So, a band came up with T-shirt, “Brass Evolutions, 2009,” but some creationist whack job parents objected so the assistant superintendent confiscated the shirts, because some parents, “don’t think evolution should be associated with our school.”
Since when did stupid people get the right to make the rest of us stupid?
What the administration should have done was contact the alma mater of said parents, and suggest that their diplomas be revoked.
Joe Klein acts like a turd at a party to I.F. Stone’s grand daughter, where among other things, he claims that Wikipedia is “leftist”, and has clueless his ass handed to him, and then he basically describes her as a member of Glenn Greenwald’s “cult”, and then he gets his nose out of shape about this:
Now, Greenwald himself has published private emails of mine that were part of a conversation taking place on a list-serve. In one of those emails, I say that Greenwald “cares not a whit for America’s national security.”
You know, the intersection of private emails and listserve (no hyphen, dude) is a null set. If you post to a listserv, and expect it to be private, you are a complete tool.
He further goes on, republishing another of his emails from the listserv, that while, “not a religious reader of Greenwald,” he has never heard him talk about who well, for example, well things went in Anbar province.
Ignoring the obvious, that if you are, “not a religious reader of Greenwald,” then you don’t know whether he wrote this or not, there is also the fact that Glenn Greenwald writes about civil liberties, not military tactics, but he continues to insist that because he, Joe Klein, has not read something on the subject, that Greenwald is somehow evil and anti-American.
It should be noted that the real cause of this is when Glenn Greenwald showed that Klein was holding authoritatively on the FISA legislation in Congress, and being completely wrong, because he had been, “he’d been lied to, by a Democratic Staffer,” ignoring the fact, that if he had read the legislation, or even if he had just had an intern read the legislation, he would have been known that what he was spouting was a crock of sh$#.
So much like Dick Cheney, Mr. Klein is a whiny bitch.
[update]Greenwald’s response, though it is rather more generally directed at the Washington DC Kule Kidz, than at Klein.
Well, it’s beginning to look the army is going to take another look at a guided 2.75-inch rocket after the congress took the money from their advanced precision kill weapon system program, and transferred it to the Marine Corps, who were apparently much further along on the task of integrating guided rockets into combat units that the Army.
The original concept was to have a guided weapon to hang from the OH-58 and similar helicopters, but given the hot and (very!) high operating conditions in Afghanistan, and the nature of the targets, a Hellfire is overkill for a truck or an ox cart.
As the picture shows, you can carry 7 rockets (right of picture store) for each Hellfire:
A market survey released on 28 August by the army’s joint attack munition systems office says that high-altitude conditions require the army to trade the number of “stowed kills” on board an aircraft in favour of adding extra fuel.
“This undesirable trade is believed to be unnecessary given recent developments by industry on lightweight precision munitions,” it adds. “Industry efforts have resulted in a number of semi-active laser (SAL) munitions that may have the potential to satisfy army aviation’s need for a lightweight, precision munition.”
Market survey? I know what they mean, but the juxtaposition of the phrase “Market Survey,” and US Army is a bit odd.
Background here.
Republican Virginia gubernatorial candidate Robert McDonald mentioned in an interview with the Washington Post that he did a masters thesis on “welfare policy,” and the Post went and did some real journalism: they went to the library at Regent University, Pat Robertson’s diploma mill, which was called Christian Broadcasting Network University at the time that he filed his papers.
What they found was shocking, though not surprising:
I am so not shocked that he is a right wing medieval nut job, but I think that some Virginia voters might be.
I’m shocked though that the Washington Post actually allowed real journalism to reach its pages. This article is positively brutal, and deservedly so.
The Today Show has hired ½ of the formerly underage alcohol driven comedy duo Jenna and Tonic, Jenna Bush Hager, daughter of GW Bush, as a correspondent.
Un-dirtyword-believable.
The Institute for Supply Management’s Chicago Purchasers’ Index beat expectations,
rising to 50, where 50 is the dividing line between contraction and expansion.
It’s the highest number since last September, but it has been goosed a bit for cash for clunkers, which has me wondering what the number will look this September.
I would say that we have a pretty good indicator for the cynics among us (hi there) that the stock market rally will soon be ending, as insiders are now selling their stocks 30.6 times more than they are buying, and when the insiders sell, it generally means that some sort of disappointment is on the way.
We are getting mixed signals from Asia, with both Chinese and Japanese industrial production rising, but South Korean exports falling this month, giving a 20.6% year over year drop.
In energy, closed at $69.96/bbl, as falling stocks led to demand concerns, and in currency, the biggest mover was the Yen, on the election news.
This is a major change in government, with the DPJ ending over 50 years of LDP rule, winning 308 of the 480 seats in the Diet.
I’m not sure how much of this is ideology, and how much is just that the voters were sick and tired of the LDP, which has been an increasingly rudderless bastion of cronyism.
From what I understand of the DPJ, their ideology is not particularly clear either.
They seem to be a bit more assertive on the foreign policy front, and a bit more inclined to developing internal consumer markets, but the differences are not much.
I do think that anti-American sentiment provided some of their votes, and we will see this all over the world for the next few decades, as we continue to feel reverberations of the absolute disgust of the population at US diplomacy under Bush and His Evil Minions&trade.
In many of the industrial democracies, we have an age cohort that has come to political awareness over the past 8 years, and their sense of the US is not as a beneficial influence in the world.
As they move into leadership positions in the next 20-30 years, we will see an increasingly confrontational foreign policy from them.
He brings together MBA students who refused to sign an ethics pledge, and does the “Scared Straight” bit with felons.
Gut-busting Hilarity ensues.
Because I was in the back yard, preparing Maghmūma With Asparagus, it’s a sort of an Arab pot pie called a “covered dish” from the book From Annals of the Caliphs’ Kitchens, translated by Nawal Nasrallah. It dates from the 1400s or so.
I was doing it in the fire-pit of my smoker, because I was checking out the recipe for “Trial by Fire”, a medieval cooking competition that is conducted under camping conditions, which means that I was preparing Arab food outside, which means that the FBI was surveilling me.
I know what you are saying: This guy has gone completely around the bend. Totally paranoid. The FBI isn’t profiling people because they eat Middle Eastern cuisine.
You know, what you are saying right now sounds right, but unfortunately, the FBI IS profiling people because they eat Middle Eastern cuisine:
Hoping that spikes in falafel and tahini purchases in the Bay Area would blaze a trail to Iranian secret agents, in 2005 and 2006, the FBI mined grocery store records for Middle Eastern food sales in the South San Francisco-San Jose area. According to Congressional Quarterly, the project didn’t last long and didn’t lead to any falafel-related prosecutions.
Not only is this morally wrong and unbelievably f$#@ing stupid, but it actually happened.
This is why civil rights and limits on law enforcement matter: because without these limits, law enforcement can, and will engage in the most abusive dumb-ass behavior imaginable.
BTW, the Maghmūma turned out very well, as did the crust, though next time, I’ll crack the coriander seeds.
In this case, it’s Cerberus, the secretive (aren’t they all) hedge fund that bought Chrysler, and then took it into bankruptcy.
As I noted at the time, they bought Chrysler because they were hoping to buy it on the cheap, and when the likely purchaser, General Motors, turned out to be in almost as bad a shape as
Chrysler, they took a bath, as well as taking a hit on their investment in GMAC.
So now, investors are clamoring for the exits, (also here) because even though Cerberus is chock full of former government insiders, they do not believe that they will make money with the firm.
It’s clear that they bet on government bailouts that would be extremely favorable to them, and they were not, and now they are experiencing a run on the bank.
H/T Hullabaloo
It turns out that the discovery that Mark Penn’s use of his Wall Street Journal column to pimp for clients and to trawl for new clients is not an issue for their editorial page.
Not surprising, given that the WSJ has the most venal and dishonest editorial OP/ED section in the United States, though Fred Hiatt and the Washington Post offer some competition in that area.
*I cannot believe that I just said that.†
†That may be the first time that I’ve ever said this about a Democrat.‡
‡But it is Mark “The Human Stain” Penn, so it is not a surprise that he would have earned this distinction.
Federal Judge Loretta Preska has stayed her order for the Federal Reserve to release information on the emergency loans that it made:
The U.S. Federal Reserve won a delay of a federal judge’s order that it reveal the names of the banks that have participated in its emergency lending programs and the sums they received.
Chief Judge Loretta Preska of the U.S. District Court in Manhattan stayed her August 24 order in favor of Bloomberg News, which had sought the information under the federal Freedom of Information Act, so that the central bank could appeal.
The Fed asked for the stay claiming that releasing the information would cause grave damage to the financial system, but that was also their argument for not complying with Bloomberg News’ Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in the 1st place, so what is really going on here is a pretty standard stay pending appeal.
I fully expect this to go all the way to the Supreme Court, and if this information gets released, I fully expect it to reveal that the Federal Reserve has been lying, as their standard behavior has been to assume that you can’t handle the truth, so the truth must be suppressed.
As I have said before, this is why central banks powers need to be limited: While the interest rate/inflation fighting function must be thoroughly insulated from politics, because the act of taking away the proverbial punch bowl is inherently politically suicidal, any other function that does not require that level of political isolation must be vested in a more accountable institution.
Background here.
While Madeline Albright did not actually call Dick Cheney “pathetic”, she said that his statements about the Department of Justice’s investigations of torture “are kind of pathetic“.
When we look at Richard Milhaus Bruce Cheney, he is pathetic, he:
This man has been a pathetic failure his entire life. It needs to be understood that whenever he has made a decision, he has been deeply wrong.
He is a sad pathetic old man, and he needs to be treated as such.
So says Barry Ritholtz in response to this gem from the New York Times:
It is clear in retrospect that in parts of the Sun Belt, the economic dependence on construction reached unhealthy levels in recent years.
And I agree wholeheartedly.
It wasn’t just the driver for economic expansion in places like Arizona and Florida, it was the economy.
Headline of the day from The Onion – America’s Finest News Source.
Seriously, though, with Beer prices rising, how long can this last.
Also, there should be a study comparing the different responses depending whether the beer is domestic or imported.
I’m just saying.
Last Week’s THAAD’s Salvo Test
Raytheon’s promotional vid for the land based SM-3 Standard
After numerous test failures of the new solid-fuel Bulava submarine launched ballistic missile (SLBM) intended for the new Borei-class submarines, there are reports that it could be replaced by the liquid fueled Sineva missile, which is currently deployed on older submarines.
My guess is that it would take less time and effort to make the Bulava work than it would to replace it, since it is derived from a land-based system which already works, and the rework of the Borei’s to do this would be involved, but I am speaking from a position of profound ignorance here.
There is this bridge in Brooklyn that I am authorized to offer for sale….
Sukhoi General Director Mikhail Pogosyan is saying that he expects the PAK-FA 5th generation Russian fighter to fly by year’s end.
Yeah, sure.
I’ll offer 2:1 odds against.
This is hilarious.
And the bunker scene is most versatile movie clip ever.