Rep. King Designs Electrified Fence For Southern Border: ‘We Do This With Livestock All The Time’Video here:
(ed note: Bigoted fucking moron) Rep. Steve King (R-IA) went on the House floor on Tuesday to discuss a fence that he “designed” for the southern boarder. (King constructed a model of the fence as he was speaking.) King’s design features a wire electrified “with the kind of current that would not kill somebody.” King noted that “we do this with livestock all the time.”
Bush Loses Core Supporters
Leonard Wilton
Associated Press
WASHINGTON, July 11, 2006
President Bush appears to be losing support among a key group of voters who had hitherto stood firmly with the president even as his poll numbers among other groups fell dramatically.
A new Gallup poll shows that, for the first time, Bush's approval rating has fallen below 35% among total fucking morons, and now stands at 27%. This represents a dramatic drop compared to a poll taken just last summer, when 62% of total fucking morons expressed support for the president and his policies.
The current poll, conducted by phone with 1,409 total fucking morons between May 4 and May 8, reveals that only 44% of those polled believe the president is doing a good job, while 27% believe he is doing a poor job and 29% don't understand the question.
The previous poll, conducted by phone with 1,530 total fucking morons, showed 62% approved of the president, 7% disapproved and 31% didn't understand the question.
Faltering approval ratings for the president among a group once thought to be a reliable source of loyal support gives Republicans one more reason to be nervous about the upcoming mid-term elections. "If we can't depend on the support of total fucking morons," says Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), "then we've got a big problem. They're a key factor in our electoral strategy, and an important part of today's Republican coalition."
"We've taken the total fucking moron vote for granted," says Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL), "and now we're paying for it. We've let the Democrats control the debate lately, and they've dragged discourse back into the realm of complex, nuanced issues. So your average total fucking moron turns on his TV and sees his Republican Congressman arguing about Constitutional law or the complexities of state formation in the Middle East, and he tunes out. He wants to hear comforting, pandering,
flattering bromides and he doesn't want to hear a logical argument more complex than what you'd find on a bumper sticker."
For Feeney, the poll is a dire warning that Republicans can ignore only at their peril. "This should send a signal that we have to regain control of the debate if we want the support of our key constituencies in the coming election and beyond. We need to bring public discourse back into the realm of stupidity and vacuity. We should be talking about homosexual illegal immigrants burning flags. We should be talking about the power of pride. We should be talking about freedom fries. These are the issues that resonate with total fucking morons."
But some total fucking morons say it's too late. Bill Snarpel of Enid, Oklahoma is a total fucking moron who voted for Bush in both 2000 and 2004. But he says he won't be voting for Bush in 2008. "I don't like it that he was going to sell our ports to the Arabs. If the Arabs own the ports then that means they'll let all the Arabs in and then we'll all be riding camels and wearing towels on our heads. I don't want my children singing the Star Spangled Banner in Muslim."
Total fucking moron Kurt Meyer of Turlock , California also says his once solid support for Bush has collapsed. "He invaded Iraq and all those soldiers died, and for what? We destroyed all their WMDs, but now their new president is making fun of us and saying he's going to build nuclear bombs and that we can't stop him. Well, nuclear bombs are even worse than WMDs, so what did we accomplish?"
Laura McDonald, a total fucking moron from Chandler, Arizona , says she is disappointed that the president hasn't been a more forceful advocate of Christian values. "This country was founded on Christian values," she says, "but you'd never know it looking around and seeing all the Mexicans running around. I thought Bush was going to bring Jesus back into the government. Instead, Christians are being persecuted worse than ever before in history, because all these Mexicans come here and tell Christians that we have to respect their religious beliefs. So now it's illegal for children to pray in school. Soon it will be illegal for them to speak English."
Not all total fucking morons have turned their backs on the president. Jeb Larkin of Topeka, Kansas says he still fully support s Bush. "He is doing a great job. He is a great president. He is a great decider. I have a puppy. His tail sticks straight up and you can see his butthole."
And not all Republican lawmakers are concerned about the poll. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), for one, does not find it a cause for anxiety.
While he agrees that his party should not take total fucking morons for granted, they "really don't have anywhere else to go. They're never going to be able to understand someone like Al Gore or John Kerry or anybody intelligent and articulate who wants to talk about substantive issues Just try having a conversation with one of them about global warming. They'll say, 'Oh, but Bush says volcanoes consume more ozone than humans do.' I mean, they're morons! Total fucking morons!"
"They've got nowhere else to go," Alexander reaffirms with a smile, "and they always vote."
Most Americans plan to vote for DemocratsBut wait, you say! What about the "incumbent factor"? The fact that, historically, 98% of incumbents are re-elected to their seats?
By DONNA CASSATA
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
WASHINGTON -- Republicans are in jeopardy of losing their grip on Congress in November. With less than four months to the midterm elections, the latest Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that Americans by an almost 3-to-1 margin hold the GOP-controlled Congress in low regard and profess a desire to see Democrats wrest control after a dozen years of Republican rule.
Further complicating the GOP outlook to turn things around is a solid percentage of liberals, moderates and even conservatives who say they'll vote Democratic. The party out of power also holds the edge among persuadable voters, a prospect that doesn't bode well for the Republicans.
The AP-Ipsos survey asked 789 registered voters if the election for the House were held today, would they vote for the Democratic or Republican candidate in their district. Democrats were favored 51 percent to 40 percent.What does this mean?
Not surprisingly, 81 percent of self-described liberals said they would vote for the Democrat. Among moderates, though, 56 percent backed a Democrat in their district and almost a quarter of conservatives - 24 percent - said they will vote Democratic.
Democrats also held the advantage among persuadable voters - those who are undecided or wouldn't say whom they prefer. A total of 51 percent said they were leaning Democrat, while 41 percent were leaning Republican.
Overall, only 27 percent approved of the way Congress is doing its job. Lawmakers get favorable marks from 36 percent of conservatives, 28 percent of moderates and 17 percent of liberals.(emphasis added)
The Voting Rights Act, adopted initially in 1965 and extended in 1970, 1975, and 1982, is generally considered the most successful piece of civil rights legislation ever adopted by the United States Congress. The Act codifies and effectuates the 15th Amendment's permanent guarantee that, throughout the nation, no person shall be denied the right to vote on account of race or color. In addition, the Act contains several special provisions that impose even more stringent requirements in certain jurisdictions throughout the country.OK, that's pretty straightforward: minorities had undue burdens to voting in elections, therefore were not represented properly in the governmental process. The Federal government, the erstwhile protector of our civil rights against the tyranny of the majority (or even minority), said "Nuh uh!" and passing the Voting Rights Act, whereby they could impose voting equality if necessary.
Adopted at a time when African Americans were substantially disfranchised in many Southern states, the Act employed measures to restore the right to vote that intruded in matters previously reserved to the individual states. Section 4 ended the use of literacy requirements for voting in six Southern states (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia) and in many counties of North Carolina, where voter registration or turnout in the 1964 presidential election was less than 50 percent of the voting-age population. Under the terms of Section 5 of the Act, no voting changes were legally enforceable in these jurisdictions until approved either by a three-judge court in the District of Columbia or by the Attorney General of the United States. Other sections authorized the Attorney General to appoint federal voting examiners who could be sent into covered jurisdictions to ensure that legally qualified persons were free to register for federal, state, and local elections, or to assign federal observers to oversee the conduct of elections.
House Moves to Renew Voting Rights ActSnarky bullet point one: Better check the guy wires on that tent, sugar, because the big top is droopy. You haven't been the big tent party since, oh, I don't know, Bob Dole needed Viagra.
By LAURIE KELLMAN
Associated Press Writer
July 13, 2006, 8:54 AM EDT
WASHINGTON -- Having quieted dissenting conservatives, House Republicans are trying again to renew the 1965 Voting Rights Act in an election-year effort to win support from minority voters.
The bill's progress through Congress is considered by Republican leaders as one way to stem the damage to the party's "big-tent" image among minorities watching the contentious debate over whether to grant most of the nation's 12 million illegal immigrants a chance at citizenship.
The renewal of the Voting Rights Act -- the legislative centerpiece of the civil rights movement -- is widely supported by House leaders in both parties. It had been expected to sail through the House last month, but a rebellion in a closed GOP caucus meeting forced supporters to cancel the vote.TRANSLATION from CongressSpeak by way of Newspaperese: The dumb crackers in the South had to go home to their districts and the county fairs and tell the Klansmen that they stopped the darkies from voting.
Conservatives, mostly from the South, contended that the bill singled out their states for Justice Department scrutiny without giving them credit for strides on civil rights.I was right! But I'm still trying to figure out how they get "strides on civil rights" out of their actions of the past forty years which have been to obstruct, deny, and delay any reforms until they've been forced to, through exhaustion, swallow their medicine.
Hours of negotiations in recent days yielded an agreement, approved 8-3 on Wednesday by the Rules Committee, to allow votes on a few amendments proposing the changes pushed by the objectors.Q.E.D.
The changes are not expected to be added to the legislation. But House leaders, intent on passing the bill over to the Senate this week, agreed to allow votes on the four amendments to move it along.
Civil rights advocates, however, see the amendments as the latest in a history of attempts to undercut growing political influence of racial minorities.
Pentagon breaks with Bush on detentions(Sidenote: Irony of ironies that an American general named England (no relation to Lynndie, presumably) makes an announcement that's barely covered in the States, but is featured on, well, English news media!)
· Geneva convention covers Guantánamo detainees
· Supreme court ruling prompts policy switch
The Bush administration was facing the collapse of its detention regime in the war on terror yesterday after the Pentagon said for the first time that prisoners at Guantánamo and elsewhere in US military custody around the world would be granted the protections of the Geneva convention.
In a memo released yesterday, the Pentagon's second in command, Gordon England, broke with the Bush administration's insistence of the past five years that the rules of war do not apply to the fight against al-Qaida.
While the Bush administration has said it will implement the supreme court decision, there were indications the new policy was only reluctantly endorsed by the White House. "We are going to do this in a way that is consistent with national security," the White House spokesman, Tony Snow, told reporters .So we're back in the middle of the struggle between the Pentagon and the White House over how to prosecute the war and its ancillary issues, such as handling detainees. Bush has said he will seek Congressional approval for continuing the previous treatment of indefinite incarceration and secret tribunals, while the Pentagon (and by extension, the CIA) will now treat prisoners according to the Geneva convention.
Other administration officials expressed reservations. In the first of three days of hearings in Congress on the treatment of detainees, Steven Bradbury, of the justice department's office of legal counsel, told senators the Geneva convention protections were ambiguous and poorly defined.
Those tensions dampened the response of civil rights organisations to the Pentagon announcement. "At the same time that the defence department is showing signs of heading in the direction of restoring the rule of law, the justice department is urging Congress to abandon it," said Anthony Romero, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union.
The most obvious answer is that the Bush Doctrine foundered in the principal place the U.S. tried to apply it. Though no one in the White House openly questions Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq, some aides now acknowledge that it has come at a steep cost in military resources, public support and credibility abroad. The Administration is paying the bill every day as it tries to cope with other crises. Pursuing the forward-leaning foreign policy envisioned in the Bush Doctrine is nearly impossible at a time when the U.S. is trying to figure out how to extricate itself from Iraq. Around the world, both the U.S.'s friends and its adversaries are taking note--and in many cases, taking advantage--of the strains on the superpower. If the toppling of Saddam Hussein marked the high-water mark of U.S. hegemony, the past three years have witnessed a steady erosion in Washington's ability to bend the world to its will....as is most clearly evidenced in the suddenly nuanced approach to North Korea. There we have a dictator who has weapons of mass destruction, has made noise about hurting us, and has shown himself to be unstable and self-destructive.
FOR SOME IN THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION, the ideal strategy for dealing with Kim has always been economic and diplomatic strangulation, with the hope that his government will eventually atrophy into collapse or succumb to a coup that might usher in a more amiable--or at least more predictable--leader. That approach is based on the idea that rather than try to negotiate with Kim or take military action against him, the U.S. and its allies are better off keeping him in a box and focusing on preventing him from peddling his arsenal to other rogue actors. Elements of that strategy have been in place for some time and have produced a few notable examples of success.Or you could call it the "Castro strategy" (I'll get to that in a moment). Nevertheless, this strategy was working to great effect in Iraq, and it was only in a fit of huffiness after September 11 that Bush decided that he would merely beat the living crap out of a defenseless dictator, not that plans to do just that hadn't already been in the works. September 11 provided a convenient excuse to execute them.
US has $80m plan for Cuba after CastroSounds pretty good, huh? Fund an opposition that's prepared to step in as soon as Castro dies, take over, and run the country with us as its guide. Not much military opposition to it, certainly China can't get troops over there, and Venezuela will have its own problems to deal with.
· Aid and advisers should be on standby, says report
· Authors fear Venezuela could fund successors
America should be prepared to move quickly to pour aid and advisers into Cuba in the event of Fidel Castro's death, to turn the island away from communist rule, a government report due for release this week will recommend.
The report, the second from a group set up by George Bush three years ago to intensify US pressure for regime change in Cuba, calls for $80m (£43m) to be put aside to step up opposition to Mr Castro.
Paying attention to Brazil would involve offering an attractive trade agreement that would grant freer access to the U.S. market for Brazilian steel, shoes, orange juice, ethanol and other products that currently face import barriers. The costs for the U.S. economy would be relatively minimal. For Brazil, such a deal would stimulate exports, drive investment and lift the economy.Imagine if we had done this with Iraq. Imagine if, instead of bombing the fuck out of them then invading, raping, and killing her people, we had engaged with nations around Hussein on footing other than how much oil we could get out of the ground?
Even more important, such an approach would reward and support a country (and a government) that is providing a powerful counterexample to the populist policies that are gaining favor in the region. That could be a very inclusive initiative: any Latin American country could be invited to join the two leading nations in the western hemisphere in this agreement. To be eligible, countries would need to adopt pro-poor, growth-inducing economic reforms that spur competition and open markets. They would also be required to enact political reforms that strengthen democratic practices and institutions. It could be a powerful stimulus for positive change, since few countries in the region could afford to be left out of an economic arrangement that included Brazil and the U.S.
PROTESTERS TRASH TIMES(emphasis added)
By TATIANA DELIGIANNAKIS
July 11, 2006 -- Dozens of protesters yesterday denounced The New York Times for disclosing details of anti-terror efforts by the Bush administration.
The groups on board so far are Free Republic, Caucus for America, the Congress for Racial Equality, and Protest Warrior, NYC Chapter. We have reached out to several other groups as well, and are waiting to hear back from them.
Even though the interview aired minutes before the protest was set to begin, and a video showed just one person protesting on the street in New York "dressed as Osama bin Laden kissing The New York Times," Cavuto and Spero spent nearly four minutes discussing the event.(Emphasis Added)
We affirm the determination awarding a divorce to plaintiff on grounds of cruel and inhuman treatment. Plaintiff's proof, when viewed cumulatively, established by a preponderance of the credible evidence that defendant had engaged in a course of conduct which was harmful to the plaintiff's physical and mental health, thus rendering cohabitation unsafe or improper (Domestic Relations Law § 170 [1]).Nice guy. No need to pity him for this.
This was not a case of ordinary marital dissatisfaction or even "riotous quarrels" as defendant suggests. Defendant intentionally traumatized plaintiff, a woman of Jewish origin born in Nazi-occupied Holland, with swastika-adorned articles and notes affixed around their home, and became enraged when she removed them. He ignored her need for support and assistance while she was undergoing surgery and treatment for breast cancer (see Siczewicz v Siczewicz, 92 AD2d 915, 916 [1983], appeal dismissed 59 NY2d 968 [1983]). He systematically cut off her access to marital funds and credit as a means of psychological abuse. Even plaintiff's assertion that defendant completely ceased speaking to her is not benign, but must be understood in the context of the prior years' verbal abuse.
Physical violence is not a prerequisite for a showing that plaintiff's physical or mental well-being rendered it unsafe or improper for her to continue cohabiting with defendant as required by Domestic Relations Law § 170 (1) (see Hessen v Hessen, 33 NY2d 406, 410 [1974]; Pfoltzer v Morris-Pfoltzer, 9 AD3d 615, 616-617 [2004]). Nor did plaintiff need an expert to prove that defendant's actions had the claimed effect on her mental condition (see Levine v Levine, 2 AD3d 498, 500 [2003]), particularly in view of her explanation that she is the type of person who finds it difficult to consider seeking psychological treatment.
Congress faces long list of unfinished tasksThe contentious issues that remain to be handled? Nothing too much, just immigration reform, stem cell research, protecting pension plans, rising energy prices...nothing TOO important to legislators who have access to the best health care, best pension plan and under-the-table illegal laborers.
By Donna Smith
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. lawmakers returning from a weeklong break on Monday will take up a long list of unfinished -- and possibly insurmountable -- tasks that could help decide whether voters will re-elect them in November.
[....]"Historically this is certainly not a Congress that will be remembered," said Larry Sabato, of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics. "There is just not much there."
When the Senate returns on Monday, it will take up a spending bill totaling nearly $32 billion that includes money for border patrols, the embattled Federal Emergency Management Agency, dirty-bomb detection and other domestic security activities.Goodness knows, we wouldn't want to underfund homeland security, now would we?
It is one of 11 spending bills Congress hopes to complete before October 1, when the new fiscal year begins. There is little agreement, even among members of each party, about how much to spend and how much to cut.
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