"Anything Goes" - Runaway Stage Productions (draft)
The Mad Flosser Goes To The DentistCOLUMBIA, S.C. — A black South Carolina pastor and his church claim they own the building that houses a so-called Klan museum and store where KKK robes and T-shirts emblazoned with racial slurs are sold, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday.
The Rev. David Kennedy said the property was transferred in 1997 to his Laurens County church by a Klansman who was fighting with others inside the hate group. A clause in the deed entitles John Howard, a man who runs the store, to operate his business in the building until he dies.
Kennedy said he'd like to close the store, but at the very least should be allowed to inspect the property.
"We've been outright denied," said Kennedy, pastor of New Beginnings Baptist Church. "Right now what we're focusing on is removing this cloud of doubt and this whole lie that we are not the real owners of the Redneck Shop building."
The lawsuit seeks to establish Kennedy's church as the legal owner of the property and stop Howard and associates from claiming to hold the deed.
According to the lawsuit, Howard and his associates have filed several court documents since the property was given to Kennedy's church that attempt to transfer the deed between various Klan-related owners, ignoring the church's claim.
...Howard, who calls himself a former Ku Klux Klan grand dragon for South Carolina and North Carolina, said Tuesday he hadn't heard of the lawsuit and hang up the phone on an AP reporter.
...Kennedy has led protests outside the store since it opened but said he's never been able to close it because of the agreement that Howard can run the shop for life.
He hopes the building will one day be the home for his New Beginnings Missionary Baptist Church, which now meets in a doublewide trailer.
Can the super-rich former governor of Massachusetts — the son of a Fortune 500 C.E.O. who made a vast fortune in the leveraged-buyout business — really keep a straight face while denouncing “Eastern elites”?
Can the former mayor of New York City, a man who, as USA Today put it, “marched in gay pride parades, dressed up in drag and lived temporarily with a gay couple and their Shih Tzu” — that was between his second and third marriages — really get away with saying that Barack Obama doesn’t think small towns are sufficiently “cosmopolitan”?
Can the vice-presidential candidate of a party that has controlled the White House, Congress or both for 26 of the past 28 years, a party that, Borg-like, assimilated much of the D.C. lobbying industry into itself — until Congress changed hands, high-paying lobbying jobs were reserved for loyal Republicans — really portray herself as running against the “Washington elite”?
Yes, they can.
A startled MSM goes into cockroach panic as Sarah Palin shows what a fully evolved woman really looks like.
T-Shirts From Back In The DayThey emailed the McCain/Palin campaign on Thursday afternoon, asking that they no longer use their song, but then it was played again on Thursday night.
“The Republican campaign did not ask for permission to use the song, nor would they have been granted that permission,” said their initial email to the campaign. When it was still played, Nancy Wilson called Entertainment Weekly to vent. “I think it’s completely unfair to be so misrepresented. I feel completely fucked over,” she said. She and her sister Ann then emailed this statement to EW.com: “Sarah Palin’s views and values in NO WAY represent us as American women. We ask that our song ‘Barracuda’ no longer be used to promote her image. The song ‘Barracuda’ was written in the late ’70s as a scathing rant against the soulless, corporate nature of the music business, particularly for women.
[Alan] Greenspan envisions the formation of a group akin to the Resolution Trust Corp. to step in, take a troubled company into conservatorship, wipe out the equity, impose some charge or "haircut" on its debts before guaranteeing them and then selling its assets. The RTC was created in 1989 to deal with the aftermath of the savings and loan crisis. It disposed of the assets of failed savings and loans and then went out of business.Oh come on, Alan, who DOESN'T like the idea of a magical piggy bank?
...Critics in Congress, in academia and elsewhere worry that the Fed's unprecedented actions - including financial backing in March for JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)'s takeover of Bear Stearns Cos. - are putting taxpayers on the hook for billions of dollars of potential losses. They also say it encourages "moral hazard," that is, allowing financial companies to gamble more recklessly in the future.
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, who took the helm after Greenspan, has repeatedly defended the Fed's actions, saying they were necessary to avert a meltdown of the entire financial system, which would have devastated the U.S. economy.
...Greenspan, 82, who ran the Fed for 18 1/2 years and was the second-longest serving chief, says he is concerned that Capitol Hill will look to the Fed's actions "as a wondrous new font of seemingly costless federal funding - a magical piggy bank."
Greenspan calls the current crisis "one of those rare, once in a century or half-century events."No, these events seem to be happening once a decade, or less. Remember the savings and loan crisis, or the dotcom crisis? They weren't that long ago. Indeed, the frequency of these events seem to be increasing!
Looking back, Greenspan says governments and central banks probably could not have altered the course of the once high-flying housing market and broken through investors' fevered euphoria.No, YOU couldn't, Mr. Greenspan. An interest rate increase anyone?
He believes that the government should have gone after fraudulent mortgage practices, however. "Bank regulators, who are expert in accounting, banking law and risk management, are not equipped for this job," he says. "It requires law-enforcement professionals."You could have lobbied for the enforcement of laws already on the books, Mr. Greenspan, had you cared.
Greenspan has taken much criticism for failing to crack down on dubious lending practices that eventually came to roost with the subprime meltdown and for failing to act as a forceful banking regulator. He also has been blamed for keeping interest rates too low for too long, feeding the housing bubble.Epitaph for a Wizard.
RIVAL groups of birds behave like football fans, shouting chants at each other and commiserating after a loss, research from England's University of Bristol has revealed.
Green woodhoopoes, a South African bird, live together in gangs of up to 12 and "rival groups often engage in raucous vocal displays, akin to opposing football supporters chanting at one another'', the university in the west of England said.
The research by Dr Andy Radford, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society, Series B, also revealed that the birds preen each other after a conflict, particularly when they have just lost or the battle lasted a long time.
"Just as football fans commiserate with their friends in the pub when their team loses a match... birds support one another following contests with their rivals,'' the university said.
NEW YORK -- The driver of a school bus that circled Brooklyn for nearly five hours while carrying about a dozen kindergartners and first-graders has been suspended.
Authorities say the 53-year-old driver claimed he had gotten lost Wednesday while ferrying the children from the Achievement First Brownsville Charter School to their homes.
When I first heard about Sarah Palin's, uh, domestic irregularities, I expected social conservatives to react with a kind of qualified, patronizing support—we are all sinners, there but for the grace of God, something like that. Instead, they are embracing her with unbridled admiration. The Family Research Council praised her for "choosing life in the midst of a difficult situation." Cathie Adams of the Eagle Forum, a conservative women's group, called her "the kind of woman I've been looking for all along." The two difficult pregnancies—Palin's with a Down syndrome baby and now her unmarried teenage daughter's—is just proof that "they're doing everything right," gushes Adams. Even the stern religious right godfather James Dobson doted: "A lot of people were praying, and I believe Sarah Palin is God's answer."
...What's missing from the conservative reaction is still remarkable. Just 15 years ago, a different Republican vice president was ripping into the creators of Murphy Brown for flaunting a working woman who chose to become a single mother. This time around, there's no stigma, no shame, no sin attached to what Dan Quayle would once have mockingly called Bristol Palin's "lifestyle" choices. In fact, so cavalier are conservatives about Sarah Palin's wreck of a home life that they make the rest of us look stuffy and slow-witted by comparison. "I think a hard-working, well-organized C.E.O. type can handle it very well," said Phyllis Schlafly, of the Eagle Forum.
Suddenly it's the Obamas, with their oh-so-perfect marriage and their Dick Van Dyke in the evenings and their two boringly innocent young girls, who seem like the fuddy-duddies.
...The most remarkable differences between the large mass of evangelicals and the rest of Americans are in divorce statistics. Since the '70s, evangelicals and the coastal elites have effectively switched places. Evangelicals are now far more likely to get divorced, whereas couples with four years of college education have cut their divorce rates in half. An intact happy marriage that produces well-behaved children, it turns out, is becoming a luxury of the elites—bad news for the Obamas.
Fire Freaked Me Out
Left: Turned out the fire had nothing to do with Step One. The battery of this vehicle had exploded unexpectedly and the entire vehicle had caught fire.Researchers found that people who live in lands conquered by the Roman army have less protection against HIV than those in countries they never reached
They say a gene which helps make people less susceptible to HIV occurs in greater frequency in areas of Europe that the Roman Empire did not stretch to.
...People with the mutation have some resistance to HIV infection and also take longer to develop AIDS, reports New Scientist.
...More than 15 per cent of people in some areas of northern Europe carry it compared with fewer than four per cent of Greeks.
...But study leader Dr Eric Faure, of Provence University in France, does not believe the Romans spread the regular version of the gene into their colonies by breeding with indigenous people.
Dr Faure, whose findings are published in Infection, Genetics and Evolution, said: "Gene flow between the two was extremely low."
Instead he believes the Romans introduced a disease to which people carrying the gene variant were particularly susceptible. As the Romans moved north this disease killed off people with the variant gene that now protects against HIV.
Perhaps I'm focusing on an irrelevant issue, but the presence, or non-presence, of Johnston on the stage tonight strikes me as important. It's one thing for delegates to be understanding and compassionate about the fix these two teenagers have gotten themselves into. It's another to actually celebrate it. And, given what we've learned in the last few days, if Johnston is up on stage with his girlfriend and the Palin family, and Republicans are wildly cheering, it will certainly look like they are celebrating this situation.
I don't usually engage in these scenarios, but I'll do it here. If the Obamas had a 17 year-old daughter who was unmarried and pregnant by a tough-talking black kid, my guess is if that they all appeared onstage at a Democratic convention and the delegates were cheering wildly, a number of conservatives might be discussing the issue of dysfunctional black families.
TV commercials are promoting the Hungry Jack's Quad Stack Burger, which contains four beef patties, four slices of cheese, two rashers of bacon, barbecue sauce and two sugared buns. It contains 71g of fat, 34.7g of saturated fat, 1930 milligrams of sodium, and 74.8g of protein.
The lack of mainstream media attacks on Bristol Palin didn't stop true believers from uncorking on a favorite straw man.
The crowd groaned at the mere mention of the pregnancy issue during a panel here Tuesday morning. Idaho Lt. Gov. Jim Risch was one of several panelists who rose to defend Bristol's honor. Risch dismissed all baby talk with a terse: "Next question." And former McCain political aide Mike Murphy, now an NBC news-talker, ordered the media to "lay off the kid."
Even the youngest delegate here, 17-year-old Mike Knopf, had fully digested the day's "bad-media" message. "Despite what the liberal media is trying to say," regurgitated young Knopf in an interview with Newsweek, "she has nothing to be ashamed of."
Surfing B3ta
Left: Bela Lugosi's Dad: What's Wrong With You People?
Left: That Random Guy: We Don't Talk About HimYesterday, Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds appeared on CNN for an interview with Campbell Brown. Brown was tough on Bounds, refusing to let him spout typical campaign talking points. She repeatedly pressed him on Palin’s foreign policy experience and qualifications, asking him to name one decision that she made as commander-in-chief of the Alaskan National Guard. Bounds was unable to do so.Meanwhile, back on the celebrity front, Lindsay Lohan thinks this pregnancy matter is distracting the nation from important issues:
Today, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer revealed that because of that tough interview, the McCain campaign has canceled the senator’s appearance on Larry King Live tonight:The McCain campaign said it believed that exchange was over the line and as a result the interview scheduled for Larry King Live with Sen. McCain was pulled. CNN does not believe that Campbell’s interview was over the line. We are committed to fair coverage of both sides of this historic election.
I am concerned with the fact that Sarah Palin brought the attention to her daughter’s pregnancy, rather than all world issues and what she believes she could possibly do to change them-if elected. I get Sarah Palin’s views against abortion, but i would much prefer to hear more about what she can do for our country rather than how her daughter is going to have a child no matter what.
Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. "She asked the library how she could go about banning books," he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. "The librarian was aghast." That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn't be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving "full support" to the mayor.
Bristol Palin, the 17-year-old daughter of Sarah Palin, is pregnant and will keep the baby and marry the baby's father, the Republican vice presidential candidate said Monday.
Terry Tang is a long time friend of my daughter and a writer for AP currently based in Phoenix.
"bare" (draft)
But it works the other way too. Several older people I talked to found the show somewhat offputting. "I don't know what I think about all this homosexual grab ass," one person said, which sounds like they know exactly what they think about all this homosexual grab ass, but just won't say it. Another person called the show "angsty - very angsty" (which brought to mind Woody Allen).
