Deep tweets

Really just too barbaric for words.

Details of OK's botched double execution are horrible. Lockett had "vein failure." After 40 minutes, he sat up and said "something's wrong"
— allisonkilkenny (@allisonkilkenny) April 30, 2014

Bayley Elise McBride reporting from the scene.

Sorry, not sorry kids, there's no free lunch

There are some conservatives who would call this a teaching moment. One wonders what lesson they think they're teaching these children.

Up to 40 kids at Uintah Elementary in Salt Lake City picked up their lunches Tuesday, then watched as the meals were taken and thrown away because of outstanding balances on their accounts — a move that shocked and angered parents.

ason Olsen, a Salt Lake City District spokesman, said the district’s child-nutrition department became aware that Uintah had a large number of students who owed money for lunches. [...]

As a result, the child-nutrition manager visited the school and decided to withhold lunches to deal with the issue, he said.

But cafeteria workers weren’t able to see which children owed money until they had already received lunches, Olsen explained.

The workers then took those lunches from the students and threw them away, he said, because once food is served to one student it can’t be served to another.

The kids who had their lunches confiscated by the child-nutrition manager were handed an orange and told to go get a milk instead.

The school apologized on facebook. They're very sorry all those deadbeat parents, who may or may not have been properly notified, forcced the school to humilate the children in this manner.

This is not new. It's been happening all over the country for some time now. Apparently the new front of the true conservative's war on the poor is literally taking the food out of the mouths of children. They'll fight to the death to force poor women to bear thebabies but once they're born, they're on their own.

Beat the distressed

This thuggish state Rep. in Hawaii is a real piece of work. He decided to show the homeless in his district who's boss, with a fucking sledgehammer. He patrols his district and destroying the meager belongings of the downtrodden.

Brower has waged this campaign for two weeks, estimating that he’s smashed about 30 shopping carts in the process.

You have to watch the video at the link to truly appreciate how creepy he is but it gets worse. Tom Brower is considering physical confrontation next.

...I want to do something practical that will really clean up the streets," he said.

"I find abandoned junk, specifically shopping carts, and I remove them. I also create a situation where those carts can't be pushed around the city. I think it's a good thing," he said.

"I don't want to be threatening to anybody," Brower said. "I think it's threatening to steal things and then walk around with them like it's their own."

Brower said he has yet to take a cart from a homeless person who's pushing it, but that may be coming. He supports other efforts to remove abandoned property. The sledgehammer approach is his way of pitching in.

If you watched the video, he doesn't actually remove them. He smashes them with the sledge and leaves them piled up for the city to remove. Which is about the meanest, most cost ineffective way to deal with abandoned carts. For one thing the carts he smashed all looked perfectly operable. He could just return them to the stores. Those carts are expensive. I'm sure they would be happy to get them back. Furthermore, stealing shopping carts has been long been the practice among the homeless. By destroying the one they already have, it just encourages them to steal a fresh one.

And how does this help the homeless get off the street anyway? Maybe he could spent some energy on finding solutions to homelessness instead of working out his frustrations with a sledgehammer. Austin, TX has a homeless problem too. They're not vandalizing property there. They're building a self-sustained Community Village for the homeless outside of downtown.

Creepy Chris Christie shouts down constituent - updated

Photo of the day. Chris Christie closes out a rally at Rutgers rally by spit-shouting at a female teacher. Clearly he's channeling his inner Ralph Kramden but without the barest shred of humanity. Meanwhile, I've seen that blank look and frozen smile on another GOP presidential hopeful wife's face.



Jersey Jazzman has the teacher's side of the story. Apparently it takes very little to trigger a tirade from New Jersey's biggest bully. Can't understand how any decent person could vote for this creep. His shameless abuse of his constituents (and his power) should have ended his career years ago.

Update: Kevin Drum thinks Christie's Big Bully schtick won't play well outside of Jersey politics. I was thinking the same. It's one thing to be amused by Gov. Blowhard as a sideshow, but would you want this hothead negotiating with testy and suspicious world leaders who have nuclear weapons? I think not.

Why Americans are so uninformed

Not sure if this says more about the media, or the markets.

Each week, TIME Magazine designs covers for four markets: the U.S., Europe, Asia and the South Pacific. Often, America's cover is quite, well – different. This week offers a stark example. [...]

This is not an isolated incident, for perusing TIME's covers reveals countless examples of the publication tempting the world with critical events, ideas or figures, while dangling before Americans the chance to indulge in trite self-absorption.

Click over to see more.

It's easy to blame Time for dumbing down the public but they're in the thankless business of selling magazines. I'm not sure who reads Time in the paper version these days but my anecdotal experience is far too few Americans care about world politics anymore. Time's US cover stories reflect what they think the US market will buy. I'm not sure they're wrong.

Blaming Obama

This takes Obama Derangement Syndrome to a new level.

The latest survey from Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling, provided exclusively to TPM, showed an eye-popping divide among Republicans in the Bayou State when it comes to accountability for the government's post-Katrina blunders.

Twenty-eight percent said they think former President George W. Bush, who was in office at the time, was more responsible for the poor federal response while 29 percent said Obama, who was still a freshman U.S. Senator when the storm battered the Gulf Coast in 2005, was more responsible. Nearly half of Louisiana Republicans — 44 percent — said they aren't sure who to blame.

To be clear, the question specifically asked, "Who do you think was more responsible for the poor response to Hurricane Katrina: George W. Bush or Barack Obama?"

In other words 73% of Louisiana Republicans don't remember who was president when Katrina hit NOLA. And people wonder why we can't have an informed debate on anything in this country anymore?

Send in the creepy clowns

I usually ignore these sort of lame-ass stupid crackpot shots at Obama but this show of disrespect to our POTUS at a Missouri rodeo wasn't just an obscure and brief reference in some movie. This was a sustained charade at a family event with lots of children in attendance.

"The announcer wanted to know if anyone would like to see Obama run down by a bull," the posting said. "The crowd went wild. He asked it again and again, louder each time, whipping the audience into a lather."

Another clown then apparently joined the performance.

"One of the clowns ran up and started bobbling the lips on the mask and the people went crazy," the posting said. "Finally a bull came close enough to him that he had to move so he jumped up and ran away to the delight of the onlookers hooting and hollering from the stands."

Real lesson for the kids in civil discourse and tempered political disagreement there. Of course it's nothing new and not really worth making a huge deal over it. The main reason I'm mentioning it at all is because nobody has asked, "WTF is that broomstick in the photo all about?"

Oh deer, overkill in Wisconsin

The militarization of local law enforcement reached a new low this week with the senseless slaughter of Giggles the fawn. In a scene reminiscent of a SWAT team raiding a criminal cartel's headquarters, nine fully armed wildlife cops and four local sheriffs descended on an animal rescue farm in search of illegal contraband -- to wit, one tiny baby deer. What happened next defied logic.

“I said the deer is scheduled to go to the wildlife reserve the next day,” Schulze said.

It was to go to a wildlife reserve in Illinois that allows the rehabilitation of deer. Schulze said agents corralled workers near the picnic area and then set out in search of the fawn.

“I was thinking in my mind they were going to take the deer and take it to a wildlife shelter, and here they come carrying the baby deer over their shoulder. She was in a body bag,” Schulze said. “I said, ‘Why did you do that?’ He said, ‘That’s our policy,’ and I said, ‘That’s one hell of a policy.’”

Granted, it apparently is illegal to harbor a wild animal in Wisconsin but they could have taken the poor little creature to the legal shelter themselves. Or fined Schulze and allowed him to transport it himself in the morning. Hard to see what was served by killing it. Fucking barbarians.

A McBudget for the working poor

"McDonalds has partnered with Visa to launch a website to help its low-wage workers making an average $8.25 an hour to budget." If this sample McBudget wasn't so cruel and insulting, it would be so absurd as to be funny.



Have to love that it starts by assuming their workers need two jobs to make ends meet. Of course that ignores the fact that few of their workers actually clear even as much as $1000 in a month, much less are offered schedules that allow them to get a second crappy minimum wage job with enough hours to make up the difference. And apparently they believe all their workers live in the tropics and thus need no money for heat.

In response to an email from Think Progress asking how they came up with this work of fantasy fiction, McDonald's had this to say.

The samples that are on this site are generic examples and are intended to help provide a general outline of what an individual budget may look like.”

I'd suggest their CEO try to live on that budget for a month or two and then get back to us on how well it worked. Measuring on the stupid or evil scale, this farce goes off the chart on both.

Koch attacks the messenger

When you're a mega-billionaire you don't need Fox News to shill for you against bad press. Instead, like the Kochs, you make up your own facts and launch individualized smear campaigns against legitimate journalists. Like this guy who wrote about the XL Pipeline.

In a rebuttal posted on its Web site, KochFacts.com, the company asserted that Sassoon’s story “deceives readers” by suggesting that Koch Industries stood to benefit from construction of the Keystone XL pipeline — a denial Sassoon included in his story. KochFacts went on to dismiss Sassoon as a “professional eco-activist” and an “agenda-driven activist.”

It didn’t stop there. The company took out ads on Facebook and via Google featuring a photo of Sassoon with the headline, “David Sassoon’s Deceptions.” The ad’s copy read, “Activist/owner of InsideClimate News misleads readers and asserts outright falsehoods about Koch. Get the full facts on KochFacts.com.”

Not going to link to it but the website is impressive. It's a combination of presenting the material from every wingnut meme that gets passed around in viral emails by your crazy uncle but couched in the language of the well-educated and a collection of articles by their friendly fluffers in BigMedia. For instance this feel-good bit from the WSJ.

As part of their effort to position themselves as a credible alternative to Warren Buffett, the Koch brothers make two promises: We won’t string you along, and we won’t go hostile.

“We get a fair amount of calls,” Dave Robertson, president and chief operating officer of Koch Industries, said in a recent interview at Koch headquarters, an anonymous-looking compound surrounded by farmland on the fringes of Wichita, Kan. “We’d like to get more — and not just from Wall Street. There may be business owners out there who have need for capital for certain things and they’re not connected with the Wall Street bunch. We’d be happy to field those calls…. We feel we have the ability to assess the opportunity and respond very quickly.”

Desperate business owners and Koch's unlimited cash reserves. What could possibly go wrong?

I've always wondered how otherwise seemingly intelligent people could get suckered in by the crackpot con propaganda. Suddenly it becomes clearer...

Hope I die before I get old

We go through this every ten years, olds blaming the youth for what's wrong with everything. The new gen blame the olds for fucking everything up. They want to change the world. The olds are threatened by change and yearn for the good old days when everything was predictable and made sense. To them. So it has been and so it shall be probably for as long as humans inhabit this planet.

Apparently, while I've been busy with real life endeavors, there's been a spate of hit pieces against the Millenials on the intertoobz. So graphic artist Matt Bors, (who turns out to be much younger than I thought), posts a great take on the latest interation of intergenerational warfare rendered in his own inimitable style.

Via Atrios who rightly reminds the crackpot cranks, "And, no, olds, you would not be able to work yourself through college without help or debt today. Public university used to be free or cheap, it no longer is."

Seriously. This new generation has been so screwed by the olds, don't see how anyone can blame the kids for anything. They have every right to be pissed off.

What year is this again?

I'm hearing this Cheerios commercial has unleashed a firestorm of racism. I saw it for the first time the other night and didn't even notice the couple was interracial. People are so weird.

Crumbling infrastructure is our national shame

Miraculously no one was killed when that bridge went down in Washington state this week. It's unlikely we'll be so lucky the next time and there will be a next time because we can't get the funding out of DC. The chart shows our national neglect of our critical infrastructure.



You might have thought the horrifying bridge collapse on I-35W in Minneapolis in 2007 would have been a wake up call, but no. At a time when one in nine of our bridges are deficient in some way, Republicans continue to block all infrastructure spending simply because they see it as win for Obama and they're still trying to squash our economy for their own politcal gain in the next election.

It's stupid. Hell it's evil. We could put people to work rebuilding our roads and bridges and as Atrios said, replace aging waterlines in our cities. Those are so ancient, they're busting open all over America.

And nothing else matters

There's a reason our corporate and political overlords aren't troubled by insanely high unemployment some five years after the crash. Wall Street is doing just fine so, no problem. This from an interview with some financial wizard explains it all:

Q: But unemployment remains high, and there are other troubling signs in the economy.

A: Yes, but it's better when you look at what drives the stock market, and that's corporate earnings. Stocks continue to be priced inexpensively relative to the earnings they generate and we're seeing decent earnings growth. And America's competitiveness is very strong. Natural gas is incredibly cheap, and we've got an efficient and strong labor force. We've had lots of productivity improvements in corporate America and modest wage growth.

Translated from greed speak, "We're making tons of money. Unemployment is good because, profit.

And apparently they've found the long sought certainty. Congressional gridlock don't bother them no more:

I suspect we'll have more last-minute compromises that won't make Republicans or Democrats happy, but will advance the ball a little bit. It doesn't matter much for corporate America, and for the market and average consumers. The economy and the strength of corporate profitability is what really matters.

Think about that for a minute. In their world, "The economy and the strength of corporate profitability is what really matters."

And by average consumer, I'm pretty sure this guy means the little people like the single mother making only $260K a year the Wall Street Journal was so concerned about recently. Anybody much below that rung on the economic ladder is invisible. Nothing more than a single obscure number on a cost/benefit printout analyzing long term trends in spreadsheet capitalism.

[Photo via TEDSARMY.COM]

The wilfull ignorance of the mainstream media

When last we saw long time DC wise men Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, they were being blackballed by the bobblehead circuit for their book blasting the establishment media's addiction to false equivalency. Now Dan Froomkin brings them back to discuss how our media elites missed the single biggest story of the race: "Namely, the radical right-wing, off-the-rails lurch of the Republican Party, both in terms of its agenda and its relationship to the truth. ...It also exposed how fabulists and liars can exploit the elite media's fear of being seen as taking sides."

"If voters are going to be able to hold accountable political figures, they've got to know what's going on," Ornstein said. "And if the story that you're telling repeatedly is that they're all to blame -- they're all equally to blame -- then you're really doing a disservice to voters, and not doing what journalism is supposed to do."

And at the root of this journalistic negligence are the billionaires who fund disinfo campaigns designed specifically to normalize a false view of reality. One in particular stands out for me.

Most reporters, however -- including many widely admired for their intelligence and aggressive reporting -- simply refused to blame one side more than the other. Mann said he was struck in conversations with journalists by how influenced they were by the heavily funded movement to promote a bipartisan consensus around deficit reduction and austerity. Such a bipartisan consensus doesn't actually exist, Mann pointed out. But if you believe it does, than you can blame both parties for failing to reach it.

"The Peterson world, I think, has given journalists the material to keep doing what they're doing," Mann said of the vast network of think tanks and other influential Washington groups underwritten at least in part by Wall Street billionaire Peter Peterson.

Several years ago, when Peterson first launched his "starve granny" campaign I was inexplicably invited on a conference call where he was introducing it to the public. I wasn't planning to talk but no one else asked any questions and his agenda was immediately obvious. So I jumped in and had a rather longish and somewhat testy convo with Mr. Peterson himself. I was polite about it, but couldn't help but challenge some of the more blatant false premises in his presentation.

Surprisingly, I was never invited on another tele-conference after that.

Anyway, do read Dan's whole post. Lord knows the media elites won't. It tells them how to fix a problem they're not interested in solving as long they continue to draw six figure (and better) salaries for pretending it doesn't exist.

Your daily jutxaposition - Updated

Unnamed sources and our useless establishment media edition. Compare and contrast. From (as Charlie Pierce calls them) Tiger Beat on the Potomac:

Obama to take corporate cash for inauguration

President Barack Obama will accept unlimited corporate donations for his Inauguration in January, reversing his position from his first Inauguration, according to two sources close to the planning.

From the White House itself:

Presidential Inaugural Committee unveils unprecedented limits on fundraising; Broadens public access

The Presidential Inaugural Committee (PIC) announced today that it will abide by an unprecedented set of limitations on fundraising as part of President-elect Obama’s pledge to put the country on a new path. Unlike previous inaugural committees, the PIC will not accept contributions from corporations, political action committees, current federally-registered lobbyists, non-U.S. citizens and registered foreign agents. The PIC will not accept individual contributions in excess of $50,000. Current law does not restrict the size of donations. In past inaugurations, contribution limits have run as high as $250,000.

In other words, Drudge's little minions at Politico either have the lousiest sources in all of DC or they're too lazy to check and find out if the scuttlebutt is real. Probably both. And people wonder why Americans are so hopelessly misinformed?

Update: Well I guess I owe the slackers at Tiger Beat an apology. Today we have a named spokesperson confirming the change in policy.

The 2013 Presidential Inaugural Committee will accept unlimited money from corporate and individual sources but will not accept contributions from political action committees or lobbyists, according to spokeswoman Addie Whisenant. The committee also will not allow sponsorship agreements, she said.

The bottomless cesspool of the cons

There is no peak wingnut. There is no depth beyond which conservatives cannot sink as they wallow in the stink of their blind and mindless hate:

After four years of invective, four years during which the right has called President Obama a traitor, a communist, a fraud, an affirmative-action case, a terrorist-sympathizer, and a tyrant, its shrillest voices have been reduced to the most primal insult of all. They are calling Obama’s mother a whore.

For a while now, pictures purporting to show Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, modeling in 1950s bondage and fetish porn have been floating around the darker corners of the Internet. Now, though, they’ve made their way into a pseudo-documentary, Joel Gilbert’s Dreams From My Real Father, which is being mailed to voters in swing states, promoted by several Tea Party groups and by at least one high-level Republican. At the same time, Dinesh D’Souza’s latest book, Obama’s America—the first of all his works to hit the top spot on The New York Times bestseller list—has a chapter essentially calling Dunham a fat slut. If Obama is reelected, it’s hard to imagine where the right goes from here.

Some unknown benefactor is funding the free distribution of hundreds of thousands of this video to the voters in the swing states. It's being aired at "conservative churches." Such good Christians. May they reap what they sow.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Very serious news analysts

No idea why Vanity Fair dragged out this 2 year old interview other than they wanted to use the photo they had hanging around. Actually, the bizarre photo is only reason I'm posting this.

I don't doubt that JoeScar has been entertaining the idea of possibly running for president someday, but I suspect he's making too much money pretending to be a pundit to give it up for the horror show that is our electoral process today.

The post is clearly an excuse to publish a little Mika cheesecake. Gotta admit it's pretty decent hit bait but how bloody embarrassing. If you didn't know it was for their show, you would think it was either a poster for some lounge act at the local Holiday Inn or maybe even an ad for some cheezy soft porn film. Which pretty much describes out teevee punditry these days, come to think of it.

r [More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Suffer the little children

Bringing new meaning to "indoctrinating the children" this is quite possibly the most disgraceful exploitation of a child I've ever seen that doesn't involve actual physical abuse.



Find the gun bit especially disturbing. Can only hope this kid wises up like the CPAC whiz kid once he gets past puberty.

[Cross-posted at Balloon Juice]

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Decline and fall of western civilization

Surely an omen predicting our impending doom. That's apparently Snooki in the middle.

Post title stolen from Josh Marshall's tweet.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]