Friday Orchid Blogging

Colmanara Wildcat

I love this flower. In orchid-land, this is considered one of the more "common" orchids (i.e., nothing special). Well, let me tell you. This is one of the first plants I ever got, and it's still possibly my favorite. I mean just look at the thing (this is my actual plant, photographed today). Look especially at the photos below, that show a close-up of one flower, and then the entire plant (there are literally 40 flowers getting ready to open on that second stem alone). I actually had trouble growing this guy for a few years, until I moved it over to the semi-hydroponic form of growing I'd mentioned before (basically, growing it in a plastic Chinese delivery container, with holes an inch above the bottom, and filling the pot with hard-baked clay pellets that absorb the water and keep the area moist yet open and airy. The thing LOVES it. This is the best it's bloomed for me, ever. Of course, it will probably fully open up in 2 weeks when I'm out of town. Anyway, really a spectacular plant. Oh, and a mouse chomped down on it too a few months back and it STILL looks like this. One more thing, orchid plants themselves are often quite hideously ugly, as plants go. Check out the plant itself in the bottom photo. Nothing special. Anyway, enjoy. JOHN



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Not everyone recognizes Obama

This is like a scene out of that Saturday Night Live skit with David Spade working as the snarky receptionist always saying "And, you are? And, you're with?" It's pretty funny:

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) may have one of the best-known faces in the world, but that doesn’t mean he is recognized everywhere, even in Washington.

Washington Sports Club employee Takehia Wheeler was manning the front desk to scan members’ identification cards Friday morning when the presidential candidate walked in with his entourage. The gym opened a month ago in the Columbia Heights district.

“He came in and walked past me,” Wheeler told In The Know. “I was like, ‘Sir, you need to come back.’ ”

Wheeler said Obama looked familiar, but she didn’t recognize him. So she asked for his ID card.

“I said, ‘What’s your last name?’ He said ‘Obama,’ ” Wheeler explained. “I said, ‘So what’s your first name?”

Then she laughed because it was at that point that Wheeler realized who she was talking to. How did she make amends? By saying, “Sorry, Mr. Future President!”

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House GOP: "There are no safe Republican seats in this election"

AP

Democrats currently hold a majority of 235-199, with one vacancy. Speaking privately, numerous Republicans have long conceded they are well on their way to additional, possibly significant losses in November, given President Bush's low approval ratings, opposition to the war in Iraq and polls that show a large majority of Americans wanting change.Karen Hanretty, communications director for the NRCC, reacted to the private report by acknowledging the difficulties confronting her party."This is a challenging environment," she said. "Any Republican running for office has to run basically on an independent platform, localize the race and not take anything for granted. There are no safe Republican seats in this election."

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Wisconsin Dems says they'll boot delegate who said she'll vote for McCain

Not so funny any more, is it? Read More......

Fed was worried about bailout credit consequences

As in worried they might become the next credit casualty. If only the Democrats in Congress would wake up to the bailout and it's potential consequences. That intervention was highly unusual and very risky yet nobody wants to talk about it. If they had to (and I'm not convinced they had to) go along with it they should have at least made it a painful process and let everyone know how exceptional it was. The lesson learned on Wall Street and by the GOP was that the wealthiest can get away with anything yet everyone else will be held accountable.

The Fed and Bernanke are in full CYA mode this week and letting everyone know how urgent this intervention was to avoid catastrophic failure. Bullshit. If the situation was so urgent, why and how did they let it get that far? How did the checks and balances fail? Anyone who believes for one minute that the risks were not known or that trouble was out there is a liar or an idiot. An overhaul of the regulation system is needed and everyone who was supposed to be providing oversight should be fired immediately and replaced, including Bernanke. Meanwhile, the Democrats failed miserably to tie this fiasco to the GOP who owns this trillion dollar mess. There are only so many lost opportunities that one can stand. Read More......

Grampa McCain promises to be more anti-gay in public (seriously)

Well that didn't take long. I'd just reported two days ago that McCain met recently with gay Republican leaders, and it only took 48 hours for the religious right to knee-cap McCain into submission. After meeting with an assemblage of anti-gay bigots, McCain has now announced that he's going to be more anti-gay in public in order to, I guess, win that all-important, and ever-shrinking, American Taliban vote. And he did just that today, by announcing his support for the effort to repeal marriage in California. So McCain is now going to fan the flames of anti-gay prejudice in order to win the presidency. I love it when mavericks sell their soul. How are you gay Republicans feeling about him now? Read More......

Recession only now starting

Hopefully he's wrong but there's plenty to suggest he may be correct.

Since last June, we've seen a fairly consistent pattern to the economic mood swings. Every three months or so, there's a round of bad news about housing, followed by warnings of more bank write-offs and then a string of disappointing corporate earnings reports. Eventually, things stabilize and there are hints that the worst may be behind us. Stocks regain some of their lost ground, bonds fall and then -- bam -- the whole cycle starts again.

It was only in November that the Dow had recovered from the panicked summer sell-off and hit a record, just above 14,000. By March, it had fallen below 12,000. By May, it climbed above 13,000. Now it's heading for a new floor at 11,000. Officially, that's bear market territory. We'll be lucky if that's the floor.

In explaining why that second-half rebound never occurred, the Fed and the Treasury and the Wall Street machers will say that nobody could have foreseen $140 a barrel oil. As excuses go, blaming it on an oil shock is a hardy perennial. That's what Jimmy Carter and Fed Chairman Arthur Burns did in the late '70s, and what George H.W. Bush and Alan Greenspan did in the early '90s. Don't believe it.

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Lead GOP activist, Grover Norquist, calls Obama "Kerry with a tan"

That's ok. I like to think of Grover Norquist as "Liberace with a wife." Read More......

Tap your foot twice if you're for marriage

As you may recall, the Republicans in Congress want to amend the US Constitution with anti-gay language that would supposedly "ban gay marriage." In fact, the amendment would likely rescind state and local laws that outlaw job discrimination against gays and provide gay partners with health benefits, and it would likely rescind laws protecting unmarried women from things such as being beaten to a bloody pulp by their boyfriends (this actually happened in Ohio, where the state court found that the local anti-gay-marriage amendment invalidated state laws covering the domestic abuse of unmarried women). Anyway, who is on the very short list of Senators introducing the "Marriage Protection Amendment" in the Senate? Why none other than foot-tapping Senator Larry Craig (R-ID), and whore-mongering Senator David Vitter (R-LA). You'll recall that the very-married Larry Craig was caught tapping his foot alongside a really hot male cop in an airport bathroom. And the very-married and very-family-values-proclaiming David Vitter, we now know, has repeatedly frequented female hookers.

So there you have it. Two of the Republicans' biggest marriage hypocrites - Larry Craig, who was accused of trying to have sex with a man (who was not his wife) in a bathroom, and David Vitter who has been repeatedly accused of frequenting hookers (who also were not his wife) - want to amend the Constitution to "protect" marriage.

Perhaps you all should call Larry Craig's and David Vitter's offices and ask them the following:

Senator Larry Craig
tel: 202-224-2752
Message: Can a married guy give handjobs and blowjobs to other guys in bathrooms and still defend heterosexual marriage?

Senator David Vitter
Phone: (202) 224-4623
Message: How many whores does a married guy have to sleep with before he's no longer defending marriage? And does the price of the whore matter?

Oh, and please do report back in the comments how your phone calls went with Craig's and Vitter's offices. Read More......

"Let the big brokers fail"

You know if the tables were turned, they would say the same for everyone else. With more rumors about Merrill Lynch and other "new" massive write downs, we should be hearing more of this talk and rightly so.

"I think there's a good chance that the Fed itself will fail one day if they say 'we're not going to let you fail' and the government will have to bail out the entire system," Faber said.

"If I'm a bad businessman and I go out of business, who's gong to help me?" he said. "But Bear Stearns and the Wall Street elite, because they are tied into the Treasury and the Federal Reserve and they have lunch together, it's a club and so forth, they're bailed out. It's a joke!"

"I think a lot of banks are already bankrupt … but they hide their rotten assets … in categories where you don't really need to value them," Faber said. "I think the financial sectors, by-and large, has much larger problems than is perceived by the investment community and the stock market to some extent is telling you that."

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Drama, drama, drama

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In Afghanistan, June is "deadliest month for foreign soldiers"

Another legacy of George Bush is the unfinished, forgotten war in Afghanistan:

Four members of the U.S.-led coalition force have been killed in insurgent attacks in Afghanistan, the force said on Friday, making June the deadliest month for foreign soldiers since the Taliban were ousted in 2001.

The deaths took the number of foreign troops killed in Afghanistan this month to 40. More than 200 foreign troops were killed in Afghanistan last year.

Three soldiers from the U.S.-led force and an interpreter were killed in Wardak province southwest of Kabul on Thursday when their convoy was blown up by a bomb, the force said in a statement.

In another attack on Thursday, in the southwestern province of Farah, a coalition soldier was killed and seven people, including two Afghan soldiers, were wounded, the U.S. military said.

If my history serves me, we went to war in Afghanistan directly because of the 9/11 attacks. But, then Bush forgot about Afghanistan to launch the war against Iraq, which had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.

It's going to take a long time to clean up the failures of George Bush. Read More......

McCain's Las Vegas coverage dominated by his support for Yucca Mountain

All politics is local and all presidential elections are state-by-state elections. That's why this latest report from Jed is very interesting. McCain was in Nevada touting nuclear power on Nevada. But, when Nevadans hear about nuclear power, they think about nuclear waste -- and that means Yucca Mountain, which is the planned site for disposing high level nuclear waste. It's about 80 miles from Las Vegas. That subject dominated the local news coverage:



And, Jed analysis is right on point:

By the way, isn't it interesting how local political coverage tends to focus on real issues, whereas national political coverage tends to focus on the meaningless stuff? I wonder what Dean Broder has to say about that.

I think this helps explain why Barack manages to do so well in so many state and national polls despite having a national media that is in love with Teflon John.

All politics is local and all presidential elections are really state-by-state elections. So simple, but lost on so many of those pundits riding around on the bus with John McCain. Read More......

Friday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

Usually, I start the day cranking about Republicans.  Not today because I had a big night last night. My students graduated. I'm so proud. Every Monday night, I teach basic English to immigrants at a program called Language ETC.  This group had two Brazilians, two Russians and the rest were from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Colombia.  I only speak basic English, but my teaching partner, Carlos, speaks something like six languages, which comes in very handy.  It is a very rewarding experience -- and, while ostensibly I'm the teacher, I actually learn a lot from my students every week.  They make every second of it worthwhile.

Anyway, I'll be back to cranking about Republicans shortly. Read More......