"One of the biggest mistakes that is made in Washington is this notion you have to dumb things down for the public." Obama, who probably had his fingers crossed when he said that Link
One big reason Gore and Kerry "lost" is they were too smart and everyone wanted to drink a beer with the stupid guy.
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"I will buy Hawaii, Obama's birthplace, from the United States and lease it to the Israelis who will go to live there - so that they don't kill children in Gaza." - 12 year old Iranian presidential candidate Kourosh Mozouni Link
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As you might have guessed after years Shrubyian neglect, US students are falling behind in the life sciences. And if you guessed this phenomena was regional, you’d be right:
The report grouped states into four categories based on performance in the four areas measured: leaders of the pack, second tier, middling performance and lagging performance.
Leaders included eight Northeast and Midwest states, including Ohio, while those lagging in performance consisted mainly of Southern states.
You think maybe if those states taught kids proper science instead of creationist bullshit, and that Eve came from a zygote rather than a man’s rib, they would do better on their life science exams?
In thematically-related advice, Jeebus might save your diabetic kid’s life you if beg enough, but administering insulin is generally considered more effective. The Lord helps those who help themselves!
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Danger, aquarists, danger!
I'm sure this happens all the time.
A 2cm long fish apparently found it's way into the penis of a 14-year-old boy from India in a bizarre medical case. The patient was admitted to hospital with complaints of pain, dribbling urine and acute urinary retention spanning a 24-hour period. According to the boy, the fish slipped into his penis while he was cleaning his aquarium at home.
This is precisely why I keep my pants on when cleaning my aquarium.
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FreeTortureReport.com: http://shootthemessengernyc.com/
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A Photo That, If the Context Was Right, Would Make the Rude Pundit Break Out the Cocaine and Moet:
The Rude Pundit says: that grim-looking f**ker behind the netting there is former Vice President Dick Cheney, and, no, he's not in a Rudolph Hess-like internment camp. He's taking a break from his "Angels and Demons" tour of talk shows to attend yesterday's baseball game between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Washington Nationals.
No doubt the man is contemplating all his sins as he stares at the mock fence, wondering how he become so bereft of humanity, that he perhaps deserves to be surrounded by gates and bars and razor wire, with a tattoo that reads "Property of the Aryan Brotherhood" on his right ass cheek. Yes, the weight of all that he has done must push heavily on him every day and every night, and perhaps he thinks he does not need an actual fence to punish him for he is imprisoned by the pain in his soul.
Doubtful.
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Give a political prisoner a new trial
The Alabama federal judge who presided over the 2006 corruption trial of the state's former governor holds a grudge against the defendant for helping to expose the judge's own alleged corruption six years ago. Former Gov. Don Siegelman therefore deserves a new trial with an unbiased judge ─ not one whose privately owned company, Doss Aviation, has been enriched by the Bush administration's award of $300 million in contracts since 2006, making the judge millions in non-judicial income. - huffpo
Kreig's report comes at a critical time in the Siegelman case. The U.S. 11th circuit court of appeals has upheld most of the convictions against Siegelman. Federal prosecutors are asking that the former governor receive a 20-year sentence, almost triple his original sentence. With the 11th circuit refusing last week to grant a review by the entire court, the case stands to return to fuller for resentencing. - legal schnauzerIf AG Eric Holder can drop charges against Ted Stevens, why can't he even open a case to investigate Rove's, et al., railroading of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman?
That's what I thought. Everybody NOT standing on your head, click here right now to send emails to your congress critters demanding single-payer health insurance.
Because President Obama and the cowardly weasels in Congress who call themselves Democrats are just about to surrender any chance of genuine health care reform to the murdering bastards of the insurance industry.
Go and read Robert Reich: The Health Care Cave-in.
If you're just tuning in, "single-payer health insurance" already covers tens of millions of Americans. They are everyone 65 years and older (Medicare) and every military veteran (VA), and if you're lucky enough to be one of them, you currently suffer the horrific "socialized medicine" President Obama wants to offer the rest of us.
Stop the lies. Stop the corruption. Stop the insurance companies from profiting off third-world coverage.
Again, click here right now to send emails to your congress critters demanding single-payer health insurance. Just type in your zip code and one click gets you the phone number and email link for both senators and your representative.
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Ashcroft gets a pass
In a sharply divided ruling today the Supreme Court ruled that former AG John Ashcroft and FBI director Robert Mueller are not liable for the mistreatment of detainees in a New York detention facility after they were rounded up and detained in the post-9/11 hysteria that gripped the nations leaders and fueled public panic, xenophobia and religious bigotry. Hundreds of Muslim men, most of Arab descent; some citizens and nearly all here legally, were herded into detention centers because they were brown and Islamic. http://theygaveusarepublic.com/diary/2800/ashcroft-gets-a-pass
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All we want to do is be ready for a nuclear war with a country containing more than a billion people, silly.
That’s likely the unstated rationale for the continuing military buildup of the world’s most unstable nuclear power:
Pakistan has never agreed to any limits and is one of three countries, along with India and Israel, that never signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
And our government was directly complicit in creating this scenario. After Bush gave India carte blanche to build its arsenal without restraint, it was a no-brainer that Pakistan would follow suit. And letting the father of Pakistan’s H-bomb off with a slap on his wrist after he surreptitiously spread nuclear technology around the globe, to numerous bad guys? Bush shrugged at that, too. But he took down the toothless dictator of Iraq who posed a threat to, um…. okay, his daddy.
And lessee, since we’re more closely allied with India, while China backs Pakistan, there should be no trouble at all sorting this out and steering clear of World War III, right?
I’m not as worried as some about Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal falling into terrorist hands. It won’t happen. Not accidentally. It’s more likely to happen because some Pakistani generals want it to. They, after all, believe the US is on a bloody Christian crusade against all Muslims.
The Bushbama administration will not ask the Supreme Court to review the national security letter provision of the Patriot Act, which has been criticized as unconstitutional by civil rights groups and curtailed by a lower court following a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union.The ACLU’s full press release here.By not seeking a review, the ACLU said, the administration is committing itself to defending the Bush-era rule.
Here's an idea, John: You and all the rest of the Rushpublics get yourselves a suite at the Gitmo Inn. Let us know how you like your stay. And by all means, fill out the little customer service score card. We want to make sure your health care is the best lobbyists and Big Pharma can buy.Ensign said that Guantanamo seemed so appealing to him that it would be “hard to imagine” why anyone would want to close the facility. When making this argument, however, Ensign inadvertently made a case for health care reform:
“It is hard to imagine why we would ever think about closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility,” Ensign said. “I walked away very proud of what our troops are doing down there. I think any American would be proud as well.”
Ensign said the facilities at Gitmo are nicer than prisons in the United States, and said the food detainees were served was better than what he and the traveling lawmakers ate. “They get better health care than the average American citizen does,” Ensign said.
Guantanamo detainees receive care that is “as good as or better than anything we would offer our own soldiers, sailors, airmen or Marines,” the general in charge of Guantanamo has said. (Veterans care is widely considered the best health care available.) [...]
While Ensign inadvertently admitted to the dismal nature of American health care, he is currently the leader of the Republican Policy Committee (RPC), which is working to derail President Obama’s health care reforms.
by digby
Reader Sleon makes an obvious observation that I haven't seen anyone else make:
The idea [of the Bush Doctrine] was that the US had the right to attack and invade other countries and change their governments because we thought they, or their proxies, or just a splinter-group of their citizens, might possibly be a threat to our citizens in the future. And if you explore that idea to it's logical conclusion you would have to agree that accepting the Bush Doctrine means you agree that the US can kill large numbers of innocent civilians in these countries, and wound and dislocate many many more. We can do this to people who never did us any harm, because our current leaders want to protect us from what their future leaders might do at some unspecified future date. Just collateral damage, don't you know.
Well, since we've built our logical case to this point, let's follow it to it's ineluctable conclusion: If that's all OK on a government to government level, it must be OK on a personal level too. And there it is: Cheney's torture policy is just the Bush Doctrine for individuals. The (evil) genius of it is that he's found a way to indefinitely extend the ticking time-bomb scenario. If we can invade other countries and kill and maim their citizens because of something their leaders might do, then surely we can do the same to individuals who may not know of any time-bombs currently ticking, but who might know of someone else who might start a bomb ticking at some future date.
They said that Saddam was likely to be a threat some time in the future and we couldn't wait for the (ticking) smoking gun to come in the form of a mushroom cloud. The torture regime is based on the same logic: we don't know for sure that there might be a ticking time bomb, but in case there is we need to torture prisoners just in case they have some information about one in the future.
The Bush Doctrine is the source of all this horror. The idea that you can invade another country simply because they might pose a threat someday is nothing more that than the illegal concept of preventive war (which the Bushies simply rebranded as "preemptive" war.) And it's what leads to the idea that you can torture and imprison indefinitely in the name of that war. You don't need a real ticking time bomb, just the belief that there might be one someday.
Torture, therefore, is an intrinsic feature of the Bush Doctrine. It all flows from there.
* I should add that using torture to coerce false confessions about lies previously told about an Iraq-al Qaeda link would be called "The Cheney Doctrine."
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Being poor is expensive
This several page piece in the Post highlighting how the poor get screwed simply by being poor is pretty solid, and the depressing thing is that I doubt very few of our elites understand these very basic things. When you factor in the fact that even public transportation is not available for most of the nation’s rural poor, a lot of the time when our nation’s haves are babbling about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, they have less idea what they are talking about than normal.
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President Obama will announce today “tough new nationwide rules for automobile emissions and mileage standards,” embracing those that the auto industry and the Bush administration have rejected for years. The new national standard takes effect in 2012 and will create a U.S. car and light truck fleet that is “almost 40 percent cleaner and more fuel-efficient by 2016 than it is today, with an average of 35.5 miles per gallon.”
While this is nice and all, why does it take 7 years to make it happen? Couldn't they use some of the billions in bailout money to speed up the process?
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Driftglass noted that the problem with Rumsfeld's biblical quotes is that Rummy used the wrong quotes. So Driftglass provided a number of examples of better ones. This is my favorite.
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Trump Magazine has folded. We suspect it has to do with The Donald getting his hands on the photographic evidence of the topless Xristian sensation and surgically augmented beauty queen Carrie Prejean; he lost his concentration.
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Well, we told Pakistan to get serious, and they did! Just another successful day in the Great American Empire, doing whatever we can do to spread democracy:
As the Pakistani military’s offensive against the Swat Valley continues, around 1.45 million are reported to have successfully fled. For several families today attempting to leave their homes, that trek ended in disaster as the Pakistani military attacked and killed several of them, and wounded an unknown number of others. Women and children were among the slain.
Witnesses who managed to escape the attack and reach a town in Upper Dir say the party of civilian families were crossing a mountain path after leaving their homes in the town of Matta, when they were attacked by the military’s helicopter gunships. Matta was the latest Swati town to be targeted in the ongoing offensive.
Police confirmed the incident, but declined to say how many civilians were slain. Locals put the number at 12 to 14. The Pakistani military has been harshly criticized for its indiscriminate shelling against residential areas of Buner District, but this appears to be the first time they have deliberately targeted civilians. So far, there has been no comment from the military except to update the number of “suspected miscreants” killed in the offensive.
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Joe Barton hard at work, being an asshole
Opossum-eyed Jesus geologist Joe Barton, Republican Congressman from Texas, signaled his intent last month to stop the liberal Waxman-Markey energy bill - the one with cap-and-trade, which is about hamburgers - with traditional adult methods of opposition: “I’m going to be the sneaky little guy that pops up from behind the bush and fights the guerrilla. But guerrilla warfare does succeed sometimes.” (Fortunately for him this world has professional transcribers, because he definitely was saying he wanted to fight a gorilla.) And now he is popping up from behind the bush with a reasonable plan to block the legislation by proposing 450 comical amendments - four-hundred-and-fifty — that will simply be rejected, one by one, during an exhausting process that will embarrass the United States around the world and in Heaven. HAW HAW HAW. Keep reading: http://wonkette.com/408603/joe-barton-hard-at-work-being-an-asshole#more-408603
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Oh, The Irony
Corporations Protest Obama Plan to Crack Down on Tax Dodging
Call paying taxes “creeping socialism.”
Satire and Reichwingnuttery have become indistinguishable.
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