"There's one thing Biden and Obama have got to get under control. And that is quit blaming George Bush. He inherited an economy that was already beginning to show real signs of the stress from the breaking of the technology bubble. George Bush didn't go out whining and complaining every day..." Huckabee, getting his facts wrongs, as always Link
Mike? How did we have a bad economy and a surplus? Bush said in the summer of 2000 that he'd give "everybody" tax cuts because the government had "too much money. Then he robbed us blind.
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Let's see, Peter King, who's he again? Oh, right, he's that pathetic dipshit that has nothing better to do than kick Michael Jackson after he's already dead.
I would've thought a member of Congress would have had more important things to do than make nasty comments about one of the greatest pop performers of the last few decades. Since his bloated salary comes out of taxpayers' money, you'd think his constituents in New York State would want their tax dollars put to better use.
Peter King has his First Amendment right to call Michael Jackson a "pervert" and a "lowlife" if he wants to. He's perfectly free to announce to the world that he's a clueless asshole with too much time on his hands.
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Yesterday the NYT had an article about how tough the Bush Recession is on the jewelry industry, and today there's one about how rough it is to be a millionaire who owns a $5.4M mansion on Nantucket and can't sell it. I don't know if this is supposed to be a "series" - it isn't billed as one - or if the NYT is simply convinced that the only audience it has that matters are all Bernie Madoff clones who work for Goldman Sachs but if so I think I just figured out why their circulation is down: that's what happens when you need to sell a couple million papers but you aim them at only a couple thousand people, 1500 of whom hate your guts.
This is not a good business decision, no?
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Shocking news: Israel has blocked another humanitarian team from reaching Gaza. This time, however, the team of doctors were organized by the French government to give medical aid and surgical help to the residents.
The team included reconstructive plastic surgeons who are needed to help residents injured in the recent Israeli incursion into Gaza. The team had proper papers and some had been allowed in Gaza previously but were turned away at the border.
Story here.
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More change I can't believe in
Obama administration reserves right to indefinitely hold detainees acquitted of charges
The Obama Administration continues its retention and expansion of abusive Bush policies — now clearly Obama policies on indefinite detention and blocking the investigation of war crimes. Jeh Johnson, the Defense Department's chief lawyer, has stated that it is a "policy question" whether acquitted individuals will be released or held indefinitely.
In May, President Obama announced that he supported indefinite detention of individual in violation of both domestic and international law. He has even found his detention policies to be a subject of jokes.
Liberals continue to be largely silent in the face of policies that they once denounced and protested. It is rare to hear any coverage or questions of the Administration's refusal to investigate war crimes of torture, for example. Liberals seem to be quickly developing a cult of personality that has supplanted the most basic principles of human rights and international law. As with the Republicans under Bush, the Democrats are refusing to push the Administration to investigate torture or comply with international law. Before the inauguration, various generals and senators claimed that Obama and Holder assured them privately that no one would be investigated for torture. It now appears that these stories were likely true. Democrats must choose between their principles and their politicians — and they appear to be making the same choice as their Republican counterparts.
Other than supposedly not torturing people, this makes Barack Obama different from George Bush and Dick Cheney how, exactly? Obama can string together a coherent paragraph, that's the real difference?
Between that and hiring a Monsanto thug who is hostile to government inspection of slaughterhouses as the FDA guy in charge of food safety, I'm not seeing a hell of a lot of difference between the two administrations.
Monsanto, of course, is the company driving third-world farmers into destitution and starvation by selling them genetically-modified seed that cannot reproduce itself, forcing farmers to buy new seed every year instead of saving seed from each harvest.
The president might ask the organic vegetable gardening First Lady what she thinks of that.
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Are men obsolete? http://jonathanturley.org/2009/07/08/are-men-obsolete/#more-12594
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11 NATO troops, including 7 Americans, have been killed by bombs, grenades or small arms fire during the past two days in Afghanistan.
Some 4,000 US military personnel, have swept into the troubled Helmand province, in the biggest operation of the Afghanistan War. Unfortunately for the success of the operation, Taliban fighters largely slipped away, some apparently disguised as women in burqas, heading for the southwest and northeast. Likely we will hear of an increased rate of violence in those provinces.
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Good news bad news from the G8 climate talks: http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/014260.php
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For those of you who are interested in understanding what you can do to lower your energy usage, both Google and Microsoft have launched websites providing an audit of the energy used in your home. And, of course, one site to visit if you are in California is the Flex-Your-Power website for energy efficiency incentives. One other site you can visit if you want to know what you can do to live a greener life is Stanford's Sustainable Choices.
And for something super cool, check this out - h/t Jeff:
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/07/07/sustainable_sweden/
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The Perils of Centrism
Progressives Push Back On Health Care
Obama reined in Rahm today somewhat from Russia about the latter's apparent tossing aside of the public option to get a health care reform package. The sands have shifted a little in the last 24 hours, as the House Progressive Caucus finally got tired of watching the DLC-types in the White House cater to the health care industry and laid down a marker of their own: no public option, then no health care reform package. Furthermore, Harry Reid told Max Baucus today to stop ditching core principles to please Republicans who won't vote with us anyway.
Obama Loses Ground in Ohio
Second, it should be no surprise to anyone, especially the DLC scum in the White House that Obama's approval ratings are falling in Ohio. If you sell out the auto industry, bail out Wall Street and foreign banks, and then let supposedly Democratic senators like Claire McCaskill and Ben Nelson gut the state stabilization funds from the stimulus bill, while passing a weak-tea package, it should not be a mystery next year when Democrats do poorly in states like Ohio and Missouri, among others.
This White House is squandering a political and electoral mandate right before our eyes.
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So Nancy Pelosi should brace herself for an onslaught of apologies, right?
"Certain officers" with in the CIA had a problem with the truth in the past.
Didn't the CIA destroy a bunch of tapes of them torturing people? Why was it ever in doubt whether or not they had lied to or mislead Congress again? I keep forgetting why up was down in the Bush era.
"I supplied the intelligence that led to the Iraq war."
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Senator Cornhole defends travel costs - 'Texas is a big state.'
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Lone Fartsack votes against resolution to thank slaves for building the capitol
Our hardworking House of Representatives took a break from bickering about health care and carbon dioxide to pass a quick "most uncontroversial resolution ever" yesterday, one authorizing the new $600 million+ (taxpayer funded!) Capitol Visitors Center — basically a museum about the history of the Capitol building — to hammer a dinky plaque to the wall thanking the Slaves for, you know, "building the Capitol." It passed by a vote of 399-1, so as a byproduct we now have mathematically infallible litmus test results that determine, officially, who is the biggest asshole in Congress. MORE »
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100 Reasons Why Quitter Sarah Palin Is America's Quittin' Queen of Dumbness
With wingnut witchcraft, Twitter, tanning, book banning, dope smoking, creationism, anti-terrorist pallin', gay-convertin' and progressin' her state by quittin' her state job as governor, Sarah Palin was the meanest, dumbest box of hair to take the national stage since Abraham Lincoln ran one of his famous coonskin-cap-clad "Lincoln Logs" for Congress, as a joke. Enjoy all one-hundred hilarious reasons why our Snowbilly grifter and Alaskan Anger Bear was really what America deserved. [True/Slant Idiocracy Index]
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Fox & Friends' Brian Kilmeade made a terrible buffoon of himself on the television this morning! You know why the Olds get Dementia and Alzheimer's, in America? This is why: "We are — we keep marrying other species and other ethnics and other … See, the problem is the Swedes have pure genes. Because they marry other Swedes …. Fins marry other Fins, so they have a pure society." Meaning: Ronald Reagan was a mulatto. [Salon, Gawker]
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Imagine if a liberal blogger had posted this during the Bush/Cheney reign:
"My advice to democracy lovers everywhere: If you're going to overthrow a strongman, kill him."
He'd be visited by the SS, held for interrogation, put on the no-fly list, audited by the IRS, and unrelentlessly stalked by the unhinged nutbars on the right. But this was posted by conservaturd Glenn Reynolds, with no explanation whatsoever (the blog he copied it from was discussing Zelaya and Chavez - and the "insanity of this policy by the Obama administration"), so its perfectly OK.
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Dick T's corner: T. Boone Pickens has called off massive wind farm in Texas; oil is $60.72/bbl; the Pope (who some might say had some ethics lapses when he covered up the pedophelia and has billions in art work and other treasures that he could sell to help the poor) lashes out at modern capitalism for being shortsighted and short on ethics; and 'A Conservative Court in a Progressive Era'.
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