Some nitwit, who evidently didn’t turn on a television for the last eight years, comes to this staggering bit of insight:

Do the members of the press no longer care about reporting the facts, or do they prefer to act as publicity agents for government instead?

This nonsense was penned by one Steven D. Laib from IntellectualConservative.com. If this is conservative “intellect” in action, its no wonder they only appeal to rednecks in the deep south.

Our media alternated between fellating George Bush and just yelling “Yippee! He’s the decider!” at every odious belch of stupidity that came from his lips, never questioning the lead up to the optional wars, turning a blind eye to everything from torture to gay hookers in the press room, and this numbnuts thinks that the press is in the tank for Obama? Puleeze.

Its called “losing”. Your ilk might better get accustomed to it, because your days of standing on the sidelines of American life are just beginning. Not saying that’s a good thing, or that the press isn’t rotten to the core, but it ain’t new. Or news.

Pensioners battered a financial adviser with Zimmer frames before kidnapping and torturing him for losing £2million of their savings.

‘The fear of death was indescribable,’ he said. Mr Amburn was rescued when he sent a fax to release funds from a Swiss bank and scribbled a message on it for the receiver to call police.’

Gas Pump Thievery: Who’s Really Behind the Rising Prices at the Pumps?

Like a Fourth of July crescendo of fireworks, our gasoline prices are rising higher and higher. While this is tough on consumers, we’re assured by a covey of tongue-clucking industry analysts that nothing can be done about it, for it’s simply the law of supply and demand in action — so suck it up, and pay up.

What’s going on here is not the “magic of the marketplace,” but some hocus-pocus by brand-name dealers. What might surprise you, though, is that the wheeler-dealers now jacking up our pump prices don’t operate under the BPExxonMobilShellChevron brands — but the logos of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and other Wall Street traders that have been placing vast, unregulated, secretive bets on the future price of oil. They’re playing an electronic casino game in a global “dark market” of exotic derivatives and credit swaps.

So, when are we going to outlaw this sort of fiscal wheeling and dealing? Here’s a hint: it ain’t gonna be while President Bank-rolled is in office.

Kodak axes Kodachrome after 74 years as digital revolution sees first colour film fade into history

For generations it has been used to capture everything from family memories to world-changing events.

There is only one laboratory in the world still producing it.

On a press call hosted by the Center for American Progress Action Fund this afternoon, Frank pointed out Republicans’ hypocrisy in railing against the deficit while simultaneously funding a $2 billion air force jet that has never once flown a mission in Afghanistan or Iraq. Frank said so-called deficit hawks act as though the Pentagon is funded with “Monopoly money”:

These arguments will come from the very people who denied that the economic recovery plan created any jobs. We have a very odd economic philosophy in Washington: It’s called weaponized Keynesianism. It is the view that the government does not create jobs when it funds the building of bridges or important research or retrains workers, but when it builds airplanes that are never going to be used in combat, that is of course economic salvation.

Excellent point. We have all the money we need to blow up innocent civilians and run covert wars against Iran, but insure our citizens? Nah. No money for that.

Obama Running Scared
by Helen Thomas

A universal health care system based on the single-payer model appears to be a bridge too far for President Barack Obama.

Obama said part of the fierce opposition to health care reform has been fueled “by some interest groups and lobbyists — opposition that has used fear tactics to paint any effort to achieve reform as an attempt to, yes, socialize medicine.”

Obama ain’t scared, he’s bought. They only look the same from the outside.

Mikhail Gorbachev sells album of romantic ballads for £100,000

An album of romantic ballads recorded by former Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev has sold for $164,940 (roughly £100,000) to an anonymous British bidder at a charity auction.

Gorbachev himself sang a song from the album at the auction, taking to the stage to perform ‘Old Letters’ in front of the 350 guests who included Gordon Brown’s wife, Sarah, and ‘Harry Potter’ author JK Rowling.

Beats world domination as a hobby, I suppose…

Iran Had a Democracy Before We Took It Away

Iranians do not need or want us to teach them about liberty and representative government. They have long embodied this struggle. It is we who need to be taught. It was Washington that orchestrated the 1953 coup to topple Iran’s democratically elected government, the first in the Middle East, and install the compliant shah in power. It was Washington that forced Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, a man who cared as much for his country as he did for the rule of law and democracy, to spend the rest of his life under house arrest. We gave to the Iranian people the corrupt regime of the shah and his savage secret police and the primitive clerics that rose out of the swamp of the dictator’s Iran. Iranians know they once had a democracy until we took it away.

Rehearsing the end of the world

What was once the most secret of all British government documents has been released in full.

Having the full War Book means it can be decoded to reveal what would happen and when. To get the nation from a peacetime to a wartime footing and beyond was a remarkable enterprise.

Certainly nice to know these sort of things are being planned for, I guess?

In Georgia, justice is still black and white

There are few places in America where it’s more difficult — politically and otherwise — to overturn a conviction than Georgia.

Reopening the case could also risk alienating white and conservative voters and complicate Chisolm’s relationship with the police force. But if Chisolm fails to intervene, “that would be very unpopular to a lot of black folk,” said the Rev. Matthew Southall Brown, a longtime black leader in Savannah.
The idea that an innocent black man may be sent to his death because pardoning black people is politically unpopular in Georgia may be understandably unpalatable to many, but that is the challenge facing Davis and his supporters.

Rarely have I as a Georgian- hell, as a human- read a more repugnant sentence. Fuck conservative voters and the racist “that boy gotta be guilty of sumptin” white people of Savannah. This is a man’s life we’re talking about.