76003.1414

Wait!

2009-12-22T09:14:00.001-05:00

Six? Degrees? That can't be good, can it?

Put some egg in that nog and let the merriment begin

2009-12-22T09:11:00.001-05:00

WASHINGTON – The Senate is at work unusually early and voting on health care as Democrats zero in on their goal of passing President Barack Obama's signature issue by Christmas.

link: Senate starts early morn votes on health care Tues - Yahoo! News

It may be a crappy bill but they got it done by Christmas. So sit down and shut up. You can believe in that.

Look, I've said before and more than once, I have no horse in this health care race. I already have the commiefascist socialist pinko-leaning government health care - my doctor is a government employee - with which arrangement I am well pleased and for which exceeding grateful. I see no reason why you shouldn't get the same good deal but apparently the.... Oh. Health care industry. Does.

Ahh. I get it now.

Oh well. Jingle bells.

Next: Spring

2009-12-22T06:16:00.001-05:00

It was, after all, "Grand Theft Auto"

2009-12-22T06:15:00.001-05:00

BOSTON – Police say a frustrated Boston woman called 911 to say she couldn't get her 14-year-old son to stop playing video games and go to sleep....

Two officers who responded to the house persuaded the child to obey his mother.

link: Boston mom calls 911 over over son's video game habit - Yahoo! News

So it doesn't seem I'm missing all that much

2009-12-21T11:51:00.001-05:00

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration took aim Monday at tarmac horror stories, ordering airlines to let passengers stuck in stranded airplanes to disembark after three hours.

link: Gov't imposes 3-hour limit on tarmac strandings - Yahoo! News

I haven't flown anywhere since the early 90's so I am blissfully unaware of what commercial flying is like these days. If it's like this - people stuck for 2, 3 hours on a plane while the plane itself just sits there on the ground - I'd just as soon take the bus.

Latitude: 42.59 N

2009-12-21T06:02:00.001-05:00

The first day of winter.

The big blizzard...

2009-12-20T11:10:00.001-05:00

...that would be both the paralyzingly disastrous part and the seriously awful part, missed. Or, at least, missed us; we got not a flake. As a matter of fact it's a warmish 22º degrees out there this morning, no sun but also no wind. So what was all the shouting about, anyway?

Alright!

2009-12-19T16:46:00.002-05:00

We're only in the "Highly Disruptive," not the "Paralyzing" path (thanks, Accuweather!) of the big Nor'easter that's blowing up the coast this afternoon. Personally, I'd rather just go to bed blissfully unaware and see what tomorrow brings (good morning, dude, you're screwed).

Nobody left on the Left

2009-12-19T12:30:00.001-05:00

Turn off MSNBC. Tune out Howard Dean and Keith Olbermann. The White House has its liberal wing in hand on health care, says White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

“There are no liberals left to get” in the Senate, Emanuel said in an interview, shrugging off some noise from the likes of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) that a few liberals might bolt over the compromises made with conservative Democrats.

link: Rahm Emanuel: Don’t Worry About the Left - Washington Wire - WSJ

Kids today

2009-12-19T07:55:00.001-05:00

“Years ago children were satisfied with Jack-in-the-boxes, monkey-on-the-sticks, and other inexpensive baubles, but nowadays they’re looking for a whole string of iron cars, miniature automobiles, and flying machines,” laments Santa Claus in this New York Times feature story from Dec. 19, 1909.

Break out the mittens, darlin, the sun is broke

2009-12-18T08:14:00.001-05:00

The sun is up but the temp keeps going down. My widget had a 4 about two hours ago. Now it has a 1. That can't be good.

So this is what it's come to now?

2009-12-18T08:05:00.001-05:00

"Yes we can" has become "Oh well, at least it's better than nothing"?

Obama said the United States has acted boldly by vowing to reduce heat-trapping gasses and help other nations pay for similar efforts. But he indirectly acknowledged that some countries feel the United States is not doing enough, and he said an imperfect accord is better than an impasse.

link: Obama: Imperfect climate deal better than none - Yahoo! News

Climatecare is starting to sound a whole lot like healthcare to me.

Throw the rascals out

2009-12-18T07:21:00.001-05:00

We are slouching toward health-care reform that's better than nothing but far worse than we had imagined it would be....In all likelihood, the White House and the Dems eventually will get a bill they can call "reform," but they will not be able to say with straight faces that the reform is a significant improvement over the terrible system we already have.

link: Robert Reich: Slouching Toward Health Care Reform

War games

2009-12-18T05:33:00.001-05:00

WASHINGTON – Insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan have hacked into live video feeds from Predator drones, a key weapon in a Pentagon spy system that serves as the military's eyes in the sky for surveillance and intelligence collection....

Shiite fighters in Iraq used off-the-shelf software programs such as SkyGrabber — available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet — to regularly capture drone video feeds, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. The interception, first done there at least a year ago, was possible because the remotely flown planes had unprotected communications links.

link: Pentagon: Insurgents intercepted drone spy videos - Yahoo! News

Sounds perfect then

2009-12-17T11:48:00.001-05:00

Liberals love Costco because they pay their workers about 40 percent more than their big box rivals.

Conservatives love them because they sell Sarah Palin’s book by the pallet, next to the camo wear.

link: Clueless in Costco - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com

What, another bake sale?

2009-12-17T11:29:00.001-05:00

COPENHAGEN – U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sought to put new life into flagging U.N. climate talks Thursday, announcing the U.S. would join others in raising $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poorer nations cope with global warming.

link: Clinton: US would help raise billions on climate - Yahoo! News

The good news is...

2009-12-17T08:38:00.001-05:00

...that although my work hours have been cut in half recently I am scheduled to get a pay increase on the remaining hours that'll net me another dollar a month and - here's the best part - all the classes I have left are in the afternoon. Which means today, for example, I don't have to walk to work in 11º cold but I can wait until noon or so, by which time the temp should be a sub-tropical 15 or possibly even 16 degrees. Also, I have all morning to sort of work myself up to the idea.

And it's not a very long walk anyway, only a few blocks. So, not bad.

Whoa!! What could this guy be smoking?

2009-12-17T08:12:00.001-05:00

US regional military commander General David Petraeus on Wednesday called Washington's fight against terrorism in Afghanistan "successful," even if Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has not been captured....

Petraeus said that even if bin Laden remains at large, "as a result of some of those efforts significant numbers of top 20 extremist leaders have of course been killed, and in some cases captured and removed from the picture."

Addressing the issue of efforts to train sufficient number of Afghan troops to succeed the United States ahead of an eventual troop pullout...

"It's very important we train as many as we can, as quickly as we can, without rushing to failure. Quantity does have a quality of its own but only if it has a reasonable quality as well," the general said.

link: The Raw Story | US war a success, even if bin Laden still at large: Petraeus

Significant numbers of top 20 extremist leaders?

Quantity has a quality of its own, but only if it has quality?

Must be some really good stuff.

Scientists get all jolly and like ho ho ho

2009-12-17T07:35:00.001-05:00

Here’s a look back at one of our Christmas research collections, this from 2001, in two separate parts. Among the more prominent items:

“Unilateral phrenic nerve paralysis from cutting down a Christmas tree,” R.H. Tiede, J.R. Hover, S.F. Davies, Southern Medical Journal, vol. 87, no. 11, November 1994, pp. 1161-3.

“Christmas or harvester’s eye,” G. Howsam, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Ophthalmology, vol. 22, no. 2, May 1994, pp. 147.

“Convulsions at Christmas,” S. Kirker, British Medical Journal, vol. 305, no. 6868, 19-26 December 1992, pp. 1580.

link: Improbable Research » Blog Archive

More on the stealth war

2009-12-16T15:37:00.001-05:00

Walter Pincus, Washington Post - The surge of 30,000 U.S. troops into Afghanistan could be accompanied by a surge of up to 56,000 contractors, vastly expanding the presence of personnel from the U.S. private sector in a war zone, according to a study by the Congressional Research Service.

CRS, which provides background information to members of Congress on a bipartisan basis, said it expects an additional 26,000 to 56,000 contractors to be sent to Afghanistan. That would bring the number of contractors in the country to anywhere from 130,000 to 160,000...

link: UNDERNEWS: OBAMA EXPECTED TO ADD 56,000 MERCENARIES TO AFGHANISTAN

Person of the Year

2009-12-16T10:36:00.001-05:00

Well, now I’ve seen everything.

link: TIME’s Person of the Year revealed - Matt Taibbi - Taibblog - True/Slant

Sorry, Bunky, you lose

2009-12-16T09:22:00.001-05:00

NEW YORK - The U.S. Treasury will not recover any portion of the $3.7 billion still outstanding in loans it made to automaker Chrysler under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, according to the terms of a plan filed with bankruptcy court on Tuesday.

link: Chrysler won’t repay $3.7 billion TARP loan - Autos- msnbc.com

And what was it that they wanted, does anybody know?

2009-12-16T09:18:00.001-05:00

WASHINGTON – History may be calling but time's running out to act by Christmas, so Senate Democrats are coming to terms with the idea they won't get everything they want from health care overhaul.

link: Dems ready to push health bill despite setbacks - Yahoo! News

Bingo

2009-12-15T16:31:00.001-05:00

As a candidate, Barack Obama endorsed the idea of allowing consumers to import cheaper pharmaceuticals from other industrialized countries. In the Senate he co-sponsored a bill that pushed the idea.

But now that he’s president and is taking money from the pharmaceutical lobby (PhRMA) to help get his bullshit health care bill passed, his administration is backtracking. His FDA chief Margaret Hamburg is pulling out the old safety canard. The CBO has estimated that a bill sponsored by Byron Dorgan to allow drug re-importation would save the government $19 billion over 10 years, and save consumers $80 billion.

There’s no legitimate reason to bar re-importation, except one: to preserve a subsidy for the pharmaceutical industry and, by extension, preserve the flow of campaign contributions to the Democratic Party....

link: PhRMA Hack: Campaign Promises Are Just That - Matt Taibbi - Taibblog - True/Slant

My New Year's Resolution this year...

2009-12-15T16:20:00.001-05:00

...is going to be quit getting organized, you moron, you're driving me crazy. I mean it. I am so organized right now I'm running out of things to do. Things I want to do, I mean. If this doesn't stop I will have to start doing things I don't want to do and I don't want to do that. Enough is enough.