aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Radio silence
Ever notice that when we’re in a heat wave, like we are in Atlanta now, you never hear about global warming on conservative talk radio? But give them one cold day in the middle of 30 blistering hot days, and they’ll spend the entire show ridiculing it.
They still got time… yesterday 101° today 105° tomorrow 100° Friday 99° Saturday 101°
Petraeus Report Won’t be Written by Petraeus
Left and Right note that...
Despite Bush’s repeated statements that the report will reflect evaluations by Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, administration officials said it would actually be written by the White House, with inputs from officials throughout the government.
So the White House will lie in the report it writes under Petraeus’ byline, then “interpret” it on its own to justify anything it wants.
Let me predict the future:
The report: “Success!”
The interpretation: ”Smashing success!”
The reality.
Now, I didn’t expect the report to be an objective view of the situation totally divorced from politics. But I did figure they’d at least take reasonable steps to at least present that illusion.
Doing it this way is so mindnumbingly stupid as to defy measurement.
i agree with both of them.
Those magnificent men in their riding machines
Doug, on the first day of fall classes, this post’s for you! Too bad it’s too hot to ride to school...
A one-of-a-kind wooden bicycle photo essay from CNET:
A replica steampunk powered monocycle from the Victorian era on eBay via Boing Boing:
The Victorian monocycle brings to mind Mr. Garrison’s gyroscope-powered Segway-parody monowheeled “IT” from the recently repeated South Park episode, The Entity. Garrison came up with the vehicle because he was tired of inefficient and frustrating airline check-ins and miserable in-flight conditions.
The public takes to the vehicle, agreeing that its propulsion method employing “four ‘flexi-grip handles’ that somewhat resemble erect penises; two used by the hands, one in the mouth, and a fourth handle which is inserted into the anus” is preferable to and more comfortable than flying. That observation is even more true this summer than it was when the episode first aired in 2001.
Viacom hasn’t settled with Google/YouTube yet (though the latest interesting development is that Google says it wants to depose Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart) so the only clip to slip through the Viacom copyright hawks is from Spain Italy…
My title is a not-so-clever take-off on the 1965 movie, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines. A fun clip from it is available on YouTube (in English!) here.
Giuliani’s terrorable foreign policy
Giuliani’s new ghost-written article in Foreign Affairs shows that a Giuliani foreign policy would best be described as Bush-plus and premised on the idea that President Bush has not pursued his terrible ideas aggressively enough.
What seems apparent about Giuliani is that he’s not kidding when he says that being Mayor of New York City is a lot like being president and running American foreign policy. And reading through not just his emphasis on the War on Terror but the particular way he describes it shows that he believes that being on the receiving end of a mass casualty terrorist attack—even though his record of preparing for it is at best mixed—gives him a unique understanding of how to combat the threat. And into this general ignorance is poured a group of extremist advisors who would likely have us blowing up various other countries in no time.
More from An Anonymous Liberal:
No potential outcome of the 2008 presidential election scares me more than the prospect of Rudy Giuliani becoming president. Obviously I’d prefer a Democratic victory, but there’s something about Giuliani that terrifies me in a way that Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, and John McCain don’t. [...]
Instead of referring to the Global War on Terror, as Bush calls it, Giuliani repeatedly uses the phrase “the Terrorists’ War on Us” (with capital letters!). Maybe you can get away with that in a stump speech, but in a supposedly scholarly article it just sounds juvenile and dumb.
I haven’t bothered reading the article. I lived in New York, I know what to expect.
TANGENTIALLY RELATED: With all that I’ve been linking to about Giuliani these past few days you’d think I’d have noted this from the Boston Globe sooner, “Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani continues to discard the moderate and liberal positions of his past. The latest is civil unions for same-sex couples, which the Republican presidential candidate has been backing away from in recent months.”
