'Tis the season to crowd Hill exits (Politico)

The holidays are drawing to a close, and for the political world a new season is dawning: retirement season.

The new year marks the unofficial starting gun of the campaign season and traditionally produces a flurry of announcements from members of Congress that they will not seek reelection in the fall ? and officials from both parties predict this year will be no different.

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It?s already begun. Two days after Christmas, Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) announced that he will forgo a third term rather than embark on a bruising reelection campaign ? a decision that likely hands the seat to Republicans. Then, on Friday, Ohio Rep. Steve Austria also bowed out, citing a redistricting plan that pits him against a fellow Republican congressman.

Democratic officials say they are closely monitoring several other party members, including 73-year-old New York Rep. Maurice Hinchey and North Carolina Rep. Brad Miller, who faces a narrow road to a sixth term after Republicans drew him into the same seat as another Democratic incumbent in this year?s redistricting. Rep. Heath Shuler, another North Carolina Democrat in a challenging district, raised questions about whether he would retire after he told a local newspaper that being in Congress ?gets old. You have to keep fighting and keep fighting, and sometimes, people just don?t listen.?

Whitney Mitchell, a Shuler spokeswoman, declined via email to elaborate on the congressman?s comments, saying only that ?Congressman Shuler is currently and actively seeking reelection in 2012.?

Democrats have borne the brunt of most of the retirements this year. Seven Democrats and two Republicans in the Senate are not running again, and 17 Democrats and nine Republicans in the House are stepping aside. But senior GOP officials say three of the party?s oldest House members ? Reps. Bill Young of Florida, Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland and Howard Coble of North Carolina ? could announce departures in the days ahead. Additionally, Reps. Elton Gallegly and Jerry Lewis, both California Republicans, have been noncommittal about their 2012 plans.

If any of those members decide to leave Capitol Hill, history suggests they could make their plans clear in the immediate weeks ahead. During the 2010 campaign, five House members and two senators announced their retirement in the month following Christmas. In the 2008 election, four House members and one senator made public their plans to forgo reelection during the same time period.

?This is the period of time where most party leaders hold their breath,? said Chris LaCivita, a former National Republican Senatorial Committee political director. ?They ask, ?What?s the next shoe that?s going to drop???

The retirements typically mark a critical juncture in the emerging campaign, locking in candidate fields before a rush of springtime filing deadlines and primaries approaches.

Politicos say it?s no accident that members make career decisions around the holidays ? a natural time for self-reflection that?s spent with family. With aides and party leaders ? who are usually invested in seeing a lawmaker carry on ? many miles away, a member can be more easily swayed to ditch Washington for good.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/politics/*http%3A//us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/external/politico_rss/rss_politico_mostpop/http___www_politico_com_news_stories1211_70969_html/44039060/SIG=11m6v4vpt/*http%3A//www.politico.com/news/stories/1211/70969.html

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Is it time to overhaul the calendar? Here's the plan

Forget leap years, months with 28 days and your birthday falling on a different day of the week each year. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland say they have a better way to mark time: a new calendar in which every year is identical to the one before.

Their proposed calendar overhaul ? largely unprecedented in the 430 years since Pope Gregory XIII instituted the Gregorian calendar we still use today ? would divvy out months and weeks so that every calendar date would always fall on the same day of the week. New Year's Day would forever come on a Sunday. So would Christmas.

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"The calendar I'm advocating isn't nearly as accurate" as the Gregorian calendar, said Richard Henry, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins who has been pushing for calendar reform for years. "But it's far more convenient."

New versus old
The trouble with designing a nice, regular calendar is that each Earth year is 365.2422 days long, leaving extra snippets of time that don't fit nicely into a cycle of 24-hour days. If this time isn't somehow accounted for, the calendar "drifts" relative to the seasons, and the next thing you know, Christmas Day is coming after the spring thaw.

The Gregorian calendar deals with this by adding an extra day (Leap Day) to February about every four years, correcting for the seasonal drift. ?

"It's really incredible that in the Middle Ages, they were able to invent a new calendar that was so accurate," Henry told LiveScience. What bothers him about the Gregorian calendar, though, is the frustrating tendency for days of the week to jump around. Because 365 is not a multiple of seven, 7-day weeks don't fit evenly into the Gregorian calendar. That means that each year, dates shift over one day of the week (two during leap years).

"Everybody has to redo their calendars," Henry said. "For sports schedules, for schools, for every damn thing. It's completely unnecessary."

Under the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar (named after Henry and Steve Hanke, a Johns Hopkins economist who also advocates calendar overhaul), every date falls on the same day of the week ? forever.

The calendar follows a pattern of two 30-day months followed by one 31-day month. That means the old rhyme, "30 days hath September, April, June and November," would need to be revised to "31 days hath September, June, March and December."

To account for extra time, Hanke and Henry drop leap years and instead create a "leap week" at the end of December every five or six years. This extra week, dubbed "Xtr," would adjust for seasonal drift while keeping the 7-day cycle on track.

"The new calendar can be fairly often off as much as three days on the seasons, but looking out, could you tell?" Henry said. "Of course you couldn't tell."

The economics of time
For Henry, the new calendar is worth it because of how much time and effort goes into revising the calendar each year. He first got into the idea of calendar reform while having to yet again update lecture dates and syllabi for his students. He quickly discovered that there were calendar-reform advocates with suggestions on how to do away with that problem, he said.

"My heart sank, and I thought, 'Oh my god, I don't want to get involved in calendar reform. It's the stupidest waste of time. It's hopeless,'" Henry said.

But he put the Hanke-Henry calendar online anyway, weathered a storm of publicity, and watched nothing come of it. This time, he said, he's hoping that the influence of Hanke, the economist, will spur real interest in change.

To Hanke, the need for a new calendar goes beyond the annoyance of out-of-date syllabi. Calculations for interest payments, for example, are complicated by the irregularity of months. Different financial entities deal with these irregularities differently, meaning that the amount of interest accrued depends not just on time, but on who did the calendar-related math. The Hanke-Henry calendar would do away with these irregularities, streamlining the process, Hanke and Henry wrote in the January 2012 issue of Globe Asia magazine.

The new calendar would also be more business-friendly, the researchers wrote. Meetings and holiday time off would be easier to schedule. Other businessmen's attempts at calendar reform, including one by Eastman Kodak founder George Eastman, failed because they didn't always maintain Sundays as weekends, disrupting the Sabbath for Christians. The Hanke-Henry calendar doesn't have that problem.

"The natural date for the introduction of these changes is 1 January 2012, because it is a Sunday in both the current Pope Gregory calendar and the simple, new calendar," the researchers wrote.

While that would not be enough time to update computers to the new calendar, he said, the target for complete technical adoption could be January 1, 2017, when the Gregorian year again begins on a Sunday.

From 2004: Pros and cons of the calendar remake

When's my birthday?
But no matter how simple Hanke and Henry's suggestion is, it faces high psychological barriers.

"My favorite reason it shouldn't be done is, 'But my birthday will always be on a Wednesday!'" Henry said. "Of course the answer to that is you can celebrate your birthday whenever you want."

Another problem: "To my extreme annoyance, my calendar contains four Friday the 13ths each year," Henry said. "Isn't that awful?"

Nonetheless, Henry has some hope for a simpler calendar. After all, he said, smoking has gone from completely acceptable to often banned in public, in just a few short decades. The federal government once managed to institute a nationwide speed limit of 55 miles per hour. And despite centuries of habit, no one says "Peking" anymore when they mean "Beijing."

"Real change is possible," Henry said.

You can follow LiveScience senior writer Stephanie Pappas on Twitter sipappas. Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience ? and on Facebook.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45828666/ns/technology_and_science-science/

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NBA: Stephen Curry Has Nike Lab Analyze His Ankle & Sneakers

Stephen Curry has had four days for his ankle to heal from a second sprain this month. He had surgery in May in hopes of strengthening the ankle, which endured at least three severe sprains last season and caused him to miss a portion of the exhibition season and eight regular-season games. ?Read more after the jump.

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?There?s a little bit of pressure to get back, but, either way, we still have the bigger picture in mind when it comes to my injury,? Curry said. ?Obviously, Monta and his family are of the utmost importance right now. It?s a big game, and we?ve got a lot of momentum going, but I?m not going to force it just because he?s not here. I am working pretty hard to get back, so one of us is out there.

?Either way, I think our team is ready to take that challenge.?

Curry used Thursday?s off day to fly to the Nike laboratory in Beaverton, Ore. He had his foot and shoes analyzed for fit and figured out that his ankle naturally rolls to the outside, which is how each sprain has occurred.

As he waits for the complete analysis, Curry has decided to switch from the Nike Hyperdunks to the Nike Hyperbraves, a shoe that he says fits lower and wider on his foot. The Warriors? medical staff is taping Curry?s ankle a little looser so as not to affect his movement or shooting mechanics.

SFGate

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Source: http://www.inflexwetrust.com/2011/12/31/nba-stephen-curry-has-nike-lab-analyze-his-ankle-sneakers/

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Era of consumer backlash: Verizon cites 'feedback' and scraps $2 fee

Less than 24 hours after news of the fee began blazing around the Internet, Verizon said it would not charge customers making a one-time bill payment online or by phone.

Call 2011 the year of the successful consumer revolt in the USA.

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First Netflix and Bank of America backtracked on announced changes their customers didn't like. Now, on the year's final business day, it was Verizon's turn.

Verizon Wireless says it is scrapping plans to institute a $2 fee when customers make a one-time bill payment online or by phone.

The company had framed the new policy as a way to cover transaction costs, but it sparked a storm of criticism, targeting one of the nation's most successful wireless providers.

In the earlier instances, Netflix reneged on a breakup of its Web-streaming and DVD-by-mail lines of business. And Bank of America announced new debit-card fees, only to retract them as customers rebelled.

Can you hear me now, corporate America?

Loud and clear, apparently. At least when consumer unrest might have big implications for the bottom line.

"Verizon Wireless has decided it will not institute the fee for online or telephone single payments," Verizon said in a statement, less than 24 hours after news of the fee began blazing around the Internet. "The company made the decision in response to customer feedback about the plan ...."

The consumer wins are at least loosely related to a broader pattern of activism worldwide. Time magazine recently named "The Protester" as its person of the year.

However, overturning a fee is hardly the same as toppling a government in the Middle East. (And for the record, some businesses are succeeding at raising fees or prices.)

But the recent corporate-backlash incidents symbolize what appears to be an increasingly empowered consumer ? motivated by tight financial times and enabled by the echo chamber of social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Part of Verizon's strategy behind the $2 fee, Industry analysts say, was to coax more customers into automated monthly payments of their wireless bills, saving transaction costs for the company.

In its statement late Friday, the company sounded as if it will now pursue that goal through something more akin to carrots than sticks.

"We believe the best path forward is to encourage customers to take advantage of the best and most efficient options, eliminating the need to institute the fee at this time,? said Dan Mead, CEO of Verizon Wireless.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/DV2N36pD2cc/Era-of-consumer-backlash-Verizon-cites-feedback-and-scraps-2-fee

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Diet patterns may keep brain from shrinking

Thursday, December 29, 2011

People with diets high in several vitamins or in omega 3 fatty acids are less likely to have the brain shrinkage associated with Alzheimer's disease than people whose diets are not high in those nutrients, according to a new study published in the December 28, 2011, online issue of Neurology?, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

Those with diets high in omega 3 fatty acids and in vitamins C, D, E and the B vitamins also had higher scores on mental thinking tests than people with diets low in those nutrients. These omega 3 fatty acids and vitamin D are primarily found in fish. The B vitamins and antioxidants C and E are primarily found in fruits and vegetables.

In another finding, the study showed that people with diets high in trans fats were more likely to have brain shrinkage and lower scores on the thinking and memory tests than people with diets low in trans fats. Trans fats are primarily found in packaged, fast, fried and frozen food, baked goods and margarine spreads.

The study involved 104 people with an average age of 87 and very few risk factors for memory and thinking problems. Blood tests were used to determine the levels of various nutrients present in the blood of each participant. All of the participants also took tests of their memory and thinking skills. A total of 42 of the participants had MRI scans to measure their brain volume.

Overall, the participants had good nutritional status, but seven percent were deficient in vitamin B12 and 25 percent were deficient in vitamin D.

Study author Gene Bowman, ND, MPH, of Oregon Health & Science University in Portland and a member of the American Academy of Neurology, said that the nutrient biomarkers in the blood accounted for a significant amount of the variation in both brain volume and thinking and memory scores. For the thinking and memory scores, the nutrient biomarkers accounted for 17 percent of the variation in the scores. Other factors such as age, number of years of education and high blood pressure accounted for 46 percent of the variation. For brain volume, the nutrient biomarkers accounted for 37 percent of the variation.

"These results need to be confirmed, but obviously it is very exciting to think that people could potentially stop their brains from shrinking and keep them sharp by adjusting their diet," Bowman said.

The study was the first to use nutrient biomarkers in the blood to analyze the effect of diet on memory and thinking skills and brain volume. Previous studies have looked at only one or a few nutrients at a time or have used questionnaires to assess people's diet. But questionnaires rely on people's memory of their diet, and they also do not account for how much of the nutrients are absorbed by the body, which can be an issue in the elderly.

###

American Academy of Neurology: http://www.aan.com/go/pressroom

Thanks to American Academy of Neurology for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/116340/Diet_patterns_may_keep_brain_from_shrinking

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Dino-chicken: Wacky but serious science idea of 2011

Paleontologist Jack Horner has always been a bit of an iconoclast. In the 1970s, Horner, the curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Mont., and his friend Bob Makela discovered a Maiasaura nesting site, painting the first picture of dinosaurs as doting moms and dads. He's also been at the forefront of research suggesting that dinosaurs were fast growing and warm-blooded.

But Horner's newest idea takes iconoclasm to a new level. He wants, in short, to hatch a dinosaur.

Or something very much like one, at least. Horner, who served as a technical advisor for the "Jurassic Park" movies, has no illusions that the technique in that movie ? extracting dino DNA from mosquitoes in amber ? would work. DNA degrades too quickly, for one thing. Dinosaur DNA has proved impossible to extract from actual dinosaur bones, never mind blood-sucking insects.

"If you actually had a piece of amber and it had an insect in it, and you drilled into it, and you got something out of that insect and you cloned it, and you did it over and over and over again, you'd have a room full of mosquitoes," Horner said in a February 2011 TED Talk in Long Beach, Calif. TED, or Technology, Entertainment and Design, is a nonprofit focusing on "ideas worth spreading."

So Horner has another idea: Use the living dinosaurs among us to recreate creatures dead for millions of years. Anyone who's seen "Jurassic Park" knows that birds are dinosaurs, part of the evolutionary line containing those toothy Velociraptors. What's less known is that organisms carry their evolutionary history with them. Human embryos, for example, have temporary tails, which are absorbed by the body during development. Rarely, babies are born with vestigial tails, the result of scrambled genetic processes that prevent the tail from getting re-absorbed. These evolutionary remnants are called atavisms.

Enough atavisms have been discovered in birds to make the idea of "reverse-engineering" a dinosaur out of, say, a chicken possible, Horner says. You wouldn't be adding anything to the bird to make it more dinosaurlike; all the ingredients are in its DNA. Horner's goal is to figure out how to wake up those ingredients.

LiveScience talked with Horner about his "chickenosaurus" plan and what sort of dinosaur he'd like to keep as a pet. [ Infographic: How to Make a Dino-Chicken ]

LiveScience: What was the genesis of this chickenosaurus idea?

Horner: Knowing that birds descended from dinosaurs and knowing the changes that occur from dinosaurs to birds, we know that the changes that did occur occurred because of genetics.

A friend of mine, Hans Larsson at McGill University, was studying some of these changes and looking into how it was that dinosaurs lost their tails in the transformation from dinosaurs to birds. They also transformed their arms from a hand and an arm to a wing. I got to thinking, if he discovered the genes that were responsible for both of those transformations, we could just simply reverse evolution and reactivate the tail, and possibly make a hand back out of the wing.

And then what we would have by doing those two things, you'd actually take a bird and turn it into an animal that looked a lot like one of the meat-eating dinosaurs. It seemed like a good idea.

LiveScience: What kind of animal would chickenosaurus be?

Horner: It's still a chicken. It's a modified chicken. You'd really have to mess with the DNA to make it something different.

The most important thing is that you cannot activate an ancestral characteristic unless the animal has ancestors. So if we can do this, it definitely shows that evolution works.

LiveScience: You've mentioned in the past that you see this dino-chicken as a teaching tool to help people understand evolution. Do you see that working?

Horner: Of course. You bet. There are people who are misinformed, and there are people who are uninformed [about the validity of evolution]. If people are uninformed, this will probably get through to them. If they've been misinformed and don't mind being misinformed, then they probably will continue to be misinformed.

LiveScience: Either way, it'd be a pretty awesome thing to take into a classroom.

Horner: Yes, it would. Exactly.

LiveScience: Starting with a chicken, how close could we really get to what a dinosaur looked like?

Horner: We're working with an animal that has all the right stuff. It's more about subtle changes, adding a tail or fixing a hand or possibly adding teeth, what we would think of as being relatively simple changes rather than messing with physiology or something like that.

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A bird is really a dinosaur, so we're pretty sure that the breathing apparatus of a bird evolved from the breathing apparatus of a dinosaur, and is therefore completely different than a mammal. The physiology of a bird is evolved from a dinosaur and not from a mammal, so it's not like we're trying to take a mammal and turn it into a dinosaur.

LiveScience: Would chickenosaurus teach us anything about dinosaurs we can't learn from fossils?

Horner: It's not really about understanding dinosaurs at all. Once we learn what certain genes do and how to turn them on and turn them off, then we have great potential of solving some medical mysteries. There are a lot of ways to think about this, but it's not really about dinosaurs other than solving Hans Larsson's problem of figuring out how birds lost their tails. [ Tales of 10 Vestigial Limbs ]

LiveScience: What do you see as the biggest challenge of making chickenosaurus happen?

Horner: The biggest challenge, first off, is to find the genes. We know that in the development of a tail, there are a variety of things that have to happen, so there are a couple of ways to possibly go about this.

One, as we know, when a chicken embryo is developing in the egg, just like basically all animals, the embryo actually for a time has a tail and then the trail re-absorbs. So if we could find the gene that re-absorbs the tail and not allow that gene to turn on then we could potentially hatch a chicken with a tail.

The other method would be simply to go in and discover what Hox genes [the genes that determine the structure of an organism] might be responsible for actually adding tail vertebrae, and then to see if we could add some, either by manipulating the Hox genes or by using temperature. There have been some experiments done showing that adding heat will add a vertebra here or there.

LiveScience: Where are you in this process now?

Horner: Right now, mostly I'm looking for a postdoctoral researcher. An adventurous postdoc who knows a lot about developmental biology and a little bit about birds and has done some work about chickens to work in our lab here in Bozeman.

Me, I just go through the literature, looking for anything that might give me a clue as to what genes might be responsible for tail absorption or tail growth or something that might help me with hands.

LiveScience: The comparisons to "Jurassic Park" are easy to make, but have you ever seen the movie "The Birds?" Do we really want chickens with extra teeth and claws running around?

Horner: You can't really compare it to either movie. First off, you can go out in the Serengeti and there are all kinds of animals that will eat you, but if you're driving around in your Jeep, you're just fine. The lions and cheetahs and leopards are not going to try to get into your Jeep when there are plenty of plant-eaters out there to eat that aren't inside of a metal cage.

That's the funny thing about " Jurassic Park," right? All these dinosaurs want to eat people no matter how hard they are to get.

So we don't have to worry about "Jurassic Park," because that's just fiction. Animals don't act that way. They're not vengeful. And birds aren't vengeful either.

LiveScience: So if you could bring a dinosaur back ? the real thing, not a modified chicken ? what species would you choose?

Horner: A little one. A little plant-eater.

LiveScience: No T. rex for you?

Horner: Would you make something that would turn around and eat you? Sixth-graders would do that, but I'd just as soon make something that wouldn't eat me. And you could have it as a pet without worrying about it eating the rest of your pets.

You can follow LiveScience senior writer Stephanie Pappas on Twitter@sipappas. Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience and on Facebook.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45804325/ns/technology_and_science-science/

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Amazon sold over a million Kindles per week in Dec.

By Rosa Golijan

Amazon

Amazon's Kindle devices are pretty darn popular and ranked highly on many Christmas wish lists this year, so we're not particularly surprised by the online retailers holiday sales statistics. Of course it sold millions of the devices.

While Amazon doesn't flat-out state?precisely how many Kindle devices it sold this holiday season, it does explain that its customers "purchased well over 1 million Kindle devices per week" throughout December. Some elementary school level multiplication suggests that this means the online retailer sold well over four million Kindle devices in the last month alone.

We wonder how many of those four million Kindle devices are Kindle Fire units. After all, that particular gadget has been at the top of Amazon's bestseller lists since its release in mid November. To meet industry projections, the Kindle Fire alone has to hit 3.9 million in sales?by year end. In other words, nearly a million per week of the tablet alone is almost expected during its debut month.

That thought aside, it's also worth noting that?the gifting ??gifting, not regular purchasing ??of Kindle ebooks was up 175 percent between Black Friday and Christmas Year (compared to the same time period last year). This means that ebooks are either becoming significantly more popular or that folks are simply putting of gift shopping until an electronically delivered item such as a Kindle ebook is their only remaining option.

Related stories:

Want more tech news, silly puns or amusing links? You'll get plenty of all three if you keep up with Rosa Golijan, the writer of this post, by following her on?Twitter, subscribing to her?Facebook?posts, or circling her?on?Google+.

Source: http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/12/29/9802369-amazon-sold-over-a-million-kindles-per-week-in-dec

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I Blame it on an Inferior Set of Golf Clubs

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Disclaimer:

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"The American flag stands for intimidation, censorship, violence, bigotry, sexism, homophobia, and shoving the Constitution through a paper shredder." Author Barbara Kingsolver after 9/11

"I mean in a way Obama?s standing above the country, above ? above the world, he?s sort of God."- Evan Thomas of Newsweek

"I'm really sorry that Glenn Beck's going blind because I think it's a travesty he's not going to see the country he's trying to destroy. Because that's what they're doing. - Ed Schultz, MSNBC

Murdoch is a Nazi! And everyone that works for him is a potential murderer! Do you not -- do you not get that? They shouldn't be listened to; they should be dragged into the street and pummeled! - Mike Malloy, Pacifica Radio

?I?ll tell you this about Americans ? about the American electorate, the voter,they don?t understand the issues. They?re too stupid. They?re like a dog. They can understand inflection. We have Democrats for one reason ? to drag the ignorant hillbilly-half of this country into the next century, which in their case is the 19th.? - Bill Maher, Professional Asshat

?Our country is founded on a sham: our forefathers were slave-owning rich white guys who wanted it their way. So when I see the American flag, I go, ?Oh my God, you?re insulting me.? That you can have a gay parade on Christopher Street in New York, with naked men and women on a float cheering, ?We?re here, we?re queer!? ? that?s what makes my heart swell. Not the flag, but a gay naked man or woman burning the flag. I get choked up with pride.? - Janeane Garofalo, Air America/Professional Asshat

Source: http://suckersonparade.blogspot.com/2011/12/via-doug-ross.html

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