Archive for September 27, 2010
“I Like Talking About People Who Don’t Have Any Power”
That would be my favorite recent quote.
– Stephen Colbert last Friday
MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell Thinks Fox News is So Nice
Lawrence O’Donnell’s new show debuted on MSNBC tonight. Why MSNBC hired him, I don’t know. The guy seems to be an accidental “political commentator” who slid along in life, getting a lot of breaks, for who knows why.
I have no idea what they see in him.
One of the first things he did on his debut day was to praise Fox News’ Greta VanSusteren:
(The top tweet reads: “Beautiful bottle of wine arrived from the Queen of 10pm. Thanks @Gretawire. Since I don’t drink, the staff will be opening at 11pm.”)
Hey, Larry. Has it occurred to you that the “Queen of 10pm” might have ulterior motives in sending you that bottle of wine?
Bad start corporate media guy.
They should have hired Cenk Uygur. Ratings soared when he subbed for Dylan Ratigan.
Newsmax v. MoveOn.Org
Whether a comparison between Newsmax and MoveOn is fair or not, I think it’s interesting to note — “enthusiasm gap-wise” — that I’ve received five emails from Newsmax today — today alone — while I haven’t received a single email from MoveOn since September 22.
U.S. Plans $4 Billion Weapons Sale to Iraq — Yes, Iraq
Insofar as Iraq is still a mess and it doesn’t have a stable government yet for God’s sake, my jaw dropped when I saw this: US Plans $4bn in Weapons Sales to Iraq.
The Obama administration has unveiled plans for more than $4bn in weapons sales to Iraq, including 18 F-16 aircraft, as part of a push for the Middle Eastern state to take full charge of its own security.
The authorisation has to be coordinated with Congress but is unlikely to be seriously opposed
In a formal notification the administration said the $4.2bn sale, which in addition to the F16s includes Sidewinder missiles, laser-guided bombs and advanced airborne reconnaissance equipment, would make Iraq “a more valuable partner in an important area of the world as well as supporting Iraq’s legitimate needs for its own self-defence.”
The Pentagon published the announcement on Monday, but had already formally notified Congress on September 15.
This is just crazy. It doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination to picture those aircraft being used against us one day.
Los Angeles Breaks Heat Record — 113º There This Afternoon
Wow. Probably pretty hard to find a climate change skeptic in L.A. today:
Los Angeles, California, has broken the all-time record high temperature of 112F with a temperature of 113F at 12:15pm PDT. Their temperature could rise more through the afternoon.
Today is the hottest day in L.A.’s history.
Democrat Makes Ad Touting His Bush Voting Record
Earl Palmeroy is a Democrat running for Congress in North Dakota.
Who’d have thought that less than two years after the despised George W. Bush slithered out of Washington, someone would crow about siding with him and that that person would be a Democrat!
What’s up is down. What’s down is up.
Alan Grayson Demolishes Daniel Webster — American Taliban
Jesus, Alan Grayson’s opponent down in Florida is a nut, disguising himself as a “true patriot” as is so often the case with that crowd. The guy wants to impose his radical Christian values on the rest of us which, as we know, is what the Taliban does with its extreme version of Islam. But hooray for Grayson. As usual, he doesn’t pull any punches. Here’s his new campaign ad:
I don’t agree with Grayson on everything but I love him because he’s a fighter and he doesn’t back down (I’m lookin’ at you Obama).
Democrats should put together a national version of this and air it everywhere.
Bad News For the Planet
Republicans should be ashamed and the rest of us should be furious: 19 out of 20 GOP senate nominees think climate change is inconclusive or just plain BS.
Unless Democrats can recover lost ground, it appears likely that the 2010 elections will produce the biggest crop of freshman Republican senators since the 11 who arrived in 1994, and possibly even the 16 who were part of Ronald Reagan’s landslide in 1980. Across a wide range of issues, the potential GOP Senate class of 2010 leans right even when compared with those earlier groups — some contenders hold positions on the far frontier of modern American politics. Next year could bring to Washington the most consistently, and even militantly, conservative class of new senators in at least the past half-century.
[...]
Nineteen of the 20 Republican Senate nominees who have expressed an opinion on the widespread scientific consensus that greenhouse gases are altering the world’s climate have declared the science either inconclusive or dead wrong, often in vitriolic terms. (Kirk is the only exception.) Ron Johnson, a business owner who won his party’s nomination in Wisconsin, says that accumulating carbon dioxide emissions are a less likely cause of any climate change than “sunspot activity or something just in the geologic eons of time where we have changes in the climate.”
All 18 GOP candidates who have taken a position support expanded drilling for oil and gas on public lands. All 19 who have taken a position want to expand construction of nuclear power plants.
These candidates don’t doubt climate change because they have spent time talking to scientists and studying the issue. They say they doubt it because that’s one of the requirements of being a Republican these days.
What a way to run a government.
Mind-Bending
Thinking about things that have to do with space and time — you know, “simple” stuff like such-and-such a planet is 23,000 light years away — makes my brain want to explode. Simultaneously, I find it interesting and a new theory about our universe makes thinking about light years seem easy:
Radical New Theory: Our Universe May be the Interior of a Black Hole Existing in Another Universe.
“Our own Universe may be the interior of a black hole existing in another universe.” In a remarkable paper about the nature of space and the origin of time, Nikodem Poplawski, a physicist at Indiana University, suggests that a small change to the theory of gravity implies that our universe inherited its arrow of time from the black hole in which it was born.
Poplawski says that the idea that black holes are the cosmic mothers of new universes is a natural consequence of a simple new assumption about the nature of spacetime. Poplawski points out that the standard derivation of general relativity takes no account of the intrinsic momentum of spin half particles. However there is another version of the theory, called the Einstein-Cartan-Kibble-Sciama theory of gravity, which does.
Wow. That gives us something to think about during our morning commute.
Good Morning
It’s a good morning because I woke up to an email a friend sent me that included the pictures below.
This is the Buffalo Bill Dam on the Shoshoni River at Cody, Wyoming. Those bump-like things are bighorn sheep walking across the face of it.
Amazing.
(H/t NA.)
