With the stuff me and Gordon eat ...

This comes as welcome news:

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"In essence, we have built a replacement sphincter that we hope can one day benefit human patients," said Khalil Bitar, a professor at the institute. Bitar performed the work while on the University of Michigan faculty.

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After a hard night of pizza and beer, or a night with the chef's tasting menu and drinks at my pal Guy's French restaurant, I have begged for something like this the next morning. Heh ...

Seriously, I applaud any medical advance that can help people live more normal lives. Good on 'em.

Great thanks to Susie for the link.

The narrative ...

If the Dems, like the conservatives, would harp on shit the other side does, maybe the narrative that the Republicans are just a buncha obstructionist assholes might stick:

And it's not just judges. The GOP is filibustering left and right on administration appointees across the baord. But again, the Democrats and the White House should be railing about this. We shouldn't have to rely on Ari Melber and MSNBC. All these issues are related. If we kept talking about the GOP filibuster of appointees we'd also have more fodder to go after the GOP filibuster of the debt ceiling increase, of health care reform, of DADT (that we finally surmounted after losing two initial votes). Everything is related to everything else. If you let the GOP slide on one thing, it helps them get you on dozens of other issues.

...

This should be Obama's job, with the bully pulpit that he has, but he's abdicated that responsibility. If he'd come out loudly on this in the beginning, maybe more Dems would have followed suit. Just another missed opportunity.

Run, baby, run!

Hopefully the people of Massachusetts will realize she's one of the good guys:

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Former Obama adviser and longtime consumer protection advocate Elizabeth Warren is moving toward a Senate run, several Democratic sources tell the Huffington Post.

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My Conversation with Jesus

You'll like this. Andy Ostroy:

Me: Mr. Christ, or can I call you Jesus?.... I gotta ask you this question before anything else. Is it true that you're a Republican?

Jesus: What!? Where did you get that ridiculous notion from, my dear Jewish atheist child. Have you not actually read my book, I mean the Bible?

Me: What about Rick Perry's 'prayer rally' in Texas on Saturday? He was talking to you. Told you "you are our only hope." Were you listening to him? Did you say anything back?

Jesus: First off, let me say neither I or anyone in my family was at that event. That's not my kind of prayer rally. As for me being the only hope, that's quite sad. Perhaps Mr. Perry would be better served to look in the mirror and judge his own narrow-minded, divisive behavior. How he and his conservative brethren prey on the weak, the meek, the needy. Remember Proverbs 14:31...He who oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors God. Ok, gotta run...I have a bris in Great Neck I have to get to...

An 'ouch' for Great Neck. Much more.

Me'n Jesus had a conversation once, but we had better acid back in the day. We pretty much agreed I'll only do very simple carpentry and he won't try to fix his own motorcycle.

Obama does not understand "bully dynamics"

Good piece by the Legal Schnauzer

Why has Barack Obama been such a disappointment to many progressives? More importantly, why has he failed the country in a time of crisis?

It's largely because Obama does not understand how bullies operate, according to a prominent political psychologist. [...]

The president is fond of referring to “the arc of history,” paraphrasing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous statement that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But with his deep-seated aversion to conflict and his profound failure to understand bully dynamics — in which conciliation is always the wrong course of action, because bullies perceive it as weakness and just punch harder the next time — he has broken that arc and has likely bent it backward for at least a generation.

The arc of history does not bend toward justice through capitulation cast as compromise. [...]

Much more.

Fixer and I have expounded at some length on how - the only way - to deal with bullies and no doubt will continue to do so until somebody does it to the far right. They have to find themselves unexpectedly sitting on their ass with a bloody nose and an incipient two-week raccoon mask shiner that'll make people laugh at 'em and tell 'em they got what was coming to 'em and give 'em something to think about when they look in the mirror. If that doesn't work, the next time you hurt 'em. Repeat as necessary until they stop fuckin' with you. Make it so they step off the curb when they see you coming down the sidewalk. Comity and respect are fine but fear works just as well.

Update:

Thanks to YubaNet.

Goddammit, O-Man, just hit the sonofabitch.

Why the center-left is fed up with Obama

Matt Miller

Here’s the thing. I know Tea Party Republicans were behind the debt-ceiling standoff that wreaked needless damage on confidence in the United States. I wrote weeks ago of Standard & Poor’s outrageous nerve in threatening a downgrade when America’s ability to pay its debts can’t possibly be in doubt. In short, I know who the real villains are at this volatile moment.

So why am I so mad at Barack Obama?

You may or may not agree with the writer. Just...go.

Chinese flattop update

Following up on Fixer's post, Reuters/Yahoo!News has an update. Nice photo of the ship.

The long-awaited debut of the vessel, a refitted former Soviet craft, marked a step forward in China's long-term plan to build a carrier force that can project power into the Asian region, where seas are spanned by busy shipping lanes and thorny territorial disputes.

I think the 'refitting' consisted mostly of pumping enough water out of her so she would float, patching rust holes, and changing all the signs and instruction manuals from Russian to Chinese.

The aircraft carrier, which is about 300 meters (984 feet) long, plowed through fog and sounded its horn three times as it left the dock, Xinhua said on its military news microblog.

Sounds like a real powerhouse. The horn works.

No word yet on the rumored deal that the Brits are selling China some surplus naval aircraft so the deck won't look so empty.

So far, the Chinese carrier is simply referred to as 'the Chinese carrier' by most, though rumor has it that the skippers of the world's fast attack submarines are calling her 'torpedo practice'. My suggestion for a name is Sin King Dragon.

Sucks to be you ...

Even if Mr. Obama and AG Holder don't want to "look back" at the transgressions of those in the Chimp administration, a federal judge thinks private citizens should be able to. Via Avedon, it looks like a lot of folks want a piece of Rummy.

What's the black stuff ...

Between the elephant's toes?

Slow moving pygmies*.

I've said it a million times; the rich don't care who they trample in their lust for money and power.

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It seems that the very rich people... the ones who like to call themselves the "upper class" in this country... may not be so upper class after all. They actually lack many of the personality traits that differentiate we human beings from the dog eat dog, survival of the fittest denizens of the animal world. As a matter of fact, there are a lot of the "lower" animals" who are more capable of empathy for their fellow creatures than most of our elitist rich.

...

Recent studies have verified that the upper class is pretty much incapable of giving a damn about the havoc they wreak on the lives of the common people... otherwise identified by both they and the mass media as the "lower" class... and while there are differences of opinion as to whether this disability is inherited through some kind of genetic disposition or learned, most of them agree that the elite are indeed incapable of or indisposed to giving any indication that they give a damn about anyone but themselves.

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For those who think the answer to our problems is to kiss the "job creators'" collective ass and hope they feel a bit of noblesse oblige, let me be the first to say you are barking at the moon. The rich give nothing up unless it suits them, or makes them more money. If you want more financial equality in the US, you're gonna have to take it, in the forms of taxes, better regulation, and at the point of a gun if necessary.

*And before anyone gets offended, I didn't mean "pygmies" in the "little black guys from Africa" vein, purely symbolic of our plight among the elephants of the GOP and their minions.

Christ ...

Our resident Long Island Dumbass is embarrassing us once again:

Rep. Peter King (R-NY) has written a letter to the Defense Department and the CIA requesting that they investigate whether the White House leaked classified information to Hurt Locker filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow about the raid that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden.

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Genius has nothing better to worry about (like the fact the banks are foreclosing on an average of 700 homes a month on Long Island) but amazingly, he gave up bashing Muslims for a day. Oh wait, I almost forgot the President is a Secret Kenyan Muslim Commie Fascist. Silly me ...

Keep praying ...

Because your faith in your elected officials is, sadly, misplaced:

In case anyone was wondering if there would come a point at which basic reality would send a wake-up call to blinkered Tea Party conservatives, you have your answer in the Great State of Texas. Specifically, the town of Kemp, population 1,133:

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I think our pal, and fellow New Yorker, Montag coined the phrase "cement heads". An apt term if I ever heard one.

Welcome home ...

Now get out:

BEND, Ore. -- It was a bittersweet, even ironic "homecoming" day for Bend resident Tim Collette who's home is in foreclosure. His son, Aaron, arrived back home on leave from a tour of duty in Iraq. But hours earlier, his house was sold back to the bank.

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You know, it's amazing what the banksters have done - are still doing - to this country and they're allowed to walk the streets, free men. They don't pay taxes yet they take our tax money to bail themselves out after running their businesses into the ground, and are still running them, still living in the style they're accustomed to. In a sane world, these people would have been the first up against the wall, shot as traitors and economic terrorists.

But, in Bizarro America, a GI can come home from the war in time to see his dad, a hard working man affected by the rotten economy the banksters caused, get evicted from his house.

I hope the powers-that-be are looking across the pond, and understand that what's happening in England can quite easily happen here. The fuel is already here, it just needs the spark.

Great thanks to our pal Montag for the link.

Standard Republican hypocrisy ...

Via TPM, one of the people who made hypocrisy into an art form shows how it's done:

Gov. Mitt Romney lobbied the credit ratings agency Standard & Poor’s in 2004 to raise his state’s credit rating in part because Massachusetts had raised taxes during an economic downturn two years earlier.

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I think Larry O'Donnell pointed this all out last night, that the Republicans know what it takes to fix the economy but they just won't do it. Thanks to President Grover Norquist's anti-tax pledge they signed and the idiot Teabaggers who've been conned into voting against their own interests, with religious-like fervor, they'd rather flush what's left of this country than do what they know is the right thing in order to hold on to power. To me, that's treasonous.

Pardon me...

...for not being too involved in this shit today. My little Tami hasn't been feeling well for a coupla days and we took her into the Vet today. Turns out she has an auto-immune problem that's causing anemia. She's very sick. Prognosis is guarded but it is not considered life-threatening at this time. Treatment is just starting and we will have to wait and see. I'm worried about her like any Dad would be. Please think good thoughts for my sweet little dog. Later.

If the Tea Party Were Liberal

Tina Dupuy

If liberals were doing to the country what extremist tea party Republicans are doing – it would be called unpatriotic. A whole tsunami of sound bites would sweep the country calling for the sabotage to stop.

Liberal dissent is akin to a security breach but conservative economic calamity is given a pass. We’ve treated the tea party like they are our country’s kooky, graying, drunken uncle at Thanksgiving dinner spouting some non sequiturs he picked up on AM radio. When really they are well-funded economic saboteurs who refuse to participate in the democratic process. Their goal of causing the executive branch of government to fail means our entire country goes with it.
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If liberals did this to their own country they’d be called criminals. The tea party did do this to their own country and they are treated like avant-garde Civil War reenactors.

That's right on the money. Let's hope this "Civil War reenactment" comes out like the Civil War did, that is, with the miscreants crushed.

I gotta call my friends in England ...

They'll be happy to know President Obama supports the protesters/rioters in London and other cities. Come on, you knew it was coming from the right wing nutosphere.

Before you freak out ...

Like all the "experts" seem to be doing, Comrade Misfit explains why we need not worry about a Chinese aircraft carrier just yet, maybe not for a long time.

What's a dirty old man to do?

Tengrain:

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Hey guys, remember that time that Congressional losers Nancy Pelosi and John Boehnerdecided to kill off the Congressional Page Program to save money? Me Neither! Anyway, some former pages are protesting. "Getting felt-up by a horny old man was a life-changing experience for me," said former page "Fark Moley." Anyway, they have set up (wait for it) a Facebook Page to reach out to other victims alumni of the program. (Roll Call)

...

Good. The less young lives these old perverts can fuck up, the better.

For a buncha treasonous clowns ...

Who are always threatening to secede from the Union, they sure like to use the levers of government to gain an advantage here:

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Then [Rep.(R-TX) Michael] Burgess fielded a suggestion that the House move to impeach Obama. "It needs to happen, and I agree with you it would tie things up," he reportedly said. "No question about that."

The U.S. Constitution, in Article II, Section 4, requires a conviction on "Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors" before an office-holder can be impeached. President Obama faces no such charges.

Asked to clarify, "Burgess said he wasn't sure whether the proper charges to bring up articles of impeachment against Obama were there, but he didn't rule out pursuing such a course," ...

Instead of trying to fuck up a country that most people, generally, still enjoy living in, why not just get the fuck out?

Great thanks to They Gave Us A Republic for the link.

Sorry ...

I been AWOL 2 mornings in a row but I had to do some emergency maintenance over at Dad-in-law's this morning. When it rains, it pours. Amazing to me, though, that a male aide (the overnight guy we have for the old man), 45 years old, can go for weeks wondering why half the lights in the house don't work and not think to change a light bulb or two to remedy the problem (let alone a half dozen like I changed today, among other things). He couldn't even bother to alert me to a possible electrical problem if he didn't have the sechel to try a new bulb. He tells the Mrs. when she was there the other day that the "house is getting dark". Fortunately, after 4 1/2 months of interviews, we've found a replacement and his ass is shipping out next week. Idiot.