The Impeach Pit

The drumbeat of Blogtopia's (© Skippy, The Bush Kangaroo) march towards impeachment is getting louder with each passing Democratic somersault at Bush's command.

I haven't said much about this, either here or on various blogs that I comment on. I'm of mixed feelings regarding it, and I hadn't really sorted them out, and still haven't. I do think it's important as a gut check for any politician who peruses Blogtopia (© Skippy, The Bush Kangaroo) to hear all sides of the issue, even the wishywashy middle.

Look, Bush is a crook, I think we can all agree on that. John Dean, who both helped mastermind and then expose Watergate, has likened the criminality and unconstitutionality of the Bush crimes against America to being far worse than Nixon's. Liz Holtzmann, who was on the House Judiciary Committee investigating and drawing up articles of impeachment against Nixon, has even written a book laying out the case for Bush's impeachment.

That there's factual reasons for impeachment cannot be denied, except by the thirty percenters who still support the jackass-in-chief. And still...

Liberals complain about Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, so much so that you can't even hear the right wing blogosphere complain about them much anymore (which might say something in its own right). They complain about capitulation, they complain about cowardice, they complain about caving in.

But if I'm House Speaker or Senate Leader, I'm not sure I start impeachment proceedings now, either. History will judge the Bush administration as one of the most corrupt, stubborn, self-aggrandizing, and ignorant group of people to run a nation since the Soviet Poliburo. The hubris of their misjudgements and abuses of power practically drips like honey off a comb.

But history will also turn a harsh eye towards Congress in the years to come, and in the cold light of a sober morning after inhaling the vodka of retribution, history is going to write one fact that will stand out amongst all others: Congress started impeachment hearings of the Commander In Chief while troops were on the ground, fighting a war.

Whether the war was just or not, whether you agreed with the war in 2002 and don't now or disagreed with the war from the start (which I did), we have troops there, and history shows that a nation at war which suffers what amounts to a revolution within its borders ends up destroyed. It happened in Rome. It happened in the Holy Roman Empire, as France peeled off bits of that agglomeration while civil war ensued. It happened to the Csarist empire during World War I, as any Finn can tell you, and indeed, you can make the case that the downfall of the British empire occurred simultaneously.

So there's historical precedent to consider. Another factor against impeachment is time. The break-in that kicked off Watergate happened in June 1972. The House committee didn't even sit until June 1974, and then only after several high-level members of the White House staff had been indicted. A fairly sizable part of this delay revolves around "executive privilege" and ultimately, the Supreme Court had to step in.

As I said in March, Bush's best defense in these last two years of his term is to merely run out the clock. Time is the enemy of Congress, time and SCOTUS. I had these two factors in mind when I said Bush would run out the clock.

Even with the entire weight of Congress pressing against Bush, with the hedged bet of a loaded Supreme Court on his side he'd gladly take his chances with a court fight. And the judiciary is notorious for not wanting to get involved in a fight between Congress and the President, so the delaying tactic would take on an even greater urgency, since SCOTUS would simply tell them to come to some sort of compromise.

Finally, in the argument against impeachment made by someone who favors it, at least partly, is the emotional factor. How much of this demand for impeachment about the criminality of the Bush administration and how much of it is anger at a man who was born on third base thinking he'd hit a triple and stumbled into nearly every break he's ever gotten in life? The image of that smirk on Jan. 20, 2009 over the shoulder of President Hillary or Barack might invite a riot in some of the rougher quarters of America, even if, as John Dean has pointed out, Bush could be impeached after the fact, altho it would amount to a slap on the wrist, since the only concrete effect it would have is to prevent him from ever seeking office again, and to disbar him, if he were a lawyer. Oh, and to enter his name in the record books.

I understand now how some of the more rabid conservatives felt about Clinton, even if the Big Dog did nothing, and I mean nothing, to warrant the level of anger that Bush has engaged with his criminality.

I, for one, would hate to see Bush leave office without an official tarnish to his record, for the right wing to point out and make the case that, in two terms, Bush was never indicted or impeached, unlike "that liberal hero, Clenis". It ain't fair.

But life ain't fair. Sometimes the bullies get away with it while the nerd sits detention for fighting back.

Carl's Insomniac Theatre

Created for Live Earth by Airside

Go Figure

The more things change, the more they stay the same:

Fuel thirst deepens despite more mass transit

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Lofty gasoline prices have helped push public transit ridership to the highest level since the country spawned its highway system in the 1950s -- but the growth is not enough to drive down demand for motor fuel any time soon.

U.S. public transportation use rose to 10.1 billion rides last year, the most since 1957, when President Dwight Eisenhower signed the interstate highway bill into law, according to the American Public Transportation Association, an industry group.

The trend toward public transit has been driven in part by high retail gasoline prices, which have hit levels above $3 per gallon each summer since hurricanes damaged oil production and refineries along the Gulf of Mexico in 2005.

Now, you gotta figure, with more people riding trains and buses, there might be fewer car trips taken, right?

Um. No.

Even so, the increase in transit use won't put the brakes on rising U.S. gasoline demand, mainly because only about 5 percent of workers who commute in a motorized vehicle use public transport, said Pisarski.

This year gasoline demand is running more than double 1957 levels, according to the Energy Information Administration. U.S. gasoline demand was more than 292 million barrels in May, the last month for which data was available, up from nearly 118 million barrels in May 1957.

Fuel demand is rising as car owners increase personal and business trips, said Pisarski. And people are increasingly both living and working in suburbs, a trend that is hard to service with public transport, he said.

Which may be true, of course. The traffic in suburban areas is noticeably higher than even five years ago. Here in New York, there's been a huge debate in Nassau and Suffolk counties about what to do to improve the load-bearing capacity of highways that don't come anywhere near the city.

The problem? Residents of these counties around the nation moved to the suburbs specifically to get away from the smells, the smoke and the asphalt of the city, so they are foursquare against any kind of improvements. Factor in that many if not most of these exurban areas are already fully developed, leaving precious little land that the county can seize and use to expand the road system anyway, and you begin to see the scope of the problem.

This exodus of jobs from the cities to the suburbs is a pretty recent phenomenon. Although the trend was in place before 2001, the terror attacks of September 11, coupled with the subsequent deliberate manipulation of information by the Bush administration to paint a picture that urban centers were constantly under the imminent threat of attack, created an environment that pushed employers to leave the cities in droves.

This is also reflected in housing prices. For example, a recent study showed that the type of rise in real estate values normally experienced in Manhattan had been occuring in Queens, Brooklyn, Nassau and Suffolk counties, too. Why commute by bus or rail across half the city to your job, when if you move off the island, you can buy a car and drive yourself to work?

And there's a big part of the problem, right there: the fact that, given a choice, more people prefer to be alone on their way to work than to be subject to the whims of a public transit system. In the city, it may be the most efficient and fastest way to get from point A to point B, but that's because it has a budget big enough from a large enough tax base to provide continual and frequent service particularly at rush hours, but also frequent enough away from rush hours that putting in overtime at your job isn't a tragic inconvenience.

Suburban systems would have to rely on a rider base that is far less densely packed together than its city counterpart and the buses (presumably) would have to cover a far bigger area in order to pick up the same number of people that a city bus does. Those two factors alone would make it impossible to achieve the level of service that a city transit system has.

Right now, suburban mass transit is mainly focused on getting people to the city. It would be hard to justify altering many routes to include intrasuburan commutes, but in saying that, it's also important to recognize that many of the suburban office centers themselves are near rail stations or in towns that are feeders to the big city, so it theoretically could be done.

Me, I love the subways. I also love my (dear departed) car, as well. I don't mind taking a train to work (it's only a twenty minute commute) since it afford me a chance to read a little, or even think about what I'm going to yammer on this blog. Driving into Manhattan would only leave me scarred emotionally.

I do understand the appeal, however.

This is a tough nut to crack, to be sure, but it's important. In an era when it's become patently clear that we must wean ourselves off the fossil fuel bottle, we find ourselves using more and more of it.

Humans is funny peoples.

Friday Music Blogging

It just dunnit get any better than this:Stevie Wonder & Ray Charles - Livin' For The City

In honor of Stevie's announcement that he will be touring again!

Friday Kitten Blogging

Cuz ma dadby es rilly bizzee thes week, he wuz not can has mah pitchers, so ah tole hem ah would fine some funnay pitchers an pose 'em. K, bai!

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) First, it was terrorist squirrels. Then, it was spy squirrels arrested in Iran. It seems like there's an entire subculture on the planet made up entirely of squirrels engaged in criminal behavior.

2) What if FDR ran World War II the way Bush has run the Iraq invasion? (h/t MissCellania)

3) It's bad enough that the administration is doing stuff on the QT, but the courts ought to know better than to be complicit in the Bush crimes. Yes, this is a secret court...so what?

4) Apparently, I'm too mellow, according to some of my critics.

5) Overly dramatic presentation aside-- come on, Barack, pauses are for children, unless you have some new bit of data to convey. We all knew you meant to exclude civilians-- Obama's statement regarding nukes was on its face a pretty moderate one, but Hillary seems determined to drive Obama onto her turf by making him seem to mimic the positions of any hack politician. She's doing a good job, too.

6) Wal-Mart's likely to take a hit on this. The old adage, you get what you pay for, is true. That Wal-Mart has made billions off the sweat of low-paid Chinese workers, and those same factories now appear to have been run on an even tighter shoe string, means that Wal-Mart will now have to go back and reconsider all products that it outsources to China, as well as all vendors. The last thing they'd want is people dropping dead in their aisles.

7) Sharight! Run another one past us, Rupert!

8) Let's put up a hat trick of annoying, hated corporations, shall we? If I walk out my office right now, one block in any direction, I can get a Starbucks coffee...if I was that insane, could take out a second mortgage for a cup, and if I felt like spending the rest of the day getting that god-awful bitter taste out of my mouth. Apparently, that might change in the future.

9) First, it was the rhinos, then it was the sharks...

10) Hm. It seems I haven't been keeping up...

11) First, it was Genesis. Then it was The Police...

12) Happy anniversary to me.

The Oil Slick

I'll have some analysis on the other side of this excerpt:

LONDON (Reuters) - Oil is headed straight to $100 a barrel, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said hours after prices surged this week to an all-time high near $79.

But others remember the price collapses of the last four years and wonder if markets are headed for a repeat.

U.S. crude on Wednesday climbed to a record high of $78.77 a barrel, surpassing the previous peak of $78.40 reached in July 2006.[...]

Since 2003, the oil market has entered into a sharp correction phase after climbing to its highs for each year.

After reaching last year's peak, prices tumbled 36 percent in the following six months to below $50 a barrel.

For the record, the futures market is betting that prices will drop, and while I concur, notice a trend that develops here: each peak is higher, each floor also rises, and longer-term, the floors are rising faster than the ceilings:Some of the heaviest hitters in the commodities markets have predicted that, even without adjusting for inflation, gasoline will hit $15 a gallon in 1995 dollars within eight years (adjusting for inflation, the actual price you'll pay would probably be somewhere in the neighborhood of $23 a gallon). And lest you think I'm talking out of my hat:

Chavez is not alone in believing oil's rally will continue. Goldman Sachs said last month prices could reach $95 by the end of the year.

It's hard to predict precisely what $100 a barrel oil will mean immediately for Americans. The correlation between crude and gasoline, for example, is less tethered than the correlation between crude and home heating oil. We see today, in fact, that oil at $79 a barrel has hardly budged gasoline prices upward, where oil at $65 a barrel back in April had prices at the pump well over $3 a gallon.

The perfect storm for Americans would be an oil spike in October. Even at $80 a barrel, refining capacity would be limited by physical production requirements: the shift to more environmentally-friendly winter blends of gas demands that refineries be shut down for retooling. And some of the crude, much of the crude, would be diverted for the imminent heating oil season. If global warming keeps the weather unseasonably warm in the fall in the Northeast, thus encouraging more people to drive later into the fall and winter, $4 a gallon at $80 a barrel would be likely. $5 a barrel in states like California and Massachussetts would be reachable.

$75 just to fill up a Toyota Corolla, $150 to fill up an SUV, will bring home the crisis to Americans in a way they'd never imagined.

Hump Day Comedy Blogging

Stick Magnetic Ribbons on Your SUV

Posted Sep 22, 2006

The Asylum Street Spankers with an ode to Republicans.

Hillary's Gambit

Hockey is a dirty game. Even when it's played beautifully, with grace and speed, there is the inevitable cheap shot elbow to the ribs, or stick between someone's feet. Often, the provocateur gets caught and penalized, but more times than not, he (or she) won't, and many times, it's this chippy kind of play that sets up scoring opportunities.

Politics is a dirty game, too. Elbows get thrown in the corner, skates get kicked, groins get kneed. You accept this when you play because you understand the nature of the game: that everyone is trying to get to the goal (office) and can't afford to play Alfonse et Gaston games.

This week, Hillary scored a goal:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Hillary Clinton has widened her lead over fellow Sen. Barack Obama in the race for the U.S. Democratic presidential nomination, a new poll showed on Wednesday.

The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll also showed that if the elections were held today, either of those Democrats would beat former New York Major Rudy Giuliani, the current Republican favorite.

Forty-three percent of Democratic respondents said they preferred the New York senator and former first lady over other Democratic candidates in the 2008 contest, up from 39 percent in June, the poll showed.

That put Clinton even farther ahead of chief rival Obama, the Illinois senator who slipped from 25 percent in the June poll to 22 percent in July. Clinton and Obama have sparred in recent weeks, trading accusations last week over foreign policy positions.

How did this happen?

It's early yet, to be sure, and there's plenty of time for that lead to get chipped away, but the race is starting in earnest now, and this was a bit of a surprise, but it bodes well for Hillary's third quuarter fundraising, I think, so it bears some examination.

For my part, I think the semi-"Sister Souljah" moment for Hillary came in the recent YouTube debate. You may recall a question regarding sitting down with people we don't particularly like to negotiate with them:Obama stated categorically he would (with, I think, the inferred background work of making sure there was something to be gained from talks). Hillary jumped on this:

Clinton sensed an opening. “I will not promise to meet with the leaders of these countries during my first year,” she said, adding, “I don’t want to be used for propaganda purposes.”

Figuring she had the high ground, Clinton continued on the attack Tuesday, calling Obama’s position “irresponsible and frankly naive.”

In one short stroke, she turned around the debate, during which Obama tried very hard to paint Hillary as "Bush lite" (ouch, that was a nasty elbow!), and made Obama seem lost at sea and unprepared to deal with the world at large.

A not-too-subtle dig at his rapid rise from state legislator to a contending Presidential candidate, and a reminder that we've just had six years of someone getting on-the-job training. Talk about calling someone "Bush lite".

Many, as that last linked article implies, have said that Obama gained ground and momentum from that debate exchange, making Hillary out to be, well, "Bush lite" by continually bringing up her Iraq invasion vote, but the truth is, that story has played itself out already, particularly in the 2004 election when Kerry was called on it by Bush himself.

Too, Obama's own voting record in the Senate has mirrored Hillary's nearly perfectly on issues like funding the continuation of the invasion. Yes, there's ground to be gained in the more rube-laden sections of the left with reminders of the war and Hillary's regrettable complicity with this administration, but I think we've reached a point where people don't care about how we got there, just what we want to do about it now. In that regard, Obama has not distinguished himself from Hillary, pretty much "me-tooing" her positions.

Why this matters, at least in my analysis, is that Hillary will now start to draw the serious money that's stayed out of the race so far: it's too early to contribute, no one's scored any points, there's two or three legitimate (four, if you count Al Gore which no one seems to be doing much lately) contenders and the penalty for jumping in too early is severe if you choose the wrong horse.

By drawing up into the 40 percent range, Hillary has put this contest up on a new plateau. People cited her experience and competence as reasons for choosing her. That she took most of her new-found support from Obama is no surprise, then.

Some have called her attack a "cheap shot." I don't think it's any cheaper than what's been thrown at her from both sides of the fence. That she took a chance and scored a point is indicative to me that the vaunted Clinton team is back and is running the show again.

*WHEW* That Was Close!

We can all breathe just a little bit easier now:

Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation has admitted it is now "highly unlikely" it will proceed with its $5bn (£2.5bn) offer for the Dow Jones media group.

It said this was because of the reported present level of opposition from the Bancroft family, which owns 64% of Dow Jones' voting shares.

With the Bancrofts expected to make a statement later on Tuesday, reports say less than a third are backing the deal.

The board of directors, which presumably has many of the Bancrofts on it, did OK the deal last week, but the Bancrofts themselves clearly had issues with Rupert Murdoch's overbearing presences in his other holdings.

It's hard to describe how sensible people feel about Rupert Murdoch. He's not precisely beloved in most circles (save for the low-normals in the Republican party), and is viewed as a sort of "necessary evil" wherever he goes, not because he can actually contribute anything to anybody or any organization, but simply because he buys ink by the barrel. You can't really ignore him and to challenge him is to risk taking any shred of privacy and decency off in public.

He's not known as someone who is a gracious loser, in other words.

The Wall Street Journal is not exactly a bastion of left-wing rabble rousing. It's editorial board sits somewhere to the right of Augusto Pinochet, the brutal former dictator of Chile, and it's hatred of anything smacking of any government control is legend.

Except of course when said government intervention saves its own bacon or covers its losses (not directly, of course).

The reporting in the news pages, however, is stellar, and something the Bancrofts can rightly be proud of. That coverage, quite objective and therefore quite "liberal", has its skirts covered by the savage reactionarism of the editors, who would probably like nothing less than to bring back child labor...after all, those kids are spending their worthless lives sitting idle in classes, learning, while they could be out there earning money for their corporate overlords!

While they may not agree with the stories they edit, they can smell a money maker a mile away, and the Journal can point with pride to the stories they cover and how they cover them. If the Journal was a newspaper as opposed to a business periodical, and invested money in the reporting staff and their resources, the WSJ could easily wrest the "paper of record" mantle from the New York Times.

And it's this that worried me most about the Murdoch take-over attempt. See, he'd rebrand some Fox channel as a "business channel in the tradition of the Wall Street Journal," and I'd be OK with that. After all, Beatle tunes are being used to sell diapers now and that's what sells now, is the brand. I accept that.

What I don't accept is, well, look, you can hear "All You Needs Is Luvs" and while you may momentarily lose your lunch over it, you can dust off Magical Mystery Tour and play the B side, and reaffirm your belief in all things Beatles.

Unfortunately, in the news business, old news is bad news and it's pointless to try to dig up an old Wall Street Journal and reminisce over the way they handled the terror attacks on 9/11. You'd want to read a current Journal and experience their top-notch journalism on a fresh story.

And if you need further proof of the Journal's reportage, Daniel Pearl was working for them when he was kidnapped and killed.

Which puts him about three million percent higher on the totem pole than the people who read only the editorials, then repeat them near-verbatim on right-wing blogs using Cheeto-stained keyboards, sitting in Mom's basement.

So you can exhale now. While the Journal's future is uncertain, it's not destined for Page Six treatment.

UPDATE: Sadly, I didn't bite when they stuffed the moosecock in my mouth, so I swallowed this story whole. I should have, could have, known better. The deal was practically done late last week, but my hopeful heart and firm faith in the better nature of humanity did me in to believing that Murdoch would be repudiated.

Silly me. Mea culpa, gentle reader. I try hard to be cynical. I let my heart get ahead of the facts here.

Murdoch, it appears, will own the Wall Street Journal. I shall now mourn.

Spoiling For A Fight

This is utter lunacy. I'm reminded of the apocryphal story recounted in "Citizen Kane" about the start of the Spanish-American War: "You provide the pictures, I'll provide the war.":

NEAR SHATT AL-ARAB (Reuters) - Mandated to secure Iraqi waters, the commander of a U.S. gunboat orders his crew to watch an Iranian look-out post for activity as his ship sails through waters with no clear divide between Iraq and Iran.

It was in this murky stretch that 15 British military personnel were captured by Iran earlier this year and accused of straying into its waters. A long-running dispute over the nearby Shatt al-Arab border river has helped spark war in the past.

Now, the U.S. military and its allies patrol as close as possible to where they believe Iraq's territorial waters end, but as tension rises between the Islamic Republic and the West, so does the potential for accidental escalation.

"We set a line where we think it's reasonable, and by customary use, going up and down that line, we try and set the tone," said John Chandler of the Australian HMAS Anzac warship, part of the coalition patrolling Iraqi waters.

"The Iranians have slightly different view as to where the line is."

Uh, yea, not like you don't have binoculars or anything, and can stand off a few hundred yards...but the clearest sign of provocation comes from the idiots on patrol there:

"We're going to drive down the line on the Iraqi side, and we're going to drive down slow. For Americans, we see this as driving down the strip on a Friday night, waving to all our friends," [USS Typhoon Commander Joel Lang] said on the way to the disputed area.

Now, I don't know where Commander Lang grew up, but I'm fairly sure the neighbors weren't polishing their guns and pointing them in your general direction. Perhaps a slightly more serious attitude is in order, rather than this reckless and insane lightheartedness?

I mean, I know you work for a man who thinks nothing of popping wheelies in a golf cart with the British Prime Minister at his first summit, but a little decorum is in order, and this isn't a dick-swinging contest to see if you can outjerk the President.(video at link)

All this comes on the heels of a warning from Iran over the weekend:

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki has told a German magazine that the United States has too many problems in Iraq to become involved in armed conflict with Iran. The United States "is not in a position to get into a new military conflict," Mottaki was quoted as saying in an excerpt of an interview to be published in Focus magazine.

Who'd have ever thought Iran would be the bastion of reason in this conflict?

That's not to say that Iran is innocent. No sir, and in fact, insurgents in Iraq have already issued warnings to Iran that they face an all-out border skirmish if they don't stop meddling in Iraq, but the simple fact is, 170,000 soldiers are tired of fighting. Americans are tired of fighting and probably won't support another war in a region we have no business meddling in at all. They might, correctly, it turns out, view an Iran-US showdown as a provocation on our part, as opposed to some imaginary slight.

Particularly given this administration's track record with honesty and forthrightness. You know, "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, errrrr...won't get fooled again" (which may be the first time The Who have made it into international diplomacy.)

Ripples Across The Pond

Earlier this year, neo-cons had great rejiocing when France elected "conservative" (because, really, he's practically middle-of-the-road-right, from an objective American viewpoint) Nicholas Sarkozy president. I wonder what they'll make of this?:

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's conservative ruling camp was headed for a devastating election defeat on Sunday that could well force the 52-year-old leader to resign, media exit polls showed.

The election for half the seats in parliament's 242-member upper house is the first nationwide electoral test since Abe took over as prime minister 10 months ago, pledging to boost Japan's global security profile, rewrite its pacifist constitution and nurture economic growth.

Public broadcaster NHK said Abe's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its partner, the New Komeito, were seen winning between 39 and 55 of the 64 seats needed to keep their majority in the upper house, where half of the 242 seats are up for grabs. The New Komeito had aimed for 13 seats.

Japan, a far more traditionalist and conservative society, put up with Abe's nonsense for less than ten months before deciding they'd like to go back to the more liberal administration of government.

Likely because, as with so many conservative administrations, Abe's administration has been rife with corruption and ineptitude almost from the very start.

But doubts about his leadership abilities were fanned by a series of gaffes and scandals that led two cabinet members to resign and one to commit suicide, as well as revelations that the government had lost track of millions of pension premium payments.

Like Bush, Abe succeeded a wildly popular Prime Minister (Junichiro Koizumi), with Elvis-Presley-like charisma.

There's a lesson here for Democrats, as well. The opposition party, the LDP, pledged to "shrink income gaps and ensure the weak are not neglected." This echoes the 2006 Congressional campaign, to an extent, but should become the focal point for the presidential campaign next year.

Boobs & Balls

I gave this item a miss when the story first hit the papers, mostly because everey other frikkin' blogger on the planet seemed to be writing about it, but also because I didn't think the story was an appropriate one in the first place and the blue-nosed tut-tutting that was going on only fed the fire.

And they call me a pervert, a sex-obsessed freak!

Anyway, you might recall that the other day, the Washington Post ran a story about a speech Hillary Clinton gave in the Senate, and focused on her "low cut" outfit which revealed some cleavage. NEWS FLASH! A WOMAN HAS YABBOS!(to give you an idea of the sexual repression involved, the only clear copy I could find was on some fascist website, who shall remain nameless). To be fair to the WaPo, the writer, Robin Givhan, is a fashion writer and to be sure, fashion and politics go hand-in-hand in Washington.

Her words belie something else, though:

There wasn't an unseemly amount of cleavage showing, but there it was. Undeniable.[...]

The cleavage, however, is an exceptional kind of flourish. After all, it's not a matter of what she's wearing but rather what's being revealed. It's tempting to say that the cleavage stirs the same kind of discomfort that might be churned up after spotting Rudy Giuliani with his shirt unbuttoned just a smidge too far. No one wants to see that. But really, it was more like catching a man with his fly unzipped. Just look away!

A rather ham-handed attempt at being faaaaaaabulously snarky fell flat on its face, and Givhan had to man the barricades for the fussilade of criticisms from the left and unintentional shrapnel from the right's brickbats tossed at Hillary's boobs.

For the record, Ms. Givhan, although you've won a Pulitzer, a better comparison would have been "the same kind of discomfort that might be churned up after spotting John Edwards' package in a pair of too-tight chinos."

I mean, really, if you're going to get disgusting about it, go the whole nine yards! Oh, it wouldn't have made it past the editor?

Then maybe the question you needed to ask was, "What's the difference between a woman's cleavage and a man's bulge?" and indeed, why is there a difference?

All you did was engage the stereotype and advance it one step further: women's bodies are to be examined carefully, clinically, while men's bodies are referred to in shibboleth. This isn't Pamela Anderson running for President (and even if it were...)! This is an intelligent, involved Senator who by all accounts has worked very hard during her tenure to get up to speed and prepare herself for the most difficult job in the history of the world: cleaning up after that huckleberry, George W. Bush.

The other side of this dust-up is the bizarre reaction from the right wing, who regularly trot out this pundit or that lunatic, dress them up real purty-like for their bohunk masses to jerk their gherkins to while keeping their TeeVees glued to Fox News, thus ensuring ratings.

After all, nothing a man likes after a long day of tamping down his sexuality by harassing the "chicks" than to have a sexual fantasy that one is his equal, sees things exactly the way a man would, showing her boobs while he drinks a beer. And it showed in the way the right wing blogosphere captured this story as a "NOT SAFE FOR WORK" moment, trying to tie Hillary's boobs into some bizarre primal suprstition that burqas protect men from raping women.

Friday Music Blogging

Living Colour - Open Letter To A Landlord

The greatst protest band of the last twenty years, U2 included. Corey Glover's got some pipes!

Friday Kitten Blogging

Doin' whut I duz bess...

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) So China has cloned a rabbit. They weren't breeding fast enough?!?!?!?!?

2) Stuff like this never happens to me.

3) Unlike Paris Hilton, for whom I have zero sympathy, I feel for Lindsay Lohan and wish her well. She clearly had a rough childhood under the surface of placid calm and relative wealth.

To Review: Creepy skank... ...troubled drunk

4) It's nice to know that Kermit will have a place to croak.

5) They don't make rockers like they used to. One thing about growing up in New York, particularly where I did: celebrity encounters are frequent. I met Brian May in, of all places, the now-closing Discovery Store in Grand Central Station, looking at, of all things, telescopes (I could have directed him to about a hundred better stores in the city to find one). This was Spring 2001, I believe, when Queen was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. With his hair, he was taller than I am (by a lot). He's an extremely nice man, and we had a nice fan-to-icon chat, meaning he suffered me gushing.

6) Rumour has it Lindsay Lohan will be entering her next rehab with NASA.

7) The more stories like this I hear, the more I wonder where in the world Bush hasn't screwed up? Pakistan is barely holding on as an ally, they have nukes, and they have an angry Muslim population. Not good.

8) And this is not good news, on that front, either.

9) As you worry about the stock markets, keep in mind a couple of things: a) many brokers are on vaction, and b) markets never collapse on a Friday, although they have had some spectacular losses.

10) Huh? What? OHNOFUCKINGWAY! You have to be kidding me?!?!?! Why, that makes me want to KILL someone!!!!

11) Memo To NATO: Oops! It's the other guys you want to bomb!

12) Keep THIS cat away from me! (Video report here) What a sweet face for a serial killer...

13) This new Star Trek film is taking forever to get off the ground.

14) I was going to get all snarcastic on this, based on the headline, but now I can't.

15) I don't think Congress has much to worry about. If it's one thing Americans know, it's television. But just in case you weren't aware of it, you have less than eighteen months to replace your TV.

16) Take a message. I'm up to my eyeballs in manure.

17) Duh, no! Really? Anybody who's read the label can tell you this...the ultimate profit center: selling a nearly-free commodity!

Le Tour De Fra

(h/t Roadcycling.com for the image)
(ed. note: Thor Hushovd has not been accused of doping)

Question: How many men does it take to carry all the dope in Keith Richards' body?

Answer: The Tour De France.

No one knows for certain whether Lance Armstrong doped up, whether it was steroids, human growth hormones, or the old Finnish standby, blood doping. All we can say for certain is he never tested positive under UCI standards. We can, of course, infer whatever the hell we want, including the fact that Armstrong, an avowed patriot and Republican, skipped the road cycling events in the 2004 Olympics in Athens, possibly because the Olympic testing standards are far more rigorous.

We do know that many of Armstrong's top competitors over the past decade were doping, from Erik Zabel to Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso, right down to Floyd Landis, the presumptive 2006 Tour De France winner, who was stripped of that title after his urine samples tested positive for large amounts of testosterone, indicative of steroid use.

In point of fact, doping has been around almost as long as the Tour has. You'd think this would be a clue, right?

Apparently not. The 1998 Tour was declared the Tour of Shame, but I suspect this years will wrest that title on points: in this week alone, three riders and two teams have been forced to withdraw from the Tour (call it Cofidis interruptus, and one more rider, the leader, Michael Rassmussen, was taken off the Tour by his team, Rabobank, because of the possibility that he might have been doped heading into the Tour.

What all this comes down to, in terms of the race, is the Discovery Channel Team, Lance Armstrong's team, will hold the first place today, and likely win the race overall on Sunday, making the Armstrong-created team (first sponsored by the US Postal Service) the Tour winner for nine straight years, even if Landis had his "win" pulled.

Steroids have been a big story this year, what I like to call a non-story story. Think about it: what larger issue does steroid use speak to in the world? Cheating? I suppose, but there are billions of people on this planet who cheat in someway, and many are not successful for it.

I hold what appears to be an unpopular view about this particular form of cheating: so what?

The way I see it, if some idiot thinks the fleeting glory and fame associated with holding this title or that record (yes, Barry, I'm talking about you) is worth sacrificing his health for, then by all means, go for it. In the end, all you'll do is cheapen the record to such a degree that no one will remember the record at all much less who held it, but for decades, you'll remember how stupid it was to stick a needle in your body and infest your bloodstream with invading chemicals and who knows what else?

Sports organizations-- leagues, federations, even teams-- also should be held accountable for steroid use, and stop the sham of being the Captain Reynault, "shocked, shocked, I say!", of sport. YOU BEGGED THESE GUYS TO CHEAT! You created an atmosphere and a culture where athletes make enormous sums of money because YOU make enormous sums of money when they do well. Don't kid us! When Jason Giambi signed with the Yankees, they knew he was doping, but looked the other way because they believed it would end up with millions more in the bank, and a bunch of World Championships to show for it.

The biggest sham of all, though, is that governments, including the US Congress, feel a need to "investigate" steroids, putting a game on the same footing as finding housing for the victims of natural catastrophes or investigating the firing of eight federal attorneys.

In fact, in 2005 and 2006, doping in sports was a bigger story than Katrina, the disappearance of billions of dollars in Iraq, the corruptions of the president, possible voter fraud in Ohio, and the suspension of civil liberties under the Patriot Act, at least as far as Congress was concerned.

Why? What national interest is in imminent danger because Barry Bonds does drugs, or some football player does? Who dies, aside from the athlete? Who stands to be harmed? The fan? Can't he find some other entertainment to occupy his time? Where are our priorities????

The real sham behind governmental investigations is, often, it's government itself that's created the environment that permits the owner to make billions of dollars off a sports franchise that looks the other way when one of its athletes cheats in order to set a record which earns the owner money who kicks it back to the politician who passed the bill that gave all that money to the owner in the first place.

A pox on all their houses! If you really want to see a change here, then make it so money stops being so important in a game, so players won't choose to ingest drugs so owners won't get high off their earnings so governments and politicians won't take bribes and kickbacks from successful-but-greedy teams.

Hump Day Comedy Blogging

Wyatt Cenac - Barack Obama announces campaign posters for President

*Lighting A Candle*

Weekly World News to stop publishing

*SOB*

At least they'll still be online...

An Unsubtle Dance

Clearly, this story and this story were timed for simultaneous release:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Terrorists may be conducting "dry runs" at U.S. airports to test security before a possible attack, according to a Transportation Security Administration warning to airport screeners.

In at least four incidents over the past year, security screeners have found items in carry-on luggage -- blocks of cheese taped to electrical components, for example -- that resembled homemade bombs, according to the TSA's July 20 memo.

...and...

Jul 24 - U.S President George W.Bush reiterates the threat posed by al Qaeda in Iraq and warns that an American military withdrawal will only enhance the influence.

(video at link)

You mean to tell me that it took Al Qaeda six years to suddenly start sticking cheese into people's luggage, attached to wires and circuit boards?

Please. Don't make me laugh. This has been going on since 9/11 and probably even earlier than that, especially when you consider this part of the warning:

"Past terrorist attacks and plots show that such testing generally indicates attacks will soon follow," said the internal memo, which was posted on the Internet by NBC News on Tuesday.

None of the passengers in question has been linked with criminal or terrorist organizations so far, the memo said.

Right. How many wired cheeses does it take for the TSA to issue an alert like this? One? Two? Three? A dozen? And yet none of the passengers has been found to have any links to terror organizations?

Who smokes that strong of dope in the White House that thinks we'd buy this story at all? Clearly, this is a made-up alert, designed to reinforce Bush's feeble message of the bogeyman:

Here's the bottom line: Al Qaida in Iraq is run by foreign leaders loyal to Osama bin Laden. Like bin Laden, they are cold-blooded killers who murder the innocent to achieve al Qaida's political objectives. Yet despite all the evidence, some will tell you that al Qaida in Iraq is not really al Qaida – and not really a threat to America. Well, that's like watching a man walk into a bank with a mask and a gun, and saying he's probably just there to cash a check.

BoogahBoogah! Gee, Mr. Bush, they weren't there before you got us stuck in the glue over there! One can logically assume that if anyone was a threat to the nation, it's the numbnuts who exaggerated and lied and aggravated a situation such that we're viewed as the bully who needs to be taken down a notch!

Um, that means you're the problem, since your reading comprehension is questionable.

The White House admitted as much that these two stories were timed for release:

Kevin Sullivan, the White House communications director, said the speech was devised as a "surge of facts" meant to rebut critics who say Mr. Bush is trying to rebuild support for the war by linking the Iraq group and the one led by Mr. bin Laden.

See? You see? There over there, and they're trying to follow us over here, but if we stay over there, magically all our cheese will be wire free! HOORAY FOR US!

Yea. Right. Let me have a terrorism expert say it:

"I think what the president is saying is in some sense fundamentally misleading," said Robert Grenier, former head of the counter-terrorism center at the CIA as well as the agency's mission manager for the war in Iraq. "If he means to suggest the invasion of Iraq has not created more jihadists bent on killing Americans, and that if Iraq hadn't been there as a magnet they would have been attracted somewhere else, that's completely disingenuous."

The war "has convinced many Muslims that the United States is the enemy of Islam and is attacking Muslims, and they have become jihadists as a result of their experience in Iraq," Grenier said.

In other words, to quote the immortal wrestler, The Rock...IT JUST DOESN'T MATTER anymore, at any rate. They'll kill us here with exploding cheeses AND fight us in Iraq.

Thanks, man. You really fucked us up, big time, asshole!

Neener Neener Neener!

I'm not sure Bush really wants to push this too far:

July 24 (Bloomberg) -- The beauty of the White House's latest claim about executive privilege is its simplicity. All President George W. Bush has to do is utter those two words and his underlings can ignore congressional subpoenas without fear of jail.

Why? Because the president says so. Who decides whether the claim is constitutional or bogus? He does. Who can challenge it? Nobody.

No check. No balance. No way to bring in a judge. See? Simple.

Of course, it's not so popular with Congress.

Yea....ya think?

Executive privilege is one of those apocryphal things that means more in theory than it does in practice. In an enlightened and honest government, executive privilege allows a president to get advice and to explore avenues to solutions unfettered by an oversight.

This is not necessarily a bad thing in, say, opening negotiations to settle a dispute with a nation that is outwardly not talking to us. When it's used to subvert justice on what amount to essentially administrative matters, it's a horrible idea, and one that a democracy ought to shun.

And had. Nixon claimed executive privilege, and had that claim tested all the way to the SCOTUS, where he was smacked down. Clinton claimed executive privilege with respect to his paramourations in the White House, and likewise (whether you agree with the investigation or not) got smacked down here, as well.

Both men, ultimately, respected the law of the land, which no man is above.

Not Bush, and I should think conservatives across the land ought to be shunning this masterpiece of obstructive justice, full stop. After all, no one party will have a stranglehold on governance, and this will devolve into a game of parliamentary chicken, until ultimately, there will be no government anymore, just a series of tyrants. After all, you know, law and order implies law at all levels.

Bush has the mechanisms in place to thoroughly subvert any investigation by Congress. Save one. I'll get to that in a moment.

Bush controls the Justice Department, headed by buttboy Alberto Gonzalez. Not going to be an investigation there, no matter how many appelate court judges insist. There's not enough time to go to the SCOTUS for relief, and besides, you know, 5-4, they'd rule for Bush, while insisting that ruling has no legal precedence in the future, just as they did when they handed him the Presidency in 2000.

Congress, in short, is fucked. Except they have one nuclear option, one that Bush wll not be able to stop, one that would immediately release an orgy of contempt jailings, right up to the door of the Oval Office:

There is an option the president can't take away from lawmakers. Congress has ``inherent contempt'' powers, which means that it can order the arrest of whomever it finds in contempt, bring them to Capitol Hill for trial and jail them if they are convicted.

This hasn't been done for 70 years, as it's a nasty process. That is why Congress wrote into law a different route: prosecution through the Justice Department.

Re-read that last paragraph: Congress agreed to allow investiggations of the Executive branch to be handled by the Executive branch, in exchange for not releasing this particular nuke.

Keep in mind as well that, as President of the Senate, Dick Cheney would oversee any contempt trial held in that chamber, which is notorious for being more moderate than the House. So it really would be up to Nancy Pelosi to initiate this action.

One more bright light on the horizon: Presidential pardons appear not apply to civil contempt procedures like the above, since it is not an "offense against the United States" or an offense against "the dignity of public authority."

How A Former President Should Act

How much you wanna bet we'd never read a story like this about any former President named "Bush"?

DAR ES SALAAM (Reuters) - Former President Bill Clinton launched a program on Sunday to make subsidized malaria drugs available in Tanzania in a test scheme that could serve as a blueprint for Africa as a whole.

The project will make life-saving ACT drugs available at 90 percent less than the current market price to a national drug wholesaler, which will then distribute them to rural shops.

Malaria, caused by a parasite carried by mosquitoes, kills up to 3 million people a year worldwide and makes 300 million seriously ill. Ninety percent of deaths are in Africa south of the Sahara, mostly among young children.

Many of those lives could be saved with modern artemisinin combination therapy (ACT) drugs, which are far more effective than older treatments such as chloroquine. But a price of up to $8 to $10 per treatment puts them out of reach for many people.

Lest you think this is your run-of-the-mill project, let's take a look at malaria in Africa:

This year malaria will strike up to a half billion people. At least a million will die, most of them under age five, the vast majority living in Africa.[...]

Four species of malaria parasites routinely infect humans; the most virulent, by far, is Plasmodium falciparum. About half of all malaria cases worldwide are caused by falciparum, and 95 percent of the deaths. It's the only form of malaria that can attack the brain. And it can do so with extreme speed—few infectious agents can overwhelm the body as swiftly as falciparum. An African youth can be happily playing soccer in the morning and dead of falciparum malaria that night.

Falciparum is a major reason nearly 20 percent of all Zambian babies do not live to see their fifth birthday. Older children and adults, too, catch the disease—pregnant women are especially prone—but most have developed just enough immunity to fight the parasites to a stalemate, though untreated malaria can persist for years, the fevers fading in and out. There are times when it seems that everyone in Zambia is debilitated to some degree by malaria; many have had it a dozen or more times. No surprise that the nation remains one of the poorest in the world: A country's economic health has little chance of improving until its physical health is revitalized.

Pretty important stuff, to be sure. And it's not like the countries of Africa aren't trying to fight back, but between malaria and AIDS, they run out of resources awfully fast, despite hundreds of millions of dollars in private aid as well as billions in foreign aid.

Now, Big Dog stood in a field outside Dar-Es-Salaam to make this announcement yesterday, pointedly reminding the world of two things: one, that Al Qaeda had destoryed the US embassy there on his watch, yet he felt safe enough to show up in person, and two, that President Bush couldn't even be bothered to slog through the swamps created after hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

Or as Kanye West put it, "George Bush doesn't care about black people."

There's a foreign policy point to be made here, as well. In the vacuum created by the twin monstrosities o f AIDS and malaria in Africa, the single most Muslim continent on the planet, we could go a long way to engendering both Muslim good will and the world's respect by focusing much more of our resources on solving malaria. George Bush may not care about black people, but America does.

Ways You Can Help

Jimmy Breslin, National Treasure

There are few men like Jimmy Breslin in journalism anymore.

You folks outside of New York probably only know Jimmy Breslin if you are of a certain age, and drank Piels' beer. "It's a good drinkin' byeer!" We here in the city know Breslin to be a champion of the common guy, the Joe Lunchbuckets of the world who make things work and fix things when they don't, who go home at night and read a tabloid with a beer and a meat and potatoes dinner.

A dying breed, in other words.

He's lost a bit off his fastball as he's gotten older, but occasionally can crank out a high hard one when he gets angry enough.

Today, he got angry enough:

The war was there to take his life because George Bush started it with bold-faced lies.

He got this lovely kid killed by lying.[...]

Yesterday, Bush didn't run the country for a couple of hours while he had a colonoscopy at the presidential retreat, Camp David. He came out of it all right. He should now take his good health and go home, quit a job he doesn't have a clue as to how to do.

The other day, Bush said he couldn't understand why in the world would some people say that millions of Americans have no health insurance. "Why, all they have to do is go to the emergency room," he said.

Said this with the smirk, the insolent smug, contemptuous way he speaks to citizens.

Plain spoken enough, and to be sure, he is someone who has shaped my own writings: why spend an entire page explaining something you can sum up in three paragraphs?

People, particularly these politicians, these frightened beggars in suits, seem petrified about impeachment. It could wreck the country. Ridiculous. I've been around this business twice and we're all still here and no politician was even injured. Richard Nixon lied during a war and helped get some 58,500 Americans killed and many escaped by hanging onto helicopter skids. Nixon left peacefully. Mike Mansfield of Montana, the Democratic Senate majority leader, said on television that the Senate impeachment trial of Nixon would be televised and there would be no immunity. That meant Nixon would have to face the country under oath and if he lied he would go to prison. He knew he was finished as he heard this. Mansfield said no more. He got up and left. Barbara Walters, on the "Today" show, said, "He doesn't say very much, does he?"

The second time the subject was Bill Clinton for illegal holding in the hallway.

So you know where this is going, even tho I've quoted the middle of his column. Like any good journalist, he aleady told his story and is now laying it out for later editing.

And in Washington we had this Bush, and it is implausible to have anyone who is this dumb running anything, smirking at his country. He sure doesn't mind copying those people. On his PBS television show the other night, Bill Moyers said he was amazed at Sara Taylor of the White House staff saying that she didn't have to talk to a congressional committee because George Bush had ordered her not to. "I took an oath to uphold the president," she said.

That president had been in charge of a government that kidnapped, tortured, lied, intercepted mail and calls, all in the name of opposing people who are willing to kill themselves right in front of you. You have to get rid of a government like this. Ask anybody in Rosedale, where Le Ron Wilson wanted to live his young life. His grave speaks out that this is an impeachable offense.

Go read the entire column. Howard Cosell used to call it "Telling it like it is." Jimmy Breslin taught Cosell everything about that.

What Does This Really Mean?

(h/t BurningIdeas.com)
I can sum up the reason for this in one phrase: too little, too late:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush, under fire over the treatment of CIA detainees, on Friday ordered that agency interrogators comply with the Geneva Conventions against torture.

Five years after he exempted al Qaeda and Taliban members from the Geneva provisions, Bush signed an executive order requiring the CIA to comply with prohibitions against "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" as set down in the conventions' Common Article 3.

Human rights activists criticized Bush's action, saying it did not go far enough to eliminate dangerous interrogation techniques.

Not only is this action in and of itself "too little, too late" in terms of helping shape what pathetic little legacy Bush hopes to salvage, but in point of fact, it describes the results of our activities under a program that ignored the Geneva Conventions.

In other words, the presumable tortures that occured led to no prevented terror attacks, no solid leads on the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, and no measurable increase in homeland security.

How do I know this? Prima facie evidence: Bush gave the program up. Think about it. This a man who stubbornly refuses to admit any error in any part of his administration of this country, suddenly deciding that the Geneva Convention is a good thing? He's going to "coddle terrorists"?

Granted, he couldn't even get his hand picked SCOTUS to vet this theory of governance for him, which had to be a blow, but he certainly could have run out the clock and stand on his "principles"...not the most solid ground in any Republican administration, but nothing more than a pile of shale debris in the Bush years.

It's possible, tho unlikely, that Bush is running scared from the odd chance of a war crimes trial looming after he's out of office and so is trying to mitigate the damage. Even with a Democratic president in place, I can't imagine any US President would permit it, since it would open the door to any number of future trials for some fairly routine matters, like Bill Clinton being brought up on charges over the Kosovo conflict (remember, the charges wouldn't have to be proven to destroy US credibility, just brought to trial).

That's a scenario that plays out incompletely at best.

There really is no other reason for this grudging admission that the Geneva Conventions exist in the matter of the Afghani conflict, except to say the torture wasn't fruitful, and the time had come to wind down the operation. More terror attacks have been prevented by focusing on the domestic crime prevention methods that allowed the UK to stop the recent car bombings, and the US to prevent the pathetically amateurish attempts in the past two years.

Which is the way it should have been from the get-go, once we captured Osama.

Oh. Right. I forgot.

Friday Music Blogging

Lenny Kravitz - Fly Away

This was the version you didn't see on MTV...

Friday Kitten Blogging

Doin' whut i duz bess!

Nobody Asked Me, But

The weekly whip-around of the news you should have seen, but probably didn't:

1) From the DoggityBlog, we learn of squirrels infiltrating Iran. Jeez, you know, I wish that was a joke...

2) ...but that doesn't excuse the United States from unleashing its most terrifying weapon in Iraq to date: giant killer badgers!

3) Remember a couple of weeks ago, I was bemoaning the fact that the United States was falling desperately behind in keeping the lights on? It gets worse. Much worse. To the tune of $1.6 trillion just to maintain and repair our crumbling infrastructure!

4) Yes, but damn, those tax cuts are just TOO important!

5) Call me a Muggle, but the last Harry Potter book does even less for me than any of the first six, which was basically zero, so we're talking negative impact here. The new movie is pretty good, though.

6) As an actor, I admit it's been fun watching Daniel Radcliffe grow as an actor. He has the best shot at a real career as an actor, followed by Rupert Grint.

7) Barry Bonds is just two home runs away from Hank Aaron's record. This has been like root canal, following this story for so long: painful, and it could have been prevented.

8) The Emmy nominations are out. YAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWN! Most of the major awards are useless exercises in stupidity, vapidity, and outright cocksuckery. I can thoroughly understand why Brando and Scott skipped the Oscars when they won.

9) Tilting at windmills, Jude? As snarky as that sounds, I have to applaud that he is at least speaking out.

10) This is no story. We have a hydrocephalic moron for president. Match THAT, France! Oh. Right. You did.

11) I've said it before: The UN reports on the environment, in a nod to the Bush administration, grossly understate glacial melting.

12) ESPN must be spinning in its grave. Not dead yet? Don't worry, just give it time. A network that has to scrape so far as to broadcast spelling bees and "rock, scissors, paper" competitions as sport is not long for this world.

13) So now we know where the Simpsons live. Funny, I don't recall Homer skiing much. Must be that global warming. Damned global warrrrminggggg....

14) To say that life for me these past two months has been challenging is an understatement. I think there's a change underway. Something to change my luck a little.

15) Bush to have colonoscopy, to remove fragments of brain that still linger.

The Banking Lobby Rears Its Ugly Head

No surprises here. Bush is beholden to his pin-striped partners:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration said on Wednesday it cannot support a U.S. Senate bill to cut college student lender subsidies by $18 billion and boost student grants, but it will work with Congress on the issue.

As the Senate neared a vote on its version of legislation passed in the House of Representatives, the White House said it "cannot support Senate passage of (the bill) in its current form because of serious concerns with some provisions."

While the administration claims it would veto the bill because not enough additional money would be in the form of grants that would not require repayment, the real reason is...

The House last week passed a bill that would cut subsidies to lenders -- such as Sallie Mae, Citigroup and Bank of America -- by $19 billion and boost grants.

(emphasis added)

Citibank is a key player here, so far as Bush is concerned. A major shareholder for Citibank is Al-Awaleed bin Talal. Tangentially, the current Prime Minister of Pakistan, Shaukat Aziz, was Executive Vice President & Head of Global Private Banking.

Once again, genuine progress for working and middle class Americans is stymied, while Bush and his cronies look for those last crumbs to feed their corporate masters and partners.

The end can't come fast enough for our country.

I'm Fine!

I'm flattered by the flood of emails asking if I'm OK after yesterday's blast in midtown Manhattan.

While the intersection where the steam pipe blew, 41st and Lexington, is a mere block and a half from my office, I had been long gone when the explosion took place, at 6PM. I am staying home today until I get an all-clear from our esteemed mayor, Mike Bloomberg, regarding the air quality. Because I work for the miserable rat bastard who owns the building that straddles the quarantine zone, and that building has one small entrance outside the quarantine zone, I was forced to come into work, despite the lack of air quality report.

According to the latest news, any asbestos exposure was last evening, brief, and knocked out of the sky by all the condesing steam.

Had the blast happened 4 1/2 hours earlier, however, I might be parboiled. Such is my luck with lotteries...amen, in this case.

Hump Day Comedy Blogging

Steve Martin - Roxanne - 20 Something Betters

I Kin Haz Ur Attention, Pliz?

Dis story nids to be tawked about more now:

U.S. Animal and Plant Inspection Service officials argue that the house, listed as a National Historic Landmark since 1968, requires a federal Animal Welfare License, like a circus or zoo, in order to keep housing the cats.

The city of Key West and Monroe County, which includes Key West and the other islands in the Keys chain off Florida's southeastern tip, are fighting back against federal intervention.

"I think it's kind of sad that a government agency would be spending taxpayers' money on this," said Linda Mendez, the home's event director and author of the "Hemingway Museum Cats" souvenir book. "We're against caging them because they're not used to it."

I live in a tiny 'partment, so I know tht catz don' like to be caged. Dadby makes me eckercise a lot every day, an' gives me plenty cat toyz to play wiff.

(Sum I eben hide my catnip in....shhhhhhhhhhh, don' tel!)

I blamez tha Preznit, George Dumbya Boosh for dis! He hatez catz! He hatez Hemingway! He hatez Florida cuz hiz brover is gov...gober...runs tha joint!

Pliz make sure you mantion how much we catz hate Boosh.

How Desperate Is John Edwards?

No one would ever accuse the Edwards' family of having a traditional family in the old style American sense: stay-at-home, docile wife, breadwinning hubby, 2.4 kids. But you'd figure John wouldn't hide behind his wife's skirt:

WASHINGTON -- Elizabeth Edwards thinks her husband is a better woman warrior than Hillary Rodham Clinton.

In an unusually blunt, no-holds-barred interview with Salon.com, Elizabeth Edwards, who is fighting cancer, said Clinton is "not as vocal a women's advocate as I want to see."

She went on to question Clinton's commitment to defending abortion rights, making a veiled reference to the former first lady's recent claim that abortions are tragedies.

Fair enough, we're all entitled to different opinions. After all, we're not Republicans. Hillary Clinton, whose work for women's issues stretches way back to pre-First Lady days, doesn't need me to defend her comments that abortions should be safe, legal and rare. It certainly doesn't help us sway moderate voters when Ms. Edwards' tries to claim that's too moderate a position. Continuing...

"She describes some cost-saving things, which John also supports, but she acts like that's going to make health care affordable to everyone," Edwards said.

"She knows it won't. She's not really talking about poverty, when the face of poverty is a woman's face, often a single mother," she said.

You can't have it both ways, Ms. Edwards. If your husband supports the same measures that Hillary supports, then it's kind of pointless to claim Ms. Clinton doesn't have a comprehensive plan, unless by extension you're admitting your own husband hasn't done his homework as well.

What bothers me most about these comments is that it's not John Edwards who is making them, and it ought to be. I'm not saying Elizabeth Edwards has no place on the campaign trail...hell, she's earned her stripes...but attacks like this ought to come from the candidate him (or her) self, and Mr. Edwards ought to stand by them. That would take courage, of course, which seems to be in short supply in the Edwards' campaign.

I say this having remarked in the past that I think Elizabeth Edwards' voice may be the most important in her husband's campaign, but I said that with the meaning of speaking to the issues, not tearing down other candidates. Contrast these comments with the ones Hilalry made in 1992 when she was running against Barbara Bush for First Lady.

What's that? She said nothing about Mrs. Bush?

My point, precisely. Meanwhile, Mrs. Bush had great sport with Hillary Clinton and in the end probably cost her husband more votes with her bitchiness than she garnered for him by tearing down Hillary.

I voted for Edwards over Kerry in the 2004 primaries. I won't make that same mistake again.

Your Tax Dollars At Work

I'm going to make a slightly surprising confession: I'm not against faith-based organizations obtaining government funding. There are somethings they do well, like family counseling, and if they promise to keep religion and the social aspects of their operations separate, I really see no point in not allowing taxpayers to provide funding. I am against proselytizing, of course, but not against a minister ministering to people in need, no matter what their faith.

There are somethings that churches do rather unwell. One thing I imagine would be public transportation.

Enter Higherway. Now, most public transport solutions involve moving masses of people from one destination to another quickly and efficiently.

Apparently, Higherway transport systems are, um, a bit more "rugged individual" than that. Here, take a look:The Higherway system employs a skyhook...you may recall one of those from summer camp. Your counselor sent you out looking for one, along with a stick to hunt snipe with...to gently lift your car off the ground and attach it, somewhat like a ski lift, to a cable running above the ground.

The Higherway PRT system has been in use in precisely one location in the United States, for some 30 years: Morgantown, WV, on the campus of West Virginia University. While the developers have touted it's utility, claiming it's even better than light rail systems, apparently, the PRT system on the West Virginia University campus breaks down about every other day under not-exactly taxing usage, and certainly that doesn't presage well for its use in a normal rush hour situation, so bad that the mayor of Kansas City said he'd never install one there, and rushed to put in place a light rail system.

UPDATE Thanks to Britisher (who's blog you should all be regularly attending to, even if he doesn't), who had enough energy to dig up this little treasure:The Control Panel Inside Each CarNote the direct phone line to the nearest jail...

Does any of this sound at all familiar to you? It should...

Leaky Drums And Other Musical Instruments

I consider myself a liberal, and as such, when I tear someone a hole, it's usually a conservative. This time, I focus my guns to my left:

KASHIWAZAKI, Japan (Reuters) - Officials at the world's biggest nuclear power plant said on Tuesday there had been more minor radiation leaks after an earthquake in Japan that killed nine people and forced thousands from their homes.

The latest admissions by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) have reignited fears about nuclear safety in a country that relies on atomic power for one-third of its electricity but has faced repeated cover-ups of past accidents by atomic power utilities.

Now, you know damned well this is going to spark some idiotic backlash here, as well.

Trouble is, nuclear power is a technology we could (and obviously should) have spent the last fifty years developing safely, that would be clean, efficient, and more important, would have minimal impact on global warming.

I don't mean to minimize the glaring errors that were made early on in nuclear development. There was a distinct air of hubris once we harnessed (and then unleashed) the power of the atom, making America feel godlike, and we were fortunate in how little damage was really done. That, make no mistake, is a testimony to the "No Nukes" movement.

But as with all good things and all "causes", it was done to excess. The strident and vociferous protests against anything nuke created an environment, pun intended, which forced us to remain thoroughly dependent on fossil fuels, to the ultimate detriment of not only Americans but the world.

One wonders how many people have died because we turned 180 degrees on nuclear power, and how many would have died if we had gone back to the labs and worked harder on the admittedly serious problems involved in nuclear power generation, developing safe ways of use and disposal of nuclear material? How many have died from complications of acid rain, or asthma, or name any number of fossil-fuel related issues?

My suspicion is that, on the whole, more people have died in this timeline than would have died with a careful roll out of nuclear power. Call it a gut feeling, I guess. Call it the dreams of someone who believes in science, but science done carefully, without agenda, research for research purposes.

We have a long way to get back to even with global warming, and things are going to get worse before they get markedly better. For all our handwringing on the left about dependence on fossil fuels, and with the admission that we could (and should) have been developing alternative renewable sources of energy as well, we have to, I think, grudgingly admit this is one area we screwed up.

Tall In The Saddle No More

Well, here's another chart we've fallen off the top from:

America used to be the tallest country in the world.

From the Founding Fathers through the industrial revolution and two world wars, Americans literally towered over other nations. In a land of boundless open spaces and limitless natural abundance, the nation turned increasing wealth into human growth.

But, as it has in other arenas, America's predominance in height has faded. Americans reached a height plateau after World War II and gradually fell behind the rest of the world.

Wait till you read who we've fallen behind...

Young adults in Japan and other prosperous Asian countries now are almost as tall as Americans.

You may recall that the stereotype Japanese during World War II was a short stocky fellow with buck teeth and slanty eyes. Aside from the short, not a whole lot of truth to that image, however, the short part was true.

So how come Americans have fallen so far down the list, heightwise?

Like many human traits, height is determined by a mix of genes and environment. Experts agree that, aside from African pygmies and a few similar exceptions, most populations have about the same genetic potential for height.
That leaves environment, specifically the environment children experience from conception through adolescence. Any deficiency, from poor prenatal care to early childhood disease or malnutrition, can prevent one from reaching his or her full height potential.

OK, so here goes: The United States has an infant mortality rate of 4.6 deaths per 100,000. That sounds pretty good, and in fact, is the best of any country that doesn't have nationalized health care.

But is just behind Cuba in terms of worldwide infant mortality rates (which average somewhere around 36 deaths per 100,000), and factoring out stillbirths doesn't do much to improve our standing (meaning that most developed nations have better post-natal care than we do, something to think about the next time a "pro-life" person wails to you about dying babies). Further, if you look at the odds of a kid under five dying in the United States, we're much worse than Cuba.

Michael Moore seems to have a point, you begin to think.

But back to this article. What does this all mean? Well, the richer a country is, the taller its population tends to be, what with improved health care and nutrition available to them. And the taller your population is, the longer it tends to live.

Note a particular word in that paragraph, though: "nutrition." That doesn't mean more food, it means better food, and clearly the American fast food diet is contributing more than its share of this trend. Fast, fatty foods contribute a lot of calories, but not much in the way of nutrition.

Finally, there's a factor at play here that gets talked about a lot in the media but never really gets looked at: income inequality. Richer countries where all people are benefitting economically tend to be taller than countries that have increasing poverty levels and increasing economic inequality.

So that's one more feather in George Bush's cap: he's made us a shorter nation, figuratively AND literally!

Clouds Looming

Much sport was made of Michael Chertoff's "gut" instinct with regards to an imminent Al Qaeda attack in the United States (or against US interests abroad). While I mentioned it in passing and may even have given it an air of snark, my own life experiences tell me to keep an eye open when someone speaks of a "gut feeling".

On the heels of that statement comes this:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden praises martyrdom as a weapon and a path to glory for Muslims in a video that CNN said on Saturday was intercepted before it was to appear on radical Islamist Web sites.

CNN, which noted it could not verify the authenticity of the 40-minute video and had translated it from Arabic into English, said on its Web site there was no indication of where or when the footage had been shot.

The news network said the video contained old clips but concluded it had been compiled in the last four weeks.

I have to admit, my gut instinct concurs with Chertoff's: something's brewing. That Al Qaeda would, for the first time since September 11th, trot out footage shot ahead of (and pretty much warning of) those attacks is a tactic I would expect a group that has shown a propensity to go back to the well when something worked.

Already in Algeria this week, we've seen not less than two seperate attacks by Al Qaeda forces in a country that for fifteen years has suffered brutal civil unrest following the nullification of an election that radical Islamist candidates were poised to win. Al Qaeda's swap out of Iraq and Sudan to an African nation is typical of the kind of misdirection play they've been known to run in the past, and may be laying the groundwork for bigger things to come, just as the assassination of Ahmed Shah Massoud presaged the 9/11 attacks.

I suspect we here in the States are in for a long hot summer. I suspect President Bush will have to skip his extended vacation, as well.