« September 2007 | Home | November 2007 »
October 25, 2007
It manages to confuse me in the supermarket.
From Japundit:
This would have been a great addition to Ted Levine's dialogue in The Silence Of The Lambs.
Tipped to me by the fine lady.
October 24, 2007
On "socialism" and the benefits of free enterprise.
The Bush administration, of course, has been doing everything it can to privatize functions that in any sane operation would be handled (or at least overseen) by the government. And in Iraq and Afghanistan, that's going really well so far.
From today's NY Times:
State Department Use of Contractors Leaps in 4 YearsOver the past four years, the amount of money the State Department pays to private security and law enforcement contractors has soared to nearly $4 billion a year from $1 billion, administration officials said Tuesday, but they said that the department had added few new officials to oversee the contracts...
Auditors and outside exerts say the results have been vast cost overruns, poor contract performance and, in some cases, violence that has so far gone unpunished...
In a report made public on Tuesday, a review panel found that there were too few American officials in Iraq to enforce the rules that apply to Blackwater and other security contractors. It also found that the conduct of the contractors had undermined the broader mission of ending the insurgency and establishing a democratic government in Iraq.
The ballooning budget for outside contracts at the State Department is emblematic of a broader trend, contracting experts say...The 2003 invasion of Iraq opened new opportunities in the burgeoning world of government security. Blackwater got a toehold with a $27 million no-bid contract to guard L. Paul Bremer III, the administrator of the American occupation in Baghdad. A year later, the State Department expanded that contract to $100 million. Blackwater now employs 845 of the more than 1,100 private security contractors at work in Iraq and holds a contract worth $1.2 billion...
Congressional investigators say the security bureau has sought to minimize episodes like the shootings of civilians.
“We are all better off getting this case — and any similar cases — behind us quickly,” one State Department security official in Iraq wrote to another, after Blackwater guards killed a father of six in Hilla in 2005, according to an internal State Department memo turned over to Congress. He recommended paying the man’s family $5,000.
The war against science: Mission Accomplished!
Washington Post:
Testimony that the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention planned to give yesterday to a Senate committee about the impact of climate change on health was significantly edited by the White House, according to two sources familiar with the documents.Specific scientific references to potential health risks were removed after Julie L. Gerberding submitted a draft of her prepared remarks to the White House Office of Management and Budget for review.
Instead, Gerberding's prepared testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee included few details on what effects climate change could have on the spread of disease. Only during questioning did the director of the government's premier disease-monitoring agency describe any specific diseases likely to be affected, again without elaboration.
A CDC official familiar with both versions said Gerberding's draft "was eviscerated," cut from 14 pages to four. The version presented to the Senate committee consisted of six pages.
The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the review process, said that while it is customary for testimony to be changed in a White House review, these changes were particularly "heavy-handed"...
The deletions directed by the White House included details on how many people might be adversely affected because of increased warming and the scientific basis for some of the CDC's analysis on what kinds of diseases might be spread in a warmer climate and rising sea levels, according to one official who had seen the original version.
I'm glad we've got the White House OMB doing peer review on scientific information. I'd hate to be warned of any oncoming diseases—it would ruin the surprise.
The full article is here.
The Carpetbagger Report links to many previous instances of BushCo keeping us safe from the facts.
October 23, 2007
A message from inside the beast.
From one of the better novels I've read in a while:
...As Carl glanced around, he recognized people from the office converging upon the building, but nobody he cared to talk to.Directly to his right, something curious was going on. Two men in tan uniforms were hosing down the alleyway—a small dead-end loading dock between our building and the one next to it. Carl watched them at their work. White water shot from their hoses. They moved the spray around the asphalt. The pressure looked mighty, for the men gripped their slender black guns, the kind seen at a manual car wash, with both hands. They lifted the guns up and sprayed the Dumpster and the brick walls as well. They spot cleaned, they moved refuse around with the stream. For all intents and purposes, they were cleaning an alleyway. An alleyway! Cleaning it! Carl was mesmerized. It was the sort of thing, six months ago, that would have sent him right over the edge, seeing these men, these first-generation Americans without much choice in the matter, spend their morning in the dark recess of a loading dock power-spraying the asphalt and the Dumpster—good god, was work so meaningless? Was life so meaningless? It reminded him of when an ad got watered down by a client, and watered down, until everything interesting about the ad disappeared. Carl still had to write the copy for it. The art director still had to put the drop shadow where the drop shadow belonged and the logo in its proper place. That was the process known as polishing the turd. Those two poor saps hosing down the alleyway were just doing the same thing. All over America, in fact, people were up and out of their beds today in a continuing effort to polish turds. Sure, for the sake of survival, but more immediately, for the sake of some sadistic manager or shit-brained client whose small imagination and numbingly dumb ideas were bleaching the world of all relevancy and hope. And meanwhile, that mad-bearded fellow there with his crossed legs could hardly lift his grease-caked hands to make it a little easier for someone to flip him a quarter.
"Well, we have to find some way of getting her in," Marilynn was saying into her cell.
Carl turned his attention back to the noble fools scouring the bricks. Another thing that would have sent him spiraling was how quickly he could come up with the advertising copy designed to sell power sprayers to those shit-brained managers. "Uniform liquid distribution guarantees remarkable scouring intensity for maximum coverage and time efficiency," he though to himself as he watched the men work, "while the high impact of our spray angles makes cleaning any surface a snap!" His quick command of that cloying and unctuous language, that false-speak, while his wife was next to him talking to Susan about mammography results or negative drug reactions, whatever—it would have been all too much to bear.
But not so much this morning, not so much somehow...
From Then We Came To The End, a novel by Joshua Ferris.
October 22, 2007
Living in the "shew thee" state.
From The American Caliban:
1 After this I looked, and, behold, a door was opened in heaven: and the first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with me; which said, Come up hither, and I will shew thee things which must be hereafter.
[Sardine stone, white raiment, and lamps of fire follow.]
When nut jobs attack.
On last Friday's Real Time, Bill Maher had his live show disrupted by some 9/11 conspiracy enthusiasts in his studio audience. His off-the-cuff response is entertaining—at one point he runs out into the seats to help shove one of the "truthers" out of the room.
Later, in the online-only addendum to the show, he cautioned against anyone thinking he's a tough guy: "We have a metal detector. I wouldn't be such a badass if we didn't."
Here's an earlier "New Rules" segment in which Maher mentions the tenacity of these Loose-Changers in their efforts to get him to air their argument: "Stop asking me to raise this ridiculous topic on the show, and start asking your doctor if Paxil is right for you."
October 19, 2007
We're crazy, all right. Crazy for guns!
Many customers are buying one for each side of the bed!
Blast a hole in your bedroom-invading toddler today.
The comments are almost as frightening as the commercial.
October 18, 2007
Craig vs. Kelly.
Great good god almighty: this Daily Show segment on the latest Larry Craig embarrassment, featuring R. Kelly (impersonated), scores high.
Via Crooks and Liars.
October 16, 2007
Is this part of the special garment?
OK, that title's a cheap shot, I admit it.
Still, come on. FUDGE-N-GLOVE! Who can pass that up?
Via Down With Tyranny.
Gore drives them crazy.
In case you haven't seen this elsewhere, it's well worth a read: Paul Krugman's take (in the NY Times) on why the right wing is so apoplectic about Al Gore's rising fortunes.
On the day after Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize, The Wall Street Journal’s editors couldn’t even bring themselves to mention Mr. Gore’s name. Instead, they devoted their editorial to a long list of people they thought deserved the prize more.And at National Review Online, Iain Murray suggested that the prize should have been shared with “that well-known peace campaigner Osama bin Laden, who implicitly endorsed Gore’s stance.” You see, bin Laden once said something about climate change — therefore, anyone who talks about climate change is a friend of the terrorists...
But Gore hatred is more than personal. When National Review decided to name its anti-environmental blog Planet Gore, it was trying to discredit the message as well as the messenger. For the truth Mr. Gore has been telling about how human activities are changing the climate isn’t just inconvenient. For conservatives, it’s deeply threatening.
Consider the policy implications of taking climate change seriously.
“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,” said F.D.R. “We know now that it is bad economics.” These words apply perfectly to climate change. It’s in the interest of most people (and especially their descendants) that somebody do something to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, but each individual would like that somebody to be somebody else. Leave it up to the free market, and in a few generations Florida will be underwater.
The full column is here.
Crooks and Liars has a sample clip of right-wing pique from (who else?) Fox News—and a bit from The Daily Show that calls out the absurdity of it all.
Dateline: Belize.
Cute animal spotted.
Identified as baby raccoon.
Name: Mambito.
Subject photographed extensively, then returned to its guardian.
Mission accomplished.
October 04, 2007
What Bonzo thought before his brain got foggy.
Who do you think said this?
The profits of corporations have doubled, while workers' wages have increased by only one-quarter. In other words, profits have gone up four times as much as wages—and the small increase workers did receive was more than eaten up by rising prices, which have also bored into their savings...Tax-reduction bills have been passed to benefit the higher-income brackets alone. The average worker saved only $1.73 a week. In the false name of economy, millions of children have been deprived of milk once provided through the federal school lunch program. This was the payoff of the Republicans' promises. And this is why we must have new faces in the Congress of the United States: Democratic faces.
Yep, Ronald Wilson Reagan, giving a 1948 radio speech in support of Harry Truman and Hubert Humphrey. And progressivism.
Shortly thereafter, his circuits began to corrode.
Via Dennis Perrin.
