Between Tracy telling people to fk off, and christine finding new ways all the time to "forgive" and Donald failing people for not meeting the good citizen standard, and squeaky doing his best imitation of the Wicked Witch of the West ("and your little dog, too!"), it's hardly worth the time it takes to read these so-called comments.

I was in college with those vets.  They earned every penny of that education: flying over Berlin, storming the beaches of France, slogging thru the snows of Belgium, lying wounded in the hedgerows, liberating the death camps....

And they paid us back in spades, so to speak--helping us rebuild a wartime economy into a booming peacetime world.

The U.S. Department of Justice says it has uncovered "substantial evidence" that sexism in a Montana county attorney's office has led to prosecutors dropping rape cases and belittling victims.

In a 20-page letter sent to Missoula County Atty. Fred Van Valkenburg, federal attorneys said rape victims had been "treated with disrespect, not informed of the status of their case, and re-victimized by the process."

For example, federal officials said, when one mother asked a county attorney why an adolescent boy who assaulted her 5-year-old daughter had only received two years of community service, the attorney responded, "boys will be boys."

Federal investigators added that Missoula prosecutors had failed to pursue "nearly every case" where a mentally or physically disabled woman claimed sexual assault, "even in cases where there was evidence such as a confession or incriminating statements by the perpetrator."

The county attorney is, of course, livid and in full denial mode.

   The Department of Homeland Security wants a private company to provide a national license-plate tracking system that would give the agency access to vast amounts of information from commercial and law enforcement tag readers, according to a government proposal that does not specify what privacy safeguards would be put in place.

    The national license-plate recognition database, which would draw data from readers that scan the tags of every vehicle crossing their paths, would help catch fugitive illegal immigrants, according to a DHS solicitation. But the database could easily contain more than 1 billion records and could be shared with other law enforcement agencies, raising concerns that the movements of ordinary citizens who are under no criminal suspicion could be scrutinized.

FDL (linked above, with embedded excerpt from WaPo article):

But don't worry, all the information will be held by a private corporation relying on a government contract. I'm serious, that was the defense given of this program by an actual government spokesperson.

   The database would enhance agents' and officers' ability to locate suspects who could pose a threat to public safety and would reduce the time required to conduct surveillance, ICE spokeswoman Gillian Christensen said.

    "It is important to note that this database would be run by a commercial enterprise, and the data would be collected and stored by the commercial enterprise, not the government," she said.

Don't you feel better? The information will be in private hands, like Koch Industries. The government won't store the information, they will just retrieve it whenever they want from a government contractor - that preserves privacy somehow. It's not a surveillance state, it's a corporate capitalist surveillance state. Progress.

Here's the part that really moved me:

...I want to take the opportunity to set forth my views on the proper relationship between the state and the citizen. This is my political credo:

I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, in human liberty as the source of national action, in the human heart as the source of national compassion, and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas. It is, I believe, the faith in our fellow citizens as individuals and as people that lies at the heart of the liberal faith. For liberalism is not so much a party creed or set of fixed platform promises as it is an attitude of mind and heart, a faith in man's ability through the experiences of his reason and judgment to increase for himself and his fellow men the amount of justice and freedom and brotherhood which all human life deserves.

[snip]

Our responsibility is not discharged by announcement of virtuous ends. Our responsibility is to achieve these objectives with social invention, with political skill, and executive vigor. I believe for these reasons that liberalism is our best and only hope in the world today. For the liberal society is a free society, and it is at the same time and for that reason a strong society. Its strength is drawn from the will of free people committed to great ends and peacefully striving to meet them. Only liberalism, in short, can repair our national power, restore our national purpose, and liberate our national energies....

Digby:

The conservative movement eventually succeeded in destroying that label and making it something shameful for average Americans to wear openly. ("I'm not a liberal or anything, but ...") So we became progressives. And that's fine, I guess. What's in a name, right? But it's still interesting to revisit what it meant half a century ago at the height of what people like to call the liberal consensus (something which obviously didn't really exist since the 1960 election was essentially a tie.) That speech is such a bold ideological statement, something you never hear Democrats do in the modern era. They hem and they haw and run from anything that might put them into a particular category they believe might offend some median voter out there whom they think could be persuaded to vote for them if only they were presented with a bucket of warm milk on the ballot.

Unfortunately my Internet provider is also Comcast, and I see nothing but rate increases coming with this merger. I have hated being a Comcast customer ever since they took over the local cable company Suscom. They always thank me for "choosing Comcast" whenever I speak to anyone on the phone. I always reply I didn't "choose" Comcast, they chose me. And they aren't my choice at all.

Look at the domestic achievements they say.
It is unfair that Lyndon's legacy is overshadowed by the war in Vietnam.

In my opinion, the horrific war in Vietnam, which made our soldiers do horrific things, interrupted the lives of thousands of young people, killed 55,000 young Americans, maimed many thousands more, poisoned thousands more, and killed thousands upon thousands of Vietnamese deserves to overshadow absolutely everything.

Not only was the War in Vietnam a nightmare, but it set the table for evildoers like Bush to mimic the manner in which it was foisted upon us:
Lies.

It also began the narrowing of the moral gulf that had seemingly existed between us and WW2 Germany. This is a process that accelerated exponentially under GW Bush - but the model had been formed by the Johnson administration.

Add to that the demise of Hubert Humphrey who belatedly tried to distance himself from Johnson, only to lose to Nixon - who had a "secret plan" to end the thing.

Nixon - another nightmare that need not have happened.

No.

For me, Johnson deserves all possible recrimination.

And until we openly acknowledge what he and his motley crew did to our country, we are doomed to have this scenario repeated and repeated: A country is declared to be evil; We are then told that they have attacked us, or are about to do so; We are then called upon to give up our children to the enterprise of war - and to further abandon any moral ground we once held.

I also think, from what I have read, that Mr. Johnson was a bit of a loon - naming everybody after himself - and subjecting his staff to embarrassing behavior.

How many black people did he send to their deaths? People who couldn't afford college deferments, or a life in Canada?

What about those black people who lost fathers, or other family members to the madness engendered by that freak? Would they say, well, he got a voting rights bill passed? (Even with that - I credit the relentless pressure from Malcolm and MLK - and whitey's fear of black uprisings for the passage of those bills.)

Everybody is complicated to some extent.
But evil is evil. That is not complicated.

Zorba - you are far more charitable than I.

Squeak Squeak blah blah

I remember that vote. I remember the trauma my nation was in.  I remember how the Bush regime did not send anyone into Afghanistan of significant number to get Bin Laden and help Afghanistan deal with being a failed state.  I remember the critical thinking, and the action being stunted, shutdown secretly, and the healing deliberately not being able to take place.

The majority of America did not know whether it was coming or going, all it knew was it was in pain.

Pretty easy to latch on to something that was already happening.

Link

After a few years the poverty rate stabilized and has remained stable while we spend trillions to subsidize the poor.

I see success as people supporting themselves and working.   I have no idea what you see but people being out of poverty due to government handouts isn't my idea of success.   Especially seeing how we where well on our way to almost solving poverty through economic expansion before LBJ got in the way.

But I guess like your buddy Hugo Chavez the goal isn't to help people the goal to make them reliant on you.

Detroit, once the world's automobile capital, has now become the world's ice dancing centre, with 15 of the 24 Olympic ice dancing teams in Sochi training there -- nine at the Novi Ice Arena, three at the Detroit Skating Club and three in Canton. C&L

Their performance was beautiful. As Russian coach Yevgeny Platov, the only ice dancer to win back-to-back Olympic gold medals, stated:

"They skate above the ice, they look like they're flying," Platov said.

"They're like a feather. What they do is super light. Whatever they do, is just light, every step."

Electromagnetic with a bomb aesthetic
But we ain't breaded edit: got no credit
Listen real close to my phonetics:
The monster is awoke and I hope you fed it

If this your first time here, raise your hand
If the police come, hide the contraband
We all leave in a box and a long sedan
How you want your name read by the anchorman?

Drop the hips; apocalypse
We ho'in out here cuz they got the chips
Like "Put it anywhere, but not the lips!"
Takeover, let's plot the shit

Badass video link.

For-profit medicine has to make that profit somewhere. From Larry, they're taking it out of his blank. (link)

v. 277
v. 276

Subsidies?  Assistance?

I'm actually serious about this one.  Hand outs is derogatory and I should know better.

OTOH if it does happen maybe that will create the push needed to force unbundling content with infrastructure, leave cable to provide and charge for a wire and bandwidth to my house, but remove them as a middle man selling content.

Only other option I see is true competition for providing the wire and bandwidth to my house as well as content.

A 39-year-old man, who has a concealed handgun permit, confronted the snow plow driver early this morning at the apartment complex with his gun drawn. He was reportedly angry the snow wasn't being removed from around his wife's vehicle fast enough, so he fired a round at the plow.

And then, of course, this is no surprise:

The Texas Tea Party Doesn't Stand a Chance

Listed are the November numbers followed by the new February numbers.