Monday Open Thread
It’s your back-to-work open thread time. For a lot of people, today is their first day back at work for 2010. Are you ready?
Nate Silver at Fivethirtyeight posted this interesting graph: health care spending per capita vs. life expectancy. The U.S. is a big outlier on the graph. In general life expectancy increases with increasing spending, except for the U.S. because our spending is so much out-of-whack with the rest of the world.
Newsweek dives into some revisionist history with an essay called “What If Gore Had Won?” In their re-imagining of history 9/11 didn’t happen because Gore didn’t ignore the threat of bin Laden, Katrina was a big disaster.
What do you think a Gore presidency would have been like? I think there is a chance that 9/11 was avoided, but if not we would have gone into Afghanistan and not Iraq. We certainly wouldn’t have let bin Laden escape in Tora Bora. We wouldn’t be tortuting people or holding them in extra-legal limbo. We would have also been prepared for Katrina because we would have had competent people running FEMA. The Terri Schiavo debacle would have ended in the Florida courts and we wouldn’t have had the Great Recession.
Tags: Open Thread
Unstable Isotope wrote It’s your back-to-work open thread time.
Crap, I knew I forgot something.
The banned word list for 2009:
What are we supposed to call tweets now?
anyone know about this? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/04/amanda-simpson-transgende_n_410346.html
i CANT WAIT to see that the Hate Wing party does with this one. Im sure she is qualified… but i wonder if this is a bone thrown to the LGBT community, or a giant middle finger right at the Hate Party… or both.
Freud would have a field day with this one…
a man who works for a missle company (raytheon) cuts off his “missle” and calls him self Amanda (A-Man-Duh)
truth is stranger than fiction
typical hate party response. after there is nothing else you can do about it, make fun of it.
Well, I hope this is a qualified appointee that does good work. As I hope every time someone is appointed to anything.
brooke, we all know making various part of the democratic base feel recognized is more important that the job the appointee does 🙂
Funny that Time magazine is telling us the list of banned words, since in 2001 they did not have the balls — yes, I said balls — enough to make Osama bin Laden their Man of the Year or Person of the Year or Newsmaker of the Year or Whatever-They-Call-It of the Year.
Can someone tell me what the deal is about posts with no vowels. It’s like Palin.
doing hellavajob there Nappy!
Extremists Online Discussed Blowing Up Planes Weeks Before Northwest Flight 253 Attempt
ABC ^ | 1/4/10 | SIMON MCGREGOR-WOOD
Online Extremists Recommended Methods Exactly Like Those Used by Abdulmutallab
Extremist Internet forums discussed blowing up planes three weeks before the Detroit attempt — and have also discussed ways of using deadly biological agents onboard planes.
A private Israeli intelligence company told ABC News Monday there was a surge of online discussions in extremist Islamic forums about blowing up planes three weeks before Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s attempt to bring down Northwest Flight 253. The discussions recommended using “improvised detonation chain” devices, exactly like the one used onboard the Detroit-bound flight.
The company has also tracked specific — and in its view — credible plans to attack planes using deadly biological agents
************
npthing to see here folks, the system worked, move along..
Brooke, no vowels is a new feature here – Memory Hole 2.0
it’s a way of dealing with inconvienent facts.
Well since RICO here wouldn’t know a fact if it strip-searched him, you are certain that his explanation of the disemvoweling is quite wrong. As he typically is.
The disemvoweling happens to trolls who want try to hijack threads in one way or another. This happens to RICO a fair bit because he is 1) a troll and 2) overly gullible over what his wingnut handlers tell him. He resents the fact that just because his radio tells him one thing, we refuse to believe it. Even though we’ve pointed out over and over that he is quite wrong.
Lizard, please defend your use of “Nappy”, you ignorant ass. Your are treading a thin line here.
Case in point — RICO and his merry band of idiots continue to try to point the fingers at Janet Napolitano for the crotch bomber.
Except they keep forgetting that the TSA and Homeland Security work off of intelligence given to them from the CIA and the NCTC. So even as the “evidence” he points to pretty clearly comes under the intelligence banner and not Homeland Security, here he is gleefully trying to blame Napolitano.
I still think that the fry station RICO works at is responsible for addling his brain.
hey nemski, even Cassy could figure our that “Nappy” was Napolitano in my paraphrasing of GW Bush “Helluva Job Brownie”. you race obsessed libs are getting dumber by the day.
A very thin line, indeed. But is anyone surprised that Lizard is a racist? I’ll wait for the “you misunderstood me” *giggle*
Instead of acknowledging a poor choice of nicknames which could be taken many ways, lizard responds by attacking Cassandra, nemski and everyone else.
Hey RICO — nemski asked you to defend your choice of words here, not for an explanation.
There is no defense. Either it was deliberate – in an aren’t I clever sort of way – or lizard is stupid. I’m comfortable with either choice.
Ah. Thought there’d been a Fox-news sale on keyboards of genuine “intelligent design” … no Science required.
Guess what phony controversy that lizard kept pushing around here has fallen out of the news? Swifthack! I thought this was going to overturn science?
Cudos to Joe!
The Hill was the only outlet to write a complete story about the visit:
Vice President Joe Biden and his wife Dr. Jill Biden on Christmas Day made an unexpected visit to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.
The couple attended the hospital’s annual Christmas Day dinner,helped serve food and spent time thanking patients and their families for their military service.
The Bidens were expected to spend Christmas in Wilmington, Del., the vice president’s hometown.
Afterwards, the Bidens visited with patients and families in the Intensive Care Unit who were unable to attend dinner.