Friday Open Thread
It’s Friday and it’s open thread time. Let me congratulate BCS champion Alabama for kicking Texas’s freshman quarterback around. Alabama was probably the best team but who knows how they would have played against Boise State. If only there was a way of determining who was really the best team…
Let’s start with some good news. Portugal is on the road to becoming the sixth European country to allow same sex marriage (the other five are Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Norway).
Portugal’s Parliament passed a bill Friday allowing gay marriage in the mostly Roman Catholic country.
The Socialist government’s bill won the support of all left-of-center parties. Right-of-center parties opposed the change and sought a national referendum on the issue, but their proposal was rejected.
…
If there is no presidential veto, the first gay marriage ceremonies could take place in April – a month before Pope Benedict XVI is due on an official visit to Portugal.
Now the bad news. The economy lost 85,000 jobs in December and unemployment stayed at 10%.
Nonfarm payroll employment edged down (-85,000) in December, and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 10.0 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment fell in construction, manufacturing, and wholesale trade, while temporary help services and health care added jobs.
I think this means a second stimulus is more likely.
Tags: Open Thread
So here is a fun story — the teabaggers have an email list. An email list where liberals will definitely be banned. They’ve been trying to make some hay out of Rachel Maddow trying to join their list, which she denies. But they banned her anyway. It is fun, though, to watch how these so-called lovers of liberty are fond of free speech for themselves but not for other people.
Their convention is at Opryland USA. Could it be anymore of a cliche?
So, you’re telling me that the teabaggers, who used their 1st amendment rights to disrupt townhall meetings don’t want liberals to use their 1st amendment rights to disrupt their meetings?
Sheesh, UI! Don’t you know that the Constitution and it’s principles only apply to Republicans. 🙂
If Steele goes – the search for the next RNC chairman will become a Republican referendum on the teabaggers.
The 2nd place candidate from the RNC election was Katon Dawson who was a member of an all-white country club. There was also that guy who sent out the “Barack the Magic Negro” CD. I’ll bet these two guys aren’t conservative enough for the teabaggers.
This is not worth a post of its own, but I have something to say to Nancy Willing.
Nancy, Scott Spencer sent all of us here at Delaware Liberal the exact same press release you received. Indeed, a press release you receive from a candidate is not an exclusive source as you claim. And I found the du Pont column at Media Matters. Media Matters is not an exclusive source to you. It is open to all of us humans. When I do stumble onto a story at your site, I give you a hat tip or otherwise reference you in my post. For example, I quoted you on your reaction to Diane Clarke Streett’s nomination, news that I first learned at your site.
What I am going to have to do, Ms. Willing, is no longer read or reference your site in the future, that way you can be sure that I am not “stealing” your posts. However, we will still run into problems since it is apparent that you consider the entire internet and all email press releases you receive your exclusive sources.
Goodbye Nancy.
Actually, this might be worth its own post.
whups, lol
Washington Monthly picked up the Think Progress piece on Castle.
Blogging isn’t really an exact science. I, like everyone else who blogs here, get my ideas from a wide variety of sources and from the voice in my head. It’s really not a surprise when several liberal bloggers post on the same story. Sometimes they’re getting it from the same source and sometimes they’re separately getting the same idea. It happens.
Geez, and to think we used to settle same thoughts by sayin’ “JINX on you–you owe me a Coke!!!” 🙂
Or a TAB
AP via Boston Herald ^ | 01/08/10 | Staff
WASHINGTON — A federal judge has tossed out most of the government’s evidence against a terrorism detainee on grounds his confessions were coerced, allegedly by U.S. forces, before he became a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay.
Biden’s mother has passed. Godspeed.
Obama spends nearly $400K on sock puppet…
Kossack Mote Dai’s discovery that “objective” analyst and MIT economist Jonathon Gruber has received a sole-source contracts with the Department of Health and Human Services since June 19, 2009 to consult on the “President’s health reform proposal” has gained some larger attention. Marcy reported that he has two contracts for a total of $392,600 to consult on the plan. The issue is that Gruber has consistently been referenced by the White House as an objective analyst in support of the bill–including the controversial excise tax–without disclosing his role as a contractor on the issue.
“Or a TAB”
UI, you’re really showing your age with that reference 🙂
LOL, Mark.
Long story short, it’s a little joke that us DLers have with Joanne. I’ve actually never actually drank a TAB but I hear you can still get them.
I have. It is just Diet Coke until another name.
Ha! If Steele leaves the replacement will be a teabagger! You gotta love the Grand Opportunist Party. Teabag Nation actually believe they can win in 2010. They even count progressives “who will see Obama for a naive, opportunist, socialist” and will join the baggers. Bag this!
DD, have to disagree with you there. I NEVER liked the aftertaste of TAB, but I can live with Diet Pepsi.
Karzai is telling the US to leave Afganistan. Afganis protesting by the thousands forced Karzai the Corrupt to tell the US, “he does not need anymore the “favor” of US led forces in his war weary country. http:www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id+1156358sectionid+351020403.
Now how many innocents have died, how much property damage done, that the Most Corrupt Karzai would come to this conclusion? Okay Obama, they want us out….when do we leave? We gotta war in Yemen to fight, then Lebanon, Syria, Oman, Somalia, Nigeria etc, etc.
Barry McCaffery the ole war general who pushed us to war in Iraq, now claims it will cost $10 billion a month for Afganistan and start seeing US dead troops at the rate of 500!
The latest from Tea Party Network (from an email a friend received):
A message to all members of Tea Party Nation
Friends, over the last 36 hours, our site has been attacked by liberals. They have joined en masse, coming on the site to offend, disrupt and interfere as much as they can. They have uploaded inappropriate content, sent us obscene messages and even uploaded pornographic images.
We are taking steps to correct these problems.
We want to take this opportunity to thank those who have become members of Tea Party Nation in the last few days. Before our site was assaulted, our growth had been phenomenal. Our precautions are going to slow our growth, but ultimately will keep TPN the site that you want it to be.
I guess they were naked pictures of Michelle Malkin, who is a sponsor of TPN (entire list on their homepage).
http://www.teapartynation.com/
The poll is missing “present-day Elvis.”
Did I read TAB? It is NOT Diet Coke!! Take that back DD. You will only make it harder for me to access, when people like you just think it’s Diet Coke:)!!! It’s the Coke company, original product, but saccharine not Nutra-Sweet. Discretion of palate DD, please…
Are all lite beers alike?
Oh, and you should have “Elvis sighting” also.
LOL. Sorry Joanne. I haven’t had it in decades, but from what I do remember it tasted like Diet Coke.
I may be horribly wrong, but that is just what I remember.
Anon’s present day Elvis is the comment of the day.
TAB and Diet Coke are definite different taste experiences. Last time I had a TAB (do not ask), it was a very medicinal or chemical taste. Diet Coke at least pretends to taste like Coke. But I do hear that the newer TAB is better, but as long as there is Cherry Coke Zero I’m not touching that TAB stuff.
What newer TAB? Coke Zero — maybe. There was some energy drink that came out named TAB recently–I don’t know why.
WOW..this really is an open thread.
Clinton – the gift that keeps on giving…
Riady returns
Wash Times ^ | 1/8/10 | William C. Triplett II
Last year, convicted businessman James Riady donated $20,000 to Bill Clinton’s Global Initiative. At about the same time, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s State Department granted him a multi-entry U.S. visa, something that seems to have been prohibited by the terms of his early 2001 plea agreement with the Department of Justice. Riady used the 2009 visa to travel widely around the United States, apparently without supervision by or even notice to Justice.
Shaking the Riady tree in the late 1990s produced an amazing number of agents of the Chinese government – more that 20 people who would eventually plead guilty to illegal campaign contributions to Bill Clinton and Al Gore and serious violations of American national security. In 1999, the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for disclosing “the corporate sale of American technology to China, with U.S. government approval despite national security risks.”
One would think that given the pounding the Clintons took a decade ago for their odious connections to the Chinese government – especially their ties to Chinese military intelligence revealed by this newspaper and others – that would make them shy away from anything that would bring those issues to the attention of a new generation of voters. However the Riady $20,000 Clinton contribution and visa events seem to part of a larger pattern suggesting that the Clintons are ready to return to Beijing connections, no matter the possible risk to the Obama administration.
LOL. The Washington Times is still in business?
Interesting article – http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10florida-t.html?ref=magazine
And yes, DD, the Times is still in business, but it has never turned a profit and loses about 50 million a year. Guess all the Moonies are tithing to the paper.
Detroit bomber ‘singing like a canary’ before arrest
Telegraph (U.K.) ^ | January 9, 2010 | Philip Sherwell
President Barack Obama is under fire over claims that the Christmas Day underwear bomber was “singing like a canary” until he was treated as an ordinary criminal and advised of his right to silence. The chance to secure crucial information about al-Qaeda operations in Yemen was lost because the Obama administration decided to charge and prosecute Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as an ordinary criminal, critics say. He is said to have reduced his co-operation with FBI interrogators on the advice of his government-appointed defence counsel. The potential significance became chillingly clear this weekend when it was reported that shortly after his…
Joanne ! Found out today that Total Wine in Cherry Hill carries Tab by the case. Maybe other ones do, too.