All of which brings you back to one central point: if you care about the integrity of elections and people actually being able to vote, the supposed cures for vote fraud are vastly more destructive than the problem. All evidence suggests that vote fraud is a minuscule, minuscule problem. Voter ID and most of the other nostrums are solutions looking for a problem. The people who support these policies are either ignorant of the facts or actually want to cull a certain subsection of the population from democratic participation. There are simply no two ways about it.

More: This Is Important. Give It a Read

Here’s a disturbing story out of Josephine County, OR. A woman calls 911 to report that her abusive ex is trying to break in to her house to hurt her. 911 dispatcher says “Sorry, no cops, can’t afford…”

seattle.cbslocal.com

“Uh, I don’t have anybody to send out there,” the 911 dispatcher told the woman. “You know, obviously, if he comes inside the residence and assaults you, can you ask him to go away? Do you know if he’s intoxicated or anything?”

The woman told the dispatcher that Bellah previously attacked her and left her hospitalized a few weeks prior to the latest incident. The dispatcher stayed on the phone with the woman for more than 10 minutes before the sexual assault took place.

“Once again it’s unfortunate you guys don’t have any law enforcement out there,” the dispatcher said, according to Oregon Public Radio.

The woman responded: “Yeah, it doesn’t matter, if he gets in the house I’m done.”

More: Fox News Host Tells Listeners to Punch Obama Voters ‘In the Face’

A host of the Fox News show The Five was so angry that the Justice Department had investigated one of the network’s reporters that she told her viewers on Thursday to find anyone who voted for President Barack Obama and “punch them in the face.”

“Fox said, we’re targets, clearly Media Matters and others have put us on a target list,” Fox News host Andrea Tantaros explained on the Thursday edition of her radio show. “And they said, ‘Oh, Fox is just crazy! They’re just paranoid!’ Really? Are we?”

“This is what is happening to our press! This is Obama’s America! It’s like the Soviet Union,” she continued. “He said he would change the country. He said it. And a lot of people voted for him.”

“And if you see any of those people today, do me a favor, punch them in the face.”

This wooden trestle was 103 years old but, hey, we’re fired up about business in Texas, thanks to low taxes and minimum regulation.

A fire toppled a railroad bridge like it was made of dominoes outside the small town of San Saba, Texas. Members of the Lometa, Texas, volunteer fire department arrived on the scene, but they could only contain the fire and watch as trestle after trestle folded, leaving the train rails suspended in air momentarily like Wile E. Coyote.

Jamie Smart, who shot the video, spends his days as principal of the local high school, but he volunteers his time at the Lometa Volunteer Fire Department. The small group uses donations to maintain vehicles and hoses when the county budget falls short. Responding to a call from a local resident, he found the air too hazy to see much when he got there. But from up close, Smart knew the 900-foot trestle bridge, built in 1910 as a spur of the Sante Fe Railroad, was in flames. “It was quite an engineering marvel, that it stood up that long,” Smart said.

Firefighters had only the water they brought in trucks—enough to fight a brush fire, but not enough to take on the giant structure made of aged, dried wood that burned like kindling. The crew spread out on the valley floor and tried to save what they could: the farmland under the bridge.

“It was the most dramatic fire I’ve seen, in terms of spectacle,” Smart says. Unlike many of the fires he’s seen in his seven years of work, this one involved no human tragedy, no family that had just lost their home or worse.

More: Watch: Burning Texas Railroad Bridge Crumples Like Dominoes

… and that is why he is so sure of the ‘miracle of the emaculate conception’”.

The Atlantic’s Hugo Schwyzer has a theory: that masturbation, as the most common sex act, is the heart of modernity’s war between Christianity and secularism.

Many progressives were bewildered by Antonin Scalia’s blistering 2003 dissent in Lawrence v Texas, in which he warned that state laws against evils such as “adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, and bestiality” might be invalidated as a result of the decision. Why, liberals wondered, was masturbation included on that list? The answer is simple: masturbation remains not only a grave sin in the eyes of the Catholic Church to which Scalia belongs, but its acceptance as benign and healthy is perhaps the foundational error of modern sexual culture.

More: Masturbation ‘At the Root of Culture Wars’ - Boing Boing

Repression could not be causing any problems for them, could it?

Seinfeld-The Contest - The Opening

Seinfeld - The Contest, Kramer, “I’m out!”

To tell you the truth. I couldn’t resist the temptation to feel the giddy joy of creating a post that combined all the tags below. I just reached a obvious state of Nirvana!

While remodeling his newly purchased home in Elbow Lake, Minn., David Gonzalez noticed something unusual amid the old newspapers that had been used as wall insulation.

It was a copy of Action Comics No. 1 from 1938, the very first comic to feature the granddaddy of all superheroes, Superman.

StarTribune.com spoke with Gonzalez about his amazing find as well as a subsequent family accident that knocked down the value of his windfall.

More: Man Finds Comic Book Worth $100,000 Being Used as Wall Insulation

Action Comics No. 1, featuring Superman (Wikipedia/Joe Shuster)

Only the best of leaders dare to reduce the powers of their office or government. I applaud the effort in the strongest terms. Please support these changes with your own Congressman or Senator.

While Obama would not declare an end to the war on terrorism, Obama offered to work with Congress to constrain some of his own authorities for waging it, reflecting what he and aides described as a discomfort with permanent executive war powers. He said he was “open” to working with Congress to establish some additional mechanism to oversee the proper targeting of terrorists, such as a court modeled on the secretive one that oversees the surveillance of suspected foreign agents. He also expressed a preference to constrain “and ultimately repeal” the broad latitude of warmaking powers granted in the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF), the legislative wellspring of the war. “This is the moment to ask ourselves hard questions,” Obama said.

Over the past five years, Obama took a relatively limited program of drone strikes and expanded it to western Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya. The CIA and the military built or expanded airfields in the Middle East and Africa capable of hosting the flying robots. As the administration became more comfortable with the drone strikes — which officials said, without providing evidence, killed few civilians — the CIA and the military began expanding their range of acceptable targets. What was once an effort to kill senior leaders of al-Qaida became a tool to kill low-ranking ones.

More: Obama Swears Drone Surge Is Done

More: Glenn Beck: CNN Interview With Atheist Tornado Survivor Was a Setup!

LA RUANA, Mexico — The farm state of Michoacan is burning. A drug cartel that takes its name from an ancient monastic order has set fire to lumber yards, packing plants and passenger buses in a medieval-like reign of terror.

The Knights Templar cartel is extorting protection payments from cattlemen, lime growers and businesses such as butchers, prompting some communities to fight back, taking up arms in vigilante patrols.

Lime picker Alejandro Ayala chose to seek help from the law instead. After the cartel forced him out of work by shutting down fruit warehouses, he and several dozen co-workers, escorted by Federal Police, met on April 10 with then-state Interior Secretary Jesus Reyna, now the acting governor of the state in western Mexico.

The 41-year-old father of two only wanted to get back to work, said his wife, Martha Elena Murguia Morales.

But, as often, the cartel responded before the government did.

On the way back, his convoy was ambushed, twice. Ayala and nine others were killed.

“I called him after the first one, and he said, `They shot at us, but I’m OK,’” Murguia Morales said. “Then I called him again, and he didn’t answer.”
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The heart of a conflict where a mafia openly rules and the government is largely absent is nowhere more evident than in the lime groves that cover the hot, hilly plains, miles and miles of trees with the fruit yellowing and falling into uncollected heaps on the ground.

More: Knights Templar Drug Cartel Burns Michoacan, Western State in Mexico