2015 Was Hottest Year in History

pontechango

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Wednesday January 20, 2016 · 12:25 PM PST

2016/01/20 · 12:25

Forget the Trump-Palin clown show. Forget the primary wars. This is the number one story of the day.

2015 Was Hottest Year in Recorded History, Scientists Say

Scientists reported Wednesday that 2015 was the hottest year in recorded history by far, breaking a record set only the year before — a burst of heat that has continued into the new year and is roiling weather patterns all over the world.

In twenty years, as Greenland melts and the storms wash away either coast, all of the other concerns will be dwarfed in significance. There is no alternative to earth. It’s time that the media treated climate change as the real existential threat that it is.

Lindsey Graham Confuses Wall with Stovepipe

pontechango

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Tuesday April 30, 2013 · 11:11 AM PDT

2013/04/30 · 11:11

Lindsey Graham is pissed at Obama. So pissed that he issued a statement unwittingly reminding everyone precisely how the Bush administration manipulated the intelligence and mislead America into an illegal war of aggression in Iraq.

If Benghazi is not an example of system failure before, during and after the attack what would be? If Boston is not an example of a pre-9/11 stovepiping mentality what would be?

I can't think of an example of pre-9/11 stovepiping mentality, but I can think of one after.

The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic—and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book “The Threatening Storm” generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was “dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.

And we all know how that turned out.

Good climate news: Prop 23 defeated

pontechango

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Wednesday November 03, 2010 · 9:39 AM PDT

2010/11/03 · 09:39

I haven't seen mention of this anywhere on DKos today but one of the few bright spots yesterday was the resounding defeat of Proposition 23 (61/39%)

By rejecting Prop 23, Californians voiced their support for economic expansion in the booming clean tech sector and improved air quality and public health. By supporting the implementation of the landmark AB 32 clean energy law, California will be able to pioneer a range of pollution reduction measures that spur cleaner energy technology. It's a true win-win situation for a state with 12.5% unemployment and in which 91% of residents live in a county with substandard air quality.

and by proxy, this is also a victory against the Koch Brothers teabagger empire

A company controlled by the billionaire Koch brothers, who have bankrolled numerous right-wing causes, has donated $1 million to the campaign to pass Proposition 23, the California ballot initiative that would suspend the state's global-warming law.

Breaking: tea party militants secede

pontechango

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Thursday April 01, 2010 · 1:36 PM PDT

2010/04/01 · 13:36

You knew it was coming. They're so disgusted by Obama's socialist America that they've formed their own breakaway independent nations. Founded on the the original spirit of the US Constitution and the second amendment, these new republics embody the real American spirit of Freedom.

And since they are now independent nations, they've formed their own Olympic Games.

Boston Globe: Scott Brown campaign surge c/o big finance

pontechango

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Monday February 01, 2010 · 7:45 AM PST

2010/02/01 · 07:45

Front page of today's Boston Globe, Financial executives spent big on Brown:

In a six-day span just before the US Senate election, Republican Scott Brown collected nearly $450,000 from donors who work at financial companies, a sign the industry is prepared to spend heavily in the upcoming midterm elections to beat back new controls and taxes President Obama wants to impose.

....

Nearly 80 percent of the money Brown got from financial workers came from outside of Massachusetts, in places with a concentration of financial firms, such as New York City, Greenwich, Conn., Chicago, and San Francisco. In addition to financial giants such as Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley, the donors included executives from hedge funds and private equity firms.

Disgusting. I can't believe people got suckered in by his truck.

Going Friedman on Climate

pontechango

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Wednesday December 09, 2009 · 2:35 PM PST

2009/12/09 · 14:35

Thomas Friedman has apparently been reading Ron Susskind lately, as he reveals in his latest op-ed at the NY Times, Going Cheney on Climate. Unfortunately for his readership, Friedman still hasn't grasped the basics of investigative journalism.

pontechango

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Thursday December 03, 2009 · 8:29 AM PST

2009/12/03 · 08:29

I just want to point some eyeballs to a great article on Ars Technica that ought to be mandatory reading for the good people at Daily Kos. It has some especially juicy history of the Associated Press. I had no idea!

How Robber Barons hijacked the "Victorian Internet"

Ars revisits those wild and crazy days when Jay Gould ruled the telegraph and Associated Press reporters helped fix presidential elections. Is government supervision really the worst thing that can happen to a communications network?

As Mark Twain said, "History doesn't repeat itself - at best it sometimes rhymes". With the prospective merger of Comcast and NBC, we're looking at a nasty stanza of corporate consolidation and anti-competitive behavior.

NOM Pushpolling in NH

pontechango

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Tuesday May 05, 2009 · 1:22 PM PDT

2009/05/05 · 13:22

I just got a robocall from the National Organization for Marriage. It asked me with urgent concern about some new legislation and whether I agreed that "only one man and woman should be allowed to marry". I'm paraphrasing here, since I wasn't paying close attention and got tripped up on the "only one man" part. I'm pretty sure that they were intending to create the impression that the legislation would legalize bigamy. I asked to repeat the question and it hung up. It looks like they're trying to put pressure on Gov Lynch (D).

pontechango

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Tuesday December 09, 2008 · 8:42 AM PST

2008/12/09 · 08:42

The election of a Barack Obama apparently has had an effect on the minds of the alleged perpetrators of 9/11:

The self-described mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and four alleged coconspirators unexpectedly told a military judge yesterday that they want to plead guilty, an apparent bid to avoid trial and become martyrs before President-elect Barack Obama follows through on a promise to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.

Isn't that something? We've known for a long time that the neoconservative approach to fighting terrorism has played right into the hands of extremists like Osama Bin Laden.

There it is in a nutshell.

The alleged perpetrators of 9/11 are scared that the Obama administration won't make martyrs of them.

Boston Globe headline, "pig remark"

pontechango

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Thursday September 11, 2008 · 5:24 AM PDT

2008/09/11 · 05:24

OK, maybe I'm late to the trough on this topic and I've been too busy at work to be following this issue closely, but I picked up today's Boston Globe and saw the following headline:

Civility is casualty as campaigns spar
'Pig' remark puts heat on Obama

RIP, civility.

Remember when Senators John McCain and Barack Obama promised a kinder, gentler presidential race? They said the issues would be front and center, the nasty personal attacks kept at bay, and they even floated the quaint notion of traveling the country together to engage voters in a respectful competition of ideas.

Goodbye to all that.

pontechango

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Wednesday July 23, 2008 · 10:42 AM PDT

2008/07/23 · 10:42

OK, OK, I know I'm taking the low road here, following up on my McCrank diary with this one. But isn't it true? Bill Richardson called him out on it

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (D) said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is "overreacting" and "whining" in response to The New York Times refusing to run his editorial about Iraq.

so why can't I?

pontechango

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Friday June 27, 2008 · 8:24 AM PDT

2008/06/27 · 08:24

In response to Keith Olbermann's diary, Well You stumped Me, which says:

Thus, as I phrased it on the air tonight, obviously Obama kicked the left in the teeth by supporting the bill. But anybody who got as hot about this as I did would prefer to see a President Obama prosecuting the telecoms criminally, instead of seeing a Senator Obama engender more "soft on terror" crap by casting a token vote in favor of civil litigation that isn't going to pass since so many other Democrats caved anyway.

But what if Obama doesn't win? What if a McCain administration becomes ascendent in January 2009?

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2015 Was Hottest Year in History

Lindsey Graham Confuses Wall with Stovepipe

Good climate news: Prop 23 defeated

Breaking: tea party militants secede

Boston Globe: Scott Brown campaign surge c/o big finance

Going Friedman on Climate

How Robber Barons hijacked the "Victorian Internet"

NOM Pushpolling in NH

Bush's failed approach to terrorism in a nutshell

Boston Globe headline, "pig remark"

John McWhine

KO: What if Obama loses in November?