If the world made sense, this would happen:

Via benediction

It is truly crazy to incite violence against abortion providers with lies about "baby parts", and then to become self-righteously offended when the connection between your words and someone's violent actions are pointed out. The right-wingnuts own the Planned Parenthood murders. They have cried fire in a crowded theater until some bastard started a blaze, and then they act surprised? Please . . . . .

Good Dog

Keystone Progress Daily Funnies .: Far Left Side, July 26, 2015

Is this thing on?

Image from fineartamerica.com by steven-digman

The effort of writing on a little seen blog when it seems the world is going to hell in a very large hand basket is often too much; this is obvious from my infrequent postings. What can be said about cops seeming to have a license to kill African-Americans, billionaires blatantly buying power, racist assholes provoking terrorist assholes to attack, or right wingers fantasizing a military takeover by Obama of Texas? You can't compete with such insane reality.

Nevertheless, I am still here, and I hope to start more frequent missives in this space. Maybe Bernie Sanders running for President has lifted my spirits (which it has), but the springtime weather also is bucking up my psyche. There is hope in this world, and to not see it is to surrender to the forces that would drag us down.

More to come.

American Priorities

(Via Keystone Daily Funnies)

I often think that we react to things like terror in a way that makes things worse, while we ignore things the monied interests and media don't think we can do anything about. Thus priorities are set . . . .

Osama's Legacy

"I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed."

When I look at the new reality in our country---that many people seem okay with all their phone calls and online communications being tracked and whistleblowers like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden are called "traitors"---I can't help but feel that Osama bin Laden accomplished his goals with the attacks of 9-11. He wanted to instill fear in our hearts and change our lives and society, and those attacks seem to have done just that. He wanted to turn us against each other and Islam, and that too seems to have been the result.

But it is only through the complicity and cooperation of our leaders and us that those things have come to pass.  We could have displayed courage and stood up to the terror Osama and his criminal cohorts tried to instill in us. Instead, we are sacrificing our freedoms for the illusion of safety. I hope it is not too late to stop the drift into totalitarianism and plutocracy.

Time will tell.

We're being sold down the river:

The people of this country have become less and less important to the political classes. Both parties, the media, and corporate America communicate more and more with each other, and less and less with the electorate. Oh, there is an enormous amount of lip service paid to "the will of the people," but it is all for show.

Cases in point: the opponents of Health Care Reform are saying most Americans oppose reform, while most polls show that a majority of Americans favor more progressive changes than are even on the table at this point. The major banks and insurance companies who crashed the economy receive massive amounts of bailout money, while homeowners and citizens without jobs are either ignored or demeaned. And an independent Consumer Credit Agency to help protect people from the predatory lending practices that are decimating the middle class is scrapped, all due to credit industry lobbying efforts.

In this atmosphere the Supreme Court grants even more power to corporations by declaring there should be no limits on spending in elections. Free speech isn't free, and those who can afford it get the most. And if you don't believe that, try getting one of your Senators or Representatives's attention. Even a group of citizens doesn't get the chance to speak that a single lobbyist for a corporation or industry does.

What is this country coming to? While people who don't have a fucking clue what they are talking about cry "Socialist" at policies that are at best moderate, and Sarah Palin is called "more intelligent" than Obama by Crazy Glenn Beck, there is no way to reason or negotiate for what is best for the people of this country.

I got news for you wing nuts: the Nazis were right wing! They lauded blind patriotism and white supremacy. They are YOU!

And the Pentagon shooter may not have been a Muslim, but he was a fucking terrorist!

AND people who call Obama a Socialist are out of their goddam minds!

There, I feel a little better now . . . .

The terrorists Have got us right where they want us

(Via BBC News)

A US Airways flight was diverted to Philadelphia after a young Jewish man's prayer items triggered a bomb scare, Philadelphia police said.

The incident arose when the man used a phylactery, a small black box Orthodox Jews strap to their head as part of their prayer rituals, police said.

The man was not arrested and the plane landed without incident.

US airports are on high alert after a Nigerian man was held over an alleged bomb plot on a plane last month.

His device allegedly malfunctioned and he was quickly overpowered by passengers and crew on the flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.

The latest incident took place on a 50-seat regional jet originally bound for Louisville, Kentucky from New York's LaGuardia airport. It landed in Philadelphia at about 0900 local time (1400 GMT).

Phylacteries - called tefillin in Hebrew - are two small boxes of black leather, with straps attached to them.

Observant Jewish men are required to place one box on their head and tie the other one on their arm as part of their morning prayers.

Another example of how the people who perpetrated 9/11 have accomplished exactly what they wanted—to terrify us into destroying ourselves.

Remember the old Twilight Zone episode, "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street," where aliens use the paranoia of the townspeople to make them turn on each other so they can watch at a safe distance? This is just what Osama Bin Laden and his lackeys envisioned in their attacks; making us so scared we see terrorists in every person who is a little different from us. In a society which supposedly prides itself on diversity, fear of the "other" can cripple us. It is already happening among the right wing tea-baggers who see our President as a "foreign" influence, bent on the destruction of our society.

By giving in to fear, those who preach of racial profiling and draconian justice are doing just what Osama and his punks want. In fact, they are NO DIFFERENT from the terrorists, it that they wish to undermine and destroy the American way of life.

Who would Jesus murder?

(Via truthout)

George R. Tiller, the nation's most prominent provider of controversial late-term abortions, was shot and killed yesterday in the lobby of his Lutheran church in Wichita, where he was serving as an usher.

So the wing nuts who call abortion murder are rattling their sabers and calling murder justice in this instance. And the vigilante who considered himself righteous shoots down a man in cold blood while he is in church.

I have always felt that if Jesus were around in this times, he would be protecting women who are running the gauntlet of rabid protesters to get into abortion providers, or even perhaps protecting the providers themselves as they are in their churches. That is, if he wasn't in Gitmo being tortured as a terrorist.

The true terrorists in our country are the assholes who justify this sort of abomination. Whether or not you think abortion is murder, murder is DEFINITELY murder.

Some perspective here, please

(Via Talking Points Memo)

The Democrats stripped funding out of the defense appropriations bill for the winding down and dismantlement of the Gitmo detention facility. And the background issue is the refusal to bring accused terrorists or possibly at some point convicted terrorists into the US for incarceration. And I'm hearing this senator or that one from this or that state, saying hey, don't bring any of these terrorists to Maine! or maybe, don't bring them to Arkansas or Kentucky or wherever.

But, c'mon, I'm assuming these guys aren't going to be deposited at the county jail in Baltimore or Baton Rouge. We've got an incredibly secure and incredibly hellish Super Max facility in Florence, Colorado. And it seems clear that that's where these guys would end up. (That's where Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, now resides, along with a bunch of other high-profile terrorists.) So can't we at least stop fools from Texas and Idaho from pretending these guys are coming to their state?

Apparently not. When did America become such a nation of scared people and fear mongers? Do we really think our prisons, which we must be expert at since we have so many of our people in them, can't handle these inmates? Or are we only good at incarcerating marijuana smokers and drunk drivers?

Actually, living by the principles this country was founded on may take more balls than America has any more.

Department of Homeland Security Blankets

What are the authorities doing???

"Don't worry, son! If this saves just one life, it'll be worth it!"

(Via KMCB)

OCEANSIDE, Calif. -- School officials in Oceanside, Calif., are defending a scared-straight exercise that sent some El Camino High School students into hysterics.

One Monday last month, California Highway Patrol officers went to 20 classrooms and delivered the grim news that several students had been killed in drunken driving car crashes over the weekend.

The news devastated Michelle de Gracia, who says she was nauseated and too stunned to cry. Others in her physics class were so upset that the teacher had to tell them it was all staged. Then they became angry. De Gracia said, "They got the shock they wanted."

A 15-year-old student said that while she feels "betrayed" by her teachers and school administrators, she also feels that "if it saves one life, it's worth it." Others disagree. During assemblies after the hoax, some students held up posters reading, "Death is real. Don't play with our emotions."

Camino High guidance counselor Lori Tauber said, "We wanted them to be traumatized."

Ya know, while saving lives is a laudable goal, such asinine ideas as pretending people are dead seems a tad, how shall I say this, CRUEL. Would this kind of stunt ever have been pulled on adults? The students are right on in being pissed about this. The smugness of this kind of stupidity is only surpassed by its meanness

Bowling vs the future of our country

(Via Glenn Greenwald)

In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to "domestic military operations" within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits. Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score.

Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:

"Yoo and torture" - 102
"Mukasey and 9/11" -- 73
"Yoo and Fourth Amendment" -- 16
"Obama and bowling" -- 1,043
"Obama and Wright" -- More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)
"Obama and patriotism" - 1,607
"Clinton and Lewinsky" -- 1,079

It is becoming more and more evident, as if it wasn't already, that as citizens we cannot depend on the media to show us the important issues. It is incumbent on us to search out the truth, as the press is far to enamored with the sound of its own voice to decide that for us. Maybe this is really the way it is supposed to be, anyway, but God help us all if we can't see that destroying our Constitutional rights is more important than Obama's bowling score.

One other point to note about all of this is that these fixations are as skewed as they are vapid. Barack Obama is an exotic elitist freak because he went to Harvard Law School and made $1 million from his book. Hillary Clinton can't possibly have any connection to the Regular Folk because her husband, who grew up dirt poor, became quite wealthy after being President. John Kerry was completely removed from the concerns of the Regular People because his second wife was rich.
By contrast, George W. Bush was a down-home, salt-of-the-earth Man of the People despite being the grandson of a U.S. Senator, the son of a President (who greatly magnified his riches in his post-presidency), and the by-product of an extremely wealthy, coddled life. Ronald Reagan was pure Americana despite spending most of his adult life as a very wealthy Hollywood actor (and converting his post-presidency into far greater riches still). And John McCain is as Regular a Guy as it gets, even though he dumped his first wife (the mother of his three children) after she was disfigured and disabled by a near-fatal car accident so that he could marry his much younger, much prettier, and extremely wealthy heiress-mistress, whose family riches then launched his political career and sustained a life of luxury for almost three decades (that's how McCain's rustic "Sedona cabin" -- i.e., his sprawling compound -- came to be).

It would be bad enough if our political press were obsessed with such trivialities. The fact that they do so in such a Republican-leader-worshiping manner makes it only that much worse, particularly given that it's this dynamic, more than anything else, that determines the outcome of our elections

It seems that to the media, torture is fine, but don't you dare get a low bowling score. What a load of crap!

Torture by any other name still stinks!

(Via truthout)

Geneva - The United Nations' torture investigator criticized the White House Wednesday for defending the use of waterboarding and urged the U.S. to give up its defense of "unjustifiable" interrogation methods.

The comments from Manfred Nowak, the U.N.'s special rapporteur on torture, came a day after the Bush administration acknowledged publicly for the first time that waterboarding was used by U.S. government questioners on three terror suspects.

Testifying before Congress, CIA Director Michael Hayden said the suspects were waterboarded in 2002 and 2003.

"This is absolutely unacceptable under international human rights law," Nowak said. "Time has come that the government will actually acknowledge that they did something wrong and not continue trying to justify what is unjustifiable."

The White House on Wednesday defended the use of waterboarding, saying it is legal - not torture as critics argue - and has saved American lives.

Our representatives are so far down the path to insanity that they can't see what is moral or even legal anymore. Impeachment needs to be back on the table. Throw the bastards out!

More proof the terrorists are winning:

(Via MSNBC)

NEW HAVEN, Conn. - Two people who sprinkled flour in a parking lot to mark a trail for their offbeat running club inadvertently caused a bioterrorism scare and now face a felony charge.

The sprinkled powder forced hundreds to evacuate an IKEA furniture store Thursday.

New Haven ophthalmologist Daniel Salchow, 36, and his sister, Dorothee, 31, who is visiting from Hamburg, Germany, were both charged with first-degree breach of peace, a felony.

The siblings set off the scare while organizing a run for a local chapter of the Hash House Harriers, a worldwide group that bills itself as a “drinking club with a running problem.”

“Hares” are given the task of marking a trail to direct runners, throwing in some dead ends and forks as challenges. On Thursday, the Salchows decided to route runners through the massive IKEA parking lot.

Police fielded a call just before 5 p.m. that someone was sprinkling powder on the ground. The store was evacuated and remained closed the rest of the night. The incident prompted a massive response from police in New Haven and surrounding towns.

(SNIP)

Mayoral spokeswoman Jessica Mayorga said the city plans to seek restitution from the Salchows, who are due in court Sept. 14.

“You see powder connected by arrows and chalk, you never know,” she said. “It could be a terrorist, it could be something more serious. We’re thankful it wasn’t, but there were a lot of resources that went into figuring that out.”

Or to put it another way, "we are dumb as a box of rocks."

This is just the kind of thing terrorists LOVE. The point of terrorism is to create a climate of fear, where the most innocent actions cause fear and inappropriate reaction. God this is stupid. Charging these people with anything other than littering is utterly insane.

Can you find the terrorist here:

or

In New Haven, the answer is number two . . . .