Friday! Friday! Friday!

This reminds me how many ’50’s pop hits came right out of The Grand Old Opry, something of which those of us in the elite enclaves of northern suburbs were blissfully unaware.

I have my issues with Obama like the stimulus was not bold enough, but really . . .

. . . for those who rail incessantly about ‘failed’ economic policies, get real (and stop pretending that stimulus was all spending . . .a big part was tax cuts).

Fridays come mighty fast

Pure harmony seems to be enjoying a bit of a  revival. The artistry of  The Beach Boys and these guys – never gets old.

Fun fact: Texas legislators regulate dildos

Oh the deliciousness. According to the March 2014 Harper’s Index*:

Maximum number of dildos a Texan may legally own : 5

I guess it isn’t surprising that the Texas Legislature took the time to examine such an urgent issue. The late Molly Ivins . . .

. . . called the Texas Legislature the best free entertainment in Austin. “Naturally, when it comes to voting, we in Texas are accustomed to discerning that fine hair’s-breadth worth of difference that makes one hopeless dipstick slightly less awful than the other. But it does raise the question: Why bother?” she wrote in a 2002 column.

* No linkee – it’s behind a pay wall.

It seems Creationists are rude

So it’s cleaning day: the vacuum sits there staring at me, cleaning fluids wait on the counter, rags out too, probably wondering what this is all about. And on C-Span is a ‘debate’ at the Creation Museum between Ken Ham, founder (for Creationism) and Bill Nye, the ‘Science Guy’. Great stuff focusing on Genesis, the Ark and the age of the earth (and evolution of course).

On go the headphones to ease the task at hand.

The debate is conducted by standard rules. The two are allowed 30 minutes to make their respective cases and are then allowed periods for rebuttal.

Ham went first (he presents an utterly bizarre case, but the man is very good on the podium) and after he concluded his remarks, the entire audience gave a nice round of applause. The entire audience.

Then Nye spoke (he’s not as polished as Ham was). And when he concluded, half of the audience applauded. Those who did not applause sat resolutely still – with grim faces.

Whatever the composition of the audience, half of them didn’t learn their manners from Mama.

Okay, so you probaly know this already, but

Tea Party hero “Joe the Plumber” (name’s not really Joe and he never was a plumber) has a new job.  At Chrysler. Which could hire him because they didn’t go out of business in 2009 after, you know, that socialist ‘rescue package’ from the Feds saved their baby bottoms. Also, it’s a union shop – Joe is now a member of the UAW.

“In order to work for Chrysler, you are required to join the Union, in this case UAW. There’s no choice – it’s a union shop – the employees voted to have it that way and in America that’s the way it is,” he wrote.

Can’t wait till Neil Cavuto has him back on the program at FOX.

Everything is Newt Gingrich’s fault

And I mean everything. Whatever veneer of civility existed in the US Congress was very deliberately extinguished in 1994 by Newt Gingrich when he instructed his caucus that their Democratic colleagues were no longer ‘the opposition’. They were ‘the enemy’.

After that, and after being tossed out by his own party just a few years later, and after a few more wives, and after a near bankruptcy or two, and after a vanity campaign for president, and after being hired by CNN – proving their irrelevance once again – to resurrect the reviled show Crossfire (perfect casting, I must say), comes now his call for John Kerry to resign as Secretary of State. Because climate change you know.

There’s no getting rid of this guy.

 

Friday Oldie

This is the real thing – an oldie hit from the days before I was myself an oldie.

What if it was Bush? How would I feel?

The 2014 World Press Freedom Index is out. Nasty news – again – for the old U-S-of-A where we’ve been sliding into the badlands ever since 9/11. And where my President and his Attorney General have some ‘splainin’ to do. Which will not happen with this President or any future President unless we get really really lucky.

Countries that pride themselves on being democracies and respecting the rule of law have not set an example . . . Freedom of information is too often sacrificed to an overly broad and abusive interpretation of national security needs, marking a disturbing retreat from democratic practices.

This has been the case in the United States (46th), which fell 13 places, one of the most significant declines, amid increased efforts to track down whistleblowers and the sources of leaks. The trial and conviction of Private Bradley Manning and the pursuit of NSA analyst Edward Snowden were warnings to all those thinking of assisting in the disclosure of sensitive information that would clearly be in the public interest.

US journalists were stunned by the Department of Justice’s seizure of Associated Press phone records without warning in order to identify the source of a CIA leak. It served as a reminder of the urgent need for a “shield law” to protect the confidentiality of journalists’ sources at the federal level. The revival of the legislative process is little consolation for James Risen of The New York Times, who is subject to a court order to testify against a former CIA employee accused of leaking classified information. And less still for Barrett Brown, a young freelance journalist facing 105 years in prison in connection with the posting of information that hackers obtained from Statfor, a private intelligence company with close ties to the federal government.

The United Kingdom (33rd, -3) distinguished itself in the war on terror by the disgraceful pressure it put on The Guardian newspaper and by its detention of David Miranda, journalist Glenn Greenwald’s partner and assistant, for nine hours. Both the US and UK authorities seem obsessed with hunting down whistleblowers instead of adopting legislation to rein in abusive surveillance practices that negate privacy, a democratic value cherished in both countries.

At least the UK was spared the shame of our double-digit decline in press freedom. USA!

Nice cartoon. Ha-ha.

From the Monday ‘Patriot Humor’ feature at The Patriot Post. And the joke is?

UPDATE: jonolan points out that I read this one wrong. The joke is that the letters behind Carney spell ‘white washing…” and that, indeed, is funny. The site it came from features regular racist slurs and that influenced how I interpreted it at first.

Yup, Friday

50 Years ago they arrived in the U.S. to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show. Soon after, this album and these wonderful sounds filled my little New York apartment (on, ironically, Sullivan Street).

Hands off the Girl Scouts: a jump the shark moment?

It seems the Girl Scouts – in a Tweet – mentioned women of achievement (and linked to a story about Wendy Davis!). Which – as night follows day – means they are in league with Planned Parenthood. Here is ABC valiantly trying to follow the story but don’t bother (you could probably write it yourself – blindfolded).

 

In so many ways . . .

. . . we are really two different countries and the similarities to Civil War era America abound.

And there’s this too  – the ten poorest States. I got it from a 2011 story at Glenn Beck’s The Blaze where commenters were not surprised, reasoning that that’s what Obama had done to us in just 20 months. The man worked fast!

1. Mississippi
2. Arkansas
3. Tennessee
4. West Virginia
5. Louisiana
6. Montana
7. South CArolina
8. Kentucky
9. Alabama
10. North Carolina

How about teen pregnancies? Below the mid point and dominating the list for ‘least teen pregnancies’, all of New England and most of the NorthEast. And what region dominates the list for ‘most teen pregnancies’? Lookee here:

STATES WITH MOST TEEN PREGNANCIES:
New Mexico – 93/1,000
Mississippi – 90/1,000
Texas – 85/1,000
Nevada – 84/1,000
Arkansas – 82/1,000
Arizona – 82/1,000
Delaware – 81/1,000
Louisiana – 80/1,000
Oklahoma – 80/1,000
Georgia – 78/1,000

STATES WITH FEWEST TEEN PREGNANCIES:
Iowa – 51/1,000
Nebraska – 50/1,000
Utah – 48/1,000
Wisconsin – 45/1,000
Maine – 43/1,000
Massachusetts – 42/1,000
North Dakota – 42/1,000
Minnesota – 42/1,000
Vermont – 38/1,000
New Hampshire – 33/1,000

How about high school dropouts by State? A pattern emerges.