World News Korner

Courtesy of Americans Against the Tea Party:

Things sure are tough in Jesusland! Apparently lacking followers, Kentucky Baptist churches are resorting to an interesting new method to win converts: gun giveaways they have dubbed “outreach to rednecks.”

The Kentucky Baptist Convention is doing exactly what Jesus would want: luring converts by giving them the means to murder others! At their “Second Amendment Celebrations,” churches across the state invite gun lovers everywhere to enjoy a nice, juicy steak and a chance to win fabulous prizes–all of which are capable of sending someone to meet Jesus very efficiently.

According to Chuck McAlister, a former pastor and Outdoor Channel hunting show host, over 1,600 men made “professions of faith” at about 50 gun giveaway events last year. The hillbilly handouts managed to lure over 500 people out of their homes on a snowy January day to a gun event at Highview Baptist Church. Sixty-one of those men “made decisions to seek salvation,” according to McAlister. According to Paul Chitwood, the Kentucky Baptist Convention’s executive director, “it’s been very effective.”

Once again I have to ask, "Have any of these people ever read the New Testament? Do that not understand the words attributed to Jesus?"

But hey if you can't trust a former pastor and hunting show host about the most effective way to get asses in the pews then who can you trust?

I am beginning to feel badly for the normal everyday Christians who are living their lives trying to be good people, and who keep finding themselves constantly represented in the news by the craziest people in the country.

Source

According to a poll by Public Policy Polling Hillary Clinton leads ALL potential presidential candidates, from both parties, by huge margins.

Among Democrats Clinton comes away with 67% of the vote, with Liberals that goes up to 79%, and with women the poll shows she is at 71%. (Only 9% see her as unfavorable.)

This is while up against Joe Biden, who gets 12% of the Democraic vote, Elizabeth Warren at 5%, Mark Warner 3%, Andrew Cuomo at 2%, and Cory Booker at 1%.

For those on the Republican side Mike Huckabee takes the lead with 17%, with Rand Paul at 14%, Jeb Bush at 13%, Chris Christie and Ted Cruz at 10%, Paul Ryan at 9%, Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal at 7%, and the one time GOP darling Mark Rubio with 3%. (By the way all of the GOP candidates still draw high favorable numbers among the party faithful with the exception of Chris Christie who has 35% unfavorable rating among Iowa Republicans.)

In a head to head match up with with Clinton the only Republican candidate to get close enough to make it a contest is Huckabee who gets a 42% to Clinton's 46%. Followed by Rand Paul with a 42% to 49% and Jeb Bush's 41% to 45% for Clinton.

Of course it must be remembered that Huckabee won the Iowa Republican caucus in 2008, yet that was not enough to convince the Republican party to make him their candidate. These are interesting numbers but they really don't say much about who will be the likely candidate on the GOP side in 2016.

However there really is no doubt who will represent the Democrats. If she wants to of course.

Interesting to note that PPP did not even bother to include Sarah Palin in their polling, even though her favorable rating is at a rather astonishing 61%. I guess PPP is well aware that Palin has never had any real intention of running for anything despite her political prick tease.

Source

Courtesy of Mediaite:

Last week, Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace was peeved that National Security Advisor Susan Rice appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press, but not on his show — perhaps, he suggested, due to the fact that he would have asked her the “tough questions” about Benghazi.

This week, it was John Kerry who left Wallace hanging, as the Secretary of State appeared on Meet the Press, This Week With George Stephanopoulos, and Face the Nation to discuss Russia’s invasion of the Crimean peninsula — but skipped Wallace’s show.

“For the record, we invited Secretary of State Kerry to join us today,” Wallace said, “but although the White House put him out on all the other Sunday shows*, they declined to make him available to us, or you.”

Wallace then pivoted right to House Oversight Committee Chair Darrell Issa (R-CA), who spent the entire next segment discussing last summer’s IRS investigation.

So first Wallace bitches that he can't get the White House to take he and his network seriously, and the next he engages in a conversation with a well known Republican attack dog about a made up controversy.

Yeah I have NO sympathy for this guy. None.

Source

These are images that recently showed up on Reddit, of Ukrainians in Crimea having their pictures taken with the mysterious troops that have shown up to protect Russian interests.

Apparently Crimea has strong loyalties to Russia and clearly the citizens here do not consider their arrival to be threat.

However there are more overt actions being taken at the Ukrainian military bases in Crimea:

Amid signs of Russian military intervention in Ukraine's Crimean peninsula, Russian generals led their troops to three bases in the region Sunday, demanding Ukrainian forces surrender and hand over their weapons, Vladislav Seleznyov, spokesman for the Crimean Media Center of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, told CNN.

Soldiers denying Russian troops access to Crimean military base.

In response Ukraine's new leaders have called up military reservists and are mobilizing troops, but as of right now not a shot has been fired, and there are no reported losses of life due to these actions.

Clearly Putin is attempting to use a show of force to bully the new Ukrainian government, which is a cobbled together patchwork or political neophytes, many of who have opposing interests, and who were behind the ouster of President Viktor F. Yanukovych, into some kind of negotiations.

Remember that these are the images that we have seen coming out of Ukraine for the last few months.

So by comparison the Russian forces have shown great restraint. So far.

How long that restraint will last, and whether Putin intends to move his troops past Crimea and further into the Ukraine, is the burning question.

This post is in no way meant to excuse Putin's actions. He is an opportunistic asshole, who cares little for, the people of Ukraine, or how he is perceived by the world at large.

I just wanted to provide a little perspective before the Right Wing hawks start beating their war drums even louder.

By the way for all of those conservatives claiming that President Obama is weak, and unwilling to do what is needed, they must be reminded that Russia invaded Georgia on President Bush's watch, and that he was unable to do a single thing about it.

While watching the various Sunday shows today there were plenty of conservatives who offered condemnation of what our President was doing, but none that offered any better options, or wanted to suggest military action.

And no Sarah Palin was not identified as being a political soothsayer.

Update: More pictures of Ukrainians with Russian soldiers in Crimea.

Source

Courtesy of the LA Times:

Amazingly, there are still some holdouts in the political and economic community who insist that the Obama stimulus failed--that is, failed to arrest a steep fall in economic output and launch a period of growth in gross domestic product, jobs, stock market valuations, and other metrics that continues to this day.

Menzie Chinn of the University of Wisconsin and Jeffrey Frankel of Harvard (and a former Clinton administration economics advisor) have just ganged up on the stimulus deniers. Their analyses are timely, since the stimulus has just passed its fifth birthday: The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was signed into law on Feb. 17, 2009.

Chinn observes (and shows his work via a series of telling slides) that the launch of ARRA coincides almost exactly with the bottoming out of the stock market, the reversal of a trend of increasing negative GDP growth and an almost unbroken record of positive growth since the end of the first quarter of 2009.

"The burden of proof," he writes, "lies on those who assert the beginning of the recovery is due to anything, anything (Fed balance sheet expansion, TARP — both implemented six months earlier –, sunspots, or the return of Ancient Aliens) but the policies implemented by the Obama Administration."

I have heard a number of so-called "economists" on Fox News and CNN claiming that the stimulus did nothing, but all evidence proves their contention incorrect.

History will prove that what President Obama did to save the economy was just this side of miraculous, until then it falls to good liberals to right the good fight of facts against purposeful misinformation.

Source

The authors of a new book entitled "The ADHD Explosion" have made a rather startling discovery:

Using Centers for Disease Control surveys, Hinshaw and Sheffler found that when rates of ADHD diagnoses are broken down by state, it turns out that there are dramatic discrepancies. Based on the most recent survey, from 2011, a child in Kentucky is three times as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD as a child in Nevada. And a child in Louisiana is five times as likely to take medication for ADHD as a child in Nevada.

And these states aren’t just outliers. The five states that have the highest rate of diagnoses — Kentucky, Arkansas, Louisiana, Indiana and North Carolina — are all over 10 percent of school age children. The five states with the lowest percent diagnosed — Nevada, New Jersey, Colorado, Utah and California — are all under 5 percent. The disparity is even greater for kids prescribed ADHD medication. The same five states are at the top of the list, all of them with over 8 percent of kids getting medication. The states at the bottom of the list for medication — Nevada, Hawaii, California, Alaska and New Jersey — are all under 3.1 percent.

The authors set out to look for factors that could account for those sharp discrepancies.

“We thought it might have to do with the supply of providers — how many pediatricians or child psychiatrists in a given region — or the ways states supplement Medicaid,” explains Hinshaw. “It might have to do with advertising. But it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that most kids first get noticed for ADHD in a classroom setting. So we wondered, are there policies about schooling that might be relevant?”

What the team found was that high rates of ADHD diagnoses correlated closely with state laws that penalize schools when students fail. Nationally, this approach to education was enacted into law in 2001 with No Child Left Behind, which makes funding contingent on the number of students who pass standardized tests. In more recent years, similar testing-based strategies have been championed by education reformers such as Michelle Rhee. But many states passed these accountability laws as early as the 1980s, and within a few years of passage, ADHD diagnoses started going up in those states, the authors found, especially for kids near the poverty line.

ADHD diagnoses of public school students within 200 percent of the federal poverty level jumped 59 percent after accountability legislation passed, Hinshaw reports, compared with less than 10 percent for middle- and high-income children. They saw no comparable trend in private schools, which are not subject to legislation like this.

I absolutely believe this to be true. In fact I have seen it in action.

Focus on the test, and stress placed on teachers to make sure each child can finish the test within the time allotted, have resulted in these medical shortcuts which will see children with perfectly normal attention spans sent to pediatricians with teacher recommendations to be evaluated for ADHD or ADD.

And believe me many pediatricians have no problem simply prescribing the medications, even for kids who fall outside of the spectrum. What I don't think many realize, and I have seen many examples of this, is that children who take medications their entire lives have no problem turning to Oxycontin or PCP, or other mood altering drugs as teenagers or young adults.

In fact many of the prescription medications for ADHD have a very high street value, and kids have been known to shop them around in exchange for beer or pot money, or for something quite a bit stronger.

Just another way that George Bush has negatively impacted a generation of young Americans.

Source

Screw Sarah Palin and her talk about taking pictures with cold fish, I would much rather have my picture taken with any of these amazing men.

Source

"Stock trader Steve Schwarzman, net worth 8 billion, once said that Obama raising his taxes 3% felt like when Hitler invaded Poland. Sounds like something Sarah Palin would tweet after huffing paint thinner."

Best line of the night.

Source

This was posted on Palin's Facebook page earlier today.

The idea that a group of people, who literally started their own news channel so that they could be protected from facts that do not meet their ideology, think that it is liberals who do not entertain other points of view is so ridiculous that I don't know if laughter or pity is the appropriate response.

After all it is not the fault of liberals that facts tend to have a liberal bias.

And let's not forget that this is from the Facebook page of Sarah Palin, a woman who gets all of her points of view from whichever hand is shoved up the back of her shirt and working the string attached to her mouth hinge.

The only thing that would shock liberals about this ignorant Right Wing bomb thrower would be watching her stand in front of a real reporter, and answering actual questions without having to read them off of a teleprompter, off her hand, or from cue cards flashed to her by RAM from the crowd.

P.S. By the way isn't it nice to see that Keith Olbermann is still getting under their skin after all this time?

And don't you miss this? "That woman is an idiot."

Source

Courtesy of the AP:

Creation Museum founder Ken Ham announced Thursday that a municipal bond offering has raised enough money to begin construction on the Ark Encounter project, estimated to cost about $73 million. Groundbreaking is planned for May and the ark is expected to be finished by the summer of 2016.

Ham said a high-profile evolution debate he had with "Science Guy" Bill Nye on Feb. 4 helped boost support for the project.

Nye said he was "heartbroken and sickened for the Commonwealth of Kentucky" after learning that the project would move forward. He said the ark would eventually draw more attention to the beliefs of Ham's ministry, which preaches that the Bible's creation story is a true account, and as a result, "voters and taxpayers in Kentucky will eventually see that this is not in their best interest."

Ham's Answers in Genesis ministry and the Creation Museum enjoyed an avalanche of news media attention during the debate, which focused on science and the Bible's explanations of the origins of the universe.

So even though Bill Nye clearly won the debate, in the end Ham gained access to his one true god.

Money.

This kind of thing sickens me beyond belief.

The story of Noah's Ark is so easily refuted that a child in elementary school could do so.

Unless of course he was educated by Creationists and taken to this aberration and told that it was a legitimate museum. Which it is NOT.

Time is not on the side of the Religious Right, but if they can keep dumbing down our children they can delay the spread of secularism and the end of Fundamentalism.

Source

Courtesy of Politicususa:

The ad features rape survivor Nicole Anderson speaking out, “I am speaking out because it really bothered me for Greg Abbott to partner with Ted Nugent knowing his history of being a predator. I was at home. I heard about it on the news. It made me feel like the it minimized the fact that Ted Nugent is a predator. I think that it sends the wrong message that he partnered up with this man that is very vocal about liking underage girls. There’s something wrong with that. It’s not okay.”

This ad is important on a couple of different levels. First, it is telling the truth about Ted Nugent. These types of ads should make Republican candidates think twice before they decide to cozy up to, and appear with, a self admitted sexual predator.

Secondly, the use of Nugent as a campaign booster by Abbott is an escalation of the Republican war on women, and the men who support the rights of all women. Abbott’s embrace of Nugent is sending the message to all voters that if Greg Abbott is elected governor, open season will continue on the rights of women.

You know I said when Nugent first appeared on stage with Abbott that this would do wonders for the Davis campaign, and clearly they agree with me.

Not only that but I can only imagine how much money Davis has raised off of Ted Nugent's interjection into the Abbott campaign.

Ted Nugent is a sick POS and it the Republicans are ignorant enough to bring him along on the campaign trail, then Democrats are going to be smart enough to use that against them.

Seriously, at this point, if any other Republican or Libertarian links themselves to Ted Nugent we really have to question their mental health. My guess is nobody will go there, but considering how stubborn and self delusional these idiots are anything is possible.

Source

Courtesy of Facebook

Courtesy of TMZ:

Levi Johnston is sick of Bristol Palin treating him like he doesn't exist -- claiming she's been traveling around the country with their son Tripp ... and he wants her held in contempt.

Levi just filed legal docs -- obtained by TMZ -- asking the judge to order Bristol ... who's currently going to school in Arizona .. to return their son to Alaska STAT.

Levi claims Bristol up and took Tripp to Arizona in January -- and all he got was a text.

During their custody battle, Levi claims both parents were ordered to keep Tripp in Alaska unless they both agreed he could travel.

Sources close to Bristol tell us, Levi's just trying to start drama because she called him out last year for not paying child support -- he's known all along Bristol goes to school in Arizona. And, she says Levi never sees the kid anyway ... so his whining is ridiculous.

So now you know why Levi's attorney filed a motion holding Bristol in contempt. She was NOT allowed to take Tripp out of state without prior agreement, and she did anyway.

And she tells him with a text?

Of course as we all know the Palins don't believe the rules apply to them anyway. We have seen that time and time again.

And by the way those "sources close to Bristol," (Hi Sarah!) are dead wrong about the child support payments.

I have been told by a little bird that he has cancelled checks that demonstrate that he has paid a significant amount of that child support, including the amount in arrears, and that this information is now with CSSD.

And as for him not seeing Tripp very often, that is all about Bristol denying him visitation. Once again Levi asks all the time and either she refuses to respond or he is given some bull shit excuse about Tripp not being available.

This is good that Levi's side is getting out there, especially after the National Enquirer claimed that the custody case was closed.

What Bristol and Sarah want is for there not to be any publicity so that they can screw Levi over, or quietly fight him in court until he is drained of resources, without anybody in the press getting wind of it.

And something that the press really needs to realize is that if they check Court View they will see that Bristol is being represented by her mother's lawyer, John J Tiemessen, whose retainer is paid by SarahPAC.

That means that while Levi scrapes together enough money to pay a lawyer up here in Alaska, while also struggling to feed his family on an electrician's paycheck, Bristol simply sits on her ass in her mother's big house in Arizona and lets the idiots that donate to her mother's PAC help her to keep Tripp away from his father.

Source