The Watering Hole: April 20 — Lyrid Meteor Shower

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The Lyrid Meteor Shower will peak this year on April 22, so if you have clear skies this weekend, go out and watch it!  Meteor shower are awesome!!

This is our daily open thread — TGIF!

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145 thoughts on “The Watering Hole: April 20 — Lyrid Meteor Shower”

    • If student loans aren’t going to be very low interest, then they should be dischargable in a personal bankruptcy. That was why they created the program in the first place.

      • Didn’t they change the law so you couldn’t get rid of them in bankruptcy? Sticking it to the little guy as usual.

    • Shayne, as far back as I can remember, discharging student loans wasn’t allowed. That was why they were low interest, and available to young people who didn’t have a credit history.

  3. Big time:

    Nugent, 63, confirmed in a statement that “two fine, professional Secret Service agents” came to see him Thursday in Oklahoma, where he was scheduled to play Ardmore’s 2 Frogs Grill that night.

    • Quick glance at that – no Koch INdustries companies there, but a couple of nasty players there:

      Southern Company (illegal pricing and suspicious deaths of whistleblowers)
      Monsanto (GM seeds and agricultural monopolies)
      Chesapeake (frcking kings)

  5. OK Zoo motor racing fans, anyone going to watch the Bahrani F1 Grand Prix?

    Bernie Eccelstone takes the typical corporate line ‘nothing to do with us’ as his circus adds legitimacy to a regime which violently suppressed its own people’s peaceful protests last year.

    F*** you Bernie.

    Sports boycotts of nations are very powerful tools – see apartheid South Africa from the 1950s to the late 1980s. You only ahve to go back to Hitler’s Olympics to see what authoritarians do with worldwide sporting events.

    Oh and f*** you Bernie in case you missed it the first time.

  6. From TP:

    While interviewing Zimmerman’s current wife, the state proscecutor read from an affidavit by the ex-girlfriend. She alleged in the sworn statement that he “pushed her,” then slapped her with an open hand to the mouth and “asked her how it felt.” She said he “picked me up and threw me on the bed” and then “grabbed me again.”

    Defending his son this morning, Zimmerman’s father said, “I’ve never known him to be violent at all, unless he was provoked.”

    Geez, obviously George feels provoked whenever he’s with another human being.

    • Would Daddy Zimmermen even recognize his kid on the street?

      He’s either a complete and total liar, or lives in a fantasy world. Or both.

      • I say both. He wants history to show his son was a victim. Which is very questionable in the real world.

    • His current wife said that George was just defending himself from the girlfriend attacking him. Was she there? I doubt it.

  7. Maryland Becomes First State To OK Facebook Password Protection Bill

    ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) — Maryland is poised to become the first state to ban employers from demanding applicants or workers hand over their log-in information for social media sites like Facebook.
    The measure, which handily passed the legislature earlier this month, keeps managers from snooping on password-protected content, a practice advocates of the bill say violates privacy and intimidates job seekers and employees.
    Robert Collins, a former corrections officer in Maryland, said he was asked for his Facebook account information while being recertified for his job following a leave of absence.

    This is what corporations do. Why on earth do people (at the worker level) try to protect corporations?

    • If mittens can’t carry enough swing states, he loses. The national polls just help the news channels keep the LIV’s attention to swell the ratings.

      • It seems they’re really just fighting over the swing voters in the swing states. Everything else is just background noise.

        • Welcome to your two-party system where 90% of the seats are decided already. Stewart was tongue-in-cheek last night that the only way a third party is coming is when the Rise of the Planet of the Apes happens

          • All the seats I get to vote for are decided, I’ve had the same city council member, congress woman, and senators for the last 20 yrs. The state representatives play musical chairs due to term limits, but it’s the same cast every time. At least on the city level, the apes would fill in nicely.

  9. Zimmerman will get out on bail.

    He “apologized” to Trayvon’s parents — but really it was making excuses for himself.

    • By itself, that photo should not be admissible as evidence. Too many questions about its authenticity. Date stamps can easily be faked. Just tell your camera it’s a different date and time. Besides, nothing in the picture definitively corroborates Zimmerman’s version of events, especially since you can’t be 100% certain that’s actually Zimmerman in that picture. The man will be on trial for murder. “Close” shouldn’t be good enough.

      • Exactly.

        I’m afraid that this case is going to get the Anna Nicole Smith treatment, so any real chance for either party is pretty slim.

        • I already can’t stand it – every program, every hour, some new talking legal head jerking off for prime time viewers …. there’s no chance of this case being tried properly and reasonably.

          And there are so many other things that the brain-dead media should be looking into.

    • “Injuries like that would be bandaged” — not if the paramedics had not yet arrived. And “calm and cool” is one response to shock. Within the context of 2nd Degree murder, the injuries are of no forensic relevance. As stated in the article:

      “Even if George Zimmerman was injured in his fight,” said Abrams, “it doesn’t change the fact that the prosecutors clearly believe that Zimmerman was the aggressor. And if Zimmerman was the aggressor and they got into a fight, that doesn’t allow him to use deadly force. It simply — you can’t be losing a fight and then decide to use your gun to protect yourself.”

      • “I did not know that he was armed or not.”

        That’s no excuse for shooting him. And there was no reasonable cause to believe that he was armed. This is the problem with allowing people (especially cops) to shoot someone based on what they “believe.” They could be fucking crazy as hell, but that doesn’t mean their beliefs should be enough to clear them of murder charges.

        You can come to “believe” something in one of two ways: You can have concrete evidence in front of you, or you can have an overactive imagination that thinks the first explanation which isn’t contradicted by what you perceive must be true. (Cops often invoke the second form of belief to justify their homicides.) It shouldn’t be enough to say simply that you “thought” you saw a gun. Because if there really isn’t any gun, then you really aren’t in mortal danger, are you?

        What if Zimmerman said that he “believed” that Trayvon was a martial arts expert who could kill him with one hand? Does that mean he’s justified in shooting him? People believe things because they either know them to be true or they imagine them to be true. Imagination should never be a justification for taking another person’s life.

        • Yeah, it’s total bullshit.

          Zimmerman lost me in his “apology” with these words: “I wanted to say…” Right, he “wanted” to say that, but he couldn’t because he’s really not sorry.

          Why do people keep phrasing “apologies” like this!? “I would like to apologize…” Arrrggghhhhhhhh!!! Words have meaning!

    • I hope they will do that. I saw that on Cenk or Ed, last night. Romney will continue to lie, and the reich-wing crowds won’t fact-check anyway. Repugs think if enough people cheer when they lie, it makes it the truth.

  13. I hope this guy endorses Romney. They could have so many good chuckles together about the little people.

    Republican Senate candidate John Raese is standing by a controversial statement he made in his latest campaign for Senate from West Virginia — in which he compared mandatory no-smoking signs in businesses to the Star of David patches that Jews were forced to wear on their clothes in Nazi Germany.

    “I can’t find anything in my statement and during my speech that wasn’t true,” Raese told the Charleston Daily Mail. “I’m not apologizing to anybody or any organization. It’s my perfect right to make a speech about meaningful subject matters in this country.”

  14. Well. I wasn’t planning on eating at home today, but the PTB decided half a day on Friday was enough this week. They had me thinking we were going to work tomorrow, too. So here I am, listening to Ed, and waiting for Thom and Bernie!

  15. Bill O’Reilly on why Glee is going to turn kids gay: “When I was a teenager and I saw James Dean smoking, it made me want to smoke.”

    There’s no explaining that.

  16. Well? We’ve learned a little more about those involved in the Secret Service hooker scandal. One of those fired posted a picture of himself leering at Bible Spice. So he wasn’t hired by an Obama appointee and, since the Reichwhiners aren’t braying “Clinton did it”, I think it’s safe to assume he was hired by a Bush, 41 or 43, appointee. He doesn’t look quite old enough to be tied to Raygun. I’m going to go way out on a limb and assume that every last one of them can be traced to a Bush appointee and that they were hired based on ideology rather than character and capability. Will the “librul media” ever mention who hired whom and when?

  18. And another consequence of bone-headed, sensation-driven or ideology-driven media:

    Amurkans think Ahmadinnerjacket’s Iran is as dangerous a threat to the US as the Soviet Union was in 1985.

    Let’s see:
    Soviet Union – long range rocket technology – check, nuclear weapons technology and 39,000 warheads ready to go at a minute’s notice – check, 5+ million men under arms, plus hundreds of nuclear subs, 1000s of tanks and planes – check,

    Iran – long range rockets – er, not really, nuclear weapons – er, none, 1+ million highly committed but poorly armed young men with no obvious way of finding their way to the US (maybe some of them could catch a flight and change flights in Frankfurt or Schipol?).

    • Well, you see back in the Cold War days America had to stand strong, tall and proud as the lone protector of the world from the militaristic ideology of a nation who believed in world domination and was willing to spare no expense to make it happen. Sad part is they did that, spared no expense and now they are kaput.

      So the US is now willing to spare no expense to protect the world from the global domination of the only power with the wherewithal to do the same. Oh wait, that would be us.

    • TtT, you must allow the right-wingnuts their fantasy. How the hell else are they going to scare the teapottier/repugnant party into toeing the line?

    • Always looking for that next war, don’t you see? With Afghanistan ending, the MIC needs a new drug…

        • who really cares about that butthole????? way too much publicity for him, and the NRA. Perhaps he’ll just shoot himself with his gun?

      • He didn’t go into it too deeply, in his announcement in the last moments of his show. Apparently it was caught early, but she’ll be having “a rough couple of months” ahead of her. That doesn’t sound like just radiation, so maybe it’s chemo as well.

  24. Reality Check from MSN Money today:
    Here’s an unhappy observation about the minimum wage: Congress last increased the rate in stages in 2007, topping it out at $7.25 an hour in 2009, or $15,080 a year.

    That amount, when adjusted for inflation, is actually lower than what a minimum-wage worker earned in 1968 and is too meager to offer anyone the chance to climb out of poverty, let alone afford basic goods and services.

  25. Secret Service ousts three more, White House hits out at Palin | The Ticket – Yahoo! News

    “You know, the president, for one, he better be wary there of—when Secret Service is accompanying his family on vacation. They may be checking out the first lady instead of guarding her. And I say that not just tongue-in-cheek, but I say that seriously, that the president, the CEO of this operation called our federal government has got to start cracking down on these agencies! He is the head of the administrative branch and all these different departments in the administration that now people are seeing things that are so amiss within these departments.”

    Can anyone actually make any sense of what she said?

    • Nope. I loaned out my Gibberish to English dictionary but I would guess that she’s pissed because there aren’t any SS agents checking her out any more. Of course, the funny part is that most if not all of the SS agents involved were hired and supervised by GOoPers but the Reichwhiners in the “librul media” haven’t brought up that little fact.

    • She’s positively giddy, isn’t she? Find out one Secret Srvice guy is oogling her, and she starts thinking it’s about her. :roll:

    • She displayed the same lack of understanding of our government that Bush did. It’s called the Executive Branch, not the Administrative Branch. I’m sorry, but a mistake like that should disqualify someone from holding public office ever again. There is just no excuse for an American politician to not know the proper names of the three, and there are only three, branches of our federal government.

      • I disqualified her when the first or second article I read was about her pet with-hunter. I wouldn’t trust anyone that crazy with sharp scissors much less the nuclear arsenal.

      • Wow, how in the world was this stupid woman ever elected to any office anywhere? That’s taught in 4th grade.

        • I am more and more convinced that these Reichwhiners get elected by people from politicized churches that vote in a block. The stupidest/craziest 25% of the electorate wield an awful lot of power through their solidarity.

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