O-bummer

By JIM VANDEHEI & MIKE ALLEN

Congressional Democrats are firing a surprising number of unexpectedly sharp brushback pitches at President-elect Barack Obama and his staff over policy plans and personnel picks, making him look embattled during what was to be a triumphant debut week in Washington.

The honeymoon isn't over — the president-elect remains widely popular, even among some Republicans — and his Inauguration on Jan. 20 will be a signature event in the lifetime of most Americans, giving his opening days a greater lift and pop than any president since at least Ronald Reagan.

But as Obama buckled down his week heading a shadow government across Lafayette Park from the waning one in the White House, Democrats hit him with daily fast balls reflecting two realities: His team is smart but not perfect, and Democrats are supportive but not supine.

Consider:

• Obama ended his troubled search for CIA director by naming Leon Panetta. The immediate response: Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) fired off a statement of disapproval, giving a negative tilt to most coverage of the pick.

• Obama floated his plan to name TV star Dr. Sanjay Gupta as surgeon general. House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers didn't even wait for the official announcement before leading a public campaign to kill the nomination. Gupta "lacks the relevant experience," Conyers wrote to colleagues.

• As Obama makes plans to roll out a sweeping economic plan, Majority Leader Harry Reid gave interviews with Politico and The Hill newspaper and made clear he won't take marching orders from Obama. "I don't work for" Obama, he told us.

• Even before Obama's plan was formally unveiled, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made plain her displeasure with parts of Obama's emerging fiscal plan, which she believes does not move fast enough to raise taxes. "I couldn't be more clear," she said Thursday at her weekly news conference. "Put me down as one in favor of repeal [of the Bush tax cuts] as soon as possible." 

• Finally, once the package was unveiled, Obama's adviser got a frosty response to some provisions from Senate Democrats, who were kind enough to go public with their concerns. "I just don't think it works. I don't think that's going to give much lift to the economy, as well-intended as it is," Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat, told Politico's David Rogers.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0109/17268.html

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What mandate for change?

Barack Obama is already facing pushback from Congress about his economic stimulus plan. But it's coming from Democrats.

By Mike Madden

The hard sell that Barack Obama put on last week went beyond the normal political smooth-talking that presidents (or presidents-elect) sometimes use to promote their legislative agenda and crossed over into something a bit more urgent.

"For the sake of our economy and our people, this is the moment to act and to act without delay," Obama said Friday, pushing Congress -- for the second day in a row -- to get moving on a massive $775 billion economic stimulus plan as soon as possible. (On Thursday, he'd devoted an entire speech to the plan, the first time he'd given what his staff had billed as a "major policy address" since he won the election.) "The American people are struggling. And behind the statistics that we see flashing on the screens are real lives, real suffering, real fears. And it is my job to make sure that Congress stays focused in the weeks to come and gets this done." His Saturday radio/YouTube address had more of the same; the transition team simultaneously released a 14-page report claiming Obama's plan would create 3 to 4 million jobs by the end of next year.

 

But the main target of his blitz isn't necessarily voters, who polls show are on board with just about anything that will help save jobs. And it isn't the Republican opposition in Congress; they may not go along with the plan in the end, but Democrats have big enough margins in both the House and the Senate that they shouldn't need too many GOP votes to pass Obama's plan. As it turns out, that's the problem: Democrats, who with their expanded majorities were supposed to make it easy for Obama's agenda to cruise through Congress, started objecting to the stimulus plan as soon as details leaked to the press.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/01/12/stimulus/

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One crisis at a time

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Bush ordered ceasefire retreat at UN

Rice told to abstain in last-minute phone call from the White House

By David Usborne

Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, was forced to step back from voting in favour of the Gaza ceasefire resolution at the UN Security Council after orders from Washington, diplomatic sources said yesterday.

The US abstention on the resolution vote early yesterday, which clearly weakened its impact, was the final twist in a tumultuous three-day marathon of negotiations in New York.

For the UN to do nothing in the face of the mounting civilian casualties was becoming increasingly untenable. But when three of the world's top diplomats – Ms Rice, David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, and his French counterpart, Bernard Kouchner – descended on New York on Tuesday to take action there was plenty of reason to believe that their efforts would end in tears.

Most alarming was the prospect of a vote on a ceasefire text tabled by Libya. The US was threatening to veto it; nor indeed was America ready at that point to support any formal resolution in deference to Israel. But by Thursday morning, the US had had a surprising change of heart. It could back a resolution, if the British drafted one. Which Mr Miliband and his diplomatic crew duly did.

It fell to Mr Miliband, above all, to bring everyone on side before the council could hold a vote sometime Thursday evening. He, M. Kouchner and Ms Rice spent all day shuttling with knitted brows in and out of a conference room in the basement of the UN building where Arab foreign ministers were huddled. By dusk, it seemed at last that everyone was on board. Mr Miliband was smiling.

"Nothing is in the bag at the UN until everything is in the bag," one senior British official was heard remarking. Indeed. Once more the deal threatened to unravel as Americans muttered about new amendments and the French asked to delay the vote to give Israel time to consider its position. The Arabs almost rebelled. "It was hairy there for a moment," one source admitted.

When finally every last hurdle was cleared and the members of the Security Council were headed to their chamber for the vote, there was a mood of celebration in the building. Ministers from Arab nations especially were slapping backs. It was only in the last minutes before the vote was due that word began suddenly to circulate. America was not going to vote in favour after all.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/bush-ordered-ceasefire-retreat-at-un-1297580.html

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US plans massive arms delivery to Israel

GPS-guided Small Diameter Bombs, GBU-39

The Pentagon plans to make a large arms delivery to Israel, rising fears that the military campaign in Gaza will go on for a long time.

The US is trying to hire a merchant ship that can carry hundreds of tons of weapons from Greece to Israel later this month; Reuters reported citing tender documents it had obtained.

According to the US Navy's Military Sealift Command (MSC), the ship will transport 325 standard 20-foot containers of what has been called 'ammunition' from the Greek port of Astakos to the Israeli port of Ashdod on two separate trips in the second half of January.

A description on the manifest says the containers will be loaded with 'hazardous material', such as explosive substances and detonators, without giving any more details.

The Pentagon announced the tender for the ship in the last hours of 2008. The two deadlines set for the deliveries are January 25 and the last day of the month.

Meanwhile, a Pentagon spokesman confirmed the planned arms shipment to Israel, but denied that the delivery was linked to the Israel's deadly offensive in Gaza.

"This previously scheduled shipment is routine and not in support of the current situation in Gaza," said Air Force Lt. Col. Patrick Ryder.

However, a senior military analyst in London, who wished to remain unnamed, said the timing of the shipments shows that they may be 'irregular' and linked to the military operation in Gaza.

 

http://www.presstv.ir/Detail.aspx?id=81515&sectionid=351020202

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The new junior senator from Illinois

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President Bush saved U.S. lives? That's only more Karl Rove-style spin

By Richard Clarke

George Bush, still President, is engaging in a legacy tour of media outlets. This comes despite his earlier having said he did not know how history would judge the Iraq war "because we'll all be dead."

Actually, many people are already dead because of Bush, and that is the point to keep in mind when he talks about his legacy.

Among the themes Bush is striking are that through action at home and fighting "them" over there, not over here, his administration stopped terrorist attacks and prevented another 9/11. There is a surface plausibility to those claims, as there has often been with the messaging served up by the Karl Rove spin machine. But let's look beneath the surface of the assertions.

Bush stopped terrorist attacks? Yes, some of the many alleged plots cited by the White House probably would have matured into attacks had not the U.S. intelligence community acted. Many were more aspirational than operational, and others were the pure inventions of FBI informants. (In the Miami Liberty City case, an FBI informant apparently bribed people who previously had no interest in Al Qaeda. When they swore the oath to Osama Bin Laden, they were then arrested for doing so.)

But even if taken on its face as true, should having stopped terrorist attacks earn this President a Harry Truman-like reassessment down the road? I can attest from firsthand knowledge that the Clinton administration stopped numerous terrorist operations that would have resulted in American deaths. Yet I don't hear Bill Clinton running around boasting about that. Clinton has other things to lay claim to - a balanced budget, huge job growth and eight years without a major war. If you don't think the Clinton administration stopped a major terrorist attack in New York City, you might want to talk with the blind sheik, who was involved in a plot to blow up the United Nations, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the George Washington Bridge and a federal building housing the FBI. But that would be tough to do because Omar Abdel-Rahman is in solitary in a federal prison in Colorado.

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2009/01/08/2009-01-08_president_bush_saved_us_lives_thats_only.html

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President Bush's Legacy: One of Our Greatest Presidents

by Jon Swift

As I recently predicted, in few months, with the benefit of hindsight, historians will look back on the Bush presidency as an unalloyed success and consider President Bush to be one of our greatest presidents. Although the White House has sent around its own talking points highlighting the President's accomplishments, I don't think they go far enough. So I have put together my own list of talking points, which should convince anyone why George W. Bush belongs on Mount Rushmore, along with Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson and the other guy.

After Hurricane Katrina President Bush kept our cities safe.

In the three years and a half years since Hurricane Katrina not a single American city has been destroyed or partially destroyed. There are more than 10,000 cities in the United States and because of George Bush every single one of them, except for New Orleans, is still largely intact. Of course, no one could have predicted Hurricane Katrina, and if President Clinton had not left us so woefully unprepared, New Orleans would probably be in a lot better shape than it is now. But since Katrina, there have been numerous hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, blizzards, fires and earthquakes and none of them has gotten out of hand and wiped out an entire city because of the disaster preparedness policies President Bush put in place. For national security reasons we may not know until records are declassified how many other potential disasters, like epidemics or nuclear power plant meltdowns or alien invasions, were averted because of the work that government agencies did behind the scenes. Unfortunately, Presidents don't usually get credit for all the disasters that don't happen. But I think we should congratulate the President for doing a heckuva job on keeping America safe in the years since Katrina.

After the October 2008 stock market correction there have been no Great Depressions.

Although the excesses of the Clinton administration's failed economic policies finally caught up with us in October 2008, in the seven years before this economic downturn the economy was doing really well. Not every President can boast of seven years of prosperity. What's more, even since October there have been no Great Depressions, which means President Bush has given us eight completely depressionless years. Although some credit Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's swift and bold moves after the market tanked for staving off a depression, I think most economists will come to agree that it was Bush's 2001 tax cuts that really kept the economy afloat. Bush's prescient tax cuts lifted up the economy to such a level that any economic downfall just brought us back to where we were before instead plunging us into depression. Meanwhile, because of easy credit during the Bush years, more people had the opportunity to buy the homes of their dreams and live in them for a few years before they had to give them back. If Obama's economic policies do plunge us into a Great Depression, Americans will look back on the relative economic prosperity of the Bush years wistfully and have only themselves to blame.

http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2009/01/president-bushs-legacy-one-of-our.html

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Bedside manner

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STUFF JOURNALISTS LIKE

# 10 drinking

For a journalist, there are a few things to look forward to. There's the end of an election. The closing of a trial and of course when the town's annual rodeo/festival/art show is finally over. After a long day of grilling public officials, dredging through public records, chasing ambulances and writing 25-inch stories, journalists like to relax with a tall cold one.

The old stereotype of the curmudgeon journalist with a bottle of whiskey in his desk is alive and well today because journalists like to drink.

Between natural disasters, covering triple homicides and reporting on fatal accidents, journalists see some pretty horrific stuff. And since journalist pay ranks around that of a trained circus monkey, they can't afford any psychological help. However, they can afford a $15 bottle of Fighting Cock bourbon.

Nothing takes the edge off after a day of reporting on the scene of drug bust, shifting through six years of financial papers at city hall and stressing over deadlines like a nice shot of low-shelf whiskey or a pint.

Interns and journalists just out of school have all heard the stories of the days when journalists kept flasks in their back pockets and handles of Jim Bean in their filing cabinets. But today, newspapers and their corporate owners shun such habits. But go to any veteran journalist and he'll show you were he keeps his bourbon.  

And if journalists don't like to drink because of having to interview a widow who just lost her husband in Iraq, then there is always job security. As one journalist after another exits the newsroom with their severance check in hand, journalists flee to their safe haven – dive bars.

Drinking is done best by journalists in shotty bars and questionable establishments. The kind of places where a journalist might run into the same perps he writes about on his beat. 

And while journalists can never really ever take off their journalist hats, while drinking, there is an unspoken ceasefire among journalists. Rival journalists, otherwise would not share more than a glance with each other at a press conference, share stories about griping editors and mayors who like to call journalists sweetie or honey. Editors and journalists, who in a newsroom walk a very palpable line of rank, talk about the cute receptionist and how the publisher is a moron. But after shots have been taken and tabs have been paid, journalists go back trying to scoop the competition and avoiding social interaction with editors.  

You can tell a journalist's bar by names such as Trail Dust, Cell House 7 and Top Hat Lounge. Such dingy hole in the wall watering holes will typically have two beers on tap, PBR and Budweiser, and a well of cheap liquor.

Here journalists gather to complain about the death of their industry and how much they miss the good ol' days. Most of the time such bars are a stone's throw from the newsroom so weary journalists won't have to stumble too far to wet their dry pallet's.

A good beer and a shot is just the medicine for any spent journalist who survived another treacherous day in the trenches reporting the truth. To report the news is to be a journalist. Same goes for drinking. Drinking is so much a part of a journalist's life that J-schools nearly made it part of the curriculum but instead choose copy editing. And journalism has suffered ever since.  

Salude'    

#75 low pay

 Journalists like to think of themselves as the regular working man/woman. Journalist like to kick the same dust as regular folks. Yes there are the millionaire reporters. But those are as rare as readers who subscribe to more than one newspaper. But for the journalists who are not Brian Williams or Rick Reilly, it's the reality of living paycheck to paycheck. 

When selecting a career, journalists knew they would make sacrifices: long hours, working holidays and low pay.

When young journalism students ask veteran journalists for advice, virtually all veterans reply with "go to business school."

However, journalists like the low pay because it allows them to focus on the news at hand rather than investing in the crashing stock market, buying a home in foreclosure or saving for retirement.

In fact, thanks to low pay journalists can forget about retirement entirely. Instead they focus on more important things like the city's $5 billion budget or the proposed salary increase for police, even though the crime rate has risen by 25%.

Journalists don't have to worry about such annoying issues like a balanced diet or traveling to exotic places. Thanks to low pay,  journalists can eat Ramen noodles or soup in a can every day for lunch and dinner, and spend their days off valeting their publisher's cars to pay the rent. In journalism, the good die poor.

But perhaps the thing journalists like most about low pay is being able to complain about it. One thing journalists like most is complaining, and complaining about low pay is at the top of their list. Go to any local watering or dive bar where journalists congregate and be a fly on the wall one evening after deadline.

You are sure to hear the topic of low pay come up at some time, usually in the context of "damn I wish I had gone to business school."

http://www.stuffjournalistslike.com/

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Obama’s Cheney Dilemma

Cheney pushed for expanded presidential powers. Now that he's leaving, what will come of his efforts? The new president won't have to wait long to tip his hand.

By Stuart Taylor Jr. and Evan Thomas

Dick Cheney, who will step down as vice president on Jan. 20, has been widely portrayed as a creature of the dark side, a monstrous figure who trampled on the Constitution to wage war against all foes, real and imagined. Barack Obama was elected partly to cleanse the temple of the Bush-Cheney stain, and in his campaign speeches he promised to reverse Cheney's efforts to seize power for the White House in the war on terror.

It may not be so simple. At a retirement ceremony recently for a top-level intelligence official, the senior spooks in the room gave each other high-fives. They were celebrating the fact that terrorists have not attacked the United States since 9/11. In the view of many intelligence professionals, the get-tough measures encouraged or permitted by George W. Bush's administration—including "waterboarding" self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—kept America safe. Cheney himself has been underscoring the point in a round of farewell interviews. "If I had advice to give it would be, before you start to implement your campaign rhetoric, you need to sit down and find out precisely what it is we did and how we did it, because it is going to be vital to keeping the nation safe and secure in the years ahead," he told CBS Radio.

In times of war and crisis, as presidents such as Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt discovered, the nation needs a strong chief executive. The flaw of the Bush-Cheney administration may have been less in what it did than in the way it did it—flaunting executive power, ignoring Congress, showing scorn for anyone who waved the banner of civil liberties. Arguably, there has been an overreaction to the alleged arrogance and heedlessness of Bush and Cheney—especially Cheney, who almost seemed to take a grim satisfaction in his Darth Vader-esque image. The courts, at first slow to respond to arrogations of executive power after September 11, have pushed back. Many federal officials have grown risk-averse, fearing that they will be prosecuted or dragged before a congressional committee for fighting too hard against terrorism. (A growing number of CIA officials buy insurance policies to cover legal fees.)

http://www.newsweek.com/id/178855

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Would I lie to you?

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Frost/Cheney

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THE BEAST 50 MOST LOATHSOME PEOPLE IN AMERICA, 2008

Written by Allan Uthman & Ian Murphy
with contributions from John Dolan, Eileen Jones, Alexander Zaitchik, & IOZ.
Illustrations by Ian Murphy.

5. Alan Greenspan

Charges: The mortgage meltdown may seem complicated, but it started simple, with Al Greenspan pegging the Fed fund rate at 1%. This made Treasury Bonds a fairly lame investment, and led to investors looking for other seemingly safe securities to buy, which led to a flourishing demand for mortgage-backed securities, which led to banks increasingly lowering their standards for mortgage applications, eventually giving liar loans away to anyone willing to take them, which used to be called usury. This led to a decline in the real value of these MBA securities due to high probabilities of foreclosure, but somehow they were still AAA-rated by credit agencies displaying either hopeless incompetence or criminal collusion. Even a monkey wouldn't need a slide rule to see what would come next. But Alan Greenspan, super-genius guru of the glorious realm of the self-regulating free market, is totally flummoxed. Refusing to accept any blame for years as the housing bubble, long-predicted by out-of-favor economic realists,  bloated and burst, only recently has Greenspan accepted even marginal responsibility, admitting only that he was "partially" wrong, professing a state of "shocked disbelief" that lenders couldn't regulate themselves, and thinking to himself, "This isn't how it worked in Atlas Shrugged!"

Exhibit A: "Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should."

Sentence: Recurring role as a senile great uncle on new C-grade sitcom "Krugman's Krew."

4. George W. Bush

Charges: It's hard—believe us, we know—to keep coming up with new things to say about this brutally stupid narcissist, who may have ruined this country irrevocably and certainly has ruined a couple of others, mugging amiably all the way. If anything good comes from Bush's reign of error, let it be the death of the notion that vitally important, life or death decisions that affect the entire world should be made with one's "gut." We used to think that incompetence was just a good cover story for this administration, an excuse that masked their deliberate criminality, but it turns out that Bush and his inner circle are both treasonous, corrupt warmongers and inept fools.  One good thing about him, though, is that he has no real interest in politics, and probably won't give a flying shoe what happens to the world when his term is up. As he once put it, ""History, we don't know. We'll all be dead." Here's to George W. Bush being history.

Exhibit A: "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter."

Sentence: Detained in formaldehyde-laced FEMA trailer without charges or counsel, sodomized by Lynndie England, declared guilty by military tribunal, set adrift naked on a small ice floe in the Arctic.

3. Sean Hannity

Charges: This relentlessly repugnant McCarthyite tool really outdid himself this year, in an all-out quest to otherize Obama in any way he could. This paranoid pustule is able to find a liberal conspiracy lurking behind any mundane occurrence, even attributing Obama's selection as Time's Person of the Year, an event as predictable as sunrise, to a pay-to-play scheme. Hopelessly outmatched shill Alan Colmes is finally leaving his role as Hannity's doormat; he will not be replaced.

Exhibit A: "I never questioned anyone's patriotism."

Sentence: Wrongfully convicted of murdering Vince Foster, based on evidence falsified by Jerome Corsi.

2. John McCain

Charges: McCain vowed to run a clean, respectful campaign, and then accused Obama of pushing sex ed for kindergartners, calling Palin a pig, hanging with terrorists, being a welfare-loving Marxist, being an arugula-loving elitist and pretty much everything but conspiring with the Borg—but he didn't really mean it, and he didn't use Reverend Wright, so we're all supposed to think he's swell. McCain lied so blatantly and constantly that even cable news bootlicks were compelled to fact-check him, to which he and his surrogates responded by insisting on the same lies. When pressed on the Nixonian onslaught of falsehood, McCain whined that he wouldn't have had to be such a mendacious prick if Obama had only refrained from raising so much more money than him. McCain pretended to give a shit about America, and then he picked a vapid ambition-hound to succeed him. His response to the economic crisis might as well have been to punch himself in the face.  In every way he could this year, McCain burned up all the credibility he had stored up from decades of shameless worship by the press, utilizing every tactic he ever decried, exuding a heady aroma of bullshit and Alzheimer's, and displaying an unrequited obsession with Joe the Plumber, and he still wound up a failed Faust even the Devil didn't want.

Exhibit A: "In the 21st century nations don't invade other nations."

Sentence: Every time anybody says the word "surge," McCain is shot in the leg.

1. Sarah Palin

Charges: If you want to know why the rest of the world is scared of Americans, consider the fact that after two terms of disastrous rule by a small-minded ignoramus, 46% of us apparently thought the problem was that he wasn't quite stupid enough. Palin's unending emissions of baffling, evasive incoherence should have disqualified her for any position that involved a desk, let alone placing her one erratic heartbeat from the presidency. The press strained mightily to feign respect for her, praising a debate performance that involved no debate, calling her a "great speaker" when her only speech was primarily a litany of insults to city-dwellers, echoing bogus sexism charges when a male Palin would have been boiled alive for the Couric interview alone, and lionizing her as she used her baby as a Pro-life stage prop before crowds who cooed when they should have been hurling polonium-tipped javelins. In the end, Palin had the beneficial effect of splitting her party between her admirers and people who can read.

Exhibit A: Waving her embryo-loving credentials, in the form of her Down syndrome baby, at "But ultimately what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the healthcare reform that is needed to help shore up our economy."

Sentence: Hand-to-hand combat with Vladimir Putin and a pack of wolves.

http://www.buffalobeast.com.nyud.net/134/50mostloathsome2008-full.html

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Perpetual Outstanding National Zero-sum Investment scheme

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It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s Gay Webcomics!

by Lyle Masaki

It's not a secret that the world of comics and comic books hasn't exactly been gay-inclusive over their long histories. Indeed, for gay readers looking to finding themselves represented in the pages of their favorite newspaper comic, the choices have been few and far between. After all, a few enraged readers are often enough to intimidate timid, already struggling newspapers into dropping certain comic strip panels which some intolerant readers deem offensive.

Unfortunately, comic books and graphic novels haven't fared much better. Among the major comic publishers such as Marvel and DC, gay characters are often relegated to minor titles that come and go as fast as Superman changes into his superhero outfit. While small press publishers tend to be more inclusive, their offerings are usually hard to find at comic shops, especially if not located in a major city.

However, there is one place where the number of opportunities for gay themes to be explored in comics and for gay creators has actually grown: the Internet.

While newspapers and their syndicated comic strips continue to wither away, thanks to the Internet there has been an explosion of "webcomics," strips usually available solely online and usually at no cost.

Webcomics aren't exactly new. Indeed, they have been around for about as long as users have been able to send images over the Internet. The earliest webcomics were distributed via usenet groups and BBS (bulletin board service) forums – and with each passing year the format of the webcomic is becoming increasingly accepted by the comics industry.

Prestigious comic industry awards like the Eisners, the Harveys and the Ignatz Awards now include a category for webcomics and the "big two" comic book publishers – DC and Marvel – have both gotten into some form of distributing comics over the web. In fact, thanks to the Internet, many of the hurdles that often keep a gay-themed comic from making it onto comic shop shelves and into readers' hands are being eliminated.

http://www.afterelton.com/internet/2009/1/webcomics

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Of course Tintin's gay. Ask Snowy

by Matthew Parris

His adventures have sold more than 200 million copies and been translated into 50 languages, and this weekend he celebrates his 80th birthday. But how well do we really know Tintin? One thing's for certain...

Billions of blue blistering barnacles, isn't it staring us in the face? Sometimes a thing's so obvious it's hard to see where the debate could start. What debate can there be when the evidence is so overwhelmingly one-way? A callow, androgynous blonde-quiffed youth in funny trousers and a scarf moving into the country mansion of his best friend, a middle-aged sailor? A sweet-faced lad devoted to a fluffy white toy terrier, whose other closest pals are an inseparable couple of detectives in bowler hats, and whose only serious female friend is an opera diva...

. . . And you're telling me Tintin isn't gay?

And Liberace was a red-blooded heterosexual. And Peter M... oops - steer clear - burnt fingers once there already. But really, what next? Lawrence of Arabia a ladies' man? Richard the Lionheart straight? And I suppose the Village People were a band of off-duty police officers, YMCA was a song about youth-hostelling, and Noddy and Big Ears are just good friends.

But I'd better make the case because, astonishingly (and though when I googled "Tintin" and "gay" I got 526,000 references), there are still Tintin aficionados who remain in denial about this.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article5461005.ece

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Lessons from past wars

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Will the Religious Right Spoil the Inaugural Party?

By Bill Berkowitz

A number of Religious Right groups, including Our Country Deserves Better PAC, preparing to take on the Obama Administration
 
The California-based PAC that failed to derail the presidential candidacy of Obama, intends to serve as 'the loyal opposition'
 
In politics, commerce, and fundraising, timing is essential. The upcoming inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama is providing all sorts of opportunities for conservative organizations to market their messages and peddle some goods at the same time.
 
On January 8, the Christian Defense Coalition (CDC), an organization headed by Reverend Patrick J. Mahoney, announced that they had received permission to display what it calls a pro life vigil -- 25 large signs showing the development of life from conception to birth -- along the parade route during the Presidential Inauguration. Claiming that President-elect Obama is on the "wrong side of history and human rights by embracing the most radical abortion policies of any President in American history," Mahoney says that "While millions will be celebrating along the Inaugural Parade route, we will be speaking 'truth to power' and calling justice and equality for all Americans."
 
Repent America, another Christian conservative group, is planning "a massive evangelism effort in Washington, DC. [where] church groups and individuals [will] … hand out tracts and engage in one-on-one witnessing efforts during" Inauguration Day activities, according to a report by OneNewsNow, the America Family Association-sponsored news service. "We know ... president-elect Barack Obama [to be] a very aggressive, pro-abortion, pro-homosexual political figure -- and now he's going to be our president," Michael Marcavage, president of Repent America, told OneNewsNow. "So it's only expected that these particular things are going to be pushed in our nation even more."
  
Over at the PatriotShop.US, a division of the Tennessee-based online publication, The Patriot Post, commerce is the main word during the lead-up to Obama's Inauguration. According to its website, you can "celebrate the Obamanation Inauguration" with a host of products including "Bitterly Clinging to Guns and Religion" posters, tee shirts and bumper stickers; an "O-Bummer" sticker; a Che Obama tee shirt and bumper sticker; "Politically Incorrect Guides" to American History, Capitalism, Global Warming, Islam, the Middle East, the Constitution, Hunting; and other assorted sundries from mugs to coin holders to even a Holy Cross.  
 
According to its website, The Patriot Post is "America's most widely read Internet-based publication … [and] is a highly acclaimed journal advocating individual liberty, the restoration of constitutional limits on government and the judiciary, and the promotion of free enterprise, national defense and traditional American values." The online publication, headed by Mark Alexander aims to be "a hard-hitting rebuttal to contemporary political, social and mainstream media protagonists on the Left, … written for those who seek a brief, informative and entertaining analysis of the week's most significant news, policy and opinion."
 
While the Christian Defense Committee is holding its vigil, Repent America is passing out flyers and looking for converts, and The Patriot Post is flogging its merchandise, another group, Our Country Deserves Better PAC, is seeking cash.   
 
Having failed to defeat Obama, despite spending thousands of dollars on anti-Obama television advertisements in several swing states, and launching its "Stop Obama Tour," which drew few anti-Obama enthusiasts as it lumbered around the country, the California-based Our Country Deserves Better PAC is asking for financial support for a long term campaign against Obama. In a new ad run by HumanEvents.com, Our Country is looking to "serve as one of the leading conservative organizations that will help prepare for a conservative resurgence in 2009 and 2010."

http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/1881

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How Many Divisions?

Uri Avnery's Column

NEARLY SEVENTY YEARS ago, in the course of World War II, a heinous crime was committed in the city of Leningrad. For more than a thousand days, a gang of extremists called "the Red Army" held the millions of the town's inhabitants hostage and provoked retaliation from the German Wehrmacht from inside the population centers. The Germans had no alternative but to bomb and shell the population and to impose a total blockade, which caused the death of hundreds of thousands.

Some time before that, a similar crime was committed in England. The Churchill gang hid among the population of London, misusing the millions of citizens as a human shield. The Germans were compelled to send their Luftwaffe and reluctantly reduce the city to ruins. They called it the Blitz.

This is the description that would now appear in the history books – if the Germans had won the war.

Absurd? No more than the daily descriptions in our media, which are being repeated ad nauseam: the Hamas terrorists use the inhabitants of Gaza as "hostages" and exploit the women and children as "human shields", they leave us no alternative but to carry out massive bombardments, in which, to our deep sorrow, thousands of women, children and unarmed men are killed and injured.

IN THIS WAR, as in any modern war, propaganda plays a major role. The disparity between the forces, between the Israeli army - with its airplanes, gunships, drones, warships, artillery and tanks - and the few thousand lightly armed Hamas fighters, is one to a thousand, perhaps one to a million. In the political arena the gap between them is even wider. But in the propaganda war, the gap is almost infinite.

Almost all the Western media initially repeated the official Israeli propaganda line. They almost entirely ignored the Palestinian side of the story, not to mention the daily demonstrations of the Israeli peace camp. The rationale of the Israeli government ("The state must defend its citizens against the Qassam rockets") has been accepted as the whole truth. The view from the other side, that the Qassams are a retaliation for the siege that starves the one and a half million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, was not mentioned at all.

Only when the horrible scenes from Gaza started to appear on Western TV screens, did world public opinion gradually begin to change.

True, Western and Israeli TV channels showed only a tiny fraction of the dreadful events that appear 24 hours every day on Aljazeera's Arabic channel, but one picture of a dead baby in the arms of its terrified father is more powerful than a thousand elegantly constructed sentences from the Israeli army spokesman. And that is what is decisive, in the end.

http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1231625457/

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Cleaning up after the elephants

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MR. SMALLEY GOES TO WASHINGTON

THE BETA POTATO

(Minneapolis, MN) It was none other than one of the NAATF's Chief Deputy Blowhards, Alex "Cut-Throat" Castellanos, who taught a worldwide CNN audience how to define the ultimate humiliation for the rethuglican party on election night, saying "If we can't beat that lunatic, [Al Franken], we're [fucked]!"   Well Alex, grab your ankles, you sick prick, 'cause Mr. Smalley's goin' to Washington!

 

Here in Gopherville USA, over 2 million mosquito-ravaged ice fisherman said "no" to the hate-filled, slanderous insanity of the "Big Fat Idiot", the "Blotchy Bully", and the rest of the NAATF, and voted "yes" for the opportunity to be represented by someone who may actually serve the shivering citizens of Minnesota in the manner contemplated by the founding fathers.

 

That's right, the real danger in a Senator Al Franken is not that he's an entertainer, and a comedian no less.  The real danger, especially for the NAATF, lies in the fact that Al Franken may turn out to be a great Senator.  The man brings a passion to expose the idiocy of the "Nut-Case Right", as he calls them, as clearly evidenced in his writings and his leadership of the progressive radio station, Air America Radio, during the past several years, and he is unlikely to swim in the traditional political bullshit.  Like it or not dub-lovers, that record of commitment to expose the truth is one of the reasons that Stuart got elected.  This stands as further evidence that quality candidates can come out of nowhere to change the nutcase status quo and that a person's vote can actually make a difference.  RIP GOP!

 

http://www.beta-potato.com/Columns/columns.htm

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Hypocrisy From the Party of Pork

By Joe Conason

As the government contemplates spending very large sums of money, it is reassuring to know that somebody still worries about waste. Or it would be reassuring, if only that somebody were not Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, who promises that he and his fellow Republicans will "protect taxpayers against the rush to spend their money."

This loud pledge of thrift and transparency by the GOP leadership might be more persuasive coming from people who had displayed such inclinations anytime before last year's election. But these are the same politicians who squandered astronomical amounts when they controlled the federal budget.

And today, at a moment when economists of all stripes agree that we must spend big and spend fast to forestall a depression, the timing of the Republican conversion is as dubious as its credibility. To delay the stimulus spending proposed by President-elect Obama for the sake of partisan posturing is to risk disaster.

The Republicans' sudden reversion to the solemn frugality of their forebears would be amusing were it not so dangerous. Having established a record over the past decade or so as the wildest wastrels in the nation's history, they now present themselves as straight-laced accountants who simply cannot abide a misspent dime.

Consider McConnell, chosen again by his fellow Republican senators to oversee policy and politics for their shrunken caucus. Last year, he barely achieved reelection in Kentucky -- and only won after a barrage of television ads touting his mastery of the Congressional pork barrel. He flew frantically from one town to another, boasting that he had brought home more than $500 million in federal discretionary funds during the past fiscal year alone, largely for projects that other states and cities must finance locally.

Even when many other Congressional Republicans realized that their awesome waste and abuse had tarnished the party's image and led to their ouster in the 2006 midterm, McConnell resisted reform. Just over a year ago, the conservative Club for Growth lambasted him for opposing a Democratic proposal to eliminate budgetary "earmarks," which have led to so much corruption and abuse on Capitol Hill. The club complained that his "support for pork projects in the Omnibus [Budget Act] is a sad statement about the priorities of the Republican leadership in the Senate."

Certainly nobody can say that the senior senator from Kentucky has failed to make his mark with those projects. His campaign for a sixth term last autumn might as well have been a tour of the many federally funded sites that literally bear his stamp. In Owensboro, residents can stroll through Mitch McConnell Plaza, an urban renewal project that is the pride of that riverfront town. In Lexington, students can take advantage of the wonderful Mitch McConnell Distance Learning Center at the university's law school. In Louisville, joggers can stretch their legs along the Mitch McConnell Loop Trail in the city's new $38 million park.

There is all that in the Bluegrass State and much, much more -- thanks to taxpayers across the country whom McConnell is so eager to protect.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/01/timing_is_wrong_for_phony_thri.html

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Environment protected by President Bush

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Bush strikes last blow to environment

by DERRICK Z. JACKSON

What could possibly be left of the environment for the Bush administration to degrade on its way out the door? Leave it to the Forest Service not to see the forest or the trees.

The Washington Post last week reported that the administration plans to issue yet another "midnight" ruling. This one would let timber companies pave over national forest logging roads so pine tree woods can become residential subdivisions with names like "Pine Woods."

The ruling would most immediately benefit the nation's largest private landowner, 8-million-acre-owning Plum Creek Timber. The Forest Service, directed by former timber industry lobbyist Mark Rey, had long been working on a paving deal with Plum Creek behind closed doors. It has been held up by outraged local officials who were not consulted over the impact of development on resources and by environmentalists gravely concerned about wildlife endangerments.

"We have 40 years of Forest Service history that has been reversed in the last three months," Patrick O'Herren, rural initiatives director for Missoula County, Montana, told the Post last July. Plum Creek is the biggest private landowner in Montana, with 1.2 million acres, much of it not far from either Missoula or Kalispell in the western part of the state. Much of that land's mountain wilderness, complete with glaciers and grizzlies, is so pristine that the Post said parts of it are "as Lewis and Clark found it."

The chicanery caught the attention of Barack Obama, who campaigned in Montana in hopes of putting a reliable red state into play (he did, losing to John McCain by just 3 percentage points). Obama issued a July statement saying, "At a time when Montana's sportsmen are finding it increasingly hard to access lands, it is outrageous that the Bush administration would exacerbate the problem by encouraging prime hunting and fishing lands to be carved up and closed off. We should be working to conserve these lands permanently so that future generations of Americans can enjoy them to hunt, fish, hike, and camp."

In October, a Government Accountability Office examination of the proposed deal between the government and Plum Creek found that it raised many perplexing questions relating to the 1964 National Forest Roads and Trails Act, few of which the Bush administration answered adequately. The act originally was meant to allow roads and trails in lands administered by the Forest Service for timber harvesting and recreation. The GAO said the Department of Agriculture "cannot convey a greater property interest than the statute allows," and that the rule change on behalf of residential development was so broadly interpreted that it "could have a nationwide impact." The GAO was particularly critical of the backdoor dealing, saying the Bush administration's approach "deprived it of the opportunity to obtain the public's views on a matter of intense public interest."

The idea of the 1964 roads act being abused to pave the way for McMansions should be overturned when Obama takes office.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/395470_jackson11.html

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Don’t Buy From Bigots

Welcome to Don't Buy From Bigots

             

On Election Day November 4, 2008, the most highly contested ballot measure in California was Proposition 8.  Entitled "Eliminates the Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry", the purpose of Proposition 8 was to amend the state constitution to remove the constitutional right of gays and lesbians to marry.  

 

Proponents of Prop 8 waged a successful campaign to strip lesbian and gay citizens of their civil rights aided in large part to the nearly $40 million they raised.  Many of these donations came from businesses throughout California and across the country.

 

These businesses have the right to support whatever ballot measures they want, but fair-minded citizens of all sexual orientations also have the right to take their money elsewhere and not patronize businesses that support bigotry.  This site is not a witch-hunt but is a tool intended to help people make informed decisions when they shop for products and services.  This site hopes to overcome some of the limitations of existing Prop 8 donor databases on the web and in time hopes to become a useful repository of all companies in the U.S. with anti-gay policies.

 

Using publicly available information from the California Secretary of State's website, DontBuyFromBigots.com strives to be the most comprehensive business-specific listing of donors to Prop 8.  This site is a work in progress created and maintained in the spare time of one person, so forgive the Spartan appearance.  Contact me if you want to help improve the website.

View the List

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What Now?!!

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Tanks

 

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From Harlem To Gaza — We’re All Palestinians

by Next Left Notes

(Photo: Thomas Good / NLN)

NEW YORK — On Saturday, January 10th, in solidarity with other protests around the world, members of MDS Staten Island joined over a 100 protesters in Harlem — to denounce the indiscriminate bombing of Gazan civilians by Israeli armed forces. The event was one of many protests in recent days as the world takes to the streets in defense of Gaza. Protesters across the globe are demanding an immediate cease fire by Israel, which has the support of the United States government in its assault on the Palestinian civilian population.

Over the last two weeks, the movement against Israeli aggression has grown throughout the world. However, in spite of a UN resolution for Israel to stop the bombing, the United States Congress, both the Senate and the House, recently passed passed a bi-partisan resolution in support of Israel's "right to defend itself" against terrorism. Conversely, the number of civilians killed, particularly women and children, has caused many in the peace movement to accuse the Israelis of committing genocide.

Members of the New Black Panther Party at the protest
(Photo: Thomas Good / NLN)

In response to the Israeli aggression, Movement for a Democratic Society, World Can't Wait, the Harlem Revolution Club, the New Black Panther Party and members of various Arab-American activist groups joined together Saturday, in front of the Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. State Office building on 125th Street and 7th Avenue. On a cold and snowy afternoon the assembled activists were warmed only by their outrage. Demands shouted into bullhorns, audible over the din of the traffic in the bustling shopping center, announced "Down, Down Israel!", "Free, Free Palestine", and "From Harlem to Gaza, we are all Palestinians!". Protesters ranging in age from 2 to 62 marched through the streets of Harlem, calling attention to what is happening in the Middle East.

The vibrant procession was met with shouts of solidarity, and questioned as to what was happening. A number of pedestrians were happy to see the march taking place, told protesters to keep up the fight, and a few joined the march as it wound down 125th street. Drivers honked their horns in support, people on the buses waved, and even some members of the NYPD, who accompanied the unpermitted march, were overheard saying they denounced what Israel was doing to the people of Gaza.

http://antiauthoritarian.net/NLN/?p=543

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God prefers Atheists

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Iran Using Fronts to Get Bomb Parts From U.S.

By Joby Warrick

The Iranian businessman was looking for high-quality American electronics, but he had to act stealthily: The special parts he coveted were denied to Iranians, especially those seeking to make roadside bombs to kill U.S. troops in Iraq.

With a few e-mails, the problem was solved. A friendly Malaysian importer would buy the parts from a company in Linden, N.J., and forward them to Iran. All that was left was coming up with a fake name for the invoice. Perhaps a Malaysian engineering school? "Of course, you can use any other company as end-user that you think is better than this," the Iranian businessman, Ahmad Rahzad, wrote in an e-mail dated March 8, 2007.

The ruse succeeded in delivering nine sensors called inclinometers to Iran, the first of several such shipments that year and the latest example of what U.S. officials and weapons experts describe as Iran's skillful flouting of export laws intended to stop lethal technology from reaching the Islamic republic.

Despite multiple attempts by the Bush administration to halt illegal imports -- including sanctions against several Dubai-based Iranian front companies in 2006 -- the technology pipeline to Tehran is flowing at an even faster pace. In some cases, Iran simply opened new front companies and shifted its operations from Dubai to farther east in Asia, the officials said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/10/AR2009011002236.html?hpid=topnews

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Shopaholic spinster found dead under 3ft of unopened goods

By James Tozer

A spinster who obsessively hoarded clothes died in her home after a mountain of suitcases fell on her, burying her alive.

Joan Cunnane, 77, owned 300 scarves as well as thousands of trinkets and valuables.

They took up so much space in her bungalow that she had only a 2ft-wide path to get around them, and her car and garage were packed with other goods.

After she was reported missing earlier this week, it took police searching her home two days to sift through her possessions.

Miss Cunnane was eventually found buried under a 3ft pile of cases in a back bedroom where she had apparently gone in search of a favourite item.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1109168/Shopaholic-spinster-dead-3ft-unopened-goods.html

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Wingnuts

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Depression Modern

Americans can't afford to spend like they used to, but is frugal living ever really going to become trendy?

by Rob Horning

It was thought to be impossible, as impossible as house prices falling simultaneously nationwide, but the American consumer has stopped spending. Even when the savings rate went negative in the midst of the housing bubble, many economists took to the op-ed pages to proclaim this perfectly rational and nothing to fear. People were saving through appreciating asset prices, we were assured. Consumer-led recessions were things of the past; we'll never run out of money.

Now asset prices are falling across the board. And with retail spending recording a record drop in October, the economy has officially begun to contract, with GDP shrinking in the third quarter of 2008.

In the past, it was presumed that we could spend our way out of recessions, this one is different. Economist Nouriel Roubini has compiled an exhaustive list of 20 reasons, but they basically boil down to what Morgan Stanley analyst Stephen Roach argued in a New York Times editorial on Black Friday: "In an era of open-ended house price appreciation and extremely cheap credit, few doubted the wisdom of borrowing against one's home. But in today's climate of falling home prices, frozen credit markets, mounting layoffs and weakening incomes, that approach has backfired. It should hardly be surprising that consumption has faltered so sharply."

We are becoming poorer and probably feel poorer than we are, judging by consumer confidence figures. Even Best Buy's CEO declared recently that "rapid, seismic changes in consumer behavior have created the most difficult climate we've ever seen." Former financial analyst and tech-bubble booster Henry Blodget concurs in this post:

For 30 years, we piled on debt and then spent almost every new penny we got. This borrowing spree was made possible by a smorgasbord of no-money-down lending products and ever-appreciating asset prices. Unfortunately, the situation has now changed. The lenders who created those products have now been demolished, and asset prices are falling fast. And this is leaving American consumers with no choice but to cut back.

Not long ago, it seemed as though nothing could make us give up consumerism voluntarily—not impending global warming, not our awareness of the futility of quickening our pace on the hedonic treadmill, not the tech crash, not the blight of hipsterism, not the forced nostalgia, not the hypermediation and reification of every aspect of life, not anything. So what happens now that the impossible has become reality?  How will American consumers change their behavior, now that it appears that they have no choice? And should we be pleased about these apparently inescapable changes?

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/column/68743-depression-modern/

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Nat Hentoff's Last Column: The 50-Year Veteran Says Goodbye

I used to say, 'I've been at the Voice since the Civil War.' But now I'm off to other combats.

By Nat Hentoff

I've borrowed Woody Guthrie's 1942 song to report that this is my last column for the Voice. I'm not retiring; I've never forgotten my exchange on that decision with Duke Ellington. In those years, he and the band played over 200 one-nighters a year, with jumps from, say, Toronto to Dallas. On one of his rare nights off, Duke looked very beat, and I presumptuously said: "You don't have to keep going through this. With the standards you've written, you could retire on your ASCAP income."

Duke looked at me as if I'd lost all my marbles.

"Retire!" he crescendoed. "Retire to what?!"

I'm still writing. In 2009, the University Press of California will publish my At the Jazz Band Ball: 60 Years on the Jazz Scene, and, later in the year, a sequel to The War on the Bill of Rights and the Gathering Resistance will be out on Seven Stories Press with the title Is This America? And I'll be breaking categories elsewhere, including in my weekly syndicated United Media column, which reaches 250 papers, and my jazz and country music pieces in The Wall Street Journal.

I came here in 1958 because I wanted a place where I could write freely on anything I cared about. There was no pay at first, but the Voice turned out to be a hell of a resounding forum. My wife, Margot—later an editor here and a columnist far more controversial than I've been—called what this paper was creating "a community of consciousness." Though a small Village "alternative" newspaper, we were reaching many around the country who were turned off by almost any establishment you could think of.

http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-01-07/columns/nat-hentoff-s-last-column-the-50-year-veteran-says-goodbye/

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Belated Christmas song from hell

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Mystery Roar from Faraway Space Detected

By Andrea Thompson

LONG BEACH, Calif. -- Space is typically thought of as a very quiet place. But one team of astronomers has found a strange cosmic noise that booms six times louder than expected.

The roar is from the distant cosmos. Nobody knows what causes it.

Of course, sound waves can't travel in a vacuum (which is what most of space is), or at least they  can't very efficiently. But radio waves can.

Radio waves are not sound waves, but they are still electromagnetic waves, situated on the low-frequency end of the light spectrum.

Many objects in the universe, including stars and quasars, emit radio waves. Even our home galaxy, the Milky Way, emits a static hiss (first detected in 1931 by physicist Karl Jansky). Other galaxies also send out a background radio hiss.

But the newly detected signal, described here today at the 213th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, is far louder than astronomers expected.

There is "something new and interesting going on in the universe," said Alan Kogut of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

A team led by Kogut detected the signal with a balloon-borne instrument named ARCADE (Absolute Radiometer for Cosmology, Astrophysics, and Diffuse Emission).

In July 2006, the instrument was launched from NASA's Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas, and reached an altitude of about 120,000 feet (36,500 meters), where the atmosphere thins into the vacuum of space.

ARCADE's mission was to search the sky for faint signs of heat from the first generation of stars, but instead they heard a roar from the distant reaches of the universe.

"The universe really threw us a curve," Kogut said. "Instead of the faint signal we hoped to find, here was this booming noise six times louder than anyone had predicted."

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090107-aas-loud-cosmic-noise.html

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Bam Loves the Berry

 

http://www.nydailynews.com/money/galleries/obama_cant_give_it_up_/ Sphere: Related Content

The First Wii: Obama brings video games to the White House

by Randy Nelson

When Barack Obama takes office on January 20th, he'll not only be the most powerful man in the world, but also the most powerful gamer. (Nintendo did give outgoing President Bush a DS and Brain Age some years ago; it's up to you to decide if he ever played it.)

The New York Times reports that the President elect -- who even took his campaign to the streets of Burnout Paradise -- gifted his daughters, Sasha and Malia, with a Nintendo Wii for Christmas ... but the head of the First Family has been playing with it, too. Apparently, Obama has been working on his bowling skills by playing Wii Sports. The President-in-waiting bowled a lowly 37 in the real-life sport while on the campaign trail, but tells the paper that he "performs better in the video game."

Being the leader of the free world probably won't leave President Obama with much time for gaming, but we'd like to hear your suggestions for Wii games he should play, given the chance. (Oh, and Mr. Obama, if you're reading this, we'd like to talk about that Video Game Czar position ... )

 

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/01/08/the-first-wii-obama-brings-video-games-to-the-white-house/

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Army says it used "John Doe" in letters to grieving families

The Army said Wednesday that it had mistakenly sent 7,000 letters with the salutation "Dear John Doe" to family members of soldiers who have died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON — The Army said Wednesday that it had mistakenly sent 7,000 letters with the salutation "Dear John Doe" to family members of soldiers who have died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The letters, which were sent to provide information about private groups that offer assistance to families of soldiers killed in the wars, were supposed to have carried personal greetings.

The Army said that the mistake was the fault of a subcontractor that printed the letters, but that the service bore ultimate responsibility because it did not check the letters before they were mailed.

"There are no words to adequately apologize for this mistake or for the hurt it may have caused," Brig. Gen. Reuben Jones, the Army adjutant general, said in a statement.

The Army said that its chief of staff, Gen. George Casey Jr., would be sending 7,000 personally addressed letters of apology.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008602530_johndoe08.html

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White House Asked Howard To Stay In Blair House To Give ‘Some Plausible Reason’ For Refusing Obama

by Ali Frick

In December, President-elect Obama asked the White House if he and his family could move into Blair House — the White House's guest house — a week early, so that his daughters Malia and Sasha could start school. The White House rebuffed them, saying the house was already booked for another guest. A White House source added that "Blair House was appalled" by the request.

After weeks of speculation, the mystery guest that trumps the President-elect and his family has finally been revealed. The White House offered the house to John Howard, the former Prime Minister of Australia who is set to receive a Medal of Freedom. Instead of arranging other accommodations for Howard's one-night stay, the Bush administration told the Obama family to stay in a hotel for two weeks. (Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, who are also receiving the Medal of Freedom, opted to find other accommodations.)

Last night on MSNBC's "Countdown," Bloomberg journalist Margaret Carlson revealed that when the White House turned down Obama's request in early December, it had not yet even invited Howard to stay at the Blair House:

I reported…on December 11 and 12 that there were no foreign dignitaries booked into Blair House during that period of time. … I have the feeling they asked him [Howard] to come and stay so that there might be some plausible reason for not letting the Obamas stay there.

She also pointed out that Blair House has "119 rooms with 35 bathrooms. Howard wouldn't even have to share a sink with the Obamas." Watch it:

That the White House choose to prioritize the former prime minister of Australia over the incoming President of the United States emphasizes Bush's sense of loyalty. Howard, a darling of the right wing, was one of Bush's biggest cheerleaders whom Bush has called his "mate of steel" for standing with him on Iraq and being the only leader of an industrialized nation — besides Bush, of course — to refuse to sign the Kyoto Protocol.

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/01/07/howard-blair-house/

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Blair House drinking fountain

 

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Obama, Spider-Man on the same comic-book page

 

By David Colton

 

In a growing world of Barack Obama collectibles, one item soon may be swinging above the rest.

On Jan. 14, Marvel Comics is releasing a special issue of Amazing Spider-Man #583 with Obama depicted on the cover. Inside are five pages of the two teaming up and even a fist-bump between Spidey and the new president.

http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2009-01-07-obama-spiderman-comic_N.htm?csp=34

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The 2008 “WTF?” Awards

by Ed Naha

As 2008 stumbles to the finish line like the last member of "The Wild Bunch" to eat the dirt, it's time to pause and reflect on the past twelve months. Yet, how to do so without using George Carlin's famous "Seven Words" a thousand times in five minutes? There's only one course to take. It's time for the "2008 'WTF?' Awards!

THE GOP BIG (TENT?) PLANTATION AWARD goes to RNC candidate Chip Saltsman who sent out a Christmas gift CD to committee members including the song "Barack the Magic Negro." It was part of a handful of right-wing parody tunes with the umbrella title "We Hate the USA." Saltsman is reportedly surprised at the subsequent uproar. Insiders say that he's secretly relieved he didn't send out his first gift choice: "The Songs of Al Jolson in Blackface."

THE "I GOT A ROCKET IN MY POCKET" AWARD is bestowed upon CIA operatives in Afghanistan. In an attempt to win the loyalty of grizzled warlords, the agents are giving them the gift of Viagra. In an effort to win the loyalty of warlords' wives, they are giving them running shoes and a six-hour head start.

THE "THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON DRUGS" PRIZE goes to economics whiz Rush Limbaugh who, shortly after the election, declared: "The Obama recession is in full swing, ladies and gentlemen. Stocks are dying, which is a precursor of things to come. This is an Obama recession. Might turn into a depression." He then forecast a return of zeppelin travel and told his maid go get more of his special take-out.

THE BOP 'TILL YOU DROP AWARD goes to Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez who, back in 2003, authorized loud music to be played 24/7 for months at a time at Gitmo in order "to create fear, disorient…and prolong capture shock." Among the artists on the recently revealed Git Parade are Queen, AC/DC, Pentera, Nine Inch Nails and the cast of "Sesame Street." This past year, Gitmo guards began to complain of side effects. "It's not easy being green," declared one. On the plus side, they'll be primed for the new "Torture Me, Elmo" doll due next year.

THE "DEAL OR NO DEAL" CONSOLATION PRIZE goes to Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich who was caught trying to sell Barack Obama's Senate Seat to the highest bidder. "Blago" didn't believe in the soft sell approach: "I've got this thing and it's fucking golden, and I'm just not giving it up for fuckin' nothing. I'm not gonna do it. And I can always use it. I can parachute me there," he said, putting the kibosh on a future career in advertising. ("Hi. I'm a Mac. And I'm a fucking P.C!")

THE ORIGINS OF FECES GOLDEN PLUNGER is awarded to McCain/Palin poster child "Joe the Plumber" Wurzelbacher, who is neither named "Joe" nor is a licensed plumber. Currently working on a book, Joe revealed that being on the campaign trail with McCain "appalled" him and made him feel "dirty." The proposed title of his tome is "I Don't Know Shit."

THE TURN THE OTHER CHEEK PRIZE goes to president-elect Barack Obama who, honoring The Golden Rule, asked controversial preacher Rick Warren to say the prayer at Obama's Inauguration.

THE SIZE NINE BETWEEN THE CHEEKS AWARD is given to all of Obama's shocked supporters who find Warren's brand of Christianity as appetizing as rat's ass-on-a-stick.

THE VERY INTERESTING – NOT! Certificate of Merit is given en masse to nervous investors who've recently snapped up $30 billion of four-week T-Bills that boast a zero interest rate. That's right. Zero. On the plus side, the T-Bills have a higher rating than Bush.

http://mkanejeeves.com/?p=339

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