World News Korner

Courtesy of Elizabeth Warren's blog:

Hobby Lobby doesn't want to cover its employees' birth control on company insurance plans. In fact, they're so outraged about women having access to birth control that they've taken the issue all the way to the Supreme Court.

I cannot believe that we live in a world where we would even consider letting some big corporation deny the women who work for it access to the basic medical tests, treatments or prescriptions that they need based on vague moral objections.

But here's the scary thing: With the judges we've got on the Supreme Court, Hobby Lobby might actually win.

The current Supreme Court has headed in a very scary direction.

Recently, three well-respected legal scholars examined almost 20,000 Supreme Court cases from the last 65 years. They found that the five conservative justices currently sitting on the Supreme Court are in the top 10 most pro-corporate justices in more than half a century.

And Justices Samuel Alito and John Roberts? They were number one and number two.

Take a look at the win rate of the national Chamber of Commerce cases before the Supreme Court. According to the Constitutional Accountability Center, the Chamber was winning 43% of the cases in participated in during the later years of the Burger Court, but that shifted to a 56% win-rate under the Rehnquist Court, and then a 70% win-rate with the Roberts Court.

Follow these pro-corporate trends to their logical conclusion, and pretty soon you'll have a Supreme Court that is a wholly owned subsidiary of big business.

Warren goes on to warn that this could just be the beginning and that future rulings could be even worse. You know because I was not already freaked out enough.

And she's right.

This court was packed with conservative big business sycophants, who seem to care less about the law then they do political ideology. And isn't it always the OTHER side complaining about "activist judges?"

I hate to wish for any ill to come to anybody, but perhaps the best thing for the future of this country is for Justice Scalia or Justice Thomas to choke to death on a chicken bone so that President Obama, or President Hillary, can put some young whippersnapper with a strong heart and a progressive outlook to take their place.

As it is there really is a fairly reasonable chance that this decision might actually come down on the side of Hobby Lobby. Which in my opinion should remove any doubt that the Supreme court is now a subsidiary of big business and religious zealots.

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Courtesy of Happy Nice Time People:

You guys we are so excited to bring you this sick new jam that is going to be the theme song for Sarah Palin’s latest teevee vanity project that she will quit in six months, “Amazing America.” Conveniently, the song is also too called “Amazing America” so Sarah can’t mess up the name. Haha she still will you guys.

Did you go listen? That song, brought to you courtesy of some band we have never heard of called “Madison Rising,” is indeed amazing, if by “amazing” we mean “almost unbearably bad to listen to.” It’s like Nickelback if Nickelback sucked 1000 times more than Nickelback. It’s like the dude from television’s “Sister Wives” started a band.

Except this band’s lead singer is no doubt way sexxxxier and more brooding and more inexplicably tattooed.

We can’t even get over the awful. It’s like Creed took a few years off, worked in an iron mine, and wrote a song about it.

You know even though I have every expectation that ANYTHING Sarah Palin touches will turn into a black hole of suckage, I am still sometimes taken off guard by the actual suction.

Part of me thinks that this must be a parody, you know put together by one of the liberals who, as your friendly neighborhood troll claims, is also lying or making stuff up about Palin to make her look bad.

But no, if you go to the actual, official site for the show there is the Madison Rising video above raping your eardrums and making you hate America.

Which I guess goes to prove that there is really NOTHING that a so-called "hater" could do to Sarah Palin, and her "career," that she has not already done herself.

Now if you will excuse me I have to put some Bactine on my damaged ears and take several bottles of aspirin.

P.S. I just figured out that if you watch the video with the sound off then it only makes your eyes bleed.

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This is probably as good of a time as any to report that I am unable to sign up for the ACA due to my somewhat complicated financial situation.

Though I make more, my actual taxable income is below the poverty limit.

I was sent to Medicaid where I learned that I do not qualify, though I would have if Sean Parnell had accepted the ACA Medicaid expansion. But he's an asshole so he didn't.

I could simply buy insurance the old fashioned way, except that I really cannot swing the $700.00 to $900.00 payments I would have to pony up without the help of Obamacare. Not to mention the rather sizable deductibles these plans have.

So essentially I am screwed unless Parnell has a change of heart (Fat chance!) or Americans get fed up and demand the single payer option.

Or I could continue eating right, getting lots of exercise, and hoping for the best until 65 when Medicare kicks in. I was already doing those things of course, but I really had my heart set on getting insurance for the first time in my life.

On the plus side apparently I can file for the hardship clause on my tax returns and won't have to pay a penalty. Yay, me.

Damn, do I hate Republicans!

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I watched this earlier today and I have to admit I was leaning forward in my chair and stressing out like crazy.

That is just about as close to death as you can get and walk away unharmed.

There is more about the fire here.

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That was it? Okay was anybody actually able to make out what mush mouth was even saying?

I have had more intelligible conversations with falling down drunks when I worked as a bouncer.

What a sad fate for a man who once held a real job, provided for his family, and had some small bit of infamy as the husband of the first female governor in Alaska history.

And now he is nothing more than a glorified purse carrier, who gets paraded around during her public appearances, and gets tossed a on-air gig or two to funnel some cash his way.

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This is the usual pro-gun, anti-abortion, teabagger that Palin always endorses so no surprise there, except with this endorsement Palin also took the time to slam the other Republican competing against her as well:

We need this fighter and advocate for women and innocent life in Washington!

I admire and respect the good folks supporting other candidates in this race, but we’ll have to disagree on this one. Lizbeth is running against a wealthy self-funded candidate with lots of splashy campaign ads claiming to be a conservative. Since when do conservatives stand for crony capitalism and government bailouts? Please do your homework, voters. Look beyond the fancy anonymous campaign ads. Look at a candidate’s record, not just their rhetoric. Lizbeth is a genuine conservative with a track record to prove it.

The "wealthy self-funded candidate" that Palin refers to is one Curt Clawson who is having some troubles of his own.

Clawson has a few notable endorsements of his own including local Tea Party favorite Byron Donalds and the Tea Party Express itself.

Of course Benacquisto has a number of fairly high profile endorsements of her own, besides Palin, including U.S. Reps. Mario Diaz-Balart, Tom Rooney and Jason Chaffetz; State Sen. Garrett Richter; Reps. Dane Eagle and Ray Rodrigues and Mayors John Sorey of Naples, Kevin Ruane of Sanibel, Randy Henderson of Fort Myers and Alan Mandel of Fort Myers Beach.

Which kind of makes her the safe bet for Palin, as she has a pretty good shot at the nomination.

Of course this being Florida, and the special election is to find a replacement for a seat formerly held by a Republican (Who as it turned out was arrested for cocaine possession.), if Beacquisto wins the nomination chances are good she will also win the election.

And that even though it appears that she violated Florida election laws a whopping 105 times.

But hey it's a Sarah Palin endorsee, what can you expect?

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Courtesy of Business Insider:

U.S. officials think that Russia may have recently obtained the ability to evade U.S. eavesdropping equipment while commandeering Crimea and amassing troops near Ukraine's border.

The revelation reportedly has the White House "very nervous," especially because it's unclear how the Kremlin hid its plans from the National Security Agency's snooping on digital and electronic communications.

One interesting parallel is the presence of Edward Snowden in Russia, where he has been living since flying to Moscow from Hong Kong on June 23.

In July, primary Snowden source Glenn Greenwald told The Associated Press that Snowden "is in possession of literally thousands of documents that contain very specific blueprints that would allow somebody who read them to know exactly how the NSA does what it does, which would in turn allow them to evade that surveillance or replicate it."

So it's either a coincidence that the Russians figured out how to evade NSA surveillance while hosting the NSA-trained hacker, or else it implies that Snowden may have provided the Russians with access to NSA files.

A coincidence? Yeah, right.

Of course the claim is that Snowden gave all of his purloined data to the journalists and kept nothing for himself, however the timeline, and veracity, of that occurrence is still in doubt.

There were many who suggested that President Obama's public statement that he will work with Congress to reign in the NSA's ability to collect data as proof that Snowden is a hero and that the country owes him their gratitude.

However we still do not dully understand exactly WHAT Snowden took, and WHOSE hands it ended up in. (Remember before landing in Russia Snowden stopped in Hong Kong for a month, and at that time definitely had the data on him. And we have already possibly seen the fallout from that.)

Personally I find it hard to believe that Putin would offer Snowden sanctuary in Russia if he did not have something substantial with which to bargain. And the ability to evade American eavesdropping equipment, allowing you to invade countries under the radar, would be a rather large bargaining chip.

One of the questions remaining is, if our intelligence gathering technology is now in the hands of the Russians, how vulnerable are we?

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