My message to Chelsea, the Obamas and future presidential kids.

Look, people don't like phonies and if you try to pretend you're just one of us, it isn't going to work. You didn't ask your dads to run for president or for the life you inherited (or will about to inherit). Acknowledge your good fortune, accept it for what it is and use your stature and connections for the betterment of others as well as yourselves. Thats why we love the Roosevelts and the Kennedys, and, if you follow in their paths, we'll love you too.

How the Portugal Draw Boosts the U.S.’s World Cup Advancement Odds

The United States was seconds away from defeating Portugal on Sunday when Michael Bradley, normally one of the steadiest American players, mishandled a ball in midfield and gave Portugal a last opportunity. Silvestre Varela took advantage, scoring on a header.

But the 2-2 draw was a result the U.S. might have been happy with before the match began. It improved the Americans’ odds of advancing to the knockout round of the World Cup. Those chances are up to 76 percent, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecast, an improvement from 65 percent before Sunday’s match.

That 76 percent figure may even be slightly low, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment. Still, the U.S. will not be guaranteed advancement unless it manages at least a draw against Germany on Thursday in Recife, Brazil. If the U.S. loses, the Portugal-Ghana game, which will kick off simultaneously in Brasilia, could cause heartbreak for Americans. You may want to have two screens at your disposal for Thursday’s matches.


http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/how-the-portugal-draw-boosts-the-u-s-s-world-cup-advancement-odds/

Grateful Dead 1989 Summer Solstice Concert (VIDEO)

When did you stop reading stories to your kid?

My 8-year old son can read fairly well on his own, but he still likes for me to read to him at night. I'm inlined to think he's a little too old, but I also value that time before bed. How old was your kid when you stopped reading to them?

BLM Shooting Suspect Is Anti-Government Conspiracy Theorist With Pending Gun Charge

The man accused of shooting two law enforcement members in California, including a Bureau of Land Management ranger, has had at least one previous run-in with law enforcement and has described himself as the target of a massive government conspiracy.

Brent Douglas Cole, 60, was named by the Nevada County Sheriff's Office on Monday as the suspect in Saturday's shooting that also left him wounded.

Anna Ferguson, assistant district attorney for Nevada County, confirmed to TPM that Cole was also facing misdemeanor charges in Nevada County Superior Court for allegedly carrying a loaded firearm. He was charged on Jan. 26.

On Tuesday, the Union newspaper in Grass Valley, Calif., published an article that quoted from court documents in the case. The documents showed Cole believed he was the target of a massive conspiracy:

Officers acted without warrant or any probable cause to seize my person using a swat team style assault, and then started looking for something to charge me with. I was attacked and molested, unconstitutionally arrested, unlawfully incarcerated, repeatedly intimidated and coerced to plead guilty to having committed a crime, held in secret for five days, and my property and liberty taken from me since January 26, 2014. I am being persecuted for being a gun owner, and for exercising my inherent Right by unwitting or unknowing accomplices of a seditious conspiracy against rights instituted by foreign powers inimical to the United States of America.

A D-Kos account of an Open Carry incident.

So, on Wednesday, we had a guy come in, not quite one of our regulars, but more than an occasional guest. He had a 1911 strapped to his hip, and was informed we do not allow open carry on premises. He unloaded the weapon, locked the slide, and I checked it into our safe. I explained it was a courtesy, since he was riding a bicycle, and that, in the future, he would simply need to leave it at home. No problem. He had lunch, and a beer, and left.

He came back two hours later, and asked if I could check the gun again, because a friend was going to come pick him up, rather than having to ride the 26 miles home. Same deal, unloaded, slide locked, into the safe. Here's where things got stupid.

Apparently, when he left, he had several more drinks, and then, because he had just purchased the gun, he decided to unload and load it, repeatedly, in the doorway of the business two doors down from my place. Playing with his new toy, you see. When the ladies that own that business attempted to leave, they saw a man in their doorway, working the action on a pistol, and then coming into the bar. The women, quite naturally, locked the door and called the police. Mind you, I'm unaware of any of this. I've been in the kitchen, working. I'm a cook, not a bouncer.

So, ten minutes later, the police show up. Right as he is getting ready to leave, with the pistol IN HIS HAND. He was about to holster it. The police, again, quite naturally, do not like this, and immediately snatch it out of his hand, and take him outside. As the senior employee, I followed. They bawl him out for his stupidity, and then ask for his ID, to make sure he has no felonies or warrants. He becomes belligerent, keeps asking, "am I free to go?" The long and short of it is, he has previous felony convictions on Washington State. They are unable to immediately discern whether he is disqualified from owning a firearm, and eventually confiscate it. (After an hour of calls back and forth to Washington, it is determined he is indeed allowed to own the weapon.) They tell him he can retrieve it, if he is entitled, at the police station. This whole incident takes nearly an hour, by the way.


http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/06/17/1307546/-Open-Carry-incidents-at-my-place-of-employment-The-cops-got-involved

Could Texas’ Perry be mulling move to California?

The Republican has made persuading top employers around the country to move to Texas a centerpiece of his administration, even leading a series of job-poaching missions in Democratically controlled states. And California has been a prime target, with Perry bashing what he calls the Golden State’s high-tax, over-regulated ways.

But a New York Times Magazine story released Tuesday says Perry’s so enamored with California that he could move there when his term ends.

“Perry told me that he loves California, vacations in San Diego annually, visits the state about six times a year and might even move here in January when he’s done with his 14-year stint running Texas,” writer Mark Leibovich says in the article, which was based on comments the governor made while visiting Los Angeles.

Perry isn’t seeking re-election in November but hasn’t ruled out a second presidential run after his 2012 White House campaign flamed out in a series of public gaffes. In April, he scored a major political victory when Toyota announced it was moving its U.S. headquarters from California to Texas.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/could-texas-perry-be-mulling-move-to-california/2014/06/17/8cefc738-f648-11e3-afdf-f7ffea8c744a_story.html

Republican: If a Woman Has Right to an Abortion, a Man Should Have Right to Force Himself on a Woman

Republican Maine state Representative Lawrence Lockman is under fire for comments he’s made in the media regarding rape, abortion, and homosexuality.

An investigation by Mike Tipping, an activist with Maine People’s Alliance, found numerous offensive comments made by the Republican in various newspaper interviews.

Perhaps the most inflammatory was a press statement from 1995 in which Lockman says “If a woman has (the right to an abortion), why shouldn’t a man be free to use his superior strength to force himself on a woman? At least the rapist’s pursuit of sexual freedom doesn’t (in most cases) result in anyone’s death.”



http://issuehawk.com/igor/2014/03/04/republican-if-a-woman-has-right-to-an-abortion-a-man-should-have-right-to-force-himself-on-a-woman.html#WJvXYWzAX0JLV5YF.99

I love the president, but I will fight him over Iraq.

I was against the war in 2003 and I'll be damned if I will support putting anymore Americans in harms way. Fuck the neocons. Fuck Glenn Beck's mind tricks. Nothing will make me budge on this.

National Review 'Soccer Is the Sport of Terrorists'

In the annals of unsurprising news, “World Cup start marred by violence and bloodshed” has to rank with the old story, “I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out.” After “‘unprecedented’ scenes of disorder” rocked Sao Paulo ahead of the quadrennial world championship Thursday, The Atlantic warned that the upheaval could have a “profound impact” on Brazil, and a CNN anchorwoman asked, “What are these people protesting?” Witnesses told the Telegraph that “they could not recall such unhappy scenes at the start of an event which usually kicks off amid a carnival atmosphere in the host nation.”

In fact, there are few things more precedented than violence and disorder outside a soccer game. The world’s sport of choice is attended by rioting and hooliganism in ways that Americans would expect to see only if the Lakers, Celtics and Bulls all won the NBA championship at the same time and all three teams were composed entirely of UConn graduates. When a player is stabbed and a referee dismembered, you’re talking futbol, not football. When 79 people are killed and more than 1,000 injured in a riot, it’s not cricket and it’s definitely not baseball. When a player is assassinated for blowing or throwing a game, it won’t be the NFL issuing shocked statements about how this kind of behavior is everything the Super Bowl is against; it will be FIFA saying roughly the same thing, in Esperanto, about the World Cup, “the most-watched sporting event on the planet.”

Soccer fans can strike back, accurately, by noting that American sports generate their own levels of face-splitting, artery-clogging fan hatred. Even the peaceful peoples of San Francisco are not safe to travel to Los Angeles for fear of the violence that haunts Chavez Ravine in Dodger Blue. The high number of soccer-related outbreaks could just be a function of mathematics for a sport that is played by many millions and watched by billions, frequently in poor and unstable countries where even the best days would be considered substandard by even poor Americans.

But these arguments will not wash. First, America polices its sports, often to a fault. Plaxico Burress did more time for shooting himself than George Zimmerman did for shooting and killing a high-school student. Donald Sterling is facing the NBA equivalent of a condo-association eviction over remarks he made privately (then expanded on in an internationally televised interview). That’s Labor and Capital both estranged from the product of their efforts by zero tolerance in the land of the free. FIFA takes stabs at punishing bureaucratic threats to its apparatus, but you certainly won’t see that organization’s long line of non-entities engaging in the kind of forelock tugging Americans engage in over non-issues like hypercompetitiveness or the team name of the Redskins.


http://www.nationalreview.com/article/380396/soccer-official-sport-terrorism-tim-cavanaugh