US POLITICS: AMERICANS, PLEASE WELCOME YOUR NEW PRESIDENT... SCOTT BROWN!

Was nice that we used all the non political time on this term fucking up the healthcare bill...

i was tryna convince myself its some kind of next level, so-stupid-it's-genius con game

makes me sad b/c he usually pops out of the fray with something smart and enlightening. this is distraction, bait and switch, shell game, i.e. status quo.

he pumps, now he fires over the middle intercepted i cant believe what im seeing right now

my roommate was rejoicing that obama is being forced to respond to the demands of the american people and ignore his own socialist agenda

favre analogy dead on

well, i don't think bad turnovers has been longterm meta of obama, but the feeling now...

the only real defense i can give of this (beyond the dipshit red-meat reasons, which, if hoos' roomate is any indicator, he won't get any credit for anyway) is that there is a huuuge political lead time necessary to make any kind of spending cuts. interest groups that are, uh, interested in the targeted money are going to have to be wooed/placated/beaten with sticks for a good long while. announce it now and maybe by 2011 it'll happen. or maybe by then, the numbers will look totally different and nobody will remember january '10 anyway.

what's super depressing is not just that the political effort to axe domestic discretionary spending is so large, it's that the political effort to axe defense spending or non-discretionary spending is basically impossible

http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/more-obama-freeze-backstory
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2010/01/26/defense/index.html

in MN two of the four prongs of a malpractice suit (duty, breach, cause, damage) are assessed by a panel of third party experts before the case can even be filed (if that's the word), so frivolous lawsuits get filtered out pretty early on, like so many electrolytes thru a glomerulus

― mage pit laceration (gbx), Monday, January 25, 2010 12:04 AM (Yesterday)

lol so how did renal midterm go

re: "climate change" as a term instead of "global warming"

Many people (including myself) prefer to use "climate change" because of the numerous expected consequences of our ghg emissions that go beyond warming itself -acidified oceans, more severe and frequent weather events, depleting freshwater stocks, the ongoing sixth great extinction event, spreading insect-borne diseases, etc.

I think the worry was that if you keep referring to "global warming" then the general public would think that the threat was limited to more sunburns and having to turn on the AC more often. Of course, that's pretty much happened anyway but…

See also: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/climate_by_any_other_name.html

But temperature change itself isn't the most severe effect of changing climate. Changes to precipitation patterns and sea level are likely to have much greater human impact than the higher temperatures alone. For this reason, scientific research on climate change encompasses far more than surface temperature change. So "global climate change" is the more scientifically accurate term. Like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we've chosen to emphasize global climate change on this website, and not global warming.

here's another theory: if the SOTU is going to make the case that health care reform is primarily a fiscal issue rather than a moral one, then the budget freeze is part of a larger sales job for that

but i'm well and truly sick of "11th dimensional chess" defenses at this point, and if it's true it would be pretty stupid.

don't really care about this proposed spending freeze myself, hard to say how things will actually shake out at this early stage.

so is healthcare just dead now? no bill? is everyone gonna act like that whole process just never happened...?

just like that season of "Dallas," which also lasted a year and went nowhere

huh?

Morbz watches Dallas

Morbz does Dallas

we're about to wake up with suzanne pleshette

At the tail end of Dallas' ninth season, Pamela Ewing (Victoria Principal) was awakened from her troubled slumbers by the sound of a familiar voice in her bathroom. Investigating, she peeked past the shower curtains -- and was astonished to find her ex-husband, Bobby Ewing (Patrick Duffy), who had presumably been killed at the end of the series' eighth season, alive and well! How could this be? Well, the opening scene of season ten explains all. Bobby was never killed -- and the entire ninth season was all a nightmare, dreamed up by poor Pamela! Thus, the writers have blithely negated everything that has happened during the previous season, and from this point forward, not even the most loyal of the series' fans will ever be able to take Dallas entirely seriously again.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

If only that last line were true of Dem voters

(really Shakey, even in the '80s I knew what happened on TV shows w/out watching them)

lol @ Newhart reference

wasn't St. Elsewhere all a dream as well

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Elsewhere#Final_episode

not quite

oh right the snow globe thing

i don't think i ever watched the show

(really Shakey, even in the '80s I knew what happened on TV shows w/out watching them)

so when did your ability to know what happened in movies w/out watching them kick in... 90s? 00s?

so is healthcare just dead now? no bill? is everyone gonna act like that whole process just never happened...?

no, it'll be a nice rallying point for both parties come the election - "they shot down health care! don't vote for them!" vs. "we shot down health care! vote for us"

read that quickly and thought the latter was supposed to be dems, and it sort of still fit :(

out loud lol

Uh . . . lol? I think?

Federal authorities have arrested four men on felony charges for attempting to infiltrate Sen. Mary Landrieu’s New Orleans office, including one filmmaker who targeted the community group ACORN last year in undercover videos.

Among those arrested was 25-year-old James O’Keefe, the conservative filmmaker, along with Joseph Basel, Robert Flanagan and Stan Dai, all 24. They were charged with entering federal property under false pretenses and attempting to gain access to the Democrat’s office by posing as telephone repairmen, according to a copy of an FBI affidavit unsealed Tuesday.

The complaint said that Flanagan and Basel each entered the premises, wearing light green fluorescent vests, denim paints and blue work shirts, tool belts and hard-hats. They informed a member of Landrieu’s staff that they were telephone repairmen and requested access to the main telephone at the reception desk.

At that point, the two men allegedly attempted to manipulate telephones and accessed the telephone closet, saying they needed to work on the entire system. The men, who said they left their credentials in their vehicles, were arrested by the U.S. Marshal’s Service soon afterward.

According to the FBI, the four men could each face up to 10 years and a fine of $250,000 if they are convicted.

O’Keefe made waves last year when he posed as a pimp and taped ACORN employees discussing a prostitution ring, embarrassing the group and forcing many of its supporters to spurn its ties with it.

If dems actually cared about environmental causes they would wrestle the debate from "Um....its gonna cause sea levels to rise in 100 years" to "Look at these cancer rates. Pollution has a HUMAN cost and we're all paying it." Conservatives are successfully keeping it in Global Warming/Climate Change territory because its a vague and abstract problem that people don't really care about.

a spending freeze doesn't even seem smart from a jaded political perspective. Are people really going to swallow a spending freeze one year after a stimulus? I guess no one ever loses money underestimating the American public...

Especially one that excludes defense spending, which pretty much everyone agrees is overrun with waste.

^^^the right does not agree with that at all

Or John Murtha.

as far as i can tell this is a stupid move design to appeal to 1) "independents"--who dont actually exist and 2) "republicans"--who, since they have no policies besides hating nonwhites, dont give a shit

max you really think the main purpose of this is to appeal to a group of people - that the q of whether it's sound economic policy or not is secondary? and if so isn't that y'know...like...horrible? not bein sarcastic or anything just thinking how terrible if decisions that affect everybody are being made primarily out of the desire to please, or not to displease, a demographic

J0hn, this happens all the time!

seems to me that's patently obvious what's going on, particularly since this is just a "proposal" with no binding legislative authority behind it

would u care 2 elucid8?

^^^^^^^^^^ awesome Prince title

Gore and carbon-credit profiteers were phrased the climate change issue as one of melting glaciers and hurricanes.

At the Pentagon and UK Ministry of Defence planners expect precipitation shifts that will cause continuous famine in the subcontinent, Sahel, and southern margins of Europe, and are worried about a "brown horde" of climate refugees. Gwynne Dyer is the expert on think tank plans for mid-century climate wars and "Lifeboat Britain". It takes a while to layout the details, but some of my climate denialist relatives seemed more concerned with this than with the 6th mass extinction.

max you really think the main purpose of this is to appeal to a group of people - that the q of whether it's sound economic policy or not is secondary? and if so isn't that y'know...like...horrible? not bein sarcastic or anything just thinking how terrible if decisions that affect everybody are being made primarily out of the desire to please, or not to displease, a demographic

― Lee Dorrian Gray (J0hn D.), Tuesday, January 26, 2010 5:34 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah it almost definitely has nothing to do w/ "sound economic policy" because 1) its not sound economic policy, according to anyone, even conservative economists 2) it has no authority--this is the responsibility of congress not the WH and 3) the political reality is that the actual proposed cuts that the WH is suggesting--which im sure will be targeted at wasteful spending like ag subsidies--will never get past congress in a million years

and the question of "horrible" is... well... i mean to have opinions about this you have to operate at a lot of different levels right? otherwise youd kill yourself. i dont know. i guess it is.

I repeat: when FDR did in 1937, in response to the complaints of conservative Democrats, it nearly threw our economy over the abyss, again.

*when FDR did it

it would be best for the democratic party and everyone in general if evan bayh was voted out of office in november, frankly

and i am usually ok with a big tent

have to say i'm enjoying the acorn pimp "filmmaker" getting himself into serious deep shit. anything for a little cheer atm...

1) "independents"--who dont actually exist

come on dude