Andrew Breitbart's Big Government blog is pretty, shall we say, interesting, but they it get it right tonight:
Most polls close at 7pm EST in Florida. Parts of the panhandle vote until 8pm EST. If the latest round of polls, it shouldn’t be a long time until we know the winner. The larger question is the margin of Romney’s victory.
In one sense, the margin between Romney (in first) and Gingrich (in second) will determine the true winner tonight.
Photographs and video recordings of Osama bin Laden's death may be released to the public, The Atlantic Wire reports. […] According to ABC News, the CIA has at least 52 images of Osama bin Laden that could make one's stomach churn. The images in question reportedly are "quite graphic, as they depict the fatal bullet wound to UBL's [Osama bin Laden's] head and other similarly gruesome images of his corpse."
Following bin Laden's death, Judicial Watch brought a lawsuit demanding the release of images from the raid that killed bin Laden under the Freedom of Information Act. Now, it appears that the Justice Department may have to comply in part.
Good. Bloody Shrubbery will post the images when– or, rather, if –they are released.
Seven (세븐) featuring JYP (박진영) – "내가 노래를 못해도 (When I Can't Sing)"
This is the first HD official music video that YG Entertainment has released for quite a while now.* This release was extremely impressive because, as the trailer revealed, JYP (of JYP Entertainment) and Se7en (of YG Entertainment) would be collaborating. In terms of company recognizability, this would be like Microsoft and Apple teaming up.
Whenever people first get iPhones, they either ask me to help them to set it up or to help them pick some apps to download. Lo and behold, I have compiled a gigantic list of my favorite apps. Enjoy.
Journalist Ali Velshi covers mostly financial news on CNN, but he had a great moment last week defending the network's recent exposé of child slavery. The incident, which he expanded upon in his podcast, raised some interesting points about how the media can play a role in combatting human trafficking and modern-day slavery.
A federal judge signed and entered a consent decree and order today in the ACLU’s case challenging widespread and pervasive religious practices in South Carolina’s Chesterfield County School District. The ACLU brought the lawsuit on behalf of a local father, Jonathan Anderson, and his son, who is a student at New Heights Middle School. Both are non-believers. The school district’s unlawful practices promoting religion garnered national attention after a video was posted online documenting a school-day assembly that featured a Christian rapper who calls himself “B-SHOC”
I blogged about this back in October 2011 – and I am glad to see results. Let's take a bit of a look at who B-SHOC is, shall we?
Barack Obama is unquestionably one of the most pro-LGBTQ rights presidents in American history. He has been far from perfect on these issues, but it is important to put him into the context of the 43 other US presidents. However, I noticed something quite fascinating in recent reports by
Everyone has heard how Gov. Jan Brewer insulted President Barack Obama when he got off of a flight in Arizona. She's claiming that he is "thin skinned," which is a difficult argument to make when you ambush someone for criticizing you. But, I digress.
Debate rant du jour: I do not understand why debate hosts should allow the crowd to yell, scream, boo, or shout at those who are debating. It's beyond unnecessary, distracting, and, frankly, generally speaking bad for the party. I personally enjoyed the crowds of teabaggers because they generally say what the GOP is afraid to. However, I could do without them,
A ninth grader at the Mustang Mid-High School is in trouble after taking a cell phone picture of a substitute teacher who appeared to be sleeping. […] The teenager took the picture last week in class. […] The photo shows the teacher leaning back in the chair with eyes closed. […] Another teacher saw it on the web and went to the principal.
Mary Leaver with the school says the student was suspended because they’re not allowed to use cell phones on campus. […] She says, “This particular set of circumstances is highly unusual.” […] School leaders are still investigating to figure out what to do about the teacher. […] Leaver says situations like these could become more frequent.
Situations like these could be come more frequent!? Teachers will being held accountable to do their jobs!? Oh no!
Let's not mince words: last night's speech was one of Barack Obama's best in months. He wasn't exactly on-message (read: as progressive) as I would have liked to have seen him, but the WTF-moments were kept to a minimum, and a sound message for his 2012 campaign rang clear. A pretty comprehensive, but admittedly incomplete, list of highlights appears below the jump.
When [reporter] Diaz asked [East Haven Republican mayor Joseph] Maturo what he planned to do for the Latino community in response to the arrests of four East Haven police officers on federal charges that they discriminated against Latino residents and others, Maturo said, "I might have tacos when I go home. I'm not quite sure yet."
He initially defended the comment, saying: "When you ask me what I would do for Latinos, I may go out and have a Latino dinner in the Latino community. There's nothing wrong with that and you can twist it and turn it whichever way the press decides to do."
He later apologized, saying it was his 12th or 13th interview of the day.[…] He went on to say that there were a lot "bigger things that we should be concerned about than that type of remark. […] If it harmed anybody or hurt anybody, I apologize," Maturo said. "Yeah, it's probably a little insensitive, but it was late in the day."
If you are a latino in East Haven who may be afraid of being systematically discriminated against by the authorities, worry not: Mayor Maturo will be having tacos for dinner!
My Internet connection is really messed up fucked up, so I am not quite sure how long it will be before I am able to post with any regularity. Yes, the State of the Union address will be live-tweeted over at my personal Twitter account. I was going to write an entire huge post against Mitt Romney, but I guess it will have to wait. Check below the jump for a list of the websites I cannot access today.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney released tax records on Tuesday indicating he will pay $6.2 million in taxes on a total of $45.2 million in income over the years 2010 and 2011. […]
Bowing to increasing political pressure to provide more detail about his vast wealth, the former private equity executive released tax returns indicating he and his wife, Ann, paid an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent in 2010. They expect to pay a 15.4 percent rate when they file their returns for 2011. […]
Romney's tax rate is below that of most wage-earning Americans because most of his income, as outlined in more than 500 pages of tax documents, flows from capital gains on investments.
Debate rant du jour: I legitimately do not understand why any Republican would think that Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, or Rick Santorum could beat President Obama. Do they believe that anyone could beat him (despite polling that says otherwise)? It's all very bizarre to me.
It's no secret that I love my iPhone 4S. Whenever people get a new one, they always come asking me for advice. To help out, I have decided to forge a couple iPhone help guides. I have been meaning to do this for some time. The following article, below the jump, refers to the iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, and iPhone 5 running iOS 5.0.1 iOS 6.0.1.
Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) announced in a video message that she is stepping down from Congress this week. (Jan. 22) (Courtesy of the office of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords)
You gotta do what you gotta do. I wish Rep. Giffords the best in all her future endeavors.
There's a Christian viral video entitled "Why I hate religion, but love Jesus" that's spreading like wildfire on Facebook. I was going to write a full post on that video, however, while doing research for a post on that video, I came across one of his earlier ones entitled, "Sexual Healing." It was painful:
If I had $10,000 for every time I heard one of the following, then I would likely consider $300,000 to not be a lot of money:
"Nobody wins both Iowa and New Hampshire and doesn't go on to be the nominee!"
"Nobody wins South Carolina and doesn't go on to be the nominee!"
Well, Mitt Romney clinched both Iowa and New Hampshire, but FiveThiryEight projects that Gingrich is going to win South Carolina. I hope it's true, just to turn all of this dumb, unscientific conventional wisdom on its head.
Assuming that Ron Paul and Rick Santorum are even still in the race by the time the Connecticut primaries come up, I cannot see them being much too different than this. Connecticut is one of the most pro-LGBTQ states in America, our tax dollars do fund abortions and Planned Parenthood, and social conservatives have very little say.* That's why Rick Santorum is at 11%.
I usually enjoy NMA's interesting take on American culture and news from an east Asian perspective, but their latest clip about oxytocin was dead wrong. It argues, as do right-wing 'no-sex-before-marriage' crowds, that a hormone called oxytocin causes women to get clingy after sex. Men's testosterone, it argues, presents the effect of oxytocin. Of course, this is all junk science.
Far-right blog called Stop The ACLU rarely gets it right, but I think they raised an excellent point against SOPA/PIPA considering yesterday's shutdown of Megaupload:
So, we apparently have laws that allow Government to shut down rogue websites which exist solely to share material, much of which is copyrighted. What would SOPA and PIPA do extra? And that is the concern of opponents of the S&P bills. S&P is a vast overreach by government, which would give a bloated, faceless, and unelected bureaucracy the power to police the Internet.
Exactly right. Since the government already possesses these powers, why do they need additional ones? Other than to give exorbitant amounts of power to already-powerful corporations, that is.
I was just watching MSNBC, and they had a woman that used to work for me and a couple of other people on there, and they were talking about the Republican primary. And I was laughing. I said, "Boy, it really has become our version of Fox."
The difference between MSNBC and Fox News has always been that the former has always presented both sides. Aside from the center-left Alan Colmes, Fox does not really have any liberals that come to mind. MSNBC had Pat Buchanan, but still has Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, and Michael Steele. [… Despite Pat Buchanan's indefinite suspension] MSNBC still has more conservative punditry (3 hours of Morning Joe every morning) than Fox News has of liberal punditry (0 hours of, well, anything remotely liberal).
It's quite popular to blame the media and to argue that "both sides are equally as bad." However, I can hardly see how this is the case. MSNBC's programming hopes to tap into the niche of liberal viewers that, frankly, Fox News and CNN do not fill. Their punditry seems to stay reserved to their respective programs and the straight news seems pretty straight to me.
The conservative backlash over Joan Walsh's latest article has pressured me into writing a piece on race. I've been meaning to tackle this for some time now. It's important to start by defining some terms.
After last month's music video fiasco, learning that none other than hip-hop mogul Swizz Beats was the CEO, the NYTimes is reporting that the storage website is under federal indictment for alleged piracy. The website does not load when one tries to access it. Seven people have already been charged with online piracy. The Hong Kong-based company has already released a statement:
"The fact is that the vast majority of Mega's Internet traffic is legitimate, and we are here to stay. If the content industry would like to take advantage of our popularity, we are happy to enter into a dialogue. We have some good ideas. Please get in touch," the statement said.
I'm not quite sure how Megaupload has been taken offline. The above statement seems to contradict the fact that the website itself has been taken offline. Something is fishy.
From pressure (from bloggers like me, no doubt), ABC News will be airing the "career ending" interview with one of Newt Gingrich's ex-wives tonight at 11:35PM. While I was quite interested at first, the preview clip does not have me feeling terribly excited. Check it out:
Debate rant du jour: At the last debate, Romney was pressed for his views on campaign finance laws. I do not think that this topic has been really broached at a GOP debate this year. I hope CNN will have the tenacity (ha!) to actually press these candidates on something meaningful.
Texas Governor Rick Perry announced Thursday morning that he is dropping out of the presidential race and is endorsing Newt Gingrich for the Republican nomination.
"There is no viable path forward for me," he told supporters on Thursday. "I gave fully of myself for a cause worthy of this country," he added. Perry said it was time for him to make a "strategic retreat."
What a loss to humanity. Nate Silver has a great guide to why Perry's supporters will likely not flock to Huntsman.
Marianne Gingrich has said she could end her ex-husband’s career with a single interview. […]
ABCNEWS suits determined it would be “unethical” to run the Marianne Gingrich interview so close to the South Carolina Primary, a curious decision, one insider argued, since the network has aggressively been reporting on other candidates. […] A decision was tentatively made to air the interview next Monday, after all votes have been counted.
Got that- the ethical thing for a news organization to do is sit on information about a candidate, because god forbid voters go to the poll informed. It’s mind-numbing that there was even a debate about this within ABC News. Of course you air the god damned thing. The only reason not to is you are afraid of being called biased. There is no other job for a news organization that to provide news and allow readers to inform themselves, yet here we have ABC “debating” whether or not they should do that job. This is almost as bad as the NY Times debating whether they should correct lies and dispute falsehoods.
WTF do these people think their job is? Why do they get up and go to work? What is going on in their heads?
Isn't it just great that ABC News has made the courageous decision to keep voters in the dark?
I've discussed Republicans' maturity before, but add this one to the list. Rachel Maddow recorded a pretty patriotic commercial for her show on MSNBC where she used the Hoover Dam as an example of a success of the government. The NRCC recorded an amateur "parody," if you can call it that, where fake Rachel Maddow makes the awkward comparison between the Hoover Dam and the Keystone XL pipeline. Compare the two:
Yesterday's anti-SOPA and anti-PIPA "blackout" protest has already been a success.
As you can see, Bloody Shrubbery has a new theme. It was picked out by someone very special to me.
In lieu of the new "greenness" of the website, I would like to post more about global warming, the importance of regulations, and environmental issues in general. I wouldn't dub this a new year's resolution, but I have noticed that I do not post about these as much as I would like.
The man who authored SOPA is a copyright violator himself. Whoops!
For technological reasons, I did not want to apply the JavaScript code from the official SOPA Strike page, but Bloody Shrubbery is protesting SOPA and PIPA here. As I have written before:
SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act, H.R. 3261) or PROTECT IP Act (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011, SB968)[:]
Essentially, both acts give gigantic corporations and the government overly broad powers not only to censor internet violations of copyright law, but also suspected violations and sites who link to websites who fall under either of those categories. […] It is internet censorship.
We join thousands of other websites–including Reddit and Wikipedia English–in protesting this all-out assault on our civil liberties.
Kim Jong Un was vaulted into the leadership role with the death of his father, Kim Jong Il, in December. He had made his public debut as anointed successor only 15 months earlier. […] His half brother suggested that North Korea's new leader, who is believed to be aged 27, faced many challenges. […]
"Without reforms, North Korea will collapse, and when such changes take place, the regime will collapse," the newspaper quoted Kim Jong Nam [Kim Jong Un's half brother] as saying. "The Kim Jong Un regime will not last long."
In my view, there is a slim chance that there may be a glasnost and perestroika moment. In the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to liberalize certain laws while maintaining the communist state. The consequence of these actions, for the most part, were the dismantling of the Soviet Union. Could this happen in North Korea? Sure, there's a chance, but it's not likely.
A lot of speculators see Kim Jong Nam to be pretty unreliable and go as far as describing him as jealous. I don't know if I would go that far, but it does seem that he is hardly the most reliable source around. Still, it is interesting to see one of Kim Jong-Il's own sons backing up my prediction.
The "Shit Girls Say" internet meme has been circulating for a while now. Essentially, each video is roughly 1-2 minutes long and each features a character spewing a collage of the most stereotyped phrases for the clip's entirety. There's a healthy debate over whether these type of videos perpetuate bigotry. I believe, however, there is a benefit to these videos being popularized: people are actually conscious of how their actions affect other people.
To begin, let's realize that not all "Shit Girls Say"-type videos are the same. There are ones for humorous purposes:
Nor would he support much of what the current-day Republican party stands for, or for their awful race-baiting. But first – PolitiFact has a great piece on the issue. In short:
Raging Elephants [a right-wing group] points to a King family member whose declaration lends support for its claim that King was a Republican: his niece Alveda. We didn't divine how she reached that conclusion. Another King relative, his son, disagrees, as do respected academic experts and former King associates and friends. The record shows that as a civil rights leader, King avoided partisan identification.
We rate the statement False.
Alveda King was awarded Keith Olbermann's coveted Worst Person in the World award for linking same-sex marriage to genocide, or something.
Ron Paul may be able to make a good advertisement, but he would make a horrible president. I am surprised to see so many otherwise informed progressives making the bizarre choice to support Republican Ron Paul. He's not a good candidate; here's why.
…and blogger Bud over at Dead-Logic has a great analysis of it. My sports friends tell me that Tim Tebow lost last night, so I decided to post this commentary on him before he fades into irrelevance for another year. I'll post about Jefferson Bethke, the poet in the video, next week.
Tim Tebow has been making the headlines recently for bringing victory to his team. (Or, at least that's what my sports-obsessive friends tell me.) I don't really have an opinion of him – at all. So what if he prays? Don't most football players do that?
What I find troubling about Tebow is his association with a radical, far-right group called Focus on the Family:
The commercial above may seem pretty mainstream and uncontroversial, but Focus on the Family certainly does not fit that description.
After the Obama administration decided that it would not support SOPA or Protect IP, Rupert Murdoch went ballistic on Twitter. His company, News Corporation, is one of many giant corporations who have formally endorsed SOPA. Check out his latest tweet:
Of course, if SOPA passed, the government and film corporations would possess the power to shut down the websites with the illegal copies of Mission Impossible (obviously), but also to block Twitter and Google for linking to them!
Aside from the convenience of being able to shop on Sunday or as late as 10 p.m., consumers could see lower prices for alcohol, one of the products for which Connecticut long has had a "minimum markup." […] The Malloy administration hopes to realize greater tax revenues from the longer hours and Sunday sales, but the main goal is a more competitive regulatory structure that yields lower prices for consumers and discourages state residents from crossing into New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island for alcohol.
Moments ago, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins announced on a conference call that social conservatives had officially settled on Rick Santorum as their preferred candidate for the Republican nomination. The decision was made today after three rounds of balloting at a meeting of more than 150 social conservative leaders and political activists held over the last two days in Brenham, Texas. Though the meeting was widely seen as an effort to settle on a candidate to stop Mitt Romney, Romney’s own campaign sent a representative to make an appeal to the group and Perkins said it was “not a bash Romney weekend” and “not a lot of time” was spent discussing him. Jon Huntsman’s campaign was the only campaign not to participate in the meeting.
Debate rant du jour: Tonight's "debate" was really the second "Mike Huckabee Forum." Since I did not count the first Mike Huckabee Forum as a "debate," then I sure as hell won't count this as one! I stay consistent–what do you think I am!? CNN?
Former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards has a life-threatening condition that will require surgery in February, according to a report in the Associated Press. […] The federal judge overseeing Edwards’ felony case on Friday revealed two letters from a cardiologist confirming the condition.
Edwards’ attorneys were seeking a 60 day delay in the trial for the operation and recovery. The judge delayed the trial until March 26, according to the AP report.
It's no secret that I love Markos Moulitsas' term "American Taliban" to describe the far-right nature of American conservatives. In some cases, they don't make much of an attempt to hide this. Take, for example, the recent disgusting video showing marines urinating on dead Taliban soldiers. The general right-wing response has been along the lines of "they would do the same to us."
Jill Stanek is one of the the United States' top so-called pro-life bloggers. Remember the non-controversy of accusing President Obama of infanticide? That was all her. She's also a columnist over at WorldNetDaily where she penned a piece arguing that Scott Roeder, the man who murdered abortion doctor George Tiller, deserves a lesser sentence. She recently published a post about a report published by the so-called "American Life League" (ALL). This group may be highly questionable, but the results are extremely telling.
Apparently the Korean girl group Wonder Girls will be releasing a Teen Nick for-TV movie soon. I have my doubts that it will be any good, although it is interesting that it is the first time an Asian actor will be playing a lead role in an American TV show. The trailer for the accompanying song was released and, I must say, it was quite good:
Whenever conservatives mock the supposed mainstream media (which turns out to be pretty much everything except for Fox News, #TCOT, and talk radio), they generally follow the same pattern: call the person unimportant or make some crack about the person's allegedly low ratings, and then proceed to rant about why the person is wrong. Dennis Miller exemplified this perfectly, in criticizing CNN's Piers Morgan:
Piers Morgan, G-d. Like Norah O’Donnell in an ascot. He just wants the cookie. Nobody watching, Piers. You’re not interesting enough. A man as bright as you should be more interesting. And to do that reflexive thing where Andrew Breitbart is evil, and to say that eight seconds spent with him would be too long a time. Are you kidding me, pal? Can you, can you check the Nielsen things to see how long people are bumping into your show?
If Piers Morgan is truly a loser whom "nobody [is] watching," then why does Dennis Miller care what he says?
Back on June 28, I posted what amounted to an endorsement of Markos Moulitsas' theory that Michele Bachmann would win the Republican nomination. To stay intellectually honest, let's take a look at some excerpts of why I was wrong:
I'm unsure about the emergence of Rick Perry at this point.
Well, he did emerge and, frankly, he stole Bachmann's far-right cred, making her just another loony religious right American Taliban member.
Polls are officially closed. (I set this to be released at 8PM!) According to MSNBC TV, based on the 5% of the precincts that have already closed, Mitt Romney is far ahead with a whopping 36%. Let's see how this night turns out.
Every now and then, a Republican friend of mine will post some ridiculous shit on Facebook, prompting me to debate whether I should respond to it. I decided against it for the following video, but it did raise an excellent point about political analogies:
…because he has clinched the sought-after Todd Palin endorsement. No, seriously:
"Newt Gingrich is a true leader, which he has proven not only since the beginning of his campaign, but throughout his career," [Todd] Palin wrote. "Just like Sarah, Newt has faced many successes and challenges. Despite his consultants leaving him last summer, Newt is still standing because of his ideas and his success in the debates - not by spending millions of dollars in campaign ads."
It's going to be hard for any other candidate to beat such a relevant, active political figure with such a long history of influence and name recognition. I'm just wondering if this means that the Alaskan Independence Party will support Newt over known secessionist Rick Perry.
Vince Offer is back from his hiatus endorsing a new product called the Schticky. It's basically a lint roller on steroids. His other two products, the Slap Chop and the ShamWoW (featured below), were the focus of much Internet ridicule (two such parodies are featured below, as well) for their over-the-top stunts, corny dialog, and unintended sexual innuendos. Well, Vince seems to have embraced these criticisms in his latest video:
Conservative contributor Pat Buchanan’s tenure at MSNBC may have finally come to an end. AP reports that MSNBC president Phil Griffin has indicated the controversial former presidential candidate will not be allowed back on the network after the release of his latest book. “Suicide of a Superpower” has been roundly condemned for its racially-charged content, including chapters titled “The End of White America” and “The Death of Christian America.” Griffin said, “When Pat was on his book tour, because of the content of the book, I didn’t think it should be part of the national dialogue much less part of the dialogue on MSNBC.” As ThinkProgress has reported, Buchanan has a long history of bigotry and has made many offensivestatements while in the network’s employ. 275,000 people signed a petition calling on MSNBC to fire him.
