via: captainyesterday
Yep.
Weekend weather
Daily Archives: June 30, 2012
The President’s Weekly Address from Colorado Springs and the Waldo Creek Fire
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President Obama speaks to the American people from Colorado, where he toured areas impacted by the devastating Waldo Canyon fire and met with first responders as well as families affected by the fires. The President thanks the brave firefighters and countless volunteers who are providing food, water, and shelter to those in need, and makes clear that his administration will continue to bring all resources available to assist efforts to combat the fires.
How to assist Colorado wildfire victims » how to donate and help
Conservatives: why they cry
via: donnaclt
The tracks of their tears this week:
Far right conservatives are beside themselves over Chief Justice John Roberts’ decision on the ACA, leading Glenn Beck to make some money on Justice Roberts ‘Coward’ T-shirts and spawning the following rightwingnuttiness and teameltdowns:
- Newsflash for Republicans: Romneycare works exactly like Obamacare – Romney’s mandate also works as a penalty, which blunts the charges critics leveled at Obama.
- Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) likened the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the Democratic health care law to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
- Former Town Councilor Mike Malzone, the founder of the Merrimack Tea Party, said Thursday in a Facebook post reacting to the Supreme Court ruling on health care, “I hope the (5 supremes) get colon cancer.” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who joined the majority opinion, was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1999 and had pancreatic cancer ten years later.
- Of all the right-wing meltdowns following yesterday’s decision by the Supreme Court to uphold the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act, this statement, encouraging open revolt against the federal government put out by the chairman of the Mississippi Tea Party may take the cake…
- Slate compiled several other funny and over-the-top reactions from prominent conservatives, like Sarah Palin who thanked God for firing up “the troops,” or Breitbart.com’s Ben Shapiro, who tweeted that the decision “is the end of America as we know it. No exaggeration.”
- The House Republicans 2009 “alternative” to Obamacare was no alternative — but that won’t stop Eric Cantor from still trying to push it to this day.
The DOJ won’t prosecute AG Holder over the Fox Entertainment / NRA political boondoggle-extravaganza known as the Fast & Furious investigation, so Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) said on Fox “we could have Attorney General Holder arrested.”
Despite the Republican Party’s best efforts at stalling, obstruction, and doing nothing, Congress on Friday approved legislation that will extend federal highway programs through 2014, a low interest rate on student loans for one year, and the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) for five years. The final bill does not include language that would require approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline.
The unwashed conservative base, who so desperately want to vote Obama out of the White House (no gay marriage! no contraception! more guns!), have to embrace the candidate who’s been chosen for them, Mr-Plutocrat-One-Percent-Mitt-Romney, AND his ideas, like only those who can pay for an education deserve an education. Mitt is telling us proletarians to suck it — corporations look forward to all the minimum wage workers our country can create.
Worst. President. Ever. (Let’s do it again with Mitt Romney)
Political Wire: “An excerpt of Where They Stand:The American Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians by Robert W. Merry in Salon suggests George W. Bush will be ranked near the bottom of all presidents: ”Based on the contemporaneous voter assessments, the objective record, and what we know of history, it’s difficult to see him even in middle-ground territory. History likely will view Bush largely as the voters did after eight years of his stewardship. And so it’s probably just as well that he doesn’t care much about the verdict of history.“
Consider that Mitt Romney, in actions if not in words, is creating a campaign that seems to be an exact duplicate of the Bush Years, from extending tax cuts for the one percent — who’ve already surpassed all other earners in the country with net income advantages, and who’ve hoarded their wealth gains to the detriment of our entire economy — to a neocon foreign policy platform that’s becoming more “Cheneyfied” by the day. What could go wrong?
Ari Berman: “Of Romney’s forty identified foreign policy advisers, more than 70 percent worked for Bush. Many hail from the neoconservative wing of the party, were enthusiastic backers of the Iraq War and are proponents of a US or Israeli attack on Iran. [...] Romney’s malleability is an advantage for his neocon advisers, giving them an opportunity to shape his worldview, as they did with Bush after 9/11. Four years after Bush left office in disgrace, Romney is their best shot to get back in power. If that happens, they’re likely to pursue the same aggressive policies they advocated under Bush. “I don’t think there’s been a deep rethink,” says Clemons. “I don’t think the neoconservatives feel chastened at all. As a movement, the true neoconservatives never, ever give up. They will be back.””
Andrew Sullivan: “When you check reality, rather than the alternate universe constantly created by Fox News and an amnesiac press, you find that Bush had a chance to pay off all our national debt before we hit the financial crisis – giving the US enormous flexibility in intervening to ameliorate the recession. Instead, we had to find money for a stimulus in a cupboard stripped bare – its contents largely given away, by an act of choice. I’m tired of being told we cannot blame Bush for our current predicament. We can and should blame him for most of it – and remind people that Romney’s policies: more tax cuts, more defense spending are identical. With one difference: Bush pledged never “to balance the budget on the backs of the poor.””
Extreme wind: eastern US storm
Eastern US storms kill several, cause wide power outages
AP: Violent storms are being blamed for the deaths of at least nine people and widespread power outages. Many in the eastern U.S. are facing triple-digit temperatures without electricity — and without air conditioning.
Follow updates on breakingnews.com, or on Twitter @breakingstorm.
Photo: An uprooted tree is seen Saturday after it damaged a home in Washington’s American University neighborhood. The tree also cut a power line. (Mandel Ngan / AFP – Getty Images via msnbc.com)
Observations on Affordable Care
“In short, unless you belong to that tiny class of wealthy Americans who are insulated and isolated from the realities of most people’s lives, the winners from that Supreme Court decision are your friends, your relatives, the people you work with — and, very likely, you. For almost all of us stand to benefit from making America a kinder and more decent society.” — Paul Krugman (via azspot)
Verses the religious fundamentalists / patriots:
image: christopherstreet
Sarah Palin popped up on Fox last night with one of her complex and thought-provoking observations
“Nancy Pelosi is a dingbat.” – Sarah Palin, in an interview on Fox News Entertainment.
She’s wearing her hair a little differently, I think:
Caturday: send water
Colorado needs a drink.
via: bunnyfood
I’m reading that late last night, about 2 million people lost power in DC, Virginia and Maryland — and seven people died — due to storms following a day of high heat. For some reason one of the deaths really struck me: a 90-year-old woman, asleep in bed, died when a tree fell on her house. Wow. When it’s your time to go… I mean, you live 90 years, you’re asleep in your own bed and boom! a tree, of all things, is what finally takes you out. Hopefully she didn’t wake up, never knew.
Apparently this storm and power outage took down Netflix and Pinterest for a time last night as well. I wouldn’t know since I was watching DVDs from Netflix instead of streaming.
One of the Netflix movies I watched last night was rather original (something that’s missing in almost 9 out of 10 horror movies). It’s called Rabies and when I put it in my queue long ago, I probably thought it was going to be another ‘infection’ type of horror movie — it’s completely not that at all.
First of all, it’s a sub-tilted horror movie out of Israel, which is very rare in itself, and it’s horrifying on several levels — both subtle (societal taboos, psychological discomfort) and blatant (cringe-inducing, very realistic gore, and no! not the dog!). Yet it’s entertaining because of the story-line and character development. It has a Fargo type of sensibility to it, and much of the initial interaction between the characters is funny.
The story revolves around eleven people and a German Shepherd, (a dog I’ve had and love) in a forest. And as a character itself, this forest is very menacing because its filled with man-made dangers, some of which are introduced in the opening scene. Everyone is there by choice (runaways, the bad guy, park employees, police) except for four college-age young people on their way to a tennis tournament who get turned around and are lost. In the end, over half of these characters kills one of the other characters, with only one character “group” who kills no one.
Anyway that’s all I’ll say about it. If you want to see something original in this genre, I recommend this movie.
