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Archive for August 2006
Bill and Ted’s Most Excellent Adventure
Posted by Clif on 08/31/06 at 8:50 am
Category: Lying Republicans
Bill Frist, cat-killer, video M.D., and surgeon of the apes, has added blogger to the “titles and emoluments” of his office. It was probably all that time blogging that kept him from doing his required continuing medical education (and then lying to Tennessee medical licensing authorities about it).
But I digress. I’m more interested, at least right now, about this curious post on his blog:
Last week, I blogged on the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, S. 2590, a crucial step towards fixing the federal government’s spending problem. S. 2590 would create a single, easily searchable database capable of tracking approximately $1 trillion in federal grants, contracts, earmarks, and loans. . . .Unfortunately, when I attempted to bring this legislation to a vote before the August recess, it was blocked.
So, to get this bill passed, I am calling on all members, when asked by the blog community, to instruct their staff to answer whether or not they have a hold, honestly and transparently, so I can pass this bill. And I encourage Minority Leader Reid to do the same.
This is just a colossal pile of monkey caca designed to suggest that even Majority Leader Frist himself has no idea, no idea I tell you, as to what Senator placed a “secret hold” on the legislation. Frist claims to be so clueless about the identity of the legislative pork snorkeler that he needs the help of the blogosphere to free the legislation from the evil Senator who has it locked up in his freezer.
Just a little review of the Senate Rules will make clear to all but the most devoted Fristers what a steaming heap this is. To begin with, the “secret hold” is the result in part of Rule VII(2) of the Standing Rules of the Senate which requires the unanimous consent of all Senators before any legislation can be brought to the floor. The practice has been that the objecting Senator tells his or her party’s Majority Leader of the hold, but nothing in the rule requires this procedure or requires that the party leader maintain the anonymity of the secret senator.
Now when Frist posted his disingenuous plea for help the identity of Senator Secret Hold was not yet publicly known. The pork snorkeler might, after all, have been a Democrat. Frist could then at least pretend that he had no idea, absolutely no idea, who the culprit was.
Of course, now we know that Senator Ted “Bridge to Nowhere” Stevens was the man of the hour. So Frist knew all along who it was and could have, without violating a single rule, said it was Stevens.
Worse still, our lazy so-called liberal media has now credited Frist’s charade and his blog brigade as outing Stevens, as if Frist couldn’t have revealed Steven’s identity by simply saying what he knew all along. Like this story in the Dallas Morning News headlined “Frist, Blogs Team up on Senator.” Pitiful
The Taranto-ula’s Kiss
Posted by Clif on 08/30/06 at 7:26 am Category: Lying Republicans, Wingnuts, Wankers, Loathsome Republicans, Iraq
James Taranto, who is more likely to lose a limb from morbid obesity than from warfare, is dissing triple-amputee war veteran Max Cleland in “Wurst of the Web Today,” Taranto’s daily feature at the WSJ’s Opinion Journal.
In an item titled “Ignorance on Parade,” Taranto notes that Cleland is undergoing treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. Taranto cites an AP story in which Cleland says that his PTSD has been “in part triggered by the ongoing violence in Iraq” and that his PTSD symptoms are “avoidance, not wanting to connect with” the war. The AP story also notes that Cleland has been a “vocal critic” of the war.
All this leads Taranto to burp out this:
How credible is Cleland as “a vocal critic of the Iraq war” when by his own admission his approach to it is “avoidance, not wanting to connect with anything dealing with” it, and trying “to disconnect and disassociate” from sources of information about it? Something tells us he was better informed in 2002, when he voted for the war–a fact the AP inexplicably leaves out.
What a loathsome twit. What Taranto “inexplicably leaves out” was that Cleland — and everyone else who voted for the war in 2002 — were less well-informed because the Administration had falsely claimed that Saddam had WMD.
Even worse, where does Taranto get off mocking Cleland’s PTSD, when the only stress-related disorder that Taranto is ever likely to experience is an intense anxiety that the bar will run out of buffalo wings during Happy Hour?
Sowell Obstruction
Posted by Clif on 08/29/06 at 8:44 am Category: Wingnuts, Environment
Over at Clown Hall, Hooha Institute Senior Fellow Thomas Sowell slam dunks the global warming crowd with this:
Climate statistics show that, with all the “global warming” hysteria today, our temperatures are still not as high as they were back in medieval times. Those medieval folks must have been driving a lot of cars and SUVs.
Climate “statistics” from medieval times? And just how exactly did we get these? Oh, silly me, I forgot that when the monks weren’t saying matins they were checking the temperature and recording it in their prayer books. (Except for the fact that Fahrenheit didn’t invent the thermometer until 1714)
Of course, there aren’t “statistics” about medieval temperatures, rather there are proxy reconstructions based on tree rings and isotopic water variations which may or may not be accurate. Those reconstructions show a “Medieval Warm Period” but, not surprisingly, all of them show lower temperatures than current temperatures.
“Mr. Sowell, it’s Mr. Tillerson on line 5. He says your check is in the mail.”
They Don’t Call Him Butt-Missile For Nothing
Posted by Clif on 08/28/06 at 9:25 pm Category: Wingnuts
Powerline blogger John “Butt-Missile” Hinderaker’s six-year stint of kissing Bush’s butt (and what ever other bodily part was offered up for veneration) paid off. Yep, on August 22, Butt-Missile got to go on a group tour of the Oval Office and, as he breathelessly reports, he heard the President speak during the tour “for approximately 40 minutes.” Since Bush was in the air on Air Force One at 1:59 p.m on that same day, it’s likely that Mr. Butt-Missile’s semi-private “afternoon” audience was considerably less than the 40 minutes Hinderaker claims, but we’ll give him a pass on this little exaggeration.
Hinderaker’s post is dripping with more veneration than one can find in a typical nineteenth-century hagiography of St. Christopher:
I had the opportunity this afternoon to be part of a relatively small group who heard President Bush talk, extemporaneously, for around forty minutes. It was an absolutely riveting experience. It was the best I’ve ever seen him. Not only that; it may have been the best I’ve ever seen any politician.
Hinderaker then paused for another deep sip of Kool-Aid
As he often does, the President structured his comments loosely around a tour of the Oval Office. But the digressions and interpolations were priceless.
Cost of one-year’s web hosting of Powerline: $249. Value of one week’s billed-hours lost by Mr. Hinderaker, Esq., while blogging at work: $9,000. Hearing Our Glorious Leader’s little digressions and his little “heh-heh” laugh: priceless.
The conventional wisdom is that Bush is not a very good speaker. But up close, he is a great communicator. . . . He was by turns instructive, persuasive, and funny. His persona is very much that of the big brother.
Ya know, John, the “big brother” metaphor probably isn’t conveying quite the idea that you intended, particularly given that stuff with the NSA.
No veneration of Bush as a nearly Christ-like figure would be complete, of course, without a passion, crucifixion and martyrdom:
I’ve sometimes worried about how President Bush can withstand the Washington snake pit and deal with a daily barrage of hate from the ignorant left that, in my opinion, dwarfs in both volume and injustice the abuse directed against any prior President.
John has a good point here. Even I was appalled that President Bush was subjected to those impeachment proceedings last year.
Not to worry. He is, of course, miles above his mean-spirited liberal critics. More than that, he clearly derives real joy from the opportunity to serve as President and to participate in the great pageant of American history. . . .
It was, in short, the most inspiring forty minutes I’ve experienced in politics.
Somehow I get the feeling that the next most inspiring moments in Hinderaker’s life will be when he discovers the image of St. W on the remains of an uneaten grilled cheese sandwich.
(Previously posted at The American Street.)
Shooting Fish in an Instacracker Barrel
Posted by Clif on 08/27/06 at 8:46 am Category: Wingnuts, Iraq
On this beautiful Sunday morning, let’s take a moment to say a word of thanks to Our Creator for having made the Instacracker, God’s gift to lazy bloggers. Rather than having to spend hours scouring the entire blogosphere looking for a prime piece of wingnuttery to offer up for your enjoyment, all I had to do was wander over to the Instacracker’s place to find this nugget offered up by our favorite law perfesser:
HOW LIKELY ARE YOU TO DIE WHILE SERVING IN IRAQ? About half as likely as Americans back home, reports the Washington Post. Yeah, there are some caveats — read the whole thing — but it’s hard to look at these numbers and see the catastrophe. . . .
This story has circulated in various forms among the stay-at-home warbloggers like Instacracker, which makes you wonder why they don’t enlist, if for no other reason than their own personal safety. After all, if you go to Baghdad you almost double your chances of surviving the mean halls of the University of Tennessee law school.
But let’s read the article that Glenn links — something his mouth-breathing fans are unlikely to do — and see just exactly what those “caveats” are. Here’s the money quote:
The ratio of deaths to person-years, .00392, or 3.92 deaths per 1,000 person-years, is the death rate of military personnel in Iraq.
How does this rate compare with that in other groups? One meaningful comparison is to the civilian population of the United States. That rate was 8.42 per 1,000 in 2003, more than twice that for military personnel in Iraq.
Yikes! Sign me up now! But wait. I wonder if that death rate includes a bunch of old people who are, on the whole, way more likely to die than anyone else. Why, yes it does:
The comparison is imperfect, of course, because a much higher fraction of the American population is elderly and subject to higher death rates from degenerative diseases.
Hmm, so what happens when we take them out of the comparison?
The death rate for U.S. men ages 18 to 39 in 2003 was 1.53 per 1,000 — 39 percent of that of troops in Iraq.
Just as I thought. There’s a good reason Glenn’s got his butt firmly ensconced in the halls of academe rather than the Green Zone.
So why does Glenn think that the death rates are comparable? Well, it turns out there is one demographic that has higher death rates than the troops in Iraq:
But one can also find something equivalent to combat conditions on home soil. The death rate for African American men ages 20 to 34 in Philadelphia was 4.37 per 1,000 in 2002, 11 percent higher than among troops in Iraq.
No shit, Sherlock. I can see the recruiting posters now: “Enlist and have a better chance of surviving your tour of duty than a young black man on the streets of Philadelphia.”
Glenn, it’s not a “caveat” when it chews up and spits out your whole fricking point.
(Cross-posted at The American Street.)
Oops
Posted by Clif on 08/26/06 at 8:50 am Category: Wingnuts, Iraq
Well perhaps we were winning in Rich Lowry’s imagination if nowhere else.
Everything It Takes . . . (Not)
Posted by Clif on 08/24/06 at 9:20 am Category: Lying Republicans, White House, Katrina
As the anniversary of Katrina approaches, you probably remember the photo op of Our Glorious Leader standing in front of Saint Louis Cathedral, all lit up by emergency generators that would be whisked away as the President left. Bush said:
And tonight I also offer this pledge of the American people: Throughout the area hit by the hurricane, we will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes, to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives.
Uh, not so much. Less than five months later, Bush broke that pledge. Donald Powell, who was in charge of the federal response to Katrina, made clear that the promise to do what it takes didn’t include “interference from government” in market processes. Powell said that the federal government would only rebuild houses in parts of New Orleans outside “established flood plains.” That means that the federal government would have nothing to do with rebuilding the 80 percent of New Orleans that is within the established flood plains. And even that money has yet to show up.
So here we have compassionate conservatism at its best: show up for photo ops, hug a few homeless mothers and children, and look concerned, but when the rubber hits the road and wallets have to be opened (particularly for black people) flip ‘em the bird and speed off into the distance.
Buttars v. Brown v. Board of Education
Posted by Clif on 08/23/06 at 12:15 am Category: Loathsome Republicans, Buttars
The Utah Council of Mormons Legislature is preparing for its 2007 session,which means that Utah Republican and professional cretin Chris Buttars is at it again. Buttars’ credentials as a dim-witted homophobe are well-established so he decided to add racist to his resume, no doubt in hopes of increasing his chances of re-election in Utah.
On Monday, during an interview with KVNU Radio, Buttars declared that the landmark decision ending school segregation, Brown v. Board of Education, was “wrong to begin with.” That’s just only a few steps short of saying that Eichman got a raw deal.
Today he was interviewed on KCPW and dug himself even deeper into a hole. Buttars not-so-brilliant attempt at damage control was to say that parts of Brown were good and other parts were bad. Of course, you might wonder what part of ending school segregation was bad. Well, according to Buttars, it was this:
There’s some things that Brown vs. Board of Education did that was [sic] wonderful, as I mentioned, by getting some of these minority kids in schools with more money, but in a lot of ways, once again, it broke up the educational system that was designed to maximize the number of minority kids in many schools in the South — that was my concern.”
That’s right, kids. Brown was good because it put some black kids in white schools but bad because it broke up a system designed to keep most black kids in the same schools. Give Buttars a chance and he’ll probably say that the bad thing about the Allied victory in WWII was it broke up a system designed to “maximize the number of Jews in many camps in Poland.”
Click play below to listen to th KCPW interview in its entirety. Buttars sounds as stupid as he appears in print: