Major elections are getting close, Netroots Nation is right around the corner...the thread is excited. To the links...
- According the NRA, this shouldn't be the case:
German police officers fired a total of 85 bullets in 2011, 49 of which were warning shots, the German publication Der Spiegel reported. Officers fired 36 times at people, killing six and injuring 15. This is a slight decline from 2010, when seven people were killed and 17 injured. Ninety-six shots were fired in 2010.
Meanwhile, in the United States, The Atlantic reported that in April, 84 shots were fired at one murder suspect in Harlem, and another 90 at an unarmed man in Los Angeles.
So basically, one our our cities' police departments fired as many shots at one guy as the police in all of Germany fired all year.
- This is the most psychotic anti-gay rant you will ever see. All delivered very calmly and read into a microphone at a meeting of the Lincoln, Nebraska, City Council. No, seriously, you need to watch it. I'm not going to quote it, because you should watch the whole thing. Wait, actually, I will. I'll leave you with this:
Do you choose Jesus, a celibate, or Judas, a homo?
And with that, I'll let you watch the rest, just, really, because you need to have something that will make you laugh out loud.
- Betty White just endorsed Obama. To be fair, most other cool people do too.
- A brilliant cartoon by Clay Bennett of the Chattanooga Times Free Press. Once a bully, always a bully.
- The irreplaceable satirist Andy Borowitz:
Dear Friends:
This week, The Washington Post reported an incident from my high school days in which I bullied a gay classmate by pinning him to the ground and cutting his hair off. This story revealed a side of Mitt Romney that may have been surprising to many of you: the Mitt Romney with an irrepressible and hilarious sense of humor.
Some of you may say, “Hold on, Mitt – isn’t holding a kid down and cutting off his hair going a little far?” Well, the merry prankster in me tells me you can never go too far when it comes to giving the greatest gift of all: the gift of laughter. And I certainly remember many of us laughing long and hard about what I did to that Nancy-boy. Was it cruel? Perhaps, but it’s not like I tied him to the roof of a car or anything.
- More notes from the war on women. a Catholic high school in Arizona has forfeited its baseball championship game. The reason? They refused to play against a girl:
PHOENIX — Instead of playing in a championship baseball game, Paige Sultzbach and her team won’t even make it to the dugout.
A Phoenix school that was scheduled to play the 15-year-old Mesa girl and her male teammates forfeited the game rather than face a female player.
They said it was out of their high respect for women: apparently, a slide into second base could have resulted in, oh, I don't know, some inappropriate hand-on-ankle action? I think that the best way they could have shown respect for her is by treating her as a member of the team they were playing against. But that's just me.
- And we now have a guy selling Trayvon Martin gun range targets. Yep, replete with a silhouetted figure, a hoodie, and a can of iced tea and Skittles. And a big target right on the chest. Offered without comment.