I refuse to lose
Here's your ticket
Hear the drummer get wicked

Read more »

...peep this...

Read more »

Man dumps glitter on Newt Gingrich in 'gay prank'.

The US Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich and his wife Callista were hit with glittery confetti by a protester during the couple's appearance at a book-signing in Minneapolis on Tuesday. The man approached the Gingrich's during the signing at a downtown hotel. As Gingrich handed him a signed copy of the book, the protester dumped a cracker box full of confetti on the pair, shouting: "Feel the rainbow, Newt! Stop the hate! Stop anti-gay politics! It's dividing our country and it's not fixing our economy!" The man was quickly pushed out of the room by an event organiser. Although authorities couldn't immediately confirm the man's identity, he appeared to be Nick Espinosa, an event crasher who disrupted at least two other political events in Minnesota, including one in which he dumped a bagful of pennies in the lap of a Republican candidate for governor last year. In that prank, Espinosa - who has also used the name Robert Erickson - told reporters he was trying to highlight immigration issues. Espinosa emailed reporters later on Tuesday and attached pictures of the confetti attack.

Read more »

US combat forces are scheduled to leave Iraq by year's end, but the State Department will still need security. So it's planning to add thousands more private contractors.

Why?

Why not have US soldiers who are under their jurisdiction do this work instead of a private company? Who will these private contractors report to? I just find it odd that a delicate matter like this is farmed out. It was contractors who murdered Iraqi's in 2007 and then tried to claim it was an ambush? The same company was responsible for the killing of two Afghan's in 2009.

Read more »

He Be Crushing!

Former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has acknowledged that he has a child with a member of his household staff, a revelation that apparently prompted wife Maria Shriver to leave the couple's home before they announced their separation last week.

Schwarzenegger and Shriver jointly announced May 9th that they were splitting up after 25 years of marriage. Yet, Shriver moved out of the family's Brentwood mansion earlier in the year after Schwarzenegger acknowledged the child was his.



In an interview Monday before Schwarzenegger issued his statement, the former staffer said another man — her husband at the time, was the child's father. When the Los Angeles Times later informed the woman of the governor's statement, she declined to comment further.

The child was born before Schwarzenegger began his seven-year stint in public office. Shriver stood by her husband during his 2003 gubernatorial campaign after the Los Angeles Times reported accusations that he had a history of groping women. Schwarzenegger later said he "behaved badly sometimes."

Read more »

1. Republican's want to give FREE drilling permits to Big Oil.
2. By doing this the majority of Republican's are letting them take the oil out of the ground at no cost to local governments or states. Meaning that whatever they find, we get nothing for it.
3. And instead of using what is found within the US - including off-shore drilling - they are then permitted to put it on the world market. To the affect that this lets Wall Street run the price per barrel sky high through speculators and the commodity market. Again, we make nothing on that.
4. From this they sell, WHAT THEY TOOK FREE out of our ground back to us at inflated prices.

FINALLY, the politicians want to continue giving them subsidies for doing all this. Big Oil then have the audacity to state that if we cease to do so prices at the pump will continue to increase. They go onto to say that any future research and development will come to a stand still. So let me get this straight, you get it for free, sell it for bank, make a killing at the pump off of hard-working citizens and every quarter you release numbers that forecast profits in the Billions of dollars? Now there is the threat that if this tax breaks/government subsidies cease the price at the pump will go higher and further exploration will stop of slow considerably. Am I getting this straight with all that was written? So technically the good hard-working citizens are paying for any/all research and development along with ongoing exploration with the continent? To which Big Oil makes serious money and shares none.

BP who's drilling platform caused severe damage to the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, posted quarterly profits of $5.481bn, down just 2% from the same quarter last year.

So tight, you got to love politics.

From the people and not for the people.

Ca$h
Rules
Everything
Around
Me

Read more »

In response to a reporters question, President Bu$h tells the world that he is "truly not that concerned" with catching the man who murdered 3,000 Americans just six months and two days earlier because "we've marginalized him."


Bu$h catches himself mid-sentence when he says "I don't know where he is, nor do I... (really care)."

"He hides in caves while sending young people off to die." Which is true, but that is no excuse for easing up on trying to find him.

Can you image if Bu$h had captured him when they had him cornered in Tora Bora? People would've lost their mind and he would've gone down as one of the best President's this country has ever had. Plus there wouldn't be an Iraq war. They let natives go after him and the Invasion Iraq happened, and we are where we're at with that. Makes you think doesn't it? Deliberate?

The Sunday morning after President Obama announced that Bin Laden was killed by American operatives in Pakistan, seven from the previous administration were making the rounds on the political shows to validate the techniques that were used on the war on terror, otherwise known as torture.

Read more »

Ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jewish newspaper, Der Tzitung, has determined that the photo of top U.S. leaders receiving an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden was too scandalous.

What was so offensive about the image? U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in the photo and, based on good intel, the editor of Der Tzitung discovered that she is a woman. The Hasidic newspaper will not intentionally include any images of women in the paper because it could be considered sexually suggestive. The iconic photo shows President Obama, Vice President Biden, and members of the U.S. National Security Team in the Situation Room of the White House.

Secretary of State Clinton, wearing a long-sleeved suit jacket, sits with her hand over her mouth. I'm not sure how Der Tzitung determined this was a racy photo. Perhaps they just don't like the idea of a woman with that much political power.

Read more »

Read more »

"Al-Qaeda founder and leader Osama Bin Laden is dead, according to US media reports citing officials.

The US is in possession of Bin Laden's body, the reports say.

Mr Bin Laden is top of the US most wanted list.

He is accused of being behind a number of atrocities, including the attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001."

Read more »

Liberals claim that the founding fathers separated church and state, while conservatives argue that the founders made faith a foundation of our government. Both sides argue that America once enjoyed a freedom to worship that they seek to preserve. Yet neither side gets it right. As we marked Passover and Easter, let's end some misconceptions about religion and politics in America.

1. The Constitution has always protected religious freedom.

Many Americans believe that the First Amendment’s separation of church and state safeguards religious liberty. But when the First Amendment was ratified in 1791, it did not apply to the states and would not until well into the 20th century. As a result, the First Amendment did not prevent states from paying churches out of the public treasury, as Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut and South Carolina did when that amendment was written. And those states that did not fund churches still favored Christianity. Blasphemy was forbidden in Delaware in 1826, and officeholders in Pennsylvania had to swear that they believed in “the being of a God and a future state of rewards and punishments.”

American federalism gave states enormous power to regulate the health, welfare and morals of their citizens. Because many thought religion was the foundation of American society, they used their power to imprint their moral ideals on state constitutions and judicial opinions for much of American history. Even today, these laws linger on the books. I still can’t buy beer on Sundays in Atlanta.

2. The founders’ faith matters.

Christians who consider the founders saintly won’t have much luck backing that up. Thomas Jefferson wrote a version of the New Testament that removed references to Jesus’s divinity. Ben Franklin was a deist. And George Washington may not have taken Communion.

But whatever the founders’ religious beliefs were, the First Amendment merely preserved the church-and-state status quo. There had never been an official religion in the 13 colonies, and the new states favored different faiths. The South was traditionally Anglican but had a growing Methodist and Baptist population. New England was traditionally Congregationalist, but evangelicals moved there nonetheless. The middle colonies mixed Lutherans, Catholics (in Maryland), Presbyterians and Quakers. A small number of Jews lived in early America, as well.

So the framers punted the issue of religion to the states, promising only that the power of the federal government would not be used to advance, say, Congregationalist beliefs over Presbyterian ones. This was a pluralistic vision of sorts but one that still allowed states to declare official religions and grant privileges to specific denominations.

3. Christian conservatives have only recently taken over politics.

Christian partisans mobilized early in U.S. history, seeking to impose an interdenominational — but still Christian and, more specifically, Protestant — moral order on the new nation.

Initially, Christians were more successful in exercising political and legal control at the state level. They passed blasphemy laws. They required Sabbath rest on Sundays. In Massachusetts, they mandated devotional exercises in public schools, a practice that spread to every state with public education.

In time, however, the faithful found a federal audience for moral reform with the passage of the 18th Amendment in 1919, a national experiment in prohibition. These moral campaigns anticipated many of the political disputes over religion that have emerged in recent decades, and they weren’t any less divisive than debates about the death penalty, abortion or gay marriage.

4. America is more secular than it used to be.

The American Revolution was actually a low point in American religious adherence. Sociologists have shown that no more than 20 percent of the population in 1776 belonged to a church. Then, under the influence of evangelical expansion during the Second Great Awakening in the early 19th century, church membership grew rapidly until, by 1850, more than one-third of Americans belonged to a church. In 1890, after another round of Protestant evangelization and Catholic immigration from Ireland, Italy and elsewhere, the proportion rose to 45 percent. And in 1906, church members became a majority — 51 percent of the population.

The trend continues. In 2000, 62 percent of the populace belonged to religious institutions, if not specifically Christian churches. Evangelical Christians still lead this expansion, and their influence has become more pronounced, not less, over the past two centuries. The presidency of George W. Bush — the most evangelical commander in chief — testifies that Americans are becoming more religious, not less.

5. Liberals are anti-religious.

In 1947’s Everson v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court demanded a more thorough separation of church and state. States could no longer endorse specific religions, and prayer and Bible reading in schools and blasphemy laws went on the chopping block. This led religious conservatives to accuse the high court — as well as liberals in general — of, well, irreligion.

But liberals such as Justices Robert H. Jackson and William Brennan argued that they sought to honor the multiple religious traditions that had been repressed in the United States. They pointed out that Catholics had been made to recite the Protestant version of the Ten Commandments in public schools; that observant Jews labored at an economic disadvantage because they had to close their shop on the Sabbath; that Buddhists, who could not swear that they believed in God, were banned from office in several states; that Jehovah’s Witnesses were made to say the pledge of allegiance in violation of their religious beliefs; and that secular humanists could be drafted without regard to their conscientious objection.

Liberals on the court sought to do away with this heritage of official discrimination, but they did not seek to do away with religion. As Jackson wrote in 1952: "My evangelistic brethren confuse an objection to compulsion with an objection to religion. It is possible to hold a faith with enough confidence to believe that what should be rendered to God does not need to be decided and collected by Caesar."

Amen to that. (Sauce)

*Author of this piece David Sehat is an assistant professor of history at Georgia State University and the author of "The Myth of American Religious Freedom."

Read more »

Grady Warren questions the race card and political correctness and double standards in the media. He then goes on to declare a TEAHAD on political correctness in the groups out to destroy America. (11/3/10)

I'm pretty sure anyone using "nigra" in modern times is probably not convincing anyone they aren't racist.

Read more »