Republican Drug plan put seniors in harms way

Drug plan leaves some in the hole: "Mildred Lindley is stuck in a hole, the doughnut hole -- 'right in the middle of it,' she says -- that comes with Medicare's new prescription drug benefit.
Just four months into the program, Lindley has hit the point in her coverage where she has to pick up, at least for a few months, the full cost of the medication she takes to keep her bone marrow cancer in remission. As a result, her two-month supply of Thalomid shot up from $40 to a whopping $1,300."

Right on the face of it, this is a complete failure of Republican ethics and morality. How they ever hope to stay out of hell is beyond comprehension. Spit on them when you can.

Citizen Brainstem Sample

Hal Turner in His Own Words: "These filthy, disease ridden, two-legged bags of human debris are too stupid to believe....Just think, America, if we bring enough of them here, they can do for America exactly what they did for Mexico! Turn our whole country into a crime-ridden, drug infested slum....These people are sub-human. I would love it if folks who do have such weapons, used them on the crowds on April 10 [at immigration rallies]. I advocate machine gunning these invaders to death at their rallies! "

Republicans should be voted out of office, don't 'ya think? I mean, "these filthy, disease ridden, two-legged bags of human debris are too stupid to believe".

You really outta read the entire article - it's chuck full of cuteness.

Who Owns Your Face ?

Somebody else, most likely: "Boosts criminal penalties for copyright infringement originally created by the No Electronic Theft Act of 1997 from five years to 10 years (and 10 years to 20 years for subsequent offenses). The NET Act targets noncommercial piracy including posting copyrighted photos, videos or news articles on a Web site if the value exceeds $1,000."

"It also represents a political setback for critics of expanding copyright law, who have been backing federal legislation that veers in the opposite direction and permits bypassing copy protection for 'fair use' purposes. That bill--introduced in 2002 by Rep. Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat--has been bottled up in a subcommittee ever since."American greed monkees are ripping culture from the public and turning it into money."

I've got major concerns about losing my culture...

UC Top Dogs Get Money - Staff Gets To Work

UC gave many top execs unapproved compensation: "The University of California gave most of its top executives extra bonuses, car allowances or other compensation that wasn't approved by the governing board of regents, according to a report presented today by the university's outside auditors.

In fact, the audit by PricewaterhouseCoopers found that the UC system gave more than two-thirds of its top managers extra pay or benefits as an exception to university policies or procedures without approval from the regents. "

But at least the staff now gets to pay for their own retirement. Good going, fucking assholian Regents !

Slight Change: Lobbyists Can Operate and Give Money To Politicians In Secret

Republican Scum In Dance Shoes: "House Republican leaders have quietly scaled back their plan to limit the political influence of lobbyists, dropping proposed requirements that lobbyists disclose which lawmakers and aides they have contacted and how they have raised money for politicians."

Of course they'll get away with it. Who's to stop them ?

Cruise Kid Gets Boot

Cruise baby name puzzles Israelis: "It means 'get out of here' in the local language, Hebrew."

Or change it to CheeYiena !

!! Hello, It's You They Want To Kill Now

Purported new bin Laden tape airs : "'I say that this war is the joint responsibility of the people and the governments. While the war continues, the people renew their allegiance to their rulers and politicians and continue to send their sons to our countries to fight us.'"

"...this war is the joint responsibility of the people and the governments."

Ding !! That is a marching order. This is different, and worse.

That Warm Feeling

Cubicle Sex: "The five-minute meaningful sexual encounter: if ever there was a holy grail for the age of the tight-wired global economy - with its time-strapped labour force and its glut of bright, shiny distractions - that is it. "

Young Officers Join the Debate Over Rumsfeld

It's a sober fact: "Most officers would acknowledge that we cannot leave Iraq, regardless of their thoughts on the invasion. We destroyed the internal security of that state, so now we have to restore it. Otherwise, we will just return later, when it is even more terrible"

FOXNews.com - Stripper Duke Rape Lacrosse

2nd woman, Kim Roberts, sends email to PR firm: "'I'm worried about letting this opportunity pass me by without making the best of it and was wondering if you had any advice as to how to spin this to my advantage. I am determined not to let any negative publicity about my life overtake me. I'm so confused as to who to talk to for relevant advice and I hope that you can return my e-mail. If you cannot help, do you know of any names and numbers I can call?'"...

...second woman, "Kim Roberts, 31, was arrested on March 22 — eight days after the party — on a probation violation from a 2001 conviction for embezzling $25,000 from a photofinishing company in Durham where she was a payroll specialist, according to documents obtained by the AP."

This story is overflowing with the potential to do great harm to the social landscape.

United 93

United 93: "'They were the first people to inhabit the post-9/11 world'"

An awesome statement

A Little Dick Talk...

ROUSING THE ISOLATION GENIE: "To most politicians, pundits and journalists inside the Beltway, American voters can move to the left or the right on foreign-policy questions. But the voters themselves perceive a third option: to step backward.

Isolationism, a largely ignored theme in our politics, is growing rapidly in the wake of the sacrifices we are making in Iraq. It is this feeling of wanting the rest of the world to go away, not any leftward drift, that is animating the drop in President Bush's approval ratings as the war drags on."

hmmm... that sounds right to me.

American Assholes Don't Give A Shit

American Military Charms Mesopoptamians: "Colonel John Coleman, former chief of staff for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq, said yesterday that if the head of the Iraqi antiquities board wanted an apology, 'if it makes him feel good, we can certainly give him one'."

Screw Babylon, now let's haul ass to Eden, trim some of them weeds, and butcher the fuck outta those lazy apple-eating rib-countin' Arab sand-kickers.

How disgusting do we have to get before we are yanked from our planes and flung hard to the ground?

Overturn Roe and I'm in the Streets

Touch my kids freedom of choice and lose your air supply. There's no second scenario: "Nancy Northrup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, protests that overturning Roe would make access to a fundamental right dependent on geography. She predicts it will inflame what is already one of the most divisive issues in American politics. 'It is going to make abortion the center of every local race for office, every state legislative race, of every state judicial race, of every state executive race, not to mention a battle for federal elections,' she says. 'It will be a never-ending battle.'"

Sign me up.

Only One Major Weenie Per Planet, decries itchy Bush

"Not attack ? Scratch that, Bush: "Report on the Iran crisis has warned that neo-conservatives in the Bush administration are on 'collision course' with Tehran."

It's those old Neo-Cons again, blazing new trails into the quagmire.

Pope speaks during Easter holiday 2006

Pope does the basics, then says: "Where is Jesus in the agony of our own time, in the division of our world into belts of prosperity and belts of poverty . . . in one room they are concerned about obesity, in the other, they are begging for charity?"

The mental landscape of modern rightie politics has absorbed an understanding of human psychology and inevitably is attempting to tether the working world to a new serfdom, reunderstanding religion's essential service to the wealthy in stopping the peasantry from killing them.

Britain's top scientist sees dangerous rise in global warming

While some scientists whine for their grants, the caravan continues on its way: "Sir David King said that, even by the most optimistic forecasts, carbon dioxide levels are set to rise to double what they were at the time of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century.

That will lead to a three-degree centigrade rise in temperature, King said, adding that if nothing is done to manage such change, few eco-systems on Earth will be able to adapt.

Even worse, said King in an interview on BBC radio, up to 400 million people around the world would find themselves at risk of hunger, because 20 million to 400 million tonnes of cereal production will be lost. "

There is no interesting model of the future where it doesn't work for us to build for a smaller footprint until such time as we know the tipping point of our planetary support systems.

Wait Untill We See The New Price Of Grapes

Path to Family Ruin and Deportation Can Start With a Traffic Stop: "The arrests of the men playing soccer in Putnam County in January might illustrate that phenomenon. Sheriff's deputies went there in response to a complaint about safety by the administrator of the elementary school, which was in session as the men played.

Mr. Smith, the Putnam sheriff, said deputies arrested the men that day only after they refused the school administrator's request for them to leave. They were charged with criminal trespass, a class B misdemeanor, and a Brewster village judge set bail at $1,000 for seven of the eight. Bail for the eighth man, Juan Jimeniz, a roofer, was set at $3,000 because he was not able to provide his home address.

Mr. Smith said federal immigration agents were called to the jail because deputies suspected the men were illegal immigrants and 'because we are trying to uphold the law for the citizens of this county.'

When they arrived, seven of the men had made bail and Mr. Jimeniz, who was not able to pay his bail, was taken by the immigration agents to a federal detention wing of the Pike County Jail in Hawley, Pa., where he has remained since, fighting deportation.
'He has no criminal record,' said Vanessa Merton, director of the Immigration Justice Clinic of the Pace University Law School, which represents Mr. Jimeniz. 'He is a roofer. He is supporting five children.'

'There is no way you could describe his detention as anything but haphazard, random and completely arbitrary,' she said."

We are each of us involved in this system that uses cheaper labor to keep the prices of some goods and services in line with an affordable American way of life. We've got to kick the habit, not the worker.

This Is Not Good

Google defends censorship practices in China, praises Beijing, offers cavity search option to local webmeisters, ridicules personal freedom: "'It is not an option for us to broadly make information available that is illegal, inappropriate or immoral or what have you.' "

What inappropriate or immoral information does he have in mind ? And I wonder what I have ?

Rightie Christians Are Warped

Reaction grows to gay student's expulsion: "'They're being hypocritical, by Christian standards,' Kuder said. 'If we love each other, accept each other for who we are, why are they kicking him out? I almost feel like they're trying to mold us, me, into a person that I wouldn't want to be.

'There's a letter in the student handbook that says everyone is a unique creation of God, you're special, we care about you. They didn't care if he didn't have a place to go. They could have pretty much ruined his life.'"

This is indeed the school to attend to become "a person that I wouldn't want to be."

No, We're Not Real Leaders...

...but we did stay at a Holiday Inn Express: "'It was an enormous mistake for us to try to occupy that country after June of 2003,' Gingrich said during a question-and-answer session at the school. 'We have to pull back, and we have to recognize it.'"

We're lucky that Democrats led America through WWII.

Bush and Cheney Squeaze Public's Balls, Dares It To Complain

...As Cheney Aide Says Bush OK'd Leak: "In the court filing, drawn in part from Libby's own grand jury testimony before his indictment, Fitzgerald indicated that:
- A July 8, 2003, Libby conversation with the Times' Miller occurred 'only after the vice president advised defendant that the president specifically had authorized defendant to disclose certain information' from a then-classified intelligence estimate on Iraq. Libby is alleged to have mentioned the CIA status of Wilson's wife in the conversation.
- Cheney's chief of staff at first told the vice president that he could not have the July 8, 2003, conversation with Miller because of the classified nature of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq.
- Libby 'testified that the vice president later advised him that the president had authorized defendant to disclose the relevant portions' of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq."

Had enough ? How many more colo-rectal rightie bullshit uploads is it going to take before we suddenly, spontaneously morph into flaming, wrath-flinging radicals ?

Send your answer to me and everyone you know.

Tony Snow Is An Insidious Nuisance

...with a huge rightie audience of those who will never question any data given them through the filter of their insecurities: "'families earning more than $100,000 would pay 73.3 percent of the total income tax burden. Families earning less than $50,000 would pay only 2.9 percent of the bill.' What Snow doesn't say is that families earning more than $100,000 pay a large proportion of the federal income tax because they earn a large proportion of the income - nearly half, in fact. Families earning less than $50,000 pay a small proportion of the federal income tax because they earn a small proportion of the income - about one-quarter. When you figure in other federal taxes, including the very regressive payroll tax - which conservatives steadfastly refuse to do - that pretty much erases whatever imbalance exists between tax proportion and income proportion. And that's not even counting state and local taxes, which are also notably regressive. According to a new study from Citizens for Tax Justice, a labor-funded nonprofit, the average state and local tax rate for the richest 1 percent of the population is 5.2 percent; for the middle 20 percent, 9.6 percent; and for the poorest 20 percent, 11.4 percent."

It no longer really matters whether or not someone like Tony Snow is lying. What matters is that his ilk continue to unbalance the public discourse - no matter the reason.

Let's Believe The Huckster Administration

Tell 'em anything: "'One of the constants in the Bush administration's miserable record on Iraq has been the manipulation of intelligence precisely for political purposes. That has caused our intelligence -- which used to be accepted without question around the world -- to be viewed with skepticism by the international community.'"

Pelosi's correct, but she has very little gravitas from my perspective. She fits the rightie stereotype of the aging boomer femi-numbskull.

Rightwinger Exposes Thinking Person

Professor's population speeches give chance for cheap-shot from the frightened and small-minded, such as Mr. Mims: "'It was 'Twilight Zone' material. It was like sitting in a science-fiction movie,' Mims said Tuesday, adding that he is worried young doctors and scientists with access to deadly diseases might take literally what he claims is a call by Pianka to control population growth through the spread of disease. 'The big concern is this professor is instilling this in the minds of students.'

Pianka said only meant to warn about the potential for epidemics in the face of uncontrolled population growth. No recording or transcript of either that speech or another delivered last Friday at St. Edward's University in Austin was available. Pianka, who said his daughters are now worried about his and their safety, says his life has been turned upside-down by 'right-wing fools.'

Those roaming the corridors at Patterson Hall on the UT campus were very supportive of their teacher and colleague. "

Killing Bin Laden will inspire 10 more says Dalai Lama

Fundamentalism is terrifying because it is based purely on emotion, rather than intelligence: "'It is fascinating. In the West, you have bigger homes, yet smaller families; you have endless conveniences -- yet you never seem to have any time. You can travel anywhere in the world, yet you don't bother to cross the road to meet your neighbours,' he said.
'I don't think people have become more selfish, but their lives have become easier and that has spoilt them. They have less resilience, they expect more, they constantly compare themselves to others and they have too much choice -- which brings no real freedom.' "

A truly interesting man.