Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
I simply can not sleep. I am worried sick; all I can think about is how good it is going to feel if my boys win, and how bad it is going to feel if they lose, and I have been staring at the ceiling for four hours now.
I do not recall a time when I have been as emotionally fragile. I feel like I could break down over nothing right now.
Umm. Go Steelers.
Yesterday I listed the various ways that the current mess at NASA (more here and here) should look familiar to experienced administration-watchers. There was the deliberate under-enforcement by appointed hacks, the intimidation of career professionals trying to do their job, and of course the fiscal mismanagement. I’m embarrassed to admit today that, via this morning’s New York Times, I missed a few other common points.
First, the annoying habit of using mid-level agency positions as a patronage mill for the inexperienced but ideologically pure:
The Big Bang memo came from Mr. Deutsch, a 24-year-old presidential appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters whose résumé says he was an intern in the “war room” of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. A 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M, he was also the public-affairs officer who sought more control over Dr. Hansen’s public statements.
In October 2005, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail message to Flint Wild, a NASA contractor working on a set of Web presentations about Einstein for middle-school students. The message said the word “theory” needed to be added after every mention of the Big Bang.
The Big Bang is “not proven fact; it is opinion,” Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, “It is not NASA’s place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator.”
…On Friday evening, repeated queries were made to the White House about how a young presidential appointee with no science background came to be supervising Web presentations on cosmology and interview requests to senior NASA scientists.
You also find the reassigning of agency resources for the sake of dingbat crusades:
Starting early in 2004, directives, almost always transmitted verbally through a chain of midlevel workers, went out from NASA headquarters to the agency’s far-flung research centers and institutes saying that all news releases on earth science developments had to allude to goals set out in Mr. Bush’s “vision statement” for the agency, according to interviews with public-affairs officials working in headquarters and at three research centers.
…One NASA scientist, William Patzert, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, confirmed the general tone of the agency that year.
“That was the time when NASA was reorganizing and all of a sudden earth science disappeared,” Mr. Patzert said. “Earth kind of got relegated to just being one of the 9 or 10 planets. It was ludicrous.”
In retrospect you could superimopse the problems at NASA over any of a dozen other Bush administration scandals from Katrina to the disastrous reconstruction of Iraq. I have no doubt that the current NSA scandal will turn out the same way, with a dingbat administrator, Lt. Gen. Hayden, and some ideologically pure appointees intimidating career professionals into a half-baked and illegal drain on critical agency resources. It’s unreasonable at this point to expect anything different.
***Update***
And more! If an agency submits an ideologically-inconvenient scientific report, just rewrite the report.
In an unprecedented action, the Environmental Protection Agency’s own scientific panel on Friday challenged the agency’s proposed public health standards governing soot and dust.
….Some panel members called the administrator’s actions “egregious” and said his proposals “twisted” or “misrepresented” their recommendations.
….Cal/EPA’s air pollution epidemiology chief, Bart Ostro, charged during the teleconference that the EPA had incorporated “last-minute opinions and edits” by the White House Office of Management and Budget that “circumvented the entire peer review process.”
One of those plays that never gets old.
From the same article, one last maneuver from the Bush playbook (playpamphlet?). What’s the point of drafting complicated policies when you could have your friends in industry write it for you:
[Ostro] said research that he and others had conducted also had been misrepresented in the EPA’s lengthy justification for the proposed new standards.In an interview later, Ostro said he was referring to marked-up drafts of Johnson’s proposals that showed changes by the White House budget office and language that was “very close to some of the letters written by some of the trade associations.”
One thing you can say for sure is that they’ll keep calling these plays as long as they keep winning.
The dinner table at the Cole household:
Mike Krempasky at Red State has a link rich Steeler round-up, with all sorts of goodies, including Puhlahmahlu the video.
And here is some Stillers Polka! If yinz don’t know, don’t ask- it’s a ‘Burgh thing.
Even the pets are in on the act.
ESPN’s experts pick.
Go Stillers!
*** Update ***
Congrats to the 2006 Hall of Fame choices:
Troy Aikman made it into the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s biggest class in years. The guy he threw to — Michael Irvin — will have to wait once again.
Reggie White, Warren Moon, Harry Carson, John Madden and Rayfield Wright also were elected Saturday. Not since 2001 had the maximum number of candidates been chosen.
Emmitt Smith, who joined with Aikman and Irvin to win three Super Bowls for the Dallas Cowboys, had campaigned vigorously for his two former teammates. But Irvin, plagued by off-the-field troubles in recent years, was left out in his second try.
Worthy selections, all of them, but I think Art Monk should be in the Hall of Fame before Michael Irvin.
The Confederate Yankee has a post up titled the “Guardian Fetches A Bucket of Prop Wash,” implying the Guardian had been bamboozled. This reminded me of something we used to do to all the new soldiers who were fresh out of basic.
Many of you are probably unaware how much of a soldier’s time is spent in the motor pool if he/she is in a mechanized or armor units. When you are on an M1-A1, you almost live in the motor pool when you are not in the field. t any rate, there are a number of games we play, such as sending newbies to supply to get a box of reticles, or chem-lite batteries, tell them to get a ‘dust sample’ from the air filters, etc. At any rate, my favorite trick:
Get a newbie who works on a different tank, preferrably when his tank commander is not around. Give him a ball peen hammer and a piece of chalk, and then tell him he has to check his tank’s armor for soft spots. Demonstrate by hitting the armor with the hammer, circling the area every time the armor sounds ‘different.’ The send the newbie on his way.
One time, we came back to the motor pool after lunch and this newb had 3 inch circles all over an entire tank. Too damned funny.
Jimmie at the Sundries Shack may be a one trick pony, but he is rambling on with a steady gait. He continues to dishonestly pretend that I somehow smeared all Christians as members of the “American Taliban,” in not one, not two, but three more posts. The lowlights, if you will, from Jimmie:
The fact is that he unhesitatingly accepted the left’s definition of “American Taliban”which, as we all know pretty darned well, includes every Christian who as much as makes a public profession of their faith, or attempts to use their faith to help determine their political judgements, or so much as says out loud that it might not be the smartest idea to cast a public gay activist in an overtly Christian movie.
Well, actually, no I didn’t. I even explained in pretty clear detail who I was talking about and he has chosen to intentionally conflate my direct condemnation of the behavior of Bauder and those like him with all Christians.
Why? I don’t know, but it is reminiscent of the late Y. Arafat and the type of behavior he would engage in to deflect legitimate criticism of the armed thugs who worked for him. Say something nasty about the militants in Fatah who were murdering innocents, and you were criticizing all Palestinians. It is an old trick, and I am not impressed.
Jimmie also seems to think that because someone is obscure, they are less of a threat:
Tagging obscure representatives of various Christian religions (really, how many Baptists have ever heard of the Central Baptist Seminary, and is Minnesota really going to be the launching point for the New Crusades Against the Heathen?) is an even worse offense against those who are, right now, trying to rid Afghanistan of the deplorable theocrats.
Because someone is obscure does not make them harmless or less of a threat. How many of you heard of Eric Rudolph before the Olympic bombings and the bombings of abortion clinics? Me either. I can’t believe people want to pretend that violent religious extremists don’t exist- go read Dave Neiwert, for goodness sakes. Go check the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Go check out the ADL webpages.
In another post, I am taunted because American Christians have not reacted to a piece of art depicting Osama bin Laden as Christ the same way Muslims have reacted to cartoons of Allah. I would never expect American Christians to behave that way- perhaps Jimmie, down in the muck defending the fringe of the radical Christian right, has lower expectations for them. At any rate, congratulations, Jimmie- your lunatics are less violent and dangerous than their lunatics (and no, I am not talking about all Christians, you halfwit). Sleep tight.
In short, Jimmie has nothing to say, and has now just resorted to cheap taunting– no argument, no case- just fake umbrage that somehow he and other Christians have been smeared. He can continue to play these dishonest games, and continue to give rhetorical and political cover to people he should be speaking out against, and I can start ignoring him, something I should have done from the beginning.
*** Update ***
It has been a while since we had one of these, but there appears to be some news:
The special prosecutor in the CIA leak case alleged that Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff was engaged in a broader web of deception than was previously known and repeatedly lied to conceal that he had been a key source for reporters about undercover operative Valerie Plame, according to court records released yesterday.
The records also show that by August 2004, early in his investigation of the disclosure of Plame’s identity, Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald had concluded that he did not have much of a case against I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby for illegally leaking classified information. Instead, Fitzgerald was focused on charging Cheney’s top aide with perjury and making false statements, and knew he needed to question reporters to prove it.
If you have anything to add, you know what to do.
This is the hardest game to predict since the Steelers and Seahawks don’t play each other in the regular season. Think that you know how it’ll shake out? As before, any correct score that doesn’t involve Seattle winning wins the sixpack of your choice. Betting ends, of course, at kickoff.
BTW, I haven’t yet found a picture yet of Troy Polamalu singlehandedly blowing past three linemen to take down Mike Anderson short of the first down. If any of you know where to find one I’ll put it up just for the sheer insaneness of that play. [Update: even better – a moving gif of the play courtesy of reader Caleb. Get your fix before we kill ImageShack’s bandwidth]
Speaking of which, Polamalu is listed as ‘probable’ after hurting his ankle on Wednesday. If you’re the praying sort you know what to do.
