Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Be a wild strawberry.

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Many life forms that would benefit from greater intelligence, sadly, do not have it.

Petty moves from a petty man.

“Perhaps I should have considered other options.” (head-desk)

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

They are not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

Disappointing to see gov. newsom with his finger to the wind.

White supremacy is terrorism.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

Beware of advice from anyone for whom Democrats are “they” and not “we.”

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Archives for 2005

Tough Road Ahead for Kenny Boy

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This could be bad news for the Enron execs:

In a reversal that transforms the criminal case against Enron’s former top officers, the company’s former chief accounting officer has reached an agreement with prosecutors to plead guilty to violating federal law during his employment there, people briefed on the decision said yesterday.

The former accounting officer, Richard A. Causey, had been viewed by lawyers in the case as likely to strike a plea deal with prosecutors and possibly serve as a witness for the government in the coming trial of two former chief executives of Enron, Kenneth L. Lay and Jeffrey K. Skilling.

While Mr. Causey’s name is not widely known to those who have not been paying close attention to the Enron case, he has long been considered potentially one of the most important witnesses in the fraud cases against Mr. Lay and Mr. Skilling. The three men had been scheduled to go on trial together, facing charges of conspiracy, securities fraud, wire fraud and other crimes, beginning Jan. 17.

Good. These folks need to pay.

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When Is An Iraqi Army Not An Iraqi Army?

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Answer: when it’s an unalloyed mixing of distinct tribes with parochial loyalties.

KIRKUK, Iraq – Kurdish leaders have inserted more than 10,000 of their militia members into Iraqi army divisions in northern Iraq to lay the groundwork to swarm south, seize the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and possibly half of Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city, and secure the borders of an independent Kurdistan.

…The soldiers said that while they wore Iraqi army uniforms they still considered themselves members of the Peshmerga — the Kurdish militia — and were awaiting orders from Kurdish leaders to break ranks. Many said they wouldn’t hesitate to kill their Iraqi army comrades, especially Arabs, if a fight for an independent Kurdistan erupted.

The Kurds stand to cause considerable trouble, but for now they have more to lose by instigating chaos than they stand to gain. One simple reason is Turkey; if Iraq crumbles entirely and the Kurds even look like they’re going to declare a state, Turkey will annex the land militarily to prevent domestic Kurds from trying to secede and join it.

Does anybody believe that no other Iraqi factions have done the same thing? I don’t.

This comes via Georgia10, whose posting makes me think that she will be regarded as one of the better additions to the Kos front page. Beside Darksyde of course, whose work is simply sublime.

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Quick Hits

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My internet has been going in and out all day long, and I have about 5 things I want to write about, but every time I try to post, my connection dies. Quick links will have to do, since I am tired of trying and am going to just retire to the couch:

Two stories in the NY Times which I thought were interesting. One about plans to recycle nuclear waste, one about conservation programs in Texas.

Next, Wired magazine is having an end of the year lists thingee, and came up with a list of the ten sexiest geeks that included Chris Mooney and Nick Denton but left out Morgan Webb, the hot gamer chick from G4. No disrespect meant to Chris Mooney or Nick Denton, but come on.

In other news, John McCain, the man who has no problem making all sorts of moral and other decisions for you, including whether or not you can have an abortion, whether or not you can use any number of controlled substances, whether or not you can play dirty video games, and what you do with your money in regards to political activities, has finally found something that should be left to the individual- whether or not intelligent design is fact or fiction:

“Let the student decide.” With those well-chosen words John McCain summed up his view on the teaching of “intelligent design” along with evolution in public schools.

Even — or perhaps especially — with controversial topics, Arizona’s ubiquitous senior U.S. senator has an uncanny knack for saying things his audience wants to hear. In this case, Mr. Straight Talk was imparting words of wisdom in an interview with MTV News.

Much more here on McCain from Steve Benen. In other ID news, check out this piece by the Commissar about ID’s Political Problem.

Finally, I just heard on NOVA that the earthquake that caused the tsunami last year was so big that it caused the earth to change course by two centimeters and shortened the day by 3 millionths of a second. Wow.

That is it- I will be back tomorrow when my connection is more stable. I called Adelphia, and they are aware of the problem and working on it.

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Someone Explain to Me

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A calm way to react to this:

When the wingnuts chant their talking points like a bunch of tambourine-beaters at the airport, they want to be paid for their efforts. And Pajamas Media was set up to do just that. They received by some accounts $7 million dollars to subsidize 70 right wing bloggers, and if you look at their sites there are no ads, many don’t even identify their affiliation with a logo. Look at some full-on loon like the Confederate Yankee who earns his/her 800 hits a day by having seizures over Google’s attempts to mock Christmas with Jesus butt plugs. The General will easily draw twenty times the traffic with his rapier-witted takedown, but the Confederate Yankee probably earns a lot more money than the General. These illiterate zeros are being paid out of principal, not out of any ad revenues. They are all Armstrong Williams.

***

In the past year alone many fine voices on the left have stopped blogging because they could no longer spare the time, had to go tend to their lives and finances. You won’t have to worry about that with the Pajamas Media crowd. Even the most dilatory, the most insultingly stupid amongst them will continue to be subsidized and probably make more than Digby. More than Billmon. All that noise about the free market, natural selection and survival of the fittest is just so much racket.

So the next time you hear us bitching about Pajamas Media, the incursion of right wing money into the blogosphere or the compromised voices of the “liberals” they’ve bought, remember that it’s just another attempt to control the message. They’re not our “counterparts on the right,” they’re paid operatives.

If you can come up with a calm, reasoned response for me, let me know, because everything I have to say is just going t0 come out with a snarl.

I am now officially sick and tired of being insulted by people I used to respect for doing nothing but choosing a steadier stream of revenue for my personal website than I had a couple months ago. I’m an ‘illiterate zero.’ I’m on ‘wingnut welfare.’ I’m a ‘paid operative.’ I am being paid to ‘spew lies.’ What the hell is wrong with these people?

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CBS Makes the Move

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And broadcast and broadband edge ever closer:

Yahoo Inc. is streaming this week CBS comedies “Two And A Half Men” and “How I Met Your Mother,” the latest example of the merger of TV and the Internet.

Yahoo on Monday started offering two episodes from each show. The shows will be available for a week, and mark the first time the Web portal has streamed a CBS show in its entirety.

Both shows, which air on TV Monday nights, are being streamed without commercials. “How I Met Your Mother” stars Josh Radnor, Alyson Hannigan, Cobie Smulders, Jason Segal and Neil Patrick Harris. “Two And A Half Men” stars Charlie Sheen, Jon Cryer and Angus T. Jones.

The Yahoo move follows the movement of TV shows to the Web. America Online Inc., a unit of Time Warner Inc., plans to launch early next year an online TV network that will stream classic TV shows, such as “Welcome Back Kotter,” “Growing Pains,” and “Chico And The Man.” The showings are the result of a partnership with Warner Bros.

I can’t even imagine what things are going to be like ten years from now.

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More on Wiretapping

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And the facts continue to dribble out:

U.S. President George Bush decided to skip seeking warrants for international wiretaps because the court was challenging him at an unprecedented rate.

A review of Justice Department reports to Congress by Hearst newspapers shows the 26-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court modified more wiretap requests from the Bush administration than the four previous presidential administrations combined.

The 11-judge court that authorizes FISA wiretaps modified only two search warrant orders out of the 13,102 applications approved over the first 22 years of the court’s operation.

But since 2001, the judges have modified 179 of the 5,645 requests for surveillance by the Bush administration, the report said. A total of 173 of those court-ordered “substantive modifications” took place in 2003 and 2004. And, the judges also rejected or deferred at least six requests for warrants during those two years — the first outright rejection of a wiretap request in the court’s history.

Precisely the type of story that partisans like- Republicans can claim that the court was playing politics with Bush’s wiretap requests, liberals can claim Bush is such a threat that even the mild-mannered FISA court, which approves almost every request, had to try to restrain the ‘Imperial President.’ It’s a win-win for everyone. Except the country.

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