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POPSRepublican Humor McCain's latest joke: when informed by an AP reporter that Iran's biggest American import is cigarettes, he joked, "well, that's a way to kill them." So funny, I forgot to laugh. Republicans are a hoot!
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POPSSingle-Digit Approval? Not Exactly Rasmussen did not ask if voters "approved" or "disapproved" of Congress, but rather to rate Congress' performance as excellent, good, fair, or poor. A total of 45% answered excellent (2%) good (7%), or fair(36%).
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POPSWomen With the horror of the recent "honor" killing in Georgia as the backdrop, I'm inspired to remind everyone that women die at the hands of male family members every day in the US. In fact, 4 times a day. I'm tired of the Right acting like they really care about women and gender equality. The only mention of women in the 2004 Republican platform is their insistence that if a woman gets pregnant, by law she'll stay that way until delivery. I went to a number of right wing websites and typed the words "violence against women" into their search engines. If any stories were listed at all, they were about honor killings in the Muslim world. The Right wrap their "concern" for women in the cloak of anti-Islamic rhetoric concerning honor killings and are dumb, deaf, and blind to all else. Enough. Islam is not the problem. Patriarchy is.
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POPSThe Urge to End It Is suicide the deadly result of a deep psychological condition - or a fleeting impulse brought on by opportunity?
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POPSCheers, President Bush, You Win! And through it all you avoided repercussions. Even losing GOP House and Senate majorities hasn’t slowed you down much. There's so much raw evidence to impeach your ass that it would be as easy as Dick Cheney shooting a lawyer in the face. The rap sheet is a mile long. Yet you remain 100 percent unscathed, threatened by nothing more than a pretzel getting stuck in your craw. That's amazing. My peasant hat is off to you.
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POPSMatt Taibbi: Full Metal McCain You'd never know it from listening to McCain, whose kickoff speech is the same election-year diatribe that Republicans have been giving for decades, one long broadside against those goddamned overgrown Sixties weenie liberals who hate the flag, love the bomb-tossing enemies of America and are bent on the twin goals of ending the system of free enterprise and placing every aspect of our lives under government control. McCain pegs Obama as a man who wants to take America "backward," to the failed ideas of the Sixties. "I'm surprised that a young man has bought into so many failed ideas!" he says, to furious applause. Then, spitting out a forced, ugly laugh that he must have practiced many (but not enough) times in the bathroom mirror of the Straight Talk Express, he adds, "That's not change we can believe in!"
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POPS"Pro-Lifers" Plan National Protest of Contraception And before you despair that your right to privacy is being lost, take comfort in the knowledge that once we all finally live in a country where ideology is valued over evidence and our government is run by and for those who subscribe, or succumb, to the exciting agenda of these groups...privacy will no longer be needed. Your point of view and way of life will, conveniently, be decided for you. So what are you waiting for?! Sign up now!
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POPSSlavery By Another Name I saw Douglas Blackmon, Wall Street Journal reporter and author of "Slavery by Another Name", on the Tavis Smiley Show tonight. I had never before heard about neo-slavery. According to Blackmon, the South was culpable; the North was complicit. Modern companies, including US Steel, profited. The system didn't come to an end until the 1940s, "partly due to fears of enemy propaganda about American racial abuse at the beginning of World War II." 13th Amendment be damned, this sale of "convicts" to private enterprises to pay of "debts" was perfectly legal until 1951.
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POPSGut Check Time for White Americans The Wright affair has such resonance in this campaign because Wright has shown himself to be the kind of black person that white people don't like. He brings out our prejudices. Yes, I said "our" prejudices. Part of it is Wright's ignorance and part of it is his arrogance and part of it is that he talks louder than white people would prefer and part of it is that he uses the sing-song cadence they associate with other black ministers they have grown to hate over the years such as Jesse Jackson. Obama is none of those things (OK, maybe a little arrogant at times), so Wright has been brought to the forefront as a substitute punching bag.