1960 - The United States imposed an embargo on exports to Cuba covering all commodities.
1984 - Four U.S. employees of the CIA were killed in El Salvador when their plane crashed.
COINCIDENCE? I think NOT!
“If any of the three prongs of the Lemon Test are violated by an act of government, it is unconstitutional:
- It must have a secular legislative purpose;
- Its principal or primary effect must neither advance nor inhibit religion;
- It must not foster excessive entanglement between government and religion.”
-- The Lemon Test, Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 US 602 (1971)
"I denounced it. I denounced interracial dating. I denounced anti-Catholic bigacy... bigotry." (W responding to attacks on his visit to ultra-conservative Bob Jones University )
FROM THE CHURCH OF INEFFABLE STUPIDITY:
a) Thanks for nothing, Congress.
Two congressional committees in charge of drafting legislation to regulate derivatives have quietly killed a provision that would allow the Federal Reserve to police the complicated financial transactions. The kind of derivatives that many blame for the near-collapse of the American financial system have never been regulated.
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Makes you wonder who they work for sometimes.
Some science and math dudes and dudettes took a serious look at the derivatives market. They learned that it is almost impossible to police, and too easy to scam the purchaser by hiding truly stinkie facets in what seems to be a solid derivative. Translation, this field cannot be regulated, inspected or controlled, and worse, if your partner in a trade is a greedy, unethical bastard, you WILL lose.
Gee. Imagine Wall Street with greed unethical bastards.
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b) From the folks that brought you SARAH PALIN
EKET, Nigeria — The nine-year-old boy lay on a bloodstained hospital sheet crawling with ants, staring blindly at the wall.
His family pastor had accused him of being a witch, and his father then tried to force acid down his throat as an exorcism. It spilled as he struggled, burning away his face and eyes. The emaciated boy barely had strength left to whisper the name of the church that had denounced him – Mount Zion Lighthouse.
A month later, he died.
Nwanaokwo Edet was one of an increasing number of children in Africa accused of witchcraft by pastors and then tortured or killed, often by family members. Pastors were involved in half of 200 cases of "witch children" reviewed by the AP, and 13 churches were named in the case files.
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
THIS is the christianity that Sarah's church is spreading throughout the Third World, including Nigeria, Niger, Alaska, South Carolina, Yemen, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Misery and Missississippi.
Funny how she manages to ignore this on twitter.
In unrelated news, Wasilly Sarah comes in a distant third in polls rating Mike Hucksterbee and Willard Mitsterbee Romney.
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c) The GOP base really is different. And quite possibly insane.
The Republican base voters are not part of the continuum leading to the center of the electorate: they truly stand apart. For additional perspective, Democracy Corps conducted a parallel set of groups in suburban Cleveland. These groups, comprised of older, white, non-college independents and weak partisans, represent some of the most conservative swing voters in the electorate,[1] and they demonstrated a wholly different worldview from Republican base voters by dismissing the fear of “socialism” and evaluating Obama in very different terms. Most importantly, regardless of their personal feelings toward Obama or how they voted in 2008, they very much want to see him succeed because they believe the country desperately needs the change he promised in his campaign. Though we kept discussion points constant between the two sets of groups, on virtually every point of discussion around President Obama and the major issues facing our country, these two audiences simply saw the world in fundamentally different ways – underscoring the extreme disconnect of the conservative Republican base voters.
http://www.democracycorps.com/...
" . . . the extreme disconnect of the conservative Republican base voters."
No shyte, Sherlock. We don't mind their disconnect so much, given that they could not dial their way out of a phone booth, or know how to open, much less read a map, but given their extremely high rate of support for the NRA, we cannot ignore that these cretins are heavily armed. It is almost if they are trying to replace missing brain cells with gun shells.
Despite one of the authors, this makes for good reading, and is worthy of a review.
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d) Balloon Boy and our MainStreamMediots
We should be grateful to daddums. In his small-minded way, he managed to highlight precisely what is so wrong with today's media outhouselets.
So daddums was so addicted to the lime of light, that he concocted, with the help of a media outlet (faux?) in order to concoct a reality show. Had any cable or boredcast news program bothered to do a reality check, they would have learned, that absent the additional lift and strength of two african sparrows, that balloon could not have raised a 90 lb kid off the ground.
Of course, asking today's MSMediots to do a reality check is akin to asking Fox News to become a news station. Highly improbable.
CNN pretends to review its own rectum from within, in retelling this story. It regrets spending the airtime on it.
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e) My kind of beer. bear. whatever.
Shoppers in a Wisconsin grocery store got an unexpected surprise when a 125-pound black bear wandered inside and headed straight for the beer cooler.
The bear stopped Thursday night at Marketplace Foods in Hayward, about 140 miles northeast of Minneapolis, sauntering through the automatic doors and heading straight for the liquor department.
It calmly climbed up 12 feet onto a shelf in the beer cooler where it sat for about an hour while employees helped evacuate customers and summoned wildlife officials.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/...
The animal was probably still upset at Green Bay not seeking Favre's help this season. Global climate change could be the other reason.
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f) Silly news, cont.
It is hard to finish this off. Today's hoax on the US Chamber of Commerce? Or Chris Christie's video admission that he raised funds for W in order to get his US attorney posting. Somali women being whipped for wearing bras? or Obama's ridiculous attack on Iran, when he knew in January that Iran's Qum processing center:
a) did not violate UN rules
b) was not operational
c) was well known to NATO, the UN, and the Bush admin
d) was going to be inspected by the UN upon completion.
Methinks that last bit may come to bite Obama in the butt. It was though AIPAC and the AJC decided to write his speech for him. Then again, maybe they did.
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"There was never a good war or a bad peace."
Benjamin Franklin