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Greetings, people. Before beginning our news coverage, make sure to peruse the shelves of these old medicine ads so as to select the product you will need to get through to the end. Selection of products that knock you out until it’s over are also acceptable. If you do not medicate, perhaps conversational Latin and advanced Latin will do the trick for you.
An article, from O magazine, about classes on sexuality for older adults, to tackle issues that the high schol curriculum just doesn't cover, mostly because the high schoolers aren’t old enough to worry about those issues, and don’t have the experience of having been with someone for years and wanting to do more than just sex for intimacy.
Getting straight into the news, then, the situation in Iran continues, even through media blackouts, to get images, videos, and information out of the country. one of the Grand Ayatollahs threw his weight behind the idea that the vote was rigged, going against the Supreme Leader’s earlier pronouncements of Mr. Ahmadinejad as the winner, as the protests and the violence continued. As the investigation has gone on, it has been disocvered some of the turnout has resulted in more votes cast than people existing in some areas of the country.
Because Twitter may very well be providing our best perspective of the conflict, as well as saving lives of protesters and permitting their continued organization, because it can be used to communicate instantly, using anonymization, proxy, and other services that the government cannot easily black out or shut down, unlike more standard telecommunications, the State Department, according to Mr. Olbermann, asked the service to move their scheduled maintenance time so that it would coincide with the dark hours in Iran, instead of in the United States. While making no mention of any such request, Twitter moved the scheduled update time. The perspective and unfolding news story here may indicate Twitter may be the vanguard of news, being well-suited to tracking things as they unfold and for quick and easy spreading of (mis)information in real-time. Traditional media may perpetually be playing catch-up, but they may also find a more comfortable role as the fact-checkers, sacrificing speed for accuracy. And, perhaps, if they leverage things right, they might be able to push out stories as they happen and are sourced, even if the television news or the websites haven’t had their pages and pieces yet constructed.
Here in the United States, the White House wanted to appear like they were supporting the people of Iran having a free election without making it appear like the U.S. was meddling in any of the affairs of Iran and thus giving ammo to the current regime to crack down harder on the opposition. Almost-President McCain takes a different tack from the White House, suggesting there needs to be more public speech about democracy in Iran from the President, a position that the WSJ echoes, because of the way the situation has unfolded, where earlier, the quiet approach was the right idea. Concerns about being used as a scapegoat and to set back any talk about Iran’s nuclear program further than where it was under Ahmadinejad be damned, I suppose. Mr. Stephens joins the parade, echoing that the United States now needs to be seen as condeming the elections and the nondemocratic actors who are working to suppress and fix the election results. Something I have not yet seen, thouh, is any indication (as the White House has noted so far), that to get involved would result in a different foreign policy from Iran to the United States. If we get involved, and the end result is that Mr. Mousavi takes the same lines toward the United States that Mr. Ahmadinejad did, then all that effort was wasted, and will eventually be used later on in the crackback of the extreme fringe against Mr. Mousavi’s government. The watch-and-wait-and-condemn-the-vote-fixing strategy might be the best course of action, at least until there’s a real sign that interference will result in a real policy change from Iran to the U.S. After all, there’s still the Supreme Leader, and he’s not up for election.
ddjango goes a highly cynical route, suggesting there is covert interference from the US in the riots, and that the Iranian people are being manipulated by various powers and factions outside their borders, all playing things out with China and Russia congratulating and the BBC (MI6’s mouthpiece, apparently) standing for solidarity with Mousavi.
Domestically, we’re still runing hot on the domestic violence and extremism count - A spin-off of the Minuteman group intended on going into vigilante violence, admittedly supposedly only against drug cartel footmen, as well as planning a revolution against the government of the United States. Thing is - the supposed drug cartel footman wasn't, and his family had their hosues broken into and the father and daughter were killed by the vigilantes. Oh, did we mention the ties to white supremacist groups yet? Is it us, or is right-wing violence on the rise because we have a supposedly leftist president in office? I don’t know, but I do know that off-color jokes are still showing up from conservative politicians. This one apologized, at least.
The Washington Times uses a federal extension of some benefits to domestic partners of homosexual federal employees as the lead for talking more about the Congressional Budget Office's projected costs of plans ready to be put forward in the houses of Congress. So, yay for the President on extending benefits, boo for the Times for putting two stories together in one article.
And perhaps the most important piece of domestic news today - Khalid Sheik Mohammed, self-cofnessed mastermind of the 11 September attacks, admitted to lying to CIA agents who were torturing him, telling them whatever they wanted to know to get the torture to stop. This includes information he may have given about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, which is why we’re fighting the other land war in Asia. This is not good. If the premise of the Afghanistan War is also false, and there never was a bin Laden in there, then the entirety of the last Presidency could be said to have come straight out of 1984, with two wars against Eurasia - if you wanted to go that far, you could even suggest that a large part of the current economic decline is due to the wasting of resources on two wars that should not have been fought in the first place, based on their justifications. (The banks and the housing bubble are still major players, but maybe we’d have recovered or whethered it better if we weren’t also having to ship men and material to many foreign locales.)
A ranking Republican, Mr. Coburn, released a list of one hundred federal stimulus-qualifying projects that he considered to be of questionable or dubious worth. In response, those supporting stimulus have indicated the Coburn report is riddled with inaccuracies and criticized projects that were never funded. The throwaway line in the second paragraph about how “the White House has promoted the stimulus package by selecting facorable newspaper stories” certainly looks very odd in the context of the article. If the writer knows this, I would think he should source it, and if he doesn’t know this, precisely what are his personal opinions doing in an informational article - and where was his editor on this?
Speaking of money, The Obama Administration released details today of a new regulatory scheme that would attempt to fix the failures that brought about the current credit crash. Naturally, the article has none of the details, but they’re suppsoedly here, and highlights may include the creation of a new entity like the FDIC intended to oversee consumer instruments (although likely without the FDIC’s deposit insurance).
In much lighter fare, or perhaps helping to explain the above, a study done indicates the traits that help to have a successful career in politics are also those that will make you an excellent serial killer. Let the political jokes begin. Just be sure to spell definitely properly.
Last before opinions, a mayor defending the practice of ticketing persons parking in their own gravel driveways, because the ordinance requires them to park on something paved.
Into the opinions we charge.
Mr. Wolfowitz gives advice to pick up and carry the story the two imprisoned American journalists in North Korea were reporting on about refugees in the country - get China on board to accept them temporarily, and have more humanitarian leadership from South Korea and the US in getting those refugees out and resettled. The conditions inside the prison camps are brutal, so getting this new effort started as soon as possible is a good idea.
The WSJ criticizes Mr. Obama's decision not to cap awards in medial malpractice suits, considering caps one of the effective ways of keeping costs down by not forcing doctors to carry ever-higher amounts of insurance against malpractice.
Mr. Boortz starts the dive off the deep end, with a short-yet-incoherent rant about how using economic crisis thinking to restructure the economy to be fairer to all will result in unions ensuring that no corporation ever makes a profit, in the name of fairness. Right, because every union is hell-bent on bankrupting all their employers by making them unprofitable, and thus screwing themselves out of a job. Thank goodness you write short bits, Mr. Boortz - I’d hate to see what sort of stuff develops if you go to a long-form column.
Ms. Bandes believes health care reform and public options can't become sustainable, based on the fact they're government programs, and no government program ever actually becomes self-sustainable - not Amtrak, the post office, Social Security, or any other program. So it’s creative accounting and lies that the President spouts whenever he talks about public health care being able to pay for itself within a few years. She could be right. Is it worth trying? I’d say so, if for all the uninsured people that can then go to a doctor for preventative care, instead of the emergency room when things get too far out of control.
However, instead of a worst person in the world tonight, we have a best person in the world. And it comes from someone who I’ve reviled before for bad columns, which proves that really, no matter what you may think of someone, they can always surprise you with something different. Now, this best might be biased, because I’m from the state he’s talking about, and thus know firsthand what he says needs fixing. Still, a gold star to Mr. McGurn, for correctly diagnosing and suggesting a workable solution to the problem of Michigan's economy - retool for the knowledge economy. We can even keep the automobile manufacturers, but the big bucks is in keeping the big brains in the state, and giving them the freedom to innovate, generate, engineer, and work the knowledge that leads to the manufacturing of products and services people want. More education for the populace to support the segment of the economy that’s making money and jobs. Which means the state (and possibly the feds, too) has to do more to get more people into college and keep them in the state when they finish. I’m part of the problem with Michigan - I left to pursue a job that could pay back my loans. Wouldn’t it be that much better if, instead, I could apply for all sorts of high-knowledge, good-paying work inside the state? I still might have left for somewhere else, but it wouldn’t be because there wasn’t anything there to keep me anchored.
In technological news, Amazon is apparently pulling its click-through associates program out of North Carolina on the day new laws expanding what items sales tax applies to go into effect, the possibility of using tissue-on-chips as experiments instead of rodent lungs, the CT scan achieving nearly-similar results as a standard invasive colonoscopy, which might encourage more people to get screened, a little bit of fearfear about the possibility a rich magnate might decide to enact a geoengineering plan without telling the rest of us, promising stem-cell therapies that might be able to reverse certain causes of degenerative vision diseases, and a superconducting material that works at room temperature, which might mean the end of computer fans for cooling, assuming the new material can be used like we want it to.
And last for tonight, remember, when Mars attacks, we'll still win with a daring counterattack. And that chirp you’re hearing? Might be a foreclosed house's fire detector batteries dying. So settle down with your USB-powered microwave and enjoy the end of the world (as we know it.)
An article, from O magazine, about classes on sexuality for older adults, to tackle issues that the high schol curriculum just doesn't cover, mostly because the high schoolers aren’t old enough to worry about those issues, and don’t have the experience of having been with someone for years and wanting to do more than just sex for intimacy.
Getting straight into the news, then, the situation in Iran continues, even through media blackouts, to get images, videos, and information out of the country. one of the Grand Ayatollahs threw his weight behind the idea that the vote was rigged, going against the Supreme Leader’s earlier pronouncements of Mr. Ahmadinejad as the winner, as the protests and the violence continued. As the investigation has gone on, it has been disocvered some of the turnout has resulted in more votes cast than people existing in some areas of the country.
Because Twitter may very well be providing our best perspective of the conflict, as well as saving lives of protesters and permitting their continued organization, because it can be used to communicate instantly, using anonymization, proxy, and other services that the government cannot easily black out or shut down, unlike more standard telecommunications, the State Department, according to Mr. Olbermann, asked the service to move their scheduled maintenance time so that it would coincide with the dark hours in Iran, instead of in the United States. While making no mention of any such request, Twitter moved the scheduled update time. The perspective and unfolding news story here may indicate Twitter may be the vanguard of news, being well-suited to tracking things as they unfold and for quick and easy spreading of (mis)information in real-time. Traditional media may perpetually be playing catch-up, but they may also find a more comfortable role as the fact-checkers, sacrificing speed for accuracy. And, perhaps, if they leverage things right, they might be able to push out stories as they happen and are sourced, even if the television news or the websites haven’t had their pages and pieces yet constructed.
Here in the United States, the White House wanted to appear like they were supporting the people of Iran having a free election without making it appear like the U.S. was meddling in any of the affairs of Iran and thus giving ammo to the current regime to crack down harder on the opposition. Almost-President McCain takes a different tack from the White House, suggesting there needs to be more public speech about democracy in Iran from the President, a position that the WSJ echoes, because of the way the situation has unfolded, where earlier, the quiet approach was the right idea. Concerns about being used as a scapegoat and to set back any talk about Iran’s nuclear program further than where it was under Ahmadinejad be damned, I suppose. Mr. Stephens joins the parade, echoing that the United States now needs to be seen as condeming the elections and the nondemocratic actors who are working to suppress and fix the election results. Something I have not yet seen, thouh, is any indication (as the White House has noted so far), that to get involved would result in a different foreign policy from Iran to the United States. If we get involved, and the end result is that Mr. Mousavi takes the same lines toward the United States that Mr. Ahmadinejad did, then all that effort was wasted, and will eventually be used later on in the crackback of the extreme fringe against Mr. Mousavi’s government. The watch-and-wait-and-condemn-the-vote-fixing strategy might be the best course of action, at least until there’s a real sign that interference will result in a real policy change from Iran to the U.S. After all, there’s still the Supreme Leader, and he’s not up for election.
ddjango goes a highly cynical route, suggesting there is covert interference from the US in the riots, and that the Iranian people are being manipulated by various powers and factions outside their borders, all playing things out with China and Russia congratulating and the BBC (MI6’s mouthpiece, apparently) standing for solidarity with Mousavi.
Domestically, we’re still runing hot on the domestic violence and extremism count - A spin-off of the Minuteman group intended on going into vigilante violence, admittedly supposedly only against drug cartel footmen, as well as planning a revolution against the government of the United States. Thing is - the supposed drug cartel footman wasn't, and his family had their hosues broken into and the father and daughter were killed by the vigilantes. Oh, did we mention the ties to white supremacist groups yet? Is it us, or is right-wing violence on the rise because we have a supposedly leftist president in office? I don’t know, but I do know that off-color jokes are still showing up from conservative politicians. This one apologized, at least.
The Washington Times uses a federal extension of some benefits to domestic partners of homosexual federal employees as the lead for talking more about the Congressional Budget Office's projected costs of plans ready to be put forward in the houses of Congress. So, yay for the President on extending benefits, boo for the Times for putting two stories together in one article.
And perhaps the most important piece of domestic news today - Khalid Sheik Mohammed, self-cofnessed mastermind of the 11 September attacks, admitted to lying to CIA agents who were torturing him, telling them whatever they wanted to know to get the torture to stop. This includes information he may have given about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, which is why we’re fighting the other land war in Asia. This is not good. If the premise of the Afghanistan War is also false, and there never was a bin Laden in there, then the entirety of the last Presidency could be said to have come straight out of 1984, with two wars against Eurasia - if you wanted to go that far, you could even suggest that a large part of the current economic decline is due to the wasting of resources on two wars that should not have been fought in the first place, based on their justifications. (The banks and the housing bubble are still major players, but maybe we’d have recovered or whethered it better if we weren’t also having to ship men and material to many foreign locales.)
A ranking Republican, Mr. Coburn, released a list of one hundred federal stimulus-qualifying projects that he considered to be of questionable or dubious worth. In response, those supporting stimulus have indicated the Coburn report is riddled with inaccuracies and criticized projects that were never funded. The throwaway line in the second paragraph about how “the White House has promoted the stimulus package by selecting facorable newspaper stories” certainly looks very odd in the context of the article. If the writer knows this, I would think he should source it, and if he doesn’t know this, precisely what are his personal opinions doing in an informational article - and where was his editor on this?
Speaking of money, The Obama Administration released details today of a new regulatory scheme that would attempt to fix the failures that brought about the current credit crash. Naturally, the article has none of the details, but they’re suppsoedly here, and highlights may include the creation of a new entity like the FDIC intended to oversee consumer instruments (although likely without the FDIC’s deposit insurance).
In much lighter fare, or perhaps helping to explain the above, a study done indicates the traits that help to have a successful career in politics are also those that will make you an excellent serial killer. Let the political jokes begin. Just be sure to spell definitely properly.
Last before opinions, a mayor defending the practice of ticketing persons parking in their own gravel driveways, because the ordinance requires them to park on something paved.
Into the opinions we charge.
Mr. Wolfowitz gives advice to pick up and carry the story the two imprisoned American journalists in North Korea were reporting on about refugees in the country - get China on board to accept them temporarily, and have more humanitarian leadership from South Korea and the US in getting those refugees out and resettled. The conditions inside the prison camps are brutal, so getting this new effort started as soon as possible is a good idea.
The WSJ criticizes Mr. Obama's decision not to cap awards in medial malpractice suits, considering caps one of the effective ways of keeping costs down by not forcing doctors to carry ever-higher amounts of insurance against malpractice.
Mr. Boortz starts the dive off the deep end, with a short-yet-incoherent rant about how using economic crisis thinking to restructure the economy to be fairer to all will result in unions ensuring that no corporation ever makes a profit, in the name of fairness. Right, because every union is hell-bent on bankrupting all their employers by making them unprofitable, and thus screwing themselves out of a job. Thank goodness you write short bits, Mr. Boortz - I’d hate to see what sort of stuff develops if you go to a long-form column.
Ms. Bandes believes health care reform and public options can't become sustainable, based on the fact they're government programs, and no government program ever actually becomes self-sustainable - not Amtrak, the post office, Social Security, or any other program. So it’s creative accounting and lies that the President spouts whenever he talks about public health care being able to pay for itself within a few years. She could be right. Is it worth trying? I’d say so, if for all the uninsured people that can then go to a doctor for preventative care, instead of the emergency room when things get too far out of control.
However, instead of a worst person in the world tonight, we have a best person in the world. And it comes from someone who I’ve reviled before for bad columns, which proves that really, no matter what you may think of someone, they can always surprise you with something different. Now, this best might be biased, because I’m from the state he’s talking about, and thus know firsthand what he says needs fixing. Still, a gold star to Mr. McGurn, for correctly diagnosing and suggesting a workable solution to the problem of Michigan's economy - retool for the knowledge economy. We can even keep the automobile manufacturers, but the big bucks is in keeping the big brains in the state, and giving them the freedom to innovate, generate, engineer, and work the knowledge that leads to the manufacturing of products and services people want. More education for the populace to support the segment of the economy that’s making money and jobs. Which means the state (and possibly the feds, too) has to do more to get more people into college and keep them in the state when they finish. I’m part of the problem with Michigan - I left to pursue a job that could pay back my loans. Wouldn’t it be that much better if, instead, I could apply for all sorts of high-knowledge, good-paying work inside the state? I still might have left for somewhere else, but it wouldn’t be because there wasn’t anything there to keep me anchored.
In technological news, Amazon is apparently pulling its click-through associates program out of North Carolina on the day new laws expanding what items sales tax applies to go into effect, the possibility of using tissue-on-chips as experiments instead of rodent lungs, the CT scan achieving nearly-similar results as a standard invasive colonoscopy, which might encourage more people to get screened, a little bit of fearfear about the possibility a rich magnate might decide to enact a geoengineering plan without telling the rest of us, promising stem-cell therapies that might be able to reverse certain causes of degenerative vision diseases, and a superconducting material that works at room temperature, which might mean the end of computer fans for cooling, assuming the new material can be used like we want it to.
And last for tonight, remember, when Mars attacks, we'll still win with a daring counterattack. And that chirp you’re hearing? Might be a foreclosed house's fire detector batteries dying. So settle down with your USB-powered microwave and enjoy the end of the world (as we know it.)
