Poor Mojo's Newswire

The Progressive platform minced no words, declaring:

"To destroy this invisible Government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day." ...

Americans are ready for real reforms to the most pressing problems of the day, but the Republicans and (most) Democrats are too busy thinking small. Without a leader of Teddy Roosevelt's massive statute, a Bull Moose movement today could never survive as a viable third party, but it could wake up and mobilize a lot of disillusioned Americans.

One hundred years later, it's time to bring the Bull Moose back!

-"Teachers in Texas will be required to cover the Judeo-Christian influences of the nation's Founding Fathers, but not highlight the philosophical rationale for the separation of church and state." “I reject the notion by the left of a constitutional separation of church and state,” said David Bradley, a conservative from Beaumont who works in real estate. “I have $1,000 for the charity of your choice if you can find it in the Constitution.”

-The Board refused to require that “students learn that the Constitution prevents the U.S. government from promoting one religion over all others.”

-McCarthyism will be taught as an example of how communism was rooted out of the federal government.

All of the possible destinations are concentration camps. Auschwitz, Dachau. Brathwaite described the moment of realization as "a fall from a hundred feet up," once the now-victorious player realizes what he or she has just done.

This isn't the end of the game. Train's rules (typed up on a genuine Nazi typewriter) specify that "the game is over when it ends." After figuring out where the trains are going, you can choose to stop playing or, as some players did, try to actually rebel against the rules and sabotage the game by intentionally trying to draw derail cards.

When a train in the game gets derailed, two things happen: half the people go back to the beginning of the board, and the others refuse to board the train. The game pieces simply sit on the board, and can no longer be manipulated. Brathwaite intentionally refused to explain exactly what had happened to those pieces. Some players assume that the tokens are dead, some assume that they've escaped and gone to Denmark. This process of volunteering your own narrative isn't lazy design or metagaming, Brathwaite seemed to suggest, but an integral part of the game that makes the player feel complicit in what they're doing.
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The RE/Mixed Media Festival celebrates remix as a legitimate, responsible form of visual art by bringing together remix artists from all disciplines to display their works publicly. The festival will be held in Brooklyn, NY on Sunday May 30, 2010 at Galapagos Art Space in Dumbo.

We are currently soliciting videos & films from lo-fi artists that utilize remix/mashup techniques, and that are under 10 minutes in length. Selected works will be screened at the festival, judged by a panel of experts, and one winner will receive a $500 cash prize.

It found Caesar's self to be ill staffed
As in final 'et tu, Brute.'
The ides of March blew its deadly draft ...

Baxter, 28, was sentenced in Van Nuys Superior Court for the creation of said website, which allows users to "send and receive anonymous questions, and learn more about people you find interesting by following their answers."

Over 2 million people have used the site to communicate anonymously with other users since its creation in 2009.

"We allow users to sign up for an account and ask questions anonymously, but we still store their data next to the question. For legal purposes," said Baxter, in a January interview.

The incident occurred in 1985, when Kevin Garn was 30, and married. In 2002, when Garn, a Republican, was running for Congress, the woman, Cheryl Maher, began contacting reporters with the story, prompting Garn to pay her and have an attorney draft a non-disclosure agreement, reports the Salt Lake Tribune.

With his wife by his side, Garn yesterday told reporters: "I expect to suffer public humiliation and embarrassment. Some lessons are hard to learn. This is something I should've done back in 2002 but I was scared. I did not want to be publicly judged by one of my life's [worst mistakes]."

The guidelines are part of a push to iron out the jumble of state standards and raise expectations for American schools. Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia joined in the effort to develop national standards, leaving Alaska and Texas as the lone holdouts.

If proponents have their way, third-graders across the country will understand the function of adjectives and adverbs, while eighth-graders will be introduced to the Pythagorean theorem. More broadly, the standards are meant to prepare kids for the possibility of college.

The proposal, backed by President Obama, was unveiled by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. It emerged with surprisingly broad agreement after years of bitter debate between the federal government and the states over who should set academic standards.

The one last hope for Senate Democratic leaders was to avoid a vote altogether on the public option, thereby relieving Senators of having to take a position and being exposed. But that trick would require the cooperation of all Senators -- any one Senator can introduce a public option amendment during the reconciliation and force a vote -- and it now seems that Bernie Sanders, to his great credit, is refusing to go along with the Democrats' sham and will do exactly that: ignore the wishes of the Senate leadership and force a roll call vote on the public option.

So now what is to be done? They only need 50 votes, so they can't use the filibuster excuse. They don't seem able to prevent a vote, as they tried to do, because Sanders will force one. And it seems there aren't enough Senate Democrats willing to vote against the public option after publicly saying all year long they supported it, which means it might get 50 votes if a roll call vote is held. So what is the Senate Democratic leadership now doing? They're whipping against the public option, which they pretended all year along to so vigorously support . . .

n a letter to parliamentarians, the banking giant said the U.S. Internal Revenue Service has collected information on the cross-border activities of about 20 Swiss banks and may soon press for a crackdown on American tax evaders at these institutions as well.

UBS urged parliament to approve an August treaty signed by the U.S. Treasury Department and Switzerland's executive Federal Council on improving cooperation in tax evasion matters.

"The risks are very considerable for the Swiss financial center and the economy as a whole if parliament were to withhold its approval," UBS said in the letter, obtained Friday by The Associated Press. The bank confirmed its authenticity.

But Gibson, unlike so many others, managed to get out before the hobby consumed his entire life.

"I don't know how I wound up at that point, but thank God I escaped when I did," Gibson, 41, said Friday. "There I was, a grown man, planning a trip to the Mustard Museum in Wisconsin, when suddenly I heard a voice deep within me say, 'This is not what you want your life to be about.'"

"It was like waking up from a bad dream," Gibson added. "A bad yellow and brown dream."

Gibson's descent into the depths of mustard obsession started innocently enough, when he got involved in an Internet exchange about the best kind of mustard to use on a grilled bratwurst. When someone posted a link encouraging him to "click on this if you really want to spice things up," he took the stranger's advice and suddenly found himself on MustardMonster.com, a discussion group devoted to the cultivation, preparation, and enjoyment of the table-side condiment.

"... He leaves behind him a legacy of almost a whole people poisoned with hate, sadism, and murder, and perverted by him. That people will remain a problem and perhaps a menace to the rest of civilization for generations to come."

Against that historical background, consider just a few of these sound bites:

Ann Coulter:

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. [Her suggestion for dealing with the Middle East.]

Glenn Beck:

"I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it.... No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out of him." [Responding to the question, "What would people do for $50 million?," "The Glenn Beck Program," May 17, 2005.]

Rush Limbaugh:

"If we are going to start rewarding no skills and stupid people - I'm serious, let the unskilled jobs, let the kinds of jobs that take absolutely no knowledge whatsoever to do - let stupid and unskilled Mexicans do that work."

John Oswald has been devising illegitimate compositions since the late 1960s. His 1975 track "Power" married frenetic Led Zeppelin guitars to the impassioned exhortations of a Southern US evangelist at the same time that hip hop was discovering the potency of the same (and related) kinds of ingredients.

Dumbfounded citizens from Maine to California gazed helplessly at the frightening chunk of print, unsure of what to do next. Without an illustration, chart, or embedded YouTube video to ease them in, millions were frozen in place, terrified by the sight of one long, unbroken string of English words.

"Why won't it just tell me what it's about?" said Boston resident Charlyne Thomson, who was bombarded with the overwhelming mass of black text late Monday afternoon. "There are no bullet points, no highlighted parts. I've looked everywhere—there's nothing here but words."

"Ow," Thomson added after reading the first and last lines in an attempt to get the gist of whatever the article, review, or possibly recipe was about.

Amr Moussa, the secretary-general of the Arab League, announced Wednesday that he had been informed by Palestine Authority president Mahmoud Abbas that the latter has pulled out of indirect talks with Israel. Late Wednesday, the Arab League itself reversed its earlier cautious endorsement of the proximity talks, recommending that that support be dropped.

Israeli colonization of Palestinian territory lies at the heart of the Mideast conflict. It isn't a complicated issue in the law, since Israel's actions are clearly illegal and unethical to boot. But might makes right and Israel is the most powerful country in the Middle East, so all the protests on legal and humanitarian grounds have amounted to nothing.

The talks were likely deliberately sabotaged by Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who had his Interior Minister announce the construction of 1600 new households in Occupied East Jerusalem the day before they were scheduled to begin. In fact, Israel is actively planning 50,000 further housing units on occupied Palestinian territory. US Vice President Joe Biden had come to kick off the process with visits to Netanyahu and Abbas, but he has now been sent home empty-handed by Netanyahu's sheer effrontery.
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According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, "the Ryan plan would result in very large revenue losses relative to current policies."

[The Tax Policy Center] estimates that even with its middle-class tax increases, the plan would reduce federal revenues to 16 percent of GDP in 2014. Because the tax cuts for the wealthy would dwarf the tax increases for the middle class, the Ryan plan would allow the federal debt to continue growing for a number of decades to come, despite its steep cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

The result, they conclude, is ballooning, unsustainable deficits--a quirky feature for a plan touted far and wide for its potential to right the country's fiscal course. And yet, Ryan's star is on the rise in the GOP and in Washington.

By contrast to the Ryan Roadmap, President Obama's budget would increase revenues as a share of GDP from 14.5 percent in 2010 to 19.6 percent in 2020. There would still be deficits at that point--but at a much more sustainable level than under the GOP alternative.