Mitt Romney is keeping his focus on the economy and encouraged young people to “take risks” to deal with a tough job market, even if it meant borrowing money from their parents, reports the New York Daily News. At a speech at Otterbein University in Ohio, Romney talked about how the owner of sandwich chain Jimmy John’s got started by borrowing $20,000 from his father.
[TRIGGER WARNING: RAPE] Paul Ryan Said Something That Should Force Him Off the Ticket, But You Probably Didn't Hear About It →
Last week, Paul Ryan gave an interview in which, defending his position that there should be no excuses for abortion, he referred to rape as a “method of conception.”
Wow, right? Talk about a benign euphemism. Rape —RAPE! — is now a “method of conception.” You know, like love-making, just without the love.
There could be no greater testament to the utter abdication of responsibility by what passes for a “news” media in America in 2012 than that, despite the grotesquerie of this cavalierly callous comment, chances are better than good that this is the first you’re hearing of it.
Here, watch it — and try to figure out why this has gotten NO MAINSTREAM MEDIA play (not even here at the Huffington Post) despite it being, to my mind, a far more offensive remark than Todd Akin’s imbecilic blurt of last weekend. What, are we tired of stupid remarks about rape now, so Ryan gets a free pass?
Given the demands for Akin’s resignation from a mere Senate race when his musings on “legitimate rape” were publicized, what do you imagine the reaction would be if people were as familiar with VP wannabe Ryan’s stunning statement? Might there be a cacophony of outrage? Might there be calls for his resignation from the ticket? Might there be a focus on how fundamentally oblivious these people who would make our laws are to not just women’s but humans’ rights and dignity? Sure, there might, but then of course people would have to have heard about it.
According to the man who would be the proverbial heartbeat away from the White House, and who in any event would — given Romney’s utter hollowness — have an inordinate influence on the judicial appointments that will determine how much freedom our children get to live under, RAPE = “METHOD OF CONCEPTION.” And yet, unless you’re a frequenter of one of a dozen or so lefty blogs — or my friend on Facebook — you probably knew nothing about it.
I truly despair for the country my 14-year-old daughter is inheriting. That a remark this intensely revealing of the danger posed by this ticket can go basically unreported is as nauseating to me as the quote itself.
YOU awesome readers heard about, because I love you enough to keep you in the loop. I don’t know what the rest of the media is doing with their time.
this deserves ten million notes.
Part one of a really fantastic, moving documentary about Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants and anarchists who were executed for murder on August 23rd, 1927 following a highly biased trial.
In the prologue, Bane impressively commandeers a plane, kills several CIA agents, and kidnaps a man for reasons I almost but didn’t quite catch. (It would help to be able to read his lips, but he has none.) Then Bane pretends to be a modern French Revolutionary type, smashing up the Stock Exchange and exhorting the people of Gotham City (once he has effectively imprisoned them) to seize the assets of the wealthy and redistribute them. Master thief Selina Kyle, a.k.a. the Catwoman (Anne Hathaway), makes a lot of class-warfare noises, too. (“There’s a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches, ‘cause when it hits, you’re all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.”) Given that Selina seems a decent sort — another in a line of witty, long-limbed female warriors that movies have recently given us — we wait for her to throw in her lot with the law-and-order types.
Are Nolan’s politics moving in an elitist direction? Batman was always, as comics writer Grant Morrison puts it in his trenchant analysis/memoir Supergods, “the ultimate capitalist hero … a millionaire who vented his childlike fury on the criminal classes of the lower orders” and “the defender of privilege and hierarchy.” But given the timing, The Dark Knight Rises effectively portrays Occupy Wall Street as an engine of supervillains to enlist a lot of envious dupes. (Nolan and his cameras poked around lower Manhattan at the height of the protests.) You come away with the notion that the ruling class might have its peccadilloes (fraud, systemic racism, etc.) but, as the Times’ David Brooks might say, it does put a premium on citizenship.
If you think this is too much emphasis on politics and philosophy when Batman is, after all, a comic-book superhero, you’re not crediting Nolan’s seriousness. God, he’s serious — it’s a wonder the Dark Knight rises at all under the weight of its themes.
— from David Edelstein’s review of The Dark Knight Rises
White Americans who live in proximity to large numbers of Latinos tend to have more conservative views. All else equal, whites living in zip codes with larger Latino populations are less likely to want the federal government to reduce income inequality, less likely to seek increased spending on health care for the poor, less likely to want to do more to cover the uninsured, and almost significantly less likely…to view poverty as a serious problem. This implication of this set of findings is an important once. Latino context is now shaping core policy concerns of the American public. And it is doing so in a way that mirrors the negative reactions that have often faced the African American community in the past. In contexts where Latinos are prominent (and perhaps threatening), whites tend to be eager to reduce services and expenditures that benefit the bottom rungs of society.
— Zoltan Hajnal et al., “Immigration and the Political Transformation of White America: How Local Immigrant Context Shapes White Policy Views and Partisanship,” University of California, San Diego Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, International Migration Conference, March 12, 2010 (via verycunninglinguist)
“Legislators, you’ve done nothing if your laws do not aim to diminish the extreme inequality of fortunes.” - M.R. (Maximilien Robespierre)
I want this banner, and/or to marry whoever made it.
Romney: Borrow Money From Your Parents →
“We’ve always encouraged young people: Take a shot, go for it. Take a risk, get the education, borrow money if you have to from your parents, start a business,” Romney said.
Democratic activists quickly pounced on the remark as another example of how the presumptive Republican nominee is out of touch.
“Only someone who paid for college by selling stock given to him by his CEO father would just casually assume students could go borrow $20,000 from their parents to deal with the economic challenges they face,” a spokesman for the Center for American Progress Action Fund tells the Associated Press.
At a roundtable discussion with seven students, Romney noted engineering majors were in high demand and wondered whether students would have chosen their areas of study differently if they had been clearly told about job prospects.
“You really don’t want to take out $150,000 loan to go into English because you’re not going to be able to pay it back. You might want to think about something else that meets your interest,” Romney said, noting that “as an English major I can say this,” reports ABC News. Romney graduated with an English degree from Brigham Young University and later went on to study law and business at Harvard.
Romney’s speech was part of an effort by his campaign to continue focusing on the economy even as President Obama tries to shift focus to other issues, including national security, points out Reuters.
LOL BECAUSE EVERYONE HAS PARENTS WHO CAN JUST LOAN THEM $20,000 ~LIKE THAT~.
God, I hate this rich, presumptive snob.
House GOP triples budget to fight same-sex marriage
- $1.5 million in funding to prevent gays from marrying source
» Don’t forget, this is taxpayer money, allocated by House Republicans to their legal counsel to defend DOMA in court. It was originally capped at $500,000, but that limit has since been tripled.
keeping the tags
Fuck the GOP. I just can’t even… fuck them so hard.
#OccupyManchester. More than 20,000 people are currently taking part in the protests against Britain’s Tory Party and massive government spending cuts. The pictures above are from Twitter users @Marvscouncil and @RichardSearle of protests in Albert Square. The hashtags being used for this are #OccupyManchester #OccupyMCR #antitorymarch #oct2demo.
Thanks to Tumblr user revolutiontrainee for alerting me to this.
“Excuse me,” she said to a man in a tan raincoat. “Would you like a copy of The Occupied Wall Street Journal?”
Source: 
Iran’s fraudulent 2009 elections were a critical moment…for it was then that Iranians realized how polarized their country had become. The hopelessness of Iranians is…palpably there—in the hardening of people and the decay of public manners, and in the cynicism of friends who used to be unfailingly optimistic… Some of the country’s brightest activists, journalists, and filmmakers have been silenced or gone into exile. Bloggers and pop musicians operate in a penumbra of semi-illegality…Asghar Farhadi’s film Nader and Simin: A Separation, is a fine account of Iran’s predicament; anyone interested in the mysteries of change and tradition—the difficulties faced by many people as they try and reconcile themselves to modern values and norms—will learn much from it.
more.
I want to see this.
After decades and decades and decades of feminists burning their bras, saying, ‘Make more money than men, do this, run over men, have sex like a man, tell your man what to do, don’t let them open the door –’ you’re not happy with the product, are ya ladies? A lot of them are older, they’re not married, and they’re not getting you-know-what.
—
Fox News’ Andrea Tantaros, discussing men paying for dinner on The Five.
Andrea Tantaros can thank a feminist for her public sphere job with that mouth.
(via reallyfoxnews)
Have these people ever actually read anything in their lives, or do they have too much trouble fitting books far enough up their asses to reach their heads?
(via swimmingdirigibles)
Wow. What a fuckwit.
(via coquifroggy)
Page 1 of 2
