StupidiNews!

• A female soldier shot and killed herself Monday morning at Fort Lee in Virginia after barricading herself inside an office.
• Comedian Billy Crystal honored his long-time friend Robin Williams at last night's Emmy Awards, calling him "the brightest star in the comedy galaxy."
• The World Health Organization is calling for substantial new regulations on e-cigarettes, including bans on indoor use and on sales to minors.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet Ukranian President Petrol Poroshenko in Belarus today, in EU-sponsored talks that aim to find a peaceful solution to the situation in Crimea.
• California's smartphone "kill-switch" bill has become law, mandating that all smartphones sold after July 1 have software that can automatically wipe the phone if stolen or lost.

Last Call For More Meat

Rejoice, plebeian food-eaters .  Now you have one more way you can torture your digestive tract, because 'MURICA.  Behold, our latest superhero, Ten Dollar Meat Mountain!

His humble origins:

Arby’s faced a key problem as it moved to attract customers: People thought the restaurant served mainly roast beef. To change that, the company made this poster showing a tall stack of every meat on the menu, from bacon to brisket.

And then something unexpected happened. 

“People started coming in and asking, ‘Can I have that?’” said Christopher Fuller, the company’s vice president of brand and corporate communications. So Arby’s began granting their wish.

America is truly great, because meat.

The “Meat Mountain,” as it’s called, will not be listed on the menu, but store associates will make it for customers who ask. The price is $10. For that, you get a bun and, from the bottom up:

• 2 chicken tenders
• 1.5 oz. of roast turkey
• 1.5 oz. of ham
• 1 slice of Swiss cheese
• 1.5 oz. of corned beef
• 1.5 oz. brisket
• 1.5 oz. of Angus steak
• 1 slice of cheddar cheese
• 1.5 oz. roast beef
• 3 half-strips of bacon

Arby’s says the Meat Mountain is so tall that it won’t fit into the traditional clamshell packaging. So if you dare to scale the Mountain, it will come wrapped in paper.

Nearly a pound of meat for $10.  Go for it, America!  Hell, you've got Obamacare, right?

Timmy King's, or Burger Hoho's?

The latest US company playing the tax inversion game (which is apparently what all the cool corporate kids are trying to do by merging with a non-US company and then moving the corporate HQ overseas to avoid US taxes) is, of all companies, Burger King.  The Home of the Whopper is apparently trying to join the Home of the Timbit, Canadian coffee and donut chain Tim Horton's.

Burger King (BKW.N) is in talks to acquire Canadian coffee and doughnut chain Tim Hortons Inc (THI.TO) in a deal that would create a fast food powerhouse with a market capitalization of roughly $18 billion. 

Burger King and Tim Hortons, comparable in size by market value, confirmed their merger discussions late on Sunday, saying the new company would be the world's third-largest quick service restaurant. It would be based in Canada, which has lower overall corporate taxes than the United States, especially for entities that have large amounts of earnings from overseas. 

The proposed deal would be structured as a so-called tax inversion transaction to move Burger King's domicile out of the United States, and could come as soon as in the next few days, according to sources familiar with the discussions. 

Recent attempts by companies for tax inversion deals, which are done to avoid higher U.S. taxes and save money on foreign earnings and cash held outside the United States, have drawn the attention of President Barack Obama, who criticized a "herd mentality" by companies seeking such deals. 

Tax inversions have become popular in recent months as low interest rates are making it cheaper for companies to make acquisitions, KeyBanc analyst Christopher O'Cull wrote in a note to clients about the potential deal.

Tim Hortons, on a forward earnings basis, is trading at a discount to Burger King, noted O'Cull. This factor likely makes an acquisition of the only slightly less valued Canadian chain more viable.

So what kind of fallout will this deal entail?  President Obama has said, and rightfully so, that tax inversion plays like his hurt American workers and the tax base.  But Burger King joining Tim Horton's and moving to Canada isn't exactly an "offshore tax haven scheme" either.  On the other hand, it would be by far the most visible tax inversion move to date, ever since the one for Walgreen's was scotched last month.

On the gripping hand, Burger King would finally get some good coffee and donuts, and Timmy Hoho's would get some good burgers in the deal.  Chicken Fries with poutine, anyone?

Still, corporate tax avoidance is corporate tax avoidance.  We'll see what the Obama administration's response is.

Run Rand Run

Sen. Rand Paul freely admits in this latest pile of crap from Politico that he can pull the millennial Snowbro vote from Hillary (which says volumes about Snowbros) but he seems to think that's going to be enough for him to win in 2016 and that Dems are scared of him running.

No Rand, we're not.  Go for it.

Sen. Rand Paul says Democrats are afraid his stance on war and foreign policy would attract independents and "even some Democrats" if he were to run against Hillary Clinton for president in 2016. 

“I think the American public is coming more and more to where I am and that those people, like Hillary Clinton, who — she fought her own war, 'Hillary’s war,' you know?" Paul said in an interview that aired Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press." 

"And I think that’s what scares the Democrats the most — is that in a general election, were I to run, there’s going to be a lot of independents and even some Democrats who say, ‘You know what? We are tired of war. We’re worried that Hillary Clinton will get us involved in another Middle Eastern war because she’s so gung-ho.’"

So they'll vote for the conservative Republican who hates civil rights, hates women's bodies, and thinks zygotes are people.  Plus, Rand Paul will totally resist the GOP perpetual war machine.  Sure he will. Worked for all those years that Ron Paul was President, right?

StupidiNews!

• Northern California is cleaning up after Sunday's magnitude 6.0 earthquake that shook Napa Valley to San Francisco Bay, the worst in the area since 1989's Loma Prieta quake.
• The planet's two largest ice sheets, one in Greenland, the other in Antarctica, are being depleted at the rate of 120 cubic miles each year, according to figures from the European Space Agency.
• Syria's Nusra Front wing of Al Qaeda has released American journalist Theo Curtis, missing in Syria since 2012.
• French President Francois Hollande has asked PM Manuel Valls to form a new cabinet over the direction of the French economy and challenges from the government over spending cuts.
• With the FCC's public comment period on the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger set to expire today, the cable giant has a lot of fans formed by its charitable giving.

Last Call For Domestic Terrorists?

Convicted felon Dinesh D'Souza is living high off the right wing crazy train, and folks, you can definitely tell he has a book to sell.

D'Souza shouted at his webcam: "The common thread between ISIS and what's going on in Ferguson is you have these people who basically believe that to correct perceived injustice, it's perfectly okay to inflict all types of new injustices. Behead guys who had nothing to do with it. Go and loot shops from business owners who were not part of the original problem whatsoever. And all of this is then licensed by the left and licensed, to some degree, by the media."

Amazing stuff there, huh.  Ferguson protesters are just as bad as ISIS, because of course black people behead good white cops daily or something.  Oh, and it's all Obama's fault.

"You have Obama, you have Holder, and you have Al Sharpton," — the liberal Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, when you think about it — "now, can a cop, acting under the exigencies of his job, expect justice in those three guys who are deciding the outcome? I mean, It seems really clear that they are fostering an atmosphere in Ferguson that basically goes, 'Let's declare this guy is probably guilty, and let's see what we can do to put him up against the wall.' The idea that he would get impartial justice is becoming highly questionable."

The fact that Michael Brown was shot dead by a cop doesn't even register with D'Souza.  Not even human, just something preventing Office Darren Wilson from getting "impartial justice".  Damn that ni-CLANG! for jumping in front of those bullets, right?

If you thought George Zimmerman was the ultimate right wing victimization poster boy, you've not seen anything yet.

The Worst Cops In The World

The Washington Post finally committed acts of actual journalism and looked into the job history of Officer Darren Wilson, the Ferguson, Missouri cop who killed unarmed Michale Brown two weeks ago.  Turns out Wilson's former police department in Jennings, Missouri was so awful that it was disbanded by authorities.

The small city of Jennings, Mo., had a police department so troubled, and with so much tension between white officers and black residents, that the city council finally decided to disband it. Everyone in the Jennings police department was fired. New officers were brought in to create a credible department from scratch.

That was three years ago. One of the officers who worked in that department, and lost his job along with everyone else, was a young man named Darren Wilson.

Some of the Jennings officers reapplied for their jobs, but Wilson got a job in the police department in the nearby city of Ferguson.

Exactly who would hire an officer from a police department so terrible that it lost the public trust to the point where the entire department was shut down and re-created?  How does a police officer in that situation get re-hired a couple of towns over?

People who know him describe him as someone who grew up in a home marked by multiple divorces and tangles with the law. His mother died when he was in high school. A friend said a career in law enforcement offered him structure in what had been a chaotic life.

What he found in Jennings, however, was a mainly white department mired in controversy and notorious for its fraught relationship with residents, especially the African American majority. It was not an ideal place to learn how to police. Officials say Wilson kept a clean record without any disciplinary action.

So a cop from a bad department moves to a controversial department with its own set of very real problems.  That sounds like a great idea.  And Wilson got his start in the kind of abusive, dirty cop shop that Ferguson was, only bigger.

After going through the police academy, Wilson landed a job in 2009 as a rookie officer in Jennings, a small, struggling city of 14,000 where 89 percent of the residents were African American and poverty rates were high. At the time, the 45-employee police unit had one or two black members on the force, said Allan Stichnote, a white Jennings City Council member.

Racial tension was endemic in Jennings, said Rodney Epps, an African American city council member.

“You’re dealing with white cops, and they don’t know how to address black people,” Epps said. “The straw that broke the camel’s back, an officer shot at a female. She was stopped for a traffic violation. She had a child in the back [of the] car and was probably worried about getting locked up. And this officer chased her down Highway 70, past city limits, and took a shot at her. Just ridiculous.”

Police faced a series of lawsuits for using unnecessary force, Stichnote said. One black resident, Cassandra Fuller, sued the department claiming a white Jennings police officer beat her in June 2009 on her own porch after she made a joke. A car had smashed into her van, which was parked in front of her home, and she called police. The responding officer asked her to move the van. “It don’t run. You can take it home with you if you want,” she answered. She said the officer became enraged, threw her off the porch, knocked her to the ground and kicked her in the stomach.

Awesome.

All the problems became too much for the city council to bear, and in March 2011 the council voted 6-to-1 to shut down the department and hire St. Louis County to run its police services, putting Lt. Jeff Fuesting in charge as commander.

St. Louis County PD.  With its surplus military gear used against the people of Ferguson.  This just keeps getting better.  And yes, this shows a distinct pattern of rotten cops across the St. Louis area, cops with no respect for black citizens they are supposed to be protecting.

Dirty as hell.

Department Of Rand 'Portation

Reminder:  Sen. Rand Paul is a conservative Republican who likes weed and wants America to be alone, which means he's just as awful as the rest of the GOP when it comes to immigration.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said in an interview published Thursday that he supports legislation ending the president’s program to defer deportation for undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children.

Speaking to Breitbart News during a medical mission in Guatemala, Paul lent his backing to House Republican efforts to address the crisis of unaccompanied minors crossing the southern U.S. border.

“I’m supportive of the House bill and I think it will go a long way to fixing the problem,” Paul said. “But like everything else, nothing good has happened because Sen. Reid has decided that he’s not going to allow any votes on any bills this year because he’s protecting his members who are vulnerable in the election -- he’s protecting them from any kind of votes. So I think there’s a very good chance the House bill could pass in the Senate, but it won’t ever pass if it doesn’t ever see the light of day.”

Which means he wants to pass that awful GOP House bill to deport all undocumented immigrants.  Every single one.

When he's not running away from them, that is.

Paul certainly is aware of that, not least because he witnessed a confrontationbetween a DACA recipient and one of the program's sharpest critics. Paul may have voted against comprehensive immigration reform in the Senate, but he has been careful to show openness to alternative measures (like expanded work visas).

“At this point in time I don't think any type of immigration reform will get out of Washington that includes a path to citizenship," Paul told "Meet The Press." "But I do think that there is a path to a secure border and an expanded work visa program.”

In addition to softer policy edges, Paul has argued that the Republican Party needs to have a more inclusive message. He has barnstormed the country in an attempt to woo minority voters.

"Until you show that you care about them and that you want to do something about them, you're not going to win," he told an audience in Iowa two weeks ago. "So if we want to win, we're going to have to change."

The only thing changing is Paul's constant flip-flop gymnastics.

Bordering On Disaster In West Africa

Ivory Coast, West Africa's largest economy, is closing its land borders with neighboring Liberia and Guinea in an effort to prevent the spread of Ebola.

Ivory Coast, French-speaking West Africa's largest economy, had previously imposed a ban on flights to and from Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.

"Faced with new outbreak sites and the reactivation of old sites...the Ivorian government decides to close its land borders with sister republics Guinea and Liberia," said a statement read on state-owned television late on Friday.

Liberia's Nimba County, which shares a border with Ivory Coast, has seen the number of Ebola cases balloon in recent weeks. According to Moses Massaquoi, the head of Ebola case management at Liberia's health ministry, 65 cases including 25 confirmed patients have now been reported there.

"The number of cases in Nimba has spiked recently and it is now an area of concern," Massaquoi told Reuters.

Ebola has killed 1,427 people out of 2,615 known cases identified since the West Africa outbreak was first identified in Guinea in March, according to WHO figures released on Friday.

However, families hiding infected loved ones and the existence of "shadow zones" where medics cannot go mean that the true scale of the epidemic is unknown, the U.N. health agency said.

The problem with closing land borders is that it's making an already tough issue with getting humanitarian aid and medical supplies worse. Hopefully some reason will start prevailing here as it's only a matter of time before a large African city gets Ebola cases, but getting the supplies in to these places is far more important.

We'll see.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• Pakistan and India exchanged mortar and small arms fire along the borders of the disputed Kashmir region, both sides claiming the other fired "unprovoked".
• Tennessee lawmakers have voted to bring back cursive handwriting classes for children in grades 2-4 as a reaction to national Common Core educational standards emphasizing keyboarding.
• The government of Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi is offering to resign within the next month in order to stop protests by the Shi'ite Houthi movement.
• Iceland's Coast Guard is on alert after scientists have detected increased activity in one of the country's largest volcanoes, Bardarbunga.
• The latest Entertainment Software Association survey of gamers now finds women gamers 18 and over make up 36% of gamers, more than twice that of boys under 18, at 17%.

Last Call For The Notorious RBG

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has a few choice words for you, America, after that Ferguson thing.

Justice Ginsburg, for her part, warned that tossing out a key prong of the Voting Rights Act “when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

In what may become the most controversial part of her interview with Coyle, Ginsburg also suggests that public acceptance of gay Americans is eclipsing our ability to relate to each other across racial lines. “Once [gay] people began to say who they were,” Ginsburg noted, “you found that it was your next-door neighbor or it could be your child, and we found people we admired.” By contrast, according to Ginsburg, “[t]hat understanding still doesn’t exist with race; you still have separation of neighborhoods, where the races are not mixed. It’s the familiarity with people who are gay that still doesn’t exist for race and will remain that way for a long time as long as where we live remains divided.”

Hard words, but true.  America needs to think about things like that.  I know I do.

The Fix For Hobby Lobby

New proposed Health and Human Services rules regarding Obamacare and birth control may be the insurance coverage fix that hundreds of thousands of American women were hoping for.

A "proposed rule" by the Department of Health and Human Services lets female employees of for-profit businesses, like Hobby Lobby, obtain birth control directly from their insurer, at no extra cost, if their boss opts out of covering the service in the company's insurance plan for religious reasons. 

The move extends an accommodation that already exists for non-profit organizations, which are allowed to refuse to cover for birth control. In short, the religious owners can pass the cost on to the insurer so that they're no longer complicit in what they view as sin. 

The Supreme Court ruled in June that owners of closely held for-profit corporations cannot be required, under Obamacare, to cover emergency contraception like Plan B, Ella and two types of IUDs if it violates their sincerely-held religious belief. The HHS move is a workaround to that ruling. 

So that's actually great news, and insurance companies will be thrilled, because contraception is a fraction of the cost of neonatal services, pregnancy complications, and childbirth.  This is outstanding, and I hope these rulesgo into effect as soon as possible so that employees of religious companies can go back to using science to do things.

This is going to help a lot of people, and I'm glad I have good news for once in the Friday news dump slot.

The Luckiest Blue Dog Democrat In Minnesota

Democratic Rep. Tim Walz of Minnesota's first district is a decent swing state liberal at best, certainly no firebrand, but he does have one thing going for him in a pretty purple part of the state:  Republicans keep nominating utterly batshit crazy people to run and lose against him.  Walz would be exactly the kind of depressingly moderate, Obama-avoiding jellyfish that would be in trouble this year (with his 63.37 lifetime Progressive Punch score on crucial votes that puts him square into ConservaDem territory)  but the GOP goofball running against him has about 3 cubic acres of baggage.  MoJo's Tim Murphy:

Republican congressional candidate Jim Hagedorn could face a major obstacle in his race to unseat Minnesota Democrat Tim Walz: conservative blogger Jim Hagedorn. 

Hagedorn, the son of retired congressman Tom Hagedorn, was a surprise victor in last Tuesday's GOP primary. But he brings some serious baggage to his race against Walz, a four-term incumbent. In posts from his old blog, Mr. Conservative, unearthed by the now-defunct Minnesota Independent, Hagedorn made light of American Indians, President Obama's Kenyan ancestry, and female Supreme Court justices, among others, in ways many voters won't appreciate.

Oh good.  Yeah, I know I'd have all kinds of fun trying to run for office with this blog.  Hagedorn hasn't figured that out yet, it seems.

Hagedorn also reveled in the type of gay innuendo you may have heard in high school courtyards in decades past. (Kids these days know better.) He referred to former Wisconsin Sen. Herb Kohl as an "alleged switch-hitter" and a "packer." Former GOP candidate Mike Taylor, the target of a homophobic attack ad during his campaign against then-Sen. Max Baucus,came out even worse: "[T]he ad really bent Taylor over with rage and caused him to go straight to the bar and get lubricated," Hagedorn wrote. "It must have taken all Taylor's power to refrain from fisting…err…using his fists on Max Baucus, or at the very least ream him inside and out." 

In an entry on the Supreme Court's 2003 Lawrence v. Texas decision, which ruled that state bans on sodomy were unconstitutional, he wrote: "Butt (sic) never have winners lost so dearly. The Court's voyage into uncharted, untreated cultural bathhouse waters was designed to offer a gentle push from behind…to generate a small skip forward for the pink triangle class…to throw them a bone, so to speak."

This is comedy in conservative GOP circles, I guess.  It's unintentionally funny to see a candidate this awful pretty much assuring Tim Walz doesn't have to try to move left, either.

Except that part doesn't make me laugh, but cry.

StupidiNews!

• A collision between two tourist buses in Egypt has killed at least 38 people and injured more than 40 as search teams are still working on recovering all of the casualties.
• Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon has ordered the National Guard to leave Ferguson as a second straight night of relative calm passed in the St. Louis suburb.
• Moscow has ordered a Russian convoy of aid trucks into eastern Ukraine without permission from the government in Kiev, raising fears it contains military supplies for pro-Russian rebels.
• US World Cup soccer star goalie Tim Howard says he'll take at least a year off from playing for the US national team, citing a desire to be with his family.
• California officials are requiring Google's self-driving cars to have a steering wheel where someone in the driver's seat can take "immediate control" in case of an emergency.

Last Call For The Epidemic In South Carolina

A new in-depth feature from Charleston, SC's Post and Courier examines the state's massive domestic violence epidemic, and what the state's lawmakers, clergy, state workers, women's groups, and others are, and in most cases are not, doing about it.

More than 300 women were shot, stabbed, strangled, beaten, bludgeoned or burned to death over the past decade by men in South Carolina, dying at a rate of one every 12 days while the state does little to stem the carnage from domestic abuse.

More than three times as many women have died here at the hands of current or former lovers than the number of Palmetto State soldiers killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined.

It’s a staggering toll that for more than 15 years has placed South Carolina among the top 10 states nationally in the rate of women killed by men. The state topped the list on three occasions, including this past year, when it posted a murder rate for women that was more than double the national rate.

Awash in guns, saddled with ineffective laws and lacking enough shelters for the battered, South Carolina is a state where the deck is stacked against women trapped in the cycle of abuse, a Post and Courier investigation has found.

Couple this with deep-rooted beliefs about the sanctity of marriage and the place of women in the home, and the vows “till death do us part” take on a sinister tone.

The stories here are heartbreaking, and all too real.

Consider 25-year-old Erica Olsen of Anderson, who was two months pregnant when her boyfriend stabbed her 25 times in front of her young daughter in October 2006. Or Andrenna Butler, 72, whose estranged husband drove from Pennsylvania to gun her down in her Newberry home in December. Or 30-year-old Dara Watson, whose fiancé shot her in the head at their Mount Pleasant home and dumped her in a Lowcountry forest in February 2012 before killing himself.

Interviews with more than 100 victims, counselors, police, prosecutors and judges reveal an ingrained, multi-generational problem in South Carolina, where abusive behavior is passed down from parents to their children. Yet the problem essentially remains a silent epidemic, a private matter that is seldom discussed outside the home until someone is seriously hurt.

Do read the whole article.