funny

Looks like we missed the best blog boat. Given the list of winners, all I can say is thank goodness.

Lawrence Lessig is coming to Raleigh on June 22nd. He's scheduled to talk from 11 to noon at 16 W. Jones Street and then from noon to 1 at 225 Hillsborough St. Thought I'd check that in Google maps to see how far he'd have to run.

Imagine my surprise to see that 16 W. Jones Street is labeled as the Asheville Citizen-Times! Last time I was downtown, it was the General Assembly Building.

Maybe I can get home delivery for the Citizen-Times now!

See below the fold for info on the Lessig event. I've long been a fan and am eager to hear him in person.

Happy Thanksgiving! I'm off to the woods of Pennsyltucky tomorrow morning, so I wanted to wish everyone a happy turkey day and also leave you with a little color. This is a picture of Sharpies on paper that I took with my Blackberry.
Why? Well, the fact that they are mounted on a slide should give you a hint, more after the break.

AccuWeather\'s Joe Bastardi told a conference in Houston today that seven hurricanes may strike the US coastline this year. Their predicting fourteen tropical storms.The report said some may cut across Florida before moving into the Gulf. A spokeperson for the White House said that the weatherman was no doubt a Bastard for putting out this Global Warming crap. A another spokeperson for the Exxon Oil company said this proves that Al Gore had a bastard evil twin brother who dabbles in rainmaking Indian myths.

Get Off it Bill O'Reilly
Cindy Sheehan
A recent Harris Poll indicated that only 22% of Americans support George's war of terror. I suspect that the less than one-fourth of our country who are still in favor of the hopeless mess BushCo has tragically involved the USA in get all of their "news" from Fox News.
I have mostly kept silent about Fox and their role as co-conspirators with the Bush Regime because I believe that the organization is too ridiculous to even waste ink or breath on. MSNBC, CNN and the networks are not much better, but they are not as openly pro-war or pro-BushCo as Fox. There are also fabulous internet sites (Media Matters and Sweet Jesus I Hate Bill O'Reilly) that do a great job of pointing out the errors and outright lies of Fox News. Robert Greenwald's Outfoxed and Al Frankens' Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them are great commentaries on the 'fair and balanced" network. O'Reilly is regularly Keith Olbermann's "Worst Person in the World" for his hateful and idiotic rhetoric.
I don't get a chance to watch TV very often, and when I do get a chance, I can give an almost 100% guarantee that I am not watching Fox News. When I broke my vow to never do Fox and went on Sean Hannity's show, he was amazed to find out that I never watch his program and wasn't nearly as pre-occupied with him as he seems to be with me. I hear things through the grapevine, but as my mom always said, I "consider the source."
However, saying all that, I have had enough of Bill O'Reilly's obsession with me and his unfair and unbalanced program. I almost wrote a piece called, "Oh Really, O'Reilly, " when the Bush Mob mouthpiece was on the David Letterman show and when Letterman stuck up for me, Bill said: "No one goes on my show and calls terrorists 'freedom fighters." He is one slimy operator because I am sure what he said was true…no one goes on his show and calls terrorists "freedom fighters," but the statement is so misleading because it leads one to believe that I have ever been on his show and have called terrorists "freedom fighters."
The only time I have watched O'Reilly's show was recently when my dear friend Col. Ann Wright, US Army, Ret. was on the program. She was ostensibly on to comment about the Geneva Conventions regarding prisoners of war during the time when Iran was holding some British Marines as prisoners. O'Reilly turned it into brouhaha about Ann being an "America hater." When Ann saliently pointed out the fact that she had served her country in the U.S. Army for 29 years and asked O'Reilly how many years he served, he had her mike cut. After that episode, I went back to working on my computer and a few minutes later O'Reilly was talking about me and how I had the "big money" of George Soros behind me and that's why he had to do his best to "expose" me every chance he gets. At that point, I looked up at my assistant who was sitting next to me and told her to get George Soros on the horn and tell him that his "big money" was about three years late and we really could use the funds. First of all, I don't know George Soros and secondly, what business is it of O'Reilly's what Soros does with his money? According to O'Reilly, George Soros funds every politician, political cause and wields huge influence over us. In my experience and travels I have never met one person who was reaping the fabled rewards of a Soros association!
So far, I have ignored this and stayed above the Fox news defamation of my character. It would not take a moral giant the equivalent of a Mother Teresa to stay above Fox News. They have no conscious or credibility. I can't think of many people lower than Fox News, their employees and frequent neo-con contributors as Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, William Kristol, etc. However when I recently received an email from a person with the email address of "G.I. Joe" who claimed to be an Iraq war vet accusing me of calling terrorists "freedom fighters" because he had just heard it on the "news," was when I decided The O'Reilly Factor had to go.

I know for a fact the evening G.I. Joe wrote me, O'Reilly brought that old lie back up. He can't think of anything new and he can't defend an indefensible criminal regime, so he has to rehash old lies and character assassinations of me and other "liberals" to keep his program afloat. I answered the soldier and explained carefully to him the distinction between a "terrorist" and an occupied person in a sovereign country who is fighting for his/her freedom from an oppressive foreign country. I tried to get G.I Joe to recall his lessons about the American Revolution when our founding fathers and mothers did the same thing. I mourn that G.I. Joe watches Fox News and is so abysmally misinformed and immorally manipulated.
The person who isn't misinformed though, is Mr. Bill O'Reilly. If he had a conscious, he should be ashamed of leading 22% of this country astray. The Jesus of Fox News thinks it is okay to kill innocent people for profit, but my Jesus said: "woe to he that causes one of the little ones to stumble. It would be better for that person to tie a millstone around his neck and be sunk in the depth of the sea." (Mt 18:6) O'Reilly and the rest of the bad shepherds at Fox News are thankfully seeing their flock decline, but they are abrogating their responsibility to inform their viewers properly and are making a mockery out of objective reporting.
There was a successful campaign led against BushCo and war critic, Don Imus, waged through his advertisers. He was taken off the air and I say it's about time that grass roots progressives pull the plug on Fox News beginning with the hate-filled rhetoric of Bill O'Reilly.
It is not because of his public libel of me, I have often found his weird attraction to me a little humorous and very sad, but because of G.I. Joe, I am calling for a boycott of every sponsor of Bill O'Reilly's show. When his empty spin zone is shut down, hopefully the rest of the purveyors of Bush propaganda will get the message.
We voters, activists, and grass roots peace and justice workers, are in the considerable majority and we are also consumers. It's about time we used the power of OUR purse strings to hold the "vast wasteland" of Fox News accountable. Then maybe, just maybe, we can get information from our mainstream news sources and not right-wing infotainment. This is something fairly easy to do, and besides a letter to Fox News telling them why you are not supporting O'Reilly and his sponsors, we can focus on what's important: ending the occupation of Iraq and holding Fox's best-friends, the Bush Administration, accountable.
Bill O'Reilly: get off your high horse and get off of our TV screens!
TO CALL FOX NEWS CHANNEL:
1-888-369-4762
TO E-MAIL GENERAL COMMENTS:
YourComments@foxnews.com

There was a recent news item about Sen. Inhofe of Oklahoma blocking an authorization for an Earth Day concert on the Capitol lawn because it was a partisan event. Ignoring the fact that the bill is co-sponsored by a Republican, I am not sure what gives a Senator who doesnt even have 50% approval in HIS OWN STATE (he has topped out at 49% over the last two years) license to say what is and is not within the purview of his party. Sadly I doubt many people watched the testimony of Vice-President Gore before the Senate Environment and Public Works committee the other week because they would have seen this guy make a complete ass out of himself. Unfortunately I cant find the full video online only Boxer scolding him (which if youre a US Senator getting scolded as if by a school marm that really says a lot) for bitching about not having enough time to allow people to answer the questions he asked, which seems to have overshadowed everything else that went on. I would like the full video because I am sure if you timed the amount of time he spent cutting off answers to his questions and complaining about time and the amount of extra time he was given, he actually had more than sufficient time (yes I wanted to see how many times I could say time at one time). Anyways this inspired me to bring back my Politician/Superhero/villain comparisons.

Presenting Senator James Inhofe aka The Mole Man. For those unfamiliar with James Inhofe he is the whiney little man who is skeptical of scientific process and attributes Global Warming to sunspots. The Mole Man for those unfamiliar with him is the epitome of sixties supervillains, this one brought to us from the Fantastic Four. He is a scientist who when testing his theory of a hollow earth discovered and was trapped in a subterranean world (which he of course thought proved his theory although it was clearly shown that it did not). Since then he has occasionally found his way to the surface and threatened the world with strange creatures from below the earth and is dutifully sent back under the rock from whence he came. He has never been more than a middling threat and for his combination of ineffectuality, misguided science, and mainly because he looks like he spends most of his time under a rock I think that clearly Sen. James Inhofe is the Moleman.

Republican KKK Wars among themselves in the Lodge Legal Room?

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Federal judge expels Klan leader after comments in N.C. court

RALEIGH

A federal judge expelled a self-proclaimed Ku Klux Klan leader from his courtroom after the man ranted about court procedures during a motions hearing.

"Take him out of here," U.S. District Court Judge Terrence Boyle said Wednesday after Charles Robert Barefoot Jr. commented on the court's handling of his case.

Barefoot was arrested in 2002 after his home near Benson was raided and investigators found equipment to make bombs. He and six others, including his son and wife, were charged by federal prosecutors last year with conspiring to blow up the Johnston County courthouse by trafficking in stolen weapons.

Barefoot and four others also were charged in 2004 by state prosecutors with murder in the death of Lawrence Arthur Pettit of Jacksonville. Pettit's decomposed body was found in 2003 in a Sampson County field.

SANIBEL, Fla. - A former Pennsylvania congressman was accused Wednesday of exposing himself to two women at a beach resort.

Joseph M. McDade, 75, was issued a summons on a charge of exposure of sexual organs, a misdemeanor that carries up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine. A police report was attain and it said that " Mr McDade appear confuse and somewhat amaze that the women claim he didn't have the Republican balls to do it. A spokenperson for the Police department book-in service said that "Mr McDade sexual organs were much smaller than most male 3 year old children during the book-in mug shot process."

The Chairman of the local Republican Party deny that McDade was not involved in the recent former Congressman Foley failed bid to be member of the resort where the alledge exposure took place.

Clinton, Edwards, Hagel, Obama, McCain, Biden, Gravel, Brownbach, Hunter, Giuliani, Kucinich, Tancredo, Romney, Dodd, Vilsak, Savage, Swift, Stanhope.

That’s only a partial list of candidates for President in 2008, and my head already hurts.

I know by the time this is over I’ll be sick and tired of elections, and probably the American electoral system generally.

Anticipating this problem, I have designed an alternative to the current system of elections that I feel has considerable merit.