George Zimmerman brags about shooting Trayvon Martin, gets punched in the face. Finally, some justice.

Courtesy of the New York Daily News:  

George Zimmerman was punched in the face at a Florida bar after bragging about killing Trayvon Martin, officials and witnesses said. 

The former neighborhood watchman said he was clocked by a drunken diner who mistook him for someone else at the Gators Riverside Grille in Sanford around 5:00 p.m. Sunday, according to a police report obtained by the Daily News. 

“This man just punched me in the face,” Zimmerman told a 911 dispatcher. “He said he was going to kill me. You need to send three or four cops.” 

But staff at the restaurant and witnesses countered the acquitted murderer’s account and said the incident was nothing more than a shoving match that stemmed from Zimmerman bragging about his notorious past. 

According to the article the guy who hit Zimmerman left on a motorcycle leaving Zimmerman to weave his own tale of the incident, in which he insisted that the guy did not hit him because he was George Zimmerman but because he mistook him for Matthew Apperson the man who shot at Zimmerman during a traffic altercation.

You know, because George Zimmerman's face is not one of the most recognizable faces in America right now.

Personally I think that anybody who believes Zimmerman's version of the events that happened the night he shot and killed Trayvon Martin is an idiot. He has shown himself over and over again to be a habitual liar who pisses people off and then cries like a bitch when they respond.

As for punching him in the face, I personally have no idea why that does not happen every day of his life.

Police may have responded slowly to recent mass shooting in Colorado due to open carry law.

Courtesy of Mother Jones:

Details are continuing to emerge about a gun rampage that took place in the streets of Colorado Springs on Saturday morning, in which 33-year-old Noah Harpham shot three people to death before police killed him in a shootout. On Monday, a troubling detail came to light in a Denver Post report suggesting that police may have had a chance to intervene before the slaughter began—but that a police dispatcher may have reacted without urgency to a 911 call about Harpham because of Colorado's open carry law: 

Witnesses watched in horror as Harpham picked his victims off. One of them, the bicyclist, pleaded for his life before being killed. 

"I heard the (young man) say, 'Don't shoot me! Don't shoot me!' " Naomi Bettis, a neighbor who witnessed the killing, said Monday. 

Bettis said she recognized the gunman as her neighbor—whom she didn't know by name—and that before the initial slaying she saw him roaming outside with a rifle. She called 911 to report the man, but a dispatcher explained that Colorado has an open carry law that allows public handling of firearms. 

"He did have a distraught look on his face," Bettis said. "It looked like he had a rough couple days or so." It's unclear how much time lapsed between Bettis' 911 call and when the rampage began, but according to The Gazette the initial police response didn't come until after the carnage was in progress.

Gee a man is walking around with an assault rifle right out in public?

What could possibly go wrong?

Just imagine how many lives could have been saved if Colorado had a common sense gun law that stated if you are walking around carrying an AR-15 like a psychopath you have to surrender it to the police and get a ticket.

And stack that against the number of lives that have been saved because some 2nd Amendment asshole was wearing his metal penis extender in public to compensate for his deficiencies.

Because that number is zero.

Open carry advocates in Texas upset about ordinance banning them from walking up to cars and handing out copies of the Constitution with assault weapons strapped to their bodies.

Courtesy of WFAA:  

There was heavy police presence outside Arlington City Hall again Tuesday night, where "open carry" looked on as the City Council approved an amended ordinance banning pedestrians from handing out literature to motorists. 

Open Carry Tarrant County often distributes copies of the U.S. Constitution. The ordinance applies only to certain busy streets. 

Advocates for openly carrying firearms say Arlington is violating their First Amendment rights. Mayor Robert Cluck said it's purely a public safety issue.

So what's the big deal if a bunch of gun nuts want to hand you a copy of a document that they move their lips while reading? Well for on thing this:

Close to 20 people attended the meeting in favor of the law, including one woman who said she was approached by members carrying guns not to long ago when she was driving through town. 

 "It's impossible for anyone to tell if you're a person that has good intention, or if you intend to do harm," said Kim Martinez.

You know this continues to be a problem for these 2nd Amendment types who simply cannot fathom why the population at large do not find assault rifles as warm and fuzzy as they do.

Not only that but the open carry advocates have a theory as to why they are being hassled by the man. Or actually woMAN:  

"We're out there to make people feel comfortable. Whenever we do our events, we always let the police know," Grisham said, adding that the Tarrant County group's "desire to resist that effort" was harming the cause for more gun rights in Texas. 

Open Carry Tarrant County says the 911 calls reporting the group are actually actually gun control activists who use 911 to harass the demonstrators. Tov Henderson of Open Carry Tarrant County blames the group "Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America." 

"They're telling their members to lie to 911. To lie to police," Henderson said. "They have told their members to call 911 on us, and say they saw us waving our guns violently."

What? Is this true?

Are those mean old moms who selfishly don't want their children shot to death while playing in a park the ones behind this clearly discriminative ordinance?

Not according to them: A spokeswoman for Moms Demand Action told News 8 they do not use 911 to harass.

Yeah you know I don't think that there really needs to be an organized effort to get people to call 911 when they are approached by some paunchy white guy sporting an AR-15. It just kind of comes naturally to people not to want to have heavily armed people walking up to their car when they are stopped at an intersection.

Go figure.

Final thought of the day. "You will never find scientists leading armies into battle."

Below is an excerpt from an interview that Neil de Grasse Tyson gave to Parade:  

"You will never find scientists leading armies into battle. You just won’t. Especially not astrophysicists—we see the biggest picture there is. We understand how small we are in the cosmos. We understand how fragile and temporary our existence is here on Earth. We understand there are bigger problems we need to solve as a species than what God you pray to.

“Any time scientists disagree, it’s because we have insufficient data. Then we can agree on what kind of data to get; we get the data; and the data solves the problem. Either I’m right or you’re right or we’re both wrong. And we move on. That kind of conflict resolution does not exist in politics or religion. It does not exist in so much of what we do as human beings on this Earth that it’s almost tragic.

“I feared for the future of the world on witnessing [9/11]. I thought we had gotten past that, that the greatest atrocities the world had seen previously were over…. I was disappointed in us as a species.”

Just think about that for a moment. And then realize that the majority of the politicians in this country are lawyers, not scientists or teachers, but lawyers.

Lawyers are trained to win debates at all costs, usually through adversarial means. They focus on the win with no regard to the innocence or guilt of their client, and beyond that their focus is on making money.

These are exactly the wrong people to be making moral, educational, and optimistic plans for this country's future.

Personally I would be all in favor of having a Senator de Grasse Tyson from my state. And I think that if each state were to recruit educators and scientists and send them to Washington many of our most pressing problems might be cleared up in decade or less.

Newtown shooting 911 calls released.

Courtesy of the Chicago Tribune:  

Newtown school shooting 911 calls reveal a mixture of calm and anguish from the callers, and gunshots from the assailant are heard in the background, audio recordings released today reveal. 

The shooting spree at the Connecticut school a year ago killed 20 children and six educators. 

Officials in Newtown, Connecticut, released recordings of 911 emergency phone calls from the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School this afternoon. 

Gunman Adam Lanza, 20, shot dead his mother at home and then entered the school on Dec. 14, 2012, killing 26 people and then himself. 

"They're shooting at the front door, something's going on ... The front glass is all shot out, it kept going on. It's still happening," a man calling himself Richard, sounding agitated and confused, tells a 911 emergency operator in one of the seven phone recordings posted on the Connecticut Post. 

The operator calmly tells him to take cover. 

Town officials initially tried to prevent release of the recordings. The state Freedom of Information Commission ordered the release of seven calls placed from inside the elementary school.

Here is the audio. (Warning! Very graphic and may cause a severe emotional response.)

I am not sure that I think releasing was necessary, or in good taste.

However I will say that, considering that there are many on the Right who feel this whole thing was a made up tragedy in order to attack the 2nd Amendment, perhaps there simply was not choice.

What I heard on those calls chilled me to the bone and made my stomach clench up tight.

I am still stunned that this tragedy did not result in significant gun control legislation. If this was not enough to bring people to their senses then perhaps there is nothing that ever will.

Perfect comparison.

You know I am really starting to warm up to John Fugelsang.

Definitely becoming one of the best we have on our side.

Edward Snowden might find himself stranded as Ecuador cools to the idea of allowing him into the country. Update!

Courtesy of The Guardian:  

President Rafael Correa halted an effort to help Snowden leave Russia amid concern Assange was usurping the role of the Ecuadoran government, according to leaked diplomatic correspondence published on Friday. 

Amid signs Quito was cooling with Snowden and irritated with Assange, Correa declared invalid a temporary travel document which could have helped extract Snowden from his reported location in Moscow. 

Correa declared that the safe conduct pass issued by Ecuador's London consul – in collaboration with Assange – was unauthorised, after other Ecuadorean diplomats privately said the WikiLeaks founder could be perceived as "running the show". 

According to the correspondence, which was obtained by the Spanish-language broadcaster Univision and shared with the Wall Street Journal, divisions over Assange have roiled Ecuador's government.

Currently it is reported that Snowden is currently stuck in the transit center in Russia, with no viable visa, and not a lot of opportunities open to him.

And while this is happening Greenwald is writing new articles based on the information provided to him by Snowden, and attacking the Obama administration for continuing the Bush era NSA program, though they may have missed a more importna point.

This from The Daily Banter:  

Greenwald’s new ‘bombshell’ article about the NSA essentially details how the NSA collected email metadata beginning shortly after 9/11. 

The screamer headline: “NSA collected US email records in bulk for more than two years under Obama.” 

We already knew about this program. Most recently, Eichenwald has been writing about it for the last week or so. 

But here’s the most revealing part of Greenwald’s article: the program was stopped by the Obama administration in 2011. As Charles Johnson tweeted yesterday, the article’s headline could actually be “Obama discontinued NSA email program started under Bush.” 

Furthermore, Greenwald wrote: “It did not include the content of emails.” The NSA only collected metadata, authorized by bulk FISA court warrants. The program, like everything else, sought overseas communications, and those communications might have inadvertently included some data from US persons connected with the overseas emails. And, again, reminder: any data from US persons that’s inadvertently collected is anonymized, encrypted and destroyed. It’s only decrypted with an individual warrant.

I have said before that I think it is good thing that we know that these programs were continued under President Obama, but it is also important to know that the President ultimately ended the program.

Even more troubling in my mind right now is that Edward Snowden is sitting in an airport with no visa, and fewer and fewer prospects, along with four laptops filled with American secrets.

One has to wonder how long it will be before he starts shopping this information around in exchange for sanctuary and protection? Or if indeed that has already happened?

Update: But then again is Edward Snowden actually even IN Russia?

This from Business Insider:

Many reporters, with purchased plane tickets that have given them access to the area, have spent sleepless nights patrolling the long halls of the transit zone, looking for witnesses among the janitors, cashiers and flight attendants. 

There have also been security personnel on patrol in plain clothes, some of them clearly monitoring the journalists... 

Journalists have spent days searching for Mr. Snowden in lounges and V.I.P. halls and behind locked doors throughout the transit zone, and at 3 a.m. one of them could be seen sitting dejectedly in a glassed-in smoking area. 

So where, exactly, is Snowden? 

I find it impossible to believe that the Russians don't know EXACTLY where Snowden is right now. Now whether of not they are willing to share that information is another thing altogether.

Michele Bachmann believes that the 911 and Benghazi attacks were due to God's "hand of judgement" while the rest of the GOP sees Benghazi as a fundraising opportunity.

Courtesy of Right Wing Watch:  

On Wednesday, Religious Right activists and members of Congress gathered together for a prayer event held in Statuary Hall at the US Capitol called "Washington: A Man of Prayer." 

Among the speakers was Rep. Michele Bachmann, who used the opportunity to promote the 9/11 prayer event being organized by Birther-king Joseph Farah, saying that "it is no secret that our nation may very well be experiencing the hand of judgment" and declaring that both the original 9/11 attack and the attack in Benghazi on 9/11 of last year were God's judgment.

Here is the text of what she said just in case you cannot believe your ears:

It’s no secret that our nation may very well be experiencing the hand of judgment. It’s no secret that we all are concerned that our nation may be in a time of decline. If that is in fact so, what is the answer? The answer is what we are doing here today: humbling ourselves before an almighty God, crying out to an almighty God, saying not of ourselves but you, would you save us oh God? We repent of our sins, we turn away from them, we seek you, we seek your ways. That’s something that we’re doing today, that we did on the National Day of Prayer, it’s something that we have chosen to do as well on another landmark day later this year on September 11. Our nation has seen judgment not once but twice on September 11. That’s why we’re going to have ‘9/11 Pray’ on that day. Is there anything better that we can do on that day rather than to humble ourselves and to pray to an almighty God?

Wow! That is an especially disturbing form of crazy!

Yes it is "no secret that our nation may very well be experiencing the hand of judgment" IF you are a crazy person that is! And as for humbling ourselves and praying to God to keep us safe on the anniversary of 911, I think a far more reasonable approach might be to heighten our awareness on those days and beef up our security at our consulates. Or is that Satan's way of keeping us safe?

Look Minnesota you might think you have free reign to tease us Alaskans about Sarah Palin, but no. not as long as you have THAT whack-a-doodle as a Representative you don't.

Well at least not ALL of the GOP is made up of crazy fundamentalists. No the rest of the GOP is made up of opportunistic assholes that see the four deaths at Benghazi as a great opportunity to do a little fundraising:

The National Republican Congressional Committee is the GOP body that helps elect Republicans to the House of Representatives. And the NRCC is now running an election fundraiser based on their Benghazi conspiracy theories.

 So there you have it folks. Your choice of Republicans these days seem to be mostly made up of the batshit crazy or the cynically conspiratorial.

Gotta love America.

Experts confirm that voice yelling for help on 911 tape is NOT that of George Zimmerman. Update!

There has been an attempt by many on the Right, and Zimmerman supporters, to make the case that Zimmerman was under attack when he shot young Trayvon Martin.

They have also claimed that the voice you hear screaming for help on the 911 tape, was not that of Martin, but instead Zimmerman right before he had to shoot the seventeen year old in self defense.

Two experts in the field of forensic voice identification say that is untrue: 

A leading expert in the field of forensic voice identification sought to answer that question by analyzing the recordings for the Orlando Sentinel. 

His result: It was not George Zimmerman who called for help. 

Tom Owen, forensic consultant for Owen Forensic Services LLC and chair emeritus for the American Board of Recorded Evidence, used voice identification software to rule out Zimmerman. Another expert contacted by the Sentinel, utilizing different techniques, came to the same conclusion. 

Zimmerman claims self-defense in the shooting and told police he was the one screaming for help. But these experts say the evidence tells a different story. 

Owen, a court-qualified expert witness and former chief engineer for the New York Public Library's Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound, is an authority on biometric voice analysis — a computerized process comparing attributes of voices to determine whether they match. 

After the Sentinel contacted Owen, he used software called Easy Voice Biometrics to compare Zimmerman's voice to the 911 call screams. 

"I took all of the screams and put those together, and cut out everything else," Owen says. 

The software compared that audio to Zimmerman's voice. It returned a 48 percent match. Owen said to reach a positive match with audio of this quality, he'd expect higher than 90 percent. 

"As a result of that, you can say with reasonable scientific certainty that it's not Zimmerman," Owen says, stressing that he cannot confirm the voice as Trayvon's, because he didn't have a sample of the teen's voice to compare.

Personally I NEVER believed the voice on that disturbing 911 call was that of George Zimmerman.

To me it clearly sounds like a young man in a state of absolute terror screaming for help right before he is shot dead.

So please can ANYBODY explain why George Zimmerman was not placed under arrest after that shooting, and why he continues to be free to this day?

Update: The funeral director who prepared Trayvon Martin for burial says that there were “no physical signs like there had been a scuffle.” In other words MORE proof that George Zimmerman is a liar, and that the police should be charged with criminal negligence for not doing their jobs!