Who knew he was so festive?
Seems there’s a new scam making the rounds where someone calls you up and says that President Obama has just signed a law that created a grant to help folks pay their utility bills and all you need to do to qualify for it is to provide the caller with your social security number and your bank’s routing number.
And there are idiots out there who not only fell for this scam, but got their friends to sign up for it as well:
Channel 2s Tony Thomas spoke to a Griffin woman who fell for the scam. Loneiyce Washington even introduced her friends to what she thought was a legitimate offer. They ended up getting scammed, too.
Washington said she thought Obama passed a law that provided credits to help her and others pay their utility bills, she told Thomas.
Investigators said the scammers ask for peoples Social Security numbers and bank routing numbers. The victims are then given a fake routing number to a bank and the money routed will go toward paying their utility bills. Washington thought after the money had been routed, her bills had been paid. But that wasnt the case and she said she didnt have to give out her private information.
“I didnt think it was a scam because they are not asking for personal information,” Washington said.
Apparently these folks don’t consider their Social Security number to be a form of personal information.
The story doesn’t say, but I’d hope that these were older folks who could be excused for being a little slow on the uptake. If it was anyone under 70, though, then they need a swift slap up the side of their head. Do not hand out your Social Security and bank routing numbers to strangers on the phone pushing too-good-to-be-true offers.
… which just makes it all the more frustrating and depressing. Especially considering there probably won’t be anyone else more worthy of our votes.
It may look like a t-shirt with a positive message to you, but to Conservatives it's SOCIALISM BEING FORCED ON THE MOURNERS!!
Conservative hatred for all things Obama has led them to say and do some crazy things in the last two years. Things like voting against legislation they had originally proposed simply because Obama thought it wasn’t a bad idea. It seems there isn’t anything Obama can do that the Conservatives won’t find a way to bitch about.
Take, for example, his appearance at the Tucson memorial for the victims of the Giffords assassination attempt. They’ve got their panties all in a bunch over a t-shirt that the college whipped up to hand out to the crowd which read: “Together We Thrive: Tucson and & America.”
Seriously:
“I’m having a physical reaction to the T-shirts,” Amanda Carpenter, a speech writer for Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) tweeted tonight. “I’m tearing up. This feels wrong.”
(The tweet has since been deleted.)
Other conservatives on Twitter shared in the sentiment. Some have already speculated the shirts were paid for with taxpayer dollars.
Michelle Malkin had earlier raised a rukus about the event’s logo on her blog.
“Isn’t the churning of the instant messaging machine a bit, well, unseemly?” she wrote. “Can’t the Democrat political stage managers give it a break just once?”
Right-wing media star Tammy Bruce had some of the harshest attacks on the event and the crowd here in Tucson. She likened the event to the 2002 funeral for Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-MN), which conservatives at the time claimed was unfairly turned into a political rally by Wellstone’s supporters.
“Massacre Rally Theatre is a complete abomination. Absolutely obscene,” Bruce tweeted Wednesday. “Clinton should be happy, no longer will ‘Wellstone’ be the benchmark.”
via Conservatives Criticize Free T-Shirts At Tucson Memorial Service | TPMDC.
You can bet that if Obama were to drop dead of a heart attack in the middle of a speech on live television the Conservatives would be complaining that he didn’t die in a fiery helicopter crash into the Democratic headquarters. And even if he did that, they’d complain that they didn’t get a front-row seat and a big bucket of popcorn to watch it happen.
For the record, the university is responsible for the “branding” they’re so upset about. But even if it was the creation of the Obama administration it’d be stunningly hypocritical of Republicans to complain about it considering how happy they were to milk the hell out of pictures and videos of the World Trade Center terrorist attacks over the years. Hell, Rudolph Giuliani seemed to have developed some weird form of Tourette’s that caused him to spit out “9/11” every fourth or fifth word during his Presidential run.
Pot, meet kettle.
…he could always take up a career in stand-up. From his speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner:
It’s good to see he has kept a sense of humor about it all.
We need more of this from the President:
Keep calling the hypocritical blow-hards out for the bullshit they’re shoveling. The rhetoric from the Right is so ridiculous that the only appropriate response is ridicule.
After all, trying to treat them like rational grown ups hasn’t worked.
Obama's new 2012 campaign slogan.
It might net him a few more Republican voters if they’re not happy with their nominee, but I don’t think it’s going to go over well with those of us who bought into his first campaign slogan.
As found over at What Would Jack Do?
Obama saying what needs to be said:
I have to wonder, though, if he isn’t just preaching to the choir with using YouTube to present the address. How many people that really need to hear this are following his YouTube channel? It seems like the sort of thing that should be part of a larger address on national television. I’d probably even happier if he took the time to call out some of the people spreading the lies in the first place. Probably impolitic, but it would get it onto the news channels at least.
I just got the following email from a SEB Reader:
Hey. Don’t know if you’ve heard about this, but the President is doing a speech to children on Sept 8th challenging them to become better students and encouraging them to stay in school in order to receive a better education. I, personally, think this is a positive thing, because for many years now, we have not had a president try to reach out to the kids about their education. The most we’ve had is Asshole-in-Chief Bush mindlessly repeating Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign and that diversion technique on 9/11 with the school children.
Heres the link to the information about the broadcast: http://www.ed.gov/admins/lead/academic/bts.html
Also, heres a link to information about how the radical right-wing nutcases are trying to completely screw up something that could inspire children to become more than burger-tossers:
These people are bloody insane. A president, for once, is trying to extend a hand to the children and these walking ballsacks have the audacity to try to deny that? Amazing how such an act of nobility and honor can be twisted into some political mumbo-jumbo to scare the people.
I don’t get it. Bush flies to a little school, talks to them, reads to them, and he’s a messiah. Obama tries to inspire the children and he’s some sort of lunatic.
I’m tired of the Republican’s demonizing everything that Obama does. I want to take action. You seem to be a tried and true voice for us that have common sense, do you have any suggestions?
I replied that I am at a loss as to what to do about it. You can’t talk sense to these people because they are immune to reality. It would help if the news media did more than egg the idiots on, but that’s what gets them the ratings.
So I said I’d toss it up here and see if any of you guys have any ideas. I’m tapped out myself in part because I’m so fatigued of it all. Let’s hear what you’ve got to say on it.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few weeks then you know that Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a prominent black Harvard law professor, was arrested for the crime of trying to enter his own home by a white Cambridge police officer. A situation made slightly worse by Obama when he criticized the police officer publicly. To try to smooth things over between all three parties the President invited both men to the White House for a beer.
How frickin’ cool is that? The President of the United States is going to have a beer with a couple of ordinary citizens involved in a heated dispute in a small gesture at improving race relations. That’s a man of the people in my book. You don’t get much cooler than that.
Naturally I expected someone to have a problem with this. Perhaps someone would bitch that Obama is wasting time chillin’ with some brewskis when there are pressing matters he should be attending to. Or perhaps someone would complain that it was nothing more than an overblown PR stunt. What I didn’t expect was that someone would raise a fuss over which beers are being served:
Earlier this week the White House indicated each man would drink the beer of their choice — Bud Light for President Obama, Blue Moon for the police officer, and perhaps Red Stripe or Beck’s for Gates.
But one Massachusetts congressman thinks another beer entirely should be served: Boston’s own Sam Adams.
In a letter to Obama dated Wednesday, Massachusetts Rep. Richard Neal strongly urges the president not to drink Budweiser, now owned by a Belgian company. Nor should the White House consider serving Miller or Coors, Neal writes, both owned by a United Kingdom conglomerate.
Instead, the White House should serve the three men — all with ties to Massachusetts — the local favorite, not only because of its popularity in the region but also because it remains the largest American-owned and brewed beer, Neal says.
Are you fucking kidding me? Are we really going to criticize the President because he wants to drink a beer produced by a foreign owned company? Why can’t we just let these guys drink whatever the fuck beer they want to drink without trying to politicize the hell out of the decision? Maybe none of the three of them likes Sam Adams beer. I wouldn’t know if Sam Adams is better than Bud Light because all beer tastes like chilled horse urine to me. Well, what I imagine chilled horse urine would taste like, not having actually tasted it.
I get so sick of these idiots in Washington who have to take the smallest gesture of goodwill on the part of anyone and find some stupid way of turning it into a test of patriotism. If the President were to personally rush into a burning building to save a baby by wrapping it in a blanket there would be someone who would complain that blanket was made in China and that the President wasn’t patriotic enough to use a blanket made in the USA to wrap the infant in. He used/consumed a foreign company’s product!? Why does he hate America??
Grow the fuck up. Let the man drink his choice of beer without having a fucking fit about it.