Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Biden: Oh no. We’ve upset Big Pharma again.

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

“woke” is the new caravan.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

Donald Jessica Trump found guilty as fuck – May 30, 2024!

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

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

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

It’s easier to kill a dangerous animal than a man who just happens to have different thoughts/values than one’s own.

The jury literally has a bell they can ring to force Trump to show up on command. Greatest thing ever!

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

Donald Trump, welcome to your everything, everywhere, all at once.

Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

So many bastards, so little time.

The willow is too close to the house.

“I never thought they’d lock HIM up,” sobbed a distraught member of the Lock Her Up Party.

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Archives for May 2010

Monday Open Thread

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Sorry for the lack of posts, but the others have you all covered nicely. Had some work work to do today, then I had some stuff to do in the yard that was irritating me.

Off my back porch, where I have hung the feeders, is a large white pine that had the bottom six feet of the side facing my house with nothing but dead branches and bramble. The only living thing that might have found that attractive would be turkeys, and the only turkey around these here parts got himself stuck on the roof the other day. So I hacked that all down and hauled it away, cleaned up about ten years of pine needles, repositioned the feeders, and then went and bought a couple trays of pachysandra, which is a nice ground cover, works really well in acidic soil, and is native to the SE United States (although not the kind I bought). I figure I will plant that there and it will serve as attractive cover, and I won’t have to spend the rest of my adult live trying to grow grass under a pine tree. I also transplanted a bunch of wild spearmint to some flower boxes to contain it until I can figure out where I want to put it.

How was your day?

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Volunteers Wanted in the Gulf States

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The National Wildlife Federation is soliciting donations and volunteers to fight the oil spill through the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana:

… We do not know the location or the extent of impact to birds, wildlife, and habitat at this time. What we do know is that we need to be ready with on-call volunteers in the event that they are needed. National Wildlife Federation, National Audubon Society, the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program and the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana are building a list of volunteers prepared to help with this response.
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Volunteers can fill a variety of needs, from oiled wildlife recovery, to monitoring and photographing oil movement, to providing a boat and driver for response activities. No specific training or experience is necessary, although you must be at least 18 years old to volunteer. Some tasks, such as food preparation, may require no training. Other tasks, such as washing oiled birds, may require specific certifications or skills. We encourage pre-veterinary students, veterinary technicians, and anyone with HAZWOPER training to volunteer. Anyone with experience in dealing with wildlife handling, rehabilitation, or hazardous materials clean up is also strongly encouraged to register…
[…] Once you have registered, we will contact you as soon as opportunities arise. The severity of this spill may require a long-term and ongoing response, so if you don’t hear from us immediately, it doesn’t mean you won’t be contacted or that your efforts won’t be needed. With your help, we can meet this challenge and reduce the impacts of this spill to habitat and wildlife.
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Note: If you encounter oiled wildlife, please call 1 (800) 557-1401. Please do not touch or disturb oiled wildlife, for your safety and theirs.

I have no prior experience with CRCL, but would be most interested in hearing from those who do.

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Lie back and think of England

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Right on cue, Michael Barone and E. J. Dionne weigh in on what lessons Americans can learn from the UK elections which have yet to happen.

Barone’s lesson is that the left is fucked, everywhere, worldwide. Dionne’s is that Republicans should move to the center.

What’s great about a foreign election is that you can draw any lesson you like from it. Given any outcome and any possible conclusion, you can find a way of arguing that the outcome is evidence for the conclusion. For example, if the Tories do well, it will partly be because of Labor losing support to Lib Dems. So it could be that the “lesson” is that Dems need to worry more about their left flank. Or that Republicans need to worry about their extreme flank. Or that Democrats should admit they are Beckett-loving atheists like Nick Clegg. So Barone’s and Dionne’s conclusions are just two of a more or less infinite set of conclusions that it is possible to draw from the UK elections…even though those elections haven’t happened yet.

I’m reminded of a Noam Chomsky quote from commenter Mark S. about a very different topic, evolutionary psychology:

You find that people cooperate, you say, ‘Yeah, that contributes to their genes’ perpetuating.’ You find that they fight, you say, ‘Sure, that’s obvious, because it means that their genes perpetuate and not somebody else’s’. In fact, just about anything you find, you can make up some story for it.

(It’s no accident that David Brooks and Nick Kristof are both preparing books on cognitive science, btw.)

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Hit ’em up

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No one could have predicted:

Attorney General Troy King has asked BP to cease circulating settlement agreements among south Alabamians.Alabama Attorney General Troy King said tonight that he has told representatives of BP Plc. that they should stop circulating settlement agreements among coastal Alabamians.

The agreements, King said, essentially require that people give up the right to sue in exchange for payment of up to $5,000.

Big government liberal regulations get in the way of Galtian superhero business.

When something goes wrong, no one could have predicted it.

Once it starts going wrong, nothing can be done unless you can do underwater surgery with robotic submarines, you naive fucking hippie.

Tort reform!

Countdown to the Mickey Kaus/Gregg Easterbrook about the *good news* about the oil spill.

And how come we never hear about all the oil rigs that aren’t spewing hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico?

Let the eagle soar.

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It’s so hard

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There’s no catchy phrase like “hippie punching” or “no one could have predicted” to describe this sort of thing, but it’s definitely a staple of modern political discourse. BP Chairman Jame McKay on capping the oil spill (via Josh Green):

[It’s like] performing open heart surgery at 5,000 feet in the dark with robot-controlled submarines.

It’s essentially the present tense form of “nothing could have been done” and, for some reason, it often involves mixed metaphor type comparisons.

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Meanwhile, At Gitmo

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Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen captured at age 15 and imprisoned in at Guantanamo since 2003, is on trial at Guantanamo. Khadr is accused of throwing a grenade that killed Sgt. Christopher Speer in a firefight in July, 2002, near Khost, Afghanistan. Khadr was shot twice in the back after throwing the grenade. On Saturday:

  • Judges cleared the court to review a videotape that has been on YouTube for two years. The videotape had already been released since it had been evidence in a Canadian Supreme Court proceeding.
  • A Special Forces officer testified that his alteration of a field report years after the fact was “completely innocent”.

The whole case revolves around whether the confessions Khadr gave in 2002 and 2003, when he was 15 and 16, were voluntary. Khadr has rejected a plea agreement that would have had him admit to throwing the grenade.

This whole case makes it clear why the Bush Administration stalled Gitmo prosecutions until after they left office. All the choices here are ugly, and we’ve only started to unravel this mess.

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Messed Up in Texas

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I wonder how much federal money Rick Perry has to reject before he gets thrown out of office. He just opted out of the national high-risk insurance pool:

The state already runs a high-risk pool for health insurance for those who find it difficult to get coverage elsewhere. The pool reported that in 2008 it covered about 26,000 Texans and paid out about $265 million in medical and pharmacy benefits.

The federal funding would have expanded the program to cover more people. According to HHS, Texas’ share of federal funding likely would have been about $493 million.

The federal program would provide insurance for anyone who is a U.S. citizen, has not had health insurance for six months and has a pre-existing condition. The Texas pool requires a person previously to have had coverage for at least 18 months and been denied coverage due to health reasons or been offered health insurance that excluded coverage for a medical condition.

This comes on the heels of Perry’s rejection of $550 billion million in unemployment stimulus, and his decision not to compete for Race to the Top education funds. His election opponent should start running ads featuring New York limousine liberals thanking Perry for lowering their taxes, since Texas is one of the few Southern states that pays in more federal money than it receives back from Washington.

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