Because self-righteous “Christians” want to make your important life decisions for you.

College women can’t even go to a party without worrying about criminal attacks.

And if you’re ever going to run for office, make sure you never had sex.

It’s especially important to make sure you never had sex if you’re going to get raped.

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“Didn’t volunteer”? Dear God, why oh why can’t we have a better press corpse?

You know that New York Times story that implicated a ‘tag team’ of virus and fungus in the collapse of American bee colonies? And how it implicitly exonerated pesticides, which are among the prime suspects in the bee plague?

CNN reports that it turns out the author of the study on which the NYT depended is funded by Bayer and may have ulterior reasons for downplaying the role of pesticides, some of which were banned in Europe because it was found that they were killing off the bees. The question is why the bees suddenly became vulnerable to fungi and viruses that had long been around. And the pesticides can’t be ruled out.

The NYT reporter on being queried said that the author of the study had not ‘volunteered’ the sources of his funding.

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Honestly, these Republicans disgust me. They really do. The fact that they obstructed filling so many positions (just as they did with Clinton) shows what an amoral bunch they are. Steve Benen:

“Obstructing a nominee as well qualified as Peter in a time of economic crisis is a harmful attempt to score political points that hurts our middle class and our broader economic recovery,” Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said in a statement.

Mr. Obama issued a separate statement congratulating Mr. Diamond and pointing out his expertise in unemployment and housing. “I hope he will be confirmed by the Senate as quickly as possible,” Mr. Obama said.

Even now, that appears exceedingly unlikely. In a statement, Shelby said he just doesn’t care: “While the Nobel Prize for Economics is a significant recognition, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences does not determine who is qualified to serve on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.”

That’s true, of course; the Nobel committee is not responsible for determining who’s qualified to serve. But it’s worth emphasizing a little detail Shelby may have forgotten — that responsibility rests with the U.S. Senate, not one conservative member.

Diamond’s nomination has been pending since April, and in case Shelby’s forgotten, we’re facing some difficult economic times and could use a functioning Fed. The nomination has cleared committee, is ready for a floor vote, and if Shelby opposes Diamond, he can vote against him.

But in 2010, that’s no longer good enough. Shelby has decided one of the nation’s most accomplished economists, a celebrated expert in employment policy, not only failed to earn his support, but is so offensive to Shelby’s far-right sensibilities that he’s forbidding the Senate from voting at all.

This is no way to run a country.

Every morning I wake up and wonder why no one’s started shooting.

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What Axelrod missed:

Hey, so who actually “owns” these foreclosed properties anyway? Funny you should ask… Sometimes the party named as the plaintiff in a foreclosure will purport to be some sort of trust, other times it will be something called the Mortgage Electronic Registry System or MERS. Either way, it is a total joke. Most of the time no one actually knows and it doesn’t matter becausemore than half of the $10.7 trillion in mortgages outstanding in this country are owned or guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac i.e. you, and hundreds of billions of others are guaranteed by other federal agencies or programs.

So put yourself in the shoes of these rightful owners, since they’re yours anyway: do you really want to evict millions of homeowners in the worst real estate market since the cholera epidemic, just so your houses can be ransacked by the lockup mercenaries, disemboweled and converted into meth labs by local entrepreneurs and blamed for the downward spiral in the values of surrounding properties many of which you also own? No of course not, only the mortgage servicers want that. You want to try and cut a deal with the homeowner, like Tim Geithner was supposed to facilitate with that “making home affordable” program that Rick Santelli used to launch a thousand tea parties, except that in his infinite ignorance Geithner outsourced that whole endeavor to the servicers who predictably sabotaged it entirely. Some private mortgage investors have tried to sue the servicers for this very reason, but it’s hard to even know who wants what because…

4. The entire industry stopped keeping track of who bought and sold.This brings us back to the aforementioned MERS. Headquartered in Reston, MERS was founded by this guy Paul Mullings who is now an executive at Freddie Mac and it is currently helmed by a fellow named R.K. Arnold who according to one account spends his leisure time collecting military toys. MERS was created to sidestep the process by which buyers and sellers of homes used to record transactions with local authorities by just entering deed and lien information electronically into a database. MERS did not even have to lobby anyone to change any laws do this, apparently: “The mortgage industry just changed how the land title system worked without getting anyone’s okay,” a law professor explained to the Washington Post. Various libertards are now arguing that since mortgages change hands a lot more often than actual houses do, MERS is the only “efficient” way of doing things, which might be true were there any evidence they were actual “doing” anything; two lawyers I spoke with and everyone quoted by anyone else who has actually done any reporting into the matter say that MERS has a pretty sloppy record of recording this stuff, since it has almost no employees of its own. That has not stopped MERS from volunteering its name to be used on the “plaintiff” side of millions of foreclosure actions, despite having no claim to anything at all except a poorly-kept database no one uses, but they have stopped doing that so much in recent months because a lot of judges have decided it might be against the law. But really, should someone have to have a claim on your house to file a foreclosure notice on it?

5. Homeowners Associations are still foreclosing on the houses of members who are delinquent on their dues by amounts of $150 or so.Seriously, how is this legal? How do I keep reading the same story over andover? Because we live in a banana republic that is carrying out some sort of unmanned drone attack on our so-called property rights for no apparent reason other than to juice the  official indicators of housing market “activity” and that sort of thing such that Steve Pearlstein will continue telling us it’s all okay, business as usual, that the whole snafu will be resolved very, very quickly, safe in the knowledge that anyone who begs to differ is guaranteed to lose the audience within the first 160 characters anyway.

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Look, I know that there are also attacks on Israelis originating in Gaza – but not like this cold-blooding shooting of children:

At least 10 Palestinian children have been shot and wounded by Israeli troops in the past three months while collecting rubble in or near the “buffer zone” created by Israel along the Gaza border, in a low-intensity offensive on the fringes of the blockaded Palestinian territory.

Israeli soldiers are routinely shooting at Gazans well beyond the unmarked boundary of the official 300 metre-wide no-go area, rights groups say.

According to Bassam Masri, head of orthopaedics at the Kamal Odwan hospital in Beit Lahiya in the north of Gaza, about 50 people have been treated for gunshot wounds suffered in or near the buffer zone while collecting rubble in the past three months; about five have been killed.

He estimates that 30% of the injured are boys under 18.

Defence for Children International (DCI) has documented 10 cases of children aged 13 to 17 being shot in a three-month period between 50 and 800 metres from the border. Nine were shot in a leg or arm; one was shot in the stomach.

The creation of the no-go area has forced farmers to abandon land and residents to leave homes for fear of coming under fire. Last month a 91-year-old man and two teenage boys were killed while harvesting olives outside the official zone when Israeli troops fired shells. Forty-three goats also died in the attack.

In another case a mother of five was killed by a shell outside her home near the zone in July.

Israel declared the buffer zone inside Gaza after the three-week war in 2008-9, saying it was intended to prevent militants firing rockets. It has dropped leaflets from planes several times warning local people not to venture within 300 metres of the fence that marks the border or risk being shot.

However, the UN, aid agencies and rights groups say that Israel has unofficially and without warning extended the zone to up to 1km from the fence, leaving residents and farmers uncertain whether it is safe to access their land or property.

“The army knows the kids are there to collect. They watch them every day and they know they have no weapons,” said Mohammed Abu Rukbi, a fieldworker with DCI. “They usually fire warning shots but the kids don’t take much notice.”

Mohammed Sobboh, 17, was shot just above the knee on August 25 when he was 800 metres from the border, he said. The 12 people in his family have no other income and are not entitled to aid from the UN as they are not refugees.

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Not as big an amoral moron as some, but pretty darn close.

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Brooklyn was hit with another freak storm tonight.

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Gorillaz:

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Give Me Another Chance, Big Star. I just love this song. If Alex Chilton had written it for me, I would’ve given him another chance!

Let Me Know, Mayer Hawthorne.

The Apartment, Marah. Philly represent!

Small Town, John Mellencamp.

Helpless Heart, Maura O’Connell.

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Meridia was “FDA approved.”

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