Duncan takes the right to task over the London shooting, and I say that he is right on.
"Bush and the Right generally have become masters of this rhetorical trick. Criticize the Bush policies in Iraq? You're attacking the troops! Criticze the Bush policies in Gitmo? You're attacking the troops! Criticize the 101st Fighting Keyboarders glee about the killing of "bad" brown people in London? You're attacking London bobbies! It's long past time for the Right to take responsible for its own actions and rhetoric, and stop trying to pawn it off on those on the front lines." read on
via Newshounds: Did you know that Fox News is a "private channel"? That's what Fox's London bureau chief, Scott Norvell said in an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal Europe on May 20, 2005. He also wrote this: "Even we at Fox News manage to get some lefties on the air occasionally, and often let them finish their sentences before we club them to death and feed the scraps to Karl Rove and Bill O'Reilly."
All right all you right wingers, mobilize. Its time to set the record straight. I'll help you this time. Let's get that Scott Norvell on the line and get a retraction. We can say that he was taken out of context. That always works. Email me with a strategy. Blogswarm maybe?
This should work. But should it take a major outcry to make President Obama step up his game?
WASHINGTON — President Obama will use his first Oval Office speech Tuesday night to outline a plan to legally compel BP to create an escrow account to compensate businesses and individuals for their losses from the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, administration officials said on Sunday.
It would be part of a week of activities intended to convey presidential command of a crisis that continues to test both the government and the company.
Mr. Obama will press for the escrow account if BP does not establish one voluntarily. The board of the London-based company will discuss the idea and other spill-related issues — including a brewing controversy over a big dividend for shareholders coming due this summer — at an emergency session on Monday, company officials said.
But it does not expect to announce decisions until after its chairman and chief executive speak with Mr. Obama at a meeting he has called for midweek.
The 42,000 claims filed with the oil company so far go well beyond the shrimpers, oystermen and seafood processers who have been the spill's most visible victims. Hotels, restaurants, machine shops, bars, tour companies all became collateral damage when the Gulf of Mexico, one of the nation's most important fisheries and tourist destinations, became an industrial cleanup site.
The people whose lives depend on those businesses complain of claims that have been ignored, phone lines that ring unanswered and lost paperwork. One man said his BP claims adjuster didn't even know where Grand Isle, La., was.
"What the future will hold, I have no idea," said Emma Chighizola, owner of the Blue Water Souvenirs shop on Grand Isle, a barrier island full of colorful beach cabins at the southern tip of Louisiana that is normally flush with pink, sweaty tourists this time of year. "We've never been through anything like this. We've been through a lot of hurricanes and we always came back. We knew what to expect. This, we don't."
Do you ever get the feeling that the class war is over, and their side won? Money for these guys - but massive conniptions over paying for national health care?
Staff at Goldman Sachs staff can look forward to the biggest bonus payouts in the firm's 140-year history after a spectacular first half of the year, sparking concern that the big investment banks which survived the credit crunch will derail financial regulation reforms.
A lack of competition and a surge in revenues from trading foreign currency, bonds and fixed-income products has sent profits at Goldman Sachs soaring, according to insiders at the firm.
Staff in London were briefed last week on the banking and securities company's prospects and told they could look forward to bumper bonuses.
Figures next month detailing the firm's second-quarter earnings are expected to show a further jump in profits. Warren Buffett, who bought $5bn of the company's shares in January, has already made a $1bn gain on his investment.
Yes, that is a tattoo of Bristol's name on Baby Daddy Levi Johnston's ring finger. Anyone else picturing Todd Palin brandishing a shotgun at the tattoo parlor? And just because this campaign can't get surreal enough, from TPM:
(Given) what we've seen so far, I can't say I'd be surprised if the moral jalopy that is the McCain-Palin Straight Talk Express sunk us even further into farce with something like this. From the Times of London ...
In an election campaign notable for its surprises, Sarah Palin, the Republican vice- presidential candidate, may be about to spring a new one -- the wedding of her pregnant teenage daughter to her ice-hockey-playing fiancé before the November 4 election.
Inside John McCain's campaign the expectation is growing that there will be a popularity boosting pre-election wedding in Alaska between Bristol Palin, 17, and Levi Johnston, 18, her schoolmate and father of her baby. "It would be fantastic," said a McCain insider.
If this actually sways a single voter, I weep for my country.
What we love most at the Open Thread is good writing. When I saw a THIRD well-written review of the Led Zeppelin London concert, reviews that were clearly labors of literary love, I had to share. It's a thing to behold when fine art, in this case an amazing musical career and arguably the concert of the year, leads and inspires another kind of artist, the journalist, to greatness as well.
Arvin Hill: American jurisprudence gone BUCK-wild! (Although sometimes it’s nice to hear from a Vogon, as opposed to the usual Krikkiters.)
Joe Bageant, author of Deer Hunting with Jesus, on losers, leftnecks, and trench liberals: “So the party of Roosevelt begins to dimly understand that now is the opportunity to re-associate itself with populism. The problem is that Democratic Party ‘leadership’ has no notion of what populism means.”
Then again, asks Alternate Brain, how do you get through to the 60-year-old man who told Michael Moore he’d “rather have no insurance than socialized medicine”? Badtux the Snarky Penguin has one compelling argument.
Yesterday they were mocking it. Today, the Sun and Mail triumphantly report that the juddering fluorescent London 2012 Olympics logo is not only bizarrely inadequate to the task of promoting the capital - it can trigger epileptic fits. "Within hours of it being launched we received 12 reports of people suffering seizures," a spokeswoman for Epilepsy Action tells the Sun.
The accompanying Talking Heads-meets-cover of-Smash Hits video has been hastily re-edited. Yesterday the multicoloured shapes were seen fizzling through swimmers' diving bodies, down motorways and up Tate Modern. Now we have footage of a cyclist being overtaken by a woman in an electronic wheelchair and elderly Britons practising their karate chops.
British officials said yesterday there was "sufficient evidence" to charge a Russian former KGB agent with murder and seek his extradition from Moscow in the sensational poisoning death of Alexander Litvinenko.
Litvinenko, 43, a vocal critic of Russian president Vladimir Putin, was poisoned by the radioactive isotope polonium-210 and died Nov. 23.
On the day he fell ill, Nov. 1, he met with former KGB agent Andrei Lugovoy for tea at a London hotel.
"I have today concluded that the evidence sent to us by the police is sufficient to charge Andrei Lugovoy with the murder of Mr. Litvinenko by deliberate poisoning," Director of Public Prosecutions Ken Macdonald said, immediately setting off a diplomatic confrontation between London and Moscow.
