2009 archive
Greater Wingnuttery XXIII 0
John Cole on Republican political strategy:
And I’m serious. Looking at the silly commercials the RNC keeps releasing, the idiotic motions to rename the Democratic party, and the rest of the nonsense they are doing, they don’t seem content to sit back and watch the world go by or build the base. They seem intent on doing whatever they can to piss off “liberals,” which includes everyone on the planet who may or may not have had Dijon mustard on a sandwich.
A friend of mine today, whose disdain for contemporary Republican ideology, if anything, exceeds mine, asked me (this is a paraphrase), “What happened to the Republican Party of our youth? Why has the Republican Party become so full of hate?”
The only answer I could hazard was,
Fear. Fear of change. Fear of black folks. Fear of Mexicans. Fear of Guatemalans. Fear of homosexuals. Fear of anything that’s not whitebread Ozzie and Harriet made-for-TV America.
Fear of the Big Wide World.
Drinking Liberally 0
Triumph Brewing Company, 2nd and Chestnut, Philadelphia, Pa, Tuesday, 6 p., just a hop, a scotch, and a soda from Penn’s Landing.
It’s safe this week. I’m on the road.
There Was a Young Landlord from Nantucket 0
Bargain basement Hernando’s Hideaway it ain’t:
Recession price: $45,000.
“Without question, it is the best summer to come to Nantucket,” said Brian Sullivan of Maury People Sotheby’s International Realty, who has been selling and renting estate compounds on the Massachusetts resort island since 1996. “Between the rentals, the restaurants, and the bed and breakfasts, all kinds of great deals are being offered.”
Give Ray a Hand 0
Details here.
Truth. No Reconciliation. 0
McClatchy factchecks Cheney. Cheney loses. Read the whole thing.
In a statement April 21, however, Blair said the information “was valuable in some instances” but that “there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means. The bottom line is that these techniques hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security.”
Via Delaware Liberal.
Move ‘Em Up, Head ‘Em Out 0
And what’s that rustling noise?
Stolen cattle are often loaded onto trailers and taken straight from their farm or ranch to auction at a stockyard, according to detectives involved in tracking thefts.
Identifying those cattle not easy since many are not branded and detectives and owners need to act fast to retrieve the animals before sale — a task made doubly difficult if they have been transported across state lines.
Texas, the nation’s biggest cattle state, reported thefts virtually tripled between 2007 and 2008 to 6,404 head of cattle, according to Carmen Fenton, spokeswoman for the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association.
An Armed Society Is a Polite Society 0
In your dreams.
A man and a woman were killed. The 10-year-old and a man were grazed in the head and another man was shot in the wrist.
Wessing says when police arrived, patrol cars were hit by gunfire and one officer was shot in the left arm.
A hot-tempered nutcase with a gun is still a hot-tempered nutcase.
More Apple Fail, Teen-Aged Boy Dept. 0
Apple has banned another program from its iPhone Apps store.
This program, called Eucalyptus, goes directly to Project Gutenberg, a highly respected repository for public domain ebooks, to allow the user to download ebooks. I have, in fact, often used Project Gutenberg, downloading books by Mark Twain, R. Austin Freeman, and others.
Seems the issue is that, among it’s other umpty-ump thousands of titles, the site contains Sir Richard Burton’s (no, not that Richard Burton; the sober one) translation of the Kama Sutra.
The Guardian reports:
For those of you unfamiliar with the Kama Sutra, it is sort of a poetic Indian “how to” of sex and love. Only a teenaged boy could find it at all prurient.
Of course, a teen-aged boy can find the Hanes catalog prurient.
Is Apple hiring teen-aged Mac fanboys to run the Apps Store? Inquiring minds want to know.
Thought Police 0
The straight and narrow . . . minds:
“That club still has the right to exist,“ Falwell said, although it cannot use the university’s name in its activities.
Furrfu.
Dustbiters 0
Holy moly, here I am in Virginia Beach for Memorial Day and, after a long drive punctuated by massive tire FAIL (fortunately I have a Real Spare Tire), I fire up the netbook to find out that banks are dropping like, well, droppings.
Can’t bank on these no more:
Citizens National Bank, Macomb, IL
Strategic Capital Bank, Champaign, IL
Plus there was yesterday’s:
BankUnited, FSB, Coral Gables, FL
Masters of the Universe, oh, yes, indeedy.
Contemporary Republican Strategy 0
There’s a great summary of it here. It sums the whole thing up so neatly I can think of no way to excerpt it.
Charted Waters 0
Bonddad has a great series up about the Federal budget.
As is typical of his posts, there’re lots of facts and almost no editorializing.
One thing his statistics show is that, despite the caterwauling, Social Security spending is not a big issue; it’s held pretty steady as a percentage of expenditure.
Medical spending–Medicare and Medicaid–that’s another thing.
He doesn’t editorialize, but I do. We need single payer.
Flair and Bolloxed 0
Stephen Colbert on John “Permanent Organ Damage” Yoo in the Philadelphia Shrinquirer:
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Extra! Extra! Bleed All About It! | ||||
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Doesn’t Meet Code 0
What happens when you use non-union electricians:
Of course KBR “denies culpability.” You wouldn’t expect them to say, “Oh, yeah, we knowingly hired bozos and cut corners,” now, would you?
Uncheneyed Melody 0
Andrew Sullivan on the pornographers of torture. Follow the link and read the whole thing:
Greater Wingnuttery XXII 0
An update on the crazy from James Wolcott.
Another One Bites the Dust 0
BankUnited, FSB, Coral Gables, Florida, is no more.
Huffington Post says it’s the biggest failure since IndyMac.
Afterthought:
It’s Thursday. They usually wait until Friday for these announcements, so they have the weekend to take care of the details. This one may have been really messed up.
According to the press release, rather than being given over to another bank, as is the usual practice (it says something that one can write “the usual practice” about a bank failure and have it seem natural, but that’s Republican Economic Theory for you), it’s been reborn under a new, but similar, name. This is truly screwy.