The New Raw Deal. W, speaking yesterday with 21-year-old privatization shill Lindsey Mottley: "When I was 22, I don't remember anybody saying to me, you better worry about Social Security."

That's because he was drunk throughout the Johnson administration, during which millions of elderly people found succor through the 1965 Medicare amendment to the Social Security Act.

Likewise, Jenna won't remember her father or the people he works for saying to her, you better worry about Social Security. She's busy getting plastered.

{ 10:56 AM }

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Red state cluelessness. A proposed new special North Carolina automobile license plate: "I'd rather be shaggin'."

{ 10:47 AM }

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Where are Bush and his corporate cronies planning to live once they finish asset-stripping the United States?

{ 9:40 AM }

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Will someone please explain to me why I got several thousand hits, the vast majority from outside the US, for this image of Arnold Schwarzenegger and a bare breast, which was originally part of this post?

{ 5:49 PM }

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Who said it?

"...the next time a bill passes through Congress or the Senate that erodes the civil liberties of Americans or gives preferential treatment to the rich amongst them at the expense of the rest, I would like you to conjure in your minds the image of a beefy Marine in tight leather shorts.

Thus endeth the lesson in democracy, American-style."

A. Daily Kos
B. AMERICABlog
C. Arab News, Saudi Arabia

{ 11:01 AM }

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Time to invade Congo. Imagine how the people who got all worked up about Saddam Hussein's rape rooms and the gassing of his own people will feel about this (FindLaw/AP):

Militiamen and renegade soldiers have raped and beaten tens of thousands of women and young girls in eastern Congo, and nearly all the crimes have gone unpunished by the country's broken judicial system, an international human rights group said Monday.

Hundreds of new rapes are reported every week, but only 10 soldiers and militants have been convicted of rape in relatively lawless eastern Congo since the end of the country's devastating war in 2002, New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a report.

"Perpetrators of sexual violence are members of virtually all the armed forces and armed groups that operate in eastern Congo," according to the 52-page report.

According to neocon rhetoric, Congo should be next up for liberating. After all, the Inaugural Address made clear the Bush administration's global advocacy of liberty as a human right.

Tens of thousands of women and girls have been raped. Where are the moral values in Bush's foreign policy? How can the pro-life party tolerate such a situation of nationwide, institutionalized sexual abuse?

Easy. "Democracy" and "liberty" are on the march only wherever there is oil underfoot — or Ariel Sharon nearby.

{ 10:35 AM }

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