There was a scuffle at a healthcare reform rally, and someone’s finger was bitten off.
*Admiral Josh Painter, The Hunt for Red October.
Year: 2009
Godwin’s Law Does not Apply*
The reason that Godwin’s law does not apply here is because we are talking about Patrick Buchanan, and, on the 60th anniversary of the start of WWII, he’s writing about how the war really wasn’t Hitler’s fault at all, but the fault of those meddling English.
OK, we know that he is a pro-Nazi kook, and we know that his Dad was involved in the German American Bund, so we can only imagine what little Patty’s dinner table discussions were like, but why does this man have a soap box at MSNBC and other networks?
The issue is not that he is an anti-Semitic and racist kook, it is that mainstream media outlets still feel compelled to give him access?
To quote the late, great Molly Ivins, “The speech was so much better in the original German.”
[on edit] I did not link directly to Pat Buchanan’s article, though I read it, because I did not want to drive page views.
*Which states that, “As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1,” with a corollary that, “the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically “lost” whatever debate was in progress.”†
†It should be noted that this law has not been considered to apply exclusively to Usenet discussions for at least a decade, and is applied generally to all forms of electronic text based communications.
Dick Cheney Emerges from his Lazurus Pit to Hunt his Favorite Prey, Humans*
It’s a Batman reference, BTW.
*I claim no credit for either the photo or the bon mot. The photo is from Wall Street Jackass, and the funny line is from Cthulhu.†
†No, not the unspeakably malevolent super-being, the contributor to the Shortskoolbus BBS.‡
‡OK, I’ve never seen the two of them together, so Cthulhu might actually be the Cthulhu, but the mere fact that he is on a BBS, interacting with humans§ would seem to mitigate against this.
§
Economics Update
Well, the first set of numbers for August job losses have come out, and ADP forecasts a drop of 298K non-farm payroll jobs, the lowest number since last September, and the Dickensian-named Challenger, Gray, and Christmas, has reported that there were 76,456 jobs cut, well down from July, but about 2K more than June. (Note: these are apples and oranges. The 1st is the total delta in employment, and the 2nd is total layoffs.)=
These numbers are not good, they are still on the minus side, but they are better, as is the revised BLS numbers for productivity, which show a 6.6% annual rate of increase.
Still, we saw consumer bankruptcies up 24% YoY, and they are on a pace to hit 1.4 million this year.
In finance, Treasuries were up, and yields down, on the release of the Federal Reserve Board’s minutes, which show a bit more concern about the recovery, and the VIX (Volatility IndeX) is up, which would tend to indicate that the current rally is on its last legs.
In real estate, mortgage applications fell, even though rates were down.
ADP’s job loss numbers pushed both the dollar and crude oil down, largely because even though they were an improvement over the prior month, they were worse than forecast.
Who is Holding a Power Drill to his Head?
So, it appears that the Stalinesque recantations among Republicans who have mistakenly told the truth continues, with Tom Ridge now completely denying that there were any political considerations in the terror alerts.
Jon Stewart is a F%$#ing Genius, Part Bazillion
He correctly points out that Fox News is the most vociferously liberal news network out there….By the standards of….Fox News….
Seems Accurate
Except for the dog part…I’m a cat person, and have had a cat attack during the act.
Thankfully, it was her foot, and not my dangly bits.
Another Subsidy Plea
The mortgage bankers association is looking to get explicit federal insurance for their mortgage backed securities, so that they can fob off the downside of their bad judgment on the taxpayer.
They can camouflage it in all they want with statements about, “The government has an important, limited role to play to ensure a stable flow of funds for mortgages,” but this is about a hand out, not a hand up.
Well, This is Disturbing
Seriously, it actually made me feel a bit weepy.
Te Stoopid, It Burns US!!!!!
Maria Bartiromo asks 454 year old Congressman Anthony Weiner if why he is not on Medicare (1:37 in vid).
Umm…You have to be 65 to qualify.
Jeebus, is she anything but a life support system for a pair of tits.*
*Yes, legs too, she has nice gams. The point is that she is a profoundly stupid woman who has her job because she is eye candy.
Bad Hair News
Upon his indictment about 7 years ago
Leaving Prison with hair in a pony tail.
Corrupt Congressman James Traficant has been released from prison after serving 7 years.
Normally, I would not note this, but when I first found the web, I decided that it was impossible for me to create a particularly useful web page, so instead I attempted create the most useless page.
It was dedicated bad hair days, and it’s been kind of moribund for years, but Mr. Traficant is there front and center.
Why Barack Obama’s Poll Numbers are Dropping
This makes perfect sense because his problem is that he’s been kow-towing to the left so much that he’s lost the country, what with all the war crimes investigations, the tax hikes for the rich, the crackdown on the banks, the repeal of “don’t ask don’t tell” and the thumbing of his nose at the Republicans every chance he gets. Not to mention the plans for full withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan by 2012 and his full blown assault on the health care industry and insistence on a Canadian style health care system. You’d think Obama would have been far, far more cautious so as not to give the Republican freakshow any possible path to demonize them as “far left.” It’s not like they could just make stuff up and a lot of people in America would believe it, right?
(emphasis mine)
At least, that’s what an anonymous “top official” (**cough** Rahm **cough**) says.
Great Googly Moogly!
The California brush fires on time lapse:
Economics Update
Auto Sales Graph Pr0n Courtesy Calculated Risk
Construction Spending Pron Also Courtesy of Calculated Risk
As is noted by Calculated Risk, light vehicle sales hit a 1¼ year high in August, but that was with the Cash for Clunkers program, which is now over, which begs the question, “What happens in September?”
I think that the trend is generally up, because the sales were so low that the fleet replacement time (fleet size/sales) was approaching 30 years, which is simply unsustainable. (click images for full size)
It should also be noted that for all the claims of recovery, both residential and non-residential construction spending continues to decline.
Additionally, notwithstanding the “green shoots”, the bond market is pricing in some very hard times ahead, with US Treasuries rising in price, which drops their yield.
This sentiment is also serving to drive the Yen and the dollar higher, and crude oil lower, as people look for a safe haven.
Stupidest Motherf$#%er on the Washington Post Payroll
Which may make Richard Cohen the stupidest motherf$#%er on the face of the earth, beating out Douglas Feith.
You see, he wants to wring his hands, and say that there should be no prosecutions for torture, because it might work, once.
This ignores the fact that it does not work most of the time, in fact it makes things much worse, because not only does it make potential allies into opponents, but it does not extract reliable information.
Notwithstanding Mr. Cohen’s self-professed, “abhorrence of torture,” this is really about the fact that inside the Washington, DC Beltway, the idea for accountability for crimes is an anathema to the “very serious people.”
He coaches this moral capitulation as his desire for the impossible, “absolute security,” which does not exist sitting in one’s home, or driving on a street, but this is thrown in because it sounds reasonable, and justifies the most heinous of acts.
The reality is that they are completely bereft of morality, and so attached to Sally Quinn’s damn cocktail parties and their access to the politically powerful in the nation, that they endorse criminality and moral indecency on a scale that boggles the mind.
That being said, cheer-leading crimes against humanity and endorsing the idea that there should never be any accountability does not make Richard Cohen a stupid man, it just makes him a war criminal, guilty of crimes against humanity like Julius Streicher or Hassan Ngeze, what makes him the stupidest man in the world is this:
Attorney General Eric Holder has named a special prosecutor to see whether any of the CIA’s interrogators broke the law. Special prosecutors are often themselves like interrogators — they don’t know when to stop. They go on and on because, well, they can go on and on. One of them managed to put Judith Miller of The New York Times in jail — a wee bit of torture right there. No CIA interrogator can feel safe. The interrogators are about to be interrogated.
(emphasis mine)
While Judith “EC” Miller’s incarceration on contempt of court charges is undoubtedly coercive, and openly so, the intent of the contempt citation and jailing was to extract information about her sources, it was by no means torture.
Anyone conflating incarceration with torture is really, really, mind bogglingly stupid.
Te stoopid….It burns us!!1
Our Dumb Nation
So, a band came up with T-shirt, “Brass Evolutions, 2009,” but some creationist whack job parents objected so the assistant superintendent confiscated the shirts, because some parents, “don’t think evolution should be associated with our school.”
Since when did stupid people get the right to make the rest of us stupid?
What the administration should have done was contact the alma mater of said parents, and suggest that their diplomas be revoked.
What a Whiny Bitch
Joe Klein acts like a turd at a party to I.F. Stone’s grand daughter, where among other things, he claims that Wikipedia is “leftist”, and has clueless his ass handed to him, and then he basically describes her as a member of Glenn Greenwald’s “cult”, and then he gets his nose out of shape about this:
Now, Greenwald himself has published private emails of mine that were part of a conversation taking place on a list-serve. In one of those emails, I say that Greenwald “cares not a whit for America’s national security.”
You know, the intersection of private emails and listserve (no hyphen, dude) is a null set. If you post to a listserv, and expect it to be private, you are a complete tool.
He further goes on, republishing another of his emails from the listserv, that while, “not a religious reader of Greenwald,” he has never heard him talk about who well, for example, well things went in Anbar province.
Ignoring the obvious, that if you are, “not a religious reader of Greenwald,” then you don’t know whether he wrote this or not, there is also the fact that Glenn Greenwald writes about civil liberties, not military tactics, but he continues to insist that because he, Joe Klein, has not read something on the subject, that Greenwald is somehow evil and anti-American.
It should be noted that the real cause of this is when Glenn Greenwald showed that Klein was holding authoritatively on the FISA legislation in Congress, and being completely wrong, because he had been, “he’d been lied to, by a Democratic Staffer,” ignoring the fact, that if he had read the legislation, or even if he had just had an intern read the legislation, he would have been known that what he was spouting was a crock of sh$#.
So much like Dick Cheney, Mr. Klein is a whiny bitch.
[update]Greenwald’s response, though it is rather more generally directed at the Washington DC Kule Kidz, than at Klein.
Army Revives Guided 2.75-inch Rocket Procurement
Well, it’s beginning to look the army is going to take another look at a guided 2.75-inch rocket after the congress took the money from their advanced precision kill weapon system program, and transferred it to the Marine Corps, who were apparently much further along on the task of integrating guided rockets into combat units that the Army.
The original concept was to have a guided weapon to hang from the OH-58 and similar helicopters, but given the hot and (very!) high operating conditions in Afghanistan, and the nature of the targets, a Hellfire is overkill for a truck or an ox cart.
As the picture shows, you can carry 7 rockets (right of picture store) for each Hellfire:
A market survey released on 28 August by the army’s joint attack munition systems office says that high-altitude conditions require the army to trade the number of “stowed kills” on board an aircraft in favour of adding extra fuel.
“This undesirable trade is believed to be unnecessary given recent developments by industry on lightweight precision munitions,” it adds. “Industry efforts have resulted in a number of semi-active laser (SAL) munitions that may have the potential to satisfy army aviation’s need for a lightweight, precision munition.”
Market survey? I know what they mean, but the juxtaposition of the phrase “Market Survey,” and US Army is a bit odd.
Background here.
The Very Modern Model of a Modern Republican Candidate
Republican Virginia gubernatorial candidate Robert McDonald mentioned in an interview with the Washington Post that he did a masters thesis on “welfare policy,” and the Post went and did some real journalism: they went to the library at Regent University, Pat Robertson’s diploma mill, which was called Christian Broadcasting Network University at the time that he filed his papers.
What they found was shocking, though not surprising:
- Called working women “detrimental to the family”.
- Opposition to birth control.
- Absolute ban on abortions, including where rape, incest, and the health of the mother are issues.
- Covenant marriage (basically making divorces much more difficult).
- Support for religious school vouchers.
- Opposed tax breaks for child care expenses.
I am so not shocked that he is a right wing medieval nut job, but I think that some Virginia voters might be.
I’m shocked though that the Washington Post actually allowed real journalism to reach its pages. This article is positively brutal, and deservedly so.
Your Liberal Media
The Today Show has hired ½ of the formerly underage alcohol driven comedy duo Jenna and Tonic, Jenna Bush Hager, daughter of GW Bush, as a correspondent.
Un-dirtyword-believable.