With Friends Like These (Part I)...

Honestly, I don't know why we bother.I've been listening to a lot of the local 'Progressive' radio station since we moved up here to Madison. Partially this is due to my insatiable craving for political news and information, but it's just as largely being driven by the fact that Madison lacks a single listenable contemporary radio station (or even, from what I can tell, a better-than-average classic rock station). Seriously. It's pretty awful up here. I thought I had it bad in Indiana.... oy.

But what Madison lacks in music, it seemed to make up for in talk radio; we have a dedicated left-wing talk station. That should kill a lot of drive-time, right?

Actually, yes. In particular I love the Stephanie Miller show, which is on in the mornings when I drive the roommate to work, or ride with her so I can take the car for the day. It's good enough I actually listen to it outside of the car, something I never do with radio. Rachel Maddow's show in the evenings is solid, but it's just a good lefty news program, and not on at a time that I'm typically in the car, so I rarely catch it.

The other stuff though...

I keep having to give up on these guys for being, well, colossal morons. First up is Thom Hartmann, who has a show that airs here in Madison in the late afternoon. Hartmann is almost a bad caricature of the mild-spoken ex-Hippy. Every show seems to revolve around some kooky, feel-good alternative social theory and how it applies to the world today, and how, naturally enough, it's better than the existing models and, if implemented, would lead to sunshine, lollipops, happiness, rainbows and the like.

Seems harmless enough, right?

I put the radio on as I went to pick up the roommate on Wednesday, and good old mild-mannered Thom was having an actual argument with a right-wing troll who had called in to attempt to pigeonhole him on immigration issues. The right-winger had the usual 'I hate Brown People' approach to the topic, as you might expect, and was trying to cast Thom as an irredeemable leftist.

That was all part of the usual song and dance; hardly surprising. What was surprising was Hartmann's response; the problem with immigration, in fact, IS that the lousy brown people are taking all of our jobs!

Seriously. First, Hartmann went off on a fairly deranged rant about how the 'Visa Program' was letting a bunch of 'Philipino nurses' and 'Indian engineers' into the country, where they took skilled American jobs.

Hartmann thinks this is unforgivable, and he has a simple solution: Don't let them in. Slash the program (btw, he's referring to the H1-B skilled guest worker program; he didn't seem to know the name of the type of Visa he hates so while on the air) and build a bunch of colleges!

Ok.... at this point, you might well be asking yourself if Thom Hartmann is aware of how long it takes to establish a college, erect the structures, employ the staff, recruit the students, and then, of course, educate them in a full course of study. It takes an already established university *years* to get a new degree granting program underway -- it's a complete mystery how Hartmann thinks a slew of all-new, dedicated colleges will be formed, overnight, to service the fields he leaves drastically short of workers (or so he believes -- see actual figures on H1-B Visas below). Even if the schools did open in a day, there would still be the matter of recruiting a student body, educating them, and placing them in jobs, which will take further years, assuming, of course, that American students even want to earn these degrees, take these jobs, etc.

Hartmann estimates, furiously, that 'a million' people a year enter America a year to steal the high-skilled jobs from poor, long-suffering Americans. A million!

Well... not so much.

The Department of Homeland Security approved about 132,000 H-1B visas in 2004 and 117,000 in 2005.

Source: Wikipedia

Ok, so Hartmann has exaggerated the scope of the 'problem'... by an ORDER OF MAGNITUDE. Still, 100k jobs, that's a lot of work going to foreigners, right?

Not so much.

These days, the economy must add from 150,000 to 200,000 jobs every month to keep the unemployment rate from rising, economists say.

Source: The New York Times (2003)

So, he's talking about fewer jobs being taken, in total, *annually*, than the number of new jobs that have to be created, in a single month, just to keep pace with the number of additional people entering the job market.

This is an urgent problem for Mr. Hartmann. I wonder why...

Let's return to the groups isolated for derision by Mr. Hartmann: Indian engineers and Philippino nurses.

In fact, while people from India do make up 25% of the H1-B Visa population, Europeans make up 27%. The Phillipines, as a country, aren't even in the top ten. India is number 1, sure. Who's Number 2? The United Kingdom. Number 3? Canada!

Source: Wikipedia (from Yearbook of US Immigration Statistics, 2005, Department of Homeland Security)

Funny how Thom doesn't pick on those pesky Eurotrash and Maple-huggers taking our jobs, isn't it. Instead, he focuses on... dark-skinned brown people.

Huh.

It gets better though; he has a plan to deal with the illegal immigration issue too.

See, when Thom lived in Germany, he had to go through a draconian process to become a legal guest worker. It took, he said, three months, and without the state-issued ID it was more or less impossible to get a job in Germany.

Hartmann wants to do the same thing for America... to prevent those illegals from taking our jobs.

Think about it. Hartmann's solution to illegal immigration is to put all undocumented immigrants out of work.

Sigh. Where to begin with this crap...

There are millions of illegal immigrants in this country. How many is, of course, impossible to precisely pin down. Estimates range from 8-20 million; middle of the road figures peg it at about 12 million.

The Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington, estimates 11.5 million to 12 million "unauthorized migrants" live in the US today. It bases its numbers on the "Current Population Survey," a monthly assessment of about 50,000 households jointly conducted by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau.

Source: The Christian Science Monitor

Thom Hartmann wants to make this entire population unemployable, forever. Presumably this means he wants to throw them out of the country; either that, or make them into Soylent Green.

But, you say, wouldn't throwing illegal immigrants out of the country en masse cause massive human suffering and economic devastation?

Yes. Yes it would.

The tiny northeast town was home to the nation's largest kosher meatpacker, which recently lost nearly half of its work force after a huge raid by immigration officials. The raid sent shockwaves through the town, which has served as a multicultural model.

Aaron Rubashkin, an Orthodox Jew from Brooklyn, founded Agriprocessors in the town 20 years ago. The plant was turning out about half of the nation's kosher beef and chicken.

Slaughter operations are now down to one shift instead of three as the company scrambles for replacement workers. It is expected that many of them will be Mexican-Americans from Texas.

The plant brought diversity and prosperity to a town with three central streets and no stoplights. But after the raid, many here are wondering if the future of the town is in jeopardy. Some 2,300 people lived in Postville before the raid; about half of them were Hispanic

Source: NPR

This was one single raid. How many illegal immigrants did they detain for deportation based on this devastated town?

389.

389 out of 12 million. What did that look like, that drop out of the bucket, that teaspoon out of the ocean?

Washington, D.C. - Sister Kathy Thill of Waterloo said she feels like a stranger in her own country in the wake of a May 12 immigration raid in tiny Postville.

The Catholic nun has assisted immigrant families there following the detainment of 389 workers at the Agriprocessors kosher meatpacking plant.

She is a member of the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas who works with Latino families in Iowa.

"I am also a United States citizen who grew up believing that this is a democratic country in which the dignity of all people is respected and their rights protected," she said Tuesday at a news conference here, surrounded by members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.


"This is not the country I experienced this past week."

...

The tension spreads beyond the Hispanic communities, she said.

Driving to Postville on Friday with a car full of donations, she said she got a call warning of possible checkpoints between Waterloo and Postville, and she wondered what might happen to her for delivering supplies.

"I suddenly felt like I was in a strange country," she said. "I didn't feel free."

The future of America, as presented by one Thom Hartmann.

389 down; 11,999,611 to go.

Political Stuff

Dirty Politics

Those Nefarious Gays!
Hilariously stupid legislator Sally Kern has a bone to pick with rich gay people.

"Where are the social conservative billionaires?" asks embattled Oklahoma House Rep. Sally Kern. "We've got some, but they don't give money the way the gay philanthropists are giving their money."

Additional audio obtained by PageOneQ of the recent controversial speech by Rep. Kern gives more detail to her criticisms of the "gay agenda," especially on a political level: the lawmaker specifically targets four philanthropists, who cumulatively contribute tens of millions of dollars a year to LGBT causes and political campaigns.

Rep. Kern has been under fire since portions of the speech calling homosexuality a larger threat than terrorism, and the "death knell" for the United States, were released by the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund earlier this month. The legislator has stood by her statements, refusing to apologize, and has since retained legal counsel.

No doubt she's afraid of the evil gay lawyers.

Source: Page One Q

Texas Is Another Country
No, seriously. They don't have to obey international treaties signed by the United States.

Texas can ignore President Bush and an international court in refusing to reopen the case of a Mexican on death row for rape and murder, the Supreme Court said Tuesday.


The court said Bush exceeded his authority when he tried to intervene on behalf of Jose Ernesto Medellin, facing the death penalty for killing two teenagers nearly 15 years ago.

The Constitution "allows the president to execute the laws, not make them," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a rebuke of the president in a case that mixed presidential power, international relations and the death penalty.

Justice Stephen Breyer, in dissent, said the decision calls into question U.S. obligations under international treaties and makes it "more difficult to negotiate new ones."

By a 6-3 vote, the court said Texas does not have to give a new hearing to death row prisoner Jose Ernesto Medellin, a former Houston gang member who is now 33.

The president was in the unusual position of siding with Medellin, a Mexican citizen whom police prevented from consulting with Mexican diplomats, as provided by international treaty.

An international court ruled in 2004 that the convictions of Medellin and 50 other Mexicans on death row around the United States violated the 1963 Vienna Convention, which provides that people arrested abroad should have access to their home country's consular officials. The International Court of Justice, also known as the world court, said the Mexican prisoners should have new court hearings to determine whether the violation affected their cases.

...

Roberts, in the unfamiliar role of limiting presidential power, said the international court decision cannot be forced upon the states.

The president may not "establish binding rules of decision that pre-empt contrary state law," Roberts said. Neither does the treaty, by itself, require individual states to take action, he said.

Breyer, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter, said the international court judgment should be enforced. "The nation may well break its word even though the president seeks to live up to that word," he said.

Hah. That's an odd situation, Bush trying to live up to his word.

Source: Raw Story

Brrr, Frosty
So Hillary Clinton is cozying up to Richard Mellon Scaife, the scumbag who basically created Whitewater.

It caught my eye as a flash on Brit Hume a few moments ago, but here is a photo from Hillary Clinton's visit today to the editorial board of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. In this picture, she is seen talking to none other than Richard Mellon Scaife, the owner of the paper and the man who once said that the death of Vincent Foster was the "Rosetta stone" of the Bill Clinton administration. (He also funded the so-called "Arkansas Project" at The American Spectator.)

I hate to say it, but this proves she pretty much WILL do anything to win.

Source: The Corner on National Review Online (I know, I know. the NRO? Still, who better than scum to carry this story?)

Ha!
Everyone should have known this would happen.

DENVER - A gun belonging to the pilot of a US Airways plane discharged as the aircraft was on approach to land in North Carolina over the weekend, the first time a weapon issued under a federal program to arm pilots was fired, authorities said Monday.

The "accidental discharge" Saturday aboard Flight 1536 from Denver to Charlotte did not pose a danger to the aircraft or the 124 passengers, two pilots and three flight attendants aboard, said Greg Alter of the Federal Air Marshal Service.

"We know that there was never any danger to the aircraft or to the occupants on board,"

Alter said.

They're smoking something if they think that a gun, going off in the cockpit of a plane, posed no threat to the plane. If the bullet had struck something vital, everyone on board could have DIED.

This is just ridiculous. Guns don't just 'go off'. Well, except for that WWII Japanese service pistol. They go off because the people who have them don't properly engage the safety, keep the gun secure from shocks and vibrations, etc.

I'm not inherently opposed to the idea of armed security on flights; the air marshals, for example. But I never liked this pilot-gun iniative, for a simple reason that should be obvious now: having guns in the hands of a random group of American pilots, without proper training and oversight, in a critical, very vulnerable-to-ballistic-shrapnel location, is monumentally dumb. Just like your average homeowner is far more likely to shoot their kids than a burglar (both because intruders are relatively rare and because the average homeowner is a moron), a pilot is far more likely to plug their avionics than a hijacker.

The least they could do is issue the pilots those frangible or bismuth rounds that can't penetrate very far into anything vital.

Source: AZ Central

Charity?
I don't know how to feel about this, though it certainly explains why Obama's so big on tax returns being released.

Democrat Barack Obama gave nearly a quarter of a million dollars to charity last year as he entered the presidential race, significantly more than during the nine previous years combined.


The Illinois senator has yet to release his 2007 tax return. His campaign said Tuesday it will be made public by Tax Day, April 15, while at the same time disclosing that Obama gave $240,000 to charity last year.

From 1998 through 2006, Obama donated a total of $150,892 to charity.

Obama posted his 2000 to 2006 returns on his campaign Web site Tuesday to pressure rival Hillary Rodham Clinton to do the same. His campaign repeatedly has criticized Clinton for failing to release tax returns for the years since she and her husband left the White House in 2001.

Clinton, campaigning in Pennsylvania, said she hoped to release the returns "within the next week."

Hehe. On the one hand, he gave a bunch to charity. On the other hand, he only did it when he was about to run for public office.

Then again, he had just come into a chunk of change.

The Obamas' income increased dramatically in the past decade.

Obama and his wife, Michelle, earned $181,507 to $272,759 each year from 1998-2004.

Their income jumped to $1.6 million in 2005, Obama's first year in the Senate, with the rerelease of his first book, "Dreams from My Father." They made nearly $1 million in 2006, half of it from his second book, "The Audacity of Hope."

The Obamas' charitable giving also increased with their newfound wealth.

From 1998-2004, they gave between $1,050-$3,400 each year. In 2005, they gave $77,315, including donations to literacy and anti-poverty campaigns and their church. In 2006, they gave $60,307 to charity.

So I'm not sure how to interpet this. I'm sure Obama fans see it as a big plus though.

Source: Raw Story

Ha! Suck It, Fundies!
Thank you Wisconsin.

WAUSAU, Wis. - A state appeals court upheld sanctions Tuesday against a pharmacist who refused to dispense birth control pills to a woman and wouldn't transfer her prescription elsewhere.

The 3rd District Court of Appeals ruled that the punishment the state Pharmacy Examining Board handed down against pharmacist Neil Noesen did not violate his state constitutional rights, specifically his "right of conscience" to religiously oppose birth control.

"Noesen abandoned even the steps necessary to perform in a minimally competent manner under any standard of care," the three-judge panel said. The decision upheld a ruling by Barron County Circuit Judge James Babler.

This asshole tried to hold a woman's prescription hostage so she couldn't receive medicine legally prescribed by her doctor because he has some whacko religious objections.

He deserves everything he gets and more.

According to court records, Noesen was working as a substitute pharmacist at a Menomonie Kmart in 2002 when a University of Wisconsin-Stout student sought to refill her birth control prescription.

Noesen testified he advised the woman of his objection to the use of contraception and refused to fill the prescription or tell her how or where she could get it refilled.

The woman was able to get the prescription filled two days later but missed the first dose of the medication, court records said. She filed a complaint with the state Department of Regulation and Licensing.

Noesen, 34, of St. Paul, Minn., told regulators that he is a devout Roman Catholic and refused to refill the prescription or release it to another pharmacy because he didn't want to commit a sin by "impairing the fertility of a human being."

The Pharmacy Examining Board ruled in 2005 that Noesen failed to carry out his professional responsibility to get the woman's prescription to someone else if he wouldn't fill it himself.

The board reprimanded Noesen and ordered him to attend ethics classes. He was allowed to keep his license as long as he informs all future employers in writing that he won't dispense birth control pills and outlines steps he will take to make sure a patient has access to medication.

The board also found Noesen liable for the cost of the proceedings against him — about $20,000 — but the appeals court ordered the board to reconsider that decision.

Larry Dupuis, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin, which like Planned Parenthood participated in the appeal, said the ruling struck the proper balance between patients' and pharmacists' rights.

A pharmacy should accommodate its pharmacists' religious beliefs but it can't leave "a patient high and dry," Dupuis said.

Noesen said the discipline "critically devastated" his business as a traveling pharmacist because some pharmacies refused to hire him and he lost his liability insurance, court records said.

Oh no, someone call the WAAAAAHmbulance! Poor baby!

Find another job, you religious tool.

What the hell is a traveling pharmacist anyway? I thought those went out with the snake oil wagons.

Apparently not.

Source: Raw Story

Iraq Go Boom
Seriously, this was inevitable.

A new civil war is threatening to explode in Iraq as American-backed Iraqi government forces fight Shia militiamen for control of Basra and parts of Baghdad.

Heavy fighting engulfed Iraq's two largest cities and spread to other towns yesterday as the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, gave fighters of the Mehdi Army, led by the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, 72 hours to surrender their weapons.

The gun battles between soldiers and militiamen, who are all Shia Muslims, show that Iraq's majority Shia community – which replaced Saddam Hussein's Sunni regime – is splitting apart for the first time.

Mr Sadr's followers believe the government is trying to eliminate them before elections in southern Iraq later this year, which they are expected to win.

Ahh, freedom has come to Iraq. The freedom to murder your political enemies with the army!

It's worth noting that the current Iraqi government under Maliki has close ties to Iran, and Sadr's people don't. So we're supporting the hostile takeover, or further takeover, of Iraq by.. Iran.

Heckuva job, Proconsul Petraeus!

Source: The Independent

Time to Call in... THE LEAGUE
Sadly, not the Justice League, that would be sweet, Batman and all. No, the League that brought us World War I.

MONTEREY, Calif. -- In McCain’s first major policy address since locking up the GOP nomination this morning, his campaign did its best to make its candidate look presidential. Using two teleprompters on the wings of the podium, McCain delivered a 30-minute speech that showed how a potential McCain presidency would try to change the shape of U.S. foreign policy.

Two new ideas came out of McCain’s speech, both focusing on shoring up relations with the country’s democratic allies.

“We have to strengthen our global alliances as the core of a new global compact -- a League of Democracies -- that can harness the vast influence of the more than one hundred democratic nations around the world to advance our values and defend our shared interests,” McCain said, reading from prepared texts.

Yes, we can't win at the UN, so we should start our OWN UN.

With blackjack! And hookers!

You know what, forget the UN!

Source: MSNBC

Free!!
Siegelman, the man railroaded into prison by Karl Rove, is out on bail at last!

UPDATE: Judge releases ex-Alabama Gov. on bond pending appeal
A federal appeals court approved the release of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman on bond Thursday while he appeals his convictions in a corruption case.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the former governor had raised "substantial questions of fact and law" in challenging his conviction.

The once-popular Democrat began serving a sentence of more than seven years in June on his conviction on six bribery-related counts and one obstruction count. He has been serving the sentence at a federal prison in Oakdale, La.

Grit your teeth, Bush. This one is going to sting.

Source: Raw Story

Bear Market
So, after a deal approving the sale of his company for 2 dollars a share, the CEO of Bear-Stearns himself cashes out at 10.

Yeah, he was obviously really gung-ho over that bailout deal.

Bear Stearns Cos. Chairman James Cayne on Thursday sold his holdings in the embattled investment bank ahead of its expected acquisition by JPMorgan Chase & Co.


Cayne sold 5.66 million shares for exactly $10.84 a share for $61.3 million. However, it was not known if those shares were dumped into the open market or if Cayne sold them to another party.

A spokesman for Bear Stearns would not comment on the sale.

I wouldn't comment either. It just makes you look bad.

Source: Raw Story

I Hate Spelling Guantanamo
The actual prison is of course a blight on humanity.

The stories of the Uyghurs in Guantánamo -- Muslims from the oppressed Xinjiang province of China, formerly known as East Turkistan -- have long demonstrated chronic injustice on the part of the US authorities to those who know of them, although they have only sporadically registered on the media's radar.

Numbering 22 men in total, three were picked up randomly in Afghanistan, another was caught crossing the Pakistani border disguised in a burka, while the other 18 were seized together by opportunistic Pakistani villagers, after fleeing Afghanistan in the wake of the US-led invasion in October 2001, and sold to US forces for a bounty, as was common at the time. A leaflet dropped by US planes offered enterprising villagers and soldiers "millions of dollars for helping the anti-Taliban force catch al-Qaeda and Taliban murderers."

These 18 men, who had fled their homeland because of persecution, in search of a new life, or in the hope of gaining some sort of training to enable them to fight back against their oppressors, had been living together in a small, run-down hamlet in Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains, mending the settlement's ruined buildings, and occasionally training on their only weapon, a aging AK-47.

After the US-led invasion, they were targeted in a US bombing raid, in which several men died. The survivors then made their way across the mountains to the Pakistani border, where they were first welcomed by the villagers, and then betrayed by them. In US custody, they attracted attention because of their supposed insights into the workings of the Chinese government, but it was apparent from early on that they had not been involved with either the Taliban or al-Qaeda, and that there was no reason to hold them.

Unfortunately for the Uyghurs, however, the declaration of their innocence only prefaced further problems, as they joined one of Guantánamo's least enviable groups: cleared prisoners who, because of international treaties, cannot be returned to their home countries for fear that they will be subjected to torture, or worse. The US government had obligingly declared those opposed to Chinese rule in Xinjiang province as "terrorists," in order to secure support for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and had even allowed -- or invited -- Chinese interrogators to question the men in Guantánamo, but when it came to returning them to China they refused to do so.

So basically, we're in bed with China on their brutal oppression of ethnic peoples (like the poor Tibetans), but we also are screwing over other innocent people who had the misfortune of being cashed in for the bounty and committed no other crime.

Lovely.

Source: The Huffington Post

Can She Do Anything Right?
More adventures of the worst Secretary of State since... well, the last one, really. That fake anthrax UN speech goes down as one of the worst moments in the history of US foreign policy.

Speaking to a group of journalists yesterday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice admitted that she didn’t think the war in Iraq would be as “this tough“:

Looking back on the last five years and the war in Iraq, Rice admitted: “I thought it would be tough, but I didn’t think it would be this tough.” She added, “It’s a society that’s only now beginning to emerge.”

...

– “What we didn’t know was how truly broken the society was,” she said. Although Saddam Hussein’s regime was mostly to blame for that, she said that U.N. sanctions contributed as well, because as a result of them, “agriculture is virtually dead in Iraq.”

Apparently, the “shock and awe” bombing campaign had little responsibility for “breaking” Iraqi society. Blaming Iraqis for the continued violence in Iraq is a fairly common strategy for those who advocated for the invasion of Iraq and are now trying to distance themselves from the disaster that ensued.

When all else fails, blame the victim!

Source: Think Progress

Another Murderer Walks Free
Heckuva job, military justice system.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Military prosecutors dropped all charges on Friday against a U.S. Marine accused of involuntary manslaughter and aggravated assault in the 2005 shooting deaths of two dozen unarmed Iraqi civilians at Haditha.


The charges against Lance Cpl. Stephen B. Tatum, 26, were dismissed "in order to continue to pursue the truth seeking process into the Haditha incident," the Marines said in a statement.

Word of the development came as jury selection was about to begin in Tatum's court-martial on charges of involuntary manslaughter, reckless endangerment and aggravated assault at the Camp Pendleton Marine base in California.

A Marine spokesman declined to elaborate on the decision, which was not announced in open court.

...

Tatum was one of eight Marines charged in the November 19, 2005, killing of 24 men, women and children at Haditha that triggered international condemnation of U.S. forces and he faced 19 years in prison if convicted on all on all charges.

Iraqi witnesses say angry Marines massacred unarmed civilians after a popular comrade, Lance Cpl. Miguel "TJ" Terrazas, was ripped in half by a roadside bomb. Defense attorneys maintain that the civilians were killed during a pitched battle with insurgents in and around Haditha.

Prosecutors have dropped charges against four other Marines in the case.

...

In previous hearings, Marines have testified that Tatum, who originally faced more serious charges of unpremeditated murder and negligent homicide, was among those who "cleared" two Iraqi houses after the roadside bombing, resulting in 19 deaths.

Another Marine testified Tatum told him to shoot a group of Iraqi women and children he found on a bed in a closed room. That Marine said he walked away but saw Tatum return and heard a loud noise, possibly gunfire or a grenade.

Who cares how many witnesses testified that they saw him murder helpless women and children?

They were just brown people!

Source: Raw Story

Oh, Eliot
Heh, the shorthand I used for this section, 'oheliot', looks like an Ancient Greek name.

This is sort of a tragedy in that sense, I suppose... hubris and all that.

Oh yeah, the story.

A prosecutor says former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer angrily ordered an aide to smear a political rival — something Spitzer denies.

Albany County District Attorney P. David Soares says Spitzer cursed at former aide Darren Dopp and told him to release records that could embarrass Senate Republican leader Joseph Bruno.

But Soares says it doesn't appear Spitzer broke any laws. This is the second time the prosecutor has reviewed the case.

Ahh, New York politics. They're just wonderfully entertaining.

Source: Raw Story

An Apt Comparison
From elected President Al Gore.

Former Vice President Al Gore is about to launch a major advertising campaign to raise awareness of global warming and will appear on 60 Minutes this Sunday to promote it.

In a brief teaser for the interview aired by CBS, Leslie Stahl says to Gore, "There's still a lot of skepticism about whether global warming is man-made."

"I don't think there's a lot," Gore replies. "You're talking about Dick Cheney?"

"I think those people are in such a tiny, tiny minority now with their point of view," Gore continues. "They're almost like the ones who still believe that the Moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona and those who believe the world is flat."

Man, Gore is better and better. He would have made a great President in 2000; now, he would be unto a God.

Source: Raw Story

Asylum
Who knew the House of Lords could be useful?

Britain must radically change its immigration policy and end immediately the deportation of failed asylum-seekers who fear persecution in Iran, a group of leading peers will tell the Government today.

The call for a moratorium on asylum removals is a direct response to the plight of Mehdi Kazemi, a gay Iranian teenager facing execution if he returns to Iran, whose case has been taken up by The Independent.

In a letter written to this newspaper, 17 members of the House of Lords say the case of Mr Kazemi demonstrates a change of policy is now the "only moral course" for the Government to follow.

And in a stark warning on capital punishment in Iran, the Lords report that, in January alone, more than 30 prisoners were executed for a range of offences deemed criminal by the Middle East state.

Go antiquated authority figures!

Source: The Independent

TSA: Protecting You From Piercings
They literally have nothing better to do.

LOS ANGELES - A Texas woman who said she was forced to remove a nipple ring with pliers in order to board an airplane called Thursday for an apology by federal security agents and a civil rights investigation.

"I wouldn't wish this experience upon anyone," Mandi Hamlin said at a news conference. "My experience with TSA was a nightmare I had to endure. No one deserves to be treated this way."

Hamlin, 37, said she was trying to board a flight from Lubbock to Dallas on Feb. 24 when she was scanned by a Transportation Security Administration agent after passing through a larger metal detector without problems.

The female TSA agent used a handheld detector that beeped when it passed in front of Hamlin's chest, the Dallas-area resident said.

Hamlin said she told the woman she was wearing nipple piercings. The women then called over her male colleagues, one of whom said she would have to remove the jewelry, Hamlin said.

Hamlin said she could not remove them and asked whether she could instead display her pierced breasts in private to the female agent. But several other male officers told her she could not board her flight until the jewelry was out, she said.

She was taken behind a curtain and managed to remove one bar-shaped piercing but had trouble with the second, a ring.

"Still crying, she informed the TSA officer that she could not remove it without the help of pliers, and the officer gave a pair to her," said Hamlin's attorney, Gloria Allred, reading from a letter she sent Thursday to the director of the TSA's Office of Civil Rights and Liberties.

Hamlin said she heard male TSA agents snickering as she took out the ring. She was scanned again and was allowed to board even though she still was wearing a belly button ring.

They were supposed to offer her a patdown search, it turns out, but the jerks wouldn't have been entertained enough by that.

This is what happens when you give scum authority, folks. They act on it.

(And no, I'm not saying all TSA agents are scum. Though the spate of recent news suggests a high proportion. I'm saying THESE ones are scum.)

Source: AZ Central

Judge Moron
So an idiot judge in Pennsylvania has decided that he's tired of all them there Spanish speakin' criminals.

HARRISBURG, Pa. - The next time they appear in Judge Peter Paul Olszewski Jr.'s Luzerne County, Pa., courtroom, four young Hazleton men who ran afoul of the law had best know their ABCs.

Learning English is a central part of the sentence that Olszewski imposed on the Spanish-speaking men, who earlier this week pleaded guilty to charges stemming from a robbery in May in Hazleton, about 100 miles northwest of Philadelphia.

The unusual sentence requires that the four, ranging in age from 17 to 22, return to his court a year from now to take an English test and show that they can speak and write the language. If they fail, the men will have to serve the full two years of the four-to-24-month sentence that Olszewski imposed.

The judge said the ruling was not meant as punishment.

"There's no way young kids can be hurt by knowing how to read and write the English language," Olszewski was quoted as saying in Thursday's Times Leader in Wilkes-Barre, which first reported the story.

"It's a means to helping them get a better education, getting a better job. Period," the judge added.

To anyone, anywhere, who thinks that this isn't racist crap, answer me this: has a judge ever assigned anyone AP math classes as a condition to avoid jail?

They too would help you with education and job searches.

Oh wait, no. Because it's not being mathematically illiterate that Americans hate; it's not speaking English.

Source: AZ Central

Mittens Is 'Out'!

We Won't Have Mitt To Kick Around Anymore
So Mitt 'suspended' his campaign today. More on that in a minute. For now it means that Guy Smiley has decided that it's not worth any more of his Clear Channel millions to fight the good fight and soldier on after the double humiliation he got on Tuesday, with McCain smashing in his teeth from the center and Huckabee putting a boot up his ass on the right.

Ahh, Mittens. We hardly knew ye.

What does this mean for the election? A couple of things. One: this is great news for Huckabee. A lot, and I mean a LOT, of people who vote for Romney will go to him, not McCain. Huckabee just went from a solid third place to a very comfortable second. Two: This is *not* great news for McCain. Romney only 'suspended' his campaign, which means his delegates aren't dispersed. It's up to the individual state in the Republican party, but at least some, perhaps most, of his delegates remain his for the convention. If he was to formally toss them to a resurgent Huckabee, it could get ugly.

Suspending a campaign has a different meaning depending on the party.

On the Republican side, decisions on how to allocate delegates is left to the state parties.

So McCain has to suck up, and suck up he shall. Oh, the sucking we shall see. Think Bangkok whorehouse,if you like.

According to a senior McCain adviser, McCain called Romney and told him he "admired his speech today and that he was a tough competitor."

McCain also told Romney he looks forward to sitting down with him at the earliest opportunity. McCain did not ask Romney for his endorsement.

McCain is being pretty friendly with him, considering, oh, this, amongst other things:

This morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Mary Matalin — former Dick Cheney adviser and current Mitt Romney flack — made what appeared to be a back-handed swipe at John McCain’s family. Romney has “what all Americans want in the White House,” Matalin said, “which is an all-American family”

John McCain, for those of you who don't know, has an adopted daughter from Bangladesh. So by 'All-American', Matalin means 'not-a-damn-darkie-among-them'.

Food for thought.

So what does Romney have to say about this? The campaign suspension, not the McCain suckup or the tacit racism, I mean. Why not-quit now?

"If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign, be a part of aiding a surrender to terror."

Ahh, so classy. Implying that two United States Senators want us to lose to a phantom enemy that exists only in our own minds.

Glad he took the high road. None of that 'spending more time with my family' crap.

Source: TPM Election Central
CNN.com
Think Progress

Saturday Morning News Coming Down

W00t, Kinkos called about our evil surprise.

Kids Do the Darndest Things
So you hear a lot about kids imitating this or that, and how it's therefore the victim of imitation's responsibility to make a product that kids either won't want to imitate, or won't die from imitating.

But what if, and here's a radical thought, kids are just sort of, you know, stupid, and could die playing any number of games? What if they could, gasp, imitate beneficial behavior as well?

Cases in point. First, a four year old British girl who apparently hung herself by accident, again apparently imitating a Go, Diego Go episode. I'm not sure how they know exactly what she was playing at, since nobody was watching her, but that's the story they're going with.

On the other hand, a young boy tried to defend his mother with a toy lightsaber from some random jackass who assaulted her on the street. Police were thinking that the commotion (and if it wasn't a cheapo saber perhaps the flashing light and sound) helped to drive off Mr. Happy-Fist.

The Lesson here? Maybe we should just remember that kids are kids, and the world is a big, scary place, itself only a fragile soap-bubble thin shell over the howling gulf of madness, and therefore, you might want to supervise the children rather than trying to child-proof Planet Earth.

Sources: Fox Noise
Fox Noise

The Old Axiom Is Probably Right
You know, the one about something seeming too good to be true...

Well, anyway, there's an air-powered car coming to market, promising 200km a tankful of air, a cost of only 7k dollars, and a top speed near 70. It's made of fiberglass and uses a compressed air engine of sorts to power itself.

Great, huh? Well...

If you look at the fine print, it's not that they're lying, but sort of exaggerating the novelty here.

The deal is, this is an electric car. An extremely, extremely light electric car. Tiny too. Instead of using Lithium-Ion batteries as the energy storage mechanism, it uses a tank of compressed air, that it can charge up by being plugged into a wall socket, where it then draws your juice to compress its own internal air supply.

So what you have here isn't a magic air-car, it's a fiberglass alterna-Prius.

Also, they 'hope' to see compressed air charging stations that would allow the car to fill up as fast as a gasoline car, which of course is the same fallacy as hydrogen cars; it'll never happen. There's no economic incentive for Big Oil to become Big Air Compressor.

So that leaves its electric car capabilities. How are those? Sort of.. beta.

It takes quite a while to charge, it's an ultra-light with a low top speed, and it has little bugs like not yet having a heating system worked out, since its engine doesn't generate heat.

Which will come in really handy, from a French automaker. It's not like they have winter in Europe,

right?

*shrug*

I'm all for alternative energy storage mechanisms, but let's not pretend we're reinventing the wheel when all we're doing is changing the number of spokes.

Sources: Raw Story
Promo Site

Texas Still Sucks
So a black couple tried to move into a white neighborhood in Arlington, Texas. Some of the locals were not impressed with this decision, assaulting the woman and spraypainting the house with racist grafitti.

The cops duly charged the woman who performed the assault with, well, assault, and the city is making a big show out of unity or something like that. But the big thing on everybody's mind in Arlington isn't that, you know, their city is full of racist, violent fucks, but that... the victimized homeowner doesn't want to take down the graffiti.

See, the guy has this funny idea that, you know, maybe the Texas town should have to bear its racist shame publicly. The cops, the neighbors, the city, the local media, they all are rather opposed to this idea, and are pressuring the man, trying to make him remove the graffiti. Despite there being no law on the books to compel him to do so, as the victim of the crime.

They're even holding fundraisers and such, as if the problem was that he couldn't pay to get a new garage door (the old one now being colorfully decorated in red spray paint with 'Die Nigger' and so forth.

However, many neighbors were annoyed. "Everyone gets the drift," said one. "It needs to be taken off."

Oh, we get the drift all right. Southerners are happy enough, coddling racist extremists, but they dislike it when the rock is removed and all their animal-lovin cousins scurry out from underneath in full Klan regalia. Bad for the public image and all that.

So once again, I say: Texas sucks.

Source: Raw Story

Privacy For Me, Not For Thee
So a judge has been forced to resign after somebody nicked, and then released to the cops and the press, an audiocassette he made. Apparently the judge likes to indulge in some rather kinky voice recordings. The cops got the impression that there was something horrible going on, until they investigated, it was leaked to the press, who are now suing to get access to the tape to publish it, and the judge, despite having committed no crime, has been pressured into resigning from office.

For what? For having a private life and hurting no one? Come on, people. You can't abuse a dictaphone. Get over yourselves. Here, let me sacrifice my chances at ever being a judge.

I loooove to kill puppies. Their dead, limp bodies feel so soft and squishy. Their fur is so much nicer as it cools, and they make great throw-pillows until the guts start to putrefy. Hmm, guts. I could stab ice picks into their tiny brains all day long, it'd be so much fun, I wish the neighborhood had more dogs!

There. See. I wrote something disgusting. Apparently my public life is over now.

Sort of a relief, really. Who wants to dedicate their life to public service when the public are such a bunch of pearl-clutching pansies, hunched perpetually over their fainting couches?

Source: AZCentral.com

Idiot Science Watch
So some nutbars at Yale have conducted a study they claim shows that women and gays are worse drivers than straight men.

If you think that sounds a bit out there, and would be skeptical, Good for you!

First the headline: Women and gay men are 'worst drivers'

Wow, that sounds pretty ironclad. Let's check the article.

Research has revealed that both perform poorly in tasks involving navigation and spatial awareness when compared to heterosexual men.

Psychologists at Queen Mary, University of London, who conducted the study, believe the findings mean driving in a strange environment would be more difficult for gay men and women than for straight male motorists.

Oh, so they didn't test driving at all. They tested 'navigation and spatial awareness'. Well, that sounds a bit fishy. What does that even mean?

The research team, led by Dr Qazi Rahman, used virtual reality simulations of two common tests of spatial learning and memory developed at Yale University.

In one, volunteers had to swim through an underwater maze to find a hidden platform, while the second involved exploring radial arms projecting from a central junction to receive 'rewards' .

So, what the study actually 'showed' is that women and gay men are worse at playing a couple of videogames, developed at Yale.

That's not nearly as big of a news story though, is it? Gee, I wonder why they would have extrapolated so wildly....

This part in particular makes me chuckle.

The results back earlier studies supporting the stereotype that women are poor navigators.

Although women are more successful in tests requiring them to remember the position of objects, men consistently do better in tasks requiring navigation and uncovering hidden objects.

God knows you never need to remember where stuff is when you're FINDING A PLACE.

Lolz. Seriously, these people are nitwits. You have a result that shows, potentially, if your copy of Tron there is actually a decent proxy, that women and gay men might have poorer navigational skills. So you run out and start screaming that they're poor drivers?

Might you want to, I dunno, actually put some subjects behind the wheel first? Test the actual, you know, driving?

Why do I have to know how to do these peoples' jobs better than they do?

Source: The Telegraph