Politics
pharyngula | December 30, 2006Saddam Hussein has been killed.
He was a venal little monster, but I don't see that we've gained anything by stooping to the level of a third-world thug, and the unseemly haste with which an irreversible act was committed makes it even more sordid and sleazy.
He said that celebrations broke out after Hussein was dead, and that there was "dancing around the body."
Barbarians.
pharyngula | December 30, 2006At this point, it's safe to say the National Park Service is stonewalling. There is a book called The Grand Canyon: A Different View, written from a young earth creationist perspective, which the NPS has approved for sale in its bookstores. It is a truly appalling piece of crap; I wrote about in in July of 2004, and you can read excerpts from it online. One might argue that the appearance of the book is simply due to a lack of discrimination by the Park Service, which just shovels the gimcracks and gewgaws into their stores to make money, but apparently they try to exercise some due…
clock | December 29, 2006John Edwards Identifies Global Warming as a Priority in His Presidential Campaign:
John Edwards has clearly made global warming a prominent part of his campaign at least at this early stage and has met one of the criteria (#2) that I identified. By including it as one of the issues he has chosen to highlight in his announcement for president, he is saying to voters that he takes the issue seriously and is implicitly promising to take action if he is elected. By my criteria John Edward's campaign is off to a good start on global warming. I hope he continues to talk about global warming at his…
jrosenhouse | December 29, 2006One of my projects for the winter break has been to read some of the Iraq War books that keep showing up in the local Barnes and Noble. First up: Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas Ricks, senior Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post.
The book makes for strange reading. On the one hand it is very hard to put down. The story it tells is gripping and it is written with considerable skill. On the other hand it is difficult to take for more than a few pages at a time. The story it tells is one of unrelenting arrogance and incompetence on the part both of the…
jlynch | December 29, 2006AP is reporting that Saddam Hussein will be executed by 10pm EST. No doubt it will bring a smile to Bush, but it is difficult to see how the hanging will make any difference to what is occurring in Iraq. And it certainly wont bring to account those responsible for the WTC attack.
clock | December 29, 2006Which one are you? (December 25, 2005)
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Big debate over Wonkery and Activism on blogs is brewing around the biggies in the Left Blogistan. Let me rehash it quickly before starting my own rant.
It all started with a Washington Monthly article titled Kos Call by Benjamin Wallace-Wells:
"Moulitsas is just basically uninterested in the intellectual and philosophical debates that lie behind the daily political trench warfare. By his own admission, he just doesn't care about policy.
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He doesn't pretend to be a policy wonk. But the more that…
clock | December 28, 2006If you read the papers or watched TV today, you may have gotten the impression that Edwards announced his run this morning around 9am in front of TV cameras. Wrong! The MSM folks think they still matter and are blind to everything happening outside of their domain.
The first people he directly announced to were about 20 of us bloggers on a teleconference phone call last night around 7pm. Soon afterwards, his campaign posted this video on YouTube, soon followed by the launch of his website.
Then, after the NOLA announcement, he spent about two hours on DailyKos answering questions from more…
purepedantry | December 28, 2006Wired Magazine has the Foot-in-Mouth Awards for 2006. My personal favorite:
"They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material."
-- Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) deconstructs the frustrations of (we think) file sharing, during a speech opposing net…
clock | December 27, 2006Edwards has unleashed his campaign website, where you can find all the info, join the discussion on the blog and see a preview of what he'll say tomorrow in NOLA on this video (and no, I am not paid by his campaign - my support is amateur):
j7uy5 | December 27, 2006I have a confession to make. I once voted for a Republican
Presidential candidate. That candidate was Gerald Ford.
Why? Several reasons. For one, it was my
first time voting, so I was not very good at it yet. Two,
even though I was upset about the pardon of Nixon, and unimpressed by
his handling of the economy, I thought he was sincere and honest.
Three, I thought he had been chosen deliberately to be a
noncontroversial "placeholder" president; not someone who was
interested in a power grab.
One of the areas where some liberals and some conservatives agree is
this: concentration…
clock | December 27, 2006John Edwards is announcing his presidential candidacy tomorrow in New Orleans, followed by a tour of town-hall meetings in Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Carolina and North Carolina. I'll be at the last one and may have some pictures etc. I'll probably resuscitate my old blog to avoid cluttering this one with all the political horse-race stuff.
Liveblogging from the event in NOLA are a couple of bloggers at OAC. Scoble will also be there.
I hope that Ford's death does not suck out too much air out of news-shows on TV tomorrow.
From last fall when Edwards took a few hundred UNC students…
jlynch | December 26, 2006
Note: Since I'm getting a lot of queries about this photo ... I don't own copyright for the photo and don't have the contact information for the source of the picture. I got the photo off the web and neglected to note the source. Googling "polar bear" should result in the original, but that may mean you have to browse many pages before you find it. Good luck!
The Washington Post is reporting that the Bush Administration wants to list polar bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act,
"We've reviewed all the available data that leads us to believe the sea ice the polar bear depends…
jlynch | December 25, 2006
From AP:
Reaching into the back of a truck, U.S. anti-immigration activist Don Pauly [founder of the Emigration Party of Nevada] grabs a Mexican flag, a can of lighter fuel and an aluminum baking tray and heads to the curbside outside the Mexican consulate. As a small group of police officers, protesters and puzzled bystanders look on, he douses the green, red and white flag with fuel and spits on it for good measure, while an eye-patch wearing accomplice [Laine Lawless, founder of the Arizona-based Border Guardians]
strikes a match. ...
In one recent Internet posting [Pauly] called for…
j7uy5 | December 25, 2006And what could be better than this?
href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6189793.stm">End
of the neo-con dream
By Paul Reynolds
World Affairs correspondent
The neo-conservative dream faded in 2006.
The ambitions proclaimed when the neo-cons' mission statement "The
Project for the New American Century" was declared in 1997 have turned
into disappointment and recriminations as the crisis in Iraq has grown.
"The Project for the New American Century" has been reduced
to a voice-mail box and a ghostly website. A single employee has been
left to wrap things up... […
oracknows | December 23, 2006Take a look at this image:
At first glance, it looks as though it's supporting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, doesn't it? But it's not. Not really. If you haven't figured out why yet, you'll see below the fold:
From MSNBC:
COPENHAGEN - A Danish art group that pokes fun at world leaders targeted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday by placing an advertisement in a Tehran newspaper with an insulting hidden message.
Beneath a picture of the president, a series of apparently sympathetic statements were arranged such as "Support his fight against Bush" and "Iran has the…
jlynch | December 22, 2006Seen at TPM:
According to Network World's Paul McNamara, the communications director for U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-MT), Todd Shriber, hired two 'hackers' to break into the computer of his alma mater, Texas Christian University, and change his college grades.
He went trolling for the law-breaking 'hackers' on a computer security website. But instead of finding anyone to do his dirty work he came across a couple non-criminally minded techies who proceeded to chat him up about his scheme, draw out in explicit detail that what he was asking them to do involved mulitple felonies and then posted…
pharyngula | December 22, 2006This country is thoroughly screwed up. Compare these two stories.
A man was found guilty of a $2 robbery, released on parole, then sentenced to life in prison after he tested positive for marijuana. It was in Texas, and the sentence has been commuted (after he'd served 16 years for smoking pot), but still, that's insane.
ExxonMobil was fined $5 billion for their negligence in the Exxon Valdez tanker accident, which they haven't paid and probably plan on never paying. They just got a friendly judge to cut the penalty in half.
Both sentences occurred at about the same time. Tyrone Brown got to…
pharyngula | December 21, 2006Thanks to Hilzoy, I've learned that our dearly beloved president has enunciated an important principle.
Bush said that despite declarations of piety from Muslim radicals now fighting the United States, he doubted that they believed in God.
"'Terrorists' can't be God-believing people,'" Richard Joel, president of Yeshiva University, quoted Bush as saying.
Before you run off and dismiss this as the ravings of an incompetent, deluded boob, think it through. It means that if someone does something wicked, we get to declare that they must not really believe in God — true faith only belongs to…