Because the prospect of hearing this song for 8 years is worse than what Bush has done.
Isn’t Celine Canadian anyway? Prolly French-Canadian at that with a name like Celine. Terrorist.
by John Cole| 55 Comments
This post is in: Politics, General Stupidity
Because the prospect of hearing this song for 8 years is worse than what Bush has done.
Isn’t Celine Canadian anyway? Prolly French-Canadian at that with a name like Celine. Terrorist.
by Tim F| 43 Comments
This post is in: War, Democratic Stupidity
Obama, Clinton and Edwards all spoke before ASFCME today — and one thing they all appeared to agree upon was that we’ll be staying in Iraq in some capacity for some time to come.
Somebody please explain to me why today, while polls punish the Democratic party for blank-checking Bush’s war, we don’t have a single Democratic candidate with the balls to say what Howard Dean said in 2004. Dean hardly got punished for his sentiments, except by the media, back when the war and our smirking war chief still had a majority following. And as it turns out practically everything that Howard Dean said about Iraq proved right on the money. The war is a hopeless crusade, run by rank nincompoops, that damages American interests every day that it goes on. These aren’t even debatable points anymore, just baseline assumptions that even the surgin’ Kagans recognized when they promoted their policy change.
Dean’s message resonated back when he sounded “crazy.” Now imagine the response when the 90% of America smarter than John Hinderaker more or less takes his position as a given. Americans hate the president and his crappy war. It doesn’t take “balls” to stand forcefully against sending more kids to die in Iraq, it takes balls not to. And yet when our Dem candidates look for inspiration in 2007, four years after Howard Dean’s grassroots phenomenon, every single one reaches for Joementum. Try to grasp how depressing that is.
by Tim F| 57 Comments
This post is in: Politics, Blogospheric Navel-Gazing
A reader writes to Andy Sullivan:
I am surprised that the Politerati, or DC’s chattering class, have not seen the parallels between Hillary Clinton and Richard Nixon. They both have brilliant strategic minds, suffer from extreme paranoia about the enemy of their agenda, and both are extremely secretive. Nixon had very high negatives, and re-launched his “brand” image in the 1968 campaign, just as Hillary is doing in 2007. In short, Hillary is Nixon in a dress, or more appropriately Nixon in a pant suit. We saw what happened the first time we entrusted the White House to a person with behavioral traits like this. Do we want to go through it again?
Methinks Sullivan’s reader made the same rhetorical mistake that war boosters make when they weigh the cost of leaving Iraq but not the cost of staying. Electing Nixon in a pantsuit sounds pretty scary until you realize that the alternative is Bush in a dress.
***
Seriously, Nixon? I can safely predict that this same writer used to nod gravely when Rush called her ‘Hitlery.” Bush Derangement Syndrome has nothing on Clinton Panic.
by Tim F| 52 Comments
This post is in: Science & Technology
Like every model since, the crude early models of greenhouse-driven climate change, with pixels the size of Kansas, predicted that warming would begin at the poles. This is because greenhouse warming only contributes a fraction of the total heat budget of temperate regions, which absorb a significant amount of heat by absorbing and re-emitting the sun’s light directly. Ice and snow at the polar regions reflect most incoming sunlight while absorbing almost none, leaving only greenhouse gases to catch solar heat before it reflects back into space. If the greenhouse contribution goes up, the polar heat budget (greenhouse alone) will go up significantly more than everywhere else (greenhouse + direct sunlight).
Similarly, climate models predict that greenhouse warming will make the nighttime less cold faster than it makes the daytime warmer. During the day heat comes both from the sun and from heat absorbed by the atmosphere, at night only the atmosphere contributes. This explains why humidity keeps the air warmer at night (water vapor has a high heat capacity and is a very effective greenhouse gas), and why cloudy nights are warmer (clouds act as an effective greenhouse layer).
These predictions make a convenient way to compare greenhouse-based models against less well supported theories based on the sun getting warmer. If solar input mattered more than CO2 heat retention then regions which absorb the most solar heat, for example the tropics, should warm up much the fastest. High-albedo polar regions, which send most solar illumation back into space, should warm up much more slowly.
Sadly, each week brings another story casting doubt on the sun-based climate “skeptics.”
Ice in north-east Greenland is melting an average of 14.6 days earlier than in the mid-1990s, bringing forward the date plants flower and birds lay eggs.
The team warned that the observed changes could disrupt the region’s ecosystems and food chain, affecting the long-term survival of some species.
[…] “We were particularly surprised to see the trends were so strong when considering that the entire summer is very short in the High Arctic – just three or four months from snowmelt to freeze-up,” said co-author Toke Hoye, from the University of Aarhus.
Needless to say these effects in the High Arctic dwarf the climate changes that we have seen anywhere else on Earth. But don’t worry too much about sunspot climate doubters. Like the creationists who inspire them, they’re a conclusion in search of evidence. As far as the money which supports such denial is concerned, one argument which puts off the inevitable reckoning is as good as any other.
by John Cole| 42 Comments
This post is in: Politics, Republican Stupidity, Outrage
The governing principle of this adminstration and her loud-mouth freedom-fighting terrorist haters in the blogosphere is simple when it comes to privacy:
“If you don’t have anything to hide, you don’t have anything to worry about.”
With that in mind, I offer you this:
White House officials made extensive use of their RNC e-mail accounts. The RNC has preserved 140,216 e-mails sent or received by Karl Rove. Over half of these e-mails (75,374) were sent to or received from individuals using official “.gov” e-mail accounts. Other heavy users of RNC e-mail accounts include former White House Director of Political Affairs Sara Taylor (66,018 e-mails) and Deputy Director of Political Affairs Scott Jennings (35,198 e-mails). These e-mail accounts were used by White House officials for official purposes, such as communicating with federal agencies about federal appointments and policies.
There has been extensive destruction of the e-mails of White House officials by the RNC. Of the 88 White House officials who received RNC e-mail accounts, the RNC has preserved no e-mails for 51 officials. In a deposition, Susan Ralston, Mr. Rove’s former executive assistant, testified that many of the White House officials for whom the RNC has no e-mail records were regular users of their RNC e-mail accounts. Although the RNC has preserved no e-mail records for Ken Mehlman, the former Director of Political Affairs, Ms. Ralston testified that Mr. Mehlman used his account “frequently, daily.” In addition, there are major gaps in the e-mail records of the 37 White House officials for whom the RNC did preserve e-mails. The RNC has preserved only 130 e-mails sent to Mr. Rove during President Bush’s first term and no e-mails sent by Mr. Rove prior to November 2003. For many other White House officials, the RNC has no e-mails from before the fall of 2006.
If we use the evidentiary standards good for the rest of us, it is clearly time to ship the White House staff to Gitmo. But don’t worry- I hear the food is ok.
by John Cole| 58 Comments
This post is in: Previous Site Maintenance
by John Cole| 49 Comments
This post is in: Military, War on Terror aka GSAVE®, Outrage
For a lengthy expose on General Taguba, the author of the Abu Ghraib report that Don Rumsfeld and others have repeatedly lied under oath about, go here. Money quote comes from the third page, when Taguba was told he and his report would be investigated:
Taguba got a different message, however, from other officers, among them General John Abizaid, then the head of Central Command. A few weeks after his report became public, Taguba, who was still in Kuwait, was in the back seat of a Mercedes sedan with Abizaid. Abizaid’s driver and his interpreter, who also served as a bodyguard, were in front. Abizaid turned to Taguba and issued a quiet warning: “You and your report will be investigated.”
“I wasn’t angry about what he said but disappointed that he would say that to me,” Taguba said. “I’d been in the Army thirty-two years by then, and it was the first time that I thought I was in the Mafia.”
I wonder how long the damage Rumsfeld and company have done to the military will take to repair. Wingnuts better start acting now and blaming this on Clinton.
Don Rumsfeld- Running the Pentagon Like the SopranosPost + Comments (49)