And Then We Can Tackle the Cell Phones

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

The auto industry said Monday that lawsuits over vehicles' greenhouse gas emissions could eventually force manufacturers to eliminate big SUVs from the market in California, an assertion denied by environmental attorneys and the state air quality board.

"If we lost (in court)," said Dave Barthmuss, General Motors' spokesman for environmental and energy affairs, "certain vehicles could not be offered for sale -- vehicles that consume more fuel than others. There would be fewer SUVs and we might not be able to offer them for sale in California. It could spell the end of the big SUV in California."

And how would this be a bad thing?

No Guts, No Glory

All you need to know about Mike Nolan as a play caller is that, on a drive on which his team had pushed the Rams around for about 70 yards rushing, he didn't think they could get one inch and opted for the field goal. And that, ladies and gentlemen, was the ball game.

If Only Bloggers Could Write Like the Pros

I have followed three links, to three diferent sites, to this AP story, which begins with this line, "A gun-wielding cartoonist dressed in camouflage entered The Miami Herald's building and demanded to speak with an editor Friday, prompting an evacuation of employees, police said." At none of these sites is there any further mention of the fact that the intruder is a cartoonish. He's not identified and there's no explanation of how they know he's a cartoonist.

Now, I realize I'm just a blogger, not a professional newsman, but even so, it seems to me that if you're going to drop an intriguing identification like that into a story it bears some development. If it's not worth explaining, leave it out.

Take that, Gipper!

Damn. In the great debate about who was the greater coach, Woody Hayes or Bo Schembechler, you've got to give major props to Bo for the lengths he'll go to to motivate the boys prior to tomorrow's big game.

Buut what's he gonna do next year?

Did I Miss a Purge?

If CNN is to be taken as a credible news source, and that's far from a given, don't you think they should avoid saying things like this?

Connecticut Democrats voted Lieberman out of the party in August, opting for vehement antiwar candidate Ned Lamont. Lieberman, running as an independent candidate, defeated Lamont in the general election.

In no election in the history of this country, save one, has it ever been perceived that not nominating somebody to represent your party in a general election is the same as kicking that person out of your party. In 1976 the Republicans nominated Gerald Ford as their Presidential Candidate. Funny, I must have missed the headlines at the time decrying how the Republican voters threw Reagan out of the party. Lieberman ran as an Independent because he chose not to accept the will of the Democrats of Connecticutt. They rejected him as a candidate. They didn't kick him out of the party, though. I would think that an organization with the stature, deserved or not, and resources of CNN could make that distinction. But then, as with so many things, I'd be wrong.

The Lame Duck Congress

You know the West Wing episode where lame duck Senator Marino, rejected by the voters but with 2 months left in office, won't agree to vote for the test ban treaty thea White House is pushing because that's one of the specific issues on which he was rejected by the voters?

Don't expect to see anything like that out of the real life lame duck Republican Congress.

A Startling Turn of Events

Michael Steele, who as recently as election day apparently believed himself to be a Democrat, has been tapped to replace Ken Mehlman as the next Republican National Committee Chairman.

Don and Saddam

Too damn funny.

Lying Liars

For years I've wondered if the right wing radio hacks such as Limbaugh and Hewitt believe the crazy ass things they say or if they just lie for the effect. Now they're clearing that up. The answer is not surprising.

One Nation, Under Gods

Listening to Lee Rodgers and Melanie Morgan fume and sputter this morning was particularly fun. They felt the election was lost because the Republicans veered too far left. Yeah, that was it. Rodgers at one point went off on an extended rant against President Bush for campaigning for Arlen Spector. That, presumably, would be the Arlen Spector who was reelected in 2004. Not really part of the reality based community yet, are these folks?

My one true WTF moment came when they were both aghast at the prospect of newly elected Keith Ellison (D-Min) taking the oath of office for the US House of Representatives (they mis-identified it as the US Senate) with his hand on the Koran. This, they said, was an example of him putting his allegiance to religion before his country. Wow. I don't know where to begin. I can't imagine they're ignorant of the fact that most members of Congress are Christian and take the oath with their hand on a bible. I imagine it must be that they fervently believe that this is a Christian nation, that our identities as Americans is tied to our identities as Christians. I wonder how they feel about all those Jews in the Senate. I think I already have a pretty good idea of how they feel about atheists and agnostics.

News of the Louisiana Strumpet

I don't usually link to celebrity "news," but this is just too funny to pass up. And timely, too!

Update: Damn, I see that T-bogg beat me to it.

The Verdict

So, Saddam and associates are convicted and sentenced to die for crimes against humanity they commited in 1982. Which makes this notorious photo from 1983, and the meeting which produced it, all the more interesting. I guess Rumsfeld was for crimes against humanity before he was against them.

Wha the Fuh?

Let me see if I have this straight...

Following the invasion we had millions of Iraqi documents that we lacked the personnel to translate.

It was believed that within those millions of documents would be some that would substantiate the Bush Administration's claims that Saddam had viable nuclear and WMD programs at the time of the invasion.

To find out if such documents were within the trove, the Bush Administration, against the advice of the intelligence community, placed these millions of documents on the internet, so the whole world could sort through them.

As it turns out, there actually were documents from Saddam's pre-Gulf War One WMD and nuclear programs, including, it is said, plans for how to build a nuclear bomb.

Now, if you're a reasonably intelligent human being and you truly believed that Saddam had such programs and that documents supporting these programs might be among those released, wouldn't it occur to you that actual plans for the assembly of these things might be among the documents? Wouldn't it further occur to you that the people most likely to be in a position to take advantage of such a document dump would be those in whose language the documents are written, a large number of whom are currently waging war against the United States? How, in any real world, could this have seemed like a good plan?

It occurs to me that the Bush Adminstration didn't really believe that Saddam had a viable nuclear weapons or WMD program at the time of the invasion and so they, forgetting that the whole world knew he had such programs in 1991, figured no such documents would appear. This would be consistent with invading a country you believed had such weapons when common sense would tell you that the single act most likely to make someone like Saddam use such weapons would be to invade his country. That's one possibility. Another is that this crew in the White House is just too incapable of planning far enough ahead to anticipate anything ever going wrong with anything they ever attempt. There is a large and growing body of evidence to indicate that this is so.

In any case, this whole episode is one more reminder of how "serious" Bush and the Republican party are about national security.