August 30, 2007 archive

“I have a wide stance…”

Tom Delay.

That’s the only Thug Tweety can get to defend Craig.

MSNBC has been running wall to wall with the audio tape playing it over and over again in full.  Their story goes something like this-

Audio of Craig arrest reveals new details
Spokesman denies three-term Idaho lawmaker preparing to quit
NBC News and news services
Updated: 35 minutes ago

WASHINGTON – Sen. Larry Craig denied soliciting an undercover police officer shortly after being arrested in a bathroom at a Minneapolis airport, an audio recording of the arrest revealed.

Craig said on the June 11 recording, released Thursday by the Minneapolis Police Department, that he may have touched Investigative Sgt. Dave Karsnia’s foot with his foot while they were in bathroom stalls.

“You said our feet bumped. I believe they did,” Craig said, adding that he was scooting over. “The next thing I knew, under the bathroom divider comes a card that says ‘Police.'”

If you want to listen, click the video link, they also have a copy of last night’s Olbermann ‘Dragnet’ Re-enactment.

Big day for schadenfreud.

Four at Four

Four at Four is an afternoon briefing of four, yes only four, news items that are important. Please look for it Monday-Friday at around 4 p.m. Eastern.

  1. The Los Angeles Times has a good story today on Jon Soltz, Iraq war veteran and founder of votevets.org. The portrait of Soltz is Soldier answers a new call to battle:

    But in a little more than a year since he launched VoteVets. org, Soltz has helped transform the war debate in Washington by channeling the raw anger and frustration of many Iraq vets into a political campaign both sophisticated and visceral. Soltz, 30, and his band of mostly twenty- and thirtysomething veterans have shaken the GOP’s claim to be the pro-military party. They accuse Republicans of recklessly sending troops to war without the right equipment and failing to care for thousands of wounded and traumatized vets…

    “Jon Soltz seems to be exactly what progressives need,” said Paul Begala, an influential Democratic strategist who worked on Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr.’s successful 2006 campaign against Santorum. “He has a pair of fists, and he knows how to use them.”

    …Soltz said the organization would remain on the offense throughout the 2008 campaign. “Everything else VoteVets has done has been warm-up,” he said. “We’re going to play in the big leagues.

  2. According to The Hill, the AFL-CIO is “unlikely to throw its support behind a candidate during the primary season. Under current rules, a candidate would need the support of two-thirds of the union’s membership, making it difficult to see how an endorsement could be offered anytime soon”.

  3. Alberto Gonzales will soon be out of a job, but his words will live on in infamy. According to the Washington Post, the soon to be Gonzales-free Justice Department is Investigating Gonzales’s Testimony:

    The Justice Department is investigating whether departing Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales gave false or misleading testimony to Congress on a broad range of issues, including the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program and the removal of nine U.S. attorneys last year, the lead investigator said today.

    The disclosure by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine shows that internal investigations that began with the prosecutor firings have widened substantially to include a focus on Gonzales’s actions and statements.

    Senate Judiciary Chair Pat Leahy (D-VT) is looking forward to the findings.

  4. The Sahara isn’t the only desert that is slowly creeping and expanding. In China, the Badain Jaran desert is expanding. From The Independent, Great Wall could be lost to sands of the desert: “Sandstorms in northern China are reducing large sections of the Great Wall to rubble. Archaeologists say whole chunks of one of the seven wonders of the world could be gone in 20 years”. The CS Monitor had a story about China’s desertification problem recently too. China loses about 950 sq miles to desertification each year.

So, what else is happening?

John! Barack! Hillary! Dennis! Bill! Joe! Chris! et al!

so you wanna be president, huh? and you tell me you’re gonna make it all better…

then tell me: when will you SHOW UP where we really really need to see you?

take the jump:::::::::::::::::::::>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

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cross-posted at dKos

Open Thread

First!

on the beach


(right, Mona Khalil and friend)

Throughout their 150 million years on earth, life has never been easy for individual sea turtles. Perhaps one in every couple thousand survived to breeding age. There have always been the hazards of predators, disease, and unlucky weather – the drivers of evolution, the producers, if you will, of the species we see now.

Recently the odds have gotten considerably worse. Abrupt, radical change in the environment has overwhelmed even the miraculous adaptive potential latent in the genome.

  Worldwide, sea turtle populations are crashing thanks to drift nets, (illegal) intentional as well as accidental long line fishing, the loss of sea grass beds to pollution and other anthropegenic factors, loss of suitable nesting habitat to beachfront development, and simple overexploitation as a food resource.

Global warming threatens to exacerbate the problems of disappearing habitat and food, and may deliver a killing blow directly. Sea turtles’ gender is not fixed genetically but determined by the temperature of the eggs.Their reproductive cycle is also extemely vulnerable to rising temperatures.

Everyone has to live somewhere. But the turtle populations driven by thousands of years of instinct to nest on the southern coast of Lebanon would seem to have drawn an awfully unlucky hand.

Picking up the check at Democracy Cafe

The rummy stumbled out of the cafe, no one cared enough to call him a cab. Left at the table was an oddball pair, looking at the havoc their dinner party had wrecked before them. It had been quite a party, but now the waiter was coming with the bill, and there was awkward silence.

Decadence and disregard for the price of the meals and drinks and debauchery had been immense, and the check had quite a few zeros on it. Long gone were the guests who ran up this outrageous total, leaving the last two to settle and square away the bill at Democracy’s Cafe.

Academic Years II


Lace

Like the Pixels

The pixels
laid singly
or in short segments
pixilated sand
intricately woven
into a meaningful
pattern
pixie dust
spread
to simulate
complexity

My world grows
takes new form
until it gets
to the point
where it can be
flipped,
flopped
flooped
it’s the flooping
that makes it
distinctly mine

Moments
are the pixels
of being
by which we color
the larger
tapestry
of our lives
living
in the instant
in the now
is our floop

–Robyn Elaine Serven
–November 8. 2005

Scheduling Reminder

Just below this you will see I have bumped ek’s scheduling post back up near the top. If you DO want a slot, go ahead and sign up. If you prefer to have a floating slot, please post a comment to that effect in THIS essay.

You are NOT required to have a regular slot. But as we get closer to launch date (yippeee!)we need to get a little tighter on how the FP is run.

Anytime more than 3 hrs has passed since the last post by a CE (Contributing Editor) you are welcome to post on the FP. UNLESS someone is scheduled for that slot!