I'm seventy-three years old and would like to leave some legacy. Nobody will remember my newspaper columns or television appearances. They won't remember me for my writing. … I have a Novak scholarship fund in perpetuity, and I am the founder and chair for writing at the University of Illinois. That is how I want to be remembered.
Actually, Novak will be remembered for committing treason by outing a covert CIA operative as part of the Bush administration's battle to spin the American public on the Iraq war. Last year, Novak said that while he had been thinking "about my life and what I've done right and not done right," he wouldn't have done anything differently.
UBS has upwards of 50,000 US customers with as much as, we're told, $18 billion on deposit, who are evading US federal income taxes. They agreed to disclose the names of a mere 10% of these. Best I can tell there are hundreds of these accommodating Swiss 'banks', and countless others operating in the Caribbean, Singapore and elsewhere in the world, actively engaged in 'offshore banking services' (read that as abetting tax evasion) for the wealthiest 5% of our population.
I can understand why the preceding Republican administration chose to remain in ignorant bliss about this most unfortunate situation, but for a Democratic administration presiding over the deepest recession in almost 80 years to decline to pursue these scofflaws at least as aggressively as Sarah Palin pursues self-promotion is unforgivable.
After months of committee meetings and hundreds of hours of heated debate, the United States Congress remained deadlocked this week over the best possible way to deny Americans health care.Gotta love The Onion.
The legislative stalemate largely stems from competing ideologies deeply rooted along party lines. Democrats want to create a government-run system for not providing health care, while Republicans say coverage is best denied by allowing private insurers to make it unaffordable for as many citizens as possible.
"No matter what we come up with," [Senate leader Harry] Reid said, "rest assured that millions of citizens will remain dangerously uninsured, and the inflated health care industry will continue to bankrupt the country for decades."
Anyone with even a gram of common sense could see during 2004 that the Bushies were manipulating peoples' fears in such a way as to drive them, lemming-like, to the polls so they could re-elect a genuinely stupid man and his cabal of war profiteers, warmongers and authoritarians.
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In 2001, terrorists capitalized on George Bush's inattention and extended vacation to strike at America. Now, Rich Scott's Conservatives for Patients' Rights believes it can adopt al Qaeda's tactics by attacking our country while the President is on vacation. "Even on vacation, the President will get no quarter on the public option from Conservatives for Patients' Rights." And they're running an ad that somewhat bizarrely tries to mock Obama's vacation.
There are obvious problems with this strategy. First, regardless of what you think of the White House strategy on health care, mocking Obama for taking the first week of vacation he has had all year will only invite comparisons with Bush, who spent 977 days at either Camp David or Crawford during his presidency - well over a year on the pig farm where he twiddled as New Orleans drowned and blew off warnings about an imminent al Qaeda by dismissing briefers for "covering their ass." Conservatives for PR may be trying to mock Obama by suggesting he's traveling to an effete location with no brush to clear. But at least this President hasn't spent significant portions of his term AWOL during crises, like Bush did.
Read more: http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/08/21/rick-scott-aspires-to-do-as-al-qaeda-did/
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Idiotcracy
The WSJ says that depressing number was actually a slight improvement.[1] Only two-thirds are competent in English and barely a majority can competently read. Cranky is on the front lines in collegiate education and she is surprised the numbers are even that good.
Back in the old days, those numbers would not be so depressing, as there were plenty of decent-paying blue-collar jobs to absorb the high school graduates (and dropouts) who weren't so good at school. For example, my first job out of high school was in a factory that paid me $3 an hour, which nowadays would be about $20 an hour, which is a pretty decent starting wage, especially if you can get any overtime. The factory offered the five of us they hired as summer help permanent work and two accepted. A lot of the full-time workers, who were pad 50 cents an hour more or better, had late-model cars, they owned their own homes and their wives stayed home with the kids.
That factory closed a long time ago. Those days are gone. The steel mills, the factories are gone. Those jobs are gone. The schools need to step up to the plate. This isn't the job of the politicians, this is the job of the American people. We have to regard educating our kids as an investment in our national future and, frankly, we are falling down on the job.
Hatch is hardly the only conservative senator to float a 75-80 vote supermajority requirement for health reform. Several of them all sang a very different tune when they were in the majority, however:
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/08/20/superfilibuster/
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Glenn Beck suspiciously 'on vacation' this week
Hmm, here's a CRAZY rumor about Glenn Beck and his disappearance this week from Fox News. Nobody ever goes on "actual" vacation in August — except the French, that is — so where the hell is Glenn Beck, really?
http://wonkette.com/410640/glenn-beck-suspiciously-on-vacation-this-week
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Tom Delay tells an amazing story, which is probably a lie, but still
Is this really what's happening now? Snarling, hateful criminal Tom DeLay signs up to be a contestant on a teevee celebrity dance show, probably to pay his legal bills, and because he's "in the news again," cable news channels invite this well known lying mcliarton onto their shows to tell awful lies about current health care legislation. All that aside, this is quite the comical image: "When I did my town hall meetings, I'll never forget one back in the '80s — on health care, by the way. They brought in quadriplegics on gurneys and dumped them on the floor in front of my podium." DUMPED! MORE »
Also, criminal scumbag Tom DeLay wants to see Prez Obama's birth certificate.
Furious blogger wants to see Tom DeLay in prison. 'Dancing' with a huge-ass lib inmate.
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John Ensign makes it very clear that he is NOT Bill Clinton
Here is what we know about John Ensign: he was schtupping his buddy's wife for six months or so until they got caught, at which point Ensign begged his old parents to give his buddy $96,000 in hush money (that worked out in the end!), which they did, spread across eight $12,000 checks to various family members so the sum wouldn't have to be declared as taxable income. He shouldn't be forced to resign. It's better this way, to see him roaming around the desert, giving interviews, meekly trying to hedge his failures, shaming himself, and coming across like a dingbat fraud, which he is: "Ensign told The Associated Press that he didn't lie under oath like Clinton did and that he hasn't 'done anything legally wrong.'" (which is a little bit like saying, 'It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is.')
Indeed, this would make a fine re-election campaign slogan. [AP, Las Vegas Gleaner]
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