Candidate?

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

I like Jim Webb, but he was pretty conservative on most things. Let’s see if he’s changed his tune:

Former senator Jim Webb laid out in stark terms the economic and military challenges facing America, saying he is “seriously looking” at a 2016 presidential campaign as a Democrat.

Webb, an ex-Navy secretary under Ronald Reagan who served one term as a senator representing Virginia, outlined in remarks at the National Press Club the federal government’s role as the middle class gets squeezed and the U.S. fights to protect national interests abroad. He shared what he called his “governing principles” in his speech and on Twitter.

“The very character of America is being called into question,” Webb said Tuesday. “Who are we as a people? What is it that unites us, rather than divides us? Where is our common ground when the centrifugal forces of social cohesion are spinning so out of control that the people at the very top exist in a distant outer orbit?”

[…] `“I have strong reasons for being a Democrat,” Webb said. “Basically, if you want true fairness in society you want to give a voice in the corridors of power for the people who otherwise would not have it, I believe that will come from the Democratic Party and we’re taking a hard look, and we’ll get back to you in a few months.”

Another Ebola forecast

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Where will Ebola strike next?

This one is going to be more gruesome than the last forecast:

Yet another set of ominous projections about the Ebola epidemic in West Africa was released Tuesday, in a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that gave worst- and best-case estimates for Liberia and Sierra Leone based on computer modeling.

In the worst-case scenario, Liberia and Sierra Leone could have 21,000 cases of Ebola by Sept. 30 and 1.4 million cases by Jan. 20 if the disease keeps following its current trajectory, without effective methods to contain it. These figures take into account the fact that many cases go undetected, and estimate that there are actually 2.5 times as many as reported.

The report does not include figures for Guinea because case counts there have gone up and down in ways that cannot be reliably modeled.

In the best-case model — which assumes that the dead are buried safely and that 70 percent of patients are treated in settings that reduce the risk of transmission — the epidemic in both countries would be “almost ended” by Jan. 20, the report said. It showed the proportion of patients now in such settings as about 18 percent in Liberia and 40 percent in Sierra Leone.

Uh huh

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Dinesh D'Souza

So the little weasel isn’t going to jail:

(Reuters) – Conservative author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza was sentenced on Tuesday to spend eight months in a community confinement center during five years of probation after pleading guilty to a campaign finance law violation.

The defendant, a frequent critic of President Barack Obama, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Richard Berman in Manhattan. He was also given a $30,000 fine and ordered to do one day of community service a week during his probation.

D’Souza, 53, admitted in May to illegally reimbursing two ‘straw donors’ who donated $10,000 each to the unsuccessful 2012 U.S. Senate campaign in New York of Wendy Long, a Republican he had known since attending Dartmouth College in the early 1980s.

“It was a crazy idea, it was a bad idea,” D’Souza told Berman before being sentenced. “I regret breaking the law.”

RFK Jr. confronted by talking parrot

~ susie

We all know wingnuts are neither creative (which is why their numerous attempts at doing humor fail) nor all that intelligent — that is, their intelligence is limited to parroting “gotcha!” lines meant to prove liberals are hypocrites, and not actual learning.

So there’s nothing surprising about watching Valley girl Michelle “Twitchy Nutjobs Love Me” Fields from PJTV (the old Pajamas Media) confront Bobby Kennedy Jr. at the People’s Climate March on Sunday.

Wingnut “journalists” are really not interested in having a conversation, which is why they never learn anything. (Geeze, even the polar opposites on “Wife Swap” learn something when exposed to other viewpoints.) And this interview isn’t anything like journalism, even if that’s what she’s allegedly paid to do. (I think the technical term is “fuckwittery.”) It’s more of a comedy bit.

But she doesn’t need actual talent, just prominent breasts and long, silky hair. She’s a proud right-wing media parrot, an honors graduate of the James O’Keefe Online School of Journalism. (One who got fired from the Daily Caller, apparently for appearing on Fox News so many times, she didn’t do any actual work.)

(Hey, Michelle, love the old “do you have an iPhone?” line of attack. It’s so fresh!)
Continue reading “RFK Jr. confronted by talking parrot” →

We know who the real savage is, Pammy

~ susie ~ 6 Comments

pammy

*Here’s what the headline refers to.

This is Pam Geller’s hate group putting up these disgusting ads. Geller is the wingnut blogger who, through her batshit crazy blog “Atlas Shrugged”, devotes her life (and makes nice bit of cash doing so) attacking the usually-imaginary “Islamic threat.” Everything is a jihad, she attacks at fever pitch, and the louder she gets, the more money rolls into her group. (Not that she needs it, after her $4 million divorce settlement and then a $5 million insurance policy when her ex died.) She is, truly, a dreadful person. I hope passengers can exercise their own First Amendment rights by defacing these signs:

pam_Geller

When an anti-Islamic group decided to advertise on city buses and billboards this fall with photos of a terrorist poised to behead an American and a Muslim leader smiling at Adolf Hitler, transit officials in New York and Washington, D.C., huffed their disapproval – but allowed the ads to run.

They had no choice, they said, because the ads were protected under the First Amendment.

SEPTA’s officials disagreed and rejected the ads.

But the group behind the ads – the American Freedom Defense Initiative – won’t surrender quietly. The New Hampshire-based group sued SEPTA in federal court last week, complaining that the transit agency violated AFDI’s free-speech rights.

One local First Amendment expert says SEPTA picked an unwinnable fight.

“The most fundamental principle of the First Amendment is that you may never bar any message based upon the content of the message,” said Burton Caine, a law professor at Temple University and past president of the Philadelphia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. “This is absolutely prohibited, what SEPTA is doing.

“Everybody has this same idea that they like the First Amendment,” Caine said, “but when the speech is offensive, people will make all kinds of excuses why it’s not protected. The whole point of the First Amendment is to protect speech that offends. No exceptions.”

A federal judge said as much in 2012, ruling that the AFDI could post ads in New York City and Washington, D.C., that compared Muslim jihadists to “savages.”

Here’s Pam in classic wingnut attack mode, explaining to Ron Reagan Jr. that she knows his father better than he does:

Horrible

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Only so many stories like this I can take in a week:

Miller’s son, however, said that the officers hadn’t listened when he tried to tell them his father was deaf.

I kept telling them that he can’t hear them. I kept telling them he can’t understand them.

This just makes it even harder. I’m the only one who knows what happened. I was right there. I saw the whole thing.