Cheap Blogging Crutch 12.18

U.S. training plan: Read first, shoot later
From liberal rag Stars and Stripes, comes a look at how the US is using literacy training to get people into the Afghan army and police, while also using a desire to get into the Afghan military and police as a way to spread literacy. We still pay less than the Taliban does, but we are giving them job skills. Shame we can't do it for anything cheaper than an extra hundred billion.

The sports-entertainment crossover: it's sublimely funny. Just ask speedskating savior Stephen Colbert
Sports Illustrated takes a look at Stephen Colbert's successful quest to save the US speed skating team through sponsorship and what it might mean for the future of Olympic sponsorship. All part of the new issue of SI that features Colbert on the cover... in a speed skating spandex suit. This is going to be the best Olympic sponsorship by a comedy program since SCTV sponsored the Canadian men's two man luge team.

In 2010, The Civilian Space Industry Finally Takes Off
It's almost at that point in time where we're starting to get past that point all our favorite sci-fi TV, movies, and books described as "the future" and into that part they called "the distant future". What do we have to show for it? The ability to watch porn anywhere and HDTV. No moon bases and nothing that even remotely hovers in a car. But 2010 is the year which we can also pay billionaires for the right to rocket our asses up into low orbit, to feel a sensation that Buzz Aldrin and Alan Shepard got tired of describing three decades ago. The future is slowly creeping up, it's just a shame that it's more in the "carnival ride" aspects of the future and not the "to boldly go..." ones.

Collider Sets Record, and Europe Takes U.S.’s Lead
Well the Large Hadron Collider is up and running and while it isn't yet up to the task of killing God or crushing Europe into a singularity, it is up to the task of rubbing America's nose in shit. It has already set the record for accelerating protons (to 1.2 trillion volts), for number and speed of collisions, for the number of particle physicists in one room named Jens, for the slowest particle on record, the largest particle on record, most PhD's at a nude science kegger, and most appearances of the "particle physicists do it with momentum and position" bumper sticker. Here's congratulating them on their serious endeavors.

People finally realize Facebook intends to make money off of their data
Yeah, Facebook is starting to become mildly evil in regards to privacy, attempting to make money, and making everything on the site public. Turns out that you can't expect Facebook to exist forever without trying to make a buck of your info. Social media isn't private, especially free social media. Shocking, I know. However, this will help you stalk 15 year-olds and ex-girlfriends you are convinced still love you without a restraining order entering into it. So, that's a plus.

Obama's Big Sellout
Matt Taibbi's big Rolling Stone piece on the Obama Administration and that whole thing where we intended to bail out banks and financial institutions while providing increased scrutiny and oversight before turning our attention to the American people, before we promptly forgot the whole scrutiny, oversight, and American people parts. He's probably a little too focused on Obama and Bob Rubin and not the collection of money humpers in Congress, but it is another thorough indictment of the way this country works. Shame he used the title "Obama's Big Sellout", what's he going to use for his article detailing the health care debacle?

Picture of the day

It being the end of the year and thus the time for many "Best of..." features, the Bad Astronomy blog has decided to put up its top 10 astronomy photos of the year.

The Apollo 11 hoax moon landing site

Cassini's look at the ice geysers of Saturn's moon Enceladus

the Butterfly Nebula, one of the first photos taken by the newly restored Hubble

The horror...

The Washington Post's brackets for their Most Influential Person of the Decade poll. Hey, an all Muslim final in the East! Al Gore has got to feel hard done by. The Harry Potter books and films were great, but the energy industry and most Republicans in Congress would agree that An Inconvenient Truth was the best fiction book and movie adaptation of the last decade.

I think that any decade "Most Influential" poll where you can not only place Paris Hilton alongside two Presidents, tech leaders, and public officials, but credibly argue that she wasn't given enough credit by voters as an important influence, pretty much cements the entire decade as one you need to use gallons and gallons of grain alcohol to completely purge from your memory.

On the bright side, the decade bar has been set so low that the remaining 9 decades will only have to avoid the complete collapse of society to ward off "Worst decade of the century" plaudits. The downside to that is the first decade of the 21st century spent so much time ignoring and exacerbating problems that it made it all the more likely that collapse would happen in the second decade. I just look forward to voting on the esteemed collection of hobos, drifters, and regional warlords that will make up the 2020 "Most Influential" list.

Video of the day

I know you've probably seen this, but doesn't this just make the sun shine a little brighter?



Sure, Lieberman still killed two separately effective parts of he health care bill that would have lowered costs for Americans and seemed to do it purely out of spite, and all that happened here was that Al Franken politely told him to shut his fucking mouth during something that was completely unimportant, but doesn't this make it all a little better? Well, as long as you're healthy and get your health care from work it should make you feel better.

How about Al Franken though? Between this, the anti-rape bill, schooling people on medical bankruptcies, his various and sundry fights on the Senate floor over health care, his correspondence with John Ashcroft, and this Supply Side Jesus cartoon he wrote, he's quickly become one of my favorite Senators. Shame that other Senators aren't this entertaining, it would at least make all the inaction and failing more palatable.

Your daily reminder of how this country works

A plan to attempt to provide American's with better health coverage at a cost of $90 billion a year? My God man, it'll takes month and months of soul sucking compromise, delays, and failures just to get to a point where it's passage still isn't assured until they hash out whether or not women have right's to their own bodies in this country.

A $626 billion dollar bill for Defense this year that doesn't even count our two wars? Walk right this way sir, we're sorry for any delay you might have had. Can we kick this dirty health care nonsense out of the way so we can get to you? Good. How are the wife and kids?

The Senate cleared a crucial hurdle early Friday, voting to end debate on a bill that combined all that remained of this year's congressional agenda – except for health care.

Anchored by a $626 billion Pentagon funding bill, the measure also carries short-term extensions of unemployment benefits, highway and transit funding, key pieces of the anti-terror Patriot Act and a measure to save doctors from shouldering a 21 percent cut in Medicare payments.

Whew! That was a close one. Defense contractors almost didn't get their money on time. That would have been a catastrophe this country could not bear. Thank God they realized that time was of the essence.

Our thing, on the other hand? Yeah... they'll have to get back to us on that. Apparently Joe Lieberman wants his name emblazoned on the flag now. So rest easy, Democrats can't come together to agree on health care, but they can come together to agree that funding wars is awesome. I think we're all proud of them.

No one can do anything right

Well what do you know, the World can't get its shit together either. We spend so much time here chronicling the failures of our own government to do things that other industrialized nations did 4-5 decades ago, that it's nice to see that they have the same problems we do on the issues of today. Shame it's going to kill us all. Ah well, at least I live far enough in from the coast to avoid drowning.

I'm speaking, of course, of the Copenhagen climate conference. With proceedings being described as an "elaborate sham" and the possibility of any deal getting done dramatically in question, today we learn that even the measures they were preparing to sign off on were woefully inadequate.

The emissions cuts offered so far at the Copenhagen climate change summit would still lead to global temperatures rising by an average of 3C, according to a confidential UN analysis obtained by the Guardian.

With the talks entering the final 24 hours on a knife-edge, the emergence of the document seriously undermines the statements by governments that they are aiming to limit emissions to a level ensuring no more than a 2C temperature rise over the next century, and indicates that the last day of negotiations will be extremely challenging.

A rise of 3C would mean up to 170 million more people suffering severe coastal floods and 550 million more at risk of hunger, according to the Stern economic review of climate change for the UK government – as well as leaving up to 50% of species facing extinction. Even a rise of 2C would lead to a sharp decline in tropical crop yields, more flooding and droughts.

Worldwide action needed, experts all saying the same thing, consensus reached on solutions, but leaders can't seem to do anything other than pass half-measures and paens to the industries that caused the problem in the first place. Where have we heard this before? At the very least, people are saying that this isn't America's fault; it's China's. America, on the other hand, is being described as helpful and "pulling things back from the brink." Weird to hear that, I know. Hell, Obama even took to trying to shame and put pressure on those who were trying to hold up a deal. A nice attempt, but still a little hollow knowing that anything the Copenhagen conference agrees to and Obama wants to sign on to will still have next to no chance of passing the US Senate.

But as we approach the end it seems that our world leaders have come up with one concrete plan of action: work their asses off to draft a weak, face saving agreement with which they can use to pretend something was done. Because what you want in a comprehensive climate agreement is a draft that has the words "ought to", "scout's honor", "Totally promise", "It would be nice if...", and "let's hope and pray" prominently featured. So as the world shows us how to fail on a global scale, we in America can take solace in a few things: this time it wasn't our fault, we tried to help, and anyway it's the developing countries that are going to be most negatively affected by the temperature changes. We win again.

But what about eggs?

The Sarah Palin book tour rolls ever on. But just a word of warning, if you want to make a salsa, a gazpacho, or have a nice slice of an heirloom tomato on a giant burger made from a meat-bearing animal, you'd better prepare it a day or so in advance. Tomatoes are not allowed in the presence of Alaskan royalty.

While going through the check-out lane, again with no wait, [Rappaport] told the clerk she forgot to get some grape tomatoes, which she loves, so she would be right back.
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The clerk told her they had no tomatoes that day.
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As she was leaving, she noticed a man with a store manager's name tag and asked him why they had no tomatoes. He informed her the store did have tomatoes, but they were taken off the shelves for a few hours.

It turns out that Palin had been pelted with a tomato at an earlier stop on her book tour and the management at the Costco was determined it wouldn't happen here.

Superb. It turns out that a man from the great state of Minnesota, attempting to win the love of both Sean and myself for continually electing Michelle Bachmann, tossed what the French would call a "love apple" at Palin... missing and hitting a cop instead. I'm sure it was something the man and the cop had a good laugh over during the tomato thrower's violent beating in lockup. Trust me, it was catsup coming out of the man's ears.

Thus, tomatoes are fruit/vegetable-non-grata in our megamarkets when our next President rolls into town on a snowmobile pulled by a gaggle of moose to promote her book. But I think this all teaches us an important lesson: when one wishes to pelt elected and newly resigned politicians with food, it's best to shop at the local farmer's market and support the area agriculture community. When smashing a governor with fruit, you really want to know that it had a low carbon footprint, was organic, and was sustainable.

Headline of the day

Vermont Supreme Court To Decide What A Dog's Love Is Worth

Let me help: A dog's love is worth the price of whatever it is you're eating when said dog has stopped plotting against you and befouling your lawn long enough to pretend to like you in a naked attempt to get a piece of what you're eating, or at least a chance to lick the plate.

All things being equal, it's the cost of a moderately priced sandwich.

Pictures of the day

The various police beatings, country targeted protests, Greenpeace demonstrations, an dirty, dirty hippies that are in Copenhagen to watch the world fail. 230 people were arrested yesterday as clashes got serious and an attempt was made to rush the summit and occupy the floor of the negotiations. How is that Pittsburgh was the one city that was able to handle a major world summit without shit getting too emotional?

But as we learn at all climate summits: a consensus on action may be hard, but everyone can always agrees that beating up hippies is carbon neutral.

People who will be waiting a very, very, very long time

Coming soon to a rapture near you. God will have a little higher production values though.

America paying it's debts. Hilarious joke, protesters, hilarious joke.

It's about to get a lot warmer

If there's a silver lining to our impending governmental foray into climate legislation it's that whatever gets passed won't be some woefully inadequate response to any agreements and goals set at the Copenhagen Conference. How do I know this? Because they aren't going to have an agreement coming out of Copenhagen, because the talks are collapsing. I know that doesn't exactly sound like good news, perhaps I'm explaining it wrong.

Talks to save the planet from catastrophic climate change were on the brink of collapse this morning as officials from the three main blocs – rich countries, major developing economies, and small island states – said they had given up on getting a substantive deal.

Even as 115 world leaders began arriving to put their personal imprint on a deal, the summit hosts were admitting they had failed to broker an agreement.
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The sense of despair from the Danes comes after nine days of working negotiations which has seen increasing acrimony and distrust between rich countries and poor countries, and industrialised countries and the rapidly emerging economies.

Isn't that always the way? Poor and emerging countries want to grow and not be in so much abject poverty, low lying and equator countries want to not fry and drown to death, and the developed nations want to be able to not take minor political hits, pass complex legislation, and make difficult decisions. It's impossible to weigh one set of goals against the other. At least the developing countries got to keep the Kyoto accords and get US support for a climate fund.

However, China is talking about "no possibility of achieving a detailed accord to tackle global warming", anything the President signs will not be listened to by our Legislative branch, the President of the Maldives has practically resigned himself to the fact that his country will resemble Atlantis soon, African countries are crying out that they're being railroaded and held hostage by countries that provide them aid, and the Danes have shown a perceptible emotion that one could construe as displeasure. So buck up, you may think that your own country is the height of political mismanagement and duty shirking, but it merely pales in comparison to when you gather the entire world together. Feel better?

By the by, you probably should have asked Santa for scuba gear, SPF 10,000 sunblock, and a boat this Christmas. You'll need all of them.

Drink up!

Because the health care fight is sometimes too depressing and infuriating to discuss, we here at These Bastards will move on to a lighter hearted subject that might bring a little smile to your face: you're drinking poison and you are going to DIE DIE DIE DIEDIEDIEDIE!!!! And it's legal. Further compounding the bad news, the problem spawned a thousand page and million word New York Times article. That's how much poison is in the glass of water that you aren't drinking because the office installed a Coke machine down the hall. If you weren't drinking so much high fructose corn syrup to shock your brain through another groggy morning, you'd probably be dead already.

The 35-year-old federal law regulating tap water is so out of date that the water Americans drink can pose what scientists say are serious health risks — and still be legal.

Only 91 contaminants are regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act, yet more than 60,000 chemicals are used within the United States, according to Environmental Protection Agency estimates. Government and independent scientists have scrutinized thousands of those chemicals in recent decades, and identified hundreds associated with a risk of cancer and other diseases at small concentrations in drinking water, according to an analysis of government records by The New York Times.

But not one chemical has been added to the list of those regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act since 2000.

Other recent studies have found that even some chemicals regulated by that law pose risks at much smaller concentrations than previously known.

Yup, since 2004 over 64 million Americans have been exposed to water that did not meet "at least one commonly used government health guideline intended to help protect people from cancer or serious disease." Right now there is probably a tumor the size of Hervé Villechaize on your spine. I know this is largely a problem that hasn't been dealt with since 1974, but what do the phrases "no chemicals added to the Safe Drinking Water Act since 2000" and "increased cancer dangers for Americans since 2004" have in common? Our good friends in the Bush Administration. I think I know what they'd say: "The water meets the legal requirements and adding chemicals to the list would just have caused undue strain on the business community. Besides, it's not like our water is 'Yamuna River, New Dehli' bad."

And our drinking water isn't "New Delhi bad", but we might only have to wait a few years for that. On the bright side, some public health officials, like Dr. Pankaj Parekh of Los Angeles, who recognize the shortcomings of the laws and are trying to go above and beyond their duty to protect people from poison induced cancers are being thwarted... by the people they're trying to protect. I guess it is a fundamental American right to poison ourselves.

Don't worry, even though action on this is about a decade or two overdue, I'm sure our elected betters will get right on it and pass a law to fix things. I mean after all, this is something that both affects public health and the environment, so they'll probably get right on it. I mean if our government does handle two things competently it's major legislation on health care and the environment.

I think I'll go cry now.

Today in health care

Yeah, the fight is still going on and it will never end. Howard Dean is pissed and wants the bill killed. Paul Krugman feels it is underwhelming but saves lives. Keith Olbermann went all "Special Comment" on the bill. The unions are wondering what the hell they fought for. Cheaper prescription drugs and real cost savings on health care was killed. And now, near the end, two Senators are vying to extract their last pounds of flesh from the bill. In a surprise move, one of them actually has good intentions.

Independent socialist Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is mad. Mad that reconciliation wasn't at least credibly threatened as an option, mad that his single payer bill was used as both a delaying tactic and not given a vote on the floor, and, as of now, he isn't voting for the bill. Whether he'll vote for cloture is another question, but he is concerned that the bill doesn't help enough people, cut costs enough, and provide real options to people. This makes him the first Senator all year to actually throw a tantrum in an attempt to extract something positive from the legislative process. Mark this on your calendar folks, it's a historic day.

The same cannot be said for Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson. He saw what Joe Lieberman got and now he's salivating over his power. And he will not vote for cloture until he shouts "Cave" and the Democratic leadership responds with a sufficient attempt to pile rubble on themselves. He's back on the abortion thing.

One issue that will be handled separately, though, is abortion. As I reported yesterday, Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA), who has been working with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), presented Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) with new legislative language on federal funding for abortion yesterday. Nelson says abortion is a make or break issue for him, and he regards the provision in the current Senate bill as too lax to support.

As of last night, Nelson hadn't had a chance to evaluate the new compromise. But according to Politico, Douglas Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee has already decided: "This proposal would break from the long-established principles of the Hyde Amendment by providing federal subsidies for health plans that cover abortion on demand. This is entirely unacceptable."

If past discussions over the Stupak Amendment and the Catholic Bishops are any indication, Ben Nelson has turned over veto power on a health care bill and the right to try to recede women back into second class citizen status on matters of their own body to private abortion groups like the NRLC. Isn't that nice? On the bright side, the fight to get Ben Nelson to sign on has at least given Glenn Beck a nice platform to lob dishonest accusations of treason around. So there is that.

So, the horse trading isn't over and the fight to make the bill worse goes ever on. Likely they will end up trading women's rights for a health care vote, because really, the goal is to get anything passed at this point. And what's more important, passing a bill where opinions on it range from "deeply mediocre with the bad outweighing the good" to "deeply mediocre with the good minutely outweighing the bad" or women having some sort of personal rights to make decisions on their own? I think we know the answer to that.

Quote of the Day

Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, reminding us that maybe Joe Lieberman isn't the guy we should be mad at for the underwhelming health care bill.

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), among the most vocal supporters of the public option, said it would be unfair to blame Lieberman for its apparent demise. Feingold said that responsibility ultimately rests with President Barack Obama and he could have insisted on a higher standard for the legislation.

“This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place, so I don’t think focusing it on Lieberman really hits the truth,” said Feingold. “I think they could have been higher. I certainly think a stronger bill would have been better in every respect.”

First off Russ, I think you underestimate my capacity to hold multiple people in spiteful contempt. Currently I loathe over 6,000 individuals, simultaneously. So it's easy to add Barack Obama in under the subheading "Health Care, fucking up of" without pushing Holy Joe out.

Secondly, are you and Glenn Greenwald trying to intimate that just because Lieberman's demands happened to coincide almost exactly what the Finance Committee passed out of conference, which just happened to coincide with the deal the White House negotiated with insurers and pharmaceutical companies, and just because the only time the President ever interjected himself into the health care debate were to sandbag progressive priorities and tell the vast majority of Democrats to roll over for the Lieberman's, Stupak's, and Nelson's of the world, that it means that the bill is exactly what President Obama wanted?

I mean that's a little conspiratorial, don't you think? They're all just happy coincidences.

'Tis the season

Big Fat Whale chronicles the atheist yuletide traditions, even if they don't really count as real people.

Gold, women, sheep

Stephen Colbert looks at the linkup between conservative commentators and precious metals and Mad Men's John Slattery tries to prepare us for the post-apocalyptic nightmare future that we all know is coming.

Picture of the day

A group of starlings shows just what they think of the assembled masses gawking at them and the human race in general.

Oh, some might say that this was just a random event at high speed that happened to be captured by a camera and that birds could have no way of understanding our rude hand gestures and swear words. Oh no, they knew. The birds knew what they were doing. The animals always know.

That's a lot of e-mails

America's long national quest to find out what chain e-mails, cat videos, and strategies to leak the names of undercover CIA agents were the most popular in the Bush White House, has finally been solved. The problem that the Bush Administration had initially described as "that idiot Jenkins misplacing all those e-mails", was pieced together by several public watchdog groups and a team of elite computer nerds. It was a lot of misplaced e-mails.

Computer technicians have found 22 million missing White House e-mails from the administration of President George W. Bush and the Obama administration is searching for dozens more days' worth of potentially lost e-mail from the Bush years, according to two groups that filed suit over the failure by the Bush White House to install an electronic record keeping system.

The two private groups – Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive – said Monday they were settling the lawsuits they filed against the Executive Office of the President in 2007.
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The tally of missing e-mails, the additional searches and the settlement are the latest development in a political controversy that stemmed from the Bush White House's failure to install a properly working electronic record keeping system. Two federal laws require the White House to preserve its records.
Story continues below

The two private organizations say there is not yet a final count on the extent of missing White House e-mail and there may never be a complete tally.

How does one accidentally misplace 22 million e-mails? I think the procedure goes something like this: select one e-mail, scroll down 22 million e-mails later, hold shift, click on the last e-mail, press delete. Luckily the computer squad knew how to work the "undelete" function and were following an ancient map that purported to tell the secret of Dick Cheney's Secret Treasure. You see, Cheney's treasure was knowledge!

But what a surprise, huh? The Bush Administration couldn't even work e-mail properly. It is hoped, because these e-mails are from the same period of time, that this discovery will shed some light on the Plame/CIA outing scandal and the Attorney firing scandal, as well as an other scandals we may have forgotten about. I doubt it. I can't see Karl Rove or Cheney using anything other than a system of mute albino couriers who traffic blood scrawled, wax sealed parchment through underground passages. In any event, we won't know what they say until 2014 at the earliest, as they have to go through the National Archives release process. Frankly it's a lot of LOLcats, family photos, "Chocolate Rain" forwards, and terrifying revelations about the governing of our country for one department to go through.

Thomson is your new Gitmo

When you wanted the government's detainee holding facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba closed because it violated both US and International law, was a humanitarian blight, undermined our foreign policy, and provided a shiny recruiting tool for extremists and terrorists, one candidate rose up and said "I agree." His name was Barack Obama. Now that he's the President he has seen the problems Gitmo creates and has finally decided to do what we all implored him to to with the detainee facility: keep everything about it the same, but move it's location to Thomson, Illinois. That was all our big problem, right? That it was in Cuba? Let them explain it to you in a letter they sent explaining it to Rep. Mark Kirk of Illinois.

If Thomson is selected, we do not anticipate that any detainees currently held at Guantanamo Bay who are transferred to Thomson would be prosecuted in civilian courts.
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Nevertheless, and interagency review panel is in the final stages of determining the number of detainees who will continue to be held, and for whom no prosecution is planned.
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the Department of Justice will pursue prosecution of Guantanamo Bay detainees in Federal Court only when admissible evidence or potentially available admissible evidence will probably be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction.

So to recap: no one moved to Thomson will receive and actual trial in an American court, those who have deigned to have some measure of rights will be charged and tried under military commissions, and the rest will be held without charges of any kind. On the bright side, they will be beefing up security at Thomson beyond the standards of a Supermax prison, thus preventing the illiterate opium farmers from using their laser vision and super strength that only the walls of Gitmo could contain.

In other words, all we've changed at Gitmo is the location. I guess symbolic measure are just as good as real ones, right? I'm sure that the worldwide legal and human rights community, the Red Cross, the UN, American's who opposed Gitmo, and the Muslim world will totally appreciate the difference. I mean Gitmo sounds like such a harsh name. Thomson? Thomson is your friend, Thomson is your buddy, Thomson wouldn't beat and torture you while he illegally imprisoned you. No, this is perfectly acceptable. This is exactly what we asked for: a change in scenery for our illegally held detainees. I'm glad Obama listened.

We are governed by adults

In case you were worried that our health care debate wasn't consumed enough by childish spite and political gamesmanship when it wasn't being consumed by corporate cronyism, Joe Lieberman, the Only Senator That Matters, stepped in to remind you that the Senate is a serious place for serious thought by serious individuals.

But in the interview, Mr. Lieberman said that he grew apprehensive when a formal proposal began to take shape. He said he worried that the program would lead to financial trouble and contribute to the instability of the existing Medicare program.

And he said he was particularly troubled by the overly enthusiastic reaction to the proposal by some liberals, including Representative Anthony Weiner, Democrat of New York, who champions a fully government-run health care system.

“Congressman Weiner made a comment that Medicare-buy in is better than a public option, it’s the beginning of a road to single-payer,” Mr. Lieberman said. “Jacob Hacker, who’s a Yale professor who is actually the man who created the public option, said, ‘This is a dream. This is better than a public option. This is a giant step.’”

That's right, Joe Lieberman scuttled a plan to expand Medicare that he supported as the VP Candidate of the Democratic party and one that he was advocating as little as three months ago, because he thought some liberals liked it too much. That was the basis for denying Medicare coverage to everyone in this country aged 55-64, making liberals angry. And not only was he so oblivious to how childish that was that he openly gave it as the reason he got the Medicare expansion dropped, the debate and the media coverage of the debate has degraded so much that he'll still be treated as a serious man of principle who has coherent thoughts on important issues.

So when you look back and wonder why a major initiative to take some of the most at risk and expensive people in the insurance market off the private rolls and onto Medicare, reducing risk, costs, and premiums in everyone else's plans, remember that it wasn't because it was a bad idea, or because analysis showed it wouldn't work, or because it was unpopular. No, you didn't get cheaper and better access to health care cause a guy wanted to stick it to liberals an punish them for liking something. Well done, Joe. We're all very sorry voters actually said they preferred Ned Lamont to you in the Democratic party. I can't even think of why they would think that. Well, you sure showed us. Thanks for acting like an adult.

Today in design

What is that? It's Sir John Chilcot standing in front of a nicely designed and official looking sign for the UK's Iraq Inquiry, the British Government's official attempt to find out what the fuck happened to drag the UK into our ill advised war. Serifs and a fancy 'Q' tail? Is that the ubiquitous movie poster favorite Trajan font? England you do know how to investigate a foreign policy disaster with style.

Will we have a nicely designed sign for our Iraq Inquiry? No, we aren't even going to have an inquiry, let alone a sign. No, looking into the run-up to Iraq would be "focusing on the past" and we have to many things in the future to look towards. Namely, not having an Afghanistan Escalation Inquiry.

Quote of the Day

Two Democratic Senators decided to fire the first official salvos in what I'm sure will be the mass movement to get "Sacrificing the public option meant that we got to keep all the other awesome stuff, so this all worked out perfectly", "Actually the bill is really, really, totally good", "An important step...", and "This was a win for progressives" all subsumed into the collective wisdom of the health care battle:

“If you compared it to the alternative, it looks good,” said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, about the prospect of moving ahead with a measure that does not have a public health insurance option. “If you compare it to the possibilities, it looks pretty sad.”
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“There is enough good in this bill that we ought to move it” even without the Medicare buy-in, Mr. Harkin said.

Well sure Sheldon, if you compare this bill to filling American's mouths in with cement as a cackling madman kills our family pets, then this bill is staggeringly awesome. Otherwise.... eh.

And Senator Harkin, if you consider "enough good" to be no real cost containment alternatives to provide competition to the private plans we're all going to be forced to buy, meaning we'll have to rely on the goodness of insurance companies not to gouge our eyes out and skullfuck us, well then I shudder to think of the rude awakening you'll receive when you don't have the government negotiating your health care plan. Actually, you'll probably be on Medicare by the time that happens, so no worries.

I know you're trying to ease the blow of biting into eat a shit sandwich, but "No, it actually tastes good" isn't really doing it for me.

'Tis the season

Don't worry Christians, CBS didn't forget about you.

Picture of the day

Because we need something pretty to look at on a day like today, Wired Science shows us the first image of the newly commissioned VISTA (the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) telescope that just went online for the European Southern Observatory’s outpost in the Chilean desert. It went a got a picture of the Flame Nebula with it's all-powerful "superior to regular visible light telescopes" infrared witchcraft.

Click to embiggen.

Showing us who's the boss

Yesterday we heard from Larry Summers, talking about how, in the end, Wall Street will do what's right for the American people because "we were there for them." Well, that statement also happened to coincide with a meeting the President was having with the major heads of financial corporations on things like executive compensation, new regulations, and lending. Thankfully, a few of our financial betters decided to show just how thankful they were.

President Obama didn’t exactly look thrilled as he stared at the Polycom speakerphone in front of him. “Well, I appreciate you guys calling in,” he began the meeting at the White House with Wall Street’s top brass on Monday.

He was, of course, referring to the three conspicuously absent attendees who were being piped in by telephone: Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs; John J. Mack, chairman of Morgan Stanley; and Richard D. Parsons, chairman of Citigroup.

Their excuse? “Inclement weather,” according to the White House. More precisely, fog delayed flights into Reagan National Airport.

Awww, fog. Shame there isn't a high speed rail system connecting the two cities, just as it's also a shame that the fog was only bad enough for those three not to make it out of New York.I guess there just wasn't a sense of urgency, seeing as they weren't going to be getting any more billions in return for showing up.

On the bright side, they are saying there has to be major financial reforms. Sure, the armies of lobbyists they pay and their Congressional toadies are saying something else, but the CEO's are pretending really hard. In the end, isn't that repayment enough? Isn't putting up a thin candy shell of humility, gratitude, and claims that you're ready to act like humans again "doing what's right'? It'll just makes the loophole riddled bill that Congress passes and Wall Street loves easier to swallow. Imagine how hard that bill would be to take if these CEO's acted likes assholes the entire way through the process?

Next time make more of an effort to catch a plane: it makes it easier for us to pretend you care. Our psyches are fragile enough as it is, what with lending dried up and no jobs. We need some phony showmanship, so we can at least pretend we got something out of the global financial apocalypse. Can't you at least give us that?

Legalese

per·son (pûrsn)
n.
1. a human being, whether man, woman, or child
2. a human being as distinguished from an animal or a thing.
3. You know, except if they're imprisoned by the US on Guantanamo Bay: See unperson

What, don't believe me? DC circuit court ruled it so and the Supreme Court upheld it, making it the law of the land.

Today, the United States Supreme Court refused to review a lower court’s dismissal of a case brought by four British former detainees against Donald Rumsfeld and senior military officers for ordering torture and religious abuse at Guantánamo. The British detainees spent more than two years in Guantanamo and were repatriated to the U.K. in 2004.

The Obama administration had asked the court not to hear the case. By refusing to hear the case, the Court let stand an earlier opinion by the D.C. Circuit Court which found that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a statute that applies by its terms to all “persons” did not apply to detainees at Guantanamo, effectively ruling that the detainees are not persons at all for purposes of U.S. law.

Furthermore their rights under the Geneva Conventions were waived because “torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military’s detention of suspected enemy combatants.” Makes sense to me. I mean if you don't want to be tortured, you shouldn't allow the US to say you're an enemy combatant.

Furthermore it was ruled that anyone being charged with torture wasn't liable, because after all, how was our government supposed to know that laws governed their actions and that detainees had rights? Again: makes sense. Courts have been affirming this standard for years; no one can be reasonably expected to believe that detainees have rights in this country.

Don't worry, this is only for the purposes of US law. If these guys wanted to get credit cards and adjustable rate mortgages, they'd still be allowed to.

So just in case you were worried, don't be. The garish social morays of the 20th Century, where torture was called torture and men were prosecuted for it, is dead and buried. Torture is no longer a war crime, it's a "foreseeable consequence". People who torture are no longer "war criminals", they're just men who couldn't be expected to know that laws mean something. As we've seen: laws don't mean anything. And what's most heartening is now we have two Presidents and a Supreme Court who agree. I just hope they call up the Oxford dictionary people, we'll want to get that whole "person" definition modified up to US legal standards ASAP. Otherwise we'll just look like idiots.