Climate change to WWII and O'Reilly in between!

Climate change?  What climate change?  What climate change might unleash.

Whale graveyard in Chile.  Counting whales from space.

Poor Bill O'Reilly... scared of tough wimmen.  Maybe he feels like this?

Therapy dogs.

Plastic in our food... is good for us.  Right?  How about raw fish?

Harry Potter and the aftermath.

President Obama hanging out with scientists.

Fukushima radiation affected the USS Reagan and its crew.

Finding the forgotten Russian soldiers from WWII.

A debate

I finally got around to watching it... and they both did well.

  Update: Video removed by user, etc, etc. Will replace when I can find the full hour and a half of the debate, but most have been pulled.

 (I had a hell of a time getting the sound high enough, finally rewiring my speakers to the old ones that go up to eleven.)

Science vs. Stupidity

If cats reported the news

Take it away, Stripes!

Dammit, who opened the catnip drawer?.... Snuffles, What do you have for us?

O'Reilly: "Many Women Who Get Pregnant Are Blasted Out Of Their Minds When They Have Sex. They're Not Going To Use Birth Control Anyway"

Rick Perry Asked Why More Kids Are Getting Pregnant in Texas

His answer? Abstinence and Jesus work, ignore the data!

And from Fox News: Free Birth Control Is Liberal Conspiracy To ‘Eradicate The Poor’

Let's condense this here: No sex education, no birth control, and of course no abortions because women are hussies anyway....

Rep. Allen West would agree with that. Bill O'Reilly agrees with West. Dammed hussies! Maybe that's all they understand. Don't you agree, Socks?

Cinnamon reporting in: There are people out there who think The Onion is a true news organization...

How's Washington, Cinnamon?

Trying to scrape the debt crisis off on Obama won't work.

And it's tough to negotiate with crazy.

Jon Stewart with Bill O'Reilly

Update 5/17: the full interview.

I think it's called a smackdown....

The start of a new meme...

Explained here. The meme generator.

My contribution:

Blog sprinkles

• The Cave of Crystals: Naica Cave. Some of the largest natural crystals ever found, up to 10m long.


• Don't we find ourselves feeling the slightest bit sorry for Bill O'Reilly?

O’REILLY: So 48 years ago — 48 years ago in this country we could make fun of Arabs. … We could make fun of people in a general way, and certainly, Ahab was the Arab was a general parody. But now, we can’t. What has changed in America?

• Gosh darnit, why can't we make the two wars we started under Bush and Cheney into holy wars? They said we could!!1

• Dancing Dave proves how Obama will NEVER win over the bigots and other Republicans and it's time to cut the losses and do what he can with what he's got.

• Tengrain at Mock, Paper, Scissors slaps some sense into us.

• The reason God made the Tree of Knowledge.

• Photoshopping disasters make you want to stop buying clothes.

Piss not off Roger Ebert

Or verily he wilt crush thee and thine vapid bloated ego:

Bill O'Reilly has been brought low by the same process that afflicted Jerry Springer. Once respected journalists, they sold their souls for higher ratings, and follow their siren song. Springer is honest about it: "I'm going to Hell for what I do, and I know it," he's likes to say. O'Reilly insists he is dealing only with the truth. When his guests disagree with him, he shouts at them, calls them liars, talks over them, and behaves like a schoolyard bully.

I am not interested in discussing O'Reilly's politics here. That would open a hornet's nest. I am more concerned about the danger he and others like him represent to a civil and peaceful society. He sets a harmful example of acceptable public behavior. He has been an influence on the most worrying trend in the field of news: The polarization of opinion, the elevation of emotional temperature, the predictability of two of the leading cable news channels. A majority of cable news viewers now get their news slanted one way or the other by angry men. O'Reilly is not the worst offender. That would be Glenn Beck. Keith Olbermann is gaining ground. Rachel Maddow provides an admirable example for the boys of firm, passionate outrage, and is more effective for nogt shouting.

Brave Sir Beck runs away

From his own words urging the very thing that has happened to Dr. Tiller and Stephen Tyrone Johns, the security guard. He wants an uprising? Well, he's got one. The lunatics are armed to the teeth (thanks to the Congress and the NRA); they have been supplied with books and websites and tv shows and articles telling them who to hate and why as well as where they live and work; and they're frantic because a black man is actually making the government work the way it's supposed to.

Own it, Glenn Beck. This is all yours. Yours along with Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Anne Coulter, Michael Savage, Michelle Malkin, and all the rest of the 'pundits' who spew hate constantly.

You wanted this to happen and now you can't just walk away from it. Come back and take a look at the bloody broken bodies your hate speech results in.

Nobody is surprised but you. Why is that?

Update: A man who actually knows what it is like taking on hate speech. Go Spocko!

Bill Moyers with his gentle journalistic style

Pulls no punches. William Black and then Amy Goodman and Glenn Greenwald.

From the transcript with William Black:

BILL MOYERS: What is your explanation for why the bankers who created this mess are still calling the shots?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, that, especially after what's just happened at G.M., that's... it's scandalous.

BILL MOYERS: Why are they firing the president of G.M. and not firing the head of all these banks that are involved?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: There are two reasons. One, they're much closer to the bankers. These are people from the banking industry. And they have a lot more sympathy. In fact, they're outright hostile to autoworkers, as you can see. They want to bash all of their contracts. But when they get to banking, they say, ‘contracts, sacred.' But the other element of your question is we don't want to change the bankers, because if we do, if we put honest people in, who didn't cause the problem, their first job would be to find the scope of the problem. And that would destroy the cover up.

BILL MOYERS: The cover up?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Sure. The cover up.

BILL MOYERS: That's a serious charge.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Of course.

BILL MOYERS: Who's covering up?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Geithner is charging, is covering up. Just like Paulson did before him. Geithner is publicly saying that it's going to take $2 trillion — a trillion is a thousand billion — $2 trillion taxpayer dollars to deal with this problem. But they're allowing all the banks to report that they're not only solvent, but fully capitalized. Both statements can't be true. It can't be that they need $2 trillion, because they have masses losses, and that they're fine.

These are all people who have failed. Paulson failed, Geithner failed. They were all promoted because they failed, not because...

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, Geithner has, was one of our nation's top regulators, during the entire subprime scandal, that I just described. He took absolutely no effective action. He gave no warning. He did nothing in response to the FBI warning that there was an epidemic of fraud. All this pig in the poke stuff happened under him. So, in his phrase about legacy assets. Well he's a failed legacy regulator.

And (same link) the interview with Goodman and Greenwald:

BILL MOYERS: Glenn, what stories are you covering that you think are being ignored by mainstream press?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, let's start with the fact that there is a very widespread perception, one that's growing with more and more revelations, by the day. That what the United States did over the last eight years, in terms of how we detained people, how we interrogated people, how we tortured people and kidnapped them, and shipped them off to black sites, where they were completely disappeared is something that is not only disgraceful, and a fundamental violation of what we claim our political values to be but are crimes. Very serious war crimes. If you look at political discussions that take place on most major television no shows, about that. What you'll find is this implied consensus that Americans don't want their political leaders spending time on investigations and looking to the past. And that's absolutely false. It's a case where public opinion is distorted. Polls show that large numbers of Americans, even 50 percent believe that there should be investigations into whether or not crimes were committed. Because if we don't investigate when our political leaders break the law, it means that there's no rule of law. Look at our policy toward Israel, and this continuous blind support for whatever the Israeli government does. Something that's about to get even more harmful to our interests now that there's a very right wing extremist party with racist factions within the government in Israel. Polls show that if you ask Americans do you think the U.S. Government should be on the side of Israel, on the side of the Palestinians, or should be even-handed? Seventy percent, seven out of ten, will say that the government should be even-handed in that conflict. And yet, that is an opinion that is virtually never heard. Debates about our policy toward Israel is something that is essentially frozen out. You can go across those issues, and find the same dynamic.

BILL MOYERS: I sometimes sense some frustration in both of your voices. And I know that I.F. Stone was often frustrated. I mean, no one dug deeper into government documents than he did. And he saw the difference between the official view of reality, and the reality on the ground. And yet, for all of his exposure of these lies and deceptions and horrors, the Vietnam War raged on another ten years. Do you ever feel futile over the results of what you do?

GLENN GREENWALD: Personally, I actually don't. And, you know, I do think there is a difference. I think that the advent of technology the internet, in particular. And also the collapse of trust that so many Americans have now placed in the political and media institutions, as Amy was saying earlier. Largely, though not exclusively, as a result of how transparent the lies were over Iraq. Have really caused so many more citizens than ever before to question the kind of establishment instruments that have been used for so long to propagandize the citizenry. And to seek out alternative sources of truth. You know, change of this type is always extremely incremental. And it can be kind of imperceptible and very frustratingly slow. But I think it clearly is happening. And the more profound and transparent are the failures of the institutions. The more the citizenry will be open to alternative ways of thinking. The greater the crises are, I think, the more people will seek out opinions that may even five, ten years ago have been entirely excluded. And so, I think when you combine those events with the potency of technology, the advent of bloggers, and alternative media, like what Amy is doing, and the growth of it. I actually feel rather optimistic that the work that we do is paying off.

Thank god for Bill Moyers and real journalism. (Just for fun and the enjoyment of delicious memories, look at how he dealt with 0'Reilly's attack dog):

Loofah wielding sex creep

Bill O'Reilly.

Dangerous for exactly who?

Last night on The O’Reilly Factor, Bill O’Reilly showed a clip of a Fox News producer ambushing Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) to accuse him of political hypocrisy for urging an investigation into Bush crimes after he had opposed the Clinton impeachment. “This Leahy thing — this is beyond the pale,” O’Reilly moaned.

Marc Thiessen, Bush’s former chief speechwriter, agreed. Not only would the investigations be hypocritcal, he said, but worse, they would be “terribly dangerous” because they would expose the “facts” of the U.S.’s interrogation techniques to Osama bin Laden

I don't think they're thinking at all about bin Laden, do you? I think they're afraid of all the shit they've done when they thought no one would ever know. The detainees would die in Gitmo and the lawyers and doctors and torturers would just melt back into society and no one would be the wiser.

But we've wised up and we want to know. Now.

You're wrong, Bill!

They so wanted Obama to say he was wrong about opposing the surge

That they cropped his quote. What was actually said:

O'REILLY: You and Joe Biden, no surge.

OBAMA: Hold on a second, Bill. If you look at the debate that was taking place, we had gone through five years of mismanagement of this war that I thought was disastrous. And the president wanted to double down and continue on an open-ended policy that did not create the kinds of pressure on the Iraqis to take responsibility and reconcile.

O'REILLY: But it worked. It worked. Come on.

OBAMA: Bill, what I said is -- I've already said it succeed beyond our wildest dreams.

O'REILLY: Right. So why can't you say, "I was right in the beginning, and I was wrong about the surge"?

OBAMA: Because there's an underlying problem with what we've done. We have reduced the violence --

O'REILLY: Yeah.

OBAMA: -- but the Iraqis still haven't taken responsibility, and we still don't have the kind of political reconciliation. We are still spending, Bill, $10 to $12 billion a month.

Shut up! Just shut up!

Real journalism vs. attack dog technique

Guess who won?



Look at Bill Moyers' style and grace under pressure. Look at how he defuses Bill O'Reilly's ambusher.

Oh, the knickers that are getting in a twist

Via Chet Scoville of The Vanity Press.

Love it! Thanks for your humor and your epic saga, J. K. Rowling!

Update: Mustang Bobby of Bark Bark Woof Woof has some choice words on the matter:

Rail on, supercilious twits. Your rants and outrage only point out how ridiculous and ignorant you are and prove once again that your predilection for focusing on irrelevancy pretty much confirms that you have no earthly business as literary critics or social commentators. And in an ironic way, making a big deal out of Dumbledore's sexual orientation will only sell more books.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Harry Potter series has already served as an allegory for misunderstood and demonized people -- witches and wizards -- and it's not too far a stretch to make the connection to the gay community. In Rowling's world, the wizarding community has to live apart, they have their own language and traditions, and they do all they can to conceal their true selves as they move through the Muggle world. As the story is told through the point of view of a teenager, the additional layer of adolescent angst and hormones makes it even more allegorical, and I daresay that there are probably legions of young readers who are already coming to terms with their own identity -- sexual or otherwise, gay or straight -- who felt an affinity towards Harry Potter as an outcast based on nothing more than who he was by birth and yet the rest of the non-magical world cannot accept him. The fact that "the gay character" in the story is Dumbledore and not one of Harry's contemporaries -- Ron or Neville, for example -- is understandable; these kids already have enough to worry about as teenage wizards. It also makes it clear that a gay man such as a teacher can be a mentor and a friend without any of the lurid overtones of pedophilia that is never far from the fevered imaginings of the Christian conservatives and their perpetual adolescent fixation with sex.

I have news for them: there is more -- much more -- to being gay than the basic matter of attraction, sexual or otherwise, to someone of your own gender. The fact that the fundies cannot get beyond that says a lot more about their hang-ups than it does about anything else.

Update 10/24:
Bill O'Reilly galumps up to put his two cents in:

On his Fox News show last night, Bill O’Reilly joined in the fray, asking if Dumbledore’s outing was part of the “gay agenda” of “indoctrination” of “children.” O’Reilly claimed that by dropping “the gay bomb,” Rowling is a “provocateur” who is “going to let all hell break loose”

Uh... right, Billo. Just what hell is that? Does it involve falafels, loofahs, phone sex and a huge mega-million dollar settlement? That kind of provocateur?

Update 10/25: Paul Croft's two foot tattoo of Dumbledore is a teasing point with his workmates, but Paul says:

“The tattoo is about 2ft in length and shows Dumbledore played by Richard Harris – who was the original and best.”

He insisted: “I don’t regret it and I’m not going to get rid of it.”

Way to go, Paul! How about acknowledging that Dumbledore is one hell of a cool wizard, you guys?

Isn't falafel

Utterly ground up and pureed chickpeas?

(Via Atrios at Eschaton) Johnathan Singer at MyDD notes Chris Dodd holds his own against Frappeed Falafel Guy.

Update: Now YouTubed:




Update: Look! Yearly Kos in Second Life:



Update: Jesus' General says it best.

Do we really want to know what Bill O'Reilly fantasizes about?

David Neiwert of Orcinus debunks the suggestion there are roving gangs of lesbian rapists carrying pink pistols.

An extensive Internet search seeking to verify O'Reilly's assertion in the introduction to Wheeler's interview that a lesbian gang called Dykes Taking Over is "terrorizing people" in Philadelphia turned up only one possible source. WCAU-TV, a local NBC affiliate in that city, reported in 2004 that a small group of 8th-grade girls at a West Philadelphia middle school were allegedly "bullying, groping and harassing" other girls in gym class with "gay remarks." The report made no mention of the 8th-graders using pink pistols or other weapons.

Similarly, O'Reilly's introductory mention of a Tennessee lesbian gang called Gays Taking Over that is "involved in raping young girls" appears to have been based solely on a highly dubious Feb. 28 television report from WPTY-TV, an ABC affiliate in Memphis, Tenn. Featuring dramatic "reenactments" of high school bathroom rape scenes shot in grainy black-and-white footage, the lengthy segment's vaguely salacious claims about local high school girls being raped and "sodomized" with "sex toys bought on the Internet" was based almost entirely on the lurid musings of a single Shelby County gang officer.

Titled "Violent Femmes," the sweeps-week segment was so thinly sourced and grotesquely sensationalized that it's difficult to believe that any professional journalist found it to be credible. And it wasn't. Under intense pressure from local gay and lesbian activists, the affiliate's station manager finally admitted that WPTY-TV's reporters had neither independently verified the gang officer's overheated claims nor obtained any documentary evidence such as arrest records or written police reports to substantiate their tale. As the station grudgingly conceded, "Our investigation did not turn up widespread violence in schools due to this."

On Countdown, Keith Olbermann couldn't stop laughing....

Break it to him gently, guys.

Update: Crooks and Liars has Keith Olbermann.

If Bill O'Reilly declares war on something

Does anyone care?

In a lengthy opening diatribe, this evening Bill O'Reilly laid out the far-left George Soros conspiracy in spades.

He had a chart and everything.

Well. If he had a chart, it must be serious...

The feminists evolutionary biologists atheists and liberal Christians will be the death of us all....