Or some such Goldbergian nonsense.
One of the many astounding feats of the right wing blogosphere is the perfection and heightening of such phenomena as psychological projection and, of course, the honing to a fine edge of the "rubber/glue" defense. Thus in right wing world, liberals are fascists (a word none of them seem to have the vaguest idea how to define) and now, with ever greater frequency it seems, "racists."
Roy Edroso skewers one such recent effort with a skill and panache that made be both laugh out loud and want to give up my own comparatively feeble writing. To wit:
"The truth is that leftists don't care about the advancement of minorities," says AmPow, "they care about the advancement of their own power." I'm afraid he misreads us -- or maybe just me; you guys might be attracting job offers from high Administration officials with your aperçus and japes, but my phone never rings. I'm only in it for the laughs, and I thank American Power for keeping them coming.
It seems awfully hard for conservatives to admit that a goodly chunk of their electoral appeal over the years has been based on intolerance and greed. I guess I understand that - it's not really inspiring to say to junior, "yes son, we conservatives really know how to hone our message to bring out the vote of the greedhead, racist, homophobe, Mexican-haters - and that's no small coalition." Rhetoric redolent of "freedom" (the freedom to pay people substandard wages, cheat on your taxes, bust unions, drop the N word, belittle women, and bash queers [oh goddamnit, I've now revealed our intense homophobia too]) is the usual strategy employed to disguise this particular truth, because really, how can any man be free, when he must pay a 35% marginal tax rate and can't complain aloud about the negroes.
He wasn't funny. No one was. In fact, the White House Correspondent's Dinner is never funny. It wasn't funny when George Bush mocked the American soldiers he sent to destroy and then die in Iraq. It wasn't even funny when Stephen Colbert hosted it - though in Colbert's defense, he didn't intend for it to be funny. Being funny, getting a laugh, was the last thing on Colbert's mind. He went to that dinner to speak truth to power, the first and last person to do so in a very long time.
Even now it doesn't happen. President Obama made jokes about Dick Cheney writing a book called "How to Shoot Friends and Interrogate People." It wasn't funny for George Bush to joke about his illegal war, and it's not funny for Barack Obama to joke about the previous administration's illegal torture regime.
For eight years the USA was led by war criminals, people who still walk free and enjoy lives of luxury. And instead of upholding the law, instead of believing his only duty to be defending the Constitution - something about which he made a vow in the sight of everyone in the country - Barack Obama makes jokes about it to the people who A) partnered with Bush and Cheney to sell their illegal war and illegal torture regime to the American people and B) who now think that Michelle Obama's arms and Barack Obama's condiment choices are real news.
Obama didn't have to show up. The reporters would have been angry, but so what? One day of withholding access from them and they'll fall in line. It's amazing to me how so much of what happens in DC is a contest to see who, without provocation, can give into whom the very most.
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The Death of a Glacier and an Island: Victims of Global Warming
A Bolivian glacier has disappeared years before scientists thought it would go.
At 17,388 feet above sea level, Chacaltaya, an 18,000 year-old glacier that delighted thousands of visitors for decades, is gone, completely melted away as of some sad, undetermined moment early this year.
"Chacaltaya has disappeared. It no longer exists," said Dr. Edson Ramirez, head of an international team of scientists that has studied the glacier since 1991.
The loss of the glacier has not just ended the viability of the world's highest ski slope, it also is a harbinger of a much drier country where water scarcity is predicted.
In other news, Kevin Drum has a post up about the last people who lived on the Charteret Islands have had to abandon their homeland for higher ground. As sea levels rise, there will be more refugees seeking to find a new home.
Too bad it wasn't all the global warming deniers living on those islands.
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From the Onion: Nation Ready To Be Lied To About Economy Again
After nearly four months of frank, honest, and open dialogue about the failing economy, a weary U.S. populace announced this week that it is once again ready to be lied to about the current state of the financial system.
Tired of hearing the grim truth about their economic future, Americans demanded that the bald-faced lies resume immediately, particularly whenever politicians feel the need to divulge another terrifying problem with Wall Street, the housing market, or any one of a hundred other ticking time bombs everyone was better off not knowing about. [. . .]
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Matt Taibbi: "Religion, agnostics, and the cure for baldness"
I'm always on the lookout for religion's latest counter-arguments, the new rhetorical approaches that God People are constantly fine-tuning for use in pimping the righteousness of faith (and for demonstrating the moral dissoluteness of agnostics like myself). There isn't an inherently irresolvable metaphysical challenge that comes close to wasting as much of the world's time and energy as this particular one. It's the intellectual equivalent of the eternal R&D quest for a baldness cure: you just never stop being surprised at how many different ways men can find to fail at growing hair.
Go and read it all.
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Karta the Orangutan escaped from her zoo pen by using a stick to short out an electric fence, then building a crude ladder to climb over a wall.
If only she'd had some coconuts and vines, she would have built a radio and called the Orangutan Liberation Front for rescue.
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Health care industry locates $2 trillion in savings - not so they can trim health care costs, but so they can trim the rise in health care costs. Victory!
How convenient that the industry who scalps the American public, charging more in America for the same products compared to elsewhere in the world, could magically whip up a few trillion in savings when pushed on cleaning up their act.
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Powell was the guy who sold Dick Cheney's excellent Baghdad adventure, and now he isn't good enough for the GOP:
CHENEY: Well, if I had to choose — in terms of being a Republican — I'd go with Rush Limbaugh, I think. My take on it was that Colin had already left the party. I didn't know he was still a Republican. [...]
SCHIEFFER: And you said you'd take Rush Limbaugh over Colin Powell?
CHENEY: I would. Politically.
It's not really all that surprising that Dick prefers Limbaugh's company to a military veteran.
Cheney and Limbaugh have more in common. They both like to get together on the occasional weekends and swap stories of their bravery. Dick can talk about all five of his deferments from Vietnam and Rush can talk about how he got out of service through a defective balloon knot. Dick can talk about shooting a friend in the face, Rush can talk about how he did the same thing with a stranger in the Dominican Repu...HEY, let's just move on shall we?
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The credit card companies find themselves awash in bad debt they're unlikely to see repaid.
Credit card companies have become famous for narrowing payment windows to the point that there is no possible way to pay on time because the due date is only a few days after you get the bill - and other stunts designed to get people who may already be underwater to help pay off the debts of others. Oh, and if you try to cancel your cards, your credit score goes down because they assume you're doing it because you are in financial trouble.
For years the credit card companies made it easy for people to get into trouble, and then exploited those who did, and now the piper is coming due. It's easy to say that one shouldn't get into debt one can't afford to pay back, but if you think those people who already can't pay back what they owe are going to do so, guess again. The credit card companies will raise YOUR rates and narrow YOUR payment windows - because you have shown that you'll pay.
This week the Senate is taking up the Credit Cardholders Bill of Rights. Remind your Senator that he works for you, not the banks.
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KABUL – Doctors voiced concern over "unusual" burns on Afghan villagers wounded in an already controversial U.S.-Taliban battle, and the country's top human rights groups said Sunday it is investigating the possibility white phosphorus was used.
The American military denied using the incendiary in the battle in Farah province — which President Hamid Karzai has said killed 125 to 130 civilians — but left open the possibility that Taliban militants did. The U.S. says Taliban fighters have used white phosphorus, a spontaneously flammable material that leaves severe chemical burns on flesh, at least four times the last two years.
Using white phosphorus to illuminate a target or create smoke is considered legitimate under international law, but rights groups say its use over populated areas can indiscriminately burn civilians and constitutes a war crime.
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May I express some exasperation at the investigation of the money paid to Rielle Hunter by the Edwards campaign for videotaping as something critical to our democracy and yet we've known that the Bush administration lost NINE BILLION dollars in Iraq and there has been not one investigation? It's not an either/or proposition, but c'mon, there has to be some economies of scale working here when a $100K paycheck takes precedence over $9 billion.
Not to mention illegal wars and torture.
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The faulty logic of teabaggers
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Dick Cheney went on Face the Nation yesterday, because nothing says Happy Mother's Day like Dick Cheney defending torture.
He was just happy to be there: "It's nice to know that you're still loved and are invited out in public sometimes."
He accused the Obama admin of selective release of documents, and if there's one thing Dick Cheney hates, it's the selective release of documents: "They don't have any qualms at all about putting things out that can be used to be critical of the Bush administration policies. But when you've got memos out there that show precisely how much was achieved and how lives were saved as a result of these policies, they won't release those."
AN INTELLIGENT INTERROGATION PROGRAM: On shutting down torture, which he says saved "thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives": "Well, then you'd have to say that, in effect, we're prepared to sacrifice American lives rather than run an intelligent interrogation program that would provide us the information we need to protect America."
OH, IT'S NEVER A WASTE OF TIME GOING TO THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT: "If we had been about torture, we wouldn't have wasted our time going to the Justice Department." The logic is inescapable.
I'M NOT TAKING THE RAP FOR THIS ALONE: Asked if Bush knew about the torture: "I certainly, yes, have every reason to believe he knew - he knew a great deal about the program. He basically authorized it. I mean, this was a presidential-level decision. And the decision went to the president. He signed off on it." He "basically" authorized it"?
Why Guantanamo is still needed: "The group that's left, the 245 or so, these are the worst of the worst. This is the hard core. You'd have a recidivism rate out of this group of maybe 50 or 60 percent. ... I don't know a single congressional district in this country that is going to say, gee, great, they're sending us 20 Al Qaida terrorists."
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Full Cheney Panic: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/05/full-cheney-panic.html#more
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Just in time for summer vacations - oil at $57.37 per barrel.
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