Most Important News Today...

Hong Kong residents demand the freedoms they were promised when China annexed the city...

Freedom Isn't Free...

Freedom
Words by Richie Havens

Freedom
Freedom
Freedom
Freedom
Freedom
Freedom
Freedom
Freedom

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
A long way from my home

Freedom
Freedom
Freedom
Freedom
Freedom
Freedom
Freedom
Freedom
Freedom
Freedom

Sometimes I feel like I’m almost gone
Sometimes I feel like I’m almost gone
Sometimes I feel like I’m almost gone
A long, long, long, way, way from my home

Clap your hands
Clap your hands
Clap your hands
Clap your hands
Clap your hands
Clap your hands
Clap your hands
Clap your hands
Hey… yeah

I got a telephone in my bosom
And I can call him up from my heart
I got a telephone in my bosom
And I can call him up from my heart

When I need my brother… brother
When I need my mother… mother
Hey… yeah… etc.

Latte Salute-Gate

Some professional O'Bama haters are fussing loudly that O'Bama had the unAmerican gall to salute while holding a coffee cup.

Yeah, as if nothing like that ever happeneded befoar...

Open Carry Nut Scares Everyone, Sez They're The Ones With A Problem...

Leonard Embody is an open carry advocate who on Wednesday stirred up massive fear as he demonstrated his open carry rights near a high school, pacing back and forth, reported Talking Points Memo. The anxiety caused by Embody prompted enough fear that many near Hillsboro High School called the police.

Despite learning of the numerous complaints, Embody showed no remorse for his actions and said “a school is a prime place to be able to hand out my leaflets and educate children that guns aren’t dangerous as people think they are. Certainly a man carrying a gun doesn’t mean they’re going to get shot.”

Tell that to the students at Columbine, Sandy Hook, Fayetteville, Kent St., and scores of others in America’s history. Students, faculty, and staff have every right to be afraid when someone approaches a school with a gun.

Story's here.

Fox’s Gretchen Carlson rips CO school protests: ‘What’s up with these punks?’

Fox "news" strikes again, insulting a group of students who are protesting an attack on critical thinking by a local school board. Apparently the paranoid school board is concerned that an advanced-placement history class doesn't concentrate enough upon NOT questioning authority.

Story's here.

So You Think President O'Bama Should Lay Off The Golf And Stay Home?

Yet you never complained about this?

Or this?

Well, aren't yoo special!

Is This Proof That Insurance Companies Are Overcharging Consumers?

"Just two weeks ago, Modern Healthcare noted that because health insurers are now required to spend at least 80 percent of premium revenue on actual patient care, they are looking for higher investment returns elsewhere. The magazine reported that insurers are increasingly putting money into technology ventures from which they expect to realize higher returns."

Two questions come to mind from this revelation:

1.) Are insurance companies overcharging their customers, since they have dough available to invest in areas other than providing their customers' healthcare (which is theoretically the purpose of insurance)?

2.) Are insurance companies using these higher investment returns to lower their customers' premiums?

Meanwhile, some employers are fed up with the insurance middleman in healthcare, and are negotiating directly with healthcare providers to provide healthcare for their employees and retirees.

It still seems to me that a single-payer universal healthcare plan would be the most efficient and cost effective solution for Americans' healthcare.

Read about this stuff here.

A WHO SAYS I HAVE TO BE REASONABLE Quiz. You'll Probably Guess This One Right Away...

Recently in Texas, police conducted "no knock" raids on individuals at home with their famblies. In both raids, the individuals, not knowing who the hell was breaking into their homes, fired guns, killing a police officer.

QUIZ: WHICH PICTURED INDIVIDUAL WAS LET OFF THE HOOK BY THE GRAND JURY, DUE TO "SELF DEFENSE", AND WHICH PICTURED INDIVIDUAL IS BEING CHARGED WITH CAPITAL (DEATH PENALTY) MURDER?

PERP A

PERP B

Yeah, you know the answer. FEARING FOR YOUR LIFE WHILE WHITE (which rates a nice fambly-style picture with your daughter in the local media) is not a crime vs. FEARING FOR YOUR LIFE WHILE BLACK (which rates a mug shot in the local paper) is worth the death penalty. 

God Bless America!

Read about the travesty here.

Except For The Beheading Part, ISIS/ISIL Is The Tea Party

Which group is:
Explicitly against homosexuality?
Explicitly anti-science?
Explicitly anti-evolution?
Explicitly anti-women’s rights?
Explicitly against other religions?
Explicitly for government based on their (and only their) religion?
Explicitly for the death penalty?
Explicitly for the use of or threat of violence to achieve political ends?
In love with their guns?
Anti-democracy?
Explicitly xenophobic?
Consumed by a hatred of America under President Barack Obama?

The answer is: Indisputably both.

Now, regarding that beheading thing... The only thing keeping the right wing from outright violence is the belief that they can still somehow turn back time and “take back their country” from all of “those” people. Once they realize that will never happen, do you think they’ll peacefully let history pass them by or lash out in fear and rage?

Story's here.

DON'T MESS WITH MAMA GRIZZLY BEAR PALIN AND THE DRUNK FAMBLY BRAWLERS! MIGHT GIT'CHA FIRED.

The lurid, stereotypical tale of Sarah Palin and her family entering into an alcohol-fueled melee at a snowmobile party is starting to pick up in the mainstream media, with Good Morning Americadevoting an entire segment to the story this morning. In doing so, they talked to Eric Townsend, an eyewitness who attended the party at the invitation of his boss.

But Townsend, who also gave his account to Alaskan political blogger Amanda Coyne, was fired today for talking to the media.

Entertainment Tonight producer Elizabeth Applegate tweeted that she’d spoken to Townsend this morning, who confirmed that he’d been fired specifically for talking to ABC. Weirdly enough, Political Gates reported that Thompson’s former employers, McKenna Brothers Paving, were the hosts of the party where the brawl took place.

Story's here.

FOX "news" TANTAROS HAS A BAD CASE OF O'BAMAPHOBIA

So, why aren't more people getting married? The reasons are complicated, but Tantaros has a thought:

"It's the policies that we're seeing coming out of Washington that are disincentivizing marriage. Obamacare for example. People are getting divorced because it's cheaper to stay single and live in sin."

Story's here.

Always anxious to politicize anything and everything, Andrea “punch an Obama supporter in the face” Tantaros found a way on Monday’s Outnumbered to blame the president and Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz for Ray Rice savagely beating his wife in an elevator.

Story's here.

LIST OF ALL THE COUNTRIES JOHN MCCAIN HAS WANTED TO ATTACK

McCain Rage Map

NEWS ORGANIZATIONS FINALLY REALIZE OBAMA’S WAR PLAN IS A HOT MESS

President Obama’s plan to “degrade and destroy” the Islamic State counts on pretty much everything going right in a region of the world where pretty much anything the U.S. does always goes wrong.

Our newspapers of record today finally remembered it’s their job to point stuff like that out.

The New York Times, in particular, calls bullshit this morning — albeit without breaking from the classic detached Timesian tonelessness.

Mark Mazzetti, Eric Schmitt and Mark Landler (with contributions from Matt Apuzzo and James Risen) start by pointing out the essential but often overlooked fact that “American intelligence agencies have concluded that [the Islamic State] poses no immediate threat to the United States.”

And then, with the cover of “some officials and terrorism experts,” they share a devastating analysis of all the coverage that has come before:

Some officials and terrorism experts believe that the actual danger posed by ISIS has been distorted in hours of television punditry and alarmist statements by politicians, and that there has been little substantive public debate about the unintended consequences of expanding American military action in the Middle East.

You’ve got to love these quotes:

Daniel Benjamin, who served as the State Department’s top counterterrorism adviser during Mr. Obama’s first term, said the public discussion about the ISIS threat has been a “farce,” with “members of the cabinet and top military officers all over the place describing the threat in lurid terms that are not justified.”

“It’s hard to imagine a better indication of the ability of elected officials and TV talking heads to spin the public into a panic, with claims that the nation is honeycombed with sleeper cells, that operatives are streaming across the border into Texas or that the group will soon be spraying Ebola virus on mass transit systems — all on the basis of no corroborated information,” said Mr. Benjamin, who is now a scholar at Dartmouth College.

Article is here.

ISIS Is America's Legacy in Iraq

How 13 years of the War on Terror led to the Islamic State.
Whatever your politics, you're not likely to feel great about America right now. After all, there's Ferguson (the whole world was watching!), an increasingly unpopular president, a Congress whose approval ratings make the president look like a rock star, rising poverty, weakening wages, and a growing inequality gap just to start what could be a long list. Abroad, from Libya and Ukraine to Iraq and the South China Sea, nothing has been coming up roses for the US Polls reflect a general American gloom, with 71% of the public claiming the country is "on the wrong track." We have the look of a superpower down on our luck.

What Americans have needed is a little pick-me-up to make us feel better, to make us, in fact, feel distinctly good. Certainly, what official Washington has needed in tough times is a bona fide enemy so darn evil, so brutal, so barbaric, so inhuman that, by contrast, we might know just how exceptional, how truly necessary to this planet we really are.

In the nick of time, riding to the rescue comes something new under the sun: the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), recently renamed Islamic State (IS). It's a group so extreme that even al-Qaeda rejected it, so brutal that it's brought backcrucifixion, beheading, waterboarding, and amputation, so fanatical that it's ready to persecute any religious group within range of its weapons, so grimly beyond morality that it's made the beheading of an innocent American a global propaganda phenomenon. If you've got a label that's really, really bad likegenocide or ethnic cleansing, you can probably apply it to ISIS's actions.

It has also proven so effective that its relatively modest band of warrior jihadis has routed the Syrian and Iraqi armies, as well as the Kurdish pesh merga militia, taking control of a territory larger than Great Britain in the heart of the Middle East. Today, it rules over at least four million people, controls its own functioning oil fields and refineries (and so their revenues as well as infusions of money from looted banks, kidnapping ransoms, and Gulf state patrons). Despite opposition, it still seems to be expanding and claims it has established a caliphate.

Read the rest here.

My Gun Is More Valuable Than Your Child....??????

Thursday Meme Roundup...

BECAUSE MONEY IS SPEECH AND CORPORATIONS ARE PEEPS WHO NEED TO SPEAK, MY FRIEND. Can't trust individuals to get it right, can we?

Sarah Palin and Family Allegedly Involved in Giant Drunken Brawl at Snowmobile Party

This weekend, Sarah Palin and many members of her family were reportedly involved in a big ol’, 20-person drunken brawl at a Wasilla snowmobile party, which, if you’re playing Palin bingo, means you’ve won.

Anchorage police confirmed that an incident had indeed occurred, and that the Palins were definitely there, and it was real nasty. “None of the involved parties wanted to press charges at the time of the incident and no arrests were made,” they added, but did not disclose names. “Alcohol was believed to have been a factor in the incident.”

But that’s not enough detail! We need detail! We need elaboration!

According to the grapevine Track had some altercation with a person who may or may not have once dated one of the Palin girls. That led to some pushing and shoving, which escalated somehow to the family being asked to leave the premises.

However before that could happen a certain former abstinence spokesperson unleashed a flurry of blows at some as of yet identified individual before being pulled off by by another partygoer, after which Todd apparently puffed up his chest and made some threatening remarks. (The “C’ word may have been uttered at one point.)

In the end the cops were called, order was restored, and the Mama Grizzly made sure the whole thing got swept under the rug.

Other accounts have Bristol punching a bunch of dudes, Todd nursing a bloody nose, and the following exchange recounted by Amanda Coyne:

It’s something to hear when Sarah screams, “Don’t you know who I am!” And it was particularly wonderful when someone in the crowd screamed back, “This isn’t some damned Hillbilly reality show!”

'Nother report:

“There’s some sort of unofficial birthday/Iron Dog-type/snowmachine party in Anchorage. A nice, mellow party, until the Palins show up,” Coyne wrote. “There’s beer, of course, and maybe other things. Which is all fine, but just about the time when some people might have had one too many, a Track Palin stumbles out of a stretch Hummer, and immediately spots an ex-boyfriend of Willow’s. Track isn’t happy with this guy, the story goes. There’s words, and more.”

“The owner of the house gets involved, and he probably wished he hadn’t,” Coyne continued. “At this point, he’s up against nearly the whole Palin tribe: Palin women screaming. Palin men thumping their chests. Word is that Bristol has a particularly strong right hook, which she employed repeatedly..."

Moar here.
And here.

Republicans Launch Game-changing War on Black Voters in the South

Georgia GOP rewrites laws to hedge against growing minority strength.

Poor, deluded fool...

Well, mebby for Our Betters™...

Mitt Romney: I Would Have Done A Better Job Than Obama

Read the hilarity here.

WTF IS WRONG WITH US, INDEED...

WTF?

Peeps Have Short Memories. I'ma Gonna Remind You Of Something You've Probably Forgotten

It’s an economic success story that can’t be emphasized enough, yet too many people seem to forget where we were just a little more than six years ago. The world economy was in danger of almost entirely imploding. When the president was inaugurated, our economy alone was losing 800,000 jobs per month. No one was spending. No one could find a job. Everyone was in debt. Housing values crashed. Every metric for a dying economy was in a nose dive. So, out of the gate, the Obama administration proposed a massive recovery plan that including a major infusion of government spending to inject cash into the economy, while also including what would amount to be — dollar for dollar — the largest middle class tax cut in American history.

(Oh, and by the way, despite the stimulus spending, the deficit has dropped from $1.4 trillion to $500 billion since 2009. Fact. Furthermore, I can name two post-WWII presidents who’ve cut the deficit through the duration of their presidencies: Clinton and Obama. What about the various Republican presidents? Bush 43? He turned a $200 billion surplus into a $400 billion deficit by the end of his first term, and a $1.2 trillion deficit by the end of his second term. Bush 41? No. Reagan? No. Ford? No. Nixon? No. The last Republican president who cut the deficit was Eisenhower.)
Moar

Who's Not Surprised?

Eric Cantor Now Wall Street Banker with $2 Million Salary

STUPID CONTROVERSIES DEPARTMENT

Bryan Fischer was very disappointed in President Obama choice of attire during yesterday's press conference, saying that his suit demonstrated that Obama simply "does not take the responsibilities of the office of the presidency seriously."

"This is not presidential dress. It's not professional," Fischer declared

- See more at: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/fischer-obamas-tan-suit-not-presidential-dress#sthash.civit2Ug.dpu