Category: Humor

Patraeus scandal really about ‘surveillance state run amok’

~ odd man out ~ 2 Comments

So Gen, David Petraeus, ex-CIA chief, was screwing around with his biographer Paula Broadwell, was was sending mildly harassing e-mails to “socialite” Jill Kelley, who was sexting with another four-star general. Kelley got mad about the e-mails to her and called in an FBI friend to investigate. Result: instant scandal. Glenn Greenwald’s perspective on this circle jerk:

…So not only did the FBI – again, all without any real evidence of a crime – trace the locations and identity of Broadwell and Petreaus, and read through Broadwell’s emails (and possibly Petraeus’), but they also got their hands on and read through 20,000-30,000 pages of emails between Gen. Allen and Kelley.

This is a surveillance state run amok. It also highlights how any remnants of internet anonymity have been all but obliterated by the union between the state and technology companies..

Texas petitioners: Let my people go

~ odd man out

Roughly 80,000 petition-signing good ol’ boys ‘n’ girls have had it up to their 10-gallon hats with a federal government that insists on meddling in the affairs of their home state, cruel and unusual Texas. The New Republic recently addressed their grievances:

…Maybe the solution is simply to give Texas and other secessionist-conservatives what they really want: free passage to the land of all their conservative fantasies. Send them all off with gratis one-way tickets (I’m happy to earmark some of my socialist tax dollars for the effort) to a country with: a small federal government with limited power and meager influence over the private lives of its citizens; extremely weak trade unions routinely sabotaged by the federal government (i.e., a “pro-business environment”); negligible income tax; few immigrants, legal or otherwise; a dominant Christian population, accounting for some 70 percent of the people; no mandatory health insurance or concept of universal health care; a strong social taboo surrounding homosexuality and a constitution that already states, “All individuals have the right to marry a person of their choice of the opposite sex”; and a gun culture so ubiquitous that you can find automatic weaponry displayed openly on the streets of its capital city and in many households.

Sound like a Texan secessionist’s dream? Well, it’s no dream. This country already exists. It’s called the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

AP Ticker’s Scrapple News: Post-Election Chaos and Radical Christian Gay Sharia Law

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Folks, I have been a proud liberal/progressive/dirty-fuckin-hippy for as long as I can remember. So it is my sad duty to tell you that in the week since Obama’s re-election , I have learned through sad, heart-wrenching experience, that the Tea Party, Ted Nugent, Victoria Jackson, Rush Limbaugh, that guy at Libertarian Republican (dot-com) and all the rest…. were right. Yes, friends they were right about Obama’s secret radical Christian gay Sharia agenda. And here’s the video that PROVES it, so get your guns and run to the hills.

We are doomed. And I am gay-married… to a BOX TURTLE. A gay one.

Reality bites Rush

~ odd man out ~ 5 Comments

Re Rush’s use of “we”: Did he mean the Republican Party or white supremacists? Is there a difference? From The Inquisitr:

Controversial radio host Rush Limbaugh isn’t so much sad that President Obama won re-election as he is dismayed that Republicans seem to be losing the national conversation…

…Limbaugh announced on his radio show Wednesday that “we are outnumbered” now in the US, and called President Barack Obama’s re-election victory “the trend” from now on.

“We have to face some truths, we have to face some reality,” Limbaugh said. “We are outnumbered and we are losing ground. This was not a glitch. This is the trend. That happened last night. This is the trend. We are outnumbered. Whether you want to put it in terms of have we lost the country or not, there’s no other explanation.”

Fear of a black planet, updated

~ odd man out ~ 2 Comments

Chris Rock made a funny pre-election video in which he pretended to argue to white voters that Barack Obama was as white as they are, therefore they should vote for him. His appeals fell on deaf ears, especially among old white men. But the times they are a-changin’. From The Nation:

If only white people had voted on Tuesday, Mitt Romney would have carried every state except for Massachusetts, Iowa, Connecticut and New Hampshire, according to the news media’s exit polls. Nationally, Romney won 59 percent of the white vote, a towering twenty-point margin over Obama. (Exit polls were canceled in nineteen states by the consortium of news media that run them…)

…What’s the matter with white people—especially old white men? They used to run everything. But their share of the electorate has been falling steadily: twenty years ago whites were 87 percent of the electorate; this year they were 72 percent. Could it be that they resent their loss of power in a country that is becoming more racially diverse every minute? The rest of America wants to know…