The neocons are parasites. They build nothing. They bring nothing. They don’t have a foundation. They don’t stand for business. They don’t stand for ideology. They use a host to facilitate and grow their own power. They are parasites that latch onto oil until is no longer convenient. They latch on to democracy until it is no longer convenient.

Rice’s appointment to the State Department is simply to reshape it into a neocon vehicle….

The neocons believe in what they think is a noble truth, power of the few, the select few. These are godless people who want power, nothing more. They do not have a country or an allegiance, they have an agenda. These people might hold American passports, but they are not Americans because they do not believe in the Constitution. They believe in the power of the few, not a government for or by the people. They are a few and their agenda is global.

Neocons as Parasites

In a recent survey, viewers of Stewart’s “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central tested better than Letterman and Leno viewers on a six-question politics quiz….

On top of that, “Daily Show” viewers know more about election issues than people who regularly read newspapers or watch television news, according to the National Annenberg Election Survey….

Comedy Central was waiting for news like this. On September 17, Stewart appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s “The O’Reilly Factor” only to be told his viewers are “stoned slackers” and “dopey kids.”

“You know what’s really frightening?” O’Reilly asked Stewart. ” You actually have an influence on this presidential election. That is scary, but it’s true.”

Comedy Central used its viewers’ test scores Tuesday to strike back at Fox News Channel and O’Reilly’s viewers.

It also trotted out stats from Nielsen Media Research to show that Stewart’s viewers are not only smart, but more educated than O’Reilly’s.

“Daily Show” viewers are 78 percent more likely than the average adult to have four or more years of college education, while O’Reilly’s audience is only 24 percent more likely to have that much schooling.

‘Daily Show’ viewers ace political quiz

Ten years ago, at the first “New News” seminar held at the Poynter Institute, a group of digital pioneers brainstormed what would be new about online news. They listed what it was that newspapers were not providing that the new digital news space would enable and how the new medium might change news reporting and writing.

Many of the predictions were based on the idea of the “limitless newshole,” an endless space for providing deep context and satisfying the “give me more” that reporters thought news seekers were craving. The promise of hyperlinking and easier communication between readers and reporters were all high on the list of ways this new news space would change news. Creating new expressive forms of reporting, providing better follow-up on reported stories and crafting new relationships between words and graphics were noted as new potentials for online news.

Ten years later, just how far have we come in realizing these predictions? How much have we truly leveraged the possibilities of new forms of news writing and reporting online?

‘New News’ retrospective: Is online news reaching its potential?

The wire service, like many other news organizations, is trying to stay competitive in an era when the news has been sliced and diced on the Internet and cable television several times over before readers reach for their morning papers.
Here’s a wacky idea… How about something other than rehashing the same story over and over?

To stay competitive, A.P. gives clients more than just facts

Blogging a press release from a campaign, or promoting a politician’s views on issues — let alone a blogger’s recommending a financial contribution to a candidate — would all fall under the McCain-Feingold law under the proposals.

In Monday’s Washington Post, another Republican FEC commissioner, David Mason, spelled it out: “We are almost certainly going to move from an environment in which the Internet was per se not regulated to where it is going to be regulated in some part,” Mason said, adding: “That shift has huge significance.”

Censor alert

Sorry, run-of-the-mill stoners: Prospective Colorado Compassion Club members need to be either licensed marijuana patients or in the process of obtaining a license. Thomas, Larisa or other caregivers in the club work with club patients, discussing their conditions and what type and dose of marijuana might be appropriate. Everything is recorded on extremely detailed paperwork — so if there’s ever another raid, Thomas and Larisa will have proof they’re not drug lords.
I’m so glad that we’re wasting taxpayer money on trying to put these people away…

The Kindness of Strangers

In his previous career as a brain surgeon, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist pulled the plug “on a regular basis,” his office acknowledged last week. In his 1989 book Transplant, Frist advocated killing anencephalic babies, who are born in the same mental state that Terry Schiavo finds herself in today.

The Party of No Principles

Battle lines were drawn Tuesday in the debate over the government’s counterterrorism powers, as an unlikely coalition of liberal civil-rights advocates, conservative libertarians, gun-rights supporters and medical privacy advocates voiced their objections to crucial parts of the law that expanded those powers after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Keeping the law intact “will do great and irreparable harm” to the Constitution by allowing the government to investigate people’s reading habits, search their homes without notice and pry into their personal lives, said Bob Barr, a former Republican congressman who is leading the coalition.

Mr. Barr voted for the law, known as the USA Patriot Act, in the House just weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks but has become one of its leading critics, a shift that reflects the growing unease among some conservative libertarians over the expansion of the government’s powers in fighting terrorism.
Too bad only Russ Feingold had the balls to vote against it in the first place…

Coalition Forms to Oppose Parts of Antiterrorism Law

Standing in an empty field along a wind-swept highway, Marvin T. Miller, who is deaf, envisions the town he wants to create here: a place built around American Sign Language, where teachers in the new school will sign, the town council will hold its debates in sign language and restaurant workers will be required to know how to sign orders.

Nearly 100 families – with people who are deaf, hard of hearing or who can hear but just want to communicate in sign language – have already publicly declared their intention to live in Mr. Miller’s village, to be called Laurent, after Laurent Clerc, a French educator of the deaf from the 1800’s.
If you don’t like it… don’t live there!

As Town for Deaf Takes Shape, Debate on Isolation Re-emerges

For Hoberman the manic fury of the drug war is rooted in the belief that drug use is a dire challenge to the productivity and efficiency that are essential to America’s prosperity and survival, with marijuana the signature threat to “the morale of a society that must produce and consume to survive.” However, he notes that, given this emphasis on productivity, it is “only a deeply irrational view of drug abuse” that makes alcohol and nicotine acceptable while “recreational drugs that do far less damage to health and workplace productivity” are demonized.

Sports, Sex and Eternal Youth