News Today

But I assure you I will be back on Sunday. Happy Halloween everyone! In the meantime, put your two cents in for my new poll.

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Thanks to Cartoon Guy for the image.
Someone (perhaps trying to put CNN out of it’s misery) shoots at Lou Dobbs’ house in New Jersey.

Michigan Representative John Dingell wrote an excellent op-ed titled “Numbers, not shouting, overwhelm health care debate” that really breaks down some of the numbers we’re dealing with in the health care debate.

House Democrats unveil 1,990 page health care bill, Obama approves.

Florida man in Home Depot gets fired for wearing a “One nation under God” button. EVERYBODY FREAK OUT!!!

Iran responds to IAEA over enrichment deal — This is definitely a story to keep watching.

HA!

Source:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwz_Tuog4NU

After a nine month hiatus of, well, pretty much anything public, George W. Bush may have found himself a new role - Motivational Speaker.

…I know right?

Over 11,000 people (some reports say upwards of 15,000) attended a “Get Motivated!” seminar in Fort Worth, Texas on Monday that featured our 43rd president, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, Rev. Robert H. Schuller, retired football great Terry Bradshaw and motivational speaker Zig Ziglar.

Looking more relaxed than he ever did during his presidency Bush strung together anecdotes and jokes while musing about his eight years in the Oval Office.

“Every single day, I was honored to be your president by bringing honor and dignity to the office,” said Bush.

-spits coffee out of mouth-

“It’s so simple in life to chase popularity, but popularity is fleeting,” said Bush, adding, “it’s not real.”

I’ll refrain from commenting out of respect for the presidency.

In all seriousness though, I think George may have found himself a suitable role (or at least a better one than POTUS). The reaction from the crowd consisted of standing ovations and, for the most part, good reviews. Last week 43 gave three speeches in Canada, and he also recently joined the Washington Speakers Bureau. His next scheduled motivational speech will take place next month in San Antonio.

Chris Clarke, a 25-year old salesman from Dallas who attended the event, summed it up pretty perfectly. He said when Bush misspeaks, it sounds “incompetent if you are president. But here it can be inspiring. It makes him seem like a regular guy, no better than me.”

Sources:
http://www.star-telegram.com/local/story/1710670.html
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2009/10/27/George-W-Bushs-gig-Motivational-speaker/UPI-16531256655386/
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-bush28-2009oct28,0,3497678.story?track=rss

While Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor made it through the Senate relatively easily (68-31 with 9 Republicans joining a unified Democratic Senate in approving the justice), the rest of President Barack Obama’s lower court nominees are moving at a much slower pace.

Slower than molasses, even.

Only three of his 22 lower court nominees have been confirmed so far and the latest, Roberto Lange (for a federal district court appointment in South Dakota), waited 3 1/2 months to be approved. Gerard Lynch from New York and Jeffrey Viken from South Dakota, the other two nominees to be confirmed, spent a similar amount of time waiting to be approved.

Two unapproved nominees, Andre Davis of Maryland and David Hamilton of Indiana, cleared the Senate judiciary committee almost 150 days ago. Both of them are still waiting for a floor vote. Another nominee, Beverly Martin, has the support of Georgia’s two conservative Republican senators and was unanimously reported out of the Senate judiciary committee almost 50 days ago. She, too, has not received a Senate floor vote.

All in all eight of Obama’s nominees are currently waiting for floor action.

In some ways this is nothing new. Senators in both parties have been guilty for a while now of using procedural tactics to block or delay confirmations. However, as Slate’s Doug Kendall points out, these heavy-handed tactics were typically reserved for controversial candidates whereas the Republicans appear to be contesting them all.

From Kendall’s article:

“To date, however, the tit-for-tat game has played out within a fairly narrow category of nominees who are deemed controversial. While there has never been an agreed-upon definition of what that means—it’s an eye-of-the-beholder type of thing—there has consistently been a large category of nominees that are not considered controversial. They have typically made it easily through the Senate confirmation process, no matter how rough the ride is for their controversial counterparts.”

Let’s compare Obama’s progress with his predecessor. During the last two years of his presidency, George W. Bush’s support was dwindling and he faced a Senate under Democratic control. Still, 26 of Bush’s 68 nominees cleared the floor within 3 months of Bush nominating them and 23 of the Bush nominees were confirmed on the Senate floor within a week of passing out of the judiciary committee.

Bush’s first two years went about the same. A Democratic majority in Congress confirmed 100 of Bush’s nominees in 17 months, even after delays due to a change in party control.

So why is it that the more popular Obama, with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, is having so much trouble?

Again let’s turn to Kendall’s article.

“The emerging Republican strategy is to hold these uncontroversial nominees hostage as pawns in the larger war over President Obama’s agenda and the direction of the federal judiciary. The Senate operates according to a set of arcane rules that allows a minority party to bring the institution to a halt if it chooses to do so. Most bills and nominations pass through the Senate with no debate and only a voice vote on the Senate floor. But this requires every senator to play along. By stonewalling on every nominee so far, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is requiring his counterpart, Sen. Reid, to negotiate, or devote precious floor time, for every judicial confirmation.”

While I can’t say I agree much with Kendall’s description of our government’s checks and balances as “a set of arcane rules,” Kendall goes on to describe why the G.O.P.’s tactics are detrimental to our whole judicial system.

“This is unprecedented and dangerous. There are already 95 vacancies on the federal bench at a time when there is bipartisan agreement that we need more judgeships. The last thing we need is for existing seats in overworked courts to go unfilled.”

“Even more important, Republican obstruction of uncontroversial nominees undermines the one part of the judicial confirmation process that was still working, until now. Well-qualified nominees who enjoy bipartisan support should be able to count on a fair and relatively smooth Senate confirmation process. This is critical because while they’re waiting, the careers of these nominees go on hold. Given the demands of the bench, and the gap between judicial salaries and what these candidates could earn in private practice, the nation is already lucky that top candidates are willing to serve. If we throw in an unpredictable and lengthy confirmation process, the quality of the federal bench—and the dispensation of justice—will unquestionably suffer.”

Sources:
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_next_war_over_the_courts
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/08/06/sonia.sotomayor/index.html
http://www.slate.com/id/2233309/#return

LoL - “Can libertarians vote in elections?”

Someone ran a search for that in yahoo and found my blog yesterday. My answer?

Of course they can! But good luck finding a candidate on the left or the right that will represent your values.

Not really related at all but enough of a coincidence to make me angry. My friend, we’ll call her Amanda, has been in the hospital since last Friday. She has yet to receive H1N1 medication and her boyfriend informed me that her situation is turning worse and worse.

. . .

“Now watch this drive” — former President George W. Bush.

Hard to forget that Bush quote. Always looking to outdo his predecessor, President Barack Obama was able to accomplish in under ten months what took Bush over 34 months to do — play 24 rounds of golf.

Of course I suppose we should be happy, because by playing with his chief domestic policy adviser, Melody Barnes, Obama became the first U.S. president to play a foursome round of golf with a woman.

Still, as my friend Amanda sits in the hospital, using all of her strength to hold on until the doctors finally give her medication, I have a hard time feeling proud of our president even though he broke such an important gender-equality barrier.

Kind of seems like the same shit on a different day to me.

Sources:
http://online.worldmag.com/2009/10/26/obama-ties-bush-in-golf/
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_OBAMA_WOMAN_IN_FOURSOME?SITE=NCAGW&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
http://www.freakingnews.com/Freak-Show-Pictures–2327-4.asp

In a 100-page report titled “Troubled Waters: Palestinians Denied Fair Access to Water,” Amnesty International claims Israel is cutting off access to water for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

“This scarcity has affected every walk of life for Palestinians,” Amnesty’s researcher on Israel, Donatella Rovera, told The Associated Press in an interview Monday, ahead of the report’s release. “A greater amount of water has to be granted to them.”

According to the report, water consumption per capita for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is about 70 liters (18 gallons) per day, while Israeli per capita use is 300 liters (79 gallons). On average, Israelis use four times the amount of water per person on than Palestinians.

In the West Bank the Mountain Aquifer is the only source of water for Palestinians. Israel controls the aquifer and over 80 percent of water drawn goes to the Jewish state. As a result, the 450,000 Israelis who live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem use more water than the 2.3 million Palestinian residents.

Rovera said the water situation in Gaza, home to 1.5 million Palestinians, had reached a “crisis point.” He also estimated damage to Gaza’s sewer system from the Israeli offensive has left 90 to 95 percent of the water in the region contaminated and unfit for human consumption. To make matters worse, an ongoing Israeli blockade is stopping any supplies for repairs to come in.

Israeli officials denied many of the claims from the report, complaining that Amnesty had neglected to use transparent information provided by the Israeli government.

“Israel has fulfilled all its obligations under the water agreement regarding the supply of additional quantities of water to the Palestinians, and has even extensively surpassed the obligatory quantity,” the foreign ministry said in a statement.

“The Palestinians, on the other hand, have significantly violated their commitments under the water agreement, specifically regarding important issues such as illegal drilling (they have drilled over 250 wells without the authorization of the Joint Water Commission) and handling of sewage.”

Sources:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NOfJfAnrmQ&feature=player_embedded
http://topics.cnn.com/topics/amnesty_international
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iVkvzuni3YkNQU5PikPz4yiPs0GQD9BJA3KO0
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/10/27/israel.water/

Oops, I better clarify that the title of this post is satirical.

Because you can’t trust everything you read on the internet. You have to verify it, take some time to find sources to back up your conclusions. That’s why I list my sources underneath every one of my articles, so you the reader can do just that. I don’t mean to sound all preachy and everything but this latest story I ran across shows why it’s important to research what you read.

Matthew Avitabile is an upstate New York grad student who writes a blog called Jumping in Pools. Often times his posts are satirical. In fact, one of the more recent blog posts that Avitabile did was actually titled “Obama to Consult Magic 8 Ball for Afghanistan Strategy.”

There’s nothing wrong with Avitabile’s postings. In fact, some of them are quite humorous. A while back Avitabile posted a blog, labeled satirical, about a fictitious seminar paper that Barack Obama wrote while at Columbia.

From JIP:

“Obama was required to write a ’senior seminar’ paper in order to graduate from Columbia. The subject of this paper, which totaled 44 pages, was American government. Entitled Aristocracy Reborn, this paper chronicled the long struggle of the working class against, as Obama put it, ‘plutocratic thugs with one hand on the money and the other on the government.’

“In the paper, in which only the first ten pages were given to the general media, Obama decries the plight of the poor: ‘I see poverty in every place I walk. In Los Angeles and New York, the poor reach to me with bleary eyes and all I can do is sigh.’

“In part, the future President blames this on the current economic system: ‘There are many who will defend the ‘free market.’ But who will defend the single mother of four working three jobs. When a system is allowed to be free at the expense of its citizens, then it is tyranny.’

“However, the President also singled out the American Constitution: ‘… the Constitution allows for many things, but what it does not allow is the most revealing. The so-called Founders did not allow for economic freedom. While political freedom is supposedly a cornerstone of the document, the distribution of wealth is not even mentioned. While many believed that the new Constitution gave them liberty, it instead fitted them with the shackles of hypocrisy.’

“It is yet unknown if more of this thesis will be released. It was also noted that the President received an A- for the paper, which later led to his graduation.”

Despite the satire label on the post, the blog posting began to gain credibility. So much so that Rush Limbaugh actually cited the posting’s claims a couple of days ago on his radio show.

“The Constitution is the most liberty-promoting and freedom-acknowledging document in the history of the world, and this little boy in college is writing about it with utter disdain, and he still shares those feelings,” Limbaugh said, adding, “So Joe Klein at Time magazine has known for a long time about Obama’s college thesis when he was at Columbia. Why didn’t this come out a year ago at this time? Why didn’t this come out before the election in November?”

Perhaps because it never happened? Within minutes a caller informed Rush that there wasn’t any credibility to the accusations. Sometimes men like Rush Limbaugh don’t like to let pesky things like truth or facts get in the way though.

“I’m also told that the blog containing the passage on Obama’s thesis is a satire blog…,” he said minutes later in the same show. “So I shout from the mountaintops, ‘It was satire!’ But we know [Obama] thinks it. Good comedy, to be comedy, must contain an element of truth, and we know how he feels about distribution of wealth. He’s mad at the courts for not going far enough on it. So we stand by the fabricated quote because we know Obama thinks it anyway. That’s how it works in the media today.”

Rush wasn’t the only one trying to backtrack though.

“It’s important to note that none of this nonsense would be running wild around the internet if the campaign had just released Obama’s thesis in the first place,” said Meredith Jessup of TownHall.com.

Yeah about that. A Columbia University spokesman told PolitiFact that “an undergraduate thesis requirement for those in political science did not even exist at Columbia in 1983.” There was no thesis, not for Obama or for any other Columbia political science student in that era.

Amazingly enough, this isn’t even the first time that one of Jumping In Pool’s fictitious postings had gained credibility. Remember the claim that Obama wanted soldiers to stop taking an oath to the Constitution and instead pledge their loyalty to the president himself? That claim was started by Avitabile as well (and was also false).

I’d like to clarify again, there’s nothing wrong with what Avitabile is doing. One of the most entertaining bloggers on today.com makes his money by posting nothing but satirical news posts. Avitabile explained that he wanted to do the post in satire, but not so over-the-top that you knew it was false right away.

“If you have to explain a joke, it’s not funny,” said Avitabile. “I kind of get inspiration from Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal. You want people to be let in and then at the end, they realize it, and either find it funny on its own terms or find their reaction to be funny.”

The problem comes when people blindly trust what they read in an e-mail forward/blog post and don’t take the time to do even a minimal amount of research before believing something that they hear or read.

Sources:
http://jumpinginpools.blogspot.com/
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/oct/26/blog-posting/obamas-columbia-thesis-all-fiction-dreamed-blogger/

Not in a world where the Joe Wilsons and Alan Graysons dominate headlines and the Keith Olbermanns and Glen Becks dominate airwaves. CNN’s prime-time ratings have been suffering for a while, but never has the news network had as much trouble drawing viewers as they did in October.

CNN was beaten handily by Fox (which isn’t anything new) but also lost to MSNBC and even CNN’s own sister network, HLN.

Individually it doesn’t get much better. Three of its four shows between 7 and 11 p.m. finished fourth and last among the cable news networks. The CNN prime-time shows were beaten convincingly by all the Fox News programs and also lost to all of the MSNBC programs. Even re-runs of Nancy Grace and Keith Olbermann faired better than the original cable news network’s shows.

For the month, CNN averaged 202,000 viewers between the ages of 25 and 54 in prime-time slots. Fox News on the other hand averaged 689,000 viewers and MSNBC averaged 250,000. HLN averaged 220,000.

“CNN’s ratings are always going to be more dependent on the news environment, much more so than opinion-based programming especially in prime time,” said CNN in a statement released on Monday.

Sources:
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/cnn-drops-to-last-place-among-cable-news-networks/?hp
http://www.politico.com/blogs/michaelcalderone/1009/CNN_drops_to_4th_in_primetime.html?showall