Last Call

This may win some sort of award for the least surprising news story ever.

The husband-and-wife team behind the planned Islamic center and mosque near New York's ground zero have received threats, a New York police spokesman said Sunday, hours after the wife said her life is under threat.

The threats "began several weeks ago," police spokesman Paul Browne told CNN "We were investigating them."

Browne would disclose no details of the threats made against Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf or his wife, Daisy Khan, or whether they were receiving any police protection.

Khan raised the issue during a discussion aired Sunday on ABC's "This Week," which spent this week's broadcast focusing on American Muslims and the fears evoked by the proposed Park51 Islamic center in New York and by mosques in other parts of the United States.

"For the record, my life is under threat," she said.

"Check with the Police Department. My husband's life is under threat," she added. "We do not walk around with bodyguards, because we love this country. We don't walk around with big bodyguards because we don't want use taxpayer's money."

Imagine that.  The folks behind Park51 are getting threats.  Muslims, getting threats in America?

Least surprising news story I've read all year.

Small Government, No...Small-Minded, Yes

Bob Cesca catches another "small-government libertarian" Republican in action, Sen. Jim DeMint.

DeMint said if someone is openly homosexual, they shouldn't be teaching in the classroom and he holds the same position on an unmarried woman who's sleeping with her boyfriend — she shouldn't be in the classroom.

Government shouldn't be interfering in the beliefs of the American people, unless it's social conservatives enforcing how people should live their lives.

The most inalienable right to a Tea Party Republican is the God-given, Constitutional right to be able to remove the people who don't agree with them in order to prevent anyone from interfering with their right to pretend that everyone else in America has the same opinion they do.

Oh, and the Teabaggers want Jim DeMint to be their new Senate leader.

Master Debaters

Jack Conway and Rand Paul appeared on FOX News Sunday today for a debate of sorts.  I give credit to Conway for showing up on FOX, too.  It was a two on one fight he had to put up with.

Conway, the state's attorney general, said that while he agreed with some Obama policies including health care reform, he would be an independent voice looking out for Kentucky.


Asked about his campaign ads and reported comments depicting Paul as "crazy," Conway said: "I'm not saying Dr. Paul is crazy. I think some of his ideas are out of the mainstream and they're out of touch with the values of normal Kentuckians."

The debate moderated by "FOX News Sunday" anchor Chris Wallace included accusations by Paul that Conway flip-flopped on some issues, first backing and now questioning cap-and-trade energy legislation and the expiration of some Bush-era tax cuts.

Conway denied changing positions but made clear that he now was firmly in the moderate camp on some hot-button issues, for example insisting that all the tax cuts should be extended.

Obama wants to extend the tax cuts for the 98 percent of the country earning up to $200,000 individually or $250,000 as families, while returning to higher tax rates of the 1990s for the 2 percent making more money.

Republicans, along with some Democrats -- including Conway -- say all the tax cuts should be extended as the economy slowly recovers from the recession.

Conway accused Paul of being out of touch with Kentuckians by advocating policies that he said were out of the 1930s. He repeatedly cited Paul's past suggestion of a $2,000 deductible for Medicare coverage and reducing the federal role in mine safety regulations as examples.

And while Jack Conway would certainly be a better Senator than Rand Paul, at best he would be another Evan Bayh/Ben Nelson type.  The really sad part is out of the four primary candidates from the two parties, Conway is the furthest to the left.  That means he's mistaken for a Republican only most of the time.

I'm not sure why Conway thinks he can beat Rand Paul by trying to be conservative.  That dog don't hunt.  Ahh, but I don't have much of a choice, do I?  After all, Rand wants to raise the retirement age for me.

Conservative Ben Nelson type over Rand Paul?  Absolutely.  I'll take predictable over insane.

Trojan Dipstick

Frank Rich's opinion of Christine O' Donnell is that she is 2010's Sarah Palin, and that's not in any way a good thing.

The O’Donnell template, by sharp contrast, is Palin. It was Palin’s endorsement that put O’Donnell on the map, and it’s Palin’s script that O’Donnell is assiduously following. The once obscure governor of Alaska was also tripped up by lies and gaffes when she emerged on the national stage, starting with her misrepresentation of her supposed opposition to “the bridge to nowhere.” But she quickly wove the attacks into a brilliant cloak of martyrdom that positioned her as a fierce small-town opponent of the coasts’ pointy-head elites.

O’Donnell, like Palin, knows that attacks by those elites, including conservative grandees, only backfire and enhance her image as a feisty defender of the aggrieved and resentful Joe Plumbers in “real America.”
The more O’Donnell is vilified, the bigger the star she becomes, and the more she can reinforce the Tea Party’s preferred narrative as “a spontaneous and quite anarchic movement” (in the recent words of the pundit Charles Krauthammer) populated only by everyday folk upset by big government and the deficit. This airbrushed take has had a surprisingly long life even in some of the nonpartisan press. In a typical example just three weeks ago, the influential publication National Journal delivered a breathless report on how the Tea Party functions as a “headless” movement where “no one gives orders.” To prove the point, a head of the headless Tea Party Patriots vouched that “75 percent of the group’s funding comes from small donations, $20 or less.”

In fact, local chapters of Tea Party Patriots routinely received early training and support from FreedomWorks, the moneyed libertarian outfit run by the former Republican House majority leader and corporate lobbyist Dick Armey. FreedomWorks is itself a spinoff from Citizens for a Sound Economy, a pseudo-grassroots group whose links to the billionaire Koch brothers were traced by Jane Mayer in her blockbuster August exposé in The New Yorker. Last week the same Tea Party Patriots leader who bragged to the National Journal about all those small donations announced a $1 million gift from a man she would identify only as an entrepreneur. The donor’s hidden identity speaks even louder than the size of the check. As long as we don’t know who he is, we won’t know what orders he’s giving either.

Such deep-pocketed mystery benefactors — not O’Donnell, whose reported income for this year and last is $5,800 — are the real indicators of what’s going on under the broad Tea Party rubric. Big money rains down on the “bottom up” Tea Party insurgency through phantom front organizations (Americans for Prosperity, Americans for Job Security) that exploit legal loopholes to keep their sugar daddies’ names secret. Reporters at The Times and The Washington Post, among others, have lately made real strides in explaining how the game works. But we still don’t know the identities of most of those anonymous donors. 

Rich is right, but he's also missing the larger point:  Tea Partiers don't give a damn about the fact that cash is being poured into the system by conservative groups with unlimited donation power, and that's because Tea Partiers don't give a damn about fiscal responsibility.  They just want Obama gone, and they don't really give a damn how it's accomplished.

All of the rest is a ruse.  Yes, if this means Christine O'Donnell is in office, they don't care what she does, as long as Obama is removed from office.

People need to recognize the driving force behind Tea Party anger is getting rid of Obama.

Fortress Europe

A major terrorism-based travel advisory for Americans in Europe is a big deal, folks.

The U.S. State Department has issued a travel alert for U.S. citizens in Europe, based on information that suggests that al Qaeda and affiliated organizations continue to plan terrorist attacks. Americans are warned to be aware of their surroundings and protect themselves when traveling.

One senior U.S. official said earlier that in addition to the travel alert from the State Department, "U.S. military installations are taking prudent precautions. This is a serious situation."

A separate U.S. official said the alert is being prompted by the volume of intelligence on possible terror threats, rather than new intelligence.

It emerged last week that U.S. intelligence officials were looking at information about a possible "Mumbai-style" attack in cities across Europe.

ABC News has more:

Strong concerns that terrorist teams in Europe have selected their targets, completed their surveillance, eluded capture and are now ready to strike at airports and tourist attractions have prompted the State Department to ready a highly unusual travel advisory for Europe, multiple law enforcement and intelligence sources tell ABC News.

Intelligence and law enforcement officials have information that the teams could at any time launch a "Mumbai style" terror attack that targets civilians for death or hostage taking. The 2008 Mumbai attack used small arms and explosives to kill 175 people and paralyze the Indian city for days.

The current concerns are for scenarios that include opening fire at airports in Europe as well as executing similar attacks at "soft" targets like tourist attractions or hotels.

According to ABC News sources, the terror plotters have moved through the surveillance stage, checked back in with al Qaeda in Pakistan, and have received the go-ahead to strike.

The US issuing an alert like this for all of Europe is not anything to be treated lightly, because it becomes an instant logistical nightmare for the EU, but apparently it's deadly serious.

Hopefully nobody will be hurt here.

Today In Village Idiocy

You don't even have to read Dean Broder's column this week, you just need to glance at the title:

"John Boehner's useful thoughts on fixing Congress"

You want to know what Orange Julius brought to Congress in the last two years?



You want to know who Broder blames for the last two years?

What Boehner called "a cycle of gridlock" afflicts both sides of the Capitol, and has been enabled by both parties, depending on who had the majority. As he was honest enough to admit, the abuses did not start when Pelosi took the gavel, and both sides have been guilty of twisting the rules.

If the margins of control shrink in January, as I think they will, it might well be time to negotiate a truce.

I'd like to see Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic leaders take Boehner up on the challenge he has raised, not try to demean it. He said, for example, that rather than stifling debate through the manipulation of rules, "we should open things up and let the battle of ideas help break down the scar tissue between the parties. . . . Let's let legislators legislate again."

Does anyone on Earth, even the Republicans, think Boehner will be allowed to "break down the scare tissue between parties" with the Tea Party in charge of the GOP?   When half of your party doesn't even think the President is legitimately the President, how do you work with him?

Broder really does need to be put out to pasture.  He lives in a fantasy world where he's actually taking John Boehner at his word.

But we're already seeing the Village meme for the next two years:  "Will the Democrats be the adults and capitulate to the Republicans?"  It'll be funny too right up to the point where Obama's being impeached.

Last Call

Estimates of the crowd at today's One Nation rally in DC drew some 175,000+ people on the National Mall.

So...since only 87,000 or so showed up at the Glenn Beck rally on 8/28, does that mean that the Tea Party really doesn't represent all of America, and that the majority of Americans are remarkably sane, normal people?

Enquiring Zandars want to know.

Larry, Timmy, And Mike

CNBC's Larry Kudlow has a Kramerian track record on pretty much everything, so I'm not sure why anyone's paying attention to his "insider" claim that NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg will be replacing Timmy after the election.





I think Larry Kudlow is full of crap. Then again, I always think Larry Kudlow is full of crap.

Up To Yer Ears In Mountaineers

If you haven't read Matt Osborne's piece/video on Appalachia Rising, then do yourself a favor a check it out.  West Virginians battling the mining companies that have killed so many in pursuit of "clean coal" is a noble pursuit indeed.



Here in Kentucky, King Coal owns all the politicians...but they don't own the people.  More power to the Appalachia Rising folks...you can check them out here.

Republican Obstruction Has A Very Real Price, Part 2

Sen. Mitch McConnell went on a rant today in the GOP weekly address accusing Democrats of refusing to take action on the Bush tax cuts.

But the real outrage needs to be directed right at McConnell and the Republicans in Congress for killing a quarter of a million jobs this week.

They left town for their pre-election recess having blocked the extension of a successful jobs program -- praised by conservatives from Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour to economist Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute -- that provided 250,000 jobs for low-income parents and youths.

A $2.5 billion version of the extension passed the House, twice. The Senate whittled it back to $1.5 billion but still could not dislodge Republican opposition -- even though the cost would have been fully paid for.

The program was a sliver of the giant stimulus measure, but one of the most effective in terms of job creation. And it sounded as if it came straight out of the GOP playbook. The money was used overwhelmingly for private-sector jobs. It went to employers, to subsidize -- depending on the state -- all or part of wages for newly hired workers who would otherwise have been on unemployment rolls or receiving welfare. It was a particular boon to small business, helping them expand at a time when they would not have otherwise had the financial leeway to do so. 

To repeat, Republicans have blocked funding, and now 250,000 Americans are going to lose their jobs.  The Republicans killed a quarter million jobs just to make election gains.  They are heartless bastards.


So when Republicans say "Where are the jobs?", you tell them "You blocked them, you asshole."  They only care about power.  And they will sacrifice as many Americans as it takes to gain it.


Repugnant.

Turn On The Lights, Watch The Roaches Scatter, Part 6

Things are moving quickly now in Foreclosure-gate.  Connecticut AG (and current Dem Senate candidate) Richard Blumenthal has instituted a 60 day moratorium on all foreclosures and other states are moving to follow suit.

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal on Friday ordered a moratorium on all foreclosures by all banks for 60 days--the most radical action taken by a state on issue of document irregularities.

California also expanded the moratorium on foreclosures it announced last week on Ally Financial foreclosures to include those by J.P. Morgan Chase.

Calling the companies' review of key foreclosure documents "a ruse," California Attorney General Jerry Brown (D) ordered J.P. Morgan to prove it is following the law before it continues foreclosures in the state.

Both J.P. Morgan Chase and Ally have frozen foreclosures in 23 states because some employees had signed off on foreclosure paperwork without properly reviewing the files.


Colorado and Illinois have stopped foreclosures by Ally and at least seven other states have launched probes into the issue. But Connecticut is the first to institute an industry-wide ban.

A multi-state moratorium on foreclosures is almost certainly on the way in the next week or so.   When it finally dawns on investors that the big mortgage banksare most likely guilty of massive, systemic fraud against millions of homeowners (and former homeonwers) then the jig is up.  When it becomes apparent that these banks are also claiming billions of assets they don't actually own and may be liable for billions more in legal indemnity, their stocks will crater.

Connecticut's actions just froze the housing market there.  More states will follow as they investigate.  When they discover there's no titles...at all...then the game ends.

Be ready.

The O'Donnell Meatball War

Real Time host Bill Maher continues to comb the video of his old political panel show Politically Incorrect and keeps running across clips of Christine O'Donnell making an idiot out of herself circa 1999.



In 1999 Christine O'Donnell told Bill Maher that she'd briefly tried Buddhism, and that she'd tried to be a Hare Krishna but couldn't take the vegetarianism.

"I was dabbling into every other kind of religion before I became a Christian," O'Donnell said on "Politically Incorrect," a July 19, 1999 clip revealed tonight on Maher's HBO show "Real Time."

Then the kicker:

I was dabbling in witchcraft, I've dabbled in Buddhism. I would have become a Hare Krishna but I didn't want to become a vegetarian. And that is honestly the reason why -- because I'm Italian, I love meatballs!

O'Donnell, now the Republican Senate nominee in Delaware, has described herself as a devout Catholic and she targeted evangelical voters during her successful primary campaign.

I wouldn't trust this woman to watch a crock pot, let alone be a United States Senator.  And yet there she is, the GOP candidate, admitting crazy stuff like this on national television.

Jesus wept.  Arguably so does the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• Flooding from North Carolina to New England is slowly receding after the remnants of Tropical Storm Nicole dropped as many as 20 inches of rain.
• Growing tensions between the US and Pakistan continue to get worse as drone strikes and Pakistani protests increase.
• The US is scrambling to apologize to Guatemala after evidence that American scientists deliberately infected people with syphilis there after WW II emerged this week.
• California may finally have a budget as early as the middle of next week according to reports.
• Microsoft has sued Motorola, claiming that the Android mobile OS is guilty of patent infringement.

Last Call

Steve M. notes Rick Sanchez, formerly of CNN, was done in by his insecurities talking about Jon Stewart.

Sanchez's anger against Stewart is class-based, and, again, he focuses on speech, among other issues:

Anybody who's different than you are, anybody who's not form your frame of reference; anybody who doesn't look and sound exactly like the people that you sound [like] and grew up with. (Emphasis added.)

After Sanchez said this, the host of the show said that Stewart should understand ethnic prejudice because he's Jewish. Sanchez scoffed at that notion, and lashed out in a way that could destroy his career:

Very powerless people… [snickers] He's such a minority, I mean, you know [sarcastically]… Please, what are you kidding? ... I'm telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart, and to imply that somehow they -- the people in this country who are Jewish -- are an oppressed minority? Yeah. [sarcastically]

The notion that Stewart singles out Sanchez's gaffes is nuts, because Stewart attacks the button-nosed Botoxed blonds of Fox (male and female) far more than he attacks Sanchez. If Sanchez thinks he's singled out for especially poor treatment, it's clearly because this insecurity eats away at him and distorts his reading of reality. If he thinks he's singled out by Stewart, he should talk to Megyn Kelly or Steve Doocy, whom Stewart absolutely hammers once or twice a week. But none of that justifies Sanchez's anti-Semitism in any way.

No, it doesn't.  Nothing does.   But what amazes me is that this story unfolded in 24 hours and Sanchez is fired.  Wingers are having a field day, since Sanchez worked for CNN he was a liberal, so that means Sanchez is proof that liberals are always the real racists and anti-semites, etc.

Meanwhile, CNN continues to employ Douchebag Douchebagson Erick Erickson and MSNBC continues to employ Pat Buchanan, both who have said a lot worse things while actually employed by these networks...and actually on these networks themselves.  Sanchez made these comments on a Sirius XM radio interview.

The same people who are waving goodbye gleefully at Sanchez continually excuse Pat Buchanan and Erick Erickson.  There's a bit of a double standard there.   I'm not defending Sanchez, he most certainly deserved to get hammered for that.  But if that's the bar for being dismissed from a network, then a healthy chunk of the people employed by cable news need to be looking for new work.

Turn On The Lights, Watch The Roaches Scatter, Part 5

The NY Times has picked up on the Ginormous Foreclosure Nightmare and things continue to move at a rapid pace as the entire industry is heading into the abyss.

“Maybe this is like shock therapy,” said the economist Karl E. Case. “Maybe this will actually get the lenders to the table and encourage them to work out deals that are to the benefit of everybody.”

While such a happy ending is possible, the near term is more likely to produce paralysis and confusion.

As more defaulting homeowners become aware of the lenders’ problems, they are expected to hire lawyers and challenge the proceedings against them. And if completed foreclosures were not properly done, families who bought the troubled homes could be vulnerable to claims by the former owners.

Apparently alarmed about such a possibility, one of the major title insurance companies, Old Republic National Title, has sent a bulletin to agents saying that “until further notice” it would not insure title to properties foreclosed upon by GMAC Mortgage, the country’s fourth-largest home lender and one of the two big lenders at the center of the current controversy.

GMAC declined to comment, and Old Republic representatives did not return calls. 

With no insurance underwriting of GMAC/Ally's foreclosures, the game's up for real now.  If insurance companies won't touch foreclosures now, then they will not move forward.  JPMorgan Chase is also knee deep in this mess.  And now, Bank of America is checking its foreclosures too while Wells Fargo is trying to sweep everything they can under the rug before the light on Florida's foreclosure farms reaches the West Coast.  That's pretty much the entire mortgage industry right there in those four banks, folks.

The only properties selling now are short sales and foreclosure sales.  With no foreclosure sales now that just leaves short sales and even those will begin to dry up as everyone in the business will want to triple check the title deed.

That means home sales will grind to a halt across the country.  The Tyler Durden prophecy is starting to look like a very real outcome, folks.  No foreclosures.  Potentially hundreds of thousands of lawsuits.  Mass obliteration of the housing market as values wither because there are no sales.  The mortgage banks get slaughtered in the markets because nobody knows who owns what in real estate.

Game over.  Starting to look potentially catastrophic, folks.  This one could very well be the trigger of the next financial crisis.

Stay tuned.  This may be one hell of an October surprise.

And We're Living Here In Harrisburg

The capital of the Keystone State may be the key stone that collapses the municipal bond market.

Harrisburg Mayor Linda Thompson asked Pennsylvania to determine the city to be in municipal financial distress so it would qualify for help and oversight under the state’s Act 47 program.

The city “stands on the precipice of full-blown financial crisis as a looming cash shortfall threatens its ability to pay vendors and meet payroll,” a statement from the mayor’s office said.

Things get interesting from here.  In a very, very bad way.

Folks, as bad as 2010 has been through the first nine months of the year, 2011 is shaping up to be absolutely horrific.  Imagine January has the Republicans in charge, wanting to cut the country off at the knees right when it needs help the most.

Fun, huh?

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

Dick Morris, former Democratic campaign maestro who is wrong about everything, is predicting that the Democrats will lose the House and Senate in the worst midterm bloodbath in history.

Bob Shrum, former Democratic campaign maestro who is wrong about everything, is predicting that the Democrats will heroically hold the House and the Senate.

Both of these men are complete idiots.  I fear they may have just destroyed the space-time continuum as a result.

Militia Mission Creep

When people ask me "Are you worried about terrorists attacking America?" I reply "Not foreign ones, no."

Camouflaged and silent, the assault team inched toward a walled stone compound for more than five hours, belly-crawling the last 200 yards. The target was an old state prison in eastern Ohio, and every handpicked member of Red Team 2 knew what was at stake: The year is 2014, and a new breed of neo-Islamic terrorism is rampant in Michigan, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio ... The current White House Administration is pro-Muslim and has ordered a stand-down against Islamic groups. The mission: Destroy the terrorist command post — or die trying. The fighters must go in "sterile" — without name tags or other identifying insignia — as a deniable covert force. "Anyone who is caught or captured cannot expect extraction," the briefing officer said.

At nightfall the raiders launched their attack. Short, sharp bursts from their M-16s cut down the perimeter guards. Once past the rear gate, the raiders fanned out and emptied clip after clip in a barrage of diversionary fire. As defenders rushed to repel the small team, the main assault force struck from the opposite flank. Red Team 1 burst through a chain-link fence, enveloping the defense in lethal cross fire. The shooting was over in minutes. Thick grenade smoke bloomed over the command post. The defenders were routed, headquarters ablaze.


This August weekend of grueling mock combat, which left some of the men prostrate and bloody-booted, capped a yearlong training regimen of the Ohio Defense Force, a private militia that claims 300 active members statewide. The fighters shot blanks, the better to learn to maneuver in squads, but they buy live ammunition in bulk. Their training — no game, they stress — expends thousands of rounds a year from a bring-your-own armory of deer rifles, assault weapons and, when the owner turns up, a belt-fed M-60 machine gun. The militia trains for ambushes, sniper missions, close-quarters battle and other infantry staples.

These guys are real.  They're out there now in places like Ohio and Utah and Vermont and Montana, training for the use of violence.  To some, it's a game.  To many, it's deadly serious.  Nearly all of them distrust the government, looking to band together in case of "the collapse." 

And they don't like Obama.  No sir.

Obama's ascendancy unhinged the radical right, offering a unified target to competing camps of racial, nativist and religious animus. Even Patriots who had no truck with white supremacy found that they could amplify their antigovernment message by "constructing Obama as an alien, not of this country, insufficiently American," according to Michael Waltman, an authority on hate speech at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Perennial features of extreme-right scare lore — including imagined schemes to declare martial law, abolish private ownership of guns and force dissidents into FEMA concentration camps — became more potent with Obama as the Commander in Chief.

Threats against Obama's life brought him Secret Service protection in May 2007, by far the earliest on record for a presidential candidate. At least four alleged assassination plots between June and December — by militiamen in Pennsylvania, white supremacists in Denver, skinheads in Tennessee and an active-duty Marine lance corporal at North Carolina's Camp Lejeune — led to arrests and criminal charges before Obama was even sworn in.

"We call it somewhat of a perfect storm," says a high-ranking FBI official who declined to speak on the record because of the political sensitivities of the subject. With an economy in free fall and rising anger about illegal immigration, Obama became "a rallying point" for dormant extremists after the 2008 election who "weren't willing to act before but now are susceptible to being recruited and radicalized." 

And this movement is getting worse as the economy does.   These few are the people I'm really, really worried about causing violence in our country.

They've done it before.  We choose not to remember much about it unless you live in Oklahoma City.

It's Probably Full Of Ur-Quan With Dalek Slaves Riding Borg

Astronomers are excited about a planet discovered in the Gliese 581 system, some 20 light-years from here, that may be the most Earth-like planet discovered yet.  Scientists believe there's a pretty good chance there's the ability to support life there, from the readings.

"Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say that the chances for life on this planet are 100 percent. I have almost no doubt about it," Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at University of California Santa Cruz, told Discovery News.

The discovery caps an 11-year effort to tease out information from instruments on ground-based telescopes that measure minute variations in starlight caused by the gravitational tugs of orbiting planets.

Planet G -- the sixth member in Gliese 581's family -- orbits right in the middle of that system's habitable region, where temperatures would be suitable for liquid water to pool on the planet's surface.

"This is really the first 'Goldilocks' planet, the first planet that is roughly the right size and just at the right distance to have liquid water on the surface," astronomer Paul Butler, with the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., told reporters during a conference call Wednesday.

I've seen this movie.  120 years from now the first colony ship that heads there gets eaten/assimilated/copied/lost in time/zombified/mindwiped/sacrificed to very old, very dark gods, and we have to nuke the place from orbit.

It's the only way to be sure.  Look at the kinds of monsters growing on this planet we're all on now.

Berserker Moderates

CNN's Joe Foreman has an interesting article on the moderate backlash to the tea Party backlash to the liberal backlash to the Bush years:  the rise of the "Militant Middle".

Which brings us to the Tea Party. Despite all the headlines about their impact on the upcoming midterms, I have a theory that out in the political heartland, the trashing by the Tea Partiers may be preparing the battlefield for a much more profound second wave of disaffected, independent voters, who could make the Tea Party look like, well, a tea party.

I've always called them the Militant Middle, and Gary Butts is a founding member. "It's about time the moderates stood up and said, 'Hey, we're in the majority here!'"

He is with ModerateVoters.org, based in Irvine, California, and he says the Militant Middle started growing and coalescing around a broad slogan of "Throw the bums out" long before the Tea Party even started brewing -- and now it's reached a boiling point.

He's not alone. Comedy Central's Jon Stewart stirred the waters with his call for a Million Moderate March on Washington the day before Halloween to "restore sanity."

Stewart tells his devoted audience, "We live in troubled times with real people facing very real problems; problems that have real if imperfect solutions that I believe 70 to 80 percent of our population could agree to try and could ultimately live with. Unfortunately the conversation and process is controlled by the other 15 to 20 percent."

The problem with this is that any "centrist" movement like this always becomes co-opted by the conservative tendencies of the Village.  It would be nice if Americans stood up for fiscally conservative, socially liberal policies, but what happens is it becomes fiscally conservative, socially conservative instead because that's what the Village wants.

The real problem was never the Tea Party.  The real problem is the corporate media that empowers it and ignores the moderates as much as they do progressives.  If you want to take control of the process from the 15 or 20 percent, as Jon Stewart says, you have to take the real control away from the 0.1% that is the Village first.