![[capt.8ff928851e824c07932b180a505c0cf3.newsweek_feb__9_cover_prn1.jpg]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_zTAAIc-L-10b0lVOzt676qgUatwk9VOpkjQI510s7NMkNgg1iQ-XY-w20PIPbd8rukfzumDmeZTw0JFnCUoiK-SxFA7H3GO1mtUOBfIioPNiY3TcNHQFjgdmTIU535HIfP0ABpnCEMpU/s1600/capt.8ff928851e824c07932b180a505c0cf3.newsweek_feb__9_cover_prn1.jpg)
David Liskany of Jamestown had pleaded guilty to charges of felonious assault and attempted felonious assault.
The judge said Liskany punished the children in 2006 and 2007 by putting them in cold showers, holding them underwater and using the shock collar, which is commonly used to train dogs.
The judge said the case sounded "like something from Guantanamo Bay."
h/t Dick - FYI:
John Thain (Merrill's redecorator-in-chief) is a prominent member of the Republican Party and a personal friend of Senator John McCain. Thain was a senior economic policy adviser to McCain and was considered a leading candidate to be his Treasury Secretary. In support of McCain's unsuccessful 2008 bid for the presidency, Thain sponsored a number of fundraisers, including a $2,300-a-seat breakfast at The Regency Hotel on Park Avenue on December 14, 2007[24].
Thain's 25-acre property in NY State spans 3 townships (Rye, Harrison, and Rye Brook). He recently purchased a $37 million condo on Park Avenue.
Republicans supposedly were the party of limited government, adherence to the Constitution, and fiscal discipline. Remember those days? Seems like a long time ago, doesn't it?
For eight years, you betrayed every principle you stood for. You backed a president whose administration doubled the Federal deficit without a single qualm.
You backed a president who championed widespread intrusions on the part of into the lives of all Americans. From collecting the telephone calls, faxes and e-mails of all Americans to using the power of the Federal government to directly interfere with the affairs of a single family, at every step along the way, you did not oppose the Bush Administration.
Admitting that this is their plan wouldn't make them look good, though, because most voters would probably want them to try to help make things better even if they had legitimate doubts. So conservatives have had to come up with excuses for their opposition — excuses that sound plausible to conservative voters. The fact that they would use these excuses tells us something about them; the fact that the excuses are accepted as plausible or reasonable by conservatives tells us something about conservatives.
http://patriotboy.blogspot.com/2009/02/stimulating-liberty-autonomy-is-not.html
This week is the 23rd anniversary of the shooting.
This could pose a difficult choice for gun owners of what weapon is best suited for a particular sermon. A Glock might be suitable for a New Testament sermon, but the Old Testament is strictly non-automatic weapons only. Easter might call for something cute like a derringer while Christmas deserves a MAC-10.
Story here.
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Deadly Force: A detailed account of the unwarranted (literally, the warrant was "on the way" at the time and later proved to be incomplete) raid on the Berwyn Heights home of Cheye Calvo and Trinity Tomsic—the town's mayor and his wife, during which the S.W.A.T. team shot the couple's two dogs to death and apparently terrorized the crap out of Ms. Tomsic's mother, not to mention them.
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From Wingnuttia:
The idea that the government should be spending and "investing" in stuff is completely ridiculous. This is not what made America a great nation.
Yeah, that GI bill and interstate highway system were such wastes.
The only plan that will work is putting more money in Americans' pockets with tax cuts. Cut the payroll tax. There is also a massive tax hike looming on the middle class when the previous tax cuts expire. Make the previous tax cuts permanent. Don't mess with people's monthly paychecks. Give them more to spend every month.
This guy thinks that taxes are the root of all problems, as if the last thirty years of false investment and wasted largesse on the wealthy have helped the economy. So when you read the comments by loons like this about taxes, or how Iraq is such a success after we wasted a trillion dollars from the treasury to destroy a country, remember the sick bastard mind you are dealing with.
For that trillion dollars,
-We never found the WMDs;
-We never dealt with the original problem of Al Qaeda in the tribal areas;
-We created a new haven for Al Qaeda in Iraq;
-We made Iran stronger;
-We abandoned Afghanistan before the mission was done; thereby
-Dumping the problem upon Bush's successor;
-The region has yet to see any sign of stabilization from Saddam's removal;
-We broke Iraq, and still have not created a sustainable central government structure;
-The world's oil markets got no benefit from Saddam's removal;
-The Bush Administration let Osama Bin Laden run free for seven years;
-We destroyed military readiness for a generation;
-We starved the VA and nearly destroyed it;
-We, by our actions, directly set in motion the deaths of more Iraqis than Saddam killed; and
-We sent over 4000 soldiers to their deaths, and maimed tens of thousands more.
And yet to despicable, gutless weasels like this guy, all of this was worth a trillion dollars - but government spending on rebuilding America here at home is bad. Throwing away a trillion dollars of money borrowed from overseas to be paid back by our kids and their kids on an imperialistic destruction of another country to line the pockets of disaster capitalists is a worthy government investment, but investing a trillion dollars here at home on Main Street, good paying jobs, health care, and energy independence is "completely ridiculous."
That, my friends, is the type of miserable, worthless individual you are dealing with here.
And we can't forget that for the $1 trillion (and 4,237 dead soldiers, tens of thousands of maimed American soldiers, a million dead Iraqis, their looted and destroyed country, and our bankrupt economy), we also got this:
Oh, and now, Betrayus and Gates are trying to convince Obama that he has to back down from his campaign pledge to withdraw all U.S. combat troops from Iraq within 18 months: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/02/generals-seek-to-reverse_n_163070.html
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Gallup - State of the states - importance of religion: http://www.gallup.com/poll/114022/State-States-Importance-Religion.aspx?version=print
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Gaza desperately short of food after Israel destroys farmland
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Scott Horton: Lieberman's sense of humor: http://harpers.org/archive/2009/02/hbc-90004323
Once inside the banquet hall, which is always off-limits to the media, the Alfalfans took turns trying to crack each other up. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) — the club's outgoing president — noted that former vice president Richard B. Cheney injured himself while moving into his new home, according to a source inside the dinner."I had no idea waterboards were so heavy," Lieberman quipped.And another knee-slapper from Senator Christopher Bond, who "reminded guests that a newspaper recently published a list of the 25 people most responsible for the global economic meltdown."
"You know who you are," he said, according to the source. "And it's good to see you here tonight."
The underlying reality is a human one: it's easier to risk other people's capital, especially when you are guaranteed to get paid huge sums of money either way - more money, in fact, if short term schemes to boost share value work out even if only during that limited time span.
That is one of the reasons why nationalization makes a lot more sense than multi-trillion dollar giveaways without any strings attached - measures that not only fail to address this conflict of interest, but in fact reinforce it.
Nationalize it. It's not an ideal solution, just the best available.
While the western media narrative is filled with voting in Iraq and attempts to sort out what Obama's Afghanistan policy will look like after another 30,000 troops—an increase that is described in an AP report as "a finger in the dike while Obama recalibrates a chaotic mishmash of military and development objectives"—there's little notice of the continued killing of Afghan civilians by US forces.
In addition to the 50 listed in the above link, three more civilians were killed by US forces Saturday, including two children in Helmand and a tribal elder in Paktia.
After each such incident, American military officials promise that more care will be taken—yet we still read accounts like these from Laghman:
An angry Afghan man with a thick black beard ranted wildly at the U.S. officials, shouting about how their overnight raid had killed 16 civilians in his village. An Afghan elder cried out in grief that his son and four grandsons were among the dead.
"One young boy said his whole family was killed, and now he wants to become a suicide bomber. This is a very negative message," Mashal said. "
These deaths occurred during nighttime raids by US Special Forces—and Afghan officials are asking that Afghan soldiers be included in the teams used—saying:
Afghans soldiers could prevent the kinds of deaths that Abdul Mateen, a village elder from Masmoot, described at the meeting. Mateen said a woman tried to leave the village to escape the battle.
"Then someone shouted at her. Maybe they told her to stop, but she couldn't understand, so they shot her," Mateen told the group. "So even people trying to get away couldn't escape."
After years of similar reports from both Afghanistan and Iraq, it's shameful to see this continued lack of care for the very people we claim to want to "save"—and you would think that even simple self-interest would finally lead military commanders to stop making speeches like Gates' above—and actually change the rules of engagement. As one member of the Afghan Parliament reminded them after the 16 civilians were killed this week:
"Maybe there were only two or three insurgents in Guloch, but I can tell you that there are thousands now."
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Loyal Bushies create Bush-Cheney alumni association website to 'help build a lasting legacy' http://thinkprogress.org/2009/02/02/bush-alumni-website/
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Wonkette male makeup expert "Ratty" points out that Senator Kerry appeared on Meet the Press this weekend looking like he'd swung by the M.A.C. counter on the way to the studio. This is not the first time we have seen such horrible makeup errors on MTP in general, and John Kerry in particular. Do none of these people consult a mirror before they go onstage in their clown faces? http://wonkette.com/405916/sad-old-muppet-visits-meet-the-press-wearing-penciled-in-eyebrows
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Arizona porn attack
Oh noes certain homes in the Tucson area saw 30 seconds of pornography instead of the Super Bowl as the game reached its exciting conclusion last night! With only three minutes left in play, viewers were shocked to see not football but instead a lady unzipping some guy's pants, and then "he did his little dance with everything hanging out," said one stunned resident. It looks like an adult cable channel crossed with the NBC feed into certain analog TV sets. This is a strong argument against converting to digital cable. [Arizona Daily Star]
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The Washington Post is out with yet another Amity Shlaes piece today claiming that the New Deal was a big failure. I won't analyze the piece itself, since I am not an economist, but I will revisit a piece she wrote last July, titled, auspiciously enough, "Phil Gramm Was Right":
Consider what happened this week. While speaking with the Washington Times, Gramm said that the country was not in a true recession but a "mental recession." He also said, "We have sort of become a nation of whiners" and "You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline."
Gramm was right about the recession and stood by his recession comments on Thursday. A recession is two consecutive quarters in which the economy shrinks, and last quarter it grew. But no matter. Voters feel they are in a recession, and so they are, at least according to Campaign Econ.
I wonder why voters thought we were in recession last July? Is it because they are ill-informed whiners? Oh, that's right, it's because we were in recession last July and had been been for seven months.
Obviously, no one could have anticipated that we were in a recession this summer, no one other than 71% of economists surveyed in March 2008, anyway.
Why on earth does the Washington Post see fit to publish a pseudo-economist who was completely wrong about the big economic issue of the year? It's probably the same reason, of course, that they exclusively (except for Meyerson) publish columnists who were completely wrong about the Iraq war. Or maybe it's just because Fred Hiatt is such an influential liberal.
You can read the mandatory rebuttal from Paul "Unlike Right-Wing Hacks, I Actually Won A Nobel Prize for Economics" Krugman here.
He also addresses her directly:
When you hear claims that the New Deal made the depression worse, they often come directly or indirectly from the work of Amity Shlaes, whose misleading statistics have been widely disseminated on the right.
Oh, and he kneecaps her here, too.
Representative Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina, said that former President George Bush's signature tax cuts in 2001 had created years of growth but that the nation's problems started when Democrats regained majorities in Congress in the 2006 elections.
That's right, it's all the Democrats' fault. Everything was hunky-dory up until 2006, with the housing, banking, and manufacturing problems, among others, springing up ex nihilo only after Reid and Pelosi took over. (Scheiber: "So the Democrats came into office and a housing bubble retroactively inflated and began to pop? Mortgage-backed assets worth trillions less than their stated value just magically appeared on bank balance sheets and in hedge fund portfolios?)
Yes, my friends, Virginia Foxx is that crazy. (Assuming that she actually believes this -- but what is there to think that she does not?)
"I think we are clearly prepared to sit down, discuss, negotiate a true stimulus package that will create jobs," McCain said on CNN's "American Morning."
"We all know how tough the economy is," he said. "But now it's time, after the way it went through the House without any Republican support. It's been rammed through the Senate so far. We need to seriously negotiate. We haven't done that yet."
How many times does Lucy have to pull the football away before the Democrats wise up and say "no way"? It's pretty clear so far that the Republicans have, never had, and never will have any intention of "negotiating in good faith". Would someone please tell the Democrats that they have the majority in both houses and the Republicans are still calling the shots?
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