Watching again a tragedy making its appearance on national, or in this case international news. I’m speaking about the disappearance of an Air Asia plane in the South Java Sea and I am again reminded about the way all news media cover these things. At this point they fill the air and the papers with dumb conjecture. Experts, who know nothing, because there is nothing at this early point to know, are brought in to make pompous pronouncements about airline safety and the failure of airline safety, none of which add anything to the information column. I watched MSNBC do this dance for a while and then CNN jumped in for a full hour of coverage complete with models, maps and various experts, who were able, at that point, to only guess about what happened and what was going on. This was interrupted only briefly by news of an Italian ferry that was on fire and might sink in the Mediterranean. What TV news needs is a station that comes on the air, says, that a plane has disappeared in the South Java Sea and that as soon as they have some solid news, that is, information backed up by facts, they will report it to us. That’s real media, not the show biz crap that we are being fed now.
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An interesting piece of potentially big news surfaced recently when a leak from the justice department hinted that Former CIA chief David Patraeus is being investigated and might be charged with disclosing classified information to his mistress and biographer. If the charges are true and nothing happens to Patraeus; where does that leave the Justice Department with respect to Ed Snowden and other whistleblowers whose motivations were pure as opposed to Patraeus who just wanted to get laid.
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With all the noise being made about Jeb Bush’s potential run for President in 2016. The big question is; what country, in keeping with the family tradition, will he invade? Maybe Iceland, they haven’t had a good war in quite a while and they must have something we want.
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Unbelievably, Dick Cheney was on TV last weekend still lying about WMDs. This guy is the reincarnation of Joseph Stalin and given the opportunity he would certainly have been responsible for millions instead of just hundreds of thousands of deaths just like Big Joe, Pol Pot or Adolph. It’s really interesting to look into the face of a sociopath speaking in front of millions of people and wonder how many of them are buying his bullshit.
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A lot of talk, about the shenanigans in the House, over the spending bill, which was just passed. The problem is that the debate is not about the parts of the bill that are destructive to the country but about Ted Cruz and Mike Lee who acted like recalcitrant children during the process. In doing that, they damaged their party’s programs, ignored the party leadership and sent Harry Reid home with a smile on his face.
Is this a forerunner of a Republican majority in both houses of congress that spends most of its time fighting among themselves instead of beating off the Democrats and does it men that once again we can expect nothing to get done in congress?
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Mike Rogers was on TV talking about how the torture report will cause violence against American interests all over the world. Is he kidding? ISIS is beheading Americans in Syria, we are droning civilians all over the Middle East. What the hell more provocation do these people need than having their own families bombed? Does us torturing some guy they don’t even know make them madder than having their own kids blown to bits? What kind of moron is Mike Rogers? Thank God he’s on his way to talk radio with Limbaugh and the other lunatics.
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Poor Joni Ernst. They gave her a State of the Union to reply to but didn’t tell her what that meant. Not only that, but they wouldn’t let her castrate a hog on TV, which took away her only functional skill.
Of course Obama didn’t give her much to attack, not unless she wanted to look like a bigger fool than Lindsay Graham or Ted Cruz. She talked about stagnant wages and lost jobs and I guess, expected us to not remember that the cause of these problems was Bush, not Obama. She called the ACA a failed policy. Really? Maybe she should ask those millions who now have health care because of it, about that. Maybe she should ask the clowns in her party how many people with illnesses they got insurance for. She assured us that the GOP would pass a jobs bill. Like the Pipeline and it grand total of 35 jobs, Joni? Yes, that will be a big help.
Then she says that the ACA must go because protecting our most vulnerable is our most important job. Right, Joni, by taking away their health care. Good job babe. Very Republican. Michele Bachman isn’t dead, her seat in congress now smells of Joni Ernst and pig balls.
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The only argument that I have ever heard for the pipeline that makes any sense is by Claire McCaskill (D) Missouri, who points out that the oil is coming out of the ground anyway and that the safest way to move it is a pipeline rather than by truck or train, which are much more dangerous. So far so good but it is much more expensive to move oil by truck and train than by pipeline so if we stop the pipeline they will build another one that goes to Vancouver instead of Texas and we won’t have that poison moving through our country at all.
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Lindsay Graham has stated that he will block funds to open an embassy in Cuba. He says that it is a bad idea at a bad time but like most Republican statements and ideas he has no backup that stands up, no better idea, no reason why it’s a bad idea and no ability to make any kind of logical statement on the subject
Then John Boehner comes along and says that we should not normalize relations with Castro until the Cuban people are free. Does he mean like the people of Saudi Arabia, or any number of Middle Eastern, South American, South East Asian or African countries with whom we have enjoyed relations over the past 50 years and where their people are nothing but slaves? Let’s face it. The only reason that clowns like Graham and Boehner are against resuming relations with Cuba is that it was Obama’s idea. If you really want to get the Republican’s on board with any idea, all you have to do is say that Obama hates it and they are 100% behind it, even if it entails closing all the oil companies and giving free rent to all illegal aliens.
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The President made the same big mistake the other day that he’s made before. He figured that the average American was intelligent enough to understand what he meant when he spoke to the area of religion. Of course he was wrong.
See, he went to this National prayer Breakfast, expecting to find a group of people who believed in Christian morals and at the same time, understood what an analogy was. Way too big expectations. So in trying to draw this analogy of the Christian Crusades to the ISIS grab for a Caliphate he got all the born again types jumping out of their skin. I always wondered why you had to be born again. I mean if you were a Catholic and now you’re still a Catholic… well, you get the picture.
So the big bitch from the Right was that Obama was referring to something that happened a thousand years ago and how was that relevant. No, I’m not going to explain how it’s relevant, if you’re too dumb to understand that, you’re way too dumb to understand anything else in the discussion. Suffice it to say that while the true believers of ISIS are raping all the female captives they take, only a couple of years ago Catholic priests were abusing all the kids they could get their grimy paws on. No, the act isn’t exactly the same but the principle certainly is. Religion is supposed to stand for good, that is why humans follow it so blindly, but humans are not intrinsically good and that’s why they shouldn’t follow anything blindly, not Catholicism, not Islam, not Judaism, not anything, and certainly not any religion over any other religion.
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The Supreme Court is finally going to deal with the capital punishment. But they’re all about the method of how it will be carried out instead of the question of should we be killing people at all. I know that many bleeding hearts are dead set against capital punishment because they think that it’s barbaric. Of course it’s barbaric, but unfortunately there are people who just deserve to die. Those who say that no one deserves to die are living in a fantasyland that bears no resemblance to earth. Of course the biggest problem with Capital punishment is our inability as a society to get it right. I’m not speaking about the way we do it but the way we decide who to do it to.
The fact that we are forever finding out that the last guy they killed in Texas or one of our more aggressive states was innocent, is more than just an embarrassment. It is or should be a crime. It is what makes most people against the death penalty. The permanence of death makes the possibility of executing the wrong guy completely unacceptable. Maybe if it was a crime to convict the wrong guy, the guys who push through conviction would be a little more careful. But until it is, the only acceptable reason to execute anyone, is if the circumstances absolutely exempt the possibility of a mistake. They drag some perp out of a school shooting, the bank robber is caught at the scene with the gun in his hand, the terrorist is apprehended with the bomb still strapped to him. Those are reasons to die.
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King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia died this week. He was known as a modern reformer who dragged his country from the seventh century to the eighth century.