But in either case, the book Go the F%$# to Sleep is a classic.
Anyone who has ever had to put there child to sleep understand this completely
Month: June 2011
Pray for Me
I’m in line for the Fahrenheit roller coaster at Hershey Park.
Straight up, straight down, upside down, and me screaming like a little girl.
Pix may follow.
Posted via mobile.
Pass the Popcorn
Two of former Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich’s aides have been indicted on charges of conspiracy to violate Maryland election laws and obstruction of justice relating to robocalls, sent out before polls closed, that suggested that people stay home, because “Governor O’Malley and President Obama have been successful”.
It would be interesting to see what happens if one of them is flipped by prosecutors.
While I don’t think that Bad Hair Bob was involved, he’s really too stupid to be involved in such a plan, I can see his wife, Kendel, giving some sort of assent to the plan.
90% of All Nursing Home Patients End Up On Medicaid
Which means that it’s an issue that the Republicans will use to scare old people, but Obama and the Congressional Democrats are negotiating draconian cuts in the program, because they have some sort of twisted political suicide pact thing going on:
This would be brutal for the poor, particularly in Republican states, but even in blue ones. Governors are champing at the bit to cut enrollment and increase cost sharing. State budgets are still strained, and Medicaid is among the highest expenditures. Much of Medicaid spending goes to keep poor seniors in nursing homes, so a lot of the cuts would get targeted there. Which means that you can call this the “Force Your Mother-in-Law to Move In With You Act.”Keep in mind that fully half of all the coverage expansions in the Affordable Care Act come from a Medicaid expansion. A removal of MOE [maintenance of effort requirements, which prohibit states from gutting the program] would basically undercut that; even though the federal government would pick up all the costs of the Medicaid expansion, states want to reduce their current level, and so the coverage expansion will just unravel. Or, the feds will put the burden on the states, and the states will just opt out of it. You’re talking about millions and millions of beneficiaries losing their coverage.
Un-dirtyword-believably stupid, particularly when Medicaid is a vehicle for much of the theoretical improvements in coverage under Obama’s precious Affordable Health Care Act.
I’m beginning to think that, notwithstanding his intellect, Obama really is not interested in doing anything beyond checking off boxes on something that resembles a standardized test, whether it makes a difference or not.
Ironically, that is his education policy.
It Will Die in the State Senate…
The law legalizing gay marriage in New York has passed the state assembly, but now it now goes to the Senate, where they will pull the football away, in a mirror image of what happened in Maryland.
And if this is true to form, it will be minority Democrats, pressured by homophobic clerics, who will flip and kill the bill.
Mixed News on Jobless Thursday
Initial jobless claims fell, but remained over 400,000, 414 K specifically, with the 4-week moving average remaining flat, with both continuing and emergency claims falling slightly.
It is a little better but the claims numbers are still, in the words of Jimmy McMillan, “Too Damn High.”
Additionally, the Philadelphia Fed’s survey of business outlook fell to a nearly two year row.
But all the very serious people keep saying that “Prosperity is just around the corner.”
They Went After Juan Cole?
The New York Times has discovered that Bush and His Evil Minions™ set the CIA on distinguished professor, and well known blogger, Juan Cole:
A former senior C.I.A. official says that officials in the Bush White House sought damaging personal information on a prominent American critic of the Iraq war in order to discredit him.
Glenn L. Carle, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was a top counterterrorism official during the administration of President George W. Bush, said the White House at least twice asked intelligence officials to gather sensitive information on Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor who writes an influential blog that criticized the war.
In an interview, Mr. Carle said his supervisor at the National Intelligence Council told him in 2005 that White House officials wanted “to get” Professor Cole, and made clear that he wanted Mr. Carle to collect information about him, an effort Mr. Carle rebuffed. Months later, Mr. Carle said, he confronted a C.I.A. official after learning of another attempt to collect information about Professor Cole. Mr. Carle said he contended at the time that such actions would have been unlawful.
It is not clear whether the White House received any damaging material about Professor Cole or whether the C.I.A. or other intelligence agencies ever provided any information or spied on him. Mr. Carle said that a memorandum written by his supervisor included derogatory details about Professor Cole, but that it may have been deleted before reaching the White House. Mr. Carle also said he did not know the origins of that information or who at the White House had requested it.
And just in case you are wondering if he is a disgruntled spy who went to the Times, he isn’t. The Times came to him:
Mr. Carle, who retired in 2007, has not previously disclosed his allegations. He did so only after he was approached by The New York Times, which learned of the episode elsewhere. While Mr. Carle, 54, has written a book to be published next month about his role in the interrogation of a terrorism suspect, it does not include his allegations about the White House’s requests concerning the Michigan professor.
My money is on it being someone in Dick Cheney’s office, because it smells like Cheney.
Welcome to the 3rd World
In a significant portion of the United States, life expectancy is falling:
Women in large swaths of the U.S. are dying younger than they were a generation ago, reversing nearly a century of progress in public health and underscoring the rising toll of smoking and record obesity.
Nationwide, life expectancy for American men and women has risen over the last two decades, and some U.S. communities still boast life expectancies as long as any in the world, according to newly released data. But over the last decade, the nation has experienced a widening gap between the most and least healthy places to live. In some parts of the United States, men and women are dying younger on average than their counterparts in nations such as Syria, Panama and Vietnam.
Overall, the United States is falling further behind other industrialized nations, many of which have also made greater strides in cutting child mortality and reducing preventable deaths.
In 737 U.S. counties out of more than 3,000, life expectancies for women declined between 1997 and 2007. For life expectancy to decline in a developed nation is rare. Setbacks on this scale have not been seen in the U.S. since the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918, according to demographers.
You can find the original article here.
There are some idiots out there who will suggest that it’s because we are too fat*, but the deltas in life expectancy have primarily been through eliminating infant and child mortality, as well as pregnancy related medical issues.
What is going on here is that our medical system is breaking down.
We are undergoing the same collapse of our medical system, albeit more slowly, that occurred towards the end of the USSR, and there was not an outbreak of obesity there.
We have aging and under maintained infrastructure, we are wasting our resources on endless wars and a bloated defense establishment, and we are descending into a morass of corruption and self dealing with no prospect of it being fixed (see Geithner, Tim).
It sounds an awful lot like the declining days of the USSR.
*He says that the same thing happened when we went from hunter-gatherer to farmer, but it misses little facts like:
- The average hunter gatherer works about 20 hours a week, the farmer works 60+ hours.
- The diet of a hunter gatherer is measurably better than that of a bronze or early Iron age farmer, because staple crops are typically less nutritionally complete.
- Agriculture requires that people move next to bodies of water, and live there full time, exposing them to things like Malaria, etc.
What really happened is that people could no longer be hunter gatherers because there was not enough land. You need something like 5 square km/year to support a single hunter gatherer, and once population crosses that threshold you move to herding, and eventually to farming, because the alternative is starvation.
life expectancies falling
So, Anthony Weiner Has Resigned
I guess the rule here, even if you are a Democrat, because they were the ones screaming for him to go, is that unlike Craig, Vitter, Coburn, Ensign, etc., is that it’s not OK if you aren’t a Republican.
The Democrats are such willing hostages to Republican political terrorism that Stockholm Syndrome should be renamed Beltway Democrat syndrome.
The only thing more pathetic is the behavior of the press, which sees fit to treat real scandals from Republicans with decorum, but turns into an (even bigger) freak show when a Democrat does something.
One final note, I would not call Anthony Weiner a dick, because a dick has a head.
Yves Smith’s Takedown of Obama on Warren is a Thing of Beauty
This is truly good writing.
She details the machinations that the Obama administration has gone through to avoid making her the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and it ain’t pretty.
Not only does it make justified critiques of the basic policies (the banksters must be protected at all cost), but it details the shortcomings in basic approach that have characterized his first two years in office.
Go read.
Deep Thought
If you are in a meeting at work, and you start getting into pirate metaphors, it’s not going to be a good meeting.
Normally, I Find This to Be a Typically Meaningless Gesture…
But Dennis Kucinich and the other house members who are suing Barack Obama for violating the War Powers Act in Libya are doing the right thing:
Ten House members led by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) are filing a complaint in federal court against President Obama for taking military action in Libya without first seeking congressional approval.
Kucinich and Reps. Walter Jones (R-N.C.), Howard Coble (R-N.C.), John Duncan (R-Tenn.), Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.), John Conyers (D-Mich.) Ron Paul (R-Texas), Michael Capuano (D-Mass.), Tim Johnson (R-Ill.) and Dan Burton (R-Ind.) filed the complaint Wednesday at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
“With regard to the war in Libya, we believe that the law was violated,” Kucinich said in a statement. “We have asked the courts to move to protect the American people from the results of these illegal policies.”
The House members argue that the Obama administration overstepped its constitutional authority by authorizing the use of U.S. military force abroad without first receiving approval from Congress. U.S. forces have been involved in the campaign against Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi for 88 days.
Critics argue that Obama violated the 1973 War Powers Resolution by failing to seek congressional approval for the mission.
It would be interesting to see how the Supreme Court might handle this.
I’ve always felt that the requirement for Senate to declare war implies that there should be a legislative requirement for the approval of war, but these days, no one seems to take this particularly seriously.
I would note that Libya appears to be a particularly cut and dried case though, there is no security threat to the US, and the primary reason that we are involved seems to be that the US Military didn’t want to be left out of the party started by French and British neo-Colonial political calculus.
Daniel Ellsburg Says the Most Depressing Thing This Century
When he notes that all the crimes committed against him, crimes which were a significant part of the impeachment case that drove Richard M. Nixon from office under threat of impeachment, are now legal:
Richard Nixon, if he were alive today, might take bittersweet satisfaction to know that he was not the last smart president to prolong unjustifiably a senseless, unwinnable war, at great cost in human life. (And his aide Henry Kissinger was not the last American official to win an undeserved Nobel Peace Prize.)
He would probably also feel vindicated (and envious) that ALL the crimes he committed against me–which forced his resignation facing impeachment–are now legal.
That includes burglarizing my former psychoanalyst’s office (for material to blackmail me into silence), warrantless wiretapping, using the CIA against an American citizen in the US, and authorizing a White House hit squad to “incapacitate me totally” (on the steps of the Capitol on May 3, 1971). All the above were to prevent me from exposing guilty secrets of his own administration that went beyond the Pentagon Papers. But under George W. Bush and Barack Obama,with the PATRIOT Act, the FISA Amendment Act, and (for the hit squad) President Obama’s executive orders. they have all become legal.
There is no further need for present or future presidents to commit obstructions of justice (like Nixon’s bribes to potential witnesses) to conceal such acts. Under the new laws, Nixon would have stayed in office, and the Vietnam War would have continued at least several more years.
Likewise, where Nixon was the first president in history to use the 54-year-old Espionage Act to indict an American (me) for unauthorized disclosures to the American people (it had previously been used, as intended, exclusively against spies), he would be impressed to see that President Obama has now brought five such indictments against leaks, almost twice as many as all previous presidents put together (three).
He could only admire Obama’s boldness in using the same Espionage Act provisions used against me–almost surely unconstitutional used against disclosures to the American press and public in my day, less surely under the current Supreme Court–to indict Thomas Drake, a classic whistleblower who exposed illegality and waste in the NSA. [ED Note: The Drake Case Collapsed, and the government settled on a plea for a no-jail-time misdemeanor]
Drake’s trial begins on June 13, the 40th anniversary of the publication of the Pentagon Papers. If Nixon were alive, he might well choose to attend.
While the erosions of civil liberties began under Reagan, and picked up steam under Bush II, it’s clear that that Obama has devoted the power and prestige of his office to further expanding the role of the Presidency and normalizing what are extreme views of executive power.
Obama is like Nixon, without the charm.
Not Good
Two pieces of economic news today, retail sales fell for the first time in 11 months, and thge National Federation of Independent Business’s survey of small business shows that they intend to reduce hiring.
At the rate that this is going, we will have President Palin in 2013, and I will be making Aliyah to Israel.
Quote of the Day
Courtesy of Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo:
Best way to make Weiner story go away is for new prominent Democrat to tell him to resign each day. Ideally early in each news cycle.
The Vaporware Beast Has Been Slain!
In 1998, the much delayed sequel to the fantastically popular first person shooter Duke Nukem, Duke Nukem Forever, was declared one of the top pieces of vaporware (promised but not delivered software) of all time.
Well, an era has ended because today, Duke Nukem Forever was released:
Even though his game is finally in stores, Duke Nukem will forever be remembered as the very personification of vaporware.
Wired.com created the Vaporware Awards many years ago to honor products that were hyped, promoted and promised but never released. Tech and gaming companies love to throw smoke and mirrors in our faces and make us think that barely begun (or simply imaginary) products are humming along quite smoothly; the Vaporware Awards attempt to cut through the spin.
Duke Nukem Forever was mentioned in our Vaporware Awards 12 times as the developers of the first-person shooter let years upon years go by without shipping the game.
Released Tuesday for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC, Duke Nukem Forever doesn’t live up to the years of hype. But simply shipping the unshippable game should be counted as an accomplishment for 2K Games and Gearbox Software, which stepped in last year to get Duke back on track after the collapse of developer 3D Realms.
The reviews are mixed. The gaming press hates it, but at least one person, Bladesmith on the SP BBS, commented that, “Seriously, the reviewers don’t get the joke. This is a throwback AND an homage to the old school 80s Duke.”
As for me, I won’t be getting it. I never played the original, so I think that I would not get the humor.
Crap
On a party line vote, the Wisconsin Supreme Court has reinstated Scott Walker’s union busting law:
The Wisconsin Supreme Court, just hours before a deadline imposed by state legislative Republicans, just reinstated the anti-union law which a district court judge had blocked because it violated state open meetings requirements. They made the novel interpretation that those requirements don’t apply to the legislature.
The court found a committee of lawmakers was not subject to the state’s open meetings law, and so did not violate that law when they hastily approved the measure and made it possible for the Senate to take it up. In doing so, the Supreme Court overruled a Dane County judge who had struck down the legislation, ending one challenge to the law even as new challenges are likely to emerge.
The majority opinion was by Justices Michael Gableman, David Prosser, Patience Roggensack and Annette Ziegler. The other three justices – Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson and Justices Ann Walsh Bradley and N. Patrick Crooks – concurred in part and dissented in part.
Not that I have to tell you this, but the four who signed the majority opinion were all nominated by Republicans, while the three who dissented were all nominated by Democrats.
I now expect the court to find a way to stop the recall elections.
God Bless The Onion
U.S. Flag Recalled After Causing 143 Million Deaths
and
The same thing that makes The Onion so amusing also makes it infuriating. It’s too close to the truth.
Germany F%$#s Up Again
While I believe that the dissolution of Yugoslavia was inevitable once Milosevic took control of the executive council, the German decision post unification to feel their diplomatic oats to recognize the independence of Slovenia set in motion a cascade of events that led to the orgy of violence and Genocide in the former Yugoslavia.
Well, the just did it again, by recognizing the rebels in Benghazi as the government of Libya :
Germany, which declined to participate in the NATO air campaign against Libya, on Monday recognized the opposition National Transitional Council as the legitimate representative of Libya, Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said during a visit to the rebel capital of Benghazi.
The announcement by Mr. Westerwelle comes after weeks of hesitation by Germany over which rebel leaders or movements, if any, it would recognize as an alternative to the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
“The Transitional Council is the legitimate representation of the Libyan people,” Mr. Westerwelle said after arriving in Benghazi. “With this council, we want to support the building of a democratic and law-abiding Libya.”
Germany will open a small mission in Benghazi, joining the United States, the European Union, the United Nations, Britain, France, Spain, Malta and Qatar, which have established a presence there in the past several weeks. Washington, however, has not extended diplomatic recognition to the council.
This has fiasco written all over it.
Italian Voters Finally Refuse to Cover Berlusconi’s Ass
I think that the Italian people may finally had their fill of Silvio, because they repealed a law granting him immunity, along with repealing laws restarting the Italian nuclear program,. as well as one privatizing the water supply:
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi suffered a stinging political defeat on Monday when voters overturned laws passed by his government that would have restarted Italy’s nuclear energy program, privatized the water supply and granted him immunity from prosecution.
Analysts said the government was not likely to fall immediately over the results, which came from a popular referendum — the first since 1995 to draw the quorum of 50 percent plus one vote required to overturn the laws.
But just weeks after Mr. Berlusconi’s candidates lost mayoral races in Milan and Naples in elections he had billed as a referendum on his own popularity, Monday’s results pointed to a new reality: the man who once had his finger on Italy’s pulse appeared to be losing touch.
The truth, for course, is that he’s never really had his fingers on Italy’s pulse.
What he has had is a monopoly on private TV in Italy, and control over all the television in Italy while he is in power.
Come to think of it, what Silvio Berlusconi has is a microcosm of America’s media oligopoly.
Imagine what the world would be like if Sarah Palin were Rupert Murdoch, and you will understand the hell that was Italian politics.
Pleasant dreams.