Its a start

Officials Reach California Deal to Cut Emissions

Arnie also signed a global warming research pact with Blair, and of course Bush was nowhere to be seen.

Senator Stevens is transparency bill blocker

Pork King says he is worried about costs

This is crazy Alaskan Senator, bridge to nowhere, the internet are like tubes, guy. Yeah, like he has nothing to hide.





NO!

Rumsfeld and fascism

Pot kettle black

The man who sees absolutes, where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning, is either a prophet, or a quack. Donald S. Rumsfeld is not a prophet.

Watch the video.

Looks like other media outlets aren't buying Rumsfelds schtick.

No God module?

More like god synchrony

A University of Montreal team found Christian mystical experiences are mediated by several brain regions.
...
They found increased activity in at least 12 regions of the brain, including areas normally involved with self-consciousness and emotion.

of course, the unnecessarily necessary qualifier quote...

This does not diminish the meaning and value of such an experience and neither does it confirm or disconfirm the existence of God.

Actually I think it both disconfirms and confirms the existence of God equally.

Although, apparently it does tell us something...

Father Stephen Wang, a Catholic priest teaching at Allen Hall Seminary in London, said: "These brain studies can give us fascinating insights into how the human body and mind and spirit inter-connect, but they should not make us think that prayer and religious experience are just an activity in the brain."

Yes, we now know that the spirt must inter-connect with 12 areas of the brain instead of just tapping into one are. Truly mysterious.

Lie By Lie

Chronicle of a War Foretold: August 1990 to March 2003

On Iran

Surpsingly relaxed

David Ignatius is in Iran and reports that though "you might expect that Tehran would feel like a garrison town" it's actually surprisingly relaxed. But why might you expect that Teheran would feel like a garrison town? Well, you would if you've been following the media's dubious, highly-spun coverage of the issue. But you wouldn't if you asked yourself some basic question. For example, if Iran is preparing to mount a Hitler-style bid for world domination they must be engaged in a big military build-up, right? But there is no such build up. Maybe there's no need for a build-up because the Iranian military is already so vast and mighty? Well, no. Iran has a defense budget of about $6 billion a year.
...
Meanwhile, the freaky and unpredictable Iranian regime has actually been in power for a very long time. Since before I was born. The regime is not only long-entrenched, but quite corrupt. Mightn't this lead you think it's being run by reasonably comfortable men who enjoy the fruits of power, intend to stay in power, and know a thing or two about maintaining their power rather than by irrational lunatics who've been waiting in the wings for 27 years preparing to spring their bid for world domination upon us without first having acquired so much as a single modern tank?

And then there's the small matter that our purported would-be Hitlers in Teheran were trying to reach a comprehensive peace agreement with the United States as recently as 2003. Their proposal was rejected by the Bush administration. Not rejected, I remind you, because the Bushies found the details of the proposal inadequate and Teheran refused to compromise further. No! It was rejected without any effort at negotiation because, at the time, the administration was busy threatening to overthrow the government of Iran as the second or third item in an ambitious plan to overthrow every government in the region.

Wow

Whistleblower uses YouTube to tell his story

I'm hoping to see more of this kind of thing. A little more transparency would go a long way in the US.

Congressional Election Nullified

Speaker of the House nullidied San Diego Congressional Race and nobody noticed.

Irony

Senator puts 'secret hold' on bill to open federal records

An unidentified senator placed a "secret hold" on legislation introduced by Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Barack Obama, D-Ill., that would create a searchable database of government contracts, grants, insurance, loans and financial assistance, worth $2.5 trillion last year. The database would bring transparency to federal spending and be as simple to use as conducting a Google search.

Another irony is that people in countries like the US are always pushing good governance, part of which is open government. They already have this type of thing in Chile and many other governments. Sad.

Drug policy is irrelevant

America's drug warriors should take a trip to Amsterdam to see there is no 'reefer madness'.

The Dutch generally use drugs less than Americans do, according to national surveys in both countries (and these surveys might understate Americans' drug usage, since respondents are less likely to admit illegal behavior). More Americans than Dutch reported having tried marijuana, cocaine and heroin. Among teenagers who'd tried marijuana, Americans were more likely to be regular users.

In a comparison of Amsterdam with another liberal port city, San Francisco, Cohen and other researchers found that people in San Francisco were nearly twice as likely to have tried marijuana. Cohen isn't sure exactly what cultural and economic factors account for the different usage patterns in America and the Netherlands, but he's confident he can rule out one explanation.

"Drug policy is irrelevant," says Cohen, the former director of the Center for Drug Research at the University of Amsterdam. It's quite logical, he says, to theorize that outlawing drugs would have an impact, but experience shows otherwise, both in America and in European countries with stricter laws than the Netherlands but no less drug use.

Meditate and thicken your brain (and improve your life too)

A new study finds that mediation experience is associated with increased cortical thickness

Abstract:
Previous research indicates that long-term meditation practice is associated with altered resting electroencephalogram patterns, suggestive of long lasting changes in brain activity. We hypothesized that meditation practice might also be associated with changes in the brain's physical structure. Magnetic resonance imaging was used to assess cortical thickness in 20 participants with extensive Insight meditation experience, which involves focused attention to internal experiences. Brain regions associated with attention, interoception and sensory processing were thicker in meditation participants than matched controls, including the prefrontal cortex and right anterior insula. Between-group differences in prefrontal cortical thickness were most pronounced in older participants, suggesting that meditation might offset age-related cortical thinning. Finally, the thickness of two regions correlated with meditation experience. These data provide the first structural evidence for experience-dependent cortical plasticity associated with meditation practice.

Study here (.pdf) [From Nick]

The best book I have read on meditation is also free online here: Mindfulness in Plain English. Good for them!

AllPeers

Share exactly what you want with exactly who you want!

This seems pretty cool. Y'all gotta sign up.

Google Library'

'Google Library' to world: give us 'all books in all languages,' free of charge

Wanted: Scarier Intelligence

And the cycle of republican political life begins anew

Another good democrat performance

It can happen even on fox

Watch the video. Hannity sounds like a whiney little baby and Coulter can't come up with anything when challenged with - "let's kill Osama, where's Osama?" The best she can say is, "he's irrelevant, things are going swimmingly in Afghanistan."

Finally!

Most in U.S. see no tie between Iraq, terror war

Fifty-one percent of those surveyed said the war in Iraq was separate from the U.S. government's war on terrorism. The findings were a considerable shift from polls taken in 2002 and early 2003, when a majority considered the two to be linked, The New York Times said.

As recently as June, opinion was evenly split, with 41 percent on both sides of the divide. Now only 32 percent considered Iraq to be a major part of the fight against terrorism, the newspaper said.

Sheesh, that only took 3 years. And really, at this point it is a win-win for the democrats. For the 51% just keep saying "where's osama?" and for the other 32% just keep saying "Bush has screwed up Iraq", followed by, "where's osama, btw?"

[update] thinking along the same lines.

Ignorant electorate and pithy sayings

A Democratic Strategist does research

So, to put it in provocative terms, how ignorant is the electorate? Bennett found that nearly one-third of adults were unaware that the Republican Party is more conservative than the Democratic Party. And lest the reader think that this is an expression of cynicism rather than a lack of knowledge, Bennett found that whether or not respondents knew there were major differences between the two parties was associated with the amount of knowledge they had of major politicians and the parties but not with their levels of governmental trust.
...
inally, in an intriguing finding, Bennett shows that consistency in positions taken across issue areas increases as political knowledge increases. Those who have little knowledge tend to have unconventional combinations of issue positions. If it is also the case that those with little political knowledge are less consistent in their positions on individual issues over time than other people are, then the result might be a sizeable constituency for demagoguery and misdirection.

So we end up with a huge percentage believing that Sadaam had connections to 9/11.

That result is intriguing, but not terribly surprising. What is really interesting is that this bloc is about 1/3 of the electorate. It is these people you have to hit with the short quick talking points - "where is Osama?" "Republicans (and Bush) are incompetent" Things like that.

Ever since I saw Colbert interviewed Geoffery Nunberg, the author of Talking Right: How conservatives turned liberals into ... blah blah blah. In the interview Geoffery can not make a single good comeback to the talking points that Colbert threw at him. At one point Colbert stops and even sort of giggles to himself - I don't even think he could believe it. This made me realize (duh!) that the democrats just need some good pity short sentences like all that republican crap to make a good comeback in many situations (unfortunately, not often do interviews go like this where apolitician is called on such a blatant use of talking points).

So a pithy comback would 1) help in debates and characterize the republicans in an unfavorable light and 2) appeal to that manipulatable 1/3 of the electorate. So I have been thinking (in the shower). Whenever a talking point like cut and run or tax and spend is thrown at you, respond in the following way:

1) Co-opt the term: "You bet I am - tax those that benefit from our wonderful society and spend it on your kids education, tax the rich, spend it on homeland security...." repeating ad nauseam.

2) Pithy phrase comback: "... which is a hell of a lot better than those 'Cut and steal' conservatives - they cut taxes for the rich and steal your health care, cut taxes on coorporations and steal your clean environment... [or something like that].

Here's another one: If they say "cut and run" on Iraq you respond, you would rather "Stay and pay" stay the course and pay the consequences, pay with national debt, pay with peoples lives... etc... hmm... well, i'm trying.

Dunno how good those are, but you get the point. What do you think?

Slam

Why don't all debates go like this?

Watch the video. Chris Matthews is all upity and the republican candidate is a talking-point robot. Paul Hackett takes him apart.

This is related to something I was thinking about the other day. Why, when people say ridiculous things like, "You'd rather have Sadaam in power" don't Democrats retort with, "I'd rather have captured Osama. Where is Osama?"

First frat boy

Party on

He loves to cuss, gets a jolly when a mountain biker wipes out trying to keep up with him, and now we're learning that the first frat boy loves flatulence jokes. A top insider let that slip when explaining why President Bush is paranoid around women, always worried about his behavior. But he's still a funny, earthy guy who, for example, can't get enough of fart jokes. He's also known to cut a few for laughs, especially when greeting new young aides, but forget about getting people to gas about that."

Dude, even I know to keep that amongst close friends.

A harbinger?

Red-state republicans turn democrat

in case you were interested, currently the money is on the GOP to retain control of the Senate and lose the house [contracts expire at 100 if republicans hold, and 0 if they lose] from intrade

Republican Party 2006 Mid Term Election Control
	SENATE.GOP.2006 Republican Party to retain control of the US Senate in 2006 election	M	78.3	79.0	78.2	13977	-2.8
	HOUSE.GOP.2006 Republican Party to retain control of the US House of Representatives in 2006 election	M	45.4	47.5	44.9	31787	-0.1

TV: hiding the truth of war

Enemy Image

Just saw this show last night on CBC's Passionate Eye Showcase. It was excellent and if you can catch it somehow (dunno how) then you should.

The invasion of Iraq was the most closely documented war ever fought. Lasting only 800 hours, it produced 20,000 hours of video, but those images were tightly controlled, producing a monolithic view of combat sanitised and controlled by the Pentagon.

Enemy Image traces the ways us television has covered war, starting with Vietnam in the 1960s and shows how the military has devised ever-improving means of ensuring the American public never again has the real face of combat beamed directly into their living rooms. Comparing footage of Vietnam, including rarely-seen material shot in North Vietnam, to coverage of Iraq and using extensive interviews with veteran war correspondents and news anchors, Mark Daniels demonstrates how television that once revealed the truth is now increasingly used to hide it.

How dems can win

Democratic Congressional Challengers Strategy Memo

Mexicans in America

By Richard Rodriguez

Quote of the day

From Blair 'feels betrayed by Bush on Lebanon'

We all feel badly let down by Bush. We thought we had persuaded him to take the Israel-Palestine situation seriously, but we were wrong. How can anyone have faith in a man of such low intellect?

A new online mag

The Democratic Strategist

Is this Kosher?

Star of gay adult films to entertain Israeli troops

Why Bush Needs Lieberman

Or, why Lieberman is a self-righteous git

Lieberman can only win by securing almost all the Republican votes. His campaign must pull Republican votes to the polls, courtesy of the national GOP on which his ambition has become dependent. That can have a drastically negative effect on the Democratic campaigns in the three Connecticut congressional districts where Republican representatives are at risk. Those three seats comprise 1/5 of the total number of 15 that Democrats need to gain the House.

What right wingers see

When reading the gray lady

Monks brawl at peace protest

Protesters calling for an end to recent violence in Sri Lanka found themselves brawling with hardline Buddhist monks Thursday

10 out of 10 Labour MPs agree

Bush is crap

Labour MPs come out in support of Prescott

John Prescott was riding a wave of support from Labour MPs last night after privately attacking the Bush administration for being "crap" on the Middle East peace process.

The Deputy Prime Minister was also buoyed by public support for his outspoken remarks about the US President, George Bush, after they were revealed in yesterday's Independent.

Mr Prescott's use of the word "crap" reached the White House yesterday. The President's press secretary, Tony Snow, made light of the remark, saying that Mr Bush had "been called a lot worse and, I suspect, will be".

Truer words Tony Snow has never spoken.

Sounds a lot like Lebanon

Kurds flee homes as Iran shells Iraq's northern frontier

Turkey and Iran have dispatched tanks, artillery and thousands of troops to their frontiers with Iraq during the past few weeks in what appears to be a coordinated effort to disrupt the activities of Kurdish rebel bases.

...

Frustrated by the reluctance of the US and the government in Baghdad to crack down on the PKK bases inside Iraq, Turkish generals have hinted they are considering a large-scale military operation across the border. They are said to be sharing intelligence about Kurdish rebel movements with their Iranian counterparts.

"We would not hesitate to take every kind of measures when our security is at stake," Abdullah Gul, the Turkish foreign minister, said last week.

Daily Colbert goodness

Breakin the law, breaking the law!

Federal District Court Rules NSA Wiretapping Program Unconstitutional

Why doesn't America believe in evolution?

In a survey of 32 European countries, the US and Japan has revealed that only Turkey is less willing than the US to accept evolution as fact.

Religious fundamentalism, bitter partisan politics and poor science education have all contributed to this denial of evolution in the US, says Jon Miller of Michigan State University in East Lansing, who conducted the survey with his colleagues. "The US is the only country in which [the teaching of evolution] has been politicised," he says. "Republicans have clearly adopted this as one of their wedge issues. In most of the world, this is a non-issue."

Lieberman

Lieberman Leads Among Likely Connecticut Voters

Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman, running as an independent, gets 53 percent of likely voters, with 41 percent for Democratic primary winner Ned Lamont and 4 percent for Republican Alan Schlesinger, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today.

Among registered voters, Sen. Lieberman gets 49 percent, followed by Lamont with 38 percent and Schlesinger with 4 percent. This compares to a 51 - 27 percent Lieberman lead over Lamont, with 9 percent for Schlesinger in a July 20 poll by the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University.

In this latest survey, Lieberman leads 75 - 13 - 10 percent among likely Republican voters, and 58 - 36 - 3 percent among likely independent voters, while likely Democratic voters back Lamont 63 - 35 percent.

If he wins given Republican support, I actually don't see it being all that bad. He will no longer be seen as a Democrat and so can't be used as a bludgeon against Democrats, the Democrats can take a more unified stand on foreign policy issues, and he is more socially liberal than a majority of all republicans. It is a much better scenario than the republican winning. Of course, I would prefer Lamont...

Faces, Too, Are Searched at U.S. Airports

Assignment: Find anyone with "evil intent"

Dare to dream

Parsing the Polls: Is a Democratic Wave Building?

In a March Parsing the Polls we looked at the edge Democrats held over Republicans on a generic ballot question, which, in essence, asks: "If the congressional election were held today, would you vote for the Democratic candidate in your district or the Republican candidate?"

At the time, we decided that although Democrats' advantage signaled considerable unrest in the country toward the majority party in Washington, it was too early in the cycle to draw any broad conclusions about what the generic ballot numbers meant for the fall.

At the time, the average of the last five national polls testing the generic ballot showed Democrats with a 13.4 percent margin. Fast forward six months and that margin has actually increased.
...
...the average Democratic generic edge has grown to 14.8 percent -- with 84 days left before the election.

So is now the time to conclude that a Democratic wave is building that will sweep Republicans out of a House majority in November?

I think I will spend many mornings visualizing a democrat senate and house...

The right approach

Democrats determined to use terror issue to their advantage

As the anniversaries of Hurricane Katrina and September 11 approach, the Democrats will use the latest alleged terrorist plot to drive home the point that the war in Iraq has fueled Islamic radicalism and distracted the Republicans from reinforcing homeland security. A video which appeared on Monday at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee website included footage of Osama bin Laden and concluded, "Feel safer? Vote for change."

Watching Lebanon

Washington’s interests in Israel’s war

The Bush Administration, however, was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah’s heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground.

Israeli military and intelligence experts I spoke to emphasized that the country’s immediate security issues were reason enough to confront Hezbollah, regardless of what the Bush Administration wanted. Shabtai Shavit, a national-security adviser to the Knesset who headed the Mossad, Israel’s foreign-intelligence service, from 1989 to 1996, told me, “We do what we think is best for us, and if it happens to meet America’s requirements, that’s just part of a relationship between two friends. Hezbollah is armed to the teeth and trained in the most advanced technology of guerrilla warfare. It was just a matter of time. We had to address it.”

Going away for a few days

on my honeymoon. I leave you with this rap goodness:

Down the rabbit hole

I just saw the movie What the Bleep Do We Know!? and I think it is worth it. It gets better as it goes along and says some interesting things.

Btw... there is still one mystery for me.

One scientists says there is an experiment where they photograph the same thing in two locations at the same time. But yet the thing about quantum mechanics is that you don't know where something is until you observe it. But then, isn't the thing being photographed being observed and therefore should be in one location? Or if it is in two locations, then what does that have to do with the observer? What am I missing here?

Don't watch

Unless you want to be a vegan - or at least buy organic.

One of the truly remarkable things about todays society is how it hides the ugliness of the world from the consumer.

Wanker

Lieberman loses

But now will go forward as an independent. What a righteous git.

Hours after losing his Democratic primary to an anti-war businessman, Sen. Joe Lieberman vowed to continue his run for a fourth term as an independent, saying Wednesday that he had to do it for the good of the country and no one could persuade him to drop out.

"I'll always take the calls of friends, but my mind is made up," Lieberman told NBC's Today show Wednesday. "I'm going forward. I'm going forward because I'm fed up with all the partisanship in Washington that stops us from getting anything done."
...
"For the sake of our state, our country and my party, I cannot and will not let that result stand," Lieberman said.

Lieberman vs. Lamont primary today

The Lieberman earthquake

Polls notwithstanding, it is hard to overstate what a profound and monumental upset it will be if Ned Lamont defeats Joe Lieberman. There are few positions that offer greater job security than being an incumbent member of the U.S. Congress. The reelection rate for incumbents in the House is now 98 percent, a figure that would create envy even among 1970s Politburo members. It is extremely rare for a three-term senator to lose an election, let alone lose to a primary challenger from his or her own party.

For some time now, this has been one of the greatest and most frustrating contradictions in our political system. Americans are overwhelmingly dissatisfied with, even contemptuous of, Congress, yet they continue to reelect the same representatives over and over, making reelection effectively automatic.

It is not hyperbole to describe a Lieberman defeat as an earthquake for the political establishment -- which is why virtually all members of that establishment, from both political parties and from its pundit class, have been enthusiastically supporting Lieberman. More than any other factor, what enables elected officials to be so unresponsive to the views of those whom they ostensibly represent is that their incumbency advantage effectively eliminates the fear of being removed from office.

Go UNESCO

Buddha statues blown up by Taleban may be put back together

The Future

Youth Give Bush Poor Grade, Hurting Republican Hopes

President George W. Bush's hopes of attracting a new generation of voters to the Republican Party may be fading, as younger Americans are far more critical of his job performance than the broader population.

A Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll of Americans age 18 to 24 found Bush's approval rating was 20 percent, with 53 percent disapproving and 28 percent with no opinion. That compares to a 40 percent approval rating among Americans of all ages in a separate Bloomberg/Times poll.

Iraq: Would U.S. Pull Out in Full Civil War?

Iraq—Plans in Case of a Civil War

President Bush will move U.S. troops out of Iraq if the country descends into civil war, according to one senior Bush aide who declined to be named while talking about internal strategy. "If there's a full-blown civil war, the president isn't going to allow our forces to be caught in the crossfire," the aide said.

Besides the question of what qualifies as a 'full-blown civil war', I wonder if Bush's ego is too big to ever pull out while he is in office. Check out one of his latest comments

...You know, I hear people say, Well, civil war this, civil war that. The Iraqi people decided against civil war when they went to the ballot box. And a unity government is working to respond to the will of the people. And, frankly, it’s quite a remarkable achievement on the political front.

Twilight of Lebanon's liberals

'Who are the liberals who will stay here now?' he asked morosely. 'They will leave. We will have the fanatics ruling, not just in Lebanon, but the whole Arab world."

Seated inside his 18th century palace, hung with portraits of his late father Kamal, an Arab socialist with a fondness for Buddhist philosophy, Jumblatt junior conceded defeat.

"The fanatics have won the day," he said gloomily, as we drank sangria in a vaulted stone room lined with oriental pillows. "The Israelis are arrogant and won't admit they've lost, but they have. Hezbollah can afford this tactic of burnt earth." "We're squeezed," he concluded, "between Karbala and Masada." Jumblatt allowed himself a slight smile for coining the expression and then sighed heavily. By invoking Karbala, the Iraqi city where the Shiite saint Hussein and his followers were massacred, Jumblatt was referring to the Shiite glorification with martyrdom. Masada, the hilltop fortress where ancient Israelites committed mass suicide rather than surrender to the Romans, symbolizes the Israeli penchant for viewing every fight as a fight to the death.