Manufacturing Consent: Imminent Financial Crisis or Political Theater?

Since last Friday, almost every sound bite on every news update or channel is of Barack Obama blaming John McCain for being in favor of “deregulation.” The implication is that McCain favored deregulating Wall Street financial institutions and Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac. This implication is patently false. In 2005, John McCain and three [...]

Saturday Night Songs: Classix Nouveaux

One of the first videos to debut on the newly created MTV

Twilight’s Last Gleaming. P.S. Our Flag Was Still There.

Notorious bigot, Ernesto Cienfuegos, editor-in-chief at the Voz de Aztlan (an online website promoting ‘La Raza’) has been vozing his glee–or his dismay, it’s hard to keep track of his meandering thesis–at the proposed bailout of the U.S. banking industry: ‘Twilight’s last gleaming’: The disintegration of the USA. The article sticks to the Voz [...]

Party Like It’s 1999

Ace of Spades dug up the original New York Times article from Sept. 30, 1999 in which Fannie Mae eases restrictions on home loans: Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending.
Fannie Mae was amazingly honest about their intent. The program
“… will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is [...]

No! No! Little ‘Roo: Global Warming Guilt Mongering

Have your little kids come home from school in tears because they heard that the polar bears are all going to die because of global warming? Wait until they see this:

So much for subtlety. It’s not ok to use camels in advertisements for cigarettes-even though the products are [...]

Blood for No Oil

A 9/19/08 reply to an opinion piece posted in The Modesto Bee Online caught my attention. The opinion piece Right-wing regurgitates hatred poses this question:
“If the surge has worked, why are the troops still in Iraq?”
To which reader xix replies
“Because they still have some oil! Even if republicans win the White House this coming [...]

Hope, Change and Lies Smear Campaign

Think you know the truth about the dirt on Sarah Palin? Rusty Shackleford at The Jawa Report has some info for you….
Hope, Change, & Lies: Orchestrated “Grassroots” Smear Campaigns & the People that Run Them

Portrait of a blinking idiot: New litmus test for right-wingers and conservatives

A research team, based at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has published results from a study (“Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits,” Science, 19 September 2008, Vol. 321, no. 5896, pp. 1667-1670) that claims to show that physiological traits such as blinking and flinching correlate to political beliefs. Of course, those folks in the [...]

Global Warming Demo Implodes, Consensus Brick Wall Unharmed

The Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, CA held its 125th Anniversary Gala on Saturday, September 13. Chabot has a wonderful space and science education program and is absolutely worth a visit if you have school-age children. One of the featured guests at the Gala was Bill Nye, The Science Guy. [...]

Berkeley Tree Sitters: The Final Frontier

The difficulty with this conversation is that it’s very different from most of the ones I’ve had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees.
Douglas Adams, Brainy Quotes

Taken on my lunch break, with a disposable Kodak camera…

Au revoir, until the next protest. Back to work…