StupidiNews!

• As the remains of Hurricane Sandy churn north across New England and Canada today, New York and New Jersey are slowly starting cleanup.
• The Mexican national accused of killing Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in the Operation Fast and Furious shootout is now pleading guilty to the crime.
• Mexico City's newest subway line opening this week is expected to cut commute times in half.
• Wall Street is back open for business on Wednesday after being shut down by weather for the first time in 124 years.
• Google's Enhanced Voice search app is now on Apple's iOS store as it competes with Siri.

Last Call

Jonah Goldberg decides he's all manly and stuff and demands to know why the media hasn't impeached President Obama over Benghazi yet and crowned Romney king.

If you want to understand why conservatives have lost faith in the so-called mainstream media, you need to ponder the question: Where is the Benghazi feeding frenzy?

Unlike some of my colleagues on the right, I don't think there's a conspiracy at work. Rather, I think journalists tend to act on their instincts (some even brag about this; you could look it up). And, collectively, the mainstream media's instincts run liberal, making groupthink inevitable.

To recap, the author of the book "Liberal Fascism" wants to know why his incomplete and misleading media narrative (created solely by groupthink, mind you) hasn't led to total vindication of his viewpoint yet, thus vindicating his viewpoint totally that the media is biased against conservative groupthink.

This is the media critic equivalent of constructing an entire book out of the sentence "The liberal acknowledgement that the federal government has a place in modern American society is admission of their complete guilt in helping that government destroy all freedoms."

Which, Goldberg actually did, and was paid money to do so.

He then goes on to complain that the media covered Bush's drunk driving incident 12 years ago, which is proof of everything he's ever said, Q.E.D.  You know, except for the part where it prevented Bush from being elected so that he couldn't actually use the federal government as a tool to destroy freedoms over the next 8 years.  He ignores that, of course.  But he ends with this critique of NBC'sDavid Gregory:

I am willing to believe that journalists like Gregory are sincere in their desire to play it straight. But among those who don't share his instincts, it's hard to distinguish between conspiracy and groupthink. Indeed, it's hard to think why one should even bother trying to make that distinction at all.

I know going after Jonah here is pretty much like hitting a pinata the size of a Canadian province with a sniper rifle at a range of roughly 2 feet, but it doesn't mean there's not sweet candy inside that must be liberated from its oppression.  I mean, it's really not hard to get a large white t-shirt, write KING OF ALL PROJECTION FOREVER on it in black marker, and then put it on the guy.

But these things must be done.

Queen Ann And Education

When's the last time you heard a potential First Lady talk like this about America's schools.

I’ve been a First Lady of the State. I have seen what happens to people’s lives if they don’t get a proper education. And we know the answers to that. The charter schools have provided the answers. The teachers’ unions are preventing those things from happening, from bringing real change to our educational system. We need to throw out the system.

But of course, the Romneys are going to be moderates.  When's the last time you heard a First Lady slag teachers as the problem in the US?  That's crazy, crazy stuff...but Queen Ann has spoken.

We need to throw out the system.  Because if teachers get paid less, that's sure to attract more qualified people to become teachers, right?

Jesus.  These people are mad.

Personhood Non Grata

The US Supreme Court punted Monday on Oklahoma's state "personhood" constitutional amendment being struck down unanimously by the state's Supreme Court.

The Liberty Counsel appealed the case to the Supreme Court on behalf of Personhood Oklahoma after the Oklahoma Supreme Court struck down the proposed ballot initiative earlier this year.

The ballot initiative sought to amend the Oklahoma Constitution by granting fertilized eggs and embryos the same constitutional rights as people. If ratified by voters, the amendment would have completely outlawed abortion under any circumstances.

“The issue is not about the merits of personhood but about whether a state court can interfere with the rights of citizens to gather signatures to amend their constitutions. On the issue, the Oklahoma Supreme Court decision is wrong. But this is by no means the end of the road in Oklahoma. Personhood initiatives will continue to expand throughout the country,” Mat Staver of the Liberty Counsel said.

The Oklahoma Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the ballot initiative violated the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which upheld the right to have an abortion.

Legislation similar to the “fetal personhood” ballot measure passed in the Oklahoma Senate in February by a 34-8 vote. However, Oklahoma House Speaker Kris Steele and the State House Republican Caucus decided not to bring the bill to the House floor for a vote.

The problem of course is that eventually one of these cases will end up in front of SCOTUS, and there's four built-in votes to grant personhood and end abortion completely, not to mention to set up the criminalization of contraception and miscarriage.  Should Romney be elected, that number will increase, and then it's game over for most of the civil rights based decisions of the last century.

Of course, the number of women who will still vote for Romney will be in the tens of millions next week, something to keep in mind.

Betty McCaskill Dies At 84

Claire McCaskill's mother, Betty, passed away yesterday.  She was 84 years old.

Sen. McCaskill said of her mother in a statement from her campaign: "For some time, mom's health has not been good, and our family takes comfort that she is now at rest. People all over the state have asked about her, and their prayers and concern have been greatly appreciated. Mom never met a stranger and lived life with enthusiasm that none of us could match."

Betty was an active figure in local politics, and Claire McCaskill has always referred to her mother as a major inspiration.  She had taken time off quietly to share her mother's final days, and hasn't said when she will resume her scheduled appearances.

All That Glitters

British police arrested convicted sex offender and former pop star Gary Glitter on Sunday as part of an investigation into allegations of child sex abuse by the late BBC presenter Jimmy Savile, media said.

Glitter was released on bail some 10 hours later. But the arrest -- the first to be reported in the case -- widened a scandal that has already damaged the reputation of the publicly-funded BBC and the legacy of Savile, a former DJ who was one of the broadcaster's top show hosts and a prolific charity fundraiser.

Accusations have moved Glitter from place to place.  It's not know whether he's guilty, but it's certainly known that he has a past that will eventually catch up to him.  Though he's made it to 68 without any serious time, I suppose anything is possible.

Outbreak Break Out

Exactly how many people have to die across the country due to a fungal meningitis infection in back pain medicine, all caused by lack of oversight of the pharmaceutical industry, before this article saying that it "may" lead to more protections for consumers becomes "should" or "must"?

Inconsistent state oversight of specialty pharmacies that mix their own medicines, like the one linked to the U.S. meningitis outbreak, shows the need for greater federal oversight, Representative Edward Markey said.

State pharmacy boards focus on licensing activities and pay little attention to safety enforcement, said Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, where the pharmacy linked to 25 meningitis deaths is located. Markey, in a report released yesterday, said the federal Food and Drug Administration does a better job making information publicly available that may help consumers avoid dangerous medicines.

Markey plans to introduce legislation that would require compounding pharmacies to register with the FDA and comply with minimum safety standards. The move adds to other legislative proposals and two congressional investigations related to New England Compounding Pharmacy Inc., known as NECC, which this month recalled more than 17,000 vials of a steroid for back pain after tainted doses were linked to a fungal meningitis outbreak that has infected 354 people, including 25 deaths.

“The tragedy of NECC is clearly just the tip of an industry iceberg that has long needed reform and federal oversight,” Markey said in a statement. “This tragedy demands the strongest response from Congress and federal and state authorities to ensure safeguards are in place to protect patients.” 

And of course Republicans will say no new oversight is needed, and that New England Compounding will be put out of business by the hand of the free market, and that the problem solves itself, right?  Surely the industry will police itself now.  Which is of course, how we got into this problem in the first place.

Yeah, sure, a dozen or so people had to needlessly die, but you break a few eggs and stuff.

Moving on.

The Brains Behind Mitt

Firefly creator, filmmaker and TV writer Joss Whedon thinks Mitt Romney's the best candidate for driving America forward...



...driving us forward into the zombie apocalypse.

“I don’t pretend to see the future,” Whedon says. “No one knows for sure if they’ll be the super fast ’28 Days Later’ zombies, or the old school shambling kind. But they’ll be out there, and they’ll need brains.”

He continues: “So, whether you’re a small business man just trying to keep his doors open; a single mom so concerned with her son’s welfare that she’ll run to embrace him when he’s clearly infected and going to bite her; or a strung out ex-military type who’s been out there too long and is taking the same kind of damn fool chances that’ll get us all killed — you need ask yourself, ‘Am I ready… for the purity and courage of Mitt Romney’s apocalyptic vision?’”

“Mitt’s ready,” Whedon concludes. “He’s not afraid to face a ravening, grasping horde of subhumans, because that’s how he sees poor people already. Let’s all embrace the future, stop pretending we care about each other and start hoarding canned goods, because if Mitt takes office, sooner or later, the zombies will come for all of us.”

Well played, Mr. Whedon.  Well played.

Robot/Zombie '12?  More like Zombie/Zombie '12.

StupidiNews!

• "Superstorm" Sandy continues to churn across the mid-Atlantic and New England, knocking out power to 6.5 million and rising.
• Wall Street remains shut for a second day as NYC transit, bridges, and tunnels remain closed due to flooding.
• Neither Syrian rebels nor the al-Asaad regime honored the last day of a long weekend cease-fire on Monday.
• This year's Legatum Institute survey finds Norway, Denmark, and Sweden the most prosperous countries on Earth, while the US has dropped out of the top 10.
• Apple has shaken up its retail and software division heads as the company makes changes to deal with market share loss.

Last Call

As Hurricane Sandy ravages the East Coast today causing rain, wind, and snow damage from Columbus, Ohio to Augusta, Maine, keep in mind what President Romney's response to the storm would be.

During a CNN debate at the height of the GOP primary, Mitt Romney was asked, in the context of the Joplin disaster and FEMA's cash crunch, whether the agency should be shuttered so that states can individually take over responsibility for disaster response.

"Absolutely," he said. "Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that's the right direction. And if you can go even further, and send it back to the private sector, that's even better. Instead of thinking, in the federal budget, what we should cut, we should ask the opposite question, what should we keep?"

"Including disaster relief, though?" debate moderator John King asked Romney.

"We cannot -- we cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids," Romney replied. "It is simply immoral, in my view, for us to continue to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids, knowing full well that we'll all be dead and gone before it's paid off. It makes no sense at all."

Privatize FEMA because disaster relief is immoral unless we cut something else from the budget.  So if you live in Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, where your vote is crucial this year, you might want to keep that in mind.  At best, his plan is to leave national disasters up to states to deal with.

You're own your own under a Romney administration.  Nothing united about these states in a disaster.

Your choice, America.

Marines Prepare For Zombie Apocalypse

SAN DIEGO — Move over vampires, goblins and haunted houses, this kind of Halloween terror aims to shake up even the toughest warriors: An untold number of so-called zombies are coming to a counterterrorism summit attended by hundreds of Marines, Navy special ops, soldiers, police, firefighters and others to prepare them for their worst nightmares.

"This is a very real exercise, this is not some type of big costume parry," said Brad Barker, president of Halo Corp, a security firm hosting the Oct. 31 training demonstration during the summit at a 44-acre Paradise Point Resort island on a San Diego bay. "Everything that will be simulated at this event has already happened, it just hasn't happened all at once on the same night. But the training is very real, it just happens to be the bad guys we're having a little fun with."

Hundreds of military, law enforcement and medical personnel will observe the Hollywood-style production of a zombie attack as part of their emergency response training.

In the scenario, a VIP and his personal detail are trapped in a village, surrounded by zombies when a bomb explodes. The VIP is wounded and his team must move through the town while dodging bullets and shooting back at the invading zombies. At one point, some members of the team are bit by zombies and must be taken to a field medical facility for decontamination and treatment.

"No one knows what the zombies will do in our scenario, but quite frankly no one knows what a terrorist will do," Barker said. "If a law enforcement officer sees a zombie and says, 'Freeze, get your hands in the air!' What's the zombie going to do? He's going to moan at you. If someone on PCP or some other psychotic drug is told that, the truth is he's not going to react to you."

It's a smart way to teach teams how to react when faced with the unexpected.  With the face gnawing going on recently, it couldn't hurt.  From destabilized populations to fast-spreading infections, we need to be prepared to handle anything that comes our way.

I love me a good zombie story.  Sleep well, knowing our military may be  having a bit of a joke but moving in the right direction to keep us safe from the unexpected

Waxing And Waning Stupidity

Couples may argue, but when the argue about being evicted from their home...well, that's just a different ball of wax. 

Denise Harris, a 39-year-old DeLeon Springs, poured hot wax on her boyfiend's face and hair and bit him in the jaw -- after a heated discussion about their impending eviction, reports The Daytona Beach News-Journal. 

When the boyfriend pushed her off him, she reportedly punched him in the nose, the report states.

It gets worse, but I think the worst of all is when I saw the picture I would have sworn she was a dude.  Which would explain the hot wax and punching a lot more than anything else I could come up with.

As for biting on the face... what the hell is up with this new trend?  I don't think in my entire life of reading news I could think of a dozen cases of face gnawing and now it is practically mainstream.

More suspicious news on face biting coming at 7 PM Zandar Standard Time.

Jackasses Abound

A family in Woodstock, Georgia, learned a difficult lesson about the dangers of posting an online advertisement. The Vercher family, who recently lost their home of 20 years to foreclosure, posted an ad on Craigslist on Tuesday night, informing people that a yard-sale-style giveaway would take place at their home the following day.

Well, on Wednesday morning, people turned out in droves. However, instead of just taking the free furniture that the family had placed outside, crowds ransacked the house, taking nearly everything inside. The Verchers tried to stop people from walking off with their belongings, but their pleas were ignored.

Everything is gone, including items of sentimental value.  I'm not sure how someone could claim a misunderstanding, I would think pleading for them to stop would be a red flag.  What kind of jackass could take from a family that had lost almost everything?  Apparently, an entire crowd of them exist.

School Teaches Kids How Shakedowns Work

A Mississippi town is facing a lawsuit for operating schools that handcuff and send children to prison for minor classroom infractions like violating the dress code or talking back to teachers.

Students in the town of Meridian sometimes spent days in a prison 80 miles away from their school without a probable cause hearing. They were not read their Miranda rights and sometimes spent more than 48 hours waiting for a hearing, which violates their constitutional rights.

Meridian police routinely arrested students without determining whether there is probable cause of an infraction or whether the school wants to press charges. Handcuffed, the students were sent to Rankin County youth detention center, which is about an hour and a half away by car.

Students were jailed for “dress code infractions such as wearing the wrong color socks or undershirt, or for having shirts untucked; tardies; flatulence in class; using vulgar language; yelling at teachers; and going to the bathroom or leaving the classroom without permission.”

Furthermore, all of the imprisoned schoolchildren referred to court were minorities, the lawsuit states. More specifically, the “school-to-prison pipeline” mostly affected African-American children and those with disabilities.

After being arrested, students are usually put on probation, sometimes without appropriate legal representation, the lawsuit claims. Students who are already on probation and violate more school rules could face suspension – time that would be spent at the detention center rather than at home.

Federal civil rights lawyers filed the lawsuit two months after the Justice Department warned local and state officials that they had 60 days to cooperate with an eight-month investigation into the jailing procedures. The Mississippi town failed to cooperate.

The town is clearly in the wrong, and their failure to see that and to pretend to give a damn is appalling.  Kids should be learning their legal rights in school, but not through having them violated and those actions upheld by the town.

This is what happens when abuse of power goes too far.  It's also what happens when government fails to see the difference between serving the people and controlling them.  Kids are constantly learning, even when they don't realize it.  In this case, the lesson is what you see when government goes wrong.  Let us hope they eventually learn better.

This is nothing less than conditioning our young to give up their rights, to be afraid to speak up when their rights are violated.  We simply cannot allow this to happen.

Racing Around The Country

The outstanding Goldie Taylor brings it on race and this election.

“We are not as divided as our politics suggests,” Obama told us. Whites and blacks alike hitched their wagons to the hope of a new day.

An Associated Press poll released Oct. 27, tells a much different story. Rather than quell, our racial tensions have flared. According to the study, “The number of Americans with anti-black sentiments jumped to 56 percent, up from 49 percent during the last presidential election.”

Jon Krosnick, a Stanford University professor who co-developed the survey said, “As much as we’d hope the impact of race would decline over time…it appears the impact of anti-black sentiment on voting is about the same as it was four years ago.”

Regrettably, white poll respondents attributed stereotypical terms like ”violent” and “lazy” to blacks and Hispanics.

“When we’ve seen [racial] progress, we’ve also seen backlash,” said Jelani Cobb, professor of history and director of the Institute for African-American Studies at the University of Connecticut.

Some believe that backlash could cost Obama the election. In fact, if John Sununu and Donald Trump are any gauges, Republicans are still banking on “white fear”— the same fear that drove Reagan democrats to the polls in 1980. The late North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms used the infamous “Hands” ad during his 1990 campaign, to stoke white fears of losing employment opportunities to blacks because of affirmative action.

Unfortunately, history tells us that those campaign tactics can be successful — especially in an economic downturn when everyone is scrapping for a job.

If you want to know why this race is close, it's because race is always close.