And in other news...

I plan to be at the Caddilac Ranch in Southington, CT tonight tonight watching people in cowboy hats and boots dance ... well ok .. i admit it .. I will mostly be watching the women .. sue me

The first 10 people that come up to me and say "hey aren't you that geeky guy I read online" gets a free drink

and no ... i dont imagine that I will have to buy any drinks .. but a man can dream ...

Rules and Bylaws Commitee Public Meeting

This is important stuff, if a little arcane for most folks .. but please watch it
Watch live video from democraticvideo's channel on Justin.tv

Doozers

I loved Fraggle Rock and especially the Doozers. And now since I am off to work .... here they are

Faith Healing

From MSNBC comes this gem

"Holy Spirit fall! God is here! We want more! More, more, more!"

That's what Canadian evangelist Todd Bentley yells out nearly every evening to the thousands who gather to hear him preach. The 32-year-old Bentley looks more like a biker than a minister, with body piercings and tattoos all over his arms and neck. But the crowds don't seem to mind how he looks. They just want what they believe Bentley has – the ability to heal them.

Bentley claims that God has used him to supernaturally heal hundreds of people of diseases ranging from glaucoma to diabetes to even cancer. How to explain it?

I explain it by saying that it is a fraud. Whether it is conscious or unconscious I do not know.

Anyone the believes that their god intervenes in individual lives like this has a conception of their deity that is far too small. It isnt that I think that God doesn't care, it is just that S/He is kind of busy with other things and really has better stuff to do than cure your Aunt Fannie's glaucoma.

Dunkin Donuts ... stupid to cave

From BusinessWeek

To be fair, Malkin picked up the original item from Littlegreenfootballs.com, whose adolescent web editor headlined his item about the scarf, “Mainstreaming Terrorism To Sell Donuts.”

Since the scarf is actually paisley, littlegreenfootballs.com and www.michellemalkin.com are, I hear, organizing a boycott of effete elderly men who wear paisley ascots, and grandmothers who still wear paisley scarfs to church.

Sorry to rant, but Malkin is such a dishonest numbskull that it seriously grinds my gears when an advertiser gives her the time of day.

I cannot bring myself to link to that odious woman but I am sure that you can find the original posting by yourself over that that cesspool she calls a blog.

Khadr Judge fired for attempting to hold a fair trial?

From CBC

The U.S. military judge presiding over the trial of Canadian terrorism suspect Omar Khadr has been fired, said Khadr's lawyer.

In a news release issued Thursday, Lt.-Cmdr. William C. Kuebler said the judge, Col. Peter Brownback, was replaced after threatening to suspend proceedings in the case earlier this month.

Brownback told prosecutors they had to provide Khadr's defence lawyers with records of his confinement at the detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or he would suspend the proceedings.

Kuebler, Khadr's U.S. military-appointed lawyer, said he learned Brownback had been fired in an email from the chief judge of the U.S. military commissions, Col. Ralph Kohlmann. Kuebler's news release also included an email sent Wednesday by lead prosecutor Maj. Jeff Groharing, which complained of numerous delays in trial proceedings.

Kuebler told CBCNews.ca he believes the prosecution hopes the change will "speed things up."

Because goodness knows that you don't want to take your time and get it right when your only mandate is to get convictions. Whatever happened to the idea of justice in this country?

Oh .. silly me .. that is such pre 9/11 thinking

Why isn't this a big story?

More Missing Data

From CBC

A computer memory stick containing the mental-health information of 150 children and teenagers has disappeared from the hospital in New Glasgow, N.S.

The Pictou County Health Authority says the device was stolen Tuesday afternoon from an employee's office at Aberdeen Hospital.

The memory stick holds the personal information of young people who have received child and adolescent mental-health services since August.

I am very open about the mental health issues that I have dealt with over the years but I know that many(most) people are not. With a little luck this memory stick is now full of someone's MP3 collection and not being used to inflict more damage on folks that are already vulnerable.

Luc Bourdon - RIP

From the CBC

Vancouver Canucks defenceman Luc Bourdon, who helped Canada win gold medals at the 2006 and 2007 world junior hockey championships, died in a motorcycle accident on Thursday. He was 21.

Police in New Brunswick said Bourdon was driving his motorcycle that collided with a transport truck on a road between Lameque and Shippagan, his hometown.

Phoenix Lander Self Portrait

Just because I am a geek I subscribe the the NASA Image of the day

Support for the space program is one of the few points of view that John McCain and I share. Not that he cares of course.

Liar Loans ... no due diligence?

From Tanta at Calculated Risk

In short, while the Court found that the Hills knowingly made false representations to the lender, the lender's claim that it "reasonably relied" on these representations doesn't hold water, because "stated income guidelines" are not reasonable things to rely on. In essence, the Court found, such lending guidelines boil down to what the regulators call "collateral dependent" loans, where the lender is relying on nothing, at the end of the day, except the value of the collateral, not the borrower's ability or willingness to repay. If you make a "liar loan," the Judge is saying here, then you cannot claim you were harmed by relying on lies. And if you rely on an inflated appraisal, that's your lookout, not the borrower's.

This is going to give a lot of stated income lenders--and investors in "stated income" securities--a really bad rotten no good day. As it should. They have managed to give the rest of us a really bad rotten no good couple of years, with no end in sight.

It seems to me that this is very large news. If stated income HELOCs are dischargeable there are going to be more writedowns .. if i read this right. This story just gets better and better.

I wonder what fmr-Sen Gramm, McCain's economics guru would have to say about this.

Happy Suck On This Day

Via Atrios

Wank Wank Wank.

I guess I just do not understand why this man is considered a serious person ... sigh

Searching For John McCain

From Chris Bowers at OpenLeft comes this wonderful idea.

Searching for John McCain is a massive, online activism campaign designed to make at least ten million non-partisan, poll-tested, on-message voter contacts that reveal the damning truth about John McCain entirely through mainstream news reports and McCain's own words. Through mass blogger participation and the use of embedded hyperlinks, Searching for John McCain will connect millions of curious, low-information swing voters to negative, mainstream news articles about John McCain without 99% of those voters even knowing that Searching for John McCain exists. It is the more sophisticated, and hopefully more effective, 2.0 version of the Googlebomb the Elections campaign which, with only $1,500 and three days of work, reached 6% of the electorate in 47 swing congressional districts during the final two weeks of the 2006 mid-term elections.
You can participate if you have a website of your own, if you make comments on other websites, or even if you are a registered user on a community website. It is quick. It is easy. It is free. And it is very, very effective. If it is done correctly, and if enough people participate, this campaign alone should cost John McCain 1% of the vote in November.

Needless to say, I am participating... Read the entire post over there and tell your friends

Scrubbing John Tower's Wikipedia Entry?

Was just looking at John Tower's Wikipedia entry and noticed that it is undergoing heavy editing the last couple days .. hmmmmm

Wonder if it had anything to do with the NY Times article that hit yesterday touting him as McCain's mentor.

and BTW ... whoever did it managed to delete about half the entry ...(as of 6 am eastern time)... nice job

McCain and that Star

From the NY Times

At a meeting in his Pentagon office in early 1981, Secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman told Capt. John S. McCain III that he was about to attain his life ambition: becoming an admiral.

When Mr. McCain returned from Vietnam in March 1973, he was determined to continue as a Navy pilot. But he eventually headed off to Capitol Hill to serve four years as the Navy’s liaison to the Senate.
But Mr. McCain, the son and grandson of revered Navy admirals, was having second thoughts about following his family’s vocation. He had spent the previous four years as the Navy’s liaison to the Senate, sampling life in the world’s most exclusive club as he escorted its members on trips around the globe — sitting with the sultan of Oman on the floor of his desert tent, or smuggling a senator’s private supply of Scotch through Saudi Arabian customs.

He had found a sense of purpose in an apprenticeship to some of the Senate’s fiercest cold warriors. And in Senator John G. Tower, a hawkish Texas Republican, he had found a new mentor, beginning a relationship that many compared to the bond between a father and son.

Is this really the narrative that McCain wants to start getting out there? Is going to be hard to paint himself as the regular guy against Obama once people realize that his father and grandfather were admirals, that he was going to be an admiral (although he has often said the contrary), and that he wanted to be a politician because ...

Mr. McCain was captivated, recalled Jeffrey Record, then an aide to former Senator Sam Nunn, the hawkish Georgia Democrat. “He thrives on competition, and he thrives on political combat,” Mr. Record said. “He saw the glamour of it. I think he really got smitten with the celebrity of power.”

But he is just a regular guy and Obama is the over-reaching elitest ... cough choke

How Cheerful

Here is a lovely little article in the Telegraph (via Naked Capitalism) that I missed

As the Fed's latest loan survey makes clear, lenders have dropped the guillotine. With the usual delay, the poison is spreading from banks to the real world.

Diane Vazza, S&P's credit chief, says defaults are rising at almost twice the rate of past downturns. "Companies are heading into this recession with a much more toxic mix. Their margin for error is razor-thin," she said.

Two-thirds have a "speculative" rating, compared to 50pc before the dotcom bust, and 40pc in the early 1990s. The culprit is debt. "They ramped it up in the last 18 months of the credit boom. A lot of deals were funded that should not have been funded," she said.

Some 174 US companies are trading at "distress levels". Spreads on their bonds have rocketed above 1,000 basis points. This does not cover the carnage among smaller firms outside the rating universe.

The California city of Vallejo (117,000 inhabitants) has just made history by opting for Chapter 9 bankruptcy, the result of tax erosion from a 26pc fall in local house prices. Half Moon Bay may be next.

"This is the tip of the iceberg: everybody is going to line up for Chapter 9 in California," said John Moorlach, Orange County board chief.

It goes on and on ... each graf more depressing than the previous one

Makes me glad to be in the "junk mail" and coupon businesses .. I have a feeling that companies are going to be heading to value priced advertising and consumers will be clipping more coupons. Bring on that profit sharing .. woohoo!!

See, and people say that I am always negative ...

Fedora 9 Install

I am currently installing Fedora 9 on an ancient Sony Vaio laptop.
So far only one of the shiny new CD's I burned has been corrupt... of course I am only on disk number 3 of 6.

Eventually all of these CD-Rs will be used up and I will start using DVDs but for now ...

And no, I am not under any illusion that anyone cares.

I Love Netflix

I just wish that they had more "instant" movies available... Oh well

If anyone has a better legal source of online entertainment let me know...

My Senator

This makes me so proud

Lieberman was aware of many of Hagee's vile statements well before McCain renounced him. On May 13, Fox News' Megyn Kelly asked Lieberman to respond to the gathering criticism of Hagee's remarks. But instead of distancing himself from Hagee's views as McCain had, Lieberman launched into a spirited defense of the televangelist, describing him as someone who "represents a lot of people in this country, particularly Christians who care about the state of Israel."

At the time, prior to McCain's sweeping renunciation, Lieberman could have reasonably claimed to be unaware of the preacher's repugnant views on the Holocaust. Now, he has no excuse for ignorance. As a key McCain surrogate who McCain may select as his running mate, Lieberman must know why Hagee is no longer welcome on the so-called Straight Talk Express.

Every time I meet someone new I ask them if they voted for Lieberman. No one has every admitted that they have. Could the fact that I generally preface the question by saying something like "Can you believe what a fucking tool Joe Lieberman is?" skew my results just a little? I wonder ...

Memorial Day

From Bradblog (via GroupNewsBlog)comes an alphabetical list (in 4 parts) of all military personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A-D
E-K
L-R
S-Z

I wonder why I started to cry as I read it

Funny Comment exchange du jour

From a MediaBistro thread

Flyboy:
since you only seem to be able to communicate through insults (typical expression of your right-wing retardness) let me remind you that Republican is an entry in the dictionary between 'Reptile' and 'Repulsive'; it fits you perfectly.


dablueshound:
Democrat is between Dazed and Confused, what's your point?

Words fail me ...

Choices

On the right side of the blogosphere dissent has always been dealt with harshly and crudely and stupidly.

In the reality based community it has been, up until recently, and with some exceptions, mostly a much more civilized, if ill mannered, place. This primary season has changed that.

There are sites that ban Obama supporters on sight. There are sites where any defense of Clinton is met with howls of derision and troll ratings and other assorted stupidity.

Come the end of the primaries, all of us are going to have a choice to make. Are we going to work together to do some good for this country or are we going to continue to throw shit at each other and do our best to make sure that the next President is named McCain. If your answer is "the latter", then you are a danger to yourself and others and you should check yourself into the nearest psych ward.

This is too important to fuck up people.

Ted Stevens - Bravo Foxtrot

At VetVoice there is a lovely piece about how the current GOP administration stands up for veterans.

What Stevens is really saying is that today's troops are unpatriotic--that they're only in it for the money and the college. And while Stevens' "mass exodus" theory has been thoroughly discredited by the Congressional Budget Office, the true irony of the situation lies in the fact that Stevens earned his own college degree after World War Two by using the same GI Bill he's aiming to prevent today's veterans from receiving.

In today's military lingo, this makes Senator Stevens a "Blue Falcon" or a "Bravo Foxtrot."

I want to be clear, I am not a veteran, I am not even American, but this kind of shit makes me sick to my stomach.

The Bushites want to have their war and their all volunteer (read that as rural, poor and undereducated) army as opposed to some sort of draft so that they can keep most people in the country from actually being impacted by the fact that over 4000 men and women have come home in body bags but for fuck's sake what is wrong with giving these people a proper GI Bill and some decent medical care once they get home.

Oh, yes, the Bravo Foxtrot designator indicates a Buddy Fucker .. one of the lowest forms of douchebaggery that there is

I can't even muster a "sigh..." for this one .. I am just so pissed off.

h/t to Nicole Belle at Crooks & Liars

Property Speculation Even In CongressCritters

Over at Calculated Risk, Tanta has a nice little rundown on the trials and tribulations of Rep. Laura Richardson.

I guess that I am just cranky that no one will lend me money to buy a condo because I only hold TN status here in the US but something about this whole story has pissed me off since I first read about it and Tanta did a far better job of saying things than I ever would have done.

Updated: Tech Glitches at FireDogLake

Surely I didn't get banned from FDL for calling out TBogg on his "i wont ever vote for Hillary" silliness (it isnt like I was alone).

Presumably it is a tech glitch that is not finding my login info and isnt emailing me to tell me that i have forgotten my password... after all they did just have a big server migration and it is a long weekend

right ... right ... hopefully...right?

Updated [as per below comment by TBogg] with the assurance that they are indeed just having tech issues.

Is always nice to see a "name" blogger that actually pays attention to us itty bitty fish every now and then. (no, that isnt snark .. it really is nice to see). On the right side of the the blogosphere I would have been bombarded by 50 trolls that said that I deserved to be banned and that I had the intellectual agility of a marmot etc etc ...

Obama at Wesleyan

Offered without comment

Semidi has lost his mind as well

From the comments to this post at his eponymous blog

Randron, nothing is going to convince me that Barack Obama is better for OR more electable to the White House when compared to Hillary Clinton. Period.

After seeing what Obama and his mujahideen have done to the party, it’s time for the Democratic Party to be destroyed and rebuilt from the ground-up. The best way of seeing that happen is contributing to Obama’s defeat against McCain, if Obama becomes the Dem nominee.

Honestly, do you have so little faith in America that we can’t survive 4 years of McCain after surviving 8 of Bush? The Democratic Party spent 8 years rolling over for Dumbya, failing to act as an opposition party, and America is still here.

I commented there but have a feeling that I will be moderated out of existence since part of the site rules there contains the following

Right-wing extremism is a virus, and this site won’t be used as vector for it. All comments and trackbacks are moderated, and in the event that a large number of those American-hating fifth columnists on the right decided to swarm, both features can be modified on a per-post basis or entirely eliminated. This also applies to Obots, Obamazoids, fauxgressives, and other pro-Obama asshats.

Since I think that Obama is the best of the current choices, despite being in favour of Edwards at the beginning, I guess I am an asshat ...

sigh ... I wish primary season was over and we could get down to kicking McCain's ass

Misleading People With Graphs

I was very saddened, but not shocked, to see this piece of BS posted by Jerome Armstrong over at MYDD.

I was pleased to see him nearly universally called out as being dishonest in the comments on the site though.

You just don't clip the axis on a graph like that, it is fundamentally dishonest and the only reason that one would do it would be to attempt to make a point that really isn't supported by the facts.

Oh, right .. he is trying to say that Hillary wuz robbed .. never mind ...

h/t to commenter jdw at atrios' place