In reply to this comment by alien_concept:
Ryan Gosling is my second favourite (imo) underrated actor after Sam Rockwell. If anyone hasn't seen Lars and the Real Girl, I massively recommend it! And obviously Half Nelson.

*promote

you rock doll!
thankies =)

Ryan Gosling is my second favourite (imo) underrated actor after Sam Rockwell. If anyone hasn't seen Lars and the Real Girl, I massively recommend it! And obviously Half Nelson.

*promote

>> ^MycroftHomlz:

To messers. Nehemiah Dodge, Ephraim Robbins, & Stephen S. Nelson, a committee of the Danbury Baptist association in the state of Connecticut.
Gentlemen
The affectionate sentiments of esteem and approbation which you are so good as to express towards me, on behalf of the Danbury Baptist association, give me the highest satisfaction. my duties dictate a faithful and zealous pursuit of the interests of my constituents, & in proportion as they are persuaded of my fidelity to those duties, the discharge of them becomes more and more pleasing.
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.
I reciprocate your kind prayers for the protection & blessing of the common father and creator of man, and tender you for yourselves & your religious association, assurances of my high respect & esteem.
Th Jefferson
Jan. 1. 1802.


Awww, come on! You can't let fact stand in the way of truth! That's evil!

To messers. Nehemiah Dodge, Ephraim Robbins, & Stephen S. Nelson, a committee of the Danbury Baptist association in the state of Connecticut.

Gentlemen

The affectionate sentiments of esteem and approbation which you are so good as to express towards me, on behalf of the Danbury Baptist association, give me the highest satisfaction. my duties dictate a faithful and zealous pursuit of the interests of my constituents, & in proportion as they are persuaded of my fidelity to those duties, the discharge of them becomes more and more pleasing.

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.

I reciprocate your kind prayers for the protection & blessing of the common father and creator of man, and tender you for yourselves & your religious association, assurances of my high respect & esteem.

Th Jefferson
Jan. 1. 1802.

You know...votes are nice...but comments like yours really make it all very worthwhile. At least for me. Thank you. I am very glad you liked it.

If I may, I wonder if you would like this rendition, http://videosift.com/video/A-SONG-FOR-YOU-Leon-Russell-Friends-1971? If you like it I would like to know if you don't mind.

And please, not for vote.

In reply to this comment by marinara:
never been a huge modern blues fan, but am very grateful this video got to me.

As you have even pointed out on more than one occasion those compound eyes, I doubt you have missed or do miss much.

Actually, I was alluding to Mycrofthomlz. Perhaps not wanting to seem presumptuous, I more like eluded....

In reply to this comment by ant:
One of our members? Who? Did I miss something?

Thank you very much my friend. I am happy you like it.

In reply to this comment by enoch:
three great tastes that go great together.
*promote!

>> ^ulysses1904:

Thanks for posting this. I miss the good old days of MST3K, especially Turkey Day 1991. I got an email from Mike Nelson once. The MST3K crew had a website up for a bit called TimmyBigHands.com and I sent a kudos, figuring some intern would reply with a form email. But got a nice email from Mike. I had mentioned that "Eegah" was one of my faves and he thanked me for reminding him of that horrible film, and now his night terrors were going to return. That cracked me up.


--nice story, Ahem... is that a Bono avatar??

Thanks for posting this. I miss the good old days of MST3K, especially Turkey Day 1991. I got an email from Mike Nelson once. The MST3K crew had a website up for a bit called TimmyBigHands.com and I sent a kudos, figuring some intern would reply with a form email. But got a nice email from Mike. I had mentioned that "Eegah" was one of my faves and he thanked me for reminding him of that horrible film, and now his night terrors were going to return. That cracked me up.

@blankfist I don't really care what label you give yourself. If lumping you in with "the right" offends you so much, perhaps you should focus more on pulling the other people in that category back into line with something more like what you believe.

Since you never seem to be able to discern my inferences when they're not blunt and explicit, I would say that my point was that Obama-as-candidate was laying out a pretty modest platform of things liberals thought could and should be done in the 2009-2013 time period, not everything the left would ever like to do if given unlimited power to implement the policies they'd like to see.

Obama-as-President with overwhelming majorities in Congress has, predictably, fallen short of even those modest goals. I'd say on the policy level a lot of that was due to the rather high proportion of both caucuses coming from DINOs like Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln.

That said, even if 2008's election had resulted in this fairytale fantasy where my specific conception of leftiness could be implemented switfly and irrevocably, I probably wouldn't have even thought to put farm subsidies on my list of Top 100 Things to Do.

In this world where even passing the most critical, common sense legislation there is (like cap & trade) requires major political battles, we're just not going to waste our energy on something that we don't think is particularly significant.

Ultimately, it's pretty much the same answer to either question at root (the politicians care more about making corporate donors happy than living up to the ideals they claim to hold true), but it does seem like it's more apt to ask why they survived under Bush than it is to ask why they haven't been eliminated by Obama since it supposedly is a priority for you guys, and the Republicans have far better party discipline than Democrats ever have.

Israel was a strange country. In the summer and fall of 1992 you'd have found me in either Tel Aviv or within the walls of the old city of Jerusalem. I often went for long walks in the evenings and it happened several times that on Allenby Street or maybe Dizengoff that an Israeli would strike up a conversation and then quickly jump to explain how "we are the same you and me, but the Arabs are animals." Or it was dogs. Or cockroaches. It always shocked me and I'd look at my watch and say something about being late.

I'd been having a wonderful time playing backgammon and chain-smoking Nelsons with the Palestinian and Egyptian friends I'd made at the open-sided cafes in Arab east Jerusalem.

Israeli racism is not unique. Franz Fanon wrote the definitive work on the racism of colonialism. (The Wretched of the Earth)

Gabriel Ash is an Israeli journalist, originally from Romania. Ash's article "Diagnosing Benny Morris: The Mind of a European Settler" is a lucid and powerful indictment.

http://dissidentvoice.org/Jan04/Ash0126.htm

Israel was a strange country. In the summer and fall of 1992 you'd have found me in either Tel Aviv or within the walls of the old city of Jerusalem. I often went for long walks in the evenings and it happened several times that on Allenby Street or maybe Dizengoff that an Israeli would strike up a conversation and then quickly jump to explain how "we are the same you and me, but the Arabs are animals." Or it was dogs. Or cockroaches. It always shocked me and I'd look at my watch and say something about being late.

I'd been having a wonderful time playing backgammon and chain-smoking Nelsons with the Palestinian and Egyptian friends I'd made at the open-sided cafes in Arab east Jerusalem.

Israeli racism is not unique. Franz Fanon wrote the definitive work on the racism of colonialism. (The Wretched of the Earth)

Gabriel Ash is an Israeli journalist, originally from Romania. Ash's article "Diagnosing Benny Morris: The Mind of a European Settler" is a lucid and powerful indictment.

http://dissidentvoice.org/Jan04/Ash0126.htm


*******

Israeli historian Benny Morris crossed a new line of shame when he put his academic credentials and respectability in the service of outlining the "moral" justification for a future genocide against Palestinians.

Benny Morris is the Israeli historian most responsible for the vindication of the Palestinian narrative of 1948. The lives of about 700,000 people were shattered as they were driven from their homes by the Jewish militia (and, later, the Israeli army) between December 1947 and early 1950. Morris went through Israeli archives and wrote the day by day account of this expulsion, documenting every "ethnically cleansed" village and every recorded act of violence, and placing each in the context of the military goals and perceptions of the cleansers.

Israel's apologists tried in vain to attack Morris' professional credibility. From the opposite direction, since he maintained that the expulsion was not "by design," he was also accused of drawing excessively narrow conclusions from the documents and of being too naive a reader of dissimulating statements. Despite these limitations, Morris' The Birth of the Palestinian Refugees Problem, 1947-1949 is an authoritative record of the expulsion.

*******

@Throbbin, I can't blame you for thinking that. He's the President, he's the most visible, most popular, and most powerful single Democrat there is. The press always has a strong tendency to make every political issue into a story about the President's personal political fortune, and that seems even more pronounced with Obama.

He's also the head of the Democratic party in theory, but we don't exercise the kind of party discipline you find in, well, virtually every other democratic country. There's no real punishment for failing to maintain party discipline on key policy votes (see Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, Joe Lieberman, etc.).

Ultimately, the real power to do things in this country resides in Congress. Obama has a larger-than-average amount of sway due to being the President, and due to having his party in the majority, but he doesn't have anything like total control over what happens in Congress.

Here are the 4 nay votes that homeboy left off his list:

Bayh (D-IN)
Dodd (D-CT)
Nelson (D-NE)
Reed (D-RI)

Willie Nelson, menace to society.