First Draft

Weekend Question Thread

Pet peeves?

For me: Little ANGRY yappy dogs like the one the crackhead neighbors have. Bitching about one's spouse in public. And indecisive driving. Pick a lane and stick with it, for God's sakes.

A.

Saturday Blogwhoring Thread

Post away.

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Cash My Checks & Place My Bets: Friday Night Galactica Vid

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From Whence The Ongoing Freakout Came

Reading around, I see a lot of ZOMG HILLARY and ZOMG THIS TREASURY DUDE and insta-analysis and joy or disappointment and predications about what this REALLY MEANS for the coming Obama presidency which seems like it's in its fifth year already, is how this is stretching out. I'm almost happy the holidays are almost here, because even though I'm not done with my shopping it will give all the crack squirrels in the world something to do other than freak out about this appointment versus that one.

Part of it's that there isn't an Obama presidency yet. Part of it's that there's so much speculation about who's gonna do what; part of it's that we're trying to figure out what we thought about Obama was true and what was some combination of adrenaline, alcohol and projection. Part of it's that unlike during the campaign, we're all just watching now. You can't go door-to-door to get Richardson made Secretary of Commerce. Well, you can, but people will stare at you funny.

Part of it, of though, is that we're simply not used to having a president whose intelligence and decisions we can trust. It's not about whether you trust Obama, it's not even about whether he's trustworthy. Opinions on that can differ and only time will tell. It's about whether you can be rewired to give anybody in this job the barest amount of the benefit of the doubt ever again.

I mean, for eight years we have basically had a president we were afraid was gonna sit on the button. We had this chewy little asshole who every time he opened his mouth caused an international incident, who couldn't pick up the phone without almost burning the place down. He and his people gave us absolutely no indication we could stop paying attention for a second because if this was the shit they did while we were watching, I mean, good God. It was like watching a guy juggle fire, and not well, and for eight years.

It's gonna take us a minute to stop jumping every time the phone rings.

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Quitting Time Booster Shot

- Here’s a perfect example of why letting computers do the work for you might not always be the best idea. Usually database pairing of ads with a story works. Here, not so much. “Hey, there was just a school shooting in Savannah! I wonder what it’d be like to go down there and enjoy the trolley!”

- From the “Think, verify, then report” department: I wonder how many times people are going to get all sexed up by some Web site that tells them some “insider” information before they start to realize that an internet connection and a cursory class on PhotoShop can set up an “Insta-Hoax” in about 20 minutes. First rule of journalism: If your mother says she loves you, go check it out. Internet corollary: Ask mom. Don’t look it up on a Wikipedia…

- Of course you didn’t always need the internet to put on a good hoax. This one was officially debunked today in 1953.

- MTV finally did something we all had been hoping they’d do for about five years now.  Still, it’s one of the coolest databases ever.  Of course, you’ve likely been looking for (and finding) most of this stuff on YouTube, but hey, let’s not be upset that MTV’s coming late to the party and be grateful they showed up at all. Of the 16,000+ videos uploaded, they’ve yet to add this classic, which I remember watching at my grandmother’s house eons ago when she had cable and we didn’t.

- Sadly, it seems post-West Wing work is kind of hard to find these days for Aaron Sorkin’s acting troupe. Saw Toby (Richard Schiff) as a soon-to-be-dead guy on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and last night Will (Joshua Malina) was pooping in a dish for the woman he loves on Gray’s Anatomy.

- Then again, it could be worse…

- And finally, here’s your one-stop shopping site for governmental stupidity. Enjoy…

Thanks for letting me share your air. See you next Friday.

Doc

Hurricane Ike dead thought to remain in debris

The Houston Chronicle has an article on Governor Perry's outrage that Texas is not getting the same level of FEMA reimbursement for debris removal that Louisiana received after Hurricane Katrina because Texas has a budget surplus. One common similarity though with Louisiana's post Katrina experience is this which is found at the end of the article:

Former Harris County Judge Robert Eckels, who will chair the new disaster recovery commission, said Chambers County is in particular need of help. Debris piles stretch for miles in some areas, he said.

Chambers County Commissioner Mark Huddleston, who attended the news conference, said it's likely that bodies are in some of those piles. Residents continue to contact the county seeking news of loved ones who have been missing since the hurricane, Huddleston said. (my emphasis)

I know it is arduous and dangerous work to search debris and reclaim victim remains and sometimes the task is impossible. Yet somehow I would have expected an advanced society and great nation to put forth a good faith effort to see this through. As with Katrina it appears once again that is not the case....

Despite pleas, the task of recovering remains has been slow, if not altogether absent in some remote areas.

SNIP

State game wardens, volunteers with trained cadaver dogs and others have worked for weeks to search remote debris sites and flag areas that possibly hold human remains. But four weeks after the storm, no one has been able to excavate so-called “hot spots” identified by dogs.

It's a very sad reality that there still appears to  be a gap between the heroic efforts of cadaver dog  teams and the reclaiming of victim's remains.

The Laura Recovery Center still lists 55 people as missing after Hurricane Ike.

"Minimally Adequate"

Monster.com did a series of commercials in the late 1990s that tried to capture the sense of how you likely didn’t want to be whatever it is you turned out to be. (The kid who says “I want to claw my way up to middle management” was one of my favorites in that commercial.) The commercials were funny and sad at the same time because you really couldn’t imagine yourself ever saying anything close to that when you were a kid. You wanted to be a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, a firefighter, an astronaut or other things we all think about when we’re kids. Yet, some of us ended up just like the kids said, arguing with the jackass in the next cubicle about who stole whose stapler.

I thought about that commercial today while reading something a friend sent me about a movement in South Carolina to change the state’s constitution. Apparently, 1895 Jim-Crow-style language argued that every kid had a right to a “minimally adequate” education. It’s been more than 110 years since that’s been written and yet “minimally adequate” still controls the dice in that state.

I go back to that Monster ad in my head and find myself imagining the dinner conversation at a typical SC house:

Mom: Did you get your minimally adequate education today, son?
Son: Yes, Maw, I did. We learned about nouns. Next semester, it’s verbs!
Mom: Hell, son, if you don’t quit now, you’ll get adjectives and such next year as a senior.

It’s not funny and I’m glad to see that some people are taking a run at this thing, trying to force the state to take education more seriously in the state. Still I worry that in a time in which education is more important than it’s ever been, conditions for teachers still lead to heavy burnout, thanks to low pay, bad classroom conditions and an assortment of other problems. 

Part of the reason is that people believe “if it was good enough for me…” which is so far from true anymore it’s not even funny. (Hey, if that’s true, why aren’t we doing math with slide rules any more or exposing the kids to asbestos, mimeograph machine chemicals and ruler-toting nuns who have a license to kill?) The other part of the reason is the argument that A made earlier in the election season:   It’s easier to tell people, “This will cost money” and create an immediate threat (I have no money, this will cost money, this will not immediately help me feed my family. Screw funding the schools.) than it is to convince them of a more nuanced argument (If you pump money in to the kids, they’ll get smarter. When they grow up and use those smarts, we’ll have better innovation, the economy will improve and we’ll be better at what we do. Also, we won’t be looking up the ass of every other country on the planet when it comes to financial and sociological conditions, but it’s going to take some time.).

A long time ago, I told my father I wanted to work in the same factory he was working in. It was the same one his father and his father before him had worked in. Dad said no, you’re getting an education, a demand for which I’ve never ceased to be grateful. I know what a good education can create for children and I know what the lack of one can yield as well. Because of that, I feel horrible for the kids at those  “minimally exceptional” schools taught by the “vaguely adequate and underpaid educators.”

In this world of slashed workforces and crashed economies, they don't have a chance.

Not even at clawing their way up to middle management.

'Students May Not Know Your Political View'

Good Christ. Forget Obama vs. McCain or even Bush vs. Kerry, this is the part of the story that stood out to me:

"As per the Code of Ethics and the above state School Board policy, students may not know your political view," it continued. "This could be construed as using your position to influence others. It is my expectation, that in the future as you teach students to clarify and express their own political views, you will remain neutral."

Because while I get that you wouldn't want to turn every day of school into Political Debate Day, nor oppress your kids or silence them, I also hate this current thing of saying the very act of discussing your politics is somehow inappropriate. Exactly whose education does that serve?

Maybe I was just massively spoiled in my teachers; I had an algebra teacher who, realizing that most of us in the class were stupendously uninterested in math, would bring in the Chicago Tribune and read it to us at the start of session each day. During the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. And believe me, there was a range of opinion and never once did Mr. R shy away from either telling us what he thought or inviting us to intellectually kick his ass if we thought he was wrong. Since he thought Anita Hill was lying, there were plenty of students who did think he was wrong and around and around we went. I didn't learn shit about algebra that year but I learned a lot about how to live in the world, and to be honest, this is why calculators were invented.

My best teachers taught that way: stand on your feet and use your mind. Defeat me in an argument. Just because I'm standing here with a ruler and you're sitting there with a bookbag doesn't mean you can't be right and I can't be wrong, but prove it. Think. It made a lot of us into people who didn't take any shit from anybody, who wouldn't let somebody get away with something just because he has a name tag on. I can see where that would seem like heresy to people invested in the idea of unearned authority, but it's never steered me wrong yet.

And yes, I would feel this way if it was the day after 2004 and the teacher had shown up wearing a Bush t-shirt, if he invited discussion and welcomed debate. Not talking about our beliefs gets us nowhere. Dishonesty (and boy can kids ever pick up on false neutrality as a chickenass move, let me tell you) gets us nowhere. We have to have the modicum of respect for each other that says, "I can tell you what I believe without you having to feel threatened by it." Simple expression of one's views is not coercion.

A.

Friday Ferretblogging

This is why we put up with them trashing our couch, chewing on flowers, shredding research notes, climbing inside briefcases, and generally making smelly, unholy pests of themselves. This right here.

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Happy Obama Photo: Georgia Edition

"Anybody kind of sad the election's over? Kind of got that day-after-Christmas feeling? Well guess what, bitches? It's STILL election season! GOTV!"

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And Through The Bars That Hid The Stars

I know not whether Laws be right,
Or whether Laws be wrong;
All that we know who lie in gaol
Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year,
A year whose days are long.
--Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol

Someday we'll be asked why they hate us:

Even in a courtroom that was closed to the public and the press, and with the detainees allowed access to the proceedings only by telephone, the court could find no reason to hold these men. This decision makes it clear once again that even with presumptions in its favor, the government cannot muster the barest evidence in support of its arbitrary detentions. For seven years, the Bush administration sought to avoid the courts because it had no evidence and sought instead to create a lawless prison.

They created a lawless prison. If I had to sum up the past eight years in a single sentence that would be it. They created a lawless prison. And I'm not talking about Guantanamo. I'm not talking about Guantanamo at all.

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For The Love of Steve: Health Beat!

Mr. A and I have a bet going. Not really a bet. More like a prediction game. A depressing one. A depressing prediction game that's also kind of a drinking game, except that we can't do it for more than one newscast or we'll go blind.

Game goes like this. Is tonight's HEALTHBEAT or YOUR HEALTH or whatever asinine "medical" segment the affiliate comes up with going to be about a) liposuction b) fad diets or c) erectile dysfunction, or will they pull a wild card and go with a breast enlargement story just so they can say the word BREAST on TV in that ponderous Anchorman voice?

Seriously, try it with your local news sometime. It's instructive. Tonight we both lost, because the story was about how to get really awesome eyelashes:

The real thing is hard to beat. But now there may be a way to get lashes to grow on their own, no matter what your age.

Never mind the fact that eyelashes have a real purpose - to protect the eye from dust and other foreign particles. Eyelashes, for many people, are also a symbol of beauty. But as we age, eyelashes seem to grow scarce.

So it's no wonder women are now batting their eyes at an anti-glaucoma medication with the unusual side effect of making lashes grow. But, how safe is it?

Apparently it's not so unsafe that the TV station felt uncomfortable appending the contact info for a doctor who will give it to you, as well as the manufacturer's web site, at the end of the "health" story.

I mean, I'm sorry, I know I'm supposed to be off killing journalism with my lack of attribution and my shaky ethical standards and all, but either we are radically redefining what "health" means to include cosmetics or there really is a problem in the world in that while millions are dying of AIDS, millions are also suffering from stubby, pale eyelashes.

A.

Oh My

Palin pardoned a turkey today and then did an interview while a worker slaughtered turkeys in the background....

Insert Minnesota Joke Here

Fun with ballots in the recount:

This Beltrami County voter cast their ballot for Al Franken, but also put "Lizard People" as a write-in candidate, not only in the U.S. Senate race, but for several others. The county auditor/treasurer ruled that the vote should not be counted because it's considered an overvote. Representatives for Franken challenged that decision.

Yes, I know, serious business. Shouldn't throw rocks at the Gopher Hole State from my glass house in Chicago.

But ... Lizard People?

Don't even get me started on the dude who wrote in Michelle Bachman's name for Senate. Lizard People starts to look like the smart choice.

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Mr. MBA President

 

The cynic in me wonders if there's some sort of method to the madness. Maybe they really do want the economic base to be so gutted that the incoming Obama administration is handcuffed if not fully accessorized with cement shoes.

Or maybe it's just history repeating itself--Mr. MBA and failure go way back. Indeed, his only "success," if it can be called that, came in baseball, a licensed monopoly (and even then, value was added mostly by some eminent domain arm-twisting mixed with sweetheart deals and political connections to construct a new stadium financed largely with taxpayer dollars.)

As the economy lurches towards January 20th, it looks like a fair swath of the GOP is washing their hands of the whole affair (as Krugman noted last night.), the latest example of course being their come-what-may dismissal of the domestic auto industry ... to be fair, you could hardly find a more dismal trio of industry representatives than Moe, Larry, & Curley Wagoner, Mulally, and Nardelli, but again citing Krugman, their Stoogesque performance shouldn't blind us to the potential loss of over a million jobs in the midst of an ongoing financial crisis. That's not just pouring gasoline on a fire--that's pouring gasoline onto a fire using a firehose.

Actually, the REAL cynic in me wonders if this was part of a broader plan that might well have succeeded if it hadn't blown up at the last moment in Team Bush's face. Suppose they had managed to keep a lid on things until the third week of January, 2009...Obama gets inaugurated, the wheels fall off, the incoming Democratic administration is left holding a fetid, rotting, stinking bag of failure, wingnuttiastan howls and bays about "irresponsible libruls," hacks like Cokie Roberts sing the chorus...setting the stage for 'nut "redemption" in 2012 and consignment of Obama as this century's Jimmy Carter.

Which could still happen: shoot, my own mom has taken up the wingnut chant of blaming Obama for the economic mess, even though he hasn't yet been sworn in...logic not being at all necessary, even tangentially, to the belief structure.

I guess we'll see what happens.

In The Name Of Reconciliation

Jeebus Marie:

Awarding Steve Hadley the Medal of Freedom would cost Mr. Obama nothing, save possibly a few howls from the Daily Kos. Surely it is not beyond a candidate who has already conceded that the surge has “succeeded beyond our wildest dreams” to bestow the Medal of Freedom on the public servant who made that success possible.

Erm.

Anyone remember the halcyon days of Early Bush II, when the Wall Street Journal was calling for Bush to award Bill Clinton and Al Gore medals of freedom for Kosovo? Anyone else remember that? Bueller? Bueller?

A.

Awww

Presidential kids bein' nice to each other!

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California Supreme Court agrees to hear Prop 8 challenges

Breaking news:

SAN FRANCISCO – California's highest court agreed Wednesday to hear several legal challenges to the state's new ban on same-sex marriage but refused to allow gay couples to resume marrying before it rules.

The California Supreme Court accepted three lawsuits seeking to nullify Proposition 8, a voter-approved constitutional amendment that overruled the court's decision in May that legalized gay marriage.

All three cases claim the measure abridges the civil rights of a vulnerable minority group. They argue that voters alone did not have the authority to enact such a significant constitutional change.

As is its custom when it takes up cases, the court elaborated little. However, the justices did say they want to address what effect, if any, a ruling upholding the amendment would have on the estimated 18,000 same-sex marriages that were sanctioned in California before election day.

Gay rights groups and local governments petitioning to overturn the ban were joined by the measure's sponsors and Attorney General Jerry Brown in urging the Supreme Court to consider whether Proposition 8 passes legal muster.

The initiative's opponents had also asked the court to grant a stay of the measure, which would have allowed gay marriages to begin again while the justices considered the cases. The court denied that request.

The justices directed Brown and lawyers for the Yes on 8 campaign to submit arguments by Dec. 19 on why the ballot initiative should not be nullified. It said lawyers for the plaintiffs, who include same-sex couples who did not wed before the election, must respond before Jan. 5.

full story here

Happy Kerry Photo: Full Circle Edition

All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again.

visit videodetective.com for more info

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Day of Remembrance

I wonder if Mike Huckabee knows that just this past year,  27 people were murdered because they were transgendered. Sixteen of those were in the United States,  11 from other countries. I wonder what he might say looking at the list.

Cause of death:

"beaten to death and tossed in a dumpster."

"Repeatedly beat in the head with a brick."

"stabbed to death"

"Severely beaten causing fractures to the head and face before being run over by a car."

"Was found in her apartment, she had been stabbed in the throat."

"Beaten, gang raped and stabbed then left to die in the back seat of a car."

"found next to a dumpster outside her home, had been shot and left to die."

"Drowned"

"shot in the back of the head with a 12gauge, shotgun."

"shot while sitting in a car with her brother. Her brother was also shot but survived."

"executed by Iraqi death squads"

Perhaps we can safely assume that former Governor Huckabee didn't hear about the murders of Stacy Brown, Ashley Sweeney, Adolphous Simmons, Ebony Whitaker, or Lloyd Nixon. Or the three transgender women shot by Iraqi death squads. He's been pretty busy with television appearances, so maybe he didn't read about Teish Cannon, shot to death four days ago.

And February was a while ago, and he was still campaigning, so maybe he wasn't watching a lot of national news and missed the national publicity given to the murder of Lawrence King.  After all, that was barely a month after all the fuss about Huckabee's statement equating gay marriage with bestiality, so maybe he was so busy spinning that away that he didn't notice the story about the teenager who was shot by a classmate at his junior high because he liked to wear makeup and women's jewelry.  I guess he just plain didn't notice when his opponents Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both issued formal statements on the murder.

Tomorrow is the Tenth Annual Transgender Day of Remembrance memorializing those killed due to anti-transgender hatred and prejudice. There will be services and events all across the United States and around the world. I think we can safely assume Governor Huckabee won't be attending one.

Fold up the sidewalks

If you've not yet seen David Modigliani's documentary Crawford, it can be viewed in its entirety at Hulu. Highly recommended, and entirely apropos now, during the lame-duck End of Days, and in light of the election 2008 bullcrap about Real America.

The pic above is part of a great post about Chicago real vs. Crawford real over at BAGnewsNotes.  Athenae riffed on this stuff a few days back in this post:

I'm pretty damn excited about a president who comes from where I come from, who sees cabs and bikes and elevated trains and subways and buses every day, who doesn't have an "estate" or a "compound" or a "ranch" someplace "real." People always say they want a candidate they can relate to, after all. As a girl so white she's practically transparent, I can't lay claim to a connection to history near as strong as those African-Americans who've been waiting their whole lives for a president who looks like them, but I can take a certain amount of joy in having a president who sees my skyline every day from his front sidewalk.

I'm fine with small towns, suburbs, you should do whatever you want to do. But we do America no favors when we assume the qualifications for leadership include coming from one place and not another, and we need not only diversity of race in our leaders but diversity of experiences.

By actually being "real," which for him meant being really different, and still winning the election, Obama  has potentially shifted the rules. It's a question of degrees: candidates will always be marketed and branded, there will always be stagecraft involved in the game for sure, but in post-Obama politics, there may be a "base" for whom reality is actually a plus instead of something to compensate for or disguise. Or, if not an outright plus, something that is simply what it is and nothing more. Obama served on a board with Wiliam Ayers and lived near him. Even though McCain never succeeded, even though it was flimsy, he never stopped trying to pin more than that on Obama.  He never had a choice because his role dictated it: since it was an undisputed fact that there was an Obama-Ayers connection, it was likely also factual that Obama would lie about it and McCain had to keep calling him out, even though it never stuck. Not enough people ever believed Obama was lying — about anything, much less Ayers.

Again, it's a shift, not an entirely brand new game, but it's a big shift, I'm not saying Obama isn't above kabuki, but he never occupied an entire town to try to prove he was something he wasn't.

W. bought the "western white house" in Crawford so he could appear real enough to win the 2000 election, so he could look like he was from somewhere, like he was of a certain culture. It didn't fool all of us but it worked for a lot of people. At least he looked like he was trying. Eight long years later, now that  pretty much everyone can seen through the holes in that cheap illusion, now that he's run the country into the ground just like the rest of his endeavors, now that he no longer needs it, he'll be leaving Crawford behind for the bright lights of Dallas, where I suspect he'll feel right at home.

Dallas is a rich man with a death wish in his eye.
A steel and concrete soul with a warm hearted love disguise.
A rich man who tends to believe in his own lies.
Dallas is a rich man with a death wish in his eyes.

Don't Feed It After Midnight

Mogwai!

A.

Okay, See, THIS is Why I Was Afraid of Huckabee

Because he comes across all nice and normal at first, and then opens his trap and this comes out.

Said Huckabee: "People who are homosexuals should have every right in terms of their civil rights, to be employed, to do anything they want. But that’s not really the issue. I know you talked about it and I think you got into it a little bit early on. But when we’re talking about a redefinition of an institution, that’s different than individual civil rights. We’re never going to convince each other...But here is the difference. Bull Connor was hosing people down in the streets of Alabama. John Lewis got his skull cracked on the Selma bridge."

As the ONTD commenters point out:

I didn't know that only when violence is committed against you in the manner of a hate crime, you deserve civil rights.

---

See, I was under the stupid impression that we should fight for rights for everyone BEFORE the violent deaths and beatings. Silly gays! They have it all BACKWARDS!

---

Tell that to Matthew Sheppard's parents.

There is no Suffering Olympics. I felt this way during the primaries and I feel this way now: Things that happen to you that suck do not suck less because somebody else has it worse. Nor do you get anything out of claiming that nailing YOU to the cross took longer than HIM, because your cross was made of hardwood and thus took longer and they had to use twice as many nails because you're bigger-boned and it was hotter the day you were nailed up and you're both still crucified, okay?. It's a way of shutting down argument, that whole "starving children in China don't even have brussel sprouts" thing we do on the chatter shows. This isn't a contest. You certainly don't want to win it.

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Kathleen Parker Has Left The Building

Exited right, gotten into her car, and sped off into the sunset as fast as she can drive:

Religious conservatives become defensive at any suggestion that they've had something to do with the GOP's erosion. And, though the recent Democratic sweep can be attributed in large part to a referendum on Bush and the failing economy, three long-term trends identified by Emory University's Alan Abramowitz have been devastating to the Republican Party: increasing racial diversity, declining marriage rates and changes in religious beliefs.

Suffice it to say, the Republican Party is largely comprised of white, married Christians. Anyone watching the two conventions last summer can't have missed the stark differences: One party was brimming with energy, youth and diversity; the other felt like an annual Depends sales meeting.

With the exception of Miss Alaska, of course.

Even Sarah Palin has blamed Bush policies for the GOP loss. She's not entirely wrong, but she's also part of the problem. Her recent conjecture about whether to run for president in 2012 (does anyone really doubt she will?) speaks for itself:

"I'm like, okay, God, if there is an open door for me somewhere, this is what I always pray, I'm like, don't let me miss the open door. Show me where the open door is.... And if there is an open door in (20)12 or four years later, and if it's something that is going to be good for my family, for my state, for my nation, an opportunity for me, then I'll plow through that door."

Let's do pray that God shows Alaska's governor the door.

If she thinks she got hate mail after the last time she tangled with assholes ...

But seriously, this is the same sort of thing. They're just NOW figuring out that keeping a beaten, starving, semi-rabid Siberian tiger chained to their back door and going out each day to taunt it with a chihuahua on a stick is a bad idea? Just NOW? After it's bitten their arms off? Now they're looking at the bloody stumps going, "Huh. That was dumb of me?" Now they figure this out.

I predict in about a week Parker will write another column about all the hate mail she got calling her every name in the book from supposed "Christians" and say that she is very shocked that people who call themselves Christians can behave in such an un-Christian manner. Anybody wanna take that bet? Same as the MoDo convention bet: Five bucks.

Of course, she's still a Republican:

But, like it or not, we are a diverse nation, no longer predominantly white and Christian. The change Barack Obama promised has already occurred, which is why he won.

Among Jewish voters, 78 percent went for Obama. Sixty-six percent of under-30 voters did likewise.

We'd have won this time if it wasn't for all you meddling bi-racial Jewish kids!

Via Kos.

A.

Adios, Ted Stevens

Buh bye.

If Tubes Ted wants to blow $15K of his own scratch on a recount, I say go for it. Let him and his lawyers siphon off all that Republican time and attention on his felonious ass while the Democrats get down to, you know, governing.

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Man or Woman?

Ever wonder if a blog is written by a man or woman?

Plug the url into GenderAnalyzer.

Of course for FD it came up with:

We think http://www.first-draft.com/ is written by a man (71%).

Imagine George Bush as mayor of your town

That's pretty much what it's like living in New Orleans under Ray Nagin. Only with less competence.

One small personal example: the plugged drain in front of my house is about to celebrate its first birthday, yet Nagin wants to raise taxes on residents still recovering from disaster, to pay for New Orleans' "high performing government".

Go Cheney Yourself, Joe

The most charitable possible reading of what just went down is Scalzi's:

LIEBERMAN looks around at the other men in the room, who stare at him impassively. Finally, LIEBERMAN sighs, reaches down into his pants, and detaches his TESTICLES. He raises them up to look them, wistfully, then moves to offer them to OBAMA.

OBAMA

No. Give them to Carl.

OBAMA nods toward one of the Secret Service agents, who is holding up a lunch-sized paper bag. LIEBERMAN drops the TESTICLES into the bag. CARL quickly folds the top of the bag over twice, three times, and once the TESTICLES are secure, hands the bag to OBAMA, whose takes it without looking, having kept his eyes on LIEBERMAN. OBAMA raises the bag, still looking at LIEBERMAN.

OBAMA

These are mine now. I’m keeping them for the next four years. I’m going to keep them in a drawer in the White House desk. And if at any time in the next four years there’s so much as a hint that you might do something to displease or oppose me, then I’m going to take them out, and then I’m going to take this –

(OBAMA raises a large rubber mallet he’s been hiding behind his back)

– and I’m going to turn them into pate, which I will then feed to Malia and Sasha’s puppy. Or maybe I’ll just skip all of that and give them to Rahm.

LIEBERMAN

(eyes widening in abject terror at the thought of what RAHM EMANUEL might do to the TESTICLES, if given a chance)

That’s not going to be necessary, sir.

A.

Compromise

Via Tbogg, we find another disingenuous argument:

Meanwhile, Schwenkler's larger point is especially worth keeping in mind when confronted - as pro-lifers often are - with arguments like this one, from P.J. O'Rourke:

Take just one example of our unconserved tendency to poke our noses into other people's business: abortion. Democracy--be it howsoever conservative--is a manifestation of the will of the people. We may argue with the people as a man may argue with his wife, but in the end we must submit to the fact of being married. Get a pro-life friend drunk to the truth-telling stage and ask him what happens if his 14-year-old gets knocked up. What if it's rape? Some people truly have the courage of their convictions. I don't know if I'm one of them. I might kill the baby. I will kill the boy.

If we take O'Rourke's hypothetical on its own terms, it reads as an argument for, say, a legal regime that makes abortion available to women/girls below the age of consent - and I think I speak for many pro-lifers when I say that I would gladly entertain that sort of compromise, as part of a broader package of restrictions, if we were drawing up abortion law from scratch.

No you don't. You don't speak for many pro-lifers. You don't speak for anyone who's currently causing the stalemate in our debate on this issue by standing on a clinic doorstep screaming at women that they're murdering whores. The hardcore, one-issue-voter, all-or-nothing pro-lifers state (whatever you may think of their motivations, let's take them at their word for the sake of argument) that abortion is murder of an innocent child.

So you can't make it okay to murder because the pregnant girl is 15 and not 18, you can't make it okay to murder in the case of rape, you can't make it okay to murder in the case of irreparable damage to the mother's health or even her life. If it's murder of an innocent to them, this isn't going to fix it all up nicely. And the continued attempt to find some way around having to declare that you don't, in fact, believe that women should be forced by the state to bear chlidren against their will is in fact more repulsive to me than outright opposition to abortion, because you're trying to find a way out of having to state your convictions and that's just weaselly bullshit.

You may speak for the mushy middle here, for the people who are uncomfortable with women's autonomy and with sex and with the idea of abortion, but this mealy-mouthed crap doesn't speak for anybody holding the line on the tightrope we're presently walking.

A.

The Hillary-As-Secretary-Of-State Rumors

I don't think she'd be bad at it, or the wrong choice for it; she could likely do just about any job in the new administration and do it just fine. I do not buy into the "she'll secretly sabotage Obama from HIS OWN CABINET MEETINGS!!!11!" scenario of which MoDo seems enamored. If she was gonna scuttle him she'd have done it during the campaign, plus, stupid.

I just wonder why she'd want it. She has a pretty good job now, looks to me.

Chime in on this, wouldja?

A.

Homeland Security

Heckuva job, Joe:

Dubois, IN - The Indiana National Guard says two soldiers exposed to a deadly chemical in Iraq now have cancer. The Guard is trying to contact more than 600 soldiers from the 1st Battalion, 152nd Infantry who may have been exposed to sodium dichromate.

"The Battalion Cdr (commander) was diagnosed with cancer last summer and there is another soldier who came home on leave from this deployment who has been diagnosed with rectal cancer," LTC Deedra Thombleson wrote in an email to Channel 13.

A third soldier, Sergeant First Class David Moore, died in 2008 from a mysterious illness after returning from Iraq.

Moore's daughter, 10-year-old Rylee Weisheit, squeezes a teddy bear on the front porch of a home in Dubois, Indiana. The bear has a t-shirt with her dad's picture. When she squeezes the arm, the voice of her father can be heard.

"Hi, my little sweetheart. I love you. Sleep tight and have sweet dreams. Daddy misses and loves you very much."

[snip]

Ed Blacke claims KBR knew sodium dichromate was at the plant.

"They knew about this in May," says Blacke. "Everything seemed to be focused on we made a commitment, we're going to get this done, we're going to get it done in this time frame, hell or high water, we're gonna get it done," added Blacke. "They (KBR) just had an attitude - they were focused on that finish line and they didn't care how they got there."

I read that when Jules sent it to me, then I read this:

The Senate is a collegial place, largely because any one Senator can go to great lengths to hold up virtually any piece of legislation and thus no Senator wants to get on the bad side of another Senator for want of not having their own bills obstructed. It is likely a result of this fundamental aspect of the chamber that just a small handful of Democratic Senators have gone on the record in opposing Lieberman's bid to maintain control over the Senate's oversight panel. But as the vote on his chairmanship will be secret, and thus Lieberman will not know for certain who voted against him, Lieberman's ability to retaliate against individual Senators will be greatly curtailed.

Because, okay. I get it. We're all nice friends here and it's very warm and fuzzy. JOE LIEBERMAN HELPED BUSH DO THIS. And he wanted to help John McCain make it worse. Forget all the palace intrigue and coffeehouse crap. Forget all the Agincourt language about betrayal and loyalty and whatnot.

What Joe did that's objectionable isn't that he said mean things about Barack Obama (President Badass can take it, I think) or Hillary Clinton or anybody. What Joe did was to perpetuate a fraud against the American people that led to a lot of them getting dead in increasingly horrific ways, and to this day, unlike many of his colleagues, he has yet to regret a second of it, and he's shown himself willing to do just about anything to continue being wrong. Including act like a very public asshole. Or a wingnut blogger.

Forget the RNC and every Sunday show on which he stroked his junk and talked about how only he alone among Democrats was brave enough to stand up for the above. His monumental ego and his shaky sense of party loyalty isn't my problem. Forget all that. Joe is as responsible as anyone who cozied up to Bush in 2003 for the horrors now coming home with our troops, and that's the real issue here.

A.

Happy Obama Photo

Can the blog stand four years of these?

Also, as an answer to the oidous "Chuck Norris Facts," here's some President-Elect Obama Facts.

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Big Changes

Josh:

But the point is that we've got the hood up and maybe the engine out on the national economy. That's a bad situation on a lot of fronts. But it's also the opportunity to really change things. Not just fix things on the margins but make the big changes. As long as we're talking about sums of money in the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars, let's not restrict ourselves to considering whether we throw Detroit a lifeline that keeps them in motion and employing their workers through the current recession. Maybe we need to invest 50 billion dollars in having a mass market fully electric car in five years. I don't see anybody who doesn't agree that whatever the costs of letting GM go under, that it's management who drove this company into the ditch with a lot of terrible decisions and unwillingness to change. So maybe we take GM into some sort of managed restructuring, push out management, clean out the equity holders, and use the 'company' as the vehicle for leapfrogging the US into the 21st century, non-hydrocarbon auto industry.

It always annoys the shit out of me during political campaigns when somebody will bring up a government program that costs 3 cents per capita and use it as an example of why we can't pay for education or health care or veterans' benefits or other stuff that costs so very much more that it's almost a joke. We're not capable of doing big things, is the message, we're only capable of the small, and even then, not doing it that well. It's like we all have collective amnesia about World War II and the moon landing, like we've internalized so much of the Republicans' crap about how government can't do anything so just sit and have a Cheeto feast and bitch some more that we can't even comprehend the possiblity that our national will can be focused on anything other than war.

You don't lose people as supporters because you ask them for too much. You lose them because you ask too little. Let me tell you, in every nonprofit organization I've been involved in and I'm currently up to my neck in three, it's the ones that need my help that I help. If somebody isn't ringing my bell, hell, I'm a busy girl, call me when you have a job for me to do. I think for so long our phone just hasn't rung that when we do hear the noise it might weird us out a little at first.

A.

What are they doing now?

We were talking about this at work the other day...PuppyCam

From The Department Of "It's About Fucking Time"

Thanks for everything, Dick and George.

Courtesy of reader Hell Kat, here's a story from CNN today.

An extensive federal report released Monday concludes that roughly one in four of the 697,000 U.S. veterans of the 1990-91 Gulf War suffer from Gulf War illness.

That illness is a condition now identified as the likely consequence of exposure to toxic chemicals, including pesticides and a drug administered to protect troops against nerve gas.

The 452-page report states that "scientific evidence leaves no question that Gulf War illness is a real condition with real causes and serious consequences for affected veterans."

The report, compiled by a panel of scientific experts and veterans serving on the congressionally mandated Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses, fails to identify any cure for the malady.

It also notes that few veterans afflicted with Gulf War illness have recovered over time.

   The report, titled "Gulf War Illness and the Health of Gulf War Veterans," was officially presented Monday to Secretary of Veterans Affairs James Peak. Noting that overall funding for research into Gulf War illness has declined dramatically since 2001, it calls for a "renewed federal research commitment" to "identify effective treatments for Gulf War illness and address other priority Gulf War health issues."

According to the report, Gulf War illness is a "complex of multiple concurrent symptoms" that "typically includes persistent memory and concentration problems, chronic headaches, widespread pain, gastrointestinal problems, and other chronic abnormalities."

The illness is identified as the consequence of multiple "biological alterations" affecting the brain and nervous system.

While it is sometimes difficult to issue a specific diagnosis of the disease, it is, according to the report, no longer difficult to identify a cause.

The report identifies two Gulf War "neurotoxic" exposures that "are causally associated with Gulf War illness." The first is the ingestion of pyridostigmine bromide (PB) pills, given to protect troops from effects of nerve agents. The second is exposure to dangerous pesticides used during the conflict.

The report does not rule out other possible contributors to Gulf War illness -- including low-level exposure to nerve agents and close proximity to oil well fires -- though it fails to establish any clear link.

The report concludes there is no clear linkage between the illness and a veteran's exposure to factors such as depleted uranium or an anthrax vaccine administered at the time.

This bit really stuck out to me:

overall funding for research into Gulf War illness has declined dramatically since 2001

Hmm.  Now what could have happened in 2001 that could have caused this?  Let's think really, really hard....

Here's how shitty the Republican Party is:  You can't tell whether this funding cut was due to Bush Jr. and Dick Cheney wanting to hush up any problems from the first Iraq War (can't have Daddy and Uncle Dick looking bad!), or just part and parcel of the usual Republican plan to cut every social service in existence and further fuck over everyone who's not already rich.  These motherfuckers make "support the troops" a cruel joke instead of a crappy slogan.

Shame on you, CNN, for not including information on who cut funding and when.  I hate this passive-voice journalism crap.  "Funding has declined."  Bullshit.  Try this:  People in the Bush administration cut funding for research into Gulf War Syndrome to the bone as soon as they took office.  See that?  Aren't active verbs better?

I'm not saying that I know what Gulf War Syndrome is, or if there's just one cause, or anything.  But there are a lot of people who are sick and hurting, and we need to find out why and what to do for them.  We've been dragging our feet for a long time on this one.

Talking Out Of Their Asses

Aimai knows how to get me going:

As they wandered in the field discussing ways of forcing google to make a deal to charge for page views of newspaper content (good luck with that!) and insisted to me that no blogs could make enough selling their content to make it worth the bloggers while I brought up Nate Silver ( and DailyKos). Sure, they said, startled that they actually knew somebody's name but unaware that Nate might be classed as a blogger--*he* has a product to sell, his expertise, but....but...he must be some kind of exceptional case. Because they had never thought of him before, and knew him primarily from his TV appearances, they didn't grasp the way Nate's blog and the special election coverage and polling that he had done busted wide open the barriers they thought existed between journalism and blogging. But hey, lets not let facts get in the way of a good group grope on the subject.

First of all, aimai, how do you not tell me you're I.F. Stone's granddaughter?

*genuflects and leaves offering of scotch on altar made of stacks of books*

Second, oh my God nail meet head. This goes back to my memorable encounter with Owen Ullman from USA Today when he spent two hours on an academic panel railing about blogs and then admitted he didn't read any. It's the same "accepted narrative vs. actual story" problem we identify with political coverage, where you report the thing everybody knows (John Kerry's a Frenchman who loves him some Al Qaeda cock) versus the thing that exists (John Kerry's actual foreign policy agenda). It's why Obama had a Jewish problem and a Latino problem and a woman problem and a blue-collar problem. Because just because, okay?!!! They call it conventional wisdom but it's neither.

Just once I wish these smug types would recall the existence of free newspapers. Forget blogging, since the sight of a laptop seems to make them insane. Let's talk about newspapers, dead tree publications, which subsist on advertising sold on the basis of eyeballs, not subscriptions. Harder to sell than guaranteed subscription numbers, maybe a bit, but most of them seem to do just fine until their owners, too, begin actively hosing them:

When a potential new audience was moving onto the Internet, the Reader declined to follow. The Chicago Tribune, the paper dinosaur the Reader had been born to challenge, beat us to the Net with an entertainment site called Metromix. In 2004, the Reader, which had once defined hipness, finally tried to get hip again. The editors insisted on shorter stories, added features on fashion, and hired a tattooed, twenty-seven-year-old stripper to write a late-night party column. They also came out with a new design that finally brought color to the front page. The Trib’s media critic hailed it as bringing the paper “into the late 1990s.” The establishment daily was tweaking the alternative weekly for being behind the times. On the day the new cover debuted, I handed out copies at an L stop in Lincoln Park. Gray-haired men and women rushed to grab copies. But no one under thirty would touch one.

I've had this piece bookmarked for a long time but every time I try to write about it the pointless nostalgia makes me tired for the same reasons the blathering ignoramuses above annoyed; deliberate stupidity by the upstairs of a news organization does not mean my generation sucks, or that you get to bitch that your audience doesn't want serious news anymore. For chrissakes.

It is in the long-term best interests of newspaper "executives" and news corporation owners that the rank and file in the newsroom be tribally pissed off at the Internet. So long as people trying to write honestly about the world around them -- whether that's online and using the word fuck a lot, or via underground pamphlet cranked out on mimeograph or in nice neat columns on InDesign before being put to a press -- are encouraged to bicker amongst ourselves, maybe we won't notice all the money going out the back door, being loaded onto trucks and the boss's Mercedes, and being driven off into the sunset.

A.

Pretty!

OMG WANT. Mr. A and I are so doing this when one of our monitors goes kaput.

A.

Today on Tommy T's Obsession with the Freepi - let the recriminations begin!

Good morning, everybody!
Well, the numbness has worn off,and the Freeperatis' wounds are beginning to hurt.
Let's suit up and pry the lids off some still-bubbling post-election anguish.

First up - former Fearless Leader gets off a good one:

Bush "I regret saying somethings I shouldn't have said"
CNN ^ | Nov 11 2008 | CNN.com
Posted on Wednesday, November 12, 2008 6:34:41 AM by rudman
"I am proud to be the commander in chief of people who are so selfless and so courageous that they would volunteer to serve our country in a time of war," he said. "I'm proud when I see people feed the hungry. I'm proud when I'm in Africa and see volunteers helping those citizens dying of HIV/AIDS."

"I remember the conversation I had with my predecessor Bill Clinton," Bush said. As a matter of fact, [I] called him yesterday and said, 'Bill, I'm getting ready to meet with the new president, and I remember how gracious you were to me. I hope I can be as gracious to President-elect Obama as you were to me.' ''

To: rudman

What about regretting NOT sayng things he SHOULD HAVE said?

4 posted on Wednesday, November 12, 2008 6:40:52 AM by IonInsights (T)

Then, the Inevitable Freeper reaction to anyone who dares post anything that puts a crack in those rose-coloured Bush Goggles - even if it was on the front page of CNN and FOX:

To: rudman

Nice try newbie. Welcome to FR (two days ago).Now, tell us all. We are dying to know.
Are you in the Executive Office Building, the Old Executive Office Building, or the Republican National Committee basement?

6 posted on Wednesday, November 12, 2008 6:43:24 AM by AmericanInTokyo

Is that anything like the basement of the Alamo?

To: rudman

Bush said. "I really do wish him all the best. I am just as American as he is American..."

BS, Mr. President! I know you had to be deplomatic, but you didn't HAVE TO say this? Do YOU know where this "thing" was born???

11 posted on Wednesday, November 12, 2008 6:50:23 AM by Chong (Read My LIPSTICK!)

In response to an earlier reply, one Freeper gathers the shreds of decency lying about and attempts to make a garment out of them:

To: rudman

"he is not perfect, and does not pretend to be - only Jesus Christ can claim perfection - he did keep America safe, even though many Americans at time did not deserve that safety."
That is his job, i.e., keep America safe. And the idea that "many Americans at time did not deserve that safety" is detestable. Every American deserves to be defended regardless of where they stand poltically. I suggest you read the Constitution.

8 posted on Wednesday, November 12, 2008 6:49:08 AM by kabar

Return fire!

To: kabar

You wrote “That is his job, i.e., keep America safe. And the idea that “many Americans at time did not deserve that safety” is detestable. Every American deserves to be defended regardless of where they stand poltically. I suggest you read the Constitution.”
Detestable??? Me thinks not. Traitors do NOT deserve the protection provided by a country they are trying to destroy. These are the folks being referred to. If you think these type of folks deserve the same constutional rights patriots and citizens enjoy you are on the wrong board. Try DU.

17 posted on Wednesday, November 12, 2008 7:02:12 AM by MGBGUN (Freedom is not free.)

I guess I really need to reread the "Constution" and see where that verbiage is written down...

To: rudman

"George W. Bush was a class act till the end"

As someone who voted for him twice and contributed to his campaign, I wouldn't vote for him a 3rd time if he were running for dog catcher.

Bush is a new world order open border capitalist who helped engineer a 21st century global aristocracy.

21 posted on Wednesday, November 12, 2008 7:12:45 AM by MikeWUSAF (Extreme vitriol and rancorous replies served daily. - Mike W USAF)

Sic transit gloria dubya....

To: discipler

Not a Bush fan. Forget McCain, or Palin, it was Bush who was the biggest drag on this ticket.

13 posted on Wednesday, November 12, 2008 6:52:47 AM by beagleone

Let's slam the lid back on this drum of bubbling BDS and move on.
More Freepery Goodness after the jump. Everybody hold hands before we jump - I don't want anyone slipping and falling to the floor. Scout fell last week, and it took four people, two crowbars, a pint of paint thinner, and a gallon of pickle relish to get him unstuck from the moronic goo.

 

Middle Way

Tim over at Balloon Juice:

We cannot justify holding on to virtually any of our detainees without charging them in a legitimate court. However, as the Hamdi case illustrates, fairly charging tortured and illegally kept detainees is essentially the same as freeing them. Then the liberated detainees can file lawsuits. If the new government shows a few scruples about using the State Secrets card more honorably then, like the pending suit by Maher Arar, an innocent Canadian tortured for a year in Syria, the civil suits alone could be catastrophic.

We already know that discovery will uncover prosecutable crimes in practically every case. Ergo, prepare for the greatest fletchering ever seen by man. If levied honestly, damages could collectively rank in legal history with the tobacco settlement. I do not have the training to guess how much one year of a life is worth, or five years. If those five years included relentless abuse that left you physically scarred and psychologically damaged, how much would you ask for?

As far as I can tell we will either geld Geneva or else we will release the vast majority of our muslim prisoners (possibly all of them, innocent and otherwise), pay them for their time and prosecute the torturers whom the president fails to pardon. If a middle way exists I fail to see it.

There is no middle way. That's the point, really. The point of this was that there is no middle ground. This is the With Us or Against Us strategy; there's no way out of this that doesn't involve being the asshole, and in fact the whole system is predicated on the idea that politicians are too cowardly to ever accept that somebody's just gonna have to be the asshole.

The war worked the same way; if we leave things will be bad and we'll have screwed the Iraqis over and killed lots of them for no good reason. Things are bad anyway, not likely to get any better, and we broke this country and screwed it all up, and I hate as much as anybody being the asshole who says, "Nothing we can do to unbreak it, let's get the hell out" because that sucks, but there's no way to stop it anymore. Same with this, our "detainees." Somebody's gonna have to be the guy who says okay, and opens the prison doors.

Somebody's gonna have to be the asshole here. It's why the Republicans name things like No Child Left Behind and The Protect America Act and Operation Iraqi Freedom; so that by raising your hand and going, "Erm, 'scuse" you're the jerk. Not them, for filling a bag full of crap and handing it to you to hold while they raid the global convenience store, but you, for dropping it on the doorstep rather than standing there with it in your hands, hoping they come out of the 7-Eleven and take it back.

A.

Love Love Love Love Crazy Love

Not going back:

More than 4,000 people showed up in Manhattan for what gay-rights activists were calling a national day of protest, with other rallies taking place across California and in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Fargo, N.D., and other cities, most put together by person-to-person efforts across the Internet.

In San Diego, a crowd estimated by police at 20,000 and by organizers at 25,000 demonstrated against Prop. 8, while in Los Angeles police said between 10,000 and 12,000 people marched peacefully though the downtown area. Smaller protests were held in cities and towns across the state.

"Today is a national tipping point," Molly McKay, a spokeswoman for Marriage Equality USA, said in a statement. "History will look back on this day as the day that the national LGBT community rose up and said, 'We are not going back.' "

A.

Happy Vice President-Elect Photo: FOOTBALL SUNDAY EDITION

Because.

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For The Love Of Steve

YOUR GROCERY CART MAY KILL YOU! I saw a promo for this the other night and nearly fell off the couch. The original story, which isn't online, was about how germy and creepy grocery carts are after people have hacked and snotted and pawed all over them, which ... well, yes. And doorknobs are gross, too. Sidewalks, I wouldn't lick those if I were you, not since Christmas shopping season has started. Hotels aren't always sanitary. Sometimes there's residue on the bottoms of your boots after you get done hiking 18 miles through the mountains. I don't know what we'd do without the local news to help us out with this stuff.

Here's a pretty good list of sweeps stories from years past in Chicago. I remember when I moved down here thinking local news would be of a slightly higher caliber than it was up in Wisconsin, because this was a large city, after all, and ... yeah, then I saw Janet Davies interviewing, like, John Cusack or something. God bless the ratings season.

Now if you'll all excuse me I have to get back to killing journalism.

A.