Doomsday Clock to change again

But they’re not saying which way:

The minute hand of the famous Doomsday Clock is set to move this Thursday, and for the first time, anyone with Internet access can watch. Which way the hand will move and by how much have not been made public.

The event will take place at 10 a.m. EST (1500 GMT) on Jan. 14 at the New York Academy of Sciences Building in New York City. While the actual clock is housed at the Bulletin of Atomic Sciences offices in Chicago, Ill., a representation of the clock will be changed at Thursday’s news conference. (You can watch the live Web feed at www.TurnBackTheClock.org.)

Since January 2007, the D-Day Clock has sat at 5 minutes to midnight.  Prior to that, the clock was at 7 minutes to, but was moved 2 minutes closer to midnight due to all the wars going on, the destruction of human habitat due to global warming and last but not least, the nuclear threat.

Who knows which way it will go!  Watch live:  tune in on Thursday at 10am eastern time and find out how close we are to destruction and utter devastation!  (Care to make it interesting?  My money’s on one minute further away, or 6 minutes to the Midnight Hour.)

161,992…

… and counting…

That’s not bad — I think it was 140 something this morning.

Momentum!!!  Join if you haven’t already (please)!

That was quick

Did I call it or did I call it?  Well really, who couldn’t have called this one?

In what will come as absolutely no surprise to anyone except the brainless rubes who’ve been donating big wads of cash to “SarahPac” in the hopes that she runs for President in 2012, Sarah Palin has joined Fox News as a regular contributor:

Sarah Palin has signed a multi-year deal with Fox News, reports a New York Times website.

The conservative lightning rod and former governor of Alaska will not have her own show, but will instead host an unspecified occasional series that will run on the network “from time to time,” according to the Times‘s Media Decoder website.

In addition, the Washington Post is reporting that Palin will also appear “as a commentator on various Fox News shows.”

Okay, I predicted she’d have her own show, rather than an “unspecified occasional series” or be a “commentator on various Fox News shows”.   Details!  (I also said 2012, which is 2 years away. )

Although this Fox deal doesn’t absolutely rule out the possibility of her running for some kind of High Office in 2012, “a multi-year deal” doesn’t sound like that’s what’s on her agenda.  Bummer.

I guess we’ll see what she has to say on Facebook!  Also.

Ten years for massaging meat

This is why people have so little respect for the law.

Exhibit A — Scott Roeder, confessed murderer of Dr. George Tiller, could conceivably end up being gifted with a prison sentence of less than 5 years if the charges are dropped to voluntary manslaughter.

Exhitbit B — this guy:

A South Carolina man has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for stealing an $80 slab of meat. The Times and Democrat of Orangeburg reported Thursday that 51-year-old Mark Zachary of Orangeburg received the maximum sentence after jurors found him guilty Wednesday of shoplifting.  Prosecutors said the sentence was justified because the Aug. 26 theft from Reid’s grocery store in Orangeburg was his ninth offense.

Authorities said when a store manager approached Zachary about the missing New York strip and the big bulk under his shirt, he fled, right into the arms of an off-duty police officer.  [...]

Zachary testified he was “massaging” the meat, not stealing it.

Hmmm, massaging the meat, eh?  Heh.  Whatevs.

But TEN YEARS!??  Is that not a bit of overkill?  I realize it’s the guy’s 9th offense, and he obviously has A Problem, but if all his other offenses were as meat-beatingly lame as this one, I don’t see how it adds up to deserving ten(10) years behind bars.  Lucky for Scott Roeder that his crime didn’t take place in South Carolina — if a serial meat-masseuse could get 10 years for what’s basically petty theft, a brainless, murderous brute like Roeder would be going away for about 5000 light-years

Edit: Light years? — whatever!  A commenter just reminded me that “light years” are distance, not time.  But you get the idea. (Fucking medication.)

The Flop Sweat hangs heavy in the air

Before I was struck down in the prime of life with an unspeakably hideous illness last week, I had been trying to co-ordinate a contest.   Remember?  “The Craziest Bloggers of 2009″?   Right.  Pffffft.

I had hoped for it to be a non-partisan thing, bringing together nominees from both (all?) sides of the ‘sphere, and a winner representing each side, however… there were only about 10 nominees, and all but one were right-wingnuts.  Due to the dearth of leftard nominations, that category has been nuked.  (Thanks for playing, wingers.  Geez, ya think??)

The contest appears to be an Unmitigated Flop, but so what?  Maybe we can still salvage the thing and have a little fun with it.  In that spirit, the nominees are:

1.  Scenty (Canadian Sentinel)  (also see balbulican’s explanation of why Scenty deserves to win)

2.  Wernerpatels

3.  Neo (Halls of Macadamia)

4.  Dodo Can Spell

5.  SUZANNE (Big Blue Fetus) WARNING: fetus porn (that’s what all non-crazy people do with incoming links, right?  Redirect them to fetus porn!  Ding ding ding, I think we have a winner!)

6.  Roid-Raging Tory

7.  EzraLevant

8.  The mudfortunate Dr. Roy

9.  Gay & Right (deserves consideration for question-mark abuse alone)

Okay: anyone who has any other nominations they want to put forward, now is the time.

Let’s get this old jalopy of a show on the road!  Better late than never.

Cartoonist gets death threats

No, I’m not talking about the crazed Somali extremist who tried to kill Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard last week in retaliation for that old Mohammed cartoon with the turban-bomb (tur-bomb?).  That was last week’s news, and I slept blissfully through it.  I’m talking about USian cartoonist Mark Fiore, who had the audacity to put up this little vid awhile ago:

Three… two… one…

OUTRAGE!

Right-wingnuts went apeshit-bananas, and Fiore reports that the death threats continue to roll in apace:

The death threats keep coming this fine morning.  I guess the Tea Party crew is determined to have “death panels” one way or another.

“Learn to Speak Tea Bag” ran on my usual client sites, including NPR, which really set off the guys over here, here (note Condi giving child flowers down by “donate” button), here, here and here.  Before you could say, “due to a pre-existing condition, your health coverage has been denied,” there was a full-fledged viral campaign by right-wing media outlets and blogs to jump, scream and shout about this animation.  Which, to me, is just great!

I say that not because I get some thrill out of receiving emails that are in all capital letters or have more exclamation points than letters in the alphabet, I say that because one of the most important functions of a political cartoon, or political animation, is to foster a discussion.  With thousands of comments posted, loads of emails and tweets, discussion was definitely fostered, and then some.  It’s the “then some” that worries me.

Fiore goes on to note the coincidence of being on the receiving end of death threats over a cartoon at the same time as the Danish cartoonist, saying “Muslim extremist, meet tea party extremist”.   Great Caesar’s Ghost, it’s the Teabaggin’ Taliban!

Who says irony is dead?  It’s just been resting.

No reason

This just cracked me up (so to speak) — The People of Walmart Rap:

Roeder could be out in 5

Indeed…

As unbelievable as it may sound, in Kansas it’s possible that a guy could walk into a church, plant a bullet in someone’s head right in front of numerous witnesses, confess to the killing, and end up getting as little as 4 years for it:

The judge presiding over Scott Roeder’s murder trial said he could consider giving the jury an option of choosing a less severe charge than murder in the killing of a Wichita abortion provider.  [...]

Wilbert told lawyers Friday that he couldn’t imagine a scenario that would allow Roeder to argue he was defending the lives of others. But the judge stopped short of legally ruling it out.

Wilbert said, however, that he could envision giving jurors the option of a charge such as voluntary manslaughter.

Under a conviction on voluntary manslaughter, Roeder could face four to six years in prison, compared to a life sentence if convicted of murder.

It’s an unlikely scenario, but even the fact that there’s a *chance* it might happen is pretty outrageous; I guess it all depends on the sanity of the jury (ie. whether it’s infested with fetus fetishists).   This judge has already denied Roeder’s attempt to use the “necessity defense“, so at least there’s that…??  Good grief.

Light blogging ahead

This has been a bad winter, health-wise.  Expect light to nil around here for the  next few, I’m fucking sick again.  Plus I spilled coffee on my keyboard and fucked it up so I’m on the lappie, which is unpleasant after the iMac.  Waahhhh.  FUCK.

Later

Turkey time

I know you’ve all been waiting for it.

Sadly, after the Thanksgiving/Christmas season, out of the 13 original turkeys there are only 4 females left.  As soon as I saw them coming up the driveway  I went outside, and look how they start running to me — and it’s because they love me, not because I’m feeding them.

Decade’s Top 10 Stuff

Now that the “2ks” have finally come to an end, the “Top Ten” lists are being fired out fast and furious in a masochistic rehash of that sad and sorry decade — like Salon’s “Top Ten Quotations“.

Salon’s list includes such ludicrous gems as “Bring ‘em on” and “Keep your government hands off my Medicare”, but any Top Ten list is limited by definition and there were a few pearls of brain-damaged wisdom that were left out.  I’ll never know how this instant classic from Sarah Palin didn’t make the top ten cut:  “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’…”

And I’m sure there are more, what do you think?

It also occurs to me that there are many words and expressions that are now part of the mainstream lexicon which either didn’t exist or I’d never heard of before the year 2000, like the term “Death Panel”.  In no particular order, some of the other ones that come to mind are:

1.    ”Google”

2.    ”Tweet” and tweep and the entire family of Twitter-related words

3.    ”Blogosphere”

4.    ”Netroots”

5.    ”Teabagger”

6.    ”Unfriend” (Oxford’s Word of the Year for 2009)

7.    ”Hanging Chad”

8.    ”LOLcat”

9.    ”WMD”

10.  ”W00T!”

And…?

How anti-choice propaganda works

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion but not to their own facts, right?  Tell that to anti-abortion bloggers, notorious for conflating opinion and fact in their ongoing pursuit of the perfect propaganda.  And here’s how it works:

Dammit Janet has a story today about a ‘crisis pregnancy center’ that was vandalized and torched recently, and fetus fetishists’ brain-damaged attempts to point the finger at pro-choicers.   The original story is on the website of the local newspaper, the White Mountain Independent:

President of the Living Hope Women’s Center governing board and former executive director Dinah Monahan said not much is known yet about the fire, but that it looks as though whoever may have set it first vandalized the Fatherhood Store and threw televisions, VCR’s and other items onto the ground outside before setting fire to the clinic in the back of the building in the Mommy Store. She said the fire did not burn the building to the ground, but it did cause enough fire and smoke damage to gut it and make it at least temporarily useless as a clinic.

Anti-abortion ‘crisis pregnancy centers’ are often little more than compelled pregnancy/adoption agencies that disguise themselves as womens’ clinics.  But this one seems to have had a good relationship with the local community and  given no reason for someone to want to torch it.

The arson appears to be a dumb and brainless act perpetrated by rotten little delinquents with too much time on their hands, and the original story gives no reason to believe otherwise.  The only brief mention of the politics of abortion was in a question investigators asked the center’s president:

“The agent very gingerly asked if we were involved in ‘anything controversial’ in our ministry,” she said. “You can imagine what they hear about Crisis Pregnancy Centers, abortion clinic bombings and the like. I assured him that even though we are a CPC (Certified Professional Consultant), our work was mostly pre-natal and parenting and that the culture in Whiteriver is very pro-life.”

So even the CPC’s president is quite sure the fire wasn’t politically-motivated.  Scrolling through the comments with the article, most seem to agree… except for:

Both “Ceecee” (the same ‘Ceecee’ who posts at Big Blue Fetus?) and “anonymous” are from hundreds of miles away, yet they know better than commenters who live in the community: it’s not kids, it’s “pro-choice violence”. Even when LifeNews reported the story, they didn’t go there — and if LifeNews doesn’t go there, you know there’s no “there” there.

But right-wingnutter Melissa Clouthier doesn’t let reality get in the way of a good SHRIEEEEK! in her article at Right Wing News (and her blog), quoting LifeNews at length and topping it off with this whopper:

Scrolling to the comments and trackbacks, it’s obvious that the screechosphere has picked up Clouthier’s foul ball and is running with it:

So now we have blogs reporting this as something they’re calling “Domestic Pro-choice Terrorism”, which (1) doesn’t exist, and (2) isn’t what the story actually said.   Two! Two! Two lies in one! Not only has this particular story been reinvented, reinterpreted and puked out through a filter of anti-choice batshittery, but something called “Pro-choice terrorism” (which doesn’t even exist — did I mention that?) has entered the news realm, if only at the basest blogospheric level.

As Clouthier concludes, “It will be interesting to find out who committed this attack”.  Indeed it will, though I don’t expect to find out from her.  As an anti-abortion propagandist, her work here is done.

El-Rushbo is A-Okay (physically speaking)

Gee, who’da thunk that an obese, cigar-smoking druggie would have heart problems?  But that’s what a steady diet of haterade, hillbilly heroin and outrage will do for you, and a couple of days ago Rush was “rushed” to a Honolulu hospital (in a socialist ambulance) after experiencing the old telltale sign that the ticker is about to collapse under the weight of all that bile — chest pains.  (Heart Attack in Honolulu — that could be a Tom Waits tune.)

Today his condition has been upgraded to “stable” and Rush says he’s “A-Okay” after undergoing a battery of tests and an angioplasty, and that’s all good.   No, really.   I won’t be one of the many who wish Rush ill –

Not I.  It won’t be me who says “I hope he (or his doctor, or his heart) fails“, because that would be vicious, low and wrong, and on the first day of this dewy new year, I won’t do it.

What I will do is enjoy the calm as millions of jabbering dittoheads fall silent without Rush telling them what to think… the only thing that might break the golden silence would be if they decided to bitch about ‘liberals’ being nasty to Rush while he was hospitalized.  But they’re not that dumb and desperate, are they?

Nope, no racism here

Just to start the new year off on the right “foot”, let’s have a glimpse into the fetid fever swamp that passes for the “mind” of an average Sarah Palin supporter.

Here’s one who thought it would be cool to email her co-workers the following photoshopped image of President Obama and Sarah Palin:

No, really:

A 73-year-old Colorado Department of Transportation supervisor is in hot water after forwarding a Photoshopped image of President Barack Obama shining the shoes of Sarah Palin.

The e-mail, sent to at least four other CDOT employees on Dec. 22, contained a line that said, “It appears he has found his niche.”

The e-mail was also sent outside the department and a person who received it complained to transportation department officials on Tuesday.

Can ya dig it?  A government employee, no less — aka one of those useless parasites who makes a living sucking at the taxpayer tit, and this is what she’s doing on the state of Colorado’s time.  I hope she gets fired from her socialist job, and her socialist union gives her the socialist finger.

(via raw story)

Happy New Year!

Hooray! Hooray!  The 2000s are over today!  Let the New & Improved 2010s begin.

Hope you had a good first morning of this new decade — I think we can all agree that it can’t be any more of a disastrophe than the last one.

But through the good times and the bad, one thing that never changes is the attitude of kittehs:

Hope this was not how you started the new year!