Author's posts
Aug 25 2008
The Stars Hollow Gazette
Aug 24 2008
Weekend News Digest
Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 Pakistan’s ruling coalition on verge of collapse
By ASIF SHAHZAD, Associated Press Writer
Sun Aug 24, 9:20 AM ET
| ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – Pakistan’s ruling coalition teetered on the brink of collapse as the two main partners squabbled over a successor to ousted President Pervez Musharraf.
Former Prime Minster Nawaz Sharif, who heads the junior partner in the coalition, demanded the dominant Pakistan People’s Party slash the president’s powers before he would support its candidate. Asif Ali Zardari, head of the PPP and widower of the party’s assassinated leader Benazir Bhutto, agreed Saturday to run for the presidency. |
Aug 23 2008
Weekend News Digest
Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 New Orleans repeating deadly levee mistakes
By CAIN BURDEAU, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 14 minutes ago
| NEW ORLEANS – Signs are emerging that history is repeating itself in the Big Easy, still healing from Katrina: People have forgotten a lesson from four decades ago and believe once again that the federal government is constructing a levee system they can prosper behind.
In a yearlong review of levee work here, The Associated Press has tracked a pattern of public misperception, political jockeying and legal fighting, along with economic and engineering miscalculations since Katrina, that threaten to make New Orleans the scene of another devastating flood. Dozens of interviews with engineers, historians, policymakers and flood zone residents confirmed many have not learned from public policy mistakes made after Hurricane Betsy in 1965, which set the stage for Katrina; many mistakes are being repeated. |
Aug 23 2008
The Stars Hollow Gazette: It’s Joe Biden Open Thread
Do you really need a Joe Biden Open Thread?
Aug 20 2008
The Morning News
The Morning News is an Open Thread
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 Afghan militants kill 10 French, strike at US base
By JASON STRAZIUSO and AMIR SHAH, Associated Press Writers
13 minutes ago
| SUROBI, Afghanistan – Insurgents mounted two of the biggest attacks in years on Western forces in Afghanistan, killing 10 French soldiers in a mountain ambush and then sending a squad of suicide bombers in a failed assault early Tuesday on a U.S. base near the Pakistan border.
The audacious strikes suggested a bolder insurgency is now willing to launch frontal assaults on U.S. and NATO troops. Only months ago, militants shied away from large-scale attacks because of the heavy losses they could incur when jet fighters appeared overhead, NATO and U.S. officials said. |
Aug 20 2008
The Stars Hollow Gazette
This is very disturbing-
[W]hen asked what advice he would give to a President Barack Obama or Democratic Congress on the matter of handling former Bush officials, McClellan speaks now of the perils of probing the past.
“If Obama were to win,” he said last week, “that would be an issue his administration would have to face early … because he’s pledging to be a uniter, not a divider – without saying those exact words we campaigned on in 2000. He’s pledging to change the way Washington works, and if Congress were to pursue that, it would be very divisive.”
He continued: “That could be very problematic for his presidency right off the start.”
Motherfucking Villagers.
Aug 19 2008
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Anthrax
Well, Detective Greenwald is back on the case, but before we get to him I just want to outline why I find it so fascinating.
To me the Anthrax attacks perfectly illustrate the Colossal Conspiracy of Incestuous Incompetence by our government’s leadership and agencies on the one hand and the Villager Idiots of our Mental Masturbatory Beltway Blind Bozo Media on the other.
And you get hairy palms too you perverts.
The story so far is that the FBI has decided to blame this dead guy who committed suicide under the pressure of their investigation. None of their public “proof” holds up to any kind of scrutiny at all. They are constantly changing their timelines and plotlines as new facts continue to be discovered and practically everybody in D.C. is trying to ignore that the only thing left of Ivins the Anthrax man is a corncob pipe and his button nose and two eyes made out of coal.
Oh and that old silk hat they found. Must have been some magic in it.
Then there is the local angle- I’ve been in Oxford, where Ottilie Lundgren died, and to Pine Grove Cemetery in Ansonia, where she is buried. I drive through Wallingford, where the postal processing center is, all the time when I’m traveling from Hartford to points south.
Still, I don’t want to seem obsessed-
And now-
Aug 18 2008
The Stars Hollow Gazette w/ Updates
Picking Fights and Drawing Lines in the Dirt.
Oh Noses. Daily Kos once again has it’s recommended list filled with scurrilous Consipracy Theories (CT stands for “Completely True” BTW).
While the point of this story doesn’t depend on the particulars I’ll briefly rehearse them so you understand the issues I’m really addressing.
So at Rick Warren’s “debate” John McCain told this heartfelt story about how he shared a moment of Christian worship with a guard who scratched out a cross in the dirt at his feet. One problem with that story is it’s been attributed to Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
In Honor of Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Writer, Leader, Hero
Monday, August 04, 2008
By Paul M. Weyrich
This man who Solzhenitsyn said he had never seen at the gulag took a stick and drew a cross in the dirt. And he left, never to be seen again. Solzhenitsyn later came to believe that that kindly figure was Christ himself.
Other details differ, in Solzhenitsyn’s story the person who scratches the cross in the dirt is a fellow prisoner.
I can’t myself prove it comes from The Gulag Archipelago, it’s Googlebook search indicates no relevant matches from ‘cross’ or ‘dirt’ or ‘guard’, but there are redacted pages and I don’t have an account. It might be from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, I haven’t checked that.
What I do know is that Paul Weyrich is this Paul Weyrich and if he remembers it from TWO STINKING WEEKS AGO! so should John McShame or at least his PLAGIRIZING SPEECH WRITERS! Otherwise they’re incompetent fools.
Just like when they plagiarized the Wikipedia article about Georgia (last week!) and those cookie recipes.
Thought seems to be split into three main camps, ‘Completely True’, ‘Cone of Silence’, and ‘Shut Up’. ‘Cone of Silence’ isn’t what you think, it’s the contention that McShame’s cheating by knowing the questions before is the more important story.
‘Shut Up’ is exactly what you would think, Democrats too cowardly to challenge McShame’s character as if Mr. Wetstart had any.
Aug 17 2008
Weekend News Digest
Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 Russia says Georgia pullout to begin Monday
By CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA, Associated Press Writer
10 minutes ago
| GORI, Georgia – Russia’s president said troops would begin pulling out of Georgia on Monday, but made no mention of leaving the separatist province at the heart of the conflict between the countries.
A defiant Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili said the former Soviet republic would not relinquish South Ossetia or Abkhazia – both now overrun with Russian troops and abandoned by Georgian soldiers – as Western leaders pushed for a swift Russian withdrawal from positions it has held for days of warfare. “Georgia will never give up a square kilometer of its territory,” Saakashvili told a news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the latest Western leader to visit Tbilisi and offer support for a country that has become a proxy for conflict between an emboldened Russia and the West. |
Aug 16 2008
Weekend News Digest
Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 Bombers strike Iraq pilgrims for 3rd straight day
By SAMEER N. YACOUB, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 17 minutes ago
| BAGHDAD – Bombers struck Shiite pilgrims Saturday for a third consecutive day, killing six people in the latest in a series of attacks apparently aimed at stoking sectarian tension.
The attacks have targeted pilgrims headed for the Shiite city of Karbala, where hundreds of thousands of people have gathered for festivities that culminate Sunday morning. No group has claimed responsibility, but assaults on Shiite civilians have been carried out for years by Sunni extremists such as al-Qaida in Iraq. |