I've got a few names in my ignore list. The first one has a white background, and all of the others have gray. Is this a bug or some feature I'm not aware of?

May Peace be in all your hearts this day.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-faith/post/tim-tebow-and-the-second-coming/2011/12/23/gIQAUJlAEP_blog.html#weighIn



What if they're right? Then our faith has no meaning because there is next to no similarity between Tim Tebow -- a self-aggrandizing well-paid pompous hypocrite who rejects our Savior's instruction to not pray ostentatiously like the Scribes and Pharisees did -- and the meek, humble, wise Christ.

Tim Tebow gives a bad name to millions of faithful Christians with his ostentatious (to the point of being annoying) empty shows of faith, and Sally Quinn belittles us further by suggesting that he might be the latest incarnation of our Savior.

http://cnx.com/?p=1668



With the Occupy movement forced out of its locations in America’s cities, the activists have been shifting their gears from long-term semi-permanent protests, such as flash mobs, “mic checks” at right wing speeches, and anti-foreclosure actions.

All of these are worthy actions and need to continue, but there is one area where the Occupy energy and tenacity should be brought into play, and that is opposing the radio stations that spew right-wing propaganda 24 hours a day. Even in “liberal friendly” cities like San Francisco the few remaining populist and progressive voices are being forced off the air by corporate conglomerates that don’t want any opposing viewpoints to their shilling for the entrenched economic and political powers that be.

So I offer a modest proposal: occupy the airwaves.

Identify the right-wing propaganda stations in your town and market (it shouldn’t be hard; they’re all over the AM dial). Make lists of their local sponsors. And then bring the good old American tradition of economic pressure to bear.

No, I’m not talking about boycotts. Boycotts don’t work. What I’m talking about is something more powerful. I’m talking about direct occupation of the sponsors of right-wing hate radio.

Once you have a good list of sponsors, start identifying the prime targets: the local businesses that run the most spots on the station. Especially high traffic ones like restaurants and car dealers. Then organize an occupation, protesting outside the businesses one by one during their business hours until they stop funding the right-wing message and pull their ads off of right-wing talk radio.

If we make it unprofitable for small, local stations to carry hate programming like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage, then eventually some of them will have to drop those programs to survive. And bit by bit we will deny the 1% their propaganda outlets.

It’s an idea whose time has come.

http://cnx.com/?p=1661

As the Republicans in Congress continue to hold the country’s working poor hostage in order to advance the more radical aspects of their agenda, there is once again talk from the White House and the more spineless members of the Democratic leadership of “compromise.”

The problem with that mentality is that the other side is uniquely unwilling to compromise, and is using our desire to compromise as a way to blackmail us into signing off on the worst parts of their agenda to get even the slightest crumbs of what we want. Many times, what we want are positions that they themselves championed until Obama started supporting them.

This puts me in mind of one of the paradoxes of Zeno. Specifically, that of Achilles and the Tortoise.

Achilles is going to race a tortoise. To be fair, he is going to give the tortoise a head start of, say, 100 yards. So they take off. By the time Achilles has run 100 yards to reach where the tortoise had started, the tortoise has moved further down the road, let’s say, an additional 10 yards. So Achilles must run an additional 10 yards to catch up with the tortoise, but in the time it took him to run those 10, the tortoise has moved another yard. No matter how Achilles tries to catch up to the tortoise, every time he reaches someplace the tortoise had been, the tortoise has moved further.

Let’s use another version of the paradox, this one popularized by the Firesign Theater on the album How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All? as the Antelope Freeway paradox. Our hero, Babe, is driving down the road looking for the turnoff for the Antelope Freeway. As he progresses, he keeps passing signs. “Antelope Freeway, One Mile.” “Antelope Freeway, 1/2 Mile.” “Antelope Freeway, 1/4 Mile.” “Antelope Freeway, 1/8 Mile.” And so on until somewhere around 1/512th of a mile to go, Babe uses his car’s climate control system to switch from the road to a tropical paradise. The moral is that no matter how fast you travel, if you only travel halfway to your destination each time, you never make it all the way to the end.

This is exactly what is wrong with our political system, and with Obama’s approach to it.

President Obama wanted an economic stimulus package. The obstructionist Republicans (and far too many obstructionist Democrats) basically told him that they’d give him half of what he wanted if he made half of that a bunch of tax giveaways for the wealthy. Deciding that half (or really a quarter) of what he wanted was better than nothing, he “compromised.” The end result was a stimulus that kept the economy on life support, but didn’t revive it.

So then as the stimulus was ending, Obama said “look, it did some good but not enough. Let’s do more.” The Republicans came back with “look, we’ll give you half of the old stimulus (by reapproving the payroll tax cut) if you agree to cut over a trillion dollars from the budget and extend the tax cuts for the wealthy. Obama “compromised.”

Now the payroll tax cut is coming up again. Obama knows that if taxes go back up on the middle class that the economy will go in the tank so he wants the tax cut extended. This time the Republicans are saying “look, we’ll let you have the tax cut for two more months if you give us this oil-sludge pipeline that isn’t going to bring a drop of oil to U.S. Markets and that even the Republicans who control the Nebraska State Legislature do not want." So now Obama is ready to compromise again.

No matter how hard you run towards the tortoise, it will move further down the road so you never catch up. No matter how many signs you pass, you never reach the Antelope Freeway.

No matter how much you compromise with the right wing, you will never accomplish what you want, or need, to do.

The answer? It’s simple. Achilles refuses to race the tortoise. Babe gives up on the Antelope Freeway. The President refuses to play their games.

That’s the way out of this stupid endless loop. Half measures never solve anything. But will the President, and the spineless Democratic leadership, take that step? We shall see.

I may be going blind, but I couldn't see any specs anywhere.

I ask because the new software crops the image at a certain height (nice feature) but if there's text next to or below the image, it hides that also. For example, check my sig. I would like to have the text next to the graphic instead of above it.

So what height should I make my signature images to keep the text from being hidden by the crop?

I sit on the Cumberland County Democratic Committee. And last night we had a meeting where we dissected our one loss from the last election. Unfortunately it was a big one.

If any of you remember a politician named Lou Magazzu who pulled the same boneheaded move that Anthony Weiner did this year, he was our County Chairman and a member of the Board of Freeholders in our county. The election we lost was the special election to fill his seat, which forced us to defend all four Democratic Freeholder seats at once in November. Our candidate in the special election lost by 480 votes, or about 2% of the vote.

There were a lot of charges of racism among voters, and the term "Bradley Effect" got thrown around a lot, because the candidate (an African-American minister) didn't poll as well as his ticket-mates in the two larger municipalities in our County. This led to a lot of discussion and a lot of denial about people voting in a bigoted manner.

That forced me to stand up.

"How many people in this room," I asked, "were members of this committee last year?" About half of them raised their hands (we had a large influx of new members right after the 2011 primary).

"Now, of those of you with your hands up, how many of you would vote to endorse a segregationist?" Every hand went down.

"Well, now you're all lying," I let them know, "because you did just that back in June."

In June, our committee voted nearly unanimously (I was the only dissenter) to endorse the State Senate and Assembly slate that led our ticket this year. These were candidates, registered Democrats mind you, who two years before not only voted down gay marriage in New Jersey they made robocalls bragging about how they were more anti-gay marriage than the Republicans were that year.

"If any of them had said such a thing about African American rights, would any of you allowed them to run on our ticket?"

I was met with silence.

"So don't tell me there's no racism, or bigotry, that affects our voting. God knows there's bigotry right here in this room and you just don't realize it yet."

Then I sat down.

One of the outgoing Freeholders took me to task privately for my statements, saying that while she understood my positions, that I was "a bit too blunt and aggressive."

"Sometimes," I told her, "you have to shock people out of their comfort zone to make them see what they don't want to see."

We'll see what happens next time, now that their comfort zone has been invaded.

On a related note, can someone put me in touch with the New Jersey branch of Stonewall Democrats? I think we need a branch down here in Cumberland County.

I appreciate that he's not running.

And hope it stays that way.

We are the 99% with a sense of humor. And we are not moving.

I am recommending that we change the name of this group to represent as broad a spectrum of our community as possible.

We don't want to shun the AbFab-fans, Closet Queens, Day-Trippers, Être aux femmes, F2Ms, Homosexuals, Intergenerationals, Jenderpunkers, Kept boys, M2F's, Nancy boys, Opera Queens, Passives, Radical Faeries, Sado-Masochists, Ursulas, Vanilla lovers, Whores, X-Queens, Yoo-Hoos, or Zanies amongst us here on DU, do we?

So I say let's welcome everyone to the LGBTQABCDEFHIJKMNOPRSUVWXYZ group! ALL are welcome here!