Bastards.
Private security guards from Blackwater Worldwide participated in some of the C.I.A.’s most sensitive activities — clandestine raids with agency officers against people suspected of being insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and the transporting of detainees, according to former company employees and intelligence officials.
The raids against suspects occurred on an [...]
Number of comments: 4 So where I’m at isn’t necessarily where I should be. Not for blogging purposes anyway. Did the coffee thing this morning but even so when I finally got home and settled in I realized I hadn’t read any of the national newspapers yet today. That’s not the problem. The problem [...]
Number of comments: 1 Silly me. I thought if I ignored Sarah Palin’s specious “climategate” op-ed in the WaPost, it would go away.
No, not hardly. Despite articles, factchecking, posts, aggregations, posts, sarcasm, posts, debunkings and freaking videos explaining why climategate is a cynically manufactured nontroversy, the Strib republished Palin’s idiocy this morning.
You cannot trust a [...]
Number of comments: 4 Not that much snow here in the Cities, but plenty all around us. In Iowa they got enough snow that the Des Moines Register decided to make their electronic version available to everyone today. Check it out.
It took me a minute or so to figure out navigation and sizing. Ten [...]
Number of comments: 8 Rod Jetton, former Missouri Speaker of the House, has been charged with second-degree assault.
None of the news reports want to come right out and say it, but they all imply that Jetton’s victim was roofied.
According to a probable cause statement filed by a Sikeston police detective, Jetton and the woman [...]
Number of comments: 2 More from the Guardian; Roger Cohen and Bob Herbert on the other war.
More important, the L.A. Times tells their readers that imposing a war tax would be insanely evil. Killing innocent civilians? Not so much so.
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John Kerry’s Tora Bora op-ed.
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Another Cargill-owned company recalls ground beef for salmonella contamination.
I’ll give Obama [...]
Number of comments: 5 It’s starting. After only two losses all season, Vikings fans are already resorting to the kind of excusifying they’re notorious for throughout the league. (When, that is, they’re not trash talking the Vikes for failing to win a Super Bowl.) According to Dan Patrick:
“Boselli points out that (left tackle) Bryant [...]
Number of comments: 2 Another one of those days when I can’t decide whether I hate Republicans or the media more. Corporatized Republicans because they just can’t stop lying about everything, and the media because they won’t stop treating the divided Republicans like a legitimate political party with actual policies that extend beyond fuck [...]
Number of comments: 4 Another very special column from Katherine Kersten this morning. Keywords include:
oil oozing
glare with disgust
sticky handprints
shill
But that’s just Kersten’s description of some nasty ad running against Michele Bachmann. Here are the words Katherine uses to describe Bachmann’s enemies:
smear machine (fueled by huge sums of cash)
Public Enemy No. 1
cabal of Democratic activists
the [...]
Number of comments: 10 No, I’m not changing it although I may spend some time tweaking it over the weekend.
I wanted to switch to Khoi Vinh’s Basic Maths theme, then I saw it cost $45.
I didn’t want to switch that bad, especially since I suspect I would have had to learn a lot more [...]
Number of comments: 6 She opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, was vehemently against the draft (but called those who evaded it “bums”), and “regarded the feminist movement as utterly without legitimacy.” In her novels, she glorified rape—if it was committed by the right kind of man. Heller quotes her most famous disciple and [...]
Back to morning posts, on the weekends at least.
Four stories at the Times that caught my eye:
Max Baucus, the execrable blue dog bastard who shoved phony health care reform up our nation’s ass, pushed an attorney he was porking to become the new U.S. Attorney for Montana
Italian court sentences Amanda [...]
In the immortal words of Atrios, I got nuthin’. Oh I could probably do something with Judith Warner’s column, but it snowed today and my mind is elsewhere.
Music at the other place later.
Later. [...]
Number of comments: 4 I’m sure you’ve heard by now that Bill Ayers has dumped Obama over Afghanistan. Clarence Page seems to enjoy the irony. If you’re committed to party politics as I am, you don’t dump the President when he’s from your own party. Not unless he tries to nickel and dime regular [...]
Number of comments: 3 Haaretz is excited.
But not so excited they forgot to mention that Marc’s father was “released from federal prison last year after serving a nearly five-year sentence for wire and bank fraud.” Former Iowa Congressman Ed Mezvinsky’s sins, of course, should not be visited upon the son.
But maybe someone should ask [...]
Number of comments: 1 Digby’s quote from a HuffPo article sums up the state of the Palin quite nicely:
As the epigram to Chapter Three, “Drill, Baby, Drill,” Palin assigns the following remarks to the Hall of Fame hoops coach:
Our land is everything to us… I will tell you one of the things we remember [...]
Number of comments: 5 I have to confess that I’m finding it hard to give a shit about the news given that we’re escalating in Afghanistan. Spot and Mick both speak to issues I have about that, and I suspect we’re in for quite a few disillusioned posts from former Obamanistas, not that Mick [...]
Number of comments: 7 There’s nothing like a series of five- and six-hour drives to give you time to think. On the way down to Ohio I emptied out my head, and on the way back I filled it up again. I think I know what I want to do with my blogs, but [...]
Number of comments: 2 Interest in medical marijuana and easing other marijuana laws picked up markedly about 18 months ago, but advocates say the biggest surge came with the election of Barack Obama, the third straight president to acknowledge having smoked marijuana, and the first to regard it with anything like nonchalance.
Even the Washington [...]
Number of comments: 6 Sarah Palin as seen by:
Frank Rich
The Times on Palin in Michigan and Indiana, but no mention of her ditching her fans in Indiana
Christopher Buckley
Steve Chapman
Joe Wurzelbacher
CNN
TBogg
TRex
Palin did manage to find time to ditch some fans yesterday so she could rip on the Senate healthcare vote in which her side has [...]
Number of comments: 1 Politics:
Bob Herbert with the sad story of Detroit
Not sure where Ray D. Madoff is coming from, but farmers do NOT need protection from estate taxes (that’s a lie, a Republican lie — it’s never been true and never will be true no matter how many times they lie about it)
Tripp Palin’s paternal [...]
Number of comments: 8 Some thoughts this morning on the fine art of trolling. That’s what I’m paneling on at Netroots Minnesota this afternoon, and that’s what I’ve been thinking about lately.
Not from defensive POV, but in my role as a liberal troll at my buddy Vick’s blog. I think my work in that [...]
Number of comments: 4 More than anything I’m putting up another post because I want to flag something for you. John Cole appears to be just about the only “news” source on the planet who’s put together the fact that CNN’s “Killing at the Canals” series on rogue U.S. troops in Iraq is about [...]
Number of comments: 5 -
I really don’t have much use for Sarah Palin, but I have even less use for smarmy doyennes who sleep their way to the top of the Village’s social heap, and then ask very broad and quite rude religious questions of someone who’s not present to answer them.
What does she [...]
Number of comments: 8 It’s Mickey Mouse’s 81st birthday today, and he’s still the property of the Disney folks who have owned Mickey since they created him in 1928.
What does that mean, exactly? It means that if you do anything with Mickey and Disney doesn’t like it (or even if they do), they can [...]
Number of comments: 3 I took this one picture just before I started blowing up the balloons and putting party favors at all the placesettings. It appeared to be in focus last night, but apparently it only took one and a half Maharajas to cloud my vision. They served the strong beer in small [...]
Number of comments: 9 No, not another link to another a story about Sarah Palin. Well, OK, if you insist. But I’m self-aware enough to know that Wegestock is just a manifestation of my inner Sarah, my need for attention, the gratification I get from having others buy me beer.
It’s not my good side. [...]
Number of comments: 4 Minnesota Public Radio’s getting ready to expand their online news presence in a way that might prove to be very interesting. Or not.
Meanwhile, the Strib jumps all over them this morning and the comments go from lib MPR hate to the usual rightwing NPR fulminations. Ed Kohler deconstructs the numbers [...]
A funny thing happened to Katherine Kersten on her way to the snarkfest.
She laid it on so thick that Katherine’s churlish wordle grew three sizes today! And the minute her heart didn’t feel quite so right, she whizzed out an upload on the bright morning snow. And she brought back [...]
Number of comments: 8 I took another look at that Franken-Coleman Mad Magazine fold-in and the more I looked at it, the more I thought that their intent couldn’t possibly have been to create a FrankMan buttplug. Or a ColeKen buttplug.
I tried folding the page differently.
That didn’t look right either, so I tried a [...]
Number of comments: 7 I think they let an intern write Opinuendo this week. Further speculation Wegeth not, but the reporting on the ID debate at St. Thomas’s law school is a bit more even handed and less snarky than the Opinuendo I remember.
Picking up after Casey Luskin’s weasel points:
Luskin was followed by Peter [...]
Number of comments: 7 Sholom Rubashkin has been found guilty of 86 out of 91 counts of felony fraud related to his management of the Agriprocessors packing plant in Postville, Iowa.
He was separately found guilty of 15 out of 20 charges of ignoring a court order that he pay livestock providers on the barrelhead [...]
Number of comments: 5 I was finally induced into watching a Strib news video with James Lileks.
I won’t do that again. Lileks approaches the news Fox style, and I just can’t handle that kind of conversational crap. If it’s news, it’s interesting whether you dress it up for a party or just read it [...]
Number of comments: 7 The enthusiasm seems to have tapered off a bit, so I think it’s time to bring out the promo poster from Tild!
I’m not sure but I think this poster references an old Julie Andrews movie, either S.O.B. or Thoroughly Modern Millie, I’m not sure which.
Catherine at The Happy Gnome was [...]
Drowning in links, but I can’t decide what makes me maddest today.
I think I’ll let Mick kick things off:
I don’t want to seem too much like a broken record, going over and over the same grooves and playing the same song until My Funny Valentine sounds like Little Lambsy-Divey but [...]
Number of comments: 5 They serve and fight for their country, and this is how we repay them?
Then again, maybe a bacon quesadilla cheeseburger would sound good to one of Minnesota’s 4,000 homeless vets.
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In a rare bit of good news, Jeff Huber says it’s bullshit that Obama has decided to send more troops to [...]
Number of comments: 2 The new header’s actually scarier when you can read the tags. Not sure everyone realized it, but the tags do denote what passes for thoughts in my innermost cranial thinkspots.
Word cancers would be another way of putting it. Lots of word cancers. This iteration of Norwegianity isn’t even a year [...]
Number of comments: 3 Kill it.
Yes, people will die, but people will die if this bill passes as is.
Joe Lieberman should die.
No, I don’t need Peter fucking Beinart to tell me it was a smart move. And I’ll ask the U.S. Conference of Bishops for their opinion the next time they chain themselves to [...]
Number of comments: 3 Krugman:
Last Thursday there was a rally outside the U.S. Capitol to protest pending health care legislation, featuring the kinds of things we’ve grown accustomed to, including large signs showing piles of bodies at Dachau with the caption “National Socialist Healthcare.” It was grotesque — and it was also ominous. For [...]
Number of comments: 7 Your biweekly Kerdle from wordle.net.
You know, sometimes I think her wordles open windows into her real obsessions. Click to read her actual post at your own peril, or just take my word for it that this Tom Toles ‘toon covers everything she has to say and then some.
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A Day in [...]
Number of comments: 3 Screaming, shouting, pantswetting Republicans doing their damnedest to disrupt the healthcare debate this morning.
And, in a last minute effort to swing votes for the anti-abortion crowd, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has just weighed in on healthcare reform.
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Not fame I had sought out but it appears I’m being credited [...]
Dept. of What Comes Around:
The firm that designed the fateful Interstate 35W bridge has asked the National Transportation Safety Board to reopen its investigation into the Aug. 1, 2007, collapse.
The request by Pasadena, Calif.-based Jacobs Engineering Group was made in a 19-page letter sent within the past few weeks to [...]
Picked up a case of much riper pomegranates so by all rights this post should go up on the other blog, me already being well on my way to being that way.
But these are N links, not M links, and frankly, I don’t think they’d age well. Friday night stuff [...]
Number of comments: 4 Michele Bachmann had her little rally on Capitol Hill and then, at her urging, the demonstrators stormed the Capitol building with twelve arrests being reported outside Speaker Pelosi’s office alone.
Because that, ladies and gentlemen, is what law and order abiding social conservatives do.
When they’re not shooting abortion doctors. Or engaging [...]
Nothing like a late night meeting with an attorney to make me reach for the bottle and pipe. Not my attorney, but the meeting was about stuff I’ll have to help with so there you go.
I did get some kind of potted plant to go with my retainer. Actually I [...]
…when everyone’s just lying anyhow?
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No, I didn’t want to click on any of that shite either. Too many pundits today trying to explain Tuesday’s election, and they’re all full of it.
But here’s the cartoon:
Nah, doesn’t do much for me either.
One thing did ring my chimes, however. Rushbo is blaming Newt [...]
Number of comments: 8 The World Serious takes a long time to play because it’s so very, very serious.
UPDATE: It took over four hours, but now you can all join in singing the We Hate the Yankees song.
This is my 57th October and the twelfth time the Yankees have come through for me. That [...]
Number of comments: 1 Memorydejavu asked in the comments as to what it all means.
John Cole says that it means the voters selected Democrats in national races, and Republicans for governorships in states already trending that way. Tim Fernholz at the centrist American Prospect says it was a rejection of extremism, but doesn’t mention [...]