Friday Orchid Blogging

It's time we continued.



This is a Paph Elfstone x Skip Bartlett. It's one of my own flowers, a first bloom (meaning the first time the plant has bloomed since reaching maturity), so it should be better in the coming years. It's a cute one, though is a bit malformed in spots. Again, it's hard to know if that's genetic or something that will work its way out in subsequent blooms. Anyway, not a very tricky grower - just water it as is approaches dryness. It likes good light, but not too strong - I now have my plants under 48 inch fluorescent bulbs, and for Paphs at least, they work perfectly.

A few more paphs are on the way, and some other exciting flowers as well. Should be a good winter for posting some of my actual flowers. Enjoy.

PS For those in the know, I bought a few kovachii crosses (legally). God help me. Read the rest of this post...

ABC News on religious right being ticked at the GOP over gays

Boo hoo. The religious right just figured out that the Republicans don't like them, or their ideas, very much. Here is the transcript of tonight's ABC broadcast about all of this. Read the rest of this post...

Oil prices drop as Saudis refuse to cut production. Now why is that?

Isn't that convenient. Right before the elections the Saudis suddenly decide to help lower oil prices. Now why is that? Oh yeah, I remember:

In an interview that aired Sunday on CBS, Woodward, a Washington Post editor, said that Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, had promised President Bush that the Saudis would cut oil prices before November to ensure the U.S. economy was strong on election day. Woodward is the author of the new book "Plan of Attack" on Bush's preparations for the Iraq war.

Read the rest of this post...

Cliff's Corner

The Week That Was 10/13/06

Another week. More preposterousness to report.

Happy Friday the 13th! Or as Republicans call it, just another day to stalk kids!

It has been quite a week hasn’t it? Chris Shays cut and run from lucidity; right-wing, self-loathing, corporate-humping pseudo-Christians decided that gays are pretty much responsible for everything from acid rain to David Hasselhoff's music and now there’s an investigation into Congressman Kolbe’s tent-pitching with teenagers in the Grand Canyon.

So it has taken only two weeks for the GOP to go from the Daddy Party to the Who’s Your Daddy? Party. Nice work.

But not to be outdone on the malefactor scale, Bob Ney admitted that, “yeah what the hell, I’m a criminal” and speaking of our penal codes (calm down Foley, they’re over seventeen years old) it turns out that George Allen appears to have an arrest on his record from 1974. Inquiring minds are hunting down the details as I write this.

I mean are these really the freakin’ people who are running my country? Tell me this is a joke, like Kevin Federline’s rapping or Ann Coulter’s larynx.

Because if you gave this script to Days Of Our Lives, they would probably kick your ass right out of the building for it’s being so ridiculous as to be not worthy of soap opera.

The predictable result is that each day that goes by the Republican Party is sinking faster than Rush after his baggage is confiscated on the way back from the Dominican Republic. I mean we are Democrats, so I am not going to get overly sanguine about some of these unbelievable poll numbers.

But I am hearing that approximately sixty Republican house seats are now considered in play. Tom Reynolds would be wetting himself over this if he were not already soaked worrying about his own seat.

Yet, at least the Bush Administration has eased tension all around by handling the North Korea situation so well. Ignoring people you don’t like—that seems like a good idea. If I understand it correctly, we had to invade Iraq to stop them from sharing nuclear weapons they didn’t have with terrorists, but insulting North Korea and allowing them to get nuclear weapons they can pass on to terrorists is a good idea. Got it.

Let’s call it the Bush Doctrine. Or being a retard. I’ll leave it up to you.

I must run along now, a little earlier than usual, as a few matters loom. But I just wish to remind you before I leave that when in doubt: blame the gays. It’s surely the reason that the top-fifteen divorce states all voted for Bush while eleven of the twelve states where people divorce least voted for Kerry.

Damn gays—when will they stop undermining all of our sacred institutions?

For what I'll call a particularly "energetic" edition of my weekly recounting of Republican Sexcapades on The Young Turks, may you go here Read the rest of this post...

Joe Six-Pack isn't happy with Bush

Read the rest of this post...

Open thread

Rudy Giuliani, latest GOP hypocrite. Read the rest of this post...

Krugman: If GOP loses the election, it will be by a landslide

NYT

a huge Democratic storm surge is heading toward a high Republican levee. It’s still possible that the surge won’t overtop the levee — that is, the Democrats could fail by a small margin to take control of Congress. But if the surge does go over the top, the flooding will almost surely reach well inland — that is, if the Democrats win, they’ll probably win big....

And here’s the thing: because there are many districts that the G.O.P. carried by only moderately large margins in recent elections, a large Democratic surge — one only a bit bigger than that needed to take the House at all — would sweep away many Republicans holding seats normally considered safe. If the actual vote is anything like what the polls now suggest, we’re talking about the Democrats holding a larger majority in the House than the Republicans have held at any point since their 1994 takeover.

So if the Democrats win, they’ll probably have a substantial majority.....

Bear in mind that the G.O.P. isn’t in trouble because of a string of bad luck. The problems that have caused Americans to turn on the party, from the disaster in Iraq to the botched response to Katrina, from the failed attempt to privatize Social Security to the sudden realization by many voters that the self-proclaimed champions of moral values are hypocrites, are deeply rooted in the whole nature of Republican governance. So even if this surge doesn’t overtop the levee, there will be another surge soon.

But the best guess is that the permanent Republican majority will end in a little over three weeks.

Read the rest of this post...

Rep. Kolbe under federal investigation for camping trip with pages where his behavior "inappropriate"

From NBC News:

Federal prosecutors in Arizona have opened a preliminary investigation of a camping trip Congressman Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., took 10 years ago that included two teenage congressional pages, a Justice Department spokesman told NBC News. NBC News first reported on the camping and rafting trip on Tuesday.

A spokesman for the Justice Department in Washington said that the U.S. attorney in Arizona has started a "preliminary assessment" of the trip, after an unidentified source made allegations about the congressman's behavior on the expedition.

"The U.S. attorney is looking into allegations about the congressman taking a trip with the two pages," the spokesman said.

Kolbe's office denies anything "improper" happened.

More NBC:

NBC News interviewed several people who were on the trip, and their accounts vary. One participant, who requested anonymity, said he was uncomfortable with the attention Kolbe paid to one of the former pages. He was "creeped out by it," he said, adding that there was a lot of "fawning, petting and touching" on the teenager's arms, shoulders and back by Kolbe.

Read the rest of this post...

Bush suddenly started avoiding Foley in Sept. 2004, after months of using Foley to help Bush's re-election campaign. What did Bush find out?

Why did the White House suddenly decide two years ago that Foley was too hot to handle? And even more interesting, why did Foley reach out to Jeb Bush about something he needed his advice on right about the time Foley's creepy emails became known amonst Republicans on the Hill in late 2005? Did Foley and Jeb Bush talk about the sdandal a year ago? Did the White House know something two years ago? Read the rest of this post...

In the shadow of North Korea, a horrific week in Iraq

(Note from John: AJ is a former US Defense Intelligence officer who covered Iraq for two years.)

North Korea dominated most of the international news this week, and probably rightfully so, but it's worth noting that the torrent of bad news coming out of Iraq continues unabated.

In the past week alone, a study was released indicating about 655,000 Iraqis (about 2.5% of the entire population) have been killed as a result of the war, the head of the UK army called for British troops to draw down from Iraq "sometime soon," and the Iraqi parliament passed a hugely divisive law by the barest of margins -- after barely attaining a quorum -- that sets the stage for a divided Iraq, a result that will ultimately cause more strife and bloodshed than keeping the country together. Senator Warner (R-VA) and former Secretary of State James Baker both indicated that the current course and strategy is not effective, and to top it all off, the U.S. military announced budget plans to account for current troop levels in Iraq, currently about 140,000, to remain there until 2010.

Violence is up, attacks are up, and deaths are up, and even the most ardent war supporters can't seem to bring themselves to claim that things are improving.

So here's some logic: We have 140,000 troops in Iraq, and that number is not able to quell the violence. There is no indication that a moderate increase in troops would engender drastic improvements, and although some people speculate that a drastic increase in troops (say, doubling the force) would improve the security situation, any legitimate expert on our armed forces will tell you our military isn't in shape to do that, regardless of any political considerations.

So. The status quo is failing -- Iraq is getting worse, not better. The U.S. military simply isn't able to significantly increase the troop level, and we've seen in the past few months that moderate increases in forces doesn't appear to effect long-term improvement. Many experts believe that our very presence in Iraq exacerbates the situation, so it stands to reason that if current troops (or slightly increased numbers) can't bring improvement, and you can't drastically augment the forces, and there's a possibility that drawing down troops may actually help the situation, that's your next logical step, yes? No? Yes?

Of course, that's just an intellectual and strategic argument. There are plenty of moral and legal arguments to be made as well, but it's all irrelevant anyway. No alternative plan is going to be adopted, and it's fairly useless to argue for troop withdrawal when President Bush has made it abundantly clear that he believes our presence is a benefit, and no matter what happens, that belief will continue. Any argument otherwise -- whether it's made by me, Sensible Liberal and Intellectual Midget Tom Friedman, clear-thinking Republicans, or anyone else -- is seen by the Bush administration as a failure of will as opposed to reality-based critical thinking.

Meanwhile, more heroic, dedicated, patriotic Americans die every day for a bad war waged by bad men. Read the rest of this post...

GOP congressman pleaded guilty today to accepting bribes for votes in Abramoff scandal. Then why is he staying in office until January?

There will very likely be a lame duck session of congress following the November elections. Why in God's name should Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH), an admitted criminal, be permitted to attend that session, vote during that session? The man just admitted to accepting bribes to influence his votes, and we're going to let him vote some more? That's a bit like giving Mark Foley a few more pages for his retirement.

Despite his guilty pleas, Ney did not resign his seat in Congress. His lawyer, Mark Touhey, told the judge he would do so before sentencing on Jan. 19. Under the Constitution, he'll be gone before then. His term expires when the new Congress is sworn in at noon on Jan. 3.

He is now an admitted criminal.

What is he doing staying in the Republican Congress? Being permitted to vote AGAIN?

I'll tell you why. Because the Republicans are afraid they may lose control of the congress and they'd rather leave in power a criminal, who takes bribes to influence his votes, than risk losing the seat.

So politics trumps ethics and morality and good government in the Republican party.

I'll bet the Mark Foley child sex predator cover-up is starting to make a whole lot more sense right about now. Read the rest of this post...

Signorile: The media should have outed Foley

Gay writer, radio show host, and activist Michelangelo Signorile writes an interesting piece in today's LA Times. He argues that not only should the media have outed Mark Foley as a gay man years ago, but that had he been outed he might not have preyed on young boys. What do you think?

Foley's closet wasn't just about protecting his political career. He seemed to be filled with shame. According to one gay man quoted in the Washington Post last week who challenged Foley on his voting for the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, Foley justified marginalizing gay marriage by saying, "I could never compare any relationship I have ever had to the nature of my mother and father's relationship."

For Foley, homosexuality meant second-class status.

That kind of self-loathing is bound to play out in harmful ways. Would Foley have made online sexual advances on teenagers if he were openly gay or if he'd been reported on, truthfully, by the media as a gay man long ago, and faced the consequences? It's quite possible the answer is no.

And the logical conclusion of Signorile's article is that those who help perpetuate the closet, and the shame, help perpetuate the abuse of children in cases like this. Thus, ironically, some of the biggest to blame would be the religious right and its leaders who help make the closet a necessity for so many gays and lesbians. Read the rest of this post...

George hearts Denny

Yep, it's official. There's a lovefest going on between Bush and Hastert now. That Republican child sex predator scandal cover-up isn't getting in the way:

“Before I liberate the speaker so he doesn’t have to stand up here for that long, Speaker, I want to say this to you,” Mr. Bush said. “I am proud to be standing with the current speaker of the House who is going to be the future speaker of the House.”

“He’s not one of these Washington politicians who spews a lot of hot air — he just gets the job done,” Mr. Bush said as the room erupted. “This country is better off with Denny Hastert as the speaker.”

Better off with Hastert as speaker? That's a stretch. But, in 25 days, we won't have to worry about that anymore.

Bush probably likes being around Hastert because Denny -- as the manifestation of the GOP Congress -- has lower approval ratings than Bush. Read the rest of this post...

Harris Poll: Bush 34% approval; Dems. up 47 - 35 in generic

Not bad numbers for 25 days out. The Harris Interactive Poll:

President Bush's job-approval rating fell, with 34% of Americans voting him "excellent" or "good," down from 38% in September, according to a new Harris Interactive poll.

Sixty-four percent of U.S. adults now have a negative view of Mr. Bush's job performance, compared with 61% who ranked him "only fair" or "poor" in a similar poll last month. The drop follows a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll that showed the president's job approval rating fell to 39% from 42% earlier in October.

With less than a month to go before the midterm congressional elections, 47% of registered voters said they would vote for a Democratic candidate, compared with 35% who said they would pick a Republican candidate.

Not bad at all.

Chris Bowers at MyDD has a slew of polls for specific House races and the latest Senate state-wide numbers. These look good, too. Read the rest of this post...

14 more tortured bodies found around Baghdad

To the untrained eye, this might look like a country in turmoil teetering on the edge of civil war when in fact upon closer inspection the murder rate there is pretty much the same as an American city where tortured and executed bodies are discovered just about every day. Right? That's what the wingnuts say, anyway.

No need to make any changes whatsoever because the war is progressing according to the plan which was created by and supported by the greatest minds in America who are all knowing. Not that they are an arrogant lot, but Bush/Cheney/Rummy are experts so it's only natural that they don't stoop down to the level of their inferiors and explain why stay the course is the right plan. We're all just too stupid to understand the complexities of their acts of brilliance. They have a plan so just sit back and let them all do their thing. Read the rest of this post...

Friday Morning Open Thread

Just start. What do we need to know? Read the rest of this post...

Unacceptable

Sounds like someone is having a temper tantrum because he can't get his way on everything. When the world is so black and white place and you don't do nuance, frustration is bound to kick in.

But a survey of transcripts from Bush's public remarks over the past seven years shows the president's worsening political predicament has actually stoked, rather than diminished, his desire to proclaim what he cannot abide. Some presidential scholars and psychologists describe the trend as a signpost of Bush's rising frustration with his declining influence.

In the first nine months of this year, Bush declared more than twice as many events or outcomes "unacceptable" or "not acceptable" as he did in all of 2005, and nearly four times as many as he did in 2004. He is, in fact, at a presidential career high in denouncing events he considers intolerable. They number 37 so far this year, as opposed to five in 2003, 18 in 2002 and 14 in 2001.

Read on because this is an especially interesting read on Bush's choice of words during his national political life. Maybe the next president will go back to old fashioned ideas such as diplomacy and nuance. Read the rest of this post...

David Horsey on that little problem hanging around for the GOP

OK, well at least one of their problems. Can you imagine how some of their internal discussions are going these days? Read the rest of this post...