Archive for 2009
December 21, 2009
ADVANCES IN nanoparticle detection.
SUPREME COURT CLERKS and law school hiring discrimination.
CHANGE: Dorgan trailing in ND re-election bid by 22 points. “Call it the Wages of ObamaCare. When only 30% of a state’s likely voters support the one piece of legislation on which the incumbent has worked for most of the year, they tend to get a little chippy about the idea of sending him back to Washington. When paired up with Republican Governor John Hoeven in a 2010 midterm election, Democratic Senator Byron Dorgan trails by 22 points, 58%-36%.”
LOOKING AROUND, ALL I CAN SAY IS “FASTER PLEASE:” Brown Fat Revelations May Lead to New Weight Loss Drugs.
HIAWATHA BRAY: Battlefield Robot Had Security Hole.
AUTOBLOG GREEN: Zombie meme alert: electric cars cause cancer. “There is a lot of hedging in DeBord’s article, and he never flat-out states that the EMFs in EVs do cause cancer, just that they might. This is a fair subject for scientific research, but no one has had enough time to determine if EVs are any worse than hair dryers or cell phones in this regard. DeBord admits that ‘automakers have tested their vehicles for EMFs (conventional cars as well as hybrids and EVs), and found them to be within accepted limits.’ Of course, there are some things we know for sure: that gasoline fumes are tremendous health hazards and the geopolitical reality of gasoline dependency isn’t that great either, but that headline isn’t as hot. Also, way back in 1999, the National Institutes of Health issued a statement saying that one researcher who claimed that EMFs and cancer were related had falsified data.” Then he went into climate research, presumably.
IN THE MAIL: From Kenneth Shear, Unoriginal Misunderstanding – Press Freedom in Early America and Interpretation of the First Amendment.
CLIMATEGATE: The Perils of Global Warming Models.
DAVID FREDDOSO: California: Running a failed state can sure be expensive.
MICKEY KAUS: “Kausfiles awaits Ezra Klein’s denunciation of Howard Dean, Keith Olbermann, Jane Hamsher and Markos Moulitsas for being ‘willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order’ to satisfy an emotional need to ‘fight’ for a doomed plan.”
Plus, Jane Hamser says she’s a Tea Partier too! Someone tell Sen. Whitehouse that the Aryan militias have moles everywhere. [Well, she is a blonde. –ed. I should have known!]
TAXPROF: A Geithner Christmas.
WILL VOTER ANGST produce a third party? With the Tea Party more popular than Republicans or Democrats, you can’t rule that out.
DRAFTING BEN CUNNINGHAM for Bart Gordon’s seat?
JANET DALEY: There’ll be nowhere to run from the new world government. Guess we’ll just have to hang ’em all then. With the enormous growth of the militia movement in the United States, as noted by Senator Whitehouse, it shouldn’t be hard to round up a posse . . . .
JOHN NOLTE: Top Ten Christmas Specials of All Time.
NUANCE: Sen. Whitehouse: foes of health care bill are birthers, right-wing militias, aryan groups. He’d better worry, then, because they’ve got him outnumbered: “For the first time in our polling, more Americans said they’d rather stick with the status quo on health care than pass the Democrats’ bill.”
UPDATE: Latest from Rasmussen: 41% favor, 55% oppose. Who knew the militia movement had become so powerful?
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Rob Crawford writes:
One of the things that bugs the living shit out of me about this type of rhetoric is that it is, on the margin, a self-fulfilling prophecy. People with good-faith objections find themselves lumped in with nut jobs, cranks, and thugs, and after a few decades, the “as well hung for a lion as a lamb” attitude. If objecting to government running your healthcare, controlling access to your medical records, confiscating another 30%+ of your labor and effectively drafting the medical industry means you’re an Aryan, right-wing militia, “birther” type, well, maybe you should give those groups another look…
I’m not going to claim the Republicans are innocent of this type of rhetoric, but, well, at least when they pointed out that the primary organizer of “anti-war” marches was the Communist group ANSWER, they had evidence to back them up.
Well, when Sen. Whitehouse gets tarred and feathered by a gang of gay Firedoglake commenters, I promise not to laugh. Oh, who am I kidding? Of course I’ll laugh.
REMEMBERING Brittany Murphy. I barely do, but now that she’s dead apparently everyone loved her.
CASH FOR CLOTURE: “You can’t even dignify this squalid racket as bribery: If I try to buy a cop, I have to use my own money. But, when Harry Reid buys a senator, he uses my money, too. It doesn’t ‘border on immoral’: it drives straight through the frontier post and heads for the dark heartland of immoral.”
Plus, Oh, Nebraska. So what exactly was different about what Rod Blagojevich did?
NBC/WSJ POLL: Sarah Palin more respected than Al Gore.
THINGS YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED THIS WEEKEND: Roger Simon catches Charlie Rangel in Copenhagen.
Jack Bauer interrogates Santa Claus.
Our Angry President.
Obama and Climate Science plummet in polls. Plus, Joe Sixpack, climate skeptic?
Poll: Americans see Iraq war as success.
Bringing a gun to a snowball fight.
More on the Andrew Sullivan ghostblogger scandal. Best line: ““Andrew was the gold standard for solo bloggers. And now… Trig is not his baby!”
And Jason Mattera presents a generational theft invoice to the AARP.
JUSTICE GINSBURG: Supreme Court may overrule Heller?