Reagan Redux

And I guess cheese is now a fruit:

Congress wants to keep pizza and french fries on school lunch lines, fighting back against an Obama administration proposal to make school lunches healthier.

The final version of a spending bill released late Monday would unravel school lunch standards the Agriculture Department proposed earlier this year, which included limiting the use of potatoes on the lunch line and delaying limits on sodium and delaying a requirement to boost whole grains.

The bill also would allow tomato paste on pizzas to be counted as a vegetable, as it is now. USDA had wanted to prevent that.

Food companies that produce frozen pizzas for schools, the salt industry and potato growers requested the changes, and some conservatives in Congress say the federal government shouldn't be telling children what to eat.

Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee said the changes would "prevent overly burdensome and costly regulations and to provide greater flexibility for local school districts to improve the nutritional quality of meals."

Because when your ideology decides that REAL Americans load up with junk food, "nutritional quality" is relative. As for the future health care costs? Who cares? No one will be insured anyway. As far as the Republicans are concerned, if low-income kids drop dead at 25 from hardening of the arteries, it's all part of God's plan.

If an Iraq war veteran can be shot in the head by police with a tear gas canister, what do you think can happen to YOU?

There's only one group being violent here, and it isn't the Occupy protesters in Oakland, California.

It's sad that Occupy protesters have been pointing out that police whose union is under siege by Tea Party governors are serving their corporate masters instead of acting in solidarity with those who are out there in the streets calling attention to the plight of police officers and fire fighters and teachers, as much as they are calling attention to the massive tossing in the garbage of the American middle class.

What does it say when a young man inspired to serve his country survives two tours of enemy fire and then comes home to be gravely injured by law enforcement in his own country?

Teabaggers are always talking about how they revere the Constitution. They talk all the time about the Second Amendment. But in their loathing for the Occupy movement, they forget the first one:

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Scott Olsen thought he was going to Iraq to defend the U.S. and its Constitution. How wrong he was.

Olsen's roommate spoke with Keith Olbermann last night:

Everything that's wrong with the shareholder model of corporate money in one article

The latest about Apple stock:

Apple today reported revenue of $28.27B for the fourth quarter and $6.62B in net profit ($7.05 per diluted share). These numbers compare quite favorably to $20.34B and $4.31B ($4.64 per diluted share) for the same quarter last year.

Gross margins for Apple during Q4 were 40.3 percent.

During the quarter, Apple sold 17.07 million iPhones (21 percent growth year-over-year), 11.12 million iPads (166 percent growth), 4.89 million Mac computers (26 percent growth), and 6.62 million iPods (27 percent decline)

[snip]

Despite the good news coming out Cupertino today, investors weren't too terribly impressed. Analysts were expecting revenue of $29.69B and earnings per share of $7.39. They also expected quarterly iPhones sales to be in the 18 million to 20 million range.

Apple shares are down over $26 in after hours trading.

Wall Street analysts are like the Critical Parent of the Transactional Analysis model developed by Eric Berne in the 1950's: No matter how well you perform, they always want to know why you didn't do better.

Saudi Arabia, NY 11215

First we have a police officer spraying pepper spray at female protesters. Now it seems that in Brooklyn, they're stopping women in the street and telling them to cover up:

In response to a string of at least 10 unsolved sexual assaults in Brooklyn, New York police are reportedly stopping women on the street who are wearing clothing they say is revealing and advising them to cover up if they don’t want to be raped. The Wall Street Journal reports on the disturbing message police officers are allegedly spreading:

Lauren, a South Slope resident, was walking home three blocks from the gym on Monday when she was stopped. The 25-year-old, who did not want her last name to be used, was wearing shorts and a T-shirt when she claims a police officer asked if she would stop and talk to him. He also stopped two other women wearing dresses. [...]

“He pointed at my outfit and said, ‘Don’t you think your shorts are a little short?‘” she recalled. “He pointed at their dresses and said they were showing a lot of skin.”

He said that such clothing could make the suspect think he had “easy access,” said Lauren. She said the officer explained that “you’re exactly the kind of girl this guy is targeting.”

Aside from the sense I have that this is more about the police officers' view of women than it is about keeping them safe, it also shows a profound ignorance of what rape is. It's an act of aggression that takes the form of a sexual attack. It is not an act of uncontrollable lust. If it were, we wouldn't hear about 80-year-old women getting raped in their apartments.

How can any woman who is assaulted in South Slope have any hope of being treated in good faith by the police, when the law acts like mullahs on the streets of Saudi Arabia?

The forgotten American victims of the Bush wars

And so they are starting to trickle home, these men and women, many of whom enlisted in the military after the 9/11 attacks with the purest of motives -- what they believed to be a fight to both avenge the attacks and to dismantle the groups that made such an attack possible. Those missing legs, arms, and eyes come home as soon as they are well enough to travel after injury. But sometimes there are invisible injuries that are just as serious, and they are coming home to a country whose government offers little to help them, and nothing to help the forgotten new victims of these wars -- the people who love them and now care for them, who, in this Ron Paul paradise in which our veterans live, they have to rely on private organizations (NYT link):

Since Mr. Marcum came back in 2008 from two tours in Iraq with a traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, his wife has quit her job as a teacher to care for him. She has watched their life savings drain away. And she has had to adjust to an entirely new relationship with her husband, who faces a range of debilitating problems including short-term memory loss and difficulties with impulse control and anger.

“The biggest loss is the loss of the man I married,” Ms. Marcum said, describing her husband now as disconnected on the best days, violent on the worst ones. “His body’s here, but his mind is not here anymore. I see glimpses of him, but he’s not who he was.”

Ms. Marcum has joined a growing community of spouses, parents and partners who, confronted with damaged loved ones returning from war who can no longer do for themselves, drop most everything in their own lives to care for them. Jobs, hobbies, friends, even parental obligations to young children fall by the wayside. Families go through savings and older parents dip into retirement funds.

Even as they grieve over a family member’s injuries, they struggle to adjust to new routines and reconfigured relationships.

The new lives take a searing toll. Many of the caregivers report feeling anxious, depressed or exhausted. They gain weight and experience health problems. On their now-frequent trips to the pharmacy, they increasingly have to pick up prescriptions for themselves as well.

While taking comfort that their loved ones came home at all, they question whether they can endure the potential strain of years, or even decades, of care.

“I’ve packed my bags, I’ve called my parents and said I’m coming home,” said Andrea Sawyer, whose husband has been suicidal since returning from Iraq with post-traumatic stress disorder. “But I don’t. I haven’t ever physically walked out of the house.”

Those attending to the most severely wounded must help their spouses or adult children with the most basic daily functions. Others, like Ms. Marcum, act as safety monitors, keeping loved ones from putting themselves in danger. They drive them to endless medical appointments and administer complicated medication regimens.

One of the most frustrating aspects of life now, they say, is the bureaucracy they face at the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs, from problems with the scheduling of medical appointments to being bounced around among different branches of the system, forcing them to become navigators and advocates for their loved ones.

A variety of care services are offered to the severely injured. But many family members do not want their loved ones in nursing homes and find home health services often unsatisfactory or unavailable.

Despite Ms. Marcum’s cheerful manner and easy laugh, she has started taking antidepressants and an anti-anxiety medication when needed. She has developed hypertension, takes steroids for a bronchial ailment that may be stress related and wears braces to relieve a jaw problem.

“I just saw all of my dreams kind of vanishing,” she said.

Over the past few years, advocacy organizations like the Wounded Warrior Project lobbied Congress to enact a law providing direct financial compensation and other benefits to family caregivers of service members. In 2010 they succeeded, and by mid-September, the veterans agency had approved 1,222 applications, with average monthly stipends of $1,600 to $1,800. Caregivers can also receive health insurance and counseling.

“We know it doesn’t replace full lost income,” said Deborah Amdur, who oversees caregiver support for the agency. “It’s really a recognition of the kinds of sacrifices that are being made.”

Read the linked article, and then think about recent Republican rhetoric about lazy people who don't work, and about how we simply cannot ask the people whose interests these men and women went to protect, to pay even one thin dime more towards their care, and about how the needy should depend on charity instead of the government. What kind of a country are we that we would let these people get away with rhetoric like this, let alone seriously consider them as presidential timber? How can we be proud of a country that uses its young men and women like this and then brings them home and throws them on the trash heap of history while at the same time using the threat of terrorism to justify continued military spending on everything BUT the care of those who actually fight? Where is the yellow ribbon magnet crowd now? Why aren't they clamoring for better care for these people?

This is what "Let him die" looks like

This needs no further comment from me:



(via)

Where's why there's no money for anything else

Because we are shoveling cash into bankers' pockets as fast as we can:

For the American economy – and for many other developed economies – the elephant in the room is the amount of money paid to bankers over the last five years. In the United States, the sum stands at an astounding $2.2 trillion. Extrapolating over the coming decade, the numbers would approach $5 trillion, an amount vastly larger than what both President Barack Obama’s administration and his Republican opponents seem willing to cut from further government deficits.

That $5 trillion dollars is not money invested in building roads, schools and other long-term projects, but is directly transferred from the American economy to the personal accounts of bank executives and employees. Such transfers represent as cunning a tax on everyone else as one can imagine. It feels quite iniquitous that bankers, having helped cause today’s financial and economic troubles, are the only class that is not suffering from them – and in many cases are actually benefiting.
Mainstream megabanks are puzzling in many respects. It is (now) no secret that they have operated so far as large sophisticated compensation schemes, masking probabilities of low-risk, high-impact “Black Swan” events and benefiting from the free backstop of implicit public guarantees. Excessive leverage, rather than skills, can be seen as the source of their resulting profits, which then flow disproportionately to employees, and of their sometimes-massive losses, which are borne by shareholders and taxpayers.

In other words, banks take risks, get paid for the upside, and then transfer the downside to shareholders, taxpayers, and even retirees. In order to rescue the banking system, the Federal Reserve, for example, put interest rates at artificially low levels; as was disclosed recently, it also has provided secret loans of $1.2 trillion to banks. The main effect so far has been to help bankers generate bonuses (rather than attract borrowers) by hiding exposures.

More here.

(via)

Another reason not to fly unless you have to

There really is no reason for this:

A woman has filed a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security over how her elderly mother was detained and searched by Transportation Security Administration officers at the Northwest Florida Regional Airport last weekend.

News Herald reported that Jean Weber filed the complaint after her wheelchair-bound 95-year-old mother, who is in the final stages of her battle with leukemia, was asked to remove an adult diaper during a pat down search.

According to Weber, her elderly mother was first taken to a glass-partitioned area and patted down before being taken to another room. As she was waiting outside of the room, officers conducting the pat down told Weber that her mother's Depends diaper would need to be removed because it was soiled and impeding their search.

“It’s something I couldn’t imagine happening on American soil,” Weber said. “Here is my mother, 95 years old, 105 pounds, barely able to stand, and then this.”

Weber took her elderly mother to the bathroom and removed her diaper, then returned to complete the pat down. She said she did not have another clean diaper with her.

A spokesperson for the TSA said that officers must follow the same procedures for everyone to prevent terrorists from finding vulnerabilities in the security check points.

/speechless.

Remind me again why we're supposed to support Democrats

Here in my little town in Outer Whitelandia, a populace that's been asleep for thirty years is finally waking up to the reality of the one-party rule that's been running the town for the last three decades. The primary intersection in town is a bottleneck every single day at rush hour. There are nights when it can take me twenty five minutes to go twenty miles, and another twenty minutes to go two. This intersection is in a residential neighborhood, but a small gas station on the corner has been grandfathered in, and there is a large catering hall on another corner, owned by a guy who has over the last decade been quietly buying up houses on the main drag and letting them fall apart. For the last five years, the first thing you see when you come into town is a house with boarded-up windows and a hole in the roof. There have been rumors that the catering hall puts up its undocumented workers in these hell houses, but they are just rumors.

Now the owner if the catering hall and the owner of the gas station have simultaneously come up with grand plans to turn the gas station into a Wawa-like convenience store/gas and diesel station complex and the dilapidated houses into a strip mall containing a CVS with a drive-thru, a hair salon, and a coffee shop -- while a quarter mile down the road, there is already a half-empty strip mall with plenty of parking on site that has a Rite-Aid, a hair salon, a Dunkin Donuts, and a bagel shop. And finally the citizenry has awakened, even though the local government refuses to allow the public to talk at the zoning board meetings that are supposed to be where people can be heard.

In 2008, the town held its first contested election in thirty years -- and the sheeple in this town voted back in the same people who had been giviing crony contracts to their friends for years. Part of the problem was that in New Jersey, we vote not office-by-office, but on a giant screen where each candidate is in a party's line. So if you tend to vote Republican, as most people in this town do, you are not going to jump around the ballot. It of course didn't help that the Democratic candidate, who had lived in town barely two years, was the brother of one of the biggest Democratic Party hacks in he state.

It's like that in Democratic Party politics. Not a month goes by when someone doesn't tell me to run for office in town, but believe me, you do not want to touch these people or play their game. Every two years, they either refuse to run a candidate to run for Congress against the odious teabagger Scott Garrett, who was a teabagger long before the Tea Party kooks even existed; or else they run a weak candidate and then refuse to support that candidate with money. The New Jersey State Democratic Party, like the natonal party has been under everyone except Howard Dean, is only interested in fighting battles it knows in advance it can win.

And so the stage is set for the travesty that happened in Trenton yesterday, where Governor Gasbag, Chris Christie, succeeded in getting bipartisan support in the state Assembly for a law to gut public worker benefits and remove their ability to collectively bargain, with the help of Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester) and Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver (D-Essex), who had shepherded the bill through the state Senate on Monday.

Everyone knows that the state pension system is dramatically underfunded, after being stiffed for decades by governors of both parties, What most people don't understand is that the police, firefighters and teachers who receive these pensions also pay in. So when politicians decide to gut these benefits, it's money paid out to these workers that's stolen for other needs -- mostly to keep from having to raise taxes on the wealthiest people in the state.

If the Democrats on the national stage won't stand up for people who pay into Social Security and Medicare all their lives and are then told not to depend on it because they stole all the money; if Democrats won't stand up for the rights of all Americans to be the same under the law; if Democrats won't stand up for the rights of workers; then why on earth should we reward them with our votes?

We know what Republicans are -- greedy, venal, hateful, cold-hearted and devoid of empathy. Republicans will do what Republicans do. We know this. Our problem is not them; it is the Democrats -- the party that increasingly pisses down our backs and then tells us it's raining.

All that tea party outrage against immigrants who might get medical care, but NO outrage about this

The teabaggers have never uttered one peep about this squandering of American tax dollars:

After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the George W. Bush administration flooded the conquered country with so much cash to pay for reconstruction and other projects in the first year that a new unit of measurement was born.

Pentagon officials determined that one giant C-130 Hercules cargo plane could carry $2.4 billion in shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills. They sent an initial full planeload of cash, followed by 20 other flights to Iraq by May 2004 in a $12-billion haul that U.S. officials believe to be the biggest international cash airlift of all time.

This month, the Pentagon and the Iraqi government are finally closing the books on the program that handled all those Benjamins. But despite years of audits and investigations, U.S. Defense officials still cannot say what happened to $6.6 billion in cash — enough to run the Los Angeles Unified School District or the Chicago Public Schools for a year, among many other things.

For the first time, federal auditors are suggesting that some or all of the cash may have been stolen, not just mislaid in an accounting error. Stuart Bowen, special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an office created by Congress, said the missing $6.6 billion may be "the largest theft of funds in national history."

The outright theft of billions, billions more given in no-bid contracts to Halliburton and KBR, the wholesale squandering of the entire Clinton-era surplus to pay for George W. Bush's wars -- wars without end that Barack Obama feels somehow obliged to continue.

When I draw the verbal picture of billionaires pointing our attention at the poor while they're lifting the last few bucks out of our wallets while we're distracted, this is exactly what I'm talking about.

Don't insult my intelligence

You know, I can understand that sometimes when two people are in a room together, there can be a point where the line between consent and rape can become blurred. This is one reason why I've always wanted our society to stop this ridiculousness about women having to be "swept away" by the moment in order to not be considered a slut. It's what keeps girls from carrying a diaphragm or condoms if they don't want to be, or can't be, on the pill. The double standard was kept at bay for many years, even if it is making a comeback now, fueled by conservatives who, masters of projection that they are, can't control themselves and can't imagine being someone who can.

But there is no universe in any kind of human consciousness where a 32-year-old West African hotel housekeeper enters the room of an aging lecher and is so seized with desire for his sagging scrotum that she falls into bed with him. And yet that is what the lawyers for IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn would have you believe.

One of the few benefits of Frank Rich leaving the New York Times (and there are precious few), is that Maureen Dowd seems to have decided it's time to grow the hell up and work on fighting her inner high school mean girl. Today in the paper she blasts this insulting framing right to smithereens:

Oh, she wanted it.

She wanted it bad.

That’s what every hard-working, God-fearing, young widow who breaks her back doing menial labor at a Times Square hotel to support her teenage daughter, justify her immigration status and take advantage of the opportunities in America wants — a crazed, rutting, wrinkly old satyr charging naked out of a bathroom, lunging at her and dragging her around the room, caveman-style.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s reputation as a thrice-married French seducer loses something in the translation.

According to the claims of the 32-year-old West African maid, what took place in the $3,000-a-day Sofitel suite had nothing to do with seduction. If the allegation is true, Strauss-Kahn’s behavior, boorish and primitive, is rape.

Was the chief of the International Monetary Fund telling other countries to tighten their belts while he was dropping his trousers? Lawyers for the 62-year-old Frenchman, who had been a leading Socialist prospect to run against Nicolas Sarkozy next year, seem ready to rebut any DNA evidence by arguing that sex with the maid who came in to clean his room was consensual.

[snip]

Strauss-Kahn’s French defenders are throwing around nutty conspiracy theories, sounding like the Pakistanis about Osama. Some have suggested that he was the victim of a honey-pot arranged by the Sarkozy forces.

Bernard-Henri Lévy, a friend of the accused, says he is outraged at the portrayal of Strauss-Kahn as an “insatiable and malevolent beast.” He wrote on The Daily Beast: “It would be nice to know — and without delay — how a chambermaid could have walked in alone, contrary to the habitual practice of most of New York’s grand hotels of sending a ‘cleaning brigade’ of two people, into the room of one of the most closely watched figures on the planet.”

At least he didn’t mention Dreyfus.

For years, I’ve stayed at the Sofitel and other hotels in New York City, and I’ve never seen a “brigade,” simply single maids coming in to clean.

In Washington, they have now nicknamed the street that separates the I.M.F. and the World Bank, where Paul Wolfowitz lost his job over financial hanky-panky with his girlfriend, the Boulevard of Bad Behavior.

These are the two institutions that are globally renowned for lecturing the rest of the world on discipline and freedom, when it’s the West that’s guilty of recklessness and improvident behavior. First in finance, then in sex.

People who can’t keep their flies zipped lecturing other people.

We've had so many instances of rich and/or powerful men in rooms with women where what emerges are battling famewhore lawyers, with the lawyer for the accused rapist insisting that the women are lying, or that they consented. But to use this claim with an immigrant woman, working as a hotel housekeeper, who goes into a hotel room to clean, is just an insult to our intelligence.

Last year Mr. Brilliant and I took a 5-day cruise to Canada. Perhaps the high point of the entire trip was returning to New York on our last day, early on a sunny morning, with cool temperatures and a light breeze blowing as we stood on deck. And as we entered the harbor, there she was -- a giant green statue of a woman holding a torch. The rising sun cast a golden glow around the Statue of Liberty that morning. And as I gazed at her, I found myself moved to tears, thinking of my own grandparents, and the millions of others who saw that same statue, perhaps at that same time of the morning, standing in the harbor with a golden glow around her, beckoning like a goddess as if to say, "Come on in...you are welcome here."

The woman at the center of this case probably didn't have that view; she probably came in by plane. But though I don't know her, I know that she came here with the same hopes that my forebears had. I hope she prevails in court against one of the most powerful men in the world. I hope that this country, the promise of which drew her here and now draws her into the system of justice that the green lady in New York harbor represents, lives up to its own self-image.

This may not be as silly as it looks on the surface

After all, Republicans have been able to claim, with some success, that the 9/11 attacks were Bill Clinton's fault, that TARP (instituted in 2008) was Barack Obama's program, that George W. http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifBush'shttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif presidency was a success, and that Bush deserves the credit for capturing Osama Bin Laden.

So with their ability and willingness to rewrite history, why WOULDN'T Newt Gingrich run as a devout, devoted husband to his lovely wife Callista, whom he was fucking on the side while married to his second wife, whom he was fucking while married to his first? http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Still in her 20s when they met, Ms. Bisek had been raised in a town of 1,500, the only child of a meat packer and a secretary. A churchgoing Roman Catholic, she had attended a Lutheran college where she practiced piano five hours a day. “Is this the wisest course for you to be taking?” Karen Olson, her best friend, recalled asking.

Today, Ms. Bisek is Mrs. Gingrich, married for 11 years, but perhaps best remembered for the six-year affair that contributed to her husband’s political downfall. His critics cast Mr. Gingrich, the former House speaker, as a hypocrite who sought to impeach a president over infidelity while engaging in it himself with Ms. Bisek, who was a Congressional aide.

Yet in a curious tale of Washington reinvention, the onetime congressman from Georgia is counting on the third Mrs. Gingrich for his political redemption.

As he prepares for a Republican presidential primary run — he said Monday that he would formally declare his intentions on Wednesday — Mr. Gingrich is presenting himself as a family man who has embraced Catholicism and found God, with his wife as a kind of character witness. Depending on one’s point of view, she is a reminder of his complicated past, or his secret political weapon.

Barely a sentence goes by without Mr. Gingrich uttering the words “Callista and I.” They are constantly together — at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington, at conservative political conferences, at book signings and screenings of their documentary films. She is the voice on his audio books; her face is all over his 2012 Web site, where visitors can read “A Note from Newt & Callista.”

At Villanova University on a recent Thursday night, Mrs. Gingrich warmed up the audience for a showing of the couple’s movie about Pope John Paul II by signing books and DVDs in her left-handed curlicue. But when asked whether she is ready for the scrutiny a campaign would bring, she smiled tightly and grew silent.

Mr. Gingrich answered for her. “Seems to be,” he said, with uncharacteristic tentativeness. “We’ve talked about it for a year. It’s difficult.”

Mr. Gingrich is well aware that social conservatives are skeptical of him because he did not emphasize their issues in Congress, but also because of his two divorces and admission of infidelity. He has been meeting with religious leaders around the country to address their concerns.

What concerns could they possibly have? After all, didn't Jesus die on the cross so that Newt Gingrich could fuck whoever he wants? Isn't that what Gingrich means when he talks about his belief in a "forgiving God"? That HE's allowed to do whatever he wants to because a Jewish guy some two thousand and some-odd years ago went through unspeakable agony so he could do it?

Chuck Schumer needs to just STFU

Who needs Republican fearmongering when you have a grandstanding moron like Chuck "Where's the Camera?" Schumer:

A senator on Sunday called for a "no-ride list" for Amtrak trains after intelligence gleaned from the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound pointed to potential attacks on the nation's train system.

Sen. Charles Schumer said he would push as well for added funding for rail security and commuter and passenger train track inspections and more monitoring of stations nationwide.

"Circumstances demand we make adjustments by increasing funding to enhance rail safety and monitoring on commuter rail transit and screening who gets on Amtrak passenger trains, so that we can provide a greater level of security to the public," the New York Democrat said at a news conference.

U.S. officials last week said evidence found after the raid on bin Laden's compound in Pakistan indicated the al Qaeda leader or his associates had engaged in discussions or planning for a possible attack on a train inside the United States on September 11, 2011.

Schumer, citing U.S. intelligence analysts, said attacks were also considered on Christmas and New Year's Day and following the president's State of the Union address.

He called on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to expand the Secure Flight monitoring program, which cross-checks air travelers with the terror watch list in an attempt to prevent anyone on the "no-fly list" from boarding, for use on Amtrak.

Such a procedure would create an Amtrak "no-ride list" to keep suspected terrorists off the U.S. rail system, he said.

What a fucking moron. Hasn't he ever seen Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?

Now, in fairness, Paul Newman and Robert Redford DID get on that train, not just put a bunch of dynamite on the tracks. But do you think a "no-ride" list would have stopped that train robbery? Hardly. And it wouldn't stop a terrorist from putting a piece of C4 explosive on a train track either. So what purpose exactly does Chuckie Cheese think a "no-ride list" would serve?

It's enough to drive a person mad. I have family in North Carolina, and I'm running out of ways to get there. I don't like to do a 10-hour drive alone in a car with eighty thousand miles on it. I don't like the idea of flying in a tin box piloted by someone who gets paid less than an assistant manager at Abercrombie & Fitch. Now if Chuck Schumer has his way we'll go through the same pointless bullshit at Penn Station that we do at the airports. So what's left? Greyhound buses?

And yet, I'm sure there are people out there, the same frothing morons out in God's country who have lived the last ten years terrified that Muslim terrorists are going to blow up the local Hardee's while they're in there enjoying a Monster Thickburger and a caramel crunch hand-scooped ice cream shake, who are going to be shown on the evening news saying, "Well, if it makes us safer....".

So what's next? Backscatter scans in order to pick up a bottle of White Citrus lotion at Bath and Body Works at the mall? Checkpoints at state borders on highways? Strip searches in order to pick up a venti skim vanilla latte at Starbucks at the Molly Pitcher Service Area? How far are we going to take this? And for God's sake, why is a fucking Democrat advocating this?

What Glenn Greenwald said:

So Al Qaeda breathes the word "trains" and Schumer jumps and demands the creation of a massive, expensive and oppressive new Security State program to keep thousands and thousands of people off trains.  The "no-fly" list has been nothing short of a Kafkaesque disaster: with thousands of people secretly placed on it without any explanation or real recourse, oftentimes causing them to be stranded in faraway places and unable to return home.

To replicate that for trains -- all because some documents mentioned them among thousands of other ideas Al Qaeda has undoubtedly considered over the years -- is hysteria and ludicrous over-reaction of the highest order. Trains can obviously be attacked without boarding them (indeed, these documents apparently discussed tampering with the rails, which wouldn't require boarding the trains at all). And if there's a "no-ride" list for Amtrak, why not for subways and buses, too? If Al Qaeda is found to have discussed targeting restaurants, will we have a no-eat list? If Al Qaeda is found to have discussed targeting large intersections or landmarks, will we have a no-walk list? How about a no-shop list in response to the targeting of malls?

But this, more or less, encapsulates the U.S. response to Terrorism since 9/11: the minute Al Qaeda utters a peep about anything, the political class collectively jumps to restrict our freedoms, empower the Government, and bankrupt ourselves in self-destructive pursuit of the ultimate illusion: Absolute Security. Al Qaeda has caused us to do more harm to ourselves than it could have ever dreamed of imposing on its own. And even in death, Osama bin Laden continues to serve as the pretext for all of this.

Word.

This is your nation under corporatism

Any questions?

All the Outrage You Can Eat

In case you haven't had your fill of Republican horseshit today....

At ThinkProgress, read how during the Bush years, the current leaders of the House GOP voted 19 times in favor of increasing the debt limit -- to the tune of $4 trillion. But let a black Democrat be elected, and suddenly it's OK to risk global economic collapse just to score cheap political points with a bunch of uneducated mouth-breathers.

And speaking of uneducated mouth breathers (you know, the guys with emphysema and cirrhosis of the liver whose spouses have cancer from working in toxic factories, who are diabetic and have macular degeneration and need knee replacements), when the Tea Party revolution reaches fruition, they're going to be the first casualties.

Lindsey Graham is playing "Mine's Bigger" with Paul Ryan by demanding that Social Security be cut too!

New Jersey governor, thug, and mainstream media mancrush Chris Christie advocates taking a bat to 76-year-old state Senator Loretta Weinberg.

Alan Simpson is still an asshole, but he smacked around Rick "Man On Dog" Santorum (who thinks he can become president and force women to make lots of babies to pay Social Security taxes) pretty good this week.

And you morons couldn't see this last November? Sheesh.

I think Matt Taibbi has been attending the Driftglass school of Refined Rantin'.

Never believe a guy who promises it'll be different this time, baby.

OK, now my head really exploded.

Enough of that.

Fortunately, it's Thursday night, so I can put my cranium back together with the one thing that always restores my sanity. Bassets.

Who needs nuclear meltdowns when you have the TSA?

Remember when they told us that TSA x-ray scanners at airports were perfectly safe and that the radiation they exposed one to was practically undetectable?

WRONG:

The Transportation Security Administration announced Friday that it would retest every full-body X-ray scanner that emits ionizing radiation — 247 machines at 38 airports — after maintenance records on some of the devices showed radiation levels 10 times higher than expected.

The TSA says that the records reflect math mistakes and that all the machines are safe. Indeed, even the highest readings listed on some of the records — the numbers that the TSA says were mistakes — appear to be many times less than what the agency says a person absorbs through one day of natural background radiation.

Even so, the TSA has ordered the new tests out of "an abundance of caution to reassure the public," spokesman Nicholas Kimball says. The tests will be finished by the end of the month, and the results will be released "as they are completed," the agency said on its website.

TSA officials have repeatedly assured the public and lawmakers that the machines have passed all inspections. The agency's review of maintenance reports, launched Dec. 10, came only after USA TODAY and lawmakers called for the release of the records late last year.

The agency posted reports Friday from 127 X-ray-emitting devices on its website and said it would continue to release results from maintenance tests for the approximately 4,500 X-ray devices at airports nationwide. Those devices include machines that examine checked luggage. Of the reports posted, about a third showed some sort of error, Kimball said.

Sigh.

Then:

Now:

President Barack Obama approved Monday the resumption of military trials for detainees at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, ending a two-year ban.

It was the latest acknowledgement that the detention facility Obama had vowed to shut down within a year of taking office will remain open for some time to come. But even while announcing a resumption of military commission trials, Obama reaffirmed his support for trying terror suspects in U.S. federal courts - something that's met vehement resistance on Capitol Hill.

"I strongly believe that the American system of justice is a key part of our arsenal in the war against al-Qaida and its affiliates, and we will continue to draw on all aspects of our justice system - including Article III courts - to ensure that our security and our values are strengthened," the president said in a statement.

The White House also reiterated that the administration remains committed to eventually closing Guantanamo Bay, though Monday's actions didn't seem to bring that outcome any closer.

Now:

For over seven months, Manning has been detained in solitary confinement at a maximum security military brig in Virginia. He has been forced to endure widely condemned conditions and could face the death sentence as a result of charges recently leveled against him. He has yet to receive so much as a preliminary hearing.

And when one of these nutballs finally does it, conservatives will say that their incendiary rhetoric had nothing to do with it

Another dispatch from Teabag America, in this case Athen, Georgia:

At Rep. Paul Broun’s town hall meeting on Tuesday, the Athens congressman asked who had driven the farthest to be there and let the winner ask the first question.

We couldn’t hear the question in the back of the packed Oglethorpe County Commission chamber, but whatever it was, it got a big laugh. According to an outraged commenter on the article, the question was, when is someone going to shoot Obama?

I’ve asked Team Broun whether that was indeed the question and haven’t gotten an answer. The commenter accurately described the questioner and the circumstances, and no one has disputed his account.

Update: Broun’s press secretary, Jessica Morris, confirmed that the question was indeed, who is going to shoot Obama? “Obviously, the question was inappropriate, so Congressman Broun moved on,” she said.

Here was Broun’s response:

The thing is, I know there’s a lot of frustration with this president. We’re going to have an election next year. Hopefully, we’ll elect somebody that’s going to be a conservative, limited-government president that will take a smaller, who will sign a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare.

He then segued into Republicans’ budget proposal.

Got that? It's at a point now where a Republican Congressman doesn't even express outrage at a question about shooting the President of the United States. Three or four signs at a Wisconsin demonstration of fifty thousand equate Scott Walker with the worst despots in history, and the media goes into a frenzy of "Both Sides Do It." But on the right, it's perfectly OK to treat a question like this as simply "inappropriate."

Asking a Congressman when he stopped beating his wife (when he hasn't) is inappropriate. Asking a Congressman who is going to shoot the president is outrageous -- and should be treated as such. Even John McCain, who whored himself in the worst way to these people in 2008, finally drew the line at "I don't trust him...he's an Arab." Today Republicans don't even flinch when someone talks about shooting elected officials of the other party.

Another of the dirty sluts that Mike Pence and Chris Smith believe should be punished for their unchastity

Here's another woman for whom Mike Pence and Chris Smith think THEY should have the power to make decisions:

Thanks to Mike Stark, whom if he didn't exist we would have to invent him. Go. Read.

UPDATE: Here's Jamie, another woman that Mike Pence and Chris Smith would rather see die than have an abortion of a much-wanted fetus that had no chance of survival anyway:

Go ahead, Republicans...keep showing your misogyny.

There's actually something refreshing about how emboldened right-wing Republican Christofascist zombies have become in their quest to turn American women into nothing but breeding machines. For decades, the fetophiles have succeeded in framing themselves as "pro-life" and "pro-women", feigning concern for the emotional problems they claim all women have after abortion (as if anyone is somehow entitled to make decisions based on what is right for them at the time); convincing far too many people that THEY are the righteous ones, even as they slash programs that might help women they would force to bear children against their will take care of the actual babies that result from forced childbearing. They used to even go so far as to say that those of us with the radical view that women are actual human beings are protectors of child molesters because legal abortion allows those who prey on young girls to hide the result of their crimes, as if forcing twelve-year-olds to walk around with pregnant bellies is somehow a badge of shame for the impregnator, rather than the impregnatee.

But as Congressional Republicans abandon all thought of job creation and resume their long-standing jihad against American women, particularly their sexuality, out in the hinterlands Teh Crazy is in full flower, and shows just what these people are:

A law under consideration in South Dakota would expand the definition of "justifiable homicide" to include killings that are intended to prevent harm to a fetus—a move that could make it legal to kill doctors who perform abortions. The Republican-backed legislation, House Bill 1171, has passed out of committee on a nine-to-three party-line vote, and is expected to face a floor vote in the state's GOP-dominated House of Representatives soon.

The bill, sponsored by state Rep. Phil Jensen, a committed foe of abortion rights, alters the state's legal definition of justifiable homicide by adding language stating that a homicide is permissible if committed by a person "while resisting an attempt to harm" that person's unborn child or the unborn child of that person's spouse, partner, parent, or child. If the bill passes, it could in theory allow a woman's father, mother, son, daughter, or husband to kill anyone who tried to provide that woman an abortion—even if she wanted one.

Yes, folks, the so-called "pro-life" movement finally admits that its reverence for human life is highly selective. Yesterday I linked to an article about a small survey which showed that men who are domestic abusers of women will often sabotage their partner's birth control in an attempt to have them become pregnant and therefore dependent (or otherwise linked to them in a permanent way). And now in South Dakota, Republican legislators would give these domestic abusers the right to go into a clinic with guns blazing in the name of killing the doctor who would dare usurp their right to keep their wives, partners, or daughters from exercising their own free will.

We hear over and over again that using the term "American Taliban" is unfairly inflammatory. Markos Moulitsas took a great deal of crap from even Bill Maher about the title of his recent book with that title. But when you have a movement in our very own country that would justify homicide against those who believe they have a right to help women make their own decisions, what else can you call these people?