The Nightowl Newswrap

post from They gave us a republic... - Front Page on 16 May 2012 01:00:00 AM. © They gave us a republic... - Front Page

By BG & YD

This kid is nine or ten kinds of awesome, at least. A nine year old boy from Topeka, Kansas saw the Phelps freaks as he was walking around the Washburn U campus with his Mom last Saturday. He was appropriately horrified by what he saw and went home and made his own sign that read simply " GOD HATES NO ONE" and went back to where he saw them and stood across the street in a silent but powerful counterprotest. Our hat's are off to young Josef Miles, and to his Mom, for doing such an awesome job of raising a child like him.

We've been saying this for years...Allow farmers to grow hemp, already. Just growing hemp would revitalize several industries by virtue of making a superior American-grown product available to them for use in their manufacturing processes. Soap manufacturers are just one of the job creators (the real ones, not that parasitic rich douchebags that republicans are always going on about) who would benefit.

The Sister Sarah Prototype is going for broke in her race against two other right-wing extremists for the republican nomination to challenge Claire McCaskill for Harry Truman's Senate seat, going on record that she is proud of the inclusion of Rush Limbaugh in the Hall of Famous Missourians. Claire is in a tight race and Karl Rove seems to have a personal vendeta against her and is pouring money into attack ads against her, but she still outperforms every last one of the opponents she's blessed with in head-to-head matchups.

Holy fucking hell religious freaks -- for the last god-damn time, "religious liberty" means that you are free to practice your religion as you see fit, so long as you aren't infringing on the rights of others to pursue their own prefered path. It does **not** mean that you are free to force your views on anyone else, let alone everyone else.

How the hell are private prisons even legal? It's antithetical to every ideal we hold dear as Americans to have a business model that relies on incarcerating as many people as possible in order to make money for stockholders. It's not just un-American, it's sick.

Bob Kerry is blessed with a crazy opponent. More than a few Nebraskans are put off that their former Governor and Senator never bothered to come home after leaving the Senate over a decade ago, until he decided to run for his old seat again, that is. Fortunately, more people are likely to be terrified by Fischer than put off by Kerry.

This sort of mean-spirited bigotry ought to be illegal. At 1:00 a.m. Tuesday the Virginia state legislature denied a judgeship to a supremely qualified nominee for the sole reason that he is gay.

This is a level of derangement that borders on criminal malfeasance. Guess how Fox News spins a story about OSHA issuing common-sense guidelines for working outside in the summer and avoiding heat stroke -- stay hydrated, work in the shade as much as possible and rest when you feel the need -- as an attack on people who work outside. We're not making this up. They are so desperate to criticize this President that they will mock sound health advice and put their viewers in peril in order to do so.

Send this gut-check to your crazy uncle. By every quantifiable metric -- taxes, economic growth, spending, deficits, jobs -- we are better off today than we were four years ago.

Let's hope the FBI is far less respectful toward Wall Street criminals than the SEC is. "The FBI has opened a probe into trading losses at the biggest US bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, stepping up the pressure on the bank after the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve said they were also looking into the bets that led to the losses."

Dude: You can't "work with" someone who wants to destroy your economy. "Newly inaugurated French President Francois Hollande has pledged to work with Germany to resolve the EU's economic crisis."

Every election is another defeat for austerity. "Greece will hold a new election after politicians failed to form a government, nine days following an inconclusive vote, prolonging a political crisis that pushes it closer to bankruptcy and exit from the euro."

And finally...

If you're not reading Latin American writers today, you're not reading. "The Mexican author Carlos Fuentes has died, aged 83. Fuentes was one of the most prolific Latin American writers known equally for his fiction and his essays on politics and culture. His most famous works were The Death of Artemio Cruz and The Old Gringo. He was associated with the Latin American Boom - a literary movement made up of mainly young authors whose politically critical works broke with established traditions. He died in a hospital in Mexico City. Hospital sources did not comment on his cause of death. Mr Fuentes wrote a wealth of novels, plays and essays and regularly commented on political events in Spanish newspaper El Pais. Born in Panama in 1928, he did not move to Mexico until he was 16. The son of a diplomat, Mr Fuentes spent much of his childhood moving around the Western Hemisphere. He said it was this which allowed him to view Latin America from a distance, giving him a critical edge."