Mitt Romney’s $250 million fortune is largely a black hole: Aside from the meager and vague disclosures he has filed under federal and Massachusetts laws, and the two years of partial tax returns (one filed and another provisional) he has released, there is almost no data on precisely what his vast holdings consist of, or what vehicles he has used to escape taxes on his income. Gawker has obtained a massive cache of confidential financial documents that shed a great deal of light on those finances, and on the tax-dodging tricks available to the hyper-rich that he has used to keep his effective tax rate at roughly 13% over the last decade.
Rep. Todd Akin, whom a majority of Missouri Republicans want representing them in the U.S. Senate, has the tortured logic of an Inquisitor during the witch trials. If you float, you’re a witch and we’ll burn you. If you drown, you weren’t a witch, but you’re still dead. If you find yourself knocked up from your “legitimate rape” then you must have enjoyed it or asked for it or or you weren’t scared enough or your skirt was too short, hence you weren’t really raped. If you were raped and you’re not pregnant, well then, by golly, you were raped and God has protected you – he loves you enough to not let you become pregnant, but not enough to stop the rape, you witch slut.
The only thing The Akin is sorry for is that he spewed his twisted logic too soon. After all, this souless cretin was LEADING IN THE POLLS. All he had to do was not let the proverbial cat out of the bag and the smart, informed, good hearted people of Missouri would have voted him back in. Like those reality-seeing sunglasses in “They Live”, the Witchfinder Akin showed his hand – and the gnarled, bloody hand of today’s Republican Party. And since his views are basically the GOP’s bro-crush Paul Ryan’s views, the wingnutbags will never forgive him. Hopefully the psychopath will stay in the race, so his name can be hung around the GOP’s neck like a rotting albatross from now until November, because he is merely the latest canary in a coalmine of crazy.
Respectfully, could Pro-Choicers please stop bellowing about exemptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother? When we do that, it adds legitimatization to the anti-choice position that personhood begins at conception. These “exceptions” do not need to be arrived at for humanitarian reasons when out position is that a fertilized egg is not a person; a blastocyst is not a baby, and that up to the point of viability outside the womb, when the fetus is no longer attached to the body of another human being, a woman should have the unrestricted right to make whatever the hell decision she wants. Nature already provides a nice clean line for the matter. It’s called birth.
photo: Vincent Price as The Conqueror Worm
from gawker:
Several Stores Sell Alcohol to Teen Carrying Fake ID Card with Photo of Bobby from King of the Hill
Six out of twenty-two stores tested by Nottinghamshire’s County Council during a recent undercover operation reportedly allowed an underage customer to purchase alcohol with a fake ID.
That wouldn’t be so bad, if it weren’t for the fact that the ID clearly belonged to one Bobby Hill — a fictitious, animated character from the TV show King of the Hill.
Oh, and also the fact that it listed the holder’s age as 17. In addition to the stores that let the fake ID slide, an additional seven didn’t even bother checking the teen’s age (which was, in actuality, 18).
“It is disappointing that around a quarter of the shops tested did not properly check the identification that they asked for before accepting it,” said community safety committee chairman Mick Murphy. “We are warning shops that we are considering using a child with fake ID following the results of this exercise.”
Bobby Hill can legally vote in the great State of PA, but my dad can’t!
remember these guys? they died so you can vote, just like jesus.
Ever wonder what’s it like to live a life so driven by greed, power and self-interest that you’d openly cheat in the hopes that people will be so complaisant as to not even try to fight it? Enter the Orwellian weasel-fuckers that call themselves the GOP. Republicans enacting desperate restrictive election laws proves one thing: the party has reached a spoken, internal consensus that it must cheat in order to win.
The very idea that even Republicans would stoop to such embarrassing machinations, that make a mockery of our democracy, that devalue the freedom of speech, the freedom of religion and the right to assemble, is so perverse it is hard to wrap my head around. What could be more un-American than the desire to exclude as many people and silence as many voices as possible?
Here is an unphotoshopped, completely legal photograph of Romney and pals waving around blood-soaked-death-squad-dollars in celebration of Bain’s initial funding via Salvadoran war criminals. When asked about the picture, Mitt responded that it was just a bunch of guys having fun and he remembered it “fondly.” Mitt fondly remembers all his Latin American death squad friends and hopes that maybe it will counter Team Romney’s admission that Romneycare prevented poor folks in Massachuste from dying, and his bloodthirsty base can heave a sigh of relief.
Romney and his partners had struggled to raise funds from traditional sources, so they met with some unsavory Central American oligarchs looking for new investment vehicles as turmoil engulfed their region. Romney was rightfully concerned that the oligarchs money might be traced back to “illegal drug money, right-wing death squads, or left-wing terrorism”. But, pressed for capital, Mitts forgot to be concerned and flew to Miami in 1984 to meet with the Salvadorans at a local bank. Some of these were members of wealthy, prominent Central American families who were financing “Death Squads” in El Salvodor’s civil war.
THE FEAR OF MEN
The rise of women. And the whining of boys.
by Jaydi Samuels
@jesscallmejaydi
Because Jerry Lewis, the late Christopher Hitchens, Two and a Half Men co-creator Lee Aronsohn, and Adam Carolla not getting it wasn’t enough, Esquire columnist Stephen Marche has decided to join the conversation on women in comedy. For those new to the discussion, the underlying argument (as presented by Marche) is twofold: 1) Expressing contempt for the male gender is rarely funny, and 2) As a whole, women are not as funny as men. Before I point out the fallacy in this logic or judge Marche’s unabashed ignorance, I should admit that I, too, once shared these sentiments. But the more these men spoke out, the more I was forced to weigh the verisimilitude of it all, and my shameful acquiescence quickly transformed into awareness. Men are not funnier than women; we are just funny in a different way than they are, and we have finally stopped suppressing our differences.