via: sandandglass
Jon Stewart highlights Romney’s refusal to release his tax returns with Fox News clips on Obama
Daily Archives: July 21, 2012
VMURTP for Romney!
via: republicanidiots
Tea Party President Judson Phillips has lost his mind (but we still want Romney’s tax returns!)
Bob Cesca grieves over what the Tea Party considers patriotic:
“Mitt Romney’s tax returns are off-limits, but Tea Party Nation President Judson Phillips would like for President Obama to prove that he’s not a gay crackhead. Really. [...] Romney has employed teams of accountants, lawyers, and professional, suited scam artists to ensure that America is denied every single penny possible using every trick, every loophole, and every single exception the system allows. And he paid for those accountants, lawyers, and scam artists with money he earned bankrupting companies, screwing people out of their pensions, and sending jobs overseas. No stone has been left un-turned in Mitt Romney’s quest to abuse the system. Highly-decorated economic experts can’t even identify half the stones, nor will anyone be able to unless Romney releases his labyrinthine tax returns.”
The Tea Party / GOP will continue this pathetic attempt to shield their candidate from having his tax returns / wealth / business dealings scrutinized by demanding increasingly ridiculous documents from the President, such as college transcripts (prove he wasn’t a foreign student!) and now medical records (prove he didn’t have anal sex and take drugs!). Un-fucking-believable.
Totally, totally not racist though – right? It’s just information that rightwing conservatives always demand of every (black, Democratic) presidential candidate. “Taxed Enough Already” my ass. That fools no one.
Aurora theater shooting: Coroner’s Office releases the names of the victims
The Arapahoe County Coroner’s Office has released the names of victims killed in Friday’s shooting at an Aurora theater, reports The Denver Post:
According to the office, 11 victims have been definitively identified. They are:
Jonathan T. Blunk
Alexander J. Boik
Jesse E. Childress
Gordon Cowden
Jessica Ghawi
John T. Larimer
Micayla Medek
Veronica Moser-Sullivan
Alex M. Sullivan
Alexander Teves
Rebecca Wingo
The coroner’s office said Matthew McQuinn has been presumptively identified and that all families have been notified.
image: newsweek
Buying online popularity: Mitt Romney sure has a lot of Twitter followers (recently)!
Think Progress wonders if Mitt Romney is buying Twitter followers:
“Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign may be buying up Twitter followers to pad the former Massachusetts governor’s online presence. @MittRomney has already attracted more than 100,000 new followers on Saturday, far more than his average 1,000 – 6,000 per day, and the new followers “seem to have major trouble with spelling simple English words, have names that sometimes seem to be random assortments of syllables, and have no (or very few) followers themselves.””
Heh. Is Mitt outsourcing / offshoring his Twitter followers — is this an ESL situation? Why does Mitt Romney hate America?
“@BarackObama, by contrast, has been growing steadily, adding 16,000 to 30,000 new followers per day: Former GOP presidential contender Newt Gingrich experienced similar Twitter embarrassment in August of 2011, after it was reported that as many as 92 percent of his Twitter followers were fake. In that case, a “former Gingrich staffer has supposedly alleged that he bought his followers.” It’s still unclear what’s happening with Romney’s account.”
This would be the least surprising bit of news on how the Romney campaign is spending its massive amounts of money, actually. Now he’s Bain Capitalizing Twitter. The Romney campaign would also like to buy Mitt the White House — we’ll have to wait and see if that’s as easy as buying Twitter popularity.
Aurora theater shooting: the next 48 hours
John Cole summarizes the next 48 hours in one post:
R- Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.
D- Yes, but guns make it very easy to kill people in large quantities. He would not have been able to stab 71 people.
R- Stop trying to politicize this tragedy! What we need are not fewer guns, but more guns. If only someone else in that theatre had had a gun, they would have been able to stop him in his tracks.
D- Yes. Nothing could go wrong with crossfire in a dark theatre. This is absurd. There is a clear lesson here, and we need to do something about the ease with which people get firearms.
R- There’s no lesson to be learned, the guy was crazy. You can’t stop every crazy person.
D- We could try to make it harder for crazy people to walk around with a shotgun, a rifle, two handguns, and gas cannisters. (My note: and 6,000 rounds of ammo off the internet)
R- I knew Obama and you liberals were coming for our guns. Second Amendment!
Cole- And after 48 hours, the topic will die down as me move on to the next scandal/tragedy du jour, and then we can have this same exact conversation again the next time someone murders a dozen people with a gun.
Also, I see that I wasn’t the only one who watched O Brother, Where Art Thou last night. In my opinion John Cole is close to the perfect man because, in addition to his opinions (which I share, more often than not), he cooks, cleans, and gardens. And he loves his pets. Total package!
Current level of energy
via: pricklylegs
Updates on breaching the apartment of Aurora shooter James Holmes
11: 17 a.m. – Aurora Police have advised media to stand behind their vehicles. They are confident in the safety of the perimeter, but are advising this extra precaution.
11:35 a.m. – Expecting an airhorn blast in 5-10 minutes; and then a detonation.
11:40 a.m. – Peoria St. is closed.
11:44 – The controller detonation has happened.
11:47 a.m. – Detonation was successful. Peoria is now reopened.
The living room of the 800-square-foot apartment is littered with about 30 softball-sized improvised explosive devices, according to a bomb technician at the scene.
Bomb technicians used a water bottle device to disable the “9D trip device” in the apartment, according to a source at the scene. They sent the device in with a robot, the robot dropped the water device and then retreated.
Aurora shooter James Holmes being held in solitary, other inmates want to kill him
So I’ll bet this is why the police won’t release Holmes’ mug shot — he did dye his hair red, did call himself the Joker, and he probably gave the booking officer with the camera an extra big, terrible smile. Why give holmes the satisfaction? From NY Daily News:
“The man accused in the Colorado movie theater massacre was still behaving erratically on the day after his rampage at a midnight screening of “The Dark Night Rises” — the last film in the Batman trilogy. “Let’s just say he hasn’t shown any remorse,” a jail employee told the Daily News. “He thinks he’s acting in a movie.” A released inmate said Holmes’ behavior behind bars was increasingly irrational. “He was spitting at the door and spitting at the guards,” the inmate told The News. “He’s spitting at everything. Dude was acting crazy.” [...] “All the inmates were talking about killing him,” Wayne Medley, 24, said as he left the facility. “Everyone was looking for an opportunity. It’s all they could talk about. [...] Holmes — who had dyed his hair red — was also wearing red clothing beneath the black body armor that terrified moviegoers saw when he opened fire early Friday morning, Danilov said. Jail guards “blacked out his windows with duct tape so no one could see him,” said Danilov. “He was cuffed in the back and had leg shackles. Six officers were walking him.” The deranged suspected killer, a former honors student and Ph.D. candidate, said nothing and walked slowly to his cell. Danilov said that if Holmes was released into the general jail population, “he won’t live to see Monday’s court appearance.””
According to NY Daily News, these photos may be of Holmes’ new look off the website “Adult Friend Finder:”
Kaitlyn Fonzi lives downstairs from James Holmes, turned his doorknob at midnight
There are close calls and then there’s this:
“[James Holmes] rigged his apartment with what authorities fear are deadly explosives and blared techno music from his stereo in what’s believed to be an attempt to invite more devastation when the door was opened.
“[...] Kaitlyn Fonzi, a 20-year-old biology student at University of Colorado Denver who lives in an apartment below Holmes’ said she heard techno music blasting from Holmes apartment around midnight. Another tenant said residents called 9-1-1 about the racket. Fonzi went upstairs and knocked on the door. When no one answered, she put her hand on the knob and realized the door was unlocked. Fonzi decided not to go inside the apartment. At almost exactly 1 a.m., Fonzi said, the music stopped.”
Our Lady of Perpetual Twitch
This first tweet caught my attention yesterday, since it practically explodes with a stunning lack of self-awareness and irony by itself, but especially because of the almost stream-of-consciousness tweetriver of far-right outrageous outrage that preceded it:
That IS ghoulish! Oh, wait…
UGH, indeed. It never fails to amuse me that Malkin named her website “twitchy” — a word that perfectly describes everything about her.
Morning
via: animalshugging
Okay, so I had to take a break from the internet yesterday when I kept running into the ‘usual’ reactions we have over the usual subjects we argue about when one of these (unfortunately) familiar tragedies happens in America. I just couldn’t do it.
Instead of flirting with an aneurysm,. I decided to clean out the kitchen cupboards (probably not the greatest idea two weeks after surgery… but, too late, it’s done). And I watched O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which helped my mood immensely.
For better or worse, today’s a new day and, naturally, The Onion summarizes yesterday perfectly:
Sadly, Nation Knows Exactly How Colorado Shooting’s Aftermath Will Play Out
…According to the nation’s citizenry, calls for a mature, thoughtful debate about the role of guns in American society started right on time, and should persist throughout the next week or so. However, the populace noted, the debate will soon spiral out of control and ultimately lead to nothing of any substance, a fact Americans everywhere acknowledged they felt “absolutely horrible” to be aware of.
With scalpel-like precision, the American populace then went on to predict, to the minute, how long it will take for the media to swarm Aurora, CO, how long it will take for them to leave, and exactly when questions will be raised as to whether or not violence in movies and video games had something to do with the act.
The nation’s citizens also confirmed that, any time now, some religious figure or cable news personality will say something unbelievably insensitive about the tragic shooting.
“[...] Oh, and here’s another thing I hate I know,” Brennen continued, “In exactly two weeks this will all be over and it will be like it never happened.”
