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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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