Endlessly reusable! 30 September 2011
Posted by marisacat in 2012 Re Election, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, Occupy Wall Street.64 comments
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Thanks to MarketshotNYC for the image >
I nicked it from this posting at Business Insider…
Yum.
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Oversight… 28 September 2011
Posted by marisacat in 2012 Re Election, DC Politics, Democrats, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, Lie Down Fall Down Dems, Total fucking lunatics.88 comments
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A keeper at the Calauit island wildlife sanctuary in Busuanga, Palawan province, in the western Philippines, feeds giraffes with leaves [TED ALJIBE/AFP/Getty Images]
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He and his are such shits….. I scooped this up, full text, from the better-than-one-might-expect-him-to-be legal writer at Politico, of all places…
Suit: Obama administration won’t ID Intelligence Oversight Board
A lawsuit filed Tuesday claims that the Obama administration is refusing to disclose the identities of those serving on a key panel that oversees the intelligence community.
The suit filed in San Francisco by the Electronic Frontier Foundation accuses the Office of the Director of National Intelligence of failing to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request submitted in February seeking information on appointments to the Intelligence Oversight Board. (The complaint is posted here.)
Under an executive order issued by President Barack Obama, intelligence agencies are required to report violations of surveillance laws to the IOB, which is a component of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board. Obama also restored the IOB’s authority to refer violations of law to the Attorney General.
Obama has announced the appointment of 11 individuals to the PIAB, but the White House has never publicly disclosed the membership of the IOB, the lawsuit says. (The co-chairs of the PIAB, former senators David Boren and Chuck Hagel, were announced with some fanfare by Obama back in 2009.)
“The IOB has a critically important mission – civilian oversight of America’s intelligence activities. The board exists to make sure government agencies are not overstepping their authority and abusing citizens’ rights,” EFF’S Mark Rumold said in a statement. “History has shown that intelligence encies overseeing their own behavior is like the fox guarding the henhouse. If the IOB is ineffective, impaired, or short-staffed, that’s information Americans need to know.”
A spokesman for ODNI declined to comment on the new suit. The White House didn’t immediately respond to a query from POLITICO about the IOB’s membership.
Papa prophylactics! 25 September 2011
Posted by marisacat in Germany, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, Total fucking lunatics, UK, Viva La Revolucion!, WAR!.56 comments
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Vestments
Clergy members protect their robes from the rain as Pope Benedict XVI arrives for the celebration of the Eucharist at the Olympic stadium in Berlin on September 22, 2011. TIME Mag:
Isn’t it cute how they need each other to get a fucking rain condom on? (moiv sent me this spectacular photo…. 😆 )
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John Halle, one of the poster/blogger/commenters that I really like over at corrente, was at the Wall St Occupation protest….
Report from the front
[A]s a parent of a small child who I was considering bringing along to this, but thankfully did not, I wasn’t sure how to respond to what seemed to be an act of almost insane recklessness. Initially, I was was appalled, but in retrospect, in revisiting the mental image, I couldn’t help but be moved by the commitment and courage displayed, and by the recognition that finally the stakes of our confrontation are becoming clear. As Marx said “we are now required to compelled to face with sober senses, (our) real conditions of life, and (our) relations with (our) kind.” While few of us will find ourselves capable of this man’s courage, this is the kind of reaction which will be required of us when we face up to the realities we are encountering with sober senses.
A description of the remainder of the march requires the trite but, in this context, altogether accurate phrase, “violently dispersed by the police”, though this is, of course, usually applied to various third world dictatorships. One block south the police began to erect a second set of barriers with the purpose of dividing the march into smaller groups, separated by a block or so, arresting those who refused to get out of the street, and who resisted. The arrests were undertaken with considerable brutality which I was a direct witness to, and almost a victim of. . . . . .
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Madman posted this wonderful link on the last thread and it is well worth carrying over…. a talented and imaginative paper artist is quietly, secretly (til they are found in the stacks or resting upon a far away, forgotten window sill) and anonymously gifting various Edinburgh places dedicated to books, art, cinema etc. with beauteous paper sculpture….
I enjoyed this interesting literary/sculptural mystery … a nice break from all of the depressing stuff. Linked via Balloon Juice.
Protest 22 September 2011
Posted by marisacat in Greece, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter.38 comments
Athens, Greece: A civil servant shouts through a megaphone during a protest against further austerity measures announced by the government [Alkis Konstantinidis/EPA]
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Politics 21 September 2011
Posted by marisacat in 2012 Re Election, DC Politics, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, Total fucking lunatics.82 comments
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Republican presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., looks at hanging beef carcasses during a plant tour at Amend Packing Co. in Des Moines, Iowa, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2011. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)
It is a pretty damned perfect depiction…. (snicker)
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mmm 18 September 2011
Posted by marisacat in 2012 Re Election, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, Total fucking lunatics.55 comments
Li Jinlong demonstrates his impressive ball skills on Chinese TV. He used just his mouth to balance a tower consisting of three plastic bottles, 12 wine glasses, glass plates and 16 footballs. He then made the entire contraption spin using just his tongue. [Quirky China News / Rex Features]
Nuclear 16 September 2011
Posted by marisacat in 2012 Re Election, Culture of Death, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, Moscow, Total fucking lunatics.74 comments
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August 1987: The village of Kopachi is buried, house by house. It was located 7km from the Chernobyl reactor that housed the control room and decontamination area in the months after the disaster. A bulldozer would dig a large trench in front of each house before burying the building and covering it with earth and flattening the soil. Entire villages would be buried this way Photograph: Igor Kostin/Corbis
From a gallery at the Guardian on Chernobyl.
Prime time…. 14 September 2011
Posted by marisacat in 2008 Election, 2010 Mid Terms, 2012 Re Election, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, Lie Down Fall Down Dems, Total fucking lunatics.59 comments
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Republican presidential candidate Texas Gov. Rick Perry reacts after a Republican presidential debate Monday, Sept. 12, 2011, in Tampa, Fla. (AP Photo/Mike Carlson)
Unfuckingbelievable. It seems a blatantly DUMB move. All some supposed challenger, from Bachmann to Huntsman, to Perry to Romney to Ron Paul to Cain to whomever has to do is stand there and ask the 2010 cycle Sheryl Angle question of Reid:
Can’t he “man-up”? (Where’s the beef?)
Outta gas, out of steam and out of time. Out of office…
From ABC’s The Blotter:
After spending months touting the Obama administration’s decision to loan $535 million to the California solar energy upstart Solyndra, top officials took a new tack Wednesday while testifying before Congress about the company’s abrupt shut-down and bankruptcy:
the loan, they said, was actually the Bush administration’s idea.
The Energy Department’s top lending officer told Congress that the Solyndra loan application was not only filed during President Bush’s term, but it surged towards completion before Obama took office in January 2009.
“By the time the Obama administration took office in late January 2009, the loan programs’ staff had already established a goal of, and timeline for, issuing the company a conditional loan guarantee commitment in March 2009,” said Jonathan Silver, who heads the Energy loan program.
Republicans pushed back hard against this version of events, unearthing internal Energy Department emails that indicate the panel evaluating the loans had made the unanimous decision to shelve Solyndra’s application two weeks before Obama took office.
Blaming the failed loan on the Bush administration marked an abrupt turn for the Energy Department, which had championed the Solyndra loan as a model for its efforts to build a so-called “green energy” industry that creates jobs and safeguards the environment. The Solyndra loan was so central to this strategy that the administration initially planned to have Obama personally announce it, and later sent the president to the company’s solar panel manufacturing facility in Fremont, California to celebrate its work. . . . . .
Out.
Pink 13 September 2011
Posted by marisacat in Inconvenient Voice of the Voter.65 comments
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A flamingo chick is cared for by its mother at Marwell Wildlife in Hampshire. Flamingos incubate their eggs for 30 days and the parents take it in turns to look after the youngster. Young flamingos are grey and white and do not turn pink for two years. For the first three to four weeks, the chick is fed entirely by the parents who secrete a creamy pink liquid called ‘crop milk’. [Marwell Wildlife]
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Perp walk… 12 September 2011
Posted by marisacat in 2012 Re Election, DC Politics, Democrats, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, Lie Down Fall Down Dems, Total fucking lunatics.53 comments
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President Barack Obama arrives to address a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, Sept. 8, 2011. (AP Photo/Kevin Lamarque, POOL)
All those to the right and left of him too, perps.
I see he is in the Rose Garden this morning, exhorting for that jobs bill, a Potemkin village of “ordinary Americans” as the backdrop… I have to say, they look silly as all hell and he sounds fake as all hell.
You know, when he got “writer’s block”, during the crafting of Audacity for Hope or whatever the book was, he and Mother Michelle took off for 4 months in Bali. I suppose by then, producing a book to accompany a senate run and perhaps one day a pretzel run, the fix was already in.
I’d love to know who paid for the 4 months of creative break in Bali.
We are so screwwed….
US government by Disney and GE, it is clear.
Reports this morning say a gaping hole in the jobs bill is any indication of a plan for housing. I notice that Mother Michelle will be appearing in an upcoming, two hour expanded, “Extreme Makover”, the Disney / ABC extravaganza that gifts some worthy update of Queen for a Day with a house.
Obviously that is the plan, it used to be women won a washer, so they could go on washing 42,000 loads a day, now it is a house.
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Marisacat 