After investigators said an engineer in last week's collision had been texting on the job, regulators temporarily banned the use of all cellular devices by anyone at the controls of a moving train.
Some of the latest atrocities which have led me to believe that the leaders of the Republican Party and their apologists in the media are terrible human beings:
The Republicans really show their true colors when they call everyone opposed to invading Iraq a traitor, then turn around and say that we don’t have enough money left over to care for our fellow Americans.
Remember when Republicans were saying that they wanted a full-throated debate on climate change, and that they thought it was dirty politics to tie up bills in committee? To no-one’s surprise, it turns out they were just lying.
Essentially, Hatch is saying that universal health care would benefit so many Americans that it would make the Democrats very popular. So he’s against it.
If this had happened on Fox News, the liberal blogs would have been awash in outrage, citing the video as proof that Fox News thinks that all black people look alike. Let’s remember that not all such slips (like saying that the difference between Bush and Obama is “like night and day”, for example) are the result of latent racism.
Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie”, now featuring Glenn Danzig!
What I like about this one is that it spares no-one. Shakira’s sex bomb routine is stripped to its bare essentials and Wyclef Jean’s silly Spanglish lyrics are satirized. Best of all, Danzig’s act, which may have been the inspiration for the film Idiocracy, is mercilessly lampooned.
Police say a 65-year-old New Sharon woman assaulted a state trooper with a 975,000-volt stun gun during an investigation into possible animal hoarding at her house on Lane Road. Carol Murphy pleaded not guilty in Franklin County Superior Court on Thursday to assault on an officer, criminal threatening, refusing to submit to arrest and criminal use of an electronic weapon. State Trooper Aaron Turcotte, who was not seriously injured by the shock to his head and neck, went to the house Wednesday after a representative from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals asked police to check on Murphy.
State Animal Welfare Program staff and Maine State Police seized at least 40 domestic and farm critters, including a donkey, two alpacas and a pot-bellied pig, at Murphy’s house on Thursday.
“We found a lot of animals,” Animal Welfare Director Norma Worley said. “Forty at minimal; maybe more.”
Murphy is under a court order that bars her from keeping animals at her home. In 2004, nearly 70 animals were seized from her property, most of them living in her house and garage. In 2005, she was convicted of animal cruelty and possessing animals without permits. Murphy was sentenced to six months in jail, with all but 24 hours suspended, and one year of probation. She was fined and ordered to pay restitution, as well as prohibited from possessing any animals for the rest of her life.
On a serious note, I think this is a case where the offender should go to a mental hospital.
A word of advice for lobbyists and Republican operatives masquerading as grassroots political activists: stay away from Rachel Maddow. She will expose and humiliate you. If you think you’re too slick for her, check out the following interview with Tim Phillips of Americans for Prosperity. It’s tame enough at the beginning, as Maddow employs her usual confrontational style and presses Phillips to disclose the identities of his donors, while Phillips slips and slides and tries to make the dishonest point that it’s actually the big health insurance companies that are pressing for Obama’s healthcare reform:
When Phillips falsely accuses Maddow of having gone soft on the Obama administration, he seemed to touch a nerve. She extended the interview, and showed everyone what a piece of crap Phillips really is:
So let this be a lesson to all you lobbyists and political insiders who are trying to fool regular people into thinking you represent them. Tim Phillips is as slick as they come, and even he couldn’t avoid being drawn and quartered by Maddow. So if you feel the need to go on TV, stick with the softball pitchers at Fox News and CNN.
A Louisiana justice of the peace said he refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple out of concern for any children the couple might have. Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, says it is his experience that most interracial marriages do not last long.
“I’m not a racist. I just don’t believe in mixing the races that way,” Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday. “I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else.”
Bardwell said he asks everyone who calls about marriage if they are a mixed race couple. If they are, he does not marry them, he said.
“There is a problem with both groups accepting a child from such a marriage,” Bardwell said. “I think those children suffer and I won’t help put them through it.” If he did an interracial marriage for one couple, he must do the same for all, he said.
“I try to treat everyone equally,” he said.
It’s amazing to me how people like Bardwell can be so ignorant of how they appear to decent people. Then again, if he wasn’t such an idiot, he probably wouldn’t be a racist.
