A horse named “Fear The Kitten” will be in the Kentucky Derby.
My favorite Kentucky Derby themed song:
Share your favorite mint julep recipe.
That’s all I’ve got.
by DougJ| 65 Comments
This post is in: Sports
A horse named “Fear The Kitten” will be in the Kentucky Derby.
My favorite Kentucky Derby themed song:
Share your favorite mint julep recipe.
That’s all I’ve got.
by Zandar| 111 Comments
This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Open Threads
In the 21st century, a US President not wanting to invade somebody is apparently news.
Open thready thing.
by Zandar| 257 Comments
This post is in: Gay Rights are Human Rights, Glibertarianism, Show Us on the Doll Where the Invisible Hand Touched You, Bring on the Brawndo!, I Read These Morons So You Don't Have To
King Reasonoid Matt Welch reminds us that ESPN’s Chris Broussard apparently has every right to be a homophobic fundamentalist bigot about NBA player Jason Collins coming out because AMERICA.
Broussard is predictably getting beaten to a rhetoric pulp on Twitter. And while I think today is a wonderful, watershed day for people (especially the artist formerly known as Ron Artest) to live as open and free as they wanna be, I agree with the New York Post editorial Robert George here:
Chris Broussard spoke what more than a few players feel. If such comments aren’t expressed, a real conversation can’t be had.
I’m trying to come up with what “real conversation” Broussard is adding when he says Collins is a sinner who is “walking in open rebellion to Jesus Christ.” But here’s where Welch goes with this as he brings in the civil rights movement in sports and the racism Jackie Robinson faced:
Now, there is no doubt that Jackie Robinson vehemently disagreed with this go-slow sentiment, but he also understood that you can’t always persuade fence-sitters through a two-handed chest-shove.* And sometimes engaging with the I’m not ready to go that far just yet crowd brings out the best in activists. See, for example, Martin Luther King’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.”
Bigotry brings conflict which brings “real conversations” which brings out the best in people, not the worst, so apparently we need bigotry, racism, and outright ignorance in America because FREEDOMS AND THE LIBERTY.
On the other hand, Welch basically saying that the struggle of racism was necessary in order to forge a leader as brilliant as Dr. King is just about the best example of false equivalence Glibertarian nonsense that I’ve ever seen, so there’s that. Dave Zirin’s take on Jason Collins is worth reading just as a reminder that Welch is full of crap, as usual, and the real change comes from those standing up to idiots like him who give bigotry acceptable cover in the first place because “conflict creates change”. That’s great if you’re a megalomaniac with a space fortress and an army of flying cyborg raptor ninjas, not so great if you want to live in a world where people are decent towards each other because people are decent.
[UPDATE] Dave Zirin makes this point about Jackie Robinson:@zandarvts Also re: Matt Welch:Jackie R at the end of his life believed w/regret he should have pushed much harder. Read his memoir.
— Dave Zirin (@EdgeofSports) April 30, 2013
Which is true.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 149 Comments
This post is in: Dog Blogging
When I was a kid, I watched the vet spay our cat. He was an old large animal vet with fingers that looked like sausages, but he was a surprisingly delicate and fast surgeon. It was pretty amazing to see him pull that tiny uterus out of what seemed like an impossibly small incision in a couple of minutes. For this life-altering procedure, our family cat had been anesthetized with some fast-acting injection. She had no IV, no airway support, no heart monitoring, no preop blood work and only Baby Jesus knew what her blood pressure was during that procedure. She survived and thrived, living to at least 19 (she was a stray so we didn’t know her real age).
Yesterday, our dog had a teeth cleaning. She had an IV, was intubated and was given anesthesia with an a machine, had heart and blood pressure monitoring, and she had pre-op blood work. In short, she had better operative monitoring than 41% of patients in Latin America, 49% in south Asia, and 70% in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The technology used to care for our cat 30-plus years ago was not comparable to care in a hospital. Today, the technology used to care for our dog was pretty close to par with what a human would get at an outpatient surgi-center. Am I a sucker? Is our vet just larding on profitable technology to clean out my wallet? (My guess is “hell yes” but I don’t think she’s the only one doing it.) Are there still vets who offer the possibility of old-school anesthesia so you can pay tens of dollars rather than hundreds for that part of your animal’s treatment? And what do people on fixed incomes do when they have to take their animal to the vet?
The Best Animal Healthcare Money Can BuyPost + Comments (149)
by $8 blue check mistermix| 54 Comments
This post is in: General Stupidity
Fukushima is still a mess and TEPCO is running from one crisis to the next, two years in:
The situation is worrisome enough that Shunichi Tanaka, a longtime nuclear power proponent who is the chairman of the newly created watchdog Nuclear Regulation Authority, told reporters after the announcement of the leaking pits that “there is concern that we cannot prevent another accident.”
Here’s another nuclear power proponent, Gregory Jaczko:
All 104 nuclear power reactors now in operation in the United States have a safety problem that cannot be fixed and they should be replaced with newer technology, the former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said on Monday. Shutting them all down at once is not practical, he said, but he supports phasing them out rather than trying to extend their lives.
Nice of him to tell us that after he’s retired. Bieber save us from regulators who get their conscience back the day they start collecting their pensions.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 26 Comments
This post is in: Republican Venality
Here’s a little taste of the Colbert/Sanford debate. Colbert got in one dig about hiking the Appalachian trail, which Sanford basically ducked, and the rest of it is her trying to sound like a Republican: “She said ‘Obamacare is extremely problematic’ and praised South Carolina’s ‘right to work’ law restricting union activity.”
Update: Hit the first link for a video – Patch seems to think autoplay that you can’t turn off in your embed is a good idea. I guess that’s the AOL in them.
This post is in: Austerity Bombing, C.R.E.A.M., Open Threads, Republican Venality
(Tom Toles via GoComics.com)
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Now this would be a promising fiscal development, if only we can hold the line: ‘austerity’ is beginning to look like last year’s model, something no fashionable econo-wonk wants to be caught defending. Alex Pareene at Salon asks “What if Simpson & Bowles threw a debt reduction party and nobody came?”:
…Since the president idiotically appointed them to his deficit-reduction panel, Simpson and Bowles have become the most respected human beings in all of Washington. It was necessary, for two years, for every serious politician to announce that he supported “the Simpson-Bowles plan,” even though in reality almost no one actually did. Recently, though, their brand has lost some luster. The economy is barely growing and joblessness is still a major crisis. The longer that is the case (and it has already been the case for the entirety of the Obama administration) the less urgent deficit-reduction seems.
Simpson and Bowles, amusingly, released their newest plan on Friday, April 19 — which you may remember as the day everyone in the country was following the search for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. This deprived the roll-out of a bit of the publicity that attended their previous plans. Also, since their initial plan, British and European austerity measures have caused massive suffering with no economic benefit. The famous Reinhart-Rogoff paper arguing that high debt led to economic contraction was found to be massively flawed.
In other words, the bipartisan “sound serious about the debt” consensus is suddenly in danger. Minutes after the Simpson-Bowles Op-Ed went up, the Post published an Op-Ed by Washington Post moderate liberal E.J. Dionne denouncing the debt obsession and calling for expansionary fiscal policy. (Madness!)…
And Kevin Roose at NYMag explains “How the mainstream media broke up with austerity“:
… Just like a compliant media sped the ascendance of the austerity movement, a newly skeptical media (perhaps prodded by hybrid old-new media publications like Wonkblog) seems to be bringing austerity to its knees. Finance leaders at the G20, reportedly citing the mistakes in the Reinhart-Rogoff study, backed away from the austerity agenda. Within days, it was no longer fashionable to support cutting government spending and reforming entitlements, no matter how many “Harlem Shake” videos Fix the Debt put out.
As if to cement how much the debate has changed, this weekend, Politico — the same Politico that all but carried Simpson and Bowles’s briefcases last year — ran a story about the “intellectual shift away from austerity” among high-profile politicians on Capitol Hill. To add insult to injury, that day‘s “Morning Money,” the Politico newsletter that carried the story, was sponsored by the pro-austerity Peter G. Peterson Foundation.
Early Morning Open Thread: Speaking of Green Shoots…Post + Comments (41)