Friday Stuff

Bye Bye Phil, and thanks for the memories (here's "River Deep, Mountain High" with Tina Turner and her late ex Ike, with the Ikettes)...



...and yeah, what BarbinMD sez here, concerning Robert Gibbs' reaction to Faux News humanoid Major Garrett's attempt to generate "Drudge bait," though his boss uttered similar sentiments; I don't recall a Bushie ever showing contrition for anything, let alone a speech from eight years ago (if "white males" are upset - GOOD!)...



...and speaking of the prior ruling regime, here's some first-class debunking of their disgusting talking points about torture and the "ticking time bomb" scenario by K.O. (kudos to Carl Levin also for a refreshing dose of reality)...

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Update 5/31/09: If you have access to New York Times' content, read every single word of what Frank Rich says here.

...and as I watch this, I find that I'm so glad that more bands don't play in a public restroom.

Where The Rubber Meets The Road (5/29/09)

As reported in last Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer, here is how Philadelphia-area members of Congress were recorded on major roll-call votes last week.

House

Federal aviation budget. Voting 277-136, the House passed a bill (HR 915) authorizing $70 billion for federal aviation programs through fiscal 2012. In part, the bill provides $39.3 billion for operating the Federal Aviation Administration, $16.2 billion for airport improvements, and $13.4 billion for modernizing the air-traffic control system.

A yes vote was to send the bill to the Senate.

Voting yes: John Adler (D., N.J.), Robert E. Andrews (D., N.J.), Robert A. Brady (D., Pa.), Michael N. Castle (R., Del.), Charles W. Dent (R., Pa.), Chaka Fattah (D., Pa.), Jim Gerlach (R., Pa.), Tim Holden (D., Pa.), Frank A. LoBiondo (R., N.J.), Patrick Murphy (D., Pa.), Allyson Y. Schwartz (D., Pa.), and Christopher H. Smith (R., N.J.).

Voting no: Joseph R. Pitts (R., Pa.) and Joe Sestak (D., Pa.).

“Now how on earth could Joe Sestak and Joe Pitts actually be on the same side of an issue?” I hear you ask.

Well, both of their congressional districts overlap the vicinity of Philadelphia International Airport. And as noted here, Sestak has fought the FAA on the matter of redesign of the flight plans of the airport for some time (the way the airport is configured, their districts end up dealing with the bulk of the noise from plane traffic – more info is here).

To say that these are protest votes is an understatement. And if I lived in either of their districts, I’d probably applaud both of them for it (well, maybe not Pancake Joe...).

Tobacco commerce. Voting 397-11, the House passed a bill (HR 1676) requiring sellers of large quantities of cigarettes and smokeless tobacco in interstate commerce to comply with state tax laws and register with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATFE). The bill awaits Senate action.

A yes vote was to pass the bill.

Voting yes: Adler, Andrews, Brady, Castle, Dent, Fattah, Gerlach, Holden, LoBiondo, Murphy, Pitts, Schwartz, Sestak, and Smith.

Senate

War appropriations. Voting 86-3, the Senate passed a bill (HR 2346) to appropriate $91.3 billion through Sept. 30 to fund U.S. war actions and international programs and respond to natural disasters at home. The bill must be reconciled with a $96.7 billion House version.

Voting yes: Bob Casey (D., Pa.), Ted Kaufman (D., Del.), Frank Lautenberg (D., N.J.), Robert Menendez (D., N.J.), and Arlen Specter (D., Pa.).

Not voting: Thomas Carper (D., Del.).

Guantanamo Bay. Voting 90-6, the Senate stripped HR 2346 (above) of $80 million requested by the Obama administration for closing the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The bill still contains language preventing the release of any of the approximately 240 Guantanamo prisoners into the United States for trials.

A yes vote was to remove the funding.

Voting yes: Carper, Casey, Kaufman, Lautenberg, Menendez, and Specter.

I think thus far that, if Obama has an “Achilles heel” when it comes to any issue, this is it.

And if so, the blame lies partially with himself for, to date, not spelling out in concrete terms what he wants to do with those at Guantanamo (hindered partly by the fact that a lot of these cases are under review), as well as those Democrats who absolutely cower in the face of NIMBY protests from their constituents (with the sentiments expressed here by Jon Tester and Max Baucus of Montana being typical; file this under “suppose they built a prison, and nobody came?”).

I think we all agree that our president could sell ice to the proverbial Eskimo, but to bring this country around to his way of thinking on this may take his greatest sales pitch ever (and again, as far as I’m concerned, we already have people capable of really bad stuff incarcerated not that far from where I reside already, so I’m not all that sympathetic to the protest here).

This week, Congress is in Memorial Day recess until the week of June 1.

Friday Mashup (5/29/09)

(And also posted over here.)

I managed to read the New York Times a bit last week while we were in The Big Apple, and while I didn’t take note of quite enough pundit nonsense in the paper to put into much of a post, I wanted to take note of some stuff anyway.

First, Helene Cooper told us the following last Sunday from here…

Democrats often complained about President George W. Bush’s frequent use of a rhetorical device as old as rhetoric itself: creating the illusion of refuting an opponent’s argument by mischaracterizing it and then knocking down that mischaracterization.

There was much outrage in 2006, for example, when Mr. Bush said that when it came to battling terrorists, “I need members of Congress who understand that you can’t negotiate with these folks,” implying that Democrats backed talks with Al Qaeda. That assertion was promptly, and angrily, disputed by Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts.

Now that there is a new team at the White House, guess who is knocking down straw men left and right? To listen to President Obama, a veritable army of naysayers has invaded Washington, urging him to sit on his hands at the White House and do nothing to address any of the economic or national security problems facing the country.

“There are those who say these plans are too ambitious, that we should be trying to do less, not more,” Mr. Obama told a town-hall-style meeting in Costa Mesa, Calif., on March 18. “Well, I say our challenges are too large to ignore.”

Mr. Obama did not specify who, exactly, was saying America should ignore its challenges.

Well, I think the blog Obsidian Wings did a pretty thorough job of debunking Cooper here, so I’ll defer to them.

And in the same issue of the paper, we have this gem from Sheryl Gay Stolberg’s piece...

(Obama) told Planned Parenthood that his first act as president would be to sign an abortion rights bill into law; now he says it is “not my highest legislative priority.” He promised gay rights advocates that he would work for the repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, but he has pushed action into the future. A proponent of transparency, he released previously classified memos describing the C.I.A.’s harsh interrogation techniques. But then he moved to block the release of photos showing abuse of detainees — a 180-degree turn from his administration’s previous position.

On all these fronts, Mr. Obama and his aides have offered detailed explanations of the factors that shape his decision-making. So far, the public seems on board. But in a sound-bite culture, there are limits to how much nuance the public can absorb.

And that raises a question: at what point is President Thinker in danger of being perceived as President Flip-Flop?

Other American politicians have faced this very threat. The first President Bush lost the White House after he broke his famous “Read my lips: no new taxes” pledge. Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democrats’ 2004 presidential candidate, inflicted a mortal wound on his own campaign with his now-infamous line about Iraq war funding: “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.”

So let’s recap: Stolberg is slamming Obama because 1) he didn’t sign an abortion rights bill (referring to the FOCA, with more info here – how can Obama sign a bill that, in all likelihood, will NEVER pass out of committee, to say nothing of surviving a House floor vote?), 2) he hasn’t repealed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” even though he hasn’t taken that off the table (nor should he), and 3) he hasn’t released the most recent round of torture photos (even though he did declassify memos describing torture).

And for this, he gets compared to Poppy Bush’s “no new taxes” pledge and John Kerry’s vote against the $87 million war appropriation for Iraq?

Would you like some avocados with your apples and oranges, Ms. Stolberg?

I’m not going to tell you Obama walks on water, which he plainly doesn’t. All I ask is that the guy gets a period of about, say, anywhere from at least 9-15 months before we actually have CONTEXT in which to offer intelligent criticism of his actions, as opposed to the vacuum we still have now (and yes, I wish he'd decided to release the photos, as I said here, but he didn't, and that's not going to be "the hill I die on," as it were). And if Stolberg and her pals are going to try and nail him, try to do it on something of actual substance, OK?

And finally, on the subject of Times’ reporting, the Page 1 “story” last week was how the Dems supposedly handed the “wedge issue” of Guantanamo to the GOP (and this was before Colin Powell said on “Face The Nation” the he supported closing it also).

In response, here is a Letter to the Editor that appeared in the Times today…

If the Republican Party discontinued its destructive efforts to undercut the administration and applied its energies to the vastly more difficult task of solving the very complicated issues the country faces, it might in the process resolve some of its own problems.

I believe that most Americans would feel a bit more positive about a party that put the well-being of the country and all its citizens ahead of its concerns about regaining power, particularly when a significant portion of responsibility for the existence of these problems may be laid at the doorstep of said party.

Nicely done.

This tells us the following…

What is the single modern invention most responsible for enhancing peoples' freedom and standard of living across the world? Arguably, it is the Internet. Yet, Democrats from revenue-starved states and Congress are proposing to make it less free by taxing Internet commerce. (Content regulation should be coming soon to a screen near you.)

This should not come as a terrible surprise. After all, the Internet was just too good, too free, too easy, too innovative, and too favorable to small businesses for government to stay away. So now, several states, and Congress, are considering laws that would require online retailers to collect state and local taxes from online consumers.

Yeah, isn’t it a shame that those bad “Democrats” like John Thune of South Dakota support that dastardly internet tax, as noted here (to say nothing of the fact that, were it not for the leadership of a Democratic vice president, the Internet as we know it might not be developed to the point where we can all take it for granted)?

Also, this tells us that a bill to tax Internet music downloads introduced in California by state assemblyman (and Dem) Charles Calderon faces “long odds,” even though big-box retailers such as Wal-of-China Mart (here) and interests such as Jewelers of America (here) want to see similar legislation passed.

Jeez, first you have those clamoring to charge a fee to view news content as the “solution” for the newspaper business, and now you’ve got these people trying to get a “piece of the action” online also.

Well, it looks like I’ll have no choice but to charge for the privilege of reading my illustrious content, then (joke, I assure you – I may make the Pay Pal link more prominent on the site, but that’s as “mercenary” as I get).

And finally, to give you an indication of where I am mentally on a Friday afternoon (hoping for nice weather this weekend; it looks like we may get it), I found myself bored to the point where I actually navigated to the blog of J.D. Mullane of the Bucks County Courier Times, and found this (from here, commenting on this post from General George Casey on the matter of whether or not we could fight North Korea – yes, General Casey really discussed that)…

Here is what J.D. said…

Look, I'm no isolationist, but fighting far flung wars around the globe is getting ridiculous. We can't fight every bad guy everywhere.

OMIGOD!

Where is the wankerific pundit who called for the return of the draft and tear-gassing hippies in response to Former President George W. Bush’s Now And Forever You Goddamn Better Believe It You Commie Luburuul War On Terra! Terra! Terra! (as noted here)?

Where is the jingoistic imbecile who pilloried former president Clinton for “(failing) to understand the rising ideological struggle of his time”?

Where is the journalistic mistake who once said, during a 2004 campaign appearance, that faux war leader Dubya, telling the adoring crowd that “Freedom is on the march,” spoke words that weren't “Lincolnesque, but his presence made up for it” (here)?

Where is the numbskull who has had not one good word for anyone who opposed the "Mesopotamian misadventure" brought to us by Number 43 (here)?

And NOW you’re telling us that “we can’t fight every bad guy everywhere”?

What a shame that you didn’t point that out when it mattered, which might have saved at least some of the lives noted here.

Thursday Stuff

Step right up for more of your "public healthcare will be run by government bureaucrats" lies right here, ladies and gentlemen (more here - and in a related note)...



..."Worst Persons" (haven't heard from Mann Coulter for a little while now, fortunately, but she's back, confusing K.O. with the spot-on Ben Affleck parody about the cat, which was really funny by the way; and unbelievably, the human train wreck that is Dennis Miller continues to steal precious cathode rays from our viewing screens in search of some feeble means to try and justify his existence in our electronic universe; and Mark Krikorian apparently doesn't like Judge Sotomayor because she isn't "Anglo" enough for his tastes - yep, take a seat with that Tancredo maniac, and thanks once more for helping to give bloggers a bad name)...

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...and I dedicate this to Miller and Krikorian, though I'm sure that, even if they were to ever watch it, they wouldn't get the point (had a clip from "West Side Story" earlier this week, and this seems to fit also)...



...and here is a tribute to former Philadelphia Flyer Peter Zezel, who left us too soon.



Update 6/18/09: This was nice also.

Boy, Erick Erickson Sure Gets Around!

I read this after reading this, that’s all – just for fun…

(And maybe I'd better not tell him about this either; no way of knowing the reaction.)

Turd Blossom's Tedious Estrada Tale

(And I also had something to say here on a matter related to the former boss of the main subject of this post.)

In today’s Murdoch Street Journal, “political expert” and guru of his party’s last two major election losses (Karl Rove by name) pontificates on the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor by President Obama for the Supreme Court (yes, this is a recording – I’ll try not to duplicate too much from this...and once more, I'm compelled to ask this question).

Rove rehashes the case of Ricci v. DeStefano, about which I’m sure you will hear quite a bit during Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing…

The Ricci case is an example: Whites were denied fire department promotions because of a clear racial quota. Ms. Sotomayor's refusal to hear their arguments won her stinging criticism from fellow Second Court of Appeals judge José Cabranes, a respected Clinton appointee.

As noted here in this Slate article (from yesterday’s post)…

When the case was argued before the Supreme Court last month, all of the justices seemed to agree that New Haven had to comply with valid federal statutes. Mr. Ricci did not challenge the constitutionality of Title VII (of the Civil Rights Act of 1964). So the only real question before the court was whether New Haven had reason to believe that if the city used the test results it would be sued under Title VII. Mr. Ricci's specific circumstances—his race, his dyslexia, and his professional aggravation—have no bearing on that legal question at all.

So why did every report on the case begin and end with Ricci's compelling employment story? Might it have something to do with the fact that the conservative organizations supporting Ricci used his sympathetic tale as the centerpiece of a successful media blitz leading up to oral argument before the court? Could it be that they wanted to make sure the justices understood just how Title VII could impact the lives of ordinary Americans like Frank Ricci? Could they—oh the horror!—have wanted the justices to empathize with Ricci's plight?

Oh noes – there’s that dreaded “e” word again! Whatever shall we do??!!

Seriously, it sounds as if the law needs to be revisited to make accommodations as noted for the New Haven firefighters or similar circumstances with other majority groups based on race; yes, I’ll admit that it’s dumb to throw out positive results just to accommodate a racial group whose results didn’t even qualify, but that’s something a legislature should fix, not a judge (maybe Sotomayor’s opinion in the case was so brief because she recognized that distinction).

But what really got me in Rove’s column was this…

The media has also quickly adopted the story line that Republicans will damage themselves with Hispanics if they oppose Ms. Sotomayor. But what damage did Democrats suffer when they viciously attacked Miguel Estrada's nomination by President George W. Bush to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the nation's second-highest court? New York Sen. Chuck Schumer was particularly ugly, labeling Mr. Estrada a right-wing "stealth missile" who was "way out of the mainstream" and openly questioning Mr. Estrada's truthfulness.

Well, I would say that any negative reaction Democrats may have received from Hispanics as a result of the Estrada hearing has been more than offset by your party’s intransigent stupidity on the matter of providing a path to citizenship for illegal/undocumented immigrants, Karl (again, all you need to do is look at the 2006 and 2008 electoral results for proof).

Besides, considering Miguel Estrada to be representative of the majority of Hispanics in this country (by virtue of his politics) is farcical. But beyond that, as Source Watch notes here…

"Mr. Estrada received disgraceful treatment at the hands of 45 United States senators during the more than two years his nomination was pending (in 2003)," said (Dubya), who aggressively tried to get the Senate to approve Estrada early this year but had been silent on the issue in recent months.

But (then) Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota said, The stumbling block to Miguel Estrada's nomination all along was the administration's refusal to allow him to complete his job application and provide the Senate with the basic information it needed to evaluate and vote on his nomination.

Typical for a whining pissant like our former president; as noted here, Dubya "(had) a better record of having his judicial nominees approved than any President in the past twenty-five years. Only ten of 215 nominations (were) turned down."

As I and many others have pointed out already, Bushco considered Congress to be a subsidiary of the executive branch and nothing more.

And NOW tells us from here that…

During his confirmation hearing, Estrada, a Federalist Society member, in a move strikingly reminiscent of Clarence Thomas's behavior, refused to reveal his position on the correctness of Roe v. Wade and Romer v. Evans, the case that struck down Colorado's anti-gay rights measure. He declined to answer and was evasive when asked crucial questions about environmental and worker rights. His troublesome record entering the hearing included having defended anti- loitering laws which have been shown to have a disproportionately negative effect on minorities. His supervisor in the Solicitor General's office has said that Estrada "lacks the judgment" and is "too much of an ideologue to be an appeals court judge." With such troubling questions in his record, and significant concerns expressed by his former supervisor, we would think that he would welcome the opportunity of a hearing to fully explain his views.

Estrada (was) opposed by the National Organization for Women and many other organizations, including the Feminist Majority, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, the Congressional Black Caucus, the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, People for the American Way, the AFL-CIO, Planned Parenthood, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, Earthjustice, the National Women's Law Center, the NAACP, the Sierra Club and AAUW.

And as far as the rest of Rove’s typical fear mongering and dog-whistle code language in the WSJ piece, I’ll leave that up to others to call it for what it is (here). However, trying to establish some faux equivalency between the circumstances of the Sotomayor and Estrada nominations is ridiculous, even for a rank propagandist like him.

Update: Keep digging, Karl.

Update 6/26/09: I had been looking high and low for this photo to communicate Estrada's insufferable sanctimony during his failed confirmation hearing, and luckily the New York Times republished it here.

Wednesday Stuff

Here are a few things to keep in mind while the media circus spins into overdrive concerning Judge Sotomayor, courtesy of People for the American Way...



...and speaking of human rights, Rachel Maddow tells us here that Bushie Ted Olson is teaming up with David Boies to fight the recent California ruling in favor of Proposition 8, though it thankfully kept existing gay marriages in tact; Olson has had a bit of an iconoclastic streak on other issues also, but it's still a bit shocking that he's actually "left" of Obama here, as Rachel notes...

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...and this has kind of a '60s feel, but I think I liked this better with Anouk Aimee and Jean-Paul Belmondo; God, is he wearing a Banlon shirt AND a turtleneck sweater?...



...and I hope J.B. really does feel good in the "great beyond" over this.

And Another Bushco Lackey Departs

I know the news cycle is currently dominated by a certain well-qualified Latina woman, but I should also point out this story, which tells us that Nancy Nord is stepping down from the Consumer Products Safety Commission effective June 1st.

I would say that Nord “ran” the CPSC, though if only to indicate that she did her best to “run it” into the ground. Here is the evidence…

This tells us that Nord blew off a hearing on defective toys because the hearing also would have included the testimony of child safety advocates (and Nord’s CPSC didn’t decide to test products until an incident was reported, and they negotiated every word of a recall alert with the manufacturer of a defective product).

This tells us more about how Nord’s CSPC was clearly understaffed and underfunded, where a “fox running the hen house” mentality ran rampant.

This tells us that Nord actually opposed a bill that would have strengthened her own agency.

This tells us how Nord was derelict on the issue of pool safety (particularly a big deal now).

And though I end up agreeing somewhat with the commenter here, let’s not lose sight of the fact that, had Nord actually decided to work with the authors of the CPSIA, maybe the law would have been written with language more favorable to those in this country who ply a trade crafting toys and other consumer products.

As I said before, given the failings of Nord’s tenure, it would have been better had no one at all run the CSPC since the beginning of the foul, fetid Bushco reign.

Some Words About "Empathy"

(And I also posted here - a lot to catch up on.)

After reading this post by Adam B at The Daily Kos on the matter of judicial “empathy,” I thought I should add a bit to it (and of course, the right wing is currently trying to turn “empathy” into code language; re., Obama Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor will not employ her formidable intellect and knowledge of the law in her decisions but instead try to achieve some legal means to “create law from the bench” as an “activist judge” because she’s a woman/Latino/Democrat/liberal/progressive/all of the above).

All of which is utter garbage, of course.

Adam B. notes the role of “empathy” in the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the High Court, but this notes the following from 2005 about the nomination of “Strip Search Sammy” Alito…

Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), told The New York Times they were pleased that Alito expressed empathy for the Religious Right belief that Supreme Court rulings maintaining church-state separation have removed God from the public square.

There are times when I know I should cut Byrd some slack, but concerning this matter, I don’t feel like it; if Byrd couldn’t see the danger Alito posed prior to his confirmation, then maybe it’s time for him to take his fiddle and resign.

And this tells us the following…

The truth is that conservative organizations have been beating the hell out of their liberal counterparts in the empathy game for some time now. More Americans can probably identify Susette Kelo and Wilhelmina Dery as the plaintiffs who had their homes snatched by the government in an eminent domain case in 2005 than can name any Supreme Court justice. That case, Kelo v. New London, had absolutely nothing to do with the adorableness of Kelo's Victorian house and the tenacity with which she fought to keep it. But to read about it in the press, you'd think Justice David Souter himself showed up on Kelo's doorstep, punched her in the mouth, then moved into her home and ate off her good china.

And who can forget Dick Heller, the sympathetic Washington, D.C., security guard who won the Second Amendment right to keep a handgun in his Capitol Hill home in last year's blockbuster gun case? If you think the conservative advocacy groups didn't look long and hard for a plaintiff who was a lawful gun owner in a crime-riddled neighborhood who simply wanted to protect what was his, you don't know the Heller case. His life story had no bearing whatsoever on the constitutional dispute before the court. But if the lead plaintiff in Heller had been a crack dealer who'd shot a pregnant woman while robbing a liquor store, those constitutional issues might have looked a lot murkier to the court that ultimately ruled in his favor.

Borrowing from the litigation strategy employed by the NAACP in Brown v. Board of Education, conservatives have tracked down and capitalized on sympathetic plaintiffs to win cases and move the law in their favored direction. Commentator Pat Buchanan has gone so far as to suggest that as part of their rebranding effort, the Republican Party should consider becoming "the Party of Frank Ricci."

And in case you’re wondering who Frank Ricci is, the link to a Pat Buchanan (ugh) column from Slate (in addition to the Slate column itself) tells us that…

He is a fireman in New Haven, Conn., with 11 years in the department, who suffers from dyslexia, but nonetheless has pursued his dream of becoming a lieutenant and a captain.

Six months before the promotion test, Ricci quit his second job. He bought $1,000 worth of the textbooks he was told to study, had a friend read them onto tapes to compensate for his dyslexia, studied every spare hour he got, and sat for the test, to compete for one of eight lieutenant slots open.

Frank made it. Frank Ricci came in sixth.

And Ricci, according to Buchanan, was denied a promotion by “the liberal bigots who run New Haven (CT).”

Yeah, that “playing the white rage” card has worked so beautifully for Repugs in the last two elections, hasn’t it, Pat?

And here’s another quote about empathy from a former Supreme Court nominee…

"I regard law as a discipline in which you have to have empathy for people you are trying to understand."

Anyone care to guess the “liberal” who uttered those words? Why, it was none other that Robert Bork, ladies and gentlemen.

I would ask that you keep all of this in mind while “the usual suspects” try to gum up the Sotomayor confirmation hearings, with Jeffrey Rosen leading the charge here in an attack featuring a misinterpretation of a footnote “in a way that (supposedly) mislead litigants,” when in fact it did no such thing; it’s actually laughable for Rosen to say anything about Sotomayor at all given that he “(hasn’t) read enough of Sotomayor's opinions to have a confident sense of them, nor have I talked to enough of Sotomayor's detractors and supporters, to get a fully balanced picture of her strengths,” as noted here.

Let the games being (sigh) – and lest anyone contemplate the “F” word, as it were, consider this.

Update 1: Oh, and while the wingnuts lose what’s left of their minds over Sotomayor, I think we should recall this.

Update 2: Ha ha ha...

Tuesday Stuff

Still shooting for a return tomorrow - we'll see...

In the meantime, it looks like The Poor Man Institute beat me to the punch here (h/t Atrios), but here I go anyway (with former pretend presidential candidate Mike Huckabee channeling Richard Beymer a bit here)...



..."Worst Persons" (TV blogger David Zurawik of The Baltimore Sun tries to make fun of K.O. and Rachel Maddow by comparing them to Nazi propagandists in the '30s - nice; Lt. Pete Hegseth is next with more of this "eight-plus-years-of-safety-since-9/11" crap - yeah, usually we should leave our service people alone, but this clown is an exception, and a nod to Atrios to boot; Laura Ingraham takes it, though, for alleging that torture is somehow OK if it only happens three times...wonder if she got her law degree from the same place as Christine Flowers - really don't want to contemplate the bizarro universe of these people)...

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...and by the way, consider this video to be a public service announcement (as a parent, it doesn't make me feel warm and cozy - ugh)...



...and this gives you a bit of insight into our NYC activities of a few days ago; great show (overdue for some jazz here, and a big raspberry to the Italian gentlemen at our table who wouldn't shut up).

Monday Stuff

Oh, and just for the record, I should let you know that Mrs. Doomsy and I were privileged to spend a few wonderful days in New York City from which we have just returned, and we can assure you that nothing blew up and no "terrists" ran rampant at all (though the Yankees didn't do a whole hell of a lot against the Phils' pitching for the most part and managed to lose two of three at home, so I guess that counts as a tragedy - heh, heh)...



...and I may not be able to get back to the whole posting thing tomorrow, but hopefully no later than Wednesday.

Sunday Stuff

Here' K.O.'s Special Comment last Thursday highlighting the murderously insane lunacy that put our people in harm's way particularly in Iraq but also in Afghanistan; I feel I must put this up because, if nothing else, Keith's last six words express my most earnest wish...

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...and don't worry, I won't say anything about how metaphorical this song really is, even though it really is (this replaces the Osgood video, by the way; got sick of trying to fix the autoplay screwup - nice job, "Third Eye" Network!)