YouTube: Condi Mixes it Up with Stanford Students over Torture

Our Next President? Palin on American Choppers (Video)

Q: So you snowmobile?
PALIN: Oh yeah. Snow machine. Yes.
Q: What kind of snowmobile do you got?
PALIN: We've got an Arctic Cat. We've got a couple of different kinds. Race machines. I inherit whatever Todd rejects from the year prior. ... We love those motor sports.
PALIN: You do so many good things for some of the other states, also. You've got that patriotism in you that people just so respect. Thank you for that.

YouTube: Karl Rove on Obama's First 100 Days

10 Coolest High Speed Trains in The World

Obama's publicly stated that he wants to be known as "The High Speed Rail" President, and here's hoping that he keeps his word.  America, the richest country in the world, is an international laughingstock with regards to passenger rail travel.  Check out how the rest of the industrialized world travels with this amazing slide show....

The GOP: A Southern Regional Party

A picture is worth a thousand words: Arlen Specter's switch was just another march in this direction...(hat tip austinvegas)

YouTube: Obama Gets Ahead of the Teleprompter

Arlen Specter Switches Parties, Rocks Washington

Statement by Senator Arlen Specter

I have been a Republican since 1966. I have been working extremely hard for the Party, for its candidates and for the ideals of a Republican Party whose tent is big enough to welcome diverse points of view. While I have been comfortable being a Republican, my Party has not defined who I am. I have taken each issue one at a time and have exercised independent judgment to do what I thought was best for Pennsylvania and the nation.

Since my election in 1980, as part of the Reagan Big Tent, the Republican Party has moved far to the right. Last year, more than 200,000 Republicans in Pennsylvania changed their registration to become Democrats. I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans.

When I supported the stimulus package, I knew that it would not be popular with the Republican Party. But, I saw the stimulus as necessary to lessen the risk of a far more serious recession than we are now experiencing.

Since then, I have traveled the State, talked to Republican leaders and office-holders and my supporters and I have carefully examined public opinion. It has become clear to me that the stimulus vote caused a schism which makes our differences irreconcilable. On this state of the record, I am unwilling to have my twenty-nine year Senate record judged by the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate. I have not represented the Republican Party. I have represented the people of Pennsylvania.

I have decided to run for re-election in 2010 in the Democratic primary.

I am ready, willing and anxious to take on all comers and have my candidacy for re-election determined in a general election.

I deeply regret that I will be disappointing many friends and supporters. I can understand their disappointment. I am also disappointed that so many in the Party I have worked for for more than four decades do not want me to be their candidate. It is very painful on both sides. I thank specially Senators McConnell and Cornyn for their forbearance.

I am not making this decision because there are no important and interesting opportunities outside the Senate. I take on this complicated run for re-election because I am deeply concerned about the future of our country and I believe I have a significant contribution to make on many of the key issues of the day, especially medical research. NIH funding has saved or lengthened thousands of lives, including mine, and much more needs to be done. And my seniority is very important to continue to bring important projects vital to Pennsylvania’s economy.

I am taking this action now because there are fewer than thirteen months to the 2010 Pennsylvania Primary and there is much to be done in preparation for that election. Upon request, I will return campaign contributions contributed during this cycle.

While each member of the Senate caucuses with his Party, what each of us hopes to accomplish is distinct from his party affiliation. The American people do not care which Party solves the problems confronting our nation. And no Senator, no matter how loyal he is to his Party, should or would put party loyalty above his duty to the state and nation.

My change in party affiliation does not mean that I will be a party-line voter any more for the Democrats that I have been for the Republicans. Unlike Senator Jeffords’ switch which changed party control, I will not be an automatic 60th vote for cloture. For example, my position on Employees Free Choice (Card Check) will not change.

Whatever my party affiliation, I will continue to be guided by President Kennedy’s statement that sometimes Party asks too much. When it does, I will continue my independent voting and follow my conscience on what I think is best for Pennsylvania and America.

YouTube: Air Force One Fly By Freaks Out Lower Manhattan

story here

Obama, The First 100 Days: Top 5 Accomplishments

It's been a whirlwind first few months and, love him or hate him, one has to agree that the new president is not one for sitting around and doing nothing.  Here's a list of the top 5 accomplishments of the still very new Obama administration:

1. Closing Guantanamo Bay--Obviously this hasn't actually happened yet, but moving quickly and announcing that America would indeed soon close this notorious gulag, this blemish on the flag, was a crucial move by Obama and showed the world that his presidency would, indeed, be all about change.
   
2. Setting a Firm Date to Exit Iraq--Iraq has been an American quagmire for the better half of a decade: sucking lives, dollars, and diminishing the country's international reputation for over six years now.  The war was a huge mistake, launched on a pack of lies, and has made the country less safe.  Again, it's impossible to just 'leave'--the problem has become too complex and we are in too deep; but by setting a firm timetable for exit, Obama has indicated that it's time to move on.  Finally.
   
3. Pumping Billions into American Rail Travel--The United States of America, the world's richest country by far, has the rail infrastructure of a backwater, third world banana republic.  It is, put simply, a national embarrassment.  The reasons are too numerous to list here, but in a nutshell it's all derived from an over reliance on the automobile due to the fact that the early automotive tycoons successfully bankrupted the rail companies using graft, corruption, etc.  Cars and highways pollute, are inefficient, and our reliance on Middle Eastern oil has been a disaster for our foreign relations.  Kudos to Obama for moving to fix this yawning problem.  He's said publicly that he wants to be known as The High Speed Rail President...
   
4. Ending the ban on Stem Cell Research--The previous administration had imposed the ban as a nod to the religious conservatives who make up a large portion of the Republican base.  Never mind the fact that this critical research saves lives, and that America had been losing to other countries in the advancement and development of these technologies.
   
5. Ending raids on Medical Marijuana Clubs--It was always extremely hypocritical for an ostensibly 'states rights' Republican administration to override states like California, which had legalized medical marijuana, and have the federal government randomly raid these clubs and arrest their owners.  Not to mention that it was stupid and inefficient, as well.  Make no mistake about it, the fact that these raids have ended is the high point so far in the legalize marijuana movement.  There is no logical reason whatsoever for booze to be legal and marijuana illegal.
   

So there you have it, a back of the envelope list of five major accomplishments in Obama's first 100 days.  Odds are that Obama will be a two term president, especially with the woeful condition the Republican party finds itself in these days.  If his first 100 days are any indication, America stands to be a very different place after his reign ends....

Bill Maher: The GOP: divorced from reality

Bill Mahrer writes a great article here.  Today's Republican party is truly a sad, sad lot.  A ship without a rudder, drifting aimlessly into oblivion....

Frank Rich: The Banality of Bush White House Evil

By FRANK RICH

Published: April 25, 2009

THE NEW YORK TIMES

WE don’t like our evil to be banal. Ten years after Columbine, it only now may be sinking in that the psychopathic killers were not jock-hating dorks from a “Trench Coat Mafia,” or, as ABC News maintained at the time, “part of a dark, underground national phenomenon known as the Gothic movement.” In the new best seller “Columbine,” the journalist Dave Cullen reaffirms that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were instead ordinary American teenagers who worked at the local pizza joint, loved their parents and were popular among their classmates.

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Barry Blitt

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On Tuesday, it will be five years since Americans first confronted the photographs from Abu Ghraib on “60 Minutes II.” Here, too, we want to cling to myths that quarantine the evil. If our country committed torture, surely it did so to prevent Armageddon, in a patriotic ticking-time-bomb scenario out of “24.” If anyone deserves blame, it was only those identified by President Bush as “a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values”: promiscuous, sinister-looking lowlifes like Lynddie England, Charles Graner and the other grunts who were held accountable while the top command got a pass.

We’ve learned much, much more about America and torture in the past five years. But as Mark Danner recently wrote in The New York Review of Books, for all the revelations, one essential fact remains unchanged: “By no later than the summer of 2004, the American people had before them the basic narrative of how the elected and appointed officials of their government decided to torture prisoners and how they went about it.” When the Obama administration said it declassified four new torture memos10 days ago in part because their contents were already largely public, it was right.

Yet we still shrink from the hardest truths and the bigger picture: that torture was a premeditated policy approved at our government’s highest levels; that it was carried out in scenarios that had no resemblance to “24”; thatpsychologists and physicians were enlisted as collaborators in inflicting pain; and that, in the assessment of reliable sources like the F.B.I. director Robert Mueller, it did not help disrupt any terrorist attacks.

The newly released Justice Department memos, like those before them, were not written by barely schooled misfits like England and Graner. John Yoo, Steven Bradbury and Jay Bybee graduated from the likes of Harvard, Yale,Stanford, Michigan and Brigham Young. They have passed through white-shoe law firms like Covington & Burling, and Sidley Austin.

Judge Bybee’s résumé tells us that he has four children and is both a Cubmaster for the Boy Scouts and a youth baseball and basketball coach. He currently occupies a tenured seat on the United States Court of Appeals. As an assistant attorney general, he was the author of the Aug. 1, 2002, memo endorsing in lengthy, prurient detail interrogation “techniques” like “facial slap (insult slap)” and “insects placed in a confinement box.”

He proposed using 10 such techniques “in some sort of escalating fashion, culminating with the waterboard, though not necessarily ending with this technique.” Waterboarding, the near-drowning favored by Pol Pot and the Spanish Inquisition, was prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II. But Bybee concluded that it “does not, in our view, inflict ‘severe pain or suffering.’ ”

Still, it’s not Bybee’s perverted lawyering and pornographic amorality that make his memo worthy of special attention. It merits a closer look because it actually does add something new — and, even after all we’ve heard, something shocking — to the five-year-old torture narrative. When placed in full context, it’s the kind of smoking gun that might free us from the myths and denial that prevent us from reckoning with this ugly chapter in our history.

Bybee’s memo was aimed at one particular detainee, Abu Zubaydah, who had been captured some four months earlier, in late March 2002. Zubaydah is portrayed in the memo (as he was publicly by Bush after his capture) as one of the top men in Al Qaeda. But by August this had been proven false. As Ron Suskind reported in his book “The One Percent Doctrine,” Zubaydah was identified soon after his capture as a logistics guy, who, in the words of the F.B.I.’s top-ranking Qaeda analyst at the time, Dan Coleman, served as the terrorist group’s flight booker and “greeter,” like “Joe Louis in the lobby of Caesar’s Palace.” Zubaydah “knew very little about real operations, or strategy.” He showed clinical symptoms of schizophrenia.

By the time Bybee wrote his memo, Zubaydah had been questioned by the F.B.I. and C.I.A. for months and had given what limited information he had. His most valuable contribution was to finger Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as the 9/11 mastermind. But, as Jane Mayer wrote in her book “The Dark Side,” even that contribution may have been old news: according to the 9/11 commission, the C.I.A. had already learned about Mohammed during the summer of 2001. In any event, as one of Zubaydah’s own F.B.I. questioners, Ali Soufan, wrote in a Times Op-Ed article last Thursday, traditional interrogation methods had worked. Yet Bybee’s memo purported that an “increased pressure phase” was required to force Zubaydah to talk.

As soon as Bybee gave the green light, torture followed: Zubaydah was waterboarded at least 83 times in August 2002, according to another of the newly released memos. Unsurprisingly, it appears that no significant intelligence was gained by torturing this mentally ill Qaeda functionary. So why the overkill? Bybee’s memo invoked a ticking time bomb: “There is currently a level of ‘chatter’ equal to that which preceded the September 11 attacks.”

We don’t know if there was such unusual “chatter” then, but it’s unlikely Zubaydah could have added information if there were. Perhaps some new facts may yet emerge if Dick Cheney succeeds in his unexpected and welcome crusade to declassify documents that he says will exonerate administration interrogation policies. Meanwhile, we do have evidence for an alternative explanation of what motivated Bybee to write his memo that August, thanks to the comprehensive Senate Armed Services Committee report on detaineesreleased last week.

The report found that Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.” As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence.

In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. Bybee’s memo was written the week after the then-secret (and subsequently leaked) “Downing Street memo,” in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” A month after Bybee’s memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on “Meet the Press,” hyping both Saddam’s W.M.D.s and the “number of contacts over the years” between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk.

But there were no links between 9/11 and Iraq, and the White House knew it. Torture may have been the last hope for coercing such bogus “intelligence” from detainees who would be tempted to say anything to stop the waterboarding.

Last week Bush-Cheney defenders, true to form, dismissed the Senate Armed Services Committee report as “partisan.” But as the committee chairman, Carl Levin, told me, the report received unanimous support from its members — John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman included.

Levin also emphasized the report’s accounts of military lawyers who dissented from White House doctrine — only to be disregarded. The Bush administration was “driven,” Levin said. By what? “They’d say it was to get more information. But they were desperate to find a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq.”

Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to “protect” us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from “another 9/11,” torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House’s illegality.

Levin suggests — and I agree — that as additional fact-finding plays out, it’s time for the Justice Department to enlist a panel of two or three apolitical outsiders, perhaps retired federal judges, “to review the mass of material” we already have. The fundamental truth is there, as it long has been. The panel can recommend a legal path that will insure accountability for this wholesale betrayal of American values.

President Obama can talk all he wants about not looking back, but this grotesque past is bigger than even he is. It won’t vanish into a memory hole any more than Andersonville, World War II internment camps or My Lai. The White House, Congress and politicians of both parties should get out of the way. We don’t need another commission. We don’t need any Capitol Hill witch hunts. What we must have are fair trials that at long last uphold and reclaim our nation’s commitment to the rule of law.

Freed Pirate Hostage Slams Limbaugh

It really hasn't been a good past few months for GOP leader Rush Limbaugh...

YouTube: Obama Weekly Address 4/25/09

YouTube Video: Gore and GOP Congresswoman Go At It Over Climate Change

YouTube: British PM Brown Ripped by Member of European Parliament

Must Read on Madoff

This Fortune piece is the definitive article on the Madoff Ponzi scheme thus far.  The story is no less mind boggling now than it was six months ago.  

My takeaway?  A fool and his money are soon parted....

Video: Olbermann Calls Hannity's Bluff, Offers $1000 for Every Second of Waterboarding

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YouTube: Hillary Rips GOP Congressman a New Asshole Over Foreign Policy

One word: Ferocious. 

"Outrage": New Documentary Claims to Out Several Closeted Gays Including Charlie Crist

This is one of the unfortunate consequences of choosing to be a public servant these days: you literally lose all of your privacy and your entire life becomes public fodder.

Now if Crist is really gay, then he's a hypocrite for supporting a ban on gay marriages--and that's the case for the vast majority of secretly gay Republican politicians--Mark Foley and Larry Craig included...

Still, that's besides the point: politics by definition is filled with hypocrisy.  A person's sexual orientation has nothing to do with whether they are or can be an effective leader of people.

I hope the movie is a failure at the box office...

Hamptons Home Prices Plummet

Quite a bit of froth has been built into the financial system over the past three decades or so, much of it built on credit.  

Salaries and bonuses of Wall Streeters were on steroids due to this easy money and credit, and like proud peacocks eager to show their feathers, these 'masters of the universe' financiers gobbled up second and third houses in the Hamptons.

Look at me!  I am rich!!

Well, the party is now officially over, and the epicenter of the froth is the Hamptons.  It always sucks to clean up the morning after a killer party.  First off, you're hung over, and the last thing you want to do is get on your hands and knees to clean up dried puke...

If I'm a buyer, I'm still waiting....It took three decades to inflate the bubble, it's going to take a little more than a year or two for it to wear off....

Audio: Glenn Beck giddy over caller hunting and cutting down trees on Earth Day: "This is like nirvana here ... This is eroticism"

MORE GLEN BECK COVERAGE HERE

YouTube DNC Ad: Introducing the New Faces of the GOP

Madoff's Mets Season Tickets Sell for $38,000

Ever wonder how one single douchebag can blow $65 billion?  Well, this will give you some idea....

Madoff, as I've said many times in this space, is the biggest thief/crook in world history.  

If you haven't yet read the New York magazine article to the right on Madoff, I suggest you do...

Prosecuters have been puzzled as to just where all the money that he stole went.

Houses in Palm Beach, New York, France.  Jets, cars, watches, donations....Mets tickets.

Weed Muffins Sicken British Dogs

Interesting that the dogs would eat the marijuana stuffed muffins in the first place, isn't it?  I thought animals knew not to eat shit that was bad for them, for the most part anyway...

Video: Ahmadinejad Racism Speech Sparks Walkout

Video: Jon Stewart on "We Don't Torture"

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YouTube: McCain Says Torturing Terrorist Suspect 183 Times was Wrong

from Think Progress by Faiz Shakir

This morning on Fox News, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) responded to the startling information — first noted by blogger Marcy Wheeler — that detainee Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times. “It’s unacceptable,” McCain said, adding:
One is too much. Waterboarding is torture, period. I can ensure you that once enough physical pain is inflicted on someone, they will tell that interrogator whatever they think they want to hear. And most importantly, it serves as a great propaganda tool for those who recruit people to fight against us.
McCain later reiterated his point, “The image of the United States of America throughout the world is a recruiting tool for Islamic extremists.” Watch it:

Here the ever charming Rush Limbaugh suggests that torture was successful in the case of McCain in Vietnam...

YouTube Video: Ron Paul Talks about Secession

YouTube: Sanford Says God Behind Tea Parties at South Carolina Rally

This is at a 'tea party' rally in South Carolina.  Sanford will almost certainly run for president in 2012.  Notice that the audience is 100% lilly white.  Also note the weird, biblical language (starts at about 7 minutes into the video) he uses to appeal to religious conservatives.  It's a sad indictment of the state of the national Republican party that this guy is considered a front runner.  He would get routed by Obama in 2012.

YouTube: GOP House Leader Boehner Cites Cow Farts To Downplay Global Warming

To the best of my knowledge, this isn't a satire piece from Saturday Night Live or The Onion or anything like that. This is the current Republican leader of the US House of Representatives, John Boehner, citing Cow farts as a primary cause of global warming...Even though this segment was taped on Sunday morning, one must question aloud whether Boehner was drunk or stoned when he gave it. These guys ran the country for the past 8 years...

U2's The Edge Pisses off California Neighbors

Five houses in an enviornmentally sensitive area would appear to be a tad much, wouldn't it?  

This fantastic musician is tone deaf on this one....

On a side note, The Edge has not been seen without a cap on in public for probably 25 years now...

Rothenberg: GOP Headed for Further Electoral Carnage in 2010

It's becoming increasingly clear just how deep the ditch Bush/Cheney left the Republican party in when they finally exited earlier this year.

As Stu Rothenberg--perhaps the nation's premier political prognosticator, writes in this brief piece, odds are that Republicans will lose additional seats in both the Senate and House in the 2010 midterm elections.

Since Bush left office, there has been a power vacuum at the leadership of the party that has been filled intermittently by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Michael Steele, Joe the Plumber, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and Glenn Beck.

Talk about a Murderer's Row of American electoral carnage.  Larry, Moe, and Curly would be better received by American voters.

The GOP backed anti-Obama 'tea parties' of last week went over like a fart in church with Independent swing voters, who were horrified with pictures and videos showing freaks of all shapes and sizes (except that they were 100% white) spewing incoherent, often times violent, hateful rhetoric.

Invariably, from the ashes of this devastated heap, a leader will emerge:  no one knows how long it will take, and who it will be.

One thing, however, is clear: if you're a Republican, get ready for more pain.

Video: Smiling Obama Shakes Hands with Chavez

Expect Republicans to be apoplectic over this....UPDATE: That didn't take long, right wingnut Michelle Malkin gives us her take on the Chavez/Obama pictures: is her opinion a credible one?  You be the judge....

Daily Show Video: John Oliver Reports on Tea Party Tyranny

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Top Ten Most Offensive Tea Party Signs

See the entire list, plus additional videos and pictures of the events here.

Video: Jon Stewart Reports on the Tea Parties

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Tempest in a Tea Party
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Kim Jong-il Makes Rare Appearance

I, for one, really like the dude's shades--

YouTube: 'Texican Whopper' Commercial Pulled After Mexican Complaints

Story here...

The Tea Parties Summed up in One Short Video

There has been a lot of buzz the past few days about the so-called anti-tax 'tea parties'. To me, the movement can be easily summed up in this short video...

YouTube: Huckabee to Coulter: Why'd you call me stupid?

More Ripper Ann Coulter coverage here....

Video: Jon Stewart Reports on Bo, The First Openly Gay First Dog

WATCH JON STEWART DELIVER A MESSAGE TO RUSH LIMBAUGH HERE!!!

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Road to the Doghouse - Bo Obama
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YouTube: Paul Begala To Ari Fleischer "You Helped Ruin The Country"

Meghan McCain: Republican Party should "Go Gay"

I wonder if daddy John wishes his verbose daughter Meghan would keep her pie hole shut..

Or, perhaps, he's happy that she's trying to drag the party kicking and screaming into the 21st century?

She'll most likely run for public office at some point in the future...

Video: Franken, "Looking forward to getting to work."

Coleman has already appealed the decision. Norm Coleman could learn a lot from Al Gore. He is in the process of permanently destroying his political career.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

YouTube: GOP Talking Head Admits FOX News is a Republican Tool

Story here.

YouTube: David Buckner faints on Glenn Beck's show

Story here. I love how the crew just sort of casually saunters over to him as he went down...Glenn Beck is one creepy, creepy dude--

YouTube: War Maniac John Bolton (Former UN Ambassador!): US Should Invade Somalia

John Bolton--like most of the other Bush administration neocon hawks (Cheney, Rove, W himself) of course never having the balls to serve in the military himself....War's real easy, John, isn't it??! Bolton, too, is a dead ringer for Captain Kangaroo on a bad acid trip.  Amazingly, indeed shockingly, Bush had the gall to appoint this guy as United States Ambassador to the United Nations.  Here's to diplomacy under the W administration!!

On Glen Beck and the Tea Parties

First question, what exactly are these 'Tea Parties'? Fiscal conservative Andrew Sullivan attempts to answer that question here....


My take is that they are basically a bunch of disenchanted, overwhelmingly white, simpleminded folks who are upset that Obama's in office.  Most of these people don't have a passport and they watch Fox News.

For reasons they can't quite communicate, they blame 'the government' for all of the country's evils.

What goes on at a 'tea party'?  Check out this video:

The politico has a great piece on the bizarre, creepy Glenn Beck phenomenon, and how it is symptomatic of a very, very ill Republican party...

High Speed Rail: Is America Ready?

This piece provides an excellent, relatively comprehensive update on the state of high speed rail in America.

In short, despite Obama's full support, high speed passenger rail travel in America at this moment is a decrepit national embarrassment.

Even though Obama pumped in billions to development in the recently passed fiscal stimulus, our present system is so decrepit, inefficient, and antiquated that the vast majority of the stimulus money will go to fix existing lines that have been starved for decades, most recently under 8 years of the Bush Jr. administration.

I was unaware before reading the above story the extent of citizen opposition to American high speed rail development.  

These people need to realize that more cars and highways are not the answer.  Not to anything good long term to our country, anyway.

I encourage supporters to remember that Rome wasn't built in a day, and that a journey of 10,000 miles begins with a first step.

The French, owners of what's widely regarded as the best nationwide bullet train system in the world, are looking to help.

The full power of the presidency is finally behind the movement.  Obama's even appointed a 'high speed rail czar' in New York's Karen Rae.

 Is high speed rail in America finally on track or permanently derailed?  What do you think?  Comments below welcome!

The Return of Timothy McVeigh?

Statistics show that Americans are buying guns and re-arming at a record pace.  Indeed, the country is running low on ammunition supply.

Swaths of Americans believe that Obama is planning to 'take their guns away'.  Fueled on my the increasingly popular Glenn Beck and similar extreme right wing rhetoric, the mania is growing.

What is driving this?  The same demographic emerged during the last Democratic administration--culminating in Timothy McVeigh.  And now Richard Andrew Poplawski.

The picture to the right is of the three Pittsburgh police officers this simple-minded maniac gunned down last week.

I believe now is even more dangerous than back then: we are experiencing a brutal recession/depression with the unemployment rate rising daily.  Lots of angry, disillusioned people armed to the teeth.  

Add the racist variable into the equation and you having the makings of one violent, toxic combination...

YouTube Video: Beck Imitates Obama Pouring Gasoline and Setting Citizens on Fire

YouTube: Harvard Dork Takes on Congressman Barney Frank

Video: North Korea's Kim Jong Il Makes Rare Appearance

Video: Jon Stewart Reports on Military Budget Proposal

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Full Metal Budget
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All Time Classic: Limbaugh Flips Out at Caller who Referred to him as a "Brainwashed Nazi"

YouTube: Glenn Beck Warns of Apocalypse, 'FEMA' Camps

I'll try and be suble about this...if you watch and listen to Glenn Beck, then...YOU ARE A TOTAL MORON.

Video: Funny? Turkish News Anchor Paints Face Black to Report on Obama Visit

Translation, story here...

Man Burns Down Apartment While Cleaning with Gasoline, Lit Cigarette

This wasn't Joe the Plumber, was it???!

Now from the French: The Obama Burger

Kudos to France for having a sense of humor and not holding a grudge against America for the bizarre, Bush/Cheney fueled, dark episode in Franco-American relations five years ago that saw normally rational Americans smash bottles of French wine in the street, and the shit-for-brains Republican Congressional majority rename french fries 'freedom fries' in the Congressional cafeteria.

How weird was that?

The mania and lust for war does very strange things to citizens of nations....