Nobody Asked Me, But...

 

1) Apologies for my absence yesterday. I was under medical treatment for tennis elbow. I got it playing softball after an earlier bout of it from bike riding. I think God's trying to tell me to take up tennis.

 

2) The Zadroga Bill for injuries and illnesses suffered by Ground Zero first responders passed by Congress...after much arm-twisting by Obama and even Jon Stewart... made an exception for coverage for cancers until a scientific study was completed. I'm not sure if this is sufficient, but...

 

3) It was a maganimous gesture made by President Obama, rescheduling perhaps his single most important address to Congress of his administration so they could hold the tee ball game that is a GOP debate. The NFL should reschedule the Thursday night season opener one hour later. It's in the midwest, which is one hour behind DC anyway, and IT'S JUST A FUCKING FOOTBALL GAME!

 

4) But keep in mind "No presidential request for a joint session had ever been turned down."

 

5) Jonathan Allen needs an enema to clear his sinuses.

 

6) A pain in the ass is dead.

 

7) It's about fucking time. By the way, believe it or not, this suggestion comes from a Bush administration official, Glenn Hubbard:

Hubbard is proposing with colleagues Christopher Mayer and Alan Boyce a national refinancing of mortgage debt for the estimated 37 million federally guaranteed loans Americans have with government mortgage issuers like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The issuers would send borrowers an application to refinance at current low mortgage rates; the borrowers would have to be current or become so for at least three months; no down payment would be required; and the government would guarantee the new loans just as it chose in 2008 to guarantee the existing ones, meaning taxpayers would not be taking on any new risk.

A national refinancing effort could slow the number of foreclosures by making mortgage payments more manageable for borrowers who can stay in their homes if they get a few thousand dollars a year in interest savings. It might also stimulate consumer spending — Hubbard estimates $50 billion to $70 billion worth — as homeowners wouldn't feel quite so pinched. "A national refinancing would be like a large, permanent tax cut which would have a very big effect on the economy," says Hubbard, who has briefed the Obama Administration since he introduced the idea.

8) Please. Get involved.

9) Maybe Mother Nature is trying to tell us something.

10) Finally...this story appears to be serious.

 

S-A-D? Blame Global Warming

 

Climate change contributes to depression.

Public Service Announcement

 

Over the next few weeks, you'll read from idiots on Facebook and Twitter who really ought to vet stories first, about the Doomsday Comet scheduled to wreak havoc on October 16.

 

Nah uh!

The Woman Who Bought An iPad And Got Wood

 

No. Seriously.

Rip Them A New One

 

That's essentially what the Economic Populist does to the Fed and Ben Bernanke.

The Shoe's On The Other Foot

 

Seriously, this creeps me out.

Pop Quiz

 

1) Your seven year old son is crying uncontrollable on a tour boat.

 

Do you c) throw him overboard like an empty plastic cup?

 

2) Your teenage son gets into a fistfight with another teen. Your twice the size of either kid, so you try to referee the fight. Do you c) beat the crap out of your kid for losing?

Grain Of Salt

 

Granted, this is Al Jazeera and so should be viewed with an eye towards bias. Still, the underlying report is fascinating.

It's Both Embarassing And Funny

 

For those of you unblessed to live outside New York City, you do not get the opportunity to hear our esteemed alcalde Mike Bloomberg mangle Spanish.

 

To his credit, he's 69 and trying to learn the language. To his discredit, he's 69 and doesn't know he really sucks at it.

 

I mean, REALLY sucks. He knows he's not good, and I suppose he gets credit from the Hispanic community for trying, but...

It was there, on Saturday morning, that @ElBloombito was born. Hurricane Irene was bearing down on New York City, and Ms. Figueroa-Levin was chuckling about Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s heavy American accent and prolific mispronunciations when he delivered warnings in Spanish about the storm during a news conference the previous night.

So she took to Twitter, and began to type.

“Hola Newo Yorko! El stormo grande is mucho dangeroso!” she wrote. And then the Twitter messages began to flow — from the living room computer, from a laptop in her bedroom and from the iPhone she carries everywhere, having mastered the skill of typing on it with one hand while holding her daughter in her other arm.

“Fill los bathtub con agua por preparando el no agua,” read one post. “Los floodwaters!” exclaimed another.

Sadly, she's not exaggerating by half (only a little). He really does sound like Archie Bunker.

I mean it.

 

Thinning The Herd

 

Idiots. Some of these stories are tragic, to be sure, but most smack of foolhardiness at best and foolishness at worst.

Great Healthcare System We Got Here

Babies in Poland have a better chance of surviving than babies in the US.

 

In 1960, the US ranked 16th, and that low due to the extreme poverty minorities lived in, pre-welfare, pre-Great Society.

 

In 2009, after Republicans (and Democrats) raped the welfare system, we ranked 29th.

 

Now, we rank 40th.

 

Soon, we'll be at the bottom.

I Had A Dream

 

This morning in the elevator up to my office, I wondered, "If politicians like Ron and Rand Paul, Rick Perry and Mickey Mouse...I mean, Bachmann are anti-disaster relief, why not bill them for the past disaster relief their constituents have received?"

 

We can take it out of the Federal aid they receive for things like highways, post offices, welfare, homeland security and military bases and contracts.

 

Think of it: we'd reduce the deficit, something else they harangue about ad nauseum, while allowing them to stand up for the principles they espouse.

 

If I was Obama, I'd have the GAO run the numbers and send the bill.

A Leap Forward

The trouble with hydrogen as a replacement for fossil fuels is the energy needed to cull hydrogen usually exceeds the energy drawn out of it, which means that use of conventional energy sources like fossil fuels would actually increase in a hydrogen-energy scheme.

 

If only there was a way to harness a free energy source...

Now scientists from the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville have found an inexpensive semiconductor material that can split water solely using sunlight as its energy source. Their findings were published in the journal Physical Review B.

Energy independence is just a few years away.

 

There, um, is one other problem: As anyone who's watched the video of the Hindenburg disaster knows, hydrogen is not only flammable, not only inflammable, it's combustible and highly reactive.

 

Storage becomes an issue. Now, for most cars, say, not so much. A hole in a gas tank, for example, would be less of a problem than you might imagine because hydrogen is lighter than air and the explosion would rise nearly straight up. An explosion in a gas tank is a different story, but that's an engineering question.

 

It's the storage, like those large tanks at refineries, that becomes the real issue. Oil won't burn unless it's exposed to air (technically, it's the petroleum vapors that burn). Hydrogen does not have this feature, so it needs to be bonded to something, but that something has to be easily disposed of or the hydrogen easily extracted from, as needed for use.

 

Also, hydrogen is the slut of the atomic world: it can bond with practically anything. It's almost as bad as carbon. It makes separating it really hard.

 

But...once more...scientitians come to the rescue this week:

Not to worry, because researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) have come up with a way to safely store hydrogen in a harmless chemical material. Their research was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

So fuel cells are on their way.

Oh Great! Now They're Blackmailing us With Jobs?

MEMO

 

To: AT&T

 

From: Actor212

 

Take your jobs and shove 'em.

 

Bring them back now, don't use people's lives as leverage.

I Missed This Article During Irene

 

Mr. Weaker Boener, WHERE ARE OUR MUTHAFUCKING JOBS?????

Remember How Green Jobs Cost The US Economy $2 Million Each?

 

Yea. About that...

It's About Time

 

Mass layoffs coming to Wall Street

SASQ

 

Yes

 

We shouldn't concern ourselves with overspending now. We should concern ourselves with undertaxation.

Oath, Shmoath

 

These two couldn't tell the truth if they had electrical wires attached to their gonads.

Irene Is Mostly Behind Us

 

While not meaning to diminish the pain she's created, particularly in places not used to hurricanes and tropical storms, it's been six years since Katrina devastated an entire city.

The Day The Earth Stood Still

 

So what if ET shows up here, all peaceful and beneficent, and then decides we don't deserve their friendship?

If You Were Worried About An Outbreak Of The Black Death....

 

 

....don't be.

 

Instead, be worried about this.

Queen Of Denial

 

It always intrigues me to read how deeply in denial people who make controversial decisions can be:

In an exclusive live interview on TODAY Tuesday, former Vice President Dick Cheney disputed the notion that the invasion of Iraq has weakened America’s standing in the global community.

“I don’t think that it damaged our reputation around the world,’’ he told Matt Lauer. “I just don’t believe that. I think the critics at home want to argue that. In fact, I think it was sound policy that dealt with a very serious problem and eliminated Saddam Hussein from the kind of problem he presented before.

Lemme see...we unilaterally invaded a sovereign nation under false pretenses, then changed those false pretenses to yet another set of false pretenses, then changed THOSE pretenses to a justification that wouldn't have passed the smell test with Neville Chamberlain, then rounded up suspects among an innocent people and tortured them, and all we managed to accomplish was to eliminate a pathetically inept dictator of a fourth rate military power who had already been contained by our massive air superiority in conjunction with our allies under the auspices of a recognized international peacekeeping body, all while inflaming a region that already had reason to hate us.

So, um, what WOULD weaken our standard in the international community, Dick?

 

Why We Are In For More Trouble Before We Get Less

 

It's because of asshats like this:

[John] Taylor is the chairman and CEO of FX Concepts, a hedge fund that specializes in currency speculation. It's the largest hedge fund of its kind worldwide, which is why Taylor is held partly responsible for the crash of the euro. Critics accuse Taylor and others like him of having exacerbated the government crisis in Greece and accelerated the collapse in Ireland.

People like Taylor are "like a pack of wolves" that seeks to tear entire countries to pieces, said Swedish Finance Minister Anders Borg. For that reason, they should be fought "without mercy," French President Nicolas Sarkozy raged. Andrew Cuomo, the former attorney general and current governor of New York, once likened short-sellers to "looters after a hurricane."

The German tabloid newspaper Bild sharply criticized Taylor on its website, writing: "This man is betting against the euro." If that is what he is doing, he is certainly successful. While Greece is threatened with bankruptcy, Taylor is listed among the world's 25 highest-paid hedge fund managers.

Markets serve a purpose. They do whittle the fat out of inefficiencies. If a firm spends more than it should, for example, the markets respond by bidding the price of the stock down, based on the theory that lower earnings means lower value in the future. This is not a bad thing. It's in many ways a healthy measure of company's health.

Even currency speculation, in and of itself, is not a bad thing, necessarily. There's nothing wrong with profiting off a country's inability to rein in a fiscal problem. They are, after all, supposed to be run by knowledgable people.

Where it gets ugly, both on the private and public side of the equation, is when the speculators can control the game.

Ideally, markets are supposed to operate in a vacuum: everyone has equal and perfect knowledge of the future. This is why the SEC exists, along with any number of industry-standard self-regulators. They're supposed to keep the game honest, because everyone is supposed to have a fair roll of the dice.

In practice, as we've seen, things don't work that way. Investment bankers become politicians and more and more often, politicians become investment bankers. This means not only is information imperfect, it's gamed and massaged to benefit those in the know over those out of the loop.

Speculators are the worst. Not only will they game the information, they'll interpret every single development like it's a Talmudic passage.

Think of the birthers and the Obama flap, and now add trillions of dollars to the mix, and you'll see how dangerous this game can be.

But hey, the rules are the rules, and these idiots think they're playing by them!

"The big problem is that in some cases these politicians are looking for the easy way out and want to blame somebody else and say speculators are taking Europe apart, taking the euro down and ruining the prosperity of our country," he says, characterizing such charges against hedge fund managers as "nonsense." "My capital isn't the capital of the Rothschilds," he says, insisting that he is working with the "capital of the people," and that his goal is to protect and increase this capital. Taylor points out that no one from any of the German pension funds that invest their money with him has ever called him on the phone to tell him not to bet against the euro.

Don't blame him because politicians have to scramble to fix the problem! After all, it's only people's lives, fortunes and sacred honor involved!

 

Sexual Transmissions

 

Today was a pretty big day for STDs.

 

1)  LA porn industry shuts down after actor tests positive for HIV

 

2)  Health Matters: HIV Patient Becomes A Donor

 

3)  Wisconsin hospital may have infected thousands of patients (I know! Wisconsin, right?)

 

4)  Report: US doctors infected Guatemalans with STDs

 

Not a good week to have sex. Or a blood transfusion. Or work in the porn industry. Or go to a hospital. Or...

Oh! It Was Just A Joke!

 

Next she'll be telling us "Two Jews walk into a bar..."

Which Witch Is Which?

 

Christine Palin and Sarah O'Donnell to attend same rally in Iowa.

Da Noive!

 

It's not like *koffkoffsekritMooslinJeremiahWright!!!!!* Obama ever faced such scrutiny

Ever Wonder What It Would Have Been Like To Be The Last Person Out?

 

Final survivor of the Trade Center attacks reflects on the past decade.

How Fast Does Rain Fall?

 

Well, here's a scientitian with far too much time on his hands.

 

I can't be arsed. Can my physicist/enthusiast friends double check his math? 55 mph sounds a little high to me.

Return Of Angry Birds

 

And this time, they've mutated.

What Did You Think Was Going To Happen, Shithead?

 

You think labor unions were about to welcome you?

 

These aren't helpless housewives living with an abusive husband.

Shorter Eric Cantor

Republican job plan

 

1) Paean workers

 

2) Pee on workers

 

3) ????

 

4) Profit!

Dumbest. Republican. Of The Week.

 

Is the National Weather Service necessary?

 

Bonus stoopidity: He wants to abolish the National Hurricane Center, too.

Money is Fiction

 

Honest to God's truth.

This Is Your Lord, Jesus....

...this is your Lord Jesus on steroids. Any questions?

 

(Forgive them, Lord, they know not what they do...)

Your Photo Of The Day

Parrotfish teeth, Great Barrier Reef (courtesy)

Pass The Box Of Godiva, Please!

 

Chocolate lowers stroke, heart disease risks.

False Start On False Starts

 

Little notice in the blizzard of storm news (HA!) was the disqualification of sprinter Usain Bolt in the 100m dash at the world championships this weekend.

 

He false started twice. The second time is controversial as it appears on some replays that the neighboring runner may have been responsible for the false start.

 

But I digress...

 

Immediately, calls went out to review the rule (that has been long-standing in track and field) to disqualify runners after a single false start. It used to be after two false starts by the same athlete, but runners would often deliberately false start to psyche out their competitors, and to sneak a peek at start tactics. In 2003, the IAAF ruled the first false start by anyone would serve as a warning to everyone, but that didn't stop the head games, so now it's one and done.

 

Which makes sense. You know the rules, you live with them. Bolt anticipated the gun in order to get an edge on the field. He lost his gamble.

Maybe Micky Mouse...I Mean, Bachmann Has A Point.

 

Maybe Irene was God's work:

 

FOX reporter covered in human feces

 

On camera, no less.

The End Of Ron Paul's Aspirations

 

Ron Paul on FEMA

Even as hurricane Irene was roaring up the East Coast, Ron Paul was asking why the federal government has any role in disaster management and relief.

Drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, Congressman.

 

Thoughts On Irene

 

Michelle Bachmann's right, in one regard: Hurricane Irene is a wake up call, but for reasons other than the ones she cites.

 

We pretty much got lucky (and I don't mean to minimize the impact on anyone who suffered a loss this weekend.) The storm did not gather strength off the DelMarVa as was originally projected, and even heading into North Carolina, dry air started to infiltrate the storm, which while it didn't weaken the winds, helped keep the rainfall totals in check a little. Basically, the back end of the storm was lopped off.

 

But the storm also should have lost strength faster than it did over cold water, and that's something scientists and meterologists will have to study closely.

 

My personal, uninformed opinion is that this storm was too big for its own good. Had there been a smaller, tighted windfield that could have kept the rotation intact longer once it reached Cat 4, it would have wreaked significant destruction all along the seaboard as more than a Cat 1 hurricane.

 

And there's the other mystery of this hurricane. It lost strength over water faster than when it was half on, half off the coastline. Usually, the friction from land will compensate for the intensifying out at sea, both tearing the storm apart while weakening it. As with the fact that it didn't maintain strength as a high Cat storm, I suspect the enormity of the windfield picking up energy off the ocean had much to do with it.

 

Too, Irene lingered off the southern coast, but once it passed the Outer Banks, it seemed to put on jets and rocket up the coast, which probably saved a lot of homes in Jersey and Long Island. Had it lingered longer, who knows what the flooding would have been like?

 

To our nation's credit, the events of 9-11 and particularly Katrina forced us to take a long, close look at disaster preparedness, and the plans implemented this weekend were a tribute to the effectiveness of those plans. It certainly helped that governors and mayors all in the storm's path spoke with one voice about the intensity and danger of this storm.

 

As much as I hate to acknowledge this, Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, the state with the longest coastline affected by the storm, deserves singling out as an effective (if bullying) voice to the people in harm's way. His words moved a million people inland, and no one seemed to really mind.

 

Unlike New York where Bloomberg's cadging was seen as unnecessary and chiding. People have short memories, forgetting that the city did practically nothing ahead of the Christmas blizzard and was taken to serious task for that.

 

We dodged a bullet. This time.

The Right Move

 

President Obama seems to have made the right pick to head the Council of Economic Advisers.

 

Dr. Alan Krueger is an economics professor who specializes in labor issues, in particular why the boomlet of the mid-2000s produced almost no jobs (a million net jobs were created in the two Bush administrations. President Obama created that many by the end of his first year in office.)

 

The people have needed a voice on the inside ever since the economic royalists of the Bush administration were rousted out the door. It's years late, but it's a hopeful sign.

Oh, Micky! You're So Fine, You Blow My Mind!

 

Micky Mouse, errrrr, Bachmann, cheerleading death and destruction

Equal Rights For The Ugly

 

I got mine, you get your own, Jack.

 

At least now we know how some neocons got their college degrees...affirmative action from other ugly folks.

Zev Chafets Needs An Enema

By Carl

 

Shorter...no, verbatim Chafets: "We're all Cheneyites now."

President Obama has largely adopted the Cheney playbook on combating terrorism, from keeping Gitmo open to trying suspected enemies of the state in military tribunals. Obama’s drone war, which has quadrupled the number of attacks in the past two years, reflects Cheney’s whatever-it-takes approach. The leftist wrath once trained on Bush’s veep is aimed at the Democratic incumbent these days. Even the Bush-Cheney pro-democracy doctrine, born as a substitute rationale for the Iraq War after the failure to find WMD, is bearing fruit, toppling dictators from Cairo to Tripoli. The dirty little secret of the last few years is that the man George Bush called “Big Time” won. We’re all Cheneyites now.

Um, no. President Obama has not been the most diametrically opposed to the Cheney/Bush policies of the past decade, it's true and that has frustrated his liberal base.

 

But if you recall, Zev, he tried to close Gitmo and in no uncertain terms was told off by, well, asshats like you and Rush Limbaugh and Weaker Boener that to do so would be tantamount to treason. Obama ended Cheney's war of choice in Iraq, for all intents and purposes. And Obama's Homeland Security department continues to thwart legitimate plots against the United States-- not the phonied up plots of the Sears Tower bombings-- by using old fashioned detective work.

 

And look, you win when the goal you set out to achieve-- finding WMDs-- is accomplished. If you move the goalposts to what you've actually accomplished, that's called a "compromise," not a victory.

 

Chafets continues to bloviate about how events in Egypt, Libya, and Syria justify the Cheney Doctrine of pre-emptive intervention, but they don't. The Arab summer would have happened under any circumstance, largely because it was internal strife, specifically shortages of food and jobs, that caused the uprisings.

 

Unless you want to make the case that the wars so bankrupted America that we were unable to prop up the shitty little dictators that the Republicans have been supporting for decades. That case I might give you but I'm not sure that, given the domestic economic fallout, it's a case you want to make.

 

The telling event in the book, the event Chafets ought to pay more attention to as he ponders the future of barbaric conservatism, especially in light of his deep support for all things Israeli, is the scene in 2007 in his book where Cheney insists on bombing Syria's nuclear reactor:

“After I finished,” he writes, “the president asked, ‘Does anyone here agree with the vice president?’ Not a single hand went up around the room.”

A room full of blood-thirsty, pro-Israel necons unanimously voted him down. There's the Bush administration in a nutshell: too little, too late, and too stupd.

(crossposted to Simply Left Behind)

Zev Chafets Needs An Enema

 

Shorter...no, verbatim Chafets: "We're all Cheneyites now."

President Obama has largely adopted the Cheney playbook on combating terrorism, from keeping Gitmo open to trying suspected enemies of the state in military tribunals. Obama’s drone war, which has quadrupled the number of attacks in the past two years, reflects Cheney’s whatever-it-takes approach. The leftist wrath once trained on Bush’s veep is aimed at the Democratic incumbent these days. Even the Bush-Cheney pro-democracy doctrine, born as a substitute rationale for the Iraq War after the failure to find WMD, is bearing fruit, toppling dictators from Cairo to Tripoli. The dirty little secret of the last few years is that the man George Bush called “Big Time” won. We’re all Cheneyites now.

Um, no. President Obama has not been the most diametrically opposed to the Cheney/Bush policies of the past decade, it's true and that has frustrated his liberal base.

 

But if you recall, Zev, he tried to close Gitmo and in no uncertain terms was told off by, well, asshats like you and Rush Limbaugh and Weaker Boener that to do so would be tantamount to treason. Obama ended Cheney's war of choice in Iraq, for all intents and purposes. And Obama's Homeland Security department continues to thwart legitimate plots against the United States-- not the phonied up plots of the Sears Tower bombings-- by using old fashioned detective work.

 

And look, you win when the goals you set out to achieve-- finding WMDs-- is accomplished. If you move the goalposts to what you've actually accomplished, that's called a "compromise," not a victory.

 

Chafets continues to bloviate about how events in Egypt, Libya, and Syria justify the Cheney Doctrine of pre-emptive intervention, but they don't. The Arab summer would have happened under any circumstance, largely because it was internal strife, specifically shortages of food and jobs, that caused the uprisings.

 

Unless you want to make the case that the wars so bankrupted America that we were unable to prop up the shitty little dictators that the Republicans have been supporting for decades. That case I might give you but I'm not sure that, given the domestic economic fallout, it's a case you want to make.

 

The telling event in the book, the event Chafets ought to pay more attention to as he ponders the future of barbaric conservatism, especially in light of his deep support for all things Israeli, is the scene in 2007 in his book where Cheney insists on bombing Syria's nuclear reactor:

“After I finished,” he writes, “the president asked, ‘Does anyone here agree with the vice president?’ Not a single hand went up around the room.”

A room full of blood-thirsty, pro-Israel necons unanimously voted him down. There's the Bush administration in a nutshell: too little, too late, and too stupd.

 

I'M ALIVE!

 

Don't all boo at once...