momusradar

From the AP article covering the newly built USS New York now underway and heading to New York City:

Brian Corcoran, a mechanical contractor, brought his four children, who range in age from 12 to 5. He figured they might be a bit late for school but was OK with that, given the importance of the occasion.

“Hopefully, it’s going overseas to do damage to them like it did to us,” he said.

Brian is a belligerent idiot.

Bill Wolfe was surprised to read the New Jersey Environmental Federation endorsed Republican candidate Chris Christie for Governor:

So to get a little understanding, I just went to the Christie website, watched the 1½ minute Christie video, and read his “entire plan” –

At a fundamental level, Christie feels that DEP has become “too intertwined with business life” in NJ (his words) and needs to shrink and disengage on the regulatory front. This language should set off all sorts of alarm bells for those who follow environmental affairs – it represents a sort of kinder and gentler (yet actually more conservative) “Open for Business” mantra.

This endorsement by New Jersey’s largest environmental group may be an asset for Christie. But as Wolfe outlines in his post, Christie’s policy declarations are seriously flawed. Combine this with the concern regarding his insubstantial plans for the state’s finances and it seems pretty clear that Christie is a poor choice for Governor.

As reported by the N.Y. Times:

In a mainly party line vote of 240 to 179, the House held that by shouting “You lie” during the president’s speech Mr. Wilson, a South Carolina Republican, committed a “breach of decorum and degraded the proceedings of the joint session, to the discredit of the House.”

Yet they can’t get their shit together to hammer out proper healthcare reform.

Jacob Weisberg raises the question:

Why are Republicans trying to kill America’s old people? After all, senior citizens are more likely to vote for the GOP than for Democrats. They were the only substantial demographic segment John McCain won in 2008. You’d think Republicans would want them to hang on as long as possible. The problem is that because of the Democratic programs Social Security and Medicare, the aged are expensive for government to keep around. Some years ago, my former colleague Jodie T. Allen suggested a reason for what she called the GOP’s “pro-death” policies: Faced with an unpalatable choice between cutting benefits and raising taxes to pay for the growing costs of entitlement programs, Republicans gravitated toward a third alternative—restraining growth in life expectancy. If you want lower taxes and aren’t willing to risk cutting spending, you need fewer beneficiaries.

GlobalPost writes about the military barrier in Morocco:

It is almost half the size of the Great Wall of China, four times the length of the wall in the West Bank, and 16 times longer than the Berlin Wall ever was, but few have heard of the 1,600-mile-long Moroccan military wall that divides the Western Sahara.

I certainly never heard of it prior to now.

From Senator Kennedy’s obituary at the Boston Globe:

He taught us to persevere and carry on in the face of loss and adversity,’’ [Chairman of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, Paul G.] Kirk added. “And we owe it to him to do the same at this time.’’

Yesterday the citizens of Venezuela passed a referendum to remove presidential term limits with a margin of about 8%. President Chávez said of the result:

It is a clear victory for the people.

Although back in 2007, during the broadcast of episode 291 of Chávez weekly television serial, Aló Presidente, Chávez showed his self-serving bias when he pressed Rory Carroll of the Guardian for a question. Carroll, who was in attendance with other members of the international press, did not have one primed; so he asked why the president wanted the right to be elected indefinitely, while not granting the same rights to the 23 state governors.
After bloviating for some hour and a half, Chávez returned to Carroll’s query with two simple statements:

That is how I conceive it. It’s a political conception.

Chávez lost that referendum by less than 2 percent and two days later stated:

There is nothing to celebrate. We have not lost anything. And get ready because a new offensive is on its way for the proposed reform, this one transformed, simplified. But I am sure- For me, it’s not a defeat, it’s another [Por ahora] for now.

The revised referendum passed this year also allows Venezuela’s mayors and governors to run indefinitely.

From the Washington Post article Staff Finds White House in the Technological Dark Ages:

Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software, and security regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts.

And:

The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software.

As you know, you transition with the White House you have. Not the White House you might want or wish to have at a later time.

The last news post I recieved from the Bush administration via Google Reader was time stamped for today, Jan. 20, at 12:06PM.

Clicking the link to view the full post page resulted in this:

Page Not Found

The page you requested wasn’t found at this location. The Obama Administration has created a brand new White House website, and it’s possible that the page you were looking for has been moved.

Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov & it is like 43 never existed.

While there was much buzz about Steve Jobs’ keynote speech at this years’ WWDC, the speech that should have received  buzz—and was mostly ignored by corporate media—was that given by independent journalist Bill Moyers on June 7^th at the National Conference for Media Reform.

A video of Moyer’s keynote speech is available at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0r71L7cojE