Archive for September 2, 2010
Republicans Embrace Stupid as a Badge of Honor
Apropos of what Jan Brewer did (or didn’t do) last night, when did “stupid become a badge of honor” for Republicans?
That would be Keith Olbermann tonight.
My thought? Two words: Fox News.
Four Minutes in Oil Spill News
Oil is good? It took me all of four minutes to find these stories. Imagine how many more are out there.
Fuel Tanker Runs Aground in Canadian Waters,
carrying 2.4 million gallons of diesel fuel that risk spilling into the Arctic waters, the Canadian Coast Guard said Thursday.
Another oil rig explodes in the Gulf of Mexico.
Texas Company Working to Plug North Dakota Oil Well:
A Texas company worked Thursday to seal the underground piping of a faulty oil well that has leaked more than 1,100 barrels of crude and water at a drill site in western North Dakota.
The spill happened about 2 1/2 miles southwest of Killdeer and was reported early Wednesday morning, said Lynn Helms, director of the state Department of Mineral Resources.
Helms called it the worst spill in the state’s oil patch since the recent resurgence in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, a process that uses pressurized fluid and sand to break open oil-bearing rock some two miles underground.
Eldridge Execuive Who Responded to the Michigan Oil Spill to Retire:
Elbridge Energy Partners, the company involved in the oil spill in the Kalamazoo River, announced this morning that their Executive Vice President is retiring effective November 1st.
The White House is Scared To Death of the Right
So, Rahm Emanuel calls liberals “fu*king retards” and Robert Gibbs lashes out at the “professional left.“ In addition, I heard someone talking on the radio today about a new book coming out (don’t remember the title or the name of the author because I didn’t think I needed to … until now) about the inner workings of the Obama White House and its disdain for unions.
OK, so that said, we learn that Robert Gibbs “got into it” today on Twitter with uber-neocon Stephen Hayes of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard:
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs got into it with critic Stephen Hayes on Twitter Thursday after the Weekly Standard contributor suggested that the small business aid bill currently stalled in the Senate would not improve businesses’ hiring.
“In conversations w/small biz owners, they’ll give you dozens of reasons they’re not hiring. Never had anyone mention small biz aid bill,” Hayes said in a Thursday tweet.
“ATTN @stephenfhayes,” Gibbs fired back. His tweet linked to an article from USA Today reporting that some business owners were delaying hiring and purchasing to wait out a vote on the bill, which was expected earlier this summer.
Hayes quickly responded, saying “Ask small business owners across the country if they’d rather have across-the-bd tax cuts or gov-backed loans @PressSec.”
He followed with a series of tweets, citing a National Federation of Independent Business report that stated that poor sales, rather than an inability to access credit, was their “top problem.”
Hayes went on to quote the report:
“‘Small bus owner responses make clear that the Admin and Cong nvr understood and still do not understand Main Street’s problem’
“Admin and Cong “knowingly initiated major destabilizing, policy changes in a deep, destabilizing recession.”
Gibbs responded after a long pause.
“The facts @stephenfhayes there would be ZERO capital gains on small business investment, expand tax cuts for new equip investments,” he said.
(Who knows, this tit for tat could continue so follow it and see the original tweets mentioned above at Robert Gibbs’ Twitter feed and Stephen Hayes Twitter feed.)
Anyway, what we learn from this is that when the “professional left” criticizes the White House — as in, oh, say the lack of a public option in the health care “reform” bill, they get irritated, call us names, and blow us off. When one of the most prominent, radical conservatives in the country criticizes what’s lacking in a White House bill, they take him seriously and respond.
As Chris Hayes tweeted a few minutes ago:
And he’s exactly right.
The White House is scared to death of the right while it simultaneously appears to loath its base.
Is it any wonder there’s “malaise” amongst Democrats this year?
Break Time — “Last Photos”
The folks over at “Weird Existence” have put together a series of what they call “last photos” supposedly taken by people in the last seconds of their life, of other people in the last seconds of their life or just before a major catastrophe.
They’ve got to be photoshopped (some are obvious), but they’re cleaver nonetheless.
Here are a few examples:
This Seems Like Kind of a Big Deal
This seems like kind of a big deal: Thad Allen: In Hindsight, BP Might Have Shut Down Oil Well Sooner…
In hindsight, if BP had removed the 5,000-foot-long tangle of riser pipe from its damaged Gulf well in the early days of the spill, a new blowout preventer or cap could have been installed, shutting down the well perhaps within weeks instead of months, according to both the federal incident commander and petroleum engineers.
…but after a quick check of the cable “news” websites, I don’t see a thing.
How is Arizona Governor Jan Brewer the Governor of Anything?
This would be Arizona’s Republican Governor, Jan Brewer, making an opening statement last night during a debate with her Democratic opponent, Terry Goddard.
I think the poor woman has a vocabulary of maybe — maybe — 25 words:
This is Jan Brewer’s opportunity to detail what she would do if elected. So what does she do? She mumbles and fumbles and bumbles and giggles and bashes Obama and health care reform.
She ain’t got nothin’ — just like the rest of the GOP.
Wingers: The Hostage Situation at the Discovery Channel Yesterday Was Al Gore’s Fault
I kid you not — an anti-climate change group — the “Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow” — is out with an article today blaming Al Gore for what James Lee did yesterday, i.e., taking three Discovery Channel employees hostage at the company’s Maryland headquarters before being shot to death:
James Lee, the gunman and hostage taker who was shot and killed by a SWAT team in the Discovery Channel Building in Silver Spring, Maryland, is the latest of a long line of eco-terrorists who have killed and maimed innocent people for over three decades.
The quick and decisive action by the Montgomery County Police Department enabled Lee’s three hostages to escape unharmed, a happy ending to an incident that brought the scourge of eco-terrorism to the gates of the nation’s capital. Before he met his end, Lee issued a manifesto which contained a set of demands aimed at the Discovery Channel. While his demands come from a deeply disturbed mind, they are rooted in an apocalyptic environmentalism that we have seen before.
[...]
According to the Maryland Gazette, James Lee was influenced by Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth.” While Gore’s controversial documentary does not advocate violence, the film’s catastrophic vision of earth’s future and man’s alleged role therein, will weigh heavily on the psychologically vulnerable among us. Let’s hope that Lee’s case is an isolated one and that we’re not facing a resurgence of eco-terrorism. The country has enough problems as it is.
The righties are famous for their “think tanks.” Too bad they don’t spend their time thinking about how to put Americans back to work or how to get us off our dependence on oil, instead of thinking about how to blame Democrats for e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g.
Citigroup Tells American Taxpayers to Go F Themselves
Too bad the Bush administration’s TARP bank bailout plan didn’t include a provision requiring companies who received bailout money– as in taxpayer money — to return the favor and do their hiring here in the U.S., instead of overseas:
Citigroup Inc. plans to almost triple its workforce in China to as many as 12,000 people in the next three years, intensifying its rivalry with HSBC Holdings Plc in the world’s fastest-growing major economy.
The New York-based bank will hire more in China than in any other Asia-Pacific country, Stephen Bird, Citigroup’s co-chief executive officer for the region, said yesterday in an interview. The expansion may make China Citigroup’s third-largest market by staff, after the U.S. and Mexico, said spokesman James Griffiths.
Infuriating.
Another Rig Has Exploded in the Gulf
Say it ain’t so already.
NEW ORLEANS — One person is missing after a rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, about 80 miles south of Vermilion Bay, the U.S. Coast Guard said.It happened around 9 a.m., and as of 10:15 a.m., the rig was still burning, the Coast Guard said. Rescue crews from New Orleans and Houston are responding.Officials said there were 13 people aboard the rig, and all but one are accounted for.
Rupert Murdoch’s Big Fail
Hah! Rupert Murdoch thought it would be a great idea to put a subscription paywall around the websites of The Times and The Sunday Times (of London), “thus removing their content from search engines.” Well guess what, traffic to those sites is — duh — collapsing and advertisers are leaving in droves.
Gee (I say sarcastically), nobody could have predicted that.
What a greedy fool.
Big Brother Just Got Bigger
Did you hear about this:
Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn’t violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway — and no reasonable expectation that the government isn’t tracking your movements.
That is the bizarre — and scary — rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants — with no need for a search warrant.
It is a dangerous decision — one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal privacy that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich.[...]
The judges veered into offensiveness when they explained why Pineda-Moreno’s driveway was not private. It was open to strangers, they said, such as delivery people and neighborhood children, who could wander across it uninvited.Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, who dissented from this month’s decision refusing to reconsider the case, pointed out whose homes are not open to strangers: rich people’s. The court’s ruling, he said, means that people who protect their homes with electric gates, fences and security booths have a large protected zone of privacy around their homes. People who cannot afford such barriers have to put up with the government sneaking around at night.
Good Morning
It’s a good morning because I had a great sleep and I’m ready to face the world!
