News Regurgitator! / News & Political Blog

Quick news bites to keep you up to date with what people
are talking about - mostly what isn't being
reported on by our 'legacy media'.

THE LATEST
FRIDAY, December 30, 2011

A major Ron Paul supporter has called for the death penalty for gays and adulterers. Ron Paul himself reportedly wouldn't use a gay man's bathroom nor would he shake the hand of a gay supporter at a campaign event. Having just watched The Help I find that a bit disturbing.

Good news! Auto accidents are no longer the leading killer in the USA. Bad news! It's now prescription drugs. 40% of those overdoses are from pain killers like Vicodin (hydrocodone), OxyContin / Percocet (oxycodone), codeine, and morphine. There's also something called Actiq, a candy lollipop that's 100 times stronger than Morphine. I'm going to the candy store today! Seriously, if it's so easy to get why can't my friends who really need it get it from a doctor? Because they don't look like business people?

Verizon plans to charge a $2 fee for paying your bill online. That is, until the bad press forces them to drop the plan. I have a credit card that charges $30 to pay online; needless to say I don't.

A 99 year old Italian man wants a divorce - he just found out his wife had an affair in the 1940s! That will make the couple the world's oldest divorcees.

Bored with today's cars and looking for something ultra-sporty? How about a 1966 Batmobile! Cruise in style as pedestrians and supervillains alike stare in amazement. The ultimate Drop Top and only $188,000 so anyone can afford it (well, maybe you can). From the press release: each Replica Batmobile packs the power of a brand new GM350 crate engine beneath its fiberglass body, so racing from the Batcave to Commissioner Gordon’s office in just a few bat-seconds is easier than sliding down the Batpole. But what about those all-important bat-gadgets? Well prepare to soil your satin pants (worn over your tights, natch) in excitement because this triumph of engineering is fully loaded, and includes a working rocket exhaust flamethrower, opening roll top dashboard doors, flashing red beacon, automatic Batbeam antenna grid and glowing Detect-a-Scope radar screen.

“Everything bad that can happen to a person has happened to me.” – Paris Hilton said that, with a straight face I'm guessing.

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CHOMP!
THURSDAY, December 29, 2011

Rick Perry: “Every barrel of oil that comes out of those sands in Canada is a barrel of oil that we don’t have to buy from a foreign source.” Boy that guy's dumb.

Or maybe not! Rick Perry (R) billed taxpayers over $1 million in the last months of 2011 for travel, lodging, food and security costs for his out-of-state Presidential campaign trips, according to The Texas Tribune.

Daily Mail UK: Children who have a poor emotional relationship with their mother are more than twice as likely to become obese, research claims.

Good Economic News - Bloomberg News reported record demand for U.S. government bonds in 2011, “pushing longer-maturity treasuries to their best performance since 1995 in a sign that President Obama may have little difficulty” financing the budget deficit. European debt drove investors to U.S. assets, an “all-time high bid-to-cover ratio of 9.07 for $30 billion of four-week bills it auctioned on Dec. 20 even though they pay zero interest.” U.S. bonds are “helping to contain borrowing costs and making it cheaper as a percentage of gross domestic product to finance deficits than when the nation last had budget surpluses.”

Sadly No is one of my favorite political sites.

DO YOU WANT TO COMMENT?

QUOTE / CLOSE QUOTE
WEDNESDAY, December 28, 2011

Corey Robin: What history demonstrates is that police officers often use their powers, with or without federal prompting, as instruments of larger political purpose....During the McCarthy era, for example, southern politicians and law-enforcement officers used the language of anti-communism to outlaw the NAACP and to arrest and indict civil-rights leaders for sedition....[I]f all politics is local in the United States, as Tip O’Neill reminded us, it stands to reason that a good deal of the political repression is as well.

Ezra Klein: “...college debt represents a special sort of betrayal. We told you that the way to get ahead in America was to get educated. You did it. And now you find yourself in the same place, but buried under debt.”

Mitt Romney: "I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country. [...] I believe that since Roe v. Wade has been the law for 20 years, that we should sustain and support it and I sustain and support that law and the right of the woman to make that choice. [...] And you will not see me wavering on that."

Mitt Romney: ...I’d like to see Roe v. Wade overturned and allow the states to put in place pro-life legislation. I recognize that for many people, that is considered an act of murder, to have an abortion. It is without question the taking of a human life. And I believe that a civilized society must respect the sanctity of the human life. But we have two lives involved here--a mom, an unborn child.

OPENING BELL
TUESDAY, December 27, 2011
Merry Christmas Eurozone: T-Mobile's German parent company Deutsche Telekom is savoring a "record high break-up fee," of $4 billion that AT&T agreed to pay the company if the merger fell through.

Kirsten Powers: It seems the GOP “class warfare” argument has been a dud. True, most Americans don’t begrudge rich people their largesse, nor should they, if it is lawfully earned. What is unseemly is the GOP’s insistence in treating the well off as though they matter more than the middle class. Most Americans just want a fair shake, and there is nothing fair about insisting that tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires are necessary and don’t need to be paid for, and then turn around and try to block a middle-class tax cut and complain that it’s not paid for. Furthermore, it doesn’t take a genius to see that the Bush tax cuts have been in effect for 10 years and the middle class is still waiting to be “trickled down” upon by the wealthy.

Comic book scribe Alan Moore responded to a right wing op ed by comic artist / writer Frank Miller: “As far as I can see, the Occupy movement is just ordinary people reclaiming rights which should always have been theirs. I can’t think of any reason why as a population we should be expected to stand by and see a gross reduction in the living standards of ourselves and our kids, possibly for generations, when the people who have got us into this have been rewarded for it; they’ve certainly not been punished in any way because they’re too big to fail. I think that the Occupy movement is, in one sense, the public saying that they should be the ones to decide who’s too big to fail. It’s a completely justified howl of moral outrage and it seems to be handled in a very intelligent, non-violent way, which is probably another reason why Frank Miller would be less than pleased with it. I’m sure if it had been a bunch of young, sociopathic vigilantes with Batman make-up on their faces, he’d be more in favour of it. We would definitely have to agree to differ on that one.”

Bruce Bartlett, a former Reagan adviser: “Basically we’re still stuck in the situation we were three years ago and we haven’t made any progress at all except that our problems are much worse because of political reasons, because we now have a crazy party in charge of one of the Houses of our Congress and they won’t allow anything to happen because it’s in their vested interest to make things worse,” Bartlett explained in his typically exasperated way. “Plus they have a theory that is completely nuts…. I’m very depressed. I’d love to see some program like this [paper] enacted. I see zero chance of it happening. The most we can hope for is that a complete crazy person like Newt Gingrich gets the Republican nomination, the Republicans lose so badly that they lose control of the House and don’t get control of the Senate and then maybe in a year we can finally talk about doing something rational such as what is discussed in this paper.”

Mike Littwin: We went into the war as the world's lone superpower. We ended the war worried about our economy, worried about China, worried about Iran. And if we're still the world's lone superpower, we've learned a hard lesson in the limits of what that means. Despite having the most powerful military in history, we've been bogged down for nearly a decade in two wars in places where the opposition doesn't even have an organized army.

THE LATEST
FRIDAY, December 30, 2011

A major Ron Paul supporter has called for the death penalty for gays and adulterers. Ron Paul himself reportedly wouldn't use a gay man's bathroom nor would he shake the hand of a gay supporter at a campaign event. Having just watched The Help I find that a bit disturbing.

Good news! Auto accidents are no longer the leading killer in the USA. Bad news! It's now prescription drugs. 40% of those overdoses are from pain killers like Vicodin (hydrocodone), OxyContin / Percocet (oxycodone), codeine, and morphine. There's also something called Actiq, a candy lollipop that's 100 times stronger than Morphine. I'm going to the candy store today! Seriously, if it's so easy to get why can't my friends who really need it get it from a doctor? Because they don't look like business people?

Verizon plans to charge a $2 fee for paying your bill online. That is, until the bad press forces them to drop the plan. I have a credit card that charges $30 to pay online; needless to say I don't.

A 99 year old Italian man wants a divorce - he just found out his wife had an affair in the 1940s! That will make the couple the world's oldest divorcees.

Bored with today's cars and looking for something ultra-sporty? How about a 1966 Batmobile! Cruise in style as pedestrians and supervillains alike stare in amazement. The ultimate Drop Top and only $188,000 so anyone can afford it (well, maybe you can). From the press release: each Replica Batmobile packs the power of a brand new GM350 crate engine beneath its fiberglass body, so racing from the Batcave to Commissioner Gordon’s office in just a few bat-seconds is easier than sliding down the Batpole. But what about those all-important bat-gadgets? Well prepare to soil your satin pants (worn over your tights, natch) in excitement because this triumph of engineering is fully loaded, and includes a working rocket exhaust flamethrower, opening roll top dashboard doors, flashing red beacon, automatic Batbeam antenna grid and glowing Detect-a-Scope radar screen.

“Everything bad that can happen to a person has happened to me.” – Paris Hilton said that, with a straight face I'm guessing.

DO YOU WANT TO COMMENT?

CHOMP!
THURSDAY, December 29, 2011

Rick Perry: “Every barrel of oil that comes out of those sands in Canada is a barrel of oil that we don’t have to buy from a foreign source.” Boy that guy's dumb.

Or maybe not! Rick Perry (R) billed taxpayers over $1 million in the last months of 2011 for travel, lodging, food and security costs for his out-of-state Presidential campaign trips, according to The Texas Tribune.

Daily Mail UK: Children who have a poor emotional relationship with their mother are more than twice as likely to become obese, research claims.

Good Economic News - Bloomberg News reported record demand for U.S. government bonds in 2011, “pushing longer-maturity treasuries to their best performance since 1995 in a sign that President Obama may have little difficulty” financing the budget deficit. European debt drove investors to U.S. assets, an “all-time high bid-to-cover ratio of 9.07 for $30 billion of four-week bills it auctioned on Dec. 20 even though they pay zero interest.” U.S. bonds are “helping to contain borrowing costs and making it cheaper as a percentage of gross domestic product to finance deficits than when the nation last had budget surpluses.”

Sadly No is one of my favorite political sites.

DO YOU WANT TO COMMENT?

QUOTE / CLOSE QUOTE
WEDNESDAY, December 28, 2011

Corey Robin: What history demonstrates is that police officers often use their powers, with or without federal prompting, as instruments of larger political purpose....During the McCarthy era, for example, southern politicians and law-enforcement officers used the language of anti-communism to outlaw the NAACP and to arrest and indict civil-rights leaders for sedition....[I]f all politics is local in the United States, as Tip O’Neill reminded us, it stands to reason that a good deal of the political repression is as well.

Ezra Klein: “...college debt represents a special sort of betrayal. We told you that the way to get ahead in America was to get educated. You did it. And now you find yourself in the same place, but buried under debt.”

Mitt Romney: "I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country. [...] I believe that since Roe v. Wade has been the law for 20 years, that we should sustain and support it and I sustain and support that law and the right of the woman to make that choice. [...] And you will not see me wavering on that."

Mitt Romney: ...I’d like to see Roe v. Wade overturned and allow the states to put in place pro-life legislation. I recognize that for many people, that is considered an act of murder, to have an abortion. It is without question the taking of a human life. And I believe that a civilized society must respect the sanctity of the human life. But we have two lives involved here--a mom, an unborn child.

OPENING BELL
TUESDAY, December 27, 2011
Merry Christmas Eurozone: T-Mobile's German parent company Deutsche Telekom is savoring a "record high break-up fee," of $4 billion that AT&T agreed to pay the company if the merger fell through.

Kirsten Powers: It seems the GOP “class warfare” argument has been a dud. True, most Americans don’t begrudge rich people their largesse, nor should they, if it is lawfully earned. What is unseemly is the GOP’s insistence in treating the well off as though they matter more than the middle class. Most Americans just want a fair shake, and there is nothing fair about insisting that tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires are necessary and don’t need to be paid for, and then turn around and try to block a middle-class tax cut and complain that it’s not paid for. Furthermore, it doesn’t take a genius to see that the Bush tax cuts have been in effect for 10 years and the middle class is still waiting to be “trickled down” upon by the wealthy.

Comic book scribe Alan Moore responded to a right wing op ed by comic artist / writer Frank Miller: “As far as I can see, the Occupy movement is just ordinary people reclaiming rights which should always have been theirs. I can’t think of any reason why as a population we should be expected to stand by and see a gross reduction in the living standards of ourselves and our kids, possibly for generations, when the people who have got us into this have been rewarded for it; they’ve certainly not been punished in any way because they’re too big to fail. I think that the Occupy movement is, in one sense, the public saying that they should be the ones to decide who’s too big to fail. It’s a completely justified howl of moral outrage and it seems to be handled in a very intelligent, non-violent way, which is probably another reason why Frank Miller would be less than pleased with it. I’m sure if it had been a bunch of young, sociopathic vigilantes with Batman make-up on their faces, he’d be more in favour of it. We would definitely have to agree to differ on that one.”

Bruce Bartlett, a former Reagan adviser: “Basically we’re still stuck in the situation we were three years ago and we haven’t made any progress at all except that our problems are much worse because of political reasons, because we now have a crazy party in charge of one of the Houses of our Congress and they won’t allow anything to happen because it’s in their vested interest to make things worse,” Bartlett explained in his typically exasperated way. “Plus they have a theory that is completely nuts…. I’m very depressed. I’d love to see some program like this [paper] enacted. I see zero chance of it happening. The most we can hope for is that a complete crazy person like Newt Gingrich gets the Republican nomination, the Republicans lose so badly that they lose control of the House and don’t get control of the Senate and then maybe in a year we can finally talk about doing something rational such as what is discussed in this paper.”

Mike Littwin: We went into the war as the world's lone superpower. We ended the war worried about our economy, worried about China, worried about Iran. And if we're still the world's lone superpower, we've learned a hard lesson in the limits of what that means. Despite having the most powerful military in history, we've been bogged down for nearly a decade in two wars in places where the opposition doesn't even have an organized army.