Open Thread: Thursday Garden Chat

From commentor TheOtherWA:

This spring was so cold and wet in the northwest, I just couldn’t get into gardening mode. Never planted the usual tomatoes and herbs. The raspberries did pretty well, they like cool weather (& were eaten before any photos were taken), but the grapevine is pathetic.

The photo is a bunch of black table grapes in mid August. I should be munching a few of these by now, waiting for most of them to get nice and dark. It’s weird, we basically didn’t have a summer this year. Most of the country was sweltering in extreme heat and drought, we’ve hardly had enough. Only people with greenhouses are getting good produce.

I’m not whining about our weather, really. Just explaining the situation.

***********

There’s a feel of fall in the air here, and it’s not just the torn leaves & downed branches. The immediate microclime was very, very lucky with Hurricane Irene… and when I see video from places like Vermont, upstate NY, northern New Jersey or the Carolinas, I’m hardly gonna complain about my tomato towers leaning askew. (We didn’t even lose power, despite the half-splintered oak branch hanging over the powerline that Northern Grid has been refusing to remove for the past 18 months.)

What’s it like in your gardens, this week? Anybody have hurricane / wildfire / drought / plague-of-locusts stories to share?

Share

September 1, 2011 9:36 pm Posted in: Black Thumb, Open Thread  18 Comments

Open Thread

Such a good night. Had a great scotch before dinner. Then had an aged NY strip I cooked on the grill, some fresh tomatoes from the garden with a little fresh basil and some mozz., a nice light garden salad, finished with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and a shot of Bärenjäger, and now I am drinking some solid black coffee and getting ready to raid (Warcraft) with guys I have known for years online. Not to mention, the Steelers are playing and I have the world’s greatest dog with me:

I’ll just leave you with this:

I’ll be back after heroic Ragnaros. Because Charlie Sheen was a piker.

Share

September 1, 2011 8:46 pm Posted in: Open Thread  96 Comments

You should’ve heard him just around midnight

I’m not a historian so I don’t want to claim that the record is incontrovertible, but isn’t there tons of evidence that Thomas Jefferson did father children with Sally Hemings? When did it become a winger cause celebre that he didn’t? Don’t they know that Jefferson hated The Bible? The Moonie Times via Wonkette:

In a book due out Thursday, eminent scholars say it’s unlikely that Thomas Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings’ children, disputing a decade’s worth of conventional wisdom that the author of the Declaration of Independence sired offspring with one of his slaves.

The debate has ensnared historians for years, and many thought the issue was settled when DNA testing in the late 1990s confirmed that a Jefferson male fathered Hemings‘ youngest son, Eston. But, with one lone dissenter, the panel of 13 scholars doubted the claim and said the evidence points instead to Jefferson’s brother Randolph as the father.

The scholars also disputed accounts that said Hemings’ children received special treatment from Jefferson, which some saw as evidence of a special bond between the third president and Hemings.

I find winger revisionism upsetting and depressing in general, but this bothers me even more than usual, so much so that I don’t have the energy to do the research to refute this new claim.

Share

September 1, 2011 7:45 pm Posted in: Post-racial America  100 Comments

Everyone is Perfect Until They Fuck Something Up

I saw a lot of chatter about this story this week:

Allan Lichtman, the American University professor whose election formula has correctly called every president since Ronald Reagan’s 1984 re-election, has a belated birthday present for Barack Obama: Rest easy, your re-election is in the bag.

“Even if I am being conservative, I don’t see how Obama can lose,” says Lichtman, the brains behind The Keys to the White House.

Lichtman’s prediction helps to explain a quirk in some polling that finds that while Americans disapprove of the president, they still think he will win re-election.

There are very few things in life that are perfect and will remain so throughout time- the FSM’s noodly adoration for us all, my dog Lily, mojitos, Shakira’s ass, and the 72 Dolphins basically complete my list. Basically, I don’t buy this at all. There are a number of reasons why Obama could lose in 2012 (and Nate Silver provides some), not including the fact that the GOP has spent the last three years doing everything in their power to disfranchise people they believe are Democrat leaning.

It would be completely disastrous for Democrats to go into 2012 assuming that the election is a lock

Share

September 1, 2011 7:03 pm Posted in: Election 2012  112 Comments

Over the Fucking Line, Donny

I’m treating tonight like Friday as this is a four day week-end, so if you expect something substantive from me, move on. I do want to pass on this little tale:

A repeat public indecency offender has been arrested for allegedly engaging in “sexual activity” with a pink inflatable swimming pool raft, according to Hamilton police.

Edwin Charles Tobergta, 32, was arrested at his Harmon Avenue home early Sunday after he was spotted in the act in an alley in the 1800 block of Howell Avenue behind a residence, a police report shows.

A male witness, who owns the raft and lives in the home near the alley, told Hamilton Police Officer William Thacker he shouted at the suspect to stop.

Tobergta took the raft and fled, the report states.

When police caught up with him, he admitted to the crime and begged for help, according to police.

Putting aside the sadness factor of him begging for help, I’m not sure what is my favorite part of the story. That he was having sex with a raft, that it wasn’t his raft, or that when he was caught, before running, he made sure to take the raft with him. But wait, it gets better:

According to court records, he has four other public indecency charges in Hamilton Municipal Court and another in Butler County.

In one public indecency case in 2002, he was caught having sex with an inflatable pumpkin that was part of a Halloween display.

What happened in the eight years that made him go from a pumpkin to a raft?

And if all you are going to do is tell me I am horrible person and should not be snickering at this, I completely agree. I’m a horrible person.

(via)

Share

September 1, 2011 6:38 pm Posted in: Because of wow., Green Balloons  78 Comments

Love it or leave it

This made me laugh:

In a sign of his frustration at the investigations into his alleged crimes and misdemeanours, Silvio Berlusconi vowed in July to leave Italy, which he described as a “shitty country” that “sickened” him.

Not so dissimilar from all the great American patriots who vowed to move to Costa Rica if their marginal rate went up a few points.

(via)

Share

September 1, 2011 6:22 pm Posted in: Going Galt  30 Comments

Open Thread

I’ve been out of the loop all day, so use this thread to explain why I am an awful person and what Obama has done to let you down.

Share

September 1, 2011 4:08 pm Posted in: Open Thread  165 Comments

Tone Deaf is to the (AZ) GOP as Zephyr is to Hurricane

I lack words to express my revulsion, but then, none are really necessary in response to this (TPM via Huffpo):

Eyebrows shot up all over the country Thursday following news that that the Republican Party in Pima County, AZ —home to Tucson and Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ (D) district—is raffling off a Glock similar to the one used to shoot Giffords in the head in January.

Props to the ousted Pima County GOP chief for his condemnation of this—but it ain’t his party any more.  Now, it seems, in order to be a 21st century Republican, you need to have both your moral sense and your capacity to imagine the emotions of others surgically excised at birth.



I got nothin’ more to say on this.  I gotta go OD on antiemetics.

Image:  Hieronymus Bosch, Hell (detail), 1500-1504

Share

September 1, 2011 3:53 pm Posted in: Crazification Factor, Fucked-up-edness, Fucksaw, Good News For Conservatives, Looks Like I Picked the Wrong Week to Stop Sniffing Glue, Republican Stupidity, Sociopaths, The stupid speaks for itself, Wingnut Event Horizon  47 Comments

ZOMG! ScheduleGate!! President Obama is a Cave-Dwelling Cave Meister!

This is Obama’s Katrina.


 For those of you who aren’t aware, Obama caved BIG-TIME yesterday… or something.

See, he wanted to address Congress about his jobs plan on September 7, which is Congress’s first day back from summer recess. (You remember jobs, right?  Most of you probably don’t have one because Congress refuses to do its job and come up with a plan to put Americans back to work.)

John Boehner, in an unprecedented yet unsurprising move, sent a letter to Administration saying, “No”—after initially offering no objection to the Obama administration’s chosen date:

[A]s the Majority Leader announced more than a month ago, the House will not be in session until Wednesday, September 7, with votes at 6:30 that evening. With the significant amount of time – typically more than three hours – that is required to allow for a security sweep of the House Chamber before receiving a President, it is my recommendation that your address be held on the following evening, when we can ensure there will be no parliamentary or logistical impediments that might detract from your remarks.

Despite the fact that the date was floated to the GOP and the GOP didn’t object, the White House pushed the address back a day because getting into a slapfight with Boehner would have only served to make everyone—not just the GOP, but also the Administration—look like asshats.

He pushed back the date by a whole day? The horror! The horror!

Delaying the address definitely proves that Obama caves on everything, and this is why he’s going to lose in 2012. Voters will remember the Day the Address Got Delayed By A Day, and voters will view it as Obama being a wimp (as Markos called him) or petty and incompetent (as Jon Walker of FDL called him) or so weak that he doesn’t even realize he’s being weak (as Cenk Ugyur called him).

What the hell is wrong with these people?

Every single Professional Left blog has front-page posts claiming that Obama is a wimp, a cavemeister, naive, petty, or incompetent:

Read the rest of this post »
Share

September 1, 2011 2:55 pm Posted in: An Unexamined Scandal, Balloon Jobs, Because of wow., Clown Shoes, Crock Pot Craziness, General Stupidity, I Hate All of You, I Read These Morons So You Don't Have To, I wish a motherfucker would!, KMBA, Looks Like I Picked the Wrong Week to Stop Sniffing Glue, Manic Progressive, OBAMA IS WORSE THAN BUSH HE SOLD US OUT!!, Our Failed Media Experiment, Our Failed Political Establishment, Republican Stupidity, Serenity Now!, Seriously, Somewhere a Village is Missing its Idiot, The Brown Enemy Within, The Failed Obama Administration (Only Took Two Weeks), The stupid speaks for itself, WTF?  261 Comments

Shot a man in Reno just to watch him die

It looks like Rick Perry put an innocent man to death and then quashed an investigation on the matter. The awful truth is that this probably helps him in the Republican primary and makes no difference for the general election.

Share

September 1, 2011 12:56 pm Posted in: Perry-tinnitus  158 Comments

Open Thread: Darth Cheney, Fictioneer


(Jim Morin via GoComics.com)

Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic has a pretty good thumbnail summary Remembering Why Americans Loathe Dick Cheney: the Iraq war, torture, Halliburton, Ahmed Chalabi, unlimited detention of the innocent, his radical view of executive power, etc. Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, sniffs about Cheney’s “cheap shots”:

“I think he’s just trying to, one, assert himself so he’s not in some subsequent time period tried for war crimes and, second, so that he somehow vindicates himself because he feels like he needs vindication. That in itself tells you something about him,” Wilkerson told ABC News, explaining that Cheney may have “angst” because of receiving deferments instead of serving in the Vietnam War like Wilkerson and others in the administration.

“He’s developed an angst and almost a protective cover, and now he fears being tried as a war criminal so he uses such terminology as ‘exploding heads all over Washington’ because that’s the way someone who’s decided he’s not going to be prosecuted acts: boldly, let’s get out in front of everybody, let’s act like we are not concerned and so forth when in fact they are covering up their own fear that somebody will Pinochet him,” Wilkerson said alluding to the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who was arrested for war crimes.

(via)

But IMO the most significant review so far is Dahlia Lithwick at Slate dissecting Cheney Getting Away With Torture:

This week Dick Cheney invites us all to join him again in a game he likes to play against the rest of us called Tedious Torture Standoff. He continues to assert—this time in his memoir, In My Time—that he has “no regrets” about developing the U.S. torture program, and he continues to argue—as he did this morning on the Today Show—that torturing prisoners is “safe, legal, and effective.” He continues to assert that he would “strongly support” water-boarding if actionable information could be elicited from a prisoner. He even says that different standards apply to torturing Americans and foreigners. Cheney is trying, in short, to draw us back into the same tiresome debate over the efficacy of torture, which is about as compelling as a debate about the efficacy of slavery or Jim Crow laws. Only fools debate whether patently illegal programs “work”—only fools or those who have been legally implicated in designing the programs in the first place…
Read the rest of this post »

Share

September 1, 2011 9:53 am Posted in: An Unexamined Scandal, Assholes, C.R.E.A.M., Grifters Gonna Grift, Lizard blogging, Open Thread, Our Failed Political Establishment, Republican Crime Syndicate - aka the Bush Admin., Sociopaths  97 Comments

Speak to Me Your Song of Greed

Here’s a classic corporate bullshit memo from T-Mobile’s president to his wage slaves (via), reacting to the news that the DOJ is going to try to block the T-Mobile/AT&T merger:

DT [T-Mobile] and AT&T believe the DOJ has failed to acknowledge the significant consumer benefits of this deal. DT remains convinced that bringing together these two world-class businesses would create significant benefits for customers and the country.

Translation: a sore asshole and an empty wallet are “consumer benefits”.

While this action is addressed in Federal court, the best thing you can do is continue to focus on strengthening our business and offering world class customer service.

So, stop what you were doing—polishing your resumes in preparation for the inevitable layoffs—and start trying to entice customers into making a two-year commitment to a company that won’t be around in a couple of months.

Customers have many reasons to choose T-Mobile—from the great value we offer, to compelling devices running on America’s largest 4G network and our leadership in customer service and satisfaction.

Those were the newest stats I could find—I doubt they’ve changed much.

Share

September 1, 2011 8:46 am Posted in: Free Markets Solve Everything  62 Comments

This Mess We’re In

This asinine, silly, childish snit and clusterfuck over scheduling of Obama’s speech on jobs shows that John Boehner is a utter dick, or that the Obama administration is hopelessly naive and John Boehner is an utter dick. I guess I’m pretty sure about the dick part, the rest is kind of grey.

Share

September 1, 2011 8:18 am Posted in: Both Sides Do It!, Crazification Factor, Decline and Fall, Democratic Cowardice, Fucked-up-edness, Fucksaw, Good News For Conservatives, I wish a motherfucker would!, IOKIYAR, Looks Like I Picked the Wrong Week to Stop Sniffing Glue, Monkeys flinging poo, Nobody could have predicted, OBAMA IS WORSE THAN BUSH HE SOLD US OUT!!, Our Failed Political Establishment, Republican Stupidity, Republican Venality, Shouting at the rain, Show Us on the Doll Where the Invisible Hand Touched You, Sweet Fancy Moses!, Teabagger Stupidity, The Failed Obama Administration (Only Took Two Weeks), The stupid speaks for itself, WWJBD- What Would Jenna Bush Do?  218 Comments

Today in the Politics of Pets

Mary Shannon Johnstone is a talented photographer who is working on a documentary series called Breeding Ignorance, which is a four-part piece about where unwanted pets come from, how they are euthanized, life in a shelter, and the practice of spaying and neutering. Fair warning: some of the images are quite disturbing, and others are pretty graphic depictions of surgical procedures on cats and dogs. One thing I learned from the series is that some shelters have a spaying program for feral cats, which is awesome.

ED Kain has the story of Steven Seagal, who accompanied Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s excursion into a Phoenix neighborhood with an armored vehicle, all to arrest a suspected cockfighter. During that arrest, a puppy was killed after the tank Segal was riding in crashed into the house. Seagal is being sued for $100,000 and is being asked for a written apology.

Update: In unrelated news, a regular commenter reminds me that EDK also has a good post on climate change at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen that’s well worth a read.

Share

September 1, 2011 8:00 am Posted in: Pet Rescue, Shitty Cops  29 Comments

Even More Agony, Rather Less Ecstasy



From Jenna Marotta at New York Magazine’s Daily Intel blog, the story of one more rightbrain individual who truly, seriously regrets the bad news about Steve Jobs:

Mike Daisey, creator and star of The Agony And The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, a solo show opening October 11 at the Public, was at Disneyland last week when he learned of the Apple CEO’s resignation. “I found out on my iPhone,” Daisey said yesterday, still stuck in California as a result of post-Hurricane Irene travel chaos. “I just had the feeling you get when you realize that something terrible has happened, when you feel your center of gravity drop down to your bowels. What I think was really telling was that the release date for his authorized was moved up from March to November, because I think he wants to see it happen.”

Daisey is known for lengthy monologues like If You See Something Say Something, Monopoly!, Truth, and The Ugly American (most of them directed by his wife, Jean-Michele Gregory). Even though Daisey calls Jobs “a hero of mine,” the monologist had enough concerns about Apple and its co-founder to fuel a critical two-hour piece that explores the human cost of Apple’s global supply chain, and the ultimate price of the shiny gadgets carried by so many. “Being a total tyrant and taskmaster,” Daisey says, “[Jobs] created the first global corporation that is welded to a single human vision.”...

Jobs’s resignation and failing health have certainly altered the atmosphere for the show. “When someone gets ill,” Daisey acknowledges, “it’s hard to talk about that onstage.” But Daisey won’t be rewriting the play to accommodate the new developments. If Jobs should actually pass away during the show’s run, Daisey says he’ll be respectful without “lionizing” him or “creating a religion” of Jobs. Ultimately, he said, “the monologue is about the end of an era” at Apple more than a biography of Jobs. “The people who founded Apple used to call themselves pirates; it went from being a company about freedom to a company that’s becoming more interested in control than creating a great user experience.”

I’m so old, I still have an aural memory of Vaughn Meader saying, “... and the rubbah swaaaaan is MINE!” on my parents’ hi-fi record player. And that’s what ran through my mind even before I read Marotte’s article… although, fortunately, Daisey’s career is not nearly as dependent on one particular monologue as Meader’s was on his impersonation of JFK.

Share

September 1, 2011 1:44 am Posted in: KULCHA!, Science and Technology  42 Comments


Switch to our mobile site