Daniel Dean Thompson, a man at the heart of the effort to strip out profanity from PG-143 and R rated DVDs, has been arrested for paying 14-year-olds for sexual favors.
Once again confirming that the blue nose brigades are driven by their own personal demons more than anything else.
McCain lies about Romney’s position on the Iraq war*, and Time’s Michael Scherer calls him out on it.
I’m stunned.
What happened to the media’s role as “fluffer” for John McCain?
Bush is ratcheting up the rhetoric on the “give the phone companies a blow job” version of the FISA update, and Harry Reid is pushing back.
Bush is threatening a veto of an extension of the so called “Protect America Act”, because, even though it protects phone companies for current warrantless domestic spying, it does not indemnify them for prior spying, some of which began in February 2001, more than 7 months before 911.
Let’s be clear. Indemnification is not about getting phone companies to cooperate. It is about helping phone companies conceal the details of this activity, so that Bush and His Evil Minions™ will never face legal consequences of their law breaking.
Well, $%#@ that.
Noah Shachtman reports on a new concept in weapons systems procurement competition. and the pushback that it is getting from defense contractors and their pet politicians.
It’s about the Joint Air-to-Ground Missile (JAGM), a missile system, designed to replace the Hellfire and Maverick missiles. (It’s probably a family of missiles, as the 50 kg Hellfire has a 8-9 kg warhead, and the 200-300 kg Maverick has a 57-135 kg warhead).
They are going to select two different groups to compete the missile program, which is not surprising, but they will base the competition on actual physical prototypes, as opposed to paper proposals.
…. Last September, Young issued a policy that went beyond competitive bidding and resurrected an old idea: competitive proto-typing.
…….
But Young’s memo decried a pattern among “many troubled programs” that were pushed forward before they were ready, wasting time and billions of dollars. The problem, in part, was that defense officials often made decisions “based largely on paper proposals that provided inadequate knowledge of technical risk and a weak foundation for estimating develop- ment and procurement costs,” he wrote ….. hence, the decision to change the acquisition strategy for the JAGM program before it proceeded too far, too fast.
The defense contractors are apoplectic over this, which to my mind shows that it’s a good idea.
Earlier verification through prototype may add a few bucks, and a few months, early in the process, but it will likely result in better, and cheaper, products.
It really looks like that Fed rate cut helped a lot, huh?
Trading day is half over, and stocks are down over 2%.
Care of Firedoglake, they will both show up to vote against cloture on the “give the phone companies a blow job” version of the FISA update.
Good for them, or more accurately, their pollsters. Someone told them that this was more important than a fund raising meeting.
Telco immunity is about Bush and His Evil Minions&trade covering up their illegal wiretapping activities that started before 9/11.
I noticed that Americans United for Change will be spending $8.5 million on ads to keep Bush’s approval numbers down for the rest of his term.
My first reaction was that this was a waste of money, public disapproval has never prevented Bush from doing the wrong thing. After all, he has a year left, and who cares.
Steve Benen, of the Carpetbagger, sets me right, and he makes the point that the Republicans have welded themselves to Bush for at least this election cycle, and they won’t begin to extricate themselves from his toxic embrace until after tie 2008 elections.
It’s true, the weaker Bush is, weaker ‘Phants are, and there is this little bon mot of Mr. Benen.
And, one assumes, if John McCain gets the Republican nomination, this initiative, coupled with a ubiquitous picture of McCain hugging Bush, should help tilt the scales a little.
True.
I just wish that I hadn’t been drinking when I read that. Steve Benen ows me a screen cleaner.
Edwards is calling on people to call their Senators to act against Telco immunity.
Clinton and Obama???
crickets.
I guess it’s tough to do the job you have sworn to do in the Senate when you are busy campaigning for Prez.
Firedog Lake asks What The F*!k Is Up With FISA?
Reid is now saying that if there is not an extension, than there will be nothing when the current misbegotten bill expires on February 1.
According to Think Progress, this is Reid’s Statement:
The White House threat to veto a short extension of the Protect America Act is shamefully irresponsible. The President is simply posturing in advance of Monday’s State of the Union address.
When it comes to providing a strong long-term Foreign Intelligence Surveillance bill, Democrats in Congress are focused on solutions, while Republicans are obviously playing politics.
The House has already passed a FISA bill, and the Senate was ready to pass its own bill until Republicans blocked all amendments. At the same time, Democrats are ready to extend current law for as long as necessary, but Republicans are blocking that extension and the White House is threatening a veto.
It is shenanigans like this that make Americans so eager for change. We hope the American public will remember these Republican stunts when they go to the polling booth this November.
In any event, current law ensures that no ongoing collection activity will be cut off on February 1. There will be no terrorism intelligence collection gap. But if there is any problem, the blame will clearly and unequivocally fall where it belongs: on President Bush and his allies in Congress.
The ‘Phants overreached. They were going to get everything that they wanted this, so they wanted this, and a pony…OK, it wasn’t a pony, they wanted to be able to humiliate the Democrats too.
Of course, she opens up with a slam against Bill Clinton, though she forgot to pimp her friendly dolphins.
That being said, there is one paragraph about Bush that I find amusing:
This is absurd. George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party, by which I mean he sundered it, broke its constituent pieces apart and set them against each other. He did this on spending, the size of government, war, the ability to prosecute war, immigration and other issues.
Bush had inflicted damage on the GOP, but this has not been a failure of George W. Bush, but an artifact of his success.
He has been remarkably successful in producing results in the Republican agenda:
The problem, is that the Republican agenda has consequences:
George W. Bush did not destroy the Republican Party, no has he wounded our nation for years to come, movement conservatism has.
Yep, they banks are looking at implementing new larger fees on holders of small accounts.
I guess that they need to stick it to the little guy because of all the money that they are losing on the high rollers that they gave exotic mortgage packages to.
Today, the average ATM fee is $1.78, while five years ago it cost a little more than a $1 to retrieve money from a bank with which you didn’t have an account.
In some areas, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Wachovia fees have hit $3 for non-customers.
Bankers and the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
I discussed this on the Usenet* group Rec.Org.SCA about three years ago.
I was watching something on the Discovery Channel, and some people were making arguments that the Black Death could not have been Yerisnia Pestis, because some of its characteristics were simply completely at odds with what is observed in modern Bubonic Plague outbreaks.
Looking back at the archives, my assessment was that it was likely a variant of the Plague with a higher affinity for lung tissues (I mention the Marmot sub-variant as an example).
In any case, Tara C. Smith just did a 4 part blog series on Y. pestis as the black death, which thoroughly convinces me that Y. pestis was Black Death.
It’s a very good read.
*Originally called UUCP, it was a system for bouncing public BBS type messages through the internet. You can still access it, and it works fairly well, but the signal to noise ratio degraded to the point of near uselessness when AOL gave it’s (l)users access to the system during the Eternal September, with the inevitable tragedy of the commons.
Saint Louis University’s basketball couch Rick Majerus tells fascist Archbishop to piss off regarding said cleric’s suggestion that disciplinary action be taken against him because he showed up to a Hillary Clinton rally, and made pro-choice statements.
Ignoring the towering idiocy of demanding that a basketball coach towing anti-woman, anti sex line of Archbishop Raymond Burke, there is also the matter, rasied in my last post on this issue, that St. Louis University just won a court case regarding a tax financing for a new sports arena because they had demonstrated they were not, “controlled by a religious creed”.
This is not the first time that this moron has damaged both the reputation and the institution of the Catholic Church:
Burke has spoken out before against Catholics or Catholic institutions that stray from church doctrine. During the 2004 election, he said he would not administer Holy Communion to presidential candidate John Kerry, a Catholic, because he supported abortion rights.
Last year, Burke dropped his seat on the board of a charity that let singer Sheryl Crow perform at a benefit concert. Crow supports abortion rights and embryonic stem cell research.
On Tuesday, Burke said he would ask Saint Louis University officials to take “appropriate action” against Majerus after the coach gave a TV interview at the Clinton rally during which he said he was Catholic and pro-choice.
In 1942, the Bishop of Father Coughlin to STFU. Perhaps it might be advisable for someone in Burke’s chain of command to do the same.
She has two children, and we’ve already had instances of what can only be called deranged behavior, such as her stalking of the Graeme Frost family.
Well, now she is saying that she is claiming that John McCain is an agent of George Soros. (H/T Whisky Fire for the catch)
I read Whiskey Fire, and I was amused, and then I read her article, and I was frightened.
Not of George Soros, as was her intent, and not of her wit or intellect, which honestly does not impress me.
I was frightened that in a few years, she would snap, and we would see another one of those stories where the police break down the door, and find that she has drowned her children in the bathtub.
It’s probably not fair, after all, my writing is not indicative of sanity, but I just get this sense that we’re going to read this story in the paper.
Anyone know of a way to help?
I’m sorry, but going to CPS based on my gut, no matter how ample, is just wrong, particularly considering how often my predictions are wrong.
But it’s like watching a slow motion train wreck.
98% Reporting: Obama 55%, Clinton 27%, Edwards 18%
Of note is the fact that Democrats out polled Republicans 521,078 to 442,918, in one of the more Republican states in the nation.
Yes, everyone’s favorite foot tapping senator Larry Craig, and as well as Senator Crap Crapo oppose him because he enforces the law.
They have both put “holds” on his nomination, because as acting head of the ATF, “The ATF stripped the license of Red’s Trading Post in Twin Falls, Idaho, in March after an audit found numerous record-keeping violations over a five-year period,” though this license is still in effect pending litigation.
Senate Democrats are looking about, “giving retirees tax rebates, extending unemployment benefits, boosting heating subsidies for the poor and temporarily increasing food stamp payments.”
This is great politics!!!, and here’s why:
On a policy level, if they were to strike the business tax credits, which will take months to have any effect, and are very inefficient, that would be a good thing.
Notwithstanding the Israeli disengagement there, I think that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas recognizes how inconsequential and how screwed up Gaza is, and so he is snubbing the Egyptian offer of mediating talks with Hamas because he does not want the region.
That makes three governmental entities that have said they don’t want anything to do with it now.
Ignoring Israeli-Palestinian issues, Gaza has nothing going for it as a geographical entity.
Let’s see what you have by way of pluses and minuses with Gaza:
Minuses:
Pluses:
One of Freddie Thompson’s former campaign staff is calling for a, “boycott of all shows and products affiliated with martial arts thespian Chuck Norris because of his endorsement of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.”
The lamitude* of this snollygoster†, “Darrel Ng, a former traveling press secretary for Thompson” just boggles the mind.
*I know that lamitude is not not a real word.
†But “snollygoster” is a real word.
