Things That Would Be Preferable To Dinner With Donald And Mitt, According To Twitter



 Access to birth control
Acid bath
Alien invasion
Aneurysm
Answering this question
Anything
Athletes' Foot
Athletes' Foot, on armpits
Bankruptcy
Baptism, posthumous
Bathtub of maggots
Beard ripped off by force
Bedbugs
Being eaten, by lions, by man high on bath salts, by pack of wild dogs, by pack of wolves, by rattlesnakes
Black Eyed Peas, mandatory annual Super Bowl Halftime show
Bleeding, in shark infested waters
Blunt force trauma
Body cavity search
Breakdancing, in skinny jeans
Breathing
Castration
Cervical cancer
Cholera
Circumcision, sans anaesthetic
Cleaning, a cat box, rest stop toilets with hands
Clubbing baby seals
Colitis
Colorectal cancer
Colonoscopy, by Edward Scissorhands, by live python, sans sedation, via chainsaw
Colostomy
Constipation
Cracked rib
Crohn's disease
Crucifixion
Death
Diarrhea
Drinking, colonoscopy prep fluid, contents of WetVac, five year old milk, hemlock, Playboy Mansion grotto water
Drought
Drowning
Dying
Dysentery
Eating, bag of thumbtacks, cat litter, cold mac and cheese whilst in underwear, dog feces, eel sushi by force, Ex-Lax brownies, ghost pepper, hot Frosted Flakes, off floor of Waffle House, Olive Garden, own vomit, rat poison, real New York City pizza, shards of glass, toenails, unrefrigerated pink slime, warm mayonnaise pie, with Dominique Strauss-Kahn, with Hannibal Lecter, with Jerry Sandusky, with Josef Stalin, with just Mitt Romney, with Justin Bieber, with Kardashians, with Westboro Baptist Church
Ebola
Elevator, trapped with gassy Karl Rove
Emergency tracheotomy
Enema, with bath salts, with hot lead, with Tabasco
Erectile dysfunction
Everything
Eyeballs, forked, icepicked, knitting needled, sporked, tattooed
Expressing one's dog's anal glands
Face, punched
Falling, into hole with glass shards
Food poisoning
Gangrene
Gargling, razorblades
Genital mutilation, by ants, by barbed wire, by battery acid, by hammer and burning log, by hot poker, by icepick, by pickle slicer, by pitchfork, by sandblaster, by shoe, by toothpicks, by zipper, in farming accident, on L Train
Getting shot
Gingrich, Newt, in tutu whilst singing "Working In A Coal Mine"
Gonorrhea
Hades/Hell
Hands, ironed, slammed in car door
Hemorrhoids
Hepatitis C
Herpes
Hitting yourself, in face with hammer
Huffing, paint at family reunion
Human centipede
Hunger strike
Ingesting, Comet, fatal amount of Sweet-N-Low, propane (anally)
Jar of farts
Jogging, post-vasectomy
Keelhauling
Kidney stone
Koala Bear, dead and lashed to backside
Lego, stepped upon
Leprosy
Listed, on White House "kill list"
Listening, to Ke$ha performing "Subterranean Homesick Blues," to Nickelback performing the works of Creed, to Octomom lecturing on parenting, to Rebecca Black covering "Chocolate Rain"
Locusts
Losing money in Facebook IPO
Malaria
Nipple, third
Nuclear winter
Papercuts, thousands (followed by lemon juice bath), millions (followed by rubbing alcohol bath)
Pelvic exam
Planking, in traffic
Poison Ivy, anal
Prison
Probe, transvaginal
Ptomaine
Pubic lice
Rectal exam
Root canal
Santorum, Google it
Scurvy
Self immolation
Self-pleasuring, with buzzsaw, with cheese grater, with Icy Hot, with sword
Showering, in molten lava
Sliding, on barbed wire, on dry sandpaper
Sound engineering, with Khloe Kardashian
Sparrow, nailed to forehead
Spiders, sprung from a popped boil
Spinal tap
Staring, at 2012 Chicago Cubs, at 24-hour webinar about personal branding and Klout, at "Battlefield Earth" sequel, at "Benson," at "Cabin Boy," at complete season of "The Apprentice," at Japanese eel porn, at "Leonard Part Six," at Mitt's tax returns, at Mitt/Trump sexual encounter, at a pornographic movie starring one's parents, at "Showgirls, at "The Time Traveler's Wife," at a "Twilight Zone" marathon, at Thomas Kinkade paintings for eternity, at Trump's actual hairline
Starvation
Sucking, on ET's fingers
Swimming, with alligators
Syphillis
Teeth-pulling
Toilet training quituplets
Toupee, Trump's on one's entire back
Trapped, in closet with Victoria Jackson
Universal health care
Unwanted sexual encounter, with buffalo, with corpse, with crocodile, with Dom Deluise in jacuzzi filled with stew, with family, with fifty dollars worth of nickels, with garden tools, with grandmother, with grandmother (dead), with in-laws, with Ravi Shankar's sitar, with Roman Polanski, with Sasquatch, with wall outlet, with wild boars
Urinary tract infection
Vas deferens, destroyed in failed gymnastic feat
Violent encounter, with cheese grater, with Chris Christie over last cupcake, with Dick Cheney, with direwolf, with lawnmower, with piranhas, with rabid bat, with tweezers, with tweezers and back hair and intoxicated chimpanzees, with wakened bear, with Zdeno Chara slap shot
War
Waterboarding
Working on a chain gang
Year without toilet paper
Yeast infection
Zombies, attack, face eaten by

well done,,,,,,,,,,,

With a splash, the (SpaceX) Dragon has landed

The first picture of the Dragon spacecraft as it floats in the ocean awaiting recovery ships. (SpaceX)

At 8:42AM Pacific/11:42 AM Eastern this morning, SpaceX completed an historic mission as the business end of the Dragon capsule splashed down safely in the Pacific ocean, to be recovered by boats and head for land. From the SpaceX announcement:

Last week, SpaceX made history when its Dragon spacecraft became the first commercial vehicle in history to successfully attach to the International Space Station. Previously only four governments – the United States, Russia, Japan and the European Space Agency – had achieved this challenging technical feat. Dragon departed the space station this morning. This is SpaceX's second demonstration flight under a 2006 Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) agreement with NASA to develop the capability to carry cargo to and from the International Space Station.

Right-wingers hate spending—unless they pocket the cash.

Paul Begala:The Right Hates Spending, Unless It Pockets the Cash

I don’t know if it’s a conservative thing or a wealth thing or just a jerk thing, but I’ve been appalled lately at the complete lack of self-awareness of rich right-wingers. The hypocrisy of Republican millionaires who say they want to cut government spending while simultaneously asking for a government handout is staggering. How can they be that clueless? Are they missing the gene for embarrassment? Or does having your ring kissed dull the shame receptors of the soul?

  Take Joe Ricketts. The billionaire businessman recently landed on the front page of The New York Times for considering a proposal to fund $10 million in ads attacking President Obama’s former minister, Jeremiah Wright. But let’s set aside the content of the ads. Focus, instead, on the stated purpose of Ricketts’s super PAC, which is nicely captured in its name: Ending Spending. That’s right: it doesn’t aim to trim or reduce government spending but to end it. How? In part by outing hypocrites who “say one thing and do another” on the subject.

So imagine my surprise when I heard about how Ricketts and his family have used the beloved Chicago Cubs as a hostage to persuade (a less charitable person would say “extort”) taxpayers to give them welfare. The Cubbies last won a World Series 103 years ago, but during the Ricketts reign they have gone from lovable losers to cynical hypocrites. After hints that the family might move the Cubs’ spring-training home from Arizona to Florida, the panicky people of Mesa handed the owners $99 million of their money.

Now Mr. Ending Spending and his son Tom Ricketts are trying the same trick on the people of Chicago, seeking $150 million of taxpayers’ money to renovate Wrigley Field, plus a share of amusement-tax revenue until the end of time—which, by the way, is coming sooner than a Cubs World Series victory. As the indispensable ThinkProgress blog noted, Joe Ricketts has smugly declared, “I think it’s a crime for our elected officials to borrow money today, to spend money today, and push the repayment of that loan out into the future on people who are not even born yet.” And yet that’s precisely what he is trying to do in Chicago. In Texas we call that chutzpah.

Ricketts, oddly, is not the only right-wing hypocrite in baseball. Former pitcher Curt Schilling should be inducted into the hall of shame as well. The state of Rhode Island has pumped $75 million of taxpayers’ money into Schilling’s unsuccessful 38 Studios, and could flush millions more down Schilling’s commode. Schilling, who earned $114 million in his baseball career, loves to lecture us bleacher bums about government spending. He campaigned for Republicans George W. Bush, John McCain, and Scott Brown because, as he said of Brown, “he’s for smaller government.” Too small to help the poor, but big enough to bail out a multimillionaire.

Alberto E. Rodriguez / Getty Images

Ricketts and Schilling will find a kindred spirit in Mitt Romney. Romney’s wealth is unspeakably vast and his personal consumption grotesquely conspicuous, but that’s his business. What rankles me—and should hurt Romney politically—is that some of that staggering wealth came from taxpayers, through bailouts and subsidies. In 1993 Bain & Co. owed the Bank of New England $38 million. The bank went under, and Romney negotiated a deal with the FDIC that allowed Bain to walk away from $10 million of that debt—sticking the taxpayers with the bill.

When Bain owned Steel Dynamics, Romney and his investors took $37 million in taxpayer subsidies—a sweet deal when they only invested about half that amount themselves. Tad DeHaven of the libertarian Cato Institute told the Los Angeles Times, “This is corporate welfare, an example of the government stepping into the marketplace, picking winners and losers, providing profits to business owners, and leaving taxpayers stuck with the bill.”

Classic crony capitalism: privatize the gain, socialize the risk. When Romney drove GST Steel into bankruptcy, he and his partners made $12 million in profit and another $4.5 million in consulting fees. But Romney stuck the taxpayers with a $44 million tab for the company’s underfunded pensions.

But Romney—like Ricketts and Schilling and so many others—never tires of lecturing the rest of us for being so selfish as to want good teachers, safe streets, and fully-funded fire departments. “Getting our fiscal house in order has become more than just an economic issue,” Romney’s campaign website piously declares. “It’s a moral imperative.”

A moral imperative? Spare me. Most middle-class Americans are tired of sanctimonious right-wingers who preach fiscal chastity after spending the night in the brothel of government bailouts

nice.....

Potato Daddy, A Mr. Potato Head Version of Big Daddy From BioShock

Potato Daddy by Ginger Troll, a wonderful Mr. Potato Head version of Big Daddy from the video game BioShock.

photos

Wayne Carter Threw Intestines At Officers After Stabbing Himself, Police Say

 Got to respect the man's determination...............

Wayne Carter allegedly stabbed himself with a knife (not pictured) and then threw bits of his flesh at cops.

A New Jersey man allegedly cut out his entrails in front of police and then threw bits of his flesh and intestines at them.

The gruesome scene played out at a home in Hackensack, N.J., where 43-year-old Wayne Carter allegedly barricaded himself in on Sunday, NBC New York reported.

Officers got a call that morning when a witness said Carter was threatening to harm himself with a knife. Two cops responded, kicked in the door and found Carter in the corner, the station reported.
Carter allegedly ignored officers' orders to put down the knife, and instead began stabbing himself in the abdomen, neck and legs.

An attempt to pepper spray the bleeding man had no effect, the Associated Press reported.

That's when Carter -- disemboweled but responsive -- reportedly threw bits of his skin and intestines at the officers.
They decided to retreat and call in the Bergen County SWAT team, Hackensack police Lt. John Heinemann told reporters. The team was able to subdue Carter and get him to a hospital, where he remained in critical condition on Monday.
Heinemann said he believes that drugs or mental illness may have led to the horrific incident, but those details haven't been confirmed.
No charges have yet been filed due to the unusual nature of the incident.

great time to be alive..........

Virgin Galactic spaceship gets FAA's OK for test flights

: xeni@xeni.net.

The Federal Aviation Administration today cleared SpaceShipTwo, Virgin Galactic's six-passenger commercial space vehicle, to begin rocket-powered suborbital test flights.

love it...........

The SpaceX Dragon, having successfully berthed with the International Space Station, is on its way back home. Last week the space vehicle became the first privately-built and operated spacecraft to reach the ISS. Dragon is targeted to land in the Pacific Ocean, about 500 miles west-southwest of Los Angeles, at approximately 8:44 AM PT/11:44 AM ET tomorrow. The vehicle's return voyage, from ISS departure to splashdown, will be webcast on NASA TV starting at 3:30AM ET/12:30 AM PT.

OK....It's not funny (it's a little funny)

hahahaha........

TOM THE DANCING BUG: Obama Sparks Creationism Controversy With "Evolution" of His Gay Marriage Position

By Ruben Bolling at 9:45 am Wednesday, May 30

Support Tom the Dancing Bug and receive untold BENEFITS and PRIVILEGES by joining the brand new INNER HIVE right now!
"$9.99 every six months to support

just a few more days...........

his best work...........

The Cussing Channel has produced a Dark Knight Joker supercut,

dragon capsule docks..............

A SpaceX illustration of the Dragon capsule as it prepares to berth with the International Space Station.

UPDATE: The Dragon capsule was successfully captured at 9:56 a.m. EDT by NASA astronaut Don Pettit, using the International Space Station's (ISS) robotic arm. SpaceX is the first private company to launch and dock a spacecraft at the ISS.

The Dragon capsule, the unmanned spacecraft that was launched on SpaceX's Dragon 9 rocket early Tuesday morning, will attempt to dock with the International Space Station on Friday.

If successful, it will be the first private spacecraft to fly to the ISS.
SCROLL DOWN FOR LIVE UPDATES
Since entering orbit on Tuesday, the capsule has been examined to make sure it is fit to berth with the space station, undergoing tests on its thrusters and Absolute Global Positioning System, among others.

Early Thursday morning, the spacecraft successfully flew 1.6 miles below the space station.

Dragon began its approach to the space station around 3 a.m. EDT on Friday, according to NASA. Running slightly behind course, astronauts aboard the ISS will use the space station's robotic arm to grapple Dragon after 8 a.m. EDT, and the spacecraft will attach to the station.

The astronauts are expected to open Dragon's hatch -- a process that takes two hours -- early Saturday morning.

The Dragon spacecraft is carrying about 1,000 pounds of non-essential rations, including clothing, food, computer equipment and student experiments.

With the retirement of the space shuttle last summer, the United States no longer has a means of transporting astronauts or supplies to space, and currently relies on Russia and its Soyuz rocket and spacecraft to make the trips.

NASA awarded $381 million to SpaceX as part of a 2006 agreement, according to press materials from the company. SpaceX has spent $1 billion over the last decade, the Associated Press reports.

NASA has also awarded $266 million to Orbital Sciences Corp., a Virginia-based space technology company, which has a goal of launching a rocket and spacecraft by the end of the year.

LIVE UPDATES CONTINUE BELOW VIDEO STREAM

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Digitally-manipulated photos of skinless women

Digitally-manipulated photos of skinless women

 

Digitally-manipulated photos of skinless women

.

two america's

Anderson Cooper quizzes supporter of pastor who proposes concentration camps for gay people

[Video Link] This is as entertaining as it is disconcerting.

Stunningly Life-Like Wooden Figure Sculptures by Bruno Walpoth

Artist

F**kin fantastic

Gary Connery Completes First Successful Wing Suit Landing Without Using a Parachute

Yesterday British stuntman Gary Connery became the first person to successfully land in a wing suit without using a parachute (video). Connery jumped out of a helicopter at an altitude of 2,400 feet and dropped for 40 seconds before landing in a massive “runway” of cardboard boxes laid out for him in the English countryside. He was unharmed

it OK, I'm sure no contraception was used...

Emanuela Orlandi Was 'Kidnapped For Vatican Sex Parties,' Claims Father Gabriele Amorth

An undated file photo showing Italian teenager Emanuela Orlandi, the daughter of a Vatican employee, believed to have been kidnapped after a music lesson in Rome on June 22, 1983, when she was 15-years-old. (AP Photo, File)

The Holy See was directly involved in the disappearance of 15-year-old Emanuela Orlandi in 1983, according to a contentious accusation by the Catholic Church's leading exorcist. The Rev. Gabriele Amorth claimed that the girl's kidnapping was a "crime of a sexual nature."

"Parties were organized, with a Vatican gendarme acting as the 'recruiter' of the girls," Amorth told La Stampa, according to a translation by The Telegraph. "The network involved diplomatic personnel from a foreign embassy to the Holy See. I believe Emanuela ended up a victim of this circle."

Amorth, who was appointed by Pope John Paul II and has carried out more than 70,000 exorcisms, is no stranger to controversial public statements; according to The Sun, the exorcist has called Harry Potter the "work of the devil," and has claimed "the devil was at work in the Vatican" when discussing the Catholic Church's sex scandals.

Clues to the missing girl's whereabouts had pointed in several directions, including toward a Turkish gunman who attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II, The Telegraph reports.

On May 14, one rumor led Italian police to exhume the grave of Enrico De Pedis, a member of Rome's Magliana mob who was killed in 1990, the Associated Press reports. A one-time girlfriend previously said De Pedis committed the kidnapping, and an anonymous call to a television show in 2005 suggested clues on Orlandi's fate lay in the dead mobster's tomb in Basilica of Sant’Apollinaire. A set of bones not belonging to De Pedis were found, but the identity of the remains has yet to be released.

The Vatican insists it has done everything in its power to help solve the mystery of the missing girl.

Really? knock me over with a feather.....

Study Finds Fox News Viewers Least Informed Of All Viewers

Posted: 05/23/2012 8:32 am Updated: 05/24/2012 11:23 am

Another study has concluded that people who only watch Fox News are less informed than all other news consumers.

Researchers at Fairleigh Dickinson University updated a study they had conducted in late 2011. That study only sampled respondents from New Jersey, where the university is located. This time, the researchers conducted a nationwide poll.

The poll asked questions about international news (Iran, Egypt, Syria and Greece were included) and domestic affairs (Republican primaries, Congress, unemployment and the Keystone XL pipeline.)
The pollsters found that people were usually able to answer 1.8 out of 4 questions on foreign news, and 1.6 of 5 questions on domestic news, and that people who don't watch any news were able to get 1.22 of the questions on domestic policy right.
As the study explained, though, people who watched only Fox News fared worse:

The Master’s Voice, A Wonderfully Bizarre Short Film

“The Master’s Voice” is a wonderfully bizarre short film by Guilherme Marcondes about two ghostly inhabitants of M., a futuristic island city that is populated by ghosts. The film is a teaser for Marcondes’ upcoming film project on M. Island

Slinky on a treadmill

   

Abzde set a slinky upon an inclined treadmill and the brave spring proceeded to slink its way down that machine for 3 heart-pounding minutes and 20 unbeatable seconds. Watch as the slinky moves from side to side, nearly -- but not quite -- going over the edge time and again, tempting fate and laughing at danger with its brave non-hands planted upon its heroic non-hips. Oh, slinky

dig it.........

WE HAVE LIFTOFF John Raoux / AP Photo

2. SpaceX Launch Successful

It’s official: Dragon has launched. The private, unmanned space shuttle built by a California’s SpaceX successfully launched early Tuesday morning from Cape Canaveral, Fla.—the first mission by a spacecraft not commissioned by the government. The Dragon capsule blasted atop SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, and the space station was flying 249 miles above the north Atlantic Ocean as the rocket lifted off, NASA officials said. If the mission is a success, it represents a potential new stage in American space exploration: NASA hopes low-Earth orbits will be privately funded, allowing the space agency to focus on new spacecraft and missions to Mars, as well as asteroids and the moon

Bill Maher: Liberty University Is Not A Real School

 

At the end of "Real Time" Friday night, Bill Maher lambasted Liberty University, the Virginia religious university that has become a mandatory stop for Republican presidential candidates. (Watch above.)
"You can't expect me to believe anything Mitt Romney said last week at Liberty University, because a) he's a liar and b) Liberty University isn't really a university," Maher began. "It's not like an actual statesman visited a real college. It's more like the Tupac hologram visited Disneyland and said what he would do as president during the Main Street Electrical Parade."

Romney delivered Liberty's commencement speech on May 12.

Maher noted that Liberty teaches "creation science," and the idea that earth was created 5,000 years ago. "This is a school you flunk out of when you get the answers right," he joked.
Much as conservatives believe gay marriage cheapens their own vows, "I think a diploma from Liberty cheapens my diploma from a real school," he continued. "I worked really hard for four years and sold a lot of drugs to get that thing."
Liberty's diploma may look real, Maher said, but "when you confuse a church with a school, Maher went on, "it mixes up the things you believe — religion — with the things we know — education. Then you start thinking that creationism is science, and gay aversion is psychology, and praying away hurricanes is meteorology."
Watch the whole clip above

Off the Grid, Photo Series of Americans Living Outside Mainstream Society

“Off the Grid” is a photo documentary series about Americans who have left mainstream society in order to live closer to nature

truth...................

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An ode to the father of the electric age.

Texas Executed wrong man (surprise)

Carlos DeLuna (left) and Carlos Hernandez

One of the strongest arguments against the death penalty is the frightening chance of executing an innocent person. Columbia University law professor James Liebman said he and a team of students have proven that Texas gave a lethal injection to the wrong man.
Carlos DeLuna was executed in 1989 for stabbing to death a gas station clerk in Corpus Christi six years earlier. It was a ghastly crime. The trial attracted local attention, but not from concern that a guiltless man would be punished while the killer went free.

DeLuna, an eighth grade dropout, maintained that he was innocent from the moment cops put him in the back seat of a patrol car until the day he died. Today, 29 years after DeLuna was arrested, Liebman and his team published a mammoth report in the Human Rights Law Review that concludes DeLuna paid with his life for a crime he likely did not commit. Shoddy police work, the prosecution's failure to pursue another suspect, and a weak defense combined to send DeLuna to death row, they argued.

"I would say that across the board, there was nonchalance," Liebman told The Huffington Post. "It looked like a common case, but we found that there was a very serious claim of innocence."
Police and prosecutors treated the killing of Wanda Lopez at the Sigmor Shamrock gas station on February 4, 1983, like a robbery gone bad. A recording of the chilling 911 call from Lopez, a 24-year-old single mom working the night shift, captured her screaming and begging her killer for mercy.
DeLuna, then 20, was found hiding under a pickup truck a few blocks from the gory crime scene. A wad of rolled-up bills totaling $149 was in his pocket.
Eyewitness testimony formed the bedrock of the case against him. Now, that testimony is perhaps most contested aspect of his conviction.
Cops brought DeLuna back to the Shamrock. A customer filling his tank before the murder told police that DeLuna was the man he saw putting a knife in his pocket outside the store. Another customer who rushed to the store's entrance when he heard Lopez struggling identified DeLuna as the man who emerged. A married couple saw a man running a few blocks away and later identified DeLuna in police photos shown to them.
With DeLuna's record of numerous arrests for burglary and public drunkenness, plus a conviction for attempted rape and auto theft, it seemed like police had found the perp. But Liebman said DeLuna took the fall in a case of mistaken identity.
Among the key findings in the Columbia team's report:

• The eyewitness statements actually conflict with each other. What witnesses said about the appearance and location of the suspect suggest that they were describing more than one person.
• Photos of a bloody footprint and blood spatter on the walls suggest the killer would have had blood on his shoes and pant legs, yet DeLuna's clothes were clean.
  
• Prosecutors and police ignored tips unearthed in the case files that Carlos Hernandez, an older friend of DeLuna, who had a reputation for wielding a blade, had killed Lopez. The defense failed to track down Hernandez, who bore a striking resemblance to DeLuna.

"If a new trial was somehow able to be conducted today, a jury would acquit DeLuna" said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, who read a draft of Liebman's report. "We don't have a perfect case where can agree that we have an innocent person who's been executed, but by weight of this investigation, I think we can say this is as close as a person is going to come."

In 1983 and during the appeals process, officials handling DeLuna's case saw the opposite -- a slam-dunk conviction. The prosecution and the court-appointed defense lawyer didn't put much stock in DeLuna's claim that Hernandez plunged a knife into Lopez's chest. Record-keeping was so lax there's no clear evidence the gas station was robbed during the slaying, Liebman said.
In trying to clear his name, DeLuna didn't help himself. For months after his arrest, he refused to reveal the name of the real killer, because he feared Hernandez. His credibility plummeted when other parts of his alibi for the night of the murder were disproven by the prosecutor.
The fateful night began, according to DeLuna, when he went to a skating rink, where he met Hernandez and two sisters. DeLuna admitted that he was near the gas station later, but said he was across the street in a bar. While he nursed his drink, Hernandez bought cigarettes in the Shamrock. He said he emerged from the bar to see Hernandez fighting with Lopez. Hearing police sirens, he said he fled, because he didn't want to get into trouble.
The prosecution, however, discredited DeLuna's version of events. One of the sisters who was allegedly with him at the rink testified that she was at her baby shower that night.
"I had blown his alibi to bits," said Steve Schiwetz, one of the prosecutors.
A guilty verdict was reached with little delay. The capital murder trial lasted six days in July 1983.
"I'm open to the argument that somebody named Carlos Hernandez really did it," said Schiwetz, "but everything I know confirms the original impression that DeLuna did it."
The apparent random targeting of Lopez wasn't Hernandez's style, Schiwetz said. Hernandez's tendency was to unleash violence on the his girlfriends and wife, not strangers, he said. In 1986, Hernandez was accused of murdering another woman with a knife, but the case was dismissed.
Several of Hernandez' family members interviewed for the Columbia University report said pictures of the murder weapon found at the gas station looked like the knife Hernandez habitually kept with him. In all of DeLuna's numerous arrests, police never found him carrying a blade, according to the Columbia report.
The relatives' portrait of Hernandez's disheveled appearance gelled with a description of the suspect seen fleeing the convenience store. Witness Kevan Baker said the killer looked like a "derelict," wearing a flannel jacket and gray sweatshirt. Hernandez's relatives said he often wore a flannel coat. DeLuna was fastidious with his appearance and always wore black slacks and dress shirts, the report said.
Liebman sought more scientific proof. Fingerprints taken from the knife and cigarette pack found at the crime scene were sent to a former Scotland Yard investigator for comparison with Hernandez's prints. But the evidence had been so poorly collected by police, Liebman said, that the results were inconclusive.
The Columbia University team's report, more than 400 pages long, also is a biography of the central players, emphasizing the troubled upbringings and hard-drinking adulthoods of DeLuna and Hernandez.
Liebman learned about DeLuna roughly 10 years ago, when he began examining convictions in which a single eyewitness testified. As he and a student delved into the files, they became convinced DeLuna wasn't guilty.

They turned over their findings to the Chicago Tribune which published a three-part series in 2006 that found evidence suggesting Hernandez killed Lopez. Multiple people told the Tribune that Hernandez -- who died in 1999 in prison from cirrhosis of the liver -- had confessed to killing her.

Revisiting questions about Lopez's death would be too painful, her nephews said.
"That's something our family has had to deal with," Louis Vargas told The Huffington Post. "We've had closure with it and we don't want to reopen it. We believe the justice system did what it had to do."
One of DeLuna's attorneys, James Lawrence, told HuffPost he doesn't count him among the clients who've been wrongfully accused of capital crimes.
"The fact that he wouldn't help us and this was his life on the line -- that's the one thing that kept bothering the living daylights out of me," Lawrence said.
Since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, there have been 1,295 executions, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Texas leads with 482 executions.
The ease with which DeLuna was prosecuted and the obscurity of his death are what makes his case so important, said Liebman.
"There are many cases out there that nobody has ever looked at and are probably at risk of innocence," said Liebman. "It's a cautionary tale about the risks we take when we have the death penalty."

lego art........

“LEGO Art” by PBS Arts: Off Book takes a look at the use of LEGO in portraiture, sculpture, and animation.

 

RIGHT ON!!!!!!!!!!!!

Miles Davis turned to Nancy Reagan and said...

   

First Lady Nancy Reagan in 1983

  In 1987 Miles was invited to a White House dinner by Ronald Reagan. Few of the guests appeared to know who he was. During dinner, Nancy Reagan turned to him and asked what he'd done with his life to merit an invitation. Straight-faced, Davis replied: "Well, I've changed the course of music five or six times. What have you done except fuck the president?"

man tnis can't get here fast enough......

cool...........

The HyQ Hydraulic Quadruped Robot

This video of the HyQ hydraulic quadruped robot demonstrates the machine’s

Idiot................

FACT CHECK: ‘Non-Citizen’ Voter In James O’Keefe’s Voter Fraud Video Is Actually A Citizen

Conservative filmmaker James O'Keefe

Conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe released a new video today supposedly exposing voter fraud in North Carolina by highlighting non-citizens like Zbigniew Gorzkowski who have voted in recent elections.
The problem: Gorzkowski is an American citizen.
In fact, if O’Keefe had done a simple Nexis search for “Zbigniew Gorzkowski”, he would have found a single article from the News & Observer in 2008 noting that Gorzkowski and his wife are naturalized citizens:

Customers flock through the red door of Zbigniew “Ziggy” and wife Halina Gorzkowski’s European grocery and flower shop to buy one of the 12 varieties they sell. The pierogis and 400 eastern European food items and flowers are also punching the naturalized citizen couple’s ticket for their version of the American Dream.

ThinkProgress spoke with Gorzkowski this morning. He verified that this information was indeed correct and he had been an American citizen since the late 1980s. Therefore, his votes in the 2008 and 2010 elections were not only perfectly legal, but encouraged as a civic duty.
In other words, the one instance in the video where O’Keefe purports to show that a non-citizen had actually voted, in fact shows that a citizen voted.
The episode does speak to a larger underlying problem with most accusations of voter fraud. It’s what I call the “Scooby Doo routine”. People like O’Keefe make wild voter fraud accusations like non-citizens voting, only to discover a much simpler explanation for the situation.

In this case, O’Keefe is using “evidence” of foreigners voting in American elections to supposedly demonstrate the need for draconian security measures like voter ID, which could disenfranchise 20 million citizens across the country. However, his evidence actually shows nothing more than an American citizen exercising his civic duty. Earlier this year, South Carolina went through the same Scooby Doo routine after Attorney General Alan Wilson claimed to have unearthed evidence of 953 dead voters, only for his state investigation to ultimately find no dead voters — and zero voter fraud — but rather a handful of clerical errors.

O’Keefe has a responsibility as a journalist to ensure the veracity of his facts before he makes wild charges like these. A simple phone call or Nexis search would have sufficed, yet doing so would have undercut his spurious argument that voter fraud is a widespread problem in the United States

Blow Job, Portraits of People Being Blown By Extreme Wind

Lithuanian photographic artist Tadao Cern has created Blow Job, a 2012 series of portraits where the participants’ faces are shown being extremely wind blown. The entire Blow Job image gallery can be found at the artist’s Facebook page.

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