brainrow

Linda Ellerbee of Nick News, Nickelodeon’s news show for kids, on the NewsHour:

If we have “messages” on Nick News, it comes down to three:

One: Ignorance is not bliss…

Two: That wherever you find bad things happening, you will always find good people trying to make it better.

And the last one is that we are probably all more alike than we are different.

Nick News will air a special election report called “Cheap Shots and Low Blows” on Sunday evening at 8:30 eastern time. The discussion should be more enlightening than most of the cable news shows.

Ron Reagan, who supports stem cell research, put forth a really whacky idea on The Colbert Report:

Most scientists who are working this field will tell you that embryonic stem cell research is the way to go, and I tend to trust people who know what they’re talking about.

That’s never gonna fly in the modern Republican Party.

Reagan: President Bush does seem to like the idea of pretending to be someone else, and that somebody else seems to be my father.

Colbert: Isn’t the president, in some ways, all of our fathers? And he’s driving us to freedom, and we’re in the back seat, and he’s saying, “Shut up and let me drive!”

Democracy is for Iraqis. We’re just not ready for it here.

Via Boing Boing: Chirag Mehta visually maps out “the popularity, frequency, and trends in the usages of words within speeches, official documents, declarations, and letters written by the Presidents of the US between 1776 – 2006 AD.” The results are enlightening and sometimes — but not always –surprising.

A government auditor in Iraq will have to close up shop:

Investigations led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr. in Iraq have sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected companies like Halliburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces.

And tucked away in a huge military authorization bill that President Bush signed two weeks ago is what some of Mr. Bowen’s supporters believe is his reward for repeatedly embarrassing the administration: a pink slip.

The order comes in the form of an obscure provision that terminates his federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, on Oct. 1, 2007. The clause was inserted by the Republican side of the House Armed Services Committee over the objections of Democratic counterparts during a closed-door conference, and it has generated surprise and some outrage among lawmakers who say they had no idea it was in the final legislation.

What an oversight! Somehow, a tiny bit of oversight got into Iraq. Well, nobody is allowed to shed light on this administration’s handling of Iraq. Not Congress, not an auditor, not anybody.

See, the kind of tyranny the Bush administration is trying to establish is very delicate. It can’t flourish in the light.

A campaign ad for Ned Lamont:

It’s not just Lieberman repeatedly making the same disastrous mistakes.

George W. Bush says Democrats have no plan:

Weakened by the unpopular Iraq war, President George W. Bush accused Democrats of lacking a plan to win it on Monday as he opened a weeklong drive to maintain Republican control of the U.S. Congress.

He wants Donald Rumsfeld to stay to the bitter end:

President Bush said Wednesday he wants Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney to remain in his administration until the end of his presidency, extending a job guarantee to two of the most-criticized members of his team.

In case you forgot, Rumsfeld is the man with no plan:

Long before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld forbade military strategists to develop plans for securing a postwar Iraq, the retiring commander of the Army Transportation Corps said [in September].

In fact, said Brig. Gen. Mark Scheid, Rumsfeld said “he would fire the next person” who talked about the need for a postwar plan.

Well, uh… let’s see. Rumsfeld’s “no plan” is better than the Democrats’ lack of a plan because it’s intentional — that’s it! And Rumsfeld’s No Plan Plan has a track record. Why, just look at how well it’s working out:

A classified briefing prepared two weeks ago by the United States Central Command portrays Iraq as edging toward chaos, in a chart that the military is using as a barometer of civil conflict. …

It shows a sharp escalation in sectarian violence since the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February, and tracks a further worsening this month despite a concerted American push to tamp down the violence in Baghdad.

In fashioning the index, the military is weighing factors like the ineffectual Iraqi police and the dwindling influence of moderate religious and political figures, rather than more traditional military measures such as the enemy’s fighting strength and the control of territory.

The conclusions the Central Command has drawn from these trends are not encouraging, according to a copy of the slide that was obtained by The New York Times. The slide shows Iraq as moving sharply away from “peace,” an ideal on the far left side of the chart, to a point much closer to the right side of the spectrum, a red zone marked “chaos.” As depicted in the command’s chart, the needle has been moving steadily toward the far right of the chart.

Considering this track record, and Bush’s determination to stick with the author of the No Plan Plan, our course now is clear: we’ve got to lame these ducks!

The current MAD magazine caught my eye.

Follow the link and you can click the image to see a bigger version of the cover, or download a PDF file with a full-sized version of the cover.

(Their Fanatic Four poster is worth checking out, too.)

This is an old one, but also appropriate in this election season: If Bush Was Running Against Jesus.

From This Modern World, an exceedingly timely cartoon by Tom Tomorrow:

Via Coyote Gulch: Should you vote next Tuesday? DontVote.org has a test for you.

DontVote.org’s mission is to combat the “Get out the Vote” movement that is pushed by organizations that would like to increase the number of uneducated voters to help their cause. DontVote.org encourages people to Vote, but only AFTER they have educated themselves on the policies and individuals for which they are voting. Voting should be considered a privilege and exercised with responsibility and discretion. Just like a final exam, responsible voting requires self-education and thought. When the time comes to cast your ballot, if you don’t know for what or whom you’re voting, then DON’T VOTE.

When you finish the test, check out the percentages who got each question right.

You have to wonder how the nearly two per cent who didn’t recognize the first picture are voting.

It says, right there in the Bible: “And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out,” but this is a new take on turning a blind eye:

How important is global warming in Maine? Not important enough for local television.

Michael Palmer, the general manager of television stations WVII and WFVX, ABC and Fox affiliates in Bangor, has told his joint staff of nine men and women that when “Bar Harbor is underwater, then we can do global warming stories.”

“Until then,” he added. “No more.”

Listen — this is a free country. Mr. Palmer has an inalienable right to his willful ignorance. If his eye offends his devotion to the Bush-Cheney agenda, he can gouge that sucker right out.

But that doesn’t mean we have to put the willfully ignorant into jobs where they can keep the rest of us in the dark until it’s too late.

This man needs to find a new line of work.

I have to admit it — I just don’t understand genetics. You inherit your genes from your parents — okay. But some traits seem to skip a generation or something.

I’m just now starting Bob Woodward’s latest book, State of Denial. Listen how smart Old Man Bush was in a February 1999 speech to about 200 Gulf War veterans:

Had we gone into Baghdad — We could have done it. You guys could have done it. You could have been there in 48 hours. And then what? Which sergeant, which private, whose life would be at stake in perhaps a fruitless hunt in an urban guerilla war to find the most-secure dictator in the world? Whose life would be on my hands as the commander-in-chief because I, unilaterally, went beyond the international law, went beyond the stated mission, and said we’re going to show our macho? We’re going into Baghdad. We’re going to be an occupying power — America in an Arab land — with no allies by our side. It would have been disastrous.

The old guy is almost psychic, huh? This is more than four years before his son’s Iraq War, which has played out just like the Old Man said.

His son, El Presidenté Bush, told Woodward years ago that he didn’t ask the Old Man for advice. “There is a higher father that I appeal to.” (Cheney, I’ll bet.)

So, anyway, if basic good sense is one of those traits that sometimes skips a generation, don’t you think we could find some way to keep the guy it skips over out of the Oval Office?

From Atrios:

Not so long after 9/11 I was in an airport, and a group of 3-4 young, probably college-aged, guys were walking by. One of them saw George Bush on the teevee and loudly and enthusiastically shouted “He’s The Man!” His companions looked at him slightly quizzically, and he backpedaled a bit, amending his proclamation by saying, “Well, he’d better be…”

None of us who lived through September 11, 2001, are ever likely to forget how that day felt. What might be harder to remember is the days, and weeks, and months that followed — how it hung over us, and clung to us, and sunk into us.

Everything looked different. Whenever a plane passed overhead, we would look up and remember. Whenever a firetruck passed by, or a siren sounded, we would look up and remember. It was hard to sleep. We newly understood something about impermanence and mortality.

It seemed we might never laugh again. On Comedy Central, The Daily Show featured serious interviews with serious people. Jon Stewart said, “We don’t know how to be funny right now.” Hollywood edited the twin towers out of shots of the New York skyline — the briefest glimpse might stir up emotions that would overwhelm any movie it was in.

On September 12, the headline on Le Monde in Paris said “We are all Americans.” On September 13, at the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace in London, the band played “The Star Spangled Banner.” I saw it on television. It took a few seconds for it to sink in. We Americans had friends everywhere.

Passing strangers on the street, we would exchange a knowing glance, understanding that we shared something now — knowing that we were all in this together.

And, unbelievably, George W. Bush and Karl Rove saw this changed world, and what they thought was this: “What’s in this for me?”

Does this remind you of anybody?

David Letterman has a list of the Top Ten Questions to Ask Yourself Before Voting for Schwarzenegger. My favorite:

Is “Come on, it’ll be funny” a good reason to vote for someone?

Why don’t the real pundits ask questions this incisive?

I was just wondering, what kind of ads are they running against Mean Jean Schmidt this year?