Palin tells teabaggers that Obama’s budget is ‘immoral’
Speaking at the 2010 Tea Party convention in Nashville, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin told the nearly 600 teabaggers in attendance that the Obama administration’s 2011 federal budget was “immoral” because it increases the national debt.
Instead of just criticizing the Obama administration’s 2011 budget, maybe she’d like to share with everyone how she would balance the 2011 federal budget. The New York Times has an interactive chart that shows were all the money will go.
What exactly would she like to cut?
How about the $738 billion that we will be spending on defense? The thing is, most of the yearly federal budget isn’t up to the president. Most of the budget is controlled by existing federal law. Other then military spending, not much can be cut by whoever is sitting in the White House. If Sarah Palin would like Obama to make drastic cuts to the military, maybe she ought to tell everyone.
Oh that crazy, wacky Pakistan
From the New York Times:
Five young Muslim American men from the Washington suburbs who disappeared late last month were detained in Pakistan on Wednesday in a police raid on a house linked to a militant group, American and Pakistani officials said.
One of the men had left behind an 11-minute video calling for the defense of Muslims in conflicts with the West and suggesting that “young Muslims have to do something,” said one person who had seen the video, describing it as a farewell of sorts. Another person who viewed it called the video “disturbing,” though he said it was not a martyrdom video of the kind sometimes made by extremists planning suicide attacks.
A story like this makes me wonder how many other groups of young Muslim American men have traveled to Pakistan who weren’t stupid enough to leave a disturbing video behind when they left the United States.
No other place in the world is more dangerous to the United States than Pakistan. It’s the place Muslim terrorists go before they try to start trouble. The 911 terrorists all flew into Pakistan before traveling to Afghanistan. When they traveled to the United States, they all flew in from Pakistan. Pakistan was one of the few countries that recognized that Taliban as official government of Afghanistan.
Not only does Pakistan have nuclear weapons technology, the Pakistani scientist that developed Pakistan’s nuclear program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, reportedly worked with North Korea and other nations, assisting them in developing nuclear weapon technology.
Who knew Maureen Dowd needed help writing her columns?
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has found herself in a bit of hot water over a column she wrote that appeared in Sunday’s edition. Her column features a paragraph that is nearly identical to one written last week by Josh Marshall on the liberal blog Talking Points Memo.
From Josh Marshall’s original column posted last Thursday, May 14:
More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.
From Maureen Dowd’s New York Times column published Sunday, May 17:
More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.
She simply changed “we were” to “the Bush crowd” and called it her own.
In an email to the The Huffington Post, she claimed that she didn’t read Talking Points Memo last week. Instead, she claims that she got the paragraph from a friend who she had told she writing about torture and the friend suggested the line, never telling her that she read it on a blog.
Right.
I read a lot of blogs, but I don’t think that I’ve ever memorized complete paragraphs that I could then later quote to my Pulitizer Prize winning columnist friends. Not that I have any friends who’ve won the Pulitzer Prize, but you get my drift.
Dowd’s lame excuse is almost actually worse. Instead of just saying that she stole the line from a blog, she in a sense says that she needed help writing her column from a friend evidently too dumb to know what she was doing was plagiarism. Shouldn’t a columnist as successful and respected (past tense) as Maureen Dowd be able to write her own columns without help from her friends?
The New York Times needs to fire her while they still have some respectability. Maybe they could replace her with Josh Marshall.
The New York Times weighs in on the Steven Cohen controversy
Once again, the mainstream news media has weighed in on the recent controversy surrounding World Soccer Daily co-host Steven Cohen. Once again, they’ve come done on the side of Cohen.
Imagine that.
Jack Bell from the New York Times soccer blog Goal has written about the recent controversy surrounding Word Soccer Daily co-host Steven Cohen.
One can argue with the appeal of a TV chat show like “Fox Football Fone-In” on the Fox Soccer Channel, but what is hard to argue with is the right of one of the co-hosts, Steven Cohen, to state an opinion without becoming the victim of opprobrium, ugly scorn, death threats and vitriolic taunts.
Cohen’s transgression? During a call on April 13 from a Liverpool fan discussing the club’s past success, Cohen (a Chelsea supporter from north London who has been in the United States for nearly 30 years) said “what about the other side of your history,” and went on to discuss the club’s and its fans’ involvement in two of the worst stadium incidents in soccer history: Heysel in Brussels on May, 29 1985, and the Hillsborough disaster in Sheffield, England, on April 15, 1989.
I can only image that Liverpool supporters will now come out of the woodwork and try their best to get advertisers to pull their ads from the New York Times and to get Jack Bell fired.
More about the Walmart trample death
The New York Times has reported more details about the Black Friday stampede at a Long Island Walmart that resulted in the death of one of it’s employees.
The crowd on hand was estimated to be more than 2,000. The doors were never actually opened by any of the Walmart employees. The mob began beating on the glass doors shortly before Walmart was to open at 5:00 am. A number of Walmart employees on the other side of the doors were attempting to push back against the crowd. There were so many people pressed up against the sliding-glass doors that the doors bowed in and then shattered.
Jdimytai Damour, 34, was pushed back when the doors shattered and he was thrown to the floor. Frantic shoppers then stepped on him as they were entering the store. Other Walmart employees were hurled back and run over, but it was clear to witnesses that Mr. Damour was getting the brunt of the crowd. Some Walmart employees fought their way to get to him. Rescue workers tried to revive him, but he was pronounced dead an hour later at the hospital.
The pregnant woman that was also trampled only sustained minor injuries. She did not lose her baby as reported earlier.
Nassau County police are reviewing the security tapes. If any of the individuals can be identified, criminal charges for the people that stepped on Mr. Damour are possible.
I can’t even figure out what drew the mob to Walmart in the first place. I remember looking though the circular, but I don’t remember seeing anything that would prompt me to go out first thing in the morning, let alone storm the front door with a mob of 2,000 other shoppers.
When I see an unruly mob of 2,000 people, I tend to go the opposite direction.
Read any good Nazi Gnome stories lately?
I stumbled on this image today while looking for something else. Something that didn’t involve gnomes armed with bull whips and wearing swastika armbands. What really struck me with this image was not the book itself, but the snippet from a review from the New York Times.
Why would the New York Times even review a book like this?
I tried to find something about the book’s author, John Christopher. As it turns out, that is not his real name. It’s only one of the many pen names employed by British writer Samuel Youd.
They don’t write books like this anymore. Maybe if they did, someone from the New York Times would review it.
Wordplay
Director: Patrick Creadon
Writers: Patrick Creadon & Christine O’Malley
Runtime: 94 painfully boring minutes
What’s an 8-letter word for a movie that totally blows? The answer is a movie entitled Wordplay. It’s a documentary on the New York Times crossword puzzle and the people that do it. Not only the über crossword puzzle nerds that actually go to a crossword puzzle convention and competition every year in Stamford, Connecticut, but famous celebrities such as Jon Stewart and Bill Clinton.
I guess the reason they included celebrities in the documentary is to show that not all people that do the New York Times crossword puzzle are major dorks. Some are just regular people that do the crossword puzzle to unwind. I can’t help but remember what else President Clinton likes to do in his spare time to unwind. It involves a female intern and a cigar.
Forgive me if I don’t take anything Bill Clinton does as an example of normalcy.
These über crossword puzzle nerds don’t just do the New York Times crossword puzzle in pen, they do it while timing themselves. How do you make the New York Times crossword puzzle even more nerdy? By turning it into a speed event. Some of them keep logs documenting how long it takes them to complete the puzzle. The reason they do this is because the competition at the yearly convention at Stamford is timed.
The level of nerdiness displayed by these puzzles doers in comparison makes the Dungeon Master of my old Dungeons & Dragons group look like Fonzi.
Much of the movie takes place at the yearly convention in Stamford. The competition involves seven timed crossword puzzles with the final three people with the best scores moving on to the main event. They then do a puzzle up on stage using a large dry erase type white board while wearing sound-canceling headphones that look to have been invented in 1972.
Towards the end of the competition when the tension was at it’s highest level, I was thinking how funny it would be for someone to pull the fire alarm. If Stamford wasn’t a 7-hour drive, I’d probably seriously consider making the trip just so I could do it.
These people would freak out.
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