World News Korner

Courtesy of Esquire:

By now, and by god, it should have settled permanently in the consciousness of the nation what a huge and untoward gamble with the country John McCain and his campaign took in 2008 when they elevated Sarah Palin from her rightful place on the tundra to the political celebrity she currently enjoys. McCain should pay a heavy price for unleashing this ignorant, two-wheeled bilewagon on the country's politics. If you think she's a legitimate political leader, you're an idiot and a sucker and I feel sorry for you.

Yesterday she gave a wildly received speech to ring down the curtain at CPAC. The applause, as far as I know, may still be going on. It was as singularly embarrassing a public address as any allegedly sentient primate ever has delivered. It was a disgrace to politics, to rhetoric, to the English language, and to seventh-grade slam books everywhere.

This ambulatiory bag of rank resentment pulled out all the tricks. The cheap shots; "Aw, John, why the long face?" to the Secretary of State. The sneering, wheedling playground taunting -- "You can't make a phone call without Michelle Obama knowing, 'This is the third time this week you dialed Pizza Hut Delivery'" -- and a full panoply of funny voices that are the trademark of dipshit comics in every two-drink minimum club in America. We got "hope and channng-ey," and how "some members" of the GOP establishment are saying to us, "Hush, America. Go to sleep, little lambs." And, in what is being celebrated as the piece de resistance , she turned Green Eggs And Ham into an extended taunt.

If you laughed, you're an idiot and I feel sorry for you.

"This ambulatory bag of rank resentment " Boy wish I would have thought of that.

Right now Palin is getting spanked all over the internet for her crazed rhetoric, and taunting of the liberals, the media, and our President.

There are few who have anything positive to say, except of course those on the Right Wing fringe.


Clearly they are so desperate for attention from the mainstream media that they would support televised self-immolation if they thought it would get national coverage and somehow reflect poorly on the President.

The funny thing about CPAC this year was that each speaker seemed to be trying to out crazy the next crazy who might follow them to the podium.

NRA Vice President Wayne LaPierre actually said:

"We don't trust government, because government itself has proven unworthy of our trust. We trust ourselves and we trust what we know in our hearts to be right. We trust our freedom. In this uncertain world, surrounded by lies and corruption everywhere you look, there is no greater freedom than the right to survive and protect our families with all the rifles, shotguns, and handguns we want.

Paul Ryan told a story about a kid who did not want to be on the school lunch program, and instead wanted to eat his lunch from a brown paper bag, that turned out to be plagiarized from a book written by a woman who actually works to feed hungry children in America.

So in this kind of atmosphere is it any wonder that Palin also had her ghostwriters plagiarize the Dr. Suess story that she claimed to have made up for Trig's benefit?

However here's the thing, one might be excused for pandering to the mental patients if one wants to get them to share their medication, put you in charge of the communal remote control, or believe you when you say you are the REAL Napoleon Bonaparte.

But pandering to the fringe should exclude you forever from actually seeking higher office in this country.

In that way perhaps Palin was among the most honest of the speakers. She knows full well that she is never going to return to public service, she just needs somebody to tune into her upcoming reality show and to keep sending their children's college money to her PAC.

And by honest I mean honestly willing to string along a group of morons too ignorant to recognize when they are being manipulated by a person who cares NOTHING about their values, their religious beliefs, or their desires for the future of the country, but is willing to fake it for attention and cash.

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Courtesy of Hollywood Reporter:

President Barack Obama is putting his stamp on Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.

The president will offer an "inspiring" introduction ahead of Sunday's series premiere at 9 p.m. ET/PT, Fox announced Saturday. In the video message, Obama invites a new generation to embrace the spirit of discovery and inspires viewers to explore new frontiers and imagine limitless possibilities for the future.

The 13-episode Cosmos, produced by Cosmos Studios and Fuzzy Door Productions, tells the story of how we discovered the laws of nature and found our coordinates in space and time. Ann Druyan, Seth MacFarlane, Cosmos Studios president Mitchell Cannold and Brannon Braga are executive producers, with Jason Clark co-executive producing.

Obama's support behind Cosmos is no secret as a screening was held at the White House as part of the first White House Student Film Festival on Feb. 28, celebrating his commitment to technology in the classroom. During the festival, Obama detailed the progress toward his ConnectED goal of connecting students to broadband and wireless technology within five years.

And just when I did not think this show, now hosted by the great Neil deGrasse Tyson, could get any cooler.

Here is the trailer. (If that doesn't fire you up, you better check your pulse.)

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Courtesy of Salon:

“Liberal” became a dirty word in American politics for two reasons. First, a combination of Democratic leaders perceived as ineffectual — George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis — helped tarnish the term. However, these individuals alone did not cause liberalism’s disappearance; after all, one does not see a similar aversion to conservatism because of Nixon, Bush and other Republican failures. The second and more important reason was that conservatives successfully conducted a campaign against the term, transfiguring it from a philosophy of freedom and social mobility into a bureaucracy-loving, freedom-depriving, taxation-and-entitlement ideology of largesse. Conservatives linked liberalism with the turmoil of the ’60s and stagflation of the ’70s, as well as the various foreign policy crises of that decade, and liberals themselves disowned the term. In vulgarizing the word liberal and polluting its definition, Republicans put Democrats on the permanent defensive. It was an act of staggering political genius.

The lesson Democrats took from George McGovern’s disastrous 1972 showing, Reagan’s overwhelming 1984 victory (where he won 525 electoral votes and won every state but Minnesota, Walter Mondale’s home state) and Bill Clinton’s successive victories was that conservatives were right. Liberalism had to be abandoned as a term and as an ideology. Democrats could compete with Republicans only by adopting conservative language and logic. After all, wasn’t Mr. “New Democrat” and “the era of big government is over” the first Democrat since FDR to win reelection? As George Orwell wrote in his famous essay, “Politics and the English Language,” “language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.” Democrats had let the opposing party define their politics, vernacular and even policies. In effect, the GOP was given a monopoly over language in the 1990s and 2000s, and thus a monopoly over the very contours of political debate. Democrats should have known better.

So muddied had the term become that even 25 years after Ronald Reagan’s victory, ostensible liberals like Barack Obama ran away from the label. To preempt criticism of his liberalism — unsuccessfully, as the more nefarious and implausible charge of socialism awaited him — candidate Obama spoke of Ronald Reagan as a transformational president. When Hillary Clinton was asked during a primary debate in 2007 whether she identified as a liberal, Clinton answered in the negative, preferring the term “progressive.” Top Obama advisers berated liberals from the White House, with Robert Gibbs dismissing “the professional left” and Rahm Emanuel calling liberals “fucking retarded.” It was as if the intellectual richness of the liberal tradition — ranging from Adam Smith to John Rawls — and its manifold policy accomplishments had all been expurgated.

As both the label and the philosophy of liberalism return to the fore, Democrats should self-confidently reclaim the term. They should be protective of the term’s meaning and use it unabashedly, the way Republicans do of conservatism. They should remind the electorate of liberalism’s inextricable connection to the American experiment. In a sentence, they should become liberals again.

I could not have said it better myself.

Liberal numbers are growing stronger everyday, and soon it will be conservatives who dare not identify themselves as such.

Well except for the deep south of course, those guys are going take quite a little while to finally join the rest of the country.

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I still believe that we need to encourage more scientists and educators to run for office.

We just need somebody with some credentials to stand up the Fundamentalists in Congress and tell them that their fealty to religion is killing us all.

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Of course Palin is introduced by a representative of the NRA.

After that they play that Palin propaganda film that SarahPAC paid for awhile back.

After that Palin strides to the podium to thunderous applause. (Well thunderous for CPAC anyhow.)

She carries with her a white three ring notebook, which means her ghostwritten speech must have been too long to fit on her palms this time.

By the way this thing is over thirty minutes long so if you think I am going to transcribe the whole thing, well you have another think coming.

Palin starts off mocking Obamacare, and claims that the youth who supported Obama are "suckers" because they end up paying the health care bills for the rest of us.

She also mocks MSNBC, who she derisively calls MSLSD, for predicting that the country is leaning to the left.

She makes a number of little quips about not being able to access the Healthcare.org website, or being able to make a phone call without Michele Obama knowing. Whatever THAT means.

She claimed that since 2012 the country had become wiser, and now knew:

"There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. There is no free birth control. There's no free phone. There's no free doctor visits. There's no free Fritos. There's no free ride. Someone pays, someone always pays. And if you don't know who that someone is, it's probably you."

Of course if you are a Palin there ARE free doctor visits, and fortunately for them SarahPAC pays for the rest.

Except the birth control, because which Palin would be caught dead using that?

"Hopefully those social engineering politicos learned something as well. Americans are not quite as obedient as they thought we were. See they set up a lot of hoops. Making us pay for insurance that we don't want, don't need. Telling us 'Ahh there's nothing to see in Benghazi, move along, move along.' Nor at the IRS. Nothing amiss. Not even a smidgeon. Making us bear the brunt of that dopey wobbling on the world stage. But we didn't jump through those hoops the way we were supposed to. It's like you all went rogue."

Red meat, get your bloody red meat here!

Nothing but Right Wing talking points as far as the eye can see.

Palin gives Ted Cruz a reach around for trying to stop Obamacare, and chastises the Republican "army" for joining with the Lamestream media in trashing Cruz and others who did not realize the battle was lost.

Palin then does the unthinkable and referring to the fact that Cruz read from Dr. Suess during his faux filibuster, claims to now read her own modified version of "Green Eggs and Ham" to poor little Trig.


"I do not like this Uncle Sam. I do not like his healthcare scam. I do not like these dirty crooks, or how they lie and cook the books. I do not like when Congress stills, I do not like their crony dills. I do not like this spying man. I do not like 'Oh yes we can.' I do not like this spending spree. We're smart we know there's nothing free. I do not like reporter's smug replies when I complain about their lies. I do not like this kind of hope. And we won't take it nope, nope, nope."

And that my friends is how SarahPAC fees for speech writers is spent.

You know I would feel badly for Trig if I even for a moment believed she actually read to him.

Palin trots out most of her worn out talking points, crony capitalism, big government, liberal elites, fundamentally transforming the country, clingers and wingers, Republican establishment, the shining city on the hill, you've heard it all before.

I will say that Palin is more polished then she has been in recent appearances but her word salad is just as thoroughly tossed as usual.

At one point the crowd starts chanting "Run Sarah, Run." Which I assume is what you get when your reality television show ponies up $9,000 to help pay for the event.

Her response, "I should. I did not get to run this morning. I was so busy man."

And that was just about all I could take.

I need to reread my contract because NOBODY should have to sit through two sessions of Sarah Palin's batshit crazy word salad in one day.

If she said anything else of interest, and you manage to last long enough to hear it, just leave it in the comments sections for us to mock.

I think I need a drink.

Update: Here is what Media Matters took away:

Palin mocked Obama for projecting weakness on the world stage in the midst of the crisis in Ukraine, taking a page out of the NRA book to tell him, “The only good thing that stops a bad guy with a nuke is a good guy with a nuke!” And she also turned the tables of the War on Women back on the Democrats, saying that “liberals seem to think that the women of America are just cheap dates” who they can condescend to on women’s issues.”

She rallied feminists in the GOP to stand up and be heard, because “donkeys just bray, only mama grizzlies can say, ‘Hear me roar!’”

Yep, I figured the speech would just keep getting dumber.

Update 2: From Politico:

Palin also devoted a section of her speech to women in the audience, urging them to resist Democratic entreaties after a year filled with partisan fights over Obamacare’s women’s health care provisions and calls by some in the GOP to retool the party’s message to women.

“Women, don’t let them use you unless you choose to be their political pawn or just their piece of accessory on their arm,” Palin said. “Honey, that’s not liberation. That’s subjugation, and this sisterhood fights against that.”

She spoke shortly after the announcement that Paul had won CPAC’s presidential straw poll. Palin took 2 percent of the votes, tied with figures such as Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, after she flirted with a run in 2011.

Well so much for being the darling of the conservative right.

Update 3: Hey guess who plagiarized that Dr. Suess bit.

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Vashti McCollum and her son James.

Courtesy of the Freedom from Religion Foundation:

On this date in 1948, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision, McCollum v. Board of Education, barring religious instruction in public schools, was handed down, with a vote of 8 to 1. The dramatic case was brought by Vashti McCollum, a mother in Champaign, Ill., on behalf of her son, Jim. In her enduring book about the challenge, One Woman's Fight, Vashti described how Jim was punished by teachers and teased by students for not taking part in religious instruction illegally taught in his public school. Although she lost at the first two court levels and was treated as "a very unpopular woman," Vashti did not give up. Her appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court resulted in a stunning victory for separation of church and state, which is still the prevailing precedent in public school law today. Vashti was an Honorary Officer of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. She died at age 93 in 2006.

“Separation means separation, not something less. Jefferson's metaphor in describing the relation between Church and State speaks of a 'wall of separation,' not a fine line easily overstepped. The public school is at once the symbol of our democracy and the most pervasive means for promoting our common destiny. In no activity of the State is it more vital to keep out divisive forces than in its schools, to avoid confusing, not to say fusing, what the Constitution sought to keep strictly apart. 'The great American principle of eternal separation' — Elihu Root's phrase bears repetition — is one of the vital reliances of our Constitutional system for assuring unities among our people stronger than our diversities. It is the Court's duty to enforce this principle in its full integrity.”

—Justice Frankfurter, concurrence, McCollum v. Board of Education

Everybody has the right to beelive whatever they need to in order to help them get through this life.

However they have NO right to teach it as fact to a classroom full of trusting children.


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Courtesy of the Times Union:

The pastor of a Lansingburgh Baptist church plans to give away an AR-15 assault rifle to the winner of a free raffle at an upcoming Sunday service.

A provocative flier he distributed rallied supporters of gun rights and stirred controversy among anti-gun advocates and some who considered it un-Christian.


The Rev. John Koletas, pastor of Grace Baptist Church, said the service and gun raffle are aimed at "honoring hunters and gun owners who have been so viciously attacked by the antichristian socialist media and antichristian socialist politicians the last few years," according to a letter he posted on the church website.

Koletas, who works as a Rensselaer County court reporter, said he wanted to show support for Second Amendment rights.

"I'm just trying to be a blessing and a help to the gun owners and the hunters and give away a free AR-15," he said. "It's the right thing to do."

You know when much this same kind of thing happened in Kentucky I was ready to write it of as just a bunch of ignorant hillbillies who may not clearly understand the teachings of Jesus, but this church is in New York.

So apparently this is now a thing.

I could go on an atheist rant about the hypocrisy of something like this, but I am actually too saddened to bother.

Apparently if religion is going to die out in this country, it is not planning to go without a fight.

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