File under: "No sh#( Sherlock"

Harvard Business School via Jezebel

According to a nationwide study of anonymous online credit card transactions, Americans living in traditionally religious, conservative states consume more online porn than their godless liberal blue state fellow citizens, with Utah leading the way.

Benjamin Edelman, an assistant professor at the Harvard Business School, analyzed anonymous credit card transactions to attempt to find a link between the rise in online porn consumption and division of "red" and "blue" states from a sociological standpoint. "Do consumption patterns of online adult entertainment reveal two separate Americas," Edelman writes, "Or is the consumption of online adult entertainment widespread, regardless of legal barriers, potential for embarrassment, and even religious conviction?"...

Church-going porn subscribers also tended to download less porn on Sundays, as church attendance provided a drop in porn usage. States that banned gay marriage had 11% more porn subscriptions than states that had not banned gay marriage. And, as Callaway notes, "States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement "I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage," bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference emerged for the statement "AIDS might be God's punishment for immoral sexual behaviour

As the saying goes, when someone is ranting about the evils of theft, hold on to your wallet. No one screams louder about sexual perversion than the sexual perverts who believe everyone must be as perverted as they are. Most people can chalk their sexual desires up to being human. They ensure that their sexual desires are enjoyed only with consenting adults and let it go at that. But the holier the roller, usually the louder the invocations against "impurity" and the more likely that said holy-roller has lots of issues that should rightly be addressed w/a therapist.

Thought for the day

The Republicans: They were FOR deficits before they were AGAINST them.

Don't you love after trillions spent in Iraq, how the repubs have finally re-found their love of balanced budgets? Interesting how a president who squandered a trillion dollar surplus and wasted billions in Iraq was never stopped by majorities in Congress for 6 years. But now that money might actually go to the little guy, it's "Henny Penny the sky is falling...."

Not Bush's America Anymore!!!

Boston

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced this afternoon that the Pentagon has decided to lift the complete ban on video and photos of the return of the war dead to US soil.

Now, it will be up to the families of the service members killed in Iraq and Afghanistan whether to allow such media coverage.

Between this decision, putting the writer of the Organic Regs in at number 2 at USDA; putting Solis in at Labor; submitting a budget wherein we finally tax the wealthy at a minuscule-ly higher rate; I have to say I apologize to team Obama. They had me worried, but I think they're on the right track. Now, if we can just expand the number of tax brackets and start taxing social security on ALL income - rather than capping it as applying on only the first $105,000 of income.

Brooks on Jindal: Nihilism

Bobby proves once again that when you elect people into government who believe that government is the problem, what you get is ineffective and bad government. Bobby, that's why we elected Obama. The problem isn't that we have a government. It's that for too long, we've ignored it (the masses) or used it as a means of funneling the money of the many into the coffers of the few (lobbyists). What we need are politicians who BELIEVE IN GOVERNMENT and who believe in fixing the problems. Not ignoring them; not making them worse; not spending just enough to fail and then point to the failures and saying "See, we spent millions here, and we couldn't fix the problem." Um, maybe because the problems need billions to address. Billions that can be found in the incomes of the multi-million dollar earners.

I feel that the tide is turning and that silly down-home, gee-whiz hucksterism as practiced by Jindal in last night's rebuttal to Obama, are finally falling on deaf ears; as they should have done for years now. Perhaps much good will come of this crisis. Perhaps people have finally seen the naked greed inherent in poorly and under-regulated capitalism. Perhaps people have decided that they don't want politicians with all the charm of snake oil salespeople who deliver their oratory in a teletubby sing-song cadence while gosh-darning us into wanting to drink a beer with them. Perhaps people are finally waking up from their long national stupor. If even Brooks can't spin Jindal, where have the republicans finally gotten with their government-hating mantras?

Bobby, your views hold no water. America is waking up.

Calling an idiot an idiot

CBS

The granddaughter of the man who founded Bank of America in San Francisco in the early 1900s called the bank's current condition "totally repulsive" and blasted the bank's management for being "idiots."...

One of the best things to come out of this mess is the destruction of the illusion that those on Wall St. are "Masters of the Universe"; gods who understand something about finances that the rest of us unwashed masses do not. What they understood was how to take millions of dollars, spend it on hookers, champagne and yachts in the South Pacific, while running the system into the ground thanks to their "me first and fuck you" attitudes.

So, how does the grandaugther of AP Giannini, Ms. Hammerness, think we should deal with the mess? Nationalization? Of course not. She's just another greedy shareholder who would be completely wiped out. I thought that was the point of shares - you know, risk and reward. Shareholders today want just the upside and want the American people to assume all the downside. Well, no thanks.

While she doesn't favor nationalization — a government takeover of the banking industry — Hammerness said she is worried that the bank's ongoing decline could leave little in the future for the other heirs in her family.

"I just think what's happening is just nauseating really. I feel so sorry for my children, my grandchilden, my great grandchildren and everybody else's," she said. [but not sorry enough to fix the problem at her own expense]

When asked if she still puts her money in the Bank of America, the Giannini heiress responded: "Well, of course. But I have no loyalty to it. It's just there because I'm too lazy to go somewhere else... That's the honest to God truth, just too lazy to move it somewhere else."

Lazy and greedy, what a nice combination.

Kurt Warner's Deep Thoughts on his loving god...

...who will be leaving "good people" out of heaven because they didn't say the magic words. Doesn't matter how good they are to others. Doesn't matter that they even believe in and love god. Nope, you have to say the magic words and believe as Kurt thinks you need to believe in order to have the magic door opened unto you.

I wonder how Kurt feels about throwing his daughters, Jada, Sierra Rose and Sienna Rae, to a maddened crowd lusting for flesh? Ah yes, biblical morals.

Genesis 19:8 (New International Version) 8 Look, I have two daughters who have never slept with a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you can do what you like with them. But don't do anything to these men, for they have come under the protection of my roof."

Don't want the gov't to tell you how to run your bidness?....

don't take TARP funds. See, how easy was that? HuffPo

Wall Street bankers, with their $18 billion in bonuses, private jets and gaudy conferences, are causing headaches for the GOP.

President Obama has proposed capping compensation for executives at banks that take taxpayer bailout money at $500,000. Republicans hate the idea -- a position puts them uncomfortably on the side of people currently about as popular as child-porn producers and subprime mortgage brokers.

Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-AZ) blamed the "tone deaf" bankers for creating the political environment that allows Obama to call for a cap.

"Because of their excesses, very bad things begin to happen, like the United States government telling a company what it can pay its employees. That's not a good thing in America," Kyl told the Huffington Post.

"What executives have done is troubling, but it's equally troubling to have government telling shareholders how much they can pay the executives," said Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL).

Of course the Republitards have to side with the multi-millionaires. That's where their bread is buttered. It's going to be fun to see how Rush makes this one palatable to the backwards-baseball-cap crowd. "Yeah, see Limbaugh-heads, they can't tell the CEOs how much money they can make on your dime, 'cause that would be unAmurican, 'cause well, when you give people money, you shouldn't ask how they spend it, like, um, well, like welfare recipients, we don't ask how they spend it...right?....What?...We do?...Well let me get back to you on this one...."

Welfare reform that passed in the 1990s created the program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). The government intervenes intimately into the lives of TANF recipients, requiring drug testing, time spent doing government approved activities and near-constant documentation of continuing compliance. The intervention is justified by reference to the payments being made.

One House Democratic aide quipped that bankers should be required to jump through some of the same hoops that welfare recipients are, beyond a simple salary cap. He suggested making bankers fulfill a strict work requirement and submit a time sheet, signed by a supervisor -- perhaps the Board of Directors -- in 15-minute intervals, proving that they worked 40 hours each week. Only certain activities would count, as is the case with TANF recipients.

"That three hour jet ride to get to the meeting in Chicago doesn't count. Reading the Wall Street Journal is also not a countable activity. If they fail to do this once, you cut them off of TARP funds. If they fudge the time sheet, you charge them with TARP fraud and make them pay back any government money they've received," the aide joked. "I'm sensing a legislative opportunity."

I will volunteer to personally review the timesheets of the CEO-bastards who got us into this mess, who took multi-million-dollar bonuses for the past 5 years, and who stood in line w/their hands out for TARP money. VOLUNTEER for it!