An activist at a Tea Party Express rally near St. Louis implored the faithful in attendance to “kill the Claire Bear, ladies and gentlemen.” In a hyperbolic rant against incumbent Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, GOP activist Scott Boston exhorted the audience, “She walks around like she’s some sort of Rainbow Brite Care Bear or something but really she’s an evil monster.”
Police in the first-term senator’s home town of Kirkwood, Mo., were asked by federal officers charged with her protection to increase the local security detail. Not only is uncivil rhetoric dangerously taking society in the wrong direction, it is, incidentally, costing taxpayers money and resources. Last month, another branch of federal police, the particularly beleaguered Secret Service, investigated similarly incendiary comments against President Obama from 1970s rocker Ted Nugent.
Well, I guess conservatives can add Clint Eastwood to the list of people they hate. I’m glad I’m not a conservative. It must be hell living with all that fear and hatred.
Romney and his “friends in Congress think the same bad ideas will lead to a different result or they’re just hoping you won’t remember what happened the last time you tried it their way,” President Obama told an audience in Columbus, Ohio today.
Republican “solutions” are to give large corporations more power, allow them to pollute the environment, more tax cuts for the rich, fire government sector workers, ban abortion, oppress gays, cut spending on our infrastructure and education, and spend even more on defense. Those things do nothing to make our country better. They’re destroying our country.
While Republicans are calling for tens or even hundreds of thousands more public sector workers to be axed, it’s clear that the public sector has already severely contracted even as the private sector recovers. Check out this chart (red is public sector employment, blue is private sector employment):
Health care in America costs more than in other industrialized nation and we aren’t even getting the world’s best care for our dollars, according to a new study.
The United States spent $7,960 per capita on health care in 2009, the most of 13 industrialized nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, reports the Commonwealth Fund, a research institution. That’s almost three times the amount spent in Japan, which has the lowest expenses of the countries reviewed.
Americans pay the highest prices for physician visits, hospital treatments and prescription drugs and get expensive diagnostic tests like MRIs at a higher-than-average rate. More Americans are obese, too, though the nation’s population is younger than all the other countries but New Zealand and is the least likely to smoke cigarettes than people anywhere but Sweden, according to the report.
Escalating prices for health care and high use of potentially wasteful, inefficient and unnecessary medical services are the main reasons for the rapidly escalating cost of health insurance, the growing ranks of the uninsured and the fiscal burdens of Medicare and Medicaid. Big price tags also lead Americans, even those with health insurance, to go without care they need.
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
On April 28th, 2012, at 9:30 a.m., thousands of Colorado women and their family members will gather at Civic Center Park’s Greek Amphitheater for a rally to protect women’s access to health care, and for the right of each woman to make her own health care decisions. State and federal legislators, musicians, poets, community leaders and ordinary Coloradans will be addressing current legislation in Colorado and other states. Following the rally, attendees will march around the State Capitol and back around Civic Center Park to where they started.
A very sad note just appeared on the website for Levon Helm, the drummer-singer of the Band.
“Levon is in the final stages of his battle with cancer,” says the note. “Please send your prayers and love to him as he makes his way through this part of his journey. Thank you fans and music lovers who have made his life so filled with joy and celebration…he has loved nothing more than to play, to fill the room up with music, lay down the back beat, and make the people dance! He did it every time he took the stage.”
Helm was diagnosed with throat cancer in the late 1990s. He recovered, but it took him many years to recover his singing voice. This past Saturday evening Robbie Robertson sent “love and prayers” out to Helm.
The songs from The Band will live on for centuries to come. Levon had one of the great voices in rock music, as did Rick Danko and Richard Manuel. They are all missed but will be remembered for all the great music they provided. They enhanced our lives tremendously.
In a far-reaching sex crimes coverup trial underway in Philadelphia, a former Catholic high school student testified today that a priest stalked him, locked him in a school conference room and ordered him to unzip his pants.
The student — now a 36-year-old man — said loud banging on the locked door halted the priest, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
The explosive testimony came on the third day of a historic trial against two Roman Catholic priests in the Philadelphia archdiocese. The Rev. James Brennan is accused of attempting to rape a 14-year-old boy in 1996. Monsignor William Lynn is accused of two counts of endangering the welfare of a child for covering up cases of molestation and abuse by members of the clergy.
Lynn, 61, is the first Catholic official in the U.S. charged with jeopardizing children by going easy on suspected priests, according to the Associated Press.
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.
Peyton Manning will become the next quarterback of the Denver Broncos, barring a snag during intensified contract negotiations that have commenced under the instruction of the four-time MVP to his agent Tom Condon, according to multiple sources.
Once the Manning deal becomes official, Denver will try to trade Tim Tebow, according to sources.
Manning instructed Condon to negotiate the finite details of a contract that would conclude with him joining the Broncos after a frenzied but focused process that began when the Indianapolis Colts released him March 7.
Manning called Broncos vice president of football operations John Elway on Monday morning to tell him the news. Manning also called the San Francisco 49ers and Tennessee Titans to inform them of his intent to now play for Denver.
Republicans destroyed our economy and the world economy, allowed us to be attacked in 2001, got us into two unwinnable wars, rendered most regulatory agencies impotent (which led to the BP oil disaster), politicized the justice department, created most of the 15 trillion dollar national debt, and blocked nearly all efforts to try to fix our country’s problems. How anyone could vote for a Republican is incomprehensible after all the damage they’ve inflicted on our country.
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.
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.
DRUDGE RETORT 