Adapted from Rant of the Week at The Stars Hollow Gazette
The gay-stream media compares Arizona’s refusal of service bill to Jim Crow laws, but Rep. Steve King argues that “self-professed behavior” doesn’t qualify for civil rights
Tag: Stephen Colbert
Mar 16 2014
Arizona’s Religious Freedom Bill & Self-Professed Gays
Feb 16 2014
Stephen Colbert: Thrift Justice
Adapted from Rant of the Week at The Stars Hollow Gazette
A ban on a lethal injection drug has state officials thinking outside of the box for new ways to put people in a box
Ohio Execution Using Untested Drug Cocktail Renews the Debate Over Lethal Injections
By Rick Lyman. The New York Times
Dennis McGuire took 15 minutes to die by lethal injection Thursday morning at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville for the 1989 rape and murder of a 22-year-old pregnant woman named Joy Stewart.
Eyewitness accounts differ slightly on how much Mr. McGuire, 53, struggled and gasped in those final minutes. But because the execution took unusually long and because Ohio was using a new, untested cocktail of drugs in the procedure, the episode has reignited debate over lethal injection.
States have been scrambling in recent years to come up with a new formula for executions after their stockpiles were depleted or expired when European manufacturers of such previously used drugs as pentobarbital and sodium thiopental stopped selling them for use in executions. No consensus has formed on what available drugs should be used.
Lethal injection drug blocked by judge
from The Guardian
Compounding pharmacy called the Apothecary Shoppe told not to supply Missouri government with unofficial pentobarbital mix
A US federal judge has temporarily blocked an Oklahoma compounding pharmacy from selling a drug to the Missouri department of corrections for use in an upcoming execution.
The restraining order was issued in a lawsuit filed a day earlier in US district court by the Missouri death row inmate Michael Taylor. His attorneys allege that the department contracts with the Apothecary Shoppe to provide the drug set to be used in Taylor’s 26 February lethal injection.
The lawsuit argues that several recent executions involving the drug, compounded pentobarbital, indicate it will likely cause Taylor “severe, unnecessary, lingering and ultimately inhumane pain”.
In his order on Wednesday Judge Terence Kern wrote that Taylor’s attorneys submitted “facts demonstrating that immediate and irreparable injury, loss, or damage will result to plaintiff before defendant can be heard in opposition”.
Nov 28 2013
Thanksgiving and Hanukkah with Stephen Colbert
Stephen’s DVD allows every family to experience the joy of having him as a guest of honor at Thanksgiving.
Stephen celebrates Thanksgiving by drawing Nancy Pelosi hand turkeys, cooking with Martha Stewart and pardoning a turkey.
Stephen celebrates Hanukkah because he has a lot of Jewish friends, and he doesn’t care who knows it.
Have a happy, health and safe holiday, everyone.
Nov 04 2013
See No Evil
Adapted from Rant of the Week at The Stars Hollow Gazette
Allegations surface that the NSA spied on the Vatican, and Representative Mike Rogers defends the agency via circular logic.
Rep. Mike Rogers Angrily Defends Bathroom Spycam
by Ken White, Techdirt
Representative Mike Rogers (R-Michigan) was defiant today in the face of accusations that he had installed a small digital camera in the women’s bathroom in his office at the Capitol.
“This is just politics,” said the ten-term Congressman. “I would argue the fact that we haven’t had any women come forward with any specificity arguing that their privacy has been violated, clearly indicates, in ten years, clearly indicates that something must be doing right. Somebody must be doing something exactly right.”
When reporters asked how women would know to complain – the spycam, funded by the government, was expertly hidden – Rogers asserted that was the point. “You can’t have your privacy violated if you don’t know your privacy is violated ,” said Rogers.
Rogers went on to explain that the nation’s Capitol – which has housed figures like former Congressman Bob Filner and former Senator Bob Packwood – presents known dangers to women, and that the spycam is calculated to make certain they are protected from those dangers. “If the women knew exactly what that spycam was about, they would be applauding and popping champagne corks. It’s a good thing. it keeps the women safe. It keeps the Capitol safe,” Rogers asserted.
Rogers then abruptly concluded the interview, threatening to sue reporters if they wrote about it.
So, by Rep. Rogers premise, if a person is knocked unconscious and raped, it’s not a rape because you didn’t know about it at the time. Right. What a pig.
Sep 10 2013
Stephen Colbert: Kitten Subway Crisis & NYC Mayoral Race
Adapted from Rant of the Week at The Stars Hollow Gazette
NYC mayoral candidate Joe Lhota goes after the key anti-kitten demographic after two lost kittens shut down America’s largest transportation system.
Kittens Stop NYC Subway Service
It only took two kittens to stop the city’s subway in its tracks.
Power was cut to the B and Q lines in Brooklyn for more than an hour after a woman reported Thursday morning that her kittens were loose in the nation’s largest subway system, transit officials said.
The furry felines, one black and the other white with gray stripes, were finally found on the tracks and rescued about seven hours later.
How they got there was a mystery. But they were seen running dangerously close to the high-voltage third rail.
Their owner rushed to a subway station with cat food for transit workers dispatched onto the tracks to use to try to corral them.
Joe Lhota, NYC Mayoral Hopeful, Wouldn’t Stop Trains For Kittens
A former chairman of the Metropolitan Transit Authority and New York City mayoral hopeful says he wouldn’t have stopped the subway because two lost kittens were scrambling along the tracks. [..]
Other mayoral hopefuls tell the paper they would’ve stopped the trains.
Fortunately, there are more cat lovers in NYC than Republican voters.
Feb 11 2013
The Word – It Gets Worse
Adapted from Rant of the Week at The Stars Hollow Gazette
Psychosomatic Medicine prints a study on gay men’s stress levels, and conservatives have been saying gays should have equal rights since the beginning of this sentence.
Pro-DOMA lawyer Paul Clement thinks the struggle for gay rights has just been too successful, so it therefore must end in failure.
Dec 17 2012
A Righteous Rant: Terrorism and Personal Responsibilty
Adapted from The Rant of the Week The Stars Hollow Gazette
Actor and singer Mandy Patinkin lets loose with a righteous rant on terrorism and personal responsibility during an interview with Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report
Dec 11 2012
More Than Just a Tutor
Adapted from Rant of the Week at The Stars Hollow Gazette
According to a rare bit of journalism in the New York Post, there is a growing trend of parents hiring tutors to do a little more than just toot.
Corrupt tutors for hire
by Doree Lewak
Unscrupulous ‘homework helpers’ are getting paid big bucks to help kids cheat their way to the top of the ivory tower
Alan wrote a heartwarming, if not tear-jerker of an essay about living with Crohn’s disease for a college application essay. He was proud of his opus detailing the struggles with the often crippling autoimmune disease that makes leading a normal teenage life all but impossible.
Only problem is, Alan is not a high school senior, but a former tutor-turned-ghostwriter in his early 30s who was paid $150 to write about this real-life situation by the applicant’s father.
The New York dad, like a lot of Alan’s clients, found him through his ad on Craigslist, the increasingly murky marketplace for legit and not-so-legit tutors, homework helpers and ghostwriters in dubious guises.
Nov 17 2012
The Last Word on L’affaire de Petraeus
Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette
The affair between David Petraeus and a married Tampa socialite was more than just embarrassing it exposed the media’s adoration of a very flawed man, the media’s cover up of his failures and the bigger scandal, the US surveillance state. Three critics of Petraeus weigh in:
The scandal that brought down CIA director David Petraeus has spread to the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen. The Pentagon says the FBI has uncovered thousands of “potentially inappropriate” emails between Allen and Jill Kelley, the woman who complained of harassment from Petraeus’ biographer and lover, Paula Broadwell. Kelley’s complaint to the FBI led to the discovery of Broadwell and Petraeus’ relationship, prompting Petraeus’ resignation on Friday. We’re joined by Guardian columnist and blogger Glenn Greenwald
Transcript can be read here
Petraeus scandal is reported with compelled veneration of all things military
by Glenn Greenwald
The reverence for the former CIA Director is part of a wider religious-like worship of the national security state.
A prime rule of US political culture is that nothing rivets, animates or delights the political media like a sex scandal. From Bill Clinton, Gary Hart, and Eliot Spitzer to John Edwards, Larry Craig and David Vitter, their titillation and joy is palpable as they revel in every last arousing detail. This giddy package is delivered draped in a sanctimonious wrapping: their excitement at reporting on these scandals is matched only by their self-righteous condemnations of the moral failings of the responsible person.
All of these behaviors have long been constant, inevitable features of every political sex scandal – until yesterday. Now, none of these sentiments is permitted because the newest salacious scandal features at its center Gen. David Petraeus, who resigned yesterday as CIA Director, citing an extramarital affair.
FBI’s abuse of the surveillance state is the real scandal needing investigation
by Glenn Greenwald
That the stars of America’s national security establishment are being devoured by out-of-control surveillance is a form of sweet justice
The Petraeus scandal is receiving intense media scrutiny obviously due to its salacious aspects, leaving one, as always, to fantasize about what a stellar press corps we would have if they devoted a tiny fraction of this energy to dissecting non-sex political scandals (this unintentionally amusing New York Times headline from this morning – “Concern Grows Over Top Military Officers’ Ethics” – illustrates that point: with all the crimes committed by the US military over the last decade and long before, it’s only adultery that causes “concern” over their “ethics”). Nonetheless, several of the emerging revelations are genuinely valuable, particularly those involving the conduct of the FBI and the reach of the US surveillance state. [..]
That is the first disturbing fact: it appears that the FBI not only devoted substantial resources, but also engaged in highly invasive surveillance, for no reason other than to do a personal favor for a friend of one of its agents, to find out who was very mildly harassing her by email. The emails Kelley received were, as the Daily Beast reports, quite banal and clearly not an event that warranted an FBI investigation: [..]
Based on what is known, what is most disturbing about the whole Petraeus scandal is not the sexual activities that it revealed, but the wildly out-of-control government surveillance powers which enabled these revelations. What requires investigation here is not Petraeus and Allen and their various sexual partners but the FBI and the whole sprawling, unaccountable surveillance system that has been built.
BuzzFeed‘s, Michael Hastings was not just harsh on David Peraeus but also took one of CNN’s own reporters for her fawning reporting, repeating the Pentagon talking points without question.
The transcript can be read here
h/t Heather at Crooks and Liars
The Sins Of General David Petraeus
by Michael Hastings
Petraeus seduced America. We should never have trusted him.
The fraud that General David Petraeus perpetrated on America started many years before the general seduced Paula Broadwell, a lower-ranking officer 20 years his junior, after meeting her on a campus visit to Harvard.
More so than any other leading military figure, Petraeus’ entire philosophy has been based on hiding the truth, on deception, on building a false image. “Perception” is key, he wrote in his 1987 Princeton dissertation: “What policymakers believe to have taken place in any particular case is what matters – more than what actually occurred.”
Yes, it’s not what actually happens that matters – it’s what you can convince the public it thinks happened.
But the final word on L’affaire de Petraeus goes the host of The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert and his guest All My Children soap star, Susan Lucci.
David Petraeus’ affair is all anybody in Washington can talk about, which might be why the country is in financial ruin.
“I think the news has jumped the shark” and that’s the “word.”
Nov 08 2012
“Truthiness”
Even though Barack Obama lost in spacious red states, he is reelected due to a technicality called the Constitution.
Open Thread
Oct 26 2012
“Meducation”
Adapted from Rant of the Week at The Stars Hollow Gazette
Since America can’t afford all the teachers it would take to give children personal attention, doctors recommend psychostimulants to improve kids’ grades.
Oct 11 2012
It’s Not Easy Having Green
Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette
America’s super rich are having a good decade, but The New Yorker claims they can’t enjoy it because President Obama hurt their feelings.
The growing antagonism of the super-wealthy toward Obama can seem mystifying, since Obama has served the rich quite well. His Administration supported the seven-hundred-billion-dollar TARP rescue package for Wall Street, and resisted calls from the Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, and others on the left, to nationalize the big banks in exchange for that largesse. At the end of September, the S. & P. 500, the benchmark U.S. stock index, had rebounded to just 6.9 per cent below its all-time pre-crisis high, on October 9, 2007. The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty have found that ninety-three per cent of the gains during the 2009-10 recovery went to the top one per cent of earners. Those seated around the table at dinner with Al Gore had done even better: the top 0.01 per cent captured thirty-seven per cent of the total recovery pie, with a rebound in their incomes of more than twenty per cent, which amounted to an additional $4.2 million each.
Notwithstanding Occupy Wall Street’s focus on the “one per cent,” or Obama’s choice of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars as the level at which taxes on family income should rise, the salient dividing line between rich and not rich is much higher up the income-distribution scale. Hostility toward the President is particularly strident among the ultra-rich.