NILF Alert!

NILF, or News I'd Like To F**k is the topic of conversation for Samantha Bee on last Thursday's Daily Show. She knew how to hit the cable news media hard for the pathetic attempt to keep viewers with exposed female flesh as opposed to, um, the news:

McCain Goes For Romney's Throat

Thankfully it didn't happen physically at the last Presidential debate, but McCain's words are ratcheting up towards his fellow Republican contender. McCain brutally lashed out at the former Massachusetts Governor by hitting him where it hurts for hardcore Republicans, on immigration.

Not only was the conversation about immigration, it went completely personal. Going off of a couple of Romney's prior statements, McCain compared undocumented Guatemalan workers that Romney employed to the varmint hunting that Mitt says he has taken part of in the past.

From Rawstory:

"Maybe I should wait a couple weeks and see if it changes," Ryan Sager reports Senator McCain saying in reference to former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney's position on immigration. "Maybe he can get out his small varmint gun and drive those Guatemalans off his yard."

How nice of McCain to compare Guatemalans to varmints. It is easy to tell how pleasant a person John McCain really is. This type of attack says a lot about McCain and his chances. He knows his campaign has been sagging in a big way for the last couple of months, so he went after the more favored Romney with abandon. I doubt these stunts McCain has been pulling will do him any good. Seeing Giuliani attack Ron Paul at the last debate garner a lot of applause, McCain has joined the race to appease right-wingers any way he can, including attacking his primary opponents in the most personal of ways.

Smithsonian Bent Over For Republicans

Historians and other people that have PhDs know that there is a problem with the planet. The only morons out there that believe there is no such thing as climate change are either seriously delusional or profiting from feigned ignorance. So it was sad to see today that the Smithsonian revealed that they toned down an exhibit on the changing landscape of the Arctic.

From The Houston Chronicle:

WASHINGTON — The Smithsonian Institution toned down an exhibit on climate change in the Arctic for fear of angering Congress and the Bush administration, says a former administrator at the museum.

Among other things, the script, or official text, of last year's exhibit was rewritten to minimize and inject more uncertainty into the relationship between global warming and humans, said Robert Sullivan, who was associate director in charge of exhibitions at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

Also, officials omitted scientists' interpretation of some research and let visitors draw their own conclusions from the data, he said. In addition, graphs were altered "to show that global warming could go either way," Sullivan said.

Sullivan left the museum in disgust after his bosses tried to reassign him. As scientists are continually attacked for using science instead of GOP talking points, our country will continue to lose credibility in the world's scientific community.

Sullivan pointed out that it wasn't a Bush official that did the pushing. Instead the top administrators were trying to present themselves as good little bureaucrats for the then Republican Congress. Since the Smithsonian is largely funded by taxpayers, getting their budgets filled by Capitol Hill was considered essential, no matter what the price. The top guns at the Museum say there was no politics considered in the matter, but their track record says otherwise. Looks like we have yet another national treasure to clean up after Republicans fouled up the place.

Impeach Gonzales Now!

As Robert Greenwald's film points out, he is guilty of several crimes due to his testimony in front of Congress. False statements, perjury and obstruction of justice can be prosecuted in a court of law. Congress can take the first step and kick his ass to the curb.

Matthew Diaz: Convicted For A Mitzvah

Commander Matthew Diaz used to be a Navy lawyer serving as a legal adviser down in Guantanamo Bay. Now he is a convicted man, sentenced to six months and a discharge by his peers in a military jury. What happened between then and now has made a world of difference for victims of torture and the rule of law for our country. Yet the military saw it fit to punish him for it. Diaz knew what was going on down in Cuba was wrong, so he slipped the names of the detainees in a Valentine's Day card and sent it off to a human rights lawyer.

From The New York Times:

In early 2005, as he was concluding a six-month tour of duty as a legal adviser at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Diaz sent an anonymous note to a New York civil liberties group containing the detainees' names.

The Center for Constitutional Rights earlier had won a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that terrorism suspects had the right to challenge their detention. But the Pentagon was refusing to identify the men, hampering the group's effort to represent them.

''I had observed the stonewalling, the obstacles we continued to place in the way of the attorneys,'' Diaz told the newspaper. ''I knew my time was limited. ... I had to do something.''

Diaz later apologized to the court for his actions, but stayed resolute in why he acted so bravely for those being imprisoned at Guantanamo. As an officer his ultimate duty is to uphold the Constitution, not the criminal activities of the Bush Administration. He may now claim the act was cowardly, but it made a world of difference for those that have been unjustly detained and tortured for several years now.

The Supreme Court had already decided that the detainees deserved to be able to face their accusers in court, but the Pentagon stonewalled on revealing the names of the prisoners. Diaz fulfilled the obligation of the Army without the top brass' approval. For that he deserves a medal, not what was doled out in a military court. He still has a ray of hope however. Rear Admiral Rick Ruehe still has to approve the sentence. Hopefully the Admiral still has the decency to see what this case is really all about and dismiss the jury's verdict.

Lou, They Aren't Aliens

Lou Dobbs is known in immigration circles (both hateful and not) for being a vocal critic of people crossing our southern border in search of a better life. Although he subscribes to the terms 'illegal immigration' and 'illegal aliens,' other people such as Laura Flanders know better. She also has the guts to tell him that his speech is dead wrong.

From Orcinus' discussion of Lou Dobbs' May 8th broadcast:

DOBBS: Well, I appreciate it. Thank you, Joe. Laura Flanders, let's talk about Mitt Romney at ...

LAURA FLANDERS, AIR AMERICA: I wanted to come back for a minute to the L.A. story, the last two stories. I think if Dr. King were alive today, he would be talking about what happened on L.A. on May 1st. When you talk about abuse, 240 rounds of rubber bullets and tear gas.

We've gone from legal punishment of illegal aliens to physical punishment, and it's not helped by language like yours, Lou, talking about these [marchers] as being illegal aliens...

DOBBS: Laura, Laura, Laura, that's ridiculous.

FLANDERS: They're not aliens, they're people. And the vast majority of people at these marches are utterly legal. They're not aliens, Lou. They're people, and you're dehumanizing them with that language.

That is exactly what Lou specializes in, dehumanization. It is why right-wing hate groups love to cite him (and appear on his show) in their publications to incite hatred towards the newest immigrants in our country. Due to a backlogged immigration system that does not let very many people in from the south, millions are forced to trek across parched and dangerous deserts to find jobs.

Instead of finding common ground with these immigrants, Lou conveniently forgets his own history (and many others) and chooses this absurd nativist route that helps no one. His type of dialogue only hurts all of us, whether directly from an immigrants' standpoint or collectively when it comes to the health of our nation and what America is all about.

What Are We Still Doing There?

Petraeus lies his ass off with no proof for the hope of our missing soldiers, Tony Blair goes to Iraq pretending everything is going great and Jimmy Carter blasts them all for their insanity:

Arlen Specter Is Clueless

Arlen Specter seems to think that the no confidence vote next week in the Senate will have an influential impact on the Commander-in-Chief. If he seriously thinks that any part of Congress will have an effect on him, Specter doesn't have a clue as to how Washington is working these days.

From Reuters:

Asked on CBS' "Face the Nation" whether many Republicans would join the majority Democrats in voting against Gonzales possibly as early as this week, Republican Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania said, "I think so."

"You already have six Republicans calling for his resignation," he said. "I have a sense ... that before the vote is taken, that Attorney General Gonzales may step down."

Gonzales has refused to resign under mounting pressure that began after criticism of the Justice Department's firing of U.S. attorneys which Democrats claimed was done mainly for political reasons.

But President George W. Bush has solidly backed Gonzales so Democrats in the Senate -- who have tried to broaden their complaints against the attorney general -- scheduled a rare "no confidence" vote in hopes of pressuring him to leave.

Congress hasn't been able to pressure the President yet on anything, since he has taken up the role of unitary executive. Six Republicans and all of the Democrats voting for a "No Confidence" of Gonzales won't do anything to stop the White House and what he has accomplished for the power of the executive. The only thing that can stop the Administration from its criminal acts is a vote for impeachment.

The Apple Doesn't Fall Far From The Tree Of Dr. Laura

Dr. Laura is hated on the left as a right-wing ideologue and the right loves her for her 'moral virtues' or whatever they claim in order to support her hateful radio show. Parents are generally assumed to bestow their good values on their children, yet Dr. Laura's kid got a healthy dose of what she is all about.

From The Salt Lake Tribune:

The soldier son of talk radio relationship counselor Laura Schlessinger is under investigation for a graphic personal Web page that one Army official has called "repulsive."

The MySpace page, publicly available until Friday when it disappeared from the Internet, included cartoon depictions of rape, murder, torture and child molestation; photographs of soldiers with guns in their mouths; a photograph of a bound and blindfolded detainee captioned "My Sweet Little Habib"; accounts of illicit drug use; and a blog entry headlined by a series of obscenities and racial epithets.

The site is credited to and includes many photographs of Deryk Schlessinger, the 21-year-old son of the talk radio personality known simply as Dr. Laura. Broadcast locally on 570 KNRS, "Family Values Talk Radio," the former family counselor spends three hours daily taking calls and offering advice on morals, ethics and values. She broadcast a show from Fort Douglas, in Salt Lake City, last week.

Are these the kind of family values that Dr. Laura admires? She would never admit to it, but one has to ask, how the hell did her kid get so twisted? Perhaps it was seeing the horrors of war or maybe it had to do with his homelife. The military recently banned myspace from its computers much to aggravation of the blogging world and all sites affected by the ban, but maybe it is a good thing to get this guy off the tubes, especially when you hear thoughts like these:

"Yes . . . F---ING Yes!!!" said one blog entry on the Schlessinger site. "I LOVE MY JOB, it takes everything reckless and deviant and heathenistic and just overall bad about me and hyper focuses these traits into my job of running around this horrid place doing nasty things to people that deserve it . . . and some that don't."

Looks like the military needs to put him in a mental ward, definitely not fit for the battlefield. It is kids like these that give us a bad name and rapport with the countries that we invade and occupy, not to mention the idiotic policies that put us there in the first place.

War Pigs: 2007

The legendary Black Sabbath song was originally sung in 1970 to protest the Vietnam War. Although that national disgrace is long over, we are more than four years into our latest military blunder. So this song is more important than ever. Here it is, set to the carnage going on in Iraq right now.

Dancing In The Streets

A huge parade went down Broadway yesterday to celebrate the arts and dancing in particular. Some of the participants were there as a symbol of protest against the city's arcane laws against dancing in certain establishments. A law from 1926 prohibits clubs from allowing more than two people dancing without a hard to obtain permit. Only 170 spots across the city have these permits, and that law needs to change. Norman Siegel is fighting to do just that.

From The New York Times:

Norman Siegel, one of the lawyers who filed the suit against the city, boogied in the parade alongside some hip-hoppers and spoke to the crowd afterward. “Dancing is expressive activity, and the government should not be regulating or prohibiting our right to dance,” he said. Two lower courts have already rejected his argument that dancing is a form of free expression, but last month he asked the Court of Appeals to review those decisions.

Though Ms. Tamam said the parade was less about protesting than advocacy and education, many groups took the opportunity to call attention to the law.

“I’ve been screaming, ‘Fight the cabaret laws’ for four hours,” said Luis Vargas, 35, a Manhattan health counselor and a member of the newly formed House Coalition, made up of house music devotees who oppose the cabaret laws. “We refuse to give up the cause. It’s not a crime to dance.”

It isn't a crime to dance, but Bloomberg has been dragging his feet with no rhythm in sight to change the law. He has said in the past he would have it changed, but nothing has been done since. This may seem like a silly little thing, but it is a big deal for many party-goers.

Norman and his supporters have gone to the courts, only to leave in vain. The judges dismissed his argument that dancing is a freedom of expression. That is just ridiculous. The Court of Appeals is going to look into the matter, but Bloomberg can clear it up quickly along with the City Council. So Mr. Mayor, what is the big deal? Get your groove on and update the law already.

The Indecent Holy Bible

The good book is considered by some to be an unholy publication filled with tales of rape and incest. The aspect of violence also has irked many over in Hong Kong and calls for it to be put in the smut category has gained momentum.

From Reuters:

HONG KONG (Reuters) - More than 800 Hong Kong residents have called on authorities to reclassify the Bible as "indecent" due to its sexual and violent content, following an uproar over a sex column in a university student journal.

A spokesperson for Hong Kong's Television and Entertainment Licensing authority (TELA) said it had received 838 complaints about the Bible by noon Wednesday.

The complaints follow the launch of an anonymous Web site -- www.truthbible.net -- which said the holy book "made one tremble" given its sexual and violent content, including rape and incest.

The situation caused quite a disturbance in the city that China has tried to communize. Ministers in the region have largely shrugged off the controversy, citing that just because it is written does not mean it is advocated for. As for the bible being put in foil wrappers behind the counter, it seems highly unlikely. Still, the porn industry has to have an ironic smile for this one.