Bush Rapes Planet; Earth Must Pay for Rape Kit.

I suppose this should come as no surprise.

The White House is working to enact a wide array of federal regulations, many of which would weaken government rules aimed at protecting consumers and the environment, before President Bush leaves office in January.

Every president does something at the end of their tenure that is difficult or impossible for his successor to undo (Marbury v. Madison ring a bell?), but generally speaking, no outgoing president declares war just before giving up the oval office.

among the most controversial deregulatory steps of the Bush era and could be difficult for his successor to undo. Some would ease or lift constraints on private industry, including power plants, mines and farms.

George W Shrub, however, will leave a President Obama with many many many poop piles on the living room rug.

regulations would help clear obstacles to some commercial ocean-fishing activities, ease controls on emissions of pollutants that contribute to global warming, relax drinking-water standards and lift a key restriction on mountaintop coal mining.

Wrong in so many ways and so thoroughly for eight years, "The Decider" has made himself even 'wronger'.
Worst. President. Ever.

edit: quoted text from the Washington Post

Rant (after reading post below this one on those who think Obama's muslim)

IN ALL SERIOUSNESS HERE: What other conclusion can one come to, other than these people are at the absolute best, thoroughly uninformed and wholly ignorant, and at worst, dumb, useless Americans? Should we coddle them and pity them for being mentally-deficient, or bitch-slap them for thinking they're smart and accepting this utter bullshit as gospel, from watching the likes of FAUX News and listening to Rush and Hannity, and continuing to perpetrate this garbage as fact?

Speaking of Rush and Hannity, how do those walking abortions sleep at night? They MUST know they are taking advantage of millions of people every day who need help; who don't have the basic tools upstairs to get along in the world. Heck, Rove, Bush, Cheney, McShame, Failin and all our other republican leaders do the same thing. It's like teasing mentally-retarded children at the playground. It's enough to make you sick to your stomach. Much like baby birds sit there with their mouths open, starving for regurgitated worms from their mothers, these unfortunate Americans swallow up whatever the mainstream media of FOX NOISE, Rush "the dopeman" Limbaugh and Sean "another drink, please" Hannity spit out at them. And yes, those insufferable fools (and related channels, websites) ARE the mainstream media, make no mistake (you didn't think the highest-rated cable news show and TWO highest-rated radio shows were "underground," did you?).

Just a sampling of 100% proven lies we've heard any number of the aforementioned talk show hosts, news channels and current White House leaders successfully sell a large percentage of less educated and ignorant Americans this decade:

Obama is a Muslim!
Gotta fight them there so we don't have to fight them here!
Must attack, for there are WMD's in dat dere Desert!
We'll spread Democracy throughout the Middle East!
We're not spying on you and we're not listening in on your phone calls!
Obama's policies are socialist!
He cannot be that patriotic if he doesn't wear a flagpin on his lapel!
He pals around with terrorists!

...this is just the tip of the melting iceberg, as most of you know. It's tough isn't it? It's tough at times to realize and accept you live in the same country as so many dimwits, dumbasses, uneducated, ignorant and mentally-deficient freaks. Even tougher when you realize that the powerful media people/outlets (mentioned above) get paid millions of dollars to exploit this mass of people and feed them mind-poison on a daily basis. And of course, it's the toughest of all, when you see our Government do it day in, day out. Our own United States Government. Lie, lie, lie to get as many people on board as possible so they can continue to enact, instill and establish policies that ultimately destroy this great country of ours, oblivious at times of the true carnage they're inflicting.

Poll finds 23% of Texans think Obama is Muslim; 5%-10% nationwide

By RICHARD S. DUNHAM
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle Washington Bureau
Oct. 29, 2008, 11:27PM

WASHINGTON — A University of Texas poll to be released today shows Republican presidential candidate John McCain and GOP Sen. John Cornyn leading by comfortable margins in Texas, as expected. But the statewide survey of 550 registered voters has one very surprising finding: 23 percent of Texans are convinced that Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama is a Muslim.

Obama is a Christian who was embroiled in a controversy earlier this year about his two-decade membership in Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ. Yet just 45 percent of those polled identified the Illinois senator as a Protestant.

The Obama-is-a-Muslim confusion is caused by fallacious Internet rumors and radio talk-show gossip. McCain went so far at one of his town hall meetings to grab a microphone from a woman who claimed that Obama was an Arab.

The Texas numbers are unusual because most national polls show that just 5 to 10 percent of Americans still believe Obama is a Muslim — less than half the number of Texans who buy into the debunked theories.

The UT poll shows McCain running ahead of Obama statewide, with a 51 percent to 40 percent margin. Cornyn, a first-term Republican from San Antonio, leads Rick Noriega, a state representative from Houston, 45 percent to 36 percent. Another 14 percent of voters remain undecided in the contest.

The poll found that 89 percent of Lone Star State voters say the country's economic situation is worse than a year ago. And President Bush and Congress both get record low marks.

Just 34 percent of Texans approve of Bush's job performance — a big change for a former governor who won re-election 10 years ago with 70 percent of the vote. And Congress is even more unpopular: Just 8 percent of Texas voters approve of the work being done on Capitol Hill.

The telephone poll was conducted by the Texas Politics Project and Department of Government at The University of Texas at Austin. The poll was conducted from Oct. 15 to 22, and had a margin of error of 4.2 percentage points.

Is this possible?


Pie-in-the-sky, but this reflects a worst-case for McCain and possible, though not by any means likely result...total realignment. But it isn't completely out of the realm of possibility. We are 5 precious days before the election, and McCain may very well be forced to defend his home state, Arizona. He is already playing defense in Indiana, North Dakota and Montana. His push into Pennsylvania seems ill-advised, though I do suspect Obama wins by a smaller margin than the polls predict there. Georgia is in play, for cryin' out loud!

More likely is something along these lines


But notice the electoral totals; still a big win.

Finally, the close race the traditional media would love to see


Not gonna happen, but notice from this map the regional strengths. Colorado and New Mexico. Virginia. The Democrats still show that they are a national party, whereas the GOP must rely on the South, minus Virginia (with a very divided North Carolina) and the mountain West (minus Colorado) for its strength.

The 50-state strategy is a winner. Thanks, Howard.

ps: You can play with the maps, just hover the cursor and click to make changes.

A Civics Lesson in Ohio?

The "Somewhat-Less-Than-Straight Talk Express" pulled in to Ohio today:

A local school district official confirmed after the event that of the 6,000 people estimated by the fire marshal to be in attendance this morning, more than 4,000 were bused in from schools in the area. The entire 2,500-student Defiance School District was in attendance, the official said, in addition to at least three other schools from neighboring districts, one of which sent 14 buses

.
Way to go, "Maverick". Nice one.
Use kids as a political prop.
Did their parents know about their little field trip?

Let's see. How much of that excursion for the students was paid for using local district property taxes, which Ohio relies on for school funding--unconstitutional per Ohio Supreme Court rulings--but, I digress... ? Was this a district-sanctioned trip for the students? What was the lesson? Any state money used by the district to bus in the crowd?

Since I'm an Ohio taxpayer, I'd kinda like to know...

Ulcer Alert #9

Why It’s Still a Race

Wednesday, October 29, 2008 8:45 AM
By Howard Fineman

Here’s all you need to know about Sen. Barack Obama and his campaign. He taped his half-hour TV special, which airs across your dial at 8 p.m. Eastern tonight, last week.

Now, a week is a year and a year is a lifetime in presidential campaigns. But it is characteristic of Obama to plan ahead in the heat of the battle. The cool, collected senator has known from the start (nearly two years ago) pretty much what he has wanted to say. He kept his eyes on the prize. The small stuff didn’t distract him.

That is why his campaign and its staff, which I have checked in with twice in the last week here in Chicago, remain relatively calm as they head into the final lap of a national NASCAR race that has not quite turned into the rout that history and other factors would lead you to predict.


By all accounts and by all odds, Obama is fairly comfortably ahead in the Electoral College—which, as Al Gore will tell you, is what matters.

On TV Wednesday night, Obama will give what one aide described to me as a “meaty” discourse on his basic tax and health-care proposals. No high-flown rhetoric, but rather a briefing paper for wary undecided swing voters---most of whom, the campaign thinks, are “soft Republicans” who kind of want to vote for Obama but need reassurance.

And yet, in the meantime, Sen. John McCain has not quite disappeared in the rear-view mirror.

I find that astonishing. And, if you are in the Obama campaign, you have to find that at the very least a teeny bit troubling in these last days.

Let me repeat the following litany, just for the sake of wonder if nothing else:

Consumer confidence is at an all-time low. The job performance rating of the outgoing Republican president is at Nixon-Carter levels. Nine out of ten voters think the country is off on the wrong track. The Democrats lead in the generic congressional preference vote by a double-digit margin.

Obama has outspent McCain on TV advertising three or four to one (though McCain is matching him in some key states here at the end). Obama has four thousand paid organizers in key states, an unheard of number. Most voters think that McCain’s running mate is not qualified to be president. Many people wonder aloud if McCain is in fact too old (72) to be president. Much of the media coverage of Obama has been fawning to say the least, and with good reason. He is one of the most winsome, charismatic candidates to have appeared on the scene in decades.

Still, in today’s “traditional Gallup” Daily Tracking Poll (the one that screens likely voters most rigorously, based on past votes), Obama leads McCain by only two percentage points, 49 to 47 percent.

Here in Chicago, they say that they expected a close race at the end, as one staffer put it. They are steady as she goes on ad spending, and they are fighting the end game on Red State turf, which is what the frontrunner does. They scoff at the idea that McCain could win Pennsylvania, and they are almost certainly right about that.

It’s hard to make the Electoral College numbers add up for McCain. He has to win all of the current tossup states (Montana, North Dakota, Missouri, Indiana, North Carolina and Florida), plus Ohio and Virginia and one of the following three: New Hampshire, Colorado or New Mexico. That isn’t just drawing one inside straight; that’s
drawing a whole casino’s worth of them.

Why hasn’t Obama run away with this?

Because the country remains culturally divided. Because the more it looks like Democrats will score huge gains in Congress, the more worried “soft Republican” voters get. Because McCain has succeeded, in the minds of some of those voters, in raising the hoary specter of “tax-and-spend” liberals. Because Obama hails from a place (South Side Chicago) and background (the son of professional academics) more reminiscent of Democratic losers like Michael Dukakis, Al Gore and John Kerry than winners like LBJ, Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton. Because some voters remember the hate-filled sound bites of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

And, to a degree we cannot measure and may never fully know, because Obama is an African-American---and one with a Swahili name at that.

There is nothing that the staffers here in Chicago can do about any of that at this point. Up on the 11th floor of the office building here, staffers are hard at work. They aren’t thinking about those things. Their campaign manager, David Plouffe, won’t let them. “We expected this to tighten,” one of them said to me a few hours ago.

And so, it seems, it has.

Roots record, baby

"..so get off the choir with your soft attire
niggas out here don't give a fuck 'cause they lost desire"

So this disc still hasn't left my Odyssey's CD player (that's how I roll, mini-van and all, yo!). Seriously. Check it. Full review several posts below or find it on left, courtesy of Pitchfork.

8-year old boy kills himself at crowded gun show. What FUN!

Boy, 8, accidentally kills self at gun show
Child was firing an Uzi submachine gun under adult supervision at fair
The Associated Press
updated 5:56 p.m. ET, Mon., Oct. 27, 2008
WESTFIELD, Mass. - An 8-year-old boy died after accidentally shooting himself in the head while firing an Uzi submachine gun under adult supervision at a gun fair.

The boy lost control of the weapon while firing it Sunday at the Machine Gun Shoot and Firearms Expo at the Westfield Sportsman’s Club, police Lt. Lawrence Vallierpratte said.

Police said the boy, Christopher Bizilj of Ashford, Conn., was with a certified instructor and called the death a “self-inflicted accidental shooting.”

As the boy fired the Uzi, "the front end of the weapon went up with the backfire and he ended up receiving a round in his head," police Lt. Hipolito Nunez said. The boy died at a hospital.

The boy's father and older brother were also there at the time, a gun club member and school official said. Francis Mitchell, a longtime member and trustee of the club, said he was told the boy's father was supporting his son from behind when the shooting happened.

Although the death appeared to be an accident, officials were investigating.

It is legal in Massachusetts for children to fire a weapon if they have permission from a parent or legal guardian and are supervised by a properly certified and licensed instructor, Lt. Hipolito Nunez said. The name of the instructor helping the boy was not released.

The event ran in conjunction with C.O.P Firearms and Training, said in an ad that people are allowed to fire weapons at vehicles, pumpkins and other targets at the event.

"It's all legal & fun — No permits or licenses required!!!!" reads the ad, posted on the club's Web site.

Messages left on answering machines for the club and the C.O.P. group were not returned Monday.

"My Friends...You Betcha!"

An Attempt at an October Surprise?

Well. Amid reports of the McCain campaign imploding, with staffers already flinging resumes to all possible employment refuges and backstabbing aplenty (as Governor Caribou Cupcake shops at Saks)...we now have reports of the campaign pushing a made-up attack against a supporter before the details were released.

A spokesman for the McCain campaign gave reporters an inflammatory version of Thursday's hoax story about a McCain volunteer being attacked by a man who carved a "B" into her face, Pittsburgh's KDKA reported.
Long before any facts about the Ashley Todd case had been established, McCain's Pennsylvania campaign communications director told reporters the alleged attacker had told the woman, "You're with the McCain campaign? I'm going to teach you a lesson."

(via Raw Story, emphasis mine)

Of course, the supposed attacker was a "black man".

McCain Campaign. Finished.