Oh, this is outstanding:

That "money = free speech" assertion

Oh, I do love this man:

It has been said that freedom isn't free. Today, we have placed a sizable down payment.

-- Stephen Colbert, after receiving approval from the Federal Election Commission to form his own "Super PAC" to mock the Supreme Court's decision to allow unlimited corporate donations to political action committees

What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander...
~~~

Oh, they've GOT to be kidding...

Did she really say this?

What would make someone be so full of hate... that they would want to see that person destroyed?

-- Sarah Palin, former vice-presidential candidate, responding to her celebrity critics

I think this is where I say, "Pot, meet kettle."
~~~

Someone I really miss

This man:

There are forces within the Democratic Party who want us to sound like kinder, gentler Republicans. I want a party that will stand up for working Americans.

---Paul Wellstone

Me too.

But we don't seem to have one.
~~~

Well, I certainly wouldn't admit it...

This:

Everything I needed to know I learned in Iowa.

-- Michele Bachmann, Republican Representative from Minnesota, addressing voters in Waterloo, Iowa, on the eve of her official presidential-campaign kickoff; Bachmann was born in Waterloo
~~~

Really disgusting headline

This one:

After Taking A $10 Billion Bailout, Goldman Sachs Announces It Will Outsource 1,000 Jobs To Singapore

Here's a little bit of what the article says:

Less than three years after receiving $10 billion in bailout money from American taxpayers, Goldman Sachs informed its employees recently that it will fire 1,000 workers in the United States and elsewhere, shifting their jobs to the cheaper Singaporean labor market.
....
The move to shift 1,000 jobs to Singapore is part of an overall effort by Goldman Sachs to cut $1 billion in operating costs over the next year. However, Goldman is firing American workers at a time of record profits for the company, which raked in $2.7 billion in profits in the first three months of 2011 alone.

What I want to know is why aren't this people denounced as unpatriotic? Even un-American?

Now listen up all you "conservatives" out there. THESE are the people you don't want to raise taxes on?

Sheesh.
~~~

Oh, oh, oh. Truly excellent:

Something about stupidity

Take a look at this headline:

Why Do People Believe Stupid Stuff, Even When They're Confronted With the Truth?

Here's how it gets started:

The Misconception: When your beliefs are challenged with facts, you alter your opinions and incorporate the new information into your thinking.

The Truth: When your deepest convictions are challenged by contradictory evidence, your beliefs get stronger.

How's that for weird?

The article explains it.
~~~

Sunday art blogging

Artist: Mary Cassett

Image from Wikimedia Commons

All you tax haters, listen up!

I want to call your attention to a piece called "102 Things NOT To Do If You Hate Taxes". Here's the beginning of the list:

1. Do not use Medicare.
2. Do not use Social Security
3. Do not become a member of the US military, who are paid with tax dollars.
4. Do not ask the National Guard to help you after a disaster.
5. Do not call 911 when you get hurt.
6. Do not call the police to stop intruders in your home.
7. Do not summon the fire department to save your burning home.
8. Do not drive on any paved road, highway, and interstate or drive on any bridge.
9. Do not use public restrooms.
10. Do not send your kids to public schools.
11. Do not put your trash out for city garbage collectors.
12. Do not live in areas with clean air.
13. Do not drink clean water.
14. Do not visit National Parks.
15. Do not visit public museums, zoos, and monuments.
16. Do not eat or use FDA inspected food and medicines.
17. Do not bring your kids to public playgrounds.
18. Do not walk or run on sidewalks.
19. Do not use public recreational facilities such as basketball and tennis courts.
20. Do not seek shelter facilities or food in soup kitchens when you are homeless and hungry.
21. Do not apply for educational or job training assistance when you lose your job.
22. Do not apply for food stamps when you can’t feed your children.
23. Do not use the judiciary system for any reason.
24. Do not ask for an attorney when you are arrested and do not ask for one to be assigned to you by the court.
25. Do not apply for any Pell Grants.
26. Do not use cures that were discovered by labs using federal dollars.
27. Do not fly on federally regulated airplanes.

And, of course, there are more. 102 in all.

Stuff to think about.
~~~

Friday cat blogging!

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

Very, very, very excellent snark

This:

I apologize for my mistake. To not do so would be irresponsible ... that would undermine the very integrity and credibility that I work so hard to pretend to care about.

-- Jon Stewart, TV host, after nonpartisan fact checker PolitiFact declared his statements about Fox News viewers false
~~~

Absolutely fascinating

I didn't know half of this stuff (it's about cheap, safe, eco-friendly cook stoves for developing countries):

Small - both beautiful and eco-friendly

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

Are you at all familiar with the "tiny house" movement? I think it's very impressive indeed. Mind you, although I have lived in very small spaces in the past, these days I really appreciate having a bit more space (especially with my four animals). But I have great respsect for those people who manage to get rid of most of their stuff and, thereby, hugely reduce their ecological footprint.

Here's a blog dedicated to the movement:

Tiny House Blog

~~~

The importance of context

First of all, here's your headline:

Jon Stewart Was Right About Fox 'News' Viewers Being the Most Misinformed Citizens

Next, I want to offer a comment that was made to the article:

My father used to tell me this story: A group of visitors to the Museum of Natural History were shown a triptych painting of a caveman, covered by a curtain. As the curtain was opened, with the left and right of the canvas still covered, it revealed a hostile, slathering savage with fire in his eyes and a stone spear extending menacingly from his hairy hands. The crowd gasped and later reported having feelings of being threatened by the man. The curtain, however continued to open revealing a raging sabretooth cat on the left and a frightened woman and child cowering behind the caveman on the right. That story stuck with me because it was my father's way, a liberal civil liberties lawyer from the Eisenhower 50s, of explaining to look closely and then look again even closer to find the truth. I don't need to tell you how Fox News would manipulate this same "picture"---in fact, they give the news this type of short shrift everyday and anyone can observe it happening a dozen times an hour on their "fair and balanced" network..

What a vivid and effective illustration.
~~~

That wall of separation

It's been said that we are all entitled to our own opinions but not to our own facts. This is so wearying. I well remember when fundamentalists were adamant about the separation of church and state. It's hard to understand how that changed so much:

I completely agree with the points made UNTIL the gentlemen made fun of people's concerns about being micro-chipped. I think that is a very sinister idea indeed - whether it's the "mark of the Beast" or not.

~~~

Sunday art blogging

Artist: August Macke

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Oh, what a headline

Here you go:

Michele Bachmann Makes Dubya Look Good

Did we ever think it was possible?

It's a short opinion piece. Just click through and read the whole thing, okay?
~~~

A man of integrity

And a Republican to boot:

I think I'm doing the right thing. It's the appropriate thing — and if the public respects that, I'm grateful. If they don't, then I move on.

-- Roy J. McDonald, New York State Republican Senator, indicating that he would vote to legalize same-sex marriage in New York; his vote brings the senate within one vote of passing the bill

He has my complete respect on this one.
~~~

Friday cat blogging!

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

Here you go:

(Hat tip to Lisa Casey at All Hat No Cattle)

Oh, this is rich:

Truly excellent snark

In all seriousness, I've wondered about this for some time now:

The first Republican presidential debate was held on Monday night. Seven Republican presidential candidates got together to agree on how much they dislike the government they would like to run. Imagine if you did that in a job interview.

– Jimmy Kimmel

(Hat tip to Lisa Casey over at All Hat No Cattle)
~~~

Gender differences (?) and sex scandals

Well, this is certainly interesting:

“The shorthand of it is that women run for office to do something, and men run for office to be somebody,” said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. “Women run because there is some public issue that they care about, some change they want to make, some issue that is a priority for them, and men tend to run for office because they see this as a career path.”

It's a quotation from an article by Amanda Marcotte. Mind you, Marcotte disagrees with Walsh. Click through if you want to explore the issues involved a bit.
~~~

A truly important headline

This one:

Why the Right-Wing's Denial of Science May Screw All of Us

Here's a little excerpt (not that any of this is new to you):

The other day [Rick Santorum] told Rush Limbaugh "the idea that man… is somehow responsible for climate change is, I think, just patently absurd." He went on to call it a left-wing conspiracy, "just an excuse for more government control of your life… I’ve never been for any scheme or even accepted the junk science behind the whole narrative."

And this man is running for president.

And here's one of the comments:

Ultimately the failure is in our inability to understand that fixing one thing does not fix all things. The science of Ecology is about understanding relationships and inter-dependencies. However, when it is filtered through our two dimensional lense of "find a problem and solve it" we deny the very existence of inter-dependence. Capitalism is the worst system in this regard since it is built on opportunism and short-term goal achievement. So we clean the rivers but leave the coal fired plants alone. Then we clean (a little bit) the coal plants but leave the dependency on automobiles alone. We "solve" the ozone layer hole but fail to appreciate the way the whole global greenhouse is causing global ice failure. Since we cannot change our paradigm, we ultimately fail as a species. Welcome to the last great extinction on earth - our own. Game over.

It's enough to make a person really depressed. (To put it mildly.)
~~~

Sunday art blogging

Artist: William Zorach

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Sad, actually

Ain't this the truth?

We all operate in two contrasting modes, which might be called open and closed. The open mode is more relaxed, more receptive, more exploratory, more democratic, more playful and more humorous. The closed mode is the tighter, more rigid, more hierarchical, more tunnel-visioned. Most people, unfortunately spend most of their time in the closed mode.

— John Cleese

Finally

a Republican who's not afraid to state the obvious:

I believe the world's getting warmer.

-- Mitt Romney, Republican presidential candidate, reaffirming his belief that climate change is real and that humans are contributing to it in the first town-hall meeting of his campaign, held in New Hampshire
~~~

Military spending

Well, now. This is refreshing:

The days of unlimited growth in defense budgets are over. We must be highly disciplined in how we spend the taxpayers' precious resources.

- Leon Panetta, CIA director, whom President Obama has nominated to be the next Defense Secretary, speaking at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee
~~~

This just makes SO much sense:

And here's what the REAL "death panels" are like:

Friday cat blogging!

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

A way to end war

From a blog post entitled God Called - He Wants His Campaign Back! the following is offered:

My Dad, a long time ago, had an idea for an anti-war movie, wherein everyone who wanted to work for the government sort of volunteered, and if they decided to have a war with someone, only the folks who were at the highest level of government (Congress, the President and his Cabinet) would suffer or die, and it would be a totally random event within a few minutes of the war being declared. One guy would get a fast acting poison injected and die, another would lose the use of an arm, an eye, or both legs, another would catch some horrible, non-communicative disease that would ruin his/her life forever, but no one - not one of them - would escape totally unscathed. All would end up psychologically scarred in some way, either through drugs or via some physical effect.

Unlike now.

Very powerful. If it worked this way, the powers that be would learn other ways of solving our problems besides war very quickly.
~~~

That arc that bends toward justice

This is how it's done:

But try as they might, they could not break her spirit, they could not make her bitter, they could not defeat her love.

-- Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, on Albertina Sisulu, who was widely considered to be the mother of South Africa's liberation struggle; she died on Sunday at age 92

I so very glad she lived to see "the new South Africa" come into being.
~~~

How to fix the economy

Put money in the hands of people who will actually spend it.

Check out this post over on Democratic Underground:

There is only one thing that can unfuck the economy. Only one.

It's brief. And it makes a huge amount of sense.
~~~

Why the Patriot Act is so, so wrong

Ha!

Friday cat blogging!

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

South Africa's big mistake

At least somebody there sees it:

Once Walmart enters your economic system, it's like having a really strong and virulent weed or fish. They come in and totally change the environment, and other species die out.

-- Seeraj Mohamed of Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand, on the multinational corporation's arrival in South Africa
~~~

The end of an era

Yes, I think so too:

It's sad to see her land for the last time.

-- Mark Kelly, upon the return of the Endeavour space shuttle after its last mission; Kelly, whose wife Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot in Tucson, Ariz., earlier this year, piloted the final mission.
~~~

Our low taxes and being a "bad politician"

Oh, I SO agree with this:

Blogging interruption

I'll be back soon, folks. I just have a lot going on right now and am a bit tired out. I'll be back Friday at the latest.

Blessings to all!

~~~