Monthly Archives: June 2009
Shaq tarnishes his legacy
After Kobe Bryant led the Lakers to their 15th NBA Championship Sunday night, former Laker star and Kobe rival, Shaq, decided to keep it classy on Twitter:
But Kobe wasn’t the only target. Shaq decided it would also be in good taste to mock Laker benchwarmers.
Later in the evening, Shaq seemed to offer up an apology, [...]
The Iranian election & American hypocrisy
The results are in. The Western world’s boogeyman, Mr. Ahmadinejad of Iran, has won re-election by a score of 24,527,516 to 13,216,411.
The United States, with democracy drooling from its lips, instantly barked about voting irregularities, even though evidence of fraud is, at the moment, nonexistent. Another bark came when Iran repressed some of [...]
Rush Limbaugh crosses the line on Von Brunn
Just in case you’ve been living under a rock, you should know that on Wednesday an 88-year-old white supremacist shot and killed a security guard in the D.C. Holocaust Museum. You can read more about the shooting, and the shooter, James von Brunn in the Times.
I don’t think there is all that much to say [...]
Good News: Executive pay limits at bailed out companies
The NY Times is reporting that the Obama administration is proposing executive compensation limits at seven bailed out companies: AIG, Citigroup, Bank of America, GM, GMAC, Chrysler and Chrysler Financial.
That’s excellent news in and of itself. These now largely government funded organizations should have pay scales more in line with other government agencies, until they [...]
Quote of the Week nominees
“… the notion that [Former Treasury Secretary] Henry Paulson is a hero is complete and utter madness because TARP would never have been necessary if someone, anyone who wasn’t a greed-addled incompetent like Paulson had actually been regulating the economy in the last years of the Bush adminstration. If anyone besides Paulson had been running [...]
Bush's 'tortured legal' opinions
(Sorry about the bad pun in the headline)
The Times has obtained Bush administration emails from 2005 which illustrate the pressure Department of Justice lawyers were under from the White House to put a legal stamp of approval on their torture program.
Dan Froomkin sums up the emails well:
The e-mails … were written by then-deputy attorney general [...]
What Obama should have said in Egypt
Good afternoon. Assalaamu alaykum.
I’m going to keep this short and simple, because I need to get back to fixing America’s health care system and designing the next Corvette. So let me start off by saying We’re Sorry.
Invading Iraq was a mistake. Instead of making the region safer or spreading democracy, all we’ve done is ignite [...]
Obama speaks in Egypt
Yesterday El Presidente gave a speech in Cairo designed to restart America’s relationship with the Middle East and the larger Muslim world.
If you’ve got 55 spare minutes, you can watch the speech here:
Or read the transcript here.
But you probably don’t have 55 minutes to watch his speech or a half hour to burn reading it. [...]
Roundup for Thursday 6/4/2009
According to the NYTimes, the Bush administration had a secret agreement with Israel whereby they “allowed Israel to build West Bank settlement housing within certain guidelines while still publicly claiming to honor a settlement ‘freeze.’”
And peace becomes that much harder to achieve.
Flickr photo of the West Bank by sduffy.
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Harry Reid, the Dem. Senate Majority Leader, [...]
Khaaaaaaaaan!
Some background:
That one word – that one syllable – that Kirk bellows is maybe the most quoted line that one could ever associate with any version of Star Trek. But it’s still kind of funny. Video artist Daniel Martinico thought so too. “I’ve done a bunch of cutups, and found footage before,” he said, but [...]