Might actually get things done?

 

Bullets, brain cells, and breasts

A mother wants you to see what bullets did to her child.

Plastic eating mealworms may save our planet from ourselves. And we need to build many of these 'trash wheels' and let them go all over the planet's oceans.  Kinda like really large roombas...

How to build new brain cells.

GMO Arctic apples.  Bacon is not fatal, just not particularly good for you.  Lettuce by LED lights.

Here's what Marijuana does to breast cancer.

The Griffin Warrior found in Pylos, Greece.

We vote not for what we like but against what we're afraid of.  Fear works.

House design after living in a dumpster.

Uh oh... Scientology has its own candidate for Senate.

Because malnutrition was so fun...

Henri - Politique

Mais... meow.

How I feel about the Supreme Court....

GAH!!

Dibs and dabs

How I feel after watching too much politics on tv.

How Swedes and Norwegians Broke the Power of the ‘1 Percent’

The 35 Most Unforgivable Facebook Statuses

I shoulda stood in bed...

The President Surrenders

Hangover

Where The Mistakes Were Made

Shares fall as US debt-deal relief rally fizzles out

Anyone Who Thinks The Debt Deal Is A Victory For America Understands Neither Economics Nor Politics

How Abortion Caused the Debt Crisis

Debt deal agreed but may not save US AAA credit rating

The Four Big Problems With — And Four Silver Linings Around — The Debt Limit Deal

What we wish Obama had said

Take back our democracy

We knew this was going to happen...

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Stupidity and insanity and banksters run amok

Wisconsin Senate hopeful Ron Johnson in all his glory.

Rand Paul.

Teapartiers love Ayn Rand but have no idea who she really was. Sickeningly,

...she became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation.

Being rewarded for torture:

A psychologist whose research was used in constructing the US's program to torture terrorism suspects has been granted a $31-million no-bid Army contract to provide "resilience training" to US soldiers.

The Pentagon needs more money:

The latest talking point du jour has been around in one form or another for years. It asks us to forget that A) America spends more on defense than every other major nation combined and B) the Pentagon, whose annual budget is now approaching World War II levels in inflation-adjusted terms, has lost track of trillions of taxpayer dollars. In light of those troubling truths, we are nonetheless urged by Beltway Republicans to focus on the fact that defense spending is "4.9 percent of our gross domestic product, significantly below the average of 6.5 percent since World War II," as a recent Wall Street Journal editorial proclaimed.

That widely circulated article, aimed squarely at grassroots conservatives, was jointly written by three of the most influential Republican think tanks in Washington -- the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and the Foreign Policy Initiative. And like clockwork, the "percentage of GDP" nugget went from their pen to the GOP's well-oiled media machine.

For those who just don't have enough:

A gold and jewel bedazzled version of Monopoly worth $2 million is heading to Wall Street this Friday. That's not a metaphor.

Crafted by master jeweler Sidney Mobell and 22 years in the making, the set features dice with 42-cut diamonds and a photo-etched 18k gold board.

Krugman on the lack of property mortgage documents:

True to form, the Obama administration’s response has been to oppose any action that might upset the banks, like a temporary moratorium on foreclosures while some of the issues are resolved. Instead, it is asking the banks, very nicely, to behave better and clean up their act. I mean, that’s worked so well in the past, right?

The response from the right is, however, even worse. Republicans in Congress are lying low, but conservative commentators like those at The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page have come out dismissing the lack of proper documents as a triviality. In effect, they’re saying that if a bank says it owns your house, we should just take its word. To me, this evokes the days when noblemen felt free to take whatever they wanted, knowing that peasants had no standing in the courts. But then, I suspect that some people regard those as the good old days.

What should be happening? The excesses of the bubble years have created a legal morass, in which property rights are ill defined because nobody has proper documentation. And where no clear property rights exist, it’s the government’s job to create them.

That won’t be easy, but there are good ideas out there. For example, the Center for American Progress has proposed giving mortgage counselors and other public entities the power to modify troubled loans directly, with their judgment standing unless appealed by the mortgage servicer. This would do a lot to clarify matters and help extract us from the morass.

One thing is for sure: What we’re doing now isn’t working. And pretending that things are O.K. won’t convince anyone.

The Era of Stupid

Started when the Republicans decided that liberals were too educated and elite and intelligent and used facts and stuff to win arguments....

The Era of Stupid

E.J. Dionne asks the question:

Can a nation remain a superpower if its internal politics are incorrigibly stupid?

I think the answer is no.

Shirley Miller Sherrod

Is a fantastic woman.

Update 7/26: The wingnuts struggle to find something... ANYTHING .. that they can stick on Sherrod to call her a liar.

Bits and bytes

Rate your lawmaker.

California voting issues.

Andre Bauer: 'Flat-Out Lazy' People Are The Real Cause Of The Immigration Problem

Dick Cheney rises from the dead.

Tom Tomorrow takes on Glenn Beck.

Goldman Showers ... the title of our new era. (via trifecta in comments)

Voices of the common folk

Are heard in Obama's Oval Office. Rather a nice change from the last regime, isn't it?

Because I really need it

Things that make me laugh:

Hilarious political signs.

You are being watched by a duck.

Censorship!

When weather goes wrong!

Owl ball.

Angry Norwegians in scuba gear chasing the Google Map car....

And speaking of cars... Toyota jokes!

Starting the week....

By reading the top ten!

This should be handed out to every freshman Republican (and some Democrats)

Political Press Confession Bingo (Click to embiggen).



Via Ali of Smelly in comments.

Update 7/8: Mapaghimagsik has a cartoon...

To help you keep track of Republican sex scandals

Here's the sex offenders list. Another list of politicians from both sides of the aisle.

The discussion of moral values.

Here's a flow chart. (This one made me laugh).

One reason why Democrats just don't get on the list that often, we are not forcibly defined by the narrow confines of 'family values' which has nothing to do with real families and absolutely nothing to do with true humanitarian values.

It's not about the sex, it's about the utter hypocrisy.

Update: Blue Girl of They Gave Us A Republic has a point.

Update: Oh, gee. Where's the outrage? Will they compare this to the date Obama took with his wife?

Sanford's South American sojourn taxpayer-funded

But our elected officials tell us the truth all the time!

Zachary Roth of TPM explains why some mainstream media fell for the Sanford Spin:

None of these are the biggest crimes in the world, but still: It feels absurd to have to point this out, but politicians and their staffers frequently have reason to dissemble, about issues far more important than an extra-marital affair. Too often, though, the press treats public statements from elected officials' offices -- especially those purporting simply to provide information, like the Appalachian Trail line -- as self-evidently accurate. It's as if, despite everything, some in the press can't quite bring themselves to believe that politicians might try to mislead people.

Part of this is structural. There's almost no acceptable way for a mainstream reporter to explicitly tell readers that the information being put out by a powerful office-holder may be false or misleading. But the only way that this structural flaw will change is if individual reporters are willing to stick out their necks to change it.

Until then, people will read blogs for stories like these.

Exactly. I was driven in great frustration from newspapers and the TV to the internet during the Bush era just because the truth was so obviously NOT what the news was reporting. The mainstream media just hasn't discovered this fact yet, as stunning as that sounds. We want the truth. We can handle it, it's the lies we can't stand.

How to win at arguments

(Stolen rudely from Phila of Bouphonia's post).

There's a list of 11 excellent points you should keep at hand for the debate before you end up having to use the folding chair on your opponent. Here is number 9:

9. What people say is less important than what they imply. What they imply is what the correct political analysis leads you to decide that they imply. Don’t take their account as to what they are saying: tell them what they are saying. Be abusive if necessary. You have been provoked.