Masterfully eloquent former NY Gov. Mario Cuomo is dead at 82

Cuomo's evisceration of Ronald Reagan's record and policies in his 1984 keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention was so stunning that he was sought to be a Democratic candidate for President in 1988 and 1992, but declined each time. He is the father of five, including Andrew Cuomo, the current Governor of New York and CNN journalist Chris Cuomo.
 

Chick-fil-A data breach acknowleged 12/31/14 may have started 12/2/13

Above: Sarah Palin and husband show
support for chain whose profits have
supported some of the most stridently
anti-gay organizations in U.S.

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

     Brian Krebs, who runs the website KrebsonSecurity.com, said financial institutions have traced credit card fraud to accounts used at Chick-fil-A stores around the nation. Krebs said he first heard about the possible hack in November, but the reports were spotty.

     In his post about the Chick-fil-A-related hack and subsequent fraud, Krebs noted that a:

...major credit card association this month alerted some financial institutions of "an unnamed retailer" being breached between December 2, 2013, and September 30, 2014.

     Krebs said the fast-food giant told him it "recently received reports of potential unusual activity involving payment cards used at a few of our restaurants."
     That's not what Kreb heard from one bank, which:

     ...had nearly 9,000 customer cards listed in that [credit card association] alert... “It’s crazy because 9,000 customer cards is more than the total number of cards we had impacted in the Target breach.”

That bank source also disclosed that the bulk of Chick-fil-A-related fraud affecting his institution occurred in Georgia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia.

NBC Nightly News chronicles the suicide of Ohio transgender teen Leelah Acorn

After her parents took away her social media and sent her to Christian counseling, she wrote a long suicide note partly indicting them, then despondently ran into the path of a semi. So now there are two more victims of Christer transgender intolerance: Leelah and the semi driver.

Happy New Year and welcome to the start of the end of civilization

And it ain't going to be no Rapture. Excerpted from Noam Chomsky's depressingly perceptive piece which you can read in its entirety at In These Times:

     ...The likely end of the era of civilization is foreshadowed in a new draft report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the generally conservative monitor of what is happening to the physical world.
      The report concludes that increasing greenhouse gas emissions risk “severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems” over the coming decades. The world is nearing the temperature when loss of the vast ice sheet over Greenland will be unstoppable. Along with melting Antarctic ice, that could raise sea levels to inundate major cities as well as coastal plains.
      The era of civilization coincides closely with the geological epoch of the Holocene, beginning over 11,000 years ago. The previous Pleistocene epoch lasted 2.5 million years. Scientists now suggest that a new epoch began about 250 years ago, the Anthropocene, the period when human activity has had a dramatic impact on the physical world. The rate of change of geological epochs is hard to ignore.
      One index of human impact is the extinction of species, now estimated to be at about the same rate as it was 65 million years ago when an asteroid hit the Earth. That is the presumed cause for the ending of the age of the dinosaurs, which opened the way for small mammals to proliferate, and ultimately modern humans. Today, it is humans who are the asteroid, condemning much of life to extinction.
      The IPCC report reaffirms that the “vast majority” of known fuel reserves must be left in the ground to avert intolerable risks to future generations. Meanwhile the major energy corporations make no secret of their goal of exploiting these reserves and discovering new ones.
     A day before its summary of the IPCC conclusions, The New York Times reported that huge Midwestern grain stocks are rotting so that the products of the North Dakota oil boom can be shipped by rail to Asia and Europe. [Thanks, Warren Buffett]
      One of the most feared consequences of anthropogenic global warming is the thawing of permafrost regions. A study in Science magazine warns that “even slightly warmer temperatures [less than anticipated in coming years] could start melting permafrost, which in turn threatens to trigger the release of huge amounts of greenhouse gases trapped in ice,” with possible “fatal consequences” for the global climate.

That Pioneer Press tweet about Aaron Rodgers' favorite beard has now been officially deleted

Jim Romanesko marked the passing (via deletion) of the St. Paul Pioneer Press's interesting reference to Green Bay Packers QB Aaron Rodgers' favorite beard. Various synonyms and one definition of the word "beard" may be found here.

Armed coup attempt against brutally homophobic Gambian president seems to have failed

The BBC said both military and diplomatic sources say soldiers from the presidential guard attacked the presidential palace in Banjul early Tuesday, but  President Jammeh wasn't in Gambia.
     Gambian radio aired a governmental statement denying a coup attempt, but later Mr. Jammeh confirmed the attack, which he claimed came from invading forces from Senegal loyal to a "disgraced" former soldier and that four attackers were killed and four more were captured.
     Jammeh said he would be:

"returning from my state visit to France immediately," but a French foreign ministry spokesman said there was no indication Mr Jammeh had been in the country. Some reports say he is in Dubai. 

France 24 reports that Jammeh:

     ...eventually landed in the Chadian capital of N'Djamena in a plane bearing the presidential emblem, according to Reuters.
     That plane took off from N'Djamena late on Tuesday after a reported refuelling stop, during which Jammeh told officials in Chad he was returning home, a senior Chadian government source said.
     The pre-dawn assault near the presidential palace in Banjul triggered panic in the tropical city, while national radio went off air for several hours and state television was suspended.
      Opposition politician Sheikh Sidya Bayo told a private Senegalese radio station that the unrest was "the start of a mutiny that changed" into a bid to topple Jammeh.
     Three of the suspected coup plotters were killed and another captured by Jammeh's forces, but there was no confirmation of an overall death toll from the fighting. 

V[]cative reports that,

     ...Jammeh was quoted in February as saying, “We will fight these vermin called homosexuals or gays the same way we are fighting malaria-causing mosquitoes, if not more aggressively.”
     The U.S. responded last week to Jammeh’s long history of institutional homophobia by excluding Gambia from the African Growth and Opportunities Act, something activists praised as a first step toward addressing LGBT human-rights abuses in the country. Gambia was exporting around $37 million in goods to the U.S. each year duty-free before the suspension placed on its ability to receive benefits from the act.

Killjoy John Boehner soon to hide who pays for GOP IL Rep. Aaron Schock's fun vacations. Bummer

Thankfully Rep. Schock takes lots of pictures of his junkets to Hawaii, Greece,
South America, etc. and boy, he sure seems to like the ladies—at least in
social media land, if not back at the boring old office.

AmericaBlog has the disappointing news:

---

After three decades of public reporting, the Republican-controlled US House of Representatives will no longer require members of Congress to disclose lavish foreign trips paid for by special interests.

AG Jon Bruning, 'fair weather federalist', may subvert state's rights in suit against CO weed law

Slate raked the attorneys-general of both Nebraska and Oklahoma, depicting them both, in essence, as ammoral, craven opportunists whose "silly" lawsuit, if successful, could threaten state's rights: 

     ...when another state decides to experiment with a new drug policy, Bruning and Pruitt’s support for state sovereignty dries up. They are arguing that Congress’s prohibition against marijuana should force every state to prohibit it as well. (These attorneys general aren’t opposed to all intoxicants. Their position on marijuana might have something to do with the fact that both Bruning and Pruitt have received significant campaign contributions from alcohol industries.)
     This strange little lawsuit against Colorado is so astonishingly hypocritical, so brazenly antipodal to Bruning and Pruitt’s professed philosophy, that even admirers of both men are aghast. Case Western Law’s Jonathan H. Adler, the mastermind behind the latest Obamacare suit, noted with disgust that “it is as if their arguments about federalism and state autonomy were not arguments of principle but rather an opportunistic effort to challenge federal policies they don’t like on other grounds.” Georgetown Law’s Randy Barnett, who brought the first Obamacare suit from the fringe to the mainstream, wrote that “I see no other way to interpret Nebraska and Oklahoma’s lawsuits than as an example of ‘fair weather federalism.’ ” (Federalism describes the balance of power between states and the central government; self-described federalists favor increased state autonomy.)      What has Adler and Barnett so riled up about the marijuana lawsuit isn’t just the rank hypocrisy. It’s the precedent...

Read the entire, withering critique at Slate.

Why is Playdoh deleting uploaded pictures OF ITS OWN PRODUCT from its website?

A picture is worth 1,000 words...
     Hasbro has already told at least one TV station that it intends to redesign its Cake Mountain "icing" extruder, but apparently not soon enough to put out the social media wildfire it invited by releasing the thing.
     And please, nothing this blatant could have been accidental.
     Now that the attention has gotten out of hand, Playdoh is trying to delete pictures of the $20 accessory as fast as they are being uploaded. It might need to hire some temps.

 \

Chuck Hagel's gay-inclusive holiday message to troops

Blink and you'll miss it, yet it shows how far Hagel has evolved, which is a lot further than any of Nebraska's leading GOP politicians currently in office.


(H/T: Towleroad)

Marriage equality mess in Florida

Matt Baume tries to make sense of the yes-here, no-there marriage patchwork in the Sunshine State and notes that the last-ditch effort by Idaho's governor Butch Otter to stall marriage equality in that state ended up a nearly half-million-dollar fail.

Nebraskans again polled on gay marriage; Nebraska Family Alliance again lies about judicial fiat

The Omaha World-Herald just reported the results of a poll it commissioned on Nebraskans' current views about gay marriage (41% here in Omaha, the state's biggest city, oppose it) and got another audaciously false precis by the head of the financially secretive Nebraska Family Alliance, which spearheaded a 10,000-signature petition drive to block the LGBT fairness ordinance passed 5-0 by the Lincoln City Council in 2012. Here's Rev. Al Riskowski's newest dissembly:

“Even though marriage has been overturned in a vast majority of states, in almost every situation it was a federal judge who overturned it and not the will of the people,” said Riskowski, executive director of the Nebraska Family Alliance.

A couple paragraphs later, the World-Herald called Rev. Riskowski on his bullshit:

Courts were responsible for overturning same-sex marriage bans or legalizing gay marriage in 23 of the 35 states where it is currently legal. State legislatures legalized gay marriage in nine states, while voters approved it in three: Washington state, Maine and Maryland.

     Even in states in which a federal judge "overturned" marriage (as Riskowski deceptively described extending the marriage franchise to same sex couples) it was often a case of judges or a judge affirming the decision of state jurisprudence, not overruling that decision.
     The most starting disparity in support for marriage equality revealed by the poll was by political party: 72% of Republicans in Nebraska opposed gay marriage; 54% of Democrats favor it.
     Below: opposition to Lincoln's 2012 LGBT fairness ordinance, orchestrated largely by ultra-right-wing pastors like Rev. Riskowski, proved to be a river of junk science, bald animus, fear-mongering and class slander.

Keystone XL boosters playing LGBTs for suckers on YouTube

Dr. Michaelson

You may not have heard of opechatesgays.com, but Dr. Jay Michaelson has, and in the Daily Beast he dismantles and excoriates the website's cheap, crude and cynical message, brought to you by TransCanada's apologists (and, perhaps, proxies.)
     The idea, apparently, is to hoodwink LGBTs by guilting them into rendering tangible gratitude, i.e., pipeline support, as a thank you for Canadian gay civil rights that TransCanada never lifted a corporate finger to advance.
     Keystone XL is a complete con. It's an export pipeline through, not to, the United States and TransCanada's own internal memos promise that it will raise gas prices throughout the Midwest.
     The record of the U.S./Canadian oil industry vis-a-vis gay civil rights is so bad that the world's biggest oil company, ExxonMobil, decided to blatantly lie about its practices to the Human Rights Campaign, the largest U.S. gay civil rights organization, which had this to say about the petroleum Goliath last June:

     ExxonMobil’s shareholders have voted 17 times to kill enumerated non-discrimination protections for ExxonMobil’s LGBT personnel—the most recent occasion was just last month. In fact when Exxon merged with Mobil in 1999, the newly formed company rescinded domestic partner benefits that had previously been offered to Mobil’s gay and lesbian employees. This unprecedented and unmatched record of corporate discrimination has earned ExxonMobil the only negative score in the 12 year history of HRC’s Corporate Equality Index.

Above: Brokeback Mountain's Alberta vs. TransCanada's
Alberta. Do you really need to be told which is which?

But back to Opechatesgays.com. Michaelson busts it as:

...one project of a much larger organization, EthicalOil.org—and here is where things get really interesting. It turns out that EthicalOil, which refuses to divulge its funders, is linked to a network of Conservative party leaders, petrodollars, and right-wing media outlets.

Michaelson continues:

     ...this notion of a global gay identity is easily manipulated. Opechatesgays is one example. So are the cynical statements of American conservatives condemning Iran’s appalling human rights record when it comes to LGBT people. The same people opposing employment protections for gays here at home suddenly wave the rainbow flag when it comes to criticizing Iran.
     Opechatesgays.com is also an example of “pinkwashing”: the attempt to use a country’s treatment of LGBT people as propaganda. The most controversial case of pinkwashing is that of Israel, which has an excellent record on LGBT equality, and which has trumpeted that record to boast that it is an advanced, liberal democracy, in contrast to Palestine and the rest of the Arab world. Not all Israeli gay propaganda is pinkwashing—a lot of it is good, old-fashioned PR to attract gay tourist dollars to Tel Aviv. But some of it—a photo circulated of two male Israeli soldiers holding hands, and captioned “It’s Pride Month. Did you know the IDF treats all of its soldiers equally?”—definitely is. 

     The stupidity of the opechatesgays website matches the stupidity of its message. My favorite fail? That gays (and other liberals) should choose Canadian oil because Canada “has no laws prohibiting LGBT lifestyle.”
      Honey, your conservative underwear is showing. “Lifestyle” is a right-wing code word. My sexual orientation is not a “lifestyle.” Nor is someone’s gender identity. They are traits. There is no such thing as a gay lifestyle, except in right-wing propaganda to oppose LGBT equality.

Michaelson has documented TransCanada's cynism in far greater detail than our excerpts show. You really owe it to yourself to read his piece in its entirety over at The Daily Beast.

Android app Twitter outage widespread

Widespread reports are coming in of Twitter users being logged out of their Android apps and subsequently being unable to log back in. This happened to AKSARBENT, but our PC-based Twitter client (via a browser) seems, so far, to be unaffected.

Joel Olsteen sent the most unintentionally hilarious 2014 tweet by a TV evangelist

Yeah, this October beut is long gone by now; only the screencaps remain, resurrected.

NSFW: Mike Tyson explains how to have sex in prison

Back in May, Mike Tyson explained to Opie and Anthony how to get away with conjugal visits on the sly:

It's always some fucking white guy in these prisons that has got the system down... even though he's always in fucking prison... he always gets caught but he's got the system down... "Make the underwear crotchless... They never check for crotchless underwear..." That's why white guys run the fucking country: because you motherfuckers think of this shit...

How to remember the colors in the LGBT flag

GIF of Joe Rogan, host of Fear Factor
 on NBC for 6 years. Rogan is not gay,
but has a locker room stalker who
annoys him greatly.

Roy G. Biv is an acronym for the sequence of hues commonly described as making up a rainbow: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet.
     The LGBT flag originally had 8 colors, but now usually has six, corresponding to Roy G. Biv less indigo, which changes the acronym to Roy G. BV, which is stupid.
     They should have kept indigo and lost violet, which would have made the acronym Roy G. Bi, which would be much easier to remember.

How Paul Rudd and Seth Rogen know you're gay

To which one might add that AKSARBENT knows YOU'RE you're gay because you have shirtless pictures of Seth Rogen's hotter brother, Joe Rogan, who isn't related to him but you don't know that because you can't spell, which also means that AKSARBENT is totally the blog for you.
     Also, Paul Rudd is not gay, which we know to be a FACT because we once saw a comment thread with a bunch of uninformed homos saying that he was, but then we saw a comment near the end of the comments by a gay plumber who once did some work on Paul Rudd's bathroom and he said it definitely was NOT the bathroom of a gay man, so we believe that.

An hour with Linda Rhonstadt

The former singer (she has Parkinson's) talked about stardom in the sixties, The Eagles, her favorites to sing with (Dolly Parton, Aaron Neville and Emmy Lou Harris) and her influences. Rhonstadt is a reader and has an inquisitive, sharp and discriminating intellect. Interview conducted for CBS SF Bay Area.

Taco Bell may or may not be faking the rainbow to flog AM Crunchwraps with up to 1370 mg. of salt

Taco Bell won't say whether the ad is real but it will say how much sodium these salt bombs contain. The commercial is adorable; the product is scary.
UPDATE: Taco Bell told Gawker, which followed up on this, the following:

We didn’t create this ad, but we can see the people who did share the same Live Mas passion for our brand—and our breakfast—as we do. Although we cannot condone unauthorized use of our intellectual property, we are impressed with their work and would be open to meeting with them.

(Via Gawker via Towleroad)

Wait for it: Teapartiers accuse 'first gay president' of aspiring to be emperor AND empress of U.S.

The White House withheld this photo, with visiting Girl Scouts, until after the election because Obama surrendered to whimsy and disobeyed his own rule about not "putting stuff on your head" if you're president.

Lee Terry, FBI patsy?

Lee Terry, who cosponsored one of the worst (failed) attempts to shackle the Internet, apparently believes everything the FBI says about North Korea hacking Sony despite the fact that most Internet security experts don't. In fact some cybersecurity geeks think the FBI is using reckless accusations to get gullible people (see headline) to support another overreaching attempt to restrict non-terrorists on the net.

Sticking it to the Supreme Leader. Purchased #TheInterview on #YouTube last night. Was worth the 6 bucks to not Let the bastard win.
— Rep. Lee Terry (@LEETERRYNE) December 26, 2014

Truth in advertising: Guardians of the Galaxy

This expensively dumb flick grows on you like Groot.

Here's the wickedly funny scene in The Interview in which queer-baiting rapper Eminem 'comes out'

This is a brilliant sendup of faking the rainbow, something that James Franco (and Craig Ferguson) have been doing for years.

Downton Abbey charity parody, features AbFab's Patsy, George Clooney; rips off It's a Wonderful Life

This was part two of the show's philanthropic text Santa self-mockery this year and included George Clooney, as well as the series' writer/creator, Julian Fellowes, who delivers comic lines very well. To see the servant's cut-throat game of strip poker in part one, go here.
     AbFab's Patsy dropped by in the Angel Clarence role from It's a Wonderful Life, in order to show Lord Grantham what life would have been like had he never been born and had never gone broke.

Speaking of sendups which borrow from It's a Wonderful Life, AKSARBENT was (after being referred by Huffpost) perusing the admonitions to RKO from the Breen office about unacceptable references in Frank Capra's aforementioned classic, now considered a paragon of wholesomeness.
     The unbelievable objections prove once again that nothing is pure enough for a blue nose wielding a blue pencil.
     Our choice for Most Idiotic was the warning to RKO (above) to ensure that 1946 moviegoers, many of whom had just beaten back the Nazis and/or Hirohito's soldiers, had better not get the idea that either George Bailey or Clarence, his angelic keeper, had completely disrobed while their clothes were drying out.
     Oh, geez.

It's a Wonderful Life: a little more respect for Lionel Barrymore's Mr. Potter, please

Maybe Lionel Barrymore was too good at playing the deliciously avaricious bankster, Henry F. Potter. While critics now rave about Donna Reed and Jimmy Stewart, appreciation of Barrymore's craft seems to have been swallowed up by the overall revulsion at his character — which would not be as acute had Barrymore been less talented (and if his scripted lines hadn't been so terrific.) Even Roger Ebert inexplicably had nothing to say about Barrymore's delightful performance.
     Next Time It's a Wonderful Life plays on TV, go ahead and chuckle appreciatively as Barrymore incorrigibly yawns, twiddles his thumbs and casts bored looks around the room while Jimmy Stewart praises the working man and appeals to high ideals.
     At one point, Barrymore's Potter tried to get the best of George by shrewdly assessing his disappointments and failed aspirations, praising him, appealing to his desire to be a better provider — and then dangled a $20,000 yearly salary (huge, in Depression America) in front of him, spinning what Jimmy Stewart called a "web" after coming to his senses. Potter's inventive machinations are a wondrous garden of evil beauty at which to cackle.
     Barrymore, by then wheelchair-bound by arthritis, turned in a performance as good as anyone else's in the movie, including Stewart's. When is he going to start getting the credit he deserves?

NBC Nightly News wants to know why MDs aren't prescribing more prayer

Brian Williams orchestrated another cheesy sop to religion in his introduction to a Nightly News  final segment by Cynthia McFadden, who noted that:

...half of Americans believe that prayer can heal before actually asking, “So why is it almost nonexistent in the doctor’s office?”

Fox Santa science vs. PBS Santa science

Fox's war on Santa got pretty mean last year, with craters in residential neighborhoods, at least one four-letter word, decapitated baby dolls, gratuitous full frontal male cartoon nudity and Santa's face turned into hamburger and licked by a dog in the fireplace. (Not to mention cruel child labor manufacturing of toys and the allegation that the Chinese eat reindeer genitals for health.)



This year, PBS counteracted the scurrilous notion that Santa couldn't possibly deliver toys to all those children, reassuring kids that, through clever usage of time zones, Santa actually has 32 hours, not 24, to deliver presents and may well be using quantum mechanics to get the job done. Whew. Ball's in your court, Roger Ailes.

Frigo's $78 million underwear endorser, 50 cent, isn't moving the merchandise

Says The Daily Beast:

     To find out if America really is ready to shell out a Franklin for some premium package packages, especially during this most intense of consumption seasons, I called a couple of the vendors listed on the RevolutionWear site.
     “I sold a couple a pairs,” admitted a gentleman reached in a Boston Neiman Marcus menswear department, who asked not to be named, when I inquired about how sales of the expensive style were doing. “I think they’re a little bit much!”
     Another preferred-to-be-nameless salesman, this time from Lord & Taylor’s 5th Avenue location in New York, wasn’t sure what the hype was about.
     “You know the funny thing was, the (RevolutionWear) rep actually said he preferred the other version over the high end version,” he laughed, adding, “They’re like Spanxx, or your basic compression short. That type of thing.”
     When asked if he thought we were ready for an influx of high-end holsters for our manhood, he chuckled again, replying:
     “I tell ya, I’ve been pushing ‘em a little bit, and they’re not really [selling]… No. I would say no.”
     This was a sentiment echoed by his Bostonian counterpart, who admitted: “According to what we’re selling, no!”

Well, you can't blame a guy for trying, officer

Bet the perp wouldn't have posed the question if Rin Tin Tin had been along for the ride.