Monday, May 31, 2010

TO NUKE OR NOT TO NUKE

The travesty in the Gulf of Mexico is on everyone's mind today. With the wetlands and marshes being ravaged, the wildlife dying, a whole way of life coming to an end, and an entire ecosystem in peril it appears that no one has a solution.

The political posturing and the ineptitude of British Petroleum is creating an atmosphere of anger and anguish as we watch what can only be characterized as one of the biggest disasters in American history.

With terms like "Top Kill" and "Junk Shot" being bandied about, we are now faced with what some are suggesting as another possibility - "Nuke it." Please take a moment to consider the following from Crooks & Liars:
Simmons said the US government should immediately take the effort to plug the leak out of the hands of BP and put the military in charge.



"Probably the only thing we can do is create a weapons system and send it down 18,000 feet and detonate it, hopefully encasing the oil," he said.


His idea echoes that of a Russian newspaper that earlier this month suggested the US detonate a small nuclear bomb to seal the oil beneath the sea. Komsomoloskaya Pravda argued in an editorial that Russia had successfully used nuclear weapons to seal oil spills on five occasions in the past.


No, see..."probably" isn't going to cut it for me.

STORY AND VIDEO CONTINUED HERE

OVERSTEPPING OR LEGITIMATE?

In this video, a school bus driver lectured a student about gay rights. Her dad said she "overstepped her bounds." The school district said she acted in accordance with school policy and did nothing wrong.  A debate is ensuing - what do you think?

Sunday, May 23, 2010

FATHER & SON TEAM GONE AMOK...

FULL STORY AND MORE HERE

In the final moments of their lives, West Memphis Police Department veterans Brandon Paudert and Bill Evans encountered Thursday an old white Plymouth Voyager minivan carrying 16-year-old Joe Kane and his 45-year-old father, Jerry R. Kane -- a man who unbeknownst to them harbored extreme anti-government views. He also had a record of previous trouble with police and a philosophy, which he credited to the Bible, of applying overwhelming violence to "conquer" foes.


Increasingly surreal revelations Friday about the Kanes gradually led to a late-evening confirmation by Arkansas State Police that Jerry Kane of Chester, Ohio, and Joe, of unknown residence, were indeed the dead suspects they believe killed Evans and Paudert -- the son of the town's chief of police.

The Kanes later wounded Crittenden County Sheriff Dick Busby and Deputy Chief W.A. Wren in the conclusive shootout at Walmart in which father and son were killed.

Jerry Kane traveled the country with his son giving seminars on what he called "mortgage fraud" and offering advice on foreclosure strategies. A website promoting those seminars provided a trove of information -- audio files and YouTube videos and links to various documents -- detailing his world views.

One particularly chilling YouTube clip involves Kane fielding a question about a "rogue" Internal Revenue Service agent: "Violence doesn't solve anything, OK. It's not violence that we're after. The Bible even tells us that if you're going to go and make war against somebody, you have to kill their sheep and their goats and their chickens and their babies and their wives. OK?"

In the YouTube video he said, "You have to kill them all. So what we're after here is not fighting, it's conquering. I don't want to have to kill anybody, but if they keep messing with me, that's what it's going to have to come out. That's what it's going to come down to, is I'm going to have to kill. And if I have to kill one, then I'm not going to be able to stop, I just know it." CONTINUED...

Friday, May 21, 2010

LIKE FATHER - LIKE SON

Well, I just thought I was through with the whole Ron Paul saga after the last election. After writing page after page about his racist past and his white supremacist ties, I thought I could put it all to rest - at least for awhile. Then comes Rand Paul, the second coming of Ron, intensified.

Rand Paul won the Republican nomination in the Tuesday night Kentucky primary and it seems that he thinks he can join Daddy Bear, better known on the Hill as "The Little Turd," in the Senate. Think again you cretin. There's enough dirt out there to build a mountain for you to climb and at the rate you are digging yourself into a hole, you don't stand a chance. Lets start with Chris Hightower:

PART OF THE STORY HERE:

Controversy is swirling over Rand Paul's doctrinaire libertarian take on the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. But this is not the first time the Kentucky Republican's campaign has hit a bump in racially sensitive territory.



In December, Chris Hightower, the spokesman for Paul's senate campaign, was forced to resign after a liberal Kentucky blog discovered that his MySpace page had a comment posted around Martin Luther King Day that read: "HAPPY N***ER DAY!!!" above what appears to be a historical photo of the lynching of a black man.


The photo and comment appeared to have been posted to Hightower's MySpace page by a friend, not by Hightower himself. The comment has since been removed but at the time it was discovered by the local blog it had been up for nearly two years.


According to the Barefoot and Progressive blog, Hightower, who was also the frontman of a local Megadeth-style metal band called Commander, wrote a MySpace post referring to "Afro-Americans" titled "Blacks don't like my Napalm Death hoodie":


So, I was in Rivergate Mall today in line to get some pizza and I noticed a group of Afro-Americans were looking at me with hate and whispering stuff. I was wondering WTF and procceeded to sit facing them and give them the "what the fuck are you looking at look". Anyway after a few snarls they quit looking at me. I was like do these fuckers think I am someone else or what? Anyway I finished my food and went to find some new shoes. About 10 minutes later, another group of Afro-Americans are giving me the same looks, it then dawns on me, there has to be something on this hoodie that is pissing off the Afro-Americans. And sure enough when I get outside the mall I look and bingo. KKK .... LOL!"In a statement at the time of Hightower's resignation in December, the Paul campaign said:


"The images were not placed there by this employee but by someone posting on the site. These images in no way represent Dr. Paul or his campaign nor do they represent the beliefs of this staff member. These images are reprehensible and have no place in civil discourse."


And Paul himself said:


"I have never heard a single utterance of racism from this staffer nor do I believe him to have any racist tendencies. However, it is impossible to present the ideas and reforms we need in this country with this controversy present. Therefore I have accepted his resignation."
MORE OF THE STORY ALONG WITH GOOD SCREEN SHOTS HERE

And if that isn't enough to toast your ass, there's this:


"Rand Paul was nice enough to throw a party for his supporters on Saturday at the Capitol building in Frankfort. And not just any supporters. My favorite kind: obese white men playing soldier dress up."

CONTINUED HERE

Looks like he follows his daddy's footsteps pretty well. For more on his nefarious attachments...

Here

Here

Here

Here

And try a few of these on for size...

Here

And how about Rand's Op Ed article against the Fair Housing Act?

There's more...lot's more. But, for now, suffice it to say that all of the stops will be pulled out in the Kentucky election come November and Rand Paul along with his army of Paulites will be defeated.







Thursday, May 20, 2010

OIL AS THICK AS CHOCOLATE SYRUP

For the past month, a horrendous disaster has been taking place in the Gulf of Mexico. The effects on our environment and ecological system will be with us for decades.

It seems that no one knows what to do and those to blame must be held accountable.

FOR FULL STORY AND VIDEO

May 20, 2010 – Yesterday, new pictures of the environmental impact from the flood of oil still pouring into the Gulf of Mexico were published, as some researchers continued to dispute BP's estimate of the amount of oil flowing from their ruptured well.




See video and slideshow HERE.



In the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon explosion and fire on April 20, 2010 that killed eleven workers and oil continues to spew into the Gulf of Mexico, only slightly abated by the insertion of a tube to siphon off oil from the broken well.



According to the Associated Press, "Steve Wereley, a mechanical engineer at Purdue University in Indiana, is sticking with his estimate that 3.9 million gallons a day is spewing from two leaks."I don't see any scenario where (BP's) numbers would be accurate," he said at a congressional hearing Wednesday. His estimate of the amount leaked to date, which he calls conservative and says has a margin of error of plus or minus 20 percent, is 126 million gallons -- or more than 11 times the total leaked from the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989. The official estimate is closer to 6 million gallons."



AP also reported, "Another researcher, Timothy Crone of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said the latest video suggested a leak of at least 840,000 to 4.2 million gallons a day, though poor video quality made it difficult to come up with an accurate figure."



See the CNN video below as David Mattingly goes along with Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal into the state's wetlands and describes the oil he sees, "Oil as thick as chocolate syrup."



Pictures in the slide show that give a graphic look at the worsening conditions in the Louisiana wetlands, come from that trip and Greenpeace sample collection work. Photos of the rescue of a baby Kemp's ridley sea turtle are provided by the Audubon Aquarium.

Thursday, May 06, 2010

THEY FOUGHT THE LAW AND THE LAW WON...

Right-Wing Extremists Take On Local Law Enforcement, Lose



Right-wing extremists who question the legitimacy of Barack Obama's presidency tried to take on local law enforcement recently -- and they seem to have come out on the losing end.



First, a Tennessee man was arrested after walking into his local county courthouse to try to effect a citizen's arrest of a grand jury foreman who had refused to investigate President Obama's legitimacy to serve -- an encounter partially caught on video. That enraged one Georgia-based member of the far-right OathKeepers group. Responding to a call from an extremist leader, he drove to Tennessee with an AK-47 in a bid to get his comrade released -- only to wind up getting arrested himself.


The bizarre sequence of events began on April 1, when Walter Fitzpatrick walked into the Monroe county courthouse in Madisonville, Tenn., and approached Grand Jury foreman Gary Pettway. "I'm charging you with official misconduct," Fitzpatrick calmly told Pettway. "I'm placing you under arrest. You must now come with me."


Why was Pettway targeted? Fitzpatrick, a retired Navy commander, is a leading member of the American Grand Jury (AGJ), a group of self-declared constitutional experts that seeks to convene a grand jury of citizens to indict President Obama for treason, on the grounds that he's not a natural-born U.S. citizen. Fitzpatrick had previously tried unsuccessfully to get Pettway, an African-American, to convene a grand jury to investigate charges of voter fraud in connection with President Obama's election, according to an online account written by Carl Swensson, another AGJ leader. In response, AGJ accused Pettway of violating state laws governing the length of time that a grand jury foreman can serve -- giving Fitzpatrick the basis for his attempted citizen's arrest.


Predictably, Pettway did not agree to be arrested by Fitzpatrick, and it was Fitzpatrick himself who was arrested and jailed for several days.


The episode triggered outrage among Fitzpatrick's allies. Swensson posted a video of the incident on his website, in which he told viewers that Fitzpatrick was now on a hunger strike, and that he had "put his life on the line for us in very much the same fashion that our founding fathers did."

STORY AND VIDEOS CONTINUED HERE

Tuesday, May 04, 2010

AN AMERICAN NIGHTMARE - FROM RUDE PUNDIT

TO RUDE PUNDIT'S BLOG

The Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Will Wreck Your Pathetic Ideology:


Tell you what, motherfuckers, when dead people are left to rot in the sun because of the incompetence of the federal government, when corpses are floating in the streets, when the President passively ignores the pleas of the governors of Gulf Coast states, when entire neighborhoods have been physically destroyed, when the federal government strands tens of thousands of people without food or water, when the federal government starts to blame the local governments, when the President praises the work of a failed, incompetent bureaucrat while a major city rots, then you can say that this is Barack Obama's "Katrina."

But until this happens, good, sweet conservative bags of fuck who need so desperately to drag this president down, the Gulf of Mexico oil leak is a corporate-created disaster, and it actually serves to demonstrate, starkly, and with a semen-like sheen, as if the ocean floor is in the midst of a prolonged sweet crude ejaculation, the utter failure of deregulation and the bullshit notion that capitalistic enterprises can police themselves when it comes to safety and environmental standards, whether it was, in this case, BP or Transocean or whoever. In other words, once again, as with so many things, this is about your ideology belly-flopping, much like, you know, when Katrina showed how years of neglect of the levees would lead to a nightmare.

So now Bobby Jindal, formerly of the "states can solve problems" crowd, is coming to the federal government with his hands out like a New Delhi beggar with leprosy. Hell, Haley Barbour already knows the routine. Bob Riley's about to discover that money from the fed ain't so bad now. Bow and scrape, assholes, as an environmental catastrophe that's coming your way is gonna destroy jobs, tourism, and wetlands.

Right now, as the Rude Pundit writes this, the booms that were set up to protect the beaches in Alabama and Mississippi are failing. They're being blown onto shore by the winds, by the waves. Dead things are washing up, too. The fishing's been halted. Pretty soon, the white, white sands, the Aryan beaches of the Redneck Riviera are going to get dingier and dingier looking, even more than when swarms of UA kids head there to vomit in the sun on spring break.

Yes, some day soon, a man with his Gulf Shores timeshare, probably a proud and loyal teabagger, will look out over his balcony during the two weeks a year he takes his family on vacation and see the bits of black that are rolling up onto the shore. And he'll wonder, even if they do everything they can, why the feds couldn't clean it up sooner. Then he'll go inside and watch Hannity or listen to Limbaugh tell him that his taxes are too high and that business, not Washington, can solve all his problems.

Notes Regarding the Feasibility of a Minor Revolution, Part 2: Embrace the Leap:

Ask any man you know who recently decided to finally come out of the closet. There's such agony in denying what you know is true, that your marriage is a sham, that your desire for a male asscozy for your cock is making you ache with desire, but you can't, alas, you just can't betray the life you've lived for so very long. Sometimes, you have to know when to leap, when to go beyond the psychological roadblocks that hinder you time and again, and you just gotta be able to seize the moment and take that leap and discover the wonders that lie over the chasm. Maybe your wife leaves you. Maybe your best friend reveals he's gay. And then you can't look over the edge. You just have to see the welcoming arms of some hung Tom of Finland pantsless biker dude awaiting you on the other side.


President Barack Obama has been handed a golden opportunity in the convergence of catastrophes that have happened on his watch. Goldman Sachs, Massey Energy, and BP have all demonstrated that the deregulation chickens have come home to roost and to shit in our nests. And here's the kick in the taint: chances are that they were all acting within the law. Even the most flagrant of the trio, Massey, used the appeals process set up on safety violations to delay and delay taking the necessary measures and paying the goddamn fines so that lives might have been saved. It was all legal, man. Let's not even get into the clusterfuck of loopholes and rules and sub-rules and what-the-fuck-ever allowed Goldman Sachs to make money by dicking over its investors and laundering the cash through a third party.

And BP? Those fuckers (and the oil rig operator, Transocean) benefited like corrupt cops at a whorehouse in the way they abused the ludicrous, worthless self-regulation system. Does the phrase "police themselves" actually have any meaning? Because, see, if the Rude Pundit were to police himself, he'd say, "Well, gee, RP, as long as you only have just a little pot, coke, and ecstasy on hand and the goat you sacrificed for the blood orgy didn't suffer much, we can overlook it all. Don't kill any people, and we're good."

Now we're learning that, because of the criminal-favoring damages-cap on lawsuits, BP may only be on the hook for $75 million in economic losses for the entire Gulf region. That's like the budget for CEO Tony Hayward's ball-waxing. Oh, no, an entire fishing industry, tourism, and marshes will be destroyed, but at least Hayward will have to live with a hairy scrotum.

Last week, the Rude Pundit posited that Americans need to have someone to hate. You can say, "Scapegoat," but that seems way too mild for the frighteningly visceral extremes in which our populace indulges its feelings towards politicians, immigrants, and So You Think You Can Dance? contestants. So we on the left need to re-direct that potent energy of the masses towards the most obvious target: corporate entities that operate without care about people, the environment, or the nation. Seems easy? No, fuck you. It's not.

Don't put on your Mao jacket yet, for there's a catch. There's always a catch, no? It has to be done in a way that can't be labeled as "socialist" or whatever word people wanna misuse these days. The method is simple, and you have to suck it up, comrades: there has to be a case for good capitalism versus bad capitalism.

What is that, you ask? And how does this involve the President? That, of course, shall be discussed in Part 3.