few thriving industries.

I'm talking about the bullshit industry.

Here are some jaw-dropping statistics:

In 2009, $4 billion was spent by the fast food industry in advertising.

Big Pharma spends more on advertising than on research and development.

Tobacco companies spend $15.3 billion a year on marketing and promotion.

In 2010, $50 billion was spent on TV advertising alone.

So, starving artists take heart! Simply become a bullshit artist, and you'll have plenty to eat. If this sounds cynical and negative, that is not my intent. One of the higher purposes of comedy is to "pump ironies" - that is, to bring to consciousness contrasts that we don't tend to notice in ordinary reality. And ... in being inundated with so many skewed messages on a daily basis, our concept of "normal" has been so toxically distorted that we accept pathology as "just the way things are."

Thanks to what I will heretofore refer to as the "bullshit industry," we are made to want things that we don't need, and are in fact, harmful. But that's not all the bullshit industry does. It also bombards us with trivia, misinformation and disinformation, causing confusion that unhinges us from our humanity and our true self-interest. Over the course of the past sixty years or so, the "citizen" has become virtually extinct, and been replaced by the "consumer."

While the consumerization that is consuming humanity is a worldwide phenomenon, the United States is a special case. I wonder what those who have fought and died for freedom of the press would say about the article that appeared on the Common Dreams site called Why Americans Are Stupid.

Here is the most recent issue of Time magazine as it appears in Europe, East Asia, the South Pacific ... and in the good ole USA.

As anyone who has traveled overseas and watched the news has observed, news for Americans is generally geared to a fifth-grade level. Consequently, we have been "stupidized" into thinking at a fifth-grade level, and have become first-rate consumers, and fifth-rate citizens.

What passes for "political discourse" is a polarizing shouting match that distracts us from what is really happening. So, while left and right have been pushing one another's hot button "G-spots" (as in God, Guns and Gays) insuring that we stay divided and conquered, a "bipartisan" bill introduced in the Senate by Democrat Carl Levin (Michigan) and Republican John McCain (Arizona) that essentially declares the USA a "permanent battlefield" where American citizens can be detained indefinitely and imprisoned without charge or trial. The bill has passed the Senate, and is now awaiting President Obama's signature or veto.

This is what happens when we're not paying attention. The good news about such alarming developments is that the purpose of an "alarm" is to wake people up. And now what is required is that we step outside of our tribal comfort zones and see and hear what folks on the "other side" are saying. While it's easy to dismiss Fox "news" as Fox fiction (Fox News is not able to broadcast in Canada because of a pesky piece of legislation, Canada's Radio Act which states "a licenser may not broadcast ... any false or misleading news") here is an amazingly clear diatribe by Judge Andrew Napolitano broadcast on Fox Business News that parallels the alarm expressed by the left-leaning ACLU in the paragraph above.

The only way we will overgrow Big Brother is first by acknowledging that the infrastructure of totalitarian tyranny is being installed NOW ... and by coming together with those who are awakening regardless of where they align on the political spectrum. Those willing to step outside the matrix of the current political puppet show to expose the "man behind the curtain" are the true leaders of the future. And folks, the future is here now.

I am reminded of a scene in Bringing Down A Dictator (a film I highly recommend renting and showing) that documents the "spectacular defeat of Slobodan Milosevic in October, 2000, by an ingenious nonviolent strategy of honest elections and massive civil disobedience." In this one scene, the leaders of all the opposition parties - many of them bitter enemies - had to unite around one candidate to oppose Milosevic. As you watch them standing together on the platform, you can feel how uncomfortable they are. And yet, this is what was required to save their nation from tyranny. In a similar way, the American Revolution was broad enough to encompass Alexander Hamilton (who was virtually a monarchist) and libertarian freethinker Thomas Jefferson.

And now an American Evolution is required to call forth the "heart and soul" of who we are, so that we use our energy to learn together instead of falling for the "impropaganda" designed to distract us. Imagine the energy that could be liberated if Americans from all political stripes (not to mention plaids and polka dots) stood together and declared, "No more bullshit! We're not buying it."

What if we brought together a left-right coalition like the one my friend Joseph McCormick helped create in April 2006 that included The Christian Coalition and MoveOn.org? Between them, those two powerful organizations shut down the switchboards of Congress in order to successfully preserve net neutrality.

Could we pull together a full-spectrum coalition today to preserve the Bill of Rights and establish a truer balance of power? This is where the REAL 99% needs to show up to completely and utterly "occupy" our political process NOW. While the Occupy Wall Street movement is about the power of money to buy influence, on a deeper level it's about a system that has become so corrupted, it's become impossible to distinguish between the corruption and the system itself.

This is what Americans from across the political spectrum are fed up with ... and only by addressing these fundamental issues of governance (rather than devolving the conversation into specific policy) will we survive as free individuals in the context of healthy community.

Provide the context ... and the content will take care of itself.

Everything else is - you should pardon the expression - extraneous bullshit.

As An Antidote ... Go See the Thrive Movie

What We the People are now involved in is a rapid self-education process. Just as a healthy body requires accurate signals to maintain health, a healthy body politic also needs accurate information in order to protect itself and thrive. And speaking of "Thrive," I highly recommend the movie of the same name produced by my evolutionary co-hearts Foster and Kimberly Gamble.

At a time when threads (not to mention threats) need to be tied together, this thoughtful, well-produced movie weaves together such diverse issues as new energy technology and suppressed inventions, UFO reports by military observers, the overarching multinational corporations and the banking industry, and even "depopulation" agendas, into a narrative that ventures down the deepest, darkest rat hole ... and emerges with an encouraging and empowering message: We are here to "thrive," and we will ... provided we evolve from spiritual, psychological and political "children" into caring, conscious and courageous adults.

You won't agree with everything in this story, and you might find some of it upsetting ... but, to quote the Swami, "The truth shall upset you free." If you find that the "official narrative" more and more questionable, you will find that Thrive provides a much likelier story, and it presents the story with no sensationalism and plenty of artistry. You may find showings in your neighborhood, and the movie is rentable for private shows (and free if no admission is charged).

Finally, you will find that the movie is a "living story" that is unfolding through Thrive's comprehensive website that offers a clear and deep analysis of the problems, practical strategies for solutions, and includes Barbara Marx Hubbard 12 sectors of human crisis / opportunity stating for each a Vision, the Dangers we face, the Opportunities ahead of us, and the Critical Issues in the field.

I am happy to be supporting this movie, and Swami's comedy will soon appear on their website.

Meanwhile, I offer one more radical - and some would say shocking - proposal ...

Is It Time to Reconsider Marxism?

When America went through the economic crisis of the 1930s called The Great Depression, it is understandable that many disheartened individuals turned to Marxism. And now 80 years later, is it possible that a Marxist approach can address our current depression? Please click here for an example of Marxist activism from 1941 that might very we be helpful today.

Join the Upwising!

Witches Bull

2011-12-06T09:19:00.003-06:00

On December 5, 1484, Pope Innocent VIII's notorious "Witches Bull" (Bull Summis desiderantes) was issued, officially commencing the witchhunts. Historians estimate that victims put to death as a result ranged from 600,000 to more than 9 million, over the 250 years of the witchhunts.

That's a pretty wide range - 600,000 to 9 million, but isn't that religion in a nutshell? (no pun intended). Anything that can't be easily explained gets a supernatural label. No doubt Christianity has come a long way since 1484 (Columbus was just about to set sail!), but it still has a long, long way to go, before it's finally put in the graveyard where it belongs.

Greg Palast in town

2011-12-05T20:10:00.000-06:00

Greg Palast has a new book out: Vulture's Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Predators. So, it's time for a book tour, and it coincides nicely with KPFT's "Quiet Campaign" fund drive. It could be time to get out of the house.

Greg Palast in Houston - KPFT Benefit

(Click image for Full-size flyer)
"Vulture's Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Predators". Book signing and movie Presentation:Thursday December 8, 2011, 7 pm. St. Paul's United Methodist Church, 5501 Main Street, Houston, Texas 77004 (Location Map) $150 Meet & Greet donation, includes a book, refreshments, a chance to chat with the author, reserved seating at the main event. $10 at the door for general admission.

Buy General Admission Tickets at this link. Movie Trailer

About the Author: Greg Palast is an investigative reporter and author of the New York Times and international bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can’t Buy and Armed Madhouse. He is best known as the reporter who uncovered how Katrina Harris purged thousands of African-Americans from the Florida voter rolls in the 2000 Presidential Election. The Guardian called him “The best investigative reporter of our time and the funniest.” He is the Patron of the University Philosophical Society at Trinity College, Dublin, an honor previously help by Jonathan Swift and Oscar Wilde.

About the Book: Vultures' Picnic is pulp nonfiction at its best. It's an unbelievable investigation into the corrupt heart of Big Oil, and behind it, Bigger Finance, exposing once and for all the corporate vultures that feed on the weak and poison our planet.

Indefinite detention?

2011-12-04T22:29:00.002-06:00

Well, this is certainly something to keep an eye on. Is the Congress going to allow the military to arrest and detain American citizens indefinitely without trial? Do we need some refreshers on the U.S. Constitution?

Are Americans in Line for Gitmo?

by Ray McGovern

click here and see if the internet obliges

Happy Birthday, WA!

2011-12-01T13:32:00.003-06:00

On this date in 1935, director Woody Allen (né Allen Stewart Konigsberg), was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. His Jewish parents sent him to eight years of Hebrew school. "I am a Jew only in the sense that I was born into a Jewish family. I have no interest in the organized religions beyond a certain cerebral historical curiosity. They are all nonsense to me in their basic premises. . . . I'm agnostic, but I have one foot in atheism." (Interview by Simon Hattenstone, The Guardian Weekend, March 29, 1997, cited in Who's Who in Hell, edited by Warren Allen Smith.)

He began selling gags to an agency serving newspaper columnists as a teenager. By 16, he was writing for Sid Caesar, and had started to call himself "Woody Allen." He briefly attended New York University, but dropped out to write scripts for television, such as the Ed Sullivan Show and The Tonight Show. Allen won his first Emmy in 1957. He did stand-up comedy, then returned to writing, working for a time for "The Candid Camera."

He wrote his first film, "What's New, Pussycat" in 1965, and directed his first film, "What's Up, Tiger Lily," in 1966. His first onscreen acting appearance was a bit part in the James Bond film, "Casino Royale" (1967). He began to write and direct a series of comic movies: "Take the Money and Run" (1969), "Bananas" (1971), "Play It Again, Sam" (1972), "Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask" (1972), "Sleeper" (1973), "Annie Hall" (1977), which won 4 Academy Awards, "Manhattan" (1979), "Stardust Memories" (1980), "Midsummer Nights Sex Comedy" (1982), and "Celebrity" (1998). His serious films include "Interiors" (1978), "Hannah & Her Sisters" (1986) and "Crimes and Misdemeanors" (1989).

The autobiographical "Stardust Memories" contains an Allen character who quips, "To you, I'm an atheist. To God, I'm the loyal opposition." In his book, Without Feathers (1975), Allen wrote: "How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?"

“Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends.” — Woody
Allen, "My Philosophy," The New Yorker, Dec. 27, 1969

Star Thrower

2011-12-01T08:13:00.000-06:00

A young girl was walking along a beach upon which thousands of starfish had been washed up during a terrible storm. When she came to each starfish, she would pick it up, and throw it back into the ocean. People watched her with amusement.

She had been doing this for some time when a man approached her and said, "Little girl, why are you doing this? Look at this beach! You can't save all these starfish. You can't begin to make a difference!"

The girl seemed crushed, suddenly deflated. But after a few moments, she bent down, picked up another starfish, and hurled it as far as she could into the ocean. Then she looked up at the man and replied,

"Well, I made a difference to that one!"

The old man looked at the girl inquisitively and thought about what she had done and said. Inspired, he joined the little girl in throwing starfish back into the sea. Soon others joined, and all the starfish were saved.

Coulter's an asshole

2011-12-01T01:05:00.000-06:00

December Stargazing

2011-12-01T00:02:00.001-06:00

from StarDate Magazine

Venus, the brightest object in the night sky after the Moon, climbs into better view as the "evening star" this month, low in the west at sunset. The next-brightest object, Jupiter, is well up in the southeast at that hour, and climbs high across the sky after Venus drops from view. Beautiful Orion, the hunter, is in view all night, with Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, tagging along behind it.

Thursday, December 1, 2011
Betelgeuse, the bright orange star that marks the shoulder of Orion, the hunter, is in the east on December evenings. The supergiant star is at least 300 times wider than the Sun and 20 times as massive, and emits 100,000 times as much energy.

Friday, December 2, 2011
The Moon is at first-quarter today, signifying that it is one quarter of the way through its month-long cycle of phases. The cycle reaches its zenith at full Moon on December 10, when there will be a lunar eclipse.

Saturday, December 3, 2011
The ancient elements of fire and water sit side by side low in the southern sky at this time of year. Fire is represented by the constellation Fornax, the furnace. To its east is the watery constellation Eridanus, the river.

Sunday, December 4, 2011
The constellation Auriga, the charioteer, is low in the northeast at nightfall and passes directly overhead by around midnight. Its brightest star is yellow-orange Capella, one of the brightest stars in the night sky.

Monday, December 5, 2011
Jupiter is in good view tonight, to the lower left of the Moon at nightfall. The giant planet looks like a brilliant star. In all the night sky, only the Moon and the planet Venus outshine Jupiter.

Tuesday, December 6, 2011
There’s a beautiful conjunction in the sky tonight — a pairing of the Moon and Jupiter. The brilliant planet is to the right of the Moon at nightfall, and below the Moon as they set in the wee hours of the morning.

Wednesday, December 7, 2011
The Moon perches between two prominent objects tonight. As darkness falls, the brilliant planet Jupiter is to the upper right of the Moon, with the dipper-shaped Pleiades star cluster about the same distance to the lower left of the Moon.

December 5-11 Moon Meanderings. The Moon passes by the brilliant planet Jupiter this week, and they're on display for much of the night. It also passes the Pleiades, and it kicks off the weekend with a lunar eclipse. Join us for this and more.

December 12-18 Moon, Mars, and meteors. The Moon passes a bright orange companion this week: the planet Mars. We'll have details. And we'll also talk about a meteor shower that's being eclipsed by the Moon. Join us for these, plus an ancient celebration.

December 19-25 Holiday Skies. We'll help spread some holiday cheer this week with a look at some beautiful sights in the night sky — including a reindeer. And we'll also have the tales of two astronomy pioneers. Join us for this and more.

December 26-31 Planetary Debris. The process of building a solar system leaves behind a lot of debris — material that can turn deadly as the system ages. Join us for planetary bombardments, plus the bounty of the New Year's Eve sky.

December Program Schedule: http://stardate.org/radio/calendars
Find an Affiliate: http://stardate.org/radio/affiliates.

Original.

Curiosity launches

2011-11-30T09:52:00.003-06:00

If all goes well, we should have some fascinating science this coming August.

This artist concept features NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover, a mobile robot for investigating Mars' past or present ability to sustain microbial life. The rocket carrying Curiosity launched on November 26, 2011.

Curiosity will explore numerous scientific experiments while on Mars. But to do that, the rover will be relying on a buffet of scientific instruments, including “ChemCam,” the Chemistry and Camera instrument, a combination spectrometer/laser developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory that fires an ultra-precise, extremely high-powered invisible laser beam designed to vaporize Martian rocks and soil samples a millimeter at a time for further analysis of their composition. The resulting plasma cloud left in the wake of the vaporized matter is then recorded by the spectrometer’s telescope.

Wallow in the scientific details by clicking here.

Flip-Flop

2011-11-30T07:50:00.002-06:00

It's time

2011-11-28T21:46:00.001-06:00

Click here for more info.

Andrew Carnegie

2011-11-28T12:21:00.006-06:00

I've only been receiving the Freedom From Religion Foundation's "Freethought of the Day" daily email for a few months now but I am continually pleasantly surprised to learn who shares my disbelief in the supernatural in general and god specifically. This time, Andrew Carnegie, one of the greatest American philanthropists who has ever lived.

On November 25, 1837, tycoon turned philanthropist Andrew Carnegie was born in Dumfermline, Scotland. In 1848, he traveled with his family to Allegheny, Penn. He entered the workforce at 13 as a bobbin boy in a cotton mill, worked at Western Union and the Pennsylvania Railroad, then founded the Keystone Bridge Works and the Union Iron Works in Pittsburgh.

In his book The Gospel of Wealth (1899), he proposed that the rich are obligated to give away their fortunes. He began his philanthropy in his thirties, first endowing his native town, and eventually establishing seven philanthropic and educational corporations. His principal desire was to promote free public libraries. When he began his campaign in 1881, they were scarce in the United States. His $56 million built 2,509 libraries.

By the time of his death he had given away more than $350 million. Carnegie rejected Christianity and sectarianism, and was delighted to replace those views with evolution: "Not only had I got rid of the theology and the supernatural, but I had found the truth of evolution," he wrote in his autobiography (p. 339).

After encountering missionaries on an ocean voyage to the Pacific, Carnegie wrote humorously in his diary that he would "never forgive" the missionary for a particularly ridiculous sermon. When applied to for money by those same missionaries to China, Carnegie wrote them: "I think that money spent upon foreign missions for China is not only money misspent, but that we do a grievous wrong to the Chinese by trying to force our religion upon them against their wishes." (Carnegie to Ella J. Newton, Foochow, China, Nov. 26, 1895)

When asked to sell five acres of his land for a "free" cemetery open to all Protestants, Carnegie wrote he would be delighted to give the land away, "provided it were open to all who desired to rest there of every sect or of none. . . . We poor mortals while living our short span are far too sharply separated. Surely, we should not refuse to lie down together at last upon the bosom of mother earth." (Carnegie to Benjamin M. Gemmill, Jan. 23, 1915).

In making preparations for his death, Carnegie wrote of "deep regrets that one isn't allowed to live here in this heaven on earth forever, which it is to me. None other satisfactory." (Letter to John Ross, Feb., 11, 1913). To Elizabeth Haldane, he added, "More and more I realize we should think less & less of 'Heaven our Home!' more & more of 'Home our Heaven.' " (Letter, Nov. 21, 1913, Haldane Papers, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.) D. 1919.

“The whole scheme of Christian Salvation is diabolical as revealed by the creeds. An angry God, imagine such a creator of the universe. Angry at what he knew was coming and was himself responsible for. Then he sets himself about to beget a son, in order that the child should beg him to forgive the Sinner. This however he cannot or will not do. He must punish somebody--so the son offers himself up & our creator punishes the innocent youth, never heard of before--for the guilty and became reconciled to us. . . . . I decline to accept Salvation from such a fiend.”
— Andrew Carnegie, to Sir James Donaldson, Principal of St. Andrews University, June 1, 1905. Letters (except to Haldane) in Library of Congress collection, cited by Joseph Frazier Wall, Andrew Carnegie, 1970.

Toon time

2011-11-27T23:16:00.000-06:00

What caused ... ?

2011-11-27T22:57:00.002-06:00

... the financial crisis of 2008?

What caused the financial crisis? The Big Lie goes viral.
by Barry Ritholtz

...One group has been especially vocal about shaping a new narrative of the credit crisis and economic collapse: those whose bad judgment and failed philosophy helped cause the crisis.

Rather than admit the error of their ways — Repent! — these people are engaged in an active campaign to rewrite history. They are not, of course, exonerated in doing so. And beyond that, they damage the process of repairing what was broken. They muddy the waters when it comes to holding guilty parties responsible. They prevent measures from being put into place to prevent another crisis.

Here is the surprising takeaway: They are winning. Thanks to the endless repetition of the Big Lie.

A Big Lie is so colossal that no one would believe that someone could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. There are many examples: Claims that Earth is not warming, or that evolution is not the best thesis we have for how humans developed. Those opposed to stimulus spending have gone so far as to claim that the infrastructure of the United States is just fine, Grade A (not D, as the we discussed last month), and needs little repair.

Wall Street has its own version: Its Big Lie is that banks and investment houses are merely victims of the crash. You see, the entire boom and bust was caused by misguided government policies. It was not irresponsible lending or derivative or excess leverage or misguided compensation packages, but rather long-standing housing policies that were at fault.

(In short) Congress radically deregulated the financial sector, doing away with many of the protections that had worked for decades. Congress allowed Wall Street to self-regulate, and the Fed turned a blind eye to bank abuses.

read the rest here. Repetition is the key to learning, and deceit has become part of the fabric of this country.

This Week in God

2011-11-26T23:37:00.003-06:00

Another installment of "This Week in God" by Steve Benen at The Washington Monthly.

This Week In God

by Steve Benen

First up from the God Machine this week is a Thanksgiving-related news story, which had some conservatives pretty worked up this week.

Here, for example, was the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer warning American consumers about the scourge of Muslim turkeys:

“I want to talk a little bit about Butterball turkeys. And I want to let you know [that] every single Butterball turkey sold in the United States of America has been sacrificed to Allah.
“Every single turkey that Butterball sells has been ritually slaughtered according to Islamic practice and has had an Islamic prayer prayed over that bird while it is being slaughtered.”

Anti-Muslim blogger Pamela Geller was also outraged by the prospect of “stealth halal turkeys” on dining room tables nationwide.

“Across this great country, on Thanksgiving tables nationwide, infidel Americans are unwittingly going to be serving halal turkeys to their families this Thursday. Turkeys that are halal certified — who wants that, especially on a day on which we are giving thanks to G-d for our freedom? I wouldn’t knowingly buy a halal turkey — would you? Halal turkey, slaughtered according to the rules of Islamic law, is just the opposite of what Thanksgiving represents: freedom and inclusiveness, neither of which are allowed for under that same Islamic law.”

Geller went so far as to call for a boycott of Butterball, while Fischer wants right-wing activists to pressure the company on this.

What in the world are these folks talking about? Well, it turns out that Butterball slaughters its turkeys in a pretty standard way, but that method happens to coincide with Jewish and Muslim dietary laws regarding food preparation. It allows Butterball to appeal to Jewish consumers who want to eat kosher, observant Muslims consumers, as well as everyone else who might want to buy a turkey. The company isn’t promoting or favoring one religion; it’s just trying to sell its product to as diverse an audience as possible. It’s about capitalism, plain and simple.

Right-wing hysterics notwithstanding, there’s just nothing for sane people to get excited about here. The turkeys themselves, in all likelihood, probably aren’t religious, and there’s nothing about their slaughter that associates them with any specific faith tradition.

This is just about some bigots who’ve decided that even turkeys at Thanksgiving should be turned into a culture-war squabble.

Also from the God Machine this week:

* The latest research from the Pew Research Center suggests Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith may affect his chances in the GOP primaries, but even conservatives who hate Mormons would vote for him over President Obama.

* Officials in Denmark are eyeing changes to the country’s marriage laws, and want to allow “same-sex couples to get married in formal church weddings, instead of the short blessing ceremonies that the state Lutheran Church currently offers.” (thanks to R.P. for the tip)

* Psychology researchers at the University of British Columbia have found that atheists are “among the least liked people … in most of the world,” and believe the animosity is driven by a lack of trust. (Can't trust atheists?! Have you seen the Republican candidates for President?!)

* In Ohio, seven members of the so-called “Bergholz Clan,” a cult-like breakaway Amish group, were arrested by FBI agents this week, charged with “violating the Hate Crimes Prevention Act in connection with a string of beard-cutting incidents.”

Maybe Steve went to print too soon for this one:

Obama Thanksgiving Address: Conservatives Upset By Lack Of God Mention

Some conservatives are annoyed that President Obama did not mention God during a short Thanksgiving address he made on Thursday. (Watch below.)

ABC News reports that multiple conservative columnists wrote about what they perceived as an oversight on the president's part. Sherman Frederick at The Las Vegas Review-Journal chided, "Somebody ought to remind Obama (and his speechwriter) that when Americans sit down around a meal today and give thanks, they give thanks to God."

Fox News columnist Todd Starnes complained that the president's "remarks were void of any religious references although Thanksgiving is a holiday traditionally steeped in giving thanks and praise to God."

And the Los Angeles Times reports that right-wing corners of Twitter were abuzz over Obama's failure to get religious, with many retweeting Starnes' headline: "Obama Leaves God Out of Thanksgiving Address."

Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro didn't hold back, tweeting:

"Unreal that Obama doesn't mention God in Thanksgiving message. Militant atheist. To whom does he think we are giving thanks?"

In his speech, which clocked in at just over three minutes, Obama delivered a simple holiday message. He said that he and his family, like many Americans, would spend the day "eating great food, watching a little football, and reflecting on how truly lucky we are." He went on to thank military service members who were "eating Thanksgiving dinners far from your families" and Americans who "are taking time out of their holiday to serve in soup kitchens and shelters...this sense of mutual responsibility, the idea that I'm my brother's keeper, that I'm my sister's keeper, has always been part of what makes our country special." He also acknowledged America's tough economic climate and its persistent political gridlock, offering hope that things could improve.

Original.

Here Comes Trouble

2011-11-25T23:08:00.000-06:00

Finished another book, this one is Michael Moore's latest, "Here Comes Trouble." Another great read.

It's composed of about 20 short essays, all written by Michael about something in his past. It's fascinating that Michael was involved in so many pivotal moments of our time. I had no idea.

If you like Michael Moore, you will LOVE this book. If you don't like Michael but you are broad-minded anyway (what are the odds?), read this book and you will gain some respect for the guy. Unless you're a hopelessly creeped-out fundmentalist zombie, perhaps. If so, go back to your cave.

Tax the Crazy?

2011-11-25T11:08:00.000-06:00

Fox News=duh

2011-11-22T23:59:00.004-06:00

According to a recent study, Fox News Viewers Know Less Than People Who Don't Watch Any News.

My suspicions have been confirmed! The more you watch Fox News, the stupider you get! Turn on the TV and turn OFF your mind!!

Unfortunately, my father has been watching Fox News for years now. I hope the Fox Effect is not irreversible. There is no law in the US that says you have to tell the truth, and Murdoch and Fox take full advantage of it.

Fox News Viewers Know Less Than People Who Don't Watch Any News: Study

Fox News viewers are less informed than people who don't watch any news, according to a new poll from Fairleigh Dickinson University.

The poll surveyed New Jersey residents about the uprisings in Egypt and the Middle East, and where they get their news sources. The study, which controlled for demographic factors like education and partisanship, found that "people who watch Fox News are 18-points less likely to know that Egyptians overthrew their government" and "6-points less likely to know that Syrians have not yet overthrown their government" compared to those who watch no news.

Overall, 53% of all respondents knew that Egyptians successfully overthrew Hosni Mubarak and 48% knew that Syrians have yet to overthrow their government.

Dan Cassino, a political science professor at Fairleigh Dickinson, explained in a statement, "Because of the controls for partisanship, we know these results are not just driven by Republicans or other groups being more likely to watch Fox News. Rather, the results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at all."

This isn't the first study that has found that Fox News viewers more misinformed in comparison to others. Last year, a study from the University of Maryland found that Fox News viewers were more likely to believe false information about politics.

We are not surprised!

Via Colori

2011-11-21T00:15:00.013-06:00

This past Saturday and Sunday in Houston's Sam Houston Park (downtown), a ton of artists tempted the cloudy skies and did their thing on Bagby and Allen Parkway streets. Literally, on the streets.

There were some outstanding artists on the scene ... and many were sitting, squatting, and crouching ...

The skies were cloudy both days and constantly threatened rain, but only a few drops fell ...

It's not every day you can attend a free event in Sam Houston Park ...

She's not made of chalk, but she's still a work of art ....

These artists did it all....from portraits ...

...to fantasy ....

...to .... puppies!

to ... well, just about everything. And all of it would be gone, wiped away by people and cars within 24 hours. Temporary and transient. And art.

"VIA COLORI. HERE TWO DAYS. GONE FOREVER. Clever. But not quite "gone."