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Saturday, July 31, 2010

Chicken Hawk Little: the sky is falling


We have seen this GOP alarmism before, haven't we.

Why is the GOP so alarmist and always think the sky is falling and the world as we know it is about to end?

Is melodrama part of the conservative psyche? Take look at one of the books that NewsMax is hyping if you think Rightardia is exaggerating.



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Alex Sink bumper stickers

Florida CFO Alex sink is leading in the last poll we looked at.  She is beating both the crooked corporatist, Rick Scott, and career politician. Bill McCollum. That's how the two Republicans define each other.

You can order a bumper sticker at this link: http://action.alexsink2010.com/p/dia/action/public/;jsessionid=02C6C7DCC7371FB22C4FE94323612A3F?action_KEY=26

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Governor Surges Into Lead in Race For U.S. Senate

By Bill Rufty & JEREMY WALLACE
Published: Friday, July 30, 2010 at 11:54 p.m. Last Modified: Friday, July 30, 2010 at 11:54 p.m.

Crist, whose independent campaign seemed in jeopardy before switching parties in May, has jumped ahead of former Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio, a Republican, and both of the Democrats battling in a primary on Aug. 24.

Regardless of whether billionaire Jeff Greene or Congressman Kendrick Meek wins the primary, neither gets even 17 percent of the vote in a three-way contest with Crist and Rubio, according to results from The Florida Poll.

Assuming Meek wins his primary and is in the race, Crist leads Rubio with 41 percent of the vote to Rubio's 30 percent, with 12 percent going to Meek, according to the poll of 590 likely voters surveyed from July 24 to July 28. Crist wins over Rubio by eight points if Greene gets the Democratic nomination.

Assuming Greene wins the Democratic primary, however, changes things.

The Florida Poll was conducted by New York Times-owned Florida newspapers, including The Ledger, and the University of South Florida Polytechnic in Lakeland.

Crist's improving political situation is mirrored in other polls, including a Quinnipiac University Polling Institute survey released Friday that similarly shows Crist moving ahead of Rubio.

In that poll, Crist leads the three-way race for the U.S. Senate seat with 37 percent to Rubio's 32 percent. Greene is at 17 percent in the Quinnipiac poll. If Meek wins the nomination, Crist's lead jumps to six per cent lead over Rubio.

Quinnipiac University surveyed 969 Florida voters from July 22 to July 27. The margin of error is 3.2 percentage points.

Republicans have tried to label Crist's abandoning the Republican Party to run as an independent as an act of political desperation. But for voters like Sarah Cross of Sarasota the move is being received more as an act of defiance to the political status quo. Cross, a Democrat, said Crist's move showed political bravery at a time when most politicians just go along to get along.

When Crist was running as a Republican, I never was going to vote for him," Cross said. "Once he had done something like that to put his own future at risk, I thought he really is trying to do the right thing.

Barbara Abowitt, a retired teacher who lives in Bradenton, had a similar view. She said Crist's switch showed he was willing to stand up to his party, not just in leaving the Republicans but also in vetoing legislation like Senate Bill 6, the teacher tenure bill.

He was willing to buck his party," said Abowitt, who calls herself an independent voter.

Robert Rippe, 52, of Lakeland disagreed with Cross and Abowitt. A Republican who said he will vote for Rubio in the general election, Rippe said Crist has been disloyal to the people who voted for him in the past.

Now that he has left the Republican Party he seems to be more liberal and probably was all the time," Rippe said. "So if he had been elected to the U.S. Senate as a Republican, he probably would not have held to Republican values.

The poll is troubling news for both Democrats in the race for the U.S. Senate. Forty-six percent of the Democrats surveyed were undecided or could not give an answer to which Democrat they would support in the Aug. 24 primary.

The unknown factor grows even greater when Democrats were asked whether they had a favorable opinion of either Meek or Greene. Sixty-one percent of the Democrats said they did not know enough about Meek to have an opinion, while 55 percent said the same thing about Greene.

HOW THE FLORIDA POLL WAS DONE

The Florida Poll survey was conducted by telephone July 24-28 from the campus of the University of South Florida Polytechnic in Lakeland.
Overall results are from 590 registered voters who were determined to be likely voters.

The telephone numbers used in the survey were identified at random by a computer programmed to ensure each area of the state was represented in proportion to its population and to include numbers from listed and unlisted land lines and cell phones.

The results from the survey have a margin of sampling error of 4 percentage points.

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Russia's MiG-35 fighter meets Indian contract requirements

Russia's export MiG-35 Fulcrum-F jet fighter corresponds to all the requirements of an Indian tender aimed at acquiring a series of fighter jets, a department head for Russia's state-controlled arms exporter Rosoboronexport said on Monday.

Sergei Kornyev, the department head of Russia's Air Force special equipment and services, made the announcement after the Farnborough Air Show outside London ended on Sunday.

In August 2007, India set an $11 billion tender for the delivery of 126 fighter aircraft. The world's largest aircraft manufacturers are bidding for the tender, including France's Dassault Aviation with its Rafale, U.S. Lockheed Martin with its F-16 Fighting Falcon and Boeing with the F-18 Super Hornet, Sweden's Saab with its most up-to-date Gripen aircraft, and the European Eurofighter offering the Typhoon.


"The requirements of the tender are quite rigid, but we have already held three evaluation tests, and we believe we have offered an aircraft which entirely corresponds to the tender requirements," Kornyev said.

Russia's MiG-35 Fulcrum-F is a highly maneuverable, single-seat multirole air superiority fighter, an export version of the MiG-29M OVT (Fulcrum F). The plane was first officially presented during the Aero India 2007 air show.

"Of course, the buyers will make the final decision. We are sure that we will participate in this tender until the end, and we hope we will win," Kornyev added.
click on graphic to enlarge

Russia has had a long defense relationship with India and the Russian fighters are cheaper than the western competitors.

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Arizona governor asks legislature for $100 billion to fund the Brewer Wall.

The Brewer Wall is to be heavily guarded police wall that will stretch from Somerton to Douglas, AZ. It will separate Anglo-America from Hispano-Mexico.
The Brewer Curtain will be the most visible symbol of American fascism against Latinos and Hispanics The wall was built by the government of Arizona in order to stop the tide of emigration to Anglo-Arizona.

Because of dissatisfaction with the economic and political conditions in Mexico (drug war violence, wages and supply gaps), an increasing number of people left Hispano-Mexico.

Millions of Mexicans now work in the US as share croppers, gardeners and fast food employees. Few have trouble finding work from US corporations and small business people.

Armed neo-Nazi guards will patrol the northern side of the wall.

In 2010, Pinal County Sheriffs Deputy Louis Puroll was shot by what he called “suspected drug smugglers” in an isolated area of south-central Arizona. Deputy Purol said he had stopped a car he suspected of having illegal drugs on Highway 8 and was shot with an AK-47 type weapon.
What he didn’t say was he illegally stopped a car of undocumented workers he had racially profiled merely because they were listening to a Linda Ronstadt CD and had brown skin.

The symbolism of the wall as a representative of the divide between Hispano- and Anglo-values was not lost on Arizona governor, Jan Brewer. President Obama has already prepared a speech urging the fascist Arizona governor to "tear down this wall between the two Americas.!"

source: http://angrywhitedude.com/?p=4204


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Tea Party erects Statue of Intolerance on border with Mexico


Why the face looks exactly like that of Arizona governor Jan Brewer!

The governor promised the Brewer Wall next that is modeled after the Berlin Wall.

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Haaretz: U.S. companies transferred funds to suspects in Dubai Mossad hit

Investigators in the United States probing the assassination of a senior Hamas official have found links between U.S. companies and Israeli suspects in the case . . . in (the) Dubai assassination of Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh

The findings show U.S. authorities playing a great role in the probe than previously revealed, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Suspects

Mohammed al-Mabhouh, a senior Hamas official, was accused by Israel of planning a series of terror attacks and weapons transfers. He  was found dead in a Dubai hotel room on January 19 after alleged Mossad agents used forged UK passports to enter Dubai. Dubai police have publicly accused Israel's Mossad spy agency of the hit.

The U.S. companies identified by investigators include wed-based firms that pair temporary job-seekers with employers.  the WSJ said. Authorities have identified financial transfers from several intermediary businesses into prepaid, cash-card accounts used by suspects in the Dubai killing, according to international investigators.

The companies are not accused of any complicity in the attack. Investigators believe suspects might have posed as freelance workers to obtain cover, using the the income from the companies for operational expenses, such as plane tickets.

Representatives of several companies identified in the probe, including, Elance Inc. and Rent a Coder, which is now called vWorker.com. These companies had not been contacted by U.S. authorities and were unaware of any investigation.

source: http://retirementrevised.com/money/here-comes-wall-streets-attack-on-social-security

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Media Matters: Conservatives' perpetual dishonesty machine

July 30, 2010 3:37 pm ET

Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh regularly tout their supposed accuracy and often claim their critics never prove them wrong. Fittingly, this in itself is a complete falsehood. Limbaugh and Beck are working for a living, but have been rewarded for their perpetual wrongness by assuming the role of the two most important cogs in the conservative media.

Every day, the conservative noise machine -- Fox News, Beck, Limbaugh, and other prominent conservative talk radio hosts and bloggers -- hurl false accusations with the hopes of damaging the Obama administration.

Democrats, and progressives politically. Make no mistake: this is the primary motivation for the majority of the stories they promote. Pesky things like "facts" and "reality" are, at best, a trivial concern.

Often, these attacks are baseless, easily debunked, and laughably absurd -- yet conservative media outlets rarely (if ever) offer corrections when they are proven wrong. Instead they either double down on their attacks or simply ignore that they were wrong in the first place and move on to the next overhyped bit of nonsense.

While it may seem like a minor story in the grand scheme of things, one example from this week perfectly exemplifies the utter lack of journalistic standards endemic to conservative media.

Early this week, conservatives were in their usual panic mode over what they claimed was evidence that the Obama administration "backed" or "preferred" the release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the terrorist better known as the Lockerbie bomber.

Fox News twisted reality to claim that the "U.S. Backed Freedom, Not Prison, for Bomber."

Matt Drudge splashed a huge headline across his website announcing that the "White House Backed Release Of Lockerbie Bomber." Pam Geller -- whose deranged rantings have earned her frequent appearances on Fox News and bylines on Andrew Breitbart's "Big" websites, Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller, and the American Thinker -- called for a "special investigation" and a "charge of treason" for Obama.

Rush Limbaugh -- while bragging, as he often does, that he was "executing assigned host duties flawlessly" with "zero mistakes" --claimed that Obama "backed the release" of the Lockerbie bomber because he wanted to "make nice with the Muslim world."


Late Monday, when the State Department released the administration's correspondence with the Scottish Ministry of Justice, it confirmed in unambiguous terms that the administration was "not prepared to support Megrahi's release on compassionate release or bail," and that "it would be most appropriate for Megrahi to remain imprisoned for the entirety of his sentence."

The Obama adminstration stipulated if he were to be released, he should remain in Scotland.

The Andrew Breitbart attacks on Shirely Sherrod are another example of the inherent dishonesty of conservative media. In this case, Sherrod is getting a lawyer and will sue Breitbart for defamation of character and libel for his media distortions of her comments. The RNC is conducting a special wing ding for Breitbart to help him with his forthcoming legal expenses.

Perhaps more lawsuits will stop what can only be described as a coordinated conservative media disinformation campaign. Progressive bloggers like Rightardia are also pushing back by ridiculing the absurdity of conservative media and their corporatist spokes people. Corporatist is a polite word for fascist.

The GOP is declining in the polls and Rightardia thinks the Republican desire to privatize Socail Security may be the issue that is hurting them. Until now the "Party of No" has taken few positions. Rightardia thinks it is peculiar that President Bush who had a GOP congress for six years was unable to privatize Social Security. Yet the 60 pound weakling of a GOP we have in Washington decided to make this an election issue.

Rightardia thinks this is the wrong issue for the GOP and the timing couldn't be better for Democrats.
Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson convened a fiscal summit in April through his Peter G. Peterson Foundation. Peterson has wanted to privatize Social security for years so Wall Streeters like himself can loot the Social Security Trust Fund. It appears the GOP is getting its marching orders from Peterson. 
 
Peterson is a former CEO of the now-defunct Lehman Brothers and former chair of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

He underwrites the foundation with his own funds — and his agenda is no secret. He wants aggressive cuts in Social Security and Medicare benefits, as well as the creation of a commission that would have legal authority to create a plan to reduce the deficit and then simply present it to Congress for an up or down vote with no debates and no amendments.

That sounds democratic, doesn't it. Obama can't even get an up and down vote from the senate on his nominations for federal judgeships.

Good luck on that idea, Mr. Peterson! You may have unwittingly brought down the Republican Party in the next election.

source: http://retirementrevised.com/money/here-comes-wall-streets-attack-on-social-security

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WH Weekly address: Good News on Autos and Obstruction on Small Business



Posted by Jesse Lee on July 31, 2010 at 6:00 AM EDT


President Obama praises the successes of the auto industry restructuring as good news for our economy, and calls on Republican leaders in the Senate to “stop holding America’s small businesses hostage to politics” by blocking a vote to help them  create jobs.

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The many new features of Linux Mint

Linux Mint "Julia" 


by Wirehead

Linux Mint (Ubuntu) has many new features. In the past, you had to configure Update Manager to identify how updates were handled.

In Linux Mint, there is a shield aplet on the bottom panel bar that indicates with a check mark if the OS has all of its updates. If the shield is blank, updates are needed.

In the Administration options there is the Gufw, a graphical front end to UFW (Uncomplicated Firewall),  which has a lot of pre-configured rule options that makes it easy to configure the Uncomplicated Firewall built into Ubuntu.

Based on Ubuntu 10.10 Linux Mint  "Julia" comes with a brand new "Software Manager", FTP support in mintUpload, proxy support and history of updates in mintUpdate, mint4win (a Linux Mint installer for Microsoft Windows), tabbed browsing in Nautilus and a lot of other improvements.  

MintUpdate 3, a brand new Update Manager: New GUI, history of applied updates, proxy support, improved stability The Linux Mint Update Manager "mintUpdate" was refactored and its graphical interface was redesigned from scratch.
mintUpdate 3 brings numerous bug fixes and a brand new GUI

MintUpload 2, with FTP supportMintUpload is the little tool which pops up when you right-click on a file and select upload .

Until now mintUpload was mostly used as a way to share files by uploading them to a public place somewhere on one of Linux Mint's servers and by sending the corresponding URL to friends and family members.

Some people also bought Mint-Space accounts and were able to set up mintUpload to add an additional upload service to it. These people could use their 1GB of Web space and have their files kept there indefinitely.

Initially mintUpload was designed with novice users in mind, people who wanted to share large files with each others and who didn't know what FTP meant or where to get free web space to store them. After gathering some feedback, we've come to realize that mintUpload also got popular with experienced users. So we added FTP support to MintUpload by defining another type of service and letting the user define his own FTP services.

Upload files to your FTP server with one click of the mouse!

MintNanny - Minimal parental control: One of the features Mint has been lacking as a family desktop is the ability for parents to prevent their children from accessing certain websites.

Parental control is easy to set up in Microsoft Windows and we got a lot of feedback from people who migrated to Linux and who missed this feature.

Of course one could install DansGuardian and a few other packages but its not easy, it usually requires the use of a proxy and it also quite complex to configure. For Linux Mint 6 we came with a compromise and we decided to implement a minimal set of features but to make it as trivial to use as possible. So here comes mintNanny.

mintNanny will block sites you really don't want to see! 

MintNanny is a small graphical interface which lets you block domain names. When you block a domain in mintNanny it basically adds an entry to your /etc/hosts file and defines that domain's IP address as being 0.0.0.0. Remember that mintNanny blocks domain names, not IP addresses so if your children are smart enough to ping the domain from another computer they'll be able to access it via its IP address.

Mint4win - A Windows installer for Linux Mint: If you run Microsoft Windows, insert the liveCD and a program called mint4win will launch automatically. This program is an installer for Linux Mint which runs on Windows. It installs Linux Mint within a file on one your partitions and it doesn't touch your existing partitions. It also sets up a Windows multiboot for you. 

 
Install Linux Mint from within Windows.

Of course the performance won't be as good as if the system was installed in its own partition but if you just want to give Linux Mint a try this is a very good option. You can remove mint4win from the Add/Remove applications tool within Windows and this will remove Linux Mint and restore your boot exactly as it was.

New software

Giver is an amazing new tool which lets you send files from one computer to another on a local network.


The application lists all the users and their computers currently connected to the network.

Drag and drop files into Giver and the recipient is immediately notified.

As you can see, sharing files across the network has just become trivial...

Giver now comes pre-installed on Linux Mint. If it proves popular it will also come pre-loaded in the future.

Gufw is an easy and intuitive Firewall configuration tool which now comes pre-installed in Linux Mint.

 
Open ports for certain applications and easily configure your firewall with Gufw.

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Friday, July 30, 2010

Democrats Maintain Advantage on Gallup generic ballot two weeks in a row

PRINCETON, NJ -- Democrats have a 48% to 44% advantage for the week of July 19-25 in Gallup tracking of registered voters' preferences for the 2010 congressional elections. This marks the second straight week in which Democrats have held an edge of at least four percentage points.



Rep. Alan Grayson: How Much Does a Congressman Cost?

You probably heard that a Republican tool in Washington, DC offered $100 last week for someone to punch me in the nose. But you may not have noticed to whom Dan Gainor extended that kind offer. Here is what he said:

"I'll give $100 to first Rep. who punches smary [sic] idiot Alan Grayson in the nose."

"Rep." means Representative, or Congressman. Gainor wanted to motivate a Congressman to hit me. And he thought that offering $100 was the way to do it.

We can't offer you a chance to punch Alan Grayson in the nose, but we can offer you a chance to support our campaign.

Now Gainor is not just any crank. He is the Director of the Business and Media Institute, a Big Business-funded Republican lie-tank in Washington, D.C. He meets with Republican Members of Congress all the time.

And he seems to have an uncanny understanding of what motivates them. Dan Gainor thinks that if you give a Republican elected official money, and he'll do anything you want. Even punch someone in the nose.

The amazing thing is not that Republican Members of Congress are for sale. The amazing thing is that you can buy one for $100, at least according to Dan Gainor. And he ought to know.

For modest amounts of money, people like Dan Gainor think that they can buy a tax break. Or a lucrative government contract. Or exemption from regulations. Or a bailout.

This is why the House Financial Services Committee passed the Shareholder Protection Act yesterday, based on legislation that I introduced months ago - to end the buying and selling of elected officials after the Citizens United decision.

Now we have had almost 50,000 people contribute to our reelection campaign. And here's the thing. None of you has ever asked for a tax break, or a government contract, or a regulatory exemption, or a bailout. In fact, all you've asked us for is good government.

Dan Gainor probably thinks that that makes you a sucker.

I see it differently. I think it makes you an American that I'm proud of.

No punches in the nose for sale here. But if you'd like to make a contribution to government of the people, by the people, and for the people, then click here.



Gibbs says Democrats will hold house

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama's press secretary says he thinks the Democrats will keep control of the House after the fall elections.

At this time the Republicans are expected to gain between 30-34 seats. the GOP needs 39-43 to take control of the House.

Spokesman Robert Gibbs told ABC's "Good Morning America" that Democrats are running better campaigns than Republicans. Gibbs thinks his party will be successful when voters make their choices in November.

Gibbs says Democrats want to make progress on big issues and help move the country ahead. He says putting the GOP back in power would mean going back economic policies that "got us into this mess."

Gibbs' confidence about Democratic prospects follows the firestorm he created when he said that there were enough House seats in play to jeopardize the Democrats' majority.

Intrade gives the GOP a 57 per cent probability of recapturing the House which is better than even odds.



Agit-Pop ad counters GOP disinformation about Social Security

Principles of the Strengthen Social Security Campaign:

1) Social Security did not cause the federal deficit; its benefits should not be cut to reduce the deficit.
2) Social Security should not be privatized in whole or in part.
3) Social Security should not be means-tested.
4) Congress should act in the coming few years to close Social Security's funding gap by requiring those who are most able to afford it to pay somewhat more.
5) Social Security's retirement age, already scheduled to increase from 65 to 67, should not be raised further.
6) Social Security's benefits should not be reduced, including by changes to the COLA or the benefit formula.
7) Social Security's benefits should be increased for those who are most disadvantaged

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Dwindling Retirement Savings casualty of the recession

Laura Bassett lbassett@huffingtonpost.com | HuffPost Reporting
First Posted: 07-30-10 03:11 PM | Updated: 07-30-10 04:48 PM

After working in executive management for over ten years with a steadily increasing salary, Rick Stephens, 51, was laid off from his job in June 2008. Two years of steady unemployment later, he has sold his car, moved in with his 75-year-old father and blown through all his retirement savings. 

I pay my bills with what is left of the savings I accumulated by being frugal all my life, but I'm going through that pretty fast," he said. "I have tapped my IRA, and the result of that is I will be heavily taxed on it next April. I honestly believe that there will be no recovery from this. If there is a recovery, it will be too late for me, as I will have exhausted my savings and my retirement that I had socked away by not living the high life.

Stephens' predicament is an increasingly common. This recession has wreaked havoc on the retirement incomes of millions of Americans. Many  who have planned and saved their entire lives, have watched that money drain out of their accounts.

To make matters worse, many corporate IRA accounts were looted by fund managers and the retiree lost one third of their IRA savings after they were laid off.  

Retirement statistics are grim. The percentage of American workers who said they have less than $10,000 in savings grew to 43 percent in 2010, according to a recent survey by the Employee Benefit Research Institute.

Nearly a quarter of the workforce said they have postponed their planned retirement in the past year and a CareerBuilder.com survey reports that 61 percent of workers say they are now living paycheck to paycheck, as compared to 43 percent in 2007.

source: Huffington Post

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Conservative Scott Lively: Open gays exceptionally brutal and savage

The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Gay Reichs
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full EpisodesPolitical HumorTea Party

Jason Jones sat down with Defend the Family President Scott Lively to talk about the much-debated topic. In his biography Lively describes himself as "one of the most knowledgeable and articulate opponents of the homosexual agenda in America".

While many oppose gays in the military because of a moral stance, Lively's reason for restricting gays is that the Nazis, including Hitler, were gay themselves, and used gay men in their armies because "open homosexuals are distinct from everyone else, men and women, in being exceptionally brutal and savage." 

Jones found this unbelievable, but Lively continued to support his claims with "evidence" that not only was Adolf Hitler a homosexual, but that the Nazis used to have meetings in gay bars.

Jones had to know - what is it about being gay that makes people as "vicious" as this man was baselessly claiming?

After checking with historian Prof. Dagmar Herzog, who pointed out that the Nazis specifically persecuted homosexuals, Jones confronted Lively with the facts.

When Lively simply argued that Nazis persecuted homosexuals to "distract public attention away from their homosexuality," Jones had the perfect opportunity to point out the holes in Lively's theory:

"So, that which you hate the most, you secretly are?" To which Lively responded: "I'm not gay."

Wikipedia indicates gay men suffered unusually cruel treatment in the concentration camps. They faced persecution not only from German soldiers but also from other prisoners, and many gay men were beaten to death.


Additionally, gay men in forced labor camps routinely received more grueling and dangerous work assignments than other non-Jewish inmates, under the policy of "Extermination Through Work".


SS soldiers also were known to use gay men for target practice, aiming their weapons at the pink triangles their human targets were forced to wear.


Lesbians were classified differently as 'anti-socials' and are believed to have worn black triangles in the jails and concentration camps.

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Zogby: Dems beat GOP in Congresional Poll


UTICA, New York - Barely one-in five likely voters approve of the job Congress is doing, according to a new Zogby Interactive survey. Broken down by party, just 25% say they approve of Republican job performance in Congress and 37% approve of the Democrats. 

The Interactive survey of 2,067 likely voters was conducted from July 23-26 and has a margin of error of +/-2.2%.

The Democrat advantage over Republicans in job approval is largely due to getting better ratings among independents and because a majority of Republicans do not approve of their party's performance.

The same poll found Republicans leading Democrats, 43%-40%, on the question of which party's candidate they planned to vote for in this year's Congressional election.

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Wikipedia: Lee Atwater

Saul David Alinsky was an American community organizer and writer. He is generally considered to be the founder of modern community organizing and has been compared in Playboy magazine to Thomas Paine as being "one of the great American leaders of the nonsocialist left." The right wing has demonized Alinsky, but he seems to be mild compared to Lee Atwater, "
Harvey LeRoy "Lee" Atwater was an American political consultant and strategist to the Republican party. He was an advisor of U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and Chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Atwater's political stock rose during the 1970s and the 1980 election in the South Carolina Republican party, working on the campaigns of Governor Carroll Campbell and Senator Strom Thurmond. During his years in South Carolina, Atwater became well known for running hard edged campaigns based on emotional wedge issues.

Atwater's aggressive tactics were first demonstrated during the 1980 congressional campaigns. He was a campaign consultant to Republican incumbent Floyd Spence in his campaign for Congress against Democratic nominee Tom Turnipseed.

Atwater's tactics in that campaign included push polling in the form of fake surveys by "independent pollsters" to inform white suburbanites that Turnipseed was a member of the NAACP.

He also sent out last-minute letters from Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) telling voters that Turnipseed would disarm America and turn it over to liberals and Communists.

At a press briefing, Atwater planted a "reporter" who rose and said, "We understand Turnipseed has had psychotic treatment."

Atwater later told the reporters off the record that Turnipseed "got hooked up to jumper cables" - a reference to electroconvulsive therapy that Turnipseed underwent as a teenager.

"Lee seemed to delight in making fun of a suicidal 16-year-old who was treated for depression with electroshock treatments", Turnipseed recalled. "In fact, my struggle with depression as a student was no secret.

After the 1980 election, Atwater went to Washington and became an aide in the Ronald Reagan administration, working under political director Ed Rollins.

In 1984, Rollins managed Reagan's re-election campaign, and Atwater became the campaign's deputy director and political director. Rollins tells several Atwater stories in his 1996 book, Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms.

Rollins states that Atwater ran a dirty tricks operation against vice-presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro including publicizing the fact that Ferraro's parents had been indicted of numbers running in the 1940s. Rollins also described Atwater as

"ruthless", "Ollie North in civilian clothes", and someone who "just had to drive in one more stake".

During his years in Washington, Atwater became aligned with Vice President George H.W. Bush, who chose Atwater to run his 1988 presidential campaign.

Atwater on the Southern Strategy

As a member of the Reagan administration in 1981, Atwater gave an anonymous interview to Political Scientist Alexander P. Lamis about the GOP's Southern Strategy and Ronald Reagan's version of it:

Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South.

Now [the new Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn’t have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he's campaigned on since 1964 and that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.

Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?

Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff.

You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. . . "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."[6][7]

Atwater's most noteworthy campaign was the 1988 presidential election, where he served as campaign manager for Republican nominee George H.W. Bush.

A particularly aggressive media program included a television advertisement produced by Floyd Brown comparing Bush and Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis on crime.

In 1976, Massachusetts passed a law to similarly ban furloughs for first-degree murderers and Dukakis vetoed the bill. Willie Horton was serving a life sentence for first degree murder for stabbing a boy to death during a robbery.

Horton while on weekend furlough kidnapped a young couple, torturing the young man and repeatedly raping his girlfriend. . . The Horton ad campaign only re-enforced the public's general opinion that Dukakis was too liberal, which helped Bush overcome Dukakis's 17-percent lead in early public opinion polls and win both the electoral and popular vote by landslide margins.

The Oldest Living Things in the World



rachel sussman | March 27, 2010

For the past 5 years I have been working on a project called The Oldest Living Things in the World. 

I'm researching, working with biologists, and traveling all over the world to find and photograph continuously living organisms that are 2000 years old and older. 

Learn a little about my project here, and how you can help support it on Kickstarter.com


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WMR: Bush's ambassador to eastern Caribbean protected Allen Stanford Ponzi operations

(Wayne Madsen Report) July 30 - August 1, 2010 publication date: Jul 30, 2010

Mary K. Ourisman, the Texas-born socialite wife of Maryland car dealer Mandy Ourisman, helped provide diplomatic and legal cover for jailed former Stanford International Bank chief Allen Stanford. this is according to Stanford insiders who spoke to WMR.

Mary Ourisman was George W. Bush's ambassador to Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean States, which include Antigua and Barbuda, the headquarters for Stanford's one-time global banking and financial services Ponzi scheme empire that collapsed in 2009.

Stanford is in prison in Texas and has been refused bail as a flight risk. Stanford is also a citizen of Antigua and Barbuda. He is scheduled to go on trial in January 2011, conveniently two months after the congressional election in November.

Stanford's campaign contributions fell into the coffers of congressional members of both Democrats and Republicans.

However, as WMR previously reported, Stanford International Bank also became a replacement for the collapsed Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) as a vehicle for drug money laundering and other covert operations on behalf of the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

Mary Ourisman, a political fundraiser for Bush and other GOP candidates and a close friend of former First Lady Laura Bush, became U.S. ambassador to Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean States in 2006.

In her job, Ourisman ensured that Stanford's financial operations in Antigua and Barbuda, as well as in two other Caribbean nations where she was credentialed as ambassador. St. Kitts-Nevis and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, are protected from federal regulators.

To provide even more protection for Stanford's money laundering ans other covert operations, Stanford showered GOP and Democratic senators with large campaign contributions, including $83,000 for John Cornyn of Texas and $950,000 for the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, and particularly, Bob Menendez (D-NJ).

Menendez, who maintains close connections to the Cuban exile community in Florida and new Jersey and its CIA veteran operatives, has refused to investigate the Stanford fraud on behalf of its victims and has tried to block any Senate investigation of Stanford's links to the CIA and top government officials, Democratic and Republican.

It is also noteworthy that Texas was the only U.S. state to have entered into a financial regulatory agreement with Antigua. The Texas Department Banking and the Antigua and Barbuda International Financial Sector Regulatory authority signed the agreement on July 26, 2001. More amazingly, the agreement was signed while Antigua was subject to a U.S. Treasury advisory warning of potential fraud.

Even today, Antigua's ambassador to the United States, Debra-Mae Lovell, the wife of Antigua's corruption-tainted Finance Minister Harold Lovell, spends most of her time in Washington acting as a public relations flack for Antigua. Lovell has ridiculed the former Stanford investors who were defrauded by the Ponzi scheme which was facilitated by a corrupt Antiguan government.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, more concerned about the continuation of U.S. military basing rights on Antigua, has warmly embraced Ambassador Lovell and members of her government and has lavished hundreds of millions of dollars of aid on Antigua.

Kristen Stogniew, who headed a one-man company in Florida, Stogniew and Associates, provided risk analysis services for Stanford. Stoniew produced a flimsy three-page risk analysis report for Stanford in 2003. It mostly consisted of disclaimers.

Gerry Stogniew, who founded his company in 1980 and resided in Seminole, Florida, died in July 2008. The firm was taken over Stogniew's daughter when the founder died. Oddly, the professional staff for Stogniew and Associates are only listed by their initials. Federal Election Commission records indicate Stogniew donated to the campaigns of George H. W. Bush in 1987 and Florida Republicans Bill McCollum in 1999 and Katherine Harris in 2005.

Allen Stanford and Mary Ourisman shared more than an interest in protecting Stanford International Bank from nosy regulators: they were both born in the small Texas town of Mexia, Ourisman in 1946 and Stanford in 1950.

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Rigtardia Alexa ratings contine to rise


Rightardia is ranked #2,490,829 in the world according to the three-month Alexa traffic rankings. And in February 2007, the Netcraft Web Server Survey found 108,810,358 distinct websites. This would place Rightardia in the top 2.3 per cent of the web sites in the world.

About 82% of visits to the site consist of only one pageview (i.e., are bounces). Visitors to the site view 1.1 unique pages each day on average.

The fraction of visits to this site referred by search engines is roughly 29%.

Alexa estimate that 65% of visitors to Rightardia.blogspot.com come from India, where it has attained a traffic rank of 203,937. However, our Web Stats numbers do not indicate a significant Indian viewer-ship.

We did not get an updated Netcraft rating this week.

We have reported that some conservative wing nuts have been forging and hacking Rightardia posts on Usenet.  This bizarre activity appears to be accelerating our ratings.

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Couple get joint custody of dog

 

Added On July 30, 2010

A judge in Maryland orders a divorcing couple to share custody of their dog. CNN's Carol Costello reports. 

Rightrdia has discussed 'dog people' before. Most are conservative and these couples do not want children. Rush Limbaugh is an example of a 'dog person.'

In Maryland, a dog is considered property but the judge gave this divorcing couple 'joint custody' of the animal.

In the 1950s many women, who bore children, looked down on other women who worked and were childless. Of course, at that time the tax table for top earning Americans was 90 per cent.

The GOP using class warfare arguments has brought the tax tables for top earning Americans down to the low thirties.

The fracturing of the middle class started during the Reagan presidency and has forced both spouses into the job market to make ends meet.

Some women have preferred to be 'dog mothers' rather than super moms who both raised children and worked.

The 'dog mother's is a consequence of Republican family values and reactionary GOP tax policy.

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Russia ranks third in Generation Sexed

by Lidia Okorokova at 19/07/2010 20:03

Russia may not have been a contender in the football in South Africa this summer. But in the World Cup of sex the country comes third only to the Brazilians and Greeks – as Russians get their leg over at least once a week, according to a survey by condom makers Durex.

So if Russians nowadays are having sex more than Europeans or Americans, why do debates still rage about the place of sex, marriage and education in a country that may be enjoying more intimate relations, but is having a hard time talking about it seriously?

“We aren’t puritan any more,” says Olga Yashina, editor-in-chief of online sex magazine 24h.ru. “Russians are quite open-minded about sex – there’s just not the sex talk culture there is in the West.”

There may be a lot of sex, but there is still little awareness, Yashina and her colleagues say – a relic from the Soviet past when couples made love behind curtains in rooms occupied by whole families.

“It’s important to raise awareness, to help people start talking about sex with a partner,” said Galina Korotun, general director of 24h.ru.

Anything but coy

With sex shops on every corner and an abundance of skin on billboards, in magazines and on television, the media is anything but coy following a sexual revolution that hit Russia a generation too late.

In the course of just 20 years, Russian media caught up with and even surpassed Western networks in air time devoted to sexual images. Kinky commercials became a staple of what advertisers believed was good taste, with a recent airline video causing a stir by depicting scantily-clad flight attendants soaping their airplane - and themselves - in full view of a drooling male fire brigade.

And for the TNT talk show “Sex with Anfisa Chekhova”, breaking taboos became the whole point. “If you know something new about sex, don’t hesitate to tell it to the nation,” the show’s web site says.

“Russians have become more open-minded when it comes to sex and it is clear that they have changed their attitude toward it too,” Alexander Zachenilo, a sex therapist at the Uro-Pro medical clinic in Moscow. 

(Recently) . . . "a middle-aged woman comes to therapy and says that if she knew which sex techniques she could use 20 years ago, she would have saved her marriage,” Zachenilo said.

A sexual generation gap

But decades of suppressing the issue and moves by the authorities to tone down overt sexual images have taken their toll. Today, Russia still has one of the highest abortion rates in the world, and sex education in school remains a controversial issue.

Thanks to the Bolsheviks, Russia - with one of most patriarchal societies in the world - became one of the first countries to give women the vote, and they legalised abortion in 1920.

As far as government policy was concerned, free love reigned until Stalin outlawed abortion in 1936 and institutionalised conservative family values.

But by the 1960s, sex in the Soviet Union occupied a paradoxical niche: abortion was once again legal and easily accessible, but sex education, contraceptives and virtually any candid discussion of the matter went deep underground.

Yevgeny Kulgavchuk, vice-president of the Russian Association of Sexologists, said that for the older generation, the changes in sexual behaviour are still not as dramatic as for those born after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Unfortunately, the trend reflects a negative effect, he says.

“We are seeing the destruction of the institution of marriage, early sexual activity, especially among girls, the increase in the number of abortions and sexually-transmitted infections,” Kulgavchuk says.

This generation gap lowers the age of sex shop clients, according to Alexander Nasonov, the owner of an online sex-toy store. Most of his customers are between 25 and 35, he says.

A survey conducted by Bayer Schering Pharma said that 65 per cent of Russians agree that sex is very important in their lives, but only a little over 50 per cent said they were satisfied in bed.

“I think Russia has its own way,” says Kulgavchuk, the sexologist. “And since we are at the crossroads of Eastern and Western cultures, we should more often look not to the West, but the East. And we must learn not to have sex, but learn to make love.”

Countries where people have sex at least once a week:

Greece - 87%
Brazil - 82%
Russia - 80%

Behind them are:

France - 70%
Spain 72%
USA, Nigeria - 53%

Confidence in talking about sex:

Mexicans - 80%
Greeks - 76%
Brits - 49% (least confident in Europe)

Sources: Durex sexual wellbeing survey

http://mn.ru/society/20100719/187938611.html

A Big Branch Mine worker claims a manager had a methane detector disabled


A Big Branch Mine worker claims his supervisor ordered an electrician to disable a methane gas detector, which could have alerted miners to danger in a deadly West Virginia explosion.

An active gas detector would have also have prevented equipment form operating that could have sparked an explosion.

Miners are afraid to speak up because they are not unionized and will be fired if they make waves about mine safety conditions.

NBC’s Tom Costello reports. (Today Show)

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Glen Beck: "When we're behind barbed wire and just eating rock soup"



From the July 30 edition of Premiere Radio Networks' Glenn Beck Program.

Glen attacks progressive hero, George Soros, and calls him "the fat man."

He then disses the Chelsea Clinton wedding because of the cost. Beck claims Bill Clinton ran the county 'poorly. . . This is heralding the end of America."

Talk about some major Fox News envy of a big Democratic family event.

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Why conservatives hate America?


To answer the question, Rightardia thinks Repblicans have trouble relating to a black president.

Since Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil rights Act of 1964, the GOP has been fueled by racism. A black president poured salt into the GOP wounds after the 2008 elections.

Hey! This is America: anything is possible.

Another problem is that the GOP thinks it owns America. It is very disturbing to the GOP when it is out of power.

A recent Gallup survey found that 79 percent of Tea Party supporters are non-Hispanic whites. Only six percent are non-Hispanic blacks.

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75th anniversary of Social Security


Rigtardia agrees with speaker Pelosai. We shouldn't weaken Social Security to pay for tax cuts for the affluent or unpaid wars that started during the Bush administration.

The Social Security (SS) system needs reform by changing the manner it is taxed to spread the tax burden to the affluent by eliminating the $108,500 cap.

This cap has made the FICA tax regressive that has been borne by the middle class since the inception of the SS program. 

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Wh Blog: West Wing Week 30



Posted by Arun Chaudhary on July 30, 2010 at 12:00 AM EDT

Thanks for checking out the West Wing Week, your guide to everything that's happening at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

This week, walk step by step with the President as he fights for campaign finance reform, boosts small business, meets with Space Shuttle Atlantis astronauts, commemorates the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, welcomes the 2009 Softball World Series champions, makes an appearance on The View and much more.

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Tea Party racist comics appear in Texas

 
Comics with Problems began posting the "Tea Party Comix," a kind of crazy, photocopied production featuring President Obama as Sambo.  
Ethan Persoff of Comics with Problems tells us he picked up the first two editions of "Tea Party Comix" from an "enthusiastic Tea Partier in Corpus Christi."The page says the artist is unknown, so it may very well have been published by the Democrap Party propaganda division.

Perpetrating racial hoaxes for political gain is nothing new.  Back in 2004 there was a psychology professor named Kerri Dunn who vandalized her own car in order to garner sympathy for her cause.

A convert to Judaism, Ms. Dunn was outraged at the discriminatio experienced by "her people," and organized a series of lectures on the "epidemic" of anti-Semitic hate crimes sweeping the nation.
 
Unfortunately, there weren't enough hate crimes to use real ones as examples, so she vandalized her own car the day of one of her lectures, breaking the windows, slashing the tires and spraypainting swastikas and slurs on it.

Kerri Dunn was eventually convicted of several charges, including insurance fraud (after filing a damage claim for her vehicle), and filing a false police report.  She was also ordered to pay nearly $20,000 in damages to the university, which had to hire extra security
to reassure the terrorized students. 
 
Ironically, the judge ordered the psychology professor to undergo 90 days of psychological evaluation before he sentenced her to a year in prison.

source:
From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?D=E4nk_666?= <dank420@rocketmail.com>
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc,alt.politics.liberalism,alt.fan.rush-limbaugh,alt.politics,alt.politics.usa
Subject: Re: The incredibly racist 'Tea Party Comix'
Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2010 19:55:58 -0700 (PDT)
Organization: http://groups.google.com

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Iowa Republican party is on the lunatic fringe

Something truly bizarre is happening in Iowa.
Newsweek's Jerry Adler has paged through some "387 enumerated planks" of the Republican Party of Iowa's platform. Among the instances are the  "North American Union" paranoia and the upholding of manure as the only agricultural poop imbued by its creator with American exceptionalism.

There also is a bizarre plan to strip President Barack Obama of his citizenship for accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. This must come as a blow to the birthers who believe that Obama is not a US citizen.  Is this a tacit admission on the part of the Iowa GOP that Obama is a US citizen?

As Adler explains, the Iowa GOP is calling for the "reintroduction and ratification of the original 13th amendment" of the Constitution. The first wrinkle here is that the current 13th Amendment is a rather important one: it bans slavery. The part the Iowa GOp likes, is what the original 13th amendment said:

If any citizen of the United States shall accept, claim, receive or retain any title of nobility or honour, or shall, without the consent of Congress accept and retain any present, pension, office or emolument of any kind whatever, from any emperor, king, prince or foreign power, such person shall cease to be a citizen of the United States and shall be incapable of holding any office of trust or profit under them, or either of them.


That language was originally considered by the states in 1810 but, as Jason Hancock at the Iowa Independent points out, "The amendment was ratified by 12 states but never got the 13th state that it needed, and thus, never became law."

This is the part where Obama, having accepted a Nobel Prize from the Nobel Committee, people appointed by the Norwegian Parliament, gets stripped of his citizenship. Presumably, this takes care of all sorts of other Nobel laureates, like former President Jimmy Carter, author Toni Morrison, Energy secretary Steven Chu, and economists Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz.

Have fun in your new home in Oslo, everyone!

Oh, and also, say goodbye to every lawyer in America!

In the world of the Thirteenthers, though, it's all a conspiracy, and the leading suspects are those shady characters who put "esquire" after their names.

To quote the Web site Constitutional Concepts, "This Amendment was for the specific purpose of banning participation in government operations by attorneys and bankers who claimed the Title of Nobility of 'Esquire.'

These people had joined the International Bar Association or the International Bankers Association and owed their allegiance to the King of England."

Rightardia can't explain it any better, but Constitutional Concepts CEO Jim Barrus says in an e-mail that enforcement of the 13th Amendment would strike a blow against "the elected politicians who have grand plans of ruling every facet of America," and would essentially delegitimize virtually every act of the federal government since 1819.

Who wouldn't want that?

source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/29/iowa-gop-embraces-plan-to_n_663621.html

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Thursday, July 29, 2010

Conservative Texas billionaires accused of insider trading

TERRY WALLACE | 07/29/10 11:02 PM | AP
DALLAS — Sam and Charles Wyly, Dallas billionaire investors known for their support of conservative candidates and causes, made $550 million in undisclosed profits through 13 years of insider trading.

This is according to  according to a Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit filed Thursday.

In a 78-page complaint filed in a Manhattan federal court in New York, the SEC said the Wylys held and traded tens of millions of shares in companies on whose boards they served.

Both men "defrauded the investing public" by misrepresenting their ownership and trading of those stocks.

"The apparatus of the fraud was an elaborate sham system of trusts and subsidiary companies located in the Isle of Man and the Cayman Islands ... created by and at the direction of the Wylys," the SEC complaint stated.


Using this offshore system, the Wylys were able to sell stock worth more than $750 million in four public companies where they served as corporate directors.

They also committed an insider trading violation at one of the companies that resulted in an unlawful gain of over $31.7 million.

The complaint lists the four companies as Michaels Stores Inc., Sterling Software Inc., Sterling Commerce Inc. and Scottish Annuity & Life Holdings Ltd., which is now known as Scottish Re Group Ltd.

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