September 2009 Archives

Two of the most-heard reasons from the Tea Party protesters as the explanation for their discontent (those who aren't screaming Marxist, Muslim, alien, that is) are that their taxes are too high and government spending is out of control. Crooks and Liars has a list of Ten Lessons for Tea Baggers, here are three which prove how misguided the protesters are on those two counts, not that they would let something like facts get in...

It's funny, but sometimes when we think about civility in politcs we often consider our times to be the least civil. I was listening to America Left on XM yesterday and they reminded me of some things I had forgotten. Everyone knows about the famous duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton. Fewer know about the beating done in South Carolina (yup there they go again. I hate using Wikipedia, but it is a well-known...

The long-awaited Senate Finance Committee version of health care reform (photo at left), better known as the Baucus Bill because he is about the only person who likes it, was finally released yesterday, raising the question--this is what we waited so long for? But then again, I guess something this completely and thoroughly bad can't be written overnight. Rome wasn't built in a day and neither was the landfill where this particular piece of...

Desperado's post this morning about Rush Limbaugh's blatant race-baiting leads us here - to former President Jimmy Carter coming out and saying, in a way perhaps only he can, that some of the opposition to President Barack Obama is rooted in the dark southern roots of white superiority.  In an interview with NBC's Brian Williams, he remarked, ". . . I think it's bubbled up to the surface because of a belief among many white people,...

As a systems engineer who helps put science experiments on the International Space Station, I certainly have a vested interest in whatever the White House decides will be the course of the human space flight program.  In my heart, I believe in the importance of exploration and that the continued survival of our species will be ultimately dependent on our ability to become a truly spacefaring species.  That's the long-term view, though.  We face some...

Never one to let an opportunity to spew his hatred and play upon the ignorance and bigotry of his listening audience pass by, Republican Party spokesman and race-baiter-in-chief Rush Limbaugh said on his radio program yesterday about the incident on a Belleville, Illinois schoolbus:"It's Obama's America, is it not? Obama's America, white kids getting beat up on school buses now. You put your kids on a school bus, you expect safety but in Obama's America...

I tend to be a big picture kind of guy most of the time. That is why so many kind people send me emails about words that have been misspelled. I do the best I can, but I often get so wrapped up in the whole presentation that I get lost in the details. My wife makes the same complaints. I suppose there are some areas where I am detail oriented, but for the most...

Part of the argument against the public option is that the private insurance companies won't be able to compete and will be driven out of business. My response to that is "GOOD." And CIGNA should be the first to go:If for just 5 minutes we could get the Republicans to stop saying "No," and the Blue Dog Democrats to stop counting campaign contributions from their insurance company masters, they might be able see what this...

As a sideline to Scott's earlier blog, it turns out some of those aerial photos of the protesters that descended upon Washington, D.C. this weekend might be fake.  At least one is.  The photograph shown here was touted by Say Anything, a conservative blog, as reasonable justification for the claim of 1,000,000 attendees.    A sharp reader on the site posted the following photograph, proving that the above picture was taken before the National Museum of the American...

While the debate on health care reform is receiving the lion's share of attention, something else is looming on the horizon for President Obama and the Congress, something which the president will address today when he goes to New York--the financial institutions that were considered too big to fail are even bigger, and Wall Street is up to it's old tricks again. "The failure of Lehman, the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history, and the panicky...