Little Lord Pontchartrain
mikethemadbiologist | July 16, 2011As a fellow card-carrying member of the Ancient, Holy and High Hermeneutic Order of the Shrill, I mean that as a compliment:
There aren't many positive aspects to the looming possibility of a U.S. debt default. But there has been, I have to admit, an element of comic relief -- of the black-humor variety -- in the spectacle of so many people who have been in denial suddenly waking up and smelling the crazy.
A number of commentators seem shocked at how unreasonable Republicans are being. "Has the G.O.P. gone insane?" they ask.
Why, yes, it has. But this isn't something that just happened, it's…
mikethemadbiologist | January 31, 2009A while ago, I mentioned that I like the idea of keeping Sheila Bair on because she didn't panic like a ninny, unlike most of the other Bushies--who panicked like ninnies about everything. Gary Kamiya says it better:
The miasma of repressed fear that has hung over America for so long will not dissipate overnight. Right-wing pundits are shrieking that we must keep torturing to keep America safe, and claiming that if Guantánamo detainees are moved into ordinary prisons, America's cities will be the targets of terrorist attacks. These boogeymen have been effective for years, and they will not…
mikethemadbiologist | January 26, 2009And you thought the War on Science was over. Bush appointee Kathie Olsen, who was the deputy director of NSF, and who couldn't give a straight answer to Senator John McCain when asked about human influences on global warming, might have been "burrowed" into the NSF:
How was Olsen permitted to slip inside the NSF bureaucracy after playing such a front-and-center role in the Bush administration's politicization of science? We're looking into whether her case fits the technical definition of "burrowing" -- and what the Obama team can do about it -- but suffice to say that her survival hasn't…
mikethemadbiologist | January 25, 2009I'm becoming more enthusiatic about Eric Holder as Attorney General. It's nice to see some clarity about waterboarding--that is, partial drowning interrogation. From Steve Benen:
The exchange was helpful in learning about both the senator and the nominee. [Republican Senator] Cornyn wanted Holder to admit that he'd torture a terrorist in a "ticking-time-bomb scenario," in order to "save perhaps tens of thousands of lives." Holder responded sensibly, noting that we have interrogation methods that aren't torture, and that torture wouldn't produce reliable intelligence anyway.
Cornyn was…
mikethemadbiologist | December 13, 2008I think this description by a former ambassador of hiring practices in the State Department during the reign of Little Lord Pontchartrain explains so much about the last eight years (italics mine):
"YOU know you have arrived when you get interviewed by the 29-year-old instead of the 22-year-old," the 57-year-old foreign service officer said to me with a laugh. It was late 2005, and this three-time ambassador had just been interviewed for a top post at the Department of State.
Her interviewer was part of a large corps of 20-somethings -- some were in their early 30s -- who ran the Office of…
mikethemadbiologist | October 23, 2008Consider the following:
23% approve of George Bush as president.
28% do not know that the earth travels around the sun.
Discuss.
mikethemadbiologist | September 17, 2008Here's another resounding success of the Bush Doctrine. Erm, not so much (italics mine):
"It's like the good old days," Oleg Mikhailishchin, a pilot in camouflage uniform, told reporters during a rare visit by foreign media to the Engels base last month, before the war with Georgia further raised tensions with the West. More than 20 Tu-160 and Tu-95 bombers could be seen on the runway near the Volga River at this once top-secret base, where the two Tu-160 "White Swan" planes that landed in Venezuela on Wednesday flew from.
Russia is also dispatching a nuclear cruiser and other warships and…
mikethemadbiologist | August 16, 2008Here's an image that is...unsettling:
REUTERS/Larry Downing
(by way of Dependable Renegade)
Seriously, I think Bush's image handlers are just mailing it in at this point. A male politician above a certain age should never appear in the same frame as a woman half his age (or younger), particularly when she's wearing a bikini.
It will not end well.
mikethemadbiologist | August 9, 2008Any time there's a send up of news anchors, disaster coverage, and George Bush, it's worth watching:
mikethemadbiologist | August 5, 2008Glenn Greenwald asks a lot of good questions about the recent turns in the anthrax case. I'll get to Greenwald's specific questions at the end of the post, but all of Greenwald's questions could have innocuous answers.
At this point, however, one would be a fool to, at least, not consider that something nefarious is going on--the only time I've been wrong about the Bush administration is when I've thought, "No, they couldn't do that." Over at Pissed on Politics, here's one vein of off-the-wall speculation (italics mine):
Ok, here is what I think happened: Some persons in the bowels of our…
mikethemadbiologist | March 3, 2008In the most recent edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, there is a perspective piece by Sara Rosenbaum that bluntly describes how the Bush Administration's opposition to S-CHIP (the State Children's Health Insurance Program) is based on ideology and not economic cost (italics mine):
Why would the President veto bipartisan legislation that does precisely what he insisted on -- namely, aggressively enroll the poorest children? One might blame the poisonous atmosphere that pervades Washington these days, but other important social policy reforms have managed to get through.
One answer…
mikethemadbiologist | February 15, 2008I've criticized Democratic Congressman Reyes before, so it's worth noting when he gets something right. Here's a letter Reyes wrote to Little Lord Pontchartrain:
Dear Mr. President:
The Preamble to our Constitution states that one of our highest duties as public officials is to "provide for the common defence." As an elected Member of Congress, a senior Member of the House Armed Services Committee, and Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, I work everyday to ensure that our defense and intelligence capabilities remain strong in the face of serious threats to our…
mikethemadbiologist | January 28, 2008Say hello to the Office on National Drug Control Policy and to faith-based drug overdose prevention. One public health intervention that saves lives is the distribution of Narcan nasal sprays to drug users:
The nasal spray is a drug called naloxone, or Narcan. It blocks the brain receptors that heroin activates, instantly reversing an overdose.
Doctors and emergency medical technicians have used Narcan for years in hospitals and ambulances. But it doesn't require much training because it's impossible to overdose on Narcan.
The Cambridge program began putting Narcan kits into drug users'…
mikethemadbiologist | January 27, 2008By way of Martini Revolution, I came across this Scott Horton post about Bush's favorite painting, "A Charge to Keep." We definitely need better art history education in the U.S., if for no other reason than to prevent people from embarrassing themselves. Horton:
Bush was so taken by it ["A Charge to Keep"], that he took the painting's name for his own official autobiography. And here's what he says about it:
I thought I would share with you a recent bit of Texas history which epitomizes our mission. When you come into my office, please take a look at the beautiful painting of a horseman…
mikethemadbiologist | January 22, 2008According to Richard Stengel, the managing editor of Time magazine, Time will run with a story claiming that twenty percent of Iraq War veterans have suffered brain trauma--that's 250,000 people:
When we got into the Iraq war we didn't know how long it would last. When we got into the Iraq war we didn't know how much it would cost. It's lasted longer, it's cost more than we ever expected. The real toll is coming out now. The Pentagon is releasing a report saying, one in five American serviceman and women who have been in Iraq are coming back with brain injuries. Mild, traumatic brain injuries…
mikethemadbiologist | December 16, 2007...not 9/11. The Bush Administration spied on American citizens without court orders before Sept. 11, 2001. And it didn't stop the attacks (italics mine):
In a separate program, N.S.A. officials met with the Qwest executives in February 2001 and asked for more access to their phone system for surveillance operations, according to people familiar with the episode. The company declined, expressing concerns that the request was illegal without a court order.
While Qwest's refusal was disclosed two months ago in court papers, the details of the N.S.A.'s request were not. The agency, those…
mikethemadbiologist | November 15, 2007As a result of the veto by Bush of the the fiscal year 2008 Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education appropriations bill, if the veto is not overriden by Congress, the NIH will receive a de facto 3.7% funding cut:
The bill, H.R.3043, also sought to bolster the budgets of the departments of Labor and Education, and carried a request for a total of $150.7 billion. Since its introduction in July, Bush has said he would veto the bill because it overshot his own budget recommendations.
"We were hoping that [Bush's veto] wouldn't be the case," Carrie Wolinetz, Federation of American…
mikethemadbiologist | November 10, 2007Rightwing nut David Horowitz just finished celebrating Islamofascist Awareness Week. One of the goals of Horowitz's exercise is to intimidate faculty and students into political correctness*. A while back, while reading Hanna Rosen's God's Harvard, this description of how one faculty member at Jesus mill Patrick Henry College**, Bob Stacey, was fired for teaching those heretical philosophers Kant and Plato struck as the kind of campus Horowitz would like:
Just before class, someone pointed out the window, where you could still see the outlines of last night's moon. "Please take your seats…
mikethemadbiologist | October 14, 2007Knute Berger relays the following email from Ed Lazowska, the former co-chair of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (italics mine):
The years of the [George W.] Bush administration have been a black time for science in this nation. I speak with the experience of having co-chaired the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee for Bush, and having chaired the Defense Department's DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] Information Science and Technology Study Group during his presidency. Funds for research, the seed corn of our future competitiveness…
mikethemadbiologist | October 10, 2007As if outing Valerie Plame, whose primary task was to monitor and contain WMD proliferation in the Middle East--including Iran, wasn't bad enough, the Bush Administration destroyed another intelligence gathering operation for political gain (italics mine):
A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had…