I've Seen This Movie Before

And topping our list of stupid things to do in the Gunshine State of Florida?  Pretend you're a zombie for a viral video project just to see how people react.  How people react is they try to shoot your undead zombie ass, that's how.

Vitaly Zdorovetskiy, who says he came to the United States in 2004 to become an actor, posted a video of himself over the weekend in a zombie costume chasing various younger people in streets, parking lots and parks in Miami.

At about the 2 minute mark in the video, one young man fleeing the zombie attack can be seen pointing a gun at the prankster.

“Very Dangerous Prank!” Zdorovetskiy wrote on his YouTube page. “Almost Got Shot at 2:00! DO NOT TRY IT!”

Americans.  Trained to shoot zombies, man.  Trained.

Schooled In The Bayou

While the country's been focusing on the Presidential election, and the euro crisis, Bobby Jindal and Louisiana Republicans are about to execute their plan to privatize the state's public schools in a massive mess that will cost taxpayers hundreds of millions.  The real crime is that the "schools" that will profit tremendously from this little scheme are...surprise!...religious-based:

Far more openings are available at smaller, less prestigious religious schools, including some that are just a few years old and others that have struggled to attract tuition-paying students.

The school willing to accept the most voucher students -- 314 -- is New Living Word in Ruston, which has a top-ranked basketball team but no library. Students spend most of the day watching TVs in bare-bones classrooms. Each lesson consists of an instructional DVD that intersperses Biblical verses with subjects such chemistry or composition.

The Upperroom Bible Church Academy in New Orleans, a bunker-like building with no windows or playground, also has plenty of slots open. It seeks to bring in 214 voucher students, worth up to $1.8 million in state funding.

At Eternity Christian Academy in Westlake, pastor-turned-principal Marie Carrier hopes to secure extra space to enroll 135 voucher students, though she now has room for just a few dozen. Her first- through eighth-grade students sit in cubicles for much of the day and move at their own pace through Christian workbooks, such as a beginning science text that explains "what God made" on each of the six days of creation. They are not exposed to the theory of evolution.

"We try to stay away from all those things that might confuse our children," Carrier said.

Other schools approved for state-funded vouchers use social studies texts warning that liberals threaten global prosperity; Bible-based math books that don't cover modern concepts such as set theory; and biology texts built around refuting evolution.

And Louisiana tax dollars are going to this.  It's insanity...and yet, Republicans now dominate the state.  This is the "future" of American education that will make us "competitive" in math and science with Europe and Asia.  Awesome.

Meanwhile, the students left in Louisiana public schools lose more and more funding for every student that takes advantage of this "more efficient approach to education", necessitating more vouchers as students and parents flee a doomed system that eventually goes under a critical mass point and collapses.  Lotteries determine who gets into the posh schools, and who gets into the windowless cubicles with the textbooks where evolution doesn't exist.  It's a grift that would make the best cons grin from ear to ear and everyone's lining up to open a school to get in on the action.

Everything about this is a complete disaster waiting to happen that will almost certainly collapse the state's schools where major private charter outfits will have to step in and "save" the state of education in Louisiana.  And the GOP will gladly hand that control over to for-profit outfits.

Which of course is the point.  The rich get the goods, the rubes get fleeced, and the poor get screwed.  Nothing's more American than that, folks.  There's plenty of damage unlimited GOP control at the state level can accomplish, as Louisiana is about to find out.

I guar-ron-tee it.

Hard Up For Help

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — A bus driver has sued a Connecticut hospital, saying staff at an affiliated facility failed to promptly and properly treat his painful erection and watched a baseball game on television while he waited.

Daren Scott of Brockton, Mass., is seeking $2 million in his federal lawsuit against Yale-New Haven Hospital. The lawsuit says Scott was diagnosed before the incident with recurrent priapism, a persistent painful erection unrelated to sexual stimulation.

Scott was driving customers from Boston to New York on April 17, 2009, when he suffered a persistent and disabling erection. After dropping off the customers, Scott said he checked into an emergency medical facility affiliated with the hospital but was told he had to move his bus because he had parked it in the wrong place.

Scott suffered more pain as a result of moving the bus, and when he explained he was in great pain was told to wait, according to the lawsuit, which was filed in March.

While waiting, Scott said he noticed that the facility's staff, including physicians on duty, was watching the game on TV. Scott says his pain worsened and he told a nurse.

Another issue we need to take care of in our ever-ailing healthcare system is the utter lack of caring we see.  Bill gouging, terrible collection practices and slow-witted counter people are a given.  Hospitals have become a dreaded place where even the lowest expectations aren't met.  This would be comical except that the pain must have been dreadful.  It is one of thousands of stories from everywhere that illustrate what injured and sick people deal with regularly.

Three Minutes Of Awesome

You can watch the history of video games told in three minutes.  It's pretty cool (though I have to point out that my beloved Lara Croft is missing).  Still, there were a lot of games out there that I had forgotten, and the Sonic footage was fun.

A Bad, Bad Breakup

Insufferable NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd's on-again, off-again love affair with President Barack Obama is firmly in the off mode this week as she gets into the ouzo and sends in her November campaign epitaph she already has worked up while in a drunken stupor at 3 AM or something.

Once glowing, his press is now burning. “To a very real degree, 2008’s candidate of hope stands poised to become 2012’s candidate of fear,” John Heilemann wrote in New York magazine, noting that because Obama feels he can’t run on his record, his campaign will resort to nuking Romney. 

In his new book, “A Nation of Wusses,” the Democrat Ed Rendell, the former governor of Pennsylvania, wonders how “the best communicator in campaign history” lost his touch. 

The legendary speaker who drew campaign crowds in the tens of thousands and inspired a dispirited nation ended up nonchalantly delegating to a pork-happy Congress, disdaining the bully pulpit, neglecting to do any L.B.J.-style grunt work with Congress and the American public, and ceding control of his narrative. 

As president, Obama has never felt the need to explain or sell his signature pieces of legislation — the stimulus and health care bills — or stanch the flow of false information from the other side. 

“The administration lost the communications war with disastrous consequences that played out on Election Day 2010,” Rendell writes, and Obama never got credit for the two pieces of legislation where he reached for greatness. 

The president had lofty dreams of playing the great convener and conciliator. But at a fund-raiser in Minneapolis, he admitted he’s just another combatant in a capital full of Hatfields and McCoys. No compromises, just nihilism. 

And so we add MoDo the Red to the growing list of wealthy Villagers who are resigned to Mitt Romney's easy victory.   After all, they'll probably fare better financially, being the one percenters.  They're okay with a Romney win.  The blood is in the water now, and it's time to flense the President.

Going to be a long, hot summer.  Oh, and as TPM's Benjy Sarlin pointed out on Twitter on Monday, Maureen Dowd has had an axe to grind over Barack Obama for five, going on six years now.

He poses for the cover of Men’s Vogue and then gets huffy when people don’t treat him as Hannah Arendt.

For some of us, it’s hard to fathom being upset at getting accused of looking great in a bathing suit. But his friends say it played into this Harvard grad’s fear of being seen as “a dumb blond.” He has been known to privately mock “pretty boys” (read John Edwards, the Breck Girl of 2004).

He doesn’t lack confidence, but he’s so hung up on being seen as thoughtful that he sometimes comes across as too emotionally detached and cerebral with crowds yearning for an electric, visceral connection. J.F.K. mixed cool with fire.

At best, she's only dismissed him as a vapid lightweight.   She's always been disappointed with him, frankly.

The Handmaid's Tale And Other Future Non-Fiction

If you want to know what a Mitt Romney presidency with appointments to SCOTUS would mean with a GOP House and Senate, you have to look no further than GOP Rep. Cliff Stearns of Florida.

Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL) unwilling admitted to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews on Friday afternoon that he believed women who receive abortions should face criminal charges. “I think the punishment should certainly be very serious,” he said. “It should be more than a civil case. It should be something very serious”:

MATTHEWS: So it should be a criminal matter for the woman as well as the doctor?

STEARNS: I think so. You are killing an embryo and in some cases you are killing an embryo that is four or five months into gestation.

My good friend at ABLC, AsiangrrlMN, talked about the defeated PRENDA act the House tried and failed to pass last week, that would have criminalized abortions "based on gender preferences".  ABL talked about it too and why the act was utter nonsense.

But that's the future of America if these guys win in November, period.  Might want to keep that in mind.

StupidiNews!

• Wisconsin voters go to the polls today in the state's special recall election to determine if GOP Gov. Scott Walker keeps his job or is replaced by Milwaukee's Democratic Mayor Tom Barrett.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin heads to China to discuss oil, Syria, and regional concerns with China, and later he'll meet with the leaders of Iran and Afghanistan.
• A new report finds that the embattled government logistics department, the GSA, handed out more than a million dollars in bonuses to employees under investigation for fraud since 2008.
• The Diamond Jubilee for Britain's Queen Elizabeth comes to a close today but concerns are mounting for her ill husband, 90-year old Prince Philip, hospitalized yesterday for a bladder infection.
• Astronomy enthusiasts around the world are eagerly awaiting the transit of Venus between the Earth and Sun today, an event not visible again for 105 years.

Last Call

And it wouldn't be a week without a ridiculous false equivalence from George F. Will.

“That’s modern liberalism: They delight in bossing people around,” Will complained to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “What Bloomberg is saying [is] the government helps with your health care, the government’s implicated in your health. Therefore, we own you. Therefore, the government can fine tune all the decisions you make pertinent to your health.”

“This is one of the reasons liberals are so enamored over the issue of climate change,” Will continued. “They say all our behaviors in some way effect the climate, therefore, the government — meaning, we liberals, the party of government — can fine tune all your behavior right down to the light bulbs you use.”

That's right, Bloomberg's proposed soda ban in NYC = Obamacare = climate change!  Liberals are stoopid and all three are the same!

Meanwhile, what hasn't changed is George Will is still ignoring the hundreds of state bills where Republicans tell women exactly what they can do with their uteri, allowing insurance companies as the last resort in death panels, and throwing away science in favor of running a theocracy.  Funnt how that works.

National Geographic Photo Winners

If you have a moment, you should check out the top pictures from National Geographic photography entries.  From heavy cream drops colliding to rain drops standing on petals, there is no doubt that this is nature at its finest.

This is my favorite.  It was closely tied with the flowers, but there was something so pure and powerful about this one that I had to give it my vote.

Video Goodness: Surprise Fail

They couldn't have done it any better in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

Enjoy!

WTH? Mom Drives Off With Baby On Car Roof

We've heard of it happening, to the point that it has become an urban legend of its own.  A young mother, stoned and stupid, drives off with the car seat on the top of the car, while horrified witnesses try to flag her attention.  It's been around as long as car seats.

Now we know for sure it's happened.

A Phoenix, Ariz., woman put her 5-week-old baby on top of her car in his car seat and drove away, apparently forgetting he was there, not even noticing when the seat fell off the car and landed in an intersection, police said.

Neighbors discovered the baby on the roadway, still strapped to his safety seat, which was lying on its side. Luckily, the baby was unhurt.

The baby’s mother, 19-year-old Catalina Clouser, who allegedly had been smoking marijuana, was arrested and charged with aggravated driving under the influence and child abuse, police said.

Clauser, her boyfriend and their friends had been smoking marijuana earlier in the evening at a nearby park, but the boyfriend was arrested on suspicion of aggravated DUI when they went to a store — with the baby in the car — to get beer, according to police.
Upset that her boyfriend was arrested, police said, Clauser went to a friend’s home and smoked more marijuana.

Clauser left around midnight and apparently put the sleeping baby on the roof of the car and drove off, forgetting he was there, and continued driving after the baby fell off the car, Holmes said.

She came back looking for her child.  The child is currently with Child Protective Services.  

War On Drugs: Endgame

With Spice, K2 and bath salts becoming a more common problem, drug enforcement is struggling to keep up.  These drugs are able to stay ahead of the law, replacing banned ingredients with something new.  The data is coming in and it doesn't look good.

The Miami Zombie case has now broken mainstream news.  Police suspect the attacker was high on bath salts, and that is what made him eat another man's face.  It may have had something to do with the fact that he took multiple gunshots and didn't bat an eye.

Whether it was by accident or design, this is likely to be used to the advantage of pro-marijuana legislation.  It truly does make sense now to legalize a mostly harmless drug and use our diminished resources to track the product that is causing face-eating, mother-beheading, carjacking good times all around the country.

You can read one man's story of overdose here.  It falls into line with thousands of similar stories from all over.  This man was lucky, he didn't hurt himself or anyone else when he parted with reality.  Not everyone is so lucky.

Hell, this stuff makes crack look good by comparison.  I can't think of a more terrifying description than that.

Greek Fire, Part 58

What a difference a week makes when I said last Monday that the biggest risk of another bailout was Greece right now. It seems there's a late dark horse entry in the EU Bailout Race that might beat both Spain and Portugal to the line to join Ireland, Greece and Italy:  tiny Cyprus is reportedly very close to having to officially petition the EU for money before the end of the month.

Cyprus looks increasingly likely to have to ask for EU bailout money to help rescue its troubled banking sector, the island's Central Bank governor has said.

Panicos Demetriades said that Cyprus, which is part of the 17-country eurozone, is struggling to find €1.8 billion ($2.23 billion) to inject in the second-largest lender, Cyprus Popular Bank, by a June 30 deadline.

"Clearly, the closer you get to the deadline, the less unlikely (asking for EU bailout money) becomes," Demetriades told the Financial Times in an interview.

The bank is the most exposed to Greek debt and suffered huge losses after writing down the value of its Greek government bond holdings.

The government last month underwrote a €1.8 billion equity issue to help the bank raise capital from private investors, meaning it will have to put up the cash itself — an amount equal to a tenth of the island's entire economy — if the bank can't find the money.

However, state coffers are running dry because Cyprus is unable to borrow from international markets after two of the world's top three credit ratings agencies downgraded the island's creditworthiness to junk status. Cyprus is relying on a Russian loan just to pay its bills this year.

And yes, the little island that could ran headlong into the unquenchable flames of the Greek Fire and has been burned badly.   With a much smaller economy and only a few banks, Cyprus is facing a rocket sled to the bottom here and doesn't have a whole lot of options considering how deep the the country is in Greek debt...and Russian loan payments.  The country is all but junked in the bond ratings and can't get anyone but Putin's boys to loan them the cash they need.  An EU bailout HAS to be better terms then to have Igor and Vlad knocking at your door with a torque wrench.

It's been lost in the news with Greece all but falling apart right now, but if Cyprus makes the call, you'd better believe everyone will be watching to see what kind of deal they get with Spain and Portugal next in line.

We'll see.

Fire Walker With Me

The final Public Policy Polling count ahead of tomorrow's recall election shows a slight Walker lead in a race that's tightening up in the final hours.

PPP's final poll on the Wisconsin recall finds Scott Walker ahead, but also a race that's tightening. Walker leads Tom Barrett 50-47. That's down from 50-45 on a PPP poll conducted three weeks ago and it's also down from a 52-45 lead that Walker posted in a Marquette Law poll released last week.

Barrett is actually winning independent voters by a 48-46 margin. The reason he continues to trail overall is that Republicans are more excited about voting in Tuesday's election than Democrats are. Our projected electorate voted for Barack Obama by only 7 points, even though he took the state by 14 in 2008. If the folks who turn out on Tuesday actually matched the 2008 electorate, Barrett would be ahead of Walker by a 50-49 margin. It's cliche but this is a race that really is going to completely come down to turnout.

Needless to say, if you'd like to help out with turning out the vote, you can help out with phone banking here.  Today's the day we need you to help.  It's crunch time, and you can make calls from your own home.  It's easy and simple.  This race is winnable, folks.

Fire Walker with me.

StupidiNews!

• A small jetliner in Nigeria crashed into a residential block in the capital of Lagos, killing 153 aboard and at least ten more on the ground.
• Murder suspect George Zimmerman will face a new bond hearing today after returning to jail with his bond revoked by a judge on Friday after lying about his finances.
• Protests over the life sentence of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak continued over the weekend as tens of thousands demonstrated against what they see as a laughably light sentence.
• AIG chief Robert Benmosche says that he sees European retirement ages rising as high as 80 in the wake of Europe's financial crisis.
• With the company suffering its first yearly loss since the introduction of the original NES, Nintendo unveiled its newest console, the WiiU at this year's E3.