reposted from guardian

A man who hid a group of shoppers, one with a baby, in a basement cold storage room at the Hyper Cacher supermarket to shield them from the gunman has been hailed a hero.

Lassana Bathily, 24, a Muslim shop assistant originally from Mali, in west Africa, was praised for risking his own life to save those led to safety.

“When they came running down I opened the door of the fridge,” he told French TV. “Several came in with me. I turned off the light and the fridge. When I turned off the cold, I put them in. I closed the door. I told them to stay calm and I said ‘you stay quiet there, I’m going back out’.”

Police originally thought Bathily was a conspirator when he managed to escape through a goods lift. “They told me, ‘get down on the ground, hands over your head’. They cuffed me and held me for an hour and a half as if I was with them,” he added. Once freed he was able to give them details of the layout of the store and where people were hiding.

After the shootout he said that many of the customers he had helped came out and shook his hand. “When they got out, they thanked me,” he said.

Several people took to social media to call for him to be officially recognised for his bravery as news of his actions spread. One tweet said: “A true hero of the hostage crisis in the kosher grocery store yesterday.’

Another read “Lassana Bathily, Muslim worker at Paris kosher shop, hid people, incl. baby.” A photograph of Bathily, labelled Malian Muslim, has been retweeted around the world as a symbol of the good of some people in the face of terrorism.

One of those trapped in the cold store Johan Dorre, 36, a father of four, was able to call his uncle and say he was trapped two floors below the ground floor. Another uncle, Jacob Katorza, said: “Johan and the others were terrified that they would be discovered by the terrorists and were forced to huddle together like frightened animals to avoid hypothermia.”

IN 2014, Barack Hussein Obama took literally ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND vacation days, on top of the Dome of the Rock, and in Mecca, where he whiled away his days in luau costume, making poi from the blood of the children of Republican donors. He signed 3500 bills into law using a secret magic pen and without reading any of them. As a result, abortion is now legal everywhere for everyone EXCEPT rape victims, who are forced to bear their doomchildren and use Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann as doulas. Also, all the roads in Real Amurka must be paved with candy and Mountain Dew so that even your stupid bloated SUV gets Type II diabetes. Happy New Year, fuckfaces. Those of you unfortunate enough to live in places like Colorado, please enjoy being frozen in 17 degree below temps and buried by a blanket of poison snow. Remember, in the upcoming year, to take personal responsibility, and don’t expect government-paid union thugs to come fight your battles.

I always picture him sleeping upside down, like a bat.

“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,’ returned the nephew. ‘Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round -apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that- as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”
Fred Scrooge ― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

In my mom’s basement I found a rubbermaid tub labeled “Kara/Phillies”. Here are the contents:

[click to continue…]

“Amidst the fragility of this politically correct era, it is imperative that we stand up for our beliefs before the element of faith in a glorious and traditional holiday like Christmas is marginalized and ignored,” Palin said in a statement released through her publisher. “This will be a fun, festive, thought provoking book, which will encourage all to see what is possible when we unite in defense of our faith and ignore the politically correct Scrooges who would rather take Christ out of Christmas.”

That nonsense is straight from Sarah Palin’s 2013 Christmas book, “GOOD TIDINGS AND GREAT JOY”; Protecting the Heart of Christmas It was in the bargain bin at Barnes and Noble tonight and no, I didn’t buy it, but I did take a copy with me to the children’s reading corner (I had on a rain hoodie pulled tight around my chin), and furiously scribble down some choice passages. Sarah Palin managed to take topic that has been so over done, so is so tired and be-troped,.and make it even stupider, in a grfity, a maniacal effort to appeal to the panic-stricken, self-pitying element of stupid white people upset about the blah President. According to the Griftess, this book is not an “in-your-face political lecture,” but there is a War on Christmas – a campaign to un-sanctify the second-most important holiday in the Christian religion - and of course the Reason for the Season is making moneys.

The book blathers on about the “scrooges” who are trying to keep explicitly Christian language from having pride of place in civic life in this country. Mooselini also shares “personal memories and traditions from her own Christmases and illustrate the reasons why the celebration of Jesus Christ’s nativity is the centerpiece of her faith.” She argle bargles on about how we should all keep Christ in Christmas, even if we aren’t necessarily Christians.

“What we believe in is freedom of expressing our faith and what our beliefs are, not allowing just a few angry atheists with attorneys perhaps to tell us that we can’t celebrate the birth of Christ the way that we would like to. And it’s not an in-your-face political lecture, it’s a fun book that incorporates the solution to the challenge that is a war on Christmas that we see taking place right now. [...]we have recipes in there, and we have just a lot of fun things that hopefully will spark some inspiration in other people to allow them, no matter what faith anyone is, but allow them some Christmas joy to spread…”

Go, Sarah!! Everybody knows that Christmas is a totally real, not-made-up-by-Hallmark holiday. Jesus was born on December 25th, Year Zero, and there were pine trees and holly and eggnog and snow in the Middle East, for some reason, while blonde-haired, blue-eyed, English-speaking shepherds carried AR-15s. And Santa blessed everything and lo, it became fact.