13
Jan
Sidney Blumenthal got nailed for DUI the night before the New Hampshire Democrat primary. He got nailed in New Hampshire. Sidney Blumenthal is a senior Hillary Clinton campaign advisor. Now, although most media eventually ran the story, they did so usually starting the 12th or 13th. The primary was the 8th.
Gotta make ya wonder, huh?
11
Jan
Kucinich alluded to online reports alleging disparities around the state between hand-counted ballots, which tended to favor Sen. Barack Obama, and machine-counted ones that tended to favor Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. He also noted the difference between pre-election polls, which indicated Obama would win, and Clinton’s triumph by a 39 percent to 37 percent margin.
Got news for Dennis, pre-election polls WITHIN the margin of error of the final vote are hardly an indication something went wrong.
And, it is not unusual for discrepencies in mail-in versus real-life votes. Very simple logic here. Obama’s supporters are more enthusiastic, ergo more likely to send in an absentee ballot. Whereas, Clinton’s supporters are more numerous.
Unfortunately for the Kucinich’s, Pauls, and possibly Obamas, the latter is all that matters in the end during an election.
This however, is the exact same mistake I think the media made in New Hampshire as well.
Mike Huckabee ran a tv ad wishing everyone a Merry Christmas. Boring you say? Well, some people can find something interesting in anything. Namely, this extremely controversial image appeared without the intention of the Huckabees ( according to them ):
That glowing cross is actually a bookshelf ( see the lights sitting on it? ). Now, some apparently believe Mike actually staged the tree and the entire set around the fact that by partially obscuring the bookshelf with a Christmas Tree, it appears to be a cross. Since it’s not good enough to go running around SAYING he’s a Christian, he obviously needed props to prove it.
Me? I think it’s merely what he says it is, a bookshelf. However, I like his response much, much, better:
“I will confess this: If you play the spot backwards it says, ‘Paul is dead. Paul is dead.”‘
Score one for Mike. The ad is meaningless to me. The response priceless.
My buds at Independent Sources so nailed this issue I just suggest going there and reading it. A synopsis:
…….but reading this story about Brazil’s recent discovery of a deep water oil field of 5,000,000,000 to 8,000,000,000 barrels of oil made me think of it…….
……but when the US has a known field of 25 to 50% greater size which is easier to extract it’s exploitation will do nothing to lower prices or decrease foreign oil dependence.
Ditto. Methinks there’s a lot more to ANWR than simple economics.
David Crosby annoyed me when I was a little kid. Crosby, Stills, Nash and sometimes Young just struck me as scary when I was real little, boring when I was old enough to know what was going on. Other than cranking out kids for lesbian babes, he’s never done anything cool to me. Nothing wrecked US culture in my opinion more than the ultra-liberal misguided egotistical philosophies of the hippie generation. We’re still paying for it with rampant drug use and the collapse of entire cultures and generations who have no ability to provide for themselves other than pursuing their next joint. That’s the hope for the future David Crosby and his ilk gave us in the 60′s. So, it kind of bugs me that Crosby is re-appearing somewhat frequently in the news of late for basically doing what he’s always done. Whine. And, whine really about things I can only attribute to too much drug use screwing his ability to perceive is real or not.
First off was this bizarre rant on, you guessed it, MSNBC:
I’m not even going to try to make any sense of that exchange. It’s the drugs. He never was terribly bright in my opinion, and now that he’s older he’s lost what he had.
But wait, that’s not all. Last week he teamed up with other 60′s dropouts and a few others to protest nuclear energy, again. We don’t agree at all on this topic. I think the bottom line is some people look to the future to solve the problems of today. Others are stuck in the past and not looking to solve any problems at all.
Or probably any office for that matter. Check this out:
Hillary got aggravated with the guy. I would have too. He’s an idiot. You don’t have to look very hard on the internet to find a whole slew of people who are quite sure we’re setting the stage to invade Iran. The way you do this of course, according to Randall Rolph, is to declare a segment of the opposing governmnet a terrorist organization and impose economic sanctions against them.
The problem with that is there is nothing in the Constitution that allows that line of thought to occur. Now, what a lot of people tend to ignore for the sake of their politics is that the United States Congress had already approved the use of force against Iraq. We had been in a standing armed conflict with Iraq for a decade. The only thing Bush did was send in troops to directly remove Saddam Hussein. That’s it folks. Bush didn’t do anything that Congress had not already authorized him to do. In the case of Afghanistan, same thing. Congress gave him the authority to use force in retaliation for harboring and abeting the attacks of 9/11/01. He didn’t even impose sanctions in that case. So, for Randal Rolph to totally ignore recent history and the entire legal process that controls what the president can do and twist it for his own political attack on Clinton just makes him look like the idiot of the day to me.
To hammer home his idiocy, which reflects a lot of people who believe in conspiracy theories that they support with their own “research”, Rolph had this to add when Hillary gave him an out by suggesting someone else gave him the question:
“I take exception,” Rolph fired back. “This is my own research. Nobody sent it to me, I am offended that you would suggest that.”
Hillary suggested this because three other people have asked the same question. Hillary just needs to Google “invade Iran” sometime to get the picture that there are a lot of loonies out there that believe this stuff. Of course, with idiots like Keith Olbermann making up these conspiracy theories, idiots like Randall Rolph don’t have to do a lot of “their own research”. Keith gave him the question Hillary. Don’t blame the right wing conspracy for this one.
So, back to why I’ll never run for office, there’s just way too many Randall Rolphs and Keith Olbermanns out there. Hillary’s getting a little flack for her retort. I can guarantee you I would not have been nearly as tactful as Hillary. I would have called him a paranoid idiot who relies on rhetoric to support his fantasy conspiracies.
That probably would not go over too well on CNN or MSNBC.
9
Oct
Originally I was going to put this on Spacedream under technology, but the story is so bad it had to come here instead. Here’s the meat:
Vanessa Alarcon saw them while working at an antiwar rally in Lafayette Square last month.
“I heard someone say, ‘Oh my god, look at those,’ ” the college senior from New York recalled. “I look up and I’m like, ‘What the hell is that?’ They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But I mean, those are not insects.”
Out in the crowd, Bernard Crane saw them, too.
“I’d never seen anything like it in my life,” the Washington lawyer said. “They were large for dragonflies. I thought, ‘Is that mechanical, or is that alive?’ ”
That is just one of the questions hovering over a handful of similar sightings at political events in Washington and New York. Some suspect the insectlike drones are high-tech surveillance tools, perhaps deployed by the Department of Homeland Security.
Now, even IF DHS has tiny drone spying devices that worked, which they say they don’t and most of science tend to agree we’re not there technologically wise, why would DHS concern themselves with a bunch of loonies at an anti-war rally? I would imagine these spybugs would be cruising Afghanistan, Iran, and North Korea right now. Besides, how many pictures and movies were made of this protest in plain site?
Some people really do think they’re a lot more important than they truly are.
Later, I’ll do what I intended in the first place and investigate the technology behind this conspiracy theory on the Spaceweb.
19
Sep
The University of Florida Police Department is taking some heat for the less than subtle means they used to shut up Andrew Meyer during a John Kerry presentation. Wearing the over-abused cliche drooping khaki pants and a t-shirt, this guy was obviously no threat to anyone. The cops didn’t get his prank or thought it was funny, so they tasered him. More than once actually. Being obnoxious doesn’t merit tasering. Sometimes I wish it did, but it doesn’t. A strong punch to the jaw I think would have shut him up more effectively and would have probably led to a lot less publicity. Media folks just don’t run around publishing stories with a headline that reads something to the effect of “Student punched in jaw!”. Proper plan, bad execution. The upside of all this is it gives me a good reason to watch Monty Python
Now, Arthur had it down perfect. When someone protests too much, just walk away and ignore them.
I pretty much figured this would happen a lot sooner than I did find it. Jeff Fecke at Shakesville ponders:
That was the setup, a writer responds with:
…I can understand a certain amount of glee that yet another Republican has been caught out on his hypocrisy. But I think the incident, as described in MB’s post, is entrapment and pretty ridiculous, considering that nothing sexual happened. And yes, it’s blatantly homophobic.
I don’t really consider this a homophobic issue in the least. If he had been busted soliciting a female prostitute for public sex I’d have the same opinion. US Senators and Cognressman merit a different level of legal scrutiny in my opinion because these are the people that make the laws we all have to live by. If they have no respect for those laws, why should anyone else? And, I see the inverse happening as well, if people have no respect for those laws, why should a Senator? My guess is Craig is waiting this out right now to see if it just blows over as so many other indescretions have. If the media fight turns into a homophobe issue as opposed to a Craig-breaking-the-law issue, he will have won and proven my point. A lot of people are also curious as to why there was even a cop in the bathroom in the first place. According to another answer there, and the one I expected, was apparently this was a problem in that particular bathroom. Now, I’m all for individual rights and stuff, but I have a four year old boy. Do I need to say more? All I ask, whether straight or gay, or even if you’ve got a thing doing it yourself, is keep it where it’s appropriate. That’s all. Public restrooms mean all kinds of people will be there. That includes kids.
Bottom line, this ain’t a homophobe issue. It’s an issue of stupidity and disrespect for anyone else who might have wondered in there. That’s the very last qualities I think Idaho expects from their Senator.
NOTES:
- Shakesville seems to be a good read. I like Fecke’s style. He seems to do as I do and look at things from more than one angle at the same time. My article here implies Fecke might be making the case for the homophobe card, he’s not. Not at all. But, he acknowledges those issues could be raised. And, that is a very valid point. )
- H/T James Joyner again. I’m sure that makes his day.
I’m not going to try to interpret James’s post, just read it.
Meanwhile, the death toll from the Japanese earthquake striking their largest nuclear plant is 0.
