The guy in this video is great!
Of course, this never aired on Fox News….He’s too good at challenging them and calling them out….
I hope we see and hear more from this guy…
Quote of the Day: Noel Coward
“It’s discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit. ”
Filed under Quote of the Day
New Evidence Could Clear 14-year-old Executed by South Carolina
This is one of the saddest cases I’ve ever read about….and that’s saying a lot.
This case, alone, should make people realize how unjust the Death Penalty is and how we will never be able to separate it from racism.
And another word to my Republican “Friends”, you can’t be “pro-life” and “pro-death penalty”. It’s a contradiction in terms….
From RawStory.com:
Over 67 years after 14-year-old George Junius Stinney Jr. was put to death by the state of South Carolina, he may soon be cleared of the crime that people familiar with the case say he never could have committed.
A lawyer and an activist both told Raw Story recently that new evidence will show that the black boy could not have possibly murdered two white girls, 11-year-old Betty June Binnicker and seven-year-old Mary Emma Thames.
Stinney, the youngest person to receive the death penalty in the last 100 years, was executed on June 16, 1944. At five feet one inch and only 95 pounds, the straps of the electric chair did not fit the boy. His feet could not touch the floor. As he was hit with the first 2,400-volt surge of electricity, the mask covering his face slipped off, “revealing his wide-open, tearful eyes and saliva coming from his mouth,” according to author Joy James.
After two more jolts of electricity, the boy was dead.
MORE: New evidence could clear 14-year-old executed by South Carolina | The Raw Story.
Filed under Death Penalty, Race
Why Absolutely Fabulous Now Looks Absolutely Prescient
I loved “Absolutely Fabulous” back in the 1990’s and am so glad to hear they are making three new episodes for this season on BBC.
But I never considered it a cultural milestone or a predictor of future societal behavior. I guess I thought it was a fairly honest depiction of my friends and I as we dealt with our 3o’s and the last gasp of our shallow, out-of-control youth.
It was our “thirtysomething”.
Guess I was wrong, again!
Great article on AbFab from the Guardian in the UK
Edina, the hard-boiled, label-hungry PR guru, and Patsy, her addiction-fuelled magazine editor sidekick, now look like prescient visions of the future. When they first emerged on screen they endeared through preposterousness. With their minute-long obsessions and faux-ethical bandwagons, the pair cascaded from one catastrophe to the next. Yet what was once recognisably absurd has become absurdly recognisable.
A preponderance of Ab Fab-type figures now clog the cultural landscape. It is almost as if there is nothing left to ironise. Simon Cowell, Mary Portas, the Beckhams, Gok Wan, Nigella Lawson and any number of Premier League footballers all come replete with their own free-floating relationship with comic cliche.
We are treated to tales that sound as if they were plucked straight from an Absolutely Fabulous storyboarding meeting. There’s Alex James, the former coke-addled rock star who opened a cheese farm in his countryside pile. Here’s Angelina Jolie, displaying her global awareness one adopted baby at a time.
There’s Gwyneth Paltrow’s commercial repositioning with a holistic self-help website. Sex and the City has built an entire franchise out of repeating Patsy’s mantra: that nothing cannot be solved by the purchase of a fancy pair of shoes. The Financial Times’s How To Spend It magazine has become a latter-day Ab Fab manual.
What started as a sly poke at ridiculous figures of fun has become a new aspirational model. Patsy’s cries of “Bolly!” and “Lacroix!” in response to any impending crisis predated the late 90s snowballing of branding culture, from smart phones to handbags.
MORE: Why Absolutely Fabulous now looks absolutely prescient | Paul Flynn | Comment is free | The Guardian.
Filed under Entertainment, Television, Uncategorized
Mommie Dearest, Part 2: Martha Stewart’s Daughter Lashes Out at Domestic Diva in New Tell-All
Leave Martha Stewart alone!!!
I’m so tired of celebrity children trying to cash in on their parents. No one would buy this lousy book if the bitch wasn’t Martha’s daughter.
Get a life and get a job- and not one your Mother gave you.
If I were Martha, I’d be calling my attorney and doing a little trimming on my Will….
Next thing you know, she’ll be trying to tell us Martha doesn’t do all this stuff herself, but has a staff to do it for her….
From that paragon of Journalistic integrity, US Weekly:
In a scathing new tell-all book, Martha Stewart’s daughter, Alexis, reveals that life as the homemaker’s child was far from perfect.
“Martha does everything better! You can’t win!” Alexis, 46, writes of her mother, 70, in her new book Whateverland: Learning to Live Here, out October 18 (as first excerpted by the U.K. Daily Mail). “If I didn’t do something perfectly, I had to do it again. I grew up with a glue gun pointed at my head.”
Now a mother herself, Alexis angrily reflects in her book on Martha’s lack of basic parenting skills.
“Martha was not interested in being kid-friendly,” Alexis reveals in Whateverland. “She used to make me wrap my own presents. She would hand me things right before Christmas and say, ‘Now wrap these but don’t look inside.'”
But Alexis says she took the most issue with the domestic diva’s habits around the house.
“My mother has a sign on all of her doors to take your shoes off,” Alexis writes. “For god’s sake! My mother’s dogs p–s and s–t on her rugs and she’s telling people to take their shoes off?
“[She] always peed with the door open,” Alexis continued of her mother’s bathroom hygiene. “I remember saying, ‘You know, now I have friends over! You can’t do that anymore! It’s gotta stop! My friends’ parents don’t do it! Give me a break here! I don’t feel like being embarrassed! It’s exhausting! I’m a kid! Stop!'”
Though Alexis drops these and other bombshells in the book, she insists she harbors no ill will. In fact, she even dedicated the tome to Martha. Says the TV personality of her daughter, Alexis: “She’s her own person. She makes up her own mind.”
MORE: Martha Stewart’s Daughter Lashes Out at Domestic Diva in New Tell-All – UsMagazine.com.
Filed under Books
Restrictions Could Keep Five Million Traditionally Democratic Voters From The Polls In 2012
This is why the GOP is pushing all these new “voter” initiatives in so many states.
It’s a coordinated effort to deny people the right to vote.
Republicans know they only win as long as turnout is low. They also know the demographic trends are against them. Therefore, their goal is to drive down turnout and find ways to disenfranchise groups of people who traditionally vote Democratic.
I’m afraid we’ll only see more of these efforts to steal elections. The GOP is the real driver of voter fraud– defrauding people of the right to vote….
Restrictive voting laws in states across the country could affect up to five million voters from traditionally Democratic demographics in 2012, according to a new report by the Brennan Center. That’s a number larger than the margin of victory in two of the last three presidential elections.
The new restrictions, the study found, “fall most heavily on young, minority, and low-income voters, as well as on voters with disabilities. This wave of changes may sharply tilt the political terrain for the 2012 election.”
The study found that:
These new laws could make it significantly harder for more than five million eligible voters to cast ballots in 2012.
The states that have already cut back on voting rights will provide 171 electoral votes in 2012 – 63 percent of the 270 needed to win the presidency.
Of the 12 likely battleground states, as assessed by an August Los Angeles Times analysis of Gallup polling, five have already cut back on voting rights (and may pass additional restrictive legislation), and two more are currently considering new restrictions.
The total number, according to the Brennan Center, is the sum of the 3.2 million voters they estimate will be affected by new photo ID laws, “the 240,000 citizens and potential voters who could be affected by new proof of citizenship laws, 202,000 voters registered in 2008 through voter registration drives that have now been made extremely difficult or impossible under new laws, 60,000 voters registered in 2008 through Election Day voter registration where it has now been repealed, one to two million voters who voted in 2008 on days eliminated under new laws rolling back early voting and at least 100,000 disenfranchised citizens who might have regained voting rights by 2012.”
“These voting law changes are radical and completely unnecessary,” Wendy. R. Weiser, a co-author of the report, said in a statement. “They especially hurt those who have been historically locked out of our electoral system, like minorities, poor people, and students. Often they seem precisely targeted to exclude certain voters.”
Filed under Elections, Politics, Uncategorized
Art Pope, Citizens United, and North Carolina Politics : The New Yorker
Very scary article in this weeks “New Yorker” about Art Pope and how he’s used his money to effect North Carolina politics….
The “Citizens United” decision by the Supreme Court last year is really hurting Democracy in America. We are only just now starting to see how much….
Here is a brief excerpt from a very long article. I encourage you to click the link and read it in it’s entirety.
For years, Pope, like several other farsighted conservative corporate activists, has been spending millions in an attempt to change the direction of American politics. According to an analysis of tax records by Democracy NC, a progressive government watchdog group, in the past decade Pope, his family, his family foundation, and his business have spent more than forty million dollars in this effort. Sizable as Pope’s contributions have been, they are negligible in comparison with his fortune. The Pope family foundation—of which Art Pope is the chairman and president, and one of four directors—reportedly has assets of nearly a hundred and fifty million dollars.
This wealth has enabled Pope to participate in the public arena on a scale that few individuals can match. Some have compared him to Charles and David Koch, the conservative oil-and-chemical magnates, whom Pope regards as friends; Pope has at times joined forces with them, attending some of their semi-annual secret planning summits and, through the family foundation, contributing millions to many of the same causes. Pope, in addition to being on the board of Americans for Prosperity—which David Koch founded, in 2004—served on the board of its predecessor, Citizens for a Sound Economy, which Koch co-founded, in 1984. Charles Koch recently praised the Popes, along with other donors, for providing financial support for the 2012 election effort, and tax records show that Pope has given money to at least twenty-seven groups supported by the Kochs, including organizations opposing environmental regulations, tax increases, unions, and campaign-spending limits. Pope, in fact, helped fund the legal center run by James Bopp, the lawyer who made the initial filing in the Citizens United case
More: Art Pope, Citizens United, and North Carolina Politics : The New Yorker.
Filed under North Carolina, Politics
Quote of the Day: Franklin Delano Roosevelt
“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it comes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism – ownership of government by an individual, by a group,”
Filed under Uncategorized
We Are the 99 Per Cent – Mark Ruffalo
Wonderful article from actor/activist Mark Ruffalo in today’s Guardian in the UK.
As my friend Linda and many others have noted, this is getting much more press in the British press and overseas than it is here.
I’m sure that has nothing to do with the fact the mainstream American media is now mostly owned by large corporate conglomerates….
Yeah, right….
Here is a brief excerpt and a link to the full column:
It is a thing of beauty to see so many people in love with the ideal of democracy, so alive with its promise, so committed to its continuity in the face of crony capitalism and corporate rule. That should be celebrated. It should be respected and admired.
Their message is very clear and simple: get money out of the political process; strive for equality in taxation and equal rights for all regardless of race, gender, social status, sexual preference or age. We must stop poisoning our food, air and water for corporate greed. The people on Wall Street and in the banking industrial complex that destroyed our economy must be investigated and brought to justice under the law for what they have done by stealing people’s homes and savings.
Jobs can and must be created. Family farms must be saved. The oil and gas industry must be divested of its political power and cheap, reliable alternative energy must be made available.
This movement transcends political affiliations. America has been debased and degraded by greed. This has touched 99% of America’s population. The other 1% is doing just fine – with more than a third of the wealth of this nation. We all know people who have been hurt by the big rip-off. We all know people who have lost their jobs or their homes. We all know people who have had to go and fight wars that seem to have no objective and no end – leaving families for years on end without fathers, mothers, sons and daughters.
More: We are the 99 per cent | Mark Ruffalo | Comment is free | The Guardian.
Filed under Politics, The Economy
Top Tea Party Organizer Arrested for Soliciting Prostitute
When are the “Family Values” crowd going to wake up and realize they are being used?
It seems like almost all their leaders are hypocrites. And I’m thinking the Family Value crowd needs to ask themselves if they aren’t hypocrites, too, for still following these guys after all their sins become public….
I mean, come on! Picking up hookers, multiple marriages, gay affairs by closeted leaders, not paying child support…..but, still good “Family Values” Republicans.
Give me a break…
The whole thing is just ludicrous….
From The Wisconsin Gazette:
Steve Stevlic, one of the top organizers of TeaCon 2011, describes himself as an ordinary family-values man. But, as Gawker reported today, he’s not ordinary in at least one sense: He was arrested last summer for soliciting a prostitute.
Last September, Stevlic mocked and condemned U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr., via Twitter over revelations that the congressman had a two-year extra-marital affair. The tweets were sent out two months after Stevlic’s arrest.
Stevlic is one of the primary sponsors behind one of the largest-ever gatherings of tea partiers. About Some 600 supporters turned out today for the opening of the event in Schaumburg, Ill., a northwest suburb of Chicago. Some of the right-wing movement’s highest-profile representatives were on hand.
But after news of Stevlic’s year-old arrest grabbed attention, he apparently decided to steer clear of the proceedings, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
Keynoters at TeaCon today included Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, conservative talk radio host Glenn Beck, and U.S. Rep. Joe Walsh, R-Ill., a party favorite and an afternoon highlight.
Walsh has image problems of his own. A Chicago judge ordered him last month to explain why he appears to be $100,000 behind in child-support payments to his ex-wife.
Laura Walsh has hauled her ex-husband to court on numerous occasions since 2002 to seek orders to make him pay his court-ordered child-support obligations. She says he started making half-payments years ago and then completely stopped sending any money.
Although Walsh claimed he was broke, last year he made a $35,000 contribution to his own congressional campaign.
Despite the evangelical-Christian bent of Tea Party supporters, including a growing anti-gay fervor, Walsh’s failure to support his kids has not dampened their enthusiasm for him.
Filed under Politics
Lost in the 21st Century 