Month: August 2010

A sign of how radical and extremist the GOP now is: on the question of the war on terror (and immigration), some of us are beginning to see the relative moderation and sophistication of George W. Bush.

A reader writes:

I believe the supportive evidence that you did not initially notice the phallic resemblances lies in the fact that the penises in question have obviously been circumcised.

A thousand words:

More photos from Rush's fourth wedding here.

I've never seen so much facial hair on so many young dudes as I have this summer in Provincetown. Most encouraging. But titi monkeys getting in on the trend?

A reader writes:

When there was a debate in South Carolina over whether its statehouse should fly the Confederate battle flag, African-Americans said they were offended by the state’s honoring a flag that stood for the enslavement of their ancestors.  Many white southerners responded by saying that they should not be held responsible for the misdeeds of their predecessors, that not all southerners were racist, and that they had a right to honor their heritage, even if some chose to be offended.  In this case, as with the case of the NYC mosque, the right-wing of the GOP stood with … white Christians.

And that appears to be the sole remaining principle of today's Dixie Republicanism: the rationalization of white evangelical paranoia.

There is some bizarre notion among the punditocracy that the Obama administration cannot and should not blame Bush and the GOP for the awful recession, looming tax rises and entitlement cuts, endless wars, tainted moral standing, crumbling infrastructure and massive debt that Obama inherited. I think this is foolish. Because it means this president not only has to take responsibility for his own policies, but for the legacy that has made his job close to impossible.

This is a recession caused by a collapse in a too-lightly regulated financial sector and a huge housing bubble sustained by the last administration. We have a debt fueled overwhelmingly by unaffordable tax cuts, two disastrous unfunded wars, and a new Medicare entitlement that was never paid for. None of this was Obama’s doing. None of it. He came into the White House facing the worst legacy since Carter bequeathed the Oval Office to Reagan. And the great difficulty of moving out of this wasteland of unemployment is due, in part, to the extreme fiscal irresponsibility of the Bush-Cheney GOP.

Now, the Tories have only just gotten into office, while Obama has had a year and a half to be accountable. But they are doing what Obama should, in my view, have done from the start: relentlessly remind people of what the GOP did to this country. Obama allowed the hacks on the right to pivot immediately to pinning the entire deficit and debt on Obama – and, amplified by the FNC, they have somehow managed to turn the debate back into the exhausted big-government vs little-guy choice – rather than debating exactly what, if anything, we can do to rescue ourselves from the Bush-Cheney hangover.

Here’s an alternative approach – aggressively blaming even future bleakness on the GOP, matching their refusal to take any responsibility for the worst period of governance in modern times with a no-holds-barred assault on their brand. It will soon be time for Obama to go on the offensive against these nihilists and amnesiacs and to remind people of the difference between the arsonist and the fire-fighter.

The Village Voice has a riveting story from "inside America's kidnapping capital."

Yes, and that ice-island is pretty tumescent as well. Unintended. Honest.

 

Brad Plumer writes:

Biochar has always sounded like a whimsical climate solution that's too good to be true. Simply stir a little charcoal into the soil and—voila—it's supposedly possible to suck thousands of tons of carbon-dioxide out of the air. Sounds suspicious, no? And yet it just might work. A new study in Nature Communications finds that the world could, in theory, sustainably offset a whopping 12 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions by producing biochar.

That study is here. I so want to believe it. I don't favor a small but slowly rising carbon tax because I want to hurt economic growth, but because I don't want an over-arching government bureaucracy setting carbon limits and offsets. But most of all because I really want to encourage the entrepreneurial dynamism of new energy investment. The real tragedy, of course, would be the emergence of climate-saving alternative energies like biochar just a little too late to prevent the kind of feed-back loops that could accelerate a process already well underway. Speaking of which, check out this new ice-island:

The image on the left was taken on 28 July and the image on the right was taken on 5 August. The floating chunk of ice measures approximately 250 square kilometres (100 square miles). According to Nasa's Earth Observatory, the glacier lost about one-quarter of its 70km-long floating ice shelf.

Here's a way to grasp the size of this new island, the biggest in half a century:

No, I didn't quite see the phallic nature of that graph when I posted it. But thanks for letting me know. Pervs.