I'm just tired of the lies and nonsense coming from the GOP, so this is my little contribution to combat the nonsense!
We thought it was the beginning of a new thing when a professional basketball team – The Miami Heat – did their version of the Harlem Shake. We thought other teams will see the need to follow-suit. But not the Timberwolves. No, they quickly put an end to that. And they did so using someone in a Miami Heat jersey!
Some things get old fast… indeed!
Well, you be the judge. Listen to Nancy Reagan and then President Ronald Reagan as they both sat in the residence of the White House and delivered a message on drugs.
And you thought you knew it all. Well think again…
Remember when Republicans and Mitt Romney said that the only way the economy would recover was if Mitt Romney was elected in November? Well Romney wasn’t elected and today, the stock market hit a new high – a new record.
If Romney was in office, Republicans would be praising him now as the savior. Well, I’m not going to praise President Obama as savior, but I will give him and his policies much credit for helping lift the economy out of the dungeons Bush left it in.
The benchmark Dow Jones industrial average reached an all-time high Tuesday on news that China was pledging to plow more money into its economy, returning the markets to highs not seen since before the 2008 financial crisis.
By noon Tuesday, the Dow was up more than 145 points, or 1.03 percent, to 14,273.70, blowing past both an intraday record and a closing record that were both set in October 2007, during a time when the economy was just peaking and headed toward disaster. The previous intraday trading high was 14,198.10; the closing record was 14,164.53.
Sheldon Adelson was a heavy donor to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. He really wanted Romney to win. He held fundraisers and even traveled overseas with the Republican candidate. At one point in the campaign, Adelson bragged that he would donate as much as $100 million dollars to make sure that Romney win the election.
Now we know why. Imagine if Romney had won. Sheldon Adelson would have definitely had a say in a Romney administration and could have possibly been in charge of the government department now investigating him. Imagine that!
The Las Vegas Sands Corporation, an international gambling empire controlled by the billionaire Sheldon G. Adelson, has informed the Securities and Exchange Commission that it likely violated a federal law against bribing foreign officials.
The disclosure comes amid an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation into the company’s business activities in China.
It is the company’s first public acknowledgment of possible wrongdoing. Ron Reese, a spokesman for the Sands, declined to comment further.
The company’s activities in mainland China, including an attempt to set up a trade center in Beijing and create a sponsored basketball team, as well as tens of millions of dollars in payments the Sands made through a Chinese intermediary, had become a focus of the federal investigation, according to reporting by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal in August.
In its filing, the Sands said that it did not believe the findings would have material impact on its financial statements, or that they warranted revisions in its past statements. The company said that it was too early to determine whether the investigation would result in any losses. “The company is cooperating with all investigations,” the statement said.
Remember the New York police officer who was arrested for his cannibalistic plot to kidnap, kill, cook and eat women? Well his case is now being heard in New York and things are getting hot… no pun intended.
NEW YORK (AP) – Jurors appeared uncomfortable Monday as prosecutors showed an apparently staged video of a screaming woman being cooked alive over an open flame and other disturbing images from websites devoted to torturing and eating women – evidence prosecutors say proves a New York City police officer was involved in a cannibalism plot.
Officer Gilberto Valle visited web pages showing various women, FBI computer forensics examiner Stephen Flatly testified at Valle’s kidnapping conspiracy trial. “Some are dead. … A couple of them appeared to have been strangled.”
As Flatly described the images that were displayed on video monitors in federal court in Manhattan, some jurors put their hands over their mouths. One shook her head. Another wiped his brow.
One cannibalism website allegedly visited by Valle promised customers they would “only receive the highest quality human beef.” The jury also heard how the officer allegedly looked up “how to tie up a girl,” “human meat recipes” and other topics the defense says were part of a fetish fantasy that never posed a real threat.
The FBI analysis of Valle’s laptop yielded a video of a naked woman hanging over an open flame and screaming in agony. It was not indicated in court whether staged or real but it seemed staged. A flame sometimes rose near the woman’s crotch but didn’t appear to linger long enough to singe the skin, and the camera at one point focused on her sweating body.
There also were several photos of women with bright red apples stuffed in their mouths.
Another image of a woman roasting on a giant spit was discovered in a computer file that Valle kept on a former college friend that prosecutors have identified as a target of the alleged plot to kidnap, torture and eat women.
h/t USA Today
So you’ve worked all your life trying to achieve “the American dream” and making ends meet. But of lately, it seems like no matter how hard your work (providing you have a job) and how much overtime you put in, that American dream has become an illusion and making ends meet gets more and more difficult.
Well there’s a reason for that and Republicans are playing a vital role in making sure your struggles continue.
Do you have any idea what’s really happening in this country where wealth distribution is concerned? I’m sure you think you do.
We’ve heard a lot about the top one percent and we’ve watched in amazement as Congressional Republicans defend this group while asking the rest of the country to do more with less. The top one percent are the group of people who Republicans go to bat for. They are the ones Republicans want to give more to – through service cuts and raising taxes on the poor to maintaining and creating more tax loops for the rich.
As you watch this video, keep in mind the Republican’s role in how income inequality is distributed in this country.
With New Rochelle holding possession on the opposite side of the court from where they wanted to be, the team enlisted the school’s star quarterback, Khalil Edney (he plays hoops too, obviously) to send the ball upcourt as deep and accurately as possible. Edney got the ball up to midcourt, but it landed in the wrong set of hands, with Mt. Vernon’s Jalen David coming up with the ball.
What happened next defies all logic. David tossed the ball up in the air. The goal was both simple and obvious: He was trying to kill off the remainder of the game without giving New Rochelle the chance to foul and get a final shot.
Yet the strategy backfired spectacularly, because time never ran out. Instead, the toss arched to the left and forward, with the ball eventually landing right in Edney’s hands just behind midcourt with 0.1 seconds remaining. Given an instant chance to redeem himself, Edney didn’t disappoint, drilling a 55-foot shot to hand New Rochelle the most unlikely of 61-60 victories in memory.
h/t Yahoo Sports
Vice President Joseph Biden today urged the Supreme Court to uphold a provision of the Voting Rights Act that gives the federal government ongoing oversight of ballot collecting in states with histories of discrimination.
Speaking at annual memorial festivities in Selma, Ala., commemorating the 1965 civil rights marchthere, the vice president told a crowd including some of those original activists, “you know it continues on today.”
“Look folks, here we are, 48 years after what you did, and we’re still fighting,” he said.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 struck down Jim Crow segregation laws and other measures designed to impede or otherwise disenfranchise black voters. It has been renewed four times, most recently in 2006 when it passed Congress near-unanimously.
But last week conservative justices on the Supreme Court indicated they were ready to void a section of the law that requires certain states, mostly in the South, to seek federal approval for any changes to their voting regulations.
“Section Five of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, OK? I even got credit getting [Sen.] Strom Thurmond to vote for its reauthorization in the Senate,” Biden said, referring to the late, formerly segregationist lawmaker. “Strom Thurmond voted for its reauthorization in the Senate, and yet it’s being challenged in the Supreme Court of the United States of America as we stand here today.”
On Wednesday, Chief Justice John Roberts expressed concern that in its renewal Congress had used an outdated “coverage formula” that singled out certain states unfairly. Justice Antonin Scalia warned of “racial entitlements” that he said would prove “very difficult” to get rid of through democratic processes.
h/t ABC News
“When I realize I’m out of deodorant, I panic. My anxiety goes crazy and I get really aggravated.” That is what 19 year old New York resident Nicole had to say about her strange deodorant-eating addiction.
Nicole said she started eating deodorant when she was four years old and her diet quickly included a stick of deodorant a day. “My brain tells me, ‘you have to eat it'” she said. Adding that after trying to give up deodorant for a week, she got really sick and suffered from headaches.
Nicole tells her story on TLC’s My Strange Addiction.
Jeff Bush, 36, was in his room sleeping and the other five members of the household were getting ready for bed on Thursday night when they heard a loud crash and Jeff screaming.
Jeff’s brother, 35-year-old Jeremy Bush, jumped into the hole and furiously kept digging to find his brother.
“I feel in my heart he didn’t make it,” Jeremy told Tampa TV station WFTS. “There were six of us in the house; five got out.”
Jeremy himself had to be rescued from the sinkhole by the first responder to the emergency call, Douglas Duvall of the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office. When Duvall entered Jeff Bush’s bedroom, all he saw was a widening chasm but no sign of Jeff.
“The hole took the entire bedroom,” said Duvall. “You could see the bedframe, the dresser, everything was sinking,” he said.
Norman Wicker, 48, the father of Jeremy’s fiancée who also lived in the house, ran to get a flashlight and shovel.
“It sounded like a car ran into the back of the house,” Wicker said.
Authorities had not detected any signs of life after lowering listening devices and cameras into the hole and rescue efforts were suspended after the site was deemed too unsafe for emergency personnel to enter.
h/t Chicago Tribune
Bonnie Franklin, star of TV’s “One Day at a Time,” died Friday at her home in Los Angeles, suffering complications from the pancreatic cancer she had revealed in September. The actress was 69.
Later Friday, her sitcom daughters shared their thoughts online.
Valerie Bertinelli, who played the younger of divorced mom Ann Romano’s kids on the long-running show, said simply on Twitter, “My heart is breaking.” She included a snapshot of herself with Franklin.
She continued on her website.
“Bonnie has always been one of the most important women in my life and was a second mother to me,” Bertinelli wrote. “The years on ‘One Day At A Time’ were some of the happiest of my life, and along with Pat [Harrington Jr.] and Mackenzie [Phillips] we were a family in every way. She taught me how to navigate this business and life itself with grace and humor, and to always be true to yourself. I will miss her terribly.”
“Remembering my friend. Rest in peace. Bonnie Franklin,” tweeted Mackenzie Phillips, who too posted a picture of herself with her onscreen mom.
When Franklin herself was a youngster, her parents enrolled her in acting classes.
“I was a bookworm, and my mom felt I should get out of myself,” she told The Times in a 1987 interview. “My four brothers and sisters also had lessons, but I’m the only one who took them seriously.”
It was a path that would lead Franklin to one Emmy nomination, one Tony nod and two Golden Globe nominations, from her career on Broadway as well as on the small screen, most notably on “One Day at a Time,” which ran from 1975 to 1984.
h/t LA Times
