Merge Left

In what appears to be the most compelling sign yet for the coming end of days, Comedy Central's The Daily Show w/Jon Stewart has ended international access to full episodes via it's website.
The post to thier forums:

Yesterday, April 28, we restricted access to full episodes of The Daily Show for several countries outside of the U.S. We did so at the request of the content licensees who control the television broadcast rights to the show in those respective territories.

We want to make it clear that we hear you, the Daily Show fans. We read your posts and comments on the boards. And given the very reasonable user feedback you've posted, we fully appreciate that fans of the show outside of the U.S. want access to full episodes. Regrettably, the nature of international licensing makes that extremely complicated.

Please know that Comedy Central will continue to work with local TV broadcasters around the globe in hopes of granting access to these episodes in your country. In the meantime, you still have access to the rest of TheDailyShow.com, including these forums.

Thanks for your understanding.

The forum thread has over 270 responses at the moment(10:30 +2GMT). The response are nearly uniform in thier content "This is lame". I have to say, I completely agree.

It's a shame there are no channels in Finland broadcasting the daily show (free or otherwise). The same holds true for quite a large number of other countries.
As one of the first responders to this thread pointed out. "congratulations on chasing your technology savvy viewers to pirate bay, and losing viewers who can't be bothered trying to download it."
Do make sure to hit the digg links
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Sweden's parliament passes gay marriage bill

VT's Republican governor threatens to veto marriage equality bill

WVA Dems defeat proposed constitutional amendment to define marriage as solely btw a man & a woman

Afghanistan bill would legalize marital rape and severely restrict rights of wives

Wikileaks has released nearly a billion dollars worth of quasi-secret reports commissioned by the United States Congress.

The 6,780 reports, current as of this month, comprise over 127,000 pages of material on some of the most contentious issues in the nation, from the U.S. relationship with Israel to the financial collapse. Nearly 2,300 of the reports were updated in the last 12 months, while the oldest report goes back to 1990. The release represents the total output of the Congressional Research Service (CRS) electronically available to Congressional offices. The CRS is Congress's analytical agency and has a budget in excess of $100M per year.

CRS reports are highly regarded as non-partisan, in-depth, and timely. The reports top the list of the "10 Most-Wanted Government Documents" compiled by the Washington based Center for Democracy and Technology. The Federation of American Scientists, in pushing for the reports to be made public, stated that the "CRS is Congress' Brain and it's useful for the public to be plugged into it,". While Wired magazine called their concealment "The biggest Congressional scandal of the digital age".

How many of the reports have not been seen before?
Almost all.

Full coverage at Wikileaks.
Screw the explanation give the torrent file now!!
These files are HUGE. The tarball is 1.9 gigs for pete's sake. Uncompressed it adds up to almost 3 gigs of PDF's and text files.

Madison took part in the national rally against prop 8. Here's some crappy cell phone video (sorry for 8 videos, my phone only records 45 seconds at a time):


Madison's Prop 8 Protest 1 / 8 from Adam C. on Vimeo.

( More under here )

cross-posted to: my blog, rockmanac, madisonwi, liberal_bias

( one of them is big )

So, despite having allowed America's financial situation to get this far by removing regulations in the interest of laissez-faire capitalism (despite indication that this kind of shit at least partially caused the Great Depression; they doomed us by failing to study history) and allowing these institutions to screw over the poor for the last several decades, Congress--both sides, dammit--decided to bail them out by handing them a huge welfare check, signed by generations of future Americans.

They do this claiming to have that future in mind. Their actions in the next few weeks to deal with the continuing crisis ('cuz a check ain't gonna solve it) is going to tell us if that is true or not.

What needs to happen is a re-regulation of the system, because relying on the common sense of a bunch of moneygrubbing corporate morons who only care about lining their pockets and inflating the stock market artificially just isn't cutting it.

But what also needs to happen is a re-evaluation of our economy, which is currently based on constant consumption. Things are poorly made in order to break easily and further this, because it's easier to convince someone to buy something new if the old is busted. Also consider the fact that we have technically turned ourselves into a COLONY economically, by shipping almost all of our manufacturing overseas and leaving so few jobs for the massive blue-collar workforce.

Face it, we've been struggling for longer than just the housing crisis. The dollar has been failing spectacularly in the world market for YEARS now.

So, no, the passage of the bail-out tells us abso-fucking-lutely nothing about whether our elected officials are worthy of re-election, no matter how much we may like or dislike the bail-out.

What will determine that is whether they take the little lee-way this band-aid provides and prep for surgery or if they hang a "Mission Accomplished" banner on the dollar bill and then act surprised when the economy continues to train-wreck.

I don't know who's been taking this but, less that 50% think she's NOT qualified to be VP. WTF? o_0!

http://www.pbs.org/now/polls/poll-435.html

OK, I'm feeling really pissed off about Sarah "I have bigger balls than you do" Palin, so I got snarky.



Ah, come on. You can't really tell me you're surprised, are you?

[REFERENCE]

I smell a Rove. It hurts, but I have to admit a grudging admiration for the clever nature of this uniquely Rovian tactic.

Let's look at this a moment.

Mayor Sarah Palin fired the city librarian for refusing to pull certain books from the shelves. The citizenry protested, and got the librarian's job back. [LINK] (Kilkenny letter)

Running for VP, this could be an embarrassing bit of personal history, so how to make it a non-story?

You create a public meme that actually *lists* the books she wanted banned, but make sure that the list itself is false. Let simmer for a few days, then declare it to be a HOAX intended to malign the candidate. It's an obvious hoax because some of the titles weren't even published yet when she was mayor of Podunk.

Story fades, and is never brought up again.

Same thing happened when 60 Minutes did a story on Bush's AWOL status from the Texas Air National Guard in 2004. The story exhibited plenty of proof,including an Officer Efficiency Report from 1972 in which his commander said that he couldn't evaluate First Lieutenant Bush's performance since he hadn't seen 1LT Bush in a year. BUT,there was also a planted document, one which was forged. It was generally a good forgery, and according to the retired secretary who would have been the one to type it, it seemed like something that would have gone into Bush's record at the time, though she couldn't remember specifically typing that letter. It turned out to be a forgery, with a handy technical "gaffe" that once illuminated (typed on a typewriter that hadn't been invented yet), made it obvious that this one document in a pile of hundreds was false. From that point on, no one in the media dared question Bush's military record again.

Beware. This is going to get nasty.

Just in the past week, I've seen several Internet-spread rumors and hoaxes that can be easily disproven, yet are still being circulated by people who are willing to believe anything that will support their predetermined beliefs. More importantly, these same believers continue to spread unverified stories. With the example above, many people would have seen the line "Palin's banned book list", and propagated it to their friends like a socially engineered Trojan virus, which is exactly what it is! Another obvious case came across my Inbox today:

"16 US troops commit suicide in Iraq: Sixteen US troops from the 57th Unit of the Airborne Division have committed
suicide inside a military base in Iraq, security sources say."

This is utter bullshit. Yes, soldiers are committing suicide both there and here, but there is no "57th Unit" of "the Airborne Division". First off, there is no "the Airborne Division". There's the 82d Airborne Division and the 101st Airborne Division, both part of XVIII Airborne Corps, both with brigades over there right now. Second, the Army (only service with large airborne units) is divided into Corps, Divisions, Brigades, Battalions, Companies (or Batteries), Platoons, Squads, and Teams. Each of these is a "unit" (not capitalized); the only "57th" anything of any size that I can find reference to is the 57th Cav Recon which disbanded years ago.

These things matter. Please, please, please! Before you forward anything that comes your way, make an effort to verify its contents. Then, if you are able to verify it, be kind enough to include references to your research for the benefit of your recipients, and anyone else they may send it along to. Helping to spread falsehoods because they appear to support our position is doing everyone a disservice! As with the examples above, one small bit of misinformation can destroy an otherwise perfectly legitimate story that people need to read, hear and see.

Thank you.

Everytime I think Faux News can't sink any lower. They turn around and out do themselves.

It is crudely simplistic to cast Russia as the sole villain in the clashes over South Ossetia. The west would be wise to stay out

Mark Almond (Wikipedia)
The Guardian, Saturday August 9 2008 (Source Watch)
Article history

For many people the sight of Russian tanks streaming across a border in August has uncanny echoes of Prague 1968. That cold war reflex is natural enough, but after two decades of Russian retreat from those bastions it is misleading. Not every development in the former Soviet Union is a replay of Soviet history.

The clash between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia, which escalated dramatically yesterday, in truth has more in common with the Falklands war of 1982 than it does with a cold war crisis. When the Argentine junta was basking in public approval for its bloodless recovery of Las Malvinas, Henry Kissinger anticipated Britain's widely unexpected military response with the comment: "No great power retreats for ever." Maybe today Russia has stopped the long retreat to Moscow which started under Gorbachev.

Back in the late 1980s, as the USSR waned, the red army withdrew from countries in eastern Europe which plainly resented its presence as the guarantor of unpopular communist regimes. That theme continued throughout the new republics of the deceased Soviet Union, and on into the premiership of Putin, under whom Russian forces were evacuated even from the country's bases in Georgia.

To many Russians this vast geopolitical retreat from places which were part of Russia long before the dawn of communist rule brought no bonus in relations with the west. The more Russia drew in its horns, the more Washington and its allies denounced the Kremlin for its imperial ambitions.
( More under the cut. )
Interesting stuff.

( New Radical Community for finding friends )

I'm Voting Republican Because...

Kucinich introduces Articles of impeachment

by Meteor Blades
Sun Jun 01, 2008 at 08:00:37 AM PDT
I’m not prescient or plugged-in enough to have any special window on how many of you Clinton supporters who are saying you will vote for John McCain in November will come to your senses by then. Many people I respect think that most of you will. I suspect they’re right. I hope they are. But it’s obvious that more than a handful of you are serious in your vindicativeness and will join Joe Lieberman to support the Senator from Arizona over Obama. That would be the anti-choice, hundred-year-war, two-faced, Republican Senator from Arizona.

Thus is born a new subspecies, McCain Democrats, McCainocrats.

If your shrieking can be believed, you McCainocrats are premeditating ballot support for an exclusive club of racist, union-busting, woman-suppressing, bedroom-peering, rights-scoffing, warmongering, torture-backing, buccaneering, global warming-denying, privatizing, public land-grabbing, Supreme Court stuffing, empire-building, Constitution-shredding raptors. All for self-indulgent revenge. You’re unhappy that your candidate has not won the nomination. I understand that. Mine didn’t win either. But you’re not just unhappy, you're also willing to contribute to the election of someone who stands against most of what your candidate has been promoted as standing for. That, I don’t comprehend at all. Emotionally, intellectually or morally. I get the feeling you would vote for George W. Bush in 2008 if the 22nd Amendment weren’t in the way.

You McCainocrats might recall that you have ancestors.

There were George Corley Wallace Democrats, for example. Whether Wallace was really a racist or merely used racism opportunistically is a semantics game I’ll leave for others to sort out. Having lost an election in which his foe was deeply racist, Wallace vowed never to be "out-ni**ered" again. Until he was reborn and publicly repented of his segregationist ways, nobody could doubt that his policies epitomized Jim Crow apartheid. Because of those policies and his ferocious rhetoric, millions of registered Democrats abandoned the party in 1968 to vote for Wallace, running as an independent against Humphrey and Nixon. Four years later, he attracted droves of Democratic voters, peppering his campaign with racist code phrases (while claiming he no longer supported segregation), and winning six primaries, including Michigan, where the open primary allowed massive crossover votes from independents and Republicans, just as it did this year. After that, he more or less faded away, and most of his supporters drifted permanently over to the Republicans.

There were the Nixon Democrats. The "official" group in 1972, Democrats for Nixon, was led by former Texas Governor John Connally, a conservative Democrat on his way, like so many Southern Democrats of the time, to becoming a full-fledged Republican. They had no desire nor means to restore the Democratic Party to its pre-1964 status. They were on their way out the door for good. And so were the rank and file Nixon Democrats, many of them Wallace Democrats with no home.

Proving that politics repeats itself endlessly, one of the ads put together by Democrats for Nixon showed George McGovern as a flip-flopper on issues such as withdrawal from Vietnam. So, while McGovern was transformed by the Republican Committee to Re-Elect the President from a heroic World War II bomber pilot into a pinko pacifist, fellow Democrats who soon would permanently join that Republican Party made a devastating hit on him, deploying the flip-flopping trope that provided a solid punch against John Kerry, three decades later.

Still, many rank-and-file Democrats, especially Southerners able to trace their party roots to ante bellum days, needed more than patriotic appeals to shift their votes. The "Southern Strategy" was just the ticket.

Watergate put an end to Nixon, and the elections of 1974 and 1976 briefly interrupted but did not reverse the outflow of Republican-cuddling Democrats. Along came 1980 and the Reagan Democrats.

The B-minus movie actor who became an A-plus Republican icon, sprung his campaign from Philadelphia, Mississippi, with a coded paean to states’ rights to regain the Wallace-cum-Nixon Democrats who had voted throughout the Old Confederacy (except in Virginia) for Jimmy Carter in ’76. Reagan Democrats, including fresh recruits among white working-class Democrats from the North and West, liked their man’s tough-talking persona delivered with a smile.

Even when he was redistributing wealth upward paid for by doubling the national debt, breaking unions, demonizing government, privatizing public patrimony, supplying guns to terrorists, and attempting to gut as much of the FDR social and economic legacy as he could get away with, all with harmful consequences for the very demographics most Reagan Democrats came from, they stayed by his side.

There have been Bush Democrats, too, though mostly Mister Bush has just managed to hang onto the leavings of his predecessors, the aged and aging Wallace, Nixon and Reagan Democrats.

You McCainocrats don’t run in a direct lineage from all these ancestors. For one thing, they had issues, many of them unlikable, even detestable, but understandable. You, however, clearly have no guiding philosophy beyond surly revenge. John McCain can’t possibly give you what you want if what you really want is what you say Senator Clinton has been in the running for this year. Only on the margins does he contravene the rightwing cabal that over time seized the party and has now left it in disarray. His discernible stances on almost everything of note are, or should be, anathema to any Democrat who is a Democrat. Much of the rest of his views are just contradictory meandering. When he opens his mouth, you never know which side he will speak from.

I’m no fan of third parties because history shows only one making the leap to even the lower rungs of national power. But I can at least understand voters who jump ship to a third party based on principle and symbolism and hope for a breakthrough in a direction amicable to their beliefs. You McCainocrats, on the other hand, are incomprehensible. Is the idea that voting for another four years of rightwing Republican rule would be worth it as long as you could say: "See? We told you Obama couldn’t win." Does the McCainocrat lunacy embrace the idea that four more years of a Republican in the White House would make Clinton a shoo-in for 2012?

If that’s what your telling me, if you’re willing to force the American people to suffer for your chance to say nah-nah-nah, I’ll have two words for you when you come around looking for my support for any candidate or any cause in 2012 or any other time in the future: Bite me.

Discuss.