Clay ... Bill Clay ...

I Destroyed My Wife's Blender

It started smoking and then it went to a bar and hung out with unsavory people.

Homeless Vets = Road Kill

Associated Press : Last week, Novak was given a $50 citation after he struck a homeless man with his black Corvette in downtown Washington. Novak kept going until he was stopped by a bicyclist, who said the man was splayed on Novak's windshield.

I'm not sure why the adjective "homeless" is required in this story. The AP style book recommends against such "elective" adjectives for the victim of a crime.

What if the reporter said this ...

Last week, Novak was given a $50 citation after he struck a white male executive with his black Corvette in downtown Washington. Novak kept going until he was stopped by a bicyclist, who said the man was splayed on Novak's windshield.

Or this ...

Last week, Novak was given a $50 citation after he struck a United States Senator with his black Corvette in downtown Washington. Novak kept going until he was stopped by a bicyclist, who said the man was splayed on Novak's windshield.

Or ...

Last week, Novak was given a $50 citation after he struck a returning Iraq War veteran with his black Corvette in downtown Washington. Novak kept going until he was stopped by a bicyclist, who said the man was splayed on Novak's windshield.

The appellation "homeless" is added to assure us that even if the guy died, nothing would be lost.

Isn't it funny how liberals are accused of hating the U.S. soldiers/my family for not wanting them to be killed, and are then accused of hating America for insisting that the homeless, many of whom are U.S. veterans be given a place to live other than beneath the Route 139 and Route 24 overpass in Stoughton, Mass.?

How can you have your Roxbury Puddingstone if you won't eat your meat?

Early Day Lily

Two Beans

What is Geddy Lee doing to Joseph McCarthy's gravestone?

Mozart in the Mud ...

This is a rare photograph of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart drowning in quicksand, holding a lady's hat case and crying. 

Saharan plants leave footprints

Tiny plants in the Sahara sprout and flower and die in just a week during very rare desert rain showers -- Eastern Mauritania sees moisture once or twice a year.

The plants' roots and stems leave these telltale marks in the regs and a tiny seed at the bottom.

Kandinsky in the Sahara

Mineral deposits in the Sahara are like paintings.

With just an inch or two of rain every year, these boron and colemanite and selenite and gypsum deposits in the deep Sahara change every year but always remain the same.

My Sahara Trip Begins ...

We made it. Eastern Mauritania. Posts will be sporadic and dependent on a reliable satellite uplink.

Here's a Google Earth satellite image of the enormous wadi (seasonally dry river valley) we are entering in the photo above. Temperature at noon: 117 F.

We're camping along this ridge before taking on the salt pan at dawn. Our Tuareg guide says the black spot in the middle is an Algerian Army transport vehicle that was looted and burned by rebels last month.

Face on Mars -- 2008 !!!

UFO Landing

Obama: the Trip is the Text

During his world trip, Obama's prepared texts -- like the trip itself -- have been meticulously designed for stateside nightly news consumption -- not for those in attendance in Berlin and his other stops. This trip is a massive Mike Deaver style masterpiece of photo op, framing and message control. Like it or not, U.S. political campaigns operate in a visual medium and rely greatly on the perceived meaning of various visual symbols and settings. The challenge is to pull it off gaffe free, to get the news media to pay attention, and to get the news media to communicate the desired symbolism intact. This is all happening.

Show, Don't Tell. By making this trip, Obama has made a headlong attack at McCain's perceived strong point and his weakest: foreign policy, military matters and the elusively defined quality of "experience" and its antonym. This trip is giving the press and the public a chance to test drive the car before they decide to buy. That the one criticism of the trip is that it might be too successful and European audiences might like him too much speaks for itself.

This is why nobody reads newspapers anymore

By Michael Levenson
Globe Staff / July 25, 2008
BUFFALO - Rain from a violent storm leaked through a glass atrium at the Hyatt Regency Hotel yesterday as a couple of dozen supremely unheralded politicians - lieutenant governors from across America - gathered in a windowless ballroom.

Lieutenant Governor Brian K. Krolicki of Nevada looked across a table filled with cold cuts and potato chips and asked Lieutenant Governor Barbara Lawton of Wisconsin, the incoming chairwoman of the group, "Do you get to wear a crown?"

Lawton laughed, until she noticed one of the very few reporters covering the conference of the National Lieutenant Governors Association standing nearby.
--
This is why nobody reads newspapers anymore.

Can't the Boston Globe find anything more interesting and newsworthy for its reporters to cover?

Bean House No. 1

School's Out Forevah

Former Cony High School, Cony Street, Augusta, Maine.

Overheard at Barry's

"I was at a dinner party this week and two FCI (formerly considered intelligent) friends, stated that they were not voting for Obama, as he would give all our money to the blacks. I, as calmly as possible with my blood pressure being 500 over 400, asked them what money would he have available to give, since the Bush admin borrowed and spent everything available. They looked at me as tho I was from outer space and I realized that America is dumbed down more than I imagined."

Comment by "larster" at Barry Ritholtz's Big Picture.

Followed by "David," who eschews those who visualize these:


larster...lifelong republican here. In 2004 and 2006 I voted straight ticket D.

I will not vote for Obama.

I would have voted for Hillary.

I researched Obama on my own time, and let me tell you there is some real juicy stuff in his hometown paper.

Heck I may even vote for McCain just to vote against him effectively.

I wanted to like the guy, but his record in office, lack of any legislation, extensive present votes and 6 "oops I hit the wrong button(out of 2 buttons) votes, FISA vote, Faith based initiative, and all the other numerous promises he has abandoned and his associations with unsavory radical left people.....so on so forth

People are starting to see him for the politician he is...nothing more, nothing less.


"David" is not a person. It is a random, self-contradictory catchphrase cut and paste machine. Nobody except a Rovian talking point device can pseudocasually toss out such encyclopedic innuendo in a short note on a financial blog.

The "unsavory radical left people" quip is the whipped cream on the sundae.

What other kind of radical left people are there ?

First Tomato

July 24th.

June 21st.

Food flowers

Easton, Mass. has some racists

My town of Easton has become full-nelsoned by racism. It seems odd to me that a town with a gigantic Civil War Monument at Center and Depot Street would become a festering cesspool of hatred against brown people, especially given that most Easton natives have lots of brown in their blood.

Douglas Watts of Augusta Maine, so you dont want code words what 'affordable housing' means. 'Affordable housing to North Easton means minorities, Cape Verdans,etc., will soon be living in Easton. That means crime violence,murders,drug dealing is coming to Easton. That means white flight.

And ...

Me? I want to live in a predominately small,quiet, boring,low crime,bedroom upperclass white community with very few ethnic minorities, Very few. A coomunity that does not allow mobile homes too. You asked.

Keepin' it real.

Taunton River Wild and Scenic River Bill Passes

The July 16, 2008 House of Representatives Calendar states:

H.R. 415 - To amend the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act to designate segments of the Taunton River in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as a component of the National Wild and Scenic Rivers (Rep. Frank – Natural Resources) (Subject to a Rule [H.Res. 1339])

The Taunton River, properly named Cotuhticut (Titicut) in the Wampanoag Indian language, is a 600 square mile watershed that occupies most of southeastern Massachusetts. It starts at the largest natural lakes in Massachusetts: Assawompsett, Nanapocksha, Apponequet and Wampettoquettoquash (Quittacus for short) and empties into Montaup (Mount Hope Bay) in Rhode Island. It is the home of Massasoit, who saved the pilgrims from starving at the first Thanksgiving.

My brother Tim has a nice photo essay on this.

House Republicans oppose the bill, because it might, perhaps, in even a small way, benefit melanin-enchanced citizens.

UPDATE: The bill was passed by the House on Wednesday, July 16, 2007 by vote of 242 - 175 (Roll no. 507).

All of the opposing votes were Republicans.

What a bunch of pathetic losers.

FOX NEWS: 15 year old Black boy should be tortured for years.

It's really simple. If white Irish children were being kept prisoner in Guantanamo since 2001 and were being tortured and kept in tiny boxes until they lost their minds, well, it wouldn't happen in the first place.

But because we all know that Dark Foreign People (TM) are bad until proven good, torturing their children is no prob.

The New Yorker cover

I know in the long run that this New Yorker cover will be the forgotten detritus of a black man being elected President, but I focus this through the mind of a young kid in 1973 whose relatives said nigger this, nigger that, with the nonchalance that they asked for another hot dog or plate of potato salad.

I use that memory as a compass.

15 Days to Obamagideon (TM) !1!!*

Mo Bettah’ MoBama only has 15 days to halt Uma Thurmonukleararr Kernning Watch Deadline From Otter Spayce by producing Teh Sacred COLB w/o the evil Telltale Anti-Aliasing Laser BEam Trayces !!!!

As Richard says, "It seems like this should be one of the biggest stories in America politics, but it seems like it barely on anyone’s radar. As most comedians will tell you though, everything is “timing”."

*h/t Neville Livingston.

Spigot Me Baby

NYT, June 28, 2000:

Gov. George W. Bush of Texas said today that if he was president, he would bring down gasoline prices through sheer force of personality, by creating enough political good will with oil-producing nations that they would increase their supply of crude.

''I would work with our friends in OPEC to convince them to open up the spigot, to increase the supply,'' Mr. Bush, the presumptive Republican candidate for president, told reporters here today. ''Use the capital that my administration will earn, with the Kuwaitis or the Saudis, and convince them to open up the spigot.''

Asked why the Clinton administration had not been able to use the power of personal persuasion, Mr. Bush said: ''The fundamental question is, 'Will I be a successful president when it comes to foreign policy?' ''

He went on to suggest, as he did in answer to other questions, that voters should simply trust him.

''I will be,'' he said in answer to his own question about whether he would be a successful president. ''But until I'm the president, it's going to be hard for me to verify that I think I'll be more effective.''

Poor Political Party Poop

This fraudulent post would have us believe that Jimmy Carter created the national 55 mph speed limit in 1978 as part of the secret Democrat(TM) plan to enslave us all in Luddite lethargy, surrender and disco-gay-malaise.











Republican President Richard Milhous Nixon signed the national 55 mph speed limit into law on January 2, 1974, three years before Jimmy Carter became President.

Nice try, though.

Texas Darlin' Reports from the Front of the Short Bus*

O pshaw ...

"Requests have not worked. Join me in demanding that Sen. Barack Obama show America a certified copy of his complete and original birth certificate (BC) by August 1. The version he has posted on the web, the Certificate of Live Birth (COLB), is only a short abstract."

We all know that most birth certificates are thousands of pages long.

*Photoshop slime courtesy politicalpartypoop.com. Good luck raising those kids.

Privatize Profits, Socialize Losses.

Paul Krugman and The Economist both used the phrase "private profits, socialized losses" in their FNM/FRE articles today. That phrase seems to have some power to it.

Ask any fish in a river killed by hydroelectric dams.

As a film critic ...

I liked it when they colorized the Presidency back in 2008.

What if you lose an election

And can't find it?

Ina: You win an Oscar and a Nobel Prize !!!

Krazy Konstitutional Kontent !!!

From World O' Crap:

Wait! Is It Too Late To File My Amicus Brief in Dred Scott v. Sandford?


Photo of white high school students at Fairdale High School, Jefferson County, Kentucky courtesy of March of the Titans: The Internet History of the White Race.

Konsumerism Nicht Das Konsumerism

That'll be your Gross National Product for the next generation, compounded monthly, and 25 cents for the Slim Jim.

"Tom" informs us that:

There is no such thing as Consumerism. We have stuff to buy and the money to buy stuff. Opponents of “Consumerism” (a term they made up) are really saying prosperity is wrong. (Leftism) Also, freedom to choose is wrong. (More Leftism)

SPECIAL "TOM" BONUS COMEBACK:

"Tom" shows us the "conservative way" (TM) to admit he's too lazy to educate himself even in the Allan Bloom sense of the word:

Excuse if I wont read Marx as I have a pile of unread books at home already. I´m sure your education wasn´t free but it was obviously for nothing.

And though he refuses to read Marx, "Tom" knows deep in his buying jones bones that Marx and his 1840s Trieste/Luddite economist ilk invented the word 'consumerism' to enslave and shame us into not buying three Hummers where two will do:

Marx and his cabal came up with the term to make freedom and prosperity sound bad. How else would they get people to hand their lives over to them? Again, rhetorical."

"Again, rhetorical." is the new Q.E.D.

h/t to Scott at World O' Crap via Roger Ailes.

Republicans: Always Joking

You can buy this button from the classy folks at Cafe Press.
Funny thing is that a banner slogan on the Pemberton New Jersey Republican Club's Web site which says the same thing as the button disappeared yesterday after local complaints.

The Web master, Ed Kuck, a recently elected Republican County committeeman, said he had seen the slogan on an Internet site and copied it onto the club's Web page about a month ago as "a joke."

Always joking.

Maine Public Radio: Presumpscot Deal is Dead

Keith Shortall on Maine Things Considered on Maine Public Radio, 7/8/08.

Even Wingnuts Admit Oil Will Stay Up.

This Wingnut Author admits that oil prices will not go back down.

Note his irritation that Saudi Arabia refuses (unlike Norway and England in the North Sea) to pump all of their oil fields dry as quickly as possible to keep prices low for us:

While some menaced war, oil companies took off looking for new provinces and found them — like the North Sea, which started pumping from zero in 1971 all the way up to its six million barrel a day peak of 1999. So much new oil was found elsewhere that OPEC’s share of world supplies dropped to forty percent from nearly sixty percent. And prices collapsed as a result, until they resumed their climb two years ago."

The bastards.

Thinking only of themselves.

Elizabeth Warren writes:

As I write, Senator Obama is giving a major policy speech on bankruptcy. So far as I know, he is the candidate to discuss consumer bankruptcy in a general election. I can think of many reasons that bankruptcy is a terrible subject for someone running for president. It is very technical (hard to wedge into a sound bite). It is depressing (no one wants to think about going bankrupt). It will annoy big-money interests (financial services gave big money to pass the current bankruptcy laws).

Savvy handlers would advise against it. So why would Obama make bankruptcy relief a visible part of his platform?

Here are my theories:

First, he understands that bankruptcy policy is an integral piece of economic security for families. When all else goes wrong, bankruptcy is the ultimate safety net. More importantly, bankruptcy rules affect all other consumer lending rules. So, for example, if homeowners in trouble on their mortgages could reorganize in Chapter 13, the threat to file Chapter 13 would get more home mortgage lenders to the negotiating table.

Second, Obama has history. He voted against the bankruptcy bill. He voted in favor of the amendments that would have eased the effects of the amendments. But his real history is deeper. He was a community organizer who saw first-hand the effects of aggressive lending. He was a state legislator who felt the impact of federal pre-emption on his ability to protect the citizens he represented.

Third, McCain has a history. McCain has voted in favor of financial institutions since he first went to Washington. He voted over and over for the bankruptcy bill, and he voted against the amendments to give medical bankrupts a means test exemption, against a uniform minimim homestead for older Americans, against limiting recovery for lenders who violate Truth-in-Lending laws. After Katrina, McCain opposed an amendment to make procedures easier for victims of natural disasters. The list is long.

The specific proposals are getting attention--expanded homestead protection, fast-tracking more consumers through bankruptcy, better protection for people nit by natural disasters. But I'm attracted more strongly to the overarching principles for rebalancing bankruptcy: Obama talks of restoring the safety net, and making bankruptcy less friendly to the very creditors that pushed a family into bankruptcy.

The deteriorating economy makes bankruptcy a more urgent national issue. Bankruptcy and consumer finance are issues where the money and power is all on one side and the middle class families are on the other. It is also an area where both candidates have an on-the-record history. They can show what walk they have walked before they became candidates for president. McCain has carried big financial institutions, while Obama has worked for families.

Word from the Black Muslim Hitler or whatever the slur is today

"Part of what makes America so beautiful is that there is no such thing as someone who looks like an American." --


Barack Obama, 7/9/08, at the League of United Latin American Citizens convention, Los Angeles, CA.

Presumpscot Deal is Dead: Portland Press-Herald

The Portland Press-Herald and John Richardson provide a good synopsis:

The leader of the Friends of Sebago Lake, a group that pledged to fight the agreement with Sappi, said the deal's collapse is good news for the river and its fish.

Roger Wheeler said the deal included too many compromises with Sappi.

Forcing the company to install fish passage at Cumberland Mills would compel the company to create fish ladders upstream at a faster pace than the agreement would have, he said. And the agreement would not have allowed salmon and other fish to swim all the way up the river.

"We want to restore the fish all the way up to Sebago Lake. That's the way it should be," he said.

Friends of Sebago Lake was preparing to fight the agreement in court, arguing that it was negotiated in private and would illegally change the terms of federal hydropower licenses. State officials defended the agreement as a legal compromise that would have finally settled the dispute.



Excellent, Smithers, excellent.

Dream Song

Every month or so, I have a dream in which I compose a song. Sometimes, I wake up in time to still remember the melody and lyrics. This morning I had a dream in which I performed the song below on a guitar strung up with 4 foot long strands of my hair; and Jon Lund, publisher of the Maine Sportsman magazine, accompanying on mandolin. As performed in my dream a half hour ago, this song has a Woody Guthrie feel crossed with the Dixie Hummingbirds (an old time gospel quartet) and the Staples Singers:

I drove down to the center
I drove down to the center
I drove down to the center of the line.
(repeat)

When I drove down to the center
When I drove down to the center
When I drove down to the center
What did I find?
(repeat)

When I drove down to the center
When I drove down to the center
When I drove down to the center
I found a line.

So I drove down to the center
I drove down to the center
I drove down to the center of the line.

Pretty crappy. But free.

Obama = Black Hitler or something ...

It's nice to see (alleged) Democrats keeping things on a high plane ...

Rather than asserting that Denver = Nuremberg.

Or that a well-attended political rally is unfair to agoraphobics.

Or that it is unseemly and and downright scary for Barack Obama to do something John F. Kennedy and Ronald W. Reagan did.

Or that small, fuzzy 30-year-old snapshots are the best way to choose the next Presleydent.

Thankfully, in Texas, NoBamaBirthCertificateKerningGate is still Go !!!!

You Are What You Beat

NYT:

"WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners."


Wunnerful, wunnerful, wunnerful.

Bad Presumpscot Deal is Dead

One year ago this week, the world was told about a "win-win" settlement between South African Pulp & Paper (SAPPI), the State of Maine, Friends of the Presumpscot River and American Rivers, and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife & Service that would "restore" the Presumpscot River.

The reality was not so pleasant as the corporate press releases would have you believe.

What actually happened one year ago is that a multi-billion dollar corporation, SAPPI Inc., announced that it would obey a state fishway law at its non-hydro Presumpscot River dam at Cumberland Mills in Westbrook, Maine if and only if SAPPI was allowed to violate the U.S. Clean Water Act at its five Presumpscot River hydro-electric dams for the next 50 years.

That's right. The State of Maine, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and America's foremost river protection group, American Rivers, and its local partner, Friends of the Presumpscot River, agreed to allow a huge corporation to violate the U.S. Clean Water Act on the Presumpscot River for the next 50 years.

SAPPI's dams violate the U.S. Clean Water Act by impounding and destroying most of the Presumpscot River, making it unlivable for its native Atlantic salmon, and cutting the river off from its source, Sebago Lake.

SAPPI's dams destroy, block and sever the finest Atlantic salmon habitat in the United States: the Sebago, Presumpscot and Crooked River Atlantic salmon watershed.

SAPPI's dams are the only reason the Presumpscot River above Westbrook is now virtually dead to its native fish life.

SAPPI's dams are the only reason Atlantic salmon do not swim from Casco Bay to Sebago Lake each spring, as they have done for the past 10,000 years.

The fake restoration deal is now dead.

SAPPI has apparently decided the cost of removing the Cumberland Mills Dam is not worth millions of dollars in federal license givebacks offered by the State of Maine, Friends of the Presumpscot River and American Rivers.

SAPPI's decision seems to make no sense because the cost of complying with Maine's fishway law at the Cumberland Mills Dam will cost as much -- or more -- as removing the dam.

Prior to last July, SAPPI repeatedly told the world that building a fishway at its minuscule Cumberland Mills Dam would put its Westbrook paper mill out of business.

Then, last year, SAPPI abruptly announced that it was willing to spend the same amount of money as a fishway to remove the entire dam.

Suddenly, a mill-killing expense became a mill-saving opportunity !!!

Now, a year later, not so much.

To prevent yourself from getting any more whiplash, here is what appears to be the situation:

1. Before July 2007, SAPPI said spending several million dollars to build a fishway at its Cumberland Mills Dam would put its Westbrook mill out of business.

2. After July 2007, SAPPI said removing the Cumberland Mills Dam would keep its Westbrook mill in business, even though removing the dam would cost as much or more than the cost of building the fishway it said would put its Westbrook mill out of business.

3. Today, in July 2008, SAPPI says that everything it has previously said on this topic during the past two years is balderdash and should not be believed.

We agree.