RelentlesslyOptimistic

See the world like George does

Bush Goggles

"*In some tax brackets, sacrifice of your children may also be required."

Republicans replace indicted DeLay [frying pan] with Blunt [fire]

Newly selected House Speaker Roy Blunt hired consultant who's also indicted [with DeLay]. Blunt has paid Jim Ellis' firm $88,000 for campaign services. Ellis was previously indicted by the same Grand Jury that indicted DeLay, and for the same criminal activities.

A few days ago Missouri's Rep. Roy Blunt was named as one of the top ten "most corrupt" House members (not counting DeLay). Now that DeLay has been indicted, Blunt has been named as replacement Majority Leader. Blunt was added to the most-corrupt list because he attempted to add provisions to legislation to help his son's and girlfriend's lobbying clients.

The Washington Post did a huge story on Blunt's growing empire in May that included this graphical explanation of the son/girlfriend/lobbying connections.

Daily Kos reports that Republicans were considering a candidate without the ethical stains linked to DeLay's troubles, but the conservatives nixed that candidate because of his politics and sexuality.

FiredUpAmerica has a page of background information on Blunt's ties to DeLay, including $150,000 in contributions from DeLay's PAC to Blunt, ties between Blunt and recently disgraced Rep. Duke "lobbyist's yacht" Cunningham, contributions from recently indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, his definition of compassionate conservatism, and much more.

I'm thinking maybe the Republican's problems with being perceived as corrupt and incompetent may not be over. What do you think?

Photo ID's will restore confidence in the electoral process

A blue ribbon commission led by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker came to the stupid-ass conclusion that people will have more confidence in the electoral system if we simply require photo ID's.

Votes are being sold and stolen by party professionals, voting machines can be hacked by teenagers too young to vote, and photo ID's are going to restore confidence?

Without even getting into the discriminatory issues around requiring photo ID's, the kindest thing you can say is that's just dumb.

KC Star | Big names help boost idea of photo IDs for voting.

"Without it my life is less full"

The Conference Bike is a bicycle built for seven, all of whom pedal. As a sometime-professional group facilitator, I think it would be a better team-building tool if steering was by consensus, but as it is only one person has the wheel.

Snide comments aside, the bike has been used to enable blind children to ride, as a party vehicle for rent, and as a group ice-breaker. Everyone loves seeing it rolling down the street.

The creator, Eric Staller, is an artist who has been making "Urban UFO's," vehicles that encourage riders to interact with others, since 1985. Don't miss the over-the-top testimonials! The U.S. Tour starts in New York October 4.

Thanks Justin!

Applying "Intelligent Design" to hurricanes

from Tom Toles

God doesn't want us to drill in Arctic Refuge?

The Financial Times reports that Hurricane Rita caused record damage to oil rigs.

"Hurricane Rita has caused more damage to oil rigs than any other storm in history and will force companies to delay drilling for oil in the US and as far away as the Middle East, initial damage assessments show."

Tom Marsh of ODS-Petrodata said “The path Katrina took was through the mature areas of the US Gulf where there are mainly oil [production] platforms. Rita came to the west where there is a lot of [exploratory] rig activity.”

DCPox, the source of the oil rig photo, believes that it's a message from Thor that we need to sign the Kyoto treaty, but since the U.S. is a Christian nation, and we've already been getting hurricane-carried messages from Him, it seems more likely to be a message from the Christian God. What else could it mean?

Guess Who's FEMA's new consultant to "review Katrina preparations?"

C'mon, guess. Who's the least likely person you can think of to be hired by FEMA? That's right, "Brownie!"

Daily Kos has links to several news stories started by CBS reporting that Michael Brown, disgraced "former" FEMA head, has been hired by the agency "as a consultant "to provide a review" of Katrina preparations and immediate aftermath."

Missouri's Roy Blunt on list of "13 Most Corrupt Members of Congress"

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) released a report naming three Senators (not counting Tom Delay) and ten Representatives as the "most corrupt" in Congress. Two of the ten were Democrats.

Missouri's Roy Blunt, the House Whip, was named for attempts to benefit his son's and his then-girlfriend's lobbying clients by inserting special provisions into legislation. One effort would have inserted a provision into a Homeland Security bill to help Phillip Morris. A provision in an emergency Iraqi War appropriation bill would have helped UPS and FedEx.

Via Daily Kos

The OTHER Nuclear Option revisited

Nuclear power doesn’t increase global warming, but it does have higher costs, higher risks and higher barriers to entry and expansion than coal. It probably is higher in all those ways than conservation, too, but we don’t know, because we haven’t tried.

I made those aguments a few weeks back in this post, and said that before we start revisiting nuclear power we need to make serious efforts to conserve. Jack Miller of Stocks or Bonds? agreed with part of my argument, but said that inceases in use will outweigh any increase in efficiency. Some sources show that even though we use more electric devices, the per capita electric consumption has leveled off, even with the half-hearted measures we've taken.  I left a trackback on his post to my expanded argument here.

I'll start by saying that I'm neither reflexively anti-nuclear nor uneducated on the subject. I worked on nuclear submarines way back in my Navy days and so have a decent understanding of  how it works and what the issues are.

My central point is that before there is any government action to support building nuclear power plants, let's make a real effort to conserve by incorporating the external costs and savings into the electrical generation and transmission markets.

We should use regulation to change the market incentives to favor conservation by utilities. If utilities had done more than give lip service to demand management, compact fluorescent bulbs would be far more common. The market incentives right now are for utilities to sell more electricity, and utilities offer lower prices to their largest users. That makes sense for the way that their market and generating capacity is structured, but it doesn't make sense for us as a society. It's time to try something different.

Much more after the break.

Public support for Iraqi reconstruction?

According to The Observer an appeal to Americans (and others, I suppose) to donate money to assist in the reconstruction of Iraq has raised a total of six hundred dollars ($600) [actually $540 - see below] since it was launched September 9th.

"The public's reluctance to contribute much more than the cost of two iPods to the administration's attempt to offer citizens 'a further stake in building a free and prosperous Iraq' has been seized on by critics as evidence of growing ambivalence over that country."

Huh. Perhaps, since aid for the poor after Katrina "is working very well for them," Iraqi war supporters should be hit up to donate to rebuild the destruction we created there. Operation Green Elephant, anyone? Click on the logo above to add your donation to the $30 billion in tax dollars already appropriated to Iraqi reconstruction.

USaid's Heather Layman denied it was disappointed with the meagre sum raised after a fortnight. 'Every little helps,' she said...Layman [also] said: 'There is no financial goal. People are looking for a way to help rebuild Iraq and this is a way to facilitate that.'

USAid does not provide email addresses from their website, so I used their contact form to ask for the total number of donations to the effort, and what the cost was for the relationship with GlobalGiving, which is processing the donations made at the iraqpartnership.org website. GlobalGiving's site [it is a 501(c)3 even though the address is a .com] says that "we retain a 10% transaction fee on all donations."

We Profit From Your Fear

THREATMETER.com : We Profit From Your Fear

Terror is rampant like a rhino running! Stop the rhino!!!!!!

"We did it for amusement" "We kept it to broken arms and legs."

"We did it for amusement."

"Some days we would just get bored, so we would have everyone sit in a corner and then make them get in a pyramid"
 

"he had seen a soldier break open a chemical light stick and beat the detainees with it. "That made them glow in the dark, which was real funny"

"He told him to bend over and broke the guy's leg with a ...metal bat."

"after the Abu Ghraib scandal..."We still did it, but we were careful," he told the human rights group."

"As long as no PUC's [prisoners] came up dead, it happened." He added, "We kept it to broken arms and legs."

"We would give them blows to the head, chest, legs and stomach, and pull them down, kick dirt on them...This happened every day."

Which is worse? What we're doing to them, or what we're doing to ourselves?

3 in 82nd Airborne Say Beating Iraqi Prisoners Was Routine - New York Times.
Image source

Amazing internet art: protest song mashup

The NYTimes pointed to this video that used Hurricane Katrina images and voices set to a Green Day song. Amazing and powerful: karmagrrrl: Wake Me Up When September Ends.

Republicans: Eliminate poor people cheating on taxes to pay for Katrina

From The Raw Story:
The House Republicans have released a document with its recommendations for "Operation Offset," which details how to pay for the recovery from Katrina without eliminating the tax cuts for the wealthy they've instituted in the last few years.

The top suggestions, and the biggest immediate savings, are to delay the Welfare for Drug Companies Medicare Prescription Drug Bill for one year to save nearly $31 billion, and to remove all pork-barrel earmarked funds from the recently passed highway bill to save $25 billion.

The document breaks out the recommendations into the different sections of the Federal budget. Those top savings above are part of the 69% of the total cuts in Title I, "Tough Options." The next greatest savings, 21%, are achievable by cuts in Title III, "Reprioritization." Title IV, "Corporate Welfare" provides 5% of the cuts.

Title I: Tough Choices for Tough Times. It's laudable that they will recommending cutting the earmarked pork projects, although a little bit of fantasy involved in budgeting on actually being able to get the Republican dominated House and Senate to pass this. Fortunately, the Republicans don't count on this in the future: 80% of the ten-year savings comes from Medicare and Medicaid.

Title III: Reprioritization of Federal Spending. Each of the other sections of the budgeted is targeted for 10-16 cuts. This section with the benign-sounding name has 65 cuts suggested.The top fantasy savings of $8.5 billion will be achieved if we just "Verify Income of Earned Income Tax Credit Participants." This figure is based on the belief that 1/3 of the total amount spent on EIC is going to people who are lying about their income. After all, we all know that they are poor because they are lazy and dishonest, right? And poor people cheating on their taxes is probably a bigger cost to the government than rich people doing so, don't you think?

Title V: Eliminating Corporate Welfare. With a title like that, you'd think some big boondoggles like no-bid Halliburton contracts were on the chopping block, right? Think again. Many of the items on this list are environmental programs: renewable energy, clean coal, researching energy efficient cars and trucks, hydrogen fuel development, etc. Whether or not you believe that Katrina was bad because of climate change, we do know that our fossil fuel use is changing the climate in a way that more severe weather is in our future. But let's eliminate funding that might reduce this tendency in order to pay for the damage cause by severe weather, OK?

Meanwhile, permanently eliminating the Estate Tax for those 500 or so people affected by it every year is still on the agenda.

Opinions wanted: anyone remember shaving with safety razors?

Were the good old days really better?
This post from Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools is the second reference I've seen recently about old-fashioned safety razors being better. My fear is that this is another example of an object-fetishism sales approach with a reality that doesn't cut it, so to speak.

The classic shaving site's descriptions are full of lyrical prose about hefty platinum razors, badger-hair brushes, accessories and Old World Craftsmanship (caps original). But those old-fashioned razors are expensive, I'm guessing they don't shave the badger to make the brushes, and I frequently cut myself with my disposable-blade razor.

So for those who used to use safety razors, the razor-burning (sorry) questions are:

• Is it truly a better shave?
• Can a graceless shaving klutz get a better shave without more frequent injuries?

For those who are convinced, visit this post's sponsor for your shaving needs:

           

Looking for safety razors and shaving sets? Try Nashville Knife Shop.