Thursday, January 30, 2014

Scientist Files ‘ET Lawsuit’ Against NASA

The Mars exploration rover, Opportunity, captured an image of a rock, dubbed "Pinnacle Island," on Martian Calendar date sol 3540 (Jan. 8). However, when researchers compared this image with another on the same terrain - captured 12 days earlier (sol 3528) - the rock was nowhere to be seen.

Now you see it …


Now you don’t …


OMG, THERE’S LIFE ON MARS! … claims astrobiologist Dr. Rhawn Joseph in a lawsuit filed earlier this week. He is suing NASA to compel the space agency to take a closer look. Specifically, the petition calls on NASA to "closely photograph and thoroughly scientifically examine and investigate a putative biological organism."

I can think of other rocks that should be examined too … like this one:


OMG, DID YOU SEE THAT!  The rock made a left turn …


A herd of grazing rocks …


How sweet!  For the love of lava ...



You riled 'em up, GOP. Now you have to deal with 'em.

Last night, the President gave his State of the Union speech for 2014. The thing is, there wasn't just one response to it. There was the "official" Republican response from Cathy McMorris Rodgers (I'm not clear if she's Fred Rogers' evil twin, or if that lady from the Harry Potter books doesn't just wear pink any more), and then there was the Tea Party response (because, as my momma always said, "stupid is as stupid does"), and then, only on Youtube, Rand Paul gave his own "Tea Party Response," speaking for the Batshit Insane caucus.

Let's all take a moment to enjoy the current dynamics playing out within the Republican Party. They've split into a bunch of tiny, warring factions, each out to stab all the others in the back. They're trying their best to hide it, but they really aren't doing a good job, as last night proved.

The problem, you see, is that in 2008 the Republicans felt that, in order to defeat Obama, instead of taking up a more reasonable stance on a few key issues, they needed to mobilize the morons and the low information voters. Unfortunately, some of the newly-active mouth-breathers refused to retreat to their sofas and soap operas after the election, and kept right on chanting, picketing, and writing increasingly incoherent diatribes and tweets.

Social media had given them new access to vast fields of topics that they knew nothing about, and they felt that it was their duty to prove how little they knew. And the best way to do this was to elect people just as stupid as they were: enter Ted Cruz, Louis Gohmert, and all of their ilk.

While there may have been some dissension in the GOP during Obama's first term, things really started coming to a head during the government shutdown debates back in September, when the nominally intelligent Republicans realized that their new, hyperpartisan friends were not just willing, but actually eager, to see the government collapse - after all, the wet dream of any dedicated small government enthusiast would have to be government disappearing completely.

People like Libertarian Fox Business wonk John Stossel wanted lawmakers to "shut down more," and "I'm hoping the shutdown will wake people up... and say 'hey, maybe we don't need all this stuff.'" (A philosophy that ignores the 24 billion dollars that the 16-day shutdown cost the taxpayers, or the billions lost by businesses across the country that are more difficult to calculate.)

The most prescient (or in this case, conniving) saw it coming months earlier: Karl Rove, in the runup to the upcoming midterm elections, basically told his donors "yes, I wasted $300 million in 2012, and if you don't give me more money, the Democrats will win again!"

That's a venal and dishonest strategy, in that it ignores the fact that most of the money he takes from the gullible rich will be going to fight the new breed of rabid Tea Partiers that he helped create.

Speaker of the House John Boehner has become openly dismissive of the Tea Party fringes. And he isn't the only one. And the Tea Party, on their part, has no love for the establishment Republicans, even the ones who danced to their tune as hard as they could (just not to the point of destroying the economy).

Millions of dollars are being raised, on both sides, as Republicans prepare to square off against other Republicans for the future of the Republican philosophy.

The best result that we can hope for, really, is that nobody learns any lessons from the trouncing they're about to get, and the GOP stays divided through the 2016 elections. In the meantime, though, I'm just going to sit here with my popcorn and watch the fireworks.

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Post-SOTU Reflections and the Continuing War of Words

Contrary to the constant sneer and jeer of rightwing rhetoric, President Obama has always been a centrist politician and hardly the “socialist dictator” as alleged by Republicans.

Perhaps Jon Stewart expressed it best last night: “President Obama is apparently now in the 'f*ck it' stage of his presidency" - given six non-stop years of legislative obstruction, filibustering, gridlock, and Godwin-style name-calling

F*ck it, indeed. Consider this ABC News interview of Warren Buffet and his secretary, Debbie Bosanek, who reveal an inconvenient truth about the American tax system:
 

What drives income inequality in America? Debbie Bosanek pays a Federal income tax rate of 35.5%. In contrast, her boss pays 17.5% on income estimated to be 200 times greater!
Everybody in our office is paying a higher tax rate than Warren,” she says.
I pay hardly any payroll taxes, Buffet admits. “Gov. Romney hardly pays any payroll taxes. Newt Gingrich hardly pays any payroll taxes. Debbie pays lots of payroll taxes,” he continues.
Repeat this admission across the economic spectrum of American life, and what you have is a massive redistribution of income from the middle class to a special privileged class. Yet, Republicans have lashed out: They dismiss Buffet’s admission as an act of “class warfare.” One has to ask: Which side of this war is hurling the bombs?

Here are more inconvenient facts: Since 1979, the productivity of American workers has risen 80%; yet, the wages of these workers have risen less than 11%:

Please note the precipitous rise in income for the privileged class: Over 240%.  In other words, American workers have put enormous wealth into the pockets of their employers, yet received next to nothing in return.

Since 2001, this trend has turned ever more ominous as shares in the national economic pie have essentially turned upside down. Middle class wage increases have fallen to less than one percent. The überclass now pockets a whopping 99% slice of the national pie but constitutes only 1% of the population.

Meanwhile, US multinational corporations are laying off workers at home and shipping jobs overseas:
Given these data, consider this thought experiment: If you are a Kochroach raking in $1 billion per year, what is the cost benefit ratio of spending $100 million on PACs and stink tanks to avoid a tax hike? The difference between a 17.5% tax rate versus 35.5% (drum roll) is:

$180,000,000 each and every year
for as long as ye shall live (badda boom)!
[The GOP] has built a whole catechism on the protection and further enrichment of America's plutocracy. Their caterwauling about deficit and debt is so much eyewash to con the public … [The GOP] could not abide so much as a one-tenth of one percent increase on the tax rates of the Walton family or the Koch brothers, much less a repeal of the carried interest rule that permits billionaire hedge fund managers to pay income tax at a lower effective rate than cops or nurses” (Mike Lofgren, Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult).
Mike Lofgren's words explain the stalking point phrases of “class warfare” and “job creators” framed and marketed by PACs and stink tanks to protect the überclass. Now you know why the Kochroach Brothers spend buckets of bucks to convince ignorant country bumpkins to vote Republican - and against their own economic self-interest.

Recently one of those country bumpkins - or perhaps a psy-ops troll employed by the überclass - left this comment under a recent post by Shaw:
"Just compare the "poor" in the US to the rest of the world and you have to come to the conclusion that our system is better for poor people. How much more do you Bleeding Heart Liberals want us to do for these people, most of them ar [sic] lazy slobs anyway who just take, take and take!"  Steve
My reply:
"For your information, most of the impoverished people of this country are the working poor earning subsistence wages - people who mow your damn lawn, pick up your damn garbage, flip your fucking hamburgers, and pick your damn fruits and vegetables under a hot sweltering sun – jobs which shiftless lazy bastards such as yourself consider beneath your contemptible dignity."
In response to President Obama’s State of the Union Address, Republicans have responded with:


"Kommandant-In-Chef" - Randy Weber (R-TX);
6,778 words. 'Benghazi' is not one of them” - Steve Stockman (R-TX);
Obama speech reads like dictates from a King” - Tim Huelskamp (R-KS);
The world is literally about to blow up” - Lindsey Graham (R-SC).

Words and more words, but nothing of substance. How long will the middle class tolerate this bullshit? Historically, no society has tolerated unchecked economic privilege and injustice for long. It is only a matter of time before the war of words spills into the streets. When that day arrives, my choice of weapon will not be ink.

Speak English

Last year, I was cruising South down the Florida coast, headed for home and minding my own business.  The VHF radio was on, monitoring channel 16 as per custom and the rules and a voice came on, a bit weak, saying something in Spanish to another vessel too far away for me to hear.  They were certainly in international waters along with countless other vessels steaming past the US en route to somewhere else.

"SPEAK ENGLISH!" blasted a nearby voice.

I can't really think of a suitable word to describe that sort of ignorant insolence, nor for the sort of person who thinks, probably in the name of freedom, he can dictate to others what language they can speak or is too caught up in the common Conservative low brow reflex to hearing some language he can't understand.

I have to admit that sometimes I feel the same way when listening to the American news media. It's not so much that I'm forced to learn useless vulgar neologisms like "twerking" but more that I simply and all too often have no idea what they're talking about.  Take HNN's recent discussion of a young woman having been beaten to death in front of witnesses and cameras.  I don't know why, because every reference to the story I can find tells me it was about a "photobomb."   Every one, because the media in their hysterical lust to sound trendy ( in the old sense of the word since trend now means something entirely different) has run off the linguistic rails.  Somehow a very attractive young woman was murdered for having done some insignificant but mysterious thing and I will never know why.

SPEAK ENGLISH!

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

This Land is Your Land

Despite the continuing efforts of the Republicans

I was never a big Pete Seeger fan, but my college years having coincided with the folk music revival, I certainly heard him a lot. I appreciated that he came from the time and conditions that produced Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck and a lot of skepticism about how well our version of Capitalism served freedom and democracy.  Those folks and many others weren't well received by the same sort of  -- I hesitate to use the word bastards, but it fits -- who are still calling everything and everyone Communists for every spurious reason they can.  Seeger has my respect, for his courage more than for his musicianship. He used his humor and his banjo against the union bashers and skull crackers, stood up to the Joe McCarthy thugs and the war mongers and spawned a generation of musical protest that seems strangely absent at a time when much of what he fought is metastasizing like a cancer. We still need to be reminded just who it is who owns this land, the Koch Brothers, Roger Ailes, the Tea Party or the voters.

Pete Seeger died yesterday at the age of 94 after a very short illness.  4 days before he entered the hospital he was chopping wood, says his grandson. He died in the hospital 4 days before he could collect the Woody Guthrie Prize.  So long Pete, it's been good to know ya but your conscience still sings to us.

Pete Seeger (1919 – 2014)

Every summer in the 1960s, I traveled to Rhode Island - sometimes by car, motorbike, or hitchhiking – for the annual Newport Folk Festival, one of the most legendary musical events in the United States. The festival debuted many of our most celebrated performers, including Joan Baez (1959), Bob Dylan (1963), Jose Feliciano (1964), Johnny Cash, Arlo Guthrie, Linda Ronstadt, Judy Collins, and others too numerous to mention. The festival also raised from obscurity such legendary blues artists as Mississippi John Hurt, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Brownie McGee, and Sonny Terry. However, no performer was more loved and revered than Pete Seeger - folksinger, songwriter, activist, a founder of the Newport Folk Festival, and the conscience of my generation.  Here is a fitting farewell:

 

Monday, January 27, 2014

Things Go Dirtier With Koch



A friend from my hometown posted this on his facebook page:


"David and Charles Koch are in the process of hosting their biannual conservative training session for billionaires in Indian Wells, California. The effort this year is to raise millions to mislead the public about Obamacare and to use that information to defeat vulnerable Democratic representatives and senators in the upcoming mid-term elections. They have rented out the entire Hotel Esmerelda (558 rooms), closed the restaurants to the public for three days, and shut down the recreational facilities (see the picture). They have also surrounded the grounds and nearby golf course with telephone laden security guards, all dressed in black (see my new friend). It was truly eerie watching this unfold."


If anyone can refute this, feel free to do so.  But I don't think anyone will.




"Though the donors will funnel tens of millions of dollars into the election this year, they will not have to disclose a single cent. Using an elaborate array of foundations, nonprofits, and other legal entities, the Koch network sponsored bus tours, attack ads, think tanks, and hired Tea Party organizers to shape the midterm elections two years ago. 

Now it appears they are expanding the effort. The most that the public knows about these meetings has been culled from leaked audio tapes, reporting from journalists like Ken Vogel, and from an invitation I exclusively reported back in October of 2010. The document I posted over a year ago explained that during the meetings, strategy is discussed, from legislative campaigns to judicial elections, and money is raised from an assortment of executives from the oil, banking, manufacturing, and real estate industries." --SOURCE



Now what was all that whining about we hear from the GOOPers about George Soros?

Do they really know nothing about the conservative corporatist fascists plotting in their own backyards to forever alter our democracy?  The low-information voters were fed the lie that it is President Obama who would "fundamentally change" America, while, covertly, the billionaire Koch brothers are doing that very thing.  The Koch brothers cynically turn us against each other, while plotting to buy up every legislator they can to make this country into their own private empire.  It won't matter who the president is.  America will belong to the Kochs.



Sunday, January 26, 2014

Subway Partners with Michelle Obama, Sincerely Ignorant respond with Hate

"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."--Martin Luther King Jr.

Conservatives have gone rabid yet again and focused their animus on Michelle Obama. So what has them foaming at the mouth this time?

Last week, the Subway Restaurant chain announced on its Facebook page that it was joining First Lady Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" campaign, and teaming up with the Partnership for a Healthier America. Nothing shocking in this partnership; Subway has offered healthy alternatives to fries and burgers for years. 

We've been bemoaning the fattening of America for at least the last decade, with a particular focus on the increasing obesity of America's children and adolescents. According to the CDC, childhood obesity has more than doubled in children and tripled in adolescents in the past 30 years. So the addition of Subway's support to an initiative to provide information about eating healthy and to encourage all of us to make healthier food choices seems like a great idea unless you're a mad dog conservative. They're out in full force on Subway's Facebook page, decrying Subway's joining the First Lady's campaign against childhood obesity and vowing to take their business elsewhere. 

It's their right to do so, and I'd be the last person to insist that anyone is obligated to support any business. What I have a problem with is their racist insults directed at the First Lady and the President. The comments comparing Mrs. Obama to cows and apes, the comments denigrating her intelligence, the comments calling her a traitor to her country. Then there's Regine Wilson who calls the First Lady "ghetto trash," and Judy Stewart who can't seem to recall how to spell the First Lady's given name and calls her "Mooshell." (public comments, no expectation of privacy, ladies). Of course, Regine and Judy aren't the only ones using disparaging terms to refer to Mrs. Obama. They are joined by a chorus of the radically hateful. Hate feeds off hate.

I can only assume that the loony bin conservatives who are having conniption fits at the idea of the First Lady advocating for a healthier America felt that the Subway Facebook was too limited a forum, so they created their own page: "I Reject Michelle Obama and Subway." Read at your own risk; it's vile, contemptible, racist, and filled with stupidity.

What truly disgusts and offends me is that these lunatic, ignorant fools who are too worthless to even shine her shoes don't give a damn that they are not only insulting the First Lady but every African-American in this country. I have heard this type of crap my entire life. I'm long past childhood and I'm immune to words of ignorance causing me personal hurt any more, but it still pisses me off that black children in this country are regularly exposed to this type of sh*t. 

I grew up in an era where racial epithets and denigration of black people was common. Those who dared object risked being taught a lesson, from losing a job, to being dragged out of your house and beaten, to being killed. I learned as a child to keep my mouth shut and my eyes down because even a glance at a white person could be interpreted as being insolent.  

I had hoped that this country, my country, was beyond overt racism, but since Obama's election the ignorant have risen and feel free to to insult both the President and the First Lady with the most vile of racial insults and it's as if we have stepped back into an era that should have long been dead and buried. I have no patience for such people and quite frankly they're not worthy to shine my shoes either.

I vent here, using my words as a weapon, so that I can resist the impulse to slap the first white person that pisses me off on any given day with nonsensical talk of how they are victims of reverse racism and how President Obama has divided this country when it comes to race. I try to keep my anger and disgust down to a simmer rather than letting it come to a full, rolling boil. I work hard to ensure that my Aunt Dorothy's prediction fails to come true and my head doesn't explode one day because I think too much.

Saturday, January 25, 2014

Mitt and Vlad sitting in a tree, K I S S I N G





Mitt Romney has a very large man-crush on Vladimir Putin because Mittens sez Vlad is better at being preznit than Obummer.

Comrad Mitt!  Is that a kalashnikov in your magic underwear or are you just happy to see me?

Loser Romney, who, incidentally, lost the presidential race to Obama, told NBC that the Russian leader “outperformed” the president “time and time again on the world stage.”  Did we mention Willard lost miserably to Barack Hussein Obama?  Well, in case you didn't know.  He did.

Excellent Mittens! But you, of the off-shore bank accounts, "outperform" every great Pay-Tree-OT in praising the former head of the COMMUNIST KGB over our American President.

BTW, Vlad blows you some of his bestest поцелуи!

Mittens' Commie hero said this about those icky gaiii Olympic athletes coming to Sochi:




Gays Are Welcome at Olympics as Long as They ‘Leave Kids Alone’


In addition, Vlad announced that clergy members (sorry) of the Catholic Church are also welcome as long as they... well you can finish it, I can't.  I'm very busy watching my bananas ripen.









Oh dear.  If the Gee-Oh-Pee-ers aren't tongue-kissing ex-Commie KGBers (Hello Mittens!), their gazillionaire supporters are writing cri de coeurs to the Wall Street Journal, telling the world that the 99 percenters are being meany Nazis to them. 

Tom Perkins sez he and his fellow gazillionaires are suffering just like the Jews and the millions who died horrible deaths by the Hitlerites.  Poor Tom Perkins!  His life is turning into one big Kristallnacht!