Massive Gas Leak in the North Sea

Exclusion zones have been put in place around the Elgin platform in the North Sea, which has been suffering a serious gas leak since Sunday.

Coastguards said shipping was being ordered to keep at least two miles away and there was a three-mile exclusion zone for aircraft.

A cloud of gas was reported to be surrounding the platform, which is located 150 miles (240km) off Aberdeen.

Workers from a second platform and drilling rig have been removed.

Shell has moved 120 non-essential staff from the Shearwater platform and Hans Deul drilling rig, about four miles from the Elgin, because of the drifting gas.

Read more…

Drill, baby, drill! If you want to destroy the world.

NPR Will No Longer Balance Facts With Right-Wing Spin On Facts

NPR [now] commits itself as an organization to avoid the worst excesses of “he said, she said” journalism. It says to itself that a report characterized by false balance is a false report. It introduces a new and potentially powerful concept of fairness: being “fair to the truth,” which as we know is not always evenly distributed among the sides in a public dispute.
Maintaining the “appearance of balance” isn’t good enough, NPR says. “If the balance of evidence in a matter of controversy weighs heavily on one side…” we have to say so. When we are spun, we don’t just report it. “We tell our audience…” This is spin!

There was nothing like that in the old Code of Ethics and Practices.

Read more…

Bad News For Republicans and Right-Wing Sheep: Economy Added 227,000 Jobs in February

In yet another sign of a strengthening recovery, the United States added 227,000 net jobs in February, the third consecutive month of gains over 200,000. The unemployment rate was unchanged from 8.3 percent in January, the Labor Department reported Friday, as nearly a half million people who had been staying on the sidelines rejoined the search for work.

Read more…

Boycott Companies That Advertise On Rush Limbaugh’s Show

Follow this link for a list of companies that advertise on Rush Limbaugh’s show. These right-wingers would call their mothers a whore if they thought they could make money from saying that, and the only way to fight these hate filled bastards is to hit them where it hurts: in the wallet.

So if you can, boycott companies that advertise on Limbaugh’s show and on the Fox propaganda channel, also.

Fear of Death

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.
~ Mark Twain

The Republican Mandate: Ultrasounds For Women Seeking an Abortion!

A bill requiring a woman to get an ultrasound before having an abortion is poised to pass Virginia’s legislature this week, placing it on track to be signed into law by Gov. Bob McDonnell.

The bill, which could pass the Republican-led House of Delegates as early as Tuesday, is one of the stronger ultrasound laws passed by states in recent years. If it is adopted, Virginia will become the eighth state to require ultrasounds before abortions, a rule that anti-abortion forces hope will cause some women to change their minds but that women’s advocates call an effort to shame women and interfere with their privacy. The Senate, which is split evenly along party lines, narrowly adopted the bill this month.

Source

Talk about big government! An ultrasound can cost upwards of $1000. So who foots the bill for this procedure? What if the woman can’t afford an ultrasound… Does that mean she can’t have an abortion? Anybody with answers to these questions, please reply.

Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan: The 62 Year Old Virgin!

Crazy F*ck

Hours after President Obama phoned to share his decision with Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of New York, who is president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the bishops’ headquarters in Washington posted on its Web site a video of Archbishop Dolan, which had been recorded the day before.

“Never before,” Archbishop Dolan said, setting the tone, “has the federal government forced individuals and organizations to go out into the marketplace and buy a product that violates their conscience. This shouldn’t happen in a land where free exercise of religion ranks first in the Bill of Rights.”

Source

These crazy f*cks dedicate their lives to some imaginary being — supposedly never engaging in sex, which they believe to be a sin. As we all know, many of them prefer sex with young boys. But what do you expect from weirdos who go around in silly costumes, preaching the writings from some book written nearly 2,000 years ago?

Isn’t it time the religious nuts joined us in the 21st century? Or how about the 20th century? There is such a thing called “science” that explains things people 2,000 years ago didn’t understand.

Saul Alinsky: a Great Man

But just who was Alinsky, really? Born in 1909, in the ghetto of Chicago’s South Side, he saw the worst of poverty and felt the ethnic prejudices that fester, then blast into violence when people are crowded into tenements and have too little to eat. He came to believe that working people, poor people, put down and stepped upon, had to organize if they were going to clean up the slums, fight the corruption that exploited them, and get a handhold on the first rung of the ladder up and out.

He became a protégé of labor leader John L. Lewis and took the principles of organizing into the streets, first in his hometown of Chicago, then across the country, showing citizens how to band together and non-violently fight for their rights, then training others to follow in his shoes. Along the way, Alinsky faced down the hatred of establishment politicians, attacks both verbal and physical, and jail time.

He was a gutsy guy. Outspoken, confrontational, profane with a caustic wit, one journalist said he looked like an accountant and talked like a stevedore. He had a flair for the dramatic, once sending a neighborhood to dump its trash on the front step of an alderman who was allowing the garbage to pile up. Or immobilizing city hall, a department store or a stockholders meeting with a flood of demonstrators demanding justice.

Source

To right-wingers, he’s just another in a long list of people they’ve been told to hate. The Republican party is the party of fear, hatred, and ignorance. Their sordid history is so full of scoundrels that they have to fabricate heroes such as their version of Ronald Reagan, who bore little resemblance to the myth they’ve created of him.

Defense Contractors File For Bankruptcy

A Belcamp defense contractor has filed for bankruptcy protection about a month after a Harford County judge ordered it to pay $2 million to a subcontractor in a legal dispute over a pair of lucrative military deals.
Stem International Inc. filed for Chapter 11 protection in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Baltimore on April 28, listing assets of between $1 million and $10 million and liabilities of between $1 million and $10 million.

The contracts with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency at Fort Belvoir in Virginia and with the Environmental Chemical and Biological Center are potentially worth as much as $110 million.
Source

Advanced Solutions for Tomorrow, the Georgia-based firm whose president has been charged in an alleged $10-million kickback scheme, filed for bankruptcy Tuesday.

The defense contractor, which also operated in Middletown, filed for voluntary Chapter 7 liquidation in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Georgia one month after laying off all its employees.

The company’s founder and president, Anjan Dutta-Gupta, of Gerogia, and Ralph M. Mariano, a civilian program manager with the Naval Sea Systems Command who has residences in Warwick and Virginia, were arrested in early February and face federal bribery charges.
Source

You’ll never see a Republican complaining about war profiteering or other abuse, though. They only express “outrage” when clean energy companies fail so they can use it for political gain. And the military industrial complex is a big source for their campaign funding.

Obama’s State of the Union Address

Obama needs to learn how to frame his comments a little better to penetrate America’s “bumper sticker” mentality. There are two central issues facing our country right now: high unemployment and high deficits.

The Republican “solution” is to fire government workers, allow businesses to pollute our environment, and allow banks to gamble with our money. And then when disaster ensues, they just blame it on the Democrats! Yeah, that’s good for our country!

Obama outlined his plan, which includes higher taxes on the highest incomes, which would help balance the budget and have little (if any) negative effect on the economy. Our infrastructure is in dire need of repair, and this is the ideal time to put people to work repairing it. We need huge cuts in military spending. The war on terror isn’t fought effectively with bombs; it’s fought with intelligence, which only requires a small fraction of the money required for traditional wars. We also need to repeal the Republican deregulation that caused the near total collapse of our economy, which means restoring Glass-Steagall.

If his SOTU speech was truly a political speech (as right-wing pundits claim), he would have called out Republicans on all the damage they’ve inflicted on our country. Republican deregulation resulted in the near total collapse of our economy. They allowed us to be attacked in 2001 and responded by invading and occupying two countries at a cost of thousands of American lives and trillions of dollars. It took intelligence to finally get Bin-Laden — not wars. Republican tax cuts (the Republican stimulus) did little to create jobs but more than doubled the national debt. Obama’s Stimulus was 1/3 tax cuts, so why all the whining about spending?

14 Elements of Fascism

Dr. Lawrence Britt analyzed the following regimes: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Papadopoulos’s Greece, Pinochet’s Chile, and Suharto’s Indonesia. While, they constitute a mixed bag of national identities, cultures, developmental levels, and history, they all followed the fascist or protofascist model in obtaining, expanding, and maintaining power. Further, all these regimes have been overthrown, so a more or less complete picture of their basic characteristics and abuses is possible.

Analysis of these seven regimes reveals fourteen common threads that link them in recognizable patterns of national behavior and abuse of power. These basic characteristics are more prevalent and intense in some regimes than in others, but they all share at least some level of similarity.

1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.
2. Disdain for the importance of human rights.
3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause.
4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism.
5. Rampant sexism.
6. A controlled mass media.
7. Obsession with national security.
8. Religion and ruling elite tied together.
9. Power of corporations protected.
10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated.
11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts.
12. Obsession with crime and punishment.
13. Rampant cronyism and corruption.
14. Fraudulent elections.

Source

Public’s Views of Political Terms

Perception is everything. If we provide an actual description for these terms, the ratings would change dramatically.

• Socialism. Our military is the largest socialized program in the U.S. If you asked right-wingers if they support the military in its current form, you’d see about 100% approval. The negative view would come from many on the left and even some libertarians. But many on the right have become convinced that any government intrusion into the free market is socialism and therefore is bad.
• Libertarian. After it was obvious that Bush’s policies were disastrous, many people decided to call themselves libertarians instead of Republicans. There really is very little difference between the two in most cases. The extreme libertarians are the militia groups and various weird cults who don’t want the government telling them that they can’t be weird.
• Capitalism. The term “capitalism” can be interpreted in various ways. Right-wingers who claim to be capitalists are referring to free-market capitalism. When some on the left voice opposition to capitalism, they’re also referring to free-market capitalism. Well regulated capitalism tends to work pretty well, but we’ve gotten away from smart regulation because of the vocal anti-government segment of the population who function under the facade of patriotism.
• Conservative. “Conservative” in the political sense is a radical ideology: aggressive foreign policies, economic policies based on theories proven to be erroneous, and embracing religion over science. If they used the political meaning of conservatism in this poll, only the die-hard right-wingers would admit to embracing such an ideology.

What’s missing from the equation is corporatism (or fascism), which is what you get with the Republican party. We were on the path to fascism with the Bush administration in 2006 when enough people woke up and voted overwhelmingly for Democrats in the congressional elections. But people have short memories, and with the flood of right-wing propaganda and the birth of the corporate sponsored Tea Party movement, Republicans were able to regain control of the House in 2010.

If you were to ask right-wingers how they felt about the tax cut legislation passed during the past dozen years, the vast majority would say they approved, yet those same people are apposed to the Stimulus bill, which was 1/3 tax cuts. Right-wing propaganda defined the Stimulus to be a massive spending bill with no reference to the tax cuts. Propaganda is the primary tool used to promote fascism, and the overly emotional, scared, hate-filled, religious population is easily manipulated into voting against their best interests.

The Iowa Caucuses: Which Turd Will Rise To The Top?

Mormon Turd

It’s been a long battle for top fly in the garbage can that is the Republican party, but tomorrow, the people of Iowa will decide which candidate’s lies have been most effective. It’s impossible to defend conservative policies without lying, and they know Obama is better for America than they would be, so all they can do is lie.

2011 – Year in Review

In no particular order…

• Japan tsunami and nuclear disaster killed nearly 20,000 people
• Death of Dennis Ritchie. Ritchie created the “C” programming language around 1970 to rewrite the UNIX operating system. It made the porting of software to various platforms much easier than with assembly language. Most software is still written in C/C++ including Windows, Linux, UNIX, Mac OS X, MS Office, most browsers…
• Death of Steve Jobs. A visionary who changed life for many with the iPad, iPhone, iPod, and many others.
• Occupy Wall St. People around the world have been protesting the right-wing policies that have destroyed our economy and ruined countless lives. America finally got into the game.
• Arab Spring. This year we saw the fall of the Tunisian, Libyan, and Egyptian governments. The fate of Syria is unknown with the government murdering 100s of protesters.
• Tim Tebow mania. A mediocre quarterback gains legendary status because he’s a religious nut.
• Killing of Osama Bin-Laden. Obama makes Republicans look bad by taking out the terrorist responsible for the 9/11/2001 attack. Republican tactic: bomb them into smithereens. Democratic tactic: use intelligence.
• Withdrawal from Iraq. One of the biggest blunders in U.S. history ends with the withdrawal of our troops from Iraq. No one has been prosecuted for lying us into war, nor has there been a serious investigation into how we got it so wrong.
• Space Shuttle program ends with final mission of Space Shuttle Atlantis. George W. Bush canceled the Space Shuttle replacement program as one of his first acts as president. Right-wingers blame Obmaa.
• Christian terrorism in Norway leaves 76 children dead.
• Consumer outrage stops BOfA credit card charges and Verizon fees. That’s evidence that we’re not powerless to fight abuse.
• And the biggest news of 2011… I wrote 3 songs! For years I’ve wanted to try my hand at writing songs and finally did it. My next goal is to write a GOOD song. 🙂

I hope you all had a good year. We need to be more active in the upcoming election to win back the House from the radical right. Get involved in local elections. Expose Republicans for the SOBs they are.

Happy New Year!

Cost of War vs. Cost of Green Energy

The cost of one bad loan to Solyndra: $535 million.
The cost of one day of war in Iraq: $720 million.

Guess which one they’re outraged over in Republicanistan?