Jon Stewart Destroys Bill Kristol on Health Care

Bill Kristol:
The Government currently runs the best health care system in America.

Watch it here:




and the public doesn't deserve it???

Protect Insurance Companies

Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell

Pete Hoekstra is a meme

The most original thought I've had in a month or four is to point you to another blog.
But it's so very very worth it.

http://petehisameme.wordpress.com/

To Hoekstra is to whine using grandiose exaggerations and comparisons.

It all started with a simple, foolish tweet. On June 17th, GOP Congressman Pete Hoekstra compared the life and death struggle of Iranians trying to get their message out via Twitter to the Republican Party’s tussle with Democrats. (See quote above.) The Twitterati began satirizing Hoekstra’s tweet (see lulz below).

And that’s how the Hoekstra meme was born.

As of the moment of my typing this post, there are three pages of fun. Make good use of the older and newer entries buttons at the bottom of each page.

One more reason Cranky Cindy is grateful that she cooks from scratch

Food companies put the onus for food safety on consumers. New York Times article. (Michael Moss 5/14/09) By writing specific directions on packaged foods, businesses hope to shift the responsibility for contamination from the company to the consumer.

"In this case, ConAgra could not pinpoint which of the more than 25 ingredients in its pies was carrying salmonella. Other companies do not even know who is supplying their ingredients, let alone if those suppliers are screening the items for microbes and other potential dangers, interviews and documents show."

Photo :Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times
"Banquet pot pies sickened thousands with salmonella in 2007. The corporate parent, ConAgra Foods, and others have decided to leave the “kill step” to eliminate pathogens up to the consumer’s cooking at home."

Interesting that this article is located in the Business section, and not, say, health.

I cook from scratch because I'm a good cook, not because I choose to permit business to shift responsibility for knowing where the ingredients come from, and how they are tested and processed to me!

The problem though, is that contamination is not simply in prepared foods, so maybe my crowing prideful sanctimoniousness is premature.

The recalls of Peanut Butter a while back and White Pepper last month leave me in a quandary. And as a from-scratch cook, (with prideful expertise in chicken with peanut sauce) should I install a lab in my basement?

One cost of high energy

Mountain Top coal removal is rarely seen. You don't really see it while driving, airplanes fly over too high to see. Once in a while we hear a story about slurry leaching down toward a town or an elementary school,

...Harriman, Tennessee, where millions of yards of coal sludge broke through a dike at TVA’s Kingston coal-fired plant at 1:00 in the morning just two days before Christmas.

Hundreds of acres have been destroyed, covered in the toxic sludge and at least two of the more than 12 homes in the sludge’s 400-acre path are now deemed inhabitable.

or this photo (opens larger in new window)

"In Raleigh County, West Virginia, about 45 miles from Charleston, just over 200 students attend Marsh Fork Elementary School. Though small, Marsh Fork is important to the folks in the Coal River Valley, and not just because it's the only school in the county with high enough enrollment to remain open. No, the fate of Marsh Fork matters more because it represents all the special interests and politics that have come to define life in the shadows of Big Coal.

Not 300 feet away from where children learn and play nine months a year sits a leaking, 385-feet tall coal refuse dam with a nearly 3-billion gallon capacity. Never mind the coal dust that has been found in the school. Never mind the drinking-water contamination that has been reported. If this dam breaks, it will destroy everyone and everything within 30 miles. So why are 200-plus children still making the trip to school every day despite the constant threat of illness and even death?

Because they have nowhere else to go."

but really, except for these occasional references in popular news, you have to choose to look.


So look at the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition site here. Click on the photos for amazing high resolution photographs. Then take a stroll through the website.

Or look through SourceWatch. This will be useful if you're a person who thinks I blow things out of proportion.

The Obama EPA is cracking down. Support them from the pushback from the Coal industry.

Clean Coal ought to start where the coal starts, not just how we burn it.

Way to Go Iowa!

Not Cranky Today!

Our responsibility, however, is to protect constitutional rights of individuals from legislative enactments that have denied those rights, even when the rights have not yet been broadly accepted, were at one time unimagined, or challenge a deeply ingrained practice or law viewed to be impervious to the passage of time." The Iowa Supreme Court.

Why some people should not drink at the staff Holiday Party

A Cartoon.
originally posted here.

No Commentary Needed.

Except to point out that this is funny, but not a personal statement of any kind.
I happen to adore my boss, and working conditions here could be improved upon, but are far from frightful.















Alternative text provided for accessibility:
A drunk man standing on the punch table up sings:
"Well conditions at work are frightful,
and the boss is not delightful,
and someday we'll all be let go,
this job blows,
this job blows,
this job blows."

Caption:
Harvey's bitter, drunken version of "Let it Snow"
brought down the house at what turned out to be
his last Christmas Party.

Friends don't let Friends give socks to terrorists

Nat Hentoff reports A Brooklyn College Grad Experiences the Constitution in a Cage.

For the past year, a 28-year-old Muslim American student, Sayed Fahad Hashmi—the first person extradited to the United States from Britain to face charges of terrorism—has been held at the Manhattan Correctional Center under conditions of confinement that are the very definition of the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishment."

He has not been charged with being a member of Al Qaeda or for providing any money or resources to any terrorist. He is here—for a trial months away in 2009—for letting a former acquaintance, Junaid Babar, stay for a couple of weeks in his London apartment, where Babar stored several ponchos, raincoats, and waterproof socks in a suitcase.

A week ago, I was having a proud to be an American moment. But there is so much work to be done. The conditions under which he is being held, this American citizen? This is keeping me safe?

On a 23-hour solitary-confinement lockdown, Hashmi, was not allowed family visits for months. Now, he can see one person for an hour and a half, but only every other week. He is permitted to write only one letter a week to a single member of his family, but he cannot use more than three pieces of paper per letter. (I would be grateful, Mr. Mukasey, for an explanation of how these restrictions serve our security needs.) Mr. Hashmi is forbidden any contact—directly or through his attorneys—with the news media. He can read newspapers, but only those portions approved by his jailers—and not until 30 days after publication. And he is absolutely forbidden to listen to news radio stations or to watch television news channels.

You will not be surprised to learn that he is under 24-hour electronic monitoring and is forbidden to communicate with any of the other inmates. However, a merciful Justice Department allows him one hour of recreation every day—inside a cage.

There is nothing I can say to comment upon this that the facts themselves don't say.
Go read the whole article.

If only I had stock in Cafe Press

The Sarah Palin Debate Flow Chart is available on products from buttons to messenger bags. I'm sitting here wondering what I'll break down and buy.

I stayed up half the night and yelled at the tv with family and facebooked with friends and then went to sleep. These guys stayed up all night and made money.

Palin-Biden debate drinking games

I went a'googlin' for drinkin' games, and lookey here, Josh Nelson over at The Huffington Post has compiled them for me.

You can go there for the whole thing, but I could choose from this brief selection:

When Palin claims she said "Thanks but no thanks" to the Bridge to Nowhere: Demand a new drink from your hosts, say "thanks but no thanks," and then when no one's looking, take it anyway, then claim you never wanted it. (Via) (from MIT)

Every time Palin mentions a Moose or says something so stupid you think she might be less intelligent than one: drink a Moosehead beer.

Everytime Biden mentions a foreign leader he has met: sip wine -- every time he mentions a Senator as a friend: drink beer.

Every time Palin fidgets and twists her fingers, switch drinks with the person next to you.

Every time Palin mentions Wasilla drink a shot of Jager and howl at the wolves.

(If you go to the original page, you'll find more ideas, and many embedded links)

But since I'm just too old to drink like that, more likely I'll simply add tequila to my margarita for every answer squeezed in that she missed with Katie Couric last week. She said she'd get back to ya on that, so I'm going to drink when she does.

Smithsonian Magazine on Why Iran is so Ticked off

I hate when I forget the history I swear I'll learn from. I'd forgotten that in 1953, the US overthrew Iran's democratic govt (whose Prime Minister was Time Magazine's Man of the Year in 1951) and installed the Shah. I had remembered that we backed the Shah, but had forgotten that we went and actually did the imperialist intervention thing to establish him.

Stephen Kinzer's excellent article, Inside Iran's Fury, is available online.

About the Iran hostage Crisis, he writes

Bruce Laingen, a career diplomat who was chief of the U.S. embassy staff, was the highest-ranking hostage. One day, after Laingen had spent more than a year as a hostage, one of his captors visited him in his solitary cell. Laingen exploded in rage, shouting at his jailer that this hostage-taking was immoral, illegal and "totally wrong." The jailer waited for him to finish, then replied without sympathy.

"You have nothing to complain about," he told Laingen. "The United States took our whole country hostage in 1953."

Understanding what hundreds of years of foreign intervention will do to the cultural and political outlook of a people (as say, First Nation peoples in North America, or African American descendants of 400 years of slavery) is important in terms of understanding the political context of a country in this fraught region.

And understanding how our CIA overthrew a[nother] government because their policies were first and foremost in the interest of their own people and not ours... that's a patriotic duty. The good and the bad people, the good and the bad.

Working Class Warrior or Liberal Elite ?

I took the How to Win a Fight with a Conservative Quiz, and with one answer change, got two different identities.

I had a terrible time deciding who to place in my naked pyramid, (in fact, wanted an opt-out so as to put no one into a naked pyramid) so I tried it both ways:

Turns out that it doesn't take much to change me from my working/middle class anti-corporate greed roots into an intellectual elite.

Putting George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld into a naked pyramid made me a Working Class Warrior.

My Liberal Identity:

You are a Working Class Warrior, also known as a blue-collar Democrat. You believe that the little guy is getting screwed by conservative greed-mongers and corporate criminals, and you’re not going to take it anymore.

Take the quiz at www.FightConservatives.com

Putting Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, and Rush Limbaugh in the pyramid is all it took to make me into a Reality Based Intellectualist

My Liberal Identity:

You are a Reality-Based Intellectualist, also known as the liberal elite. You are a proud member of what’s known as the reality-based community, where science, reason, and non-Jesus-based thought reign supreme.

Take the quiz at www.FightConservatives.com

Truth is, I'm a farm girl that went and got edumakated. Which kind of makes me a Working Class Warrior Liberal Elite.

Funny how quizzes never have a category for that.

Nod to Ms. Kitty and Rev. Sean.

While you were watching the Other Hand

The House just passed the $630 Billion Omnibus bill. The Bank Bail out makes great press, as does John McCain's "suspending the campaign."
Meantime, as if they're powerless, the House Dems have passed a bill that contains
$488 Billion for the Pentagon
$30 Billion for Homeland Security
But not the increase in food stamps, extension of unemployment insurance, or Medicaid support they wanted.
Thank god there's an increase in funding for Veterans' Health programs, but here's a surprise to me, a 25-Billion dollar bail out (low interest loan) of the US Auto manufacturers. hmmm...

Thanks to ohmygov.com

and mom.

David Letterman on "suspending the campaign"

I haven't seen Letterman go on and on like this in a long time.

"You don't suspend your campaign, you have the vice president run it... are we suspending it b/c there's an economic crisis, or are we suspending it because his poll numbers are dropping......someone's been putting something in his Metamucil... you don't suspend the campaign, you put in your second string quarter back. Where's Sarah Palin? ...The Economy in Alaska is fine.

and best of all, 7 minutes in he does a lovely bit about how McCain couldn't be on Letterman because he was racing back to Washington, but then cuts live to the Evening News studio where he is doing an interview with Catie Couric.



or link directly

Sarah Palin - even talking about her is sexist

Why watch real news when there's Jon Stewart? He masters another moment of letting people speak for themselves...again and again and Oh My Goodness, it's quite lovely. Watch Karl Rove, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Dick Morris, Nancy Pfotenhauer.

Reasons to love Jimmy Carter #46587b

You may have forgotten, but Carter put solar panels on the white house in 1979, and offered tax credits to Americans who did the same.

Reason # 5,947,356 to be mad at Ronald Reagon -- he took them down and terminated the tax credits.

Carter's goal was to have 20% of the nations energy supplied by renewable sources by the end of the 20th century.

Today it is the same as it was in 1979 -- %6

Jon Stewart and Samantha Bee introduce Sarah Palin

Right here...


Keep watching for the excellent moment of letting FOX commentators speak for themselves.

Just a heads up, Samantha Bee goes a bit over the top... even for me.

Really really bad judgement

See the party boat.

See students drink.

Drink, Students, Drink.

Vodka or beer?

Both please.

They can drink because everyone on board is over 21.

Drink more students, drink more.

(wait, excuse me a minute....

What?

Not all students?

A... what was that? A President?

Oh, that guy my age is Robert Paxton, President of their community college?

Oh.)

Hold the keg Mr. President.

Drink, Students, Drink.

Resign, Mr. President, resign.


Why might he think this wasn't a bad idea? Maybe because no one has ever put the brakes on his behavior before. According to Clark Kauffman at the Des Moines Register,

In 2002, Paxton was indicted on charges of felonious misconduct in office, falsification of public records and tampering with public records. The charges grew out of an investigation into student athletes being awarded false grades.

Three of Paxton’s colleagues at Iowa Central eventually pleaded guilty to charges they tampered with student records to benefit the athletes and to deceive others. All three men retained their jobs at the school. The charges against Paxton were deferred under an agreement in which he accepted responsibility for the transcript fraud.

I guess if you get to keep your job after being responsible for tampering with student records, it might not occur to you that partying with students is a bad idea.

My favorite bit: he gets paid $400,000 for resigning.

PolitiFact : checking on political accusations

The Truth-O-Meter is great!

Even better than truthiness, they do fact-checking.

Constantly updated, for instance, when it became clear that John McCain has 8, (not 7) houses, they fixed it immediately.

When is Fasting and Prayer like Mind Control?

When it happens in DC, in August, for 12 straight hours, in likely 90+ degree heat and has silence rather than speech as an expectation of participants.
Mind Control = Creating circumstances within which one person can modify perception and cognition of another. It's not rocket science - it's social psychology.

The Call : A Fast, not a Festival August 16, 2008, Chief organizer, Lou Engle.

It is not enough that Jesus died. Someone must apply the blood of Jesus to the national sin of USA.
~ Lou Engle, from The doctrine of the Shedding of Innocent Blood(this is a .pdf).

First, who is Lou Engle? You think you've never heard of him, but you did if you saw "Jesus Camp" He is the man who showed plastic fetuses to young children and reminded them that 1/3 of their potential friends had been aborted. He prayed while the children chanted, "Righteous Judges, Righteous Judges."

We are preparing for some 500,000 people, but really there's no way of knowing beforehand.

Can you imagine though if 500,000 people gathered on the National Mall, not in irritated protest against a man or his policies, but in abandoned worship and prayer - coming before the Lord, in a Joel 2 Solemn Assembly where united in fasting and prayer, generations turn to seek the Lord? Can you see the largest silent siege - as seas of people in solemn silent prayer with red LIFE tape across their mouths turn to face the supreme court and pray to the Maker of Heaven and Earth to "...end abortion and send revival to America?" and establish righteous judges?

What might this LIFE tape look like at a rally of fasting and prayer?


Faith Development is the natural unfolding of one's mind toward trust and commitment. There are natural stages of this, and concrete ways to help people to explore in developmentally appropriate ways.

The opposite of Faith Development is Mind Control -- dishonest and manipulative influence over what people believe.

How do you exert, not honest, appropriate influence, but manipulative influence to the point of control, over what people believe?
BITE
Control over Behavior, Information, Thought, Emotions. (Hassan)

What might this look like?
~Control the environment and limit information and ideas -- social environment and physical environment.
~Cast the world as binary - 1 and 0, yes or no, on or off. Don't allow for questioning, or context or complexity.
~Be sure you have absolute truth and repeat it again and again.
~Use language that is so loaded that everyone accepts the meaning of the word, and the surrounding ideas.
~Manipulate and induce blank-mind states - trance like states of openness -- through prayer, chanting, repetitive singing, etc.
~Keep them tired, fill up their awake time with material controlled by the group leader.
~Create emotional highs and lows and use those emotional states to induce thinking that the leader wants.

If you want to control someone's mind, control their behavior, limit their freedoms (of movement, speech, self-care), and keep them hungry and tired.

I've been to Marches on Washington. Hot, sweaty, thirsty, hungry and tired from a bzillion hour bus ride, but I am expected to participate, to march, to move my body and interact with people, to eat and drink, and listen to different speakers, some of whom don't' agree on everything and we all agree to disagree that day b/c the focus of the march is primary.
And we holler. And hoot. and whistle. And did I say, eat?

We sometimes take UU youth to events, overnight trips/lock-ins, or camps - and we support them while they examine and ponder and talk and worship and eat and drink. We feed and water them, we keep them safe, we engage them in dialogue, and we strongly encourage sleeping and other forms of self-care.

What happens if young people stand silently in the sun without eating for 12 hours?
They think this is what will happen:

TheCall does not seek to entertain, but to encounter God. Unlike other mass gatherings which attract people through the rhythms of loud music, the glamour of flashing lights, or through the appeal of charismatic personalities, TheCall is a gathering centered around the affections of a loving God. There will be no advertised bands and no promoted speakers, as our purpose is not to promote any man or ministry.

TheCall is a FAST not a festival. TheCall is a SOLEMN ASSEMBLY not a conference.
Whereas conferences focus primarily on training and discipleship, the 12 hours of TheCall are spent primarily before the Lord in the place of prayer and worship. ...
PEOPLE SHOULD PRAYERFULLY CONSIDER FASTING ON THE DAY OF THECALL
Those who fast should do so under the supervision of parents and doctors and by the leading of the Holy Spirit. A person could fast just one meal or drink only juice for the day. Water will be provided by The Call organization; however, food will not be available because this is a solemn assembly to pray and fast for revival. (bold emphasis mine)

I think that this prayer and fasting in the sun is just plain wrong. Their belief system aside (and don't get me started) I think this is coercive at best, abusive at worst.

An intervention is called for. This is what I would do if I weren't' in a pulpit the next day 650 miles away. Maybe you might choose to do it my stead.

Go to the rally.
Pass out juice and crackers/cookies/fruit.
Tell people the food is free, like speech, and you hope they will ask questions instead of agreeing to silence.
Don't argue, feed and walk away.

Jesus fed the 5000. No reason we couldn't as well.