Archive for September, 2010
Democrats: “What We Need to Do Before November”
I keep hearing and reading about establishment Democrats talking about “what we need to do before November.”
Hey, the election, and “November,” are five weeks away. Five weeks. It’s time to do “what we need to do before November,” NOW!
The Wholly Owned Corporate Senators of the United States
From The Hill:
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Tuesday blasted the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) for opposing legislation that attempts to in-source jobs by granting companies a payroll tax holiday that shift overseas jobs to the U.S. and limits the use of tax deferral.
“Of course they are [opposed],” Sanders told reporters. “They much prefer paying people in Vietnam 20 cents an hour than American workers a living wage.”
Last week, NAM and the Chamber raised concerns that the bill would impose new costs on U.S. multinational companies making them less competitive in the global marketplace and jeopardizing U.S. job creation.
[...]
“It is to their advantage, in many cases, to shut down plants here and pay people a fraction of the wages that American workers lose by going to China,” Sanders said. “What’s the surprise about that?”
Sanders suggested that these organizations oppose the bill because it bolsters the bottom lines of their members.
The bill was defeated in the Senate today:
Forty GOP senators voted against the bill, along with four Democrats and independent Sen. Joe Lieberman (Conn.).
The four Democrats who crossed the aisle to oppose the bill were Sens. Max Baucus and Jon Tester of Montana, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Mark Warner of Virginia. Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) were not present for the vote.
Every single Republican who was present voted against this, as did four Democrats and of course — no surprise there — Joe Lieberman.
SHAME! on all of them. The corporatists have got to go. I figure November might be our last chance. I fear it’s only going to get worse as corporations become comfortable with Citizens United and they in turn buy more and more legislators.
Break Time — Eggs!
Here’s a cool post titled, “Eggs Around the World,” showing some of the different ways people serve them, primarily for breakfast.
This is the one I’d like to try. Throw in a little bit of chicken stock and it would be grrrrrreat!
Check out the other ones at the link above.
Fox Sends Out Scary Tweet About Unions Containing 19-Day-Old News
Minutes ago I got this tweet from Fox News:
Click on the link and you go to an article with the same headline but — what? — the dateline is September 9. September 9?
Here’s a screen shot, just in case the sleaze bags over there change the date:
Anyway, this is Fox fear mongering at its best. Those lazy union socialists are going to “amass a war chest” and buy the election.
Pretty funny.
Ironically, Mary Kay, the new president of the SEIU, was on The Ed Schultz Show this morning. She and Schultz briefly touched on the Citizens United case which is often cited by wingers as favorable to unions and their ability to affect elections. Yes, it is true that Citizens United gave both corporations and unions the right to contribute unlimited amounts of money to campaigns, but the ability of the two to do so on an equal basis is a farce. According to Kay, this election cycle alone, corporations are giving to conservative campaigns by a margin of 26 to 1 when compared to what unions are able to contribute. So, this talk about unions “amassing a war chest” is crap and Fox knows it but they don’t care. They’re trying to scare their base.
But what’s going on with Fox dragging a 19-day-old article out and tweeting it as if it’s new news? One can only guess. Maybe they are trying to counteract Kay’s appearance on Schultz’s show? Maybe they’re setting it up so they can blame the unions if lots of Republicans lose in November? One can only wonder but guaranteed, they’re up to something.
Good News From the Obama Administration
This is wonderful, but that it took a letter writing campaign to make it happen is kind of disgusting:
Department of Homeland Security Revises Plan — WILL Screen Shelter Dogs!
It’s a victory for shelter dogs and we helped make it happen. When the Department of Homeland Security 9DHS, announced it would be paying breeders to produce several thousand Shepherds, Retrievers, and Labs for DHS security programs, we wrote letters to Director Janet Napolitano and to our congressmen and senators. We respectfully requested that shelter dogs be considered for the project instead.
Folks, we did it. Our requests were heard. The DHS announced last month that it would indeed consider shelter dogs for its programs. The announcement was made via a letter to PETA president, Ingrid Newkirk, who also lobbied passionately on behalf of shelter dogs. Usually, however, it takes many, many voices to impel a ship as big as the federal government away from its chosen course, so credit must be shared with all of us who took action. Thank you, thank you for helping to make a difference.
Wall Street Doesn’t Do Well When Democrats Are in Office
Ah yes, one of the favorite winger memes — that Wall Street hates it when a Democrat is in the White House. Guess they’re hating it all the way to the bank these days:
Good Morning
It’s a good morning because my to do list is short and I think I can “buck up,” “stop whining” and get it all done today!
“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.)
When Television Was Free
I remember when anything and everything on television was free — when nobody had ever heard of “pay per view.”
You bought a television. You bought an antenna. You put the antenna up. You watched television.
Period. That was it.
There was none of this $60+ per month stuff.
Wish I’d paid attention to this old (but, sadly, ineffective) ad when it aired in the 70′s because well, here we are, getting ripped off and takin’ it:
Polygamy Goes Mainstream
So, a new show about a polygamist debuted on TLC tonight:
Sister Wives
Meet husband Kody — along with his three wives: Meri, Janelle and Christine and their combined 13 children — and see how they attempt to navigate life as a “normal” family in a society that shuns their lifestyle. From their unconventional family structure and living arrangements to financial challenges, each half hour episode exposes the inner workings of a polygamist household, revealing the unexpectedly tight-knit and loving relationships between Kody’s wives.Sister Wives also captures the intense dynamics surrounding a man juggling three wives while attempting to keep it a secret from the outside world — but the general public is not the only challenge that the Brown family unit is facing. The series begins with Kody announcing plans to take on another wife and her three kids — and although expected, the news is met with mixed feelings. Meri, Janelle and Christine were married before starting families so all of the children grew up as siblings. And for sixteen years, the Sister Wives have established their own role within the group and worked together to maintain a cohesive, loving unit. Bringing on a fourth wife could easily disrupt the balance, changing lives forever. The series chronicles the growing pains as Robyn and her kids assimilate into the family and the sister wives work through the insecurities and uncertainties that are inevitable to their chosen way of life.
Hey, I don’t care what people do in their private lives. What I’m waiting for is the sound of the Tea Partiers screaming about the end of life as we know it. So far, all I hear are crickets.
Gosh. I wonder if the silence has something to do with this: Sarah Palin Reality Show — “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” Premiering on November 14 on, you guessed it, TLC.
When We Leave Afghanistan Is Not Up To You, General Petraeus
General David Petraeus seems to have forgotten who the Commander in Chief is:
