Author's posts
Oct 24 2009
9/11 Redux (Part 2)
Oct 24 2009
We’re gonna spite our noses right offa our faces…
In Spite Of Ourselves
Oct 23 2009
9/11 Redux (Part 1)
Oct 21 2009
Poor Poor Pitiful Harry
Pelosi Prepares To Move Ahead With Robust Public Option
by Brian Beutler last night at TPM, October 20, 2009, 8:09PM
A preliminary analysis from CBO may have sealed the deal. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is preparing to move ahead with a “robust” public option–one that reimburses hospitals and providers at Medicare rates, plus five percent–in the House’s health care bill. She is briefing her caucus about the plan’s savings tonight, and, pending the approval of a sufficient majority of members, will adopt the measure as part of the complete reform package.
The analysis finds the reconstituted House proposal to be deficit neutral, and require less than $900 billion in new spending, over ten years.
The bill remains nominally more expensive than the Senate Finance Committee proposal, but would cover 96 percent of all Americans, providing greater bang for each federal dollar spent. And, aides note, the bill that comes to the floor of the Senate will be a hybrid of the Finance and more expensive HELP Committee bills, so the price is expected to rise.
The move is sure to make progressives ecstatic, and puts Senate leaders, who have been unable to reach any decisions about their preferences for a public option in their own bill, in an uncomfortable position.
Read the whole thing at TPM…
Oct 17 2009
Arctic Ice to be free in summer – but only for a limited time Greenpeace says
Greenpeace have announced a big give-away, Arctic Ice will be free to anyone who wants it in summer but only for a limited time.
The recent news in from IARC-JAXA (International Arctic Research Center / Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) is that in August-September 2009 that the arctic sea ice minimum exceeds that of 2005 and thus there is evidence of Global Cooling has caused much consternation in the among global warming fascisti.
Hard on the heels of this comes a British expedition to measure Arctic Ice thickness who report the thinning of sea ice.
The give-away has been organised by Greenpeace ostensibly to benefit all those green consumers who have thrown away their fridges due to worries about the Ozone layer and Global Warming only to exchange them for worries about food poisoning. On the other hand it could be seen as a neat way to reduce the sea ice and thus refute the Japanese work and cover this up by so-called good works.
“It’s the most natural way of keeping things cool” said Dawn Lovedyke the GP spokesperson and editor of the website lesbiangaia.web. “We are also planning refrigerated mercy ships to Africa and the Third World, after all everyone, without exclusion, has the right to Ice in their Budweiser even if they only eat Yam porridge.”
At a press conference having being picked up off the ice late yesterday after a trek of 435.782km, the British Catlin Arctic Survey team led by tough-guy Pen Gwynn and his companions, bulky unprepossessing Anny Portinstorm and puny scientist D.O.A. Attwork reported that ice floes were less than 1.8567m thick showing that this was first year ice, ideal for breaking up by household ice picks.
The team met many hardships during the voyage including Polar Bears sitting on ice floes and Inuit realtors angry about the team breaking up perfectly good building materials. Anny was nearly lost when she fell through the ice but was lucky enough to be thrown back by a passing sperm whale. “It was the closest enounter I’ve ever had with a Sperm before, it will stay with me for the rest of my life” she said.
[snip]
Oct 14 2009
Frontline: Obama’s War
PBS Frontline:
In Obama’s War, veteran correspondent Martin Smith travels across Afghanistan and Pakistan to see first-hand how the president’s new strategy is taking shape, delivering vivid, on-the-ground reporting from this eight-year-old war’s many fronts. Through interviews with top generals, diplomats and government officials, Smith also reports the internal debates over President Obama’s grand attempt to combat terrorism at its roots.
“What we found on the ground was a huge exercise in nation building,” says Smith. “The concept’s become a bit of a dirty word, but that’s what this is. We started with the goal of eliminating Al Qaeda, and now we’ve wound up with the immense task of re-engineering two nations.”
In Obama’s War, veteran correspondent Martin Smith travels across Afghanistan and Pakistan to see first-hand how the president’s new strategy is taking shape, delivering vivid, on-the-ground reporting from this eight-year-old war’s many fronts. Through interviews with top generals, diplomats and government officials, Smith also reports the internal debates over President Obama’s grand attempt to combat terrorism at its roots.
This is a 25 minute preview of the full program that was apparently scheduled to air October 13, and was scheduled to be available for online viewing here, but perhaps there has been a delay in that, as I do not see any video online there. CORRECTION: It is there but may only be viewable with IE, as I cannot see it there using FireFox 3.
Oct 12 2009
War, Peace, the Nobel, the Audacity, and the Dawn
I suppose we should not begrudge Barack Obama his Nobel Peace Prize, though it represents a radical break in tradition, since he’s only had slightly less than nine months to discharge his imperial duties, most concretely through the agency of high explosives in the Hindu Kush whereas laureates like Henry Kissinger had been diligently slaughtering people across the world for years.
Woodrow Wilson, the liberal imperialist with whom Obama bears some marked affinities, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919, having brought America into the carnage of the First World War. The peace laureate president who preceded him was Teddy Roosevelt, who got the prize in 1906 as reward for sponsorship of the Spanish-American war and ardent bloodletting in the Philippines. Senator George Hoar’s famous denunciation of Roosevelt on the floor of the US Senate in May of 1902 was probably what alerted the Nobel Committee to Roosevelt’s eligibility for the Peace Prize:
“You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives-the flower of our youth. You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit. You have established reconcentration camps. Your generals are coming home from their harvest bringing sheaves with them, in the shape of other thousands of sick and wounded and insane to drag out miserable lives, wrecked in body and mind. You make the American flag in the eyes of a numerous people the emblem of sacrilege in Christian churches, and of the burning of human dwellings, and of the horror of the water torture.”
TR was given the peace prize not long after he’d displayed his boundless compassion for humanity by sponsoring an exhibition of Filipino “monkey men” in the 1904 St Louis World Fair as “the missing link” in the evolution of Man from ape to Aryan, and thus in sore need of assimilation, forcible if necessary, to the American way. On receipt of the prize, Roosevelt promptly dispatched the Great White Fleet (sixteen U.S. Navy ships of the Atlantic Fleet including four battleships) on a worldwide tour to display Uncle Sam’s imperial credentials, anticipating by scarce more than a century, Obama’s award, as he prepares to impose Pax Americana on the Hindukush and portions of Pakistan.People marvel at the idiocy of these Nobel awards, but there’s method in the madness, since in the end they train people to accept without demur or protest absurdity as part and parcel of the human condition, which they should accept as representing the considered opinion of rational men, albeit Norwegian. It’s a twist on the Alger myth, inspiring to youth: you too can get to murder Filipinos, or Palestinians, or Vietnamese or Afghans and still win a Peace Prize. That’s the audacity of hope at full stretch.
Oct 11 2009
NewsFlash: Obama Makes Another New Promise
No link since it doesn’t really matter what the promise is, apparently.
Here’s some Sunday music instead.