headline of the day

Human ancestors mated with more than Neanderthals

You can bet that the more socially conservative cave people dismissed this as a lifestyle choice.

mitt romney panders on foreign policy. it can be outsourced to Israel.

Not much point in dicussing this seriously, since Mitt will likely have changed his position by the time you make a comment.

Still, this could reduce the deficit, as Mitt might not even need a Secretary of State, since Israel's already got one:

It seems that a President Romney will allow the Israeli government to decide American policy toward that country. The free daily newspaper Israel Hayom — a media outlet closely associatedwith right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — asked Romney if, as president, he would ever consider moving the American Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. In his answer, Romney made some astonishing claims. First, that his policy toward Israel will be guided by Israeli leaders; second, on the Jerusalem issue, he’d do whatever Israel tells him to do; and third, he does not think the United States should take a leadership role in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

ROMNEY: The actions that I will take will be actions recommended and supported by Israeli leaders. I don’t seek to take actions independent of what our allies think is best, and if Israel’s leaders thought that a move of that nature would be helpful to their efforts, then that’s something I’ll be inclined to do. But again, that’s a decision which I would look to the Israeli leadership to help guide. I don’t think America should play the role of the leader of the peace process, instead we should stand by our ally. Again, my inclination is to follow the guidance of our ally Israel, as to where our facilities and embassies would exist.

my grandson as GI Joe for halloween. not news but important to me.

Clue:  he's the one who doesn't look like a witch.

headline (and story) of the day: 1927 edition

From Drug War Rant:

peace dividend? we don't need no stinkin' peace dividend.

Anybody who thinks, delusionally, that the "withdrawal" from Iraq somehow constitutes an opportunity to reduce the US interventionist footprint in the Persian Gulf area, should read the NYT and think again:

The Obama administration plans to bolster the American military presence in the Persian Gulf after it withdraws the remaining troops from Iraq this year, according to officials and diplomats. That repositioning could include new combat forces inKuwait able to respond to a collapse of security in Iraq or a military confrontation with Iran.

Unfortunately, the longer you study America's imperial activities around the world, the more prophetic Chalmers Johnson starts to become.

tell me again that Barack Obama is different from George W. Bush in terms of his total and complete disregard for civil liberties or government accountability. go ahead. i'm waiting

From Pro Publica:

A proposed rule to the Freedom of Information Act would allow federal agencies to tell people requesting certain law-enforcement or national security documents that records don’t exist – even when they do.

Under current FOIA practice, the government may withhold information and issue what’s known as a Glomar denial that says it can neither confirm nor deny the existence of records.

The new proposal – part of a lengthy rule revision by the Department of Justice – would direct government agencies to “respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist."

The irony here is that ... hell, there is no irony here.

in a world where economics more than military might defines great powers, old men in Bejing have demands

In exchange for contribuing $100 billion or more to Europe's recovery package, China wants only a few concessions:

1.  Stop criticizing the old men in Bejing when they manipulate the worldwide currency markets.

2.  Take a large percentage of the money in renminbi.  Or better yet maybe in mxyzptlks.


Quoth the President of France

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France welcomed the prospect of a Chinese contribution to the eurozone rescue package. “Our independence would not be put into question by this,” he said in a television interview. “Why would we not accept that the Chinese had confidence in the eurozone and place a part of their surpluses in our funds or our banks. Would you rather they placed it with the US?”

needing little comment unless you cannot figure out the answer.

today's headline confirms something I have always secretly suspected. or feared.

Unrelenting sex drive may signal deadly rabies

From MSN.

This leads me to wonder, then, if foaming at the mouth during or after orgasm may be a "dead" giveway.

in any less oppositional time this would just be funny. in today's world I am waiting for a Republican to demand a special prosecutor

The State Dept has spent $70,000 buying copies of President Obama's books to give away.  (And, no, apparently neither W nor Clinton did this.)

Not much of a scandal, and not much off the top of a multi-trillion-dollar deficit.  Mostly funny.

Yet not as funny as the fact that our own "Supermax" prison in McLean VA has banned the President's books:

The federal government's most secure prison has determined that two books written by President Barack Obama contain material "potentially detrimental to national security" and rejected an inmate's request to read them.

You really can't make this stuff up.

this is just cool

Cracking an 18th-century secret society's code.

one of the only things that will ever get us out of Afghanistan: China gets into Pakistan

The old men in Bejing have many faults, but like the old men who used to inhabit the Kremlin they know that nuclear war on the Indian subcontinent would spoil everybody's day.

So, finally, China is stepping up as a regional power (rather than use us as military contractors in Afghanistan) and seeking bases in Pakistan.

This is a good thing.  Repressive as they may be at home, the geezers in Bejing and the USA have a common interest in regional stability there, and if the price of us getting rid of that obligation is that China gets Pakistan, I'm OK with that.

India, of course, will not be thrilled.

and you thought the TSA Gestapo was just for airports. silly wabbit.

Coming to a highway near you:  TSA random stops.

You gotta love these two lines from the story of their new VIPR operation in Tennessee:

You're probably used to seeing TSA's signature blue uniforms at the airport, but now agents are hitting the interstates to fight terrorism with Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR).

...

Tuesday's statewide "VIPR" operation isn't in response to any particular threat, according to officials.

In other words:  "Just because we can, whenever we want to."

All of a sudden, parts of Ron Paul don't sound so whacky any more, do they?

nah, of course Goldman Sachs (better known as the unofficial Treasury Department) is completely on the up and up

Nothing to see here, folks.  Move along quietly.

the unintentionally ironic headline of the day (or maybe it was intentional)

Romney, Perry spar over who helped illegal immigrants more

From CBS

In any other debate, the winner would be the one who helped people more, right?  So I can sort of understand the headline writer's dilemma.

But still....

comment rescue: Think123 on the "real" war against wall street

A great piece of writing in the comment section of the previous post that deserves its own headline:

This greed and corruption protest is something liberals and conservatives can come together on. Mainly because it's true and clear for all to see.

The real genuine Wall Street protesters are the ones with high powered lawyers. Citi just agreed to settle fraud charges for $250 million. AIG sued Bank Of America for $10 Billion claiming they were conned by BOA.

the inherent characteristics of populist movements should not keep us from asking why they arise

I'm sure everyone can recall this image, the one that initially tarnished the Tea Party with charges of racism:

I am equally sure that this image will be used to make the same charges about the Occupy movement:

The charges in both cases are true and false.

the games schools play to avoiding providing services to children with special needs and disabilities--a second consideration

Disclaimer:  there are a lot of great special ed teachers, guidance counselors, and school psychologists out there.  This article is not about them, or directed at them.  It IS about the schmucks who too often find jobs in the school system wherein their ability to keep the school for paying for providing services is what keeps them employed.  I am tired of pretending that they don't exist in large numbers.

Here is an incomplete list of some of the myths and just plain falsehoods used by school districts to avoid compliance with IDEA or 34 CFR for children with special needs and disabilities.

Myth #1:  "We know more about your child's disability than you do."

rick perry is a birther. who'da thunk it--not

I guess this was predictable.

Wonder if that will make Steve Forbes re-think endorsing him?

why is public education so adversarial toward the parents of special needs children? a first consideration

For the past fifteen years I have been representing children (my own and others) in 504 and IEP meetings around the mid-Atlantic region (including Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, and New York).

My role is "parent advocate," which is virtually the only loophole favorable to parents under the whole IDEA and 34 CFR structure that governs the education of children with disabilities and special needs.  Parents have the absolute right to bring in any advocate they please (with some restrictions on actual attorneys) without prior notice to the school district.

When you arrived, unannounced, as a Parent Advocate, a number of things generically happen.  First, there a lot of shuffling and whispering, as the others on the "team" tell each other that there's an outsider in the room.  Then there is the inevitable but ever so polite request that I provide my bona fides for knowing anything at all about public education or special needs children (they, of course, being school district employees, are immune to such questions).

Then they start the meeting.  If you've ever been a parent unhappy with your child's educational experience in a special ed or 504 disability setting, please feel free to skip the next painful section:  you've been through it too many times.

in which I return (probably unwisely) to the strange American fascination with moralizing about the deplorable use of Hitler in political rhetoric

When I ran a post several days ago noting that American political rhetoric had long ago trivialized Hitler and the Holocaust, a anonymous commenter objected:

Nobody is burning David at the stake. People just asked that he get rid of that cheesy Hitler movie. He finally did. Good for him.

If your defense is look at all this other rotten stupid stuff people do, so why can't David be stupid too, that's pretty lame. The guy is an elected official.

...

I think the issue is portraying the President (Bush, Obama, Clinton, George Washington) as Hitler. It's as low as you go in American politics. Why do it? Why defend it?

That so misses the point by a breathtaking margin that I am moved to return to the subject of Third Reich imagery and comparisons in American politics (as well as rank hypocrisy in the Delaware blogosphere on the same topic) in the following disjointed manner:

electric cars as the ultimate nimby refusal to deal with underlying issues

Coyote blog makes the best point about how people just don't get the issues involved with electric cars (I mean, aside from the fact that my commute and recharging would pretty much require me to stay overnight at my job every other day):

Press responses from Fisker Automotive highlight the problem here:  electric vehicle makers want to pretend that the electricity to charge the car comes from magic sparkle ponies sprinkling pixie dust rather than burning fossil fuels.  Take this quote, for example:

while this won't end the global warming debate, you could hold out a faint hope that it might change the nature of the argument

The Berkely Earth project, a collaboration of a whole passel of extremely reputable climatologists, has issued a new set of findings regarding global temperature change over land for the past 100 years.  They used a statistical model that incorporated virtually every known data set, and came up with the following:

Their conclusions include the following:

WaPo fact check doesn't say that joe biden is insane, just that things he says are insane (and wildly incorrect)

Which shouldn't surprise anybody.

I'm thinking Joe on the campaign trail this year will be a shoe-in for the Spiro Agnew accuracy in speech-making award.

it is now illegal to read or speak parts of the bill of rights when dealing with the tsa

Which doesn't really surprise me.

the saddest, most painful, and most important piece you will read today

If you love children, read it.

note to delawareliberal and the anti-defamation league ...

... we, as a culture, trivialized Hitler and the Holocaust a long, long time ago.

So why not forget about burning David Anderson at the stake?

as we police the world yet again, you have to wonder where is our compelling strategic interest ... in Uganda

Will Rogers once famously quipped that the US would send the Marines to any country that could get twenty people together to ask for them.

Obviously President Barack Obama is a fan of the Will Rogers Doctrine.

100 Green Berets are referred to as the "first wave" of US troops hitting Uganda.

Think back ... when the Obama administration created Africacom, they told us that it was primarily for use in supporting development, gathering intelligence, and improving logistics.

That facade lasted only a few months before we involved ourselves in military operations in Somalia.

Exactly who thought this was a good idea now?

Undoubtedly the headline of the day ...

IRAN SPACE MONKEY LAUNCH ATTEMPT FAILS

from Discovery

the best visual explanation of the similarities and differences between tea baggers and occupiers

Libertarians, corporations, and "Occupy Wall Street"

I wasn't enamored with the Tea Party from the very beginning, and I said so.

I am bemused about Occupy [enter name of urban area] more than anything else.  Such demonstrations in dictatorships inevitably lead to more repression on the part of the regime, international pressure, calls for the ouster of a ruler who has lost his legitimacy, general strikes, and sometimes civil war.

Yes, a few cops are going to break some heads, the mullahs in Iran and the old farts in China will blather, we're already on schedule for an election that will settle Barack Obama's fate, people actually have to be working to go on strike, and of all the fringes of the political spectrum the Wall Street warriors are probably the worst armed and least likely to resort to anything much beyond name-calling and mild civil disobedience.

In short:  we won't have an Arab spring because we're not a sheikdom and it's not spring.

What Occupy Everybody is really about

Michelle Bachmann is a religious zealot nutcase who would take away any of your civil rights that Jesus told her to ...

Welcome to the world of the Bachmann administration where the government would want to force a plastic wand up the vagina of any pregnant woman considering an abortion.

Those of you who think Michelle Bachmann is somehow a Libertarian Republican, try squaring that belief with the idea that the government should have to power to insert surgical instruments into women's bodies on an ideological whim.

He's back--with the twin caveats that who he is and what constitutes "back" may require explanation

I was once the Delaware Libertarian, and then I stopped.


Inspiration waned, the cut-and-thrust became increasingly banal, and I realized that another blog hashing over the day's news from any particular ideological perspective represented little more than public masturbation (wanna shake hands now?).


There's nothing inherently wrong with masturbation (and I thank Christine O'Donnell for mainstreaming that discussion), but it is only briefly pleasurable and it really doesn't accomplish anything.


And like my friend Waldo with regards to the conservative movement/GOP and my longtime commenter Anonone with respect to the Obama administration/Democrats, I began to feel that the Libertarian Party/movement walked off and left me.


I have almost as much difficulty today supporting a Libertarian movement that sympathizes with the Tea Party as I suspect a committed progressive has supporting a Democratic administration that just barely pays lip service to your ideals while continuing to fund a "defense" establishment and a growing internal police state, while cutting deal after deal with corporate donors.


So "who I am" has changed a bit...

Pictures worth not just thousands of words, but trillions of dollars

This from Kids Prefer Cheese (written by real, actual economists and such):

It has become almost fashionable to claim that the Fed is not doing nearly enough to revive the economy. This conclusion follows from the same logic that the "stimulus was too small" meme employs: Has the economy recovered? No? Then policymakers have not done nearly enough.

Check out what's happened to the monetary base since the crisis began:

The base has gone from a path of roughly doubling each decade to more than tripling in three years. 

Then this is the new proposed gerrymandered Congressional district in Maryland,