Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Pillow Fight


If only this demographic would get as excited about the upcoming election as they are about Facebook.
*sigh*


Saturday, September 27, 2008

Green Arrow

Since we're all on a tight budget these days, it's easy to choose conventionally grown produce over organic. Have you ever wondered if certain fruits and vegetables should be organic over others? Here is a list of "The Dirty Dozen," fruits and vegetables that SHOULD be purchased from the organic section of the store because the Department of Agriculture says that even after washing, they retain much higher levels of pesticides. (via Apartment Therapy)

Here are the must-buy organic fruits:

  • Apples
  • Cherries
  • Grapes, imported
  • Nectarines
  • Peaches
  • Pears
  • Raspberries
  • Strawberries

And the must-buy organic vegetables:

  • Bell peppers
  • Celery
  • Potatoes
  • Spinach/lettuce


These generally don't have pesticide residue. For the full list of rankings, click here.
Don't worry about going organic with these fruits:

  • Bananas
  • Kiwi
  • Mangos
  • Papaya
  • Pineapples

Vegetables:

  • Asparagus
  • Avocado
  • Broccoli
  • Cauliflower
  • Onions

The results are based on an analysis of government tests by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a research and advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C.

Car Song

This is my friend's dad's car wash. Hmmmm...I definitely know which side I would drive into!

[carwash+campaign.bmp]

Thursday, September 25, 2008

But The Post Helps The Turtle See Russia!



While suturing a cut on the hand of a 75-year old Texas rancher whose hand was caught in a gate while working cattle, the doctor struck up a conversation with the old man. Eventually the topic got around to Sarah Palin and her bid to be a heartbeat away from being President. The old rancher said, "Well, ya know, Palin is a post turtle."

Not being familiar with the term, the doctor asked him what a post turtle was.

The old rancher said, "When you're driving down a country road and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that's a post turtle."

The old rancher saw a puzzled look on the doctor's face, so he continued to explain. "You know she didn't get up there by herself, she doesn't belong up there, she doesn't know what to do while she is up there, and you just wonder what kind of dumb-ass put her up there to begin with."

I'll Tap the Brake While You Crack The Window

Guerrilla gas signs go up in Los Angeles...oh how I love this one!

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Some of Those Who Burn Crosses are the Same Who Hold Office

So, some interesting footage from the Wasilla Assembly of God has emerged. It shows Pastor Muthee of the Wasilla Assembly of God praying over Sarah Palin. He says, and I quote:

"If we have God in our schools we will not have kids being taught, you know, how to worship Buddha, how to worship Mohammad; we will not have in the curriculum witchcraft and sorcery."

This is a man who conducted an actual witch hunt in Kenya. He accused a Kenyan woman of causing car accidents and of witchcraft, and after he spoke out against this woman, many villagers demanded that she be stoned. What does Palin say about Muthee? She calls him "awesome." Seriously. You can see her speak about him (just 3 months ago) in the below footage.

Of course, it's not getting much press, because Governor Palin is a white conservative Republican (can you even imagine how the Republicans would rake Obama over the coals if this was footage of him, his pastor, and his church? Or for that matter, if he had a pregnant teenage daughter?) Put an African American in the race and Republicans accuse him of being Muslim (which he's not). But they don't seem to mind that Palin's pastor is an actual witch hunter, and still boasts about it to this day.

THE FULL PRAYER:


KEITH OLBERMANN INTERVIEWS SHANNYN MOORE REGARDING THE "PASTOR DISASTER":

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Unequal Pay for Equal Work - THANKS MCCAIN

John McCain voted 19 times against raising minimum wage.

John McCain has consistently voted NO on increased funding for the head start program.

John McCain is against equal pay for equal work and says that women need more education and more training to do the same job as a man. He openly opposed a bill that would seek equal pay for equal work.

Ha. Maybe he chose Sarah Palin for VP because she needs more training and education, and he could therefor pay her less?

Liar Liar Pants on FIRE!

For the people out there who "can't decide who to vote for" (that's a direct quote from someone I know, ahem, very well)...how about you vote for the one whose pants aren't on fire?

#1)





#2) Tiiiiimes is on my siiiiide:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/opinion/21rich.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Truthiness Stages a Comeback

NOT until 2004 could the 9/11 commission at last reveal the title of the intelligence briefing President Bush ignored on Aug. 6, 2001, in Crawford: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” No wonder John McCain called for a new “9/11 commission” to “get to the bottom” of 9/14, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers set off another kind of blood bath in Lower Manhattan. Put a slo-mo Beltway panel in charge, and Election Day will be ancient history before we get to the bottom of just how little he and the president did to defend America against a devastating new threat on their watch.

For better or worse, the candidacy of Barack Obama, a senator-come-lately, must be evaluated on his judgment, ideas and potential to lead. McCain, by contrast, has been chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, where he claims to have overseen “every part of our economy.” He didn’t, thank heavens, but he does have a long and relevant economic record that begins with the Keating Five scandal of 1989 and extends to this campaign, where his fiscal policies bear the fingerprints of Phil Gramm and Carly Fiorina. It’s not the résumé that a presidential candidate wants to advertise as America faces its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. That’s why the main thrust of the McCain campaign has been to cover up his history of economic malpractice.

McCain has largely pulled it off so far, under the guidance of Steve Schmidt, a Karl Rove protégé. A Rovian political strategy by definition means all slime, all the time. But the more crucial Rove game plan is to envelop the entire presidential race in a thick fog of truthiness. All campaigns, Obama’s included, engage in false attacks. But McCain, Sarah Palin and their surrogates keep repeating the same lies over and over not just to smear their opponents and not just to mask their own record. Their larger aim is to construct a bogus alternative reality so relentless it can overwhelm any haphazard journalistic stabs at puncturing it.

When a McCain spokesman told Politico a week ago that “we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say” about the campaign’s incessant fictions, he was channeling a famous Bush dictum of 2003: “Somehow you just got to go over the heads of the filter.” In Bush’s case, the lies lobbed over the heads of the press were to sell the war in Iraq. That propaganda blitz, devised by a secret White House Iraq Group that included Rove, was a triumph. In mere months, Americans came to believe that Saddam Hussein had aided the 9/11 attacks and even that Iraqis were among the hijackers. A largely cowed press failed to set the record straight.

Just as the Bushies once flogged uranium from Africa, so Palin ceaselessly repeats her discredited claim that she said “no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. Nothing is too small or sacred for the McCain campaign to lie about. It was even caught (by The Christian Science Monitor) peddling an imaginary encounter between Cindy McCain and Mother Teresa when McCain was adopting her daughter in Bangladesh.

If you doubt that the big lies are sticking, look at the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll. Half of voters now believe in the daily McCain refrain that Obama will raise their taxes. In fact, Obama proposes raising taxes only on the 1.9 percent of households that make more than $250,000 a year and cutting them for nearly everyone else.

You know the press is impotent at unmasking this truthiness when the hardest-hitting interrogation McCain has yet faced on television came on “The View.” Barbara Walters and Joy Behar called him on several falsehoods, including his endlessly repeated fantasy that Palin opposed earmarks for Alaska. Behar used the word “lies” to his face. The McCains are so used to deference from “the filter” that Cindy McCain later complained that “The View” picked “our bones clean.” In our news culture, Behar, a stand-up comic by profession, looms as the new Edward R. Murrow.

Network news, with its dwindling handful of investigative reporters, has barely mentioned, let alone advanced, major new print revelations about Cindy McCain’s drug-addiction history (in The Washington Post) and the rampant cronyism and secrecy in Palin’s governance of Alaska (in last Sunday’s New York Times). At least the networks repeatedly fact-check the low-hanging fruit among the countless Palin lies, but John McCain’s past usually remains off limits.

That’s strange since the indisputable historical antecedent for our current crisis is the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal of the go-go 1980s. When Charles Keating’s bank went belly up because of risky, unregulated investments, it wiped out its depositors’ savings and cost taxpayers more than $3 billion. More than 1,000 other S.&L. institutions capsized nationwide.

It was ugly for the McCains. He had received more than $100,000 in Keating campaign contributions, and both McCains had repeatedly hopped on Keating’s corporate jet. Cindy McCain and her beer-magnate father had invested nearly $360,000 in a Keating shopping center a year before her husband joined four senators in inappropriate meetings with regulators charged with S.&L. oversight.

After Congressional hearings, McCain was reprimanded for “poor judgment.” He had committed no crime and had not intervened to protect Keating from ruin. Yet he, like many deregulators in his party, was guilty of bankrupt policy-making before disaster struck. He was among the sponsors of a House resolution calling for the delay of regulations intended to deter risky investments just like those that brought down Lincoln and its ilk.

Ever since, McCain has publicly thrashed himself for his mistakes back then — and boasted of the lessons he learned. He embraced campaign finance reform to rebrand himself as a “maverick.” But whatever lessons he learned are now forgotten.

For all his fiery calls last week for a Wall Street crackdown, McCain opposed the very regulations that might have helped avert the current catastrophe. In 1999, he supported a law co-authored by Gramm (and ultimately signed by Bill Clinton) that revoked the New Deal reforms intended to prevent commercial banks, insurance companies and investment banks from mingling their businesses. Equally laughable is the McCain-Palin ticket’s born-again outrage over the greed of Wall Street C.E.O.’s. When McCain’s chief financial surrogate, Fiorina, was fired as Hewlett-Packard’s chief executive after a 50 percent drop in shareholders’ value and 20,000 pink slips, she took home a package worth $42 million.

The McCain campaign canceled Fiorina’s television appearances last week after she inadvertently admitted that Palin was unqualified to run a corporation. But that doesn’t mean Fiorina is gone. Gramm, too, was ostentatiously exiled after he blamed the economic meltdown on our “nation of whiners” and “mental recession,” but he remains in the McCain loop.

The corporate jets, lobbyists and sleazes that gravitated around McCain in the Keating era have also reappeared in new incarnations. The Nation’s Web site recently unearthed a photo of the resolutely anticelebrity McCain being greeted by the con man Raffaello Follieri and his then girlfriend, the Hollywood actress Anne Hathaway, as McCain celebrated his 70th birthday on Follieri’s rented yacht in Montenegro in August 2006. It’s the perfect bookend to the old pictures of McCain in a funny hat partying with Keating in the Bahamas.

Whatever blanks are yet to be filled in on Obama, we at least know his economic plans and the known quantities who are shaping them (Lawrence Summers, Robert Rubin, Paul Volcker). McCain has reversed himself on every single economic issue this year, often within a 24-hour period, whether he’s judging the strength of the economy’s fundamentals or the wisdom of the government bailout of A.I.G. He once promised that he’d run every decision past Alan Greenspan — and even have him write a new tax code — but Greenspan has jumped ship rather than support McCain’s biggest flip-flop, his expansion of the Bush tax cuts. McCain’s official chief economic adviser is now Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who last week declared that McCain had “helped create” the BlackBerry.

But Holtz-Eakin’s most telling statement was about McCain’s economic plans — namely, that the details are irrelevant. “I don’t think it’s imperative at this moment to write down what the plan should be,” he said. “The real issue here is a leadership issue.” This, too, is a Rove-Bush replay. We want a tough guy who will “fix” things with his own two hands — let’s take out the S.E.C. chairman! — instead of wimpy Frenchified Democrats who just “talk.” The fine print of policy is superfluous if there’s a quick-draw decider in the White House.

The twin-pronged strategy of truculence and propaganda that sold Bush and his war could yet work for McCain. Even now his campaign has kept the “filter” from learning the very basics about his fitness to serve as president — his finances and his health. The McCain multihousehold’s multimillion-dollar mother lode is buried in Cindy McCain’s still-unreleased complete tax returns. John McCain’s full medical records, our sole index to the odds of an imminent Palin presidency, also remain locked away. The McCain campaign instead invited 20 chosen reporters to speed-read through 1,173 pages of medical history for a mere three hours on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend. No photocopying was permitted.

This is the same tactic of selective document release that the Bush White House used to bamboozle Congress and the press about Saddam’s nonexistent W.M.D. As truthiness repeats itself, so may history, and not as farce.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Alaskan Women Reject Palin - Largest Protest in Alaska's HISTORY

picture from Daily Kos


I grew up in a feminist household with a mother who remembered what it was like to live in a country where abortion was illegal. The quote below brought tears to my eyes and reminded me of some of the horror stories my mother has told me:

"Some of the signs spoke out against Palin's anti-abortion position. Laura Kimmel, a 40-year-old Anchorage woman expecting her second baby in April, wore a clothes hanger with a sign attached that said, "This is not a surgical instrument. Keep abortions safe and legal."

Susan Soule, 65, a part-time health consultant, said she is old enough to remember when abortion wasn't legal and what women went through who wanted to terminate their pregnancies.

"I know the terror of unwanted pregnancy and back-room abortions. I know what that did to women," said Soule."

Just like the "war against drugs," if you make abortion illegal, women will find a way to get it done, whether it be in a bathroom stall with a coat hanger or in a back alley with someone who may or may not be an MD. And on TOP of that, if you remove sex education from schools and preach abstinence only, and make contraceptives more difficult to acquire, it will only make kids more interested in sex, pregnancy will rise, and thus the abortion rates will rise. Women who attempt coat hanger abortions often end up bleeding to death, resulting in 2 deaths.

You don't believe that Palin's policies and beliefs are radical? Then listen to what the Alaskan women are saying about her...after all, they are the ones who know her best.

It says a lot that this was the largest protest in Alaska's history (herstory?)!

Lots of great footage and pics here!

some of my favorite sign slogans:
Bush in a Skirt
Pitbulls Make Poor Diplomats
Real Leaders Don't Have to Cram for Interviews
Blink Before Going to War
Keep Your Laws OFF My Body
McCain/Palin: Incontinence/Incompetence
Blind Ambition Tour
Bristol Got to Choose - Why Can't We?

Friday, September 12, 2008

Daily Crime Report

700 EDGEMONT AVE FOUND PROPERTY FOUND CRACK PIPES

Friday, September 5, 2008

Acronyms Galore

RATM (Rage Against the Machine) was scheduled to play a LEGAL concert at the Target center outside the RNC. After Anti-Flag played their last song and RATM was about to go on, the police cut power to the stage. MPR (Minnesota Public Radio) did a good YouTube video about it.



Also, The video below shows a lot more of the actual a capella RATM performance:


per BoingBoing:
"Rage Against the Machine had a scheduled legal concert in the Target Center in downtown Minneapolis tonight. Police and media where sitting and waiting outside during the whole concert in heavy numbers just waiting for something to happen when the show got out. The police got what they wanted. Police pepper spraying going on right now."

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

This Devil's Workday

She's pro-life, except when it comes to decorating her Alaskan office.

So how come a human life is more important than an animal's life? Are we not ALL God's creatures?

Answer me that.

Just Palin Wrong

If you haven't read this article yet, you should. Some highlights:

1)At some point in those fractious first days, Palin told the department heads they needed her permission to talk to reporters. "She put a gag order on those people, something that you'd expect to find in the big city, not here," says Naegele. "She flew in there like a big-city gal, which she's not. It was a strange time, and [the Frontiersman] came out very harshly against her."

2) "Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. "She asked the library how she could go about banning books," he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. "The librarian was aghast." That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn't be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving "full support" to the mayor."

3) "We like to call this the Bible Belt of Alaska," says Cheryl Metiva, head of the local chamber of commerce. Churches proliferate in Wasilla today, and among the largest and most influential is the Wasilla Bible Church, where the Palins worship.

At the 11:15 a.m. Sunday service, hundreds sit in folding chairs, listening to a 20-minute sermon about the Book of Malachi and singing along to alt-rock praise songs. The only sign of culture warring in the whole production is an insert in the day's program advertising an upcoming Focus on the Family conference on homosexuality in Anchorage called Love Won Out. The group promises to teach attendees how to "respond to misinformation in our culture" and help them "overcome" homosexuality.



Tuesday, September 2, 2008

One Headlight

Dear gold Hyundai driver who passed me on I-35S tonight:

Perhaps you should stop spending money on fancy exhaust pipes, and start spending money on replacing headlights when they burn out.

Just a thought....

-me

Monday, September 1, 2008

Let's get Political, Political...

First I find out that there have been massive preemptive police raids on suspected RNC protesters in Minneapolis. Really...as the Republicans moan about their right to own machine guns and rant about their conservative views on banning abortion even in cases of rape and incest (*ahem* Sarah Palin), young, peaceful activists are fighting for the basic right of free speech, and being violently arrested and raided with SWAT teams and semi-automatic rifles for only PLANNING protests.

Then
I hear on NPR that Magomed Yevloyev, the owner of an internet site critical of the Russian authorities in the volatile region of Ingushetia has been shot dead in police custody.

I'm sorry, do I live in the United States of America, or do I live in Russia? It's starting to seem a bit blurry.

On a side note, here is an example of some not-so-classy behavior of Sarah Palin on a radio talk show, in which she laughs along as a political opponent is called a "cancer," a "bitch," and is mocked for her weight. *oh. so. classy.* Listen to it if you don't believe me (below). Her own hometown newspaper even unleashed an article about it, calling it (among other things), "unbecoming," "unprofessional, childish, and inexcusable."