- Have the Republicans become the party of instant satisfaction and gratification? This illustration offers some numbers in support of the suggestion:
- Do you have any idea why McCain won’t comment on matters of marital infidelity? It’s not like him to give up a chance to be high and mighty…
- A lot of locals have been excited to discover that Google Street View has come to Chattanooga, and they are pouring over the maps to find all the easter eggs caught in the images. But will they find anything as quite as spooky as a house on fire?
- Tennessee’s progressive blogosphere Sunday roundup.
- Quote of the week, from Ian McKellan, regarding an (yet another) intolerant religious leader: “From the pulpit, homophobia is preached by some arrogant religious leaders who think their beliefs are superior to our inborn and, some would say, God-given nature.” Ha!
- Here’s a puzzler:
So John McCain apparently lifted huge portions of his statement on the unfolding crisis in Georgia from Wikipedia. Here’s a 3 AM question for you: do you want a President with a real strategy for containing such a crisis, or do you want someone who’s stumbling over wikipedia entries after getting internet lessons from his wife? I guess when it comes to McCain and foreign policy, it’s a google!
I don’t think he’s up for the job, but we’ll see. (UPDATE: more here and here!) - Mind-boggling quote of the day, from George W. Bush on Russia’s activities in Georgia: “Russia has invaded a sovereign neighbouring state…. Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century…. We have no doubts about it. This is a deliberate attempt to destroy an entire country and change the regime.” I am speechless. (UPDATE: more here!)
- Will a Southern community serve as a nuclear waste dump?
But nevertheless, even if we accept McCain’s unsophisticated spin at face value, there’s just not much of an argument here. McCain, faced with the most important national security and foreign policy decision in a generation, got the war wrong. Indeed, he kept getting the war wrong, telling Americans we had to “stay the course” while the Bush/Rumsfeld policy was failing miserably. Now there’s a sovereign Iraqi government, and wouldn’t you know it, the prime minister thinks McCain is still wrong.
And the surge is supposed to be the saving grace? McCain got the big question wrong, and was half-right about a tactical decision after supporting a half-decade of failure? Please.
Oh, pul-eeze. A “general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals” is an incredibly tortured way of finally admitting that we’re going to adopt a timeline for getting the troops out of Iraq.
Not really.
But can you imagine the news coverage if it was true?!? It would be huge. It’s not, however, something I concocted from thin air. The story is true, only John McCain is the guy who cheated on his first wife and then married his second wife before the divorce was final with the first wife, who he dumped because she was a cripple and not as rich as the trollop he would ride into the Senate. No kidding. But watch and see how nobody cares about the story, even though the news media would be lapsing into a collective case of apoplexy if Barack Obama had done something even half as bad. Damn liberal media! Oh, yeah — and then McCain lied about it all. Yet again, you gotta love those Republican family values.
It’s been a newsy weekend! I posted a couple of stories yesterday morning, but there’s more!
- _blank">Jesse Helms: Not everyone believes the man who brought us so much negativity, hate, and prejudice deserves the half-staff treatment. A few are even willing to take a stand. Others feel obligated to give him a hat tip.
- Gina Gray got fired from her job at Arlington Cemetery because the Pentagon doesn’t want you to know that in a war, soldiers die. Will the Army do the right thing?
- The Chattanooga Green Report calls for more buses and more recycling! Maybe instead of spending money on a stupid raccoon, we should spend it on actual incentives?
- Their design is great, but so is the heavy-handedness. More and more, it’s getting hard to like Apple Computer.
- Via Craig Hickman, an awesome tennis blogger I only just discovered, check out the ITF’s new book promoting the Beijing Olympics.
- Pam directs us to Women We Love!
- Barbara talks about Megachruches and Hamas
- Bush is still embarrassing us around the world. And then there’s sleaze and those pesky little war crimes. Only six more months (at best!).
- McCain: oh, where to begin?!? He’s had such a bad week (though you’d never know it from the American press coverage!). More campaign shakeups, and it turns out that his homophobic campaign chairman has sex with men (now there’s a surprise! Yet another self-hating gay Republican!). And he, along with a lot of Republicans, hates birth control — doesn’t want to talk about it, doesn’t want to improve access to it. This story won’t go away! Also, the fallout from the Gramm idiocy continues — the hypocrisy, lies, and questions about leadership and credibility. He’s been caught lying (or is it just memory problems?) about his experience as a POW (which, btw, he doesn’t want to talk about, unless he’s exploiting the experience to scare up some votes). And through it all, the poor thing is trying to learn how to open a web browser (which isn’t necessarily a dig at his age, but does bring into question his competence). So much for the press to ignore!
And finally, check out this cool experiment in physics and sound (the tray, which contains a mixture of corn starch and water, is sitting on a speaker while the music plays):
I’ve been reading these internets today and have a random sampling of interesting tidbits found in these here tubes:
- Hello. I’m Billy Blades. And so are you.
- Today the Iraqi government says that they want the US out of Iraq — including our military bases. This flies in the face of all of John McCain’s plans for permanent bases in Iraq and a 100-years war. What will he doooo?!?
- Speaking of John McCain, the old coot thinks that he’s much more highly regarded among vets than he really is. And btw, only people who have served have the right to question McCain’s judgment — oops! Make that: only people who have served AND who also agree with John McCain! And he doesn’t want to talk about being a POW — unless it’s in a freakin’ campaign commercial. Seriously?
- You’ve probably heard that those inbred polygamists who got busted earlier this year for letting old men knock up their daughters while they’re still little girls have their own clothing line. It turns out they let their daughters dress like flashy harlots.
- Remember when there were only 3 channels on TV (well, four if you were lucky enough to live in an area with a PBS station)? Have things changed all that much? Not really.
- Now here are a couple of stories that made me laugh out loud today: 1) That the man who never read a book might pretend to write one. and 2) That there are people out there who would consider it appropriate to put the same clueless moron, who can’t even quote Jefferson properly, in a classroom. With children.
- And speaking of George Bush, his buddy John McCain hates bloggers. Yeah, that whole free-flowing information thing sure does put a real crimp in the old bullshit spewer, don’t it?
- Those wacky internetizens are not done with Jesse Helms yet. They’re questioning his patriotism, calling him irrelevant and defeated, and remembering when his house was condemed! Oh, and Mike Huckabee loved and admired him.
- Charlie “110% Heterosexual” Crist is still in the news and Chris Matthews doesn’t love him.
- Are you a quilter? How about quilting for our nation’s wounded heroes?
- A guy in Cleveland, TN has figured out how to run a car on Chattanooga’s greatest natural resource (more here)!
- A Norwich woman spent the morning with a bat in her bra (via BoingBoing).
- Are you ready to wear a bracelet when you get on a plane? One that zaps you with a shock if you don’t behave?
- Here’s the latest from the awesome Improv Everywhere troupe!
- Worst. President. Ever.
- Jonah Goldberg is still a half-witted wanker.
- When world leaders meet to discuss world hunger, is it appropriate for them to enjoy a six-course lunch and 18-course dinner?!? Sheesh!
I’m really worried about America’s karma these days. We’re turning into a nation of mean, nasty people. The king mean nasty person and his lackeys in Congress have been screwing over our nation’s greatest heroes — the first responders and GIs — for years. And our nation’s largest retailer, along with others, is quickly gaining a reputation for repeatedly trying to stand between people and proper medical care and benefits. And we are completely failing when it comes to taking care of the men and women who serve on the front lines of Bush’s unbelievably stupid war.
News stories like these are a daily thing in the Bush/McCain regime and I don’t know how much more negative energy this nation can take.
I’m still sorting through my travel photos while also slogging through some blogs, getting caught up on the news I missed. There were a lot of big stories — ranging from the very sad (Ted Kennedy’s health problems) to the exciting (California’s Supreme Court sanely confirming that all people are created equal) — but those stories have been beaten to death. Here are a few links that cover some quieter events:
- Exits: Annika Sorenstam (golf) and Justine Henin (tennis) are both retiring — Justine is the first tennis player to quit while holding the #1 spot!
- Via Boing Boing is this gorgeous public spaces animation
- beep found some incredible photography
- Chris points to some beautiful underwater footage
- Cute Overload discovered some animal odd couple images
- Bush claims that he’s made great golf-related sacrifices because of his war. But he lies. And he got busted. And mocked.
- And finally, a couple of quotes. These are the kind of take-no-prisoners Democrats I’ve been wishing for all these years!
“While I always appreciate hearing the news from John McCain, he should explain to the American people why almost every single promise and prediction that he has made about Iraq has turned to be catastrophically wrong, including his support for a surge that was supposed to achieve political reconciliation. While John McCain offers his poor judgment in supporting George Bush’s war and a failed foreign policy that has left us less secure, I will continue to make the case for a new foreign policy that deploys all elements of American power — including tough, principled and direct diplomacy. It’s stunning that in such a lengthy written statement, John McCain could not articulate a single new idea that hasn’t been tried — and failed — over the last eight years.” — Barack Obama
The Bush-McCain saber rattling is the most self-defeating policy imaginable. It achieves nothing. But it forces Iranians who despise the regime to rally behind their leaders. And it spurs instability in the Middle East, which adds to the price of oil, with the proceeds going right from American wallets into Tehran’s pockets.
The worst nightmare for a regime that thrives on tension with America is an America ready, willing and able to engage. Since when has talking removed the word “no” from our vocabulary?
It’s amazing how little faith George Bush, Joe Lieberman and John McCain have in themselves - and in America. — Joe Biden
- UPDATE: one more… Bob Geiger: Dead Troops Remembered By President Who Had Them Killed (via Nicole Belle)
Everywhere I’ve gone for the past few days, everyone has been talking about how Hillary (and McCain, for that matter) wants to have a gas tax holiday. No one I’ve met who has an opinion about it thinks her idea is a good one. I’d like to suggest an alternative.
Hillary likes to frame her position from a people-vs.-the-big-bad-oil-companies perspective, which is a pretty smart approach to the situation. They are big and they are bad. Some of them are downright disgusting, if you ask me (I’d rather push my car than buy gas at Exxon/Mobil).
But, the problem with Hillary’s tax holiday is that it offers nothing that would change the behavior of Big Oil. In fact, it would be doing them a terrific favor because gas prices would drop, which would in turn raise demand. They could sell more oil without lowering their prices! It’s almost like Hillary has worked out a deal with these guys.
But here’s another idea.
[Let me note here that this proposal does not offer any sort of long-term solution to our energy problems (neither does Hillary or McCain's for that matter). It just buys us a bit of time, which I would hope we could use to take drastic and dramatic steps to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.]
So, there’s the idea. At this moment, we have 700 million barrels of oil in the US Stretegic Oil Reserve. What would happen if we suddenly unleashed just a million of those barrels on the market? Well, I’m guessing prices would drop precipitously, which would help out the consumer quite a bit. And, there would be the special bonus benefit of screwing over the oil companies, too, because they’d be forced to drop their prices in response to the sudden increase in supply. Ha! Teach them to screw over their customers for the sake of record-breaking profits and hundred-million-dollar golden parachutes.
Then I would go one step further. I would pull our troops out of Iraq. If the oil companies want Iraq’s oil, let them use those all record profits to fight their own freakin’ oil wars (hell, send Lee Raymond over there to fight), but leave us out of it. We’ve already spent over half a trillion dollars (and counting) trying to secure their oil supply. Now it’s time for them to do their own damn dirty work.
And there you have it. That’s my proposal.
Via Joe. My. God., from Married to the Sea
