Monthly Archives: February 2011

Valentine’s Day Open Thread

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! You’re all my sweethearts, even you trolls. I hope you’re having a good one! What’s on your mind besides love?

Bad news – it looks like the losses at the Egyptian Antiquities Museum are greater than initially believed.

At least 17 artifacts from the Egyptian Museum of Cairo are missing following a break-in, the country’s minister of antiquities said Sunday.

The missing objects include a gilded wood statue of King Tutankhamun being carried by a goddess; parts of a gilded wood statue of Tutankhamun harpooning; a limestone statue of Akhenaten; a statue of Nefertiti making offerings; a sandstone head of an Amarna princess; a stone statuette of a scribe from Amarna; 11 wooden shabti statuettes of Yuya; and a heart scarab of Yuya.
The discovery that the ancient treasures are missing came after museum staff took an inventory, Zahi Hawass said in a statement.
The police and army plan to question people who are already in custody, Hawass said.

One good thing is that these objects are so recognizable that they won’t be easy to sell. I don’t doubt that there are some unscrupulous dealers out there willing to handle them. Unless a buyer has a private collection they show to very few people, it will be difficult to take these pieces. I’m hoping that the museum recovers the artifacts quickly.

There’s an anniversary coming! It’s been five years since Clarence Thomas has uttered a word publicly during a SCOTUS case.

A week from Tuesday, when the Supreme Court returns from its midwinter break and hears arguments in two criminal cases, it will have been five years since Justice Clarence Thomas has spoken during a court argument.

If he is true to form, Justice Thomas will spend the arguments as he always does: leaning back in his chair, staring at the ceiling, rubbing his eyes, whispering to Justice Stephen G. Breyer, consulting papers and looking a little irritated and a little bored. He will ask no questions.

Who needs words when your ideology has already decided the case? That’s just extra energy that he doesn’t want to waste. Let us all celebrate Silent Clarence and his intellectual addition to law.

Good Morning Delaware – February 14, 2011

Tailgating before Church. That’s a new one. But Pastor Bill Schlonecker of the Bible Fellowship Church of Newark deserves credit. He’s being innovative and creative in making religion relevant in our cluttered world.

Two Sussex teens are charged with 16 buglaries of cars. Two other Sussex men charged with 60 break-ins. What is going on downstate? Don’t try to match Wilmington’s crime record! You’ll never win.

Proposed funding cuts hit home in Delaware, as they will in every state, just so a few billionaires can keep their money. Fuckers.

One of the reasons I oppose the death penalty in most cases is that it is not used properly. Look at Delaware’s death row. Several of the inmates have been sentenced to death since the Administration of George Bush. George H.W. Bush. 1992. If you are going to have it, use it as soon as it is legally permissible.

Medical Marijuana in Delaware? Hell Yes!

Rehoboth considers outdoor smoking ban. What’s next? Outer space?

Really, I Have No Idea Why People Make Fun Of Libertarians

Ron Paul was a big hit at this year’s CPAC convention and he really brought the house down with his speech. He has, well, an interesting proposal.

A lot of Republicans running for president (or “maybe running for president”) these days are trying to reach out to the Libertarian wing of the party, whose fiscal views have come to dominate the tea party movement. But Paul made it clear how far the Mitt Romneys and Tim Pawlentys of the world will have to go before they really talk like a libertarian. Where they’re talking about small government and shrunken entitlements, Paul’s suggesting young people be allowed to walk away from the government entirely. His proposed deal works like this: you pay the government 10% of your income (presumably to protect your borders and such) and you promise you’ll never take advantage of a government service for the rest of your life.

Can we make sure that these opt-liters don’t use our roads, our sewers and our electrical grids? How would this work at all in practice? Would the opt-Lugers wear special badges or something so police know not to help them and ambulances can ignore them. I suppose they could go live in a cabin in Idaho or something.

Also, apparently conservatives have found their love of trains. The Atlas Shrugged, Part 1 of 3 (no I’m not kidding, supposedly there’s 3 movies total) was a big hit at CPAC.

I’m sure you’re all saving your money already to go see this.

CPAC Insanity

Grover Norquist is married to a Muslim and is therefor spearheading “campaigns within the conservative establishment on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood.” That’s the theory. I shit you not.

ThinkProgress asked (Center for Security Policy head Frank Gaffney) the question Friday afternoon when we spotted him breaking his self-imposed exile to “do some interviews” at CPAC we saw him again Saturday morning as well. In a lengthy interview with ThinkProgress, Gaffney warned that Grover Norquist, the anti-tax activist and influential Republican strategist, was spearheading “active measure” campaigns within the conservative establishment on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood. “I belive the conservative movement is being subjected to a concerted Muslim Brotherhood infiltration effort,” Gaffney told us, adding that Norquist began his insidious effort in the 1980s. Norquist’s wife is Muslim.

Asked for evidence of infiltration at CPAC, Gaffney pointed to the presence of Norquist — indeed, they passed within 20 feet of each other at one point — and of former Bush Muslim outreach director Suhail Kahn, whom Gaffney also accused of aiding the Muslim Brotherhood. Asked for further evidence, Gaffney came up empty, saying, “I have not been here long enough.” The presence of Norquist and Kahn was “sufficient” evidence “to be of concern,” Gaffney explained.

I want to laugh at this shit, but all I can muster is a WTF, because conservative nutbags like Norquist and Gaffney still have way too much power and influence.

Shirley Sherrod To Sue Andrew Breitbart

I’m sure you remember the case of Shirley Sherrod, the USDA employee who lost her job when Andrew Breitbart released a highly edited video of her remarks to a NAACP group. Here’s the post that Andrew Breitbart made when he released the video:

We are in possession of a video from in which Shirley Sherrod, USDA Georgia Director of Rural Development, speaks at the NAACP Freedom Fund dinner in Georgia. In her meandering speech to what appears to be an all-black audience, this federally appointed executive bureaucrat lays out in stark detail, that her federal duties are managed through the prism of race and class distinctions.

In the first video, Sherrod describes how she racially discriminates against a white farmer. She describes how she is torn over how much she will choose to help him. And, she admits that she doesn’t do everything she can for him, because he is white. Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help. But she decides that he should get help from “one of his own kind”. She refers him to a white lawyer.

Sherrod’s racist tale is received by the NAACP audience with nodding approval and murmurs of recognition and agreement. Hardly the behavior of the group now holding itself up as the supreme judge of another groups’ racial tolerance.

Of course, that turned out to be completely untrue. Her tale was actually a heart-warming tale of overcoming prejudice and redemption. After a few days, the NAACP found the full video and released it. Shirley Sherrod had been deceptively edited and her story abruptly cut off.

By the time the video was released, Sherrod had lost her job and had been called a racist by many news commentators. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack did ask Sherrod to return to USDA, which she declined. The story has a coda, Sherrod is now suing Breitbart.

Andrew Breitbart, the owner of several conservative Web sites, was served at the conference on Saturday with a lawsuit filed by Shirley Sherrod, the former Agriculture Department employee who lost her job last year over a video that Mr. Brietbart posted at his site biggovernment.com.

The video was selectively edited so that it appeared Ms. Sherrod was confessing she had discriminated against a farmer because he was white. In the suit, which was filed in Washington on Friday, Ms. Sherrod says the video has damaged her reputation and prevented her from continuing her work.

Mr. Breitbart said in a statement that he “categorically rejects the transparent effort to chill his constitutionally protected free speech.”

I hope she owns Breitbart’s empire before this over. I’m no lawyer or expert in law but I think she has a case. Defamation law states that four elements must be present:

1. A false and defamatory statement concerning another;
2. The unprivileged publication of the statement to a third party (that is, somebody other than the person defamed by the statement);
3. If the defamatory matter is of public concern, fault amounting at least to negligence on the part of the publisher; and
4. Damage to the plaintiff.

I think #3 is where Breitbart’s defense will lie. He’s already stated that he received this video as is but he trusted the source. It should be interesting to find out how he got the video in the discovery phase, if it comes to that.

More Polling Goodness

President Obama won nine red and purple states in 2008 in addition to the 19 typically blue states that John Kerry, Al Gore and Bill Clinton carried for the last 20 years. Those states are Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, Colorado, New Mexico, Iowa, Nevada and Indiana, as well as the one congressional district in Nebraska, which may or may not exist in 2012 because petulant Republicans in the state legislature are trying to pass a bill to make Nebraska winner take all again.

To see where he stands for reelection at this point, Public Policy Polling polled every state but Indiana (which has some strange law against automated polling). The results are very heartening.

As you can see, President Obama would win all eight states and the NE-2 again, in some cases by even larger margins. Romney is obviously the best candidate polling wise for the GOP. Too bad for them that there is no way the teabagging base of the Republican Party will vote for him.

The Battlegrounds will be Ohio, North Carolina and Florida, as that is where the polls are closest at this point.

The Party of Lincoln No More

We all know by now that the Nixon’s Southern Strategy began to lock up the South and all its baggage with the Republican Party. Paul Krugman notes that 40 years later,even  the Republican Party does not considers itself the Party of Lincoln.

But sooner or later, Republicans were bound to notice other reasons to disavow Lincoln. He was, after all, the first president to institute an income tax. And he was also the first president to issue a paper currency — the “greenback” — that wasn’t backed by gold or silver. “There is nothing more insidious that a country can do to its people than to debase its currency,” declared Representative Paul Ryan in one of two hearings Congress held on Wednesday on monetary policy. So much, then, for the Great Liberator.

Chris Coons Continues To Impress

Coons used the Huffington Post to release the first draft of the “serious close” portion of a speech he gave at the Washington Press Club Foundation’s Congressional Dinner.

I wasn’t sure where he was going with it, but the example he used to illustrate his point brings it home. Read it and try to imagine Tom Carper saying anything as transparently Democratic.

Of course I realize that Senator Coons never actually “said” those either, but that fact that he was willing to commit them to the public record is refreshing.

Regional Pride

One of the best things about being from the mighty Mid-Atlantic is growing up knowing what a pizza and an italian subs are supposed to taste like.

One of the other best things is being on the Amtrak Northeast Corridor.

Weekend Open Thread

Welcome to your weekend open thread. It looks like maybe the groundhog was right this year – perhaps we’re getting an early spring. I’m hopeful anyway.

Multiple-Choice Mitt rewrote portions of his book to make himself into a Teapublican. He’s now a stimulus-hating, health care repealing genuine Tea Party patriot and Constitution hugger.

As the Boston Phoenix reports, there are two significant changes: The book no longer offers even a qualified defense of the stimulus, and now it makes sure the reader knows that Mitt Romney really hates “Obamacare,” even though it’s basically a national version of Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts healthcare plan.

The first rewrite excises a relatively even-handed assessment of the 2009 economic-stimulus package. In the original, Romney wrote that it “will accelerate the timing of the start of the recovery, but not as much as it could have.” The paperback pronounces the stimulus “a failure,” and blasts Obama’s “economic missteps” with conservative red-meat language — for example: “This is the first time government has declared war on free enterprise.”

The other major change comes in a chapter on health care. In the original hardcover, Romney tried to carefully distinguish between the Massachusetts law and the national version that was nearing passage as he wrote.

But the Massachusetts model has become Romney’s bête noire among conservatives, who loathe the national reform they call “Obamacare.” The rewritten paperback swings much harder, proclaiming that “Obamacare will not work and should be repealed,” and “Obamacare is an unconstitutional federal incursion into the rights of states.”

Other additions in that section blame the Massachusetts legislature for altering his plan, and the current Democratic administration of Governor Deval Patrick for botching the implementation.

Romney also added a new introduction in which he babbles about the Founding Fathers and literally uses the word “Constitution” 11 times. Romney’s spokesman explained the alterations by saying “[a] lot has occurred over the last two years, and these updates reflect those happenings.” The man is amazing.

You have to admit, that’s pretty bold. Do you have any doubt that if he manages to win the nomination that he doesn’t turn back into a “pragmatist.”

It’s interesting watching establishment Republicans get eaten by the fringe. Orrin Hatch crashed a Tea Party meeting last week and he also tried to walk back his TARP vote.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) participated at a panel discussion at the Conservative Political Action Conference yesterday afternoon, and he had to know a question on the financial industry bailout was coming.

It’s a shame he didn’t prepare a better answer.

Mr. Hatch said he voted for it to keep the country from slipping into a depression — and said he would do so again if he had to be the deciding vote — but acknowledged that he now felt sorry that he had voted for the bill.

“All I can say is, there aren’t many people who will say, ‘I’m sorry.’ I’m one who will,” Mr. Hatch said.

A simple apology might have worked under the circumstances. Hatch cast a vote, he regrets it now, and he’s sorry.

But that’s not what Hatch said, exactly. The senator apologized for the vote, but also said that without the rescue package, “I believe we would have gone into a depression.” The Republican added, “I probably made a mistake voting for it.”

So, Hatch is now sorry he stopped a depression. Republicans trying to square reality with their base usually just decide to ignore reality. A few braver ones try to explain reality (most of them lost). Hatch is trying to explain reality while ignoring it at the same time.