Thursday Quick Hits
- Some good Obama press...oh, and he's on Larry King Live tonite and was on some Philly sports talk station this morning that got everybody aflutter at the station...
- Two pieces (here, here) on the Obama race speech fall out...and an editorial cartoon which sums it all up...
- I was listening to this on Sean Hannity's radio program on the way home last night regarding that "Obama links to the black panthers" junk...here's Obama's response...and here something else about Rupert Murdoch, owner of Myspace, hosting Hezbollah and Hamas official myspace webpages. Hello, kettle? Why does FOX love terrorists?
- Obama on the Iraq War and how it sunks the economy in more ways than one (1, 2, 3)
- More on the defense of Obama from Huckabee...
- Oh, and with more digesting of Hill's FLOTUS daily calendar, she really overstated, OK, pretty much lied, about her not liking NAFTA the whole time, playing a big role in getting the Federal Family Leave Act passed, and lied about getting intel about China prior to her big 1995 speech there...that about raps er up again...
Labels: 2008 Elections, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, China, economy, Fox News, Hillary Clinton, Iraq, Sean Hannity, USA
Let's actually do some engineering here on this blog...this is a Popular Mechanics article about the reconstruction of the
I-35 bridge that collapsed last year, and really showed off the crumbling nature of our infrastructure...but, this new bridge is state-of-the-art. The mode of failure in the bridge was a design where the gussets used to transfer load within the truss structure were designed, or ended up, being only 1/2 the thickness they should have been. I hedge it in this way only as the NTSB was not able to find the original calcs, so while in the end its the engineer's fault, we dont know where in the design process this happened - the calcs, the procurement, or where...speaking of new beauties, check
this out...oh, and here's the
latest ASCE report card...
Labels: ASCE, bridge, engineering, USA
[UPDATE Jan 28: Sometimes, even tho the Herald is a NewsCorp ragmag mouthpiece of the GOP, does have funny stuff. And, of course, they love to show blowups between Democrats...to wit, their cover from today, below and this second WaPo piece]
Bill Clinton's unfair attacks on Obama over the past week have really started to hit the national airwaves now; politically it cant help but help Obama, but the amount of consternation the Dem establishment is showing really shows the fear that they dont want to mess this up. The lib blogs are
starting to
be all afire over these zingers.
Labels: 2008 Elections, americablog.com, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Boston, Boston Herald, crooksandliars.com, Hillary Clinton, mydd.com, Ted Kennedy, USA
Science News
Two sci/tech items:
* This
lead piece about the last, final upcoming repair of the Hubble to extend its capabilities to the year 2020.
*
This article about the difficulty of disposing of the (finally!) new rage of UV bulbs that are direct replacements of incandescent bulbs, and gives a bit of future on the eventual banning of the incandescent bulb. Notes the owner of
www.bulbs.com, which is situated in Worcester, Mass.
Labels: engineering, environment, global warming, space, USA
This essay by
John Hockenberry describes, more than likely, the internal workings that are not any more or less than the other major news outlets (ABC, CBS, CNN)
despite what this kos diarist had to say, but figured that it was worth the read since John is one of the good guys
in the biz...or used to be in the biz...Labels: ABC, al-Qaeda, CBS, CNBC, CNN, colleges, Disney, General Electric, Homeland Security, John Hockenberry, MIT, NBC, USA
More Stupid Unemployment Numbers
Firstly,
this rosy news was not how it was reported
on Bloomberg when I was listening this morning...
My boy at
The Big Picture infers a lot of the same thing - that the jobs data is not as rosy as the Fed makes it out to be. And, of course, as I harp on all the time, the unemployment rate is just total bunk - it really doesn't give you anything meaningful.
Labels: 2008 Elections, economy, The Big Picture, unemployment, USA
The
sites and dates have been selected, but nothing yet on the moderators...
Labels: 2008 Elections, Barack Obama, colleges, debate, debates.org, Democrats, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, media, press, USA
This guy is just scarry scarry scarry...even conservative republicans in the justice department thought he went way too far...wifey and I watched this for about 20 minutes of this at the point of the infamous visit to Ashcroft's hospital bed...we just had to turn it off since it's just too scarry to watch what actually happened in this country...
Labels: blog, Cheney, crime, crooksandliars.com, dubya, Frontline, media, PBS, press, RNC, Spending, USA
And he says this with a straight face - even if he believes that this illegal warrantless domestic spying is perfectly legal he thinks they need to get immunity? Huh?
Labels: Cheney, CIA, crime, dubya, FBI, Homeland Security, media, USA
Scarry stuff...
Labels: Cheney, CIA, computer, dubya, engineering, FBI, Homeland Security, media, Patriot Act, peace, USA, WaPo
...but there's an interesting bit in there about the political theatre surrounding increasing mpg.
I am all for increasing mpg, even if it's Bushie that suggests it. I dont necessarily believe him, but still...
Labels: auto safety, dubya, ESPN, global warming, mileage, USA
About Goddamn time...
Labels: Cheney, dubya, FBI, Patriot Act, USA, WaPo
blogger crapped out on me, so I wont type the whole post again. But, the linked article talks about the mayor of Hiroshima, Japan was murdered by handgun by a member of the yakuza. The article had this blurb in it:
Organized crime groups are behind most shootings in Japan, with two-thirds of the country's 53 known shootings last year being gang-related, according to the National Police Agency. Police estimate there are about 84,500 gangsters across Japan.
53 shootings.
Look up in the 2005 (latest data available) FBI stats for just murders by guns, and the number is
10,100. Holy fucking shit. 10,100 to 53. And that's still not a fair comparision, since it's only total shootings in Japan and only murders in the USA, meaning there's probably more to be added to 10,100 number to account for all shootings. Japan's population is 127,400,000 people, v. 300,000,000 in the US.
Labels: crime, Japan, murder rates, USA
