While I’m not a cat fan, this is hilarious.

Don’t you dare call them racists. Don’t you dare.

A group trying to register voters in Houston received threats and emails containing racist slurs after being targeted by a local tea party group accusing it of ‘voter fraud.’

In emails obtained by TPM, the group Houston Votes was accused of being ‘a bunch of white guilt ridden assholes, NIGGERS and greasy mexican spics,’ ‘fraudulent Marxist pigs,’ and ‘American hating A-holes.’

‘We received a couple of threats and several harassing e-mails,’ Maureen Haver of Houston Voters told TPMMuckraker. ‘There have been several efforts, I think, just trying to race-bait and stir racial tension and part of that I think is just based on what we’ve received in messaging from them.’

Very interesting.

Griffith Rutherford Harsh V was never arrested or charged with a crime in connection with the incident. Princeton dealt with it quietly and internally, ultimately allowing Harsh to continue his education. He graduated with the class of 2009, three years after his rape accusation—and two years after the inauguration of Whitman College, the residential living complex his billionaire mother donated $30 million to help build. The donation was announced in 2002, the year before Griff matriculated.

Remember, he’s a genius. The same genius who spent millions on MySpace, etc. Just a total flop on anything digital.

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. is ditching an idea one year and $31.5 million in the making: an online newsstand that would have bundled online subscriptions to newspapers and magazine. ‘Project Alesia,’ as it was called, is being abandoned for lack of interest among the publishers News Corp. had pitched.

Reuters’ source says that Alesia is just on hold, but MediaWeek claims the decision is absolute: ‘an entire, dedicated News Corp U.K. operation being dismantled just days before a product was due to go on market.’ Over a hundred people were working on the project; most have been reassigned elsewhere.

And just like that the worst President ever is back in the news.

Former President George W. Bush signaled on Thursday that he sees not privatizing Social Security as his greatest failure from the eight years he served in the White House, the Chicago Tribune reports.

The unpopular Republican leader made the suggestion while speaking at a trade conference in the Windy City, where he discussed his legacy and also offered a glimpse into what readers can expect from his forthcoming memoir, Decision Points.

‘I would like to be remembered as a guy who had a set of priorities, and was willing to live by those priorities,’ explained Bush. ‘In terms of accomplishments, my biggest accomplishment is that I kept the country safe amidst a real danger.’

Yes, if you pretend away the worst terror attack in U.S. history and the unnecessary invasion of Iraq that allowed Al Qaeda and the Taliban to flourish, Bush kept us safe for the domestic anthrax attack and the drowning of New Orleans.

At the time of the Clarence Thomas hearings, Lillian McEwen’s relationship with Clarence Thomas was cited by defenders as a rebuttal to Anita Hill’s testimony against him:

To McEwen, Hill’s allegations that Thomas had pressed her for dates and made lurid sexual references rang familiar.

‘He was always actively watching the women he worked with to see if they could be potential partners,’ McEwen said matter-of-factly. ‘It was a hobby of his.’”

…

“He was obsessed with porn,” she said of Thomas, who is now 63. “He would talk about what he had seen in magazines and films, if there was something worth noting.”

McEwen added that she had no problem with Thomas’s interests, although she found pornography to be “boring.”

According to McEwen, Thomas would also tell her about women he encountered at work. He was partial to women with large breasts, she said. In an instance at work, Thomas was so impressed that he asked one woman her bra size, McEwen recalled him telling her.

…

However bizarre they may seem, McEwen’s recollections resemble accounts shared by other women that swirled around the Thomas confirmation.

Angela Wright, who in 1984 worked as public affairs director at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — which polices sexual harassment claims — during Thomas’s long tenure as chairman, shared similar accounts with Senate investigators.

Once, when walking into an EEOC seminar with Thomas, he asked her, “What size are your breasts?” according to the transcript of her Senate interview.

Her story was corroborated by a former EEOC speechwriter, who told investigators that Wright had become increasingly uneasy around Thomas because of his comments about her appearance.

…

Another woman, Sukari Hardnett, who worked as a special assistant to Thomas in 1985 and 1986, wrote in a letter to the Judiciary Committee that “If you were young, black, female and reasonably attractive, you knew full well you were being inspected and auditioned as a female” by Thomas.

Transcipt:

First a refresher. This is the text of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The misunderstanding of this provision – perhaps the clearest such provision in the Constitution – tells you volumes about the conservative movement and their hypocrisy in lecturing to the rest of us about what is and isn’t unconstitutional. The Constitution’s First Amendment bars the government from infringing on an individual’s right to free expression, religion, assembly, and redress of grievances.

What the Constitution does not guarantee is one’s right to a tv/radio show or a job as a political pundit. There is, to date, no enshrined right in the Constitution that Juan Williams has a right to a job as a news analyst on NPR.

You wouldn’t know this if you listened to the whining of our friendly neighborhood conservatives on Thursday.

Bernard Goldberg:

But these are the kind of people who believe in “free speech” only as long as they agree with you.

Roger Ailes:

Juan has been a staunch defender of liberal viewpoints since his tenure began at Fox News in 1997,” Ailes said in a statement, adding a jab at NPR: “He’s an honest man whose freedom of speech is protected by Fox News on a daily basis.”

Sarah Palin:

I don’t expect Juan Williams to support me (he’s said some tough things about me in the past) – but I will always support his right and the right of all Americans to speak honestly about the threats this country faces.

These people, and their fellow travelers on the right, are all very stupid on this. The government had no involvement in NPR’s decision to end their relationship with Williams. His right to say whatever thing he wants to – bigoted or not – remains perfectly intact. The first amendment grants the freedom of speech without government interference. Williams and all of us retain this right.

Conservatives demonstrate with a frightening reality their absolute ignorance of U.S. laws and practices, but never hesitate to lecture us on the right way to do everything under the sun.

Those who slept through history and civics class have now appointed themselves the unimpeachable guardians of American tradition. They are wrong, and we have to say so, the consequences of allowing ignorance to triumph demand it.

Today, Glenn Beck (like other cons before him) tried mighty hard to claim that from It’s A Wonderful Life the character of Mr. Potter is a liberal and George Bailey is a conservative.

This is absurd. Quite frankly even if you were watching the movie with a lobotomy there’s no way you could glean this message. The character of George Bailey is a classic FDR liberal. He runs the Savings & Loan in Bedford Falls not for the fiscal upside (he barely scrapes by) but out of concern for his community. The malevolent entity here is Mr. Potter, who represents a banking conglomerate that doesn’t have any of the care for the community as Bailey’s Savings & Loan. It is Mr. Potter – and the nightmarish Potterville – that represents the conservative ideal of capitalism run amok. Eventually, George Bailey’s world of capital responsive to the community triumphs as the All-American and preferable point of view.

Just watch the following scene where George organizes the community in response to a run on the bank, exhorting them to put their collective well-being over individual salvation.

If anything, George Bailey is considerably to the left of modern American Democrats like President Obama.

It’s A Wonderful Life is one of my favorite movies of all time. Conservatives twisting it just annoys the hell out of me.

They’ll only get worse.

Police locked down the Tucson congressional office of Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) on Thursday afternoon after staffers received a package containing a ‘confirmed’ toxic substance, a Grijalva spokesman said.

A suspicious package with swastikas written on the envelope was mailed Thursday to the Tucson office, where about a dozen staffers work. Upon inspection, it was found the package contained a white powder authorities later determined to be toxic, said Grijalva campaign spokesman Adam Sarvana.