Sanity at last

Full text.

VOTE

Update:

Shut up shut up shut up!1!

Or you will get stomped, handcuffed, threatened, and wrestled to the ground. All because teabaggers love God, the Constitution, and free speech....

Update: waterboarded....

Congress actually DID do stuff this last session....

Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly:

Remember, this isn't about merit. Gallup didn't ask whether folks like what Congress did; it asked whether people perceive the Congress has having accomplished more or less than the typical Congress. Whether one is fully satisfied or not, denying the policy breakthroughs of the last two years is a serious mistake.

Evaluating the quality of these accomplishments is a subjective question, open to all kinds of competing opinions. Evaluating whether the accomplishments exceed the norm is an objective question and the answer, whether people realize it or not, is unambiguous.

I don't expect the public to have an extensive knowledge of federal policymaking history, but I at least hoped Americans would realize the scope of recent accomplishments. We are, after all, talking about a two-year span in which Congress passed and the president signed the Affordable Care Act, the Recovery Act, Wall Street reform, student loan reform, Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, new regulation of the credit card industry, new regulation of the tobacco industry, a national service bill, expanded stem-cell research, the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, the most sweeping land-protection act in 15 years, etc. Policymakers might yet add to this list in the lame-duck session.

Some of these efforts have been decades in the making. In the case of health care reform, politicians have been talking about a major overhaul for a full century, but it took this Congress and this president to get it done.

Doesn't look like a happy camper...

An eight-week-old female lion cub swims through fall leaves during a swim test at the National Zoo in Washington, Tuesday, Oct. 26, 2010. The test was to make sure the four cubs will be safe around the water feature when they are put on public display, which is expected to take place in late December. The test was very successful according to the lion keepers. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Thank god for Rachel Maddow

Via Pandagon.

It's good to yell back

It takes them by surprise....

They think we'll eat seafood from the Gulf?

Stop telling us it's all clean now.

MATTHEW HINTON / THE TIMES-PICAYUNE Oil was spotted in West Bay just west of the Southwest Pass of the Mississippi River, seen at top left, by the Gulf of Mexico Friday October 22, 2010.

TV political ads....

And Friday Cat blogging together in one!

Scary Muslims wearing scary clothes

Be afraid!

These people have oil in their bodies

Questions questions questions....

This would explain a lot:

Parallel universe?!

Cat fight?

Rush Limbaugh Picks On Karl Rove For Tea Party Comments

They're never going away, are they?

Creationism lives on in US public schools

A Cirrate octopus (rare and therefore extinctly edible?):



Coming around to see ourselves going?

Astronomers find oldest galaxy yet

Says right there in black and white....

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Update: Thomas Jefferson in a letter to the Danbury Baptist association in Connecticut.:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.

Update10/21: The Dunning–Kruger effect which is apparently the strongest in Americans:

Kruger and Dunning proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:

tend to overestimate their own level of skill;

fail to recognize genuine skill in others;

fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy;

recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they can be trained to substantially improve.

Imagine sending info over the net

That would build a Lego house on Mars or a replacement tool in the Arctic or an appliance for your home....

Grover as Old Spice Man

Mark Twain

Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.

The world according to ...

San Francisco.

McCain/Palin.

Jesusland. (Better pic here)

Monsanto.

The Moon.

Cool views of the world according to subjects.

Stupidity and insanity and banksters run amok

Wisconsin Senate hopeful Ron Johnson in all his glory.

Rand Paul.

Teapartiers love Ayn Rand but have no idea who she really was. Sickeningly,

...she became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation.

Being rewarded for torture:

A psychologist whose research was used in constructing the US's program to torture terrorism suspects has been granted a $31-million no-bid Army contract to provide "resilience training" to US soldiers.

The Pentagon needs more money:

The latest talking point du jour has been around in one form or another for years. It asks us to forget that A) America spends more on defense than every other major nation combined and B) the Pentagon, whose annual budget is now approaching World War II levels in inflation-adjusted terms, has lost track of trillions of taxpayer dollars. In light of those troubling truths, we are nonetheless urged by Beltway Republicans to focus on the fact that defense spending is "4.9 percent of our gross domestic product, significantly below the average of 6.5 percent since World War II," as a recent Wall Street Journal editorial proclaimed.

That widely circulated article, aimed squarely at grassroots conservatives, was jointly written by three of the most influential Republican think tanks in Washington -- the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and the Foreign Policy Initiative. And like clockwork, the "percentage of GDP" nugget went from their pen to the GOP's well-oiled media machine.

For those who just don't have enough:

A gold and jewel bedazzled version of Monopoly worth $2 million is heading to Wall Street this Friday. That's not a metaphor.

Crafted by master jeweler Sidney Mobell and 22 years in the making, the set features dice with 42-cut diamonds and a photo-etched 18k gold board.

Krugman on the lack of property mortgage documents:

True to form, the Obama administration’s response has been to oppose any action that might upset the banks, like a temporary moratorium on foreclosures while some of the issues are resolved. Instead, it is asking the banks, very nicely, to behave better and clean up their act. I mean, that’s worked so well in the past, right?

The response from the right is, however, even worse. Republicans in Congress are lying low, but conservative commentators like those at The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page have come out dismissing the lack of proper documents as a triviality. In effect, they’re saying that if a bank says it owns your house, we should just take its word. To me, this evokes the days when noblemen felt free to take whatever they wanted, knowing that peasants had no standing in the courts. But then, I suspect that some people regard those as the good old days.

What should be happening? The excesses of the bubble years have created a legal morass, in which property rights are ill defined because nobody has proper documentation. And where no clear property rights exist, it’s the government’s job to create them.

That won’t be easy, but there are good ideas out there. For example, the Center for American Progress has proposed giving mortgage counselors and other public entities the power to modify troubled loans directly, with their judgment standing unless appealed by the mortgage servicer. This would do a lot to clarify matters and help extract us from the morass.

One thing is for sure: What we’re doing now isn’t working. And pretending that things are O.K. won’t convince anyone.

It gets better

If you have time for only one thing today, watch this.

I love these kinds of inventions

The Seakettle.



Especially because I read Survive the Savage Sea and Adrift: 76 Days Lost at Sea.

Dave

The movie that shows what a government could do if it really felt like governing:

Why are we giving the insane

Acknowledgement by the press?

Why?

You can make any of the holy books

Justify almost anything:

Internetal tubing

Today is 10/10/10. What did Nostradamus and the Aztecs say about this?

Fathers.

Time capsule: For 70 years the Parisian apartment had been left uninhabited, under lock and key, the rent faithfully paid but no hint of what was inside.

My son was just given one of these. We're rich!!1! ... or he's rich and we're related so he better share!1!!1

And speaking of the rich:

Donald Duck and Glenn Beck:

Mickey's response to Donald Duck's smear of Glenn Beck:

We can't live without land.

Bee happy...

Scientists may finally understand what is causing the Colony Collapse Disorder:

Since 2006, 20 to 40 percent of the bee colonies in the United States alone have suffered “colony collapse.” Suspected culprits ranged from pesticides to genetically modified food.

Now, a unique partnership — of military scientists and entomologists — appears to have achieved a major breakthrough: identifying a new suspect, or two.

A fungus tag-teaming with a virus have apparently interacted to cause the problem, according to a paper by Army scientists in Maryland and bee experts in Montana in the online science journal PLoS One.

Exactly how that combination kills bees remains uncertain, the scientists said — a subject for the next round of research. But there are solid clues: both the virus and the fungus proliferate in cool, damp weather, and both do their dirty work in the bee gut, suggesting that insect nutrition is somehow compromised.

Only ugly old widows can apply?

What part of reality does DeMint actually connect with?

DeMint: Sexually Active Unmarried Women And Gay Teachers Should Be Barred From Classrooms

We are finally getting down to the very essence of the 'family values' party. The party of 'You Better Not Be Doing What I Think You're Doing!!'

Where is Gollum?

Is it Caturday or just Friday Cat blogging?

I can never remember when it's dark outside and spooky sounds are crickling and creaking and something moves in the bushes and .....

Blog sprinkles

The Brits are being droned?

Two official safety inquiries took place into the military use of drones over southern England after near-collisions with helicopters, the Guardian can reveal.

The investigations are the first of their kind involving unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which are increasingly being flown in British civilian airspace after extensive use in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obviously the drone operators were distracted by eating cheetos or something. Gotta get real gamers to operate the things, they would know how to avoid collisions!

How many accents can you do?



The GOP will not.. no they won't! ... WON'T eat their evil nasty green ugly vegetables. So there!

Was Christine O'Donnell going from A to Z with her religious quest to see which one would offer the best way to make money?

Two hope blogs for the price of one!!

We could have predicted that all the gay bashing that has gone on would lead to youthful gays killing themselves in despair. Hate speech leads to hate crimes.

And GOPs will claim when caught that they were only joking!