The Lovell Sisters perform at Bonnaroo 2009 on "This Tent" Stage!! Song: Bleeding Heart (written by Jimi Hendrix) | For more information about The Lovell Sisters, visit: www.lovellsistersband.com
And here, from this week, is an example of how Rush is faring. In sorting out the why's and wherefore's of "this [Gov. Mark] Sanford business," Limbaugh said, he actually said:
This is almost like: I don't give a damn! Country's going to hell in a handbasket. I just want out of here! He had just tried to fight the stimulus money coming to South Carolina. He didn't want any part of it. He lost the battle and said, "What the hell? The Federal government is taking over! I want to enjoy life!"
Yes, it's one for the psychiatric record-books, folks: In Rush Limbaugh's increasingly dark, desperate and distorted mind, a $787 billion economic stimulus package is believable-enough stimulation to send a perfectly proper, right-thinking Southern governor into a follow-up exploration of Argentina's forbidden bush country.
So I put this to you: That's beyond strategic broadcasting; that's just plain nuts. And it just may be that Rush has been acting the lunatic for so long -- stridently bashing the left and absolving the right for ever-greater fun and profit -- he has finally become a genuine, certifiable one.
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
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WASHINGTON - The family of a woman killed Monday is dealing with more than just grief in the aftermath of Metro's deadliest accident in history.
The family of Ana Fernandez says they have been getting hate-filled telephone messages about whether or not Fernandez, a mother of six, was a legal immigrant.
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[...] Pop culture just died. Didn't you hear?
First, it was the beauty. How many countless millions of feverish boyhood fantasies were spawned by 1970's Farrah Fawcett? How many of our admittedly vapid and slightly sexist, yet somehow also wondrous and utterly divine ideas of lust and desire and perfect all-American prettiness were inspired by her uncomplicated sparkle, that Barbie-doll hair?
I am unashamed to say, I had that poster on my wall. Most every male I know of that generation had that poster on his wall. It was some sort of boyhood law, a requirement, a key to the Kingdom of Testosterone. Chances are you don't even need to click that link to know which poster I'm talking about. Chances are you can close your eyes and see it in a split second, and sigh. Sex and beauty and Americana and teeth and sex and hope and hairdryers and carefree love and bathing suits and shimmer and sex. Farrah made it all possible.
But even that glorious, soft-focus icon is no match for the King of Pop. There is no contest.
BAGHDAD — Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has taken to calling the withdrawal of American combat troops from Iraq’s cities by next Tuesday a “great victory,” a repulsion of foreign occupiers he compares to the rebellion against British troops in 1920.
The day itself has been declared a national holiday, though it is not yet clear whether Iraq will hold the “feast and festivals” he recently promised.
More than 150 American bases or outposts have been closed in Iraqi cities this year — 85 percent of the total, an Iraqi official said — including some that commanders considered crucial.
The Americans asked to keep open an outpost in Sadr City, the Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad that once served as the base of Shiite militias, only to be rebuffed.
“This is one we wanted,” Brig. Gen. John M. Murray said. “The Iraqi government said ‘no,’ so now we are leaving.”
Far from a celebration, the deadline has provoked uncertainty and even dread among average Iraqis, underscoring the potential problems that Mr. Maliki could face if bloodshed intensifies.
Even some Iraqi officers are worried. Brig. Gen. Mahmoud Muhsen, a commander with the First Division of the Iraqi National Police, grimly predicted that sectarian violence could return. He warned that control of Iraq’s borders remained ineffective, allowing more foreign fighters to enter.
“They are taking away all the equipment that the Americans provide,” he said, “and with the agenda of countries neighboring Iraq, it is a recipe for disaster.”
“When the Americans get out of city centers, a big war will start,” a woman who identified herself as Um Hussan said amid the wreckage of a bombing on Monday outside her house in the Ur neighborhood of Baghdad. It has been months, she added, since she last saw American forces there.
“We ask God to help us for what is coming,” she said
Iraq opens fields; Exxon, Shell seek foothold
“Iraq is the big prize in the region,” said Raja Kiwan, a Dubai-based analyst at consultants PFC Energy. “It is one of the only remaining areas that provide the level of upside for companies who want to access reserves.”
I guess we'll have to put up with one long, one-week media circus bukkakke of freakishness about Michael Jackson ...
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"We were just lucky to be here today," said Kyle Joyce of Sacramento, who came to the hospital after hearing the news while walking on Venice Beach. "We just wanted to see it with our own eyes."
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But its about to get even worse for this 'fiscal conservative' as news of his financial flimflammery starts spurting out like Lindsey Graham's freedom-juice at a Cub Scout jamboree.
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The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a school's strip search of an Arizona teenage girl accused of having prescription-strength ibuprofen was illegal.
The court ruled 8-1 on Thursday that school officials violated the law with their search of Savana Redding in the rural eastern Arizona town of Safford.
By deciding that it is better equipped to decide what behavior should be permitted in schools, the Court has undercut student safety and undermined the authority of school administrators and local officials. Even more troubling, it has done so in a case in which the underlying response by school administrators was reasonable and justified. I cannot join this regrettable decision. I, therefore, respectfully dissent from the Court’s determination that this search violated the Fourth Amendment.
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For the President to offer a veto threat, which to my recollection is the first veto threat of his Presidency, over ending the military-industrial complex gravy train is pretty significant. If we don't take the first step and restore the ability to end weapons systems, then the military budget will just grow and grow. Most politicians already consider it magic and unrelated to any other spending, even while they scold about "runaway budget deficits" in the same breath. The jobs argument attempted here is bogus, "weaponized Keynesianism", as Barney Frank called it. Building bridges and roads and a smart energy grid were the kinds of job-creating engines that all the fiscal scolds considered too expensive during the stimulus fight, but suddenly when defense is on the menu, they're all "jobs, baby, jobs." Those Blue Dogs who scream about budgets can now tell everyone why we can afford a plane that the Air Force doesn't need and the manufacturer doesn't even want to make.
The President's taking a small risk here. I can already hear the resurrection of Zell Miller demagoguing in 2012 about "what are we gonna use, spitballs?" But this represents the setting of a marker, one of the first I can remember, that our military budget is not sustainable, and as a first step we have to be able to wind down Cold War-era weapons systems that are completely inapplicable to the present day. Not many people have allowed themselves to publicly make this argument. So it deserves some credit. [my em]
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[New York Governor David] Paterson made the threat late Wednesday. He said he intends to be in court at 9 a.m. on Thursday—unless all 62 senators agreed to show up and participate in an emergency legislative session that Paterson has called for 3 p.m. that same day.
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"This is a farce," said Paterson, visibly angry. "Senators, get to work tomorrow. You’re not going home. You’re not getting paid. And you’re not going to disrespect the people of New York any longer."
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"What we’re simply doing here is compelling them to get to work," Paterson said of his plans to sue senators. "The people have had enough. I know I have."
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I'm gouging my eyes out as I write this.
Back on Iyyar 2, 5769 (that's April 26th of this year to most Americans) the most left of Israel's major newspapers, Haaretz, published an article by Amer Oren titled, "Why Lawrence of Arabia is still relevant, from Gaza to Kabul." I resolved to watch the movie, and ordered it from a popular online seller. Last week I caught enough time (it runs over 3 hours) to watch it. Oren was right.
Its critical essence - what provoked Oren to write his piece for Haaretz and led Admiral Eric Olson, the chief of US Special Operations Command in the Middle East to initiate last year "Project Lawrence" - is the story of Lawrence, a British Army officer, who comes to know the culture of the local Arabs so intimately that he is able to lead them in a world-changing uprising and several major battles against the then-massive Turkish Ottoman Empire.
There are a number of subtexts to the movie, and given recent US and British adventures in the region, some that weren't even intended by David Lean and Sam Spiegel, its director and producer. First among these is how the British apparently hadn't learned a thing since the American Revolution about taking on a foreign army that's nationalistic, decentralized, and fights in an unconventional fashion. They also had (have?) never given up their insufferable assumption of absolute cultural superiority relative to virtually everybody but particularly with regard to people who live tribally.
Lawrence got it - so much so that one of his superior officers wonders out loud if he's "gone native" - and it was through this understanding of the Arab culture that he was able to accomplish what he did. The consequences of those accomplishments are still playing out in the region, nearly a century later.
And Lawrence's understanding is what inspired Admiral Olson to tell the House Armed Services Committee this past June that he's now recruiting native Pashtu, Hausa, and Sinhala speakers (among others) for his "Project Lawrence." Olson doesn't intend to repeat the British mistakes, and one hopes that in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq he and his peers have learned something. Two weeks ago in New York I had occasion to talk with one of the Army generals responsible for southern Afghanistan. "We can't kill our way to victory," he said to me, adding that we must both respect their culture and help them build a modern and functional infrastructure. Another military person who watched the movie?
Other subtexts include the madness of the legal mass murder we call war and its effect on those we push into it; Lawrence's homosexuality (and later love of masochism); the importance of hospitality in tribal cultures; and how when cultures clash (particularly violently) those with the poorest technology are most often absorbed or at least dramatically changed by their brush with the more technological.
Sanford was in Argentina, not hiking on the Appalachian Trail
He will hold a news conference at 2 p.m ET.
Maybe I'm wrong but I now do suspect
That in the near future -- without fail --
New slang for being on a bender will be,
"I'm hiking on the Appalachian trail."
Barack Obama has few, if any, more adoring fans in the world of establishment punditry than New York Times columnist Bob Herbert. Back in February, Herbert constructed an entire column around the ultimate Obama fan cheer: he venerated Obama as a "chess master," a "championship chess player, always several moves ahead of friend and foe alike" who "is smart, deft, elegant and subtle." That's what makes Herbert's superb column today -- lambasting Obama for his "unwillingness to end many of the mind-numbing abuses linked to the so-called war on terror and to establish a legal and moral framework designed to prevent those abuses from ever occurring again" -- so significant.
Note that Herbert is not complaining that Obama has failed to move fast enough to fix these problems. Rather, he's exclusively criticizing Obama for Bush-replicating policies, positions and abuses which the administration has affirmatively embraced and aggressively defended. And as Herbert suggests in his last sentence -- in which he argues that Obama's actions are mutually exclusive with the pledge "to get our moral compass back" -- these issues were not ancillary to progressive objections to the Bush presidency but were central to them. As Herbert says: "Policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House." If a full-fledged Obama admirer like Herbert has the intellectual honesty to acknowledge this and be angry about it, that's a fairly compelling sign of just how extreme this has now become.
Policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House.
One of the most disappointing aspects of the early months of the Obama administration has been its unwillingness to end many of the mind-numbing abuses linked to the so-called war on terror and to establish a legal and moral framework designed to prevent those abuses from ever occurring again.
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It was thought by many that a President Obama would put a stop to the madness, put an end to the Bush administration’s nightmarish approach to national security. But Mr. Obama has shown no inclination to bring even the worst offenders of the Bush years to account, and seems perfectly willing to move ahead in lockstep with the excessive secrecy and some of the most egregious activities of the Bush era.
The new president’s excessively cautious approach to the national security and civil liberties outrages of the Bush administration are unacceptable, and the organizations and individuals committed to fairness, justice and the rule of law — the Center for Constitutional Rights, the American Civil Liberties Union, and many others — should intensify their efforts to get the new administration to do the right thing.
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SEOUL, South Korea – A North Korean-flagged ship under close watch in Asian waters is believed to be heading toward Myanmar carrying small arms cargo banned under a new U.N. resolution, a South Korean intelligence official said Monday.
A senior U.S. military official told The Associated Press on Friday that a Navy ship, the USS John S. McCain, is relatively close to the North Korean vessel but had no orders to intercept it. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
Any chance for an armed skirmish between the two ships is low, analysts say, though the North Korean crew is possibly armed with rifles.
"It's still a cargo ship. A cargo ship can't confront a warship," said Baek Seung-joo of the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses.
Indeed, if a public option were to be piggybacked onto the existing Medicare bureaucracy, the chances for savings could be impressive for average Americans and the overall American economy.
Insurance middlemen could be eliminated; investigators who ferret out “preexisting conditions” wouldn’t be needed; doctors could save on administrative costs; the burden on U.S. industry providing health benefits could be reduced; and more money could be freed to cover the nearly 50 million uninsured or for actual doctoring.
According to a New York Times/CBS poll, that point is obvious to 72 percent of the American people who favor “offering everyone a government administered health insurance plan like Medicare that would compete with private health insurance plans.”
It’s also reflected in a study cited by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and other insurance industry defenders saying that 119 million Americans would bolt from their private insurers to the public option if they were given the chance.
To put that figure in perspective, it is about two-thirds of Americans who have private insurance through their employers or as individuals. In other words, the industry's defenders say two of every three customers want out.
Though some analysts doubt the defection rate would reach 119 million, Grassley’s argument is that Americans would so prefer a government-run plan that it would destroy the private insurance industry – and that therefore the public option simply can’t be permitted.
Grassley’s fear of 119 million Americans voting with their pocketbooks against private health insurance represents a remarkable admission of failure by the industry and its backers. It says, in effect, that the industry’s treatment of its customers has been so highhanded over the decades that the industry can only survive if Americans are left with the unappetizing choice of private coverage or no coverage.
Even in the sorry history of special-interest-dominated Washington, it is rare for politicians to so blatantly adopt defense of a private industry over the will of the people.
Under the deal, brokered by Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, drug companies agreed to pay half the cost of prescription drugs that fall under the "doughnut hole" in the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit. Now, Medicare beneficiaries are responsible for paying the full cost of their prescription drugs once they exceed $2,700 per year, up to $6,154 per year.
President Obama welcomed the agreement in a statement Monday.
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Analysts say that the drug companies' decision was strategic -- they accepted the payment cuts now in order to gain a seat at the bargaining table and stave off potentially more drastic cuts later.
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Like he doesn't have a dog in the fight. Spawn of Shah should forget about any dreams of becoming the next leader of Iran, for the odds are that there are damn few people in Iran interested in being ruled by the offspring of a CIA stooge.
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Americans Saving More
Spending less on clothing, transportation.
Obama Compares Health Care to “Ticking Time Bomb”
Justifies torture of certain key Republicans.
Federal Judge Rejects DOJ Argument in Cheney Case that Future Veeps Would Withhold Info from FBI for Fear of Becoming ‘Fodder for Daily Show’
Strict constructionist says Founding Fathers didn’t watch late night TV.
New Research Suggests Orangutans May Be Our Closest Relatives
Promises much livelier Thanksgiving dinners.
One in Four Mammal Species Faces Extinction
One in forty-six hundred mammal species is responsible.
Japan Unveils Latest Bullet Train
Shown: oops, you missed it.
[...]...voters are ready for major change.
The question now is whether we will nonetheless fail to get that change, because a handful of Democratic senators are still determined to party like it’s 1993.
And yes, I mean Democratic senators. The Republicans, with a few possible exceptions, have decided to do all they can to make the Obama administration a failure. Their role in the health care debate is purely that of spoilers who keep shouting the old slogans — Government-run health care! Socialism! Europe! — hoping that someone still cares.
Whatever may be motivating these Democrats, they don’t seem able to explain their reasons in public.
Thus Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska initially declared that the public option — which, remember, has overwhelming popular support — was a “deal-breaker.” Why? Because he didn’t think private insurers could compete: “At the end of the day, the public plan wins the day.” Um, isn’t the purpose of health care reform to protect American citizens, not insurance companies?
And Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota offers a perfectly circular argument: we can’t have the public option, because if we do, health care reform won’t get the votes of senators like him. “In a 60-vote environment,” he says (implicitly rejecting the idea, embraced by President Obama, of bypassing the filibuster if necessary), “you’ve got to attract some Republicans as well as holding virtually all the Democrats together, and that, I don’t believe, is possible with a pure public option.”
Honestly, I don’t know what these Democrats are trying to achieve. Yes, some of the balking senators receive large campaign contributions from the medical-industrial complex — but who in politics doesn’t? If I had to guess, I’d say that what’s really going on is that relatively conservative Democrats still cling to the old dream of becoming kingmakers, of recreating the bipartisan center that used to run America.
But this fantasy can’t be allowed to stand in the way of giving America the health care reform it needs. This time, the alleged center must not hold.
Sung by Dolores Keane from Caherlestrane (which I think is Gaelic for 'Shit's Creek' - G), County Galway. Beautiful Scottish Love Song composed by a great Scots Poet Dougie MacLean
NYT/CBS Poll: Wide Support for Government-Run Health Care Plan
