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Credit: Get Your Censor On

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The comic genius behind "Get Your War On" is back with "Get Your Censor On," with links to writing Congress against SOPA. Open thread below....

I love this footage of Texas bluesman Black Ace. Maybe you will too.

And Nights at the Roundtable has jazz from The Three Sounds - 1960.

Whatcha listening to this Friday night?

I'm the Boss Card in Your Hand
	Artist: Black Ace Buck Turner Price: $13.79 (As of 01/06/12 05:11 pm details)

2011 closeout! Everything must go! Through the magic of year-end compilations, the Year in Crazy can be yours! See what happened over this last crazy year - from wars to dictators to occupy everything to candidates.

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In his Rewrite segment on this Thursday evening's Last Word, Lawrence O'Donnell suggested Mitt Romney might want to find out more about the song "America the Beautiful", its lyrics and songwriter Katharine Lee Bates before he quotes it on the campaign trail again.

After attacking President Obama for his use of the teleprompter, apparently Mitt Romney has been trying to avoid them on the campaign trail and as O'Donnell noted, "when Romney tries to sound like he's speaking from the heart, he relies on a semi-memorized version of America the Beautiful."

And as O'Donnell pointed out, the poem which was later put to music that Romney pretends to love so much has verses that none of us remember such as this one:

America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

O'Donnell noted that Mitt Romney, in his attempt to appeal to some of the Libertarians and Ron Paul voters in the Republican base this year, pretends that our laws are robbing us of our liberty, and songwriter Bates might have been a Republican, but she would not have been a Romney Republican. I wouldn't restrict that just to Romney, but I don't disagree that anyone who was a Republican ages ago might not recognize their party now and how far its fallen off the right wing crazy train these days. Romney's moved so far to the right during this primary race that I'm really curious how severely he's going to try to boomerang back over to the so-called "center" if he does eventually win the primary, which I suspect he will since he's the one with all of the big money behind him.

I also agree with O'Donnell on how stiff Romney is on the campaign trail and the reason his handlers really don't want him going off script too often, or the results are the type he showed us in the beginning of the segment above. He's a member of the 1 percent and doesn't have a clue what life is like for most Americans and it shows... to put it mildly.

[Photo of the teepee that led to Wednesday's Occupy Oakland raid - via @geekeasy]

Khali Johnson was arrested for "basically littering," which could somehow turn into his third strike and a lifetime in prison.

You may recall that I told you all about the situation with Khali last month, after his arrest during a December 16th Oakland Police raid. There was great concern because Khali had been held in detention unusually long, appeared at each court hearing severely bruised and didn't have access to his prescribed psychiatric medication.

More Via:

The threat of life imprisonment looms for Occupy Oakland activist Marcel Johnson - better known by his alias, Khali - after a third-strike arrest during the demonstration. Having spent about 15 years incarcerated already, 38 year-old Khali said he was trying to turn his life around by distributing food to the needy at the Occupy Oakland encampment, where he was a frequent, vocal, sometimes endearing presence. On December 16 he was arrested outside City Hall for violating anti-encroachment laws — namely, for a dispute about a blanket — which normally wouldn't have warranted more than a few hours jail time. Since Khali was in fact violating his probation terms for a different case in Sacramento, he was taken to Santa Rita and made to serve some jail time in lieu of going to trial, his attorney Dan Siegel explained. There, Khali was held in solitary confinement and not given his psychiatric medications, which might explain why he got into an altercation with a peace officer — the exact circumstances of which are still widely disputed. Now, Khali faces a felony assault charge in place of his original misdemeanor. As of Friday, December 23, Khali's bail was set at $580,000, according his attorney, Dan Siegel.

Siegel won't be representing Khali in the assault case, but luckily was able to convince a judge to order a medical evaluation that hopefully will explain the altercation between Khali, and the officer in Santa Rita. The next scheduled court date for Khali is January 9th in Pleasanton where he will face that potential "third strike," and bail that would be completely out of reach as Khali is homeless, with no money or possessions to his name.

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At a campaign stop in South Carolina yesterday, Senator John McCain refers to Mitt Romney as President Obama. Friday morning he said Santorum and Romney (instead of Gingrich) don't share his views on eliminating earmarks.

And we're reminded again with these frequent 'senior moments' why it's fortunate he lost in 2008.

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If Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum's latest stump speech is successful, his opponents may find themselves campaigning against Christ.

Speaking to a tea party group at Windham High School in New Hampshire on Thursday, the former Pennsylvania senator actually compared himself to the Christian savior.

Santorum told the crowd that during a radio interview earlier in the week, a man had phoned in to tell him, "We don't need a Jesus candidate; we need an economic candidate."

"My answer to that was, we always need a Jesus candidate," Santorum, who is a Catholic, recalled.

"I don't mean that in saying we need a Jesus candidate, someone who's a Christian, but we need someone who believes in something more than themselves, some higher power, some god," he added. "When we say, 'God bless America,' do we mean it or do we just say it?"

I wonder if anyone's going to make a deal and spill the beans on Walker:

Three individuals - including a former top aide to Gov. Scott Walker - were charged Thursday with felonies as part of the ongoing John Doe investigation into Walker staffers.

Tim Russell, a longtime Walker campaign and county staffer, was charged with two felonies and one misdemeanor count of embezzlement. One source said the charges are tied to Operation Freedom, an annual military appreciation day held at the zoo.

In 2010, Walker's county administration had asked prosecutors to investigate what had happened to $11,000 raised in 2007 for the event.

Russell's attorney, Michael Maistelman, could not be immediately reached for comment.

Also charged Thursday was Brian Pierick, Russell's longtime partner and a staffer at the state Department of Public Instruction, and Kevin Kavanaugh, Walker's appointee to the Milwaukee County Veteran Service Commission.

Kavanaugh is charged with five felonies for theft and fraudulent writings by a corporate officer. He was the treasurer of the Milwaukee Purple Heart chapter at the time of the dispute over the $11,000 for Operation Freedom.

Pierick, 48, was charged with two felony counts for child enticement. He is an office operations assistant at DPI dealing with education for homeless children and youth, according to the agency's website.

Walker spokesman Chris Schrimpf had no immediate comment on the news but said the office would provide one later in the day.

"We're still looking at it," he said.

Russell, who was housing director for Walker at the county, is facing Class G and Class I felonies. A class G felony carries a fine of up to $25,000 and up to 10 years in prison or both. A class I felony carries a fine of up to $10,000 and up to three and a half years in prison or both.

In August 2010, authorities seized Russell's county computer just weeks before the gubernatorial primary.

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Oops, he did it again.

For the second time in as many days, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has confused President Barack Obama with another person during a campaign event for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

On Thursday, the Arizona senator had declared that "President Obama will turn this country around," and was quickly corrected by both Romney and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.

Less than 24 hours later, McCain was on the stump in Conway when he goofed again.

"He will rebuild the moral of American and he will restore America," McCain said of Romney. "I guarantee you he will not lead from behind like Ronald Reagan. He will lead from in front."

Both Romney's wife, Ann, and Haley turned to look at the candidate, but he simply applauded this time instead of correcting the 2008 GOP nominee.

McCain most likely mangled a line that he had used several days before in New Hampshire.

"I guarantee one thing," McCain declared. "No one will ever say that Mitt Romney will lead from behind. He will lead from the front like Ronald Reagan did."

Republicans have long mocked President Barack Obama over the assertion that he was "leading from behind."

Mitt Romney does an interesting little tap dance here when confronted by an Occupy New Hampshire protester about corporate personhood:

AMY GOODMAN: And in a moment, we’re going to have a very interesting discussion about what’s going on in Indiana around worker rights. But I wanted to turn to one last clip. A day after narrowly winning the Iowa caucus, Mitt Romney came under intense questioning in New Hampshire Wednesday by a member of Occupy Boston and Occupy New Hampshire over his past comment that corporations are people. The exchange took place at a televised town hall during which Senator John McCain endorsed Romney.

MARK PROVOST: You’ve said that corporations are people. But in the last two years, corporate profits have surged to record highs, directly at the expense of wages. That’s in a JPMorgan report. Now, it seems that the U.S., it’s a great place to be a corporation then, but increasingly a desperate place to live and work. So would you refine your earlier statement from "corporations are people" to "corporations are abusive people"? And would you be willing to reverse the policies of both the Obama administration and his predecessors around corporate-centric economic policies that only see wealth and income, you know, just go to the top, at record highs seemingly, every—faster every year? And the people in this country are in a permanent economic stagnation. So, I just want to see some color on that.

MITT ROMNEY: Where do you think corporations’ profit goes? When you hear that a corporation has profit, where does it go?

MARK PROVOST: [inaudible] profit, I mean, it depends—

MITT ROMNEY: Yeah, but where does it go?

MARK PROVOST: Well, it depends. If they retain it, there’s retained earnings, that means that they’re not spending it on—they’re not distributing it as dividends, and that means they’re not using it for capex, capital expenditure. You know, so they could just hoard it. That’s retained earnings. Right? But as profits, it goes to shareholders. So it goes to the 1 percent of Americans that own 90 percent of the stocks.

MITT ROMNEY: OK, not let’s get to facts, all right? There are two places they can go. Hold on. It’s my turn. You’ve had your turn. Now it’s my turn, all right? First of all, you’re right it goes to dividends, all right, which is to the owners. But they’re not the 1 percent. All right? They’re not only the 1 percent. I’m sure, among the dividends, go to the 1 percent, but also go to the people who have pensions. All right? There’s a guy. You don’t—are you in the 1 percent? No. He’s got dividends and retirement plans, 401(k)s. They’re filled of the dividends that come out from corporations. That’s number one.

Number two, you are right, they can go into retained earnings, which then can be used for capital expenditures or growing the business or hiring people or working capital. When a business has profit, it can do good things: give it to the shareholders and grow the enterprise. And by the way, the only way it can hire people is if it grows the enterprise.

Now, corporations, they’re made up of people, and then, of course, the buildings that people work in. The buildings don’t pay taxes. The only people that—the only entities that pay taxes are people. And so, corporations are collections of people that are trying to have good jobs for themselves and promote the future. And so, corporations are made up of people, and the money goes to people, either to hire people or to pay shareholders. And so, they’re made up of people. So, somehow thinking that there’s something else out there that we could just grab money from and get taxes from, and everything could be better, that doesn’t involve people, well, they’re still people. And what I want to do is make America a place where those corporations that have that money decide to invest here.

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