Beware the "greenwash."
That's the underlying message of famed filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen's latest side-project: A television commercial lampooning the myth of "clean" coal through the visual metaphor of an air freshener that spews black smoke.
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Last year President Bush and Cheney were the stars of the event. And Mitt Romney chose the conference to announce that he was suspending his campaign.
This year, Cheney and Bush are off the agenda, replaced by ghosts of the campaign trail like Joe the Plumber (Joe Wurzelbacher) and documentarian John Ziegler, who has been making the rounds to restore Sarah Palin's self-imposed media debacle with his documentary "Media Malpractice: How Obama Got Elected and Palin Was Targeted." And of course Rush Limbaugh will be there as the biggest draw. [my em]
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One day after delivering the official Republican response to President Obama's address to Congress, Gov. Bobby Jindal received high marks for cheering up a recession-weary nation that has not had a good laugh in months.
Across the country, Americans of all walks of life gave thanks to Gov. Jindal for giving them the most precious gift of all: the gift of laughter.
"They say that laughter is the best medicine," said Toledo housewife Carol Foyler. "If that's the case, Bobby Jindal is just what the doctor ordered."
Tracy Klugian, a computer technician in Modesto, California, responded to Gov. Jindal's speech in a way that was echoed by many others: "I peed myself."
The Republican National Committee applauded Gov. Jindal for his performance, and announced that the official GOP response to the president's radio address would be delivered by Carrot Top.
"Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet"
I hate to pile on to the Bobby-Jindal-channeled-Kenneth-the-Page assault. Okay I lied … I just love to pile on.
Ode To Bobby “Kenneth the Page” Jindal
By Madeleine Begun Kane
Dear Bobby, is Kenneth your twin?
From your voices, I’d swear you were kin.
You’re the GOP’s best?
Then the GOP’s quest
For the White House is done — you can’t win.
"This Jindal guy sounds like a real goober."
"This Jindal guy sounds like a real goober...natorial representative."
As for our auto industry, everyone recognizes that years of bad decision-making and a global recession have pushed our automakers to the brink. We should not, and will not, protect them from their own bad practices. But we are committed to the goal of a re-tooled, re-imagined auto industry that can compete and win. Millions of jobs depend on it. Scores of communities depend on it. And I believe the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it (my em).
Early experimenters using gasses included in 1806, Swiss engineer François Isaac de Rivaz who built an internal combustion engine powered by a hydrogen and oxygen mixture and in 1826, Samuel Brown who tested his hydrogen-fuelled internal combustion engine by using it to propel a vehicle up Shooter's Hill in south east London.
If we had to give credit to one inventor, it would probably be Karl Benz from Germany.
Yes, I said it. That's not even snark- I can conclusively prove it. Ready?
Did you know about the exorcism? The name that came from The Brady Bunch? Those and other surprising facts about one of America’s fastest rising young politicians.
Anyone who can thinks they helped exorcise a demon in college needs to be kept as far away from the Football as possible. I mean, George W. Bush was bad, but at least he seemed like a half-hearted fundamentalist, at best. This guy seems to deeply believe some of the most outlandish supernatural tenets of Catholicism, as well as thinking he has a duty to exorcise convulsing friends instead of doing what every parent teaches their child to do in the same circumstance; call 911.
Although the chance of a volcanic eruption in any given year is small, future eruptions will occur in the Long Valley area. Because volcanic unrest can escalate to an eruption in a few weeks or less, USGS scientists are closely monitoring activity in this region. To be able to provide the public with reliable and timely warnings before an eruption, the USGS has joined local and State authorities in developing procedures for responding to changing levels of volcanic unrest in the Long Valley area. The ongoing work of the USGS Volcano Hazards Program in this and other volcanic regions of the United States helps to better protect people's lives and property from volcano hazards.
Damn, I certainly would hate for your ass to pay one fucking nickel for any monitoring, ya know.
Kiss my ass you ignorant fuck.
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Back to the subject here, Mr. Jindal, have you ever heard of a U.S.city called Seattle?
How about Mt. Rainier?
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Shut Yer Fucking Mouth about things you have no clue about, eh?
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[C]ustomers arriving for an organic gardening class — and even store employees — were surprised Saturday when the [former Boy King] showed up to, um, shop. According to the store, Bush walked in around 11 a.m. wearing his presidentin’ outfit: a bomber jacket with the presidential seal on the left breast and his name on the right. Accompanied by a small Secret Service detail, Bush signed autographs and posed for photos.*
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The full gamut of punditry had little praise for Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal's rebuttal speech Tuesday night. Notably, Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman, responding to the flak Jindal gave high-speed rail and volcano-monitoring, has labeled the GOP 'the party of Beavis and Butthead':
And leaving aside the chutzpah of casting the failure of his own party’s governance as proof that government can’t work, does he really think that the response to natural disasters like Katrina is best undertaken by uncoordinated private action? Hey, why bother having an army? Let’s just rely on self-defense by armed citizens.
The intellectual incoherence is stunning. Basically, the political philosophy of the GOP right now seems to consist of snickering at stuff that they think sounds funny. The party of ideas has become the party of Beavis and Butthead.
ERUSALEM — It may be known as Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's last scandal. If it isn't settled soon, the brewing controversy also has the potential to become the first diplomatic dust-up between President Barack Obama and America's strongest Middle East ally.
At issue is an unpaid $320 bill for dinner with a White House advance team at a restaurant near Olmert's official residence.
"It's embarrassing for me to have to go to the White House," co-owner Shahar Levy told Israel's newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. "But for this amount of meat and alcohol, they need to pay me."
Damn that Abe Lincoln. When Louisiana and Mississippi seceded from the Union, a sensible president would have sent them a box of chocolates with a note, "Goodbye and good riddance."
Jindal, and some other Republican governors, notably Haley Barbour of Mississippi, are actually turning down millions in federal funds for their own state's unemployed out of fear that, four years from now, they may have to maintain full unemployment insurance like the rest of America.
As an economist, I can tell you that the only industry Mississippi leads in is deep-fried chicken-dog manufacturing. I will admit that Louisiana and Mississippi can boast of growing employment at several casinos and cathouses spilling across what the locals charmingly call the "Coon-ass Riviera." Jindal's Louisiana is, after all, the state that solved its unemployment problem by sending its unemployed to Texas in FEMA trailers.
Jindal himself is a product of a more advanced culture: His parents are Democrats. The Jindals are Hindus who come from the Punjab in India, a state known for its welfare safety net. Jindal, turning away from the successful example of his parents' politics and culture, has gone native, becoming a born-again Christian Republican who doesn't accept Darwinian evolution nor Keynesian economics. (I hear he may complete his redneck makeover next week by marrying his cousin at a tractor pull.)
Years back, when I worked as an economic consultant to New Orleans, the Louisiana State Legislature was about to require that schools teach evolution as merely a theory equal to the Bible's literal creation myth. When asked if this would harm big employers' views of the state, I said, "Not at all: most national employers think of Louisiana as a state filled with Bible-thumping, dumb-bell rednecks. You won't have to worry about changing that impression."
OK, it's easy to make jokes about America's own Third World states. And before I get a zillion complaints, I'll be the first one to note that Louisiana has birthed the extraordinary, including the greatest of America's investigative journalists, the late Ron Ridenhour, jazz, Ruth Chris' Steakhouse, and gris-gris. And it was Louisiana that long ago led the nation in social reform, whose governor in 1932 led the national fight to create a program now known as "unemployment insurance." Really.
Nevertheless, Jindal's rejection of funds for his state's own unemployed simply follows a history of local Republican plantation-mentality cruelty. [...]
Now, once again, the Republican Party, by making Jindal the party's official spokesman, is adopting the Barbourous refusal to reach out a saving hand to Americans drowning in this economy.
So, let me make a suggestion for Governors Jindal and Barbour. If you cannot join America in accepting our President's call to arms against disaster, if you reject our President's State of the Union -- then leave the Union.
There once was a cracker named Hollis
Who used animals for his solace.
His children had scales
And prehensile tales
And voted for Governor Wallace. (c. 1966)
Yesterday, Nancy Pelosi announced that a housing bill which could come up for a vote this week would include the "cram-down" provision, which would allow bankruptcy judges to modify the terms of mortgages for borrowers on their primary residence (currently judges have the ability to do this on secondary residences). This is an important provision, which most economists believe will be the best tool homeowners can have for them to stay in their homes, and for lenders to agree to loan modifications. The banksters hate this idea, mainly because they know it would blow the whistle on their consistent violations of the spirit and the letter of the Truth In Lending Law, in their mania to lock as many people into mortgages as possible without regard for ability to pay, so they could sell those mortgages on as securities, and so on and so forth. This ultimately is the fault of the lender, who are clearly the irresponsible ones in the whole scenario. [my em]
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"I've been young for an incredibly long time," says New York performance artist Penny Arcade, "and I've eked out that imposture longer than most people are able to." That makes it all the more fitting that the onetime Warhol Factory superstar is making her full-scale San Francisco theatrical debut with a show in which she talks about sex and art, surrounds herself with professional erotic dancers, and performs a striptease to a reading of Lenny Bruce's classic obscenity speech.
Reporting from Sacramento -- Could Cannabis sativa be a salvation for California's fiscal misfortunes? Can the state get a better budget grip by taxing what some folks toke?
An assemblyman from San Francisco announced legislation Monday to do just that: make California the first state in the nation to tax and regulate recreational marijuana in the same manner as alcohol.
Anti-drug groups are anything but amused by the idea of California collecting a windfall from the leafy herb that remains illegal under federal law.
But the biggest boon might be to the bottom line. By some estimates, California's pot crop is a $14-billion industry, putting it above vegetables ($5.7 billion) and grapes ($2.6 billion). If so, that could mean upward of $1 billion in tax revenue for the state each year.
"I'm a martini guy myself," Ammiano said. "But I think it's time for California to . . . look at this in a truly deliberative fashion."
He sees the possibility of an eventual truce in the marijuana wars with Barack Obama now in the White House.
A White House spokesman declined to discuss Ammiano's legislation, instead pointing to a transition website that says the president "is not in favor of the legalization of marijuana."
Several cities in California and around the nation have adopted laws making marijuana the lowest law enforcement priority, including Santa Barbara, Santa Monica, Denver and Seattle.
It also has the backing of Betty Yee, who chairs the state Board of Equalization, which collects taxes in California. An analysis by the agency concluded the state would collect $1.3 billion a year from tax revenues and a $50-an-ounce levy on retail sales if marijuana were legal.
HOME SCHOOLING FOR REPUBLICANS WHO MAKE NON-APOLOGY APOLOGIES.
Jim Bunning on his prediction that
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg would drop dead
soon and be replaced with a wing-nut
