Another nutbag

Seriously, WHERE do the Republicans keep coming up with these nutbags? I am beginning to think that damn near ALL of them are insane as hell.  It's a pretty simple case of Teabaggers coming home to roost.  The Frankenstein monster has been unleashed! 

It's no wonder they lie like dogs, because if the truth were to really reach the grassroots, they'd never make it to public office. The fact that some get close: Rand Paul, Sharron Angle (insert your own crazy here), speaks very poorly of the electorate.


This latest freak, Tim D'Annunzio, is in a runoff to be the Republican nominee for a North Carolina U.S. House seat against Harold Johnson on June 22. I hope Tim wins and gets wide airplay. That SHOULD guarantee his defeat in November against Democrat Larry Kissell.

We've always had crazies in the U.S.  Probably always will.  But come on, now!  Turn off FOX News!

North Carolina Republicans are circulating court documents that suggest a far-right Tea-Party-backed congressional candidate claimed to be the Messiah, tried to raise his stepfather from the dead, believed God would drop a 1,000-mile high pyramid as the New Jerusalem on Greenland, and found the Ark of the Covenant in Arizona.


Tim D’Annunzio also has written that he wants to abolish several key government departments, including the IRS. But there’s more going on here than just another wacky conservative politician. The effort by GOP leaders to stop D’Annunzio at all costs offers an intriguing test case of their ability to keep control of the party in the face of challenges from the Tea Party wing. Or as D’Annunzio himself has put it: "The power brokers in Raleigh and in Washington are willing to go to any length and use any unscrupulous tactic to try to destroy somebody. They think that they’re losing their control over the Republican party."


D’Annunzio is seeking the GOP nomination to take on Rep. Larry Kissell (D-NC) this fall. He was the leader in a primary earlier this month, but didn’t win enough of the vote to avoid a runoff in June. The state and national party is backing his opponent, former T.V. sportscaster Harold Johnson. And how.


"I consider Mr. D’Annunzio unfit for public office at any level," Tom Fetzer, the North Carolina GOP chair, told reporters recently. "What he could do to the party as our nominee is secondary in my view to what he could do to the country if he got elected." And a spokesman for the NRCC said: "The issue is, do we give Democrats a candidate that they can absolutely tear apart in the general election? I don’t think most Republicans want to see that happen."


To undermine D’Annunzio, the state GOP has been circulating records from his 1995 divorce and from a 1998 child support judgment. In the latter, as the Charlotte Observer reported Sunday, the judge called D’Annunzio "a self-described religious zealot," and wrote that D’Annunzio had "described the government as the ‘Antichrist’."


In the divorce case, Anne D’Annunzio said her husband had told her that "God was going to drop a 1,000-mile high pyramid" on Greenland, and also that he had found the Ark of the Covenant in Arizona, among other unusual beliefs.


In addition, a doctor wrote in the custody proceedings that D’Annunzio told him he had once received treatment for heroin dependence, and was jailed three times for offenses that included burglary and assaulting a police officer.


D’Annunzio says his personal problems are in all in the past. But the Born Again candidate still has some pretty extreme political ideas. On a blog he writes, entitled "Christ’s War," D’Annunzio declared [Teabagger delinked] earlier this year that he wanted to "abolish the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, Agriculture, Energy, Labor, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Transportation, Treasury, and Home Land Security," and the IRS, as well as "any appellate court that has shown an anti Constitutional activism." He also advocated giving control of Social Security and Medicare to the states… [emphasis added]

The original above is here.  

Some Republicans appear to have functioning brains, as they are trying to keep D'Annunzio from office.  Click here.

Lost Generation

17,000 pages

I heard a story on the news this morning that one company filing a claim to BP from the oil gusher in the gulf was given a claims form that contained 17,000 pages.  17,000 pages.

Hopefully, that is the anomaly.  I can't find that online, and it's not in the story below.

With all that money sloshing around, I wonder how many scam artists are converging on the area?  How many fake claims will be filed?  How much money will be siphoned off to the hucksters?  Wherever and whenever there is a lot of money, the con artists are not far behind.

Red tape vexes Gulf residents seeking BP payments

GRAND ISLE, La. – The reefs that David Walter makes for anglers to drop into the Gulf of Mexico are fake, but his frustration as he tries to win compensation from BP for lost income is real. 

State regulators stopped issuing permits for the reefs on May 4 because of the oil spill, effectively killing off $350,000 in Walter's expected business. It sent him into a labyrinth of archived invoices and documents lost by BP. Finally, an offer came: $5,000.

"I said that's not fair because if you say that, then I have to go out of business and I lose everything," said Walter, whose company is based in Alabama. 

Fishermen, property owners and businesspeople who have filed damage claims with BP are angrily complaining of delays, excessive paperwork and skimpy payments that have put them on the verge of going under as the financial and environmental toll of the seven-week-old disaster grows. 

the rest of the story is here.

Pitt - Helen Thomas

Now that Helen is gone, who is going to give the administration a hard time?  Hello?  Oh, all gone.

I Come to Praise 
Helen Thomas, Not 
to Bury Her
Wednesday 09 June 2010

by: William Rivers Pitt, truthout|Op-Ed

I am not going to try and defend the comments 
Helen Thomas made about getting the Jews out 
of Palestine and sending them to Germany and 
Poland; that was an unbelievably stupid thing 
to say, not just to a rabbi, but to anyone. 
Thomas is a Lebanese-American with very 
strong views on Israel, views to which she 
has every right, but in saying what she said, 
she abrogated two responsibilities: first, to 
treat others as she would want to be treated, 
and second, to avoid undercutting the 
legitimacy of her own views with incendiary, 
insulting and inappropriate vitriol. Thomas 
blew it on both fronts, and her words 
became torpedoes that struck the ship 
of her career at the waterline.

Perhaps, it is entirely just and appropriate 
that her comments have finished her as a
 journalist, but that is an argument for 
other people to make. In this space, I 
come to praise Helen Thomas, not to 
bury her. There are plenty of voices in 
the so-called "mainstream" media who 
gleefully shouted her down after her 
ill-advised tirade, a lot of whom are now
 very happy to see her gone. You see, 
Helen Thomas was and remains a mirror
 held up to the rest of the press, forcing 
them to see their own glaring flaws and 
faults, forcing them to see just how much 
blood is on their hands.

I refuse, I absolutely refuse, to let this one 
incident become the thing everyone 
remembers about Helen Thomas. That 
would be a sin equally as great as the one 
she committed with her words, and it would 
give cover to the mainstream press cretins 
who always wished she would go away, 
because she exposed them for what they 
really are.

Frauds. Mouthpieces. Dupes. Willing 
participants. Colluders. Conspirators. 
Traitors. That's what much of the press 
has become over the last ten years, but 
not Thomas. Never Thomas. Much of 
the outrage directed at Thomas today 
isn't based on her comments about Israel, 
but are, instead, a barbaric yawp from a 
pack of liars who are thrilled to see her 
gone, as it means they no longer have to 
look at themselves in that mirror she held 
up with her life, her career and her 
uncompromising way of speaking actual 
truth to power.

It was articles like this by Thomas that 
made her colleagues in the media squirm 
and blush, and well they should, because 
in this, she was exactly correct:

Of all the unhappy trends I have witnessed - conservative swings on television networks, dwindling newspaper circulation, the jailing  of reporters and "spin" - nothing is more troubling to me than the obsequious press during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. They lapped up everything the Pentagon and White House could dish out - no questions asked.

The naive complicity of the press and the government was never more pronounced than in the prelude to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The media became an echo chamber for White House pronouncements. One example: At President Bush's March 6, 2003, news conference, in which he made it eminently clear that the United States was going to war, one reporter pleased the "born again" Bush when she asked him if he prayed about going to war. And so it went.

After all, two of the nation's most prestigious newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post, had kept up a drumbeat for war with Iraq to bring down dictator Saddam Hussein. They accepted almost unquestioningly the bogus evidence of weapons of mass destruction, the dubious White House rationale that proved to be so costly on a human scale, not to mention a drain on the Treasury. The Post was much more hawkish than the Times - running many editorials pumping up the need to wage war against the Iraqi dictator - but both newspapers played into the hands of the Administration.

Like Helen Thomas, I was one of the 
reporters out there who strenuously pushed 
back against the war rhetoric from the Bush 
White House, rhetoric which was inevitably 
parroted and amplified by the mainstream 
media. Unlike Helen Thomas, I made very 
little headway in altering the narrative. 
Thomas, from her front-row seat in the 
press room, was a very public thorn in the 
side of every Bush press secretary who tried
 to sell the public a bill of rotten goods.

Had the press and the Bush administration
 paid heed to Helen Thomas, there would 
not be 5,000 new graves at Arlington 
National Cemetery. There would not be 
40,000 plus wounded American soldiers. 
There would not be thousands and 
thousands more suffering from 
post-traumatic stress disorder and other 
ailments, who are unable to get proper 
treatment from an over-stressed Veterans
 Affairs' system. There would not have 
been soldiers left to rot in Walter Reed. 
There would not be more than a million 
dead and maimed Iraqis. The Sunnis 
would not have been massacred, and 
Iran would not now be in full control of 
Iraq. There would not have been hundreds
 of billions of our tax dollars poured into 
the sand and into the coffers of Bush-
friendly "defense" contractors; they call 
our current economic situation the "Great 
Recession," but by rights, it should be 
called the "Iraq Recession," and it would
 not be as bad as it is had we listened to
 Helen Thomas.

Perhaps, these things were inevitable. Bush 
and his crew wanted a war, and if the entire
 press corps had been made up of Helen 
Thomas clones, it is entirely possible we 
would have wound up mired in that filthy 
conflict anyway. But Thomas tried when 
her colleagues did not. Thomas asked 
sharp questions when her colleagues 
refused. Thomas wrote the truth when 
her colleagues reprinted Bush 
administration talking points to protect
 their seats in the press room. Helen 
Thomas was right, did right, just as she
 has done with every administration since 
John F. Kennedy.

One stupid comment cannot wash away 
60 years of credibility and honor. One 
stupid comment cannot wash away the 
fight she waged against the Bush 
administration's criminal campaign in Iraq.
 One stupid comment cannot wash away 
the fact that, by her very existence, Helen
 Thomas exposed the mainstream media 
for what they are, and no matter how 
vigorously they jump on her today, they 
all know the blood remains on their hands.

I am sorry she said what she did. It was very
 stupid, and perhaps even justifies the 
termination of her six-decade career. That,
 as I said, is for others to decide. I stand 
today to remind any and all that one bad 
act does not erase a lifetime of excellence.
 She is gone, and perhaps rightly so, but
 we were a better country while she labored
 for us, when she asked the tough questions, 
when she stood before the powerful and 
called them liars to their faces.

Thank you, Helen Thomas. For everything.

This work by Truthout is licensed under a 
Creative Commons Attribution-
Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

Find the original here.

And read what Robert
Parry had to say here.

Luna's progress

Yes, we still have a cat. Kitten, actually, although "Luna" is growing fast. Today was three weeks since the wife brought her home.

As with most cats, Luna likes to sleep a lot.

She is harder to photograph since she's solid black.Do people still snatch black cats and do evil things to them? Ignorance dies hard.

but it was only a catnap...

This is one of the only times I have used a flash, and it didn't faze her at all.  She seems to like to pose.

Here's Luna in the dark.