Brrrrilliant!

Katie Couric To Obama: People Are “Scratching Their Heads” About Your Opposition To Surge
Even if we could cast the “Surge” as an unqualified success, the overall strategy has netted America four major failures. And within the larger context of a failure to find WMDs, a failure to improve America’s security, a failure to thwart or even impede al Qaeda in the wake of 9/11, and a failure to prevent malign regional forces like Iran and Hezbollah from increasing their regional influence, the “Surge” is entirely without relevance - a fourth quarter field goal when you’re down four touchdowns.

Court Tosses FCC “Wardrobe Malfunction” Fine Against CBS
PHILADELPHIA — A federal appeals court on Monday threw out a $550,000 indecency fine against CBS Corp. for the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show that ended with Janet Jackson’s breast-baring “wardrobe malfunction.”

“The Commission’s determination that CBS’s broadcast of a nine-sixteenths of one second glimpse of a bare female breast was actionably indecent evidenced the agency’s departure from its prior policy,” the court found. “Its orders constituted the announcement of a policy change _ that fleeting images would no longer be excluded from the scope of actionable indecency.”

But Tim Winter of the watchdog organization Parents Television Council said the court’s decision “borders on judicial stupidity.”

“If a striptease during the Super Bowl in front of 90 million people _ including millions of children _ doesn’t fit the parameters of broadcast indecency, then what does?” Winter said in a statement.

In throwing out this fine, these black-robed tyrants have thrown open the doors of Pandora’s Box and unleashed the demons of moral turpitude upon our society!

Now, with no threat of punishment, these filth-merchants will constantly push the envelope, exposing our children to increasing levels of debauchery.  Today it’s nine-sixteenths of one second of Janet Jackson’s right breast.  Tomorrow they’ll push it to nineteen-thirty-secondths of one second of Lisa Lisa’s left breast, and before you know it, our kids will be exposed to a full three-quarters of a second of The Fly Girls topless!

With such shocking and provocative halftime entertainment, our children will be too distracted to enjoy the wholesome beer, liquor, Cialis, Levitra, and Viagra ads.  Research shows that American children today are exposed to, on average, 1,648.6 naked breasts by the time they graduate high school.  When exposure to even six-tenths of a breast can lead to severe attention deficit in 90% of men, we can only imagine these thousands of unrestrained bosoms must be responsible for the severe declines in education  over the past three decades (see “Charlie’s Angels, Three’s Company, & The Rise in American Stupidity” by Dr. V. Boombatz, Dangerfield Institute of Pseudo-Scientific Heuristic Information Technologies, 2006).

I implore all the readers of this blog to protest the decision of this Third Circuit court.  If we don’t uphold the rule of law and severely punish those who would broadcast the naked flesh which God commands us to be ashamed of, then we cannot be surprised when this country descends into the kind of Sodom & Gommorah that would openly accept people of all shapes and sizes, clothed and unclothed, and feel no shame about nudity, sex, gender, or sexuality.

Yours in Jeebus,

Rev. Dr. Oral G. Moorehead
Parents Righteously United in Defiance of Excess

“Socialize the risk, privatize the profits.”  That’s the big money Wall Street Socialism espoused by so-called “conservatives” these days.  Whenever I scream about some CEO making 500x the average worker’s wage while laying off tens of thousands and presiding over huge stock losses, some conservative tries to tell me that these CEOs are highly gifted entrepreneurs taking serious risks, and that there are so few of them that supply and demand means these guys are like the Kobe Bryants and Alex Rodriguezes of the financial world and deserve their massive nine-figure incomes.

And I would buy into that, if ever these guys actually had to suffer the downsides of their risks.  The recent bail-out proposed for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac illustrates this perfectly.  People mistake these two institutions as public government programs, but they are not; they are for-profit private corporations.  So if we taxpayers are going to bail them out, to suffer the downsides of the risks, why not just nationalize them and get it over with?  Robert Borosage in the Huffington Post hits the nail on the head:

Robert L. Borosage: Wall Street Socialism
If the guarantees work, private speculators, having driven the stock down, will clean up on the upside. And the bank’s CEO’s will continue to pocket the multi-million dollar salaries that are de rigueur on Wall Street. Call it Wall Street socialism. Their losses are socialized; their profits are pocketed. You and I will pay for their failures. And if conservatives have their way, their families will pocket their successes, without even having to pay a tax for the transfer of the estates we’ve helped to create.

These enterprises are operating on our tab now — completely. Why not just nationalize them, as even that font of economic convention, Sabastian Mallaby suggested yesterday in the Washington Post. Sure, we’d have to add the $5 trillion in debt to the federal balance sheet, but we could add the assets also. And after Paulson’s announcement, global investors are already toting up their debts onto the federal balance sheet.

Why pay dividends to shareholders when they are essentially playing with our money? Why pay managers of public enterprises the bloated pay packages of Wall Street speculators? Why allow them to finance lobbyists to shield them from accountability? The fiction of their separate existence has been exploded; let’s save the dough and run them efficiently.

From HuffPo:

In a spectacular act of complicity with the religious right, the Department of Health and Human Services Monday released a proposal that allows any federal grant recipient to obstruct a woman’s access to contraception. In order to do this, the Department is attempting to redefine many forms of contraception, the birth control 40% of Americans use, as abortion. Doing so protects extremists under the Weldon and Church amendments. Those laws prohibit federal grant recipients from requiring employees to help provide or refer for abortion services. In the “Definitions” section of the HHS proposal it states,

“Abortion: An abortion is the termination of a pregnancy. There are two commonly held views on the question of when a pregnancy begins. Some consider a pregnancy to begin at conception (that is, the fertilization of the egg by the sperm), while others consider it to begin with implantation (when the embryo implants in the lining of the uterus). A 2001 Zogby International American Values poll revealed that 49% of Americans believe that human life begins at conception. Presumably many who hold this belief think that any action that destroys human life after conception is the termination of a pregnancy, and so would be included in their definition of the term “abortion.” Those who believe pregnancy begins at implantation believe the term “abortion” only includes the destruction of a human being after it has implanted in the lining of the uterus.”

Every 28 days, I feel sorry for all the sexually-active menstruating pro-Life-federally-enforced-procreation women who believe life begins at conception. Oh, how they must weep for all those aborted babies on their maxi-pads and tampons!

From the Seattle P-I:

mccainparody.gif (image)

Flippin’ genius - I thought about a similar drawing, but have no artistic skillz… –”R”R

Courtesy of Keith Tucker and What Now Toons.

Just listening to the podcast, realized I never did get to the story on Military Evangelism.  Too many whiners, I guess.  But I will save the segment for next week, don’t you worry.

Rasmussen Reportsâ„¢: The most comprehensive public opinion coverage ever provided for a presidential election.
The percentage of voters who give Congress good or excellent ratings has fallen to single digits for the first time in Rasmussen Reports tracking history. This month, just 9% say Congress is doing a good or excellent job. Most voters (52%) say Congress is doing a poor job, which ties the record high in that dubious category.

Last month, 11% of voters gave the legislature good or excellent ratings. Congress has not received higher than a 15% approval rating since the beginning of 2008.

It’s simple math, really.  If President X has an approval rating of 23%, and he is constantly triumphing over Congress Y, then X > Y.

 

 2008-07-12 [113:54m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

A fantastic show featuring eleven callers on the subject of Phil Gramm’s “Nation of Whiners” comment.

Jay Lakin from PokerSourceOnline.net returns to update us on lifiting restrictions on internet gaming.

And very special guest Harry Shearer (”The Simpsons”, “Spinal Tap”, “A Mighty Wind”) joins us to discuss censorship of his new album (“Songs of the Bushmen”) by Clear Channel billboards in Chicago.

(Sorry the podcast has been sporadic; I’ve been having some computer difficulties.  The shows we missed will be uploaded as soon as I can get them processed. — “R”R)

As my local fans know, I am very involved in the signature drive for OCTA - The Oregon Cannabis Tax Act.  We’re proposing to the State of Oregon to tax and regulate the production and sales of cannabis to adults 21 and over through state liquor dispensaries.  It’s been all over our local news and I got quoted extensively in the local weekly, Willamette Week.

I went out to Saturday Market on my way to an errand, just to spend 90 minutes gathering signatures.  I only got 27.  I had my notebook with the big OCTA logo held out for all to see, plus my seven-second “Tax Marijuana to fund the State - sign my petition” announcement to any who I approached.  Most people either eagerly signed, weren’t from Oregon, or politely refused.  I had only one aggressively-opposed person, and it was a guy I didn’t even approach.

I’m sitting on the MAX, with my OCTA logo visible (and my Oregon NORML hat), minding my own biz (I won’t solicit on the train, I think it’s rude and I think it may be against their rules), when this older dude with severely f’ed-up teeth approached me, saying something.  I couldn’t make it out, because I was transfixed on the massive overbite of his bottom jaw and its eight millimeter gap.  Seriously, this guy had gargoyle teeth.  Oh, and a huge distended alcoholic seven-days-from-cirrhosis-death belly, disheveled white hair, and dirty clothes.

“We don’t need to have marijuana killing more people in Oregon!”  I finally deciphered he was saying.

Now, before I can go into full-blown encyclopedic “Radical” Russ mode, a handsome young twenty-something dude sitting across from me say, “Man, marijuana’s never killed anyone in history!”

I asked the toothy one, “Do you really believe marijuana is killing people?”
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