Drain Clogs – 02-28-2011

The Republican class war continues in Wisconsin, and has spread to Indiana and Maine.

The US has wasted tens of billions of dollars on contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. But, we must cut money from the poors, not these rich companies!

US Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) laughed along with the crowd when a supporter asked him when someone was going to shoot President Obama. I’m sure he laughed peacefully at the peaceful questioner who only wants Obama to be shot with a camera, and peacefully reported him to the secret service.

Fucking insane Georgia Republican state rep. Bobby Franklin wants to make miscarriages illegal. Every time a miscarriage happens, there will be a criminal investigation and the woman must prove she didn’t do it herself. Or she gets the death penalty. Culture of life, bitches! Considering like 1/3 of all pregnancies end in miscarriages (many without the woman even knowing), invest your money in death penalty chemicals!

I guess Georgia is sick of Arizona being the worst state in the Union…

South Dakota was going to make it legal to kill abortion doctors, but instead have decide to just make women who want to have abortions have “counseling”

(3) Provide the pregnant mother with the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of all pregnancy help centers that are registered with the South Dakota Department of Health pursuant to this Act, and provide her with written instructions that set forth the following:
(a) That prior to the day of any scheduled abortion the pregnant mother must have a consultation at a pregnancy help center at which the pregnancy help center shall inform her about what education, counseling, and other assistance is available to help the pregnant mother keep and care for her child, and have a private interview to discuss her circumstances that may subject her decision to coercion;
(b) That prior to signing a consent to an abortion, the physician shall first obtain from the pregnant mother, a written statement that she obtained a consultation with a pregnancy help center, which sets forth the name and address of the pregnancy help center, the date and time of the consultation, and the name of the counselor at the pregnancy help center with whom she consulted;

Why these are bad.
What South Dakota already requires women who want abortions to do:

(a) The name of the physician who will perform the abortion;
(b) That the abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being;
(c) That the pregnant woman has an existing relationship with that unborn human being and that the relationship enjoys protection under the United States Constitution and under the laws of South Dakota;
(d) That by having an abortion, her existing relationship and her existing constitutional rights with regards to that relationship will be terminated;
(e) A description of all known medical risks of the procedure and statistically significant risk factors to which the pregnant woman would be subjected, including:
(i) Depression and related psychological distress;
(ii) Increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide;
(iii) A statement setting forth an accurate rate of deaths due to abortions, including all deaths in which the abortion procedure was a substantial contributing factor;
(iv) All other known medical risks to the physical health of the woman, including the risk of infection, hemorrhage, danger to subsequent pregnancies, and infertility;
(f) The probable gestational age of the unborn child at the time the abortion is to be performed, and a scientifically accurate statement describing the development of the unborn child at that age; and
(g) The statistically significant medical risks associated with carrying her child to term compared to undergoing an induced abortion.

Florida Senate teabag candidates are hiring assistants for over $100K/year:

But to help them do it they hired 61 assistants, each making more than a $100,000 a year. Salaries in the speaker’s office rose one and a half percent.

Cannon’s top aide, Matthew Bahl, makes $146,000 a year; that’s more than three-and-a-half times the speaker’s salary. Haridopolos’ top aide, Stephen MacNamara, makes more than $175,000, or more than four times the Senate president’s salary.

Fiscal Responsibility!

Cartoon of the Day:

Wisconsin strikes back!

Newly elected Republican Governor Scott Walker decided he was going to go all Freddy Krueger on the Wisconsin state unions, and even threatened to call in the National Guard to take on demonstrations to his plan.

But the demonstrations came anyway, and have continued to grow and grow. Schools closed as teachers threatened to walk off work and went to the protests. Police, football players, students, union workers, state workers, young, old, the numbers kept coming and growing.

Tuesday brought out 12-15,000 protesters,
The crowd has swollen to over 30,000 on Wednesday,

I have never been prouder of our movement than I am at this moment,” shouted Wisconsin AFL-CIO President Phil Neuenfeldt, as he surveyed the crowds of union members and their supporters that surged around the state Capitol and into the streets of Madison Wednesday, literally closing the downtown as tens of thousands of Wisconsinites protested their Republican governor’s attempt to strip public employee unions of their collective bargaining rights.

Meanwhile, Senate Dems have left the state to prevent quorum in the Wisconsin senate! Republicans control the senate 19-14, but you need 20 members to have a quorum. This reminds us old people (on the internet, anyone older than 21 is “old people”) of when the Texas Democrats did this to stop a redistricting plan.

Over 4000 protesters are inside the Wisconsin Capitol building. This is what a real protest looks like, Teabaggers!

And the media is…ignoring all this pretty much. I guess because they aren’t several dozen senior citizens with goofy signs on medicare screaming about socialized medicine, they get no coverage.

Are we finally getting the pushback against the teabagger revolution we need? One hopes so.

FreeRepublic.com loves rape

CBS News’ Lara Logan was sexually assaulted in Egypt during the protests. FreeRepublic.com leaps to the conclusion it is all her fault for being a dirty lib who hangs around with horrible devil monkey men (Muslims) and the comments get more and more awful. These are only a few of the threads:

CBS News’ Lara Logan Sexually Assaulted During Egypt Protests

dog whistle time

To: MindBender26
This is not a surprise actually, when civil order breaks down….. chalk it up to diversity

7 posted on February 15, 2011 1:26:52 PM PST by GeronL (http://www.stink-eye.net/forum/index.php for FR backup site!)

Rape is so funny!

To: MindBender26
Apparently a mob of Egyptions “would hit it”.

10 posted on February 15, 2011 1:27:34 PM PST by Nachoman (Wisdom is learned, cynicism is earned.)

Continue reading

More on the private intel stuff

LA Times:

Hoping to win a lucrative agreement with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, three data security contractors for federal defense and intelligence agencies developed a proposal to monitor and manipulate the chamber’s left-leaning critics, according to recently released e-mail correspondence.

Employees of the firms compiled short dossiers on a few activists that included photographs, references to their families and charts of their relationships with other liberal and labor leaders.

NYT:

Jonathan E. Turner, who runs a Tennessee-based business that gathers intelligence for corporate clients, said that companies nationwide relied on investigators to gather potentially damaging information on possible business partners or rivals. “Information is power,” said Mr. Turner, former chairman of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners.

He estimated that the “competitive intelligence” industry had 9,700 companies offering these services, with an annual market of more than $2 billion, but said there were limits to what tactics should be used.

More from Glenn Greenwald today here.

Really, really, really creepy.

Bank of America hired private intel to target WikiLeaks

This is really creepy.

It doesn’t look like there’s much on this story yet, but apparently Glenn Greenwald was contacted about it because he was mentioned in the leaked report (pdf).  There are also news reports being made right now downplaying the the BoA documents, which could be a PR effort on their part.

The report also shows evidence of something I’d been hoping I wouldn’t see:

It’s called social network analysis and there is very powerful software available to do it.  There are almost certainly all kinds of private databases being put together with all kinds of information about people obtained through data mining.

FreeRepublic History of Copyright Infringement

In this thread, Bob J details some of the insider information of FreeRepublic’s copyright infringement lawsuits, both past and present. There is also a condemnation of the ineffectiveness of FreeRepublic in the past few years, largely due to a single figure that you can probably guess is the cause.

Archived from: http://truebluefreedom.com/index.php/topic,248.0.html
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We are not going to speculate on that last sentence, though we are “in the loop”

Bob J also explains why he is saying what he is.
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Bob J was a valued member of Freerepublic.com and someone who helped take it to the next level. Despite disagreeing with Bob J on almost every issue, it would be stupid of me to not see how valuable of a person he would be to any organization. The fact that JimRob has been burning bridges like this for the past 13 years one by one is not only telling, but a future predictor of what will happen with tea party groups across the country. The few organizers who are sane or independent from corporate interests will be overridden and driven out by egomaniacs and sellouts.

In our next post on this subject, we hope to go over some of the past FreeRepublic protests, including such features as Bob J himself dressed as Clintonocci while protesting Hillary Clinton.

FreeRepublic.com Finances

At the TrueBlueConservative message board, former Freepers dish the dirt. BobJ, who you may recall from the History of FreeRepublic.com article we wrote was a huge player on FR for over a decade before being randomly banned in one of JimRob’s hissyfits, gives us a behind the scenes look at the numbers for cost of the site as of probably a year or so ago, which is far more recent than the numbers JimRob has posted up a few times (mostly copy/pastes of an old post he did years ago)

http://truebluefreedom.com/index.php/topic,50.0.html – moved to http://truebluefreedom.com/index.php/topic,6.285.html

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Even though Bob J is exposing the numbers, he isn’t calling JimRob a shyster, something to keep in mind
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And here is the story behind Bob J being banned despite all he has done for FR over the years:
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More on the Righthaven situation in another post, but here is a bit now:
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Big breakdown of the Freep finances begin here. Bob J knows a lot because he was in talks to buy FR at one point, so we can consider this highly probable information.
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Despite all of what Bob J has been through, he still won’t throw out unfounded information, which makes what he says even the more likely to be true.
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More info from Bob J on the TrueBlueConservative Forum coming soon. For those of us who follow FR, this is very interesting.