Mobtown Shank

Today: SoWeBo!

SoWeBo Today! Sunday, May 30
11AM - 9PM. Hollins Market Area. SoWeBo, Baltimore.

Here are the band schedules:

Bohemian Stage
1:00 - Grace International Church
2:15 - Remnants
3:30- Caleb Stine
4:45 -Rico
6:00 - Shook
7:15 - Great Divide

Rise Up Stage
11-12 - Breakdance showdown on the street
12:00 - K.O.E.
1:15 - Gizmo
2:30 - John Lee
3:45 - Higher Hands
5:00 - Pasadena
5:45 - The Scarborough Sideshow
6:15 - The Grilled Lincolns
7:30 - Sweet Leda

Get Down Stage
12:30 - Bond and Bently
1:45 - Kerq
3:00 - Keefe Rocket
4:15 - Summercoat
5:30 - Lazlo Lee and the Motherless Children www
6:45 - East Toast

BP Stops Gulf Leak With Help Of Government (Media Leak That Is)

Okay, so maybe BP sucks at plugging oil leaks.

And maybe the local and federal government sucks at forcing BP to plug its oil leaks.

But at least the can work together and stop some kind of leak - the media.

The oil is still gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. It's just that we aren't being allowed to see it.

As BP makes its latest attempt to plug its gushing oil well, news photographers are complaining that their efforts to document the slow-motion disaster in the Gulf of Mexico are being thwarted by local and federal officials—working with BP—who are blocking access to the sites where the effects of the spill are most visible. More than a month into the disaster, a host of anecdotal evidence is emerging from reporters, photographers, and TV crews in which BP and Coast Guard officials explicitly target members of the media, restricting and denying them access to oil-covered beaches, staging areas for clean-up efforts, and even flyovers.

Whose country is this again? Who does the government represent, again?

Source.

ShankTV: Repubs Freak Over DADT Repeal

Last night, the House passed a repeal of the flawed and discriminatory Don't Ask/Don't Tell military policy.

But not before Republicans had a chance to reveal themselves as a bunch of hysterical, backward thinking dumbasses.

Man, these guys REALLY hate gays.

Oh, and there's shit like this too. Seriously? SERIOUSLY?!!

More.

Okay, so now that we have DADT squared away, could we maybe focus on forcing BP to stop the millions of gallons of oil that are still leaking into the Gulf of Mexico and to clean up the mess?

Obama Administration Backs Pedophiles

It is better to not take a side than to side with villains.

Here, Obama is siding with villains in an obvious attempt to suck up to Catholics.

Which, by the way, won't work.

The Obama administration has made a rare foray into the Catholic sexual abuse crisis, backing the Vatican's claim it is immune to lawsuits in the U.S. because it is a sovereign nation.

Source.

NC Repubs Loves Them A Freak

Meet Tim D'Annunzio.

He's the leading Republican (and Tea Party) Candidate for Congress in North Carolina (he's heading into a run off election, but he received a majority of the vote).

This is the candidate who held a "Machine Gun Social and Fundraiser" in Charlotte.

He is a supposed "libertarian" Republican who thinks a woman doesn't have the right to decide what goes on with her body.

He, despite the current Gulf of Mexico/BP oil disaster, is in favor of offshore drilling and believes it needs to be deregulated to encourage more of it.

He wants to abolish the Department of Education.

He wants to abolish the Department of Health & Human Services.

He wants to abolish the Department of Agriculture.

He wants to abolish the Department of Labor.

He wants to abolish the Department of Treasury.

He wants to abolish the Department of Interior.

He wants to abolish the Department of Energy.

He wants to abolish the Department of Transportation.

He wants to abolish the Department of Housing & Urban Development.

He wants to abolish the Department of Homeland Security.

He believes states should take over Social Security and Medicare.

He wants to eliminate the IRS.

Now all of this stuff, while stupid, is not particularly strange for a Tea Bagger to believe (even the hypocritical bit about being anti-abortion and still thinking you're some kind of "libertarian".)

No, that's not the weird stuff.

This is the weird stuff.

He believes he is the messiah.

He believes the Ark of the Covenant exists in Arizona.

He can raise people from the dead.

God is going to establish the New Jerusalem in Greenland via a 1,000 mile high pyramid.

This, folks, is Tim D'Annunzio - the man who won the most votes in the North Carolina Republican primary.

Source.

Tonight! Charles Village Meeting With Wal-Mart Developers

The Charles Village Civic Association
May 26: General CVCA Membership Meeting
7:00 PM., Saints Philips & James Church
2801 Charles Street

The 25th St. Station/Wal-Mart Developers will once again be meeting with the Charles Village Civic Association (CVCA).

The CVCA (a membership-based community association) meeting is open to the public.

Be sure to attend and force the developers to address your questions and concerns.

Remember, on the CVCA website, it says:
"Shop Local -- Help Keep Our Neighborhood Strong!"

Tonight is a fine opportunity to find out how this 25th St. Station fits in to that philosophy.

The Charles Village Civic Association
May 26: General CVCA Membership Meeting
7:00 PM., Saints Philips & James Church
2801 Charles Street

The 25th St. Station/Wal-Mart Developers will once again be meeting with the Charles Village Civic Association (CVCA).

The CVCA (a membership-based community association) meeting is open to the public.

Be sure to attend and force the developers to address your questions and concerns.

Remember, on the CVCA website, it says:
"Shop Local -- Help Keep Our Neighborhood Strong!"

Tonight is a fine opportunity to find out how this 25th St. Station fits in to that philosophy.

Tracking: Dan Higgs' Say God

by Brian Dubin

SAY GOD - DANIEL HIGGS
This might be my favorite Daniel Higgs album. I had been seeing him play a bunch in Baltimore and he was playing these really amazing songs. And all of them are on this album. It has a very interesting feel to it, the album that is.

The first song "Hoofprints on the Ceiling of Your Mind" is a sort of drone with Higgs speaking/chanting/singing over it and he really pulls you into the song and it puts you in an almost trance-like state. I loved watching him play that song live. It's really otherworldly in the best possible way.

The next song, "Song for Azariah" is an instrumental banjo song which is quite amazing as well. Daniel Higgs is an incredibly diverse and fascinating musician and person.

I think his personality/beliefs/thoughts really shine through in this album, thus making it my favorite of his. So, I highly recommend picking it up. It's limited to 1,000 copies on vinyl, so get it before it's gone! Otherwise, just get the CD.

The artwork is pretty great as well.

[mp3] Hoofprints on the Ceiling of Your Mind

Said What?: Rats & Birds

overheard by Benn Ray
drawn by Noah van Sciver

Look for a brand new Said What? comic in Wednesday's B: The Paper. Available free around town.
----------------------------------------------------
Overhear something amazing? Post them in the comments section (with your email address) or email your Overheards (using this format) to: MobtownshankATatomicbooksDOTcom. It could end up as a comic strip.
Order a copy of The Shank's book I Keee You!!: A Collection Of Overheards.

ShankTV: Abstinence Chat With The Mistress

Meet eight-term Republican Rep. Mark Souder (IN) Indiana. He was elected back in the '90s as part of that "Republican Revolution".

He's long been a "family values" advocate (whatever that means), and he called for Clinton to resign because of the Lewinsky sex scandal back in the late '90s.

And here's a pro-abstinence education video he shot.


The woman in the video? That's his mistress.

The hypocrite has resigned from Congress.

What Kind Of Tea Have They Been Drinking?

So what do the Tea Party folks believe?

Here are 10 things that Tea Baggers believe to be true even though they have been completely disproved from John Amato and David Neiwert's upcoming book, Over the Cliff: How Obama’s Election Drove the American Right Insane.

The numbers of things that the American Right -- embodied in its wildly popular new “grassroots” Tea Party movement – believes but that are provably untrue is actually a pretty long list. But we’ve put together the Top 10, listed by importance in their increasingly Planet Bizarro-like worldview:

1. The birth-certificate conspiracy. Reality: Not even official birth certificates from Hawaii, newspaper clippings from 1961, and the testimony of state officials will convince the true-blue Tea Partiers. Which is why WorldNetDaily’s Joseph Farah lectured the National Tea Party Convention for an hour about the “truth” of the birth-certificate story.

2. Death panels. Reality: PolitiFact named Sarah Palin’s Facebook invention its “Lie of the Year,” and the belief was thoroughly exposed as a falsehood by every news network (even Fox). Yet Palin still insists that the panels exist somewhere in the health-care reform bill that was signed into law, its actual language notwithstanding.

3. Obama is a Muslim/Socialist/Fascist. Glenn Beck’s fantasy of the week -- one week Obama was a Socialist, the next he was a Communist, then a Fascist. Then it was on to Marxism and Maoism -- was avidly adopted by sign-bearing fans at Tea Party gatherings, who sometimes shared Beck’s confusion by just calling Obama All of the Above. Reality: Give us a break. Obama’s self-evident cautious centrism, embodied by his health-care reform package stripped of a public option, as well as his more recent embrace of a limited offshore drilling program, has infuriated liberals in his party -- but it hasn’t stopped Tea Partiers from denouncing the president as a radical anyway.

4. Obama is going to take away our guns. Well, the NRA managed to scare a whole lot of people into buying up every gun and piece of ammunition in sight the first year or so after Obama’s election. And at least five police officers died because the suspects they were arresting feared Obama was going to take away their guns. But Obama not only has adhered to his promise not to address gun-control issues, there hasn’t been even a breath of it from his administration. Which, of course, just makes the paranoids that much more paranoid: It’s proof that he’s really up to something.

5. Obama is raising our taxes. Reality: Obama lowered taxes for 95 percent of working Americans in his first year in office. But, you know, he’s a liberal Democrat – and for true-blue right-wing folks, that ALWAYS means a tax hike.

6. Fascism is a left-wing phenomenon. We can thank Jonah Goldberg -- with a big assist from Beck -- for the popularity of this one, even though Goldberg’s thesis has been demolished and angrily dismissed by academic historians. It’s especially come in handy for Tea Partiers with Obama-as-Hitler signs, who are not impressed by those pointy-headed professorial types anyway.

7. Global warming is a hoax. So Sean Hannity assures us, citing the Climategate brouhaha -- which was itself shown largely to be a hoax of its own. Meanwhile, the world’s ocean levels keep rising, and glaciers and the polar ice cap keep receding -- regardless of the endless words thrown up denying that they are.

8. Some 16,000 new IRS agents will enforce the new health care reform act by throwing you in jail. Reality: The IRS is actually only increasing its spending in the coming budget year as it normally would -- but some Republican operatives decided to figure out how many positions its increased budget would buy, and came up with 16,000, a figure that then became gospel on Newt Gingrich’s lips. According to the same mythmakers, this nonexistent new army of health care police was going to start throwing people in jail if they failed to buy health insurance -- though in fact, the only penalties contemplated for such failures are fines and taxes.

9. Two million people were at the 9/12 March on Washington. At the culmination of a monthlong promotion (highlighted by a national Tea Party Express bus tour) by Beck and Fox News, about 70,000 people gathered on the National Mall on September 12 to protest. Beck cited an erroneous early report that over a million had shown up. Later that grew to be two million, the figure now commonly cited by Tea Party leaders as evidence of their tremendous numerical force.

10. The Tea Parties are a non-partisan, broad grassroots movement. Sure, if by non-partisan you mean rabidly paleo-conservative, to the point of even dismissing Republicans, and by grassroots you mean fake populism organized and whipped up by the most popular cable-news network on television, with a heaping helping of corporate financing.

Tea Party folks and their defenders also want to believe that they’re just ordinary Americans who want to be serious about helping their country. But it’s pretty hard to fit that description when you embrace plain old nuttiness.

The biggest threat to the Tea Party? Reality.

Kind of make sense that they're also Republicans then, since Republicans also have "reality issues".

Read more about the book.