Political Humour

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A Nuclear Iran

Posted by mario piperni On July - 23 - 2009

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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s latest remarks on Iran are quite a departure from the US’s position of not allowing Iran to develop nuclear weapons. …

“We… have made it clear that we’ll take actions, as I’ve said time and time again, crippling action working to upgrade the defences of our partners in the region,” Clinton told Thai television.

“We want Iran to calculate what I think is a fair assessment: that if the United States extends a defence umbrella over the region, if we do even more to develop the military capacity of those (allies) in the Gulf, it is unlikely that Iran will be any stronger or safer because they won’t be able to intimidate and dominate as they apparently believe they can once they have a nuclear weapon.”

The response from Israel’s minister of intelligence…

“I was not thrilled to hear the American statement…that they will protect their allies with a nuclear umbrella, as if they have already come to terms with a nuclear Iran. I think that’s a mistake”

The take on this is that the US’s hope to deter Iran’s nuclear ambitions by way of diplomacy is wavering. If sanctions fail what are the alternatives to stop Iran from developing it’s nuclear arms? Israel’s the wild card here and while an Israeli first-strike is unlikely, it is not improbable.

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I Dream of Apollo pictures

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Larry Hagman as Major Anthony Nelson.


NASA To Release Missing Videotapes pictures

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Moon Landing pictures

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George Bush sings a song - VERY FUNNY

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And you thought birthers hated Obama…

A 78-year-old Carroll, Iowa woman says she’s so tired of seeing President Barack Obama on the airwaves that she’s selling her television sets - two of them.

Deloris Nissen, a retired nurses’ aide and former Kmart employee who was raised on a farm near Audubon, placed a classified advertisement with The Daily Times Herald for Friday’s paper.

In the $5.50 ad, Nissen tells readers she has two television sets for sale.

The reason: “Obama on every channel and station.”

In an interview Nissen said she is serious about selling two TVs - and genuine about her disgust with what she believes to be an overexposed president.

“I just got tired of watching him on every channel,” Nissen said. “I thought, my gosh, does he ever stay at the White House?”

See? What have I been saying these many months? Obama is driving conservatives to the brink of insanity.

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The politics of fear roars on. Republican Rep. Verginia Foxx on the House floor…

The Republican [health] plan would “make sure we bring down the cost of health care for all Americans and that ensures affordable access for all Americans and is pro-life because it will not put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government.”

And here’s conservative Betsy McCaughey, chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Death…

“Congress would make it mandatory — absolutely require — that every five years people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner.”

Politifact gave this one a ‘Pants on Fire’ rating. The House bill actually says…

“such consultation shall include the following: An explanation by the practitioner of advance care planning, including key questions and considerations, important steps, and suggested people to talk to; an explanation by the practitioner of advance directives, including living wills and durable powers of attorney, and their uses; an explanation by the practitioner of the role and responsibilities of a health care proxy.”

Medicare will cover one session every five years, the legislation states. If a patient becomes very ill in the interim, Medicare will cover additional sessions.

Jon Keyserling, general counsel and vice president of public policy for the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization, which supports the provision, said the bill doesn’t encourage seniors to end their lives, it just allows some important counseling for decisions that take time and consideration.

“These are very serious conversations,” he said. “It needs to be an informative conversation from the medical side and it needs to be thought about carefully by the patient and their families.”

Leave it to Republicans to take an intelligent and compassionate provision and twist it to the extent of claiming that the government wants “seniors in a position of being put to death.” Fear over truth triumphs once more.

My mom would not have liked these people.

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Can someone please explain why the ‘cash-for-clunkers’ initiative is in any way bad?

“My children and grandchildren are going to have to pay for these cars and we’re helping auto dealers while there are thousands of other small businesses that aren’t getting the help,” said Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) during an appearance on Fox News Sunday. “The role of the federal government is not to run the used car business.”

“We’re definitely going to debate it and I’ve heard that John McCain is going to stand up and try to stop it and I’m going to work with him every way that I can,” he said. “This is crazy to try to rush this thing through again.”

Is the idea not to stimulate the economy? Upwards of 250,000 new vehicles have been sold since the program began. Add to this the fact that old gas-guzzlers are being taken off the road and it would seem like a winner all way around - consumers, manufacturers, dealerships, the environment and the economy.

What do Republicans want? Is the economy going to just miraculously turn around because…well, just because? Is every government initiative going to be attacked and deemed disastrous simply because Democrats are running the show? Will Sarah and Todd divorce?

I need to know.

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Why she quit - SEX Scandals?


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Sarah, tell us about your secret lover...


Excerpt:
The National Enquirer names Sarah Palin's secret lover!

No less than three members of the man’s family including one by sworn affidavit have claimed that
Sarah Palin engaged in an extramarital affair with Todd’s former business partner, Brad Hanson.

These sources have named Hanson as Palin’s secret love, and say their affair nearly wrecked both their marriages.

Hanson owned a snowmobile dealership with Todd, who immediately dissolved the partnership after he heard
about the affair, which occurred around 1996, according to the sources. At the time, Palin was mayor of Wasilla.


http://www.nationalenquirer.com/national_enquirer_world_exclusive_sarah_palins_sec ret_lover_revealed/celebrity/65481

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Makes one wonder why anyone would ever want to be president…

US President Barack Obama is the target of more than 30 potential death threats a day and is being protected by an increasingly over-stretched and under-resourced Secret Service, according to a new book.

Since Mr Obama took office, the rate of threats against the president has increased 400 per cent from the 3,000 a year or so under President George W. Bush, according to Ronald Kessler, author of In the President’s Secret Service.

Some threats to Mr Obama, whose Secret Service codename is Renegade, have been publicised, including an alleged plot by white supremacists in Tennessee late last year to rob a gun store, shoot 88 black people, decapitate another 14 and then assassinate the first black president in American history.

Frightening.

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Required Signage at All
Congressional Forums


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Hide Your Dirty Laundry!


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I Guess Dems are the REAL Pussies!

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August - 10 - 2009

These people have no shame.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUVM5pDvQ4s

Lie till you’re blue in the face and you’ll frighten enough people into believing your lies…especially the old folks.

A tiring act, a deceitful act…but an effective one. Bastards.

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If Chuck Norris's career wasn't already dead
this would probably kill it.

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mario piperni On August - 12 - 2009

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John Richardson begins his excellent piece in Esquire with…

This is the most frightening thing I have heard in a very long time: According to a poll conducted by the Daily Kos, which I fervently hope is wrong, 28 percent of Republicans believe that President Obama is not an American citizen. Another 30 percent are undecided. A wider survey to be released tomorrow takes that 58 percent of potential “birthers” nationwide up to nearly 70 in Virginia alone. And this is not in dispute: Ten Republican congressmen have now signed on to a bill demanding that Obama prove his citizenship.

If a majority of our conservative population and that much of its elected leadership think that even some of this “birther” stuff is remotely possible, some very dark times may be heading to this country.

Richardson goes on to make a broader point.

[Some] argue that the whole thing is getting overblown because it’s August — the “silly season” for news — and because the more reasonable and mainstream Republicans don’t want to take a stand that will further alienate part of their base. This is probably true. But it also obscures a troubling truth: By focusing on the “news hook” about our president’s birth certificate, we are ignoring the broader mixture of paranoid apocalyptic fantasies that feed this troubling — and growing, perhaps into the tens of millions — group of people. People who told me they’re not just looking for the president’s birth certificate. They’re looking for his death certificate.

People who are also saying…

“Prepare yourself for the worst. Stock up on water. Conserve. Start your own garden. There won’t be enough food to go around.”

“Keep up the spirit of 1776! Bring that revolution back!”

“Everyone who voted for [Obama] ought to leave the country.”

“9 out of 10 terrorists support Obama.”

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

It’s easy enough to become blase about stuff like this. Subject oneself to insanity for a long enough period of time and the tendency is to downplay it or completely ignore it. In the meantime, the echo chamber reverberates as the conservative media, politicians and right wing interest groups ratch up the rhetoric and misinformation. The town hall meetings of late have been a clear reminder of how irrational people can be when fear is used as a driving force.

As Richardson writes, “Ideas can have a body count.”

___

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...to disrupt a town hall meeting.

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Krugman nails this one.

President Obama is now facing the same kind of opposition that President Bill Clinton had to deal with: an enraged right that denies the legitimacy of his presidency, that eagerly seizes on every wild rumor manufactured by the right-wing media complex.

This opposition cannot be appeased. Some pundits claim that Mr. Obama has polarized the country by following too liberal an agenda. But the truth is that the attacks on the president have no relationship to anything he is actually doing or proposing.

[...]

So much, then, for Mr. Obama’s dream of moving beyond divisive politics. The truth is that the factors that made politics so ugly in the Clinton years — the paranoia of a significant minority of Americans and the cynical willingness of leading Republicans to cater to that paranoia — are as strong as ever. In fact, the situation may be even worse than it was in the 1990s because the collapse of the Bush administration has left the G.O.P. with no real leaders other than Rush Limbaugh.

It’s not as if we didn’t know all of this before but it needs to be repeated over and over. There is no chance of bipartisanship. It just ain’t gonna happen…not now and not in the foreseeable future. Trying to appease the current crop of repubs is like trying to agree on a space sharing arrangement with a hungry croc. It’s got only one thing on its mind and it isn’t pretty.

The sooner Obama arrives at the obvious conclusion that Gingrich and Limbaugh will never like him, the better off everyone will be.

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Come to think of it,
"Death Panels" may not be such a bad idea!

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Political Illustrations 14 (Photoshop) Mario Piperni dot Com

( A very cool soundtrack too.)




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New! RESIST DRAMA T-shirt!
Black or Gray! Immediate shipping!



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I'll be buying this shirt this weekend!

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Serenity Miller, 4, clings to her father Cpt. David Miller after he and fellow U.S. Army soldiers arrived home from Iraq on August 18, 2009 to Fort Carson, Colorado. Approximately 575 soldiers from the 2nd Brigade Combat team from the 4th Infantry Division returned Tuesday following a 12 month deployment to Iraq. By John Moore/Getty.

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Oh dear,



"Sarah Palin exposed the shocking truth about Obama's health care plan, saying that the America she knows is not one where her loved ones will 'have to stand in front of Obama's death panel so his bureaucrats can decide ... whether they are worthy of health care.' Bravo, Ms. Palin! That is the most powerful message you've written by throwing a handful of magnetic poetry against the fridge." --Stephen Colbert

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How Stupid Do They Think Everyone Is?


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Great thread. :)

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Great thread. :)

Thank you ;)

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There Are Political Candidates and Then There’s Glenn Moon

Livonia Michigan City Council candidate Glenn Moon is somewhat shaky on where church ends and state starts.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsKRccvcrK4

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Andrew Sullivan …

“…the question of torture - and the United States’ embrace of inhumanity as a core American value under the presidency of George W. Bush - remains, in my view, the pre-eminent moral question in American politics. The descent of the United States - and of Americans in general - to lower standards of morality and justice than those demanded by Iranians of their regime is a sign of the polity’s moral degeneracy.”

[...]

“This is what Bush and Cheney truly achieved in their tragic response to 9/11: two terribly failed, brutally expensive wars, the revival of sectarian warfare and genocide in the Middle East, the end of America’s global moral authority, the empowerment of Iran’s and North Korea’s dictatorships, and the nightmares of Gitmo and Bagram still haunting the new administration.”

“But what they did to the culture - how they systematically dismantled core American values like the prohibition on torture and respect for the rule of law - is the worst and most enduring of the legacies. One political party in this country is now explicitly pro-torture, and wants to restore a torture regime if it regains power. Decent conservatives for the most part simply looked the other way. Unless these cultural forces in defense of violence and torture are defeated - not appeased or excused, but defeated - America will never return the way it once was.”

You’ll need to read the entire piece to understand why Sullivan writes…

“Our job, in other words, is to raise the core moral baseline of Americans to that of Iranians. That’s the depth of the hole Cheney dug. And it’s a hole the current GOP wants to dig deeper and darker.”

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When a Rethug comes in to the ER,
how hard do the nurses try to save him?

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Remember Barney Frank telling a lunatic right-winger who was holding up an image of President Obama in Nazi gear that talking to her was like talking to his dining room table? Well, here’s the psychology behind Frank’s statement.

Some people form and cling to false beliefs about health-care reform (or Obama’s citizenship) despite overwhelming evidence thanks to a mental phenomenon called motivated reasoning, says sociologist Steven Hoffman. “Rather than search rationally for information that either confirms or disconfirms a particular belief,” he says, “people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe.”

“For the most part,” says Hoffman, “people completely ignore contrary information” and are able to “develop elaborate rationalizations based on faulty information.”

Hoffman describes another psychological phenomenon which I believe is commonly found in the right, lunatic fringe or otherwise.

“We refer to this as ‘inferred justification,’” says Hoffman. Inferred justification is a sort of backward chain of reasoning. You start with something you believe strongly (the invasion of Iraq was the right move) and work backward to find support for it (Saddam was behind 9/11). “For these voters,” says Hoffman, “the sheer fact that we were engaged in war led to a post-hoc search for a justification for that war.”

For an explanation of this behavior, look no further than the psychological theory of cognitive dissonance. This theory holds that when people are presented with information that contradicts preexisting beliefs, they try to relieve the cognitive tension one way or another. They process and respond to information defensively, for instance: their belief challenged by fact, they ignore the latter. They also accept and seek out confirming information but ignore, discredit the source of, or argue against contrary information, studies have shown.

After reading the above, anyone following the health care debate would have to come to the conclusion that a good 90% of Republicans in Congress suffer from cognitive dissonance. I imagine the other 10% are just liars. Don’t know. But hey, what about the whackos attending the town hall meetings? What’s the story with these people?

Which brings us back to health-care reform—in particular, the apoplexy at town-hall meetings and the effectiveness of the lies being spread about health-care reform proposals. First of all, let’s remember that 59,934,814 voters cast their ballot for John McCain, so we can assume that tens of millions of Americans believe the wrong guy is in the White House. To justify that belief, they need to find evidence that he’s leading the country astray. What better evidence of that than to seize on the misinformation about Obama’s health-care reform ideas and believe that he wants to insure illegal aliens, for example, and give the Feds electronic access to doctors’ bank accounts?

Obama’s opponents also need to find evidence that their reading of him back in November was correct. They therefore seize on “confirmation” that he wants to, for instance, redistribute the wealth, as in his “spread the wealth around” remark to Joe the Plumber—finding such confirmation in the claims that health-care reform will do just that, redistributing health care from those who have it now to the 46 million currently uninsured. Similarly, they seize on anything that confirms the “socialist” label that got pinned on Obama during the campaign, or the pro-abortion label—anything to comfort themselves that they made the right choice last November.

Most of us are already aware that birthers, teabaggers and Bush apologists, to name a few, are first class wingnuts but it’s kinda nice to be able to give their mental condition a highfalutin sounding medical term . Very cool I think to be able to look at one of these people directly in the eyes and say, “Hey bud, I think you might be suffering from inferred justification. You might want to get that looked at before it develops into something more serious, like cognitive dissonance perhaps.”

In any case, it’s reassuring knowing that psychologists are studying this mental disorder. Also, it helps to absolve us from any guilt associated with having to call wingnuts wingnuts repeatedly.

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Sarah Derangement Syndrome


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Is the Government doing enough to suppress the proletariat? (http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/UnNews:Is_the_Government_doing_enough_to_suppress_ the_proletariat%3F)

I love uncyclopedia:D

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Reuters - 9-1-09‎
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Former Miss California USA Carrie Prejean has sued beauty pageant organizers claiming she was wrongfully fired for saying marriage should be only between a man and a woman, her lawyer said on Monday.

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Tales From The Republican Hellhole: Is Anyone Listening?

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"We have been saying all along that the most important part of this debate is not the public option, but rather ensuring choice and competition," an Obama aide said.

Hey un-named Obama aide!
We've already got that... it's called
Health Insurance Companies!
(if you can afford it!)

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Change the Fu*kin' Narrative!

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Why don’t we hear this from Sarah Palin?

More than one of every five requests for medical claims for insured patients, even when recommended by a patient’s physician, are rejected by California’s largest private insurers, amounting to very real death panels in practice daily in the nation’s biggest state, according to data released Wednesday by the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee.

From 2002 through June 30, 2009, six of the largest insurers operating in California rejected 47.7 million claims for care — 22 percent of all claims.

Claims denial rates by leading California insurers, first six months of 2009:

PacifiCare — 39.6 percent
Cigna — 32.7 percent
HealthNet — 30 percent
Kaiser Permanente — 28.3 percent
Blue Cross — 27.9 percent
Aetna — 6.4 percent
“Every claim that is denied represents a real patient enduring pain and suffering. Every denial has real, sometimes fatal consequences.”

There are other consequences too.

Rejection of care is a very lucrative business for the insurance giants. The top 18 insurance giants racked up $15.9 billion in profits last year.

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I got to attend a town hall meeting on health care this week. No punches were thrown and no one lost a finger. It turned out to be a peaceful evening where people expressed both their hopes and concerns on an issue which has gotten way too messy. It was a town hall get-together I think, just like what one would expect - calm, informative and respectful - before the conservative movement began disrupting them with their astroturfing tactics.

My personal highlights for the evening, were two women, both nervous but articulate, one for the public option, the other against, who took the microphone and told their stories. One of the stories both moved and angered me. The second story befuddled me.

The first one was told in a passionate voice which often broke as the woman held back tears. She told the story of a neighbor, a man and dear friend she had known for many years, who ran a small business in southern Florida. A number of months ago he had become aware of a serious heart condition which required expensive surgery. His current health care provider dropped him on the basis of pre-existing conditions. He found a new provider at a cost of $1500 per month but was told that his heart condition would not be covered for a period of 24 months. A week ago, the man collapsed and died from a heart attack.

A hard working American who could afford expensive health insurance but not the cost for the surgery and post-op treatment required, became a victim of the system.

The second story came from a woman who appeared to be in her mid 30s who stood up and immediately told the Democratic congressman that while she respected him, she disagreed with 95% of what he had said on health care reform. Alright, fair enough. People can disagree but here’s the part that blew me away. She then informed us that she was a single mom who happened to be one of the 47 million uninsured in the country and she was against a public option of any kind. Not only that but her only real concern about the current state of health care seemed to be her belief that tort reform was needed.

What?

While tort reform is needed, malpractice costs only account for less than 2 percent of all health care costs. Furthermore, the CBO has announced that tort reform would do little to cut down on the rising cost of insurance premiums.

I would think that a single mom would be more concerned with acquiring decent health insurance for herself and child before getting riled up about tort reform. We most probably had a woman here, loyal in her beliefs, who has spent too much time listening to conservative media doing a hack job on the reform proposals before Congress. She no doubt heard a Hannity or Limbaugh or some Republican politician going on about a socialist government takeover of health care while the REAL problem was tort reform. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

As for the first story, look at it from any perspective you wish and the conclusion is the same. The current health care system killed this man. It is no less a murder than if he had been shot in the back of the head in a darkly lit back alley. Except…that it was not a back alley. The crime was committed in broad daylight while 300 million people idly watched.

And, this same crime is repeated thousands of times each year.

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It's hard to do parody when you can see the real thing
just by turning on any radio, television or computer

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