Dana Gould wonders: 'Is Obama literally Hitler?'

Dana Gould was on Real Time with Bill Maher last Friday and showed this clip in which he visits some town hall protesters and a Remote Area Medical station in Inglewood, CA. Compare and contrast:



In case that clip gets pulled you can watch it here as well.

There was so much 'Hitler'...And this one guy I was talking to, I said like 'Why Hitler?' and he goes 'Well Hitler also wanted to restrict medical care for people." But was that what he was the most known for though?

Oh and in case you didn't already know, Obama Is Literally Hitler.

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James Dobson, fortune teller extraordinaire!

Check out James Dobson's (of Focus on the Family) "Letter from 2012 in Obama's America" (PDF) which includes premonitions that Obama will somehow fill the Supreme Court with liberals, fund international terrorism, quash conservative radio, let Iran nuke Israel, Russia expand like Nazi Germany, and make it such that "our freedoms have been systematically taken away." Worst of all, dear alarmists, he will help... the gays!

Suddenly, homosexual "marriage" was the law of the land in all 50 states, and no state legislature, no state Supreme Court, no state Constitutional amendment, not even Congress, had any power to change it. ... The Boy Scouts no longer exist as an organization. They chose to disband rather than be forced to obey the Supreme Court decision that they would have to hire homosexual scoutmasters and allow them to sleep in tents with young boys.

That's right, the Supreme Court will soon be forcing gay men into tents with young boys, oh the horror!

(via ManBabies)

Zach Galifianakis Between Two Ferns with Natalie Portman

I have never seen a celebrity this uncomfortable in my life...

The Credit Crisis: It's All About Risk

If moving pictures work better for you than text this infographic-style video will clarify the economic collapse. It all came down to reselling risky repackaged mortgages.

Hey, 1999. What the fuck?

Back in the late 1990s Citicorp and Travelers Insurance merged to form Citigroup, currently known as Citi. Citycorp was the successor of the long line of banks started by City Bank of New York in 1812, and Travelers a consortium of insurers and creditors. The merger was unprecedented in its time because those two financial animals—bankers and creditors—were prohibited from sharing assets by the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. That act separated bankers and brokers in order to prevent the wild speculation that inflated the stock markets leading to the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression.

The act was repealed in 1999 by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, in large part to allow for mergers such as Citigroup to stand. Well guess what:

The repeal enabled commercial lenders such as Citigroup, which was in 1999 then the largest U.S. bank by assets, to underwrite and trade instruments such as mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations and establish so-called structured investment vehicles, or SIVs, that bought those securities. It is believed that the repeal of this act contributed to the Global financial crisis of 2008–2009.

You can actually go back and read the coverage from the New York Times, including former Treasury Secretary and current White House National Economic Council director Larry Summers's pronouncement that "this historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy." But the most significant part of the report is this small prognostication:

"I think we will look back in 10 years' time and say we should not have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930's is true in 2010," said Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota. "I wasn't around during the 1930's or the debate over Glass-Steagall. But I was here in the early 1980's when it was decided to allow the expansion of savings and loans. We have now decided in the name of modernization to forget the lessons of the past, of safety and of soundness."

Now here we are.

My douche sense is tingling...

Holy shit! Ex-President George W. Bush is down my street visiting former Ambassador Mel Sembler's place. There are cops and Secret Service everywhere and passers-by gawking at the commotion.

Sembler spoke at my middle school way back when. He was ambassador to Australia, Naru and most recently Italy. Guess this is what happens when you live in a neighborhood with a big Republican National Committee operative. Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to go look suspicious by standing in my back yard while taking pictures... and eating frozen yogurt.

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How to make peanut butter and jelly the EXTREME way.

A Tale of Two Douches

First this report came out yesterday:

A U.N. spokesman says Hamas police in Gaza have seized thousands of blankets and food parcels meant for needy residents. Spokesman Christopher Gunness says Hamas police raided a U.N. warehouse in Gaza City on Tuesday evening. He says police snatched 3,500 blankets and more than 400 food parcels.

Then this report comes out today:

The Israeli Navy intercepted a cargo ship headed for Gaza on Thursday, diverting it to an Israeli port where the people aboard were to be questioned, the military announced. The boat, called The Brotherhood Ship, was carrying what its organizers said was humanitarian aid: food, medicine, and toys. ... Among the nine people aboard was the former Greek Orthodox archbishop of Jerusalem, Monsignor Hilarion Capucci.

That's right, both sides fighting in the recent Hamas-Israel conflict are blocking aid meant for Palestinian civilians. What a bunch of douches!

In the case of the raided U.N. warehouse Hamas might either be stealing those supplies for themselves or planning to redistribute it to garner support from civilians. That's the reason they were running the tunnels between Egypt and Gaza, to bring in weapons and supplies (which Israel invaded to bomb the shit out of). As for the intercepted supply ship, depending on how Israel proceeds those supplies could still get to needy Palestinians as Israel allows a maximum of 200 trucks of aid though their Gaza blockade a day.

Still, Israel diverted, boarded and pointed guns at a ship with only nine crew members including a former archbishop! Meanwhile...

...the Israeli military acknowledged that its soldiers fired two tank shells on Jan. 16 at the house of Izzeldin Abuelaish, a well-known Gaza doctor, killing three of his daughters and a niece. The military said that it was "saddened by the harm caused" to the doctor's family, but that under the circumstances, it considered the decision to fire toward the building "reasonable."

No, it wasn't. And shut up.

Ok, I'm Back...

Damn was it cold in DC and NY. I nearly died. No, really.

Dick Cheney on Iraq

Bob Schieffer: "Do you think that perhaps you looked at the intelligence and saw what you wanted to see, rather than make a real logical analysis of what you saw?"

Vice President Dick Cheney: "No I don't, Bob."

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Colorful 2D Side-Scrolling Madness!

This animated short, "Hyper Parsnip Bitches", clocks in at 11 hyper-kinetic minutes. In the 8-bit art meme I would rate this up there with Shynola's Move Your Feet video for Junior Senior. Stay off the LSD kids, all you need is the internet.



Grab a high quality version at No Fat Clips!!!

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Mario's Mindscape

by Harvey James

Synchronized Presidential Debating

This is insane. But then anyone who knows how much these candidates are groomed and must say the same lines over and over again at each campaign stop probably won't find this too surprising.

Look what a bunch of McCain/Palin supporters said at a meetup in Tampa

Flipping through my Reader on Friday I came across this gem...no, gems are pretty...this speck of shame: "I attended a McCain/Palin meetup tonight." An Obama supporter stumbled across a Republican gathering at the Starbucks on Gandy Blvd. in Tampa. Keep in mind this area is near MacDill Air Force Base so Republican supporters coalescing in the area isn't that notable, but the things he heard certainly are:

They talked a little more about how Obama would destroy our country with "free health care" and "gay marriages". The feared his daughters would probably play loud rap music in the White House while world leaders were staying. They feared that Muslim would become our official religion. One of them even feared that "the Muslim language would be taught in schools." Priceless.
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One woman even thought that God may be punishing the country by giving us Obama.
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They changed the subject for a while, but on the way out the door one of the men told me "you are a disgrace to white people if you vote for that man."

Keep in mind this article was published on The Daily Kos and garnered 803 comments and 33,422 votes on the tally at the bottom plus made it to the front page of the high-traffic social news site Digg with 4,330 people digging it and 736 comments. Thanks for making Tampa Bay look retarded McCain supporters!

"I am Shawn Earl Gardner, live man, flesh and blood."

Washington Monthly featured this story "Too Weird for The Wire" about four African-American defendants charged with murder, drug dealing, weapons possession and racketeering by the federal district court in Baltimore back in 2005. The story behind the case is grisly and devious but altogether unremarkable in the world of narcotics. The hook is their invocation of the "flesh and blood" defense, a strange route of logic that states because the federal government keeps its records on citizens using Social Security numbers and names in uppercase letters, a federal criminal charge is really against a "legal straw man," not the person detained.

That defense relies on the argument that, because of the post-Civil War act "Posse Comitatus" passed in 1878 to maintain segregation, federal law enforcement jurisdiction is limited to federally-owned property. Thus those SSNs and uppercase identifiers are not applicable to people outside of this federal domain. William Gale, a certifiably loony anti-Semite and minister of racist Christian Identity theology, repurposed Posse Comitatus to devise this theory back in 1971. He used it to form groups tasked with "enforcing the Constitution" against an illegitimate government:

Soon, Posses were sprouting across the country, attracting veterans of the 1960s-era tax protest movement, Second Amendment absolutists, Christian Identity adherents, and ardent anti-communists who had abandoned the John Birch Society because they felt the organization wasn’t extreme enough. Local groups would meet to share literature, listen to tapes of Gale’s sermons, and discuss preparations for the approaching End Times. This extremist stew produced exotic amalgamations of paranoia, such as when Posse members would explain the need for local militias to stockpile weapons in order to defend white Christians from blacks in the coming race war sparked by the inevitable economic collapse caused by the income tax and a cabal of international Jewish bankers bent on global dominance through one world government, for Satan.

We're talking over-the edge conspiracy theorists here, guys with tinfoil hats and sheds full of illegal arms. Terry Nichols, co-conspirator in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, was a subscriber to one of these Posses. The article gets into how these ideas founded in racism and separatism made their way to four African-Americans defending themselves against drug and homicide charges and the whole story is really engrossing, I highly recommend it. The case has still not gone to trial.

(via kottke.org)