"I handcuffed lightnin' and throwed thunder in jail"
Happy birthday to the greatest.
I grew up without benefit of color. I don't remember even meeting anybody with dark brown skin for the first 12 or 15 years of my life. But in 7th grade, I had a teacher/coach who showed us films of (then) Cassius Clay. He taught us that a man's ability is where everything starts because that will show you what's in his heart. If you get hung up on how he doesn't look like you or act like you or think like you - while you're busy with all the shit that doesn't matter, he'll be busy knockin' you on your dumb ass. On a playing field. In a classroom. At a job. Everybody's competing. Everybody can learn to do what it takes to win.
If you don't respect all of that because you refuse to see anybody else as your equal, you'll have a hard time being willing to do the work necessary to give yourself a shot. Then the only way you win is if the game is rigged in your favor. And that ain't winnin'.
Again, this by no means obviates the real threat from terrorism generally or ISIS specifically, but it makes the rhetoric on the GOP stage seem a bit hysterical.
Obviously one key difference here is that terrorist groups would like to kill many more Americans, and are surely trying to accomplish just that, whereas presumably your sofa is not plotting any major attacks. But the point is that the risk terrorism poses to everyday American lives is not where you might have thought it was from this debate.
America just doesn't have much of a domestic terrorism problem. Incidents like the shootings in San Bernardino are vanishingly rare, as violent extremist groups have very few adherents here. US intelligence operations make it very difficult for foreign terrorist groups to bring operatives into the US and plan an attack.
Former Virginia Governor Robert (Vaginal Bob) McDonnell will stay out of federal prison for a bit longer. HuffPo:
The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday agreed to take up the case of former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R), who in October urged the justices to review his multiple convictions on federal corruption charges.
The justices' decision to hear the case effectively allows McDonnell to remain out of prison at least until the court issues a decision -- which could arrive as late as June.
McDonnell's lawyers are trying to convince the court that the kind of "official action" federal law treats as corruption -- and that a jury agreed McDonnell committed while governor -- was no more than "routine political courtesies," including activities such as "arranging meetings, asking questions, and attending events."
"This is the first time in our history that a public official has been convicted of corruption despite never agreeing to put a thumb on the scales of any government decision," McDonnell's lawyers wrote in their appeal to the Supreme Court. "Officials routinely arrange meetings for donors, take their calls, and politely listen to their ideas."
I think we need to be ready for the Roberts Court to use this case to strengthen the link between Money and Speech. It seems like these guys need to establish precedents that reinforce the system of Legalized Bribery that's been evolving from what continues to look more and more like our failed experiment in self-government.
For a minute there, I tho't I'd accidentally surfed into a That Girl rerun. But anyway. Governor Nikki Haley, R-SC:
These things are never good and most often flat-out awful, so she gets a little credit just for having the guts to try, and by comparison, it's a shitload better than Rubio or Jindal, so there's that(?)
Conventional wisdom has it that this is mostly a message aimed at Trump on behalf of a GOP Establishment as they finally start to wake up and get worried that the Monster Of The Id that they created in the 80s and 90s and fed for 35 years has crashed through the fence that was supposed to keep it in the Democrats' yard and is now completely fucking up the GOP rose beds, shittin' in GOP swimming pools and sniffin' everybody's butt cracks - which is pretty much exactly what the "Libruls" (and the GOP's very own "moderates") have been trying to tell them would happen for those same 35 years. Because rational thinkers understand that you don't control people for very long. And - not to get too nerdily metaphorical on ya here - when you push somebody to tap into something that always includes that "dark side", try not to act so surprised when Kylo Ren shivs you through the fucking heart, Mr Solo. (hat tip = driftglass)
Anyway.
She makes the GOP's big point about immigration and terrorism, and how we have to be really reallyreally careful and even straight-up suspicious of new-comers and outsiders and people who're different from us. Then, not more than a few paragraphs later, she slides right into "nine beautiful souls" welcoming a stranger into their worship circle only to be gunned down because he turned out to be a terrorist jerkwad. Of course, she disguises it by glossing it over with how forward-thinking and courageous she is for having taken down that stoopid fucking flag (props for that BTW), but she's inviting that standard xenophobia inference, and she knows the people she wants to make the connection will make the connection.
This shit doesn't happen by accident, kids. That's some of the best code-speak ever.
She's not saying "stop being a buncha ignorant racist assholes". She's saying, "stop being ignorant racist assholes out in the open because that embarrasses me because I have to get you to vote for me".
In the end, she's telling people who're in open revolt against what they see as a party - that they've been taught BY THAT PARTY - to believe is being ruined by "Political Correctness" to be politically correct. She's demanding it.
I'd say the horse has left the barn, but that assumes the barn's still there as some kinda point of reference. You're in a bit of a pickle, Nikki.
"It's not too much of a stretch to say that some of the only people in America who're going to work the same job in the same place with a health and retirement package for 30 years are sitting in this chamber."
(about 18:50)
"But after years now of record corporate profit, working families won't get more opportunity or bigger paychecks just by letting big banks or big oil or hedge funds make their own rules at everybody else's expense."
(about 22:00) Talking about innovation and research. He's trying to reassert government's proper roll in pushing for progress while trying to keep the privateers and the rentiers from controlling the mechanisms of that progress solely for the sake of corporate profit. (starting about 30:00) Let's go back to being the smart country when it comes to what we do about terrorism. Let's not help the bad guys by repeating their rhetoric about how big and bad they are, and how they're coming to fucking destroy America. Basically - "Stop losing your shit all the fucking time." These are bad guys and they "have to be rooted out, hunted down and destroyed", but stop saying that a buncha slavering fanatics charging around in a used Toyota pickup is somehow the equivalent of any random squad of US Marines - why do you not understand how insulting that is to the troops you claim to have the highest regard for? Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you people?
NeoLib uh-oh: (about 17:00) - This one sounds like he's selling an investment plan for Wall Street - but it ties into the remarks on not letting the too-big-to-fail gang play by their own rules - he's going for that famous "Obama in the middle" thing(?)
"(on a guy losing his job)...he should still be able to save for retirement and take his savings with him."
It was a good one to go out on. I wonder how long before the Repubs get their strategies in place for what to do now. Gov Haley's "response" seemed to hold some interesting weirdness. I'll try to get to that later.
A car full of Irish nuns is sitting at a traffic light in downtown Dublin, when a bunch of rowdy drunks pull up alongside of them.
"Hey, show us yer tits, ya bloody penguins!" shouts one of the drunks.
Quite shocked, Mother Superior turns to Sister Mary Immaculata and says, "I don't think they know who we are; show them your cross." Sister Mary Immaculata rolls down her window and shouts, "Piss off, ya fookin' little wankers, before I come over there and rip yer balls off!"
Sister Mary Immaculata then rolls up her window, looks back at Mother Superior, quite innocently, and asks, "Did that sound cross enough?
Yes, it's Al Jazeera. And yes, it's biased. And yes, we have to get used to the fact that nobody's really doing good journalism anymore, so we have to be able to sort thru the shit on our own.
The Bundys have voiced support for a variety of right-wing fringe ideas, particularly the “posse comitatus” notion that no legitimate governments exist above the county level, and they believe in no higher law authority than the county sheriff.
However, posse members have embedded an implicit threat in their belief system.
If the sheriff violates his oath of office, as determined by the right-wing extremists themselves, “he shall be removed by the posse to the most populated intersection of streets in the township and at high noon be hung by the neck, the body remaining until sundown as an example to those who would subvert the law.”
The main point here is that there's not a dime's worth of difference between what these jagoffs are doing in places like Oregon and what their counterpart jagoffs are doing in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.
The safety gizmo was found to be malfunctioning during an inspection in 1976 - the last time this site was inspected - and it was removed in 1979.
No safety inspections in very nearly 40 years. A safety valve that prob'ly would have prevented the thing from leaking for these last 4 months - but hey, we'll just go on about our bidness because the market will make any necessary corrections all in good time, and only some libtard who hates anybody trying to make a living would think anything might actually go wrong.
This fits nicely into my take on the GOP Playbook.
1) Fuck up the EPA - cut funding, block appointments, harass in general
2) Wait for an environmental disaster
3) Point at it and say, "The EPA's all fucked up; their job-killing business-hostile regulations were supposed to make sure this didn't happen. The EPA is useless. Let's get rid of the EPA"
