And people don’t believe in God

Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs has actually called out Pam Geller for associating with Nazis. Real Nazis.

I never thought I would see a Republican violate the 11th Commandment (“See no evil when it involves a fellow right-winger”). It looks like Johnson is back to the original Ten.

(Larisa has the story. I refuse to link to LGF, but I have read his original, which has lots of nice pictures and explanation.)

Sunday Morning News Roundup

– Windows 7 will have an XP emulator mode so you can run all the programs that don’t work in Vista.

– Ben Nelson just got put in his place over the giveaway to the banks known as “the student loan program”.

– Speaking of putting people in their place, Obama has told Congressional Republicans that he has had enough of their garbage:

If you’ve ever been in a no-limit high stakes poker game and found yourself with a short stack of chips, you know what it’s like to play with a major disadvantage. It’s not enough to have a good hand. At any time, another player can force you to make the decision between folding and going all-in with the remainder of your chips. Any hand you choose to play could spell your elimination. Under those circumstances, you have to wait until you have a great hand. Bluffing becomes a suicide mission. And, yet, if you just keep folding as you wait for a great hand, your pile will be slowly bled dry by the antes. You must gamble. Analogous decisions have faced the Republicans since the beginning of this Congress.

Barack Obama has watched how the Republicans play their game, and he appears to have come to the conclusion that they like to overplay their hands.

 

In a meeting with House Republicans at the White House Thursday, President Obama reminded the minority that the last time he reached out to them, they reacted with zero votes — twice — for his stimulus package. And then he reminded them again. And again. And again.A GOP source familiar with the meeting said that the president was extremely sensitive — even “thin-skinned” — to the fact that the stimulus bill received no GOP votes in the House. He continually brought it up throughout the meeting.

You can call him ‘thin-skinned’ if you want, but he’s really just being realistic. He made concessions to the House GOP during the stimulus debate and he got absolutely nothing in return. In essence, he folded a good hand and lost a pot that rightfully belonged to him. The Republicans had been bluffing about bipartisanship. He’s not about to trust them again over the signature domestic issue of his campaign: health care reform.

It’s a bit byzantine and I’m not going to get into full details here, but the Democrats have decided to use the budget ‘reconciliation’ process to push through health care. It’s a procedure that limits debate, which therefore eliminates the GOP’s ability to filibuster. The point is that health care can pass with 50 votes (plus Joe Biden’s tiebreaker) instead of the 60 normally needed to cut off debate. If Congress does not pass a health care bill by October 15th, it will be passed under reconciliation.

More like this, please.

Mexico, April 25th 2009

Alfredo Corchado, Nieman:

Today those words [of confidence in the rule of law by former president Vicente Fox] are a hollow echo as drug violence explodes in Mexico. One the biggest victims: journalism, the cornerstone of any democracy. Since that celebratory night [in 2000], more than 30 journalists have either been killed or disappeared in this so-called decade of Mexican democracy.

The majority of those murdered have been victims either because of their involvement with criminals or because of their hard-hitting reporting on what some experts call the most powerful organized criminal organizations in the Western Hemisphere….

What’s happened to the Mexican press is not unlike the experiences of other countries, including Russia, where transition from either authoritarian, or semi-authoritarian rule leaves a power vacuum..

For decades, the Mexican press was largely controlled by the powerful Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, through intimidation or graft. …

Indeed, with Fox’s victory, the long existing peaceful accommodation between government and shady characters came to a halt. Shortly after Fox took office, drug traffickers filled the power vacuum. In some communities, with the old government middlemen gone, drug kingpins, touting the latest weapons from grenade launchers to 50-caliber machine guns, strategically took over entire cities: local governments, police departments and the media.

Does anyone work at work anymore?

You would have to be a really stupid boss to miss these tricks.

Apparently, many are.

Ask The Bloggess

Go ahead, ask her anything. You’ll always get a memorable response. For example:

… The thing that makes me most qualified to have an advice column is the fact that someone gave me an advice column.  Also I’m better than Dr. Phil, who is apparently following me on twitter. I’m not sure if it’s the real Dr. Phil but the advice he was giving out was total crap so it’s probably him.  I spent an entire afternoon arguing with Dr. Phil about his completely unrealistic and unhelpful tweets and even though most of it only happened in my head it’s pretty clear who won.  A few examples of Dr. Phil’s advice vs. my advice:

Dr. Phil: Never assume that you’re stuck with the way things are. You have the ability to make a difference.

Me: Never assume that you’re stuck with the way things are. Things can get way shittier.

Dr. Phil: The world in which you live depends on the world you choose to see and the values you choose to express!

Me: The world in which you live depends on where you were born and if you have access to clean drinking water.  Otherwise you are in for a lot of diarrhea.

C’mon, she’s TBogg Approved!

Friday Cat Blogging

Palin Can Forget About 2012 Now

Let’s see: Her state legislature has turned on her, she’s facing serious legal issues, and now her daughter’s ex-boyfriend, Levi Johnston, has lawyered up:

In an interview with CNN’s Larry King, Johnston, his mother, and his sister acknowledged that they have a lawyer and are contemplating taking legal action to protect Johnston’s parental rights.

“That is what we’re going to have to do next,” Johnston’s mother, Sherry, said Wednesday on Larry King Live. “We were just hoping that we wouldn’t have to,” Sherry Johnston also said.

But “that is the step we’re going to have to go,” Johnston’s mother said later in the interview.

Dang. I was hoping she wouldn’t blow up so soon; I wanted her to be strong enough to take down Newt in the money race prior to the primaries.

The Mindset Obama Faces

David Frum, on the possibility that Bush-era torturers might be held accountable: “Obama slides toward show trials“.

I heard Chris Cillizza on Hardball tonight say much the same thing.

Remember, impeachment over oral sex = OK. Prosecutions for torture and other war crimes = icky partisanship.

(image from International Freebies)

The Economist:

The plunge in manufacturing is in part the result of a huge global inventory adjustment. With unsold goods piling up and finance hard to come by, firms around the world have slashed production even faster than demand has fallen. Once firms have run down their stocks they will start making things again and the manufacturing recession will be past its worst.

Even if that moment is at hand, two other slumps are likely to poison the economy for much longer. The most important is the banking crisis and the purge of debt in the bubble economies, especially America and Britain. Demand has plummeted as tighter credit and sinking asset prices have exposed consumers’ excessive borrowing and scared them into saving more. History suggests that such balance-sheet recessions are long and that the recoveries which eventually follow them are feeble.

The second slump is in the emerging world, where many economies have been hit by the sudden fall in private cross-border capital flows. Emerging economies, which imported capital worth 5% of their GDP in 2007, now face a world where cautious investors keep their money at home. According to the IMF, banks, firms and governments in the emerging world have some $1.8 trillion-worth of borrowing to roll over this year, much of that in central and eastern Europe. Even if emerging markets escape a full-blown debt crisis, investors’ confidence is unlikely to recover for years.

These crises sent the world economy into a decline that, on several measures, has been steeper than the onset of the Depression.

This Is Wrong

The Obama Administration is arguing in a Supreme Court case that police should be allowed under the Constitution to “initiate questions” when a defendant doesn’t have a lawyer present.

The government said defendants who don’t wish to talk to police don’t have to and that officers must respect that decision. But it said there is no reason a defendant who wants to should not be able to respond to officers’ questions.

I disagree completely. Too many defendants don’t have the knowledge or the social status to defend themselves from an overazealous pursuit of “case solved”. Without a lawyer present, there is too much opportunity for police to intimidate a defendant into “wanting” to answer questions, and too much opportunity to mislead or intimidate a defendant into giving the answers the police want to hear.