Friday Cat Blogging

Trying out for the Cat Olympics, in the Synchronized Lounging event.

Number games

Citizens for Tax Justice is the sharpest pencil when it comes to decoding the games that Bushco plays with taxes and budgets. From their newsletter:

Then there’s this:

President Bush is now touting projections that the federal budget deficit for fiscal year 2007 will be only $205 billion … The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities rightly points out that revenues have increased…but that always happens in an economic recovery, and usually revenues increase by more….

The only thing we would add is that the real deficit is bigger than $205 billion. …the Administration will borrow $180 billion from the Social Security Trust Fund this year to keep the total deficit as low as $205. …Not counting the Social Security surplus, this year’s budget deficit is really $385 billion.

And there’s this: 

Your Right Hand Thief…

…is the go-to blog for All Things New Orleans. (Yes, including Vitter. But the Oyster has other worthwhile topics, too.)

Conrad Black not guilty of racketeering

But he was convicted of 4 charges and is almost certain to go to jail.

Unless he makes a sufficiently large donation to the Republican Party.

Mike Robinson, AP (on AOL):

Black, 62, was convicted of three counts of mail fraud and one count of obstruction of justice. He faces a maximum of 35 years in prison for the offenses, plus a maximum penalty of $1 million.

A New Dawn for the Chicago Sun-Times

Editor & Publisher reports that the Chicago Sun-Time, formerly owned by such rightwing rascals as Rupert Murdoch and Lord Conrad Black, is moving to the left:

“We are returning to our liberal, working-class roots, a position that pits us squarely opposite the Chicago Tribune — that Republican, George Bush-touting paper over on moneyed Michigan Avenue,” [Editorial Page Editor Cheryl L. Reed] wrote. “We’re rethinking our stance on several issues, including the most pressing issue facing Americans today: Bush’s war in Iraq.”

[…]

Reed said the Sun-Times will be adding seats to the editorial board “so that board members — the paper’s brain trust — reflect the ethnic and social diversity of our city.”

If you live where the Sun-Times is delivered, consider subscribing to it. If the political shift has positive financial effects, other newspapers will take notice.

Sprint supports the troops (or not)

Russell Shaw, ZDNet:

Things are really heating up on the SprintUser.com Forum.

According to Shafted_Sprint, Sprint has been cancelling accounts due to “excessive roaming.”

Some 200 of these cancellations are military accounts.

In my opinion, soldiers should be issued telephones for free, with a few hours of free minutes each month, and no roaming charges.  

Making You Sick, Then Selling You Snake Oil

Avedon, in her recurring role as Not Atrios, asks the following question:

Shouldn’t it concern us that Republicans are constantly talking about how people will all wise up when the next terrorist attack at home comes?

Yes, it should concern us. For one thing, there’ve already been lots of post-9/11 terror attacks at home — Rick Perstein mentioned a few of them back in May, and then there was this recent incident. But we don’t hear much about them (just as we haven’t heard much about the scads of pre-9/11 terrorism incidents in the US) because they’ve been done by conservative white people. Rick Santorum’s not going to go out of his way to criticize, say, white militia members like the Noonday suitcase bombers, because the people that like him also like those white militia members.

Another thing we don’t hear much about is how these terrorists, as well as the brown Muslim ones we hear so much about in the press, actually are aided and abetted by the lobbyists for America’s small-arms industry. As the Washington Post noted in a December 16, 2001 editorial titled “Gun Shows and Terrorists” (now hidden behind the WP’s pay wall), an Al-Qaeda training manual for terrorists found in Afghanistan in 2001 urges would-be terrorists to purchase their weapons at US gun shows, which are very lightly regulated when compared to American gun stores, which must at least do background checks thanks to The Brady Law. In fact, the BATF has essentially been told by the NRA’s puppets in Congress to ease up on gun shows ever since they busted a ton of shifty gun dealers at a Virginia show in 2005.)

The NRA and its friends in the “militia movement” are into the same stock-in-trade: Fear. Their target audience: Those people, generally disenfranchised white males with at most a high-school education and middling to piddling income, who suspect they’re being screwed but either have no clue who’s screwing them — or who know but don’t have the guts to fight the real enemy. The NRA and its allies push fear in general, and fear of non-whites in particular, to these white males, telling them that blacks/liberals/Jews/women/etc. (but never ever ever corrupt corporations or businesses) are the cause of the white guys’ problem — then promptly sell themselves as the solution.

Another Shoe Drops, With The Promise Of More

And now we know why the Louisiana GOP’s members are so desperate to see David Vitter gone (and are hoping that they could con Kathleen Blanco into cutting a deal to appoint another Republican to replace him).

One of the other shoes has just dropped: Vitter made phone calls to the DC Madam’s offices during roll call votes on the House floor.

Okay, Blanco: You’ve got the leverage now. Wait another week, and Vitter will be pushed out by his own party without you cutting any deals — and then you can appoint anyone you want to replace him.

Meanwhile, the phone number of another Washington Big Wheel has appeared on the list. Conservative pundit and strategist Jack Burkman, come on down! You can join Toesucker Dick Morris and other former clients of Debora Jeane Palfrey’s fine establishment in the public eye.

Memo to AP’s Headline Writer

(“Behind the Great Wave at Kanagawa”, by Katsushika Hokusai)

Iraq report may mean longer U.S. surge

While many in Congress are pushing President Bush to alter course in Iraq by September if not sooner, his new status report on the war strongly implies that the administration believes its military strategy will take many more months to meet its goals.

When a so-called surge lasts “many months, the correct term is escalation.

Yes, just like in Vietnam.

I’m just sayin’.

Friday Morning News Roundup

Today’s news so far:

— Doofuses in London botch car bombings: BIG news, US media freaks out. Doofuses send John Edwards packages with things like white powder and in one case a device that beeped intermittently (reminiscent of the manner of a cell phone bomb): US press rolls over and yawns. (And of course the neighbors get pissed at Edwards, not the terrorists.)

— Woo-hoo! The Dow’s in record territory! (But of course the dollar’s still dropping, as Bonddad points out.)

— Shortly after the Republicans suffered the loss of Congress last November, the CIA told the Iraq Study Group that contrary to Bush’s rosy scenarios, the Iraqi government was essentially nonexistent and the only stable portions thereof were the death squads. (The ISG would soon craft a report that urged Bush to withdraw our troops, and gave him as much face-saving cover as was possible. He of course angrily rejected the report as a “flaming turd“.)

— Why They Hate Us, Part 3453824057243:

We heard a few reports, in one case corroborated by photographs, that some soldiers had so lost their moral compass that they’d mocked or desecrated Iraqi corpses. One photo, among dozens turned over to The Nation during the investigation, shows an American soldier acting as if he is about to eat the spilled brains of a dead Iraqi man with his brown plastic Army-issue spoon.

“Take a picture of me and this motherfucker,” a soldier who had been in Sergeant Mejía’s squad said as he put his arm around the corpse. Sergeant Mejía recalls that the shroud covering the body fell away, revealing that the young man was wearing only his pants. There was a bullet hole in his chest.

“Damn, they really fucked you up, didn’t they!?” the soldier laughed.

The scene, Sergeant Mejía said, was witnessed by the dead man’s brothers and cousins.

— And because otherwise this all would be just one great big bummer of a news roundup: Community planners worldwide are really liking solar lighting, especially with the new energy-efficient CFLs and LEDs. They really like that the lights stay on even if the local power plant goes kaflooey. And they really, really, really like not having to dig up the sidewalk to lay out miles and miles of expensive electrical wire!