For those of you who are unfamiliar with tropical wildlife, those are ibises, including a juvenile (the one in grey), along with their squirrel guide.
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- A Blog Around The Clock: Feed on these.Remember the veterans.
- archy on Fort Hood
- Bark Bark Woof Woof: As Maine went...
- Bloggg: College watch.
- Dohiyi Mir: NTodd writes to Congress.
- Echidne Of The Snakes begins to celebrate her sixth anniversary of blogging.
- Florida Progressive Coalition Blog: Five stories to read.
- ...I Am A Tree has a great picture for autumn.
- Iddybud Journal on Huffington on Obama, Plouffe, and the Media.
- Left Is Right and the UN's vote record on Cuba.
- Pen-Elayne on the Web gets elemental about dessert.
- Rook's Rant on the Republicans undoing Reagan's success.
- rubber hose survives the Philly transit strike and tells the tale.
- Scrutiny Hooligans: "Our weapon is fear."
- Speedkill: heehee.
- Steve Bates, The Yellow Doggerel Democrat, reports on the election in Texas.
- Stupid Enough Unexplanation with a good article from Townhall.
- The Invisible Library notes that it's National Novel Writing Month.
- WTF Is It Now?? with Jon Stewart.
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Twelve people have been killed and 31 wounded in a shooting spree at a Texas military base in a murderous rampage that officials believe was carried out by an Army psychiatrist.The story to a lot of people will be that the alleged killer was named Nadal Malik Hasan.
The suspected gunman was identified by ABC News as Major Nadal Malik Hasan. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, R-Texas, told Fox News that military sources informed her that the gunman was about to be deployed to Iraq. Sources tell ABC News that this would have been his first deployment.
The shooter was killed and two other suspects, who are also soldiers, have been apprehended, Lt. Gen. Robert W. Cone said.
Hasan allegedly opened fire and killed 11 people on the base before he was shot dead, bringing the total number of fatalities to 12.
The general said there were "eyewitness accounts of more than one shooter," and the others were tracked to an adjacent facility.
Cone called the attack "a terrible tragedy, stunning." He said the community was "absolutely devastated."
President Obama called the Fort Hood shootings a "horrific outburst of violence."
"It is difficult enough to lose" soldiers overseas, but it is "horrifying that they should lose their lives at an Army base in the U.S.," he said.
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No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.If it is activism to live up to the simple precepts of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, then let us make the most of it.
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The state's GOP primary for U.S. Senate has all the ingredients for an ideological powder keg. It pits the sitting governor, Charlie Crist, who embraced President Barack Obama's spending plan, against a scrappy former state lawmaker, Marco Rubio, who's become a darling of the conservative movement.Seeing as how well that went for their candidate in upstate New York -- Bill Owens, the Democrat, won the seat from the Republicans for the first time since 1872 -- it will be interesting to see how they avoid the inevitable inter-party fighting and the resentment of outside interference that could play right into the hands of the Florida Democratic Party.
And it's all happening in the nation's biggest swing state, which typically leans Republican but fell for Obama in the 2008 election and has five statewide seats that will be up for grabs in 2010.
Some conservative groups active in a New York congressional race that forced out a moderate Republican say Florida is next on their agenda.
''There's no question that the Florida race is going to be a focal point of the 2010 election cycle, with its classic David-and-Goliath matchup,'' said Mike Connolly, a spokesman for the Club for Growth, an anti-tax group that spent $1 million in the last month in New York. ''There's no question that Florida is going to attract and energize conservatives.''
The group is expected to endorse Rubio in the coming weeks, raising the prospect of an anti-Crist media blitz that could cut into the governor's fivefold fundraising advantage. FreedomWorks, a group that led many of the anti-Obama ''tea party'' rallies nationwide, is also setting its sights on Florida.
''The small government activists and the tea party movement is drawn to Rubio with great enthusiasm, and they're going to assert themselves,'' said FreedomWorks Chairman Dick Armey, a former Republican leader in the House of Representatives.
With the accusations this week that Scott Rothstein, fast-living Fort Lauderdale attorney and friend and donor to Gov. Charlie Crist, orchestrated a massive fraud out of his law firm, there are now three Crist moneymen caught up in alleged criminal or extremely shady activity.Besides Mr. Rothstein, two more of Mr. Crist's allies have problems; Alan Mendelsohn, who was indicted in September for fraudulent fund raising, and Harry Sargent, who garnered some attention in the 2008 election with his contracting overcharges on fuel delivery to the US military in Iraq to the point that the McCain campaign had to return his donations. He's also a close friend of Gov. Crist and was the state GOP finance chair until he was forced out earlier this year.
Crist, whose career has been fueled by his skill as a fundraiser, finds himself entangled with the trio of scandals just as his U.S. Senate primary campaign against conservative Marco Rubio is attracting national attention. And there's already talk down in Florida that the Crist-linked scandals may become a factor in the primary contest.
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In NY-23, Conservatives WinIn the real world, Democrat Bill Owens won, beating the carpetbagged and wingnut-approved Doug Hoffman. Mr. Erickson's logic is that the goal all along was to beat the GOP candidate Dede Scozzafava since she wasn't right-wing enough, and they did that; she dropped out last Saturday, backed Owens, and came in third.
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[Years ago] Limbaugh credited his success with being “one-dimensional.” “I’m totally concerned with me,” he said. And that was way before he got a contract for $400 million, so we can only imagine how one-dimensional he is now.Every now and then Ms. Dowd gets off a good one. This is one.
But on Sunday, he ripped the president for having “an out-of-this-world ego,” for being “very narcissistic,” “immature, inexperienced, in over his head.” (Isn’t immaturity scoring OxyContin from your maid?)
It gives new meaning to pot, kettle and black.
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If you’re uninsured, this won’t help you.Aside from the fact that this bill sounds like it was written by Aetna and UHC, after all the weeping and carrying on about bipartisanship, there's nothing in this proposal that has any of the basic ideas that are in the Democratic bills in either the House or the Senate. Oh, wait... the Republican bill does have the word "insurance" in it. But as Steve Benen points out,
If you’re insured, but you worry that circumstances beyond your control—a global financial meltdown leading to layoffs at your company, say—this won’t help you.
If you’re insured, but you worry that if you get sick your insurer will gin up some pretext to drop your coverage, this won’t help you.
If you’re insured but your premiums are escalating so fast you worry that you won’t be able to afford to keep paying them, this won’t help you.
Instead, Boehner is proposing the de facto total deregulation of the health insurance industry. Starting with the accurate observation that it’s odd to have insurance regulated fifty different ways in fifty states, the GOP decided not to do the sensible thing and create uniform federal regulation, but instead to let insurers sell plans across state lines. In other words, there’ll be a race to the bottom and all insurance will soon be offered under the rules of whichever state is laxest in its rules—goodbye consumer protections!
The result of all this will be a situation in which the health insurance systems works better for people who don’t need health care services, and much worse for people who actually are sick or who become sick in the future. It’s basically a health un-insurance policy.
Several GOP leaders have said they agree with "80 percent" of what Democrats have put together, so the smart course, they said, would be start over and build on those areas of agreement. More recently, Republicans have complained that Democrats haven't sought GOP input, and have instead been legislating "behind closed doors."If you had any doubts as to whether or not the Republicans were serious about anything to do with healthcare reform other than to get on TV, say "No" a lot, and rattle their teabags, this should pretty much put an end to that.
And now what do we see, aside from a truly ridiculous reform GOP plan? A proposal that was written in secret, behind closed doors, without input from Democrats. The "80 percent" of the reform policy that Republicans said they liked? It's gone. Areas on which Democrats have been willing to make concessions? They're gone, too. The GOP desire to advance a "bipartisan" plan? Like sand through an hourglass.
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If you choose to have a society where government provides you with more, then you must have more government. And you must have more government involvement in your economy. And the more that government is involved in your economy, the less economy there is left over for the rest of us.I'm not sure what he means by "the rest of us." It's as if "We the people" was some alien concept and that government, be it local, state, or federal, was something imposed on us by an outside entity. But that's the paradox of being a Republican: we're outsiders, we hate Washington, so send us there so we can install a permanent Republican majority.
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And if they get there, of course, you’re going to have a very rough time having a two-party system in this country, because almost everybody’s going to say, “All we ever were, all we ever are, all we ever hope to be depends on the Democratic Party.”And they must be stopped!
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Everywhere I go in my district, people tell me they are frightened .... I share that fear, and I believe they should be fearful. And I believe the greatest fear that we all should have to our freedom comes from this room — this very room — and what may happen later this week in terms of a tax increase bill masquerading as a health care bill. I believe we have more to fear from the potential of that bill passing than we do from any terrorist right now in any country.As has been noted in the past, she's a full-tilt lunatic; among her other charms, including being a deather and a tenther, she also claimed that Matthew Shepard's murder was a "hoax." I know what that says about Ms. Foxx; she's a loathsome and vicious excuse for a sentient being, but what does it also tell you about the people who voted for her?
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''Listening to you makes me feel like there's hope,'' said retired teacher Anne McLemore after hearing Rubio at a Republican women's club in Miramar Beach. She added later, ''He was saying all the things I need to hear.''That would include feeding the birthers.
The former leader of the Florida House [...] declines to venture an opinion on President Barack Obama's U.S. citizenship. ''I don't know the answer to that,'' Rubio equivocated when asked at the GOP women's club whether the president's birth certificate is valid.There's something ironic in hearing the son of Cuban refugees question someone else's citizenship, but hey, when you're trying to dance to the tune of the nutsery, you do what you gotta do.
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Continued below the fold.On paper, Representative Alan Grayson, a freshman Democrat from Florida, seems a bit stiff: degrees from Harvard and Harvard Law; a résumé that includes clerking for the United States Court of Appeals under Judges Antonin Scalia, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Robert Bork; an advocate for the aging.
But in recent weeks, Mr. Grayson has catapulted himself to national renown for outlandish rhetoric and a pugilistic political style that makes him seem less staid lawmaker than a character on the lam from one of his Orlando district’s theme parks.
First it was his comment, “If you get sick, America, the Republicans’ health care plan is this: Die quickly.” Then, appearing on MSNBC, he said of former Vice President Dick Cheney: “I have trouble listening to what he says sometimes because of the blood that drips from his teeth while he’s talking.” Finally, a radio interview surfaced in which he had called a female adviser to the Federal Reserve chairman “a K Street whore” — a reference to her former job as a Washington lobbyist. That one forced him to make a formal apology.
Mr. Grayson could be the latest incarnation of what in the American political idiom is known as a wing nut — a loud darling of cable television and talk radio whose remarks are outrageous but often serious enough not to be dismissed entirely. Mr. Grayson is the more notable because he hurls his nuts from the left in a winger world long associated with the right.
That might just be the point. House Democratic leaders publicly frown on his behavior and have urged him to tone it down, saying he contributes to an atmosphere of incivility. But the incivility is no accident; nor is the bluster. Such antics are often quickly rewarded in the media-crazed wrestling pit of American politics. One talked-about TV appearance leads to three more; every quotable outburst is a potential pitch, spread instantly by YouTube and blogs to an eager audience that can cheer by way of campaign donations made with the click of a mouse.
Some Democrats also say that Mr. Grayson fills a void, defying their party’s inferiority complex, the constant sense that liberals just are not tough enough. They say that as an attention-grabbing motivator of the party’s base, he could prove hugely useful in getting out the message for next year’s midterm elections.
“There is always a feeling among liberals, a psychology that we are too apologetic; we see six sides to the Pentagon,” said James Carville, the Democratic operative and commentator, who met Mr. Grayson in a CNN studio shortly after the “die quickly” speech in Congress.
“He was smart; he’s not just a crank,” Mr. Carville said. “He wanted to be anything but an apologetic, ‘if I said anything that offended anybody’ kind of liberal.” Mr. Carville added that party leaders will view Mr. Grayson as a “torpedo” they can deploy, especially if Democrats lose important governors’ races this week.
“We need guys like that out there,” he said.
Not everyone thinks so. Mr. Grayson joins colleagues like Michele Bachmann, Republican of Minnesota; Pete Stark, Democrat of California; and Joe Wilson, Republican of South Carolina, in what the decorum-minded see as a bipartisan playpen reserved for political problem children. So for party leaders, the behavior often forces a question: Do you cheer, or wince, or both?
The more rightists who win G.O.P. primaries, the greater the Democrats’ prospects next year. But the electoral math is less interesting than the pathology of this movement. Its antecedent can be found in the early 1960s, when radical-right hysteria carried some of the same traits we’re seeing now: seething rage, fear of minorities, maniacal contempt for government, and a Freudian tendency to mimic the excesses of political foes. Writing in 1964 of that era’s equivalent to today’s tea party cells, the historian Richard Hofstadter observed that the John Birch Society’s “ruthless prosecution” of its own ideological war often mimicked the tactics of its Communist enemies.Michelle Malkin proves Mr. Rich's point by crowing that the "mainstream conservatives have asserted themselves" by driving Ms. Scozzafava out of the race in the NY 23rd district race. If Mr. Hoffman, the animatronic Club for Growth conservative who does not live in the district and is unfamiliar with the issues facing the people there, is "mainstream," then the GOP is in for an interesting couple of election cycles, and not in a good way for them.
The same could be said of Beck, Palin and their acolytes. Though they constantly liken the president to various totalitarian dictators, it is they who are re-enacting Stalinism in full purge mode. They drove out Arlen Specter, and now want to “melt Snowe” (as the blog Red State put it). The same Republicans who once deplored Democrats for refusing to let an anti-abortion dissident, Gov. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, speak at the 1992 Clinton convention now routinely banish any dissenters in their own camp.
These conservatives’ whiny cries of victimization also parrot a tic they once condemned in liberals. After Rush Limbaugh was booted from an ownership group bidding on the St. Louis Rams, he moaned about being done in by the “race card.” What actually did him in, of course, was the free-market American capitalism he claims to champion. Limbaugh didn’t understand that in an increasingly diverse nation, profit-seeking N.F.L. franchises actually want to court black ticket buyers, not drive them away.
This same note of self-martyrdom was sounded in a much-noticed recent column by the former Nixon hand Pat Buchanan. Ol’ Pat sounded like the dispossessed antebellum grandees in “Gone With the Wind” when lamenting the plight of white working-class voters. “America was once their country,” he wrote. “They sense they are losing it. And they are right.”
They are right. That America was lost years ago, and no national political party can thrive if it lives in denial of that truth. The right still may want to believe, as Palin said during the campaign, that Alaska, with its small black and Hispanic populations, is a “microcosm of America.” (New York’s 23rd also has few blacks or Hispanics.) But most Americans like their country’s 21st-century profile
Martina Metzler peers at the piles of paper strips spread across four desks in her office. Seeing two jagged edges that match, her eyes light up and she tapes them together.Doonesbury -- Women's work.
"Another join, another small success," she says with a wry smile -- even though at least two-thirds of the sheet is still missing.
Metzler, 45, is a "puzzler," one of a team of eight government workers that has attempted for the last 14 years to manually restore documents hurriedly shredded by East Germany's secret police, or Stasi, in the dying days of one of the Soviet bloc's most repressive regimes.
Two decades after the heady days when crowds danced atop the Berlin Wall, Germany has reunited and many of its people have moved on. But historians say it is important to establish the truth about the Communist era, and the work of the puzzlers has unmasked prominent figures in the former East Germany as Stasi agents. In addition, about 100,000 people annually apply to see their own files.
The Stasi, which is said to have had more than 170,000 informers, succeeded in destroying thousands of files, shredding them in machines called "ripping wolves" until the equipment broke down under the weight of the task, then through burning and pulping (the contents, held in buckets in the archive, are known as "Stasi porridge"). At the end, agents tore them by bare hand as the teeming crowds smashed down their doors.
The shredded files, which any good German bureaucrat knows as vorvernichtete Akten or pre-destroyed files -- fill a staggering 16,000 mail sacks that contain about 45 million individual pages, or 600 million scraps. Thus far, the puzzlers are 440 sacks into the process.
"If we carry on at this pace we'll still be here in 500 years' time," says Ernst Schroedinger, a 54-year-old former amateur boxer turned puzzler.
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