Quote of the day

Another good one I found on Facebook:

"Only in America can you be Pro-Death Penalty, Pro-War, Pro-Unmanned Drone Bombs, Pro-Nuclear Weapons, Pro-Guns, Pro-Torture, Pro-Land Mines, AND still call yourself ‘Pro-Life’."

-- John Fugelsang
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GOP commitments

(click to enlarge)

Now here's a quote for you!!!

Oh, my goodness. This is world class snark; yes it is:

‎"Calling Obama the 'Food Stamp President' because he came into office during a recession is like calling George W. Bush the 'Planes Crashing Into Buildings President'."

- Bill Maher
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Well, that's politics....

"The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it."

-- P.J. O'Rourke
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A rather sane assessment:

Good point:

Something about Congress

Here's a quote offered by one of my facebook friends:

"In 2010, just as the president and his administration managed to lift their heads above the brim of the ditch in which their predeceesors had dumped the country, We, The People elected the most retrograde, brick-stupid, poo-flinging monkeyhouse of a House of Representatives in the history of the Republic."

-- Charles S. Pierce

I'm not actually sure I can add anything edifying.
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Definitely a good one

“New Rule: Someone has to tell Francesco Schettino that embracing a callous policy of “every man for himself” doesn’t make you a sea captain. It makes you the Republican nominee.” -Bill Maher


(A tip of the hat to Lisa over at All Hat No Cattle.)
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Fair question

Oh, people. Brace yourselves for this one!

The Daily Show
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Quote of the Day (IMHO)

Just look at this:

“I did not think I lived a good enough life to see Newt Gingrich as the Republican nominee,” the 30-year House veteran [Barney Frank] said. “He would be the best thing to happen to Democrats since Barry Goldwater ... It’s still unlikely, but I have hopes.”

Hey, I'm not sure he's right about this but I rather like the way he said it anyway.
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Heartbreaking

For this to happen is wrong, wrong, wrong. And any person who possesses even a marginal degree of human decency knows it:

(Click the photo to enlarge if you need to.)

Ha!

Oh, m'goodness!  (Some of the lyrics are a bit difficult to make out but you can definitely get the gist of it.) Many thanks to my friend Stephie Patterson for posting this on facebook!

And in response...

A sincere tip of the hat to Tracie Holladay.

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Yes

Do click on this (or double click) so that you can read all the text.
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The reality of the situation

A facebook friend named Mark Manley said the following today:

"In America, we’re supposed to have one person, one vote. But in reality, corporations have more than a single vote. They rig the system in their favor because they essentially buy elected officials."

This is really tragic, people. Utterly tragic.
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Newt Gingrich = King David?????

Okay. Here's the name of the article I want you to know about:

"Why Is There So Much God in Our Politics? The Religious Right's Theocratic Plan for the 2012 Election"

And here's the passage that caught my attention and really disgusted me:

“Maybe the guy in the race that would make the best president is on his third marriage,” Steve Deace, a prominent Religious Right leader in Iowa, recently mused to writer Michelle Goldberg of “The Daily Beast” website. “How do we reconcile that?”


One way is to do what Deace did and compare Gingrich with King David, the Old Testament figure who committed adultery with another man’s wife but later repented.


“I see a lot of parallels between King David and Newt Gingrich, two extraordinary men gifted by God, whose lives include very high highs and very low lows,” Deace added.

Well, what can I say but good grief. Good, good grief.
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A Time Magazine quote of the day

This is really horrible:

"I have now been informed by intelligence sources ... that paid assassins from the Mumbai underworld may be on their way to Jaipur to 'eliminate' me."

-- Salman Rushdie, in a statement. The author has withdrawn from India's biggest literary festival, saying that he feared assassination after influential Muslim clerics protested against his participation.
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Just because I really like it...

Thanks to Tom Holliday for calling the artist, Gustav Klimt, to my attention. The image is from Wikimedia Commons. You might like to check out Tom's blog, Viewed from Another Angle.
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And then there were four....

Hmmm. Very white. Very male.
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Oh, my goodness

This is the CNN Quickvote for this evening. This is really worrying:

Which GOP candidate do you want to win the presidential nomination?

Paul

41%

Romney

29%

Gingrich

18%

Santorum

12%

It's clear that Paul would destroy what's left of the social safety net. Also, there is evidence that he is a racist. At the very least, he panders to racists.
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The main reason I'm pro-choice

This has been known for quite some time, actually:

Abortion Rates Are Higher In Countries Where Procedure Is Illegal, Study Finds

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A photo making the rounds today:

"Not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
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Definitely in the karma department....

Republican Sponsor Of Bill To Require Drug Testing For Georgia Welfare Recipients Arrested For DUI

Here's how the article gets started:

"A Georgia Republican who wants all welfare recipients subject to drug tests failed one himself after he ran a red light on Friday morning. "


Click on through for more details.
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Something about laws

This was posted by a facebook friend today. Oh, my. Really excellent:

‎"Laws: We know what they are, and what they are worth! They are spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, fishing nets in the hands of government."

-- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
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A senator of integrity

The true nature of peace

The following quotation was sent out in an email today from Tulsa Peace Fellowship. Spinoza was a 17th century philosopher for whom I have long had great respect.

"Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice."

-- Baruch Spinoza
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Please review this carefully:

Click to enlarge.
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Actually, he has a point....

It's one of the Time Magazine quotes of the day:

"Iran hasn't invaded anyone. Who has dropped thousands and thousands of bombs ... including atomic bombs?"

-- Hugo Chavez, Venezuelan President, defending Iran on Monday, as Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad arrived in Venezuela at the start of a four-country tour of Latin America
~~~

Interesting headline of the day

I'm not sure I'm convinced of a causal relationship here but I think the correlation is very interesting indeed:

Why Abstinence-Only Sex Ed Makes Kids Into Bullies

Here's how the article gets started:

"Abstinence-only education creates a petri dish for bullying in schools. There is always a lot of back and forth about the efficacy of these programs, and I fall on the side that they demonstrably fail to reduce teen pregnancy, the rate of incidence of teen sex, or the transmission of sexutally transmitted infections (STIs) (all you have to do is look at Texas). In addition, however, I believe that the heyday of our federal investment in abstinence-only programs had a terrible collateral effect -- namely, kids who were "educated" in this way were more likely to bully and harass because they learned, in ways integral to abstinence provisions, outdated "traditional" ideas about gender and sexuality. Even kids whose parents talked to them at home, about contraception or healthy sex, were taught gendered rules and more and more of them appear to have enforced those rules to great harm."
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An interesting endorsement:

"The priorities he would set for the country, from leading the world in renewable energy to retooling education and immigration policies to help American high-tech industries, are far-sighted."

-- The Boston Globe, in an editorial endorsing Republican presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman ahead of the New Hampshire primary election on Tuesday, Jan. 10

Sadly, it's not really surprising that a Republican who is deemed by a major newspaper to be "farsighted" is not doing too well.
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Well, here's one way of looking at it:

Barney Frank jokes that the Democrats 2012 campaign slogan should be "We're not perfect, but they're nuts."
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I completely agree:

Headline of the day

It's a short article and very carefully written. I think you might find it useful:

Explaining Socialism To A Republican

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And you're saying you wouldn't, Newt?

It's a Time Magazine quote of the day:

"Romney would buy the election if he could."

-- Newt Gingrich, Republican presidential candidate, on his view that rival Mitt Romney has conducted a relentless and costly negative advertising campaign against him.
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A little something to ponder

Good morning and a Happy New Year to everybody!

I want to recommend a brief essay by Garrison Keillor that was offered this morning by a group called Seniors for a Democratic Society:

We’re Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore

Here's an excerpt:

"The Union is what needs defending this year. Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln spoke of. This gang of Pithecanthropus Republicanii has humbugged us to death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to know what books we read and to dump their sewage upstream from the town and clear-cut the forests and gut the IRS and mark up the constitution on behalf of intolerance and promote the corporate takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them.


"This is a great country, and it wasn’t made so by angry people. We have a sacred duty to bequeath it to our grandchildren in better shape than however we found it. We have a long way to go and we’re not getting any younger."

Good stuff, people. Good stuff.
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