Obscanity: You'll know it when you see it

They killed their neighbors: genocide’s foot soldiers – CNN.com.

The picture makes me sick. They truly look like they haven’t a care in the world. And frankly, they probably don’t. Bastards.

Israeli Web site advises using wisdom of Quran – CNN.com.

Bush must navigate a treacherous post-presidency – CNN.com.

Bush and his handlers are mapping out this phase of the president’s post-White House years. Plans are well under way for a “Freedom Institute” that will aim to promote democracies abroad.

God forbid he should try to “help” any more. I don’t think the world can take any more of George W. Bush’s help. The biggest favor he can do for all of us, including himself, is to return to his Texas “ranch,” live out a quiet retirement and enjoy his massive oil fortune. Oh, and don’t forget the logging money. “Need some wood?”

Obama unveils 21st Century New Deal – Mike Allen and Jonathan Martin – Politico.com.

It’s about fucking time we had a president with real ideas about how to fix this country’s economy. I spent a little bit of time reading the comments, and it’s clear that the conservatives on that site have no idea how we got into this mess in the first place.

This economic crisis is not the product of liberal rule. It’s the product of Reaganomics, pure and simple. Reagan spent and spent and spent, and slashed taxes instead of paying for his spending. Outwardly he theorized that if he made sure the wealthiest people had lots of money, somehow it would trickle down to benefiting the working class. This was, of course, never the true intention, and I sincerely doubt anybody genuinely thought it was going to work. The ultimate goal was to redistribute wealth upward, accumulating most of the nation’s wealth in a few greedy hands, including his own. And that’s what has happened. The middle class is either dying or dead, and they’re still being taxed an arm and a leg, frequently paying larger effective tax rates than people who make millions of dollars. Reagan got rich people accustomed to paying less than their fair share in taxes, and now they bitch and moan if they see so much as a 1% increase in their rates. Reagan racked up massive amounts of debt, piling it up like no president had before. Then Bush piled it up more than all the other presidents combined – including Reagan! The Bush administration has completely demolished this country’s economy and stability – and no conservative can fix it. It will take a liberal hand to do what needs to be done to clean up the mess left by almost 30 years of Republican tyranny, with only a short but sweet Clintonian respite (partially, anyway, since Congress was still ruled by Republicans during Clinton’s terms).

Commentary: Pregnant woman asks for help, gets ticket – CNN.com.

OY. That’s all I have to say. It must be idiot-cop season.

Injured boy doesn’t know attacks in India killed relatives – CNN.com.

Another child orphaned by these horrible attacks. 🙁

Read Sandra Samuel’s account of the targeting of the Chabad House in Mumbai and the way she saved the life of the Holtzbergs’ baby. Amazing. People are just… amazing sometimes. In a good way.

How awful that the child saw his parents killed, though. I didn’t know that before, though it explains the news accounts of his blood-soaked pants. This poor baby. 🙁 At least he has this wonderful woman looking out for him.

Things just keep getting worse for his family, though. Not only is the Mumbai police commissioner now stating that evidence shows the people killed in the Chabad house were tortured first, but it turns out that Rivkah Holtzberg was five months pregnant.

Thought you were safe this holiday season? Guess again. A new study suggests good cheer may spread itself. Apparently it threatens to become a rampant epidemic. Be careful out there!

OH NO! You’ve been exposed!!!!

What the fuck, man?

Anaheim officer mistakenly kills man on his front lawn.

But on the bright side, he was innocent. Wait – what?!?!

I’m sure it came as SUUUUUCH a relief to Julian Alexander’s family that the police have proclaimed that he was “was innocent of anything that the officer suspected was going on in the neighborhood.”

No, really – it’s precious:

“Anaheim Police Chief John Welter met with about 30 members of Alexander’s family Tuesday afternoon at a news conference. While not coming out and saying it was the department’s fault, Chief Welter wanted Alexander’s family to know that the 20-year-old, in the department’s eyes, was an innocent bystander in this incident.”

Fantastic. I’m sure that line went over great at the FUNERAL. “Well, we’ve lost our beloved son, grandson, husband, soon-to-be father because he looked like the suspects (in that he was black, and that’s pretty much it)… but on the bright side, the police say he didn’t do anything to deserve this! What a relief!”

To be somewhat fair to the police, I think the family had asked them to specify in their news release that he was an innocent bystander – but still! This reminds me of the way they used to test women for witchcraft by weighting them down with stones and putting them in the water. If the women survived, they were guilty and sent to be hanged. If they drowned, well, at least their families could take consolation in the fact that they were innocent…

So sad – the kid was only 20 years old – and his wife was 7 months pregnant at the time. She’s due this month.

Terrorism That’s Personal – NYTimes.com.

“Since 1994, Ms. Bukhari has documented 7,800 cases of women who were deliberately burned, scalded or subjected to acid attacks, just in the Islamabad area. In only 2 percent of those cases was anyone convicted.”

This NY Times article highlights the prevalence of acid and burning attacks against women in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other countries where women are viewed as inferior to men. It’s disgusting that these men are getting away with these acts 98% of the time. Absolutely disgusting.

Watch the video. You need to watch the video.

Cash-strapped teacher sells ads on tests – CNN.com.

It’s sad that it had to come to this… but hey, the guy is smart! Here’s hoping this doesn’t become a permanent fix.

Transcript: Brad Pitt on movies, family and New Orleans – CNN.com.

Gotta love the Jolie-Pitt family…

Israel buries victims of Mumbai terror attacks – CNN.com.

That poor little boy. He’s already lost a brother. His other brother is going to die. And his parents are gone. The poor kid’s second birthday was the day after the attacks, so he’ll never even get the chance to enjoy his birthdays without a dark cloud of memory cast over them.

you thought we wouldn’t notice » Blog Archive » Rosamond the Strange.

Iiiiinteresting.

Oldest Ever Lolcat Found gasp Iz From Teh 1905.

The differences are clear. Proper grammar and a more formal tone was in vogue back then. But the similarities to modern-day kitten struggles and lolcats are amazing. ALL CAPS is still cool, but most importantly, she also no can has cheezburger. More than a hundred years later, all that’s changed is the spelling.

It’s official: We’ve been in a recession for a full year now.

This, from the National Institute of DUH!

Of course, it’s good to know that this isn’t all in our heads… you know, like some sort of mental recession by a nation of whiners…

Pam’s House Blend:: Shopping With My Pink Dollars…How Much Research Do I Need To Do?.

Shopping with my pink dollars in a way that rewards businesses that have progressive policies for their trans employees apparently is going to take a lot of effort on my part. I believe after watching Milk on T-Day night, I believe it’s incredibly important to reward the businesses that support people like me the most.

Turns out the company she was looking at was doing the BARE minimum to get a 100% rating from HRC – and it wasn’t very much. I don’t think anybody should be surprised that HRC isn’t going to provide a sufficient measure for trans-friendly businesses… considering they’re not particularly trans-friendly themselves. 😛

As for anybody who would criticize and claim we’re “blacklisting” companies for their beliefs? Guess what? You people have been doing this for YYEEEEEEAARS. Just ask the American Family Association, which has browbeaten countless corporations into repealing their support for LGBT causes or pulling their advertising from gay-friendly TV programming, and which has organized multiple boycotts of companies which simply committed the heinous crime of offering domestic partnership benefits to its employees. OH NOES – EQUALITY! Punish! Punish! Kill! Kill!

Deal with it. It’s a taste of your own damned medicine.

Armed Teams Sowed Chaos With Precision – NYTimes.com.

Utter insanity. How easily could this happen here in the States?

Wal-Mart death preventable, union says – CNN.com.

Well, yeah. A lot of the bad things that happen at (and because of) Wal-Mart are preventable. The problem is that they never bother to make the effort to prevent them. They have so much money that they simply do not care. So they pay $1 or $2 million to the family who lost a loved one. It might have cost them $3 or $4 million to hire extra people and arrange for crowd control and barriers in all of their stores. Hey, in their eyes, they probably see this death as a bargain. A rolled-back price, if you will…

Seth Grahame-Smith: Should Adopted Children be Allowed to Say “Mommy” and “Daddy?”.

An idea lost on fanatics – Los Angeles Times.

The brittle, fanatic minds that could countenance something like the Mumbai massacre are well armored against real-world complexities, like irony and paradox. If they were not, they might have realized that they could not have found a more confounding target for their hatred of Jews than one of the thousands of houses around the world operated by the Chabad Lubavitch movement for which Holtzberg and his wife served as emissaries. The facility they ran is really an observant Jewish version of the old-fashioned settlement houses, a place that simply was there to educate and to help.

Worker dies in Black Friday store rush – 11/29/08 – New York News and Tri-State News – 7online.com.

"This incident was avoidable," said Bruce Both, President of United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 1500. "Where were the safety barriers? Where was security? How did store management not see dangerous numbers of customers barreling down on the store in such an unsafe manner?" asked President Both. "This is not just tragic; it rises to a level of blatant irresponsibility by Wal-Mart. UFCW Local 1500 will demand a full investigation by all levels of Government to ensure both justice for the surviving family members and to ensure the safety of current employees and the general public. This can never be allowed to happen again and those responsible must be held accountable," Both concluded.

Amen!

Oh, and here’s another fun detail from this article – remember how I said Wal-Mart finally did something right by closing the store for the day after the employee was killed?

They re-opened around 1PM that same day. They re-opened hours later, after making the announcement to all the newsmedia that they were closing for the day because of what happened.

Reminds me of the time Wal-Mart got a huge amount of flak for selling The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion categorized as a Social Sciences book on their website, with a caption about how if this book is true, it sure sheds some light on current world situations. “If this book is true”???? It’s a known forgery! This is common knowledge! FUCKING BASTARDS. Can you imagine? It’s like selling Mein Kampf and marketing it as “one man’s heroic struggle.” I was one of the people who sent them a nasty letter.

So anyway, after they got called out on this ridiculous situation, they issued a press release apologizing for the mistake and announced that they would no longer be selling this book.

In English.

Well, no. The press release certainly didn’t make that little stipulation. But a week after they removed the book from their website, I searched their website and discovered that the book was still being sold in Spanish! Oops.

So yeah. They reopened the store a few hours later. Disgusting, but no surprises there. That’s Wal-Mart.

This story just makes me sick. A Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death as the store opened and the crowd literally broke down the stores surging into the store.

I heard about this while waiting in line at Kohl’s earlier today with a friend and some relatives. People were griping about the long wait, and talking about how crazy it was that the line was sooooo long. One lady mentioned something about a stampede at another store, and a bunch of other people chimed in, adding that an employee at that other store was killed and a pregnant lady was injured and might be having a miscarriage. (Thankfully the pregnant woman who was injured did not have a miscarriage; the news article says her baby will be fine). I remarked that that at the very least, hearing this story made waiting 1.5 hours in line to check out seem pretty darned nice.

When one guy mentioned that the store in question was Wal-Mart, I quietly muttered, “Well. That’s Wal-Mart.” One of my relatives overheard this and was like, “Oh, I know you don’t like Wal-Mart, but you can’t blame this on them too!!” I pointed out that it was their responsibility to manage crowds and hire extra security, because crowds certainly can’t manage themselves – and the people around us in line started chipping in about how dangerous Wal-Mart parking lots are, and how they don’t really invest in security anyway, and how they understaff their stores, and all the stuff that I am always wishing more people knew about. I was impressed.

Seriously, people – the story makes me sick. What really kills me is that when the store finally did something RIGHT by shutting down for the day, after the employee had been murdered by careless and selfish shoppers, this same crowd actually got angry at the store for closing. They were indignant, insisting that they deserved their discounts after waiting in line since 5AM.

These people KILLED a man, and simply did not seem to care.

Meanwhile, wouldn’t it have been worth a little extra money for Wal-Mart to fucking hire some crowd management staff, when they know damned well that they’re going to have a crowd like this? Rabid shoppers are not exactly a new phenomenon, especially on major “shopping holidays.” But God forbid a Wal-Mart should be adequately staffed… Oh no. Their feigning surprise at this incident is like John McCain going, “Good heavens! Who knew sub-prime lending would lead to economic collapse??? If only we had known, we could have prevented this crisis…”

Honestly. I wish they could be held accountable for what they did. The store, the crowd, the decision-makers. I wish every person whose foot touched this man, or who deliberately jostled somebody into somebody else into somebody else whose foot touched this man, could share a little bit in the punishment for his completely unnecessary death. I wish the store could be held accountable for failing to provide adequate crowd control mechanisms.

But of course, nobody will be held accountable. Oh, people will be criticized, but nobody will really be punished for this. Ah, America and its consumer-driven mob mentality.

2,700-year-old marijuana stash found | Weird | News | Toronto Sun.

UPDATE: Mumbai-Based Rabbi and Wife Killed in Terrorist Attacks – Stories – Chabad-Lubavitch News.

Wow. They were so young. I was so relieved to hear that their child made it out safely – but this is so sad. I mean, I’m sad for everybody who lost their lives these past few days (including that poor Walmart employee who got trampled by a mob of overeager shoppers) – but somehow it hits home when it’s people you could easily know, even if you don’t. You know?