Don’t be sad, Paul saw this coming.

News/Politics

Paul the Octopus: Famed psychic cephalopod is dead. Luckily, he’s also delicious.

Iran: Loading fuel into a nuclear reactor for the first time, Iran takes another step toward getting bombed.

Saturday, October 30, 2010 - 12:00pm - 3:00pm
The Village Lantern, 167 Bleecker Street (between Thompson and Sullivan)

For New Yorkers who can't get to Washington DC for Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity and Stephen Colbert's March to Keep Fear Alive, you can still show your solidarity for the cause at the Village Lantern in Manhattan, sponsored by dagblog.com.

“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

If there has been one phrase reverberating across the United States the past decade or so, it’s that “Freedom isn’t Free.” So why is Freedom of Religion free?

As conservatives and liberals alike fret over the current U.S. deficit, Republicans have made it clear that they believe any new taxes would stifle growth and hurt business both large and small. But religion is not a business.

November 8, 1994. It was a slaughter. In one night, Republicans seized 54 seats in the House and eight seats in the Senate, capturing Congress for the first time since 1954.

The newcomers, many from the South, were predominantly white, male and angry. "You're going to have a difference in style," predicted an Atlanta-based Republican pollster. "With the Southern Republicans, you get a more aggressive, assertive conservatism. This is a conservatism that has been built on confronting Democrats and liberals, not accommodating them."

Conservative leaders credited Rush Limbaugh, king of angry white men, with propelling the Republican revolution. "He was the standard by which we ran," said former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, invited Limbaugh to deliver the keynote at its orientation for new lawmakers. Limbaugh encouraged the newcomers to stay mean: "This is not the time to get moderate. This is not the time to start trying to be liked."

Read the rest of the article at CNN.com

Lori Klausutis was a 28-year old woman. A wife & daughter. She ran marathons. She loved & was loved. She died July 20, 2001.

Make Monday Manic.

OK, say you're leading a religious flock in a city characterized by gun violence. This is what you read almost every day:

Hello readers. At 4:30pm EST Michelangelo Signorile will interview me on Sirius Satellite Radio Channel 109 OutQ about my book, Blowing Smoke: Why the Right Keeps Serving Up Whack-Job Fantasies about the Plot to Euthanize Grandma, Outlaw Christmas, and Turn Junior into a Raging Homosexual.

If you'd like to listen but don't subscribe to Sirius, you can get a free 7-day pass to listen online.

I've posted about the housing and mortgage crisis, and the impending dangers, here and here, but there's one additional problem that I hadn't got my head around when I wrote those posts. That's the tranche problem, which is likely to lead to all kinds of perverse incentives and unforeseen difficulties.

Guess which side is winning this particular war?

Wolfrum's Word

You aren't supposed to talk about this, but the U.S. is seriously mired in Class Warfare, and has been for a long, long time. And the upper class is just plain kicking the crap out of the lower classes. Perhaps it's time to stop ignoring the raging war around us.

I didn’t have internet service at my house this week. There was nothing wrong with the service. I paid the bill and magical signals were coming through the cables hanging high up above the street. I say magical because I don’t understand the ins and outs of how I can sit down on my couch in Jakarta and communicate with people all over the world through invisible electrical impulses. What’s more, I don’t really care how it works, just that it does. And when it fails, I get the tiniest bit cranky. 

I just returned from a rally on Federal Hill Park to reelect Governor Martin O'Malley and the MD Democratic ticket. The rally was advertised to start at 3:00 PM, but I got there about 4:30 and some fellow told me that only Kratovil, Kamenetz and a few others had spoken already.