X-Tra Rant

Un-fucking-believable. I am fucking DISGUSTED by this. Animation Producer Gets Ugly Slurs | The Progressive

Ava Lowery is a fifteen-year-old who lives in Alabama. She calls herself a peace activist, and for the past year, she’s been producing her own short animations on her website, peacetakescourage.com. All in all, she’s made about seventy of them, she says, and most of them oppose Bush and his Iraq War.
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But she was unprepared for the viciousness of the negative feedback—especially the ugly sexual slurs similar to those that Cindy Sheehan has faced. (If you can’t stand foul language, stop reading now.)

“It’s people like you who need to fucking die and get raped while your corpse rots in the sun,” said one e-mail Lowery shared with me. “Fuck you, I would jack off on your parents if I could. If you don’t like the team, get out of the park. That means take ur small dick and get the fuck off of my homeland you faggot chocolate gulper.”

“You are a TRAITOR to your country and should be executed for treason,” another one said. “All you do is bitch about the US. If you hate it so much, why don’t you GET THE FUCK OUT.”

“Why don’t you go masterbate [sic] to a pic of Sheehan and fuck off,” said a third.

“Are you a muslem [sic] terrorist?” asked another.

Sickening. Sickening and sadly the type of person that is being appealed to by the hateful wing of the modern Republican Party - the leaders of that party that say any dissent is treason,any opposition to government policies is anti-American. Surprised that this is what it leads to?

Go visit Miss Lowrey’s site, Peace Takes Courage and especially check out the animation that started the whole mess. WWJD. Even an atheist found it incredibly powerful and moving.

I need to find this movie somewhere. A Player To Be Named Later

Directed by Bart Stephens, A Player To Be Named Later captures a season in the lives of four different Indianapolis Indians, the Triple-A farm team for the Milwaukee Brewers: Brad Tyler, a 32-year-old veteran who has never made it to the majors; Micah Franklin, a once-hot prospect who is fresh from two years playing in Japan; Kyle Peterson, a former first-round draft pick who underwent shoulder surgery and missed the previous season and Marco Scutaro, a Venezuelan athlete determined to make it big for himself and his family.

I’m probably the only member of my various social circles (various. hah!) that finds neither the cult classic series Strangers With Candy no any of the films by Wes Anderson to be funny and/or entertianing. This (A Strangers With Candy movie??) and this (A Wes Anderson directed AmEx commercial). I find neither of them remotely funny. I know. Blasphemy. I’ll say it. I thought The Life Aquatic was atrocious.

Okay all your Clinton bashers that hated him for lieing about a little blowjob and got your colelctive panties all bunched up over a little sex outside the marriage. Will a Republican sex scandal get you talking too, or will you convenient ignore it?

Federal prosecutors are investigating whether two contractors implicated in the bribery of former Rep. Randall “Duke” Cunningham supplied him with prostitutes and free use of a limousine and hotel suites, pursuing evidence that could broaden their long-running inquiry.

Besides scrutinizing the prostitution scheme for evidence that might implicate contractor Brent Wilkes, investigators are focusing on whether any other members of Congress, or their staffs, may also have used the same free services, though it isn’t clear whether investigators have turned up anything to implicate others.
Prosecutors May Widen Congressional-Bribe Case, WSJ.com

But it isn’t just the Dukestir. Ohhhhh no that would be too easy.

CALBREATH [,Dean. Of the San Diego Union Tribune]: We and a number of other papers have been on this for about six months or so. We have all been looking for the break in this and the Wall Street Journal found it, which is the confirmation that the feds were actually looking at this. For the past six months there we have been hearing a lot of rumors that not only the Congressman Cunningham but as many as a half dozen other Congressmen may have been involved in this. And we’ve also been hearing about the limousine service that Brent Wilkes used to bring prostitutes to the Watergate hotel and the Grand Westin in Washington.
MSNBC, via Think Progress

And you think it’s just current Congressmen that might be involved with this Conservative Lobbyist Prostitution Ring? Ooohhhhh no sir-eee. Why stop there?

Ken Silverstein at Harper’s blog dropped a bombshell last night about just how far-reaching the scandal may be, revealing that the FBI is investigating former lawmakers, including “one person who now holds a powerful intelligence post.” TPM Muckraker points out that CIA Director Porter Goss fits that description perfectly. Silverstein also disclosed that there are pictures.
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Porter Goss, if you’ll recall, was a highly partisan Republican lawmaker for fifteen years before he was tapped as CIA Director. And Justin Rood over at TPM Muckraker thinks that the prostitution ring could lasted about fifteen years.

Is the CIA Director involved in a D.C. prostitution ring? (It’s so surreal just to type that question out). In refusing to investigate the CIA leak case, Goss famously proclaimed “Somebody sends me a blue dress and some DNA, I’ll have an investigation.”
Many sources all rounded up in a great dailyKos entry

Wow. A convicted ex member of Congress, possibly half a dozen other Congressmen, and the Director of the CIA (a former conservative Congressman himself) all possibly involved in a conservative lobbyist prostitution ring?

Now THAT’S the party of family values!

It’s really too bad that something like, I dunno, lieing about the reasons for going to war, was a “juicy” as a good sex scandal. But at this point, anything that highlights the culture of corruption in the GOP controlled Congress is good by me.

Oh CJ will love to see this when he gets back after this weekend.

Buried in the bill, however, is a provision that would effectively require music webcasters to use DRM-laden streaming formats, rather than the MP3 streaming format used by Live365, Shoutcast, and many smaller webcasters (like Santa Monica’s KCRW and Seattle’s KEXP). The streaming radio stations included in iTunes also rely on MP3 streams (since Apple isn’t about to license the Real or Microsoft streaming codecs).

Today, webcasters that want to transmit major label music are entitled to do so under a statutory license (administered by SoundExchange) set out in section 114(d) of the Copyright Act. So long as they follow the rules and pay a royalty, webcasters can play whatever music they like, using whatever streaming format they like.

Marvelous. Sadly, this bill is being co-sponsored by a normally “good” Democrat Dianne Feinstein (D-Cal) who unfortuantely seems to come down on the wrong side of some bills like this.

hmb in dumbo

Originally uploaded by michele*lee.

Ooohhh I am now totally fascinated by the Hungry March Band. They really defy categorization or explanation. The marching band dork in my is absolutely in love with this band and listening to it makes me want to break out my trumpet again.

You can listen to the entire new Neil YOung album Living With War streaming online here.

Quoted without further comment:

FDA grilled about Plan B contraceptive — Newsday.com

n the memo released by the FDA during the discovery process, Dr. Curtis Rosebraugh, an agency medical officer, wrote: “As an example, she stated that we could not anticipate, or prevent extreme promiscuous behaviors such as the medication taking on an ‘urban legend’ status that would lead adolescents to form sex-based cults centered around the use of Plan B.”

WWdN: In Exile: Oklahoma Politicians Decide Some Videogames are “Harmful to Minors”

Just a friendly reminder to any of my Indy-area blog readers that arne’t on the DL mailing list.

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