BUSH: ... we also want to address the root causes of the problem. And the root cause of the problem is you've got Hezbollah that is armed and willing to fire rockets into Israel.
That's like saying the root cause of World War II was the Wehrmacht.
Brewers add chorizo to sausage race By EMILY FREDRIX, Associated Press Writer Thu Jul 27, 8:08 PM ET
MILWAUKEE - It could have been wurst. On his first outing as the newest sausage at Miller Park, Chorizo didn't fall on his buns. Wearing an oversized brown sombrero and a bright yellow shirt emblazoned with the number five, Chorizo became the fifth pork product to run the famed sausage race at the home of the Milwaukee Brewers.
Chorizo, who is also known as "El Picante" and "Cinco," will race for the first time during a game on Saturday. But that'll be the only time this year he runs in the Klement's Sausage races because of Major League rules regarding the introduction of mascots, said Rick Schlesinger, the team's executive vice president of business operations.
Chorizo will be put through the grind in the minor league, so he can get some extra seasoning before rejoining the other sausages next season, Melvin said.
The addition of Chorizo comes after several years of receiving letters and e-mails asking for more sausages, especially some with a Latino flavor, Schlesinger said.
"Then it really, to use a food analogy, mushroomed to something much larger where we started to take it seriously," he said.Chorizo said in a statement read in both English and Spanish, that his dream has come true.
"I am very humbled to be in the presence of so many world-class wieners, but hopefully I can bring a little something new to the table, and Brewers fans will welcome me into their hearts and grills," he said.
As explained to me by several senior State Department officials, Rice is entranced by a new "domino" theory: Israel's attacks will demolish Hezbollah; the Lebanese will blame Hezbollah and destroy its influence; and the backlash will extend to the Palestinians' Hamas, which will collapse. From the administration's point of view, the Israel-Lebanon conflict is a proxy war with Iran (and Syria) that will inexplicably help turn around Iraq.
If that's what Rice & Co. are betting on, you can write off Iraq right now.
It's nothing more than a fantasy, one that gets you out of a hole. It's on a par with fevered thoughts just before finals week at college. The student who hasn't studied at all, hopes an earthquake will strike, postponing the tests and discombobulating the professors, who in turn give everybody a passing grade.
July 24, 2006 — The Department of Energy said today that the national average price for a gallon of regular unleaded is now just above $3 — 1.4 cents higher than the price a week ago. Continued high crude oil prices have driven the increase.
The only time the average price went higher was immediately after Hurricane Katrina knocked out a third of the nation's refining capacity last year. At that point, the price of the average gallon of gas was $3.07.
If you compare the price to the same time a year ago ($2.29), you'll see that consumers are paying 31 percent more today to fill up.
Here in Los Angeles, it's been that way for three months.
And it's a real issue for many, causing strain on household budgets. It'll be interesting to see how the rest of the nation handles it.
"War is a bracing tonic for the national spirit ..."
So Gene Healy writes about the thinking of neocons. Here is an extended excerpt of Healy's essay at cato-at-liberty.org: (emp add)
War without End
Here’s the money quote from the Bill Kristol piece George Will went after yesterday:
"We might consider countering this act of Iranian aggression with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait? Does anyone think a nuclear Iran can be contained? That the current regime will negotiate in good faith? It would be easier to act sooner rather than later. Yes, there would be repercussions — and they would be healthy ones, showing a strong America that has rejected further appeasement."
And here’s a front pager in today’s Washington Post about neoconservative anger towards the Bush administration because of its newfound restraint in foreign policy. Prominent Iraq hawks like Max Boot and Cakewalk Ken Adelman are upset that their favored tactic, "bomb today for a brighter tomorrow," no longer commands the respect it once did in Washington.
Now, you could marvel at the brazenness of all this: the same people who helped lead us into the biggest foreign policy disaster in 30 years trying to push another war (or wars) on us without so much as a prefatory "sorry about the whole Iraq thing, old boy." But the current squawking also strikes me as a useful reminder of how very, very important war is in the neoconservative vision. It is as central to that vision as peace is to the classical liberal vision.
For the neoconservatives, it’s not about Israel. It’s about war. War is a bracing tonic for the national spirit and in all its forms it presents opportunities for national greatness. "Ultimately, American purpose can find its voice only in Washington," David Brooks once wrote. And Washington’s never louder or more powerful than when it has a war to fight.
In 1997, Fred Barnes pouted about the “ennui” accompanying that decade’s peace and prosperity:
The last great moment in Washington was Desert Storm…. It was exciting to follow and write about … Every press conference, I watched. Desert Storm was all I thought about or talked about. My stories concentrated on President Bush’s heroic role in the war."
Indeed, for many neoconservatives, the 1990s were about the search for an enemy. Who it was didn’t much matter. That can be seen in this 1996 Foreign Affairs article by Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan, in which they seem distinctly unsettled by the apparant lack of anyone for the U.S. to fight:
"The ubiquitous post-Cold War question — where is the threat? — is thus misconceived. In a world in which peace and American security depend on American power and the will to use it, the main threat the United States faces now and in the future is its own weakness."
To dispel any notions of weakness, a little therapeutic bombing is sometimes in order. As AEI’s Michael Ledeen apparently put it some years ago:
"Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."
Juan Williams got it right last week when he said to Bill Kristol: (from Think Progress)
Well, it just seems to me that you want…you just want war, war, war, and you want us in more war. You wanted us in Iraq. Now you want us in Iran.
Bush doesn't support millionaires, he supports the richest millionth:
Everybody says Bush cares only for the richest 1%, or 1/2 of 1%, or some other "percentage" figure. But consider remarks by Bush at the NAACP today. Here's how Think Progress reported it:
President Bush addressed the NAACP today for the first time in his presidency. Speaking on behalf of his friend, multi-millionaire conservative BET founder Bob Johnson, Bush used the opportunity to promote the repeal of the estate tax on the ultra-rich:
One of my friends is Bob Johnson, founder of BET. He’s an interesting man. He believes strongly in ownership. He has been a successful owner. He believes strongly, for example, that the death tax will prevent future African-American entrepreneurs from being able to pass their assets from one generation to the next. He and I also understand that the investor class shouldn’t be just confined to the old definition of the investor class.
President Bush’s “death tax” pitch demonstrates his stunning disconnect from the African-American community. According to an American Progress analysis, just 59 African-Americans will pay the estate tax this year, and that number will drop to 33 in 2009.
59 African-Americans now, 33 later. The average is
46
How many African Americans are there? From the CIA World Factbook, we get 12.9% of 298 million. That's
38 million
So you could fairly say that, when talking to African-Americans, Bush is defending a policy that is favorable to the richest one in a million. Remarkable.
ANKARA, Turkey - Turkish officials signaled Tuesday they are prepared to send the army into northern Iraq if U.S. and Iraqi forces do not take steps to combat Turkish Kurdish guerrillas there — a move that could put Turkey on a collision course with the United States.
Turkey is facing increasing domestic pressure to act after 15 soldiers, police and guards were killed fighting the guerrillas in southeastern Turkey in the past week.
"The government is really in a bind," said Seyfi Tashan, director of the Foreign Policy Institute at Bilkent University in Ankara. "On the one hand, they don't want things to break down with the United States. On the other hand, the public is crying for action."
Diplomats and experts cautioned the increasingly aggressive Turkish statements were likely aimed at calming public anger and pressing the U.S. and Iraq to act against the Turkish Kurdish guerrillas. But they also said Turkish politicians and military officers could act if nothing is done.
Bush to Putin: "... I talked about my desire to promote institutional change in parts of the world like Iraq where there's a free press and free religion, and I told him that a lot of people in our country would hope that Russia would do the same thing ...
Item Two:
Bush at a press event: "Does it concern you that the Beirut airport has been bombed?" a reporter asked. "And do you see a risk of triggering a wider war?"
"I thought you were going to ask me about the pig," Bush replied blithely.
Today's topic (among many) is stem cell research and the Senate votes on three different measures. One would broaden the scope of federally funded research to include new stem cell lines - derived from embryos created as a result of in vitro fertilization (IVF). Proponents of using those embryos point out, correctly, that the IVF process creates "surplus" embryos that will never be implanted, and that will eventually be discarded (in part, because they deteriorate even though cryogenically frozen). So what's the big deal?
Those proponents have solid logic on their side. If IVF is allowed, which "uses" embryos (in the sense that some never become babies), then stem cell research should also be able to "use" them.
The challenge to opponents of federal funding for research into stem cells that go beyond the limited set of existing lines, is this:
Why don't you also oppose in vitro fertilization?
Give them credit, the Catholic Church opposes IVF. So they can be consistent when opposing embryonic stem cell research (and therapy, should it ever come about).
But what about Joe Republican, member of Congress. Or Bush, for that matter. If they're all fired up in opposition to using IVF embryos, where is the outrage over IVF itself?
Karl Rove was quoted recently saying that "we were all an embryo at one point, and we ought to as a society be very careful about being callous about the wanton destruction of embryos, of life". Okay. So get movin' on outlawing IVF.
ADDENDUM: Yes, there is a difference between allowing IVF/embryonic-stem-cell research, and funding it. A quick look at the governmen'ts HSS site doesn't show if there is funding for IVF (for patients or for research), but there are links to places that do IVF, which could be considered tacit approval, at least.
The United States is heading for bankruptcy, according to an extraordinary paper published by one of the key members of the country's central bank.
A ballooning budget deficit and a pensions and welfare timebomb could send the economic superpower into insolvency, according to research by Professor Laurence Kotlikoff for the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, a leading constituent of the US Federal Reserve.
Prof Kotlikoff said that, by some measures, the US is already bankrupt. "To paraphrase the Oxford English Dictionary, is the United States at the end of its resources, exhausted, stripped bare, destitute, bereft, wanting in property, or wrecked in consequence of failure to pay its creditors," he asked.
According to his central analysis, "the US government is, indeed, bankrupt, insofar as it will be unable to pay its creditors, who, in this context, are current and future generations to whom it has explicitly or implicitly promised future net payments of various kinds''.
The opinion is a bit over the top, and could be considered an argument for limiting payments promised. But still, it puts the focus on the legacy of the Bush tax cuts (further down in the article).
110, 122 (!) and More Dog Days to Come By David Kelly and Melissa Pamer Times Staff Writers July 16, 2006
Excessive heat, severe fire danger, record-breaking energy consumption and, on top of that, bad air and rising humidity made for a day of extremes in Southern California on Saturday, with little relief expected in coming days.
Scorching temperatures reached into the triple digits, with only a few degrees separating Los Angeles communities and far-flung desert locales: 104 in Burbank and 108 in Palmdale; 110 in Woodland Hills and 107 in Yucca Valley. As the temperature rose, air conditioners hummed, busting electricity usage records for a Saturday throughout most of Southern California.
Downtown Los Angeles hit 97, falling one degree short of the record set in 1886, and at 89 degrees, the weather station at UCLA broke its record by one point. Indio registered an all-time high of 122, and the San Diego Zoo's Wild Animal Park broke its record with 108. Elsewhere, temperatures skirted just below records, but mugginess made it feel much hotter.
122°
That's half way between freezing and boiling!
Global warming: we're just getting started and it's going to be worse than you think.
Looks like it could be the economy. Housing is slowing and the consumer might pull back (no more REFIs, plus prices are up for gas and everything else). It may make Iraq a second tier issue. And it wouldn't be good for the Republicans. There's no way to spin a slowing economy.
In the 1970's there was a magazine, TREK, which was for hard-core fans of the television show Star Trek. How hard core? They had an article, A Star Trek Needlepoint Design, for those who wanted to make a sampler with quotes from the series.
That magazine appears to have ceased publication a long time ago, but recently I came upon three old paperbacks, The Best of TREK, volumes 1, 2, and 3. Took a look and found some of it interesting, but much that was dull (e.g. they speculate on whether a Star Trek movie will ever be made).
One article from the magazine that made it into volume 2 of the best-of paperback was this: The Rise of the Federation. The author, Jim Huston, writing no later than 1979, gives readers a "history" for 1980 to 2038 (during which many events take place, mostly on earth) that apparently leads to the situation in the 23rd century which is the period when the action in the original television series is supposed to take place.
The article is severely incomplete, in that only a tiny fraction of time from 1980 to 2254 is covered. In a note to readers, the editors promise a follow up "history" in volume 3, but that isn't honored.
Anyway, with that background information out of the way, the reason for this post is to look at selected events that were forecast back in 1979. Somebody once said that nothing ages fast than "the future" and that's certainly true in this case. But it's still interesting and amusing to see what one person, over 25 years ago, was proposing for the future (admittedly, with an optimistic science-fiction bias).
Here then, are selected excerpts from the "history":
1980 : First space shuttle flights
1982 : Construction begins on Starlab, the first permanently manned space station.
1983 - August : The United States, Russia, England, France, Germany, Japan, and Australia begin construction of a permanent base on the Moon.
1984 : Starlab completed, full operations begin. Agricultural experiments are added to Moon Base One.
1986 - July : The first manned Martian mission is launched from orbit around the moon.
1989 : Construction is started on the giant spaceship Martian Genesis, planned to carry over 1,000 people ... who will begin the task of making the Martian surface habitable for man.
1991 to 2000 : Mankind enters what appears to be a golden age. Due to the technology developed in the colonization of the Moon and Mars, the standard of living goes up radically the world over.
2006 : Man now has a foothold on most of the inhabitable planets in the solar system. ... Advances in weather-control techniques and the influx of foodstuffs from the space stations have ended Earth's food problems. The standard of living throughout the world has never been higher. Power and raw materials are abundant ... ... Major wars, which a few short years ago seemed unavoidable, are now unthinkable.
2019 : Germany becomes a whole nation again ...
No Y2K bug in this guy's future.
How about those "advances in weather-control techniques"? Somebody tell Al Gore!
China? India? Never heard of 'em.
Peak Oil? Not a problem. "Power and raw materials are abundant ..."
And it's nice to see that wars are unthinkable in 2006.
The evolution and extinction of a far-right blogger:
In the wake of the absurd charges by David Horowitz, that the New York Times travel section was ("in an apparent retaliation for criticism") providing information about Cheney and Rumsfeld's vacation homes that put them at risk, one blogger went over the top. The blog, informally named The Flying Monkey-Right Blog, but with a URL of thepoliticalinsight.blogspot.com, wrote this: (dead link) (caught by patriotboy) (emp add)
So, in the school of what's good for the goose is good for the gander, we are providing this link so YOU may help the blogosphere in locating the homes (perhaps with photos?) of the editors and reporters of the New York Times.
Let's start with the following New York Times reporters and editors: Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr. , Bill Keller, Eric Lichtblau, and James Risen. Do you have an idea where they live?
Go hunt them down and do America a favor. Get their photo, street address, where their kids go to school, anything you can dig up, and send it to the link above. This is your chance to be famous - grab for the golden ring.
After heavy criticism, that last paragraph was changed to:
Go track them down and do America a favor. Get their photo, street address, where their kids go to school, anything you can dig up, and send it to the link above. This is your chance to be famous - grab for the golden ring.
Go track them down and do America a favor. Get their photo, street address, where they shop, anything you can dig up, and send it to the link above. This is your chance to be famous - grab for the golden ring.
The blogger, Denny K, substituted "track" for "hunt" and "where they shop" for "where their kids go to school", but the post was still radioactive.
In response, someone created a blog with a single post, one that gave the full name of "Denny K", where he lives, where he works, his telephone number, and a Google map of his house! (These blog vs blog fights can get pretty nasty.)
And now it appears that The Flying Monkey-Right Blog has been dismantled. All links to posts on http://thepoliticalinsight.blogspot.com die. The blog doesn't exist any more (actually, going to the blog's main page triggers a redirect to http://topnetdeals888.info, a kind of domain parking page). And that's not surprising. It was calling for violent action against various New York Times employees. It will be interesting to see what legal trouble this guy has gotten into. It's almost a guarantee that the Times got their lawyers on this case. Remember, once you put something stupid out on the Internet, you can try and scrub it clean, but that's virtually impossible unless you are really obscure - which this blogger wasn't.
For the full story on this, including observations of other right-wing bloggers who fanned the flames of this bogus charge against the Times, like Red State, Malkin, et al, see this post by Glenn Greenwald.
Or maybe not. First, this excerpt from Robert Samuelson's op-ed on why we can't do anything about global warming: (emp add)
From 2003 to 2050, the world's population is projected to grow from 6.4 billion people to 9.1 billion, a 42 percent increase. If energy use per person and technology remain the same, total energy use and greenhouse gas emissions (mainly, carbon dioxide) will be 42 percent higher in 2050. But that's too low, because societies that grow richer use more energy. Unless we condemn the world's poor to their present poverty -- and freeze everyone else's living standards -- we need economic growth. With modest growth, energy use and greenhouse emissions more than double by 2050.
So, reining in population growth might be a good thing. For lots of reasons, including global warming. But that's not the way they think over at Focus on the Family. From an report over at their CitizenLink section: (excerpts, emp add)
Gates-Buffett Linkup Troubles Pro-Life Activists
The billionaires' combining of forces almost certain to mean millions more for abortion, population-control groups.
Billionaire financier Warren Buffett announced this week he is going to leave 80 percent of his estate — more than $35 billion — to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
It's a donation that is troubling to the pro-life community, according to Joseph D'Agostino of the Population Research Institute.
"It's very scary," D'Agostino told CitizenLink. "The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has very close ties and gives a lot of money to pro-abortion groups, such as Planned Parenthood, and for population control around the world."
"It's especially scary from a population-control perspective, because birth rates have been dropping dramatically in the Third World over the last few decades and continue to go down," D'Agostino said. "The last thing the Third World needs is more population control, because their populations are already facing dramatic aging, but they don't have anything like the financial resources we do to take care of all these older people."
D'Agostino said the "population time bomb" that Gates and Buffett seem to fear is a myth. But Gates' and Buffett's philanthropy is a "bomb" in its own right.
"Population control is quite literally destroying much of the Third World," he said. "Even in Mexico, the birthrate is below replacement level. And over time, since there are not enough children being born to replace the population, they are not going to have enough workers. They are going to have these old people who are going to retire, and there are not going to be enough workers there to support them — and these countries are facing, in the long-term, financial collapse."
Most of these poor countries already have too many people. The notion that growing the population will provide support for the aging sector is mistaken. It'll just make everyone worse off. But there you have it, a willful desire to increase the population of poor countries.
After years of avoiding talk of the number of casualties in Iraq, Bush says this on Independence Day: (To a military audience at Fort Bragg)
I'm going to make you this promise: I'm not going to allow the sacrifice of 2,527 troops who have died in Iraq to be in vain by pulling out before the job is done.
After years of avoiding talk of the number of casualties in Iraq, Bush says this on Independence Day: (To a military audience at Fort Bragg)
I'm going to make you this promise: I'm not going to allow the sacrifice of 2,527 troops who have died in Iraq to be in vain by pulling out before the job is done.
DETROIT (AP) - About 125,000 employees and retirees of the former Kmart Corp. will share in the $11.75 million settlement of a lawsuit that said former company executives acted improperly when they invested pension money in now-worthless Kmart stock.
[...]
The deal involves those who participated in Kmart pensions from March 15, 1999, to March 6, 2003.
[...]
The suit said company officials invested pension money in Kmart stock after the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Jan. 22, 2002. It said the officials failed to exercise proper care for the pension money.
No kidding. In case you're wondering, $11.75 million divided by 125,000 employees comes out to $94 a person. (Presumably for, on average, 2 years of service.) That's essentially nothing.
In 2004, the Republicans got lots of states to have anti gay marriage initiatives on the ballot. Gets out the base, and all that. And it may have helped Bush win over Kerry.
So why did Democratic senator Diane Feinstein, from a safely blue state (though up for reelection*), co-sponsor an amendment to the Constitution to protect the flag from "desecration"?
True, the amendment failed in the Senate by one vote, but if it had passed, it would have been a major political issue going into the elections. Instead of about a dozen states with marriage initiatives, all fifty states would have been debating the flag amendment. That's because after passing the House and Senate, it's off to the states for 3/4 approval. It would divide Democrats more than Republicans and nationalize state races on the theme of "defending the flag".
Nothing is guaranteed, so it's not a sure thing that the flag issue would make a big difference, but the risk was clear.
Why did Feinstein support something that, if it had passed, would have endangered the Democrats' chance of taking back one of the houses of Congress and many, many local races?
