Think 'Drill Baby Drill' has been set aside for the nonce while a bazillion barrels of toxic crude poisons the gulf? Think again. Think it's wise to re-examine the permits issued by a government agency that's been run the Oil producers for aver a decade now that we know they've been rubber stamping every request without bothering to asses the danger? Think again and remember our new national anthem: Drill Baby Drill.
Agree with the dittoheads that Obama is the problem? That if he had or hadn't done some nebulous thing we'll think of if we have to, that we wouldn't have had this mess? Of course you do even though his attempt to make sure we wouldn't have another blowout before we've stopped this one has been shot down by courts to the tune of Drill Baby Drill. It's a victory!
Yes, the real disaster is Barack Obama and we'll all smile and nod approval and even giggle when our friends tell us 2012 will be "the end of an error." 2012 - we can get back to calling people traitors for criticizing the government. We can restore the cap on BP's liability and teach those lazy unemployed people to eat tar balls and shut up.
Maybe we can take advantage of the new corporate personhood by electing Exxon as president; replace congress with the Shell Oil board of directors or even make Sarah Palin Chief Justice if we can count on her not cutting and running halfway through. The possibilities are endless.
Friday, July 9, 2010
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Lady Blah-Blah
Contrived extrapolations from the trivial and inconsequential event to gross generalizations, sweeping condemnations and general non sequitur makes up so much of the right wing blather that I'm tempted to say that blissful silence would ensue if it were to stop, and inclined to pray for it.
What kind of "journalist" would pounce upon small children for giving away lemonade because they didn't truly understand the concept of profit? Lady Blah-Blah herself, Terry Savage, of course. Jumping from her car, she writes, she admonished them for not being capitalists and likely scared hell out of them. Of course that only constitutes being rude, self important and nasty and the verbal abuse of children. Yes, that's a prerequisite for being a Republican pundit, but what elevates her to the ranks of the truly despicable, is her blowhardian expose in the Chicago Sun-Times in which she rants about welfare, government subsidies for things other than oil drilling and the decline of America. She tilts at all the usual windmills with all the same old cliche arguments having nothing to do with the innocence of Kindergarteners and the righteousness of profits and all at the expense of some cute little kids who have yet to learn just how nasty, pompous, self-righteous, dishonest, stupid and bad at their jobs Right wing columnists can be.
Sorry, Terry, perhaps some of the 6 quarts of botox you pump into your aging face every morning has leaked into the parts of your brain concerned with basic human decency and has totally paralyzed any notions of honesty. Yes, Terry, we can teach our children about economics - they're already learning thanks to your having driven us over a cliff. No Terry, these are just babies, and sorry, we all know what a profit is and no we're not having a recession because we try to help struggling Americans and keep them from the Dickensian hell you dream about every night.
We're suffering high unemployment because of your insistence that Giving the very rich a tax break will create new jobs, raise government revenues, reduce the tax burden on the middle and working classes; because of your insistence that businesses will resist cheating and corruption and fraudulent activities if we no longer test their claims, audit their books and make fraud itself legal. We're suffering not because some kid you made cry hasn't been reading Ayn Rand, but because you're still reading it while each and every one of your and her bogus axioms has been proven false over and over and over again. At least the girls you're exploiting are giving away real lemonade instead of the toxic and even lethal witches brew you're giving away.
Stop me if I'm wrong, but it didn't say anything about subsidizing Oil Drilling or looking the other way while our resources are stolen; while we're sold fraudulent securities by fraudulent corporations, while the government starts wars for profit and gives away billions to friends of the Vice President either. It didn't promise corporate feudalism and it didn't suggest a Randian denial of responsibility or a great many other things you're trying to work into the discussion of a lemonade stand. If that's the best you can do, perhaps it's time to shut the hell up and send the RNC their check back.
A decent human being -- and by that I mean someone other than you -- would simply have given the girls a dollar and told them they would earn some money to replace their stolen bicycle by charging, but no, not you. You made it into a baseless condemnation, a sales pitch for calamity and a caustic attack on the innocence of childhood. You found it more important to bear false witness against your country than to protect the feelings of small children who will doubtless remember the nasty witch screaming NO! from her car for the rest of their lives.
If people like you can call our President Pol Pot and Hitler in the same breath simply for talking to them about making the future a better one, I can certainly call you worse for trying to perpetuate the same twisted economic madness that's brought us to our knees as it did in 1929 and screaming it at our kids. I can call you all kinds of things with a clear conscience but none can be so damning as the name you've made for yourself.
What kind of "journalist" would pounce upon small children for giving away lemonade because they didn't truly understand the concept of profit? Lady Blah-Blah herself, Terry Savage, of course. Jumping from her car, she writes, she admonished them for not being capitalists and likely scared hell out of them. Of course that only constitutes being rude, self important and nasty and the verbal abuse of children. Yes, that's a prerequisite for being a Republican pundit, but what elevates her to the ranks of the truly despicable, is her blowhardian expose in the Chicago Sun-Times in which she rants about welfare, government subsidies for things other than oil drilling and the decline of America. She tilts at all the usual windmills with all the same old cliche arguments having nothing to do with the innocence of Kindergarteners and the righteousness of profits and all at the expense of some cute little kids who have yet to learn just how nasty, pompous, self-righteous, dishonest, stupid and bad at their jobs Right wing columnists can be.
"If we can't teach our kids the basics of running a lemonade stand, how can we ever teach Congress the basics of economics?"The government does not exist to make a profit, and if, as you say, unemployment benefits will only impoverish the employed, you owe us an explanation of why your version of capitalism has done exactly that, why no new private sector jobs were created by it in 8 years and why each Republican administration has brought us ever increasing expense and debt and ever decreasing standards of living. Never mind tiny tots and lemonade -- explain that.
Sorry, Terry, perhaps some of the 6 quarts of botox you pump into your aging face every morning has leaked into the parts of your brain concerned with basic human decency and has totally paralyzed any notions of honesty. Yes, Terry, we can teach our children about economics - they're already learning thanks to your having driven us over a cliff. No Terry, these are just babies, and sorry, we all know what a profit is and no we're not having a recession because we try to help struggling Americans and keep them from the Dickensian hell you dream about every night.
We're suffering high unemployment because of your insistence that Giving the very rich a tax break will create new jobs, raise government revenues, reduce the tax burden on the middle and working classes; because of your insistence that businesses will resist cheating and corruption and fraudulent activities if we no longer test their claims, audit their books and make fraud itself legal. We're suffering not because some kid you made cry hasn't been reading Ayn Rand, but because you're still reading it while each and every one of your and her bogus axioms has been proven false over and over and over again. At least the girls you're exploiting are giving away real lemonade instead of the toxic and even lethal witches brew you're giving away.
"The Declaration of Independence promised "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." It didn't promise anything free. Something to think about this July 4th holiday weekend."
Stop me if I'm wrong, but it didn't say anything about subsidizing Oil Drilling or looking the other way while our resources are stolen; while we're sold fraudulent securities by fraudulent corporations, while the government starts wars for profit and gives away billions to friends of the Vice President either. It didn't promise corporate feudalism and it didn't suggest a Randian denial of responsibility or a great many other things you're trying to work into the discussion of a lemonade stand. If that's the best you can do, perhaps it's time to shut the hell up and send the RNC their check back.
A decent human being -- and by that I mean someone other than you -- would simply have given the girls a dollar and told them they would earn some money to replace their stolen bicycle by charging, but no, not you. You made it into a baseless condemnation, a sales pitch for calamity and a caustic attack on the innocence of childhood. You found it more important to bear false witness against your country than to protect the feelings of small children who will doubtless remember the nasty witch screaming NO! from her car for the rest of their lives.
If people like you can call our President Pol Pot and Hitler in the same breath simply for talking to them about making the future a better one, I can certainly call you worse for trying to perpetuate the same twisted economic madness that's brought us to our knees as it did in 1929 and screaming it at our kids. I can call you all kinds of things with a clear conscience but none can be so damning as the name you've made for yourself.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Markos of the Daily Kos: Meet your new pollster.
If you've been following the World Cup, you know about Paul, my little nephew who lives at Sea Life Aquarium in Oberhausen, Germany. So far, Paul has used his nine brains (one main brain and eight smaller ones in each arm) to pick the winners. Paul has perfectly predicted the outcome of all six German World Cup games.
Last week, Paul predicted Spain to win over Germany, a prognostication that did not please his captors. Today, his prediction came true: Spain won, which means six for six, a new record for my precocious cephalopod nephew.
For his own safety, we need to hustle Paul out of Germany ... fast. Markos needs a new pollster. How about Paul.
27,000 ACCIDENTS WAITING TO HAPPEN
In the early days of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, I was puzzled by an observation that received little attention at the time. When a few tar balls were found on the Florida coast, an official said that these were probably not from the Deepwater well and would have to be tested to determine origin. At the time I thought, “How odd; if not from Deepwater, where else would tar balls be coming from?” Today I found a possible answer in THIS ARTICLE.
There are now more than 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells JUST IN THE GULF! This has been on going since the 1940s with little if any regulation and virtually no oversight or monitoring of the well heads. One can only imagine what might be happening to concrete that has been exposed to sea water and ocean floor disturbances.
If a well is only temporarily abandoned, the requirements for sealing them are less stringent. The company with drilling rights is supposed to either reopen the well or close it off permanently within a year but this rarely happens. I suspect that many wells are “temporarily” closed simply to save money with no intentions of reopening them.
Capped wells on land and under water can repressurize and those capped on land frequently leak. Not much is known about how many wells are now leaking in the Gulf because no one is monitoring them.
The US Mineral Management Service, now the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, which is supposed to oversee the operation and condition of these wells has done little more over the decades than shuffle paper.
“In the end, the Coast Guard's Marine Safety Laboratory handles little more than 200 cases of oil pollution each year. And manager Wayne Gronlund says it's often impossible to tell leaking wells from natural seeps, where untold thousands of barrels of oil and untold millions of cubic feet of gas escape annually through cracks that permeate the sea floor.”
The Deepwater Horizon leak is just the tip of the iceberg. The Gulf could easily become our Chernobyl.
(Octopus addition: Rachel Maddow recalls
earlier oil spills... now conveniently forgotten):
Suing Arizona
Years ago, returning from a visit to El Paso, we were booming along a lonely Texas road in my old Corvette, enjoying the breathtaking desert scenery on the way to Carlesbad, New Mexico. Seeing something on the side of the road a long way ahead, I backed off on the throttle and coasted down to something resembling the speed limit. "Damn" I said to myself as I saw a uniformed officer getting out of his car to flag me down. I thought perhaps I'd been snagged by an airplane and was going to get a ticket, but no, the very polite officer simply asked me where I was going and where I'd come from. "And you ma'am?" he said to my uncustomarily silent wife. "He wants to hear your accent, dear. Say something."
It was really no surprise. Returning from a number of trips abroad, someone from the government hanging around the baggage claim always has managed to inquire as to where she was born or something like that -- just to hear her speak. I'm used to being embarrassed by and for my country and its undying suspicion of non-European genetics. Now of course, in Arizona, the State we usually passed through on the way to visit her brother, a retired US Army Colonel, she would be required to furnish proof of citizenship to any officer who used any pretext to stop us. My home state is hell bent to emulate them.
That's not the sad or the unexpected part of the story. That would be the fact that a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. national poll conducted a month ago showed 57 percent of Americans support Arizona's unconstitutional power grab, an attempt that if it had been backed by Democrats would surely be compared with Adolph Hitler, Josef Stalin and Ted Nugent's favorite, Mao Zedong. Perhaps we can blame a lack of respect for citizens of foreign birth or for citizens with certain ethnic backgrounds or the appearance of it. Perhaps we can blame the smug attitude that "I'm blond, so what do I care?" Instead they're already trashing Obama for what they would have trashed him for had he supported it.
Whether these gentlefolk really are so concerned with a real, but already decreasing problem or whether as usual, they're just trying to sabotage the Democrats even if it sinks the ship of state is impossible to tell, but of course I suspect the latter.
I do have to ask whether 57% of Americans would support the Federal Government's efforts in other important respects by allowing small town police to stop anyone and demand tax returns of anyone who appears too wealthy? I have to ask why the Tea Bag twits get away with insisting we're losing our freedom while supporting the loss. I don't have to get an answer however and I'm sure I won't. I'm also sure that nothing will ever induce me to visit that state again.
It was really no surprise. Returning from a number of trips abroad, someone from the government hanging around the baggage claim always has managed to inquire as to where she was born or something like that -- just to hear her speak. I'm used to being embarrassed by and for my country and its undying suspicion of non-European genetics. Now of course, in Arizona, the State we usually passed through on the way to visit her brother, a retired US Army Colonel, she would be required to furnish proof of citizenship to any officer who used any pretext to stop us. My home state is hell bent to emulate them.
That's not the sad or the unexpected part of the story. That would be the fact that a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. national poll conducted a month ago showed 57 percent of Americans support Arizona's unconstitutional power grab, an attempt that if it had been backed by Democrats would surely be compared with Adolph Hitler, Josef Stalin and Ted Nugent's favorite, Mao Zedong. Perhaps we can blame a lack of respect for citizens of foreign birth or for citizens with certain ethnic backgrounds or the appearance of it. Perhaps we can blame the smug attitude that "I'm blond, so what do I care?" Instead they're already trashing Obama for what they would have trashed him for had he supported it.
"The American people must wonder whether the Obama administration is really committed to securing the border when it sues a state that is simply trying to protect its people by enforcing immigration law,"said Senators Jon Kyl and John McCain in a joint statement as though any bad and illegal measure was justified by a legitimate problem. Representative Lamar Smith, Representative Ann Kirkpatrick, and Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (Republicans all) Piled on with the same arguments and attacks on Obama with all the enthusiasm of an 8th grade football team in response to the Justice Department's decision to sue.
Whether these gentlefolk really are so concerned with a real, but already decreasing problem or whether as usual, they're just trying to sabotage the Democrats even if it sinks the ship of state is impossible to tell, but of course I suspect the latter.
I do have to ask whether 57% of Americans would support the Federal Government's efforts in other important respects by allowing small town police to stop anyone and demand tax returns of anyone who appears too wealthy? I have to ask why the Tea Bag twits get away with insisting we're losing our freedom while supporting the loss. I don't have to get an answer however and I'm sure I won't. I'm also sure that nothing will ever induce me to visit that state again.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
I Never Get Tired Of...
baghead bashing! It's been a while since I've posted one of these; I'd forgotten how it refreshes me.
There, my childen, didn't that just loose you right up and stimulate your individual fredom?
There, my childen, didn't that just loose you right up and stimulate your individual fredom?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)