Bush cuts money to save the Hubble space telescope

He figures we're all dead in ten years anyway, whether from the Rapture or his policies, so why fund the thing. Just think China and the Cultural Revolution - first you have to kill all the people with glasses. The Hubble has glasses to correct its mirror. Same idea. The intellectuals get killed first.

What a pig. Glad that tax cut of his isn't costing us anything. I'm sure it's September 11 that killed the Hubble (I understand September 11 is also the cause of cancer and cancre sores). That $1.6 trillion tax cut isn't costing us a dime. Read the rest of this post...

Peggy Noonan rips Bush's inaugural address

Yikes. This lady is a big deal in the GOP. Was Reagan's top speechwriter. Joe Gandelman summarizes the snarkiest points of her comments:

Here are some key parts of what she wrote (not quoted in the order in which they appear):

One wonders if they shouldn't ease up, calm down, breathe deep, get more securely grounded. The most moving speeches summon us to the cause of what is actually possible. Perfection in the life of man on earth is not.

And

The president's speech seemed rather heavenish. It was a God-drenched speech. This president, who has been accused of giving too much attention to religious imagery and religious thought, has not let the criticism enter him. God was invoked relentlessly. "The Author of Liberty." "God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind . . . the longing of the soul."

It seemed a document produced by a White House on a mission. The United States, the speech said, has put the world on notice: Good governments that are just to their people are our friends, and those that are not are, essentially, not. We know the way: democracy. The president told every nondemocratic government in the world to shape up. "Success in our relations [with other governments] will require the decent treatment of their own people."

Even more stinging:

Ending tyranny in the world? Well that's an ambition, and if you're going to have an ambition it might as well be a big one. But this declaration, which is not wrong by any means, seemed to me to land somewhere between dreamy and disturbing. Tyranny is a very bad thing and quite wicked, but one doesn't expect we're going to eradicate it any time soon. Again, this is not heaven, it's earth.

Plus:

And yet such promising moments were followed by this, the ending of the speech. "Renewed in our strength--tested, but not weary--we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom."

This is--how else to put it?--over the top. It is the kind of sentence that makes you wonder if this White House did not, in the preparation period, have a case of what I have called in the past "mission inebriation." A sense that there are few legitimate boundaries to the desires born in the goodness of their good hearts.

Overall, she starts giving him high marks...then indulges in a big chunk of snark:

The inaugural address itself was startling. It left me with a bad feeling, and reluctant dislike. Rhetorically, it veered from high-class boilerplate to strong and simple sentences, but it was not pedestrian. George W. Bush's second inaugural will no doubt prove historic because it carried a punch, asserting an agenda so sweeping that an observer quipped that by the end he would not have been surprised if the president had announced we were going to colonize Mars.

Please note that TMV missed all the fuss. Our reaction here can be summed up in one word with a shrug of the shoulders and a raised eyebrow: "Ehh..." To TMV, the speech was a typical inauguration speech (the REAL speech will come during the State of the Union Address.). But more of Peggy:

It was a foreign-policy speech. To the extent our foreign policy is marked by a division that has been (crudely but serviceably) defined as a division between moralists and realists--the moralists taken with a romantic longing to carry democracy and justice to foreign fields, the realists motivated by what might be called cynicism and an acknowledgment of the limits of governmental power--President Bush sided strongly with the moralists, which was not a surprise. But he did it in a way that left this Bush supporter yearning for something she does not normally yearn for, and that is: nuance.

Read the rest of this post...

End of the work day open thread

Double Stargate season premiere AND a new episode of Battlestar. I never have to go out on Friday nights again :-) Read the rest of this post...

What's our elevator pitch?

I'm stealing this from Daily Kos cuz it's good:

The American Prospect defines the GOP elevator pitch as:

We believe in freedom and liberty, and we're for low taxes, less government, traditional values, and a strong national defense.

Nevermind the ways the Bush agenda has strayed from that pitch. This is how they have branded themselves and it has been spectacularly effective.

The editors at the Prospect are looking for suggestions for the Democratic pitch. I'm stealing their idea so we can riff about it here. So here's the rules: Define what we stand for in a sentence no longer than 30 words.

So, I challenge you to do the same. Come up with a good defenition of what Democrats stand for, something you could tell the boss who's running for the elevator so you only have 10 to 15 seconds to tell him/her. Read the rest of this post...

Conservaltives don't even bother with the truth anymore

Now they're beating up on CBS' Face the Nation for interviewing a Democratic Senator without a Republican response. The problem is, Face the Nation has had more Republican guests without Democratic responses than vice-versa. Oops. So in fact, we should be the ones who complain. But hey, that would muck up the GOP victimization bandwagon. Christians are under attack. The media is liberal. Our marriages will all evaporate if gays are allowed to fall in love. Our children's heads will explode if we teach them the truth about science. Blah blah blah. If the GOP likes ignorance so much, then why don't they all move to Alabama where I'm sure they'll all be very very happy watching Benny Hill and discussing the finer points of creationism, when they're not playing Bible Bingo. Read the rest of this post...

Friday Orchid Blogging

Bl. Yellow Bird

Another fairly easy to grow plant. The flowers start off much redder/purpler, then over a few days become yellow like this. This is how an earlier blooming of the plant was just a day or two after it bloomed (note the marked difference in color, and actually it wasn't that dark this time around, it's funny how the flowers differ each time it blooms, depends on lighting and temp):



It's pretty easy to take care of, just make sure you don't over or underwater it. I water mine every 4-5 days or so in winter - you want the medium just starting to dry out, but not too dry, nor too wet, or the roots will die. It's a very cool looking plant as well. In principle, it's fragrant at night (I've not noticed mine being so). Oh, and mine blooms at least 3 times a year, and the blooms last for maybe 3-4 weeks. Very cool plant. I got mine at Al's Orchid Greenhouse in Leesburg, VA - he sells online, very nice plants. Read the rest of this post...

Ken Mehlman personally authorized using gay-bashing as political weapon in presidential race

So it was Mehlman himself who personally asked GOP officials to use gay marriage as a wedge issue during the presidential campaign. As you know, this is relevant because rumors have swirled for months about Mr. Mehlman's own sexual orientation, and the rumors have only been fed by Mehlman's continuing refusal to state on the record that he's heterosexual.

From the Cinci Enquirer:

"They're clearly using it as a wedge issue," said Brendon Cull, a spokesman for the Ohio Democratic Party. "John Kerry and John Edwards have made it very clear that they believe marriage is between a man and a woman. George Bush stood up in front of this country four years ago - almost to the week - and said he wanted to be a uniter and not a divider. But like Bill Clinton said, they want the country divided because they know they can't win if we're not."

Blackwell said it was "an activist court in Massachusetts" - which ruled last November that the state could not ban same-sex-marriages - that set the stage for the national debate, not any Republican campaign committee.

"All things flow from there," said Blackwell, who said he was asked by Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman earlier this year to do "surrogate work" on gay marriage in Ohio.

Read the rest of this post...

O'Reilly says Hitler and Stalin would be ACLU members

I try to like O'Reilly. I've been on his show probably 8 times or so, and most of the times he's been really nice to me, believe it or not. But there's this side of him that goes all FOX News-y, and it's been coming out more of late. To wit, this latest from Media Matters:

O'REILLY: They won't even tell you in the statement what intelligent design entails. They won't mention a creator, a deity, a God. You know why? Because the ACLU then can haul them into court and cost them $100,000 to defend themselves. Fascism, fascism, fascism. Okay? Ah, drive me nuts! Hitler would be a card-carrying ACLU member. So would Stalin. Castro probably is. And so would Mao Zedong.

The only response I can give is to quote Michael Douglas in the wonderful film "The American President":

For the record: Yes, I am a card-carrying member of the A.C.L.U. But the more important question is why aren't you, Bob? This is an organization whose sole purpose is to defend the Bill of Rights, so it naturally begs the questions.

Why would a senator, his party's most powerful spokesman and a candidate for president, choose to reject upholding the Constitution? If you can answer that question, then, folks, you're smarter than I am, because I didn't understand it until a couple of minutes ago. Everybody knows American isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship.

You gotta want it bad, 'cause it's gonna put up a fight. It's gonna say, "You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who's standing center stage and advocating, at the top of his lungs, that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as the land of the free, then the symbol of your country can't just be a flag; the symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest." Show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.

Read the rest of this post...

More on that homo pervert, Sponge Bob

From Reuters.


Fag. Read the rest of this post...

Santorum wins award

And it's very well deserved.

From Dan Savage's column this week, a letter from a reader, and Dan's response:

I'm probably the 6,715th person to alert you, but "santorum" was voted the "most outrageous" word of 2004 by the American Dialect Society (www.americandialect.org). One of the judges wrote this on Slate.com: "The Most Outrageous category is tricky; we never agree whether it's the word itself that's outrageous (typically for having some vulgar element, as in 2003's winner, cliterati, for 'prominent feminists') or the concept (as with 2002's neuticles, 'false testicles for neutered pets'). This year the strongest contender was santorum, defined (and heavily promoted) by sex writer Dan Savage--in a campaign to besmirch the name of right-wing Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum--as 'the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.' We dismissed one potential problem--that newspapers wouldn't print the term if it won--on the grounds that we shouldn't censor ourselves. And indeed, in the afternoon's voting, santorum did win, but many newspapers simply skipped this category in their coverage."

Congratulations on your success!

Wasting Time At Work

Thank you for the sweet note, WTAW, but Christian humility prevents me from taking credit for coming up with the new definition of santorum. My column was merely the platform from which santorum spewed forth. If congratulations are in order, let us congratulate the Savage Love reader who suggested I honor Sen. Rick Santorum by attaching a new definition to his name and the Savage Love reader who actually came up with the now-infamous "frothy mix" definition when I asked my readers for suggestions. And, of course, congratulations are in order for Sen. Rick Santorum. But for Rick's idiotic anti-sex statements, the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex would remain nameless to this day. Anyone interested in sending Senator Santorum a message of congratulations or thanks can e-mail him via his website--http://santorum.senate.gov--but e-mail, on an occasion like this, seems a little too informal, don't you agree? So I would like to encourage my readers to send cards and letters of congratulation and thanks to Sen. Rick Santorum, 511 Dirksen Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20510. Rick is thinking of running for president in 2008 and I think we should all encourage him to do so, if only to get our hands on collectible "Santorum!" campaign T-shirts.

May I just add that every time they mention Santorum on TV or the radio, let's file an FCC indecency complaint! Read the rest of this post...

Morning open thread

Sunny and cold in DC. Gosh, hope the Texans don't catch a cold. Read the rest of this post...

Cheney snowballed

Go to defcon 1, go to defcon 1, invade Mexico, nuke Canada, arrest some Musllims! Cheney's limo got hit by a single snowball! Oh the humanity.



Funny as hell. Read the rest of this post...