The MSM is a Weapon of Mass Distraction.

Be Well.

FTA: "There is no good way to gauge" how much any given company spends on elections, said Karl Sandstrom, a former vice chairman of the Federal Election Commission and counsel to the Center for Political Accountability. "There's no central collection of the information, no monitoring."

As the people lose privacy the corporations gain secrecy and even more political power than ever.

Do Not Want.

Be Well.

/That's it fer now fer the Tater o' Doom, folks.
//Exiting the Retort as ya do
stage left.

What happens if you pay an exorcist to rid yer body of evil spirits and then pay him with a bad cheque?

Do you get re-possessed?

/Yes, feeling really bad about that one! ^_^

Be Well.

Refusing to accept Jeremy Rosner's self-serving revisionist history on behalf of his good friends Rahm, James and Stan is particularly critical now because Democrats are poised to do this yet again, and this same tired faction is providing the "intellectual and strategic" ammunition. When running for President, Barack Obama emphatically pledged again and again to overturn -- not continue -- the Bush/Cheney template on Terrorism and civil liberties. He railed against the notion that we need to abandon our "values" (due process, the rule of law, civilian courts, habeas corpus, transparency) in order to stay safe. And he won -- resoundingly.

Yet from the start, he takes a half-step forward in that direction followed by two fearful steps back. He grants civilian trials to a handful of detainees while ordering military commissions and indefinite detention for most. He trumpets new transparency guidelines while invoking "secrecy" to block courts from reviewing Bush crimes and re-writing FOIA to allow the suppression of torture photos. He vows to close GITMO and then plans to re-locate its core injustices to Illinois. He praises habeas review for GITMO detainees while seeking to deny it to those shipped from around the world to Bagram. He lauds the beauty of due process while compiling hit lists of American citizens to be murdered with no due process, far from any battlefield. He hails the centrality of the Rule of Law while demanding that Bush crimes be suppressed in the name of Looking Forward, etc. etc.

THIS!

Be Well.

Some pretty savvy analysis from Mr Greenwald on how cynical advice from such ostensibly lib luminaries as Carville, Greenberg and Shrum led to both the original backing of the Iraq War by Dems, their subsequent support for the costs of that war up to and including Obama's current nonsensical continuation of FAILed BushCo policies.

The story aint sexy and it's a bit of a slog but it's also important stuff, well worth noting.

Be Well.

Q: What do you get when you cross an elephant with a prostitute?

A: A two-ton pick-up.

...or a girl who'll do you fer a peanut.

Be Well.

/Yo Mama so fat that the back of her neck looks like a package of hotdogs.

//So fat that when she jumped in the air she got stuck.

///So fat that she's got more Chins than a Chinese phone book.

This country is capable of great change during moments of great leadership.

That's a little naive.

America is a country that is ruled by a corporate duopoly posing as a functioning representative democratic republic.

This has been true fer generations now.

The two parties are both dependent on donations from the 400 richest families in the country and corporate dough, both domestic and international, in order to get elected and then re-elected.

Last election over 100 major corporations gave huge wads of cash to BOTH parties.

The will of the people and their long term needs and wants are given short shrift in order to facilitate a corporate agenda.

In light of that grim reality any change that comes to America through legislation is doomed to mediocrity. Doomed to be either crushed coming out the gate or de-clawed through lobbied loopholes and demonized in the MSM.

The way they are able to get away with is because the country is divided by social issues that never seem to find resolution.

The pro-life, anti-gay right point fingers at the pro-choice, pro-equal rights left thus ensuring that the politicians never find an electorate united against them.

Obviously the information age has helped matters somewhat. The low approval numbers of the Legislative branch of government bear out the idea that more folks are waking up to the untenable situation they find themselves in.

Within that context the idea that a single leader can change everything single-handedly is preposterous.

Spud holds to the idea that Obama is a well intentioned leader who is being stymied by the realities of his own need to please the powers-that-be as well as by the thoroughly corrupted congress and senate.

He's a good actor in a bad play.

Until corporate money is removed from the electoral process there can be no real change. The latest BS decision by the SCOTUS that money equals free speech dictates that things will only get worse from here on in.

Spud's 2 cents.

/Don't you just hate Canadian change?

Be Well.

Wow, Mississipi is one backwards-assed fuckstain of a place.

A hearty spuddish FU to the asswipes who made this stupid move.

And a tip of me spuddish chapeau to the good people at the ACLU fer fighting this insanity.

Be Well.

Kid goes home from school one day and tells his dad that he's been offered a role in the school play.

"What role is it?" asked the Dad.

"I'd play a guy who's been married for twenty years" sed the kid.

"That's no good", sputtered the Dad, "You should hold out for a speaking part"

Be Well.

I am curious how white folks in rural area are over-represented. Are you saying census takers count 10 in a household when there are really 8? Or are you saying that being accurately counted is over-representation?

Good question, Goat.

While Congress bickers about whether to make statistical adjustments to the census, whose old-fashioned nose-counting method famously undercounts poor people and minorities, yet another problem with unadjusted enumeration tends to get overlooked: It almost certainly overcounts rich people.

Perhaps you're familiar with the statistic that the 1990 census missed 4 million (disproportionately low-income) people. This is actually a slight oversimplification. The 1990 census missed a net 4 million people, a figure arrived at by combining the 8.4 million people the census failed to count and the 4.4 million the census never should have counted in the first place. According to a study by the General Accounting Office, about 4 million of those 4.4 million overcounted people were "double counts"--people who'd already been counted once in the census and somehow got counted a second time.

When Wisgoof was born the doctor took one look at him and slapped his mother.

One night Wisgoof, 101 Airhorn and Jakoff were talking about how ugly their wives were. Not able to settle it there they headed off to see for themselves. When they got to Jakoff house he knocked and his wife opened the door. Airhorn threw up but Wisgoof only retched a little. When they got to Airhorn's house he knocked and the little lady weighing 300 pounds opened the door making Jakoff cry out for eyebleach.

Finally, they arrived at Wisgoof's house and he took them around to the cellar door at the back of the house. He unlocked the chain and knocked on the door and yelled "Honey, get up here".

"Should I wear the bag over my head?" she asked.

Naw, sed Wisgoof, I don't wanna fuck you I just want you to meet some people.

Be Well.

Why the rush to pass it before recess?

Because realistically a POTUS only has 18 months from innaugeration to pass legislation before the mid term campaigning starts and nothing can get done.

Wait ... people went bankrupt because 18 million couldn't buy insurance???

The people went bankrupt were not only the uninsured and under-insured but the insured as well.

BACKGROUND: Our 2001 study in 5 states found that medical problems contributed to at least 46.2% of
all bankruptcies. Since then, health costs and the numbers of un- and underinsured have increased, and
bankruptcy laws have tightened.
METHODS: We surveyed a random national sample of 2314 bankruptcy filers in 2007, abstracted their court
records, and interviewed 1032 of them. We designated bankruptcies as "medical" based on debtors' stated
reasons for filing, income loss due to illness, and the magnitude of their medical debts.
RESULTS: Using a conservative definition, 62.1% of all bankruptcies in 2007 were medical; 92% of these
medical debtors had medical debts over $5000, or 10% of pretax family income. The rest met criteria for
medical bankruptcy because they had lost significant income due to illness or mortgaged a home to pay medical
bills. Most medical debtors were well educated, owned homes, and had middle-class occupations. Three
quarters had health insurance. Using identical definitions in 2001 and 2007, the share of bankruptcies attributable
to medical problems rose by 49.6%. In logistic regression analysis controlling for demographic factors,
the odds that a bankruptcy had a medical cause was 2.38-fold higher in 2007 than in 2001.
CONCLUSIONS: Illness and medical bills contribute to a large and increasing share of US bankruptcies.

Erog = Ergo

Be Well.

/Spud's second rule of blog-world FTW!

Waterboarding save lives,

Spud'll assume you meant "saved" there and call you a liar.

You obviously bought into Cheney's bullshit that waterboarding produced actionable intel.

It didn't.

FBI statements have confirmed that all actionable intel came from the use of standard interrogation techniques while waterboarding produced only false intel that muddied the waters.

Conversely, America's use of torture has been a big recruiting tool for the extremists which has arguably cost lives.

Erog, you are a morally bankrupt moron.

K?

Be Well.

Obamacare is ridiculously unpopular with the public.

Until you ask them about the stuff that's actually in the bill and then they actually do like it.

The mostly RW propagandizing against this bill has demonized it to a ridiculous extent.

Be Well.

Is it the best bill it could be?

No.

If it was there would be a public option and no mandate to buy insurance.

Is it better than just allowing the current FAILed system to continue causing mass bankrupcies?

Hells, yeah.

Be Well.

Descartes walks into a bar and the bartender asks him if he wants a Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Descartes sneers... That swill? I think not!

Then he immediately disappeared.

Be Well.

/Think about it.
//You'll get it eventually.

Post-coital conversation.

He: I know you really enjoyed that by the way you curled yer toes.

She: Well, if you'd given me enough time to take my pantyhose off first...

Be Well.

He says he quit because of what he alleges were "criminal acts" by Toyota -- specifically, withholding information the company was legally required to turn over to plaintiffs' lawyers during litigation.

Ouchie.

When yer business practises are so shoddy that they give a corporate lawyer an attack of conscience you know you got troubles.

Be Well.

There are no jobs

Tell that to the 100,000 people who will lose their non-existent jobs come September.

Hey, FOXNews said she was a Democrat!

~KBM

its quite amuzing when you get mad.

Almost as amusing as watching you try to spell or make a serious point.

Face it, you haven't sed one damn thing of note since you got here.

You have less substance than a soap bubble.

"Does "wormfood" refer to the dead meat between your ears?

Be Well.

A great idea.

Let's see if thy actually stick to it.

By this point it's kinda like shutting the barn door after the horse has escaped but wot the hey, better late than never.

Be Well.

Why do they call it "hyper-text"?

Too much Java!

/Meh, at least Rcade might like it.

Be Well.

When they finish it, it's likely to be empty like the Dubai Tower.

The Dubai Tower started construction after 9/11 and is already built.

The delay in rebuilding the WTC makes America look weak.

Be Well.