Another day, another homophobic, misogynistic rapper...

The latest bleating is from Ja Rule, who must be in need of some publicity. It's too bad that whatever meaningful message he was trying to get across about racism is polluted by his ignorance, and a ridiculous, sad, crotch-grabbing assertion of his manhood by blaming gays for the downfall of the country. The irony of that is quite stunning. (Complex.com):

C: Did you see that report about Congress preparing to hold hearings??
Ja: (interrupts) Yeah, they got my man Doug Morris under fire and shit, they got him going down to go speak to Congress about hip-hop lyrics, are you fucking serious? There's a fucking black kid right now about to get 25 years for having a fight with some white kids over hanging the nooses over the white tree, lets get to that. Let's get into shit like that, because that's what's tearing up America, not me calling a woman a bitch or a hoe on my rap songs. And if it is, then we need to go step to Paramount, and fucking MGM, and all of these other motherfuckers that's making all of these movies and we need to go step to MTV and Viacom, and lets talk about all these fucking shows that they have on MTV that is promoting homosexuality, that my kids can't watch this shit. Dating shows that's showing two guys or two girls in mid afternoon. Let's talk about shit like that! If that's not fucking up America, I don't know what is. There's a lot of issues we can address besides hip-hop, but they want to put everything on us like we're the problem. But see, and this is going to be a shameless fucking plug, but I said, "when everyone wants to point the finger, and ask why there's so much corruption, they only need to look in the mirror." It starts with themselves.

Factoid -- Ja Rule, whose real name is Jeffrey Atkins, hails from Hollis, Queens, NYC, a neighborhood I lived in for several years as a kid -- the days of old-school rap (Run-D.M.C., also from Hollis).

Related:
* Discussing racism and misogyny - one step forward, two steps back, and a lot of pointing fingers Read More......

Joe Lieberman, who would lose if the election was this year, is still a registered Democrat. His wife and daughter aren't.

Daily Kos released a poll this week showing that if the election were held this year, Democrat Ned Lamont would defeat Independent Joe Lieberman by a margin of 48 - 40 with 10% for the Republican.

A friend in Connecticut (who knows these things) tells us that the independent Senator from Connecticut registered as a Democrat when he moved to his new hometown of Stamford. He moved there this past summer from New Haven. However, his wife, Hadassah, and his daughter, Hana, are now registered as unaffiliated so there are some independents in the family. That's according to the voter registrar's records in Stamford anyway.

Let's hope his new best friends, Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter, don't find out Joe's dirty little secret.

UPDATE: Sprinkles has a post at Daily Kos pointing out that Joe was supposed to join another party, but didn't:

This past week Senator Joseph Lieberman had a chance to keep his promise that he made to the Secretary of State that he would join another party.

Of course he continued his deception and he registered once again as a Democrat in his new town of Stamford. In order to get on the ballot last year after losing the Democratic primary to Ned Lamont, Lieberman promised that he would not be running as a Democrat which would violate state law by having two members of the same party running for the same office after the primaries.

He circulated a petition to form a new party in Connecticut called "Connecticut for Lieberman". I challenged him in August 2006 and said he had no intention of joining such a party, that he was going to remain a Democrat and that he was just using this gimmick to keep on running as a stealth Democrat. The new party had no party chair, no rules, no platform, nada.

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New brain study: Liberals adapt to new circumstances, conservatives stay with the status quo even if they're wrong

Funny, I always thought being a Republican was a lifestyle choice. Now I see that they're born that way. Still, with gene therapy, anything is possible.

From the LA Times:

In a simple experiment reported today in the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists at New York University and UCLA show that political orientation is related to differences in how the brain processes information.

Previous psychological studies have found that conservatives tend to be more structured and persistent in their judgments whereas liberals are more open to new experiences. The latest study found those traits are not confined to political situations but also influence everyday decisions.

The results show "there are two cognitive styles -- a liberal style and a conservative style," said UCLA neurologist Dr. Marco Iacoboni, who was not connected to the latest research.

Participants were college students whose politics ranged from "very liberal" to "very conservative." They were instructed to tap a keyboard when an M appeared on a computer monitor and to refrain from tapping when they saw a W.

M appeared four times more frequently than W, conditioning participants to press a key in knee-jerk fashion whenever they saw a letter.

Each participant was wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency (pressing a key) and a more appropriate response (not pressing the key). Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W, researchers said.

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New leading choice for Attorney General says CNN

CNN's John King's reported the "Breaking News" that there's a new leading candidate for Attorney General: Former Federal Judge Michael Mukasey. According to King, Mukasey is acceptable to some Democrats. That, of course, means the wing-nuts are freaking out. They want a fight for Ted Olson.
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$2 billion withdrawn, 30% stock crash by British mortgage lender

The real estate bubble is bursting and it's not pretty. Just as the GOP has some explaining to do concerning their blatant disregard for basic economic fundamentals, the British Labour government and Gordon Brown ought to explain why they thought "easy money" was such a good idea now that everything is falling apart so quickly and violently. Considering how connected banking has become in recent years it has been obvious that problems in one country, especially a country as large as the US, could trigger problems in other countries.

Branches of Northern Rock were besieged by savers yesterday as fears grew in the City that the Bank of England rescue package for Britain's fifth-biggest mortgage lender could herald a slide in house prices and further financial collapses.

Amid news that property prices were already falling sharply before the Bank's first use of its lender-of-last-resort facility in more than 30 years, the Newcastle-based Northern Rock was forced to keep branches open late to allow savers access to their money. By last night it was reported a total of £1bn had been withdrawn.

Customers ignored reassurances from the chancellor, Alistair Darling, the British Bankers Association and Northern Rock itself that funds were safe.

In the first real test of internet banking, websites at Northern Rock and many other banks crashed as savers tried to access their accounts. Police had to be called to a branch in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, when a couple barricaded the manager in her office when she refused to let them withdraw their £1m savings.

Shares in Northern Rock fell more than 30% yesterday, dragging the stock market down. With speculation other mortgage lenders were at risk, the FTSE 100 index closed down more than 1%. A sharp drop in shares of buy-to-let lender Paragon Mortgages made it issue a statement that it had no need to resort to the Bank of England, while Bradford & Bingley and Alliance & Leicester denied they had problems.

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Saturday Morning Open Thread

Good Morning.

It's the weekend. If you need a distraction, check out the poem of the week: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. It's a poem about a painting -- a double dose of culture for a Saturday morning.

Start threading the news. Read More......

Bush knows how to keep America safe

He says so, so it must be true.

Ten years after Congress ordered federal agencies to have outside auditors review their books, neither the Defense Department nor the newer Department of Homeland Security has met even basic accounting requirements, leaving them vulnerable to waste, fraud and abuse.

An Associated Press review shows that the two departments’ financial records are so disorganized and inconsistent that they have repeatedly earned “disclaimer” opinions, meaning that they simply cannot be fully audited.

“It means we really can’t put any faith in the numbers they use,” said Ross Rubenstein, who teaches public administration at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School.

It's amazing that we have managed to discover the numerous cases of corruption and over-billing considering the chaotic state of these federal agencies though the trend during this administration is blatantly obvious. The positive angle here is that it makes it easier to understand how so much of our taxpayer money has gone missing in Iraq and why Petraeus skipped over that little issue when suggesting Iraq was good for the US arms business even though so much of those funds disappeared. Ignorance is bliss...not to mention SOP at the Defense Department. Read More......

Mr Bubble kicking off his "rescue my legacy" tour

Greenapan's book launch and PR tour could not come at a more interesting time. Maybe he can still get the book title changed to "Mr Bubble" since he helped create so many of them. Better still, Greenspan can team up with Bush and they can both explain how great they really are despite what everyone can see with their own eyes. Excerpts from his 60 Minutes interview here.

"With hindsight, it is possible to see that his modus operandi was to blow one bubble after another," said Tom Schlesinger, the executive director of the Virginia-based Financial Markets Center, which analyses the Fed. "Mr Greenspan consistently argued that central banks have no legitimacy to intervene to prevent asset price bubbles, and to substitute their judgement for that of millions of market participants. But central banks have no problem whatsoever intervening when they think that product prices are inflating, or when labour markets are overheating."

Aggressive moves to cut interest rates in 1987 were credited with preventing the stock market crash from affecting the rest of the US economy, which kept on growing, but a similar move to restore confidence after the collapse of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1998 has been blamed for having the side effect of inflating the dot.com bubble, which burst in 2000.

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