Fast and Furious News Pace Requires Another Open Thread
With the pace of news these past two weeks, the last open thread is overflowing. So here is another. The facts for today's gem are taken from the New York Times: In a reprise of "Mission Accomplished" President Codpiece had twenty million dollars budgeted for a national VI (Victory in Iraq Day) celebration in 2006. Clearly this money won't be spent, so it is being rolled over into 2007. To our misfortune, there is much much more where this one came from.
Why is this the only place
...I can find this story this morning?
Is this so common? Is it so triviial?
The story is starting to get some legs
Now it is over at RawStory, UnderNews and several other places. Its good when people can say they saw it here first.
Fox News Solves Republican Foley Problem
According to BradBlog, Fox news has managed to fix the Republican scandal over hebephile Mark Foley. They simply switched Foley's party affiliation, and made him a Democrat.
"Just amazing. Fox's O'Reilly Factor just covered the Mark Foley (R-FL) issue in two different segments, one of them with a page who says he received communications from Foley, and another with Ann Coulter.
Never mind the content of either segment for now. Incredibly, during a total of three different cutaways to video footage of Foley, he was labelled at the bottom of the screen eachtime as "(D-FL)" !
Three different times. In two different segements. Each cutaway about 15 seconds or more. Showing Foley as a DEMOCRAT. Amazing."
Scrambling for cover
Seems the Rethuglican Molester Apologists are all scrambling for cover. Any cover will do. They are lying like ten year olds, if one story doesn't work, then they will whip out another.
AmericaBlog has a good read on this today:
"1. The most important contradiction is about why Reynolds' top aide tried to basically bribe ABC to not run the details of the lurid instant message chats.
Reynolds' chief of staff, Kirk Fordham, retained a lawyer. You'll recall that Fordham tried to get ABC to not publish the really damning "take off your shorts" instant messages last Friday. Fordham's lawyer now claims that this wasn't an attempt to obstruct justice, but rather, was an attempt to shield "his boss" (not clear if that's Foley or Reynolds, Fordham used to be Foley's chief of staff and campaign manager) for the controversy.
The aide's attempt to ask ABC not to publish or air the instant messages was not an effort to withhold the information from law enforcement, Heaphy said.
"It was never an attempt to obstruct justice," [Fordham's lawyer Tim] Heaphy said. "It was an attempt to shield his boss from the political storm."
I won't try to write a precis of the rest, no adult in their right mind could do justice to the excuses and confabulations.
Read it yourself at AmericaBlog
Rep Reynold's Chief of Staff Resigns
The [Nw York] state Democratic Party notes conservative columnist Robert Novak is reporting that NRCC Chair U.S. Rep. Tom Reynolds convinced now-disgraced former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley to run for re-election this fall even though Reynolds knew of the first round of questionable e-mails Foley had sent to a teenage male congressional page.
“A member of the House leadership told me that Foley, under continuous political pressure because of his sexual orientation, was considering not seeking a seventh term this year but that Rep. Tom Reynolds, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), talked him into running,” Novak wrote.
Reynolds confirmed to Novak that he did indeed urge Foley to run - as he urged all incumbents who “had not yet made up their minds.” Novak noted that the sexually explicit instant messages Foley sent to several male teens had not yet surfaced.
Hastert knew two years ago
According to Rep Reynold's now fired Chief of Staff, Kirk Fordham, Hastert knew about Foley two years ago. This may very well be the end of Hastert.
From AP:
"A senior congressional aide said Wednesday he told House Speaker Dennis Hastert's office in 2004 about worrisome conduct by former Rep. Mark Foley with teenage pages -- the earliest known alert to the GOP leadership.
Kirk Fordham told The Associated Press that when he was told about Foley's inappropriate behavior toward pages, he had "more than one conversation with senior staff at the highest level of the House of Representatives asking them to intervene."
The conversations took place long before the e-mail scandal broke, Fordham said, and at least a year earlier than members of the House GOP leadership have acknowledged."
Jeezus.
At the end of each story you posted m, I started reaching for the reply button to say how unbelievable or particularly atrocious it was. And then I read the next one, and thought that one was worse and started to reach for the reply button on that on, and then I read the next one...
I've heard them called the Christofacist Zombie Brigade before, but I think that inaccurate. Zombies are much less resilient.
That is good
Every time I think that it can't get any worse, it does. With this on going proof, I have come to understand that we are not at the bottom of the pit ;^)
Immihate's collateral damage on agriculture
Fruits and Vegatables that require hand planting, care or picking are suffering from the lack of labor available because of the crackdown on illegal aliens.
From Undernews:
The problem is now reaching crisis proportions, food growers say. As much as 30 percent of the year's pear crop was lost in Northern California, growers estimate. More than one-third of Florida's Valencia orange crop went unharvested, Regelbrugge said. In New York, apples are rotting on the trees, because workers who once picked the fruit have fled frequent raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, said Maureen Marshall, an apple grower in Elba.
Iraq burns
While national attention is focused on the Foley/Hastert/?/?/? scandals, Iraq is burning under some of the most intense fighting and terrorism of the whole war. Massive numbers of Iraqis are being slaughtered every day. US casualties have also sharply increased. The US Military spokesman in Iraq says that IED attacks are at an alltime high.
Lately, for some reason...
reports like these make me just say something absurd like, "Yeah, really. hmm...have you heard about the new Toyota SUV?"
The "oblivious American response" (OAR): speech defined by a lack of comprehension, compassion, and an inability to see or care about future implications.
Emotional and Intellectual Saturation
That is what the Rethugs are hoping for. Thirtythree days, and then we can turn off for a while. Actually, if the Democrats fail to gain a majority, we can just turn off.
You're right, m
If there is a time to pull it together it's now...
Notes of interest
As you can see (unless your browser has cached the site) I've clean things up around here visually. Also, I've added something which will give things a new dimension if we use it right - the ability to tag our posts with categories, so that over time we'll have a library of content sorted in some kind of order.
Also, since we now have the 'my workspace' area (see the nav menu), and because comments #'s or whether they are new or not shows up in a couple different place, and because the spam filter catches comment spam and unpublishes them but doesn't keep the comment from showing up in the list - I've disable the recent comments listing in favor of the catagories listing on the left hand side.
That's all for now. Next is Breaking News which kind of excited about actually...
Looks neat!
Its a slow news day so far, at least in comparison to the past six days. I am looking for stuff to publish so we can see how it looks in RL.
RL = Real Life
As opposed to just being written, or in test.
There are seven levels of correctness for any software. I don't remember them all exactly, but the list goes something like this.
1) I wrote it.
2) It compiles.
3) It runs for some data.
4) It provides a reasonable answer for some data.
5) It provides a proper result for valid data.
6) It rejects invalid input.
7) It always provides the proper result no matter what data is input.
For too many programmers, Level 1 is sufficient.
Level 7 correctness is rare, but does occur. IE, an addition tutorial for children.
Ha. Very appropriate.
I just launched another other hosting site about 2 hours ago. It all floats somewhere between a 4 and a 7 depending on the issue this point.
Right it's looking like a re-packaged version of BLand but the idea is to get oriented more towards "normal" websites vs. blogs, and to cater to businesses...
Will be interest to see what you're working on. :)
Not writing software now
I have a lot of DIY type projects going on. Right now I am building a work area for the new lathe I had custom built, and that is coming next week after a three month wait.
My next software project will be some house automation. Sensors to keep track of weather parameters, house temps, what equipment in the house is on/off. Monitor power usage, and exert some external control as well. I will throw in some other server type facilities as well. I would like to centralize my music collection, have a dedicated file server, etc. But I want it to be very Green. Some low power boxes are hitting the market, and with some facilities that are near completion in Linux I should be able to keep a box going for about 15 watts when not accessing disk storage. But this is probably two or more years away, and in a lot of ways more hardware oriented than software.
House Ethics Probe of PageGate
According to Speaker of the House Denny Hastert, the House Ethics Committee will open a probe of the latest Rethuglican sex scandal. Forty-eight subpoenas have been issued, and the investigation is claimed to be fastracked to complete in weeks rather than months.
Amazing
I can't believe it. This is the first time I've seen the GOP lose their never since I've been blogging. And before then a little too. Guess the crush of reality is a lot to deal with when you're trying to control ranks. Right on!
Looks like Hastert is going
Fox did a poll which sees a 20 seat loss in the House for the Rethugs if Hastert goes, 50 seats loss if he stays.
Please don't go...
We finally want the guy to stay and now it looks like he's out the door. Such sweet sorrow...
Not so fast.
Well, it looks like the "flight forward" still proceeds.
After apology, GOP rallies to Hastert's defense
If there is one thing these people have together it's that they know that the best way through hard times is to go straight fucking through it. I don't know this is so hard for anyone that isn't a republican to understand. I actually admire them for it (though not their morals - or lack thereof - behind it, of course), and I simply despise the cowardice of people who do the opposite.
Even Gandhi said that the only thing worse than violence is cowardice. We deserve to get screwed at this point if no good people will act.
I'm just disgusted today...
White House promises no lies on Foley
Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, has taken a vow to not lie on the subject of Foley.
He stated, 'I will be maddeningly but consistently non-responsive'. This is the closest that the White House can get to not lying.
No lies but just a few teeny weeny unfounded accusations
It's interesting to see how both parties scramble and re-group when a scandal hits the fan. Dems rarely seem to have a coordinated response. But those Repubs, now they know how to stick together and repeat the same talking points -- even when those points are utterly ridiculous. For instance, here's an excerpt of Hastert's comments from October 5:
When the [GOP's conservative] base finds out who's feeding this monster, they're not going to be happy. The people who want to see this thing blow up are ABC News and a lot of Democratic operatives, people funded by George Soros.
This was repeated numerous times on the Sunday Talk Show circuit today by GOP pundits. One Dem strategist said it was too ridiculous to even respond to. The bottom line is you got a GOP congressman emailing illicit messages to a minor and an apparent GOP cover-up.
The party who wanted to impeach Clinton because of a personal indiscretion is accusing Dems of politicizing this incident. And a few weeks ago, when ABC aired "Path to 9-11" which fabricated Clinton's & Bush's roll in 9-11, conservatives said the network was being forthright and accurate. Now, they are just a liberal news hack agency out to destroy the GOP. Hmmmmmmmmmmm.
Does anybody remember what responsible leadership looked like?
Flying by the seat of my rants...
What had happened was....
Didn't want to keep coming up with violin-type excuses, but believe it or not, had another death in the family and was in Opelika, Alabama all last week. And I mean the country part where people not only don't have a computer, but have a natural aversion to it. And my laptop's battery is on the fritz. Like I said, I'm not an excuses and sob story person -- though I know life happens. And the last few weeks, I've had my share of it. Feel like I've got a lot of catching up to do!
Thanks for your concern.
Flying by the seat of my rants...
Life happens.
And sometimes it can seem one big sob story at times. Am glad that you sound like you're going to keep on keepin' on in spite of it. :)
Me too.
(I always find the other choices much less attractive somehow...)
Olbermann Does It Again
At RawStory there is a link to another corruscating Olbermann editorial. RawStory titles it 'Bush would sell America out to preserve GOP power,' but Bush started out by selling out the GOP. His only interest is preserving his own power. That requires keeping a Congress that he controls.
Bush Threat to Constitution
From Josh Marshall at TalkingPointsMemo:
"Let's not mince words: President Bush is a profound threat to the US constitution.
From the AP ...
President Bush, again defying Congress, says he has the power to edit the Homeland Security Department’s reports about whether it obeys privacy rules while handling background checks, ID cards and watchlists.
In the law Bush signed Wednesday, Congress stated no one but the privacy officer could alter, delay or prohibit the mandatory annual report on Homeland Security department activities that affect privacy, including complaints.
But Bush, in a signing statement attached to the agency’s 2007 spending bill, said he will interpret that section “in a manner consistent with the President’s constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch.”
His contempt for the rule of law needs to be ended."
Rove's Personal Aide Resigns over Abramoff Ties
Susan Ralston, a one time aide to Abramoff, and from 2001 until today Karl Rove's personal aide, resigned this afternoon because of her ties to Jack Abramoff. The resignation came in on Fri afternoon around 5pm, which is typical when the Rethugs want to make sure they can "hide" something by keeping it in the lee of the news cycle.
"Typical" is the word for it
There's even a catch phrase for the practice which I can't remember at the moment.
Fyi re: breaking news
I didn't do a very good job of explaining how the breaking news feature works and subsequently no one read my mind. ;)
For clarity this is how it functions:
Go to the add news item link (also found on the front page at the top) and just enter the sordid details. It looks very similar to a diary entry except that there is a seperate teaser and body entry area - so no more worrying about "break commands"!
Additionally, once the item is posted it the title will automatically appear on the front page under the "Breaking news" feature area at the top, and it will automatically be added to the main breaking news page.
The reason for doing this, as opposed to just creating continual open threads, is because it is very easy for info to get lost in those, it's impossible to categorize it, and we get no search traction at all from it really. With each news item having it's own area people will be able to comment there and it will be easier for everyone, on the site and off, to find. :)
Arrested for assaulting VPs "sensibilities"
According to RockyMountainNews.com, a local man was arrested for "assaulting" VP Cheney after telling the VP "I think your policies in Iraq are reprehensible," or words to that effect, then walked on.
The arresting SS officer dropped the charges to harrassment by the time that the man, in handcuffs, was delivered to the Eagle County Jail. Eventually all charges were dropped.
The victim of the SS has filed suit in Federal District Court, claiming that he was arrested in retaliation for expressing his First Amendmen Rights, and in violation of his Fourth Amendment right to be free of unwarranted search and seizure.
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