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PM of Texas asks for international help

This is pretty interesting:

"Gov. Prime Minister Rick Perry Saturday asked the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for 37,430 courses of antiviral medications from the Strategic National Stockpile (of the United States of America) as a precaution after three cases of swine flu were confirmed in (the newly sovereign country of) Texas. "

I hope this makes Texans think a little harder about secession, but I doubt it.

"Tent City" Rapidly Growing in Sacramento - and other cities

In a country with a record level of empty housing, this is pretty surreal:

What's wrong with America: Part 3,596

The food development team spent a year creating two breakfast sandwiches for the pairings. Although the eggs and cheese are mixed in huge vats, poured into tins, baked, frozen and shipped to distribution centers to be assembled, they wanted them to look freshly made to appeal to people who do not like fast-food outlets.

Sounds dee-lish.

"It's Hell in Here"

Ceremony

Happy New Year

It's a beautiful world we live in...

Americans love them their guns:

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Bernie Conatser has never seen business this good.

The owner of a gun shop in the Washington suburb of Manassas, Virginia, Conatser said sales have doubled or tripled the numbers he racked up in late October. Saturday, he said, he did as much business as he would normally do in a week.

"I have been in business for 12 years, and I was here for Y2K, September 11th, Katrina," Conatser said as a steady stream of customers browsed what remained of his stock. "And all of those were big events, and we did notice a spike in business, but nothing on the order of what we are seeing right now."

Weapons dealers in much of the United States are reporting sharply higher sales since Barack Obama won the presidency a week ago. Buyers and sellers attribute the surge to worries that Obama and a Democratic-controlled Congress will move to restrict firearm ownership, despite the insistence of campaign aides that the president-elect supports gun rights and considers the issue a low priority.

According to FBI figures for the week of November 3-9, the bureau received more than 374,000 requests for background checks on gun purchasers — a nearly 49 percent increase over the same period in 2007. Conatser said his store, Virginia Arms Company, has run out of some models — such as the AR-15 rifle, the civilian version of the military's M-16 — and is running low on others.

Such assault weapons are among the firearms that gun dealers and customers say they fear Obama will hit with new restrictions, or even take off the market.

Virginia gun owner Kyle Lewandowski said he was buying a .45-caliber pistol to "hedge my bets."

"Every election year, you have to worry about your rights being eroded a little bit at a time," he said. But he added, "I also knew, because of the Democrat majority and because of the election, everybody would have the same reaction I did."

Dealers in Colorado, Ohio, Connecticut and New Hampshire also reported seeing major increases.

"It's a fact that the liberal Democrats that now control all three branches of our government do not like guns. They want us out of business," Connecticut resident Scott Hoffman said. "They don't want the average American to have a right to defend themselves."

And New Hampshire gun owner Lloyd Clement said, "I think there's going to be an attack to some degree on the gun owners."

The Clinton administration imposed a ban on several types of military-style semi-automatic rifles and high-capacity magazines in 1994, but that ban was allowed to lapse in 2004. Obama has proposed restoring the ban, requiring background checks for buyers at gun shows and other "common-sense
measures."

He has said he supports the rights of local governments to set their own gun laws, but believes the Second Amendment to the Constitution protects individual gun rights.

"I believe the Second Amendment means something. I do think it speaks to an individual right," Obama said in Milwaukee in February.

With the U.S. economy in a tailspin, however, the president-elect's advisers say gun legislation is not a high priority.

"What people do is their own business, and if they decide to go out and buy guns they'll go out and buy guns, assuming that they are eligible to buy guns," John Podesta, the co-chairman of Obama's transition team, told reporters Sunday. "But I think that President-elect Obama has been clear in his campaign that what he wants to focus on is the economy, trying to get jobs growing again, dealing with the health care crisis, and dealing with our dependence on foreign oil."

Some customers specifically are stocking up on ammunition and point to concerns raised by the National Rifle Association, which ran anti-Obama ads during the campaign. The NRA said Obama would support a "huge new tax on my guns and ammo," referencing a 1999 article in a Chicago newspaper saying the then-Illinois state senator promoted a plan to increase federal taxes by 500 percent on the sales of firearms and ammunition.

But as a state legislator, Obama would not have had any control over federal taxes. And as a U.S. senator and presidential candidate, he has not introduced or promoted such a proposal.

"I don't really believe it is fear. It is more there is just uncertainty," said Virginia customer David Reynolds, who was buying ammunition in the store as well as ordering more online. "You know, we don't really know what is going on. There really hasn't been a lot of clear direction on where he
supports it, although he says he supports the Second Amendment. But it just remains to be seen. I think some people are just uncomfortable with what his policy may be."

Religion

I just don't get it. Here is some video from what appears to me to be the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The AP description says this:

"Israeli police rushed into one of Christianity's holiest churches Sunday and arrested two clergyman after an argument between monks erupted into a brawl next to the site of Jesus' tomb."

Its just frikkin unreal

It was GEORGE BUSH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! JFC - these people should be arrested.

Jesusland shrinking

Jesusland got a little smaller this year.

Although I still have a hard time getting my head around the fact that 50 million people voted for McCain.

Fired up - ready to go

This better be a goddamn landslide...

Sarah the Socialist

For her part, Sarah Palin, who has lately taken to calling Obama “Barack the Wealth Spreader,” seems to be something of a suspect character herself. She is, at the very least, a fellow-traveller of what might be called socialism with an Alaskan face. The state that she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds finance the government’s activities and enable it to issue a four-figure annual check to every man, woman, and child in the state. One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year’s check, bringing the per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” Perhaps there is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and sharing it (“collectively,” no less), but finding it would require the analytic skills of Karl the Marxist.

I haven no problems with this set up. I applaud it. This issue is the right blantanly lying about Obama.

I mean WTF?!!?!?!

Where did they find her:

It is embarrassing that a US Senator has to sit still and answer this drivel. He should have got up and left.

I sent and email to Josh Marshall earlier:

"Can someone please bring up the point that the current administration, flailing around to stem this financial crisis, are the ones actually investing US government funds into the private sector (i.e. Socialism)? In perhaps Obama's lone gaffe of the campaign (if you can even call it that!), telling Joe The Plumber that he wanted to "spread the wealth" a little - the right wing noise machine has been able to label him a socialist? While Paulson, Bernanke, and Bush are actually committing US funds in unprecedented ways into the private sector, to sit here and have to read over and over how Obama is a socialist is just too much to take! We (the US) now own AIG - we forced 25 billion down JPMorgan's throat that they are now sitting on - we are buying commerial paper from GE - I mean, WTF?!?
I can still hear Bush extolling Iraqi citizens not to destroy any oil infrasrtucture on the night of "Shock and Awe" - how that all belonged to the people of Iraq. I sat there that night thinking that George Bush was a socialist - and wondering where my check was from the oil fields of Texas."

That is socialism. Wanting to raise taxed on people making over 250k a year (who have steadily had their taxed cut for decades!) isn't. The right is deluding itself.

Wassup

I think I just...

...puked in my mouth a little bit:

"She's intelligent, she's adorable and she has the audacity to speak her mind," said Ray Gilson of Corapeake, N.C., who attended the Virginia Beach rally. "I've never loved a politician like I love her. I want her to be president someday."

Make-Believe Maverick

Pretty good piece on McCain in Rolling Stone: Make-Believe Maverick