Friday Orchid Blogging

Paph hirsutissimum (I think)

I may be the only person in orchid-dom who thinks that this thing looks like the Bat Signal.



Or maybe it's just me. Anyway, as always, this photo is one I took in a greenhouse. I do own one of these plants, and it's basking in the outdoors this summer, which is doing it some good. Lots of orchids enjoy the summer orchids (depending where you live - Florida can get too hot, depending when and which orchid), but days in the 80s and nights in the 60s tend to make many orchids very happy. You gotta watch the sunlight, this guy would probably prefer morning sun and late afternoon sun, bright shade the rest of the time. I'll let you know if mine survives and every blooms.

Enjoy. Read the rest of this post...

Another night of violence in Paris suburbs

Plenty more tough talk but nobody sounds ready to get serious about tackling the real problems of racism and lack of opportunity. Read the rest of this post...

Will Mary and Heather be in the Rose Garden on Monday?

Froomkin reports on the upcoming gay bashing speech:

Bush has invited some of the nation's leading social conservatives to the Rose Garden on Monday, to cheer him on as he strongly endorses a proposed constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage.

What leaders will be there? How about Dick and Lynn Cheney? Will they join the gay bashing? How about all the homos working at the White House and the RNC? Will all of them -- and there are plenty -- be there to cheer on the homophobic president?

This is really pissing me off...so it's a good time to listen one more time to Pink's song, Dear Mr. President with the timely lyrics, "what kind of father might hate his own daughter if she were gay..."

To paraphrase Pink, what kind of President would hate his own citizens cause they are gay? Read the rest of this post...

Cliff's Corner

The Week That Was 6.2.06

Another week. More preposterousness to report.

So this week that collection of Mensa neocortexes at the Homeland Security Department — in between browsing senior prom signup sheets to find their next friend with benefits — have decided that they are going to allocate funds for our protection based upon familiar criteria to anyone even casually observing this profligate presidency over the past 5+ years. They have cut money granted to New York and Washington D.C. by 40% — where some event happened about five years ago, but I forget exactly what it was because Karl Rove so seldomly mentions it — while jacking up funds for such asset-rich terrain such as Topeka and Terre Haute.

Where GOP voters and Republican marionette legislators hail from would be the most accurate way to figure out the destination of government cash (although in Rick Santorum’s case you would think that would mean Northern Virginia). It correlates nicely with places where there’s enough brush to give our president a stiffy or allow our vice-president cover to shoot another man in the face. Hey, why shouldn’t national security take its rightful place right next to estate tax elimination and bridges to Ted Stevens’ reelection when it comes to its likelihood to be whored out to special interests by those tough-talking-bed wetters known as the Bush Administration.

And while this may not be the first time, with this most recent decision I think we can safely say the degree of stupidity at the DHS has ascended from Code Level Red to Mary Matalin.

I must admit this is a subject area I take quite personally. I grew up in New York and was unlucky enough to be working an election in lower Manhattan on 9/11. I have vivid memories of watching incredulously from a mile away as the second plane made contact. I live right outside of Washington D.C.

So when these putrescent blowhards who would sell out America’s ports, soldiers and Friday nights on Christopher Street with Ken Mehlman — all for political power and a trip to the Marianas — lay bare their pathetic record on homeland security and then plan to run on it in the 2006 midterms, I become as irate as Rush when the maid arrives 15 minutes late. Without all the lipids, excessive sudation and furious heaving of course.

Very simply put, again and again we are presented with the fact that Republicans running homeland security is much like David Duke doing an open mic night at the Apollo or Joe Lieberman being a Democrat.

Therefore, I would like to offer this humble bit of advice to Democratic candidates and consultants who may be reading: DON’T HIDE FROM THIS ISSUE AGAIN.

There were no WMDs, troops in Iraq don’t have enough armor, numerous generals have basically said that Donald Rumsfeld planning a war is like Tom Cruise becoming a psychiatrist, nuclear facilities remain vulnerable, Osama bin Laden’s sipping sherry at his summer time-share and lest we forget, there was that Oscar Madison response to Katrina.

And now funding has been drastically cut from the areas most likely to be attacked, which also just happens to be where such trivial things as the federal government and financial markets are headquartered.

Like with everything else, from riding bicycles to balancing budgets, this president is the ridiculously incompetent and corrupt jester that many of us predicted he would be six years ago from all available evidence. Now 34% of the public concurs that he is the worst president in 50 years (although adding 100 and going back to Buchanan would probably be more accurate).

So when Rove runs on national security this time, Democrats should have a simple, unapologetic response:

Bring It On Read the rest of this post...

Open thread

So, what's the best way to have an online database of our results from contacting the Hill offices about their sodomy and adultery behaviors? Is there anyway to host a database online? Best to upload an excel spreadsheet? Read the rest of this post...

Speaking of marriage protection... Monday is going to be lots of fun ;-)

A little birdie tells that a top deputy in the White House is a big fag. I'm just curious if he's going to be attending the big gay-bashing ceremony that Bush is having at the White House on Monday with all the far-right hate groups.

I mean, if we're going to protect marriage from the evil homosexuals, that protection really ought to begin at home, or house.

Next week, I think we really need to start asking how marriage protection is going in the House and Senate as well. After all, we wouldn't want any Senator or Congressmen who have committed adultery, are committing adultery, or ever will commit adultery voting in favor of "protecting marriage" when they refuse to protect it at home. That would be a travesty that no good American could accept.

It would also be a sin, and against procreation, if any member of Congress or White House staffer engaged in sodomy of any kind (that includes heterosexual oral sex). Not only are such sex acts sinful, but they don't promote procreation, the disgust for such sexual acts is part of the basis for the "marriage protection" movement. So, I really think we need to start asking our Senators and Congressmen, and the White House staff and Cabinet, if they've ever had oral or anal sex, whether they're currently having oral or anal sex, and whether they inted to ever have oral or anal sex (whether inside or outside of marriage).

And if you think I'm joking, just wait until Monday. Congress is going to be some very interesting phone calls, and we're going to keep a list of their answers.

George Bush and the Republicans in Congress want to have an open debate about the morality of our sex lives, come Monday we start having an open debate about theirs.

Speaking of which, I really hope Mary Cheney and her lover Heather Poe are celibate. Read the rest of this post...

Another GOP "Marriage Protector"

Ah, the Republicans. Those fierce defenders of marriage protection. One of their candidates for Congress loves marriage so much, he's on his third -- and for awhile, he actually had two wives at once. If George Bush is so worried about protecting marriage, he should talk about Jim Galley on Monday when he gives his big anti-gay speech. Because Galley, like so many other GOPers, makes a mockery of marriage:

Republican Jim Galley, who is running for Congress as a “pro-traditional family” candidate, was married to two women at the same time, defaulted on his child support payments and has been accused of abuse by one of his ex-wives.

The San Diego Union-Tribune discovered the personal history in making public-records checks on Galley, who is making his fourth run for elective office in four years. These checks are part of the newspaper's election reporting process.

Galley married his second wife, Beth, in 1982 when, unbeknownst to her, he was still married to his first wife, Terry. Beth and Galley divorced in 1990 after she sought a restraining order alleging abuse.

The child support was owed to his first wife.

We really need to start cataloguing all the actions of the marriage protectors. How many of the supporters of the anti-gay amendment actually stick to their marriage vows? Because the sanctimonious GOPer are really a bunch of hypocrites. They are obsessed with all things gay -- which really is odd. Really odd. Disturbingly odd.

Would that they were as obsessed about gas prices. Read the rest of this post...

Media Matters details the Associated Press' and John Solomon's partisan yellow journalism

UPDATE: Josh Marshall is hearing that AP may actually be seriously looking into whether Solomon's anti-Harry-Reid coverage has been fair, objective and accurate. I hope they are, it would certainly help their credibility if they gave some indication that they actually take concerns about fair reporting seriously.
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Media Matters details Solomon's unsubstantiated, incorrect, and misleading witch hunt against Senate Democrats from the very beginning.

(And let's not forget AP's John Solomon also wrote fabrications about Ambassador Joe Wilson as well - claiming Wilson said his wife Valerie Plame wasn't undercover when she outed. Wilson said nothing of the kind, yet the TV networks picked up AP's false story and ran with it, doing significant damage to Wilson and his wife. Yet again, John Solomon's sloppy inaccurate reporting ends up hurting Democrats. Gee, what an ongoing coincidence.)

Someone at AP really needs to be fired. Or doesn't accuracy and objectivity matter anymore to the Associated Press? Read the rest of this post...

Now Blogger hates us

Digby and Atrios have been having hell all week with blogger, not being able to log into their blogs. Now it's hit us today. Ugh. If you see stuff poorly formated, it's because we're emailing posts in some of the time. That also means no edits for typos - which for us is death. Anyway, stay tuned. Read the rest of this post...

CREW wins -- can depose number 3 guy at Justice Dept.

Because the only way to get information from the Bush administration is to sue them and put them under oath:

A federal judge ruled yesterday that Associate Attorney General Robert D. McCallum Jr. must undergo questioning in a lawsuit by a nonprofit group seeking records about the Justice Department's conduct in a landmark case against the tobacco industry.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sued last year after the department ignored the testimony of one of its own witnesses in the tobacco trial and reduced the amount the Bush administration is seeking from the tobacco industry from $130 billion to $10 billion.

It's not like the U.S. could have used that $120 billion. Read the rest of this post...

Feds now lying about why they cut NYC and DC's anti-terror money by 40%

Right. The Bush administration cut NY's (Hillary Clinton) and DC's (no vote in Congress) homeland security "stop the next 9/11" monies because the application wasn't emailed, it was faxed instead.

What is this, 5th grade?

Putting aside the fact that it appears the administration is lying - read the article - are they really trying to tell us that they would let the next September 11 happen, the big one, the nuclear one as they keep telling us, because New York City faxed their application instead of emailed it?

If this is true, that the Bush administration is holding back funding to stop the next September 11 because of the equivalent of grammatical errors, then everyone involved involved in this decision, up to the top of the Homeland Security department, needs to be fired.

Not to mention, then why did DC lose 40% of its funding as well? Funny how NYC and DC BOTH lost the same amount. Coincidence I'm sure.

As the mayor of NYC notes, this is looking more and more like Bush wanted the extra cash in the homeland security budget to dole out around the country to congressional districts that are in trouble in the next election.

They're using our 9.11 money for politics.

The war on terror is over. We lost. Read the rest of this post...

Federal judge says NSA law suit WILL go on

Thank God. Read the rest of this post...

DOJ wants web surfing records available

The overly intrusive Bush administration wants access to the web sites you've been surfing:

The Justice Department is asking Internet companies to keep records on the Web-surfing activities of their customers to aid law enforcement, and may propose legislation to force them to do so.

The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales held a meeting in Washington last Friday where they offered a general proposal on record-keeping to a group of senior executives from Internet companies, said Brian Roehrkasse, a spokesman for the department. The meeting included representatives from America Online, Microsoft, Google, Verizon and Comcast.

This, of course, raises major privacy concerns. Gonzales and his crew claimed they want to use the records for "kiddie porn" and "terrorism." Gonzales always says something like that when he wants to invade the privacy of Americans. He knows everyone's against both of those and it makes it difficult to oppose the effort if they keep saying those buzz words. But, this program is far going to go way beyond that and Gonzales knows it:

At the meeting with privacy groups, officials sought to assuage concerns that the retention of the records could compromise the privacy of Americans. But Mr. Rotenberg [executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington] said he left with lingering concerns.

"This is a sharp departure from current practice," he said. "Data retention is an open-ended obligation to retain all information on all customers for all purposes, and from a traditional Fourth Amendment perspective, that really turns things upside down."

Plus, they're probably doing it anyway. Read the rest of this post...

75,000 jobs added in May

Ouch. I hope that number is revised upward soon because that is half of the 150K average per month new entrants in the market. Read the rest of this post...

Friday Morning Open Thread

Word for the day: ursprache. That was the winning word in the National Spelling Bee last night.

Now, give us some news. Read the rest of this post...

Underperform and cash in - The New-New economy

Underperform and lose money for investors but still pull in monster bonuses. Who says America is not the land of opportunity? It got Bush to the WH so why shouldn't it work for others? How many more times are investors going to have sand kicked in their faces before they rebel? Sadly, this is the new-new economy that rewards scoundrels and helps maintain the status quo. With so much global competition out there, this strikes me as an odd way of competing, but the GOP has gone to great lengths in recent times to reward the biggest corporations at the expense of small business so it should hardly come as a surprise.

Four more top executives of the Las Vegas Sands, which owns the Venetian Resort Hotel and Casino, received more than they should have. The total in excess bonus payments for the five men was $2.8 million.

The compensation committee of the board conceded that it had made an error. But it said that "the outstanding performance of the company in 2005" justified the extra money, and it allowed the executives to keep it.

Shareholders of Las Vegas Sands did not fare as well. The value of their holdings fell 18 percent last year.

Read the rest of this post...

Bush wants more CIA spies for Hayden

OK, so how about the administration quits outing the ones that we have for starters? The WP article goes on and on about how difficult it is to recruit the right people, train them, get them in the field and then make it all work but they completely skip over what the Bush administration did to Plame. How did the outing of Plame not make it into this article? If they are going to talk about all of the challenges of the CIA, it seems to me that Plamegate is as much or more of a problem as any of the other challenges that are listed.

An agency official with clandestine experience said such protections are essential. "Because cover exists to protect our people and assist our operations, its strength and improvement are a constant concern for CIA," the official said. "We have been enhancing our cover tradecraft to meet the challenges of the Internet age, when personal data is more easily accessible than ever before. To be sure, there is more to be done, and no one here underestimates the complexity and difficulty of the task," he added.

Read the rest of this post...

Another million plus records lost

That's OK though because the Social Security numbers and names were just regular people and not congressmen or senators. Otherwise, our friends in DC would actually have to get off of their asses and do something to make personal data protection safe and secure. Whew! Crisis averted. Read the rest of this post...

Okay, I'm not making this up. AP has lied AGAIN (again). This is absolutely bizarre.

The Associated Press is melting down. They've apparently issued some kind of statement to respond to all the criticism they've received for outright lying, making unsubstantiated accusations, and intentionally misleading readers in repeated stories about Senator Harry Reid. And their statement, according to Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall, is again a lie and inaccurate.

Josh has more. And TPM Muckraker will be going through the entire AP statement tomorrow. But it seems that the AP statement was written by someone who hadn't even read the criticism and didn't even understand the underlying facts of the story. It's simply bizarre.

Not to mention, incredibly unprofessional and unethical.

UPDATE: You can find AP's statement here. Shorter AP - It depends on what the definition of "is" is. You haven't read parsing and obfuscation until you've read AP's statement, published by Media Matters. In a nutshell, AP tries to get you caught in the weeds of the argument while totally ingnoring the most damning charge. Namely, that AP intentionally misled their readers via numerous sentences in several stories meant to have the reader reach a conclusion that was untrue and unsupported by the facts. AP quite clearly led their readers to believe that Harry Reid's actions were considered unethical by the Senate rules (wrong) and that Harry Reid admitted as much (wrong). And that wasn't the only misleading part of the stories.

It is amazing that AP thinks we're all going to just ignore their lies and misdirection simply because they give us a bunch of legalese that doesn't even address the main concerns we raised. This story isn't going away.

It is, however, funny to see AP act like every other company that's been caught lying about their partisan bias. From AOL to Microsoft to Ford, they move to the far-right thinking you didn't notice, then when they get caught they first ignore you, then deny it, then give you detailed lies about it, and finally after their credibility has been drawn through the mud and is sinking fast, they finally fess up. (AP might want to read its Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.)

It's going to be fun watching AP destroy its own brand over the next few weeks defending a reporter who thought he was taking on the white whale, but in fact was taking on the entire progressive Internet - a couple million rather angry folks who no longer take bullshit for an answer. Read the rest of this post...