Is Britain the last Shrubya patsy to depart from the Iraqi Quicksand? Or did I forget Poland or somebody else? Reminds me of 2004 when it seemed like every week one or another bit of the ‘Coalition’ figleaf would get ripped away.
Hey, maybe if we are lucky, Obama will get a clue and pull us out! What a concept, huh?
Al Franken, aka Stuart Smalley, aka "GOP's Worst Nightmare"
Poor, poor Repugs! With #59 Arlen Specter firmly in the Dem camp, the GOP’s last hope for obstructing the people’s will through the non-stop reading of phone books on C-SPAN rests on Norm Coleman’s increasingly desperate and ridiculous legal appeals for the Senate seat that is all but Al Franken’s at this point.
Now if only the Dems would do something about that loser Harry Reid…
(Via Talking Points Memo)
This is allegedly a picture of President Obama talking to Sen. Arlen Specter about the latter’s change in parties (from the GOP to the Democrats)… but feel free to supply your own details and/or alternate interpretation!
Scientific American ‘keeps it real’ and lays out the greatest threats to the current world order. No, it’s not Islam, Communism, the Clash of Cultures or any of that nonsense – it’s the massive consumption (for livestock and biofuelds) of the world food supply on the part of the halves that is putting severe pressure on the halve-nots – causing states to fail and foster terrorism, piracy, the drug trade and disease.
Again, our foreign policy and national defense spending is greatly misguided – or perhaps insane would be a better word.
Lost in the still unreconstructed Needlenose ‘middle years’ archive is a rant of mine about the ridiculous wrong-wing fear mongering about 3rd world terrorists using bioweapons and germ warfare – I consider it very unlikely because any such weapon would require high-technology and be very expensive to produce, and would have a disasterous ‘blow back’ on whatever hell-hole the terrorist and his family hailed from.
What we should be worried is the all-natural, all-organic kind of germ warfare – from Mother Nature! Case in point – the recent outbreak of a ‘killer’ swine flu in Mexico. Obama and the Euroweenie leaders need to return to the Status Quo Ante where developed nations lead (and finance) the charge to aggressively combat infectious diseases in the developing world because viruses don’t respect national boundaries – and we are getting dangerously close to “The Big One” of killer pandemics. This is the real and present danger presented by disease.
*Update* Speaking of stoopid wrong wingers, guess who stripped out dollars allocated for pandemic preparadness from the stimulus package? Yep, the same assholes who criticized money allocated for volcano monitoring on the eve of a major eruption near a populated area. Dumbasses.
*Update* See it spread on Google Earth
Ryan Grim at the Huffington Post reports:
In a meeting with House Republicans at the White House Thursday, President Obama reminded the minority that the last time he reached out to them, they reacted with zero votes — twice — for his stimulus package….
Obama also offered payback for that goose egg. A major overhaul of the health care system, he told the Republican leadership, would be done using a legislative process known as reconciliation, meaning that the GOP won’t be able to filibuster it.
Congress has until October 15 to pass health care or student lending reform under the normal process. If it doesn’t, reconciliation can be used to eliminate the 60-vote requirement.
Commenting on the same news, Chris Bowers at Open Left says:
Without the filibuster available to Republicans, it is highly likely that in 2009 Democrats will succeed where they failed in 1994. This might be the biggest legislative victory for progressives in, well, about as long as I can remember.
However, Grim at HuffPo notes that the Repubs have a plan to counterattack — by whining!
A GOP source familiar with the meeting said that the president was extremely sensitive — even “thin-skinned” — to the fact that the stimulus bill received no GOP votes in the House. He continually brought it up throughout the meeting.
Look for the “thin-skinned” meme to start getting heavy airplay at Drudge and establishment media outlets near you.
(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)
It seems like Cheney is just asking for it with his continuing crticisms of the Obama Administration. I guess he didn’t bother to read the memo that says former Administration members should just shut the fuck up and let the new guy do his job.
Yesterday, I was idly thinking of posting advice to Obama to consider opening up a Torture Truth Commission to put a little pressure on Cheney and maybe get him to shut up that way, but I figured Obama really isn’t interested in spending any political capital on going after Shrubya-era crimes, no matter how egregious, so I didn’t bother.
Imagine my delighted surprise with Obama’s pronouncement that he won’t give immunity to the architects of torture.
Maybe that’ll shut Dick up.
Recently I railed about the high levels of pharmaceuticals found in fish caught off the coast of several major cities. I had naively thought that stemmed from medicines passed from overmedicated Americans through their urine that weren’t being filtered out by wastewater treatment plants (an earlier explanation I had read).
Well that could certainly be a contributor, but who would have thought Big Pharma would just be dumping medicine-laden water directly (and legally) into the sewer system?
Three woeful facts here – one, that discharges of these chemicals isn’t regulated, two these discharges are mostly not even monitored, and three – we don’t filter these chemicals out of the waste stream before they enter our seafood pantry.
Enough to make me a vegetarian. Oh wait…I already am one!
(President Obama and Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez yesterday, via the Associated Press.)
Man this is an ugly cat!
What did we once call these Friday animal pics? Serontonin Uptake Inhibitor posts or something? Must have been post 2004, still need to get the other old posts uploaded into this site. Anyway, I was in the mood for some old school cat blogging.