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Monday, September 19, 2005
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Is this parody?
will suggest that President Bush understands money better than any President we have ever had. He understands it better than most economists. He understands it better than our illustrious pundits. President Bush understands money the way a financier understands money. He sees it as a force or a power that one squirts at the world to make the world change. He sees it as a weapon.
10:16:04 PM 
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From Drive out the Bush Regime. Mobilize for November 2, 2005!: Your government, on the basis of outrageous lies, is waging a murderous and utterly illegitimate war in Iraq, with other countries in their sights.
Your government is openly torturing people, and justifying it.
Your government puts people in jail on the merest suspicion, refusing them lawyers, and either holding them indefinitely or deporting them in the dead of night
Your government is moving each day closer to a theocracy, where a narrow and hateful brand of Christian fundamentalism will rule.
Your government suppresses the science that doesn’t fit its religious, political and economic agenda, forcing present and future generations to pay a terrible price.
Your government is moving to deny women here, and all over the world, the right to birth control and abortion.
Your government enforces a culture of greed, bigotry, intolerance and ignorance.
(Via Jesus Politics.)
10:12:56 PM
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By the end of the next decade sure doesn't have the ring of "we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things." And, truth to tell, the 15 year promise made by NASA today seems possible than JFK's 8-year promise did 43 years ago. But have a look at the Flash demos; if NASA has learned one thing in the last three decades, it's how to sell, a talent it seemed to lack back in the 60's.
Three stray sentences are funny and don't seem well thought out:
"There are echoes of the iconic images of the past, but it won't be your grandfather's moon shot." Isn't that kind of damning? "Your grandfather" went from a standing start to being on the moon in less than 10 years, and started a continuing robot exploration of the solar system. And this thing is so far in the future that the exchange we're getting is that our grandkids are going to have to pay for it.
"Best of all, these launch systems are 10 times safer than the shuttle because of an escape rocket on top of the capsule that can quickly blast the crew away if launch problems develop." Well, why do they say 10? How did they quantify that? Why 10 and not 9 or 10.5 or 12?
"The new ship can be reused up to 10 times. After the craft parachutes to dry land (with a splashdown as a backup option), NASA can easily recover it, replace the heat shield and launch it again." Again, why 10? Why the round number?
Looking at all these animations is cool. The whole idea is cool, and it would be nice to do. Heck it's be great to go faster. But be clear: to go this stuff means less of this, or this that we can do. How many of these missions won't fly? There's no mention of a replacement for the Hubble Space Telescope. Are a few people on the moon worth the entire solar system? I'm pretty skeptical.
10:09:59 PM
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Rep. Don Young of Alaska hates the gulf coast: In any case it won't die: the idea that Alaska, to help Hurricane Katrina victims, should forfeit the dough it got in the federal highway bill for the Knik and Gravina bridges. The New York Times: "Surely Rep. Don Young, the Alaska Republican who is chairman of the transportation committee, might put off that $223 million 'bridge to nowhere' in his state's outback. It's redundant now -- Louisiana suddenly has several bridges to nowhere." The Wall Street Journal: "That same half a billion dollars (for the two Alaska bridges) could rebuild thousands of homes for suffering New Orleans evacuees." No doubt to make Alaskans look bad, city leaders in Bozeman, Mont., are investigating whether they can give Katrina victims the $4 million they got in the federal bill for a downtown parking garage. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., raised the charitable pork idea on the Senate floor last week, although he stopped short of endorsing it. So, how about it, Mr. Chairman? "They can kiss my ear!" Young boomed when Sam Bishop, Washington correspondent for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, asked him about the many pleas to redirect the bridge money. "That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard," Young went on, noting that Louisiana did quite well in his highway bill. And, the congressman said, he helped the seafood industry donate more than $500,000 for hurricane victims. (That was at the "Seafood Invitational," a charity golf tournament Sept. 9 in Roslyn, Wash., Bishop reported Friday.) "I raised enough money to give back to them voluntarily," he said, "and that's it!"
It's particularly important to note just how useless those Bridges to Nowhere are. Yet due to funds in a new transportation bill, which President Bush is scheduled to sign Wednesday, Sallee and his neighbors may soon receive a bridge nearly as long as the Golden Gate Bridge and 80 feet taller than the Brooklyn Bridge. With a $223 million check from the federal government, the bridge will connect Gravina [population less than 50] to the bustling Alaskan metropolis of Ketchikan, pop. 8,000. "How is the bridge going to pay for itself?" asks Susan Walsh, Sallee's wife, who works as a nurse in Ketchikan. She notes that a ferry, which runs every 15 minutes in the summer, already connects Gravina to Ketchikan. "It can get us to the hospital in five minutes. How is this bridge fair to the rest of the country?" [...] Included in the bill's special Alaska projects is $231 million for a bridge that will connect Anchorage to Port MacKenzie, a rural area that has exactly one resident, north of the town of Knik, pop. 22. The land is a network of swamps between a few hummocks of dry ground. Although it may or may not set the stage for future development, the bridge, to be named "Don Young's Way," will not save commuters into Anchorage any time, says Walt Parker, a former Alaska commissioner of highways.
$233 million to connect 50 people on an island with regular ferry service to the mainland, and $231 million for a bridge that will connect Anchorage to 23 other people. And to Don Young (and presumably the rest of the state's all-Republican congressional delegation), those bridges are more important than rebuilding the gulf coast.
(Via Daily Kos.)
8:03:26 PM
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I've been waiting for James Lee Burke to write about New Orleans after Katrina. It's a terrific, short piece.
But loving New Orleans, like loving the state where my family has lived since 1836, is like falling in love with the great whore of Babylon. It's not coincidence that the American incarnation of the mafia, or Black Hand, had its inception in New Orleans and announced its presence in 1891 by murdering the police commissioner. Keeping the tradition alive, U.S. Sen. Huey P. Long gave the state of Louisiana to Frank Costello and the Mob. The slot and racehorse machines came from Chicago; the credit line that bought them came from my family's hometown, New Iberia. In my lifetime, one of the most despised politicians in the state was an attorney general who tried to shut down the cathouses and gambling joints in the southern parishes. In Louisiana we love the idealism of Don Quixote, but we have always made room for his libertine, hedonistic sidekick, Sancho Panza.
(Via Syntax of Things.)
7:50:59 PM
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© Copyright 2005 Steve Michel.
Last update: 10/1/2005; 12:09:05 AM.
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