So, would you be surprised to learn that Sarah Palin has two sets of rules, the ones she preaches (that she wants you to live by), and another (easier, for the empowered elite, by which lives)? No? I didn't think so.
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin -- who has gone to great lengths to hype the supposed dangers of a big government takeover of American health care -- admitted over the weekend that she used to get her treatment in Canada's single-payer system.
"We used to hustle over the border for health care we received in Canada," Palin said in her first Canadian appearance since stepping down as governor of Alaska. "And I think now, isn't that ironic?"
By now, we've all heard about Toyota's inability to stop their cars, well, we just learned that a California Highway Patrol officer assisted in slowing down a runaway Toyota Prius (from 94 mph to a safe stop) on Monday after the car's accelerator became stuck on a San Diego County freeway.
Prius driver James Sikes called 911 about 1:30 p.m. after accelerating to pass another vehicle on Interstate 80 near La Posta and finding that he could not control his car, the CHP said.
"I pushed the gas pedal to pass a car and it did something kind of funny... it jumped and it just stuck there," the 61-year-old driver said at a news conference. "As it was going, I was trying
the brakes...it wasn't stopping, it wasn't doing anything and it just kept speeding up," Sikes said, adding he could smell the brakes burning he was pressing the pedal so hard.
I was chatting with Walt earlier today and told him that a dispute between ABC and my local cable provider (Cablevison) has caused ABC to cut the feed as of midnight this morning. According to ABC it is Cablevisions fault, and (you guessed it) Cablevision, it is all ABC's fault.
The Disney Co., which owns the ABC network, cut off service to the city's 3.1 million Cablevision customers after the two sides failed to reach a deal.
ABC officials acted on their threat to pull the channel unless Cablevision agreed to pay a rights fee to offer the top-rated station to its subscribers.
"Cablevision has once again betrayed its subscribers by losing ABC7, the most popular station in the tri-state area," Channel 7 president Rebecca Campbell said in a statement.
Cablevision blamed the stall in negotiations on Disney CEO Bob Iger.
What this mostly means to ABC customers, is that they won't get to watch the Oscars tonight. Fortunately, I live in CT, and we have a local ABC Affiliate (WTNH in New Haven), and can still access the feed through them.
Needless to say, this is (obviously) a short-term fix, and, well, something is going to have to be done.
Personally, I'm a little suspect, as since ABC is still essentially a "broadcast" channel, the Federal Government has decreed that the broadcast belongs to the public and should be free, so how can ABC pull the feed. An interesting question since the FCC doesn't control cable programming.
The $40 million that ABC is asking for from cablevision is actually rather interesting given as how its parent company (Disney), is renown for being the living embodiment of it's tightwad character, Scrooge McDuck.
Yeah, that's apparently what happened to Megan Mariah Barnes in South Florida recently. Apparently, as the story goes, Barnes was driving to meet her boyfriend, something that she shouldn't have been doing in the first place (and no, it wasn't because Barnes' ex husband Charles Judy was in the passenger seat; it was because the day before, Barnes had been convicted of DUI and was driving with her license suspended. Further, Barnes had been ordered to impound her car, and her license had been revoked for five years. To make matters worse, after her suspension she was supposed to install a Breathalyzer ignition interlock device on any vehicle she drove. Not to mention that she, had also been sentenced to nine months' probation.
Anyway, the real fun starts because of what she was doing in the car at the time of the accident that she caused. Apparently the 37-year-old woman was:
...shaving her bikini area while her ex-husband took the wheel from the passenger seat.
According to the state trooper who arrived at the scene of the accident;
"She said she was meeting her boyfriend in Key West and wanted to be ready for the visit,"
Yeah, you read that right.
Barnes and Charles Judy were southbound in her Thunderbird at 11 a.m. when they slammed into the back of a 2006 Chevrolet pickup driven by David Schoff of Palm Bay. His passengers were a man and two women; the latter were treated for minor injuries at Lower Keys Medical Center, FHP spokesman Alex Annunziato said.
Schoff had slowed to about 5 mph to make a turn when the Thunderbird hit him, traveling about 45 mph, which was within the speed limit, Dunick said.
Barnes allegedly drove another half-mile, then switched seats with Judy, who allegedly claimed to be driving, Annunziato said.
If I saw this in a movie, I wouldn't have believed it.
To paraphrase Eddy Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop, "...don't worry about us. We got guns and coffee here. We're gonna get wired and have a big party." Yeah, here at Cuppa central, those are two things that we dearly love (Walt because he's a Texan, and me because, well I just like to get wired and blow stuff up).
Still, if we ever found ourselves out on the road, we know one coffeehouse we're surely gonna visit, and yep, that's Starbucks, for as surely as we all know that these establishments are the gateway to the Underworld, at least they support an open carry policy in their stores.
...in light of a renewed statement by Starbucks that’s it’s standing by a policy to allow people brandishing unloaded weapons into its stores. (Check out the good videos embedded in the story, as well.)
The quick backstory: The “open carry” movement, in which gun owners carry unconcealed handguns as they go about their everyday business, has been gaining serious traction in recent months. Gun-control advocates have been pushing to quash the movement, including by petitioning the Starbucks coffee chain to ban guns on its premises. Gun-rights advocates have been taking the battle, and their guns, to an ever-broadening range of retail establishments.
While some retail establishments have, for one reason or another, banned open carriers from their premises, others haven’t. Among those in the latter category: Starbucks.
Yep, what could go wrong with a bunch of folks hopped up on caffeine and carrying weapons?
So, you've heard about the problem Toyota is having these days with cars that don't seem to want to stop. Well, apparently, they have been going on a bit longer than we all realized.
In June of 2006, 32-year-old Koua Fong Lee of St. Paul, Minnesota, was getting off the highway in his 1996 Toyota Camry. But he accidentally hit the gas instead of the brakes, and slammed into another car at 90 miles per hour. Three people were killed in the crash, and Koua was sentenced to eight years in prison for criminal vehicular homicide, careless driving, and several other charges.
But now, Koua is requesting that his case be reopened. He swears he didn’t step on the wrong pedal, and he’s convinced that Toyota and its faulty engineering is to blame for the accident.
Koua says, quote, “I think that might be the reason why I’m in here . . . I know that I stepped on the brake. I was pressing it to the max, but it wasn’t working.”
Yeah, you read that right. Even though I’m a fan of Mr. Colbert and a member of his “nation" I want to give him something of a bitch slap for incorrectly displaying the American Flag on Thursday night’s episode of his coverage of the Winter Olympics. Yep, he (well his set dresser), hung the US flag wrong for one of the segments of his show:
As you can clearly see from this image that was lifted from his sketch Freud Rage - The Iceman Counseleth - Shani Davis both U.S. flags are hung vertically with the blue field in the upper right. As any Boy Scout knows, when hung, the U.S. Flag is always hung with the blue field in the upper left.
Seriously, shame on Colbert for screwing up so simple a thing as this.
Just when you thought it was safe to go out to a ball game, some over-eager yabbo with nothing better to do gives us this...
Yesterday, the American Academy of Pediatrics released a policy statement on Prevention of Choking Among Children (PDF). A laudable goal, no doubt. One particular recommendation found in the report, though, has got the American public's hackles up. The kiddie docs identified the hot dog as the food on which little Billy is most likely to choke and die. This is because of their "cylindrical, airway sized, and compressible" nature. And you thought Dan Aykroyd made them sound unappealing.
Seriously, though sometimes you just have to wonder how any of us made it as far as we have without killing ourselves because we didn't know that the stove was hot, we need to cross at the light, and knives are sharp. Personally, I'm with the guy on the street being interviewed who says, "You know what parents are going to learn what to do? They are going to have to learn how to watch their kids."
As an infant, my daughter chocked on a McDonald's french fry. I was paying attention and solved the problem, I didn't go out on a quest to change the shape of the way fries are made.
Meghan Shea, is a college student in North Carolina, can easily speak “backwards". Meghan is majoring in biology, but she can’t get a degree for her most unusual skill. Give her a listen.
Sort of sounds like she is speaking Hebrew, doesn't it?
By now you've all heard how the ex-Governatrix (over) reacted to the Valentine's Day episode of The Family Guy, well, as it turns out, the actress (Andrea Fay Friedman) who voiced "Ellen" — the character who was depicted as having Down syndrome — actually does have Down syndrome herself.
Friedman recently responded to Palin's comments on Fox by saying:
My name is Andrea Fay Friedman. I was born with Down syndrome. I played the role of Ellen on the "Extra Large Medium" episode of Family Guy that was broadcast on Valentine's day. Although they gave me red hair on the show, I am really a blonde. I also wore a red wig for my role in " Smudge" but I was a blonde in "Life Goes On". I guess former Governor Palin does not have a sense of humor. I thought the line "I am the daughter of the former governor of Alaska" was very funny. I think the word is "sarcasm".
Friedman then continued her comments by taking the opportunity to deliver her own little Gibb's-slap to Alaska's ex-Governatrix by saying:
In my family we think laughing is good. My parents raised me to have a sense of humor and to live a normal life. My mother did not carry me around under her arm like a loaf of French bread the way former Governor Palin carries her son Trig around looking for sympathy and votes.
Nope, this is not a follow-up to the Keven Smith story, but rather a similar story that eerily mirrors what happened to Smith. Only this time, it was about odor, not size, and the individual affected was not nearly as famous or as (digitally) well-connected as is Smith.
A man on Jazz Air, a regional airline in Canada that also serves U.S. cities, was reportedly kicked off a plane earlier this month because of his strong body odor.
"People were just mumbling and staring at him," said a woman who sat near the man, according to The Guardian, a newspaper in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, where the flight originated on February 6. It was a very uncomfortable situation, she added.
Another passenger described the smell as "brutal."
Perhaps if had been sitting next to Smith, he would have been treated better, or not.
Yeah, everyone likes to kick a loser when they are down, and well, these days, everyone's favorite target seems to be the ex-Govenatrix herself, and well, we'd feel sorry for her, but, well she we know that she seems to invite this type of firestorm on herself, all by herself, even without the "assistance" of the "Liberal, elite media".
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, in a nod to former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, wrote a faux shopping list on his hand in dark pen Tuesday in response to reports over the weekend that Palin had written notes to herself during the Tea Party Convention this past weekend.
By way of comparison, I want to point out that if a student had done this (write answers on their hand) in school, during a test, they would have, in all probability, been suspended and flunked the test. The least thing she could have done was to apologize for having committed such a gaff, but she didn't. Nope, she came out the next day with the words "Hi Mom" written on her hand for the cameras to catch.
You just know that if a Democrat had done that she wouldn't have found it nearly as funny.
I can't help but to think that the Republican party so deserves this bimbo.
Yeah, yeah, I know that Walt posted a link to this in his response to an earlier post, but I felt that it was so funny (I nearly wet myself when watching it live last night), that I felt that it deserved its own post.
Yesterday, we gave you the first two parts of this interview, here is part three.
Here is what I find interesting about this interview:
1) That O'Reilly (a newsman?) feels that the opinion of a comedian (and fake newsman) is somehow relevant. 2) That Stewart managed to elicit a laugh from a member of the crew. 3) Do you notice that O'Reilly seems more interested in asking questions than in actually getting answers.
Still, in a throw down between these two men, I'm still on Jon's side. He informs me and makes me laugh; O'Reilly just frightens me. (If you want to see the entire interview you can do that too.)
So, would you be surprised to learn that Sarah Palin has two sets of rules, the ones she preaches (that she wants you to live by), and another (easier, for the empowered elite, by which lives)? No? I didn't think so. 
