Ogre-oid: News Corp's $1 Million Donation to GOP

And the floodgates are open and we're off to the races!

BP Ends Meeting When Someone Brings in Some "Missing" Oil

Not surprisingly, at a public meeting BP shuts off the mics when a fisherman pulls out a bag of oil he got out of the marshes a few miles away after BP claims there is no oil.

Ogre-oid: Six Months Too Late - Times Retracts "Climategate" "Story"

The Times of London (owned by Rupert Murdoch) has decided maybe there wasn't so much to those "climategate" letters as they pretended there was.  Actually, they say now, there really was nothing to them, just like every sane person that looked at them thought.  [more here, here, and here]

I would like to quote the Newsweek article about why this retraction will make no difference because it's an excellent summation of what's known about this:  "One of the strongest, most-repeated findings in the psychology of belief is that once people have been told X, especially if X is shocking, if they are later told, 'No, we were wrong about X,' most people still believe X."  This effect is even more pronounced amongst conservatives.

Ogre-oid: Republicans Blame Democrats for Teabagger Epithets

Just to bring you up to date, at a recent gathering of the lunatic right (i.e. the Republican non-ultramega "base") to protest health care reform the crowd chanted "nigger" at Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) as he went from building to building and an elderly man shouted, "Barney, you faggot" at Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) to laughter from the rest of the crowd.  Civilized Americans would be appalled at this behavior (which I believe reveals more about the true reason for teabagger anger than any bills in Congress) but Republicans' reaction to it can be summed up in muted at best or completely nutjob like Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) who blamed it on (wait for it)  the Democrats and their "totalitarian tactics" like majority rule by our elected representatives.

"When you use totalitarian tactics, people begin to act crazy. And I think, y'know there's people that have every right to say what they want. If they want to smear someone they can do it. It's not appropriate. and I think I would stop short of characterizing the 20,000 people who were protesting that all of them were doing that."

It must be fun living through the looking glass where everything is the opposite of reality.  A universe where this utterly flawed reform bill contains "Death Panels," forces us to euthanize Grandma, eliminates Medicare (a program the Republicans suddenly want to protect fiercely after trying to kill it since it was first suggested), and will put America so deeply in debt we won't be able to keep the lights on (as opposed to the huge savings the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says it will deliver over the course of the next decade.  A universe where fascism and communism are the same thing.  A universe where a parliamentary procedure they used to ram through Bush's tax cuts which have nearly bankrupted the country (and when added to the price tag for his insane foreign wars they may very well have bankrupted us, we just haven't filed for Chapter 11 yet) is suddenly "exotic" and like nothing that has ever been done before in history. 

When the revolution comes I want to be one of the ones lining these SOBs up against the wall.  They've destroyed this country and will not stop until slavery and indentured servitude is the most common state of the lower classes.  If you vote Republican, FUCK YOU.

Ogre-oid: Republican Health Reform Lies

Dave doesn't agree with me that there is a large slice of Americans that listen to the authority figures they have been taught to believe which explains why the Republicans can lie about health reform in every aspect and their followers will believe them.  When you ask Americans about each individual aspect of the healthcare bills now before Congress they agree with all of them, but when you ask them what they think about reform they are marginally against it.  I blame the liars and Dave blames those that listen to the lies.