July 21, 2008
So they want to
name a sewage plant in “honor” of George W. Bush. Ha-ha funny, right? Imagine you work there. What does the fact that some people think naming a sewage plant after someone is an insult say to you?
The employees of the sewage plant have an important, thankless job that most people would rather ignore, and they do not deserve to be made the punch-line to a President Bush is Crap joke. Can we come up with some other idea that doesn’t cause so much collateral damage?
Posted in Politics 
8 Comments »
July 21, 2008
1. Maliki says he supports Obama’s timetable for troop withdrawl in Iraq.
2. Maliki recants, via the US Military, saying the words were “misunderstood & mistranslated.”
3. But the original translation is borne out by several independent translations.
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it is obviously a pigeon in a duck suit, comrade. What are you, some kind of anti-patriot?
Hilzoy has the details.
Posted in War 3 Comments »
July 19, 2008
If you know anyone who tends to get their news via email forward, Snopes (yes, Snopes) has an analysis of a message full of MUS (made up shit) going around claiming Obama will raise everyone’s taxes by enormous amounts:
The statement that Senator Obama proposes instituting a 28% tax “on profit from ALL home sales” is false. Both candidates’ proposals would leave intact an existing capital gains exemption for the first $500,000 per housedhold of profit from the sale of a primary residence. Homeowners who realize a profit higher than the current exemption amount from the sale of their primary residences might pay more capital gains tax under an Obama presidency than they would now, but those instances currently constitute a very small minority of all home sales. [
Proposed Tax Changes ]
Email forwards continue to be an excellent means to send panicky messages full of crappy pseudofacts that manipulate low-information readers. Just like Fox News.
Posted in Speaking Very Slowly 3 Comments »
July 15, 2008
There’s a new book out about the frat-house resort “
Club Gitmo.” [ Warning: link goes to dittoheads wearing Club Gitmo t-shirts. ] Here’s the Washington Post’s synopsis:
In The Dark Side, Jane Mayer, a staff writer for the New Yorker, documents some of the ugliest allegations of wrongdoing charged against the Bush administration … Since embarking upon its global war on terror, the United States has blatantly disregarded the Geneva Conventions. It has imprisoned suspects, including U.S. citizens, without charge, holding them indefinitely and denying them due process. It has created an American gulag in which thousands of detainees, including many innocent of any wrongdoing, have been subjected to ritual abuse and humiliation. It has delivered suspected terrorists into the hands of foreign torturers.
Under the guise of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” it has succeeded, in Mayer’s words, in “making torture the official law of the land in all but name.” Further, it has done all these things as a direct result of policy decisions made at the highest levels of government.
To dismiss these as wild, anti-American ravings will not do. They are facts, which Mayer substantiates in persuasive detail, citing the testimony not of noted liberals like Noam Chomsky or Keith Olbermann but of military officers, intelligence professionals, “hard-line law-and-order stalwarts in the criminal justice system” and impeccably conservative Bush appointees who resisted the conspiracy from within the administration. [
Collateral Damage ]
In 2002 up to a third of the detainees had been imprisoned by mistake:
A CIA analyst warned the Bush administration in 2002 that up to a third of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay may have been imprisoned by mistake, but White House officials ignored the finding and insisted that all were “enemy combatants” subject to indefinite incarceration. [
A blind eye to Gitmo? ]
But the CIA was wrong because George W. Bush said so.
“There will be no review,” the book quotes Cheney staff director David Addington as saying. “The president has determined that they are ALL enemy combatants. We are not going to revisit it.” [
Ibid. ]
Besides the fact that we incarcerated and most probably tortured large numbers of innocent people, this means
the scenario I described yesterday is not far-fetched.
On occasion I have heard people joke to me about the “great conditions” at Guantanamo Bay, saying they wished their vacation had been as nice. I don’t know about the great conditions. But it is too bad that they — or all the folks smiling in Club Gitmo shirts, especially Rush Limbaugh himself — did not get to experience them first-hand. For four years. While their families back home wonder where they went.
Hat Tip:
Hilzoy.
Posted in Politics No Comments »
July 14, 2008
It’s no secret that I hate phones. Hate hate. Phones. Hate.
Part of it has to do with the inconvenience of being in the middle of a movie or a meal or a thought and having to answer the phone. But another part of it has to do with thinking phone companies are sleazy good-for-nothings dedicated to nickle-and-diming their customers into an infuriated pauper’s grave. But oh, Vonage, I had hoped you would be different. I really did.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Unpersuasive Marketing 2 Comments »
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