Alan Grayson takes on critics ‘Occupy Wall Street’

Former Florida Congressman Alan Grayson appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher last night and presented a clear, articulate case for the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

Conservative humorist and former National Lampoon and Rolling Stone contributor PJ O’Rourke (and Maher himself) dismissed the protesters as a bunch of pot-smoking “hippies” who have no clear agenda and no idea what they’re talking about. Former Sarah Palin handler and GOP strategist Nicole Wallace seemed to mostly object to the protests on the grounds that there weren’t enough porta-potties provided, saying “We (Republicans) can do logistics”.

Grayson came to the demonstrators’ defense, “Let me tell what they’re talking about. They’re complaining about the fact the Wall Street wrecked the economy three years ago and nobody’s held responsible for that. Not a single person has been indicted or convicted for destroying twenty percent of our national net worth accumulated over two centuries.”

O’Rourke said that Grayson should take his shoes off, get a bongo drum, and “forget where to go to the bathroom”, and the role of spokesman for the demonstrators would be his.

Grayson responded, “If I am the spokesman for all the people who think we should not have twenty four million people in this country who can’t find a full time job. Who should not have fifty million people who can’t see a doctor when they’re sick. That we shouldn’t have forty seven million people of this country who need government help to feed themselves. We shouldn’t have fifteen million families who owe more on their mortgage than the value of home, OK, I’ll be that spokesman.”

Watch this video, embedded via Medaite, below:

GOP RESPONSE

Bill Maher: primer on how not to respond to accusations of racism

On Friday night’s episode of Real Time, host Bill Maher –in a segment reminiscent of our own primer on how not to respond to accusations of racism– pulled no punches in discussing the controversy surrounding the painted rock at Rick Perry’s “N*ggerhead Ranch.”

“If you find yourself prefacing more than half the things you say with ‘I’m not a racist, but …’ then you’re probably a racist.”

In a jab to the GOP, Maher added, “Overtly racist bullshit thinly painted over. Honestly, could anyone have written a better metaphor for the modern Republican party?”

Program to RIG ELECTION in 2012 MURDER SPIES AND VOTING LIES: The Clint Curtis Story

Murders Spies And Voting Lifes: The Clint Curtis Story is an incredible documentary which tells the story of a computer programmer who was contacted by a private company' with ties to convicted chinese spies, to write a program that could be used to rig elections...what follows is the breaking of a massive conspiracy in which there would be hard evidence of vote manipulation via electronic voting machines-whether using Curtis's program or the twenty year old bootloader hack which, as show by students at Princeton University, could be loaded onto any of these machines in less than a minute; the sketchy firing of two employees-one being Curtis himself- from the Florida Dept of Transportation; corrupt ties to leading members of Diebold-one of two companies responsible for vote counting in the US; and a dead Florida DOT investigator- Raymond Lemme RIP- who was privately investigating the claims made by Curtis...who conveniently commited suicide in Georgia, where autopsies are not done on suicide victims, as opposed to Florida where an autopsy would have been automatic. What really happened in 2000 to Al Gore and Ohio & Florida, and again in 2004.....now you can finally know the truth, and it ain't pretty! 7 parts








WATCH ALL SEVEN PARTS CLICK HERE

Senate Scheduled To Vote Today On Obama's Jobs Bill

The Senate today will vote on President Obama’s jobs package, NBC News' Libby Leist reports.

Donald Rumsfeld Loses it in Al Jazeera Interview- video

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld engaged in a heated exchange with an Al Jazeera reporter after he was questioned on the preparations taken before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. 

"You keep making assertions which are fundamentally false," said Rumsfeld in the interview. 

Al Jazeera's Abderrahim Foukara responded by saying, "correct me." 

"No one in the Pentagon said they [number of troops] were not enough, the president went around the room … we went back and forth with the commanders in Iraq and at CENTCOM asking them do they want additional forces and the answer was 'no,' " said Rumsfeld. 

Foukara's questions led to an increasingly tense back-and-forth between the reporter and former Defense secretary. 

"Now Mr. Secretary, seriously, just give me an answer," said Foukara. 

"What do you mean seriously? I'm being serious. This is worthless. This is not an interview, you're haranguing, that's what you're doing," responded Rumsfeld. 

This was the former secretary's first interview with the channel since 2004, according to Al Jazeera. The full Rumsfeld interview aired Tuesday, Oct. 4., on Al Jazeera Arabic.

Unabashed efforts to suppress voting rights

Citing false and exaggerated allegations of election fraud, many states have recently imposed new restrictions on voting that threaten to roll back the hard-won right of American citizens to participate in our Nation’s democratic processes.  Such restrictions could discourage or preventthousands or even millions of eligible citizens from registering and voting, including minorities, low-income persons, senior citizens, voters with disabilities, and students.  The Lawyers’ Committee has joined with other civil rights leaders and groups to speak out against these unabashed efforts to suppress voting rights.  To combat these efforts, we have developed anInteractive Map of Shame that illustrates the extent to which states have recently enacted voting restrictions and have widely disseminated the Map to decision-makers, community activists, and the media.   Stand with us and speak out now against voter suppression efforts! Now, North Carolina has joined the movement to disenfranchise eligible voters by proposing a purge of the state’s voter registration records.  North Carolina must obtain preclearance for this new procedure under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, and now is your chance to take a stand and tell the Justice Department to use its authority to deny preclearance.  The new procedure most directly impacts recently naturalized citizens who are seeking to participate in the democratic process by registering to vote and casting their ballots.  Rather than celebrating their determination and effort, North Carolina is implementing a faulty system that presumes that these individuals in fact were not citizens when they registered to vote.  This presumption is contrary to the data North Carolina itself has developed, and ignores the fact that thousands of North Carolina residents each year become naturalized citizens. Please join the Lawyers’ Committee in this fight against voter suppression and tell the Justice Department to disapprove North Carolina’s effort to restrict the right to vote!  Specifically, North Carolina is using flawed computer matching techniques to target newly registered voters who had previously obtained a driver’s license in the state but were not yet citizens.  The obvious problem is that there is a gap between North Carolina’s outdated DMV records and the voter registration rolls with up-to-date information on citizenship.  The state proposes that these new citizens targeted by the faulty system must show proof of citizenship, a requirement not asked of any other citizens in the state.  If the individuals do not respond, even if notice was not received because the state used an outdated address or made another mistake, the state will unjustly purge them from the registration rolls. The Voting Rights Act requires that North Carolina demonstrate that its new procedure does not have a discriminatory purpose and will not have a discriminatory effect.  The overwhelming majority of persons who will be subjected to the new purge procedure are African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans.  Because the new purge procedure will disproportionately impact minority voters protected by the Voting Rights Act, and the state has no justification for its presumption of non-citizenship, the Justice Department should deny preclearance because of the procedure’s discriminatory effect. Our right to vote is too important for us to allow these assaults to continue!  Legislators and election officials need to fix our election system and expand access to the ballot box, not enact unnecessary and unfair restrictions on the right to vote. Click here to submit a letter to the Justice Department urging them to deny preclearance to North Carolina, and to carefully scrutinize other voter suppression efforts as well. We greatly appreciate your assistance in the fight to preserve our voting rights. Sincerely, The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law

"The Top 1 Percent Are Taking In More Of The Nation’s Income Than At Any Other Time Since The 1920s

"The Top 1 Percent Are Taking In More Of The Nation’s Income Than At
Any Other Time Since The 1920s: Not only are the wealthiest 1 percent
of Americans taking home a tremendous portion of the national income,
but their share of this income is greater than at any other time since the
Great Depression..."

Source: CBPP calculations based on data from Piketty and Saenz

Minnesota Family Council sought LGBT criminalization before settling for banning gay marriage

The Minnesota Family Council (MFC) may have spent the last eight years pushing for the constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage that Minnesotans will vote on in November, but since its founding, the group has fought to uphold antiquated laws against homosexuality and sodomy that were often used against LGBT people.           

                                                                                               
Formed as Coalition of Concerned Christians
The Minnesota Family Council got its start in 1982 as a group of conservative Christians concerned that laws criminalizing gays and lesbians would be overturned.
“I believe we need to be true to our roots and let who we are grow out of that. The Berean League, as we were known, was founded locally by four people in 1982 as a ‘Coalition of Concerned Christians,’ former Chief Operating Officer of the Minnesota Family Council, Mike Christenson, told that organization’s newspaper, the Pro-Family News in 2001. ”This was in response to the very narrow defeat at the legislature of an attempt to repeal the Minnesota sodomy law.”
The effort to repeal the criminalization of homosexuality was supported by the Minnesota Council of Churches in 1982 . Amidst the perceived liberalism of mainstream Christianity in Minnesota, the Coalition of Concerned Christians was formed, which then blossomed into the Berean League.
Wendell and Roberta Brown were among the early founders and they joined the Rev. Morris Vaagenes of North Heights Lutheran Church in Roseville and former legislator Wayne Oloft to found the League. The foursome set out to block the planned repeal of sodomy laws and were successful; the repeal was narrowly defeated in the Minnesota Legislature in 1983.
Berean League’s literature painted gay people as diseased
The Berean League set up shop in St. Paul, where it published Roger J. Magnuson’s “Are Gay Rights Right?” a work that has been a staple of religious right groups for decades and has been discredited by civil rights groups.
The book, first published in 1985 and revamped in 1990 with a “special AIDs supplement,” contains chapters such as “What do homosexuals do?,” “Where do homosexuals do it?,” and “With whom does the homosexual do it?” The book collected the most extreme examples of sexual activity from pornography, police reports and research articles from before psychological organizations had rejected homosexuality as a mental illness, to paint gay men as diseased and psychologically deviant.
The book took advantage of the HIV epidemic in gay men to spur fears that “innocent” Americans may become infected.
Magnuson and his book played key roles in the 1992 Colorado ballot initiative that barred laws preventing discrimination against LGBT people. That initiative passed by the voters but was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1996.
In 1990, Dr. Ralph Blair of Evangelicals Concerned, reviewed Magnuson’s book, which argued that gay people weren’t discriminated against. Blair knocked down “outrageous statements” by Magnuson, such as that “one-fifth of all homosexuals admitted to having sexual contact, or at least masturbating, with animals.”
Blair condemned the false information in Magnuson’s book: ” These statements may remind one of segregationists’ warnings against racial “mongrelization,” appeals to Bible verses to support slavery, and papal decrees against sex with Jews and Protestants. How can a Christian write such a book? How can Christians buy into such a book?”

Read More.............

Christie Coulda' Been A Contender, Quinnipiac University National Poll Finds; Ran Neck And Neck With Romney, Obama

Confirming the ABC/WaPo poll from early this morning, Quinnipiac University released some very similar national numbers on the GOP Presidential primary: former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney back in the lead, with businessman Herman Cain a surprising second.

Romney gets 22 percent, Cain 17 and former national frontrunner Texas Gov. Rick Perry all the way down to third at 14 among the announced candidates. Quinnipiac also polled the race with NJ Gov. Chris Christie in the field, showing him in a first place tie with Romney at 17 percent each, Cain at 12 and Perry fourth at 10.

Breaking... South Carolina moves primary to Jan. 21

South Carolina Republicans will move their primary up to Jan. 21, making them the first domino to fall after Florida moved its date up to Jan. 31 last Friday, pushing the other early-voting states to schedule their dates even earlier in the month.
The state’s move will cost it half its delegates at the Republican National Convention because of Republican National Committee rules designed to keep the primary process from interfering with the holiday season. But South Carolina’s response is just the first that ensures this will not happen — Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada all plan to hold their primaries and caucuses before South Carolina's.
South Carolina Republican Party Chairman Chad Connelly slammed Florida for its move during his announcement of South Carolina’s move. “Forty nine states played pretty in the sandbox,” he said. “Only one did it wrong.”
“A nine-person committee brought chaos to the Republican nominating calendar,” said Connelly, attacking the 9-member Republican commission that moved the state’s primary. “Today, South Carolina restores order.”
Read the complete story here.