Tag: Open Thread

Weekend News Digest

Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread

45 stories, Business and Science to come.

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 AP IMPACT: Security firms join Somali piracy fight

By KATHARINE HOURELD, Associated Press Writer

53 mins ago

NAIROBI, Kenya – Blackwater Worldwide and other private security firms – some with a reputation for being quick on the trigger in Iraq – are joining the battle against pirates plaguing one of the world’s most important shipping lanes off the coast of Somalia.

The growing interest among merchant fleets to hire their own firepower is encouraged by the U.S. Navy and represents a new and potential lucrative market for security firms scaling back operations in Iraq.

But some maritime organizations told The Associated Press that armed guards may increase the danger to ships’ crews or that overzealous contractors might accidentally fire on fishermen.

Weekend News Digest

Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 AP INVESTIGATION: Palin pipeline terms curbed bids

By JUSTIN PRITCHARD and GARANCE BURKE, Associated Press Writers

2 hrs 1 min ago

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – Gov. Sarah Palin’s signature accomplishment – a contract to build a 1,715-mile pipeline to bring natural gas from Alaska to the Lower 48 – emerged from a flawed bidding process that narrowed the field to a company with ties to her administration, an Associated Press investigation shows.

Beginning at the Republican National Convention in August, the McCain-Palin ticket has touted the pipeline as an example of how it would help America achieve energy independence.

“We’re building a nearly $40 billion natural gas pipeline, which is North America’s largest and most expensive infrastructure project ever, to flow those sources of energy into hungry markets,” Palin said during the Oct. 2 vice presidential debate.

Drive Time

A Stars Hollow Gazette

Wheeeeeeeeeeee!

When we left our story Her Bartiromoness was proclaiming the best week ever.

Oh fickle finger of fate.

Bail Out Boost! 9/26 Friday +121.07 11,143.13
Wall St. snit fit. 9/29 Monday -777.68 10,365.45
Bow to my Bartiromoness. 9/30 Tuesday +485.21 10,850.66
Down, down, down. 10/1 Wednesday -19.59 10,831.07
10/2 Thursday -348.22 10,482.85
10/3 Friday -157.47 10,325.38
10/6 Monday -369.88 9,955.50
10/7 Tuesday -508.39 9,447.11
10/8 Wednesday -189.01 9,258.10
10/9 Thursday -678.91 8,579.19
10/10 Friday -128.00 8,451.19
Big G7, G20 Summit. 10/13 Monday +936.42 9,387.61
Oops. 10/14 Tuesday -76.62 9,310.99
10/15 Wednesday -733.08 8,577.91
Bounce. 10/16 Thursday +401.35 8,979.26
10/17 Friday -127.04 8,852.22
Bounce. 10/20 Monday +413.21 9,265.43
10/21 Tuesday -213.77 9,033.66
Today! 10/22 Wednesday -514.45 8,519.21

What do I expect?  Another dead cat bounce followed by a sell off into the weekend because who wants to be long?

The Stars Hollow Gazette

Mønti Pythøn ik den Hølie Gräilen
Røtern nik Akten Di
Wik
Alsø wik
Alsø alsø wik
Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?
See the løveli lakes
The wøndërful telephøne system
And mäni interesting furry animals
The Characters and incidents portrayed and the names used are fictitious and any similarity to the names, characters, or history of any person is entirely accidental and unintentional.
Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
Including the majestik møøse
A Møøse once bit my sister…
No realli! She was Karving her initials on the møøse with the sharpened end of an interspace tøøthbrush given her by Svenge – her brother-in-law – an Oslo dentist and star of many Norwegian møvies: “The Høt Hands of an Oslo Dentist”, “Fillings of Passion”, “The Huge Mølars of Horst Nordfink”…

We apologise for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible have been sacked.

Mynd you, møøse bites Kan be pretty nasti…

We apologise again for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.

Møøse trained by YUTTE HERMSGERVØRDENBRØTBØRDA
Special Møøse Effects OLAF PROT
Møøse Costumes SIGGI CHURCHILL
Møøse Choreographed by HORST PROT III
Miss Taylor’s Møøses by HENGST DOUGLAS-HOME
Møøse trained to mix concrete and sign complicated insurance forms by JURGEN WIGG
Møøses’ noses wiped by BJØRN IRKESTØM-SLATER WALKER
Large møøse on the left hand side of the screen in the third scene from the end, given a thorough grounding in Latin, French and “O” Level Geography by BO BENN
Suggestive poses for the Møøse suggested by VIC ROTTER
Antler-care by LIV THATCHER

The directors of the firm hired to continue the credits after the other people had been sacked, wish it to be known that they have just been sacked.

The credits have been completed in an entirely different style at great expense and at the last minute.

The Morning News

Miskatonic University sends out Antarctic Expedition-

82 Huge Mountain Range Should Not Be There

LiveScience Staff

Tue Oct 21, 10:21 am ET

An Antarctic mountain range that rivals the Alps in elevation will be probed this month by an expedition of scientists using airborne radar and other Information Age tools to virtually “peel away” more than 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) of ice covering the peaks.

One of the mysteries of the mountain range is that current evidence suggests that it “shouldn’t be there” at all.

The researchers hope to find answers there to some basic questions about the nature of the southernmost continent, including the massive East Antarctic Ice Sheet. For instance, it is unclear how Antarctica came to be ice-covered in the first place and whether that process began millions of years ago in the enigmatic Gamburtsev Mountain range.

At The Mountains of Madness

Open Thread

This is an open thread.  Chat away!  Please do not rec the open thread!

Open Thread

From one of my favorite NOLA bloggers, adrastos, a Bob Grant rant:

All the nuts in the US and A seem to be commenting on the 2008 election and some of them have talk radio shows. My new favorite winger weirdness comes from veteran yakker Bob Grant:

“[W]hat is that flag that Obama’s been standing in front of that looks like an American flag, but instead of having the field of 50 stars representing the 50 states, there’s a circle?” He then said: “Is the circle the ‘O’ for Obama? Is that what it is?” Grant later said: “[D]id you notice Obama is not content with just having several American flags, plain old American flags with the 50 states represented by 50 stars? He has the ‘O’ flag. And that’s what that ‘O’ is. That’s what that ‘O’ is. Just like he did with the plane he was using. He had the flag painted over, and the ‘O’ for Obama. Now, these are symptom — these things are symptomatic of a person who would like to be a potentate — a dictator.” ‘

Check out the flag and the rest of the post; I don’t want to spoil this.

Open thread is now … OPEN!  

Weekend News Digest

Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 AP IMPACT: Mortgage firm arranged stealth campaign

By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer

50 mins ago

WASHINGTON – Freddie Mac secretly paid a Republican consulting firm $2 million to kill legislation that would have regulated and trimmed the mortgage finance giant and its sister company, Fannie Mae, three years before the government took control to prevent their collapse.

In the cross hairs of the campaign carried out by DCI of Washington were Republican senators and a regulatory overhaul bill sponsored by Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb. DCI’s chief executive is Doug Goodyear, whom John McCain’s campaign later hired to manage the GOP convention in September.

Freddie Mac’s payments to DCI began shortly after the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee sent Hagel’s bill to the then GOP-run Senate on July 28, 2005. All GOP members of the committee supported it; all Democrats opposed it.

Weekend News Digest

Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 Muqtada al-Sadr urges rejection of US-Iraqi pact

By HAMZA HENDAWI, Associated Press Writer

36 mins ago

BAGHDAD – Anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr urged Iraq’s parliament to reject a pact that would extend U.S. presence in Iraq for three years as tens of thousands of his followers marched through Baghdad’s streets Saturday to reinforce that demand.

The large turnout points to trouble ahead for the U.S.-Iraqi security deal as Sunni and Shiite lawmakers weigh the political risks associated with the far-reaching agreement.

Waving Iraqi flags and green Shiite banners, protesters chanted slogans condemning the pact. The demonstration in the mostly Shiite eastern part of Baghdad was staged under tight security, with army soldiers and police manning checkpoints along the route.

10/15 Debate Essay Rescue

We had some good essays that kind of got lost during the debate and I thought I’d mention them so that if they escaped your attention you might pay a visit.

and

are pretty October 15th specific, celebrating anniversaries like they do.

and

might get a promotion, but they also might slide down.

If you want to see each and every artist’s original conception I encourage you to bookmark the DocuDharma Essays Button.

So did I mention Pat Buchanan is a fascist?

So did I mention Pat Buchanan is a fascist?

He supports policies that would lead to an authoritarian corporatist state dedicated to global hegemony.

He admires fascist politicians, like explicitly Hilter.

Pat Buchanan says Adolf Hitler only sought to dominate Europe, making him, “no physical threat to the US” after 1940. He observes that to push Japan into starting a war, Franklin Delano Roosevelt “froze all Japanese assets, cutting off trade, including oil.” He refers to Roosevelt as “a base appeaser of Stalin” and that his administration was “shot through with Communist spies and traitors.” “In World War II,” he writes, “patriots argued the wisdom of FDR’s ‘Europe First’ policy that left our men on Corregidor to the mercy of the butchers of Bataan”. He says, “Responsibility for the lack of American preparedness at the time of Pearl Harbor rests wholly with FDR. He had been in power nine years and had controlled both Houses of Congress for all nine of those years. Blaming our lack of preparedness on the isolationists (or even on the Communists) is the shilling of court historians”.

In a 1977 column, Buchanan said despite Hitler’s anti-Jewish and genocidal tendencies he was “an individual of great courage…Hitler’s success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path.”

He’s also a racist-

In a 2002 speech, he said, “In the next 50 years, the Third World will grow by the equivalent of 30 to 40 new Mexicos. If you go to the end of the century, the white and European population is down to about three percent. This is what I call the death of the West. I see the nations dying when the populations die. I see the civilization dying. It is under attack in our own countries, from our own people.

And believes in Kulturekampf.

Pat Buchanan says that America is divided by a culture war. He calls it a conflict over the power to define society’s definition of right and wrong. Fronts include environmentalism, feminism, abortion, gay rights, freedom of religion, women in combat, display of the Confederate Flag, recognition of Christmas and taxpayer-funded art. He also said that the controversy given this idea of culture wars was itself evidence of polarization.

Pat Buchanan is an unreconstructed, brownshirted, unionist beating Fascist and his opinions about it or instituting a McCarthyite witchhunt on Capitol Hill for communist lefty fifth columnist Congressmen are hardly unbiased.

Fascism is a totalitarian and nationalist ideology. It is primarily concerned with perceived problems associated with cultural, economic, political, and social decline or decadence, and which seeks to solve such problems by achieving a millenarian national rebirth by exalting the nation, protecting the nation from what fascism deems as the excesses of the internationalist ideologies of capitalism and communism by advocating a Third Position, promoting the territorial defense or expansion of a nation through a constant state of military preparedness and promotion of militarism as well as promoting cults of unity, strength and purity.

Are you listening Tweety?

We interrupt this program

While we drown in debate I’d like to remind you of the implosion of the Republican Party.

Trading opens today at 9:30 am (et) (Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding) after a loss of 733.08 points, the second-worst single-day point loss by the Dow in history.

So to remind us how we’ve gotten where we’re at

Happy Anniversary

Bail Out Boost! 9/26 Friday +121.07 11,143.13
Wall St. snit fit. 9/29 Monday -777.68 10,365.45
Bow to my Bartiromoness. 9/30 Tuesday +485.21 10,850.66
Down, down, down. 10/1 Wednesday -19.59 10,831.07
10/2 Thursday -348.22 10,482.85
10/3 Friday -157.47 10,325.38
10/6 Monday -369.88 9,955.50
10/7 Tuesday -508.39 9,447.11
10/8 Wednesday -189.01 9,258.10
10/9 Thursday -678.91 8,579.19
10/10 Friday -128.00 8,451.19
Big G7, G20 Summit. 10/13 Monday +936.42 9387.61
Oops. 10/14 Tuesday -76.62 9310.99
10/15 Wednesday -733.08 8577.91

But remember, the market drop is because the Democrats forced stupid loans to brown people and I’m afraid the most (shudder) “LIBERAL” one will be President and Filibuster Proof Democratic Socialism reign so it’s all good for McDone.

We’re DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED!

WHEEEEEEEEE!

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