- Sex-phobic anti-choicers removed contraception from the list of mandated benefits and, as Marcotte says, "watching all this nonsense go down, I'm forced to suggest that the major factor is that our government is still mainly run by a bunch of middle-aged men who've been shielded from having to deal honestly and empathetically with women's lives their whole lives, and therefore are prone to seeing women's concerns as disposable at best, and at worst, as frighteningly alien and needing to be controlled."
- Sen. Schumer complained, bloggers complained, and now a company that was going to build a wind farm in Texas using Chinese-made turbines is going to build a factory in the US that may create as many as 1,000 jobs.
- A GAO audit has revealed that OSHA statistics have been under-reporting workplace injuries for years by only relying on old, employer-reported data, which is routinely misrepresented. There's a chance that the new management will do something about this.
- Since when did police get the idea that it was necessary to Taser 10 year old girls because they're kicking and screaming? It's a 10 year old, for love of gods. Ten.
- The Colorado health insurance lobby really doesn't want to cover maternity care. It's too expensive, they say. Well, I'm sure that won't cost the rest of society anything if they get their way, will it? It's just a gaping hole in family budgets, sucking up a bunch of money at a time when surprising new costs materialize out of thin air. It only hurts kids by stressing their parents right the hell out when any older children may be feeling strange about a new baby, and the baby needs constant attention. It's just a big middle finger to everyone who takes on the work of raising the next generation of people. No BFD.
- Sens. Jim Webb and Jay Rockefeller have decided to be obstacles to climate legislation in the Senate, having sold their souls, respectively, to the nuclear and coal industry lobbies. I remember we used to make fun of Republicans over obstructing necessary bills like that for transparent greed.
Allow me to explain how our federal government works. To begin with, by the federal government I mean Democrats and Republicans working together. And the only thing dumber than a Democrat or a Republican is when those pr*cks work together. You see, in our two-party system, the Democrats are the party of no ideas and the Republicans are the party of bad ideas.
It usually goes something like this. A Republican will stand up in Congress and say, "I've got a really bad idea." And a Democrat will immediately jump to his feet and declare, "And I'm gonna make it sh*ttier."
- Corporate lobbyists are caught writing floor speeches for both parties, changed slightly whether the speaker is a Democrat or a Republican, because evidently, Congress has figured out how to outsource their own brains.
- When men are surveyed about whether they've engaged in specific behaviors, a lot of them admit to being rapists and sexual harassers. The 4% of them who rape repeatedly account for over a quarter of all violence perpetrated against women and children.
- Mangrove swamps are more valuable than the shrimp farms that often replace them. A new United Nations report has delved into the economic benefits of these and other ecosystems and found that the services they provide are generally very expensive to replace by technological means.
- If it costs the US government $3 million to settle every illegal wiretapping case, I think they should take it out of the Bush and Cheney family fortunes. Also, I now have a keen interest in finding out if I've been wiretapped.
- The Slacktivist continues his walk-through of the Left Behind series, and Our Heroes' attempt to save Hattie Durham. The plot dissections work both as entertaining literary criticism and illuminating windows into the strains of Christian fundamentalism most likely to lead people to be Glenn Beck fans.
- "What if my mother had aborted me?" You wouldn't be around to have an opinion about it, that's what. Same as if your dad had worn a condom that night, or if your folks had decided do crosswords instead of each other, or, or, or, etc.
- Demonstrations in Iran on the anniversary of the seizure of the American embassy drew counter-protestors and police crackdowns, as it would seem that not all members of the Iranian public have forgotten the last election.
- The US never had much to fear from Najibullah Zazi. John Mueller explains at the link that if he's the top of the terrorist vanguard, we're probably pretty dang safe.
- A new scientific technique for gathering proxy data on ice coverage allows CO2 and ice sheet extent to be correlated 20 million years back. They found that, "Specifically, the last time that there was this much CO2 in the air, there was little to no sea ice in the Arctic, Greenland had little to no ice, there was essentially no ice on West Antarctica, and even East Antarctica was mostly ice-free."
- Via Raw Story, an elderly Michigan woman died of a tooth infection after Medicaid cuts stopped her dental coverage, and in completely unrelated news, Barclays' CEO tells churchgoers that bank profits are "not Satanic" but are instead totally compatible with Christianity.
- Global warming presents health risks to the public, particularly those of increased heat stress, asthma, pulmonary disease, and more rapid spread of infectious diseases.
- In a bid to cut municipal electricity costs and light pollution, the city of Toulouse has installed heat-sensitive streetlights that brighten when there are people nearby and dim when no one's around.
- In the embedded video, the mother-in-law of a pregnant 24 year old who died because she didn't have insurance tells the story of how she was turned away from a for-profit hospital and succumbed to pneumonia. Jenny Fritts was survived by her husband of five years and two year old daughter.
- It turns out not only to be wrong to fleece gullible and guilt-ridden people out of exorbitant amounts of money while appropriating Native American spiritual traditions, but also dangerous.
- They're pulling out all the stops for the Copenhagen climate summit and bringing out kids to beg world leaders to do the right thing. Why this story makes me want to switch to my 'eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die' fallback plan for dealing with certain doom, I can't say, but maybe you understand anyhow.
- The stimulus package, even if insufficient, may have saved 250,000 education jobs nationwide. That's a tenth of a percent fewer members of our 154 million strong labor force adding to the unemployment rolls, so, yay!
- If you live in the US and you're down about the corruption and lack of accountability in our politics, you can at least be glad that you don't live in Italy.
- J. Wayne Leonard, CEO of Entergy, a New Orleans-based utility company, recently warned that global warming could lead to humanity's extinction if we don't act quickly. He called for a cap on carbon pollution and said that the risk of inaction to future generations was too great to justify.
- It's possible to make saving the planet more fun, at least sometimes. If we can add ease, social reward, leisure and profit to the potential short-term benefits, we'll be set.
- Some things you need to know about genetically engineered food, aka, GMOs or genetically modified organisms.
- Apparently intent on alienating and offending everyone whose ancestry includes victims of widespread authoritarian oppression, Republicans are now comparing giving all Americans healthcare to Soviet-style gulags. The Khmer Rouge associations can't be far behind.
- I apologize to the person whose tweet I completely lost track of after I got this link from it, but I can't resist posting it anyway. If you're a total sci-fi dork, click here as soon as you have some time to kill. Good Star Trek, Blade Runner and BSG discussions, complaints about bad science in fiction, loads of terrible, terrible puns, hilarious jokes, and angst re the human condition. Just go.
- It's always irritating when you're "young" (some consider that term to apply to everyone under 45, it's slippery) to be told that you just don't know about certain things you don't remember, which is hardly your fault seeing as you weren't born yet. At 34, I really don't know whether I should call myself young or middle-aged, but different experiences do produce different thinking, or, as Chris might point out, demography wouldn't have the correlation it does with voting patterns. Having grown up in a strict, fundamentalist home, culturally frozen in a rigidly patriarchal past and identifying more with Leave It To Beaver than The Facts Of Life as a kid, I've had to acknowledge how those experiences often leave me relating better to the attitudes of feminist women 20-30 years my senior, the ones who grew up well surrounded by the kind of men who today run the US Senate.
This can produce weird internal dialogues that we needn't go into now, but it also does make me look at Avedon's analysis of how conservative policies could backfire on Democrats and let out a heartfelt, "Ayup." Because you can't expect people to know how bad, or good, anything was before they got to it, and you also can't just expect them to take your word for it.
- Wow. More economists come out of the closet as uninformed climate denialists. What do you expect from a discipline that routinely rejects the basic principles of thermodynamics?
- In Washington State, local Republicans are doing their best to drown government in a bathtub, and local journalists are doing their best to help them out by refusing to look at the facts. As above, so below, as they say.
- The Washington Post is hosting a discussion about whether young gays are coasting on the struggles of the previous generation. I have no basis for an opinion on this, and point it out to note with some amusement that it sounds kind of like the conversation that was happening in the feminist community during the primary.
- What coal plants scrub from smokestacks ends up in the water, including a range of toxic heavy metals and radioactive substances poorly regulated by existing laws. Just another good reminder that carbon dioxide isn't the only problematic byproduct of coal-fired power generation.
- Heads up, babies are supposed to be fat. Under 6 months, the fatter, the better. There's no earthly frakking reason, barring an extremely rare case of genetic obesity, that anyone should ever have a conversation about putting an otherwise healthy baby, especially if they're breastfeeding, on a frakking diet. Ever.
- I really feel for the Obama White House, being expected to come through on their promises, since it's true that changing the system is very difficult. Though maybe these yippee-ki-yay campaign gladhanders should have realized this earlier and thought through the "YES WE CAN!" theme a little bit better. Perhaps instead of having to hope today that we'll forget what they said last year, they should have run a 'maybe we could' campaign, or an 'incremental improvements are within reach' campaign. But they didn't. So now they're sitting up there in their fancy suits telling us pinstripe-challenged peons that they're unqualified for the jobs they applied for, and also that they were lying. Yet this reflects badly ... on us?
- The problem with change is that, as it was once rightly said, power concedes nothing without a demand. Nonetheless, word your demand too politely and you will get exactly no response. Act like a bunch of violent anti-abortion, Operation Rescue-style terrorists, and the only kind of change you can guarantee is that you will shift the world by varying margins towards fearful authoritarianism, hatred and isolation along class, gender and/or ethnic lines - which makes violence a non-starter if you care about getting to a progressive end goal.
So what should we do? Peaceful protest won out for the abolition, women's suffrage, anti-colonialism and civil rights movements, yet they all required great masses of people to demonstrate over periods of years. Though unlike other countries with active national strike cultures, not only has a strike ethic diminished in stature as an option in the activist toolkit, the national media barely reports on such events unless they are violent, represent authoritarian ideologies, or can readily be mocked. People seeking peaceful change in the US are often effectively isolated from sympathetic peers around the world and at home and turn only rarely to collective action solutions to shared problems.
Maybe an idea like these Common Security Clubs, which try to gather small groups of neighbors to talk about economic issues face to face, could help. It's hard to say. But the injustices piling up in this world and this country have got to be addressed.
Why can't I sleep on even a perfectly lovely Friday night with no work due tomorrow and the farmers market beckoning, when I was so zonked out earlier that I nodded off on a friends' couch? It isn't fair. Anyway, here's stuff I'm reading instead of enjoying a few restorative REM cycles, like that's so much to ask.
- Yes, Tom Tomorrow, I too wish Democrats would act like Republicans in their determination to pass healthcare. (Via) Alas, the way in which most Democrats who aren't Alan Grayson have chosen to act like Republicans is to suck up to big corporations and help the larger portion of their constituencies only when absolutely forced.
- Time off, even forced time off improves productivity. And they said that in the Harvard Business Review, so you either know that the matter has been thoroughly investigated, or that the DFHs have run totally amok.
- California, my home state, the state with an economy so large that if it were a separate country it would have qualified for the G8, is on track to become America's first failed state. The same Republican governance theories that brought us the drowning of New Orleans have made it impossible for the state to raise revenue, have cursed it with a legislature as dysfunctionally sociopathic as the US Senate, and brought it another puppet spokesmodel for governor whose entire platform consists of telling people to get out of the way of his Hummer. So to the Governator and the people controlling the stick up his bum, I say, with feeling, eff you and your H2.
- There are a lot of reasons why people are overweight, and not all overweight people are actually unhealthy, making a 'fat tax' on health care both stupid and cruel. Echoing the medication angle highlighted in the post, a doctor once put me on something for chronic migraines that had me gaining a pound a week as soon as I started it and for the entire month and a half (iirc) it took me to realize that a) it wasn't helping my migraines and b) the host of side effects was ruining my quality of life. I had the choice to stop taking it and found a very effective alternate treatment, but not everyone is so lucky. And last but not least, if accusations of irresponsibility are going to fly thick and fast, a great many of them need to stick to the food processing industry.
- Speaking of responsibility, Turkey is working at mending fences with Armenia, which is remarkable, on account of wanting to qualify to join the EU. They haven't resolved everything and Erdogan seems to be hoping he can at least downplay discussion of the 1915 genocide, but it's a step farther than a lot of people probably expected they'd go. It's amazing how many old, intractable disagreements can start to fade when a people starts pursuing more peaceable goals.
- Starting Nov. 1, an Oklahoma law will mandate publicizing demographic details about each abortion in the state. There is no other medical procedure subjected to this disrespect for patients' privacy, and no more stupid time than a few months after an actual doctor who performed abortions was murdered in cold blood while he was in his @ing church on @ing Sunday because some creeps made a sport of stalking him and publicly posting his every move. Is there really common ground with people who hate women this much? Maybe if you're a moron, or a 'moderate' Democrat with a bipartisanship fetish, but I *ing well repeat myself.
- Maybe Congress is mostly about the retirement plan, which is to say, the grossly overpaid lobbying jobs they get to grease up their former colleagues on behalf of corporate criminals.
- It's surprising to discover that the Obama administration is privately siding with Bush-era interpretations of search and seizure. Just shocked. I mean, he's been so progressive in fighting for the rights of women, the LGBT community, people without healthcare, getting us out of the wars, I'm confused. It's totally out of character for his administration to make nice public statements and then be so retrograde when it comes to actual policy.
- The health insurance industry is freaked out and contemplating a scary, 11th hour lobbying campaign. Corporatist tool Ceci Connolly says it's because they're wigging over the Baucus monstrosity, but it seems more likely that it's Pelosi's request to the CBO to score three different public option proposals. Anyone in Congress who hasn't considered just about everything the health and insurance professions have to say on the matter by now is slacking big time. I'm looking at you, Sen. Kent Conrad.
- Dude! Despite my snarky dismissal, someone may actually have invented fake trees that can sequester carbon from the atmosphere and maybe save our ecologically unrepentant behinds. That would be wicked cool.
- Ayn Rand was a greedy simpleton who founded the greedy, simplistic ideology because her mom gave away some of her toys to charity. My mom took things away from me when I was a kid, too. Though I got over it, because for gods' sake, that was decades ago.
- President Obama apparently backs the public option behind the scenes. We'll find out for sure when we see what ends up in the Senate merge, or later, in the conference report and the earlier it shows up in something the Senate has to vote on, the better.
- Officials "lost credibility" by telling everyone that the banks getting the first bailout help were in great shape, nothing to see here. If they thought no one would ever find out differently, they were clearly mistaken.
- In wingnuttia, the fact that some wealthy, educated women may decide to stay home with their children, as first reported even in the liberal New York Times, means that no working parents deserve help with child care expenses.
- Carol Browner, Obama's energy adviser, thinks a climate bill is unlikely this year. Probably bad news for US participation in the Copenhagen climate talks. Perhaps bad news for getting a bill at all. This year, the good reason is that these big world talks are coming up. Next year, the excuse may well be that it's an election year and you can't possibly expect Democrats to be pro-environment when someone might notice.
- A 4.4 million year old human ancestor has been uncovered in Ethiopia, with remarkably complete hands and feet, as well as the bones of other members of its species. The find reveals a previously unknown set of traits, along with sex-selective clues to the origins of bipedalism.
- Aid agencies need to respond to the elderly, who have different needs and may be key to supporting their families. That would be especially likely the case in AIDS-devastated regions of Africa, where the disease can hollow out the mid-range adult demographics, leaving behind grandparents and children.
- While you may have been alarmed by previous leafy green contamination scares, the agricultural industry's cure is worse than the disease, with California's pilot program having led to manic eradication of wildlife habitat and the trapping and poisoning of wild animals in the quest for the perfectly sterile farm.
- Look, if someone tells you they don't want to have sex with you, but you drug them and then have sex with them anyway, it's rape. Even if they're really slutty, or incredibly hot, or way too uptight for their own good, or in a seedy bar, or even, and this is key, if they're in your very own house, nay, your very own jacuzzi! And even if you're a really brilliant person, maybe especially then, because you should have f*ing known better. It's rape, and it's wrong.
- Sen. John Ensign is only right about how great health care in America is if you factor out people who die, and also misspoke in other ways in his comments to the Finance Committee.
- Naomi Klein interviews Michael Moore. It's a little known fact that if the two of them were ever in a room with Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner, that the ensuing antimatter reaction would leave a crater the size of the OECD.
- Ok, I want a Buddha machine. And not just because it has a cool name, but more because I'm kind of a musical barbarian who nonetheless can't stand when it's too quiet.
- It isn't that Obama is as bad as Bush, but that it's a low, low bar over which to defend his administration's retention of Bush's unconstitutional power grabs. Believers in the Super Secret Progressivism Theory of why Obama deserves our uncritical support no matter what he does may have other opinions on the matter, but I doubt I'd feel better informed after hearing them.
- As another major energy utility bolts the Chamber of Commerce over their retrograde climate denial, the CoC claims they never denied the science, in spite of mountains of recent evidence to the contrary.
- We're really only the best country in the world at bombing any more, and if that pisses people off to hear, then they should bloody well be encouraging Congress to fix that sh*t because it's also true that we still have the resources to turn it around.
- Many animal species are under serious extinction threat, including 20% of mammals and 29% of amphibians, with around 10% of the world's readily recognizable animal groupings at risk of vanishing forever. Since this state of affairs would surely be readily correctable by way of free market mechanisms if these species had any value whatsoever, so undoubtedly it'll be just fine.
- The successful rightwing permanent smear campaign will be targeting the SEIU next. But hey, the SEIU isn't perfect, so I don't know if I can be seen to give a damn. I'm even told they tried to destroy the union movement from the inside a couple years ago, and for all I know, they're still on the rampage to this day. Nurses, janitors and school bus drivers, you know, can't trust 'em. And should the rightwing nutjobs succeed in getting Congress to censure the SEIU for un-American activities, or something, I'm sure they'll be satisfied enough to stop this madcap campaign to smear, isolate and defund liberal political actors cold, right then. Nothing to see here, liberals, this is not your problem.
- Regular banks have gotten into the payday loan business by way of ridiculous overdraft fees. My solution: get a credit union account if you are eligible at all.
- Some people are too stupid to have gathered that Obama is a Christian and also think religion is hereditary. That last would explain a lot about the Palin family related phenomenon, but is in fact only 'true' in countries where religious affiliations/conversions are a matter of public record carrying specific legal and inheritance rights that are considered to pass to descendants in perpetuity, barring some other official conversion. Just, they should move to Iran or Saudi Arabia already. Their instincts would serve them better there.
- Tropical storm Ketsana wasn't finished after hitting into Cambodia and Vietnam, it went on to cause the worst flooding in the Phillipines in decades. According to the AP article, in addition to over 240 known deaths, "[t]he homes of some 2.3 million people are affected, and 390,000 are seeking shelter in relief centers, disaster officials said."
- Days of heavy storms have flooded parts of Georgia and Tennessee, killing 9, with the possibility that more could be on the way. The one minor bright spot is that Gov. Perdue won't have to offer up more prayers on behalf of Atlanta's water supply for a while.
- Iraq faces drought because of decreased snowfall in the mountains of Turkey. Kenya faces drought because agricultural deforestation has reduced the amount of water stored in their highland forest ecosystems, though also because their region is suffering a 5 year drought affecting them and 6 other countries in east Africa. Guatemala is experiencing the worst drought in 30 years and a food shortage from the resultant crop failure. Australia lost a million tons of topsoil in a drought-induced dust storm. California has been declared an agricultural disaster area by the USDA because drought has hit 50 of the state's 58 counties - which was already bad enough before Sean Hannity lied about the water situation.
- Police used sonic cannons, tear gas and stun grenades against demonstrators at the G20 in Pittsburgh. Police departments everywhere are apparently keen to see how that went over. Coming to a town near you? Jon Stewart didn't seem to think it was a big deal last night, but I don't like the idea of peaceful protesters and bystanders being treated like criminals.
- Health care issues aside, Sen. Harry Reid has done something impressively farsighted by introducing a bill to develop biochar technology for improved carbon cycle and water management. No snark, I'm blown away. It's possible that biochar could be done unwisely, but this article discusses how it could be used to benefit ailing forests and denuded soils in the US, while reducing invasive plants and fire risks in managed forests. And wow, just unreserved, holy frakkin' wow.
- The UK government will extend their popular car scrappage program, which has encouraged 200,000 Britons to trade in cars that were more than 10 years old, stimulating sales and saving manufacturing jobs.
- Sustainable food advocate Michael Pollan met some angry farmers and turned away their rage with mild answers.
- The leaders of Iran's air force and nuclear energy programs have pledged that Iran won't make a first strike and that the enrichment facility at Qom will be opened to IAEA inspections.
- Lastly, I didn't really expect to find any Leslie Fish on YouTube and I didn't find much, but find some, I did. Hope this one cheers you up in spite of the political environment.
- Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) has been looking into the behavior of the Federal Reserve for a while. No one's really minding the store over there, as determined in a hearing this last May.
- Grayson continued looking into the behavior of the Fed last week, questioning their general counsel on conducting GAO audits of the Fed and those empowered to act on their behalf to spend the money US taxpayers coughed up to let them throw around without oversight.
- Crazy conservatives make wild, wild claims about how "regulations" are the root of all evil, costing businesses all kinds of money. Funny how they never seem to worry about unregulated businesses stealing wages, wrecking people's health and selling defective products to an even greater degree than the regulated ones, and thus extracting huge amounts of wealth from individuals. Yeah, funny, ha ha.
- Dear The Government, we'd like unemployment to drop and for you to make sure that we will all, always, have healthcare, before you go proclaiming willy-nilly that 'the country' is out of the woods re this whole Great Recession thing. You mostly don't seem to care about household level losses of opportunity and profit, or general misery and fear, but look, the people who live in our households really, really do. Kissy the face, n.
- The interesting thing about making abortion illegal is that it doesn't make it more rare, just more expensive and difficult, as Australians have found. This has been highlighted recently by the case of Tegan Leach, a young Australian woman on trial for inducing a chemical abortion.
- It's mostly optional to check luggage on planes, except that it's a pain in the rear (not to mention expensive and environmentally irresponsible) to have an entire duplicate set of toiletries in 2 oz. or under sizes packed in a specific size ziploc bag that isn't sturdy enough to really protect your clothing in the event of minor spills. Hence, the airlines have a captive audience for these ridiculous baggage handling fees. I almost never checked bags before the federal government decided that it was possible to hide the smell of *ing acetone. If the Obama administration would repeal the stupid security theater provisions of our air travel standards, I bet they'd see a 10 percent approval bump pretty much immediately. (Via)
- The Democrats have been campaigning as a party on making health care affordable for years. They have been telling us that the only obstacles to getting everyone covered were Republicans, and this last campaign cycle they promised us a public health program for people left behind by private insurance. If, and reports are conflicting, if they think they can get away with telling their base to just put a little more mustard on the turd sandwich they're offering, then they are the dumbest pigboinkers to have ever crawled out of the primordial slime. We didn't vote for a Baucus-Snowe presidency, you timid, corporatist bottom-lickers.
- The president of the Maldives was at the UN climate conference this week, as he has been at previous such events where he's described the plight of his increasingly waterlogged country. His verdict? "We know deep down, you aren't really listening."Ouch. Harsh, but so, sotrue. Protests are rightly under way.
- US banks have the most bloated CEO salaries in the world. Looks like someone's wasting money on coddling whiny, incompetent employees. Too bad there isn't some industry or group of professionals whose job it is to advise against such pointless extravagance.
- For the first time ever, researchers have gotten some positive results from an AIDS vaccine trial. Results were limited and the study designers don't know why it worked for some of the participants, but this has been the only sign to date that a vaccine is even possible.
... Physics and chemistry demand swift and deep cuts in carbon emissions; political realism says to move slowly. In that fight, there's really only one choice. The tax code can be amended, but the laws of nature can't.
The only real hope is for decisive legislation from Congress; activists are calling for a law that commits the United States to early cuts, closes all coal-fired power plants and auctions the right to pollute so that we can raise the revenue to fund the transformation of our energy system. President Bush won't sign such a law, so it doesn't have to pass this fall; we're working to set the stage for 2009, when a new leader takes over. ...
- Yes, indeed, let us mourn the death of civility, because we have got nothing the frak else to worry about.
- UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown is going to personally attend the Copenhagen climate negotiations over replacing the expiring Kyoto protocol, and is urging fellow world leaders to attend so that greater commitments to action can be made. Still, Brown has yet to commit to effective emissions cuts by 2020, just like all the rest of the world leaders who are waiting for the other guy to go first.
- Some ACORN organizers said ridiculous things on camera, while the organization as a whole helps low-income communities keep their houses and find work. KBR electrocuted soldiers serving in Iraq, along with having covered up criminal acts by their employees while probably continuing to rip off the federal treasury as they have done, lo, these many years. Congress naturally cut off ACORN's funding, while KBR continues to be employed by our Dear Leaders.
- The fact that we still have lousy policies under this regime of patently useless conservative Democrats is no frakking accident. (via)
- It's nice to know that at least one Bush administration official is under investigation.
- America may well be drowning in McCarthyism and if it goes under, it will be for the same reasons a story about a very old mosque in Paris can remind me that less than 24 hours ago I had a conversation with a fellow American who asked me in all earnest if it was safe for their kid to go to Paris, considering how they heard on the news that France is 40% Muslim. A news source for this figure was not specified on request, but I have my guesses.
- Iran still does not have The Bomb, and their Supreme Leader fundamentally rejects nuclear weapons, much to the deep disappointment of all the people who would like to see them get blowed up like Iraq did.
- Global warming, climate disruption, what have you, will be extremely expensive, particularly for the global poor, whom it is likely to cost everything.
