I would hope, at this point, someone is willing to work on a new system:

...he recounted all the grief he and his family went through while work on their kitchen renovation dragged on and on and on. "During that time, I had blood lust against my contractor," Inslee said. "Six months went by, and he was still arguing with the plumber. Eight months went by, and there were still wires hanging down everywhere, and he was having trouble with the building inspector."

But eventually, the job got done. "And now I love that kitchen," Inslee recalls saying. "I bake bread in that kitchen. My wife cooks great meals in that kitchen. The contractor's now a buddy of mine, and I've had beers with him in that kitchen."

Inslee looked at his colleagues and declared: "We've got to finish the kitchen." His point was that Americans won't experience any of the benefits of health-care reform until Congress puts a new system in place.

Bipartisanship be damned.

It's time to actually do something...

Posted by Earl at 07:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Someone needs to bring this up:

Deputy national security adviser John Brennan complained Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press" that politicians, many of them Republicans, were unfairly criticizing the administration for partisan purposes and second-guessing the case with a "500-mile screwdriver" that reaches from Washington to the scene of the bombing attempt in Detroit.

"Quite frankly, I'm tiring of politicians using national security issues such as terrorism as a political football," Brennan said. "They are going out there. They're unknowing of the facts. And they're making charges and allegations that are not anchored in reality."

But they're living in their own reality, remember, and it's fundraising über alles.

Especially when they can ignore a shared reality:

Brennan said he had personally briefed top GOP lawmakers, including Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, on Christmas night about Abdulmutallab's arrest, and none of them raised objections.

Posted by Earl at 05:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Regarding the grifter and her basic lack of constitutional comprehension:

...if the constitution is so great and worth dying for, why is it bad to study it systematically?

So at every turn she invoked the constitution to undermine the constitution.

She is not about law, but is about power. We've had enough narcissistic sociopaths in politics.

I can only hope.

Posted by Earl at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Somewhere amidst all of the hoople and overpriced commercial airtime, there's a game being played.

I may watcha bit of it.

I may not.

Last I heard, the Colts were favored.

Take them and give the points.

Trust me...

Posted by Earl at 04:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Snap judgments from watching the tweets go by.

For example, Markos:

Tried to hire Scott Rasmussen to re-do our GOP-only poll, says he's now a "media company", no longer does commissioned polls.

So it would seem that Rasmussen is more interested in selling a preconceived narrative than polling at this point.

It's funny how Scott makes himself known on his website, however:

Scott Rasmussen, president of Rasmussen Reports, has been an independent pollster for more than a decade.

Funny how he doesn't explain that he's not really polling anymore.

Especially funny when Joe tries to use Scott's storytelling a little later.

I like my system at this point: If a BSer admits to wholly BSing, well, I think someone is attempting to BS me.

Simple, but effective.

Posted by Earl at 03:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Al Joyner has been a hero of mine since the Summer Olympics in 1984.

It's not as if I believe ads during the game in any case, but the Tebows are allowed their fantasies along with office clothing drives:

Support Planned Parenthood!

Posted by Earl at 01:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Forget almost everything I said before about Billo and Faux.

Thanks to @ebertchicago, the painfully obvious truth was presented to Billo this week.

Billo simply decided to edit it out.

Because that would be the "fair" and "balanced" thing to do in his world...

Posted by Earl at 01:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It seems to be the night for computer updating and browswer workability.

We'll see what happens in the near future...

Posted by Earl at 07:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was anticipating fun, of course.

I have to admit that it was a decent interview by Jon, but Billo is so extraordinarily obvious in his conversation-steering and attempting to fit all the words he can into his preconceived narrative, I can't really watch any more of him.

But I did say that I would have to wait for a reality-based take on it, so here it is:

Continue reading "Regarding Jon on Faux" »

Posted by Earl at 08:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Time will tell, but Krugman sees something:

So why the sudden ubiquity of deficit scare stories? It isn’t being driven by any actual news. It has been obvious for at least a year that the U.S. government would face an extended period of large deficits, and projections of those deficits haven’t changed much since last summer. Yet the drumbeat of dire fiscal warnings has grown vastly louder.

To me — and I’m not alone in this — the sudden outbreak of deficit hysteria brings back memories of the groupthink that took hold during the run-up to the Iraq war.

And we all know how well that turned out.

I'm partial to Fiore's take on this, actually.

Posted by Earl at 04:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I thought she would have a spine.

Well, now we know, don't we?

Continue reading "Lesson Learned" »

Posted by Earl at 04:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

FARK made me laugh tonight:

Saxby Chambliss works himself up into a Santorum over what repealing DADT will bring to the military

If you don't realize what everything means, get Googling...

Posted by Earl at 09:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

First reports had me jumping to this very preliminary conclusion when the story broke last week:

-- Haiti charges American missionaries with kidnapping children and criminal association, a government official says.

I wish I could say that I'm surprised.

Sadly, I am not surprised.

Posted by Earl at 07:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With gratitude to John Cole for pointing this out to me.

"So apparently aging sociopath John McCain slapped a hold NLRB nominee Craig Becker back in October, and even though Becker has been a nominee for six months and answered 280 written questions, McCain never found the time to submit any questions. Al Franken comes to the rescue:"

I'm enjoying Al more and more as the days go by:

My senator simply pointing out the obstructionism of the old fart.

W00t!

(Home internet is working again, also!)

Posted by Earl at 08:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Remember when this was as bad as it got?

Happy birthday, Danny!

Posted by Earl at 06:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I admit to a bit of laziness on my part.  I liked the idea of taking what painfully little money I have in the big bank and going to a local bank, but never got my stuff together to do it.

I don't feel as guilty as I should after reading this:

Money is fungible, protean, and highly mobile even when it looks locally rooted. That very mutability is part of what makes money so valuable: it’s the ideal form of general wealth that can instantly be turned into caviar, lodging, Swedish massage, or shares of Google.

There's that fungibility-thing again.

In other words

Getting banks under control is a matter of politics, not individual portfolio allocation decisions.

And good luck to us with all that...

Posted by Earl at 04:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Apparently:

The leader of the Conservatives apologised for his party's history of spearheading anti-gay legislation and went further than any previous Tory leader in laying out his belief in equal rights for all regardless of sexual preference.

Because laws would have nothing to do with that, right?

Update: The post's title is in reference to this.  Sorry for possible confusion...

Posted by Earl at 03:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Completely and verifiably wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

Got that?

If you need a visual, it's under the jump:

Continue reading "Maine's Senator, Completely Wrong" »

Posted by Earl at 01:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Shrunken so as not to scare you, of course:

Clicking for readability highly recommended!

Trying to scare you since 2001...

Posted by Earl at 12:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the most annoying traits of the previous administration was this:

We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.

The trouble has always been that reality has a funny way of not acting the way that your dreams envision.  That was the recurring thought that stuck in my head as I watched TRMS tonight.

Witness the frustration after the jump:

Continue reading "Still Dreaming of Their Own Reality..." »

Posted by Earl at 12:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From HuffPo:

If what astronomers believe is correct, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 happened to be correctly oriented just as two asteroids slammed into each other 90 million miles away from the Earth.

Scientists are guessing the collision happened at speeds over 11,000 miles per hour, which is what scientists believe the average speed of asteroid collisions are. (see photo below)

It seems that only one asteroid, named P/2010 A2, survived the impact and is seen in the image glowing just outside of the X-debris pattern. It is assumed that the other asteroid disintegrated fully.

Picture moved under the jump because I get too picky about format every once in a while...

Continue reading "Impressive Geekery" »

Posted by Earl at 07:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I mentioned the hypocrisy last night and it is good to see that it was covered today, as well.

Of course, one statement did seem to leap out at me:

Indeed, by the right's own logic, the military should ban heterosexual men.

And, as the title suggests, it's not as though logic ever seems to visit rightwingnutteryland in the first place, but The Rude Pundit does have a point.

Not that they'll ever get it in the first place...

Posted by Earl at 06:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)