The Politics That Flaps In the Night

Let's Get Political

Wastes of Skin
So here's a story of what happens when idiot hyper-religious people are allowed to raise children.

An 11-year-old town of Weston girl died Sunday night after her parents refused to seek medical attention for her treatable case of diabetes.

Everest Metro police Chief Dan Vergin said autopsy results confirm Madeline Neumann died from diabetic ketoacidosis, essentially an untreated case of diabetes.

Neumann's parents believed that their faith could heal the girl, Vergin said. They do not belong to a specific church or religion.

Neumann's aunt from California called authorities Sunday asking them to check on the girl, Vergin said. Authorities found the girl's almost lifeless body at the house. Neumann was pronounced dead on arrival at St. Clare's Hospital in Weston.

Authorities will send the results of their investigation to the Marathon County district attorney's office to determine whether the parents should face criminal charges.

These scum make me utterly sick. The next time someone tells you that gay people would make terrible parents, or atheists, or anyone else, remember what can happen when two 'normal', midwestern religious parents screw up.

Source: Wisconsin Radio Network

Wal-Mart Sucks
Keith Olbermann has been beating the drum on this, and good thing too. It's outrageous.

JACKSON, Missouri (CNN) -- Debbie Shank breaks down in tears every time she's told that her 18-year-old son, Jeremy, was killed in Iraq.

The 52-year-old mother of three attended her son's funeral, but she continues to ask how he's doing. When her family reminds her that he's dead, she weeps as if hearing the news for the first time.

Shank suffered severe brain damage after a traffic accident nearly eight years ago that robbed her of much of her short-term memory and left her in a wheelchair and living in a nursing home.

It was the beginning of a series of battles -- both personal and legal -- that loomed for Shank and her family. One of their biggest was with Wal-Mart's health plan.

Eight years ago, Shank was stocking shelves for the retail giant and signed up for Wal-Mart's health and benefits plan.

Two years after the accident, Shank and her husband, Jim, were awarded about $1 million in a lawsuit against the trucking company involved in the crash. After legal fees were paid, $417,000 was placed in a trust to pay for Debbie Shank's long-term care.

Wal-Mart had paid out about $470,000 for Shank's medical expenses and later sued for the same amount. However, the court ruled it can only recoup what is left in the family's trust.

The Shanks didn't notice in the fine print of Wal-Mart's health plan policy that the company has the right to recoup medical expenses if an employee collects damages in a lawsuit.

The legal fight is over, as the Supreme Court refused to hear their appeal.

So Wal-Mart is going to bleed this woman for every penny she has left in the world, which is all that pays for her lifetime of medical needs.

The family's situation is so dire that last year Jim Shank divorced Debbie, so she could receive more money from Medicaid.

Jim Shank, 54, is recovering from prostate cancer, works two jobs and struggles to pay the bills. He's afraid he won't be able to send their youngest son to college and pay for his and Debbie's care.

"Who needs the money more? A disabled lady in a wheelchair with no future, whatsoever, or does Wal-Mart need $90 billion, plus $200,000?" he asked.

The family's attorney agrees.

"The recovery that Debbie Shank made was recovery for future lost earnings, for her pain and suffering," Graham said.

"She'll never be able to work again. Never have a relationship with her husband or children again. The damage she recovered was for much more than just medical expenses."

Graham said he believes Wal-Mart should be entitled to only about $100,000. Right now, about $277,000 remains in the trust -- far short of the $470,000 Wal-Mart wants back.

Refusing to give up the fight, the Shanks appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. But just last week, the high court said it would not hear the case.

Graham said the Shanks have exhausted all their resources and there's nothing more they can do but go on with their lives.


Jim Shank said he's disappointed with the Supreme Court's decision not to hear the case -- not for the sake of his family -- but for those who might face similar circumstances.

For now, he said the family will figure out a way to get by and "do the best we can for Debbie."

"Luckily, she's oblivious to everything," he said. "We don't tell her
what's going on because it will just upset her."

Soulless scumbags.

This story illustrates perfectly why we should dispense with private health insurance with all due speed. You don't see this kind of garbage in any civilized country.

Source: CNN.com

Bill-O!!
A fascinating and quite lengthy Bill O'Reilly biographical piece from a couple of years ago. It really does give one some insight into the increasingly-irrelevant talk show host.

Class—that is, class resentment—is where, for O’Reilly, politics, and everything else, begins. His first best-seller, “The O’Reilly Factor,” published in 2000, asserts, “Whatever I have done or will do in this life, I’m working-class Irish American Bill O’Reilly.” (Another of O’Reilly’s feuds is with the columnist Michael Kinsley, who several years ago suggested that O’Reilly is actually from a middle-class background; last year, on the radio, O’Reilly objected to a call by the Los Angeles Times editorial page, then edited by Kinsley, for legal representation of detainees at Guantánamo Bay. “They’ll never get it,” O’Reilly said, “until they grab Michael Kinsley out of his little house and they cut his head off. And maybe when the blade sinks in, he’ll go, ‘Perhaps O’Reilly was right.’ ”) In the book, O’Reilly goes on, “No one ever told me or my sister that we were pretty far down the social totem pole while we were growing up in 1960s America. We took for granted that it was normal to buy cars only when they were secondhand, that every family clipped coupons to save money, and that luncheon meats were the special of the day.” And so on: “When our family went out to eat, a rare treat, we didn’t waste money on appetizers, if only because we didn’t go to the kind of restaurants that offered appetizers. Typically the pasta dish was spaghetti, and that was it. No linguine, fettuccine, rigatoni, etceterini, etceterini, to confuse the issue.”

I never saw Nassau County, Long Island, where O’Reilly, who is fifty-six, grew up, in the nineteen-sixties, but I’m guessing that restaurants so unpretentious that they wouldn’t serve a soup-of-the-day didn’t actually exist. Still, the idea of such a restaurant captures O’Reilly’s idea of himself. As soon as he left home—to go to Marist College, in Poughkeepsie, New York—O’Reilly had occasional encounters with members of the fortunate classes, in which, inevitably, he was put down. At Marist, he longed for the girls from nearby Vassar, but “the Ivy Leaguers up from Princeton or down from Cornell got the dates; we were treated like hired help.” By O’Reilly’s account, wealth and fame have not changed the pattern. Even now, when he wanders within range of the “swells,” which he does surprisingly often for a guy who despises them, they sneer at him, just as they would sneer at any ordinary American.

In particular, it's worth noting just how ritualized the O'Reilly factor is. It's a cliche, I know but the show sounds like nothing so much as The Two Minutes Hate.

But the real gems are the items on just how bitter and borderline insane Bill really is.

O’Reilly’s account of what went wrong at CBS has him, as always, pissing off powerful people because he won’t play their phony games. The key moment seems to have come when, during the Falkland Islands War, O’Reilly and his crew got some exclusive footage of a riot in the streets of Buenos Aires and it wound up being incorporated into a report from the veteran correspondent Bob Schieffer, which failed to mention O’Reilly’s contribution. O’Reilly was furious, and after that, by his account, he was in career Siberia at CBS. During this period of forced inaction, he later wrote, “on a visit to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, I stumbled upon an amazing story. The tiny fishing village of Provincetown had become a gay mecca!” O’Reilly took a cameraman there and did a piece on the dangers this posed to local kids, but the network wouldn’t air it. Not long after that, he left.

In 1998, after the launch of “The O’Reilly Factor,” but before superstardom, he published a thriller called “Those Who Trespass,” which is his most ambitious and deeply felt piece of writing. “Those Who Trespass” is a revenge fantasy, and it displays extraordinarily violent impulses. A tall, b.s.-intolerant television journalist named Shannon Michaels, the “product of two Celtic parents,” is pushed out by Global News Network after an incident during the Falkland Islands War, and then by a local station, and he systematically murders the people who ruined his career. He starts with Ron Costello, the veteran correspondent who stole his Falkland story:

The assailant’s right hand, now holding the oval base of the spoon, rocketed upward, jamming the stainless stem through the roof of Ron Costello’s mouth. The soft tissue gave way quickly and the steel penetrated the correspondent’s brain stem. Ron Costello was clinically dead in four seconds.


Michaels stalks the woman who forced his resignation from the network and throws her off a balcony. He next murders a television research consultant who had advised the local station to dismiss him: he buries the guy in beach sand up to his neck and lets him slowly drown. Finally, during a break in the Radio and Television News Directors Association convention, he slits the throat of the station manager. O’Reilly describes each of these killings—the careful planning, the suffering of the victim, the act itself—in loving detail.

In the novel, O’Reilly splits his alter ego in two, by creating a second tall, b.s.-intolerant Irish-American, a New York City homicide detective named Tommy O’Malley. O’Malley is charged with solving the murders that Michaels has committed, while competing with Michaels for the heart of Ashley Van Buren, a blond, busty aristocrat turned b.s.-intolerant crime columnist. Michaels, a possibly once good man driven mad by broadcast journalism, tells Ashley, “Journalism, as you know, is a profession that requires its participants to be aggressive, skeptical, and persistent in pursuit of the truth. Yet, the moment you enter your own newsroom, you’ve got to drop all that. The managers want total conformity. They want you to play the game, to do what you’re told to do.” And, later, “It’s a self-obsessed business. ‘How are things going to impact on me? Is this person my friend or my enemy? I’ll get him before he gets me.’ That kind of thing. It’s a brutal way to live.” Again and again, O’Reilly’s characters remind us that on-air broadcasters are among the most powerful and glamorous people in America, and so the stakes in television newsroom politics could not be higher.

Tommy O’Malley, too, has a lot of ambition and rage, but he channels it into bringing bad guys (not just Michaels but a collection of urban ethnic street punks out of the old “Dirty Harry” or “Death Wish” movies) to justice. Michaels, though rejected by the suits, the swells, and the phonies, is not entirely immune to their values. He lives in a mansion, eats filet mignon, dresses stylishly, and can’t dismiss the A-listers from his consciousness. He is drawn to places like Malibu, Martha’s Vineyard, and the Upper West Side, partly to carry out his murders and partly because a kind of psychological undertow pulls him there. O’Malley seems not to know that they exist; he is broke and not stylish. He is morally redeemed by the police mission, just as Michaels is morally damned by television.

So there you have it. O'Reilyl engages in, even publishes, grotesque revenge fantasies and ultimately seems to desire his own self-destruction as much as that of his enemies.

Truly a bizarre man.

Source: The New Yorker

Yet More Olympics
So the lack of momentum for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics seems to be not-building.

The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, yesterday became the first world leader to decide not to attend the Olympics in Beijing.

As pressure built for concerted western protests to China over the crackdown in Tibet, EU leaders prepared to discuss the crisis for the first time today, amid a rift over whether to boycott the Olympics.

The disclosure that Germany is to stay away from the games' opening ceremonies in August could encourage President Nicolas Sarkozy of France to join in a gesture of defiance and complicate Gordon Brown's determination to attend the Olympics.

Donald Tusk, Poland's prime minister, became the first EU head of government to announce a boycott on Thursday and he was promptly joined by President Václav Klaus of the Czech Republic, who had previously promised to travel to Beijing.

"The presence of politicians at the inauguration of the Olympics seems inappropriate," Tusk said. "I do not intend to take part."

Further, it looks like the EU as a whole might boycott the Olympics.

The EU foreign ministers are to discuss the China quandary at lunch in Slovenia today, with calls being made for a common European position.

"We don't support a boycott and don't intend to boycott the opening of the games," a British Foreign Office spokesman said. "None of the 27 [EU states] are calling for a boycott yet."

The French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, has described the boycott proposal as "interesting", while Sarkozy this week hedged his bets and said his attendance depended on China's conduct.

"Yet". None of them are doing it.. "yet".

Hehe.

Source: The Guardian

Siege of Basra
So the Iraqi central government, under Iranian semi-pupppet Maliki, decided to bust a cap in its political adversaries to the south, and staged an invasion of Basra.

Things went predictably enough.

BAGHDAD — Shiite militiamen in Basra openly controlled wide swaths of the city on Saturday and staged increasingly bold raids on Iraqi government forces sent five days ago to wrest control from the gunmen, witnesses said, as Iraqi political leaders grew increasingly critical of the stalled assault.

Witnesses in Basra said members of the most powerful militia in the city, the Mahdi Army, were setting up checkpoints and controlling traffic in many places ringing the central district controlled by some of the 30,000 Iraqi Army and police forces involved in the assault. Fighters were regularly attacking the government forces, then quickly retreating.

Senior members of several political parties said the operation, ordered by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, had been poorly planned. The growing discontent adds a new level of complication to the American-led effort to demonstrate that the Iraqi government had made strides toward being able to operate a functioning country and keep the peace without thousands of American troops.

Mr. Maliki has staked his reputation on the success of the Basra assault, fulfilling a longstanding American desire for him to boldly take on militias.

But as criticism of the assault has risen, it has brought into question another American benchmark of progress in Iraq: political reconciliation.

Security has suffered as well.

Since the Basra assault began Tuesday, violence has spread to Shiite districts of Baghdad and other places in Iraq where Shiite militiamen hold sway, raising fears that security gains often attributed to a yearlong American troop buildup could be at risk. Any widespread breakdown of a cease-fire called by Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric who founded the Mahdi Army, could bring the country back to the sectarian violence that strained it in 2006 and 2007.

So basically, Maliki's Pro-Iranian government, which recently gave the Iranian President Ach-ma-dick-inajad (credit to the Daily Show for giving me a pejorative which saves me spelling his name) a warm welcome, complete with flowers and red carpet treatment, is trying to take out its biggest Shiite rival, Al-Sadr. Meanwhile, Iraqi politics continued to degenerate.

“We don’t have to rush to military solutions,” said Nadeem al-Jabiri, a Parliament member from the Fadhila Party, a strong rival of Mr. Sadr’s party that would have been expected to back the operation, at least on political grounds. Instead of solving the problems in Basra, Mr. Jabiri said, Mr. Maliki “escalated the situation.”

...

In Baghdad, the American military was also drawn deeper into the violence generated by the Basra assault. The military issued a statement saying that American soldiers had killed nine Iraqis that it called terrorists in firefights around Sadr City, the Shiite slum that forms Mr. Sadr’s base of support. The statement said seven of the Iraqis were killed after they attacked an American unit, and two more when they were caught placing roadside bombs. Later Saturday, the military announced that two American soldiers had been killed by a roadside bomb in Shiite-controlled eastern Baghdad.

Iraqi Interior Ministry officials said they would extend a strict and citywide curfew indefinitely, in an attempt to keep the streets clear.

Mr. Maliki’s forces may also have lost ground in the battle for public opinion when, in a well-publicized event in Sadr City, 40 men who said they were Iraqi police officers surrendered their weapons to Sadr officials, who symbolically gave the officers olive branches and Korans. The weapons were returned after the officers pledged not to use them against Mahdi Army members.

“These weapons are for defending the country but not for fighting your brothers,” said Sheik Salman al-Fraji, head of the Sadr office there.

Although a citywide curfew remained in effect in Baghdad, the booms of rockets or mortars were heard in the morning. It was not immediately clear who had fired them or where they landed, although the fortified Green Zone, the nerve center of American and Iraqi governmental operations here, has been a frequent target since the Basra operation began.

Clashes between militias and Iraqi government security forces continued elsewhere. There was intense fighting for a second day north of Basra in Dhi Qar Province and its capital, Nasiriya, where officials said the toll on Saturday was 28 killed and 59 wounded. There were running battles on a main bridge in Nasiriya, an Iraqi police officer said, and gunmen controlled the town of Shatra, about 20 miles north.

...



“Unfortunately we were expecting one thing but we saw something else,” said Ali Hussam, 48, a teacher, who said that after Saddam Hussein the people of Basra had hoped for peace. “But unfortunately with the presence of this new government and this democracy that was brought to us by the invader, it made us kill each other.”

“And the war is now between us,” he said.

Source: The New York Times

Live from Basra
Some great reporting by an Iraqi stringer for the Times on how things went down in Basra.

Iraqi forces started their assault on the Shiite militias in Basra on Tuesday. Whatever the initial goal of the operation, by the time I arrived in Basra it was a patchwork of neighborhoods that were either deserted or overrun by Mahdi fighters. There were scattered Iraqi Army and police checkpoints, but no place seemed to be truly under government control.

...

That is when we started to see terrible signs of the conflict in Basra. I counted about 20 civilian cars coming north with coffins strapped to their roofs, heading to bury their dead in the Shiite cemetery in the holy city of Najaf. My driver and I were unsure about the road ahead, so we flagged down a family driving in the opposite direction. As we did so, a woman in the passenger seat began frantically waving a piece of white cloth — a white flag — out her window.

It turned out that she was terrified that we might be members of the Mahdi Army, who she said had put bombs and snipers all along the road where the family had just passed. Once we calmed her down, she suggested another way.

...

Gun battles broke out unpredictably, so I ran or walked when it was quiet, then dropped down and sought cover when I could hear shooting. After 45 minutes or so, I came upon the Rumaila Hotel in a central neighborhood called Ashar. Amazingly, it was open, with six or seven guests inside and a couple of employees. I was so exhausted I didn’t think twice, just checked in.

The next day I moved around as much as I could. The common observation was this: There was nowhere the Mahdi either did not control or could not strike at will.

...

On Saturday I was talking with a colleague on my cellphone when a gun battle started right outside the hotel. It was so loud I couldn’t hear the voice on the other end of the line anymore. I dived into a corner of my room and waited for it to end.

A while after the shooting stopped, some other residents of the hotel and I went outside. The street was littered with the shells of heavy machine guns where the Mahdi Army had fired toward another hotel, the Meerbad, where Ministry of Interior officials were staying, perhaps 50 yards away. We could see their pickup trucks, now full of bullet holes, in the parking lot of the hotel.

Yeah, this thing went really well.

Source: The New York Times

This Looks Like a Job For.... Iran?
So who could dampen the escalating violence in Iraq? Who could possibly wield enough power and influence in such a volatile place?

Who's actually in charge, in other words?

BAGHDAD — Iranian officials helped broker a cease-fire agreement Sunday between Iraq's government and radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, according to Iraqi lawmakers.

The deal could help defuse a wave of violence that had threatened recent security progress in Iraq. It also may signal the growing regional influence of Iran, a country the Bush administration accuses of providing support to terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere.

It would be funny if it weren't so tragic.

NOt to mention predictable.

Osama al-Nujaifi, a Sunni lawmaker who oversaw mediation in Baghdad, said representatives from al-Maliki's Dawa Party and another Shiite party traveled to Iran to finalize talks with al-Sadr.

Iran has close ties with both al-Sadr's movement and al-Maliki, who spent several years in exile there. Al-Nujaifi said the agreement was brokered by the commander of Iran's al-Quds Brigade, which is considered a terrorist organization by Washington.

That's right, they traveled to Iran, on orders from its 'terrorist' military, where they agreed to a peace ordered by the Iranians.

Wow.

Source: USA Today

Another Perspective on the War
Namely, one you get from actually considering the human cost of grand ambitions, which is something that El Presidente would never do.

Comedy Central's Jon Stewart was in Washington, DC Tuesday night for the USO-Metro Awards Dinner, where the Daily Show host was honored with a Merit Award from Joint Chiefs vice-chair General James Cartwright. If it seems an odd fit for a comic who consistently lampoons the Bush administration, the Washington Post's Reliable Source informs readers that all the comedic comfort Stewart gives critics of the Iraq War is matched by his efforts to comfort our wounded soldiers:
Turns out the comedian has been quietly visiting soldiers at Walter Reed and Bethesda hospitals, trips he began in 2004 to better understand the Iraq war. "I felt that I was living in a world of theory," he told the audience, "but I hadn't touched the reality and the humanity of it." The first patient he met was "funnier than I was" -- and Stewart's been a regular ever since.

Stewart told the Post, "I certainly get a lot more out of it than they do...If anything, it's made me angrier... You can be for the war, against the war, but you can't be uninformed about it. To see the human cost is part of the equation."

Source: The Huffington Post

Not Just Iraq
Finally, a story that shows the Bush administration can reduce any number of countries to uninhabited rubble, not just Iraq.

Imagine that your home was reduced to mold-covered wood framing by Hurricane Katrina. Desperate for money to rebuild, you engage in a frustrating bureaucratic process, and after months of living in a government provided-trailer that gives off formaldehyde fumes you finally win a federal grant.


Then a collector announces that you have to pay back thousands of dollars.

Thousands of Katrina victims may be in the same boat.

A private contractor under investigation for the compensation it received to run the Road Home grant program for Katrina victims says that in the rush to deliver aid to homeowners in need some people got too much. Now it wants to hire a separate company to collect millions in grant overpayments.

...

One-third of qualified applicants for Road Home help had yet to receive any rebuilding check as of this past week. The program, which has come to symbolize the lurching Katrina recovery effort, has $11 billion in federal funds.

...

Frank Silvestri, co-chair of the Citizen's Road Home Action Team, a group that formed out of frustrations with ICF, sees it far differently.

"They want people to pay for their incompetence and their mistakes. What they need to be is aggressive about finding the underpayments," he said. "People relied, to their detriment, on their (ICFs) expertise and rebuilt their houses and now they want to squeeze this money back out of them."

The prospect of Road Home grant collections comes less than two weeks after the Louisiana inspector general and the legislative auditor said they were investigating why former Gov. Kathleen Blanco paid ICF an extra $156 million in her waning days in office to administer the program. With the increase, ICF stands to earn $912 million to run Road Home, a contract that also sweetened its initial public stock offering, helping it buy out four other companies and enter government contracting in sectors including national defense and the environment.

Paul Rainwater, executive director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, the state body that asked for the Blanco-ICF investigations, acknowledged the collections could be painful for applicants, many of whom have used up their nest eggs to rebuild.

...

Melanie Ehrlich, co-chair of Citizen's Road Home Action Team, which has documented Road Home cases that appear littered with mistakes, said she had no confidence that ICF had correctly calculated overpayments. She charged that the company was more likely using collections as retribution against people who had appealed their award amounts in effort to get the aid they deserved.

"I think they are looking for ways to decrease awards and that's part of dissuading people," she said.

Oh, I'm sure everything is above board, with this massive private contractor operating under the Bush administration.

Riiiight.

Source: Raw Story

Republican Values

Not Just Greed

Bill Orly
So Bill-O, fresh off of threatening to lead a lynch mob against Michelle Obama if there was 'evidence', is now comparing Arianna Huffington, Republican Apostate, to... Hitler. Hitler and the KKK.

Summary: While discussing comments posted to an item on The Huffington Post, Bill O'Reilly said of the website's founder, "Arianna Huffington, I have no respect for that woman. I think that she is hurting the country." O'Reilly asked: "[W]hat's the difference between the Ku Klux Klan and Arianna Huffington?" and later stated: "I don't see any difference between Huffington and the Nazis."

This from the man who's amazed black people can eat at a restaurant without screaming obscenities, and who wants to lead an ideological purge against uppity black women.

Riiiight.

Source: Media Matters

Republicans Are Bad For Children
...and other living things.

Today, the Children’s Defense Fund Action Council released its 2007 Nonpartisan Congressional Scorecard. CDF reports some positive news, particularly that average scores for members of Congress “improved from the previous three years with more Members scoring 100 percent than in 2004, 2005 or 2006.”

Many, however, did not fare so well. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) received a 10 percent rating — the worst in the U.S. Senate.

Oops.

Source: Think Progress

Another Plagiarist
Right-wingers do love to steal other peoples' ideas, don't they?

The latest huckster is Tim Goeglein, a top White House staffer, who also writes a column for a newspaper. Naturally, he's also the liaison to their faith-based theocracy program.

Also, by 'writes', I mean, of course, 'steals'.

WASHINGTON - A Fort Wayne native and White House official acknowledged Friday he copied large portions of an essay that appeared in a Dartmouth College publication and presented them as his own in a News-Sentinel column.


"It is true," Tim Goeglein wrote to The Journal Gazette in an e-mail. "I am entirely at fault. It was wrong of me. There are no excuses."


He said he wrote to the author of the essay, Jeffrey Hart "to apologize, and do so categorically and without exception."


Nancy Nall, a former News-Sentinel columnist who writes a blog from her home in Michigan, detailed the nearly word-for-word similarities of eight paragraphs of Goeglein's 16-pargraph essay about college education, which appeared in the News-Sentinel on Thursday, and Hart's column, which was written about a decade ago.

...

Goeglein has worked in the Bush White House since 2001 as the Bush administration's liaison to religious organizations. He formerly worked for then-Sen. Dan Coats, R-Ind.

Ahh, more of those famous Heartland Values.

This is hardly the first time either. From the Post, regarding the efforts of Nall and her readers to see how far back this goes:

Since then, one of her readers found passages in Goeglein's Nov. 5 column about Hoagy Carmichael that appears lifted from a Jonathan Yardley essay published in The Washington Post on Sept. 3.

Another reader found Goeglein's July 23 column on John Wayne's centenary containing passages from an article by Bruce Bennett published in the New York Sun on June 20. That same reader then found similarities between Goeglein's July 5 column and an article by Robert R. Reilly published in Crisis Magazine on June 13.

Wowie-wow-wow.

Sources: The Washington Post
Nancy Nall.com
Journal Gazette

Good Fences and All That
So the much-vaunted 'Border Fence' that Bush was pushing turns out to have gone completely to custard.

Actually it's so bad, it probably started out that way.

GAO investigators said that Boeing's software could not process large amounts of sensor data. The resulting delays made it hard for operators in a Tucson command center 65 miles to the north to lock cameras on targets. Radar systems were also triggered inadvertently by rain and other environmental factors. Cameras had trouble resolving images at five kilometers when they were expected to work at twice that distance, Stana said.

...

A nongovernment source familiar with the project said that the Bush administration's push to speed the project during last year's immigration debate led Boeing to deploy equipment without enough testing or consultation.

So we have an intruder alarm system that works at half the distance intended, meaning huge gaps, and triggers false positives whenever it rains.

Wonderful! This fence should help ensure that more illegal immigrants sneak into the country.

That will mean more delicious tacos for me. Everybody wins.

Source: The Washington Post

Finally for Budding Fascists
A Playmobil Security Checkpoint!

No, really.

The comments at Amazon are classic.

Educational and Fun!, February 27, 2008 By Zampano (New York City) - See all my reviews

Durability: Fun: Educational:
Thank you Playmobil for allowing me to teach my 5-year old the importance of recognizing what a failing bureaucracy in a ever growing fascist state looks like. Sometimes it's a hard lesson for kids to learn because not all pigs carry billy clubs and wear body armor. I applaud the people who created this toy for finally being hip to our changing times. Little children need to be aware that not all smiling faces and uniforms are friendly. I noticed that my child is now more interested in current events. Just the other day he asked me why we had to forfeit so much of our liberties and personal freedoms and I had to answer "well, it's because the terrorists have already won". Yes, they have won.

I also highly recommend the Playmobil "farm fencing" so you can take your escorted airline passenger away and fence him behind bars as if he were in Guantanamo Bay.

Is O'Reilly Still On the Air?

Warning: Strong Satire

In a discussion of recent comments made by Michelle Obama, Bill O'Reilly took a call from a listener who stated that, according to "a friend who had knowledge of her," Obama " 'is a very angry,' her word was 'militant woman.' " O'Reilly later stated: "I don't want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there's evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels. If that's how she really feels -- that America is a bad country or a flawed nation, whatever -- then that's legit. We'll track it down."

Apparently, Bill-O only wants to lynch the uppity niggers.

That's awfully generous of him.

Source: Firedoglake

I Survived the LSAT

But At What Cost?

Where the White Women At?
It's a question on Bill Kristol's mind, it seems.

BILL KRISTOL: Look, the only people for Hillary Clinton are the Democratic establishment and white women. The Democratic establishment -- it would be crazy for the Democratic Party to follow an establishment that's led it to defeat year after year. White women are a problem, that's, you know -- we all live with that.

[laughter]

JUAN WILLIAMS (National Public Radio correspondent and Fox News contributor): Not me!

HUME: Bill, for the record, I like white women.

KRISTOL: I know, I shouldn't have said that.

Probably not, no. Also, what's up with Juan Williams here?

*shrug*

Conservatives are weird.

Source: Media Matters

Neil Boortz, Total Ass
Neil Boorz, right-wing radio pundit and general waste of skin, has decided that it's time to reveal how he really feels about Katrina refugees.

Summary: On his nationally syndicated radio show, Neal Boortz made disparaging remarks about Hurricane Katrina victims, stating, "When these Katrina so-called refugees were scattered about the country, it was just a glorified episode of putting out the garbage." Boortz also described New Orleans as "a city of parasites, a city of people who could not and had no desire to fend for themselves."

Neil, please, go fuck yourself. Seriously. Racist, classist fuckwit.

Offhand I'd say it's hard to fend for yourself when your entire city is underwater due to gross federal negligence, there's no drinking water, no electricity, no security, bodies floating past what's left of you home and none of those federal agencies you pay taxes to every year show up to help or give a damn. For years afterward, either.

But why bother responding to this guy? He's a moron. He always will be a moron. There's no helping someone this monumentally, viciously stupid.

Source: Media Matters

Rise of the HPV Vaccine
A new study shows that the Human papillomavirus, which causes cervical cancer in women, also causes throat cancer in men, at a far higher rate than previously speculated.

I imagine that the religious right, who vehemently opposed the vaccine being given to preteen girls, will now absolutely CLAMOR that it be given to their boys.

Those arguments about preventing disease encouraging sex won't hold up in their tiny minds when it's their precious heirs at risk, after all. Women are just chattal; you can always buy more.

Source: The Associated Press

Chart of the Datasphere
Well, the (underwater) internet part of it, at any rate. Fascinating stuff. Largely the internet flows where you'd expect it to, with white developed areas receiving by far the hugest share, but things do stand out. Australia, for instance, has little connectivity, though some decent bandwidth (and more is planned). Brazil has a lot of undersea connections, distributed over different areas, so even if they had a similar cabling accident to the one that took out much of the Middle East's bandwidth this week, BRASIL!!! would still flood across the interwebs in rainbow colors.

Such a heartwarming thought.

The accident in question was caused by a ship that tried to put down anchor off the coast of Egypt during bad weather. Understandable thing to do. Unfortunately, said anchor snagged something other than rocks... two very, very pricey ocean-floor fiber optic cables.

According to reports, the internet blackout, which has left 75 million people with only limited access, was caused by a ship that tried to moor off the coast of Egypt in bad weather on Wednesday. Since then phone and internet traffic has been severely reduced across a huge swath of the region, slashed by as much as 70% in countries including India, Egypt and Dubai.

Ooopsies.

Source: The Guardian
For nifty chart

Bill-O
For those who didn't see it on Olbermann (you know who you are), Bill O'Reilly's recent campaign against John Edwards for daring to note that a lot of veterans are homeless has culminated in a protest against him by the very homeless veterans he insisted didn't exist, or only existed because they were are all crazy and on drugs.

Carol Gardener, executive director of Fitzgerald House, which provides transitional housing and job placement assistance to homeless veterans, recently appeared at News Corporation headquarters to deliver a petition to FOX News mainstay and The O'Reilly Factor host Bill O'Reilly.

The petition, signed by 17,000 people, demands an apology from O'Reilly over a claim he made that there are no homeless veterans.

"The only thing sleeping under a bridge is that guy's brain," O'Reilly quipped during his January 4 broadcast, referring to part of a speech that former senator and presidential candidate John Edwards (D-NC) gave, dropping a figure of 200,000 veterans sleeping "under bridges and on grates." (The Department of Veterans Affairs estimates 195,000.)

O'Reilly repeatedly joked about homeless veterans, insisting that, even if there was such a problem, there "aren't that many."

Worst...Person....In the World!!! (sorry Keith)

Source: Raw Story

Saturday Evening (News) Post

Like the cheap champagne we're going down in flames...

O'Reilly's O'Meltdown
So it seems Bill O'Reilly got into a shoving match with an Obama staffer at an Obama event, an event where the crowd was very, err, unhappy to see him to start with.

When the popular Fox News entertainer arrived at the Obama event in Nashua, people turned to him but not always approvingly. "Hey O'Reilly," yelled a man. When O'Reilly turned he got a single-finger salute. A few people approached Bill to shake his hand but the overwhelming sentiment was unfavorable. "O'Reilly hatemonger," yelled a woman. A few other people gave him the bird. "I hate you Bill," yelled a man. "You can't stop us Bill," yelled another. I thought someone might brain him with one of those Obama "Hope" signs.

A number of people shouted falafel, the word O'Reilly used in a racy set of telephone conversations with a young woman he was trying to seduce as he described a shower they might take together. He meant loofa, which is not a Middle Eastern delicacy but a bath item.

That would be a funny enough story in itself, but it seems O'Reilly lost his cool completely when the Obama staff failed to show him the deference to which he is accustomed.

The incident was triggered when O'Reilly--with a Fox News crew shooting--was screaming at Obama National Trip Director Marvin Nicholson "Move" so he could get Obama's attention, according to several eyewitnesses. "O'Reilly was yelling at him, yelling at his face," a photographer shooting the scene said.

O'Reilly grabbed Nicholson's arm and shoved him, another eyewitness said. Nicholson, who is 6'8, said O'Reilly called him "low class."

"He grabbed me with both his hands here," Nicholson said, gesturing to his left arm and O'Reilly "started shoving me." Nicholson said, " He was pretty upset. He was yelling at me."

Secret Service agents who were nearby flanked O 'Reilly after he pushed Nicholson. They told O'Reilly he needed to calm down and get behind the fence-like barricade that contained the press.

Yeah Bill, err, acting angry, agitated and physically aggressive around a Presidential candidate might not be the best move you could make. Those Secret Service guys will drop you without giving a second thought to Fox News' primetime ratings if they think you're going to go all whacko on the candidate.

Though, man, that'd be entertaining.

Source: Slate
blogs.suntimes.com

Cute Stunt, But Careful Now...
So the Lakota Sioux, after something like two decades of debate, have decided to unilaterally withdraw from their treaties with the United States and reform their nation.

At least, on paper.

In practice of course, rather a large number of other people live there now and that would make for a headache. For now one supposes they just want to set their own laws without interference on whatever reservation territory they have left.

Given that, while drawing up maps of your new country might be funny, it might not be the best idea...

Source: Jazz From Hell

So the Drama
The National Academy of Sciences puts out a book detailing the relationship between science education and evolution, which pans creationism and says it has no place in the classroom.

NBC, far from recognizing the obvious and letting the statement of said obvious things lie, decides it'd make a racier story if it was a 'controversy', so they whip one up, and have an idiot from the Family Research Council on as an opposing viewpoint to thousands of educated scientists.

This is just..... garghhg.

Source: Raw Story

Random Sweeney Related Thing
So the roommate was curious where Johnny Depp was from, and we looked up his wikipedia bio. Turns out, Kentucky, of all godforsaken places.

Later in his bio it said he played a slide guitar. I didn't know what that was, so I looked it up. Short answer: a guitar you play with a thing over your finger that you slide up and down the strings. Neato.

There's a nifty picture of how to play one using a coke bottle as the slide.
Source: Wikipedia

Rethuglican Post-Iowa Meme
So Obama's victory in Iowa has the thuggish Republicans scared, and when they get scared, they turn to conspiracy theories.

Now the theory being advanced is that the Democrats are running Obama because white people will be afraid not to vote for him, or else the big, scary black mobs will rise up and burn down their houses.

Seriously.

Source: Glenn Greenwald

I Yet Live!

So after the snowman incident I kind of came down with something and was pretty sick all week. Yeesh.

But I'm better now, so on with the links and news.

Finally, CSI Redux
This pretty much explains the whole show, along with all of its various clones and retreads.

Source: Cascade Failure

Ebay Madness
If you're evil and have disposable income there's no end to the fun you can have.

Source: Ebay (naturally)

Mars Was Already Pretty Beaten Up, It Hardly Needs a New Dent
Used planets just aren't what they once were.

Oh well.

Source: The LA Times

Slashdot Said It Best, I Think
Begun, this War on Christmas Has.

Source: Gizmodo

Bush Sez: A Bargain at Twice The Price!
Oh, and you will be paying twice the price, too.

Iraq war now tops Vietnam in cost using adjusted dollars. Twice as expensive as Korea.

Source: Yahoo News

Lakota Indians Withdraw from Meaningless Treaties
Not that it will help them, but at least it made the news.

Source: Fox News (oddly enough)

Putin of the Year
Vlad makes Person of the Year at Time.

The article has some great Russian jokes in it too.

Still, creepy, creepy man.

Oh, and FYI, Time? "A Tsar is Born" is not a clever title. Not the least bit. Plus, considering how Russkies see the Tsars, it's pretty insensitive.

Source: Time.com

Department of RICHARD IS BACK OH THANK THE LORD
Looking for Group with another Richard comic that needs to be made into a shirt.

Seriously. I'd buy like five all by myself.

Source: Looking for Group

I've Got Those Sunday Morning News Blues

My baby left me... something about a train..... 

Let's make this rapid-fire so I can clear out my Opera tabs, shall we?

There's a Right Way and a Wrong Way To Do Almost Anything
El Presidente sends out Christmas cards with a staunch religious message and an extensive bible quote.

Asks Walters: "Does this also go to agnostics, and atheists, and Muslims?"

"Don't you think it's a little interesting," Walters also asks, "that the president of all the people is sending out a religious Christmas card?"

I think it's a little offensive that the President sends out Christmas cards through the White House, actually. I don't care if he wants to do it as a private individual, but since when is it the place of government to tell us about Jesus?

There are, of course, alternatives, if you want to do something more fun and less preachy.

Sources: Raw Story
Slashfilm.com

Al Sharpton, Legal Eagle
So it turns out there's an FBI tape from 2003 where Al Sharpton asks for $50,000 to be donated to his political campaign with the promise that he'll land the donor a cushy contract if he does so.

Sharpton claims that this is not illegal, because he was only a candidate for office, not an elected official. If he's right and that loophole exists, then... just wow. Amazing.

Source: Philly.com

Mackris v. O'Reilly
Turns out that an enterprising soul has made an opera out of the sexual harassment case against Bill O'Reilly, he of War on Christmas fame. A sample has been posted to Youtube, and it is astonishingly funny.

Source: Jesus' General

Department of I Can't Help But Gawk
I really don't want to be the guy who slows down at a car accident to see the carnage, here (leave that for the esteemed Mr. Carlin), but you really have to see some things to believe them. You might have read or seen an article about the little girl in India born with four extra limbs, thought by some to be an incarnation of an eight-limbed Hindu goddess of wealth. Well, they performed a successful surgery to remove the extra appendages and she's apparently doing well. The reason I link this particular article is most of the way down the page, they include an x-ray of the girl pre-surgery.

Wowsa.

Apparently she didn't so much have extra limbs as a headless, torso-less conjoined twin growing out of her pelvis. Those were its arms and legs, not hers, that they cut out.

Ewww.

Here's hoping she does well in the future.

Source: BBC News

Department of Another Bad Idea
So it seems there's not actually any law governing how much money a charity has to spend out of what it collects on, you know, charity.

Seriously.

This has led, in turn, to a raft of less than scrupulous 'charity' organizations that take in money, supposedly for Iraq war veterans, and then siphon huge amounts off the top. Things like half-million a year salaries, for instance.

Lovely.

On the other hand, you have charities like Fisher House, which spend 90% of what they take in directly on charitable work. They don't do much in the way of advertising, so they rely on word of mouth and so forth to get the dollars. Jeffrey Rowland of Overcompensating and Wigu had a shirt on sale to benefit them for a while but unfortunately that option is no longer available. The roommate has one and I shall have to post a picture sometime. At any rate, if you're going to give money, make sure you check out who it's going to.

And if you want to give to vets, the Fisher House people are apparently a good place to send the checks.

Sources: Fisher House
The Washington Post

RIP, Julia Carson
Finally on a sad note, Julia Carson, long-time public servant and Indiana congresswoman, just died from complications of a long fight with lung cancer. Carson was a remarkable figure in Indiana politics, a black woman hated with visceral fury by the Republicans and the right wing, who used people power as a political machine and created a small Democratic empire out of the city of Indianapolis. By all accounts honest, hard working, ingenious and dedicated, she spent her life helping other people and fighting the sort of entitled idiots who have driven this country to the brink of self-destruction. She will be missed.

My own most vivid memory about Carson was the vicious campaign against her one election year when I was still a kid growing up half-time on the south side. The Republicans thought that doctoring up a photograph of Carson, using the old Nazi propaganda techniques (lighting from below, high contrasts, etc) so that she looked like a crack addict would play well in their advertising. It was one of the most baldly racist, ugly things I've ever seen in a political campaign, and a real harbinger of events to come, where in future elections Republicans would insinuate that black candidates were out to get your white women, or that Max Cleland, who lost 3 limbs serving his country, was in league with Osama Bin Laden.

Carson won the election, handily as usual. It takes guts to stand up to abuse like that. I always admired her for it.

Source: IndyStar.com