Hey Paul Krugman

I'm still working on getting my photos organized. It's been too damn cold to go outside (I ran on the treadmill today -- if it's Saturday, it's 5K day), so I don't have anything interesting to report, but I found this on Buzzfeed's Best Things on the Internet in 2009...

Take a deep breath!

Apparently Bono spoke too soon...

"It's extraordinary to me that the United States can find $700 billion to save Wall Street and the entire G8 can't find $25 billion dollars to saved 25,000 children who die every day from preventable diseases."

Here are a few links responding to the day's news:

House GOP Defeat of Bailout Over 'Partisan Remarks' Is Worst Fit of Pique Since Gingrich Shut Down Government Over Clinton 'Snub'

Shorter House GOP: We killed the bailout bill because Pelosi hurt our feelings

Who Are America’s Worst Politicians Today? All Of Them!

Krugman: OK, we are a banana republic

Barney Frank responds

CNN's Ed Henry: John McCain failed

McCain has another "McCain Moment"

That’s Rich

Which John McCain?

And here's a quick question from me: Whatever happened to "Country First?" The stock market has set new records in plummeting and the House members have pretty much all split town -- and they won't be back until Thursday?!?!? WTF? What the hell are we supposed to do in the meantime? What do they think the market is going to do for the next few days?!? Did they even bother looking at what this is doing to the world's markets before they hightailed it out of town?

Uh, would I be speaking for most of the country if I suggested that they just not bother coming back?* With wankers like these, who needs Herbert Hoover?

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Oh, and ps! Michael Bérubé is back, and he's ready to place the blame!

Also, have you checked out the Tennessee's Progressive Blog Roundup this week?

*If anyone sees Zach Wamp skulking or slithering about town this week, please smack him upside the head for the rest of us!

Jenna's Wedding Day Links

Here's a bit of what's going on out there on the net this weekend!

• Check out the weather forecast in Crawford, TX. According to John McCain's chief spiritual advisor, John "America is Damned" Hagee, this clearly means that God hates the Bushes.
• Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens was in Chattanooga yesterday to speak at the 68th conference of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. Check out the comments he made regarding the use of lethal injections: [H]e suggested that the recently-euthanized Kentucky Derby horse Eight Bells had probably experienced a more humane death than those who die on death row. "I had checked the procedure they used to kill the horse," Justice Stevens said, expressing surprise to learn it is against the law in Kentucky to kill animals using one of the drugs in a three-drug lethal injection cocktail that many believe is cruel to humans.
• Now that he's staring down the barrel at his reelection prospects, Chattanooga's Mayor Littlefield apparently is having second thoughts about the drastic cuts he's made to the curbside recycling program.
• Jesus! vs Darwin!
• You gotta love those family values republicans. It seems as though every week, another one finds his way out from under his rock...
• Would you crash this poll?
• The columnists speak of the end of the primary season: Eugene Robinson and Paul Krugman on the divisions in the Democratic party
• Cindy Lou: show me the money!

Gore Derangement Syndrome

From Paul Krugman:

What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?

Partly it's a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.

And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job — to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda's recruiters could have hoped for — the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.

The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the "ozone man," but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, "the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam." And so it has proved.

Monday News Tidbits

They've been looking kinda sketchy for a while, but now it's official: Target is evil. Apparently their employees can refuse to wait on a customer for just about any kooky reason they can come up with. (If you happen to work at Target, I suggest you start refusing to sell fertility aids to religious fanatics because you have a moral problem with children being raised in hateful, intolerant familes.)

Bush is finally being exposed as the lying weasel that he is.

Immigration Pat thinks Bush is ruining the GOP. I think it goes much further than that. Dubya is ruining this country and is putting the entire world at risk -- he's screwing up the economy, environment, creating a breeding ground for terrorists, and failing to take the necessary steps to keep deadly weapons out of the hands of fanatics and nutjobs.

Get out your protest kit! Cheney will be at UTK tomorrow! Shudder.

Paul Krugman talks about health care coverage.

Bill O'Reilly has really gone off the deep end.

And Frank Rich asks what everyone's been wondering: where does Dubya get off claiming that we don't torture when his VP was, at that very time, trying to make sure that US government will continue to support our policy of torture?!? Sheesh -- it's starting to look like these guys aren't even trying to pretend they're not evil anymore.

Does Bill Frist still suffer from the delusion that he has a shot at the presidency?!? Gak. Give it up, Bill. Time to go home. We'll find something for you to do. Maybe you can restart your practice and diagnose more people you've never even met!

And finally: yet another reason to love John Cusask.

Saturday morning meme

Heh. No breaking news here.

You are Paul Krugman! You're a brilliant economist with a knack for both making sense of the current economic situation and exposing the Bush administration's lies about it. You somehow came out as the best anti-war writer on the Op-Ed staff. Other economists hate your guts for selling out to the liberals. To hell with 'em.

Which New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Are You?
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I was up awfully early today, especially for a Saturday. My sinuses are all upset about the changes in weather, so I haven't been sleeping well for the past few nights. The sunrise has been very slow and muted this morning. The cloud cover is dense and we're still getting a bit of freezing rain, which is coating the trees and grass in a layer of ice. Hopefully it hasn't been cold long enough for the roads to be all that slick -- my car is covered in ice, but there's a puddle of water on my driveway, so except for the bridges, we might be ok. As long as the trees don't give way under the weight of the ice, this winter event should give us a picturesque morning without disrupting our weekend much. I'll post a photo in a bit -- at the moment, I'm holding out for better light.

Oh, since I started this out with the columnist meme, here's a link for you: Krugman archive. What better way to spend a cold and dreary Saturday than catching up with your favorite progressive economist? ;-)