“No, they didn’t, and no, it isn’t. “

The Destructive Center

by Paul Krugman (or cross-posted at Common Dreams)

What do you call someone who eliminates hundreds of thousands of American jobs, deprives millions of adequate health care and nutrition, undermines schools, but offers a $15,000 bonus to affluent people who flip their houses?

A proud centrist. For that is what the senators who ended up calling the tune on the stimulus bill just accomplished.

Even if the original Obama plan — around $800 billion in stimulus, with a substantial fraction of that total given over to ineffective tax cuts — had been enacted, it wouldn’t have been enough to fill the looming hole in the U.S. economy, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will amount to $2.9 trillion over the next three years.

Yet the centrists did their best to make the plan weaker and worse.

Read this entire piece..

Paul Krugman ends his this week’s opinion piece with this:

Now, House and Senate negotiators have to reconcile their versions of the stimulus, and it’s possible that the final bill will undo the centrists’ worst. And Mr. Obama may be able to come back for a second round. But this was his best chance to get decisive action, and it fell short.

So has Mr. Obama learned from this experience? Early indications aren’t good.

For rather than acknowledge the failure of his political strategy and the damage to his economic strategy, the president tried to put a postpartisan happy face on the whole thing. “Democrats and Republicans came together in the Senate and responded appropriately to the urgency this moment demands,” he declared on Saturday, and “the scale and scope of this plan is right.”

No, they didn’t, and no, it isn’t.

Pretty strong words. Do you agree with him or disagree? Why?

Monday – Open Thread, Time for a Little Whimsy

JABBERWOCKY

Lewis Carroll

(from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872)

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought –
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

“And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’
He chortled in his joy.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

We care — unless you’re “teh gay”

CommonDreams

As her partner of 17 years slipped into a coma, Janice Langbehn pleaded with doctors and anyone who would listen to let her into the woman’s hospital room.

Eight anguishing hours passed before Langbehn would be allowed into Jackson Memorial Hospital’s Ryder Trauma Center. By then, she could only say her final farewell as a priest performed the last rites on 39-year-old Lisa Marie Pond.

Jackson staffers advised Langbehn that she could not see Pond earlier because the hospital’s visitation policy in cases of emergency was limited to immediate family and spouses — not partners. In Florida, same-sex marriages or partnerships are not recognized. On Friday, two years after her partner’s death, Langbehn and her attorneys were in federal court, claiming emotional distress and negligence in a suit they filed last June.

Jackson attorneys filed a motion to dismiss the case on grounds that the hospital has no obligation to allow patients’ visitors.

Jackson Memorial Hospital took this stand, in spite of the fact that Ms Langbehn had the proper legal documents in hand, which allowed her to make medical decisions for her partner.

I looked up the Mission Statement of Jackson Memorial Hospital, and this is what I found:

Mission Statement:  To build the health of the community by providing a single, high standard of quality care for the resident of Miami-Dade County.

Vision Statement:  Our strategic vision is to be a nationally and internationally recognized, world-class academic medical system and to be the provider of choice for quality care.

Values:  Service Excellence and Quality, Commitment, Compassion, Teamwork and Communication, Respect, Confidentiality, Integrity and Stewardship, Inclusion.

Wow.  That brought a tear to my eye.

But then I remembered what Jackson Memorial Hospital did to the Langbehn/Pong family, and would suggest an addendum to JMH’s “Mission & Vision” page:  UNLESS YOU’RE GAY.

Senator John Ensign (R-NV) is a bald-faced liar

ThinkProgress has the story here.

I was just following orders…

is now a sufficient excuse to get away with…torture!

According to Leon Pannetta:

CIA officers who acted on legal orders from the Bush administration would not be held responsible for those policies.

So, all one need do is find one lawyer, somewhere in the United States (or world now, for that matter) willing to re-define torture to allow anything short of disembowelment and those folks who commit torture are immune from prosecution.

This decision to not prosecute under domestic law opens up the door for International prosecutions. After all, how can an order to torture ever be considered a legal order?

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A complete break is best…you’ll feel better soon

All cartoons are posted with the artists’ express permission to TPZoo.
Jack Ohman, Portland Oregonian

Time to kick the fry cook upstairs…

All cartoons are posted with the artists’ express permission to TPZoo.
Matt Davies, NY Journal News

Suck it up, welfare queen…

All cartoons are posted with the artists’ express permission to TPZoo.
Jack Ohman, Portland Oregonian

Sunday Open Thread — Schadenfreude?

From the New York Times:

As much as anyone, he is a product of a decade in which the sport took a pharmaceutical path that, for too many reputations, has become the road to ruin.

Rodriguez, according to the Sports Illustrated report, tested positive for Primobolan and testosterone while playing for the Texas Rangers, but does it really matter where it was or when, or for how long? Unless he or baseball, or both, can effectively counter another damaging blow, Rodriguez takes his place in the ever-expanding enhancement holding pen, a shadow cast across his career.

Unlike McGwire, Bonds and Clemens, he isn’t going away anytime soon. A-Rod will play on, the way Jason Giambi did after it was leaked that he had come clean about steroids to a federal grand jury, the way Pettitte did after telling a Congressional investigation that he had used human growth hormone. It will be fascinating to see what strategy A-Rod embraces: silence, denial, attack or a Pettitte-like confessional.

Times are Tough

Opinion piece by Cats

The job situation is becoming worse. Each day, news outlets are reporting another Corporate lay off effecting thousands of people’s lives. When I drive around my neighborhood, I see more and more “For Sale” signs in front of houses.  I even saw one house that had a “For Sale” sign and a “For Rent” sign in front of it. Either option was acceptable to the homeowner.  Now that’s desperation.

President Obama created a stimulus plan that would help put Americans back to work. He presented this plan to the House of Representatives hoping that Congress would write a job stimulus bill. After a few days of discussion, the House passed a bill which removed some of the spending and added more tax cuts.

The House stimulus bill is now with that elite group, the Senators, and the so called “Moderates” or “Centrists” have brutally chopped away at the “spending” and added more tax cuts. For 8 years, the Republican mantra has been tax cuts and more tax cuts. Since our economy is taking a nose dive over a cliff (h/t Daily Kos), it is obvious that these tax cuts didn’t save us. So what do the Republicans want more of in this stimulus bill? You guessed it, more tax cuts. They want to continue doing the same thing over and over again even though it never worked in the past. There is a word for this behavior. It is called insanity.

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Bull pucky!!

Rachel Maddow addresses “the know nothings” in Congress, regarding the jobs bill.

Saturday Open Thread – End of the book?

A Computerworld columnist claims that e-books are on the verge of a boom, and offers six reasons why. Are you an e-book fan? Do you agree with Steve Jobs that it’s a “fact” that people don’t read anymore?

On Monday, Amazon.com is expected to unveil a new version of its Kindle reader. It will probably be a lot better and a little cheaper than the first version. But the real news already broke this week: A company spokesman announced that Amazon plans to offer Kindle books on cell phones.

This news countered Google’s announcement that the 1.5 million public domain books available on its Google Book Search offering will soon be available (free, of course) via a new cell phone application.

I believe that cell phones will quickly outpace the dedicated e-book readers, including the Kindle, as the platform of choice for e-book readers. Leading the pack? The iPhone, ironically.

Putney Swope

One of the most amazing movies of the 1960s was Putney Swope (written and directed by Morton Downey SR.) A stuffed-shirt WASP New York ad agency is taken over by a newly-elected Black board chairman and a coterie of 60s Black Power types. They proceed to overturn the status quo of advertising, including this commercial for Face Off (the clip starts with the end of another commercial).

Ghost walk

Budos Band

Fantastic…

Origin of Man

Sexiest song EVER.

The prophet

CJ Bolland

There’s no video — just listen!  Try to keep from moving — I dare you!

Just a day

Feeder

This one will get you bouncing off the walls. 

Well Your Boobs Are Nice Too…

My Shit Is Beyond F’d Up

RIP WZ

Punk!

Buzzcocks!

Never heard of him

Which would be the most likely response to “Miller Anderson?”, even though he’s been an integral part of British blues for more than 40 years. He’s played in Keef Hartley Band, Savoy Brown, T. Rex, Mountain, the Spencer Davis Group, and with a host of others and after all this time, he’s still got a terrific voice and brilliant guitar. I first heard him when I ran across an LP by the Keef Hartley Band (spun off from John Mayall, like just about everyone in British blues) in 1969, and bought all their LPs and then ended up as one of the 14 people in the universe to buy his solo album, Bright City. (Which I hope is buried in the LP boxes and gets digitized.)

This video is from last year.

TDS: GOP vs. GOP on spending policy

Raw Story

Jon Stewart compares Republican rhetoric on spending during the Bush administration with today’s rhetoric.

I heard more of this nonsense today on CSPAN. It sounds very strange to me hearing Republicans stand up and rant about how irresponsible it would be to put this kind of a burden on our children, and their children, by increasing the national debt with this Stimulus Bill.. Acting all… Conservative…

More like hypocritical. Hey you Republicans! You can’t just pretend the last eight years DIDN’T happen! Stop being part of the problem.

I don’t know what’s funnier.. Jon Stewart, or listening to the Republicans standing up and acting all righteous and suddenly responsible and caring.

more about “TDS: GOP vs. GOP on spending policy“, posted with vodpod

On The Edge

Common Dreams

by Paul Krugman (NY Times)

A not-so-funny thing happened on the way to economic recovery. Over the last two weeks, what should have been a deadly serious debate about how to save an economy in desperate straits turned, instead, into hackneyed political theater, with Republicans spouting all the old clichés about wasteful government spending and the wonders of tax cuts.

It’s as if the dismal economic failure of the last eight years never happened – yet Democrats have, incredibly, been on the defensive. Even if a major stimulus bill does pass the Senate, there’s a real risk that important parts of the original plan, especially aid to state and local governments, will have been emasculated.

Somehow, Washington has lost any sense of what’s at stake – of the reality that we may well be falling into an economic abyss, and that if we do, it will be very hard to get out again.

It’s hard to exaggerate how much economic trouble we’re in. The crisis began with housing, but the implosion of the Bush-era housing bubble has set economic dominoes falling not just in the United States, but around the world…

Don’t miss the rest of this post.

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Friday Open Thread – How’s your eyesight?

Source: holypants.com

This is my last Open Thread for a week. I’ll be off skiing with the family andwill be back on Feb 16th. You all enjoy yourselves at TheZoo!

Olbermann: It’s time for Cheney to shut up

Special Comment tonight by Keith Olbermann on MSNBC’s Countdown.

Awwwww…STFU

All cartoons are posted with the artists’ express permission to TPZoo.
Jack Ohman, Portland Oregonian