Last Call

Been a while since the whole "Obama the Antichrist" nonsense got any play, but leave it to Walker, Texas Moron to get things started right for the Republicans.

A video released this weekend by action movie hero Chuck Norris claims that America faces “1,000 years of darkness” if President Barack Obama is reelected.

“If we look to history, our great country and freedom are under attack,” Norris warns, standing next to his wife. “We’re at a tipping point and, quite possibly, our country as we know it may be lost forever if we don’t change the course in which our country is headed.”

The pair go on to explain that Obama won in 2008 because more than 30 million evangelical Christians stayed home on Election Day. “We know you love your family and your freedom as much as Gena and I do, and it is because of that we can no longer sit quietly or stand on the sidelines and watch our country go the way of socialism or something much worse,” Norris explains.

Quoting President Ronald Reagan, Norris’s wife Gina adds that defeating Obama “will preserve for our children this last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into 1,000 years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.”

See, here's the problem.  Somebody's going to say "But Chuck, if we fail and he wins, we didn't do all we could do to stop him.  He's still alive."  Which is the one thing Chuckles here can't say directly, of course.  The whole "any means necessary" is simply implied.

Onward, Christian soldiers.

Podcast Versus The Stupid, Labor Day Special

We get to the non RNC week in news as Bon and I talk Thurston Howell Romney III evading taxes at Bain Capital, cops beating up nurses, the worst priest/pedophile criminal defense lawyers in history, and good news as the courts step in to help fight GOP voter suppression laws in key states.

Listen to internet radio with Zandar Versus The Stupid on Blog Talk Radio

We'll have a special on the DNC on Thursday evening as we cover the events from Charlotte, too.  Stay tuned!

Now You're Just Being Stupid

(AP) DES MOINES, Iowa - Authorities say the brutal heat is suspected in the death of a Des Moines police dog found dead inside a patrol vehicle.

Des Moines television KCCI reports that Harley, a Labrador retriever assigned to the narcotics team, was found Wednesday afternoon. The temperature had already reached the low 90s.

Are you freaking kidding me?  Christ in a sidecar, when will people figure out CHILDREN AND ANIMALS DIE WHEN YOU LEAVE THEM LOCKED IN CARS.  They cannot defend or help themselves. They live, and often die, because of our actions.

Labor Day Goodness

This made me absurdly happy, so I wanted to share it with you.

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — A formerly blind Sumatran orangutan can see her baby twins for the first time after undergoing cataract surgery in the first such operation in Indonesia.

The orangutan, named Gober, was captured for her own safety in late 2008 in North Sumatra province after she went blind in both eyes due to cataracts. She gave birth to the twins in early 2011 as part of a breeding program.

Doctors at the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Program in the provincial capital of Medan performed the cataract surgery on the 40-year-old animal on Monday. They announced the successful results late Thursday.

Excuse me, there's something in my eye.  Please click the link to the full article for picture goodness.  Might wanna grab a Kleenex first, it's a leaker.

Boys Will Be Boys

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — An employee of the Catholic Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph says the bishop commented that “boys will be boys” when he was told about lewd images of children on a priest’s laptop computer.

That lawsuit alleges the Rev. Shawn Ratigan abused a 9-year-old girl months after the diocese learned of the photos on his computer.

Ratigan has pleaded guilty to federal charges of producing child pornography. Finn and the diocese are charged in state court with misdemeanor failure to report suspected child abuse. Finn has pleaded not guilty.

Of course he isn't guilty.  I mean, sometimes the kids are the aggressors, right?  The adults just can't help themselves when pressured.  In other words, the kid asked for it.  Or to use their own words, boys will be boys.

Tell us again why it's not their fault.

What Romney Convention Bounce?

Gallup finds there's so far zero evidence of any convention bounce for Mitt Romney in their own numbers.

The seven-day average has been at 47% Obama, 46% Romney for the last five days. As a matter of fact, both Obama and Romney for the most part have been at or around 46% since we began tracking in April. The latest Gallup average covers Aug. 26-Sept. 1, or Sunday through Saturday. That for the most part covers the GOP convention, albeit with only two days of polling completely after Thursday's climactic events, including Mitt Romney’s speech, and actor Clint Eastwood’s appearance.

At this point, as noted, there is no consistent change in the pattern of vote intentions within our Daily tracking. Each of the two candidates has been up at some point over the last week in the individual nightly numbers, but that’s normal. Romney so far has not been able to generate a sustained “bounce” from his convention over the last week.

We’ll know a little more when we report our seven-day average on Tuesday,September 4, which will contain include four days after Romney’s speech on Thursday. After that point, any impact of the GOP convention will begin to be co-mingled with the impact of the Democratic convention. That’s why the ultimate reckoning will be what the election landscape looks like after both conventions.

We do have some new data that reinforce the tentative conclusion that the Republican convention did not change the race. The results, from data gathered Friday and Saturday and set to be released on gallup.com Monday morning, show that both the self-reported impact of the GOP convention and  evaluations of Romney’s speech were at the very low end of the scale compared with the previous years in which we have asked the same questions about other conventions and nominees. 

Indeed, that evidence shows that just 38% of Americans found Romney's speech to be good or excellent, a far cry from the 58% President Obama got in 2008.  However, given the very plausible case that a vast majority of Americans have already made up their mind at this point, I don't expect the DNC to move the needle much either.

StupidiNews, Labor Day Edition!

• Authorities in Louisiana at keeping an eye on the Pearl River canal lock near St. Tammany Parish, as floodwaters from Isaac are threatening to break open the gates.
• As with the Republican National Convention in Tampa, tough new security measures at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte are raising concerns.
• Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke says that more stimulus may be needed if job growth continues to stall.
• Corruption in India's Uttar Pradesh state alone may have cost millions of starving people there as much as $14.5 billion in food over the last decade, according to Bloomberg News.
• A Brooklyn bookshop is restoring out-of-print sci-fi classics as public domain e-books, with a little help from the internet.

Last Call

The Mitt Romney tax return story will not go away, not with stuff like this in the news.

The New York attorney general is investigating whether some of the nation’s biggest private equity firms have abused a tax strategy in order to slice hundreds of millions of dollars from their tax bills, according to executives with direct knowledge of the inquiry. 

The attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, has in recent weeks subpoenaed more than a dozen firms seeking documents that would reveal whether they converted certain management fees collected from their investors into fund investments, which are taxed at a far lower rate than ordinary income.

Among the firms to receive subpoenas are Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company, TPG Capital, Sun Capital Partners, Apollo Global Management, Silver Lake Partners and Bain Capital, which was founded by Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee for president. Representatives for the firms declined to comment on the inquiry. 

Mr. Schneiderman’s investigation will intensify scrutiny of an industry already bruised by the campaign season, as President Obama and the Democrats have sought to depict Mr. Romney through his long career in private equity as a businessman who dismantled companies and laid off workers while amassing a personal fortune estimated at $250 million. 

Some executives at the firms said they feared that Mr. Schneiderman, a first-term Democrat with ties to the Obama administration, was seeking to embarrass the industry because of Mr. Romney’s roots at Bain. Others suggested that the subpoenas, which were issued by the attorney general’s Taxpayer Protection Bureau, might be part of an effort to recover more revenue for New York under state tax law. The attorney general’s office does not have the power to enforce federal tax laws.

You can bet New York wants that tax revenue.  You can also bet the more Republicans scream about how it's sooooo unfair for anyone to be going after tax loopholes.  And New York is holding all the leverage here.  You want to be on Wall Street?  You have to play by Empire State rules.  Merry Christmas, Eric.  Take them to the cleaners.

Podcast Versus The Stupid!

Our special coverage of the national party conventions continues with today's bonus show, Million Dollar Boobie Part 2.  Bon and I discuss Condi Rice, peanut tossing jackasses, Romney in Cincy, Springfield's spineless city council, and more.

Listen to internet radio with Zandar Versus The Stupid on Blog Talk Radio

We'll have more for you on Monday's Labor Day special show too.  Give it a listen.

Old School Awesome

Zap! Atari and Microsoft today launched Atari Arcade, an excellent example of how HTML5 can change the way we play video games.

The portal of retro entertainment -- primarily launched to celebrate Atari's 40th anniversary -- includes Asteroids, Centipede, Combat, Lunar Lander, Missile Command, Pong, Super Breakout, and Yars' Revenge. The best part? It's free, and doesn't require Flash, Java, or any other plug-in to play, running solely on HTML5.

That means you can play these classic games in modern versions of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and other HTML5-enabled Web browsers (such as those on Android and iOS devices). Talk about the perfect way to sneak a little game time in somewhere.

Awesome fun, and it brings back so many memories.  I got my first Atari when I was four, in 1980.  They were still a revolution, and I cannot tell you how many hours I *ahem* wasted playing the likes of Super Breakout and Night Driver.

Enjoy!

Cops Slam Nurse On The Ground

Two L.A. cops pull a woman from her car, handcuff her, and slam her into the ground again.  The five foot four inch woman is helpless to protect her face or body.  It looks more like an amateur wrestling move.  She's so much smaller than them it's disgusting.  And the best I can tell, besides some reflexes going off, she never resists arrest.

Watch the video to hear the outcome.  Spoiler alert: you'll be pissed.

I'm At WRMONEY In Cincinnati

Mitt Romney's first campaign stop after the convention?  Right here in Cincy yesterday.  Southwest Ohio will determine who wins the state, and Ohio may determine the Presidency, just look at 2004.  Romney wants to turn out Boehner Country and the northern suburbs and Dayton as much as he can to tip the scales, but Hamilton County can go either way and both sides know it.  Obama won here 53-46 over McCain in 2008, for Romney to win the state he's going to have to win Hamilton County...and he knows it.

Returning to campaign mode on Saturday –– the first day of college football - Romney offered several sports-related analogies.

Obama, he said, promised more jobs, but “23 million people are out of work or stopped looking for work or underemployed.

“Let me tell you, if you have a coach that's 0-23 million, you say it's time to get a new coach. It’s time for America to see a winning season again and we're going to bring it to them.”

Romney really is a moron.  He's basically saying having any unemployed or underemployed Americans is Obama's fault.  If having ANY unemployed or underemployed Americans is grounds for not being re-elected, then no President should be.  In fact, basically every President we've ever had is, by the standards of Romney's idiotic sports metaphor, a "losing coach".  Hell, Mitt Romney himself was a losing coach as Governor of Massachusetts, right?  Jesus.   Oh, but it gets worse.

Romney also mentioned Neil Armstrong, the former astronaut and University of Cincinnati professor from Indian Hill who died last week.

“I will do everything in my power to bring us together, because united, America built the strongest economy in the history of the earth,” Romney said. “United, we put Neil Armstrong on the moon.”

We did, Mitt.  And we did it by using the government to do it.  And I'm sure Neil Armstrong would cold cock you for the way your party treats government employees and college professors:  as burdensome cancers on society that need to be cut out so that you can afford more tax cuts.  Jackass.

And as far as uniting America?  This is the guy running ads saying Obama is making it easier for those people to get welfare.  It's an awful, racist, divisive lie and the Romney campaign admits that being a racist bunch of assholes has been their most effective ad campaign so far.  That's the kind of "uniter" Mitt Romney is, a disgusting con man playing on fear and hatred in order to drive people to the polls.

President Obama's response was in Iowa again on Saturday.  He summed up the entire RNC in one sentence:

The president recalled the GOP convention as a look backward. “It was a re-run — we’d seen it before,” he said. “You might as well have watched it on a black-and-white TV.”

Well played with the double entendre, Mr. President.

The only thing Romney will do to unite us is make all of us poor to make him rich.

Jackass.

[UPDATE]  Speaking of jackasses, I see Hugh Hewitt is convinced the election in 2012 will cement Ohio's permanent red state status or something, with Romney and Senate candidate Josh Mandel winning in a fashion that "won't even be close".    He gives five reasons (Ohio loves Kasich and the GOP leadership, Ohio loves fracking, the Catholic vote will abandon Obama, the Jewish vote will abandon Obama, and Sherrod Brown is a, "uber-leftist") as to why, all of which are laughable when you look back at the 2011 election where the Jewish and Catholic vote helped viciously smack Kasich down. 

This state has union autoworkers Hugh, and they know which side left them for dead.  Kasich's at 41% approval.  Things are getting closer for Josh Mandel, but that's because the state's been close.  It always is.  Brown continues to lead in poll after poll. And let's not forget that the GOP leadership is suing to stop people from voting.  And fracking?  Yeah Hugh, people like earthquakes in Ohio.  Not even Kasich wants that in an election year.

Don't speak up about the Buckeye state's politics unless you know something about them, Hugh.

Last Call

Everything you need to know about the delegates at the RNC:

Thousands of delegates have assembled in Tampa this week to nominate Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, vote on the party rules, and wear ridiculous hats in a socially acceptable setting. But what do they think about, you know, certain things — such as where President Obama was born, and whether he has committed impeachable offenses? In an effort to find out, Daily Intel presented 50 of these delegates with a multiple-choice poll. (The goal was 100, but many delegates did not want to pause from their busy schedules to share their opinions.)

In case it's not obvious, this is not a completely representative polling sample. That said, there are some interesting nuggets in here.

Like this:

 

 

...and this.

 

 

 

Questions?

The Romney/Ryan Welfare Card Is Nothing New

On this morning's Melissa Harris-Perry show, Melissa and her guests discussed just why Americans hate the word welfare when they love social spending, safety nets, Social Security, Medicare, and education spending.

The problem of course is that for the last 32 years, Republicans have been relentlessly tying the word "welfare" to black Americans.  Melissa is joined by Bob Franken, Nancy Giles, David Coates, and Monica Mehta and the discussion is certainly worth your ten minutes to watch. Do so.  At one point Melissa uncharacteristically blows a gasket about the notion that the reward of being rich is sufficiently cosmically balanced by the risk of investment.

“What is riskier than living poor in America?” Harris-Perry demanded. “Seriously! What in the world is riskier than being a poor person in America? I live in a neighborhood where people are shot on my street corner. I live in a neighborhood where people have to figure out how to get their kid into school because maybe it will be a good school and maybe it won’t. I am sick of the idea that being wealthy is risky. No. There is a huge safety net that whenever you fail will catch you and catch you and catch you. Being poor is what is risky. We have to create a safety net for poor people. And when we won’t, because they happen to look different from us, it is the pervasive ugliness.”

And it needed to be said a thousand times more.   Thank you, Melissa.

Podcast Versus The Stupid!

This week's episode "Million Dollar Boobie" is up.  Give a listen as we take on Clint Eastwood losing arguments with inanimate objects, Chris Christie and education, Paul Ryan's lies and more as we cover the first part of the RNC in this expanded week of coverage.

Listen to internet radio with Zandar Versus The Stupid on Blog Talk Radio

Part 2 will be coming up tomorrow.