Wednesday, July 30, 2008

In Case You Missed This: July 30

McCain's Tax Burden - McCain is fond of saying, "Senator Obama will raise your taxes; I won't." Apparently, that's not so true and now even the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal is calling McCain on his bull$#!#. Honestly, you'd think someone who has been in Congress for 30 years would be better at running for office. (Go Obama!)

McCain Goes Negative, Worrying Some in GOP - Also, McCain is getting desperate. Oh, and dirty. Don't forget dirty.

CIA Outlines Pakistani Links with Militants - Pakistan's Intelligence Services (ISI) are connected to militants in Afghanistan (they have links to the Taliban from well before 9/11) and may have been behind the recent bombing of the Indian Embassy in Afghanistan. They may also be behind recent violence along the Pakistani/Indian line of control in Kashmir. These may be attempts to undermine the current Pakistani government. So...basically...oh, crap.

Israeli PM to resign, won't run in party primary - Ehud Olmert is going to resign in September and will either be replaced by someone else in Kadima or there will have to be new elections, which Likud and former PM Benjamin Netanyahu will likely win. Either way, the already dim prospects of an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord in the near future have probably been extinguished. I have little doubt that Olmert is corrupt, but at least he was trying to look like he was trying to make a deal.

Zimbabwe to revalue its currency - Mugabe's answer to multi-million percent inflation? Just knock 10 zeros off of the currency denominations. God help that country.

The Return of Cheap Oil? - I read this and kept thinking, "How can people pretend that market speculation hasn't pushed up the price of oil?" How does oil drop $25/barrel in two weeks without that explanation? I'm not saying I have a solution but can we stop pretending that greedy mother#@#$ers aren't part of the problem?

Agreement Will Allow Iraqis to Compete - The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has deigned to allow Iraq's TWO Olympic athletes to compete in Beijing. Bravo. It isn't bad enough that the IOC is corrupt, and that they relentlessly shill for the Chinese government, but try kicking a country when they are down a little more. I wonder how much oil money Iraq had to kick to the IOC to get those two Iraqis into the games.

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Recommended Reading: July 29

Evangelicals warn against Romney on ticket - Ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaa! The Republicans continue to eat themselves. (Seriously though, can even Democrats screw this election up?)

Congress Lays Groundwork for 2009 - The Democrats are setting themselves up to actually do something in Congress next year. (Yikes!)

Kaine in 'Serious' Talks with Obama - Meh.

On al-Qaeda, Good News and Bad News - A RAND study released today says that the "War on Terror" needs to be dealt with as a police and intelligence matter. Could've used that info about six years ago.

This is awesome.

But not as awesome as this: Ted Stevens indicted - Enjoy prison, Mr. Bridge to Nowhere.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Jim Webb on the Colbert Report

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Monday, July 14, 2008

AM Punk Rock: Damien Marley - Welcome to Jamrock

[OK, not punk. But still good.]

"On the beach with a few club sodas
Bedtime stories, and pose like them name Chuck Norris
And don't know the real hardcore"

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Saturday, July 12, 2008

China and Russia Veto Mugabe Regime Sanctions

God...dammit.

Well, I guess if you are autocratic, repress and brutalize your own people, you can't really fault someone else when they do it.

But hey! The Olympics are going to be awesome, right? And let's make sure we don't do anything to curb our oil consumption so we can keep pumping money in to prop up the Putin/Medvedev regime!

Dirty...bastards.

[BTW, don't think that we didn't set ourselves up for this. Since Bush has thrown our moral authority in the toilet (along with a few Korans), we have no credibility on these types of issues anymore. (President Obama is the only way we can start to rebuild our credibility.)]

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Friday, July 11, 2008

AM Punk Rock: Dropkick Murphys - The Spicy McHaggis Jig

"I'll tell you a story, believe me it's true
a tale you'd best hope never happens to you."

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Thursday, July 10, 2008

AM Punk Rock: Tim Armstrong - Wake Up

"I got a new girl I'm seein'.
Just like the last one, jus' like the first one."

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Wednesday, July 09, 2008

AM Punk Rock: Rancid - Salvation

"I was down on my luck working for the salvation army.
The shelter is where I reside."

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Tuesday, July 08, 2008

AM Punk Rock: NOFX - Franco Un-American

"I don't want changes, I have no reactions.
Your dilemmas are my distractions."

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Monday, July 07, 2008

Webb Says "No" to V.P.

Suck.

Oh, well. Go Biden, I guess.

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Thursday, July 03, 2008

AM Punk Rock: Motion City Soundtrack - My Favorite Accident

"I spent two years alone with you."

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Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Recommended Reading: July 2

"U.S. Prodding UN Security Council to Punish Mugabe" - Nothing will come of this, of course. (I'm looking at you China, South Africa, and Russia.) Still, I'm glad to see the U.S. is finally doing something.

"Betancourt, U.S. Contractors Rescued from FARC" - This is unbelievable. I read an article yesterday (which I now wish I would have posted) about how the FARC is getting its @$$ kicked in Columbia. This just adds on to that decline. These were the highest profile hostages they had and hostages are rapidly becoming one of their few remaining strengths (along with $300 million/year in drug money, which eases the pain I'm sure.)

On another note, the decline of the FARC just goes to show that Hugo Chavez really can pick the right ponies to back: Socialism, the Castro brothers, and now the FARC. Suck it, fatty!

"Do We Need a Wartime President?" - Fareed Zakaria says, "no," and, once again, explains that we have horribly overreacted to the threat of Islamic terrorism.

"China Inspired Interrogations at Guantanamo" - Something else we've imported from China. How quaint:
"The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of 'coercive management techniques' for possible use on prisoners, including 'sleep deprivation,' 'prolonged constraint,' and 'exposure.'

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners."
"Plea for Aid to Avert Starvation" - World Bank President Robert Zoellick is asking world leaders to commit to increased food aid to help avoid severe starvation all over the world.

"South African Addicts Turn to AIDS Medications to Get High" - Africa is messed up.

AM Punk Rock: Bad Religion - Broken

"I know I'm not broken.
A little cracked,
but still I'm not broken"

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Tuesday, July 01, 2008

African Union Calls for Unity Government in Zimbabwe

I would say 'About damn time' but I'm honestly stunned that they said anything.

At least someone is paying attention to calls like this one.

PS: Cato has a paper on how to fix Zimbabwe's hyperinflation, which the paper notes has been 3.8 billion percent since 1997. Unbelievable. Also, the German company that supplies Zimbabwe with the paper it uses to print bank notes has cut off deliveries to the country in response to the call for sanctions.

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Recommended Reading: July 1

Everyday I email myself a list of links to articles that I read that day or that I want to read or blog about when I get home. Most items don't get the attention they deserve (due to the demands of my stupid actual life - curse my blissful happiness!)

Anyway, from now on I'm gonna try to throw down some basics about each article if I thin they merit reading. Whether they do or not, you can judge for yourself.

Here's today's batch:

"New Iraq Report: 15 of 18 Benchmarks Satisfactory" - I know this is somewhat sacrilegious to say on a left-leaning blog but things actually do seem to be getting better in Iraq. ("Better" of course being relative to the disastrous cluster#%@$ orgy of violence it has been.) I say, "Great!" That'll make it easier to pull as many of our troops out as possible and bring them home or send them to Afghanistan where the Taliban an al-Qaeda are doing just fine, thank you. Look, everyone knows Bush and company are idiots - nothing is going to change that at this point.

"Corporate Tax Cut Windfall" - Generally speaking, I think the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal are a bunch of #%@%ing liars (even before Rupert Murdoch). However, this piece on repatriating earnings from foreign subsidies of U.S. firms at a lower tax rate was intriguing. I'm all for bringing American investment back to America. I assume their conclusions are self-serving for their corporate masters, but there may be a middle path that could be beneficial to the U.S. economy. I assume it couldn't be worse than borrowing more money from China for stimulus checks.

"Officials Praise New Test for Drug-Resistant TB" -
"A new test that can detect multiple-drug-resistant tuberculosis in two days instead of the standard two to three months promises to help significantly improve treatment and prevent the spread of the airborne infection, the World Health Organization said on Monday."
Huge. Simply huge. That's all I can say.

"Dutch Smoking Ban Goes Into Effect" - I think this excerpt pretty much says it all:
"Patrons of cannabis cafes will still be allowed to smoke marijuana as long as it is not mixed with tobacco."
Only a bloody Dutchman.

NYT Op-Ed: Obama Can't Win the South (Except Virginia)

I really do like Virginia even more when I read things like this:
"Virginia, however, is the one Southern state that Mr. Obama has a reasonable chance of winning. And it’s precisely because the home of Robert E. Lee, as NBC News’s political director, Chuck Todd, has suggested, is seceding from the Confederacy."
And it only took 140 years!

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AM Punk Rock: NOFX - Leave It Alone

"I hear the voice of reason on the P.A."

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