The ultimate Republican win-win - destroy Obama AND America

They wouldn't take a deal that would have cut the accumulation of debt by anywhere from 2.7 to 4 trillion, so instead we get this. If they hate taxes so much, why do they want us all to pay higher interest on everything?

Obama could win and lose at the same time, striking a deal to avoid default but failing to pass muster on the substance of that deal with credit agencies, which could go ahead and downgrade the rating anyway.
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Hey America - Steinberg just called ya yeller

The only thing we have to fear...

I don't know why Europeans are so much better at change than we are ... For whatever reason, France -- no stranger to tradition -- could scrap its 350-year-old franc and embrace the euro while we can't even replace dollar bills with sturdier dollar coins.

Part of it is leadership vacuum -- our politicians continually run for re-election, and who wants to risk alienating the generous zinc industry by scrapping the penny? Americans resist change, not because we love the status quo, but because we're terrified that whatever comes next will be worse. That isn't a laudable national quality, but then we didn't invent timidity either. As Hamlet muses, we'd "rather bear those ills we have, than fly to others that we know not of. Thus conscience does make cowards of us all."

And there is a definite cowardly feel to this moment in American history. Serious problems face us, yet the public howl is for inaction.

Bush/sewer clown nexus on the ballot, or, San Francisco: not one of the pro-America parts of the country

News item: Every San Francisco election has something that captures the nation's attention - and this year it's Proposition R, the proposed renaming of a sewage-treatment plant after George W. Bush.

people who can draw are untrustworthy

Are there bigger America-haters out there anywhere than a smarty-pants America-hating cartoonist?

speaking of shockers -- who's hating America today?

The New York Times.

What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole...

The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

so it's good that FEMA sucks?

I think we can safely grasp the theme of Thomas Frank's book - HATE.

"The best public servant is the worst one. A thoroughly first-rate man in public service is corrosive. He eats holes in our liberties. The better he is and the longer he stays the greater the danger. If he is an enthusiast -- a bright-eyed madman who is frantic to make this the finest government in the world -- the black plague is a house pet by comparison."

But the onrushing flow swamps all taxonomies. Mass firing of federal prosecutors; bribing of newspaper columnists; pallets of shrink-wrapped cash "misplaced" in Iraq; inexperienced kids running the Baghdad stock exchange; the discovery that many of Alaska's leading politicians are apparently on the take -- our heads swim. We climb to the rooftop, but we cannot find the heights of irony from which we might laugh off the blend of thug and Pharisee that was Tom DeLay -- or dispel the nauseating suspicion, quickly becoming a certainty, that the government of our nation deliberately fibbed us into a pointless, catastrophic war...

Which leaves us to marvel helplessly at what appears to be a spectacular run of lousy luck. My, what a lot of bad apples they are growing these days!

why are the liberal media still lying about this?

Sarah Palin said yes, thanks, to a road to nowhere in Alaska

liberal media tied up in knots - HATERS!

Fortunately the good American people see through all this fact-mongering

Seeing Is Experiencing, But Better

As a mom, I don’t have to have any experience at these things. You would not ask a man to have any experience, and so I don’t understand why I am being asked about this. Do I think I need this experience?

No, I do not.

we also need to address the buggy whip shortage

Making America Stupid (there's a challenge... Ed.)
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN (HATES America)

Imagine for a minute that attending the Republican convention in St. Paul, sitting in a skybox overlooking the convention floor, were observers from Russia, Iran and Venezuela. And imagine for a minute what these observers would have been doing when Rudy Giuliani led the delegates in a chant of “drill, baby, drill!”

I’ll tell you what they would have been doing: the Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan observers would have been up out of their seats, exchanging high-fives and joining in the chant louder than anyone in the hall — “Yes! Yes! Drill, America, drill!” — because an America that is focused first and foremost on drilling for oil is an America more focused on feeding its oil habit than kicking it.

Why would Republicans, the party of business, want to focus our country on breathing life into a 19th-century technology — fossil fuels — rather than giving birth to a 21st-century technology — renewable energy? As I have argued before, it reminds me of someone who, on the eve of the I.T. revolution — on the eve of PCs and the Internet — is pounding the table for America to make more I.B.M. typewriters and carbon paper. “Typewriters, baby, typewriters.”
. . .

whole lot of America-hating going on here...

Lipstick on a Wing Nut

§ Forty-seven million Americans lack health insurance. John Goodman, who has advised McCain on healthcare, has proposed redefining them as covered because, he says, anyone can get care at an ER. Do you agree with him?

§ Cindy and John McCain say you have experience in foreign affairs because Alaska is next to Russia. When did you last speak with Prime Minister Putin, and what did you talk about?

§ Approximately how old is the earth? Five thousand years? 10,000? 5 billion?

§ You've suggested that God approves of the Iraq War and the Alaska pipeline. How do you know?

The Sliming of Osama in Venn Diagram Format, If You're Having Trouble Visualizing It... I Mean Obama

I wonder where the "uppity" bubble should go.

phokking scientists think they're so phokking smart

Science Idol: The Scientific Integrity Editorial Cartoon Contest
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It's like they're reading my mind... wait, they are reading my mind...

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SUCKS-like symptoms infest Team USA dugout

Night of the Tiffees Part II - The Horroring

With former/current K-Madders Tiffee, Koplove, LaPorta, Schierholtz, Marson, and most ominously, Dexter Fowler on his first day as a Prairie Chicken, these poor phokks never had a chance.

Jung Bong started for Korea. Winning pitcher: Y Suk Min.

KO yammering on about BushCo again...

Republicans have taken Nixon's disgraced tactics and approach to presidential power as their starting point. They have learned that if caught, deny it. If that doesn't work, ignore the fact you have been caught and just keep doing it, and claim you have the inherent power to do so. They can get away with it because right-wing talk radio and Fox Cable News have become the cheering section that did not exist during Watergate. As for oversight, during the first six years of the Bush/Cheney administration, the GOP-controlled Congress could not even spell the word "oversight." Only now are we approaching real tests of whether the Democratic Congress will go the distance to get the information they are entitled to have.

Then again, what would you expect from... wait... that was John Dean who said that. Sorry.

McDonald's - wid da Red Chinese

From Crain's, July 23:

Ads airing on Chinese TV depict Chinese athletes chowing down on Big Macs and the like, amid catchy music and the tag line, “I’m lovin’ it when China wins.”

In addition to the “Cheer for China” TV spot, the firm in April flew to Beijing the one and only Ronald McDonald, McDonald's Corp.'s “chief happiness officer,” as a press release puts it.

Mr. McDonald met with the five winners of a nationwide talent search “to find unique individuals to cheer for Chinese athletes during the Olympic Games period,” the press release says. More than 1 million people reportedly competed for the honor.

The release adds that Ronald McDonald and the five cheerers “danced steps in time with McDonald’s Shake Shake Fries rattles and special McDonald’s Cheering Cups to add to the excitement of the program. From today, McDonald’s is also extending the ‘I’m lovin’ China Win’ cheer and dance to employees at its restaurants as a customer greeting.”

added to k-mad's America-hating book list

The Outlaw Presidency

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Monday, July 14, 2008; 12:47 PM

Another major book chronicling the descent into lawlessness of the Bush presidency is out this week. This one is by Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, and it's called "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals." . . .

"The biggest torture-fueled wild-goose chase, of course, is the war in Iraq. Exhibit A, revisited in 'The Dark Side,' is Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an accused Qaeda commander whose torture was outsourced by the C.I.A. to Egypt. His fabricated tales of Saddam's biological and chemical W.M.D. -- and of nonexistent links between Iraq and Al Qaeda -- were cited by President Bush in his fateful Oct. 7, 2002, Cincinnati speech ginning up the war and by Mr. Powell in his subsequent United Nations presentation on Iraqi weaponry. Two F.B.I. officials told Ms. Mayer that Mr. al-Libi later explained his lies by saying: 'They were killing me. I had to tell them something.'"

And, if Bush is playing rope-a-dope with the press, it seems the America-haters may finally have punched themselves out...

. . . a polemic with the provocative title 'The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder,' has risen to best-seller status with nary a peep from the usual outlets that help sell books: cable television and book reviews in major daily newspapers....

"Mr. Bugliosi, in a recent telephone interview from his home in Los Angeles, said he had expected some resistance from the mainstream media because of the subject matter - the book lays a legal case for holding President Bush 'criminally responsible' for the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq - but not a virtual blackout...

"The editor of Newsweek, Jon Meacham, said he had not read the manuscript, but he offered a reason why the media might be silent: 'I think there's a kind of Bush-bashing fatigue out there.'"

A lot of why I feel mostly disgust when I watch football

is explained in this article better than I've ever been able to say it.

And Gene Upshaw is a disease:

July 12, 2008
Can Of Corn
Double Standards

by Dayn Perry

The unfortunate reality—both now and throughout recent decades—is that football as the NFL practices it is the most popular sport in the United States. There's no accounting for taste, of course, but this fact nonetheless speaks ill of our ability as a people to make sensible choices as consumers. Subjectively, as a nation it's a matter of our favoring a sport that's far less entertaining and compelling than what MLB offers us; objectively—and more importantly—it's a case of our favoring a sport that's morally bankrupt in comparison to leagues of similar aims and dimensions.

It's not a question that's often asked: Is the NFL somehow less "moral" than MLB? However, it's an important one to ask, and it's one that, I think, has a clear answer.

First, in comparing the two industries, there's the noisome labor structure of the NFL. It's the most violent of major professional team sports (more on that in a moment), and it's the one that's most structurally hostile toward its workforce. Mostly, this is the fault of the NFLPA and Gene Upshaw, who's less a fire-eyed labor leader than an obedient valet to the owners. So, we've got a league that has a salary cap and non-guaranteed contracts. It's tempting to view the outgrowths of labor-management negotiations as value-neutral and beyond some common range of moral understanding. If those subject to the NFLPA's terminal ankle-grabbing were, say, actuaries, schoolteachers, or lawyers, then perhaps that would be true. But professional football players have dangerous jobs. Whether it's the cumulative harm absorbed or the single, transformative incident—a crack-back block, a blindside sack, or a receiver simply going across the middle—the NFL player's gladiatorial existence means he should be entitled to more safeguards. But the owners won't give it to him, and the union won't fight for it on his behalf.

In spite of those grim possibilities, NFL players have their wages capped, and the concept of "contractual obligations" doesn't extend to their employers. This is precisely the sport that shouldn't countenance such an arrangement. That's because, as intimated above, the game of football at the highest level is uncommonly violent. There are those who have suffered life-altering spinal injuries (Darryl Stingley, Mike Utley, Dennis Byrd, and, more recently, Al Lucas, Kevin Everett, and Cedric Killings, to name just a few), there are those who have died from heatstroke (Korey Stringer), and then there are those whose brain functions have been hopelessly compromised (Andre Waters and Ted Johnson, among countless others). It's that last category of horrifying danger that's particularly troubling. While the neck injuries and heat-related deaths can be callously dismissed as trumped-up anecdotal accounts, the head injuries cannot. In fact, according to a University of North Carolina study conducted 1995-96, more than half of NFL players had been knocked unconscious at least once, and almost a third had suffered three or more concussions. Worse, almost three-fourths of those suffering concussions were given no time to recover from their injuries.

All of this is to say nothing of the epidemic of obesity among interior lineman. In 1990, for instance, 39 NFL players weighed in at 300 pounds of more. By 2005, that figure rose to 338. NFL organizations cherish beefy linemen, and there's a financial incentive for amateur linemen to meet the size standards established by the NFL. But what becomes of these players after they retire, when the 10,000-calorie diet isn't at least partially mitigated by the rigors of the job? Most are luckier than Thomas Herrion, in that they make it to retirement. However, later in life retired NFL linemen suffer heart disease at more than twice the rate of "civilians" of the same age.

Of course, if a player indeed suffers one of these workaday terrors, then his own resources may prove to be more useful than the league's disability plan. That disability plan, based on the demerits, was the subject of recent Congressional inquiry, and Upshaw has been known to threaten critics of it with severe bodily harm. On a certain level, it makes perfect sense—the NFL so routinely damages its employees that it necessarily must neglect some of them in order for its pension and disability systems to remain viable. If that's the case, then the structure itself is to be demonized and bullied, not those who seek redress.

This discussion of sports and their individual moral implications would be incomplete without touching upon the matter of performance-enhancing drugs. On this point, the NFL fails miserably. While baseball has been subject to transcendent levels of ridicule over its supposed problems, it's worth noting that the NFL's vaunted testing program was manifestly inadequate until recent changes took hold. But this does nothing to forgive the NFL's ugly, extensive history when it comes to steroid use, especially as exemplified by the Pittsburgh Steelers dynasty of the '70s. Imagine the spittle-flecked outrage that would follow if one of baseball's signature dynastic franchises had ever similarly been so indulgent of PED abuse.

It's football's sanctioned violence that urges to many players to seek such self-destructive edges over their rivals for roster spots and opponents on the field, and it's also that sanctioned violence that leads to violent tendencies among players, even at the lower levels. It doesn't take an accomplished theorist to surmise that, in the NFL, the scourge of domestic violence is an echo of those early tendencies. While no major sport does an exemplary job of punishing domestic violence, the NFL stands out as a main offender. In 2006, for instance, the Washington Post compiled a non-exhaustive list of NFL player arrests for the year. Of those 41 (!) arrests, five were for various flavors of domestic assault. Those numbers are hardly aberrant. They also don't include some of the more famous incidents (Warren Moon, Lawrence Phillips, Michael Pittman, and, of course, O.J. Simpson).

None of this is meant to imply that baseball is somehow a paragon of responsibility and virtue—it isn't. However, the facts bear out a few straightforward claims. Major League Baseball is less deadly, less physically damaging, less imbalanced in terms of player-owner relations, less socially perilous, and less culpable when it comes to the pervasive "Steroids Age" than is the more popular and more profitable NFL. That the NFL is, in fact, so popular and profitable should be a source of shame to American consumers—ruthlessness may be profitable, but it's not a virtue. It's a blood sport, so lavish it in scorn, not dollars.

Dayn Perry is an author of Baseball Prospectus. You can contact Dayn by clicking here or click here to see Dayn's other articles.

good stuff

Science Idol: The Scientific Integrity Editorial Cartoon Contest

look who's hating America tonight

Tonight on KO: In the discussion on FISA, Nancy Pelosi is sounding like Bush, and John Dean is sounding like Kucinich.