From here on out, Saturday is Caption Contest Day on Lefty's Last Cry. If you have an idea for a funny caption respond in the comments section for the above picture. At the end of the weekend we'll pick the best one and post it on our Funny page!
I got the picture from Pundit Kitchen, which is another good place for putting captions and text on political pictures.
Enjoy your weekend!
UPDATE:
The winner of this week's caption contest is "The Professor." You can see the captioned image here.
With Evan Bayh's abrupt departure from the senate, it's up to Indiana to decide who will take his place. Who better than Indiana's own rock-and-roll-laureate, Mr. John (Cougar) Mellencamp? Here's why.
1. He was born in a small town
Educated in a small town Taught to fear Jesus in a small town Used to daydream in that small town Another born romantic that's me
Are there any lyrics written by a liberal that so wonderfully court the teabaggers and Sarah Palin's "real America"? Just don't let the song play to the part where he "marries an L.A. doll", or we'll lose them just as soon as we get them.
2. He has a history of saying "screw you" to Republicans
During the last campaign, John Mellencamp got royally pissed off when he discovered that John McCain was using his tune "Our Country" for the McCain/Palin campaign. Apparently, McCain ignored the lyrics:
There's room enough here For science to live And there's room enough here For religion to forgive And try to understand All the people of this land This is our country
Not exactly courting to the conservative base. Anyway, this ordeal was reminiscent of years earlier, when Mellencamp shut down Reagan's attempt to co-opt the tune "Pink Houses" - a song about how the American dream tends to fail those who were born less fortunate (Reagan also missed the point when he tried to use Springsteen's "Born In the USA", which is about how terribly the government treated Vietnam veterans). He's been doing this since Reagan! That's experience you can count on.
"Violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer"
-Joseph Andrew Stack
A man named Joseph Andrew Stack, fed up with paying taxes and being audited by the IRS, set fire to his house and flew a plane into an IRS building in Austin, TX (in an obvious homage to the September 11th terrorist attacks). The reaction to this incident has been absolutely confounding.
Try a google search for "IRS attack", "IRS Austin", or "Joseph Andrew Stack". The headlines from NBC, CBS, Fox, even NPR are calling it a "plan crash", or even a "suicide". I have yet to see a major news network use the word "terrorism" or "terrorist" in their headlines. Why are we so unwilling to call it what it is? A man, angry at the government, launched a suicide bomb at a federal building, intent on killing innocent people.
Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) appears to the be the only public figure in America who is willing to use the phrase "domestic terrorism."
"Like the larger-scale tragedy in Oklahoma City, this was a cowardly act of domestic terrorism. Stack's apparent website message reflects the steadily increasing flow of 'the government is out to get me' paranoia."
I can't begin to wrap my head around the hand-wringing going on in America. Are Americans so afraid of the anti-government tea party thugs that they can't even call a terrorist attack a terrorist attack? I don't know what to call this other a sign of cowardice on the part of the media. When Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City people were actually willing to call it terrorism. The only that has changed since then is that now the violent radical right has gone mainstream.
On top of that, newly elected Senator Scott Brown went on Fox News after the terrorist attack and rather than condemn the attack, he sympathized with the terrorist's actions.
If that's not sickening enough, people on Facebook have been praising the actions of this terrorist. A Fan Page popped up this evening, accumulating over 250 members (hopefully with a sizable portion of those people being dissenters) before being taken down by Facebook. Undeterred, the right-wing domestic terrorist sympathizers on Facebook started putting up copycat fan pages. They're calling him a "hero" and decrying that Facebook took down the original fan page.
It's funny, since as college students, we're often reminded that we need to be careful with what we do on facebook to make sure that we exclude incriminating information or pictures that would paint a negative public image about our character. Yet there is a surprising number of people who seem content to have, among the list of their fanpages, a suicide terrorist fan page.
I am glad, however, that the fan pages have continued to pop up after Facebook cracked down on the first one. Freedom of speech issues aside, I'm happy to have the opportunity to 1) Be able to see who on Facebook is such a lost cause that they're willing to express public support for terrorism and 2) Be able to see Stack's manifesto, so we can understand the corrosive impact that right-wing anti-government paranoia can have.
The manifesto in its entirety can be read right here after the break.
The starting wage for Notre Dame building service employees is $9.02 an hour, or $8 an hour with no benefits for temporary workers, of which there are many. In St. Joe’s County, a self-sufficiency wage, the wage rate that provides a full-time worker an income sufficient to meet basic needs without subsidies of any kind is $12.90. And let’s be real, even workers who are lucky enough to make this “self-sufficiency” wage are struggling to pay their bills and support their families. Not such a great life, is it? Meanwhile, we are paying tens of thousands of dollars to attend this fine Catholic institution, which is systematically shitting on its own mission statement. Notre Dame is first and foremost a business, which, like many corporations, specializes in cutting costs at the expense of its workers. Ever-increasing workloads, decreasing (or no) raises, hiring freezes, cutting hours, favoritism, discrimination, under-appreciation, working with injuries, disrespect, unjust suspensions... the list goes on. Talk to some workers; you’ll hear these stories, too.
The late Pope John Paul II—God rest his soul—wrote, “It is right to struggle against an unjust economic system that does not uphold the priority of the human being over capital and land.” That’s a pretty powerful statement. In an effort to make JPII proud, some quality Notre Dame students decided to hang up posters publicizing the nearly $4/hour difference between the self-sufficiency wage and the starting hourly wage of a Notre Dame building services employee. However, a couple of these students were stopped after hanging just one poster in the men’s bathroom. Apparently this is considered “vandalism” worthy of calling the all-powerful Notre Dame Security Police. Not wanting to risk a high-speed segway chase that would inevitably have ended with a career ruining reslife, the posters were removed. By the way, dictionary.com defines vandals as “a person who willfully destroys or mars something beautiful or valuable.” Never knew Debartolo bathrooms were valued so highly.
I don’t know when making people aware of injustice by hanging posters became vandalism, but that’s absurd. Do we have freedom of speech at this university, or can we only express things that paint Notre Dame in a positive light? Not only is JPII turning in his grave, but countless urinal users have been deprived of their right to a good read by this overbearing, unethical, yet allegedly Catholic institution.
Let me preface this entry by noting I am largely a judicial conservative. I am one of the fiercest liberals in my advocacy of sound public policy, but my views on the judiciary often pit me against my brethren.
I found this interesting, as a Supreme Court watcher and constitutional law scholar, I thought I could provide some insight into this absurd conservative rambling I stumbled on the Huffpo:
“A group of more than 80 conservative leaders plan to sign a document on Wednesday that signals a retrenchment to "founding principles."The document will be called The Mount Vernon Statement in honor of the location of the signing ceremony. The signers include a who's who of conservative heavy weights -- names like Grover Norquist, Ed Meese, Richard Viguerie, Edwin Feulner and Alfred Regnery”
The treatise opens with the rather peculiar declaration of “Constitutional Conservatism: A Statement for the 21st Century.” An open declaration of conservative principles is fine by me, but shamefully attempting to cloak these thoughts in the mantle of constitutional conservatism is an act worthy of ridicule, which we may now joyfully engage. After a lengthy preface, of the typical counterfactual history that conservatives too often engage, we stumble upon their real intentions. Let’s take these misconceptions one at a time.
“[The Constitution] applies the principle of limited government based on the rule of law to every proposal.”
This certainly depends on what one means by the ‘principle of limited government.’ The congress acts within its authority when enacting legislation pursuant to the powers of the legislature in Article 1 section 8. Principles of limited government, therefore, must suppose that congress has acted without authority when enacting legislation, or that the ‘conservative constitution’ would provide congress with fewer tools to address the challenges of a nation of some three hundred million. I am unsure of what complaint these conservatives have (Not enough domestic spying!?). Do they think social security, Medicare, Health Care reform, to be a violation of the interstate commerce clause? Even if such programs were not to be interpreted as coherent with the interstate commerce, congress continues to retain such authority in the means of general welfare, or even through some system of cooperative federalism. Last, allow me to note, that when republicans blissfully held power, they enacted a large scale, unfunded, Medicare prescription bill, that one must believe is also unconstitutional under this bizarre reading of congressional authority. Either way, let’s take grandma's money and health care away, okay? Obviously too much government etc.
Lost amid the controversy over teleprompters vs "hand-notes" last week was an interesting point made by Sarah Palin. It certainly was hilarious to see a public figure take swipes at the President for the (rather common) practice of reading prepared speeches from a teleprompter and then refer to notes written on her palms (e.g. "Energy" "budget tax cuts", "lift American spirit") for a not-so-candid post-address interview. However, I found my self more troubled by some comments from another interview she gave with Fox News' Chris Wallace last week:
More on this, including my take on it, if you click the "Read More" button below.
Bayh resigned the day before the senatorial candidate's forms & signatures are due. If no one files by noon today, it's in the hands of the Indiana Democratic Party to choose the senate candidate (Indiana code 3-13-1-7). Maddow interviewed Dan Parker, chairman of the Indiana Democratic Party, on what's next for Indiana democrats:
Although D'Ippolito's chances of being on the ballot are looking grim, I completely agree with her statement about the Hoosier political world: “Politics in Indiana is the old boy’s school.” And I hate to get all lady-lovin' gendertastic* on you, but alas, it's in my nature. Currently, 17 of the 100 U.S. Senators are women. Thirteen of the women who have served were appointed; seven of those were appointed to succeed their deceased husbands. In the next decade it would be really refreshing to see an Indiana that is progressive enough to elect a lady senator (just throwing that pipe dream out there).
Keeping Indiana blue for the 2010 election is looking to be an uphill battle.
*word pulled from personal lexicon: gendertastic -adj - describing unrestrained gender ideology
"There are better ways to serve my fellow citizens... I love working for the people of Indiana. I love helping our citizens make the most of their lives, but I do not love Congress."
Bayh stated that his frustration with "excessive partisanship" was his reason for leaving the Senate, citing the recent examples of Harry Reid scrapping the proposed "jobs bill" and the 7 Republican co-sponsors of the bill to form the Deficit Reduction Commission voting against their own bill as examples.
While Bayh himself has stated that "even in the current challenging environment, I am confident in my prospects for re-election," I'm not so sure he had any reason to be that confident. In today's environment, Democratic incumbents in "purple states" have every reason to fear losing their jobs in the coming months. He's polling well now, but 2010 is going to be a long year. Martha Coakley was polling well for a while too, and we all know how that turned out.
Bayh's decision to not run for reelection most likely dooms the Democrats to losing his seat this November, so Democrats have every reason to feel betrayed. However, I don't feel this way. At least, not yet.
It's been a while, but we here at Lefty's want to bring it back. So here it is, your Valentine's Day present from us- a little Sunday Evening Tunes. Enjoy!
