8 Years of Bush in 8 Mintutes

I love you Keith Olbermann

Pink Velvet Sausage Wallet

Sarah Palin has received her first job offer since failing in her bid to become vice-president of the United States -- to appear in a porno movie.

Florida-based porn director Cezar Capone has offered to pay Palin $2 million to appear in an adult film production.

Capone promises in an open letter on his website that the film would be distributed internationally, shot in high definition and feature a "beautiful mother recognized by all of America as well as the rest of the world -- the most desirable woman over 40."

Palin offered $2M to appear in porn movie

This is not a drill, this is really happening

In September 2007, the Inspector General of the Justice Department reported that the Terrorist Screening Center (the FBI-administered organization that consolidates terrorist watch list information in the United States) had over 700,000 names in its database as of April 2007 - and that the list was growing by an average of over 20,000 records per month.

At that rate, our list will have a million names on it by July. If there were really that many terrorists running around, we'd all be dead.

Terrorist watch lists must be tightly focused on true terrorists who pose a genuine threat. Bloated lists are bad because they ensnare many innocent travelers as suspected terrorists, and because they waste screeners' time and divert their energies from looking for true terrorists. Small, focused watch lists are better for civil liberties and for security.

The uncontroversial contention that Osama Bin Laden and a handful of other known terrorists should not be allowed on an aircraft is being used to create a monster that goes far beyond what ordinary Americans think of when they think about a "terrorist watch list."

This is not just a problem of numbers. The numbers are merely a symptom. What's needed is fairness. If the government is going to rely on these kinds of lists, they need checks and balances to ensure that innocent people are protected.

Granted the ACLU has stated things some things in the past that are a little too far left for my personal tastes, but if you're going to have fundamentalist neo-conservatives running this country and telling us what to fear on a daily basis, we should definitely have an organization that opposes such ideology on the other end of the spectrum.
ACLU: Watch List Counter

Fox & Friends

I posted a little video a few days showing a comedian by the name of Lee Camp on Fox News. While his rant wasn't really tactful and he didn't really take the huge opportunity to say something mind blowing, you have to support him for taking a stab at Fox 'News'. He apparently has received a huge amount of emails about the video and went on to discuss the situation in the following article.

What happened after they cut to a commercial? Clayton Morris was visibly furious but didn't say a word. Neither did anyone in the main studio. I got up, took my microphone off, and walked silently back to the greenroom, itching to the get the fuck out of that sixth circle of hell. Back in the greenroom I saw the female co-host, who was wearing her normal business skirt that is only half an inch away from illegal in 23 states. Even though there are three TV's back there showing nothing but Fox "News" (and we act like water boarding is torture?) she apparently had not watched the segment. She looked at me and said, "GREAT JOB!! We need more humor on the show. It's all so serious!" She did not get to the natural conclusion of her thought, "Now excuse me. I have to go interview strippers wearing Star Trek outfits designed for three-year-olds."

I then left the building without speaking to anyone. Following the break, intrepid newshound Clayton Morris pretended on-air as if he had thrown me out of the building. Here's the clip: He says something like, "I had to get rid of that guy!" The other anchor then says something like, "Well, it shows we have both sides of the issues here at Fox News." They then go on to interview the naked Star Trek chicks. (...)

Everyone has been amused with the irony that after I said my remarks respectable journalist Clayton Morris hit back with, "You can get all the news you can at Fox," and then sends it over to a story about Captain Kirk's lovers, which would not have been a news story even if it had been covered during Star Trek's actual run 38 years ago. (...)

This helps answer the last question - Wasn't my tirade a little rude and lacking in class? A few people who agree with what I said have asked this. My own mother said I should have warned the nice news people that I was going to trash them. My view of a lack of class is knowing that nearly a million civilians have died in Iraq and yet then reporting that 80,000 have. My view of unrefined is calling peace activists "anti-American." My view of barbaric is being aware that genocide goes on in Darfur but refusing to speak about it on-air because the people funding it are your corporate friends. My view of disrespectful is calling the first probable African American nominee for president "Muslim" in hopes that it will inspire enough racism in your viewers to defeat him in November. My idea of vulgar is creating false "news" stories that have some relation to naked women so that you can show clips of those women while you discuss it in a "professional" manner.

I realize I'm a comedian, and I realize my job is not to tell the truth. But in a situation like this, I feel it's a crime not to. Plus, all the best comedians have spoken the truth - Bruce, Carlin, Pryor, Hicks. So I don't give a fuck if people say "that's not funny."

alternet.org | read article

A little comment from a fellow digg user:

Roger Ailes, the President of Fox News was former George H.W. Bush's campaign manager. He put Rush Limbaugh on the air, helped Reagan get re-elected, and is an openly conservative supporter of the GOP. Everyone has some political leaning, not all of us have HUGE NEWS NETWORKS to use to share our views.

News is not unbiased. By the power of human nature, all reporting is biased, if even subtly. Fox unfortunately goes to the other end of the spectrum however, featuring conservative rhetoric, themes, and news reporting, unfortunately.

Indie docs speak out

Phil Donahue was so enraged by coverage of the Iraq War that he came out of retirement. But instead of heading back to a network studio, where he had spent more than 30 years building his name as a talk-show host, he followed the lead of some of the most talented storytellers in media: He made an independent documentary.

Donahue's Body of War, co-directed with Ellen Spiro, tells the harrowing story of an American soldier who, returning home from Iraq paralyzed, begins fighting the system that sent him there. It's one of a growing number of provocative, ambitious and impassioned indie docs born, in part, out of frustration with the perceived inadequacy of the mainstream press.

"I believe these documentaries fill the giant black hole left by corporate media," Donahue said. "These [independent filmmakers] don't report to boardrooms. They don't fear making people angry."

"The mainstream reportage of Iraq either has blindly sided with the party line from Washington or has not asked the tough questions these filmmakers are willing to ask," he said, adding that war docs relate stories "you aren't really seeing in your daily newspapers or evening news. They are thinking outside of the box, coming at things from a different point of view."

Fearless War Docs Fight the Good Fight at Oscars

Someone call Jimmy Carter, we're about to get shit on.

chomsky.info | site

Mo money, no problems

The Port Authority missed its New Year’s Eve deadline to finish excavating Ground Zero, and developer Larry Silverstein will start collecting $300,000 a day in penalties.

Despite working 20 hours a day, construction crews are still weeks away from clearing the subterranean beds on Church St. for Silverstein to erect Towers 3 and 4 of the sprawling project.

The Port Authority, which owns the site, said it could end up owing Silverstein $9 million to $13.5 million in fines because of the delay.
nydailynews.com | read article

The New Wars Of Religion

Stolen from another blog, originally from the lead story in the Nov. 3rd edition of The Economist.


A religious fanatic goes overseas to fight for his God and then returns home to attempt a bloody act of terrorism. As Britons celebrate the capture of Guy Fawkes, a Catholic jihadist who attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605, they might reflect how dismally modern the Gunpowder Plot and Europe's wars of religion now seem in 2007.

Back in the 20th century, most Western politicans and intellectuals (and even some clerics) assumed religion was becoming marginal to public life; faith was largely treated as an irrelevance in foreign policy. Symptomatically, State Department diaries ignored Muslim holidays until the 1990s. In the 21st century, by contrast, religion is playing a central role. From Nigeria to Sri Lanka, from Chechnya to Bagdad, people are being slain in God's name; and money and volunteers are pouring into these religions. Once again, one of the world's great religions has a bloody divide (this time it is Sunnis and Shias, not Catholics and Protestants). And once again, zealotry seems all too relevant to foreign policy.

It does not stop there. Outside Western Europe, religion has forced itself dramatically into the public square. In 1960 John Kennedy pleaded with Americans to treat his Catholicism as irrelevant; now a born-again Christian sits in the White House and his most likely Democrat replacement wants voters to know she prays. An Islamist party rules once-secular Turkey; Hindu nationalists may return to power in India's next election; even more children in Israel and Palestine are attending religious schools that tell them that God granted them the whole Holy Land. On present trends, China, the world's largest Communist dictatorship, will also become the world's largest Christian country-- and perhaps the largest Muslim one too. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, not usually a reliable authority on current affairs, got it right in an open letter to George Bush: "Whether we like it or not," he wrote, "the world is gravitating toward faith in the Almightly."

How frightening is this prospect? The idea that religion has "re-emerged" in pubic life is to some extent an illusion. It never really went away-- certainly not to the extend that French politicans and American college professors imagined. Its new power is mostly the consequence of two changes. The first is the failure of secular creeds; religion's political comeback began in the 1970s, when faith in government everywhere was crumbling. Second, although some theocracies survive in the Islamic world, religion has returned to the stage as a much more democratic, individualistic affair; a bottom-up marketing success, suprisingly in tune with globalisation. Secularism was not as modern as many intellectuals hoped, but pluralism is. Free up religion and ardent believers and ardent atheists both do well.

From a classical liberal point of view, this multiplicity of sects is a good thing. Freedom of conscience is an axiom of liberal thought. If man is, after all, a theotropic beast, inclined to believe in a hereafter, it is surely better that he choses his own faith, rather than follow one his government orders. But this also makes religion a politically difficult force to deal with. In domestic policy, adults who choose to become Pentecostals, Orthodox Jews or Muslim fundamentalists are far less likely to forget those beliefs when it comes to the ballot box. The "culture wars" that America has grown used to may become a global phenomenon. We can expect fierce battles over science, in particular.

Abroad, yes, there is a chance of a full-blown war of religion between states. A conflagration between Iran and Israel would, alas, be seen as a faith-based conflict by millions; so would a war between India and Pakistan. But compared with Guy Fawkes's time, when wars sprang from monarchs throwing their military might at other monarchs of different faiths, religious conflict today is the result as much of popular will as of state sponsorship: it is bottom-up, driven by volunteers not conscripts, their activities blessed by rogue preachers not popes, their fury mostly directed at apostates, not competing civilisations. Ironically, America, the model for much choice-based religion, has often seemed stuck in the secular era, declaring war on state-sponsored terror, only to discover the main weapon of militant Islamism is often the ballot box.

-From "The New Wars Of Religion," The Economist.

The narrator is British he has to be right. Actually this sums up everything very nicely and not in an extreme way.

The Illuminated Draconian Pharaohs Wish to Continue Their Mind Control of the Sheep Masses

I'm too tired to write up anything about this article. Opinionated? Of course. We don't live in a world where everything is black and white, but our government appears to think that way or would like us to think that way.

The Huffington Post: After the Next 9/11