October 22, 2009

When Did Terrorists Take Over Colorado?

Seriously, what the hell is going on in Colorado?  The cops are having a field day beating the crap out of people:



I love the bit where the police spokesthug Sonny Jackson saying "it would be a rush to judgement" to say that Michael Cordova unquestionably violated the law by lying under oath about Heeney's arrest. No, Mr. Jackson, it would NOT be a rush to judgment to say that these cops violated the law and their oaths. But it shows poor judgment on your part that you're not harshly criticizing these uniformed criminals.

But that's probably because all the cops in Colorado may be as twisted as the ones that beat up Heeney.

Like this gang of reprobates:

She's not sure if she's going to sue.  I say she should absolutely sue the crap out of them; the cops AND the city for employing them.

And then there's the case of Marc Johnson:
...he saw two officers holding someone down, the lawsuit states.

"One officer was hitting the individual in the face, and the other officer started kicking him in the face," documents state. "The individual was also tased by the officers."

Johnson started to film the incident and made the officers aware by shouting, "I believe you are kicking that guy in the face with your boot," the lawsuit states.
The cops then beat up Johnson, too.  They claim they have nothing to hide, but refuse to release the police reports.

I guess they were too busy watching Adams County deputies beating up
three generations
of a Denver family.  Taka Fushima saw cops roughing
up his son on the street outside his home.  He told the deputies that
we was going to get his video camera to record their brutality.
That was when one of the Adams County (Colorado) deputies pounced on him, threatening to arrest him before pushing him into a glass window of his home.
Fushima's 85 year old father stepped outside to see what all that noise was:
Fushimi Sr. said he was just coming out of the house to find out what was going on. He bent down to pick up his son’s wallet when officers twisted his arm and pushed him to the concrete.
A neighbor witnessed the entire thing.

I finally have to say that maybe we DO need to get out of Afghanistan, so we can free the citizens of Colorado from the wild-eyed horde terrorizing them: Colorado law officers.

Thanks to Carlos Miller for pointing out these stories.

October 19, 2009

Altogether Ooky Obituary

Vic Mizzy, composer of the Addams Family theme song, has passed at the age of 93.

Miami Herald Sucks at Geography

First, they put Palm Beach County in Broward County

Now, they've put the entire state of New Jersey into Florida:



No matter how you spin this, this really isn't a Florida news story.  Is it of interest to Floridians?  Sure.  But it takes place entirely outside of Florida.
The manatee... has since disappeared from the Arthur Kill, a waterway between New Jersey and Staten Island, N.Y.
Sure, manatees are native to Florida, but they don't know that.  Manatees are animals.  Coyotes have been sighted in The Bronx, but do you think Texas papers put that story in the LOCAL section?  Of course not.

This is a NATIONAL story, because it takes place out in the NATION.  And that's where a competent editor would have put the story.

Every time they layoff people, they keep the worst editors.  No wonder people aren't reading newspapers anymore.

Honorable Mention

South Florida Daily Blog has me on their sidebar:

October 18, 2009

FAIL: Miami Herald Broward Section

Palm Beach is not now nor has it ever been a part of Broward County, even if you want to find a good place for the "Horshack as teacher" story.


Sunday Morning Sunshine

It's a gorgeous day in South Florida. Rather than face the stack of dirty dishes in the sink, I headed down to my local coffee shop, for caffeine and wireless.

Two young women were sipping lattes and reading books; the one in the peach top was reading a Kindle, and occasionally texting on her cel phone. I suspect she's tweeting.

The is the first time I've seen a kindle "in the wild," and she enthusiastically answered questions about it. It gets like over a week on a charge, can hold about 400 books, which cost between 4.99 and 6.99. You can read blogs and email on it. She left it on last night, and it's still got 95% charge left.

She and her girlfriend started talking about lunch possibilities, and she consulted the recipe book in her Kindle about tomato bisque. She then realized she didn't have a Wine book, and downloaded one.

Show off.

I feel almost like a dinosaur on m Lenovo Y510. On the other hand, my laptop has kick-ass sound and a subwoofer, so I can't complain to much. On the gripping hand, I went from full charge to 89% in about 20 minutes, unlike the week or so with the Kindle.

As I finish my coffee (Guatemalan beans, mmmm) I watch a woman walk by wrapped up in a heavy if fashionable wool coat.

It's 65 degrees out, people. You won't die of exposure between the car and your front door. Although, I confess, I'm wearing socks and a corduroy shirt.

So much for the morning; it's afternoon, and I'm off to enjoy the day....

October 12, 2009

More Sacrilege

Maybe this is the line that Father Dueppen used at the strip clubs:

October 9, 2009

WWJD about the stripper and the priest?

WFOR's Jim Defede reports that Father David Dueppen, disgraced Catholic priest, wants custody of the out-of-wedlock child he had with former stripper Beatrice Hernandez.

On the plus side, he's admitted paternity.

But here's the dilemma: who would make the better parent; the woman who worked for awhile as a stripper to support her family, or an oath-breaking priest who betrayed everything he claimed to hold sacred?

Sure, we could argue that she tempted him into it, but who made the oath, here; the priest, or the stripper? I'm pretty sure that strip-club owners don't make you swear not to fuck a priest. But I'm positive that the Catholic Church is still making priests, monks, and nuns take vows of celibacy.

Frankly, I think that strippers have a better morale fiber than this oath-breaking, stripper-screwing disgraced priest. I seem to recall that even Jesus had issues with priests.

WWJD?

He'd let the mother keep her daughter, and give Dueppen a good chewing out, that's what I think.


Ripped from the Headlines

So here are the headlines:
Obama awarded 2009 Nobel Peace Prize
NASA crashes on the moon -- twice

And here's the story I expect to find on Fox News:

OBAMA AWARDED "PEACE" PRIZE, BOMBS MOON!

(h/t to Tom the Alien Cat, on alt.callahans)

October 4, 2009

Wendell Potter Comes Clean

A lot of people have been citing various studies in the discussion of health care.  The studies all show that Nationalized Health Care is bad for America.

And they were all manufactured by Wendell Potter.  Bill Moyers interviewed Potter, who comes clean about his complicity.  Wendell was head of corporate communications for Cigna, one of the largest private health insurers in the country.

He finally had an epiphany when he was visiting family, and attended a "health care fair" in rural Virginia.  Instead of providers handing out literature, he found people lining up in the rain to receive treatments in animal stalls at the local fairgrounds.  They had come from as far as Georgia.

He discusses his part in the highly publicized case of Nataline Sarkisyan, a young woman whose liver transplant was denied, resulting in her death days later.

He also details how he cherry-picked from all sorts of studies to make it appear that countries with national health systems didn't perform as well as our system.  He created the term "socialized medicine" in order to cast a negative image of what are actually superior health care systems.

He made sure that everything you know about government run health care is false.

October 1, 2009

Another Link.

This sketch shows what a 4 million-year-old hominid, nicknamed Ardi, may have looked like.The hominid line has been pushed back to some 4 million years.

According to CNN:
Ardipithecus ramidus, nicknamed "Ardi," is a hominid species that lived 4.4 million years ago in what is now Aramis, Ethiopia. That makes Ardi more than a million years older than the celebrated Lucy, the partial ape-human skeleton found in Africa in 1974.
One of the findings that surprised me is that she was less of a tree climber than chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans, and was more of a true omnivore.
Many scientists hypothesize that humans took a different evolutionary
trajectory from those of chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas. Ardi's
findings help challenge earlier beliefs that humans evolved from
chimpanzees, their closest genetic relatives, scientists say.
That should make the Inherit the Wind crowd happy.  Of course, no one ever really claimed that humans evolved from chimpanzees.  The story all along has been only that we shared a common ancestor. But it's not Ardi; at 4.4 million years old, she's little more than halfway back to the 8 million year old divide between us and apes.