in case you need some signs

Republicans Are A Disease

Download these ANTI REPUBLICAN signs. Print them out. Hand them out. Put them in your car's back window, or you home's windows. Put them up on telephone poles. Tell your neighbors how you feel about the criminals in the GOP who have been running our country into the ditch for all these years! - Reaganomics Has Failed Big Time!

Tell everyone you know about RepublicansAreADisease.com. Let them, and their friends get their signs here too! The more we are in "their" face the better. Republicans are a disease AND THEY KNOW IT. If any Reublicans don't like your sign(s) tell them to go make their own country. Call it Torture-Land.

RepublicansAreADisease.com

WE are all torture victims now....

I'm somewhat thankful I live in a state that doesn't allow officers to carry tasers ...

a frightening but worthy read on the "Cult" of Law Enforcement via Digby at Glenn Greenwald:

Like Glenn, I write a lot about civil liberties, which have been at the heart of the national conversation since the beginning of the War On Terror and the expansion of the national security state. But my interest in civil liberties predates 9/11 and until then was usually pointed at the far more prosaic issues of police and prosecutorial misconduct (and the inevitable conclusions any study of those things brings to the issue of the death penalty). Nowadays, the theme of civil liberties seem to be a sub-plot to a James Bond flick rather than "To Kill A Mockingbird." And yet, I think the two are intertwined much more closely that we think. In our apparent acceptance of torture as a legal method of interrogation, the bar of civilized official behavior has been lowered to the point where we are accepting torture in everyday life as if it's nothing. Indeed, we are using it as a form of entertainment.

I'm speaking of the ever more common use of the Taser, an electrical device used by police and other authorities to drop its victims to the ground and coerce instant compliance. The videos of various incidents make the rounds on the internet and you can see by the comments at the YouTube site that a large number of Americans find tasering to be a sort of slapstick comedy, the equivalent of someone slipping on a banana peel, with a touch of that authoritarian cruelty that always seems to amuse a certain kind of person. "Don't tase me bro" is a national catch phrase.

Tasers aren't benign however. They kill people. Nobody knows exactly why some people die from being tasered, and they certainly don't know how to tell in advance which ones are at risk. But there have been hundreds of deaths similar to the one below, which nobody can adequately explain:

read on.

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In related NJ News...Bob Dylan managed NOT to get tased in Long Branch for walking the streets without ID. PFFffffffttt.






Rock legend Bob Dylan was treated like a complete unknown by police in a New Jersey shore community when a resident called to report someone wandering around the neighborhood.

Dylan was in Long Branch, about a two-hour drive south of New York City, on July 23 as part of a tour with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp that was to play at a baseball stadium in nearby Lakewood.

read the full report here.

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Doctors Are Mad As Hell

You CAN handle the Truth

There's no nice way to say it. The financial cost of health care is killing our citizens, hobbling our economy, crushing small business, and threatening the solvency of our government. In the meantime, the Health Care Industry is spending almost two million dollars a day lobbying Congress and manipulating public opinion to accept “reform” legislation that leaves a vicious, for-profit system intact. The "public option" is a trap. We need real reform that finds immediate savings, controls costs, and accomplishes the moral imperative of true Universal Access. A Single Payer plan is the only real path to a Health Care System that is socially, ethically and fiscally responsible. And yet, our elected officials refuse to even discuss the possibility of a Single Payer plan!

If that doesn't make you mad, we recommend checking your pulse.Link

Heh.


'Bout time and Welcome to the club.





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20 largest cases of companies bilking the government.

via skippy the bush kangaroo:

These are pikers, unrepentant white collar criminals.The same people who fuel the lunatic right wingnuts.

1) tenet healthcare -- $900,000,000 under the false claims act
in july 2006, tenet healthcare (formerly known as nme, see #9 on this list) agreed to pay the federal government $900 million for billing violations that include manipulation of outlier payments to medicare, as well as kickbacks, upcoding, and bill padding.

2) hca -- $731,400,000 under the false claims act
in december 2000, hca the healthcare company (formerly known as columbia hca), the largest for-profit hospital chain in the united states, pled guilty to criminal conduct and agreed to pay more than $840 million in criminal fines, civil penalties and damages for unlawful billing practices. ....note that the december 2000 agreement does not resolve allegations that hca unlawfully charged the u.s government for the costs of running its hospitals, and that it paid kickbacks to physicians to get medicare and medicaid patients referred to its facilities.

3) hca -- $631,000,000 under the false claims act
in june 2003, hca, inc. (formerly known as columbia/hca and hca the healthcare company) agreed to pay the united states $631 million in civil penalties and damages arising from false claims submitted to medicare and other federal health programs.

read on






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...a reminder from Naomi Klein via Buzzflash:

Republicans Use Chaos as a Shock Doctrine to Create Authoritarian Rule



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