Redskins Reboot (Again)

12:39 pm EST September 4th, 2011 | Sports | 4 Comments

Shanahan cleaned out the Redskins.

The team trimmed its roster from 80 players to 53 Saturday, revealing a roster that bears only passing resemblance to what Shanahan used last season. Barely half of last year’s Week 1 roster — 27 players in all — survived on the team Shanahan will use to begin preparations for next Sunday’s season opener against the New York Giants.

While Saturday’s cuts didn’t include any major surprises, the team did part ways with a handful of veterans: linebacker Horatio Blades, safety Chris Horton, nose tackle Anthony Bryant and offensive lineman Artis Hicks. Gone, too, are running back Keiland Williams, quarterback Kellen Clemens and three 2011 draft picks, including Evan Royster, the former Penn State running back who was selected in the sixth round.

I feel pretty optimistic, but I’m a bad barometer because I’m always optimistic in September when it comes to the Redskins.

That said, this team feels the least Snyderiffic of all the teams we’ve had in a long time, and that’s a good thing.

Prediction: 9-7

Topic: Redskins

Science Deniers Lose Another Round

5:16 pm EST September 2nd, 2011 | Environment, Science | 46 Comments

Fake climate science trumpeted by the right is quickly debunked and run out of town. Again.

Obama Wimps Out Again, Air Remains Dirty

10:57 am EST September 2nd, 2011 | Environment | 20 Comments

Lucy pulls the football away.

President Obama abruptly pulled back proposed new national smog standards Friday morning, overruling the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to compel states and communities nationwide to reduce local air pollution in the coming years or face federal penalties.

The move represented a win for the business community, which had lobbied to postpone new restrictions on ground-level ozone—known as smog—until 2013 in light of the current economic downturn.

In a statement, Obama praised EPA administrator Lisa P. Jackson’s effort to improve the nation’s air quality, but said he had asked her to withdraw the draft standards since they were scheduled to be reconsidered two years from now anyway.

“Work is already underway to update a 2006 review of the science that will result in the reconsideration of the ozone standard in 2013,” Obama said. “Ultimately, I did not support asking state and local governments to begin implementing a new standard that will soon be reconsidered.”

News Of Note

1:44 pm EST September 1st, 2011 | News | 8 Comments

National Confidential:

Mark Zuckerberg Tops 2011 Vanity Fair New Establishment List

Boehner Backstab: Agreed To Speech Date With Obama, Rescinded It In Public

Jon Hutt: Man Cut Off Toes With Pocket Knife After Foot Pinned

VIDEO: Man Jet Skis Down Streets After Hurricane Irene

Lawsuit: AIDS Grant Money Went To Washington D.C. Strip Club

Former Bush Official Was Advising Gaddafi On How To Beat Rebels With PR

1:13 pm EST August 31st, 2011 | Foreign Policy | 17 Comments

Great people.

I managed to smuggle away some documents, among them some that indicate the Gaddafi regime, despite its constant anti-American rhetoric – maintained direct communications with influential figures in the US.

I found what appeared to be the minutes of a meeting between senior Libyan officials – Abubakr Alzleitny and Mohammed Ahmed Ismail – and David Welch, the former assistant secretary of state who served under George W Bush and the man who brokered the deal which restored diplomatic relations between the US and Libya in 2008.

Welch now works for Bechtel, a multinational American company with billion dollar construction deals across the Middle East. The documents record that, on August 2, 2011, David Welch met with Gaddafi’s officials at the Four Seasons Hotel in Cairo, just a few blocks from the US embassy there.

During that meeting Welch advised Gaddafi’s team on how to win the propaganda war – suggesting several “confidence building measures”, the documents said. The documents appear to indicate that an influential US political personality was advising Gaddafi on how to beat the US and NATO.

Minutes of this meeting note his advice on how to undermine Libya’s rebel movement, with the potential assistance of foreign intelligence agencies, including Israel. “Any information related to al-Qaeda or other terrorist extremist organisations should be found and given to the American administration but only via the intelligence agencies of either Israel, Egypt, Morroco, or Jordan… America will listen to them… It’s better to receive this information as if it originated from those countries…”

The papers also document that Welch advised Gaddafi’s regime to take advantage of the current unrest in Syria, pointing out: “The importance of taking advantage of the Syrian situation particularly regarding the double-standard policy adopted by Washington… the Syrians were never your friends and you would loose nothing from exploiting the situation there in order to embarrass the West.”

Topic: Libya

Wikileaks Endangers Lives

11:25 am EST August 30th, 2011 | News | 22 Comments

The good guys, my ass.

In a shift of tactics that has alarmed American officials, the antisecrecy organization WikiLeaks has published on the Web nearly 134,000 leaked diplomatic cables in recent days, more than six times the total disclosed publicly since the posting of the leaked State Department documents began last November.

A sampling of the documents showed that the newly published cables included the names of some people who had spoken confidentially to American diplomats and whose identities were marked in the cables with the warning “strictly protect.”

State Department officials and human rights activists have been concerned that such diplomatic sources, including activists, journalists and academics in authoritarian countries, could face reprisals, including dismissal from their jobs, prosecution or violence.

Topic: Wikileaks

Dick Cheney Lies In New Book

11:14 am EST August 30th, 2011 | Conservative, Republicans | 57 Comments

The whole point of a Dick Cheney book is to lie about what happened so that the future misremembers its history and looks on the worst vice president in US history in a kinder light.

Topic: Dick Cheney

Yet Another Study: No Link Between Vaccines & Autism

5:48 pm EST August 25th, 2011 | Science | 82 Comments

The anti-vaccination know-nothings lose another round:

The M.M.R. vaccine doesn’t cause autism, and the evidence is overwhelming that it doesn’t,” Dr. Ellen Wright Clayton, the chairwoman of the panel, assembled by the Institute of Medicine, said in an interview, referring to a combination vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella that has long been a focus of concern from some parents’ groups.

The panel did conclude, however, that there are risks to getting the chickenpox vaccine that can arise years after vaccination. People who have had the vaccine can develop pneumonia, meningitis or hepatitis years later if the virus used in the vaccine reawakens because an unrelated health problem, like cancer, has compromised their immune systems.

These same problems are far more likely in patients who are infected naturally at some point in their lives with chickenpox, since varicella zoster, the virus that causes chickenpox, can live dormant in nerve cells for decades. Shingles, a painful eruption of skin blisters that usually affects the aged, is generally caused by this Lazarus-like ability of varicella zoster.

Again, if you oppose vaccination, you are killing children.

Topic: Vaccination

Not Anti-War, But Anti-Stupid War

9:18 am EST August 25th, 2011 | Foreign Policy | 67 Comments

The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf takes Howard Dean to task for not opposing military action in Libya.

Dean lost in the primaries, so we never got to see whether he’d really embrace the rule of law, truth-telling, and transparency about facts as president. But he is still speaking out about foreign wars. On Wednesday morning, for example, he went on MSNBC, where he praised President Obama for the war in Libya. “It’s very smart. You don’t put boots on the ground. You don’t commit trillions of dollars to a war in Iraq,” he said. “You do it with the other tools that we have that frankly work much better over the long term because you don’t get a lot of public resistance — drones, special operations forces, use of intelligence agencies. That’s exactly what he did.”

Isn’t that something?

He’s praising drone strikes and special ops because they’re less likely to attract the scrutiny and criticism from American citizens. It’s a position one doesn’t expect a prominent Iraq War dissenter to take — you’d think he of all people would understand that it’s vital for the American public to scrutinize the foreign policy decisions of its leaders regardless of the political party in power.

Friedersdorf goes on to attack the anti-war movement as just so much partisan hackery. Except, he’s wrong. The bulk of opposition to the Iraq War wasn’t opposition to the concept of war. For most of us who opposed the Iraq War, it was neither out of dovishness or kneejerk opposition to Bush. It was opposition to a war that was unnecessary and distracting from the already ongoing war against Al Qaeda and its affiliates.

The only military action of the last 20 years I have seriously opposed was the invasion and occupation of Iraq, because it never made any sense. There were no WMDs and thousands of Americans died due to poor leadership from Bush and his crew.

When Obama ran for president, he did not run as an anti-war candidate, something even some of his supporters seem to have ignored. Obama said he opposed the Iraq War, but even on the campaign trail he made clear that he thought the conflict in Afghanistan was needed.

I don’t get this sort of strawman type argument that because someone – rightly – opposed the Iraq War, they should oppose all other wars and if they don’t they’re a hypocrite.

Living Up To Parody, Conservatives Begin Earthquake Blame Game With Obama

4:33 pm EST August 23rd, 2011 | Conservative | 65 Comments

Like clockwork.

Following the 5.8 magnitude earthquake that shook the D.C. region this afternoon, conservative media figures have responded the only way they know how: by twisting it into an attack on Obama’s vacation in Martha’s Vineyard.