Aug 05 2008
Cross-ranted from WWL
The Rude Pundit has a nice rude piece up about McStain courting bikers in Sturgis… even offering up his wife for a topless/sometimes bottomless Beauty Pageant.
Hell he coulda entered her in the Sturgis Tractor Pull:
‘Sprised he didn’t offer her to pull a * train for them. (* that has whole different meaning, ifygmd..) He has no respect for her, none for women generally, you know, we are Cunts who pack on the War Paint.
Aug 05 2008
Does public pressure, personal contact with legislators, and protest matter in shaping public policy? After eight years of Bush and Cheney many might say no, our voices and opinions are ignored in Washington. But read on.
Today’s exhibit: Representative Jan Schakowsky, Democrat of Illinois. She appears to have had an awakening. As we used to say, she has had her consciousness raised.
Aug 05 2008
Getting Started
Barack Obama said something today that I think is beautiful from a framing perspective:
I mean it’s like these guys take pride in ignorance! It’s like they like being ignorant.
(hat tip to ruff4life at the Great Orange Satan)
I believe this is the counter frame to the Elitist Democrat.
Nobody wants to be ignorant, and depending on leaders who are proud of their ignorance and demand ignorance from their followers cannot be good for the running of a country.
Ignorance is simply not good public policy.
Aug 05 2008
Bloomberg reports Oil falls to $118 as global economy slows and storm danger lessens. The service sectors of the U.S. and European economies are slowing down and Tropical Storm Edouard appears to be leaving the oil rigs and refineries along the Texas coast undamaged. So “Oil has lost $27 since touching a record of $147.27 a barrel in New York on July 11”.
Additionally, “U.S. gasoline stockpiles are 3 percent above their five-year seasonal norm at 213.6 million barrels, according to the Energy Department.”
I expect the price of oil to continue to fall until after the November election, when it will rise again in time for winter heating bills. The question is will Americans remember the high price of gasoline when they go to the polls? According to the AP, Obama links the nation’s energy troubles to Dick Cheney. Obama noted that John McCain is more concerned about oil company profits and drilling than an overall energy strategy for America. “McCain has taken a page out of the Cheney playbook,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that Gas prices have applied the brakes To suburban migration.
Cheap oil, which helped push the American Dream away from the city center, isn’t so cheap anymore. As more and more families reconsider their dreams, land-use experts are beginning to ask whether $4-a-gallon gas is enough to change the way Americans have thought for half a century about where they live…
Even the way the government pays for roads and transit is dependent on gas taxes, which is effective only if Americans keep driving…
Federal spending is about 4 to 1 in favor of highways over transit. Today, more than 99 percent of the trips taken by U.S. residents are in cars or some other non-transit vehicle, largely as a result of decades of such unbalanced spending.
The policies — building so many highways and building so many houses near those highways — have had a direct bearing on how and where people live and work. More Americans, 52 percent, live in the suburbs than anywhere else. The suburban growth rate exceeded 90 percent in the past decade.
But there’s been a radical shift in recent months. Americans drove 9.6 billion fewer highway miles in May than a year earlier. In the Washington area and elsewhere, mass transit ridership is setting records. Last year, transit trips nationwide topped 10.3 billion, a 50-year high.
The high prices at the gas pump may be less than they were a few weeks ago, but they’re not going away unless demand dramatically falls. The days of $1 a gallon gas are gone.
And over the weekend, the NY Times reported Shipping costs start to crimp globalization. “Cheap oil, the lubricant of quick, inexpensive transportation links across the world, may not return anytime soon, upsetting the logic of diffuse global supply chains that treat geography as a footnote in the pursuit of lower wages. Rising concern about global warming, the reaction against lost jobs in rich countries, worries about food safety and security, and the collapse of world trade talks in Geneva last week also signal that political and environmental concerns may make the calculus of globalization far more complex.”
Four at Four continues with yet another impeachable offense of Bush, Denver’s police state, extinction for gorillas and monkeys, and bonus story about bulletproof bras.
Aug 05 2008
Crossposted at Huffington Post’s Off the Bus.
The presidential election is turning again on a choice between conversation and confrontation. How will we choose to approach our neighbors, allies and adversaries — domestic and foreign? Helena Cobban is a veteran journalist who has traveled extensively around the world. She writes for the Christian Science Monitor, the Boston Review, and blogs at justworldnews.org Her most recent book is Re-engage! America and the World after Bush, in which she suggests ways citizens can help shape a more inclusive, less confrontational, foreign policy. Off The Bus caught up with Cobban this week and asked her about her book and what she thinks the “post-Decider”-era might hold in store for us and the world.
Interview below the fold.
Aug 05 2008
Harmful If Swallowed
On the heels of his ad mocking Barack Obama as a Messiah-like figure, John McCain has now anointed himself as “The One.”
This new ad declares that “Washington’s broken” and “John McCain knows it.” He admits that “We’re worse off than we were four years ago.” But without acknowledging the brazen hypocrisy, the ad asserts that McCain is “the only” candidate who can fix our broken nation. Then he goes further to seriously describe himself in the same manner he had sarcastically portrayed Obama:
“One is ready to lead – McCain”
Aug 05 2008
I posted part 1 yesterday. Updated Wednesday, August 06, 2008
In this update today, an Iraqi journalist continues his series of video reports of the ‘real’ reality on the ground in Iraq, with part 2…
Baghdad, 5 years on (part 2): killing fields One Baghdad’s killings fields on the edge of Sadr City. The scene of thousands of sectarian murders over the last three years, it is a desolate and evil place: ‘Only the killers and the killed ever come here’ says Abdul-Ahad. Here in the thousands of unmarked graves lie the victims of militia gangs. Video by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad.
4 min 28 sec
An Iraqi journalist begins a series of video reports of the ‘real’ reality on the ground in Iraq, with…
Baghdad, 5 years on (part 1): City of walls US claims that the military surge is bringing stability to Iraq. By travelling through the heart of Baghdad its easy to see by enclosing the Sunni and Shia populations behind 12ft walls, the surge has left the city more divided and desperate than ever.
4 min 37 sec
On the flip… Pepe Escobar of Asia Times deconstructs and shreds the sole foundation of McCain’s presidential campaign…
Aug 05 2008
X-posted from Daily Kos.
This is a big story. I heard Ron Suskind being interviewed on NPR this morning. There’s also a Rec List diary [on Daily Kos] on this story and I invite you to read it. Bombshell: White House ordered forged document to sell war
I have some more details on this story. Author Ron Suskind appeared on the Today show and said that Bush ordered the CIA to forge a letter after the invasion linking Saddam Husein and al-Qaeda, in an effort to justify the invasion after the fact. His new book is “The Way of the World.”
President Bush committed an impeachable offense by ordering the CIA to to manufacture a false pretense for the Iraq war in the form of a backdated, handwritten document linking Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, an explosive new book claims.
I have more, including a link to video, after the fold,
Aug 05 2008
The Olympics Bring
New Freedoms To China
Only If You’re A
Government Official Or The Rich
Secret deal kept British Army out of battle for Basra
From The Times
August 5, 2008
Deborah Haynes in Baquba and Michael Evans, Defence Editor
A secret deal between Britain and the notorious al-Mahdi militia prevented British Forces from coming to the aid of their US and Iraqi allies for nearly a week during the battle for Basra this year, The Times has learnt.Four thousand British troops – including elements of the SAS and an entire mechanised brigade – watched from the sidelines for six days because of an “accommodation” with the Iranian-backed group, according to American and Iraqi officers who took part in the assault.
US Marines and soldiers had to be rushed in to fill the void, fighting bitter street battles and facing mortar fire, rockets and roadside bombs with their Iraqi counterparts.
China clears streets for the Olympics
Petitioners — those taking their grievances to the government — are swept away for a few weeks.
By Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
August 5, 2008BEIJING — On a hot summer night about 10:30, the many men and women living under an elevated section of highway were trying to nod off, swatting the mosquitoes at their ears, shifting their hips uncomfortably on sheets of newspaper and cardboard strewn on the pavement, when someone shouted, “Police!”
By the time most could rouse themselves, it was too late. Police had blocked the routes of escape with large buses they would later use to cart away their quarry.
The bedtime bust was part of a massive Olympic cleanup, in which thousands of Chinese citizens are being booted out of the capital like gate-crashers at a party.
The underpass raid that began July 13 and continued for two days netted about 1,000 people. All were petitioners who had come to protest mistreatment in their home provinces.
USA
At Freddie Mac, Chief Discarded Warning Signs
By CHARLES DUHIGG
Published: August 5, 2008
The chief executive of the mortgage giant Freddie Mac rejected internal warnings that could have protected the company from some of the financial crises now engulfing it, according to more than two dozen current and former high-ranking executives and others.
That chief executive, Richard F. Syron, in 2004 received a memo from Freddie Mac’s chief risk officer warning him that the firm was financing questionable loans that threatened its financial health.Today, Freddie Mac and the nation’s other major mortgage finance company, Fannie Mae, are in such perilous condition that the federal government has readied a taxpayer-financed bailout that could cost billions.
Aug 05 2008
 Muse in the Morning |
–The Dhammapada, 201
Phenomena XIII: hurting
 Ice
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