
Yeah... uhm... I'll bet it won't forget. Damn. In the Republicans favor, the elephant wasn't clothed and thus was "asking for it".
via Wonkette
What the McCain campaign doesn’t want people to know, according to one GOP strategist I spoke with over the weekend, is that they had an ad script ready to go if Obama had visited the wounded troops saying that Obama was...wait for it...using wounded troops as campaign props. So, no matter which way Obama turned, McCain had an Obama bashing ad ready to launch. I guess that’s political hardball. But another word for it is the one word that most politicians are loathe to use about their opponents—a lie.The ad mentioned here, is one I haven't linked to... and won't... it's actually worse than the one below, and contains outright fabrications... not just insanity. It will be interesting to see what the press calls him on if this continues. As I said, I think they're on the verge of rebelling, but loudly repeating lies until people start believing you is something that has worked very well for Republicans... it's pretty much all they know, and they've gotten good at it. The question ends up being whether people really are tired of the "same old politics" or not. We shall see.
I've never read his diaries, despite considering myself a serious fan of his work... so I'm pretty excited at this opportunity. Definitely looking forward to it. So many questions... did he have cats? Will there be pictures?The diaries will be published in blog form on the George Orwell prize website each day 70 years after they were first written, opening up a wonderful opportunity to acquaint and reacquaint with Orwell in a very accessible way, offering eyewitness accounts from the 1930s on everything from unemployment, fascism and communism, but also his musings on the natural world.
The project kicks off on August 9th and covers an important part of his life as a writer, beginning just before the period he spent recovering from tuberculosis in Morocco in 1938 and immediately following his time in Spain during the Spanish civil war, which led to the writing of ‘Homage to Catalonia’, my favourite Orwell book, and when he was writing his 1939 novel ‘Coming up for Air’.
[first name of a candidate] and pre/2 [last name of a candidate] w/7 bush or gore or republican! or democrat! or charg! or accus! or criticiz! or blam! or defend! or iran contra or clinton or spotted owl or florida recount or sex! or controvers! or racis! or fraud! or investigat! or bankrupt! or layoff! or downsiz! or PNTR or NAFTA or outsourc! or indict! or enron or kerry or iraq or wmd! or arrest! or intox! or fired or sex! or racis! or intox! or slur! or arrest! or fired or controvers! or abortion! or gay! or homosexual! or gun! or firearm!
Goodling regularly asked candidates for career jobs: "What is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?" the report said.
An experienced counterterrorism prosecutor, for example, was kept from advancing in favor of a more junior lawyer who lacked a background in terrorism.
"Apparently the political screening was so pervasive that even qualified Republican applicants were rejected...because they were 'not Republican enough' for Monica Goodling and others," Conyers said.
If you're a fan of 24, you'll enjoy The Dark Side. There you will meet Mamdouh Habib, an Australian captured in Pakistan, beaten by American interrogators with what he believed to be an "electric cattle prod," and threatened with rape by dogs. He confessed to all sorts of things that weren't true. He was released after three years without charges. You'll also meet Maher Arar, a Canadian engineer who experienced pretty much the same story, save that the beatings were with electrical cables. Arar was also released without explanation. He's been cleared of any links to terrorism by the Canadian government. Jack Bauer would have known these men were not "ticking time bombs" inside of 10 minutes. Our real-life heroes had to torture them for years before realizing they were innocent.If we are going to base our national security policies on a TV show, why not Airwolf? That would be much cooler and involve significantly less torture.
While John McCain is not, like Jimmy Carter, an incumbent with a lot of problems, he's close enough to the actual incumbent and his deeply unpopular views and record to get very contaminated by him. And Barack Obama, like Ronald Reagan, is a candidate whose main challenge seems to be overcoming a relatively low threshold of acceptability by an electorate that wants a party change in the White House. It's sometimes forgotten that the 1980 race was actually quite close until the last couple of weeks, when Reagan appears to have crossed that threshold and voters broke decisively in his direction...
...like red ants on a wounded puppy.
Not only is this a political flier meant to influence American voters via the Deutchland, it is seriously unnerving propaganda. What are the Obama people thinking? This is nuts.
Surely we can all agree that something is nuts here.
Tattoos are the emblems of our age. They bristle from the biceps of men in summer shirts, from the lower backs of women as they ascend stairs, from the shoulders of basketball players as they drive toward the basket, and from every inch of certain celebrities. The tattoo is the battle flag of today in its war with tomorrow. It is carried by sure losers.
A thought for the day: the political class has determined that Barack Obama was right about the Iraq war and that John McCain was right about the Surge. Does one right trump another? Or, as the war re-polarizes along party lines, do they cancel each other out?
And it's clear that the Iraqi government wants U.S. troops out more quickly than John McCain does, whilst U.S. generals want to send troops home more slowly than Obama does. Who trumps who?
The term flip-flopping doesn’t do justice to Mr. McCain’s self-contradictory economic pronouncements because that implies there’s some rational, if hypocritical, logic at work. What he serves up instead is plain old incoherence, as if he were compulsively consulting one of those old Magic 8 Balls. In a single 24-hour period in April, Mr. McCain went from saying there’s been “great economic progress” during the Bush presidency to saying “Americans are not better off than they were eight years ago.” He reversed his initial condemnation of mortgage bailouts in just two weeks.
In February Mr. McCain said he would balance the federal budget by the end of his first term even while extending the gargantuan Bush tax cuts. In April he said he’d accomplish this by the end of his second term. In July he’s again saying he’ll do it in his first term. Why not just say he’ll do it on Inauguration Day? It really doesn’t matter since he’s never supplied real numbers that would give this promise even a patina of credibility.
Obama’s remarks that — if he takes office — in 16 months he would withdraw the forces, we think that this period could increase or decrease a little, but that it could be suitable to end the presence of the forces in Iraq... Who wants to exit in a quicker way has a better assessment of the situation in Iraq.
Iraq's government spokesman is hopeful that U.S. combat forces could be out of the country by 2010. Ali al-Dabbagh made the comments following a meeting in Baghdad on Monday between Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama, who arrived in Iraq earlier in the day.
The timeframe is similar to Obama's proposal to pull back combat troops within 16 months. The Iraqi government has been trying to clarify its position on a possible troop withdrawal since al-Maliki was quoted in a German magazine last week saying he supported Obama's timetable.
The US plans to establish a diplomatic presence in Tehran for the first time in 30 years as part of a remarkable turnaround in policy by President George Bush.Hurrrwhaaa!?
The Guardian has learned that an announcement will be made in the next month to establish a US interests section - a halfway house to setting up a full embassy. The move will see US diplomats stationed in the country.
There are a few catches, though. Microsoft touted the streaming service as free, but that’s not exactly true. First, you’ll need to be a Gold-level member of Xbox Live, which costs $50 a year. And you’ll need to be a Netflix member, obviously. Even then, only membership above the base Netflix plan of $4.99 will get you access to the streaming service.
What's more, you won’t get a crack at every piece of entertainment in Netflix’s 100,000-piece library. Subscribers to this streaming/Xbox Live service may only choose from a smaller subset of 10,000 movies and TV shows.
Such was the hubris of Hillary’s team that they discounted Obama as a passing pop star to non-voters. Politico.com reported that at a November 2007 Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Iowa, where 9,000 people showed up, 3,000 were already for Obama. “Our people look like caucus-goers,” Mandy Grunwald sniffed, “and his [Obama’s] people look like they are 18. Penn said they look like Facebook.”Emphasis mine.
“Did they sleep through the 2003–4 election cycle?” asks an incredulous Joe Trippi, referring to Howard Dean and his new form of communication. As the pioneer who kick-started the bottom-up, low-dollar style of campaigning, tapping grassroots organizers and “newbies” for Dean through the Internet, Trippi was appalled that the Clinton machine stuck with a top-down, status-quo campaign. But the Clintons were out of touch with new forms of communication. Bill Clinton still doesn’t use e-mail or own a BlackBerry.
Why hadn’t they been using the Internet all along as a bulging cash register the way the Obama forces were doing? Hillary’s team had held a retreat in the fall of ’07 to huddle with propeller heads from Google and Yahoo, hoping to update their Internet savvy, but basically gave up on trying. “We tried direct mail but we couldn’t come close to him,” admits one member of Clinton’s brain trust. “Obama tapped a different sensibility. They had a more, uh, viral [i.e., spreads by itself] campaign.” The very word “viral” in his mouth sounded foreign.
If real prices of houses in places like LA return to historical norms — and there’s no reason to think they won’t — many, many borrowers with conforming loans will end up with big negative equity anyway, and this in turn will produce a lot of defaults.
This crisis is a long way from being over.
In a number of previous housing busts, real prices declined for 5 to 7 years before finally hitting bottom. If this bust follows that pattern, we will continue to see real price declines for several more years - but if that happens, the rate of decline will probably slow (imagine somewhat of a bell curve on those graphs).
However, with the record foreclosure activity, prices might adjust quicker than normal (lenders are less prone to sticky prices than ordinary homeowners).
Articles in the "Jeter sucks" canon include: James Click's "Did Derek Jeter Deserve the Gold Glove?" from the book Baseball Between the Numbers, Tom Tango's "With or Without Derek Jeter" from the Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2008, Bill James' "Jeter vs. [Adam] Everett" from John Dewan's The Fielding Bible, and Mike Emeigh's "Derek Jeter and the State of Fielding Analysis in Sabermetrics, Parts 1 Through 8" (really). The gist of all these articles is that Jeter generally makes the plays he gets to (in fact, it turns out he's slightly better than most shortstops at charging slow ground balls and handling balls hit right at him), but he gets to many, many fewer than he should. As fielding-stat pioneer Michael Humphries explained it to me, "Basically, he's OK at easy plays and terrible on all others, in other words, all the plays that matter." That patented jumping, twisting throw to first? Probably just a byproduct of his limited range. As the Onion once declared, "Experts: Jeter Probably Didn't Need To Jump To Throw That Guy Out."
“They go on for me,” he said. “I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself. I don’t expect to be a great communicator, I don’t expect to set up my own blog, but I am becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need.”
Asked which blogs he read, he said: “Brooke and Mark show me Drudge, obviously. Everybody watches, for better or for worse, Drudge. Sometimes I look at Politico. Sometimes RealPolitics.”
At that point, Mrs. McCain, who had been intensely engaged with her BlackBerry, looked up and chastised her husband. “Meghan’s blog!” she said, reminding him of their daughter’s blog on his campaign Web site. “Meghan’s blog,” he said sheepishly.
As he answered questions, sipping a cup of coffee with his tie tight around his neck, his aides stared down at their BlackBerries.
As they tapped, Mr. McCain said he did not use a BlackBerry, though he regularly reads messages on those of his aides. “I don’t e-mail, I’ve never felt the particular need to e-mail,” Mr. McCain said.
Fees from imaging have become a significant part of cardiologists’ income — accounting for half or more of the $400,000 or so that cardiologists typically make in this country, said Jean M. Mitchell, an economist at Georgetown University who studies the way financial incentives influence doctors.
Besides generating profits themselves, the scans enable cardiologists to find blockages in patients who have no symptoms of heart problems. Doctors can then place stents in patients who would not otherwise have received them, generating additional revenue of $7,500 to $20,000 per patient.
Cardiologists like Dr. Brindis hurt their patients by being overly conservative and setting unrealistic standards for the use of new technology, Dr. Hecht said.
“It’s incumbent on the community to dispense with the need for evidence-based medicine,” he said. “Thousands of people are dying unnecessarily.”