Jan 24, 2012

three contests, two heavy evangelical populations, Romeny only wins the one that isn't...hmmmmm

wow.....

Jan 20, 2012

oh please, oh please, oh please........

Gingrich Could Win South Carolina, Dowd Says

Jan. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Matthew Dowd, Bloomberg political analyst and former chief campaign strategist for George W. Bush, talks about last night's Republican presidential debate. Dowd, speaking with Betty Liu on Bloomberg Television's "In the Loop," also discusses the Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index. (Source: Bloomberg)

Cthulhu carpets

Denmark's EGE Carpets sells a line of carpeting inspired by HP Lovecraft illustrations called Dark Water. They were created by Kirill Rozhkov, who has a nice gallery of them on Behance.

finally....

)

Gnat sez, "The only thing cuter than this Game Master asking TeX gurus for help making his RPG notes 'look like they were scrawled by a gibbering madman, unhinged by the horrors he has witnessed' is the serious responses, with examples of output. He even got an answer saying how to typeset an Elder Sign! Truly, there is nothing more awesome than typesetting geeks helping gaming geeks

must see tv...

Urban Dictionary TV is a site that plays user-submitted videos for Urban Dictionary word definitions. It is a collaboration between Urban Dictionary and the VHX video platform

weird but cool....

Conjoined II art show in Santa Monica

Wp-Content Uploads 2012 01 2 Christopher-Conte-La-Petite-Mort

Jan 19, 2012

GOP Campaign Trail Filled With Revisionist History

I've just returned from a sojourn in an alternate historical universe, which is to say I've been in South Carolina, listening to the Republican presidential candidates.
These people have managed to distill modern American times down to a deliciously accessible account that goes something like this:
In the beginning there was Ronald Reagan. He was so awesome! He slashed taxes and fired pencil-necked bureaucrats, whose sole function was to antagonize salt-of-the-earth business folk. Money rained from the sky. Then Barack Obama arrived and screwed up everything. He wrote new rules designed to tie the economy in knots and kill jobs so he could realize his true aim, expanding food stamp dependency, as part of his plot to turn America into a socialist, nanny state-governed Loserville.
If you're wondering what happened to those years when the country was run by a pair of guys named Bush (and someone else named Clinton in between), they have been airbrushed out of this updated Republican history. So have a few seemingly pertinent events connected to their tenures: the dismantling of key financial regulations (particularly by Clinton), a massive redistribution of wealth to the richest households engineered by George W. Bush, and a failure to address stagnating wages and lost job opportunities for most workers all along the way.
Oh, and a nearly apocalyptic financial crisis that arrived on W's watch, prompting taxpayer bailouts of behemoth Wall Street firms while delivering the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
On the Republican campaign trail, none of these little details have been making it into accounts of recent times, because they collide with the narrative guiding the proceedings. Though Romney, Santorum, Gingrich and Perry (before he dropped out) have been sniping about all sorts of tedious little things, in the main they have been reading from the same script: Everything bad that ever happened resulted from too many taxes and too much regulation. Everything good comes from deregulation, and handing gobs of money to rich people and corporations.
If you think I'm exaggerating, you have clearly been intelligent enough to occupy your hours watching something more enlightening than the Republican debates (a list that might include both "Jersey Shore" and reruns of people smacking other people with chairs on the "Jerry Springer" show). But my cartoonish account is really only a little more cartoonish than the things Republicans have been saying about what has happened to our economy as they wander South Carolina in pursuit of votes.
The other day, at a candidate forum in downtown Columbia, the state capitol, Newt Gingrich looked out at a room full of business people and boasted about the supposedly key role he played in forging supply-side economics, the school of thought that says tax cutting is the answer to every policy question. He burnished this "credential" by noting that he had been right there alongside Reagan and Arthur Laffer in the engine room of supply-side thinking.
This is a little bit like saying that you were the guy on the deck of the Titanic, hollering, "Full speed ahead!" long after the iceberg loomed. Laffer is the economist who popularized the notion that cutting taxes increases government revenue, a doctrine that has stood the test of time about as well as drowning people to find out if they are witches.

Rare is the credentialed economist who still asserts that cutting taxes generates additional revenue, an idea so patently at odds with common sense that only someone with a doctorate could have suggested it. Greg Mankiw, a conservative economist who served in the George W. Bush administration as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers (and who is now an adviser to Romney), uses a chapter of his widely assigned economics textbook, "Principles of Economics," to challenge the idea that lower taxes produce higher revenues.

But never mind the theory. Take a look at actual history, as distilled in a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Reagan, leaning on advice from Laffer, slashed marginal personal income tax rates by 25 percent between the fall of 1981 and the summer of 1983. Tax revenues subsequently dipped, and the federal deficit expanded. During the sweep of Reagan's presidency -- an era now held up as a paragon by the same crop of candidates who claim to be fierce deficit hawks -- federal spending outstripped revenues by more than $1.4 trillion.

Taxes and deficits are not the only subjects that have come in for wholesale revision in the Republican account. Four years after speculative excesses on Wall Street nearly brought down the financial system, the candidates appear to have forgotten all about it. How else to explain their repeated vows to immediately repeal Dodd-Frank, the financial regulatory reform law adopted in an effort to prevent a repeat, while offering no alternative?

Rick Perry and Gingrich, the candidate Perry endorsed as he dropped out of the race on Thursday, have both made repealing Dodd-Frank a primary talking point. Romney has said he would do the same, though he has expressed some desire to retain portions of the law.

Like perhaps every piece of enormous legislation to emerge from Congress, Dodd-Frank is a fat mess of a law, one seemingly understood by no one in its entirety. It is filled with contradictory provisions inserted by one lobbyist or another, presenting federal agencies with a dog's breakfast of regulations that must be written to implement it. The law will not prevent another crisis, because it is so mind-bendingly complex that the financial industry will game it to suit its proclivities.
But does anyone not paid to do so seriously maintain that Dodd-Frank is so flawed that the circumstances that existed pre-crisis would be better? Do we really want to double down on market fundamentalism and let Wall Street have another go in the casino, unsupervised, while playing with taxpayer money?
Don't ask the Republican candidates, because they have eliminated the crisis from historical memory, skipping all the way back to Morning In America, when everyone worked, no one was poor, the stock market only went up, and taxes existed only in the Soviet Union.

TOM THE DANCING BUG: Your Handy "Sex-Act Morality Flow Chart"

By Ruben Bolling at 8:50 am Thursday, Jan 19

RECOMMEND: Visit the TOM THE DANCING BUG WEBSITE, and follow

hahahahahah....

Marianne Gingrich, Newt Gingrich's Ex-Wife, Says He Wanted An 'Open Marriage'

So, it seems that one part of that juicy ABC News "bombshell" interview with Marianne Gingrich concerns one of the "big ideas" that Newt Gingrich, hive of constant innovation, had during the period of time the former House Speaker was out of office: he wanted Marianne, his second wife, to enter into an "open marriage" arrangement, so that he could continue to consort with Callista Bisek. (You know, the third wife that introduced him to Catholicism.)

ABC's Brian Ross interviewed Gingrich about the matter:

GINGRICH: I said to him, we've been married a long time. And he said, yes, but you want me all to yourself. Callista doesn't care what I do. ROSS: What was he saying to you, do you think?
GINGRICH: He was asking to have an open marriage, and I refused.
ROSS: He wanted an open marriage.
GINGRICH: Yeah, that I accept the fact that he has somebody else in his life.
ROSS: And you said?
GINGRICH: No. No. That is not a marriage.

Of course, to a certain extent, this is something we've already basically known. Let's recall that in the August 2010 Esquire profile of Gingrich, Marianne offered this account of their marriage's last days:

Early in May, she went out to Ohio for her mother's birthday. A day and a half went by and Newt didn't return her calls, which was strange. They always talked every day, often ten times a day, so she was frantic by the time he called to say he needed to talk to her. "About what?"
He wanted to talk in person, he said.
"I said, 'No, we need to talk now.'"
He went quiet.
"There's somebody else, isn't there?"
She kind of guessed it, of course. Women usually do. But did she know the woman was in her apartment, eating off her plates, sleeping in her bed?
She called a minister they both trusted. He came over to the house the next day and worked with them the whole weekend, but Gingrich just kept saying she was a Jaguar and all he wanted was a Chevrolet. "'I can't handle a Jaguar right now.' He said that many times. 'All I want is a Chevrolet.'"
He asked her to just tolerate the affair, an offer she refused.

So, the new wrinkle here is that Marianne Gingrich is characterizing this as a desire on Newt's part to have an open marriage, rather than just have his wife tolerate his affair on the side. In many ways, this is a distinction without a difference, though I suppose it now makes a lot of his new demonstrations of Catholic conversion to be ... well, I suppose the phrase we're using these days is, "pious bologna."

Newt Gingrich has yet to weigh in on these new allegations from his ex-wife. In the past, he's written off his infidelities as events that occurred while he was too busy loving America.

[Would you like to

very cool....

This music -- which sounds like a moody piano soundtrack for a existentialist movie about a rainy day -- is made by slicing a tree in cross-section, sticking it on a turntable, and dropping a tone-arm with a PlayStation Eye Camera
.

William Gibson Calls SOPA ‘Draconian’

: Everett; William Gibson

Sci-fi author William Gibson recently talked to Speakeasy about his new collection of essays, and we took the opportunity to ask his thoughts on the controversial Internet-antipiracy bill, SOPA.
“I’m not by any means an enemy of intellectual property, and in fact keep a roof over my head because the concept exists,” says Gibson, the author of “Neuromancer,” in which he coined the term, “cyberspace.” “But I think that SOPA as it stands now, or as it stood before they paused to think about it, is extremely ill thought out, and a basically crazily Draconian piece of legislation.”
The Stop Online Piracy Act in the House of Representatives and the Protect Intellectual Property Act under consideration in the Senate are designed to crack down on sales of pirated U.S. products overseas. Proponents say the legislation could protect intellectual property, while critics say the act could infringe on free speech and other rights.
“One of the problems with legislating around emerging technology is that nobody legislates the technology into emergence,” Gibson says. “So, the emergent technology is sort of brought into the world by the invisible hand of the market. Then we have to play catch-up and when the emergent technology is sufficiently radical that it’s pushing all sorts of societal and cultural change, and actually pushing the market in the broadest sense and changing that, we’re in a very awkward situation.”
Gibson says it’s very difficult to legislate elegantly in a situation like this, which has random drivers. As a result, governing the Internet is much tougher than other industries and markets.
Meanwhile, Gibson answered a few other questions for us:
Nowadays, it seems there are two new paradigms: 3-D film and film as an online streaming experience in one’s own home. How would you reconcile these two futures of film?
I’m not convinced 3D is a new paradigm. I think it’s generally (James Cameron’s Avatar aside) a ploy to get people back into theaters, and it doesn’t seem to be working very well at doing that. Online streaming doesn’t really strike me as a new paradigm either, though it’s a new delivery method. The new paradigm is the viewer’s ability to watch a given film repeatedly, and in any order. The DVD boxed set changed the nature of the experience of cinema more profoundly than 3D or online streaming.
Comic books are your childhood – are they also your present and future?

The comic book was a part of my childhood, but it didn’t hold on into adulthood for me. I missed the birth of Marvel entirely, did read the 60s underground classics but nothing else, and have only read a couple of Alan Moore graphic novels since. Probably more my failing than the medium’s.
Ridley Scott broke the news to us a few months ago that he’s working on a sequel to “Blade Runner.” Do you welcome this news, or does it sound a little risky?
If anyone could pull it off, it would be Ridley Scott. But the idea of franchise, rather than one-off films, becoming the actual form, strikes me as decadent. Blade Runner is a classic, on the order of Citizen Kane. What would a sequel to Citizen Kane have done to the original?

wheeeeeeee!!!!!!

ABC Insider: Marianne Gingrich Interview Likely To Air Before Primary; Gingrich Daughters Respond

CHARLESTON, S.C. -- The Drudge Report began teasing political reporters Wednesday that a network's holding a "bombshell campaign interview." And soon, Drudge revealed that the network in question, ABC, had conducted a two-hour interview with Marianne Gingrich, ex-wife of Newt Gingrich, that may not run until after the South Carolina primary. The decision, Drudge reported, sparked a "civil war" at the network.

ABC staffers were caught by surprise at the news, telling The Huffington Post that if there was a "civil war," they hadn't heard about it. That doesn't mean there wasn't any debate among ABC executives over when to air the interview, but simply that the war certainly wasn't raging through the newsroom.
It also looks like the interview will air before Saturday's South Carolina primary after all. One ABC insider said that the Gingrich interview, conducted with Brian Ross, will likely air on Thursday's "Nightline."

Marianne Gingrich, the former Speaker's second wife, of 18 years, hasn't been shy about her feelings toward her ex-husband's presidential ambitions, telling Esquire in 2010 that there's "no way."

"He could have been president," she said. "But when you try and change your history too much, and try and recolor it because you don't like the way it was or you want it to be different to prove something new ... you lose touch with who you really are. You lose your way."

"He believes that what he says in public and how he lives don't have to be connected," Gingrich added, in the Esquire interview. "If you believe that, then yeah, you can run for president."
In the Esquire interview, Marianne also dismisses the conversion to Catholicism during his current, and third, marriage. She said it "has no meaning."
It's unclear who leaked the story to Drudge -- perhaps an ABC staffer who didn't want the interview to possibly get held until next week or rival campaign operative hoping to get Gingrich's baggage front-and-center on the influential conservative aggregator. Whoever the source, they got the political tongues wagging just 72 hours before the primary.
Gingrich's two daughters from his first marriage pushed back Wednesday, writing in a letter to the network's leadership that "ABC News or other campaigns may want to talk about the past, just days before an important primary election [but] Newt is going to talk to the people of South Carolina about the future."

The Bark Side, Dogs Barking Star Wars Imperial March Theme in Volkswagen Super Bowl Ad

Jan 18, 2012

special kind of idiot.....

Mark Wahlberg On 9/11 Plane: I Would Have Beat Terrorists, Landed It Safely

Mark Wahlberg is one of today's biggest action movie stars, but as he sees it, his heroism doesn't end at a film's credits. Instead, he fancies himself a real badass off screen, too.

In a new interview with Men's Journal, Wahlberg says that world history would have been different had he not made a fortuitous decision to fly to Toronto a week early and thus avoid boarding one of the planes out of Boston that crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11th.

"If I was on that plane with my kids, it wouldn’t have went down like it did," he tells the magazine. "There would have been a lot of blood in that first-class cabin and then me saying, 'OK, we’re going to land somewhere safely, don’t worry.'"
Wahlberg has spoken before of the near-miss, and the action he would have taken had he been on the flight.

"We certainly would have tried to do something to fight," he said in 2006. "I've had probably over 50 dreams about it."

To his credit, Wahlberg is in impeccable shape. Part of what makes him stand out as an action star is his willingness to put himself on the line for a scene.

"[In 'Contraband'] I did all the stunts and then in 'The Fighter' obviously we did all the fighting and we fought and we made it real," he recently told GQ. "If it's necessary then we'll do it.

It worked out; "Contraband" won the box office with a $28.5 million take this past weekend.
Still, Wahlberg has a soft side. He recalls that he cried "about six or seven times" during "The Help," and, walked out of "Straw Dogs" because he did not like the rape scene.
Now a religious man, has markedly changed his sex life -- at least when it comes to his own personal intimacy.
"I don't get down with jerking off, dude. Look. I don't believe in everything that the church says. I try to do the right thing. I lead a clean and pure life. I'm a married guy. I have a beautiful wife. Sex is not the most important thing to me, being horny all the time, spanking the -- I mean, it's not against the law. You can do whatever you want. And it's not like, 'I shouldn't do it because of my faith. I'm just not really that into it that much anyway."

For more from Wahlberg, click over to Men's

Believe It Or Not: Facts You're Not Supposed To Know About Religion

1. The institutions, we as a civilization, have considered "sacred" for thousands of years often are not considered that same way in organized religion, when powerful political forces or massive carnal desire enter the picture
2. Universal rights have been a sticky point for a number of religions because of what particular groups would benefit from them
3. Established religions, throughout history, have been a magnet for would-be messiahs, and an opportunity for those clever iconoclasts and tricksters to create their own new "religion" to challenge the old ones; and finally,
4. Any group calling for "Heavenly Peace on Earth" often has ended up killing millions of people in their fervor, and even stranger, the greatest conqueror in human history actually allowed religious tolerance in an truly unprecedented manner that, even today, we have not seen over most of our planet.

lovely.....

Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Agrees With Newt Gingrich, Says He Would Send Blacks Back 'To The Plantation'

The Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, the super-conservative African American Republican who has campaigned vigorously against Kwanzaa ("The Racist Holiday From Hell" he has called it), the Rev. Jesse Jackson Jr. and President Barack Obama, said he has a simple solution to black America's employment woes: hard labor.

"One of the things that I would do is take all black people back to the South and put them on the plantation so they would understand the ethic of working," Peterson told The Huffington Post's Black Voices on Tuesday afternoon. "I'm going to put them all on the plantation. They need a good hard education on what it is to work."

Peterson made the remarks after he was asked to comment on Monday night's sparring between moderator Juan Williams and Newt Gingrich, during the Republican presidential debate after Williams asked Gingrich whether he thought his recent statements suggesting a lack of work ethic among poor black kids could be viewed as insulting.

"People don't want to hear the truth," said Peterson, the founder of the Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny, or BOND. "Newt was 100 percent correct," Peterson said. "Newt said that he would have black children, minority children work as janitors at school. Working as a janitor would build character, more so than the handouts so many of them like."

"I know some people take it personally because a whole lot of folks don't like hearing the truth; they like to be in denial," he added. "Not all black people, but most black people know, and white people know, and black people say it more in private than they would in public, but for the last 50 years or so, generations and generations of black people have relied on the government or someone else to take care of them."
"Many black women have had babies out of wedlock and passed that on to their daughters that if they have babies out of wedlock, they'll get food stamps, free houses and your rent paid," Peterson said.
Peterson, who was raised on a plantation in Alabama where he said generations of his family worked first as slaves and then sharecroppers, said he learned to have a strong work ethic by doing such backbreaking work as picking cotton.
Day in and day out, it was the same thing: get home from school, eat supper, change clothes and get into the cotton field, he said.
Nearly 30 years ago Peterson left the plantation and headed West to California. But today, he said, millions of blacks are on the mental "plantation" of the Democratic Party. To fight back, he said, he formed the Tea Party of South Central Los Angeles. Considering this is black and Latino neighborhood where residents have traditionally voted Democratic, it might be an uphill battle.
"I hope that once [black people] hear the truth, they will pull away from the Democratic Party and their godless leaders," Peterson said in a recent interview with HuffPost. "When you tell them the truth first, they become upset ... They think if you're black and conservative, you're an Uncle Tom. Once you let them yell and scream and carry on -- because they will carry on -- and when they calm down, they understand."

wwbd? (take a nap)

The economy? It’s still Bush’s fault A majority of Americans believe that former President George W. Bush is more responsible than President Obama for the current economic problems in the country, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

In a Jan. 25, 2007 file photo President George W. Bush waves as he departs the White House in Washington for a trip to Missouri to speak on healthcare. (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds/file)Fifty-four percent of respondents said that Bush was more to blame while 29 percent put the blame on Obama; 9 percent said both men deserved blame while 6 percent said neither did. Among registered voters, the numbers are almost identical; 54 percent blame Bush, while 30 percent blame Obama.

classic remakes....

Famous movies were transposed to earlier eras with different actors and directors in this clever movie poster series by designer

great minimalist design...

AMC’s hit television show, Mad Men, is promoting their upcoming fifth season with this minimalistic one-sheet teaser poster. The show returns on March 25, 2012 with a much-anticipated two-hour premiere

Jan 13, 2012

need it....

Star Trek Electronic Door Chime

By EDW Lynch on January 13, 2012

The Star Trek Electronic Door Chime by ThinkGeek is a motion sensitive door chime styled after the Star Trek wall communicator panels from the original series. The chime makes either the starship Enterprise door opening “swoosh” sound, or the red alert siren

gotta have it...

anyone who is surprised that he is from Carolina raise your hand..

Ray Lynn Mitcham Jr. Charged With Sex With North Carolina Neighbor's Dog

County, N.C., arrested Ray Lynn Mitcham Jr. Monday after his neighbor claimed she saw him having sex with her dog, according to the Gaston Gazette.

Mitcham, 33, of Linden, N.C., was charged with a crime against nature, a felony. He appeared before a magistrate at the county jail on Jan. 9 and was released on a $5,000 unsecured bond.
Debbie Tanna of the Cumberland County Sheriff's Office said the incident occurred Jan. 2, when Mitcham's next-door neighbor, who also is Mitcham's landlord, opened the door to his mobile home and saw him attacking her dog.

The dog, a shepherd-Lab mix weighing 60 pounds, was taken to Cumberland County Animal Control , where a veterinarian recovered a DNA sample that Tanna said matched Mitcham.

"There's no way he can sidestep this," Tanna told the Associated Press.
Animal Control director Dr. John Lauby said the examination showed no physical injury to the dog. He said he doubts the attack will leave lasting trauma.
"With dogs, the dominant animal breeds with the others, so I don't think there will be psychological

best show on TV

Video: Slick Editing Brings Together Great Breaking Bad POV Moments

When watching wicked meth-cooking drama Breaking Bad, it’s easy to get so caught up in the “OMG, WTF?!” of the show’s crazy plot twists that you don’t notice the great camerawork and editing on display

disturbing....

Growth, Destruction, Rebirth I, Nature Themed Anatomical Illustrations

By EDW Lynch on January 12, 2012

Growth, Destruction, Rebirth I by Caitlin Bates

In the illustration series “Growth, Destruction, Rebirth I” by artist Caitlin Bates, body parts are cut away to reveal leaves, twigs, and other natural materials

god bless the japanese

yikes.....

North Dakota tries to be cool, fails

We all probably had at least one friend who attempted to reinvent themselves after high-school in a way that was so not them that it just made you feel pity. You know what I'm talking about. Like the goody-goody who tried so hard to change their squeaky clean reputation, but would clearly never be a badass cool kid, no matter how many times they told you that they got "sooooo drunk" last weekend.

Jan 11, 2012

and so it begins...

CHURCH HISTORY Romney Demanded Mom Give Up Baby

Emmanuel Dunand, AFP / Getty Images

1. Romney Demanded Mom Give Up Baby

The conservative evangelicals in South Carolina are sure to be leery of Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith, but after this, they may not be the only ones. The Real Romney, a new biography written by a pair of Boston Globe reporters, reveals that as a Mormon bishop in the 1980s, the GOP frontrunner demanded a single mom give up her baby for adoption or face excommunication from the church. “This is not playing around,” the woman said. “This is not like, ‘You don’t get to take Communion.’ This is like ‘You will not be saved. You will never see the face of God.’” The authors say that people are not often excommunicated from the LDS Church over such matters, and the woman had positive things to say about Romney outside his role in church leadership. But the woman left the church, and Romney denies the threats took place.

a purse I may have to sport

Handmade TARDIS purse

Etsy seller LIMOchi makes these killer "poly leather" TARDIS purses to order for all your time-travelling bits and bobs. The seller claims that they are, indeed, bigger on the inside than they are on the outside.

granted he said this in red prada slippers.....

Pope Benedict said on Monday that gay marriage was one of several threats to the traditional family that undermined 'the future of humanity itself'.

nixon and nazi apologist and full time prat whines over scrutiny.

Pat Buchanan: 'Militant Gay Rights Groups' And Van Jones Are Behind My MSNBC Controversy

Embattled pundit Pat Buchanan lobbed another grenade at MSNBC on Tuesday, saying that a smear campaign by "militant gay rights groups" and Van Jones was contributing to his months-long absence from the network.

Buchanan has not been seen on MSNBC since late October, and network president Phil Griffin told reporters on Saturday that the views his employee laid out in a recent book are to blame. The book, "Suicide of a Superpower," contains a chapter entitled "The Death of White America" and posits that the "European core" of the country is being throttled by immigrants. Griffin said that Buchanan might not be allowed back on MSNBC at all.

However, Buchanan has recently been pushing back against his bosses. On Monday, he spoke to radio host Hugh Hewitt, saying that medical problems had sidelined him and that he has not been formally suspended from MSNBC. On Tuesday, he spoke to Sean Hannity on his radio show and repeated that claim. But he took things one step further. He said that the issues in his book were the "great issues facing the country for the next 25 years" and should be discussed.

"Look, for a long period of time the hard left, militant gay rights groups, militant -- they call themselves civil rights groups, but I'm not sure they're concerned about civil rights -- people of color, Van Jones, these folks and others have been out to get Pat Buchanan off TV," Buchanan continued. "This has been done for years and years and years and it's the usual suspects doing the same thing again."

Buchanan has recently been the target of a sustained campaign from Color of Change, the group Jones founded, as well as the Human Rights Campaign and the Anti-Defamation League.

Listen (via Think Progress):
.

Buchanan has recently been the target of a sustained campaign from Color of Change, the group Jones founded, as well as the Human Rights Campaign and the Anti-Defamation League.

Listen (via Think Progress):

very,very,spooky.........

Well, this is a bad way to start the year.
Over the past 48 hours, news has broken in India of the existence of at least 12 patients infected with tuberculosis that has become resistant to all the drugs used against the disease. Physicians in Mumbai are calling the strain TDR, for Totally Drug-Resistant. In other words, it is untreatable as far as they know.
News of some of the cases was published Dec. 21 in an ahead-of-print letter to the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, which just about everyone missed, including me. (But not, thankfully, the hyper-alert global-health blogger Crawford Kilian, to whom I hat-tip.) That letter describes the discovery and treatment of four cases of TDR-TB since last October. On Saturday, the Times of India disclosed that there are actually 12 known cases just in one hospital, the P. D. Hinduja National Hospital and Medical Research Centre; in the article, Hinduja’s Dr. Amita Athawale admits, “The cases we clinically isolate are just the tip of the iceberg.” And as a followup, the Hindustan Times reported yesterday that most hospitals in the city — by extension, most Indian cities — don’t have the facilities to identify the TDR strain, making it more likely that unrecognized cases can go on to infect others.
Why this is bad news: TB is already one of the world’s worst killers, up there with malaria and HIV/AIDS, accounting for 9.4 million cases and 1.7 million deaths in 2009, according to the WHO. At the best of times, TB treatment is difficult, requiring at least 6 months of pill combinations that have unpleasant side effects and must be taken long after the patient begins to feel well.
Because of the mismatch between treatment and symptoms, people often don’t take their full course of drugs — and from that (and some other factors I’ll talk about in a minute) we get multi-drug resistant and extensively drug-resistant, MDR and XDR, TB. MDR is resistant to the first-choice drugs, requiring that patients instead be treated with a larger cocktail of “second-line” agents, which are less effective, have more side effects, and take much longer to effect a cure, sometimes 2 years or more. XDR is resistant to the three first-line drugs and several of the nine or so drugs usually recognized as being second choice.
As of last spring, according to the WHO, there were about 440,000 cases of MDR-TB per year, accounting for 150,000 deaths, and 25,000 cases of XDR. At the time, the WHO predicted there would be 2 million MDR or XDR cases in the word by 2012.
That was before TDR-TB.
The first cases, as it turns out, were not these Indian ones, but an equally under-reported cluster of 15 patients in Iran in 2009. They were embedded in a larger outbreak of 146 cases of MDR-TB, and what most worried the physicians who saw them was that the drug resistance was occurring in immigrants and cross-border migrants as well as Iranians: Half of the patients were Iranian, and the rest Afghan, Azerbaijani and Iraqi. The Iranian team raised the possibility at the time that rates of TDR were higher than they knew, especially in border areas where there would be little diagnostic capacity or even basic medical care.
The Indian cases disclosed before Christmas demonstrate what happens when TB patients don’t get good medical care. The letter to CID describes the course of four of the 12 patients; all four saw two to four doctors during their illness, and at least three got multiple, partial courses of the wrong antibiotics. The authors say this is not unusual:

The vast majority of these unfortunate patients seek care from private physicians in a desperate attempt to find a cure for their tuberculosis. This sector of private-sector physicians in India is among the largest in the world and these physicians are unregulated both in terms of prescribing practice and qualifications. A study that we conducted in Mumbai showed that only 5 of 106 private practitioners practicing in a crowded area called Dharavi could prescribe a correct prescription for a hypothetical patient with MDR tuberculosis. The majority of prescriptions were inappropriate and would only have served to further amplify resistance, converting MDR tuberculosis to XDR tuberculosis and TDR tuberculosis.

As their comment suggests, the other TB challenge is diagnosis, especially of resistant strains, and here again the news is not good. The WHO said last spring that only two-thirds of countries with resistant TB epidemics have the lab capacity to detect the resistant strains. As a result, only one MDR patient out of every 10 even gets into treatment, and when they do, cure rates range from 82 percent down to 25 percent. That’s for MDR. None of the TDR patients have been recorded cured, and at least one of the known Indian patients has died.
Meanwhile, health authorities estimate that one patient with active TB can infect up to 15 others. And thus resistant TB spreads: XDR-TB was first identified just in 2006, and it has since been found in 69 countries around the world.
Cite: Zarir F et al. Totally Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis in India. Clin Infect Dis. advance access Dec. 21, 2011. doi: 10.1093/cid/cir889.