Mah Nà Mah Nà

Doo dooo doodoodoo...

The Occupied Agenda

Ok MSM, you sneer that you can't get a coherant specific answer as to what the Occupy Wall Street crowds are protesting.  Here you go guys:

"There is nobody who got rich on his own."

Elizabeth Warren utterly shreds moronic 'class war' rhetoric:

“I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever,’” Warren said. “No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody.

“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.

“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

What made Jack Layton a better leader than Barack Obama:

“If you start with a compromise right at the beginning and no debate, you’re really only going with the status quo and buttering it up a little. No space is created for change to happen.” - Jack Layton

The New World

"I think you know that there's no such thing as an American anymore. No Hispanics, no Japanese, no blacks, no whites, no nothing. It's just rich people and poor people. The three of us are all rich, so we're on the same side"  - Deep Cover, 1992

Quote of the Day

If you're about to embark on an G20 austerity program that will attack social/health programs for the poor the hardest, you're going to need to get those people acclimatized to not having any rights first. - Alison, paraphrasing Paul Wells

"You ain't got no pancake mix!"

The only reasonable response to tea-baggers, fanatics and assorted haters:

Quote of the Day

Joe Barton was plain stupid to apologize to BP. His masters would have forgiven a little attack, to maintain his cover. - Roger Ebert

Your Country

your country raised you
your country fed you
And just like any other country
It will break you
On front line send you
Tax the hell out of you
And just like any other country
It will lock you up you!

Quote of the day

"When your heart is hardened against the corpses of children buried in rubble, it is hardened too much. And the job of a real friend is to point this out, not to enable it."

-Andrew Sullivan

The rest of the piece is a thoughtful consideration of issues of justice, history and morality attendant on the establishment of the state of Israel.

The Seductive appeal of Victimhood

Greenwald pours out a barn-burner on the subject and Anshel Pfeffer explores it as well in Haaretz.

Thus, nuclear-armed Israel is bullied and victimized by starving Gazans with stones. The Israel Navy is threatened by a flotilla filled with wheelchairs and medicine. And the greatest superpower the Earth has ever known faces a grave and existential threat from a handful of religious fanatics hiding in caves.

Quote of the day

Laura Bush coming out for gay marriage! I guess if ur married to W for 30 yrs u know u don't have to be gay to have sex with an asshole. -

Posted from twitter Bill Maher

Quote of the Day

"Every asshole who ever chanted 'Drill baby drill' should have to report to the Gulf coast today for cleanup duty," - Bill Maher.

'The Laughing Heart'

Tom Waits reads Charles Bukowski.

4/20

Better to celebrate a friendly leafy plant than the birthday of a flatulent failed wallpaper hanger with one testicle and a bad attitude.

J K Rowling on the British Conservatives contempt for single mothers

Spotted at BoingBoing

I had become a single mother when my first marriage split up in 1993. In one devastating stroke, I became a hate figure to a certain section of the press, and a bogeyman to the Tory Government. Peter Lilley, then Secretary of State at the DSS, had recently entertained the Conservative Party conference with a spoof Gilbert and Sullivan number, in which he decried “young ladies who get pregnant just to jump the housing list”. The Secretary of State for Wales, John Redwood, castigated single-parent families from St Mellons, Cardiff, as “one of the biggest social problems of our day”. (John Redwood has since divorced the mother of his children.) Women like me (for it is a curious fact that lone male parents are generally portrayed as heroes, whereas women left holding the baby are vilified) were, according to popular myth, a prime cause of social breakdown, and in it for all we could get: free money, state-funded accommodation, an easy life.
An easy life. Between 1993 and 1997 I did the job of two parents, qualified and then worked as a secondary school teacher, wrote one and a half novels and did the planning for a further five. For a while, I was clinically depressed. To be told, over and over again, that I was feckless, lazy — even immoral — did not help.

...

Nobody who has ever experienced the reality of poverty could say “it’s not the money, it’s the message”. When your flat has been broken into, and you cannot afford a locksmith, it is the money. When you are two pence short of a tin of baked beans, and your child is hungry, it is the money. When you find yourself contemplating shoplifting to get nappies, it is the money. If Mr Cameron’s only practical advice to women living in poverty, the sole carers of their children, is “get married, and we’ll give you £150”, he reveals himself to be completely ignorant of their true situation.

Wow does this ever sound familiar...

Quote of the Day

"...we don’t have a left and a right party in this country anymore; we have a center-right party and a crazy party. And over the last thirty-odd years Democrats have moved to the right and the right has moved into a mental hospital."

-Bill Maher

Quote of the Day

People say I complain a lot about things,
but good news! Oral Roberts is still dead.
-Warren Ellis

Quote of the day

"When politics can't do real things, it becomes by default a realm of entertainment and titillation, requiring ever new thrills and Susan Boyle-like surprises."
-Rick Salutin

Quote of the Day

I’ve got to say those people (Republicans), if anybody needs a health plan in America, it’s those people who are in severe need of mental health services.

- Congressman Barney Frank