Skank

An open apology to boomers everywhere

skank — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 13:40:52 +0000

Dear boomers: We’re sorry for rolling our eyes at you all these years….

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2008/11/07/havrilesky/

The free market’s invisible hand picks the taxpayer’s pockets again

skank — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 13:14:57 +0000

Now that we’re all about to take on hundreds of billions or perhaps a trillion dollars in new public debt to redeem the nation’s super-smart corporate financiers, there is one thing I hope we can expect in addition to postponing the apocalypse. Will they all please shut up about the wonders of the unfettered free market and the horrors of big government?

For decades, the investment class and their mouthpieces in the conservative movement have been telling Americans that if only we repealed all those musty old New Deal rules and programs, then we could enjoy unprecedented prosperity. Repeated endlessly by the think tanks, magazines and academics of the right-wing machinery, this message eventually drowned out the reality-based ideas of the American liberal tradition. Although those were the ideas that had actually built this country over the past century, they were erased from public consciousness by a combination of amnesia and propaganda.

Arrrr!

skank — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 00:33:27 +0000

Remember to celebrate. It’s International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

C’mon, John. Tell us what you really think.

skank — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 02:52:15 +0000

Former Republican John Cole on Sarah Palin:

Sarah Palin is the distilled essence of wingnut. She has it all. She is dishonest. She is a religious nut. She is incurious. She is anti-science. She is inexperienced. She abuses her authority. She hides behind executive privilege. She is a big spender. She works from the gut and places a greater value on instinct than knowledge.

And most dangerous of all, she is supremely self-confident to the point of not recognizing how ill-equipped she is to lead the country.

Palin’s “Stand against earmarks.”

skank — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 02:49:56 +0000

No comment.

According to Alaska’s 2009 catalog of earmark requests the state’s sea life are in great need of federal money. As Politico points out, Palin’s office requested $2 million in federal monies to study crab mating habits; $494,900 for the recreational halibut harvest and $3.2 million for seal genetics research.

Those requests for the study of wildlife genetics and mating habits seems pretty antithetical to the long-standig views of Palin’s running mate, John McCain.

“We’re not going to spend $3 million of your tax dollars to study the DNA of bears in Montana,” McCain said earlier this year, referring to a request from Montana for federal money to study the endangered grizzly bear. “I don’t know if it was a paternity issue or criminal, but it was a waste of money.”

Wait until she gets a gander at the Library of Congress

skank — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 03:22:13 +0000

The city of Wasilla released all the records of the Palin administration today. I’ve crossed out the ones I’ve read. I also crossed out the Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary which I own. The remaining books are going on my read list.

Books Mayor Sarah Palin tried to remove from Wasilla library

This information is taken from the official minutes of the Wasilla Library Board.
When the librarian refused to ban the books, Palin tried to get her fired.

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Blubber by Judy Blume
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
Carrie by Stephen King
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Christine by Stephen King
Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Cujo by Stephen King
Curses, Hexes, and Spells by Daniel Cohen
Daddy’s Roommate by Michael Willhoite
Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Decameron by Boccaccio
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Fallen Angels by Walter Myers
Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure) by John Cleland
Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Forever by Judy Blume
Grendel by John Champlin Gardner
Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
Have to Go by Robert Munsch
Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Impressions edited by Jack Booth
In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
It’s Okay if You Don’t Love Me by Norma Klein
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Little Red Riding Hood by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Love is One of the Choices by Norma Klein
Lysistrata by Aristophanes
More Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
My Brother Sam Is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher
Collier
My House by Nikki Giovanni
My Friend Flicka by Mary O’Hara
Night Chills by Dean Koontz
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Ordinary People by Judith Guest
Our Bodies, Ourselves by Boston Women’s Health Collective
Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
Revolting Rhymes by Roald Dahl
Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones by Alvin Schwartz
Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
Separate Peace by John Knowles
Silas Marner by George Eliot
Slaughterhouse- Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The Bastard by John Jakes
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Devil’s Alternative by Frederick Forsyth
The Figure in the Shadows by John Bellairs
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Snyder
The Learning Tree by Gordon Parks
The Living Bible by William C. Bower
The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
The New Teenage Body Book by Kathy McCoy and Charles Wibbelsman
The Pigman by Paul Zindel
The Seduction of Peter S. by Lawrence Sanders
The Shining by Stephen King
The Witches by Roald Dahl
The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Snyder
Then Again, Maybe I Won’t by Judy Blume
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary by the Merriam-Webster
Editorial Staff

‘I don’t even know who Petraeus and Crocker are.’

skank — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 23:53:10 +0000

Fragile progress indeed:
The Washington Post writes that “few Iraqis paid much attention” to the testimonies of Gen. David Petraeus and Amb. Ryan Crocker:

“The Americans have hundreds of meetings and testimonies like this, and what has it done for the Iraqi people? Nothing,” said Allah Sadiq, 49, a carpenter in the capital’s Karrada district. “So why do we care? We just want all the foreigners to leave and stop causing disasters for our country.”

“I don’t even know who Petraeus and Crocker are,” said 31-year old shop owner Yasser Kadhoum al-Khafaji. “I think these sorts of things are more important for Americans than they are for Iraqis.”

More…

Flying penguins filmed by BBC

skank — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 13:19:14 +0000

See it here.

Not as bad as I’d been led to believe

skank — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 03:02:22 +0000

The surgeon broke my nose last week. She straightened a badly deviated septum and resected the turbinate structures in the nose. The upshot is that when everything has healed, I’ll be able to breathe through my nose. I haven’t been able to sleep more than 3 or 4 hours a night for months because my airway shut down. Soon I should be able to get a good night’s rest.

I was prepared to have two black eyes and a tampon-like cotton packing shoved up each nostril for a week. But I escaped those indignities. In the mean time I can’t sleep for more than an hour before I wake up. I’ve been sleeping 4 or 5 on hour stretches each night.

Mitt Romney defends himself from vile attacks

skank — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 14:04:17 +0000

Check it out here. Hat tip to Atrios.