Breitbart Leaks Photo of Weiner’s Naked Penis

For once, Andrew Breitbart may have been right…

But he’s still pond scum…

Don’t even think this was accidental…

Most college fraternities are more mature than these guys….

And, as a Gay Man I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m so tired of hearing about penises…

From RawStory.com:

Although conservative publisher Andrew Breitbart initially promised to keep the most explicit picture of Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) to himself — barring certain actions by Weiner — an alleged picture of Weiner’s naked, erect penis nonetheless leaked out this morning.

During an appearance on Sirius XM Radio’s notoriously raunchy program The Opie and Anthony Show Wednesday, Breitbart reportedly showed the radio shock jocks the image that was saved on his iPhone. Though they now claim that they retrieved a still of the phone from a videotape of the show and that Breitbart didn’t allow them to photograph it, the original image, now removed from Yfrog, showed a thumb in the corner of the lens, as though it was taken from a cell phone camera. Yfrog was the image-sharing service to which Weiner sent the “joke” photo of him in his boxers that started the entire scandal.

The show Tweeted the photo to its official account and brought it to the attention of the gossip sites Gawker and WWTDD. The now-removed image [NSFW] is still available at Gawker.

At a press conference called by Weiner Monday, Breitbart admitted that he had been given a more explicit photo of Weiner, but said he was trying to do the “right thing” by not releasing it.

The conservative provocateur told NBC’s Matt Lauer Tuesday that he would release the photo “if Anthony Weiner decides to make it a jihad against me.”

“I don’t think I want to put his family through that type of thing,” Breitbart said. “I could put that out there and his career would have been over today.”

For his part, Weiner has thus far refused to resign, but has not commented on the release of the latest photo.

 

via Breitbart leaks photo of Weiner’s naked penis | The Raw Story.

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Woman Tattoo’s All FaceBook Friends Profile Pictures on Her Arm

Okay, I admit I just don’t get tattoo’s at all.  Maybe it was growing up around too many World War II vets who got them while they were drunk overseas and kept saying the wish they had never done it.

Maybe it’s because I’m so aware fashions change and these things are permanent.  I would hate to be stuck with the 1970’s fashions for the rest of my life…

Maybe it’s because I keep thinking that what looks cute on a tight 20-year-old body is really going to start looking like crap on a heavier, sagging 60-year-old body….

But what is this woman going to do if someone defriends her or changes their profile picture?

Another example that supports my concerns for the critical thinking skills of people today….

I just wish I knew of a company that will be able to remove these things in the future so I could invest in them now.  It would make for a most comfortable retirement…

UPDATE:  It has been reveled this was all a publicity stunt and the video is faked.  These are temporary tattoos that wash off in a couple of days….I trust no one decided to follow suit and do this in reality!!

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Decline and Fall of the American Empire

A fascinating article in The Guardian from the UK  that is worth reading in it’s entirety.

Being a student of History, I have often wondered if we were at the beginning of the end of the American Empire.  Or maybe in the middle of it….

Like people, Empires have a finite life span.  Neither the Roman nor the British Empire lasted forever.  On my bad days, I wonder if we aren’t all living in a declining democracy on the way to being a third world country.

I particularly have this feeling when I travel by air or read too much about the Republican positions….

Don’t go screeching USA! USA! USA! at me…

Read the article and think if there are ways we can reverse this- or is it already  too late?

Talk amongst yourselves…

 

Let me put an alternative hypothesis. America in 2011 is Rome in 200AD or Britain on the eve of the first world war: an empire at the zenith of its power but with cracks beginning to show.

The experience of both Rome and Britain suggests that it is hard to stop the rot once it has set in, so here are the a few of the warning signs of trouble ahead: military overstretch, a widening gulf between rich and poor, a hollowed-out economy, citizens using debt to live beyond their means, and once-effective policies no longer working. The high levels of violent crime, epidemic of obesity, addiction to pornography and excessive use of energy may be telling us something: the US is in an advanced state of cultural decadence.

Empires decline for many different reasons but certain factors recur. There is an initial reluctance to admit that there is much to fret about, and there is the arrival of a challenger (or several challengers) to the settled international order. In Spain’s case, the rival was Britain. In Britain’s case, it was America. In America’s case, the threat comes from China.

Britain’s decline was extremely rapid after 1914. By 1945, the UK was a bit player in the bipolar world dominated by the US and the Soviet Union, and sterling – the heart of the 19th-century gold standard – was rapidly losing its lustre as a reserve currency. There had been concerns, voiced as far back as the 1851 Great Exhibition, that the hungrier, more efficient producers in Germany and the US threatened Britain’s industrial hegemony. But no serious policy action was taken. In the second half of the 19th century there was a subtle shift in the economy, from the north of England to the south, from manufacturing to finance, from making things to living off investment income. By 1914, the writing was on the wall.

In two important respects, the US today differs from Britain a century ago. It is much bigger, which means that it benefits from continent-wide economies of scale, and it has a presence in the industries that will be strategically important in the first half of the 21st century. Britain in 1914 was over-reliant on coal and shipbuilding, industries that struggled between the world wars, and had failed to grasp early enough the importance of emerging new technologies.

Even so, there are parallels. There has been a long-term shift of emphasis in the US economy away from manufacturing and towards finance. There is a growing challenge from producers in other parts of the world.

via Decline and fall of the American empire | Business | The Guardian.

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Delta Air Lines Charges Returning Soldiers for Checked Bags

Another reason to hate the US Airlines…As if we needed another reason.

But this is truly despicable.  Charging checked baggage fees to soldiers returning from fighting in Afghanistan????

Unbelievable…

From Gadling.com:

A team of returning soldiers from Afghanistan was hit with an unpleasant surprise upon their arrival into the United States this morning. The squadron, bringing a full load of gear with them back from the Central Asia was sacked with the baggage fees in place at Delta Air Lines, which, despite the agreement that they have with the armed forces charged the soldiers extra baggage fees.

In sum, the group spent nearly $2800 in baggage fees for their gear, money that had to come straight out of their pockets.

via Delta Air Lines charges returning soldiers for checked bags | Gadling.com.

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Heartless Hypocrite Eric Cantor Calls On Weiner To Resign

There are a lot of despicable politicians, but right now I can’t think of one worse than Eric Cantor, Republican Congressman of Virginia…

First he wants to destroy Medicaid and Medicare.

Then he only wants to help tornado victims in Missouri if he can cut money somewhere else in the budget.

Now, he’s jumping into the Anthony Weiner story and saying he should resign.

Funny, he didn’t say that about David Vitter or John Ensign.  But then, they were Republicans…

I don’t know how this man sleeps at night. Or how anyone sleeps with him….

He really should be left alone under a bridge like the troll he is…

From TalkingPointsMemo.com:

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) is now calling on Democratic New York Rep. Anthony Weiner to resign, in the wake of Weiner’s admission on Monday that he has engaged in online sexual exchanges with younger women, and that he had lied about the matter for the past week after accidentally posting a public Tweet, intended to have been a direct message to a college student, of a photo of his underwear-clad crotch.

“I don’t condone his activity. And I think he should resign,” Cantor said after a Chamber of Commerce luncheon in Louisa, Virginia, the Charlottesville Daily Progress reports.

“We’ve got a lot of serious challenges in this country and a lot of work for Congress to do,” Cantor also added. “The last thing we need to do is get enmeshed in a discussion about Congressman Weiner and his Twitter activities.”

via Cantor Calls On Weiner To Resign | TPMDC.

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Weiner, Vitter, Spitzer, Ensign, Edwards, Tobias: One of These Is Not Like the Others : Ms Magazine Blog

Great article, from Jodi Jacobson at MS Magazine Blog, about the differences between Anthony Weiner and the other recent sexcapades…

I could not agree more with this article….

Weiner’s mistakes were nothing compared to the other guys.

I’m frankly tired of this story and ready to move on, but our Puritanical country and the hypocrites in Washington have to ride this a while longer…

Anthony Weiner is a very ambitious man who has taken a big hit to his career and his ego.  But he is a good Congressman.

He is going to have enough to do to save his marriage and his career.  This has hit him hard and he’s going to have to pay a lot of penance and eat a lot of crow.  Let’s leave him alone to work through this so he can get back to doing the work he was elected to do.

This is all really none of our business….

Hat tip to Pam Spaulding at Pam’s House Blend where I originally saw the link to this:

 

Is it dumb and poor personal judgment for a politician to send photos of himself in various stages of undress and arousal to women who are not his wife? In my opinion, yes. Is it my business? Not really, unless he has, for example, been railing against “sexting,” faulting women, contraception, abortion, and gay people with the downfall of America and earthquakes in far-off places, or has been seeking to restrict people’s rights based on a bastardized version of morality. Is it even dumber to go on an “I-did-not-send-pictures-to-[that]-woman” pity tour to make himself look like the victim of hacking? Oh, yeah. He may yet be forced to resign for his stupidity.

But, I don’t necessarily think he should have to do so. As I have said here before, I really do not care in what sexual practices consenting adults engage or what agreements are forged between two consenting adults, especially if the spouse of a given Twitterer knows about and lives with her or his spouse’s preferences.

What I do care about is the “holier-than-thou” moralizing in which so many of these philanderers engage, and the fact that they both pretend to be better than the rest of us, and, even worse, attempt to legislate our private lives.

Weiner did none of this.

The others did.

via Weiner, Vitter, Spitzer, Ensign, Edwards, Tobias: One of These Is Not Like the Others : Ms Magazine Blog.

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The GOP’s Dangerous Arrogance

Great article up at YahooNews…

Even I- no political innocent- am still shocked at how callous and blatantly Political the GOP is…

They really don’t seem to care about the Country, only about their political power and their wealthy campaign contributors.

Defaulting on the national debt is just unthinkable.  If they do not raise the debt ceiling, the entire economy will be thrown into chaos and Wall Street will go crazy.  I hope their Corporate owners force the Republicans to do the right thing, but I’m afraid they are too out of control right now even for the Wall Street moneymen to bring them into line.  This is scary stuff….

The Republicans have done everything they can to slow the recovery just so the economy will either collapse into crisis again or be so weak they can use it politically.

They have no interest in Statesmanship or in what is best for the Country.  All they care about is what is best for the GOP, the Rich and the Corporations who fund them…

I just hope the Rich and the Corporations still have enough control to stop the GOP from destroying the economy just for Political gain.  If they do play politics with the debt ceiling, even the Rich and the Corporations will feel the hurt.  But the Middle Class will feel it more.  As usual….

 

Nationally and globally, the economy is at a tipping point. The GOP, driven by invincible ignorance or cynical design – and perhaps both – is working overtime to trash the recovery with budget cuts that would drain demand from the economy – or a debt ceiling vote that could trigger a financial collapse equal to 2008, or perhaps unpredictably graver. For proof, all you had to do was listen to Mitt Romney’s announcement speech today. In it, he made a smarmy attempt to blame Barack Obama for the economic pain actually caused by the dereliction of duty by George W. Bush & Co., pain that was then prolonged by the obstruction of congressional Republicans. Those legislators contrived successfully to limit the stimulus package, block a second one, and forthwith blame the stimulus that saved us from another Great Depression for the slow climb out of the Great Recession. Never, of course, did they mention that the America’s deep deficits were generated by the fraudulent Bush war in Iraq and the unfair Bush tax cuts, which were founded on the false premise that they would pay for themselves.

The same tawdry spectacle has played out for two years and more in America’s capitol, a place that is still, despite recently fashionable worries about its destiny, the indispensible engine of the world economy. Indeed, the future of billions of human beings is determined by our elections, in which most of them have no vote. JFK once noted that the proudest boast of the ancient world was the boast of democratic citizenship: Civis Romanus sum: ‘I am a Roman citizen.’ The inescapable reality of the present world, for better or worse, is that people everywhere have to say, Civis Americanus sum. That’s strikingly clear here in Europe, in good times and bad. President Obama is a more popular, hope-giving figure than the leaders he recently visited; he’s the counterpoint to Bush and the redeemer of an American image carelessly disfigured during the first decade of the century.

And now the GOP that has moved decidedly to the right of Bush would compound his errors. Congressional Republicans could shatter the restored credibility of the United States by refusing to protect its full faith and credit by raising the national debt ceiling or by holding that essential measure hostage to the repeal of the New Deal – something that never even occurred to Ronald Reagan or either Bush president. In those Oval Offices, they regularly signed debt-ceiling increases.

via The GOP’s dangerous arrogance – Yahoo! News.

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House Republicans Propose Social Security Opt Out/Privatization

They really are coming out of the closet…

First they wanted to destroy Medicare and Medicaid…

Now, they want to destroy Social Security.

I don’t know about you, but I would much rather have Social Security than trust Wall Street to manage my retirement money.  And not everyone has the skills to manage their own investments.

I keep saying it:  Remove the earnings cap on Social Security contributions and we have no Social Security issues anymore.  It’s a small, easy fix and no one has to ever worry about Social Security being insolvent again.

But that’s not what the GOP wants.  They don’t want to save Social Security.  They  just want an excuse to kill it.

If the Democrats will just stand up to them and protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid- which is consistent with the Party’s core beliefs- they could take back the House and keep the Senate.  And the Presidency if the President will stand up also…

From The Hill:

House Republicans on Friday introduced legislation that would allow workers to partially opt out of Social Security immediately, and fully opt out after 15 years.

Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas), who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, and several other Republicans introduced the Savings Account for Every American (SAFE) Act. Under the bill, workers would immediately have 6.2 percent of their wages sent to a “SAFE” account each year.

That would take the place of the 6.2 percent the workers now contributed to Social Security.

Another 6.2% is sent to Social Security by employers. Under the Sessions bill, employers would continue to make this matching contribution to Social Security, but after 15 years, employers could also send that amount to the employee’s SAFE account.

Sessions said this transition to a private retirement savings option is needed because Social Security last year began paying out more money than it took in.

via House Republicans propose Social Security opt-out – The Hill’s Floor Action.

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Anthony Weiner Admits He Tweeted Lewd Photos, Will Not Resign

Personally, I think this is much ado about nothing…

Not a real bright move, but no big deal since this was between consenting adults…

I also think Anthony Weiner is an incredibly effective Progressive politician, with an unfortunate name, who is going to be drug through the mud over this…

The Right Wing wants him out of the fight and they’re going to do all they can to bring him down.

To me, this is an issue to be handled between him and his wife.  This is the type of foolishness that, in the good old days, would not even have been reported.  (Remember JFK, among others….)

He needs to take the heat for a while and ride this out…

Thank god, he a represents New York City district and they’ll probably shrug this off…

Remember, Republican Senator David Vitter of Louisiana broke the law by playing with hookers and he is still in office….

There are also two probable side effects to this:

1.  This will put an end to the Gay rumors and innuendoes about Congressman Wiener-which I always thought were wishful thinking.

and

2.  Sarah Palin is probably standing in front of a web cam right now taking topless shots and sending them to Glenn Beck to get the media back to paying attention to her….

From Talking Points Memo:

Anthony Weiner admitted to lying about a lewd photo he sent to a college student in Washington state, telling reporters at a press conference in New York that he concocted a phony hacking story in a panic after deleting the public message.

“Last Friday night i tweeted a photograph of myself that I intended to send as a direct message as part of a joke to a woman in Seattle,” he said, fighting back tears. “Once I realized I had posted to Twitter, I panicked, I took it down and said I had been hacked. I then continued to stick to that story which was a hugely regrettable mistake.”

He added: “To be clear, the picture was of me and I sent this. I am deeply sorry for the pain this has caused my wife Huma and our family and my constituents, friends, supporters and staff.”

As for his own future, Weiner pledged to remain in Congress, saying he had not broken any law to his knowledge. “I am not resigning,” Weiner said, telling reporters he would try to convince his constituents this was a “personal failing” and did not alter his record.

via Anthony Weiner Admits He Tweeted Lewd Photos, Will Not Resign | TPMDC.

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Danville Downtowner Motor Inn to be Demolished

Ah, another part of my  misspent youth is going to be gone shortly…

We had some damn good parties at that place and I used to eat lunch in their Restaurant when I worked in Downtown Danville at a Bank right after college.

Had some fun times at their “disco”, the Black Horse Cellar…

We also spent most of our Senior Prom in a Suite there having cocktails before and after making our token appearance at the Dance…

See my previous blog post on my other blog for details:  http://mysoutherngothiclife.com/2011/02/12/chapter-50-party-at-the-hot-sheet-hotel/

From GoDanRiver.Com:

The Danville Industrial Development Authority has bought the former Downtowner Motel at the corner of Main and Union streets with the help of a Danville Regional Foundation grant.

“Without the financial support of the Danville Regional Foundation, we would not have been able to make this very significant purchase at this time to advance the Master Plan being developed for the River District,” said Richard Turner, chairman of the Industrial Development Authority. “Because of its high visibility, the removal of this structure will begin what we all think will be a major transformation of the district.”

The Downtowner building has been empty for more than a decade but has “become the focal point of blight eradication and redevelopment in the newly designated River District,” the release said.

via Danville IDA buys the former Downtowner Motel | GoDanRiver.com.

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