Oh, Those Doggone, Wacky, Fun-Lovin' Christian, Assassination- Promoting Preachers Are Just A STITCH!

Via The ReligionClause:

Parishioners Come Armed To Defend
Pastor Who Prays For Obama's Death

In Tempe, Arizona yesterday, members of the Faithful Word Baptist Church came to services armed with guns after Pastor Steven Anderson said he and his congregation have received death threats. (Oh, gee. That's fucking terrible! Who'd do such a thing...Oh, yeah...W.)

The threats came in response to a sermon by Anderson earlier this month titled "Why I Hate Barack Obama", in which Anderson said that he prays for Obama's death. (recording of sermon.) Yesterday Anderson says he wants this to occur by natural causes: "I don't want him to be a martyr, we don't need another holiday," he said. All of Anderson's recent sermons are on the church's website. (Funny guy, that preacher. Didja get the dig at the MLK holiday, which John McCain voted against gor Arizonans? I hope Parson Anderson gets hit by a big fucking bus.W.)

ABC15 News today reports that Anderson yesterday welcomed his armed parishioners, saying that "guns are a great deterrent." The night after Anderson's Aug. 16 anti-Obama sermon, one of his parishioners, Christopher Broughton, carried an AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle outside President Obama's speech to the VFW at the Phoenix Convention Center.

If I were a praying man, I'd be begging the Lord for a sign: Burn down that fucking church with all its parishioners in it. Just by accident. Like next Sunday, when they're all inside, hit it with a couple of lightning bolts. Or a 500-lb bomb, from Luke AFB.

It's the Christian way, innit?

"War-On-People" (WOP) New Phase: "Too Many Aghanis?"

One of those funny, iconoclastic, antic, occasional, brilliant postings on FafBlog, this by Medium Lobster, somehow eluded me when it appeared in July:

This week the United States moved ever closer to completing its daring humanitarian mission in Iraq: to slowly and grudgingly leave the country, after paying local residents not to kill them, after spending a very long time killing those residents by any means possible, after failing to recruit those residents to work for them, after invading their country and destroying its infrastructure. And to think they said it couldn't be done.

Were lives lost? Of course. Were cities razed, flesh burned with poison gas, families slaughtered and children raped? Naturally. But one can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, burning the crockery, setting the kitchen on fire, firebombing the restaurant and summarily executing the survivors. And lest we forget, the cause for which America launched this war was a good and noble one. For although the war neither made America safe nor Iraq free, it did address one critical problem: the apparent existence of some one million surplus human beings living in that nation, which the United States, in its capacity as the forthright leader of the Free World, quickly recognized and sought to correct.

As America's work in Iraq gradually draws to a close, we now turn to the problem of too many Afghans living in Afghanistan, the crisis of a Pakistan menaced by hordes of Pakistanis, and the dire encroachment of Iranians on the nation of Iran. We can only hope that the same wisdom that has made America such an enormous force for good in the world will continue to guide its hand.

Glub- Glub

Susie @ Suburban Guerrilla noticed this:

Forty years ago, Teddy Kennedy (panicked and...W.) left a woman in a car to drown.

Four years ago, George Bush (calmly and deliberately ... W) left an entire city to drown.

Guess which one the Republicans still remember?

(Foto: AFP.)

Barack Obama's Economic Team

For re-appointing Ben Bernanke to be Chair of the Federal Reserve. As I said at the time, Obama is taking bows for re-appointing the man who, if he didn't lead the country into the crisis, at least peacefully ushered it in. Bill Greider, at The Nation, had a similarly disloyal thought:

The Federal Reserve did not "avert disaster" for many millions of Americans. It helped to cause their disaster. The central bank, as I have written, was co-author of the destruction, along with the reckless financiers of Wall Street. Now we are told to feel good about its heroic efforts to clean up their mess.

The personalized narrative is the standard approach the establishment uses to disarm substantive critics and divert public opinion. Create a fictionalized drama about the wise leaders who manage "to do the right thing" in the face of horrendous adversity and wrongheaded political opposition. Remember Alan Greenspan celebrated as the Maestro. Or Time's "Committee to Save the World" cover after the 1998 Asian financial crisis -- picturing Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan and Larry Summers as our saviors. Now it is Gentle Ben to the rescue.

All in all, I guess we should be grateful Obama didn't appoint that sexist, feckless, sack of shit Larry Summers.

Barack Obama/National Ronald Reagan Centennial Commemorative Celebrations

We should be celebrating the feculent of fascist is dead. I'd open his grave just to shit on his face. But Barack ("Gotta Tongue-lave the Proles/Pukes' Prostates") Obama is setting up a national commission to honor the 100th anniversary of the birth of this filthy, vile, execrable, feculent, dishonest, disloyal, dishonorable monstrosity. Obama earned my scorn and lost my support when he lionized Raygun while castigating the "excesses" of my generation. Had he forgotten his own (half-black) satchel-ass owed a no little bit to those 'excesses,' too?

It felt then, as it feels now, that he is standing on my shoulders, peeing on my head. Fuck the skeevy shitwhistle...

Just FYI (it's so EASY to forget these things, innit?), here's a brief precis of Raygun's environmental legacy:

‘A look back at Reagan’s environmental record’ Grist, 10 Jun 2004

“The Reagan administration adopted an extraordinarily aggressive policy of issuing leases for oil, gas, and coal development on tens of millions of acres of national lands — more than any other administration in history, including the current one [Bush II],” said the Wilderness Society’s David Alberswerth.

Before delving further into Reagan’s track record, it’s worth recalling his infamous public statement that “trees cause more pollution than automobiles do,” and that if “you’ve seen one tree you’ve seen them all.” This is not, in other words, a president who demonstrated much ecological prowess.
…
The list of rollbacks attempted by these administrators is as sweeping as those of the current [Bush II] administration. Gorsuch tried to gut the Clean Air Act with proposals to weaken pollution standards “on everything from automobiles to furniture manufacturers — efforts which took Congress two years to defeat,” according to Clapp. Moves to weaken the Clean Water Act were equally aggressive, crescendoing in 1987 when Reagan vetoed a strong reauthorization of the act only to have his veto overwhelmingly overridden by Congress. Assaults on Superfund were so hideous that Rita Lavelle, director of the program, was thrown in jail for lying to Congress under oath about corruption in her agency division.

The gutting of funds for environmental protection was another part of Reagan’s legacy. “EPA budget cuts during Reagan’s first term were worse than they are today,” said Frank O’Donnell, director of Clean Air Trust, who reported on environmental policy for The Washington Monthly during the Reagan era. “The administration tried to cut EPA funding by more than 25 percent in its first budget proposal,” he said. And massive cuts to Carter-era renewable-energy programs “set solar back a decade,” said Clapp.

Topping it all off were efforts to slash the EPA enforcement program: “The enforcement slowdown was staggering,” said a staffer at the House Energy and Commerce Committee who helped investigate the Reagan administration’s enforcement of environmental laws during the early ’80s. “In the first year of the Reagan administration, there was a 79 percent decline in the number of enforcement cases filed from regional offices to EPA headquarters, and a 69 percent decline in the number of cases filed from the EPA to the Department of Justice.”

Reagan's environmental record is second, in its destructiveness, to his economic record and his civil rights records. Ronald Reagan will be judged, historically, as the 2nd or 3rd worst president in history, on his record, if not by popularity indices.

(DOTOF™: Antemedius)

Hillary Clinton (e.g.)

(A Different Clinton: Then President Clinton reacts to applause as he finishes speaking to potential donors and Democratic National Committee members at a dinner in Washington in this June 11, 1997 file photo. From left, Stan Chesley, Bernard Schwartz, Clinton, Hassan Nemazee.)

Lie down with scum-bags, get up all scummy. "They are ALL dirty," is no longer a defensible position, or a mere euphemism... Via TPM:

Top Clinton Fundraiser Charged With Defrauding Citigroup

The top fundraiser for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign has been charged with fraudulently applying for a loan of over $74 million from Citigroup.

Federal prosecutors allege that Hassan Nemazee, a New York businessman who was national finance chair for the Clinton campaign, "submitted, and caused to be submitted to Citibank numerous documents that purported to establish the existence of accounts in Nemazee's name at various financial institutions containing many hundreds of millions of dollars. In fact, those were fraudulent and forged documents."

A Justice Department press release offers details on the alleged scheme:

Specifically, the various accounts referenced in the fraudulent documents that Nemazee submitted, and caused to be submitted to Citibank either never existed or had been closed years before he submitted the documents referencing those accounts. Furthermore, on many of the documents at issue, Nemazee falsely provided as the address and telephone numbers of various financial institutions purportedly vouching for his financial strength an address and telephone number that was, in fact, controlled by Nemazee. As a result, in the event anyone at Citibank made an effort to confirm the existence of the assets reflected on the fraudulent documents submitted by Nemazee, they would in fact be contacting a telephone number assigned to Nemazee himself, and not any financial institution.

The Feds explain that they interviewed Nemzaee on Sunday at Newark airport, as he was checking in for a flight to Rome. The following day, he repaid the over $74 million loan to Citibank.

The Wall Street Journal adds (sub. req.): "According to an FBI report, Mr. Nemazee first contacted Citibank in December 2006 to borrow $25 million, and later raised the sum to $80 million."

Nemazee's lawyer, Marc Mukasey, told TPMmuckraker: "We are reviewing the allegations."

A Citigroup spokeswoman told TPMmuckraker: "We are working with the authorities on this matter."

Nemazee, 59, is the chairman and CEO of Nemazee Capital Corporation. He's charged with one count of bank fraud, which carries a potential prison term of 30 years. He's expected to appear in court this afternoon.

Marc Mukasey? Son of the former AG; represented some other prominent fraudsters, iirc: Frank diPascali, a former official in the former Bernie Madoff Ponzi empire.

Science, especially Human Physiology

Bastards never leave well enough alone. Consider: The Appendix. Useless. Vestigial. Right?

Nope.

Not at ALL, as it turns out:

The body's appendix has long been thought of as nothing more than a worthless evolutionary artifact, good for nothing save a potentially lethal case of inflammation.

Now researchers suggest the appendix is a lot more than a useless remnant. Not only was it recently proposed to actually possess a critical function, but scientists now find it appears in nature a lot more often than before thought. And it's possible some of this organ's ancient uses could be recruited by physicians to help the human body fight disease more effectively.

In a way, the idea that the appendix is an organ whose time has passed has itself become a concept whose time is over.

"Maybe it's time to correct the textbooks," said researcher William Parker, an immunologist at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C. "Many biology texts today still refer to the appendix as a 'vestigial organ.'"

Slimy sac

The vermiform appendix is a slimy dead-end sac that hangs between the small and large intestines. No less than Charles Darwin first suggested that the appendix was a vestigial organ from an ancestor that ate leaves, theorizing that it was the evolutionary remains of a larger structure, called a cecum, which once was used by now-extinct predecessors for digesting food.

"Everybody likely knows at least one person who had to get their appendix taken out - slightly more than 1 in 20 people do - and they see there are no ill effects, and this suggests that you don't need it," Parker said.

However, Parker and his colleagues recently suggested that the appendix still served as a vital safehouse where good bacteria could lie in wait until they were needed to repopulate the gut after a nasty case of diarrhea. Past studies had also found the appendix can help make, direct and train white blood cells.

Now, in the first investigation of the appendix over the ages, Parker explained they discovered that it has been around much longer than anyone had suspected, hinting that it plays a critical function.

"The appendix has been around for at least 80 million years, much longer than we would estimate if Darwin's ideas about the appendix were correct," Parker said.

Moreover, the appendix appears in nature much more often than previously acknowledged. It has evolved at least twice, once among Australian marsupials such as the wombat and another time among rats, lemmings, meadow voles, Cape dune mole-rats and other rodents, as well as humans and certain primates.

"When species are divided into groups called 'families,' we find that more than 70 percent of all primate and rodent groups contain species with an appendix," Parker said.

Several living species, including several lemurs, certain rodents and the scaly-tailed flying squirrel, still have an appendix attached to a large cecum, which is used in digestion. Darwin had thought appendices appeared in only a small handful of animals.

"We're not saying that Darwin's idea of evolution is wrong - that would be absurd, as we're using his ideas on evolution to do this work," Parker told LiveScience. "It's just that Darwin simply didn't have the information we have now."

He added, "If Darwin had been aware of the species that have an appendix attached to a large cecum, and if he had known about the widespread nature of the appendix, he probably would not have thought of the appendix as a vestige of evolution."

Don't ya just HATE shit like that?

And what the fuck was wrong with Darwin, anyway?

Photo: Noted biologist/atheist/provocateur PZ Myers, gleefully astride a dinosaur, at the dissolution of a Creationist "museum/theme park" recently.)