Atrios and DKos diarist oxfdblue have details.
This has been building for a while. Boys and girls, welcome to 1929, part deux. Apparently the stocks tanked even after the NYSE called it a day and the traders went home.
You know, Cheney, W and Co. have 80-some-odd days of looting left. What exactly is the next president gonna find in the piggy bank? “I made you an economy, but I eated it” notes?

and this’s one of the poets.

That’s Waddie Mitchell, for you greenhorn / tenderfoot folk.

If you can’t run a Google search, let me just tell you to go to Amazon and take a look at his books.

Or listen to his work read out loud.

Man flat can wrangle words.

Baseball’s winding down and football’s ramping up. Perhaps the heat will begin to subside; we’ve 60 more days of hurricane season, alas, to survive; but Gustav seems to have missed NOLa. Baton Rouge may not have been so lucky.
Schools are back in session, bikes and dogs in the yards looking lonely, swimming pools closed/drained for the winter.
What has been the harvest of your summer?

Not for being a woman or a hunter or angler. For being a patsy for Big Oil, yes.
Here’s a statement from Defenders of Wildlife’s Roger Schickelson on Palin:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 29, 2008

Shocking Choice by John McCain

WASHINGTON— Senator John McCain just announced his choice for running mate: Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska. To follow is a statement by Rodger Schlickeisen, president of Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund.

“Senator McCain’s choice for a running mate is beyond belief. By choosing Sarah Palin, McCain has clearly made a decision to continue the Bush legacy of destructive environmental policies.  Read more 

From Jim Hightower’s blog, I learn that the highly-compensated officers of corporate America’s fiefdoms have discovered a way to ease the pain of having to pay taxes on their company-furnished jet plane rides, country club memberships, and the like. They’re passing the buck to the shareholders.

You got shareholders? Too bad for you ’cause now you gotta buy your own plane tickets, pay the government fees and the fuel surcharges yourself — and, oh, yeah: if your job reimburses you, uh, there’s nobody to double-dip for tax relief from. So you only get to not-quite-break even, instead of piling on additional monetary benefits.  Read more 

The party in Denver continues.

I would like to know if anyone can suggest five simple things each of us can do to change the world, no matter what the politicians do, or don’t do.

Like carrying a reusable bag to the grocery store, so you don’t need either plastic or paper.

Like changing your expectations — a vehicle should be something dependable, but shouldn’t it be something you can afford to repair, rather than replace? What about a printer? What about a television or a cell phone?

Like turning the thinking on ROI upside down. How big a scam, exactly, is the 401K program? How much money are small investors risking / losing, compared to what the same amount of money would have been worth in the (former) pension plan?  Read more 

I heard it AGAIN at work today, the endless whine that “raising taxes will wreck the economy.” The whiner referred to the Laffer Curve and claimed Ronald Reagan had proven the truth of this theory beyond question for ever and ever amen: “When you raise taxes you reach a point where people just refuse to participate. They disengage.”  Read more 

Biden.
Obama.
Eh. But, still. Better than McCain, no?

Let’s talk about the OTHER races on the ballot in 2 1/2 months. The ones like Noriega vs. Cornyn, for Senator from Texas. What have y’all got? Who can y’all support?

As Mulder’s office poster said, “I want to believe!”

It took a Texan receiver misjudging the two-point conversion pass after a touchdown Houston scored three times before it counted to salt away the Cowboys’ first preseason win of the year, but the ’Boys eked out a 23-22 win over the Texans in the game for the Governor’s Cup.

Tony Romo and Terrell Owens appear back in sync, but the best news of the night is that Houston Texan Harry Williams, who was laid flat on the field, motionless with a neck injury in the first quarter, is said to have movement in all four extremities.  Read more 

According to Jim Hightower’s web site today, corporate ag-chem giant Monsanto has put its Posilac business up for sale. This is good, because it means the company could not force the American people to accept milk laced with an artificial sex hormone.
It’s news because Monsanto had unsuccessfully sued to keep farmers and dairies from advertising their milk as free of the product.  Read more 

It’s classless and unChristian, as well.

Mostly, though, it’s just ugly. And there’s enough ugly in the world, Amy Alkon, without your “advice goddess” self adding anything to the total, ’k?

So, bitch, can you just shut the fuck up already, you judgmental hag?

Look at that photo of you on your blog, Amy Alkon.

Why in the name of the seven bald steers you’d show yourself in public looking like *that* is beyond me.  Read more 

There’s more than one reason, and more than one kind of cat, involved in this idea, from my point of view.

We’re not all kids anymore.

Most of us still care about kids, though.

So we want tomorrow to be better than yesterday was.

How is it that this is such an unpopular idea in most of the good old USA nowadays? How is it that we’ve so limited our definitions of citizens?

 Read more 

marriage and Republicans.

Say what, you ask?

The GOP defends “traditional marriage” with a passion. They will tell you all day, all night, and again the next day that marriage means one man and one woman.

What they won’t tell you is how many times they will change the members of that one-man, one-woman equation. Look at Rush Limbaugh; look at Ronald Reagan. Look at Sally Quinn. John McCain’s on his second marriage. How many wives has Newt Gingrich cheated on?

The possible exception to the GOP marriage “rule” is The Governator.

But the “Scandals” are all about the Democrats — JFK, John Edwards, Bill Clinton, even Jimmy “lust in his heart” Carter.

ALL of whom, I point out, are STILL married to their FIRST  Read more 

There is a place in New Mexico, a few miles outside Carlsbad, you should go. Just because you can see the Seven Rivers country from one of the overlooks in Living Desert State Park. You can watch a bobcat have a bath, rub an elk’s nose, study more than 40 species of Chihuahuan desert native wildlife at your own pace — and for a reasonable price. You can see these folks, at their house, too.
— and some really impressive birds, too  Read more 

Reading is my second favorite indoor sport. It’s (late) summertime, and the book I want to talk about posits a world in which ordinary Americans confront extraordinary circumstances — and as is apt to happen, do so with mixed results. It’s called 1632, and the author is Eric Flint.

Some might call it science fiction; others might call it fantasy. I call it a rippin’ good story — and without being pedantic, it reinforces “the American way” as it was before 2000. The book isn’t new — it was written in 1998-99.  Read more 

For the multitudes killed by the bombing of Hiroshima, Japan.

One of them, whose name I do not know, is pictured over the break. It is not a photo small children should see.  Read more 

From the invaluable McClatchy service comes word that Phill Kline, famous for his drive to shut down Planned Parenthood clinics and subpoena the records of patients in a search for women who had had abortions, has lost his bid to become the DA in a Kansas City suburb.

What’s significant here is that outsiders spent six figures — maybe more — in an effort to boost Kline’s candidacy.
Abortion played a key role in the race because Kline is the first prosecutor since Roe v. Wade to file criminal charges against a Planned Parenthood clinic.

Abortion opponents from outside Kansas are thought to have spent more than $100,000 to keep Kline’s candidacy alive. says part of the story linked above.

Is the tide turning? Are one-issue, special-interest, big-money groups beginning, at long last, to FAIL in pushing the conservative agenda (family values such as misogyny and homophobia) down the nation’s throat at last?  Read more 

Via Atrios, Morgan Freeman has been hurt in one. As Atrios says, I hope he recovers.

I’m posting a long quote from a New York Times book review here, because the quote says something important about the future of our nation.

There is no happy ending to this sordid and shameful story. Despite growing political pressure, despite Supreme Court decisions challenging the detainment policy, despite increasing revelations of the once-hidden program that have shocked the conscience of the world, there is little evidence that the secret camps and the torture programs have been abandoned or even much diminished. New heads of the Defense and Justice Departments have resisted addressing the torture issue, aware that dozens of their colleagues would face legal jeopardy should they do so. And the presidential candidates of both parties have so far shown little interest in confronting the use of torture or recommitting the country to the Geneva Conventions and to America’s own laws and traditions.

Now I wonder — is that lack of interest in confronting the use of torture or recommitting the nation to abiding by international law really something we could have expected from a different Democratic nominee?

And is that why the Village destroyed them all?  Read more 

About thumbnail-sized, and not seedless, but so dark a purple they look black, and utterly sweet. Yes, this is what July is all about, boys and girls!!
No, there are no pictures. I should break down and buy a cheap digital camera off Ebay, or something.
I don’t know what kind they are; the first year in this house, the grapes were a seedless white, and then the vine DIED — there was no sign of life for two solid years. Three years ago it sprouted. Last year, in the rain, it made the first grapes we’d had in seven seasons. This year, there are almost as many. But they’re purple, and they have two seeds apiece.

So this guy is taking part in a fund-raiser for The Jimmy Fund. This guy’s good pretty good health care. So does his buddy, to whom he’s dedicating his effort this year.

That’s OK. Maybe if more guys like this one did more things like this ride, we’d have better health care for everybody.
I don’t know. This guy, too, was in Viet Nam. This guy, too, had people trying to smear him for serving, and coming home and saying that what he had seen and done didn’t match the ideals he thought he was supposed to be fighting for.

I’m not asking you to give money, but maybe you could let this guy know he’s doing something good.

[Welcome, Michael Tomaskey readers!]

For months now the claims that John Sidney McCain III would be more of the same as the Bush administration have been beaten like the drums of war.

A McCain administration might not be the same as another Bush term, though — it might be worse, especially if their respective flying records are anything to go by.

Don’t misunderstand. This is not to disrespect McCain or denigrate his service. It’s to suggest, strongly, that in light of what a younger and arguably less (flight-related) accident-prone Republican President has achieved in the past two terms, accepting McCain as just like Bush might seriously understate  Read more 

At 1:30 in the morning on July 23, a double-hulled tanker collided with a barge being pushed by a tugboat in the Mississippi River. More than 9980 barrels of fuel oil emptied from the destroyed barge into the water. Yet there’s been no national television coverage. No photos like this one:

have been reprinted on the front page of every newspaper in the country. Why?

When the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound in 1989, as had happened with the Ixtoc I spill from a leaking Gulf well and happened with the Santa Barbara spill (out of which came the ban on drilling the GOP so desperately wants to rip aside now), the pictures of oil-soaked birds and the descriptions of the damage done to the shores and seabeds were inescapable.

Photo from wwwl-tv, NOLa. Taken from US Coast Guard patrol boat.

So why is the 10,000-barrel oil spill on the Mississippi river different? No M$M coverage of the devastation unleashed by more than 400,000 gallons of oil in the water supply for New Orleans; no film of black gunk on the shorelines, trapped wildlife dying  Read more 

California, in spite of Reckless Kelly’s song reproduced below, has set national trends for quite some time now.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s latest executive order, which will reduce state employees’ wages to $6.55 per hour indefinitely, appears to be trying to capitalize on that history.

How was California?

Did they teach you how to surf?

Was it everything they said it was?

Was it all that you deserved?

(Chorus)
Did you hate the Golden state?  Read more