Hey, if Newt “The Whiner” Gingrich can be considered a serious candidate given his dubious accomplishments and dalliances, then why not anyone? After all, she apparently has the bong hit vote. Not that stoners are likely to get off the couch to vote unless there are free bowls of Cheetos at the polls.

Roseanne Barr is serious about her bid for the presidency in 2012. Seriously. No, really. She means it. She’s filled out the paperwork for the Green Party and everything.

Trouble is, third-party candidates usually rely on young voters, as the Christian Science Monitor points out, yet young voters aren’t likely to know who Roseanne Barr is. Or was, as they say in Hollywood. The sitcom that made Roseanne Barr famous ran way back in the 1980s, when young voters hadn’t been born yet.

“If this were someone like Chelsea Handler or even Tina Fey who is very visible right now, then it might be clearer who will pay attention to her bid,” Lara Brown, political science professor at Villanova University, told the Monitor.

I wonder how many of those in favor of doing so realize what would happen if we/Israel did? Here is an interesting rumination (from two years ago!) about the implications.

Nearly half of likely voters think the United States should be willing to use military force to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, according to this week’s The Hill Poll. Forty-nine percent said military force should be used, while 31 percent said it should not and 20 percent were not sure.

Sixty-two percent of likely voters said they were somewhat or very concerned about Iran making a terrorist strike on the United States, while 37 percent said they were not very concerned or not at all concerned about it.

Nearly half — 49 percent — of likely voters also said they opposed cutting military spending to balance the federal budget, while 40 percent said it should be reduced.
[...]
The findings were based on a nationwide survey of 1,000 likely voters conducted Feb. 2 by Pulse Opinion Research, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

As for not cutting military spending, apparently those against it are expecting another WWII-type war to break out. Or don’t want to lose their military contract money.

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Click pic for a lot more flyers for assorted businesses

I feel so much safer.

Found by Brother Uncle Don

Click pic for more

Has everything worthwhile artistically been done and we’ve reached the point where if you make it and you call yourself an artist that makes it art? Especially if an ‘art critic’ says it is and someone with money is willing to buy it?

People differentiate between artist and non-artist based on degree of mastery in imitating nature, and further differentiate Realism from Hyperrealism based on skill in rendering details. Different motivations on the part of the artist can also be used to make distinctions such as Realism, Symbolism or perhaps other “isms.”
[...]
I think artists really want to play god more than anything else, and will stop at nothing to construct a truth that validates the self. They first delude themselves, then maybe move on to people around them. I really wonder to what extent these self deceptions and constructed truths can strike a nerve in the knowing onlooker.

Huh. Who could have guessed this? Other than intelligent people, of course.

Are racists dumb? Do conservatives tend to be less intelligent than liberals? A provocative new study from Brock University in Ontario suggests the answer to both questions may be a qualified yes. The study, published in Psychological Science, showed that people who score low on I.Q. tests in childhood are more likely to develop prejudiced beliefs and socially conservative politics in adulthood.
[...]
“Ideologies get rid of the messiness and impose a simpler solution. So, it may not be surprising that people with less cognitive capacity will be attracted to simplifying ideologies.”

But Nosek said less intelligent types might be attracted to liberal “simplifying ideologies” as well as conservative ones.

For some reason, I think there may be a few who disagree with the findings.

Apparently, too much public exposure to corrup… er, um… to how policy is made is detrimental to the process.

In a stunning break with First Amendment policy, House Republicans directed Capitol Hill police to detain a highly regarded documentary crew that was attempting to film a Wednesday hearing on a controversial natural gas procurement practice. Republicans also denied the entrance of a credentialed ABC News news team that was attempting to film the event.

Click pic to learn all about it

Now why would FEMA want to develop their own coffin? Have they been stockpiling them somewhere? Do they know something we don’t?

Possibly NSFW, depending on where you work.

Social conservatives: don’t want government interference with their guns and money, but all for government interference in your private life.

The Virginia Senate, for years a firewall against efforts to restrict abortion, today is poised to pass a bill to require that pregnant women undergo an ultrasound and get a chance to see the image before having an abortion. It’s one of several anti-abortion bills now moving through the General Assembly. Others would give legal rights to unborn children, prohibit abortions after 20 weeks unless a woman’s life or physical well-being is at risk, and further limit public funding for some abortions.

Unlike past sessions when some of those measures failed in the Senate, social conservatives now sense a chance for long-desired gains.
[...]
The bill would force low-income women to choose between carrying a doomed pregnancy “or pay out of pocket for abortion care she and her doctor may determine she needs at a difficult time,” argued Jessica Honke, a lobbyist for Planned Parenthood.
[...]
Sen. Janet Howell, D-Fairfax County, was dismayed enough by the bill’s progress that she tried to amend it so men seeking prescriptions for erectile dysfunction medication such as Viagra would be required to undergo a rectal exam and cardiac stress test. She said that’s “only fair, that if we’re going to subject women to unnecessary procedures, and we’re going to subject doctors to having to do things that they don’t think is medically advisory.”

I wonder if this is one of the things Gingrich was paid to advise them to do?

Freddie Mac, the taxpayer-owned mortgage giant, has placed multibillion-dollar bets that pay off if homeowners stay trapped in expensive mortgages with interest rates well above current rates.

Freddie began increasing these bets dramatically in late 2010, the same time that the company was making it harder for homeowners to get out of such high-interest mortgages.
[...]
Freddie’s charter calls for the company to make home loans more accessible. Its chief executive, Charles Haldeman Jr., recently told Congress that his company is “helping financially strapped families reduce their mortgage costs through refinancing their mortgages.”

But the trades, uncovered for the first time in an investigation by ProPublica and NPR, give Freddie a powerful incentive to do the opposite, highlighting a conflict of interest at the heart of the company. In addition to being an instrument of government policy dedicated to making home loans more accessible, Freddie also has giant investment portfolios and could lose substantial amounts of money if too many borrowers refinance.

Economic sanctions by the European Union and the United States can only be allowed a limited time period to prevent Iran from attempting to acquire a nuclear arsenal before a military strike must be contemplated, Israeli leaders have declared. The tough public stance from Tel Aviv comes amid conflicting reports on the readiness of the Israeli military establishment to carry out an attack on Iran.

One account claims that Israel’s security agencies have concluded that the turmoil predicted from a strike, and the likely response from Tehran, has been widely exaggerated. However, a senior British official told The Independent that the hierarchy of the intelligence service, Mossad, and the armed forces continued to have deep trepidation about conflict in the region.

Speaking at the Davos economic summit yesterday, the Israeli Defence Minister, Ehud Barak, yesterday warned that a situation could be rapidly reached when even “surgical” military action could not block the Tehran regime from getting the bomb. “We will know early enough whether the Iranians are ready to give up their nuclear weapons,” following measures such as the recently announced EU oil embargo, he said.

Mr Barak continued, “We are determined to prevent Iran from turning nuclear. It seems to us to be urgent, because the Iranians are deliberately drifting into what we call an immunity zone where practically no surgical operation could block them”.

And then there’s us with our “mothership” on its way. Here’s one guy’s analysis of that.

Read about it all here.

Found by Brother Uncle Don

What will they think of next!

No if they’d only rule against the Patriot Act and other invasions of privacy and police state activities.

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that police must obtain a search warrant before using a GPS device to track criminal suspects. But the justices left for another day larger questions about how technology has altered a person’s expectation of privacy.
[...]
“We hold that the government’s installation of a GPS device on a target’s vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a ‘search’ ” under the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, Scalia wrote.
[...]
It was that question — society’s expectation of privacy in a modern world — that had animated the court’s consideration of the case. In an intense hour-long oral argument last November, the Big Brother of George Orwell’s novel “1984” was referenced six times. The justices pondered a world in which satellites can zero in on an individual’s house, cameras can record the faces at a crowded intersection and individuals can instantly announce their every movement to the world on Facebook. They wondered about the government placing tracking devices in overcoats or on license plates.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said the decision also should have settled some of those questions instead of deciding a case about a “21st-century surveillance technique” by using “18th-century tort law.”

Researchers have used surveys, imaging scans and biopsies of women, all trying to locate and define the presumably orgasmic area on the vaginal wall known as the G-spot. Based on a review of 96 published studies, an Israeli and American research team came to one conclusion.

“Without a doubt, a discreet anatomic entity called the G-spot does not exist,” said Dr. Amichai Kilchevsky, a urology resident at Yale-New Haven Hospital in Connecticut, and lead author of the review, published Jan. 12 in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.
[...]
“I think that the bulk of the evidence shows that the G-spot is not a particular thing. It’s not like saying, ‘What is the thyroid gland?’” Komisaruk said. “The G-spot is more of a thing like New York City is a thing. It’s a region, it’s a convergence of many different structures.”
[...]
“We don’t even have orgasm all figured out yet, I don’t why we would expect to have the G-spot figured out,” Herbenick said.

There you have it, men. Tell her the G-spot is like New York City and you’re a cab driver who can’t speak English well enough to know how to get her to her desired destination. Or learn how to ride a unicycle. Uh… No idea where I’m going with this…