Keith Olbermann has been fired in an acrimonious fashion, with both sides livid and displaying seething contempt for each other. Again.
It’s Friday, So You Know What That MeansPost + Comments (87)
by John Cole| 87 Comments
This post is in: Manic Progressive
Keith Olbermann has been fired in an acrimonious fashion, with both sides livid and displaying seething contempt for each other. Again.
It’s Friday, So You Know What That MeansPost + Comments (87)
by John Cole| 85 Comments
This post is in: Religious Nuts 2, The War On Women, Assholes, Sociopaths
And the Arizona GOP is now taking panty-snifffing to an entirely new level, demanding that “the gestational age of the fetus should be ‘calculated from the first day of the last menstrual period of the pregnant woman.'” So in order to get an abortion, you now have to provide a bunch of old perverts a calendar with your menstrual cycle highlighted.
These people are sick and evil. We’re seriously one or two bills away before women will be required to go to the well of the Arizona Senate and tell these old white perverts their favorite sexual position and how old they were when they lost their virginity.
by Imani Gandy (ABL)| 140 Comments
This post is in: World's Best Healthcare (If You Can Afford It)
Anna Brown had visited several hospitals complaining of pain in her legs. When she was ignored at St. Mary’s Hospital, she refused to leaved, screaming and yelling that she was in pain. The hospital had her arrested. The police dragged her out of the hospital and into a squad car. At the Richmond Heights Police Department, she cried that she couldn’t stand up or get out of the car, so the officers dragged her out of the car, into a jail cell, and left her there.
Fifteen minutes later she was dead from a pulmonary embolism:
RICHMOND HEIGHTS • Anna Brown wasn’t leaving the emergency room quietly.
She yelled from a wheelchair at St. Mary’s Health Center security personnel and Richmond Heights police officers that her legs hurt so badly she couldn’t stand.
She had already been to two other hospitals that week in September, complaining of leg pain after spraining her ankle.
This time, she refused to leave.
A police officer arrested Brown for trespassing. He wheeled her out in handcuffs after a doctor said she was healthy enough to be locked up.
Brown was 29. A mother who had lost custody of two children. Homeless. On Medicaid. And, an autopsy later revealed, dying from blood clots that started in her legs, then lodged in her lungs.
She told officers she couldn’t get out of the police car, so they dragged her by her arms into the station. They left her lying on the concrete floor of a jail cell, moaning and struggling to breathe. Just 15 minutes later, a jail worker found her cold to the touch.
Officers suspected Brown was using drugs. Autopsy results showed she had no drugs in her system.Six months later, family members still wonder how Brown’s sprained ankle led to her death in police custody, and whether anyone — including themselves — is to blame.
There seems to be no simple answer.
St. Mary’s officials say they did all they were supposed to do for Brown. Richmond Heights police said they trusted a doctor who said she was fit for jail.
Brown’s mother, Dorothy Davis, isn’t sure what to think.
“If the police killed my daughter, I want to know,” she said. “If the hospital is at fault, I want to know. I want to be able to tell her children why their mother isn’t here.”
Davis also faults the St. Louis County Family Court, which she said forced her into a heartbreaking dilemma after the state took away Brown’s children on a claim of neglect. Davis could take in her grandchildren or her daughter, a judge said, but not both.
“I’m mad at myself because if I hadn’t listened to the courts, she would still be here,” Davis said. “If she had been here at this house, she would be here today.”
They did all they were “supposed” to do for her. Not all they could do for her. Horrific.
Just in case the past three weeks of the Trayvon Martin affair hasn’t demonstrated exactly how invaluable black lives are to some people, Anna Brown should cement the notion. She was profiled, deemed to be a drug seeker, and cast aside as if she were irrelevant; dragged away from life-saving care to her death on a cold floor in jail, in the same way that the Sanford Police Department left Trayvon Martin face down in the grass while they tried to figure out how to absolve George Zimmerman of blame.
Somebody should make Scalia watch this video. Anna Browns will be de rigueur should the ACA be repealed. It’s unfathomable.
*** See Youth Revolutionary Council for action items.
[via SandraRose]
[cross-posted at ABLC]This post is in: Open Threads, #notintendedtobeafactualstatement
Via Washington Monthly‘s Ed Kilgore, a Facebook app for the aggressively aggrieved:
(CNN) — To the dismay of some, Facebook has no “Dislike” button. But a new application for the social network may prove to be the next-best thing.
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The app, EnemyGraph, encourages Facebook users to list people or places or things they dislike, then share them with like-minded haters as a way of bonding. (“You think Crocs are hideous? I think Crocs are hideous! Let’s be buds!”)
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“Most social networks attempt to connect people based on affinities: you like a certain band or film or sports team, I like them, therefore we should be friends,” writes EnemyGraph co-creator Dean Terry in a blog post. “But people are also connected and motivated by things they dislike. Alliances are created, conversations are generated, friendships are stressed, stretched, and/or enhanced.”…
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Users of the app appear to largely be left-of-center politically. Near the top of the enemies’ list are GOP candidates Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, Fox News, conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. President Barack Obama is the sole Democrat on the list…
Yeah, or else the Talibangelicals, fReichtards & Banana Republicans just haven’t gotten the blast fax from Rush and the AFP yet. As a non-Facebook-user, I really really hope this app takes off big time. Given enough fellow haterz to play with, we might never see Veritas or its fellow trolls around here again.
by John Cole| 76 Comments
This post is in: Both Sides Do It!, DC Press Corpse, Our Failed Media Experiment
Most of the time I try to avoid the worst of the worst in our media, but sometimes I am in the mood for a little psychic pain. When those urges arise, my go to columnists are Charles Lane at the WaPo and Bobo at the NYT. Many of you will think I should probably go to Halperin, but he’s just so stupid it doesn’t cause me the physical pain that Lane and Bobo do. As far as I am concerned, no one can deliver the kick to the gut that Charles Lane can pack in one of his Both Sides Do It masterpieces. Here’s one of my recent favorites, which I have bookmarked so that whenever I start to feel good about myself or the country, I can read it and be brought back to earth:
I don’t know about you, but I’m sick and tired of war.
The Democratic National Committee accuses the GOP of a “Republican War on Women,” to go along with its “war on working families” (according to the Progressive Change Campaign Committee) and “Paul Ryan’s war on seniors” (Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky).
Various Republicans accuse President Obama of waging “war on religious freedom” or even, in the words of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, “a war on religion.” According to the Republican National Committee, the president is also waging “war on energy,” the sequel, apparently, to what the House Republican Leadership has called “Democrats’ war on American jobs.”
***Amid the fog of blog posts,Twitter, Facebook, talk radio and the rest, only hyperbole has a chance to break through. Even so, many, if not most, people tune out the parties’ “war” propaganda. The shriller it gets, the less seriously they take it. For any given individual, this is a mentally healthy response.
Multiplied across the entire electorate, however, the effect may be more corrosive. To the extent that sensible citizens tune out politics, they abandon the field to people who are receptive to constant cries of war, war, war — people who are prepared to think of their opponents as enemies.
When you think of someone as an enemy, it’s harder to contemplate trusting, respecting or cooperating with him or her. Indeed, those behaviors start to look like treason, instead of what they really are: the minimum requirements of democratic life.
On his Web site, Frank Luntz, the erstwhile GOP propagandist whose credits include rebranding the estate tax as the “death tax,” tells potential clients about “transforming mere words into an effective arsenal for the war of perception we all wage each and every day.”
According to Luntz, “We all submit to the power of language, whether we know it or not.”
My fear is that he’s right. All the more reason to stop the wars.
Tell me, after reading that, are you conflicted as to whether you should grab the scotch and slowly drink yourself to death, or just grab a handgun and end it quickly. No one, in my estimation, can bring it like Chuck. He’s the worst of the worst. He’s the Michael Jordan of false equivalence.
At any rate, what columnists have the same impact on you?
Whip Me, Beat Me, Call Me Trash, Kick Me With High HeelsPost + Comments (76)
by John Cole| 51 Comments
This post is in: Rare Sincerity
He’s absolutely right, but this is kind of astonishing coming from a Republican:
That’s Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell (R) advocating for single payer.
by John Cole| 79 Comments
This post is in: Science & Technology, Teabagger Stupidity
If you are wondering why the Republican base is screaming about science and mocking global warming and thinks Jesus rode a dinosaur, it is because that is what the GOP elites want them to believe:
This is not because conservatives are a bunch of undereducated yahoos. In fact, quite the opposite:
Conservatives with high school degrees, bachelor’s degrees, and graduate degrees all experienced greater distrust in science over time….In addition…conservatives with college degrees decline more quickly than those with only a high school degree []. These results are quite profound, because they imply that conservative discontent with science was not attributable to the uneducated but to rising distrust among educated conservatives.
In other words, this decline in trust in science has been led by the most educated, most engaged segment of conservatism. Conservative elites have led the anti-science charge and the rank-and-file has followed.
Just another arrow in the quiver for the next time you hear a “reasonable” Republican lament the behavior of the party. None of this was an accident.