Webber... told The Guardian newspaper that his grandfather had a "good eye" for antiques and picked up "all sorts" as he plied his trade in the town of Taunton in south-west England.
Also, for the really ignorant - the screech monkeys - what they are referring to as a Keffiyeh is in reality a Shemagh. Dang it, ol' reality just isn't a concept they can get their hands on, now is it?!| A necessary evil. - 40% |
| The bane of modern society. - 50% |
| Petty tyrants. - 20% |
| Clueless drones. - 25% |
[Quote]
By Gordon Smith
If you read the comments at the Asheville Citizen-Times, you’re already aware that Barack Obama is an Islamic apostate who may be a mooslim, that he’s BFF with terrorists from Hamas to Weather Underground, and that he Hates white people. As a regular participant in the lowly AC-T forums, I’ve come to expect the worst sorts of smear tactics from zealous, frothy-mouthed shut-ins.
This sort of poison is rippling across the internet and talk radio, lapping at the harried shores of truck stops, diners, and dive bars. It’s infecting the subtext of this Presidential contest with racism, xenophobia, and Christian Nationalism.
The people responsible for propagating lies and smears like these aren’t big John McCain supporters either - they’re Republicans staggering about, eyes-wide, incredulous and angry that their movement conservatism failed so mightily under the hand of Bush and Cheney. They liked the “with us or against us” rhetoric. They applauded when Freedom Fries went onto the menu on Capitol Hill. Saddam’s spider hole was a visceral thrill, and hating the Dixie Chicks was an exercise in loyalty and conviction. After years of being at the bottom of the political heap, it was their time to shine.
Now only 20-odd percent of Americans believe George W. is a good President. Over half of those who voted for Bush in 2000 and 2004 are now faced with a terrible reality - They were wrong. Now they’re going to lash out at the presumed Democratic nominee with a cynical, nihilistic fervor. It’s not as though they admire or even like John McCain. He’s the mockery of their last hope that a ‘real’ conservative would step up and prove that they hadn’t married their identities to a failed set of ideas. They are distraught, even grossly impaired. In their anguish they build a mythology steeped in the sense that the world is so out of control that even their most hyperbolic exhortations might just be true.
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Yeah, what he said!
The troubling thing is it is not a small isolated cluster of troglodytes regurgitating bile in the local newspaper but the similar small clusters of low-brows regurgitating bile in dark corners across the nation. But the good thing about it now is as Red Rider put it:
Lunatic Fringe, we know your out there ... and we're not going to let you steal the laughter this time.
In excerpts from a 341-page book to be released Monday, Scott McClellan writes on the war in Iraq that Bush "and his advisers confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war."
"[I]n this regard, he was terribly ill-served by his top advisers, especially those involved directly in national security," McClellan wrote.
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino called McClellan's description of his time at the White House "sad."
"Scott, we now know, is disgruntled about his experience at the White House," Perino said. "For those of us who fully supported him, before, during and after he was press secretary, we are puzzled. It is sad. This is not the Scott we knew."
McClellan's former White House colleagues had harsher reactions to McClellan's book.
Frances Townsend, former Homeland Security adviser to Bush, said advisers to the president should speak up when they have policy concerns.
"Scott never did that on any of these issues as best I can remember or as best as I know from any of my White House colleagues," said Townsend, now a CNN contributor. "For him to do this now strikes me as self-serving, disingenuous and unprofessional."
Fox News contributor and former White House adviser Karl Rove said on that network Tuesday that the excerpts from the book he's read sound more like they were written by a "left-wing logger" than his former colleague.
Rove declined to comment to CNN after the Fox News interview.
In a brief phone conversation with CNN Tuesday evening, McClellan made clear that he stands behind the accuracy of his book. McClellan said he cannot give on-the-record quotes yet because of an agreement with his publisher.
Another former Bush aide-turned-critic says the reaction to McClellan's book by his former colleagues has a familiar ring to it.
"They're saying some of the exact same things about McClellan they said about me," Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism chief, told CNN.
Clarke left government in 2003. The following year, he accused President Bush of ignoring warnings about the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington and of using the attacks to push for war with Iraq.
But Clarke gave McClellan little credit for speaking out now.
"I think the difference with McClellan's book is he's now telling us something we all know -- that the war with Iraq was a disastrous war [and] was sold with deception. It's a little different when you say something as I did and a few other people did four or five years ago, when the war was popular and when we were unpopular for saying what we said."
Besides his criticism of how the administration handled the run-up to the Iraq war, McClellan also sharply criticizes the administration on its handling of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in the book.
"One of the worst disasters in our nation's history became one of the biggest disasters in Bush's presidency," he wrote. "Katrina and the botched federal response to it would largely come to define Bush's second term."
Early in the book, which CNN obtained late Tuesday, McClellan wrote that he believes he told untruths on Bush's behalf in the case of CIA agent Valerie Plame, whose identity was leaked to the media.
Rove and fellow White House advisers Elliot Abrams and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby were accused of leaking the name of Plame -- whose husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson, had gone public with charges the Bush administration had "twisted" facts to justify the war in Iraq.
Libby was convicted last year of lying to a grand jury and federal agents investigating the leak. Bush commuted his 30-month prison term, calling it excessive. At the time, McClellan called the three "good individuals" and said he spoke to them before telling reporters they were not involved.
"I had allowed myself to be deceived into unknowingly passing along a falsehood," he wrote. "It would ultimately prove fatal to my ability to serve the president effectively."
McClellan wrote he didn't realize what he said was untrue until reporters began digging up details of the case almost two years later.
A former spokesman for Bush when he was governor of Texas, McClellan was named White House press secretary in 2003, replacing Ari Fleischer. McClellan had previously been a deputy press secretary and was the traveling spokesman for the Bush campaign during the 2000 election.
He announced he was resigning in April 2006 at a news conference with Bush.
"One of these days, he and I are going to be rocking in chairs in Texas talking about the good old days of his time as the press secretary," Bush said at that conference. "And I can assure you, I will feel the same way then that I feel now, that I can say to Scott, job well done."
The Canadian foreign minister who resigned this week for a security breach had left classified documents about a NATO summit at the home of his ex-girlfriend, the government said Tuesday.
But Prime Minister Stephen Harper said it appeared that no confidential information had gotten out.
The foreign minister, Maxime Bernier, resigned Monday after leaving the documents at the home of Julie Couillard, who has generated controversy for past ties to members of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang in Quebec. Harper called Bernier's security breach a "serious error."
Biker gangs have long gained attention in the French-speaking province and have been accused of trying to extend their influence to the government and the courts.
Conservative lawmaker Peter Van Loan said Tuesday that the documents were a mix of classified and public documents relating to the April NATO summit in Romania where Canada sought reinforcements for troops in Afghanistan.
"Thus far we have no information that would suggest that any secrets have been revealed," Harper said in Paris. He said the incident would be reviewed.
Bernier wrote in his letter of resignation that he learned Sunday night that he had left behind classified documents at a private residence.
"Prime Minister, the security breach that occurred was my fault and my fault alone and I take full responsibility for my actions," Bernier wrote.
Couillard said she contacted a lawyer five weeks after he left the documents at her home in April. Couillard's lawyer returned them to the government on Sunday.
In an interview broadcast Monday, she denied ever reading the documents, saying "it was definitely not for my eyes."
"I was panicked by the fact that I had that at my house," Couillard said.
Opposition parties demanded that the government explain how it took them five weeks to realize the classified documents were missing. Opposition Liberal Leader Stephane Dion said Harper showed "appalling lack of judgment" for dismissing security concerns over Bernier's involvement with a woman with past ties to gang members, and called for a public inquiry.
But Harper said that Bernier's resignation has put an end to the matter. He named David Emerson, the international trade minister, to serve as interim foreign minister.
"As we've said, private lives are private lives and the government of Canada does not intend to get into the business of investigating private citizens," Harper said. "This has nothing to do with Madame Couillard. This was the unfortunate error, the unfortunate actions of the minister that are at issue here."
Bernier first drew the attention of Canadians when he appeared at his swearing-in ceremony in August with the provocatively dressed Couillard on his arm. Her former links to Hells Angels did not become public until recently.
Couillard had lived with Gilles Giguere, a well-known Montreal crime figure for three years beginning in 1993, who had ties to Maurice Boucher, the now-jailed leader of the Hells Angels in Quebec. Giguere was shot to death in 1996 when he decided to become a police informer after being arrested with a cache of submachine-guns and marijuana.
She later married Stephane Sirois, who admitted to being an enforcer for a Hells Angels-affiliated biker club. He later turned informant and testified against a dozen of his former colleagues in a 2002 trial. The two divorced in 1999.
The former model said she had never done anything wrong and never been convicted of any crime. She said she told Bernier about her involvement with Quebec bikers shortly after she began dating him in the summer of 2007.
"I am definitely not a biker's chick," she said.
The great film director, producer, and actor Sydney Pollack died today at 73 years of age, at his home in Southern California. Here is an obituary. I met him a ways back at a SAG convention. He had some truly inspired ideas about narrative in the digital age, and the clash between old Hollywood vs. new.
Stuff like tricloroethylene, formaldehyde, and benzene can be really toxic. Yet they're commonly found right in your house. Fortunately, adding some common houseplants to your surroundings can apparently help clean up the toxins. Friends at GOOD Magazine posted a useful charticle showing where the compounds tend to rear their ugly heads and the common plants that can act as, er, toxic avengers. Link For $6Tn we could buy a lot of juice — a quarter of our global civilization's energy budget would go carbon-neutral at a stroke. (Yes, we just solved our carbon dioxide emissions problem by switching to a nuclear economy.) This probably isn't the ideal way of dealing with our environmental problems, and it's a naive treatment of the costs (has anyone done a proper treatment of the economic implications of shifting the planet over to a nuclear economy, say to the same extent as France?) but it's thought-provoking.Finally, there's all the other little stuff we could solve by pointing $513Bn at it, never mind $6000Bn. Eliminating childhood diseases in South-East Asia? Piffle — Bill and Melinda Gates are trying to do that out of their pocket lint. Build first-world grade housing in shiny new cities for 600 million Chinese peasants, nearly a tenth of the planetary population? Yes, this budget will cover that. What else?
Yes, I'm asking you: what would you do with the cost of the Iraq war (take your pick: $513Bn or $6000Bn) in your budget? Colonise Mars? Solve our carbon emission problem and fix global warming? House half a billion people? Or something else ...?
(And what isn't going to happen now, because we pissed it all away on the desert sands?)
"Thanks to the vigilance and quick action of the security team at Stonehenge, very minimal damage was caused," said a spokeswoman for English Heritage.
"A tiny chip was taken from the north side of the Heel Stone with a screwdriver and hammer, but as soon as the two men were spotted by security guards they escaped over the fence and drove off.
"This is now a matter for the police," she added.
Freeman Dyson, professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, reviewed two books about global warming for the New York Review of Books. His lengthy review is loaded with fascinating insights and ideas. Here's one highlight: At this point I return to the Keeling graph, which demonstrates the strong coupling between atmosphere and plants. The wiggles in the graph show us that every carbon dioxide molecule in the atmosphere is incorporated in a plant within a time of the order of twelve years. Therefore, if we can control what the plants do with the carbon, the fate of the carbon in the atmosphere is in our hands. That is what Nordhaus meant when he mentioned "genetically engineered carbon-eating trees" as a low-cost backstop to global warming. The science and technology of genetic engineering are not yet ripe for large-scale use. We do not understand the language of the genome well enough to read and write it fluently. But the science is advancing rapidly, and the technology of reading and writing genomes is advancing even more rapidly. I consider it likely that we shall have "genetically engineered carbon-eating trees" within twenty years, and almost certainly within fifty years.Carbon-eating trees could convert most of the carbon that they absorb from the atmosphere into some chemically stable form and bury it underground. Or they could convert the carbon into liquid fuels and other useful chemicals. Biotechnology is enormously powerful, capable of burying or transforming any molecule of carbon dioxide that comes into its grasp. Keeling's wiggles prove that a big fraction of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere comes within the grasp of biotechnology every decade. If one quarter of the world's forests were replanted with carbon-eating varieties of the same species, the forests would be preserved as ecological resources and as habitats for wildlife, and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be reduced by half in about fifty years.
It is likely that biotechnology will dominate our lives and our economic activities during the second half of the twenty-first century, just as computer technology dominated our lives and our economy during the second half of the twentieth. Biotechnology could be a great equalizer, spreading wealth over the world wherever there is land and air and water and sunlight. This has nothing to do with the misguided efforts that are now being made to reduce carbon emissions by growing corn and converting it into ethanol fuel. The ethanol program fails to reduce emissions and incidentally hurts poor people all over the world by raising the price of food. After we have mastered biotechnology, the rules of the climate game will be radically changed. In a world economy based on biotechnology, some low-cost and environmentally benign backstop to carbon emissions is likely to become a reality.
