KicK! Making Politics Fun

In the what's not new department of overpaid and testosterone overloaded black athletes, pit bull blood and gore rise once again from the ghost of Michael Vick.

Retired Houston Texan Steve Foley kept a couple of what neighbors called dangerojus pit bulls on his gated property.

The other day when Twana Schulz and the puppy she was holding were picking up her daughter at the bus stop, a neighbor yelled "His dogs are lose!" Twana with the fear of God in her ran to her home but the dogs intercepted her in her front yard.

After suffering several bites to her face and neck (hospitalization and stitches) she gave up the puppy to the pit bulls who gleefully tore it apart in front of her. Probe continues in Fort Bend pit bull attack

This falls under the three things I would most not like to have:

A loaded AK 47 on my kitchen table

Violent pit pulls running in my yard

A hemorrhoid bigger than my head

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For years, Dave McArdle loved dressing up as Andrew Jackson, and visitors to the Hermitage delighted in McArdle's folksy way of bringing "Old Hickory" to life. McArdle is also the spitting image of Jackson, and we cast him as Jackson in our film. But just after we finished shooting, startling news arrived: McArdle had resigned from the job he loved — the job for which he was seemingly born — because he refused to work for an organization that made Jackson look bad because he owned slaves. Soon after, we found out that McArdle held something close to the majority view in Tennessee. No more Excuses Carl Byker

This is one of the three reasons I am still holding hope for Hillary. Sure Tennessee is part of the Old South which a Democratic Presidential candidate cannot win no matter, but this racism - oops wrong word, there is no racism anymore the GOP has changed the name for it to nativism now - spills over everywhere to various degrees which leads me to sadly believe The Bradley Effect is in full swing in this election. White Americans may say they will vote for an African American, but when they hit the voting booths they won't. My other two issues are that Hillary will do a much better job of the long overdue ass kicking the Republicans are so in need of, and my fear of some unknown issue in the past that will rear its head after the convention and knock Obama out making John W. McBush President. There is nothing new about Hillary, and NEW sells.

If you have been reading this blog over the months I hope you have taken note that I have not attacked either candidate, or any Democats for that matter. The bottom line is that I tend to believe that the so called unlikeable Hillary factor is less a problem than our historic racist nature. Please please prove me wrong come November...

Perhaps white Americans should ask themselves: "What would it have been like to work 365 days a year from sunrise to midnight, with no hope of a better life? And to see my children living exactly the same nightmare."

And perhaps black Americans ought to ask themselves: "If I were a white Southerner before the Civil War, would I have owned slaves if it meant a better life for my family? And would that have made me irredeemably evil?" No more Excuses Carl Byker

And that is the gist of our racist nature. Byker is referring to what is called empathy, or what over the years I have called the POV gene (point of view). Though no Republican possesses the genetic material to put themselves in another's shoes and ask such questions, it too drifts beyond the GOP base.

Continue reading "Tennessee Believes Andrew Jackson was a Good Slave Owner"

The story on this video is not so much that for the first time in history the President of the United States was heartily booed throwing out the first pitch of the season at a ball park, but that the sport announcers giving live  commentary were AFRAID to mention it. Why is that?  Facebook | Digg | Reddit | Stumble | Buzz it! | Email Article |

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From Real Time with Bill Maher comes the photographic future of yet another failed Presidential candidate growing a beard.

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"And at bottom, his economic vision makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. He’s going to keep the Bush tax cuts, continue our $3-trillion-and-counting war in Iraq and decrease corporate taxes. And how is he going to pay for it? By getting rid of pork-barrel earmarks. And I am planning to remodel my house by purchasing a tube of Elmer’s glue. But give the man credit for telling it like he thinks it is. So far, he’s only alienated the homeowners, retirees and vacation-takers."

March 29, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
McCain Forecloses Early
By GAIL COLLINS

I don’t see how anybody could deny that John McCain is a straight-talker. The country is terrified of economic collapse and he’s been sounding like Mr. Potter, the banker in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” You can’t get more forthright than that.

McCain, by the way, is going to be the Republican presidential nominee. Really. While you were watching Hillary and Barack in the Campaign That Never Ends, the Republicans picked him.

How did this happen so fast? We haven’t even heard from Pennsylvania!

The Republicans, with their unfair but very, very efficient winner-take-all primaries, closed the deal while the Democrats were still trying to count the votes in Texas. (Results are due any minute!) Now, the Democrats are terrified that McCain will have months and months to raise money and ingratiate himself with the American people while their candidates are spending every cent they can get their hands on to make each other less popular. On Friday, Senator Patrick Leahy called on Hillary Clinton to drop out of the race because McCain was getting a “free ride” while Democrats squabble.

That felt like an overestimation. Not that McCain hasn’t scored some points on the days that he wasn’t getting Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq mixed up. Witness the speed and dexterity with which he’s been distancing himself from the White House. The only withdrawal McCain supports began when he said he was eager to have Bush campaign for him whenever “it fits into his busy schedule,” making it clear that the busyness of said schedule was going to be beyond comprehension.

Then McCain gave a foreign policy speech in which he broke dramatically with the administration by acknowledging that we should probably quit invading other countries in the face of enormous opposition from our allies.

No fair! He got to start first! Why aren’t the Republicans required to use primary rules that allocate delegates in a fair, proportional way that makes it impossible for anybody to actually win? If McCain were still running against Mitt (Available for Vice President) Romney and Fred (Available for “Law & Order” Cameo) Thompson, he would, of course, still be sounding like a divorced-from-reality loon. But once a Republican clinches his party’s nomination, he moves to the middle, stops dropping Ronald Reagan’s name every five seconds and begins describing himself as a “Roosevelt Republican,” hoping that older working-class voters will think he means Franklin.

Fortunately for the quivering Democrats, McCain has also felt compelled to speak about the mortgage crisis. His economic thinking — which is, in any form, a brand-new phenomenon — harks back to the time when Republicans all seemed to be elderly rich guys who muttered a lot about bonded indebtedness. The public’s deep lack of enthusiasm for this worldview was what encouraged Reagan to change the subject to optimism and abortion.

The theme for his mortgage speech this week was basically McCain to Homeowners: Drop Dead. It was, he said sternly, “not the duty of the government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly.” The good news, he noted, was that out of 80 million American homeowners, only 4 million are in the tank, while everybody else is “working a second job, skipping a vacation and managing their budgets” the way Countrywide Financial intended them to.

He did, however, leave the door open for some vague, amorphous, undefined aid to good homeowners, as opposed to irresponsible ones who ... did something irresponsible. Like taking that vacation.

McCain then suggested that the federal government ought to do something about getting regulations off the back of the financial markets and concluded with a call to reduce the corporate tax rate. It was not exactly a rallying cry for the masses.

Imagine what Mitt (Really, Really, Really Available) Romney would have been saying about mortgages if he had the nomination in hand and was repositioning his deeply flexible self for the general election. Can you see the “Wall Street Is Broken” banners? He’d probably have sent a son bearing a certified check to every mortgage defaulter in a swing state.

McCain also favors privatizing parts of the Social Security system, an idea so deeply unpopular with actual people that it never flew in Congress, even when the Republicans were in control and the nation had not yet deduced that the president was permanently out to lunch.

And at bottom, his economic vision makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. He’s going to keep the Bush tax cuts, continue our $3-trillion-and-counting war in Iraq and decrease corporate taxes. And how is he going to pay for it? By getting rid of pork-barrel earmarks. And I am planning to remodel my house by purchasing a tube of Elmer’s glue.

But give the man credit for telling it like he thinks it is. So far, he’s only alienated the homeowners, retirees and vacation-takers. Facebook | Digg | Reddit | Stumble | Buzz it! | Email Article |

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Mandi Hamlin. forced to remove a nipple ring with pliers before she could board an airplane for a flight from Lubbock to Dallas on February 24th, called this Thursday for an apology by federal security agents and a civil rights investigation.

Perhaps she seemed like a terrorist threat to the TSA agent, though it's a far stretch. Hamlin passed through the large metal detector without incident. The female agent used a hand held detector which beeped in front of Hamlin's chest. Hamlin explained she was wearing piercings. Apparently this was cause for a pow wow with the male agents who insisted she remove the jewelry. Explaining she could not remove the piercings, an offer to show them to a female agent was turned down.

Taken behind a curtain, she managed to get one bar shaped piercing out, but had great trouble with a ring which had obviously grown into the skin. "Still crying, she informed the TSA officer that she could not remove it without the help of pliers, and the officer gave a pair to her," said Hamlin's attorney, Gloria Allred, reading from a letter she sent Thursday to the director of the TSA's Office of Civil Rights and Liberties. Allred is a well-known Los Angeles lawyer who often represents high-profile claims."After rings are inserted, the skin can often heal around the piercing, and the rings can be extremely difficult and painful to remove," Allred said in the letter.

Applying pliers to the torso of a mannequin that had a peach-colored bra with the rings on it, Hamlin showed reporters at the news conference how she took off the second ring. Male agents snickered as she took the ring out. She was scanned again and allowed to board though she was wearing a belly button ring. Obviously that wasn't the exploding one.

I wouldn't wish this experience upon anyone," Mandi Hamlin said at a news conference. "My experience with TSA was a nightmare I had to endure. No one deserves to be treated this way."Hamlin filed a complaint, but the TSA's customer service manager at the Lubbock airport concluded the screening was handled properly. Allred said Hamlin wants an apology from the TSA and an investigation by the agency's civil rights office.Allred said she might consider legal action if the TSA does not apologize. Call me crazy, but an apology seems a small price.

Hamlin was publicly humiliated and has "undergone an enormous amount of physical pain to have the nipple rings reinserted" because of scar tissue, Allred said.Hamlin said her piercings have never set off an airport metal detector."The conduct of TSA was cruel and unnecessary," Allred wrote. "The last time that I checked a nipple was not a dangerous weapon."

There may still be a few glitches which need working out in our airport security practices, though I assume like everything else dealing with our safety, it's being handled by trained professionals. Woman Says TSA Forced Piercings Removal

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Beautiful Jenna Walters would seem to have everything she wants. Miss Fayetteville, N.C. 2007,will be making her next public appearance in court.Arrested in November, her volatile nature was frightening for Angela Thomas.

Walters veered recklessly through traffic in Southern Pines, N.C. in order to harass driver Angela Thomas. Walters then cut in front of Thomas blocking her path, got out, and proceeded to scream and taunt the woman. Abruptly she stopped and drove away, returning only moments later from the other direction, bumped Thomas' car and continued screaming. Thomas must have thought her ordeal over, only to be jolted yet again from behind and hearing more yelling. Miss Congeniality loses her temper

Irony anyone? Walters was voted the 2006 Miss Fayetteville Miss Congeniality winner!

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We often wonder how some people can be sooooo stupid. In the case of Paul John Vickers of Longmont, Colorado we may have a clue. After a tiff with his wife, 50 year old Vickers shot her cat Bootsie. He then emailed her and other friends and family to brag about it. Someone forwarded the email to the police who arrived and found his house full of pot plants and a stash of 4 more pounds. Paul John went to jail and is being held on $25,000 bond. As of yet, his wife has not dashed down to the Boulder jail to bail him out. Man shoots wife's cat

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