Ukraine's got talent

h/t to Roger Ebert

Move it or lose it

Rick Mercer lays out the rules of the road for pedestrians. I would only add that stopping to gawk around at the top or bottom of an escalator shouldn't be hanging offense, at least not the first time, but standing in the doorway of the subway car to wave bye-bye to your friends while other people are waiting to get on or off the train should be for anyone older than five.

then they came for the hyperbolic and paranoid...

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Highway to Health - Last Tea Party Protest of the Year
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

For those who can't see the clip, it's from the Daily Show on Dec. 16. It's a bit of video from the last Teabagger rally of the year. It features some outstanding examples of total lunacy. We have uber-douchebag and perrenial also-ran candidate for governor of New Jersey Steve Lonegan of "Americans for Prosperity" proclaiming that "we cannot allow the pen to become mightier than the sword," and Rick Scott of Conservatives for Patient Rights demanding ponies that shit gold and to top it all off right-wing talk radio shrieker Laura Ingraham oh-so-very-respectful reinterpretation of Rev. Martin Niemoller's famous amphorism about the Holocaust updated to serve the Republican party and their wealthy masters.

Clearly, for someone who speaks on the radio for a living, Laura has some trouble getting her dim-bulb ideas marshaled into coherent speech. I guess she's learned to speak from watch old Dubya speeches. May she's the one that needs the teleprompter. This is what she is being quoted as saying in full, and since the bit about "property owners being confiscated" isn't in here I can only assume these were prepared remarks distributed ahead of time to various new organizations

“First they came for the rich. And I did not speak out because I was not rich.
Then they came for the property owners, and I did not speak out because I did not own property.
Then they came for the right to bear arms, and I did not speak out because I was not armed.
Then they came for me and denied me my medical care, and there was no one left to speak for me,”

Not that her gibberish is any less offensive for being phrased with proper grammar and diction. Now, the question is this: Does Laura Ingraham really believe that boosting the income tax a few percent for the wealthiest people in the United States is the same as genocide or is she engaged in a cynical piece of blatant manipulation and false equivalency in order to get people to vote and engage in political activism that is against their own best interests? Or is she just trying to stir controversy to get herself mentioned on the news? The bottom line is that she is either a completely ignorant moron, an evil fascist demagogue or an amoral attention whore - not that any of these things are mutually exclusive.

Once again the right hits the bottom of the barrel and keeps on digging.

Bonus blazing stupidity: Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Stupid) bounded on to the stage at the same rally and cheerfully declared the demonstration "The Charge of the Light Brigade" - obviously she's not a student of history. The famous charge was a disaster - a futile attack on the wrong target that got huge numbers of men killed for no reason at all, due to the stupidity and rashness of their commanders. On second thought, maybe Bachmann is smarter than I thought.

Dear Joe Lieberman

Senator, I've been talking to a lot of liberals lately, especially liberal bloggers and we all agree. We are convinced that we must at cost stop senators from Connecticut from walking blindfolded across expressways, sleeping on railroad tracks and drinking bleach. All of us liberals agree that you must not do these things and that by not doing these things you will make us all very happy. Also, we firmly oppose senators playing Russian roulette. We feel it is an abomination and something that should never, ever be allowed, especially for members of the Senate. Please Joe, stay away from Russian roulette, don't ever put a round in the revolver, spin the cylinder, put the muzzle to your temple and pull the trigger. Never do that, it will make all us Liberals so very, very sad. And please Joe, stop smoking in bed, especially after sloshing kerosene around the room. We liberals further demand that you never, ever shower with a toaster or go swimming with your anvil collection. Don't do it Joe! It will really piss off the liberals if you do, especially the bloggers.

sincerely,
Your pal
Rev. Paperboy

P.S. If you really wanted to drive us liberal crazy Joe, you could give all your money to the homeless and then go from bed to bed in hospitals across the United States apologizing to people for making sure they won't ever be able to afford decent health care. Boy, that would sure teach us liberal bloggers a lesson. We'd just hate that.

My favorite Christmas song and story

In all the list making the other day about best and worst Christmas songs, I completely forgot about my real favorite.



Excuse me, I seem to have something in my eye.

more border shenanigans

While Canadian border authorities are acting like a bunch of dicks in worrying about whether a U.S. reporter coming into the country is going to say mean things about the Vancouver Olympics we learn via Boing Boing that the U.S. Fatherland Security blackshirts are beating up foreign citizens who are trying to leave the United States before leaving them to die of exposure in a snowstorm.
This is a big part of why I fork out the extra few hundred dollars to fly to Toronto via Vancouver on Air Canada rather than the cheaper route through Detroit on Northwestern - It means one less set of self-important paranoid authoritarian stormtrooper demanding my papers. These are not the 'droids you're looking for fellas, honest.

Rumors of a coup

Would someone kindly light a fire under Michael Ignatieff, Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe and explain to them that they don't have to let Stephen Harper steal their lunch money and give the entire country a wedgie? Word is now that Stephen Harper is going to try to progue Parliament again until after the Olympics rather than submit to an order by the House of Commons to turn over uncensored documents in the Afghan prisoner investigation. Doing so would allow the Conservatives to take control of the Senate in the new year, so while it would mean a few of their bills die on the order paper, it would allow them to blatantly defy the will of Parliament and dodge the Afghan prisoner scandal in the short term.

I can't believe I need to haul this out again so soon.

Coincidence?

Probably, but a lot of key political people seem to be dying in plane crashes over the last dozen or so years - Ron Brown, Paul Wellstone and now I hear about Mike Connell, the GOP's head IT guy who was responsible for the all the lost Bush White House E-mails that were found today.
Let me be clear, I am not saying all these people were murdered, but the person who looked into the circumstances surrounding Connell's death is not exactly some fruitcake with a website, she is "a Peabody and 4 time Murrow Award winning veteran of ABC News. She recently co-produced "Section 60: Arlington National Cemetery" for HBO Documentaries which won a Scripps Howard Foundation Award for Excellence in Journalism," so I'm not inclined to dismiss the idea outright that something could be fishy. It certainly deserves to get as much coverage as the completely bullshit "Hilary Clinton killed Vince Foster" story that keeps getting repeated despite being debunked again and again.

the year in pictures - part one

If a picture is worth a thousand words this will be my longest post of the year by far.
Part one

The not-so-happy holidays

Further proof of the great divide between the news section and the editorial page section in the Wall Street Journal is brought to us by Atta J. Turk. Though, I have to admit, If it weren't for the greedhead Randites running the editorial page and their fellow travellers on Wall Street, on K Street and in Congress, the news guys would have had such touching subject material.

(link now fixed, thanks to JJ for pointing it out)