Quote of the day

McCain has trouble telling Sunni's from Shiites. It's easy. Their big dispute is over a matter of succession following the death of Mohammed. Fourteen hundred years later the fighting's fiercer than ever. If you think it won't be resolved soon, or that we have little to add to the discussion, you probably want our kids home sooner, not later.

~ Bill Curry (who should have been our governor)

McPain

Check out the first few frames of this new campaign commercial. Not only is McLame being a little too precipitous with this, can you even imagine what Obama would be put through if he were to splash that word across any of his campaign materials?

Not only is it pretty presumptuous, he seems to be bald in most of the rest of it. Is it photos of him during his cancer treatments? If so, that does not make me more confident of his health.

Coneflowers

US News & World Reports has a new poll out, asking:
"Should doctors have the right to refuse to fill birth control prescriptions based on personal objections? Y/N "
Click on this to vote.

Right now I'm proud to say it's running 93% NO to 7% YES !

Today's Pic

Oooo Baby!

Pic of the day

Quote of the day

"There are no exit strategies." ~ Secretary of Defense Robert Gates

Send Karl to Jail

Quote of the day

The cry of ANWR for ever is the Republican Party telling everyone that they have no faith in the American worker, the American entrepreneur, or the free market system. It is them telling everyone that Americans cannot make things the rest of the world wants to buy.

~ Stirling Newberry

McCain Surrogates Still Calling Obama's Iraq Trip A "Stunt"

I'll tell you which trip was a "Stunt" - McCain's walk around the Baghdad market - you know, the one where the squad of bodyguards and the helicopters were carefully left out of the footage that was shown on the news. Now, that was a stunt.

You would think his advisors would be too smart to go there...

We Gazed Upon...

...The Chimes of Freedom Flashin'

Volunteers

Wild bachelor's button volunteering

Another fine volunteer

This was a volunteer in a friend's yard, so she brought it in for me

These guys have volunteered to be pretty

Wild snapdragon and black eyed susans volunteer to stand in the path

McLame volunteers to receive Social Security:

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Although Republican presidential candidate John McCain has called Social Security "a disgrace," he still cashes his own retirement check every month.

~snip~

McCain's 2007 tax return shows Social Security benefits of $23,157 for the year, an average of $1,929.75 a month. He said he started receiving the payments "whenever I was eligible."

~snip~

"Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today," he said. "And that's a disgrace. It's an absolute disgrace, and it's got to be fixed."

So, after spending every minute of his life feeding at the public trough- without the slightest notion of how his benefits were provided him- he calls this intergenerational contract that is Social Security disgraceful. And that's not bad enough, after marrying a multi millionaire, and while still making around four times the average income of the people who pay him, he still takes the 23,157 dollars every year for himself.

McCain has received everything from the American people and has more than the vast majority of us- yet he still sucks at the Social Security tit that he thinks is so disgraceful.

And he wants to "fix" Social Security by throwing scads of OUR money at the same financial industry that just had an equity-gutting free-for-all.


Aren't we done with Teh Stupid yet?

Quote of the day

Enough already with the shampoo approach to economic growth: bubble, bust, repeat.

~Jared Bernstein

Daylillies!

Via Krugman: Oh the sweet smell of Regulation in the morning...

Here Comes The Sun (doot 'n do do..)

I have a new button on my sidebar to the left: clicking on the blue flower will take you to my picasa photo album, with most of the pics I've posted over the last 3 years. The album contains all the visuals that have been posted on my blog (some nature pics from the good earth posts, plus all cartoons and graphs - are not mine, but if I delete them from the album, they disappear from the blog) Feel free to download and use these pics, but understand that I consider them under copywrite. Enjoy!

From the NY Times:

“Seventy-five thousand people do not attend political rallies unless something truly magical is happening,” Bob Blanchard wrote on May 18 in the comment section accompanying an account of the rally on the New York Times’s Web site. “Our great country will soon close the book on ‘government by division,’ and embrace ‘government by inclusion.’ ”

So - just as the Republicans are spiraling down the toilet, it's time for "inclusion" rather than "division".


The Song Remains the Same

Pics and more pics

What a surprise - I thought this orange Begonia would have single flowers like the pink one above it.

And what spectacular flowers!

This Calla Lilly is just opening

Luminous, catching the last rays of the day

Hold them accountable for their vote on FISA

from Greenwald:

Speaking of the Nixon era, one of the true American heroes from that time -- Daniel Ellsberg -- has an excellent post and video entitled "What Every American Needs to Know (and Do) About FISA." The debate over the FISA bill has begun now on the Senate floor and can be viewed at the C-SPAN website.

BushCo's Legacy

In Behind the Bush Bust Paul Krugman claims that the economy that BushCo is leaving us with is not so much GW's fault. Krugman blames the ever deepening Health Care hole on Newt Gengrich, ignoring the lack of leadership on this issue for the last - oh - 7 1/2 years.

Where he really turns into a Bush apologist is here:

As for high food and fuel prices, they’re mainly the result of growing demand from China and other emerging economies. But oil prices wouldn’t be as high as they are, and the United States would have been much less vulnerable to the current price spike, if we had taken steps in the past to limit our oil consumption.

Mr. Bush certainly deserves some blame here, and not just for his destructive embrace of ethanol as the answer to our energy problems. After 9/11 he could easily have called for higher gas taxes and fuel efficiency standards as a national security measure, but the thought never seems to have crossed his mind.

Still, in energy as in health care the biggest missed opportunities came 15 or more years ago, when Mr. Gingrich and other conservative Republicans in Congress, aided by Democrats with ties to energy-intensive industries, blocked conservation measures.

Um... hello?

Newtie notwithstanding, the complete clusterfuck in Iraq combined with outrageous tax cuts for the rich and an energy policy designed by Big Oil is what has been driving this economy for the last seven years. Even I can suss that out.

Hot Summer Days...

From my full-sun garden at work, which has really started to pop!

My namesake: The BlackBrown Eyed Susan ;)

Aaakk, I'm pulling out my hair today. The news says Obama is taking on one of Bushco's worst ideas, and will try to expand it if he becomes President.

CHICAGO - Reaching out to evangelical voters, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is announcing plans to expand President Bush's program steering federal social service dollars to religious groups and — in a move sure to cause controversy — support some ability to hire and fire based on faith.
~snip~
"The challenges we face today ... are simply too big for government to solve alone," Obama was to say, according to a prepared text of his remarks obtained by The Associated Press. "We need all hands on deck." (my ems)

Funny, I thought he was the "YES WE CAN" guy. It's for a president to face the challenges of his presidency wielding the full power of the US government. If he needs more, he should be planning on inspiring us all to work together and make the sacrifices that will get the job done, rather than thinking about how he can get the throne by paying off the christianists with my tax dollars.

But Obama's support for letting religious charities that receive federal funding consider religion in employment decisions could invite a protest from those in his own party who view such faith requirements as discrimination.
~snip~
Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, criticized Obama's proposed expansion of a program he said has undermined civil rights and civil liberties.

"I am disappointed that any presidential candidate would want to continue a failed policy of the Bush administration," he said. "It ought to be shut down, not continued."

...and that's totally how I feel. We need a FEMA that works, and if Bill Clinton can staff and fund a competent and professionally run agency, then Barak can either do it too, or hire Clinton to set it up for him. As a taxpayer, I don't want to have to rely on some christianist organization to dole out to me, and likely guilt me, for emergency relief that I am entitled to as a US citizen (as in already paid for). Neither do I want to have to send my taxes to support any kind of religion.


The full story can be found here

Quote of the day

The cry of ANWR for ever is the Republican Party telling everyone that they have no faith in the American worker, the American entrepreneur, or the free market system. It is them telling everyone that Americans cannot make things the rest of the world wants to buy.

~Stirling Newberry