SEX IS DEATH. (Acting out out of the closet)

I came to Carthage, where I found myself in the midst of a hissing cauldron of lusts. I had not yet fallen in love, but I was in love with the idea of it, and this feeling that something was missing made me despise myself for not being more anxious to satisfy the need. I began to look around for some object for my love, since I badly wanted to love something. — St. Augustine, Confessions


From AP [via Yahoo! News] comes this story of sodomy gone awry...and then some.

Canada police: Body parts victim a Chinese student

The man killed in a videotaped attack that was discovered after body parts were mailed to Canada's top political parties was a Chinese student, police said Friday, as authorities in France searched for the suspect, a Canadian porn actor.

Did he only do "gay" porn? Or was he a really good actor?

Montreal Police Cmdr. Ian Lafreniere identified the victim as Jun Lin, 33. Police have said he dated Luka Rocco Magnotta, who is now on Interpol's equivalent of its most-wanted list.

Rocco, huh? Sounds like one of my idiot Italian cousins.

A senior French police official said he is sure Magnotta is in France and that Magnotta has been there in the past. Another French police official said Magnotta apparently flew to Paris from Montreal last weekend, before the case emerged.

Lafreniere said Jun Lin doesn't have family in Montreal, but a family member reported him missing on Tuesday. He had last been seen May 24. 

Lafreniere said the murder occurred the night of May 24-25, and the suspect left for Europe on May 26.

According to a missing person's notice on the website of the Chinese consulate in Montreal, the victim was from the city of Wuhan and arrived in Montreal in July 2011.

"He is a Chinese citizen who studied at a university here in Montreal and was here for a certain time," Lafreniere said. "Thanks to the Chinese embassy, we have been able to reach the family with the sad news of what happened."

The case began Tuesday, when a package containing a severed foot was opened at the ruling Conservative Party headquarters. A hand was discovered at a postal facility, addressed to the Liberal party of Canada. A torso was found in a suitcase on a garbage dump in Montreal, outside Magnotta's apartment building.

Montreal police have said they believe Magnotta, 29, fled for France based on evidence they found at his apartment and a blog he once wrote about how to disappear.

So... it's political, too?

"What will hinder him the most is what he used to glorify himself, the web, with all the photos we have of him," Lafreniere said. But he warned that Magnotta is "someone who can disguise himself, he can change into a woman, wear a wig."

Maybe he was a really, really good actor and the Chinese guy thought he was dating a chick after all.

France's fugitive search unit has been ordered to hunt for Magnotta, the French officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about such searches publicly. They gave no details about his suspected whereabouts.

Lafreniere said Magnotta could be anywhere in Europe, and "there's even been talk he might have returned to Canada under another identity."

Police suspect Magnotta filmed the murder. The video, posted online, shows a man stabbing another man with an ice pick while the victim lies naked and tied up. The first man later reveals he has slashed the other man's throat. He also dismembers the corpse and performs sexual acts with it.

A "gay" porn snuff film. I'll bet this is much more popular in the sodomite community than they would be willing to admit. 

You have to admit that's real love there. After all, if you love a guy enough to keep sodomizing him after he's been murdered and chopped up...

"We have quite convincing proof of the crime he committed," Lafreniere said Friday, referring to the video.

Other body parts remain missing.

Imagine what sort of trophies this monster might keep.

Police said Magnotta is also known by the names Eric Clinton Newman and Vladimir Romanov, and they described him as white and 5 feet 8 inches tall (1.78 meters) with blue eyes and black hair. A police official said he was a porn actor.

Hey! Italian and Russian? That's my schtick!

Derek MacKinnon, a former resident of the building where Magnotta lived, said he was the only person Magnotta would speak to in the building. MacKinnon identified himself as an actor who played a serial killer in the 1980 horror film "Terror Train."

"I was a killer who killed 11 people in this film, so he was rather interested in my career versus his," MacKinnon said. "It was like a quick conversation, not like anything big. And knowing that we were both gay, I think that's probably where he had the connection with me because he was extremely cold, standoffish, wouldn't talk to anybody, but he would stop for a sec to say something to me, and I think that he felt there was a kindred spirit or something between the two of us."

La MacKinnon is lucky he's old and not so cute anymore. He could have starred in Magnotta's greatest cinematic effort.

He said Magnotta "was always well groomed" until the last time MacKinnon saw him, on May 25. He said Magnotta was having "a bad hair day."

 Cops just love witnesses who notice the little things.

"It was red, and he normally is dark," MacKinnon said. "It looked like a really bad wig."

It seems cannibalism is IN this year.

From AP via Yahoo! News:

Maryland man says he ate heart of victim

A 21-year-old college student accused of killing a housemate told police he ate the victim's heart and part of his brain after he died.

Alexander Kinyua hid the head and hands of the dead man in his family's basement laundry room in a suburb of Baltimore, according to the Harford County Sheriff's Office. Kinyua, a student at Morgan State University, was charged earlier in May in another attack in which the victim was brutally beaten but survived.

Kinyua, a Kenya native, is charged with first-degree murder and other charges in the death of 37-year-old Kujoe Bonsafo Agyei-Kodie. He was ordered held on no bail.

His public defender did not return a call seeking comment, and a voicemail left at Kinyua's home was not returned.

Sheriff's spokeswoman Monica Worrell said the chief medical examiner had not yet officially identified the body parts, but that authorities believe they are those of Kodie, who was reported missing May 25. His cellphone and wallet were left in the home and police were initially told he had gone for a run.

On Tuesday, Kinyua's father, Antony Kinyua, called detectives and reported that another son, Jarrod, found what he thought were human remains in the house where they all lived in Joppatowne.

Jarrod found two metal tins, which held a human head and two human hands. Police say Jarrod confronted his brother, who said the remains were animals.

According to charging documents, Jarrod and his father went to the basement, where Jarrod "observed that the items he observed were gone and Alex Kinyua was cleaning the container he observed them in."

Detectives obtained a search warrant and found the head and hands in the house. Police say Alexander Kinyua admitted to killing Kodie by cutting him up with a knife and eating his heart and part of his brain.
Authorities say Kinyua told detectives the rest of the body could be found in a trash container at the Town Baptist Church in Harford County where they discovered remains.

The attack comes in the same week as a man in Miami chewed away another man's face along a busy highway and wouldn't stop until an officer shot him to death. Witnesses say 31-year-old Rudy Eugene growled at the officer and continued to chew away. 

The victim, identified as 65-year-old Ronald Poppo, a homeless man who lived under the causeway, was in critical condition and will be permanently disfigured.
On May 19, Kinyua beat a man with a baseball bat on Morgan's campus, fracturing his skull and making him lose sight in one eye, according to Baltimore police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi.

Kinyua was arrested May 20 and released on $220,000 bail.

Morgan officials say Kinyua studied electrical engineering and was also in the ROTC.

According to court records, the victim, Kodie, a native of Ghana, was convicted in November 2008 in Baltimore County of sex offense and assault in September 2007 and harassment, stalking and telephone misuse for making repeated calls in 2007 and 2008 to a woman. He was sentenced to at least a year and a half in jail.

Oh, yeah...right. BUSH was the coke fiend...

...or, HOLY sheep bleep! They think he's going to lose.

Why else put this crap on the bookshelves now other than to be able to say "We knew he was a jerk all along."

From Yahoo!'s The Ticket:

In the forthcoming biography "Barack Obama: The Story," due in bookstores June 19, David Maraniss tells the largely untold story of Obama's family, his life growing up in Hawaii and Indonesia, his journey through college in California and New York and his years as a community organizer on the South side of Chicago.

Some of the details from the book have already been released, including sections about Obama's pot-smoking school days in Hawaii and stories about his early girlfriends, but the book, obtained by Yahoo News, is full of stories about Obama's past (even if Obama doesn't show up in the book until page 165).
Here are 20 details from Obama's life detailed in Maraniss' book:




1. Maraniss suggests that Obama's father, Barack Obama Sr., may have abused Obama's mother.
"There is no direct evidence that Obama hit Ann. She never talked about it to her son or family, and in retrospect always tried to give their brief relationship the rosiest interpretations. Bus as we shall see, Obama physically abused his next wife, another American with similar characteristics. This does not mean that he abused Ann, but it leads to that possibility."



2. When Obama was six years old, he moved to Jakarta, Indonesia to live with his mother and step-father, Lolo Soetoro, in a home full of exotic animals.

"The backyard was a sight to behold, Lolo's personal Indonesian zoo: Chickens, cockatoos, snakes, turtles, two biawaks (reptiles that resemble miniature crocodiles) in a pond, and a small ape named Tata that he brought back from a mapping assignment with the army in Papua."

3. Obama's presidential ambitions stretched back to the 3rd grade when he wrote this paper for his class.

My name is Barry Soetoro. I am a third-grade student at SD Asisi.
My mom is my idol.
My teacher is Ibu Fer. I have a lot of friends.
I live near the school. I usually walk to the school with my mom, then go home by mystelf.
Someday I want to be president. I love to visit all the places in Indonesia.
Done.
The eeeeeeeeend.

4. As a teenager, Obama was in a car accident while drag racing in Hawaii.

Obama wasn't behind the wheel of the car, but while he and some friends were racing, the car he was riding in flipped and landed upside down. The other car turned around and found Obama, who had crawled out a back window, laughing hysterically.
"You can't drive for shit!" he kept telling the driver.



5. Obama doesn't have hops.
He loved playing basketball in high school, but he was "one of few players on the team" who couldn't jump high enough to dunk.


6. Obama, college style.
Maraniss describes Obama's look while he was a student at Occidental University:
"First there was his little toe. It stuck out from the end of his slippers, or flip-flops as they were called on the mainland. his little toe was straight, rather than cramped and curling inward, a sign that his feet enjoyed a liberated existence, unbound by leather shoes. Then there was the rest of his daily uniform: OP (Ocean Pacific) corduroy shorts or denim jeans, a shell bracelet, polo shirts or tees (including one promoting the Hawaii state senate candidacy of Neil Abercrombie...)."



7. Obama's got the moves like Jagger.
"Barry Obama played a lot of Hendrix, Earth, Wind & Fire, and Billie Holiday, but was known in the Annex for his wicked impression of Mick Jagger. He could do the walk, the strut, the face, and act out the dramatic scene of the Rolling Stones onstage at the Altamont Speedway outside Livermore, California, on December 6, 1969,.."

8. Obama thought the world would be a better place without clothes, especially when nice-looking ladies were around.

Allegedly stoned and drunk one night at Occidental, Obama and a friend stopped to talk to an attractive girl and "Barry launched into a riff on nudity, offering his theory that the human race would be better off if people did not wear clothes. This declaration was made with the urgency of someone ready to strip then and there. ...It seemed apparent that Barry was trying to seduce the woman right in front of" his friend who had a crush on the girl.
She appeared "sympathetic to the theoretical argument but not ready to put it into practice."

9. Obama loved to wear hats in college
"Mark Parsons said Obama displayed one small trait that showed he wanted to be a player: he wore a lot of 'stupid hats.' He usually wore them cocked, to look cool."



10. In his younger days, Obama smoked his cigarettes like he smoked his weed.

"His friends noticed that Barry had a peculiar smoking style, a little affectation. He turned his wrist up and cupped the cigarette between thumb and index finger. He smoked a cigarette the same way he smoked a joint."

11. Obama joked that he would stop smoking after he got married because it would be okay to get fat then.
Mark Parsons: "I remember him telling me he would quit after he got married. He didn't want to quit smoking because he said he would gain weight, but after he got married it would be okay to gain weight. I think it was mostly a joke."



12. The camera loved Obama, and he loved it back.

At Occidental, fellow student Lisa Jack asked to photograph him in her apartment, and Obama stole the show.

"It was one of those times when his ambition was unmistakable ... He blew smoke like he was on a Bob Dylan album jacket. he put on his hat and cocked it low like he was Jimi Hendrix. he walked toward a heating grate and knelt down like Miles Davis. "These are all his ideas, not mine," Jack recalled. "No one else got up to stand over the grate with a hat on. Nobody. I think he was into it. he was pleased he had been asked. ... In one roll of film Barry goes from innocent baby to Jimi Hendrix to a Black Panther--from having furn to thoughtful to angst."

13. Obama was that guy in college who didn't study much but still got better grades than you.

Friends in his class at Occidental "returned from the library late one night and found Obama lounging on the Barf Couch, smoking."
...
"'Did you finish your project?'" they asked.

"'I've written it,' Obama responded. 'I just haven't written it down.' A while later Barry 'wandered off to the library' and pulled an all-nighter writing a paper that eventually got an A+."

14. Obama was known to show compassion to those who seemed lonely or different.
Friend Kofi Manu said, "Obama was especially friendly to people who seemed lonely or felt a sense of otherness ...'If you are alone he will come up next to you and engage you in conversation," Manu recalled. 'People would say he was engaging, but I would say it differently. He comes to you. He is drawn to people.'"



15. Five writing tips from a future president.
A friend sent Obama a manuscript for editing, Obama wrote back with five tips:

1)  "Careful about too many adverbs, particularly describing how people speak (Paul asked disbelievingly, etc.) It can be cumbersome and a bit intrusive on the reader"

2) "Resist the temptation of easy satire...Good satire has to be a little muted. Should spill out from under a seemingly somber situation."

3)  "Try to get the basic stats on the characters out of the way early {Paul was 24} so that you can spend the rest of the story revealing character."

4) "Think about the key moment(s) in the story, and build tension leading to those key moments."

5) "[W]rite outside your own experience...I find that this works the fictive imagination harder."

16. Obama slept outside in an alley on his first night in New York.
"Obama arrived in New York a week before [his roommate], but when he reached 109th Street he did not have a key to the apartment and could not find anyone to give him one. he spent his first night in the big city outside, curled up in a nearby alleyway, and woke up with a white hen pecking at his face."

17. Obama says he wasn't very interested in running for office during his college days.

"I don't think I could see a clear path [to the presidency]," Obama told Maraniss in an interview for the book. "At that age I was much more interested in being a leader outside of politics. If you had asked me during that time what kind of career I'd love to have, more likely I would have said something like a Bob Moses [the civil rights leader], maybe with a slightly higher profile than that. ... I would not have precluded politics, but during that period I was pretty skeptical of it. There weren't a lot of political figures at that time that I particularly admired."

18. When it came to social life, Obama was friendly, but he was no Bill Clinton.

Amelia Rugland, a student at Columbia recalls:

"When you'd see him walking in the hall he always looked like he was thinking of something ... He was interesting. He didn't talk to everybody and know everybody's names. He was not gregarious. It was more that he was obviously very aware of other people and their surroundings ... He just seemed really engaged in what he was working on."

19. Obama the doodler.

"Wherever he went in Chicago, he had a pen and notebook with him. He constantly jotted notes or doodled. Since his lower school days at Punahou, when he got into superhero comics, he had shown a penchant for sketching figures and faces. 'He was always doodling, drawing, writing He could draw,' Loretta Augustine-Herron recalled. 'He could draw when we were in meetings, thing like that. He usually had a legal pad.'"

20. How Obama liked to chillax.

From a postcard Obama sent to friend Phil Boerner while he was back in Indonesia: "I'm sitting on the porch in my sarong, sipping strong coffee and drawing on a clove cigarette, watching the heavy dusk close over the paddy terraces of Java. Very kick back, so far away from the madness."

"Golly, Fyodor, that stuff couldn't happen in a first world country..."

It happened in Spain in the 1930's, kiddies. And guess what political persuasion was gunning down Catholics then? [Hint: Again, it was the commies!]

BTW, do you think Benito and Myhell will let their two brats see these two visions of socialist utopia?

Check out the DVD of

There Be Dragons 

For Greater Glory opens today!

Take your children and grandchildren to see this movie. All must be taught "religious freedom" always always always hangs from a very thin thread.

For Greater Glory

 What price would you pay for freedom? In the exhilarating action epic FOR GREATER GLORY an impassioned group of men and women each make the decision to risk it all for family, faith and the very future of their country, as the film's adventure unfolds against the long-hidden, true story of the 1920s Cristero War ­the daring people¹s revolt that rocked 20th Century North America.

Academy Award® nominee Andy Garcia headlines an acclaimed cast as General Gorostieta, the retired military man who at first thinks he has nothing personal at stake as he and his wife (Golden Globe nominee Eva Longoria) watch Mexico fall into a violent civil war. Yet the man who hesitates in joining the cause will soon become the resistance's most inspiring and self-sacrificing leader, as he begins to see the cost of religious persecution on his countrymen . . . and transforms a rag-tag band of rebels into a heroic force to be reckoned with.  The General faces impossible odds against a powerful and ruthless government.  Yet is those he meets on the journey ­ youthful idealists, feisty renegades and, most of all, one remarkable teenager named Jose ­ who reveal to him how courage and belief are forged even when justice seems lost.

Director Dean Wright brings a visual power honed from years as a leading Hollywood effects guru ­ on such blockbusters as TITANIC, THE LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy and CHRONICLES OF NARNIA ­ to this real-life tale that has never been told on screen before.  The film is written by Michael Love.  The producer is Pablo Jose Barroso.  Garcia and Longoria lead a stellar multinational cast that includes the legendary Peter O¹Toole, rapidly rising star Oscar Isaac (DRIVE), recording star and actor Ruben Blades (SAFE HOUSE), Bruce Greenwood (STAR TREK, SUPER 8), Nestor Carbonell (THE DARK NIGHT RISES), Bruce McGill (LINCOLN), Santiago Cabrera (³Heroes,² CHE), Oscar®-nominated Catalina Sandino Moreno (MARIA FULL OF GRACE) and Eduardo Verástegui (BELLA).

Shooting on historic locations throughout Mexico, the equally accomplished behind the scenes team includes director of photography Eduardo Martinez Solares (BAD HABITS), Oscar®-nominated editor Richard Francis-Bruce (THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, SEVEN, HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER¹S STONE), production designer Salvador Parra (VOLVER) and Oscar®-winning composer James Horner (AVATAR, TITANIC, BRAVEHEART).


From Fox News:
 REVIEW: 'For Greater Glory' a sweeping, sentimental adventure

 “For Greater Glory” takes its cues from a bygone era of Technicolor Golden Age epics and delivers a sprawling political drama steeped in old-fashioned Hollywood romanticism.

During the 1920s, Mexico was thrust into civil war when President Plutarco Calles (Rubén Blades) outlawed Catholicism, banned religious activity, confiscated all church property and exiled clergy. Priests and nuns that protested were arrested or publicly executed and hung on display from roadside posts. Rebel factions formed by schoolboys to farmers to artisans rose up and thus started the Cristero War.

Andy Garcia gives an excellent performance as the legendary General Gorostieta, a militaristic mastermind hired to lead the directionless rebels against Calles. In pure movie fashion, one man becomes a symbol, uniting a country in its struggle for civil liberty and religious freedom. But Gorostieta’s story is an interesting one: He’s an atheist who joins the cause out of boredom – and a little prodding from his wife (Eva Longoria) -- but he quickly finds worth and value when he’s introduced to a young boy, José Luis Sanchez.

Newcomer Mauricio Kuri – with the most moving performance in the film -- is young José, a mischievous schoolboy who witnesses the atrocities of Calles’ law first hand and makes a pilgrimage to join the Cristeros and fight alongside General Gorostieta.

Like Steven Spielberg’s “War Horse,” “For Greater Glory” is a film displaced in time. This historical adventure feels like a fifty-year-old film minus Charlton Heston. Director Dean Wright (a visual effects master on films like “Lord of the Rings” and “Titanic”) keeps things old fashioned but never crosses the line to pastiche. With sun-soaked cinematography, beautiful panoramic vistas, a lush James Horner score and multitudes of idealist characters and pious speeches, “For Greater Glory” feels like a war movie from a much more innocent time. Though Wright deftly uses that old Hollywood glory against us; he alternates between Hallmark card sentimentality and raw contemporary violence. As the war progresses, the film becomes increasingly violent but never loses its classic film visage, which, whether intentional or not, is eerie and memorable.

Though similar in style to “War Horse,” “For Great Glory” is a much more satisfying journey, though could benefit from some additional editing. There’s a clear structure to the film and even the stereotypical characters feel better defined, from the fiendish Calles to Ambassador Dwight Morrow (Bruce Greenwood) to the contentious rebel “El Catorce” (Oscar Isaac).

Screen legend Peter O’Toole makes a brief appearance as the staunch Father Christopher and within those few moments the actor lives up to his reputation of an acting force to be reckoned with. From the iconic timbres of his voice to his statuesque appearance, at 80 years old, O’Toole hasn’t lost his edge one bit.

Meanwhile, Longoria is a lovely respite from the war-torn action scenes while Bruce Greenwood, Nestor Carbonell and Oscar Isaac round out the noteworthy supporting cast.

“For Greater Glory” is very heavy on religion [WTF? It's about people being massacred because of their religious beliefs! Of course it's heavy on religion, you dope! - F.G.], but a well-done war film nonetheless, overflowing with sentimentality and classic Hollywood adventure.

Here's a dumbass review from a McClatchy guy who should know better:






Movie Review | For Greater Glory: 'Historical' look at civil war more like propaganda


 By  Roger Moore
McCLATCHY-TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICE


For Greater Glory is a meandering, malnourished epic of a forgotten Mexican civil war — the one “after” the Mexican Revolution, which made Pancho Villa famous.

The period piece, partly financed by the Knights of Columbus, is about the Cristero War, when Catholic priests and peasants took up arms against the Mexican government’s efforts to repress the Roman Catholic Church.
It is a preachy and violent movie aimed at the faithful — people who won’t grimace or roll their eyes at every character who declares, “God save us from these heathens!”

In 1920s Mexico, the leftist administration of President Plutarco Calles (Ruben Blades) takes Marx’s maxim that “Religion is the opiate of the masses” seriously. Calles introduces “reforms” and edicts ranging from the practical — taking church dogma out of the schools, especially science class — to the more alarming — mass deportations of foreign priests and violence against priests who refuse to leave.

A coalition of church officials and reactionaries, left over from the losing side of the recent civil war, rises up. They call themselves “Cristeros,” and the revolt rages off and on for years. Priests such as Father Vega (Santiago Cabrera) take up arms when priests such as Father Christopher (Peter O’Toole) are executed.
But as the revolt roils the country, the Cristeros see they need a leader. They turn to an agnostic hero of the Mexican Revolution, Gen. Velarde (Andy Garcia). For reasons both righteous and mercenary, he and his wife (Eva Longoria) realize that he can make a difference for the Cristeros.

Director Dean Wright, working from a Michael Love (Gaby: A True Story) script, manages the combat scenes — raids on villages, trains — well enough. But he has no sense of pace and has a hard time keeping the various factions distinct. And if he can’t keep them straight, what hope do we have?

Any movie set in a civil war or revolution is going to take sides, and, as in the Opus Dei-backed There Be Dragons, this one certainly has. But church backers need to make better, less laughably propagandistic movies about recent instances of Catholic martyrdom.

The history itself is dodgy.The horrific excesses of a government determined to reign in a church thoroughly allied with the former ruling classes are documented, but there is nothing about the Cristeros’ mass slaughter of rural teachers who dared to lecture on evolution.

If you’re tackling a subject this complex, you need to be more careful. And if you’re going to try to produce an epic, you need to spend more money.

"Complex"? The white martyrdom of American Catholics is well underway and if we are to avoid mass murder on religious grounds [Oops! We already have that. It's called "abortion".] this movie is the kind of lesson we need to learn. 

 

All the emperor's toadies and all the emperor's sycophants can't put The Community Organizer From The High-Yellow Lagoon back together again.

You know the jug-eared job killer is in trouble when the AmericaLast Media realizes they can't fake the numbers.

From Yahoo! Finance's Contrary Indicator:

May’s jobs report disappoints across the board

Well, this is a bad employment report — across the board. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the economy created just 69,000 jobs in May -- the fewest in a year -- and the unemployment rate crept up to 8.2 percent.

 

 A few takeaways:


Spring Slowdown. Once again, the jobs figures testify to a slowing of growth in the spring. But the gloomy data extend beyond the headline payroll jobs figure. The economy is growing and demand continues to rise. But that's not translating into more work or significantly higher wages. The average workweek for private sector sectors fell in May by .1 hours — i.e., six minutes. Manufacturing, which has been a pocket of strength, showed signs of weakness. The manufacturing workweek fell .3 hours to 40.5, and factory overtime fell sharply. Hourly earnings crept up a smidgen in May, and over the past year have risen just 1.7 percent.

Labor Force Rises. There's an odd wrinkle here. The unemployment rate is derived from the household survey, in which BLS calls people and asks them about their employment status. The rate is calculated by dividing the number of people estimated to be unemployed into the size of the labor force. When the labor force shrinks, the unemployment rate can fall even if the number of people who say they're working doesn't rise. But that's not what happened this month. In May, according to the BLS, the labor force actually grew by 635,000 — which means a lot of people who had been sitting on the sidelines jumped back in. The number of people employed, according to the Household survey, rose by 422,000 in the month.

The Conservative Recovery Continues. Europe isn't the only area where austerity and reduced government spending are impacting employment. Virtually every month for the past few years, the private sector has added jobs while the public sector (local, state and federal government) has cut jobs. That continued in May. The private sector added 82,000 payroll jobs in May while government cut 13,000 positions. Since February 2010, the private sector has added 4.27 million jobs, while the public sector has cut 1.028 million jobs since May 2010.

The Trend Isn't Your Friend. There was another way in which the May report reversed recent trends. Every month, when it reports the figures, BLS goes back and revises the figures it had reported for the prior two months. For much of this recovery, the trend has been for BLS to discover jobs that hadn't been originally reported and revise the prior months' totals higher. But not this month. In May, BLS revised the gains for the two previous months lower. March's figure, originally reported as a 120,000 gain, had been revised upward to 154,000 in April, was revised back down to 143,000. The April figure, originally reported as a gain of 115,000, was revised to a gain of only 77,000.

Labor Market Frustration Rising. Despite the general trend of more job openings and declining first-time unemployment claims, this report shows that the jobs market softened in May. In addition to reporting the headline unemployment rate, BLS publishes alternative measures of labor force frustration — e.g., rates that include workers who have given up, or who are working part-time but would prefer to work full-time. BLS compiles all such measures in the U-6. After falling for much of the past year, it rose in May — to 14.8 percent.

Jobs & The 2012 Election

As is always the case in an election year, voters have their eyes firm on the trend of that headline unemployment number. In the accompanying video, my Daily Ticker colleagues Aaron Task and Henry Blodget talk to Politico's Morning Money columnist and Wall Street reporter Ben White about the political implications of this grim payroll number.


After a decent start to the year, President Obama "cannot make the case clearly, at least at this point, that the economy is recovering strongly under his leadership and it opens the door wide for Mitt Romney to say, 'I've got a set of policies that could create faster job creation,'" says White who thinks it is going to be a "razor tight" election. "If [the unemployment number] stays where we are now, sort of bouncing around 100,000 or if we go back above, I think it is still a 50-50 race."

In a recent column, White does however note that the economies in most of the swing states are performing better than the national average (with the exception of Florida). But May's rise in the unemployment rate to 8.2% muddles this story and won't help Obama come election day, says White.

This may be some kind of record.

First, if you are a blood-soaked commie butcher, you probably have to pay at least a million bucks for even a hand job.

Second, what does he care? He stole all that money anyway.

Third, she sure is pretty. 

But nobody's that pretty.

From ABC via Yahoo! News:
Movie Star Allegedly Made $1 Million Per Night as Hooker
 

The Chinese actress who starred in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," "Memoirs of a Geisha" and "Rush Hour 2" has angrily denied selling her sexual favors to a disgraced official of the ruling Chinese Communist Party for $1 million per night. 

A story in the Hong Kong tabloid newspaper Apple Daily alleged that Zhang Ziyi provided her sexual services in exchange for close to $1 million U.S. dollars a night to former Commerce Minister Bo Xilai and other clients. The Apple Daily, Hong Kong's second-best-selling paper and a frequent critic of the Chinese regime, also alleged that Ziyi had earned $110 million over four years via prostitution. 

Ziyi, whose absence from last week's Cannes premiere of her latest movie, "Dangerous Liaisons," was noted by the international media, has issued a heated denial of the charges. 

According to the Apple Daily, Zhang Ziyi's main client was Bo Xilai, who allegedly had sex with her 11 times between 2007 and 2011. The report alleges Ziyi amassed 110 million dollars from these and trysts with other clients arranged by a prominent billionaire businessman, Xu Ming. 

On Tuesday, a Hong Kong law firm representing Zhang Ziyi dismissed the report. 

"Your allegations concerning our client are completely untrue and constitute a grave libel upon her," said the firm's statement to the Apple Daily. The firm demanded a full and prompt retraction and apology and reserved the right to legal action. 

Zhang Ziyi's publicist issued a stern statement vowing accountability. "This time, we are telling those rumor-makers that we will respond. We will prove our side of the story; we'll seek legal justice; we'll find you in the darkest corner and go after you," the online statement read." 

Bo Xilai, though the scion of a family prominent in the Chinese Communist Party, has been hit with a series of scandals involving corruption and abuse of power in recent months leading to his highly unusual dismissal from the party. The most recent scandal involves accusations that his wife orchestrated the murder of a British businessman, Neil Heywood, because of a conflict of interest. Bo became head of the Communist Party in Chongqing in 2007 after serving as Commerce Minister. He was fired as local party chief in March 2012 and suspended from China's ruling Politburo in April. 

Xu, a long-standing associate of Bo, is also reportedly under investigation in China for corruption. 

Killa O desperately tries to to look like a tough guy.

From ABC via Yahoo! News:

Obama's ‘secret kill list' shows president is final word 

When it comes to the "secret kill list"--a regularly updated chart showing the world's most wanted terrorists--President Obama is the "final moral calculation" in the kill or capture debate, according to the third in a series of New York Times articles assessing his record.

Who was the last one we captured? This jug-eared moron is fine with playing the Kill The Goat-Rapist video game, but gets squeamish at the thought of beating useful intelligence out of these murderers. What a real mensch.

And despite his liberal background, Obama has taken an aggressive approach to counterterrorism.

The Times said it interviewed three dozen current and former advisers to Obama for the article, who described his "evolution since taking on the role, without precedent in presidential history, of personally overseeing the shadow war with Al Qaeda":

They describe a paradoxical leader who shunned the legislative deal-making required to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, but approves lethal action without hand-wringing. While he was adamant about narrowing the fight and improving relations with the Muslim world, he has followed the metastasizing enemy into new and dangerous lands. When he applies his lawyering skills to counterterrorism, it is usually to enable, not constrain, his ferocious campaign against Al Qaeda—even when it comes to killing an American cleric in Yemen, a decision that Mr. Obama told colleagues was "an easy one."

Part of Obama's "evolution" on terror apparently began early in his term, when a drone strike resulted in civilian casualties:

Just days after taking office, the president got word that the first strike under his administration had killed a number of innocent Pakistanis. "The president was very sharp on the thing, and said, 'I want to know how this happened,'" a top White House adviser recounted.

In response to his concern, the C.I.A. downsized its munitions for more pinpoint strikes. In addition, the president tightened standards, aides say: If the agency did not have a "near certainty" that a strike would result in zero civilian deaths, Mr. Obama wanted to decide personally whether to go ahead.

"The care that Mr. Obama and his counterterrorism chief take in choosing targets," the Times said, "and their reliance on a precision weapon, the drone, reflect his pledge at the outset of his presidency to reject what he called the Bush administration's 'false choice between our safety and our ideals.'"

And Obama's success limiting civilian deaths in drone strikes is, in part, due to "a disputed method for counting civilian casualties" embraced by Obama. According to the Times, the White House considers "all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants ... unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent." 

Obama's personal involvement  in counterterrorism operations can be seen in his study of the "baseball card"-like "kill list." For example, in January 2010--four months before he ordered the operation that killed Osama bin Laden--President Obama questioned the ages of some of the al-Qaeda suspects on it.

"How old are these people?" Obama asked during his regular Tuesday briefing with intelligence officials--dubbed the "Terror Tuesday" meeting--in the White House Situation Room. "If they are starting to use children, we are moving into a whole different phase."

The White House has also struggled with the so-called "Whac-A-Mole" approach to counterterrorism--an al-Qaida leader killed in, say, a drone strike is simply replaced with another.

"One guy gets knocked off, and the guy's driver, who's No. 21, becomes 20?" William M. Daley, Obama's chief of staff in 2011, told the Times. "At what point are you just filling the bucket with numbers?"

The Party of Blasphemy, Buggery, and 'Bortion makes killing girls a-ok in the USA.

From AP via Yahoo! News:

House rejects sex-selection abortion ban

 The House on Thursday fell short in an effort to ban abortions based on the sex of the fetus as Republicans and Democrats made an election-year appeal for women's votes.

The legislation would have made it a federal crime to perform or force a woman to undergo a sex-based abortion, a practice most common in some Asian countries where families wanting sons abort female fetuses.

It was a rare social issue to reach the House floor in a year when the economy has dominated the political conversation, and Republicans, besieged by Democratic claims that they are waging a war on women, struck back by trying to depict the vote as a women's rights issue.

"It is violence against women," said Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., of abortions of female fetuses. "This is the real war on women."

The White House, most Democrats, abortion rights groups and some Asian-American organizations opposed the bill, saying it could lead to racial profiling of Asian-American women and subject doctors who do not report suspected sex-selection abortions to criminal charges.

"The administration opposes gender discrimination in all forms, but the end result of this legislation would be to subject doctors to criminal prosecution if they fail to determine the motivations behind a very personal and private decision," White House spokeswoman Jamie Smith said in a statement. "The government should not intrude in medical decisions or private family matters in this way."

The bill had little chance of becoming law. The Democratic-controlled Senate would likely have ignored it, and the House brought it up under a procedure requiring a two-thirds majority for passage. The vote was 246-168 — 30 votes short of that majority. Twenty Democrats voted for it, while seven Republicans opposed it.

The bill's author, Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., said before the vote that regardless of the outcome, the point would be made. "When people vote on this, the world will know where they really stand."

Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the House's No. 2 Democrat, said he thought the bill was introduced because "somebody decided politically that this was a difficult place to put people in."

The legislation would have made it a federal offense, subject to up to five years in prison, to perform, solicit funds for or coerce a woman into having a sex-selection abortion. Bringing a woman into the country to obtain such an abortion would also be punishable by up to five years in prison. While doctors would not have an affirmative responsibility to ask a woman her motivations for an abortion, health workers could be imprisoned for up to a year for not reporting known or suspected violations of the ban on sex-based abortions.

An earlier version of the bill also made it illegal to abort a fetus based on race.
"We are the only advanced country left in the world that still doesn't restrict sex-selection abortion in any way," said Franks, who has also collided with abortion-rights groups recently over a bill he supports to ban abortions in the District of Columbia after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

Franks and others say there is evidence of sex-selection abortions in the United States among certain ethnic groups from countries where there is a traditional preference for sons. The bill notes that while the United States has no federal law against such abortions, countries such as India and China, where the practice has contributed to lopsided boy-girl ratios, have enacted bans on the practice.

Lawmakers "who recently have embraced contrived political rhetoric asserting that they are resisting a 'war on women' must reflect on whether they now wish to be recorded as being defenders of the escalating war on baby girls," said National Right to Life Committee legislative director Douglas Johnson.

His group, in a letter to lawmakers, said there are credible estimates that 160 million women and girls are missing from the world due to sex selection.

But the Guttmacher Institute, an organization that favors abortion rights, said evidence of sex selection in the United States is limited and inconclusive. It said that while there is census data showing some evidence of son preference among Chinese-, Indian- and Korean-American families when older children are daughters, the overall U.S. sex ratio at birth in 2005 was 105 boys to 100 girls, "squarely within biologically normal parameters."

NARAL Pro-Choice America president Nancy Keenan said that while her group has long opposed reproductive coercion, "the Franks bill exploits the very real problem of sex discrimination and gender inequity while failing to offer any genuine solutions that would eliminate disparities in health care access and information."

Marcia Greenberger, co-president of the National Women's Law Center, said the bill fosters discrimination by "subjecting women from certain racial and ethnic backgrounds to additional scrutiny about their decision to terminate a pregnancy."

"Doctors would be forced to police their patients, read their minds and conceal information from them," said Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y.

Instant translation: "We gotta keep killing all the darkies we can."

Republicans also used the bill to continue their ongoing criticism of Planned Parenthood, citing a video taken by the group Live Action purporting to show a Planned Parenthood social worker advising a woman on how to determine if her fetus was female before she terminated the pregnancy.

Wanna know how I know that Hitlery for Veep talk is nonsense?

From Yahoo!'s The Ticket:

Bill Clinton criticizes Obama’s Bain attacks, praises Romney’s career

Beware the eye in the sky and the one underfoot.

Let's hope and pray these are only used to get the bad guys...




From Wired.com:

This Rock Could Spy on You for Decades

 America is supposed to wind down its war in Afghanistan by 2014. But U.S. forces may continue to track Afghans for years after the conflict is officially done. Palm-sized sensors, developed for the American military, will remain littered across the Afghan countryside — detecting anyone who moves nearby and reporting their locations back to a remote headquarters. Some of these surveillance tools could be buried in the ground, all-but-unnoticeable by passersby. Others might be disguised as rocks, with wafer-sized, solar-rechargeable batteries that could enable the sensors’ operation for perhaps as long as two decades, if their makers are to be believed.

Traditionally, when armies clash, they leave behind a horrific legacy: leftover mines which can blow civilians apart long after the shooting war is over. These “unattended ground sensors,” or UGSs, won’t do that kind of damage. But they could give the Pentagon an enduring ability to monitor a one-time battlefield long, long after regular American forces are supposed to have returned home.

“Were going to leave behind a lot of special operators in Afghanistan. And they need the kind of capability that’s easy to put out so they can monitor a village without a lot of overt U.S.-made material on pathways and roadways,” says Matt Plyburn, an executive at Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contractor.

The U.S. military has used unattended ground sensors in one form or another since 1966, when American forces dropped acoustic monitors on the Ho Chi Minh trail. Tens of thousands of UGSs have been emplaced around Afghanistan and Iraq, forming electronic perimeters around combat outposts and keeping tabs on remote locations. It’s a way to monitor the largest possible area with the smallest number of troops.

“You use them to cover up your dead space — the areas you’re concerned about but can’t cover with other ISR [intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance] assets,” says Lt. Col. Matt Russell, an Army program manager overseeing the deployment of unattended sensors.

But earlier UGSs — even ones of the recent past — were relatively large and clunky, prone to false alarms, and had lifespans measurable in days or weeks. “What we found in the field was significant under-usage,” Russell tells Danger Room. Plans to incorporate them into every combat brigade fizzled as the Army’s proposed $200 billion revamp, Future Combat Systems, went south.

The new models are dramatically smaller and consume far less power, enabling them to operate for months — maybe even years — at a time with only the slimmest chance of being detected. Lockheed calls them “field and forget” systems for “persistent surveillance.”

And they won’t just be used overseas. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol today employs more than 7,500 UGSs on the Mexican border to spot illegal migrants. Defense contractors believe one of the biggest markets for the next generation of the sensors will be here at home.

“They could be used for border security or even around corporate headquarters,” Plyburn tells Danger Room.

They could even be used to monitor people going into and out of Catholic churches.

  In early 2011, commanders in Afghanistan issued an “urgent operational needs statement” for better sensors. In response, the Army shipped a new line of about 1,500 “expendable” UGSs to the warzone. The size of a few stacked hockey pucks with a four-inch antenna, these sensors are easily hidden, and can “pick up wheels or footprints” for up to three months at a time, Russell says. It’s a perfect surveillance tool for the remote valleys of eastern Afghanistan.

Soon, when one of the sensors picks up a signal, it’ll queue a spy blimp to focus in on the spot. “That’s a capability coming to a theater near you soon,” he adds.

Even more sophisticated are the UGSs being tested northeast of Norfolk, Virginia, at a Lockheed proving ground. Arrays of up to 50 palm-sized acoustic and seismic sensors form a mesh network. When one sensor detects a person or a vehicle passing by, it uses unlicensed radio frequency bands to pass an alert from one node to the next. The alert finally hits a communications gateway, which can send the signal via satellite, tactical radio network, or Wi-Fi to a command and control center. That signal can tip off additional sensors — or it can send a Twitter-like message to an intelligence officer’s phone or tablet.

When they’re not picking up signals or passing along messages, the sensors are all-but-shut-down, barely consuming any power. That allows them to last for weeks, buried underground. Or the sensors can be encased in hollow “rocks” equipped with miniature solar panels. A quick recharge from the sun will allow the sensor to “get through the night anywhere on Earth that U.S. forces operate,” says Plyburn.

Plyburn claims that the sensor’s battery, about the size of a postage stamp, has been able to go through 80,000 recharges, compared to a few hundred cycles for a typical lithium-ion battery. Even if he’s off by a factor of 10, the sensor’s battery could keep the machine operational for nearly twenty-two years.

Russell is skeptical of these assertions of longevity. “I’m sure there are a lot of claims by contractors,” he says. “My experience is: the longer the lifespan, the bigger the battery.”

Nor does Lockheed currently have a contract with Defense Department to mass-produce the sensors. But Plyburn says there has been interest around the armed forces, especially since the system is relatively cheap. Plyburn says each sensor could cost as little as $1,000 each — practically expendable for a military paying $80,000 for a single guided artillery round.

Lockheed isn’t the only company claiming that its sensors can operate for years on end. U.S. Special Operations Command has handed out at least $12 million in UGS contracts to tiny Camgian Microsystems, based out of Starksville, Mississippi. Company CEO Gary Butler, who spent years developing ultra-low power integrated circuits for Darpa, was awarded in March a patent for such a next-gen unattended sensor suite.

Rather than relaying alerts from node to node, each of Butler’s sensors is designed to send signals directly to a satellite — speeding up notifications, and cutting down on power consumed. Rather than a simple acoustic or seismic detector, the sensor relies a steerable, phased-array radar and moving-target indicator algorithms. That could give it a much greater ability to detect people and vehicles on the run. High-powered solar cells provide will enable up to “500,000 recharge cycles” could give the sensor a “10-20 year life,” according to the patent.

Butler won’t say how U.S. special operators are using his research, if at all. But when I ask him about the possibility of leaving UGS networks behind after American troops have officially left, Butler calls that “plausible. Very Plausible.”

Camgian’s patent claims that the sensor’s ease-of-use and small size means it “is easily emplaced in difficult areas, using airborne assets such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.” Edward Carapezza, who has been overseeing UGS research for more than two decades, says drones are already dropping unattended sensors into hostile locations.

“In certain areas, we certainly are using unmanned vehicles and unattended sensors together,” says Carapezza, who now works at the defense contractor General Atomics. He declined to name where these operations were being conducted. He simply gave the rationale for the missions. “Instead of sending patrols of our guys in, we send in drones and unattended sensors — dropping arrays, locating bad guys, and then putting weapons on target.”

The “MicroObserver” UGS from defense contractor Textron has been in the field since 2008. The U.S. Army is currently using the sensors in Afghanistan. “Another customer — we’re not allowed to say who or where — used it as part of a comprehensive border security program in a Middle Eastern country,” says Patty Shafer, a Textron executive.

Textron’s seismic sensors come in two varieties. The smaller, three inch-long model, weighing 1.4 pounds, will last about a month. The bigger system, a 4.4 pound spike, can be buried in the ground and gather intelligence for more than two years. It can detect and characterize people from 100 meters away, and vehicles from three times that distance, Shafer says. A conformal antenna allows it to communicate with a gateway five kilometers away.

Northrop Grumman employs a family of sensors for its Scorpion surveillance network.




“Seismic sensors work well detecting vehicles on bumpy roads, but lose range as the road becomes smoother, or the vehicle lighter. Typically, magnetic sensors sense only large vehicles at fairly short distances. The range of acoustic sensors depends upon environmental conditions such as humidity and surroundings. Most sense engine exhaust noise or other periodic pulse trains and measure the period to determine numbers of cylinders and classify the source,” explains a Northrop presentation to an academic conference on unattended sensors.

The Army has purchased over a thousand of the original versions, with an average of four sensors, each. The vast majority have been sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. Another 20 Scorpion II systems were recently bought by the Army Research Lab. The sensors can today spot people from 800 meters away, and vehicles from 2,100 meters. The sensors’ batteries wear out after a month.

These might have been eye-popping results, not long ago. But the U.S. military now has plans to keep its network of tiny, hidden spies going for much longer than that.

Phil Mushnick knows we're awash in race hypocrisy. Do you?

America's last real sports columnist took a shot [Oops!] at the soon-to-be Brooklyn Nets and what promises to be a new low in marketing thuggery to young white suburban boys. Naturally, he was called a racist.

Just as naturally, the name-callers conveniently ignored Mr. Mushnick's long career that is totally bereft of racism. I'm guessing Phil realizes these ass-clowns [the real racists, that is] are merely using the ultimate modern slur to protect their future bottom line.

I'm also betting Phil doesn't give a rat's ass.


Here's the offending snippet from a May 4 column entitled...



Don't rely on media to evaluate bad behavior


Nets on Jay-Z track
As long as the Nets are allowing Jay-Z to call their marketing shots — what a shock that he chose black and white as the new team colors to stress, as the Nets explained, their new “urban” home — why not have him apply the full Jay-Z treatment?

Why the Brooklyn Nets when they can be the New York N------s? The cheerleaders could be the Brooklyn B----hes or Hoes. Team logo? A 9 mm with hollow-tip shell casings strewn beneath. Wanna be Jay-Z hip? Then go all the way!

“I guess I won’t need my color TV anymore now that the Nets will be wearing black and white,’’ writes reader John Lynch.

And reader David Distefano now wonders what’s left for the Nets to choose as “their alternate third-uniform to sell during nationally televised games.”

The war on Catholicism continues apace...

If it's good enough for the jug-eared Commie-In-Chief, it's good enough for a few thugs playing Indians. [Does Elizabeth Warren have an alibi for the night in question?]

From AP via Yahoo! News:

California church vandalized; artifacts damaged

 Vandalism at a historic Central California church that held artifacts from the 1700s is being investigated as a possible hate crime because anti-church graffiti and symbols were scrawled on the walls, police said.

Vandals struck at the Holy Cross Church in Santa Cruz before dawn Sunday. Windows were shattered by rocks, and paint was sprayed and poured on doors, walls and statues, according to Santa Cruz police spokesman Zach Friend.

The Roman Catholic Parish of Holy Cross is the home of Mission Santa Cruz, which was founded in 1791 as the 12th link in the chain of 21 Franciscan missions stretching from San Diego to Sonoma.

Among the damaged items was a baptismal font brought to Santa Cruz by Father Junipero Serra, who founded the mission system in California. The artifact was broken into several pieces, and it's unclear if it can be repaired, said Warren Hoy, spokesman for the Diocese of Monterey.

Phrases scrawled by the vandals, including "This is Ohlone land" and "This was made by slaves," appeared to refer to the history of the missions, many of which were built on land native to the Ohlone Indians. The culture clash decimated Ohlone power and the population in the region in the late 18th century.

The damage from the vandalism spread across the main church, the church museum, an adjacent home serving pregnant women and a garden area. Someone also climbed on a roof to spray-paint the church's bell tower.

The Holy Cross Church has been the target of minor vandalism in the past because of its mission history, but nothing on this scale, Hoy said.

Staff and volunteers have managed to clean off much of the paint, and officials were waiting Tuesday for repair costs on damage to statues and the baptismal font, he said.

Police are reviewing surveillance footage, which caught at least one person on video.

 

Ex-Rep. Artur Davis slips his shackles and bolts the plantation.

Golly, the slave masters are pissed off. You can tell because they are trying to laugh it off.

From The Atlantic Wire via Yahoo! News:

Media WIll Have One Less 'Diassatisfied Dem' After Artur Davis Switches to the GOP

 The long rumored news that former Democratic congressman Artur Davis is considering a Congressional run as a Republican means journalists will have to find a new go-to guy to fill the role of "dissatisfied black Democratic critic of President Obama." Davis was a prominent supporter of Obama in 2008, but then voted against the health care reform in early 2010, and went on to run for governor in Alabama (he lost in the Democratic primary) later that year. Since then, he's been a reliable Obama critic when he. Buzzfeed's Rosie Gray reports that he's considering a congressional bid in Virginia as a Republican. The New Republic's Alec MacGillis greeted the news Tuesday on Twitter, sarcastically, writing, "What? The same guy quoted constantly as unnamed 'concerned Dem'? No!" 

Davis was one of the guys who helped bring us Dumbo The Presphant. He seconded his nomination at 2008's convention. [An Asian presiphant, of course. An African presiphant would be racist.]

 Indeed. Journalists tell stories and stories need characters, so journalists often cast sources into certain roles as a matter of convenience. "Black Democratic critic of Obama" is quite the political casting call, and Davis has been a useful go-to over the years, as MacGillis hinted. We can't speak to the instances where he spoke as an unnamed source, but there are plenty of examples in recent political coverage where he's served the role of an on-the-record dissatisfied Democrat. Here are a few:

• Just yesterday, Buzzfeed's Gray wrote a story headlined, "Black Democratic Stars Prove Fickle Allies For Obama" and Davis featured prominently. "I’m not involved in supporting the Obama campaign,” he told her, complaining about the way they greeted his deviance from party lines of late. 
• Last month, The Hill wrote a piece about Democrats with "buyers remorse" over health care. Davis was quoted saying, "I think the Affordable Care Act is the single least popular piece of major domestic legislation in the last 70 years. It was not popular when it passed; it’s less popular now." The quote got a fair amount of play through the news cycle as evidence of internal strife in the Democratic Party.
• In February, Politico's Jonathan Allen declared that Obama's disagreement with the Catholic Church over contraception policy marked the return of the culture wars, and Allen quoted Davis, noting that he'd been "a big Obama supporter during the 2008 Democratic presidential primary." Davis wrote, "In one swoop, they have handed Republicans grounds to galvanize evangelicals and more conservative Catholics, and they have badly discomfited Catholic [Democratic] candidates like Tim Kaine and Bob Casey."
• Also in February, Politico noted that race issues surrounding the president had made a comeback, and there was Davis, warning the campaign not to use the race card. "I think it's a huge mistake. I think it's a tactic that's likely to backfire, and I think it's something that accusing people of racism ultimately damages Obama's interest..." he said.

So Davis has gotten a fair amount of political press for a former Congressman who isn't currently running for office, but don't expect that to last. "Republican critic of Obama" gives what he says a lot less inherent news value. But is a lot nicer than what Davis said about his political standing following his humiliating loss in Alabama's Democratic gubernatorial primary: "A candidate that fails across-the-board like that obviously needs to find something else productive to do with his life."