Another transition from primary to general election is now under way for Obama, and it is causing him a similar set of problems, all of which stem from a realization among his supporters that superheroes don’t become President; politicians do.
The Bush administration is admitting defeat in its efforts to conclude a status-of-forces agreement with Iraq before the end of Bush's term of office. Such an agreement would have codified the long-term presence of US troops and military bases in the country. Beneath the gobbledegook, the hang-up seems clear: the Iraqis would not conclude an agreement without a clear timetable for US withdrawal.
Dalton could sound like Billie Holiday, and she had the striking beauty of a Walker Evans dustbowl portrait. Bob Dylan called her his favorite singer from the Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1960s.
Greetings from the little old librarian.
It was Sen. John McCain's staff who asked security at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts to remove people holding protest signs at the venue -- not U.S. Secret Service agents, who were not involved in Carol Kreck's ouster from the galleria.
It's been quite a week for me, McCain, the police and the Secret Service. While I may write more later, there are a couple issues I would like to address now -- but first, an excerpt from today's Denver Post story by Felisa Cardona:
Suesan Heroux, 63, of Port Townsend, (WA) begged her son to outfit a car for her so she could participate in destruction derbies. "It makes me feel very alive," she said...
..."When I'm waiting out there for them to give me the flag, my whole focus is on the ramp," Heroux said. "I don't want to miss the ramp."
She's never missed it. Known as "Grandma Hook," Heroux showed a knack for "rolling" from the beginning. On her first try, she turned her car all the way around and finished right side up, garnering five points.
She also broke the skin on both of her knuckles...
...
But before she could roll, Susan Heroux faced another challenge — she needed to lose about 100 pounds. Because the doors are welded shut, the windows are the only way to enter the car.
"I really had to prove how serious I was, and I was very, very serious," Heroux said. "I needed to get small enough to crawl out of a car window."
The Big Penis Book is out. Bet you didn't know there was a Big Breast book, too, but you're not surprised. Okay, nuff said.
Big shoulders, big lapels, and big hair may come and go, but the big penis never goes out of fashion. With those possessing more than 8 inches (20 cm) making up less than 2% of the world’s population, this rare accessory will always fascinate.
UPDATE BELOW Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said this morning that the House Judiciary Committee may hold hearings on an impeachment resolution offered by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio). Kucinich is expected to offer a "privileged resolution" this afternoon calling on the House to look at whether President Bush should be removed from office for lying to Congress and the American public when he sought congressional approval back in 2002 for taking military action to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein. Pelosi has said previously that impeachment "was off the table," so her comments this morning were surprising, and clearly signaled a new willingness to entertain the idea of ousting Bush, although no one in the Democratic leadership believes that is likely since the president has only six months left in this term. "This is a Judiciary Committee matter, and I believe we will some attention being paid to it by the Judiciary Committee," Pelosi told reporters. "Not necessarily taking up the articles of impeachment because that would have to be approved on the floor, but to have some hearings on the subject." Pelosi added: "My expectation is that there will be some review of that in the committee." A spokesman for the House Judiciary Committee had no immediate comment when asked whether Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), the panel's chairman, planned hearings on Kucinich's impeachment resolutions.Copyright 2008 POLITICO
UPDATE II:Once they have called for hearings and they are taking place THEN they have to turn over the documents and they can't claim privilege!!! (from a Daily kos commenter) That means Rove, Meirs, Bolton, not Bush. The House Judiciary Committe can try them for inherent contempt.UPDATE: Quote o' teh day:"If impeachment is off the table, can we at least kick it around the floor a bit?" Also, this might be worth watching. Is impeachment discussion a way to get those Bush administration officials who refused to testify citing executive privilege before a committee?
You liked Barack because you thought he could get us past the old brain-dead politics, right? He talked — and talked and talked — about how there were going to be no more red states and blue states, how he was going to bring Americans together, including Republicans and Democrats. Exactly where did everybody think this gathering was going to take place? Left field?
© UNESCO/Sigurdur Á. ThráinssonThe World Heritage Committee added eight natural sites and 19 cultural sites to UNESCO's World Heritage List of cultural, natural, and mixed properties that have "outstanding universal value."The new natural sites include:
Surtsey, a volcanic island in the North Atlantic, approximately 32 km off Iceland’s south coast, has scientific importance because of the detailed records kept of the eruption that formed it, its modifications by later geological and geomorphic processes, and its ongoing colonisation by plants and animals.
Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
...Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works. Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page... Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”
Wash the potatoes thoroughly. Boil in water until ready.Peel the potatoes.Serve hot as a meal with any legume stew, groundnut stew, sour milk, tea, porridge or mashed with beans. It can also be eaten hot or cold as a snack.
More.
What is most striking is that when the Congress was controlled by the GOP -- when the Senate was run by Bill Frist and the House by Denny Hastert -- the Bush administration attempted to have a bill passed very similar to the one that just passed today. But they were unable to do so. The administration had to wait until Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats took over Congress before being able to put a corrupt end to the scandal that began when, in December of 2005, the New York Times revealed that the President had been breaking the law for years by spying on Americans without the warrants required by law.
What the researchers at MIT found was that even in the U.S. people with the lowest energy usage, a homeless person, a five-year-old and a Buddhist monk, all have a carbon footprint twice as large as the average global citizen. This is because the services provided for every American, including infrastructure and public services, guarantee set a baseline that no American can drop below.
Wolfe, who calls himself “the social secretary of neuroscience,” often turns to current research to inform his stories and cultural commentary. His 1996 essay, “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died,” raised questions about personal responsibility in the age of genetic predeterminism. Similar concerns led Gazzaniga to found the Law and Neuroscience Project. When Gazzaniga, who just published Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique, was last in New York, Seed incited a discussion: on status, free will, and the human condition.
If so, go here. (No, I haven't. Not enough time. But I will. Soon. Tomorrow, maybe.)Sex with animals is perfectly legal for men in Washington state, as long as the animal weighs less than 40 pounds.The reason I suspect it is because we had a local story in the newspaper I used to work for in which a woman who happened to be holding her cell phone went to the screen door to the call her husband in and found him fucking the family dog. She took his picture with the phone, then called the cops, who arrested him. He was arrested and convicted of animal abuse. Did it weigh less than 40 pounds. I'm not sure. I just don't believe there is such a law in Washington, home of Passado's law.
From David Brody of the Christian BroadcastingImportantly, though, they did not concede that he was not a muslim or that he's not a scary black man.....
One last question on Guantanamo. What to do with all the prisoners? My opinion? Well, seeing as we have all of these gentlemen who have been incarcerated as prisoners of war, before we release them, we ought to thoroughly vet these prisoners to see if any of them have crashed five planes. I've been told that wartime incarceration, when combined with pilot incompetence, makes for the ideal GOP candidate.
2nd Thought: Kerry for veep? Hmm.
">" border="0" alt="" />According to energy policy experts, it was in the late 1980s and early 1990s — during the administrations of President George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton — that things began to go wrong. Before that point, the country reaped the benefits of the first fuel-economy standards, passed in 1975, known as corporate average fuel economy, or CAFE. Between 1974 and 1989, the efficiency of a typical car sold in the United States almost doubled, to 27.5 miles per gallon from 13.8. LARGELY as a result, oil consumption in 1990 totaled 16.9 million barrels, basically on a par with the 17 million barrels consumed in 1980, even as the economy grew substantially. Oil prices were in the middle of a long downward slide that would take them from well above $30 a barrel in 1980 to a low of just under $10 in late 1998 and early 1999, interrupted only by brief spike in 1990 after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.Wait, it's Jesse Helms' and Carl Levin's fault that I paid $4.41 a gallon yesterday? At Costco, mind you. And John Dingell and Newt Gingrich? I like Carl, always peering over those glasses way down on his nose. And I like Dingell. How could they? Detroit, honey, Detroit. And Slade Gorton was one of the good guys. Who knew? The Dutch pay $10 a gallon for gas, more than half of it taxes. But Newt still contends Americans would never accept an attempt to control consumption with heavy taxes. No-o-o, the R's want to open up new drilling fields and so far 70 percent of Americans think they're right, according to polls, despite:
A recent study by the federal government’s Energy Information Administration estimated that under the best-case scenario opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would reduce prices by $1.44 a barrel by 2027. Drilling in broader swaths off the continental United States wouldn’t affect prices until 2030.It's mostly supply and demand (what's sitting in your driveway?), the article says, although it quotes one economist who attributes about 20 percent to the falling dollar. It dismisses speculation, which is unregulated, without examination. But I watched that panel of experts testify a couple weeks ago, and they convinced me. The NYT writer quotes a couple energy company people also dismissing speculation, but there was one, from Exxon, I think, who agreed that speculation played a big role. At the time, they were saying as much as 25 percent. Krugman doesn't buy the speculation argument either and has the numbers to prove his case, basically that there isn't enough hoarding going on to indicate speculation. Nobody seems to be blaming the oil companies except Maria Cantwell. So, okay, it's all our fault. Kind of reminds me of the JFK assassination, when some TV newsman like Howard K. Smith said we were all to blame. Blame everybody, then nobody's accountable.
"If you have an R in front of your name, you better run scared," said Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.), chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, who says the party will do well if it holds its losses to three or four seats.Which is why Dino Rossi has registered his affiliation as "GOP Party." Which translates to Grand Old Party Party. Heh.
Far too late for it to do anybody any good, Jesse Helms has died. He has done so on Independence Day, which, since he was born too late to own slaves and in too liberal an age to allow him to outlaw sedition, will forever be his only resemblance to Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.
It is rude to speak ill of the dead. Luckily, I did so ahead of time
orTime and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force. Lord Peter Wimsey
- As I grow older and older
And totter toward the tomb
I find that I care less and less
Who goes to bed with whom
The U.S. economy needs to add more than 100,000 jobs each month just to keep up with growth in the working-age population. Over the past 6 months, nonfarm payroll employment has fallen more than 400,000. So job creation this year has fallen well over a million jobs short
The economy has entered a slow motion recession. It is not seeing the dramatic plunges in jobs that characterized prior recessions, but the collapse of the housing bubble is slowly sinking more and more sectors of the economy. Total private sector job gains in the Bush years may fall below 3 million by November. The annual average for the Clinton years was 2.6 million.
ELDORADO, Texas - A new clothing brand may be born out of the Texas raid on a polygamous sect. FLDS women for the first time are offering their handmade, distinctive style of children's clothes to the public through the Web site fldsdress.com. Launched initially to provide Texas authorities with clothing for FLDS children in custody, the online store now is aimed at helping their mothers earn a living. The venture, which has already drawn queries from throughout the U.S., is banking on interest in modest clothes, curiosity and charity to be a success.
Senator Edward M. Kennedy's office has begun convening a series of meetings involving a wide array of healthcare specialists to begin laying the groundwork for a new attempt to provide universal healthcare, according to participants. The discussions signal that Kennedy, who instructed aides to begin holding the meetings while he is in Massachusetts undergoing treatment for brain cancer, intends to work vigorously to build bipartisan support for a major healthcare initiative when he returns to Washington in the fall. Those involved in the discussions said Kennedy believes it is extremely important to move as quickly as possible on overhauling the healthcare system after the next president takes office in January in order to capitalize on the momentum behind a new administration. Kennedy was an early endorser of Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee who is also a member of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, which Kennedy chairs. Obama's Senate staff has attended the roundtable discussions. If Obama is elected, Kennedy's effort to identify points of agreement among senators could smooth the way for the new administration to press ahead on universal healthcare, which Obama has promised to implement within four years.
Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program. Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature. Under federal law, a Presidential Finding, which is highly classified, must be issued when a covert intelligence operation gets under way and, at a minimum, must be made known to Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and the Senate and to the ranking members of their respective intelligence committees—the so-called Gang of Eight. Money for the operation can then be reprogrammed from previous appropriations, as needed, by the relevant congressional committees, which also can be briefed.
McCaskill's advice has made a difference in more subtle ways, too. She says Obama sometimes has "a tendency to explain the intellectual rationale for something he's done before he explains what was going on in his heart."
After his remarks in Pennsylvania that rural voters bitter over the economy "cling to guns and religion," Obama tried to explain by saying his "syntax was poor."
"I teased him about using the word syntax," McCaskill said. "I said, 'Barack, where I come from that's the tax you have to pay on beer.' Sometimes it's better to say 'I screwed up' than to say 'I got the wrong syntax.'"
From Huffpo via AP
WASHINGTON — For the first time in American history a woman has been chosen for promotion to four-star general.
The Pentagon announced Monday that President Bush nominated Lt. Gen. Ann E. Dunwoody to head the Army Materiel Command, responsible for equipping, outfitting and arming soldiers throughout the Army.
If confirmed by the Senate, she would be the first woman to attain the rank of a full general. By law, the Army is limited to 11 active-duty four-stars, including the Army chief of staff, Gen. George Casey.
Recycling them is about to get easier. Home Depot, the nation’s second-largest retailer, will announce on Tuesday that it will take back old compact fluorescents in all 1,973 of its stores in the United States, creating the nation’s most widespread recycling program for the bulbs.
The cover-up is nearly complete. With congressional approval, the Bush administration's warrantless eavesdropping on Americans' overseas phone calls and e-mail for nearly six years will be spared the third-degree treatment by any judge or jury.At the same time, Bush or his successor would have virtual free rein to continue the massive antiterror surveillance sweeps of communications to and from this country.
Whatever the risk from another terror attack, Americans' privacy would be the assured casualty from these antiterror tactics. . . .Indeed, Sen. Arlen Specter (R., Pa.) said the new Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act offered no safeguard against future lawless spying. . . .
The [telecom] lawsuits offered the best means to plumb what occurred during the spy program. That avenue would be blocked now, and it's doubtful that reviews ordered by several agencies' inspectors general will provide a better public accounting.
It's incredible to hear Democrats try to justify their capitulation on grounds that they forced Bush to accept an additional $95 billion worth of domestic spending. Unemployment insurance and higher-education benefits for veterans, great stuff. But since when is it right to horse-trade over the cherished, constitutional right to privacy?
There's still time for the Senate to stand up for the Constitution and reject this deal.
UPDATE: So, uh,TPM says this means there will be a filibuster. I dunno.
Equal but different.
You hear that a lot on the lush green campus of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
God values men and women equally, any student here will tell you. It’s just that he’s given them different responsibilities in life: Men make decisions. Women make dinner.
This fall, the internationally known seminary – a century-old training ground for Southern Baptists – began reinforcing those traditional gender roles with college classes in homemaking. The academic program, open only to women, includes lectures on laundering stubborn stains and a lab in baking chocolate-chip cookies.
Philosophical courses such as “Biblical Model for the Home and Family” teach that God expects wives to graciously submit to their husbands’ leadership. A model house, to be completed by next fall, will allow women to get credit toward bachelor’s degrees by learning how to set tables, sew buttons and sustain lively dinnertime conversation.
It all sounds wonderful to sophomore Emily Felts, 19, who signed up as soon as she arrived on campus this fall.
Several relatives have told Felts that she’s selling herself short. They want her to become a lawyer, and she agrees she’d make a good one. But that’s not what she wants to do with her life.
More to the point, it’s not what she believes God wants of her.
“My created purpose as a woman is to be a helper,” Felts said firmly. “This is a college education that I can use.”
As someone who was definitely a Hippie let me expand upon your statement,
"But in the reaction to a doomed war, in their sense that mankind faced an existential crisis as destructive weapons technology spread, in their understanding that Christianity was not, at its core, socially productive or in any familiar sense, socially conservative, the hippies were onto something."
Those aspects of Hippie culture, to which I subscribed and lent what leadership abilities I then had, that were most critical were definitely based upon an understanding of essential Essene Christianity.
The culture was a communal, love based collaboration in a spiritual quest to bring peace, end bigotry - then against African and Native Americans, shortly adding women and not too long after Gays - stopping nuclear proliferation and war, and saving the planet from the rampages of unfettered exploitation. (Love in the Christian sense, though at 19, when I first got involved the sexual aspects were pretty attractive too.)
In a very strong sense, the hippies were a Conservative force. One that believed in Jeffersonian agrarian principles, practiced the Golden Rule, and direct religious experience, often enabled or enhanced by the use of psychotropic drugs such as Marijuana, Mescaline, psilocybin and LSD.
One of my favorite anecdotes of the period was being driven in Northern Arizona by an attorney who'd agreed to take a case for my room mate and me because it was on his way to a meeting to hear Barry Goldwater speak. We spoke about the war in Vietnam, the riots that had occurred after the assassination of MLK and the shooting of Bobby Kennedy and George Wallace, and the need to preserve the fantastic landscape through which we were driving. I remember the conversation because we agreed that the rioting after MLK seemed to be a reasonable, through regrettable response to that outrage (this 1968 ultra conservative was pro civil rights), that it was very frightening that there were forces willing to assassinate leaders rather than vote for them, and most startling, that we agreed that if we were unwilling to do what was required to win in Vietnam, we should leave. We even agreed that to win, would probably destroy Vietnam to the degree that the victory would be Pyrrhic.
And it should come as no surprise that preserving Arizona's beauty was a shared wish, though I suspect on many of the aspects of that topic we now hold important but which were then relatively unknown by most people, we'd have disagreed. All I know is we both hated the cancerous growth that was Phoenix. Even then.
Of course, Hippidom was co opted by the greater culture within the context of fashions and music, AIDS and other STD's put the kibosh on free love, and Nixon and Republicans of the day so frightened the older generation about their own kids that being against war and thermonuclear weapons was seen as treasonous. And not actually being Jesus meant that turning the other cheek and acting peaceably ended with the police riots in Chicago and the Hell's Angels at Altamont.
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - As Barack Obama broadens his outreach to evangelical voters, one of the movement's biggest names, James Dobson, accuses the likely Democratic presidential nominee of distorting the Bible and pushing a "fruitcake interpretation" of the Constitution.
