Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
Christian activists briefly disrupted a Hindu invocation in the US Senate on Thursday, marring a historic first for the chamber and showing that fundamentalism is present and shouting in the US too.
Invited by the Senate to offer Hindu prayers in place of the usual Christian invocation, Rajan Zed, a Hindu priest from Reno, Nevada, had just stepped up to the podium for the landmark occasion when three protesters, said to belong to the Christian Right anti-abortion group Operation Save America, interrupted by loudly asking for God’s forgiveness for allowing the ‘’false prayer’’ of a Hindu in the Senate chamber.
“Lord Jesus, forgive us father for allowing a prayer of the wicked, which is an abomination in your sight,” the first protester shouted. “This is an abomination. We shall have no other gods before you.”
Democratic Senator Bob Casey, who was serving as the presiding officer for the morning, immediately asked the sergeant-at-arms to restore order. But they continued to protest as they were headed out the door by the marshals, shouting, “No Lord but Jesus Christ!” and “There’s only one true God!”
Zed, clad in saffron with a prominent tilak on his forehead, then nervously went through the invocation.
Lunatics. Remember who these festering scumbags are when the GOP engages in recreational gay-bashing in a few months to get their votes. This is playing real well abroad, btw.
Tim has pretty much beat me to every topic I was even remotely interested in, but I beat him on this: Cindy Sheehan has now posted her 97th GBCW post at DKOS.
In all seriousness, it will be interesting to watch the internal politics within the progressive movement play out on the pages of DKOS, especially since the editorial direction set by Kos is that of electing Democrats.
A quick aside- in the past 24 hours, Bush has ordered a private citizen to defy Congress, has issued what I suggest should be called the “Black Knight Iraq Progress Report,” John McCain’s campaign has been derailed by Gay sweaters, and a McCain campaign official has been derailed for soliciting gay sex from an undercover officer. These are heady times for Democrats.
He’s saying he agrees with his Republican critics. He’s blaming the generals for all the combat decisions that have made this war a failure. His blaming Tommy Franks specifically for the troop levels was particularly piquant.
DC—Departing from his usual hopeful rhetoric during a question-and-answer session with reporters in the White House Rose Garden, President Bush suggested Tuesday that the war in Iraq has not been successful because the nation’s armed forces are “just not very good.”
“When the decision was made to liberate Iraq, I was going on what my advisers were telling me and what everyone has said for nearly a century—that the U.S. military is the best in the world,” Bush said. “But if that were the case, and we did have the most powerful army, navy, marines, and air force on the globe, we would be winning, right?”
The major thing the Onion got wrong is that Bush held his press conference on a Thursday.
Well, I asked that question, “Do you need more?” to General Tommy Franks.
In the first phase of this operation, General Franks, you know, was obviously in charge.
And during our discussions in the run-up to the decision to remove Saddam Hussein after he ignored the Security Council resolutions, my primary question to General Franks was: Do you have what it takes to succeed? And do you have what it takes to succeed after you succeed in removing Saddam Hussein?
And his answer was yes.
It is funny how commanders who tell the president what he doesn’t want to hear tend to get fired. Ask Peter Pace, or Eric Shinseki. It’s easy to rely on the advice of commanders who know they will lose their job if they contradict you.
The thread that ties together the passport meltdown, hurricane FEMA and stories like this is that in so many important ways, our government just lacks the ability to do simple tasks well.
Undercover congressional investigators posing as West Virginia businessmen obtained a license with almost no scrutiny from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that enabled them to buy enough radioactive material from U.S. suppliers to build a “dirty bomb,” a new government report says.
The investigators obtained the license within 28 days from officials at the NRC, the federal agency that in addition to regulating nuclear power plants oversees radioactive materials used in health care and industry, the report by the Government Accountability Office says.
[...] Using a post-office box at Mail Boxes Etc., a telephone and a fax machine, the undercover investigators from the GAO obtained the license “without ever leaving their desks,” the report says.
As I pointed out in my post below, the government cares primarily about the appearance of credibility, the appearance of safety. They know when they’re lying and they probably know that our security apparatus has more holes than Fred Fielding’s last legal brief. They don’t care. Or maybe they think that nothing will serve the Norquist brigades better than gumming up government until it breaks down altogether. Either way, 2009 cannot come soon enough.
At a closed-door meeting in early January, [National Hurricane Center director Bill] Proenza told his bosses, including National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration head Conrad C. Lautenbacher Jr., that hurricane forecasts could suffer if the satellite known as QuikSCAT suddenly died. It was already more than three years past its life expectancy and running on a backup transmitter.
“We were on borrowed time, and I needed their support immediately,” Proenza recalled. “But I got no response. Nothing.
[...] “I got pushed back from some of my staff. They felt I was bringing in complications to their world,” Proenza said earlier this week in his first detailed interview since his removal.
For forecasters, “perceived credibility is very, very important,” said Hugh Willoughby, a Florida International University professor who ran NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division from 1995 to 2002. “Their mission statement says to be the calm voice in the storm, and they perceived that what [Proenza] was saying was undermining people’s confidence.”
For me the bolded part is the real nut of this story. Like the administration it serves, forecasters at the NHS care first and foremost about perceived credibility. Real credibility, like making sure that they have the hardware to forecast accurately, plainly ranks second to giving a public impression that their forecasts are accurate.
To be quite fair I think the Bush administration hardly invented this particular mentality. Weather forecasters have been the butt of unreliability jokes since God created weather forecasters, so anybody would understand if forecasting professionals get tetchy on the subject. When a director shows up who really upsets the apple cart, the conflict described here seems inevitable under any administration. What caught my eye was what the administration actually did about it.
Remember, America is a country that has could really use accurate hurricane forecasting. The director of the nation’s Hurricane center has persuasively arguedg that the government soon will not be able to provide that service. On the other side, his staff is basically saying, “like, shut up.” Nobody has made any effort to refute his brief, they just want it to go away. After a national tragedy like Katrina, it would shame any normal administration to be seen siding publicly against the guy arguing for more and better resources for forecasting.
Today, not so much. Less and weaker scientific reporting suits this administration justfine, and there’s nothing they hate more than a whistleblower. Tough luck, Mr. Proenza, and if that satellite goes down, good luck finding insurance in southern Mississippi.
***Update***
Via a commenter, others report Bill Proenza’s position with far more skepticism than did the Washington Post. Read and evaluate for yourself, to me it sounds like Proenza might have deserved to go. Obviously there is nothing to criticize if the Bushies fired an impossible manager on a misguided crusade, so let’s put this post on provisional status for now.
Indeed, the only reason why filibustering minority members don’t stand and read out of the phone book like sotrmin’ Strom used to do is because people thought that it would encourage comity. Sounds archaic, doesn’t it? Since some time around the Gingrich years the GOP decided to drop any pretense of courtesy. In that light I see no reason save the Democrat’s pissant timidity why the majority party should not return the favor. I would love to see Mitch McConnell or Trent Lot hold up the Senate for six hours or longer over a procedural vote for a massively popular bill that passed the Senate 96-2. Good theater and good politics, and all it takes is a pair of balls.
In ye olden days you and I would read that last phrase and think, “Democrats? Balls? I guess that’s the end of that.” Insofar as we blogizens serve any purpose at all I think the old cynicism is only half deserved. There is a source of hope for Dems sacking up these days. It’s us. If you’re sick of watching Dems bring Nerf bats to a gun fight then spread the word around. Call your Democratic Senator and let him or her know that you’re sick of them acting like chumps. Kevin Drum recently mused, despairingly:
I wonder how many Americans understand that you can’t pass legislation in America with 50% of the votes in Congress? How many of them understand that, outside of budget resolutions, you need 60 votes in the Senate? That a filibuster isn’t a matter of Jimmy Stewart talking himself ragged for hours on end, but of merely declaring an intention to filibuster? And that this is done for all but the most routine matters? With the result that the 60-vote minimum is no longer reserved for occasional high-profile issues, but has been institutionalized for virtually all legislation of any consequence?
I figure maybe 2%.
Among other advantages (kittens!) the blogosphere is great at making a lot of noise in a hurry. If you think this issue deserves it, and I think it’s pretty obvious that this issue does, then spread the word around. Enough bloggers generating enough noise could put the “enhanced filibuster” on the table by the weekend.
Did you know that the president can order a private citizen to do things? It’s true.
WASHINGTON (AP) _ President Bush has ordered his former White House counsel, Harriet Miers, to defy a congressional subpoena and refuse to testify Thursday before a House panel investigating…
The outrage isn’t over yet. After he got off the phone with Harriet the prez called and ordered me to post this video. Apparently the demo software promotional clip in the beginning is part of the magic.
The Washington Post has discovered that – zut alors! – Mitch McConnell’s Party of No is basically filibustering any legislation that has do with Iraq. This isn’t really news for two reasons.
One, president Bush has already made clear that he will veto any bill that contains Iraq language that he doesn’t like, regardless of the cost to the country. Overriding a veto takes 67 votes so any bill that can make it past the president’s veto will easily surmount a filibuster. Conversely, a bill that can’t beat McConnell’s obstructionism obviously cannot beat a veto.
Two, Republicans these days filibuster everything that passes through the Senate. The filibuster the bills, they filibuster the conference committees and they filibuster procedural steps in between. This Senate has already had thirteen cloture votes, compared with four for the previous two Congressional sessions combined. There’s no reason why Republicans shouldn’t gum up Iraq legislation when they already filibuster everything else.
Former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona told a Congressional panel Tuesday that top Bush administration officials repeatedly tried to weaken or suppress important public health reports because of political considerations.
The administration, Dr. Carmona said, would not allow him to speak or issue reports about stem cells, emergency contraception, sex education, or prison, mental and global health issues. Top officials delayed for years and tried to “water down” a landmark report on secondhand smoke, he said. Released last year, the report concluded that even brief exposure to cigarette smoke could cause immediate harm.
Dr. Carmona said he was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches. He also said he was asked to make speeches to support Republican political candidates and to attend political briefings.
And administration officials even discouraged him from attending the Special Olympics because, he said, of that charitable organization’s longtime ties to a “prominent family” that he refused to name.
It is going to take years to undo the damage of these guys. There is simply no facet of government which has not been infected by these hacks.
Bush’s first Surgeon General: the White House constantly interfered with my office to promote its partisan agenda. Raise your hand if you’re surprised. [Update : talk about this story on John’s post above. Also, I fixed the Surgeon General’s title so that it no longer referred to John Ashcroft.]
I’m with Kevin Drum about the Michael Moore movie – agitprop doesn’t get much better than that. More than that though, based on some anecdotes and my own intuition I have a sense that the less people like Michael Moore the more effective the movie will be. The main point, that we ought to be able to care for people at least as well as countries with a crappier economy than our own (France, England, we’ll talk later), should resonate especially well with the USA! USA! crowd.
Someone named Sheehan has officially kicked off a futile primary challenge to Nancy Pelosi. I only mention this to head off the post that you know John is already writing.
Woot. Dick Durbin followed through on his promise and cut Cheney’s Executive branch budget until he complies with classified information policies. Next month’s Onion headline: in a signing statement Bush reluctantly eliminates the Legislative branch.
Please disregard the Palfrey-related rumors floating around Washington. They’re probably bogus. But if true, I cannot tell you what lengths I will go to avoid reading the Starr Report about it. Seriously. If Wolf Blitzer has a celebrity panel talking about distinguishing marks I might put a brick through my teevee.
— 