Okay, this is probably a little bit dick-ish at some level and is about as realistic as me being the President of Antarctica, but I just had goofy thought.

Wouldn't it be great, if, in response to John McCain's demand to a townhall debate, Barack Obama sets one up... between him and Bob Barr of the Libertarian Party, while freezing out the GOP?

You know, Bob Barr, the ex-GOP representative, the one who was so disgusted with the GOP that he left the Party?

Think of the putdown value: you can bill this as a debate between a "True(tm)liberal and a True(tm) conservative". And you can honestly call it as such: it seems entirely feasible that either candidate would concede points on the margin-whether this relatively unimportant activity calls for more government or less, instead of the "OMG where's your lapel pin?!" nonsense.

Of course, a debate between the two will not obscure the fact that True(tm) conservatives and True(tm) liberals will call dumb war for what it is, as well as its enabler. It's a win-win situation for both the Libertarian Party and the Democratic Party, both coincidentally at the expense of the GOP.

The imagery of the GOP looking bad trying to smear the Libertarian Party as being insufficiently conservative fills me with premium grade schadenfreude  

You might have heard the blurb about how Rupert Murdoch a) influenced the NY Post to endorse Barack Obama and b) predicts a landslide victory for Obama:

The tide is against the Republicans, and Obama could overcome the race issue. McCain, Murdoch said, is a friend, patriot, and decent guy, though he conceded also that he is unpredictable, has spent too much time in Washington, and is not great on the economy (which he said is in a recession) or organizationally adept.

What you might not have heard is that Elizabeth Murdoch held a fundraiser at her home that netted $400K for Obama two weeks ago:

Cici's Pizza, according to Wikipedia, is a 707-store buffet chain operating in 29 States.

I just saw their commercials today at the gym and I literally did a double take.

Here is the actual commercial

http://www.cicispizza.com/

One of the lines in the commercial is

YOU shower with a loofah

Complete transcript below:

While as owner of the Texas Rangers, Bush oversaw/permitted the who's who of steroid users in baseball to hone their craft:

President Bush was managing general partner of the Texas Rangers from 1989 until he was elected Texas governor in 1994. Several former Rangers — Ivan Rodriguez, Juan Gonzalez, Rafael Palmiero, and Jose Canseco — are all alleged to have used, or have admitted to using, steroids while playing for Bush.

The larger point, I think, is not that Bush allowed cheating to take place, but rather that he failed to have a decent team even when he cheated. During his 5 year tenure, the Rangers were 466-458, barely above 500. Not exactly bad, but pretty pathtic considering the edge you gave yourself. To put this in perspective, it would be as if Team Bush finishes in middle of the pack at Tour de France after shooting steroids up to their eyeballs or... if Bush stacks the 2006 elections in their favor via caging and crooked US attorneys... and still manage to lose it.  

Just saying.

EAP [WASHINGTON]- President Clinton commuted former FBI agent Robert Hanssen's prison sentence, thereby sparing him from having to spend a day in jail.

Robert Hanssen, a conservative whose political views made him a source for Robert Novak, was convicted and sentenced for imperiling our CIA agents by outing them. In addition to compromising the CIA's ability to conduct espionage, seriously imperiled the lives of our operatives.

In a prepared press release, President Clinton claimed that a prison sentence meted out to a person convicted of treason was "far too excessive", and argued that "ruined reputation" is enough a punishment for someone who betrayed our country.

Mr. Hanssen has already lined up a book deal with the American Enterprise Institute.

The reactions have been swift- Senator Fred Thompson: "Even a Douchbag like me know that you don't pardon a traitor. What's President Clinton going to do next, start a fake war that would cost half a trillion dollars and destory our army inside out?"

I don't know if anyone has done this, but I noticed that the attorneys fired by Bush weren't done so for not being Republicans, but that they were insufficiently so.

By looking at their political contributions (via opensecrets.org), it's obvious that these guys were rank-and-file-Republicans. This is hardly surpising given that they were appointed by Bush in the first place.

These guys weren't just giving money to GOP-lites. Among others, the fired attorneys gave money to Rick Santorum and Don Young, and of course GW Bush. These are the last people you'd expect to go easy on corrupt Democrats, despite Bush's paranoias.

This might not elicit too much sympathy from us Kossacks, but it seems to me that Bush is essentially liquidating the GOP base for the sake of his extremist vision of the Republican Party. How much money do you think these erstwhile Republicans will contribute in 2008?

This is a far more enjoyable entry than my previous diary: "Rare River Dolphin... Extinct" in reference to the extinction of the Chinese River dolphin.

As a strobusguy commented in that diary, "We've lost a lot, and we continue to lose battles.  But we can occasionally bring back a species, or a place...", and sometime one must balance out the sadness of loss with enouraging news.

And so it is nice to hear this:

Cambodia's rare Mekong dolphin is making a tentative comeback from the edge of extinction after net fishing was banned in its main habitat, Cambodian and World Wildlife Fund officials said on Wednesday.
...
Fishing was banned in the area last year and local people encouraged to grow crops or work in the growing tourism industry instead of fishing.

What is particularly striking to me is that Cambodia, which is a developing economy like China, nonetheless had the will to protect its own biological heritage. To me this is enouraging because it means extinction does not have to be the price of development.

The GOP are upset that Gore actually walks the walk, and making them look bad at the same time.

Gore believes that the best way to reduce our CO2 signature is to do within the framework of a market system, and as such the purchase of energy derived from renewable sources makes eminent sense. I don't see why putting your money where your mouth is constitutes hypocrisy, in fact I would say the opposite is true.

As such, I encourage all Republicans who still believe in this war to purchase Iraq-War offsets. It's rather hypocritical of them to believe in this war but make the rest of us pay for their clusterfuck. Like Gore, they should be putting their money where their mouth is.

Therefore, I propose that the US Congress create a special war bond called the "Iraq-War Offsets".

From Andrew Leonard of salon.com:

...a group of scientific publishers...have hired a notorious public relations gunslinger to fight back against those kooks who think scientific information should be freely accessible to all.

Among those kooks, by the way, is the United States government, in the form of the National Institutes of Health, which is under the odd impression that publicly funded research should be publicly accessible.

We know the $500K these guys are paying Mr. Dezenhall, our "PR gunslinger", is money well spent, because Mr. Dezenhall helpfully submitted this catchy slogan:

Public access equals government censorship

 

I'm confused. When Rush Limbaugh attacked Donovan McNabb for being an "overrated black quarterback", the issue of race was fair game, now that both Super Bowl Teams will be led by black coaches, we shouldn't make note of it?

That's the gist of it from Human Events' Vincent Fiore

What’s wrong with just trumpeting the marvelous efforts by both coaches?  Are they not Americans first, and black second?  Why does this concept seem not only foreign to the media, but to so many of these "minority" groups themselves?

Ahh... so it's okay for Rush to attack McNabb on the basis of his skin color or most recently, this:

Look, let me put it to you this way: the NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons. There, I said it.

But it's not okay to celebrate a tiny milestone of sorts.

Asif Mandvi of the Daily Show makes a comment in passing of how Joe Biden's anagram is "I need job". So this of course got me thinking....

Using the standard anagram website I got the following:

Barack Hussein Obama= U! bias hacks name a bro'
Joseph Isadore Lieberman=Herein poses bad, major, lie
Wesley Kanne Clark=Clean ranks weekly
Hillary Rodham Clinton= I, hill lady, march in. Or not

John Sidney McCain=Joe, Can I mind synch?
Newton Leroy Gingrich=Town ignoring lechery
Rudolph W.L. Giuliani=Liar! I win dull GOP! Uh!

I came across this on the Libertarian blog Hit & Run and I figure it might be of interest to my fellow Kossacks

David WU (D, OR1) lays the smackdown on Bush:

Now, this president has listened to some people -- the so-called "Vulcans" in the White House. The ideologues. But you know, unlike the Vulcans of Star Trek who make their decisions based on logic and fact, these guys make it on ideology. These aren't Vulcans! There are Klingons in the White House! But unlike the real Klingons of Star Trek, these Klingons have never fought a battle of their own. Don't let faux Klingons send real Americans to war. It's wrong.

Fox News et al have demonized "San Francisco Values" as something that rock-ribbed conseravtives should stay away from. And while penty of diaries have shown why this is bullshit (see here) I like to point out a couple more things:

A) San Francisco, is one of the few cities that made its professional team build their stadium without making its taxpayers foot the bill. I wonder if the Republican taxpayers in Tampa Bay would prefer a bit of that "San Francisco Value" right now.

I didn't see this posted anywhere, so in case you missed it

The rare white-flag dolphin, called baiji, has seemingly disappeared from the Yangtze River, its only habitat. If true, the estimated three-million-year-old species is now extinct.

Bai-ji (literally "white porpoise" in Chinese) is nicknamed "The Goddess of Yangtze", a cruel metaphor that the death of a goddess should accompany the rapid industrialization of the Yangtze region. This is not to say that the people should remain impoverished, but extinction is forever.

London, 1796 [ROTTERS]- Lord Richard Cheney, Prime Minister to King George Dubya II assured that the insurrection in the colonies are "in the last throes", as he asked the house of Commons for an additional 67 million Pound Sterling to further prosecute the war, adding to the 487 million Pound Sterling already expanded on the War against the Americas.

David G Schwartz's "Roll the Bones: The History of Gambling" made a comment in passing of how Julius Caesar used to adjudicate trials by flipping a coin. This got me thinking, what would happen if we deliberately introduce chance in the US electoral process....

So now that Rumsfeld has been sacked given the permission to spend more time with his family, and in his place is Roberts Gates, which kos points out was a key figure in the Iran-Contra scandal, I just like to make the following observation:

Our Secretary of Defense went from someone who glad-handed Saddam to someone who helped sold missiles to Iran

Which leads to my prediction: If Bush sacks Gates, the next Sec Def will have to be connected North Korea's nukes in some way, shape, or fashion.

I know is this a bit off topic for the week (to put it mildly), but I was struck by the newsweek article on the Evanglical Identity Crisis, in particular:

At Willow Creek's annual meeting last summer, the highlight was a video of Hybels and Bono hashing over the fate of the world. Bono quoted Scripture (Luke, chapter 4); the crowd wept. Cally Parkinson, who runs the Willow Creek media-relations department, was there. As she was leaving, she overheard one pastor say to another, "I went in there wondering if Bono was a Christian, and I came out wondering if I was."

There has been much hand-wringing about how the progressives should try to find common ground with the "Evangelicals". Well, I'm going to turn the question around, why aren't they the ones meeting us halfway? The causes embraced by both Bono and (some) Evangelical Right are the same causes already embraced by the secular liberals. Why should we be the ones doing all the "understanding" and "outreach"?