There is nothing remotely cute or endearing about 4 old guys gleefully plotting to kill hundreds or thousands of innocent people in Washington DC just to take down a little old thing we like to call the US Government, including the Executive Branch and most of Congress plus any other faceless bureaucrats. Nothing defensible in some of their other activities, either. I hope the undercover agents have been able to wash the stench off; the transcripts are appalling. It’s easy for me to make a cheap joke about old-guy terrorists mixing up their batches of castor bean-derived ricin, but the…
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Link: Cantor Backtracks: Protesters’ Frustration ‘Warranted’ | Video Cafe.
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The biggest part of this story isn’t that Joe “Deadbeat Dad” Walsh was a late addition to the speakers’ list at the Illinois Tea Party Patriots’ “Teacon 2011” event in Schaumburg at the Renaissance Hotel. It’s that attendance in this story was reported to be about 600 activists, where only yesterday they were expecting at least a thousand, a lot fewer than attended last year’s “Right Nation” thing. Even with Glenn Beck headlining – and this year’s Right Nation has been pushed back, probably into 2012 in order to not conflict with this shindig and to be closer to the…
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Here’s a fine post to really blow your hair back, commenting on a really dunderheaded statement by Mike Huckabee in a NYT piece about online activists pressuring companies not to give financial support to anti-gay hate groups. It includes some of the quiet ways big retailers like Apple, Microsoft, Netflix and Wal-Mart have channels for donations to certain groups, which on the surface are doing “good” work, but actually have ties to or directly support hate groups. And these hate groups claim the right to hate because “it says so in the Bible” as a God-directed mandate. So here’s Huckabee’s…
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UPDATE: Maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t make a fuss about getting in – I was turned politely away by a nice lady who just kept repeating “It’s a Small. Businesss. Forum.” when I asked if it was open to the public. If I’d pressed the issue (could have claimed I’m a really, really SMALL business owner since I have a shop on Second Life’s Marketplace), I might have ended up like these people. When I got to the Prairie Center, there were FIVE media trucks, some guy with good hair smiling as he spoke on camera to the…
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Daily Kos’ David Waldman points out that the horrific events in Norway were not just the acts of a right-wing terrorist – they were deliberately targeting the Norwegian Labour Party’s “Worker’s Youth League.” He likens it to sending a Terminator back in time to eliminate future Parliamentary opposition leaders. The truly stomach-turning aspect of the stunning terrorist attacks in Norway yesterday surely had to be the shooting spree that was initially reported—in English language outlets, anyway—to be at a “summer camp.” I had heard through the grapevine that the “camp” had a very distinct political affiliation, but it didn’t really…
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So sad. Another “national Tea Party convention” cancelled due to lack of interest… and funding, since it was billed as a true grassroots-organized event not supported by one of the AstroTurf groups that pay for the buses and the wall-to-wall FOX News coverage. Organizers of the Freedom Jamboree announced Wednesday that they have canceled the tea party convention planned for this fall, citing low registration. They had hoped the event would serve as a stage for Republican presidential candidates to court the conservative movement, and two — Rep. Michele Bachmann Minn. and former Sen. Rick Santorum Pa. — had already…
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Something I missed before; the phone hack of murder victim Milly Dowler was back in 2002 according to this. I conflated it with the royal voicemail scandal, which is a different but likely related story. I’ll guess that journos and PIs have been figuring out how easy it is to navigate voicemails since the technology was invented. Maybe they found it more convenient and less risky than breaking in to homes and offices to listen to taped messages on the old first generation machines? Since many people never changed the default passwords on their analog and digital voicemails, it just…
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As a progressive who abhors the unprecedented and frighting hold Murdoch holds over Fox News, and by extension the radical Religious Right in the US, his fall from power as Britain’s “uncrowned king” can’t come soon enough. And with the latest news breaking that millions of emails pertinent to the scandal might have been deleted by a News International executive, it’s possible the scandal may jump the pond and take a few of Murdoch’s US institutions down AND even a family member or two. Oh, I hope so. I do hope so. And now, Andy Coulson has been arrested: he’s…
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After some discussion tonight watching the feed from Netroots Nation, I realized that I don’t want to give my money to Target anymore. Too bad I already started wearing the underwear. I’ll just let it get really… ripe before I wash it, so there. Workers at a Long Island Target store have been attempting to form a union, an effort which comes to a vote on Friday. Target has been waging a pretty standard corporate anti-union campaign—which is to say, lots of intimidation. But now it’s taken a turn for the humorous. Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan, who has been doing stellar…