Category — Uncategorized

Charlie Pierce lives and works in Boston, so it was natural for him to begin early to report on the bombing. In his first post he told people not to jump to conclusions because ‘nobody knows anything yet.’

Apparently his caution was too much for some people and a Blight attack has occurred.

Now he did mention Timothy McVeigh as an example of someone other than their “preferred Muslim terrorists” as a type of person who would do something like this, so that possibly set off the rabid horde.

A safer path would have been to use al Qaeda of Cambridge, Friends of Hamas, the Newer Black Panthers, or ACORN, rather than a convicted terrorist bomber. [Please note that ACORN, which no longer exists, is the only real group in that list. The others are made up. It’s called sarcasm, OK?]

Fortunately officials have stepped in to save Abdulrahman Ali Alharbi from becoming the Richard Jewell of this event. Which reminds me that Eric Rudolph would have been a closer match for the Boston Marathon than McVeigh.

Nice catch by Susie Madrak of a post at Think Progress. The Arkansas spill is covered by the Oil Spill Fund but, because the pipeline was carrying tar sands / diluted bitumen, not oil, Exxon wasn’t required to pay the tax that funds the clean-ups.

The Keystone XL will be in the same category, they won’t have to pay into the Oil Spill Fund. Their spills will be paid for by other people because the tar sands corporations bought the right Congresscritter to put in an amendment to exempt them.

If you are familiar with French New Wave cinema, don’t miss the latest from Henri, the existentialist tuxedo cat, discussing Halloween. [If you don’t speak French, close the ads immediately or you can’t see the subtitles.]

Senate Democrats have a PDF of the Congressional Research Service report on Taxes and the Economy. The Senate Republicans demanded it be pulled down because it shows that tax cuts for the wealthy don’t create jobs or help the economy, they just make the rich richer. Yes, Virginia, Reaganomics/supply-side is ‘Voodoo economics’.

So, there’s a lot going on in ‘real life’ which limits my available time to write and the tropics have calmed down with cold fronts mugging both Nadine and Oscar to limit the boiler plate posts.

I liked Dave Johnson’s post, So DO Tax Cuts Create Jobs?, but for my own reason. If someone thinks that there is a causative link between the top marginal tax rate and jobs, they will certainly agree that we simply need to look at the historical data to find the optimal rate.

Actually the best rate not only for job growth, but for the GDP, and the deficit turns out to be between 75% and 80%. Just look at the charts and it is obvious. I get the feeling that the people who decided to promote a linked relationship didn’t do much research.

I wonder if anyone is considering showing up at Rmoney events with a large yellow foam hand that has the appropriate digit extended. Someone really should be following Mitt the Twit around with a big yellow bird…

So, do you think the Congressional Republican witch hunt on the Benghazi consulate attack will include testimony from the Republican House caucus that voted to cut massive amounts of money from the State Department’s budget for security at embassies and consulates?

Noz’s post, reruns again? proves that occasionally even a winger will accidentally tell the truth.

Essentially, Tucker Carlson admits that he isn’t really a journalist, because the fact that he featured the video in question on his MSNBC show in 2007 is consistent with his claim that the media didn’t cover it in 2007. Obviously putting it on Carlson’s show was the same thing as ignoring it, because no one watched his show.

Actually, MSNBC lends credence to Carlson’s claim, as they canceled the show in 2008 for poor to nonexistent ratings.

At least, that’s what I got from his explanation, but Noz has the quote that he verified from the video.

I do take exception to Carlson’s claim of an ‘exclusive’, as this kind of nonsensical whining is characteristic of a number of wingers.

One of those places is Switzerland, where the Piccard family lives. [Jean-Luc Picard of ST-TNG was named for this family.]

Auguste Piccard went higher in a balloon than anyone had ever done. His son, Jacques, went lower into the Marianna Trench. Jacques’ son, Bertrand, is following up his success in being on the crew of the first balloon flight to circumnavigate the Earth, to fly a solar-powered aircraft.

The BBC reports that the Solar plane en route from Spain to Morocco

A solar-powered plane is on its way from Spain to Morocco in a bid to finish the second leg of its transatlantic journey.

Pilot Bertrand Piccard is set to land in the Moroccan capital Rabat by Tuesday evening.

The Solar Impulse, the size of a jumbo jet, is powered by 12,000 solar cells turning four electrical motors.

The 2,500km-trip (1,550 miles), begun in Switzerland in May, is described as a rehearsal for a world tour in 2014 .

Made of carbon fibre, the giant plane is the size of an Airbus A340 but only weighs as much as an average family car, according to its creators.

The Solar Impulse Website is very well done, providing a cockpit view when the aircraft is in flight. [I saw the landing on the site as it occurred.]

This aircraft will never win races, as it is essentially a powered glider, but it gets there without anything but sunshine. At the end of the flight the battery indicator showed 100% charge after about 19 hours in the air.

I assume they will be flying to an airport on the coast of West Africa and then probably to the Azores, before making the long flight across the Atlantic.

The Piccards still dream.

The ABC reports on the annual Eurovision contest, a talent show for countries. [Consider a talent show put on by the State Department …]

So you know, a Swedish singer named Loreen won with a club/disco song called Euphoria. It is apparently essential that you be made aware that she wasn’t wearing shoes when she performed. [No idea why that’s important, but all the reporting mentions it. She may have taken them off when going through airport security, and never got them back.]

The other big thing was the battle of the grandparents between Russia and the UK. The two groups came in second – the Russian grandmothers, Buranovskiye Babushki, were second from the top, and the UK grandfather, Engelbert Humperdinck, came in second to last.

I have to say that I would never have expected that a group of pensioners from a small village singing a traditional song put to a disco beat would have done well.

Norway came in last, but they probably wore shoes.

They changed the rules this year and added ‘professional judges’ whose votes counted for 50% of the final score. The other 50% was based on phone calls and text messages. After last year, when Azerbaijan won, and won the right to host this year’s contest, there was concern that the government apparently knew how everyone in the country voted, and actually invoked sanctions against people who didn’t vote for the ‘home team’, it was thought there might be a problem with all of the votes coming over the Azeri telecommunications system.

It is safe enough to watch the video at the ABC site, as it is only 60 seconds and features the short takes of the winner and the Russian grannies. If you are a musical masochist, here’s the Official Site which contains videos of all the performances in their entirety.

Both Lance Mackey and Karen Ramstead have a “problem”.

Karen’s problem is much worse that Lance’s as 7 of her dogs have gone into heat on the trail, which leads to major complications whenever the team stops.

Lance only has one dog in heat, but it’s Maple, his go-to lead dog.

The boys are not thinking about racing.

—

Scott Janssen, ‘the Mushing Mortician’, had to give CPR to Marshall, a 9-year-old on his last Iditarod. Janssen, a funeral director, said that while the team was descending the Dalzell Gorge, Marshall just fell over, and wasn’t breathing when Janssen got to him. Chest compression and mouth-to-snout breathing got him going again, but Marshall rode in the sled bag to Rohn where the vets took over.

Best guess is a heart problem of some kind. Marshall is heading back to Anchorage and retirement.

That was the signature line used by Sergeant Phil Esterhaus at the end of roll call in the old TV show, Hill Street Blues. It’s good advice.

When I’m working on a house I always have two pieces of safety gear on, wrap-around safety glasses and a hard hat. There are a lot of good reasons.

The glasses aren’t just about saw dust or metal chips from using tools, I use a lot of chemicals and don’t want them on my regular glasses, or in my eyes. Some of the things I use are caustic, and others are oily, but neither kind is anything you want to deal with. Even latex paint, especially the tiny splatters from using a roller, are not benign.

The hard hat is to protect my head. I’m bald, so if a board falls, or the guy helping me accidentally whacks me with hardwood closet rod, or galvanized pipe, it is going to open a gash that will bleed like crazy. There isn’t a lot of cushion between the skin and the bone on your skull, so the skin breaks easily and bleeds profusely. The hard hat stops that from happening.

Having watched what is going on in NYC, I think that both items would be a good idea for the people at Occupy Wall Street. I graduated from a police academy in New York State, and know what the procedures are for the use of force, specifically chemical weapons and the baton. The NYPD is not following the normal procedure, in fact, they are doing things that I was specifically taught not to do.

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Duncan can come up with one-liners: “After I clicked through I realized the New York Times is perhaps a commendable jobs program for special needs people.”

You have to be careful about references to or about cats, because people take such things very seriously.

The BBC reports that Theresa May ‘wrong’ over migrant cat tale

A claim by the Home Secretary that an illegal immigrant could not be deported because of his pet cat is wrong, according to England’s top judges.

Theresa May told the Conservative Party Conference that the ruling illustrated the problem with human rights laws.

A spokesman for the Judicial Office said the man’s pet had had nothing to do with the judgement allowing him to stay.

Mrs May has since told the BBC that her speech had been checked for accuracy.

The ‘Home Secretary’ [Secretary of State for the Home Department] doesn’t have an exact equivalent in the US government, as the job includes all of our Department of Homeland Security functions, plus some functions from the Department of Justice and the Department of the Interior.

The opposition smell ‘blood in the water’, so Theresa May under fire over deportation cat claim.

The quick version of what actually happened is that the cat was mentioned as part of the evidence that the defendant had a long-term relationship with a British citizen. This is similar to the US exemption for the spouse of a US citizen. The Home Office didn’t follow its own regulations in the deportation, so their decision was overruled on appeal. Neither the cat, nor human rights law was involved in the judicial decision, only the Home Office regulations.

Ms May has stepped in the litter box.

The satellite managed to come down, probably in the Pacific, and there are no reports of death or destruction — yet.

CBS reacted by bringing back a classic from Saturday Night Live [when it was funny] John Belushi reporting on the fall of Skylab as the science reporter of Weekend Update.

The link goes to CNN’s Belief Blog, not to the Onion or Newsbiscuit, OK?

Poll: 52 percent approve of God’s job performance.

I present it only as an example of the decline of American media.

The Captain Louis Renault Award to the media for being “Shocked, shocked I tell you” that Dominique Strauss-Kahn has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior. They have been acting like this was without precedent in his life … and then someone started looking back at the record to find that this is definitely not the first time he has been involved in something that may have been a good deal more serious than what was reported.

[Update below the fold.]

IMF chief may face new sex charge

IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s troubles are mounting, 24 hours after he was charged with attacking and attempting to rape a hotel maid.

Mr Strauss-Kahn, who is set to appear at a New York court on Monday morning, denies the charges.

His court hearing was delayed to allow forensic tests to be carried out.

Now French writer Tristane Banon, 31, has indicated she is considering filing a complaint of sexual assault over a 2002 incident, her lawyer says.
…

Ms Banon’s mother, Anne Mansouret, herself a politician from Mr Strauss-Kahn’s centre-left Socialist Party, said she persuaded her daughter not to file a complaint at the time.

“I just want to say that the only reason she didn’t press charges at the time is because I convinced her not to, because I thought it was better for her,” Ms Mansouret told French state TV.
…
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