Thursday, October 30, 2008

Happy Halloween

This is a hurried and blurry photo of the Skeletal Protester character for this year's Halloween display. The body is a cheap Bucky skeleton with a glowing head and hands. The sign says "On all the important issues of our day, I have been totally in agreement and support of President Bush," which is what McCain said on Meet the Press in 2005. With it is a photo of McCain hugging Bush in 2004.

I had to put it on the front step to keep it out of the fucking rain. We're supposed to have rain tonight through Sunday. It couldn't have waited two more days?! I took tomorrow off to finish building my cave in the garage. Hopefully we'll get at least a couple of kids. I can't do anything in the garage until tomorrow because we park the cars in there so I'll be busy. The zombie Nixon is done though, and I should be able to finish before it gets dark. I'll keep the garage door closed as long as possible but I'll have to finish hanging the cobwebs from the ceiling when the door is open. If everything works ok, then I'll try to post a better picture.

5 days until the election! Don't forget to vote early if you are able to and haven't done so. I'll hit the phonebank over the weekend and maybe get out in the street for No on 8 if I can.

Friday, October 24, 2008

Upgrade city

This is my first post on my new Mac. I waited until the new MacBooks came out then decided to get a previous generation Pro on clearance. This upgrade was desperately needed and it feels good to be up to date again. Of course, now I have no excuse not to assemble a home network.Or at least I don't after the election.  Next spring, when the weather is nice I'll blog from the back yard. I love technology.

Funny or die

Ron Howard reunites with some old friends for Obama. When you've lost Andy Griffith, you've lost the country.

A look inside the right-wing mind

They want to smear Obama with his tenuous association with Bill Ayers yet Palin doesn't consider abortion clinic bombers terrorists. Palin and her supporters think killing people is just fine when it's done on their behalf.

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Cambrian conga line

A paper out last week describes a strange fossil. It's a group of small shrimplike creatures attached head to tail. Nobody knows what they were doing 500 million years ago, but it must have been important for them to hold on to each other as they were buried in sediment. Feeding has been ruled out since that would have been nasty for all but the first one. Mating? Maybe it was a wedding that got out of hand.

Catalogue of Organisms, HMNH and Pharyngula have more insight into this mystery.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

How to filet a wingnut

A good example of why we love Rachel Maddow.  Oily slimeball David Frum tries to draw Rachel into a Crossfire-style shouting match, and she pins him down and nails him to the wall. Tristero at Digby's house and HTML Mencken at Sadly, No! love her, too.

McCain: Pallin' with terrorists

2  2  = 5
The Huffington Post has a live one: William Timmons, the lobbyist heading up John McCain's transition team, lobbied for Saddam Hussein. It's a long post, but read the whole thing anyway. Two guys working for Timmons were convicted of acting as unregistered agents for Saddam, and Timmons bragged that his ideas led to the disastrous oil-for-food program. MCain want's to bring up Obama's associations in the debate tomorrow. We can only hope.

2 votes in the bag for Obama

Lee J and I filled out and mailed in our absentee ballots. If you are voting absentee or are in a district where you can vote early, please do so! There is going to be a huge turnout for this election and the earlier we can get our ballots in the easier it will be for the election officials to count them. This will also give the Republicans less of an opportunity for messing with the process and making false claims of vote fraud.

A trained parrot

John Cleese defines Sarah Palin.

Thursday, October 9, 2008

The mask is off

Republican voters are showing their true colors:

More examples of compassionate conservatism here, here, here, here, and here.

Monday, October 6, 2008

Here's mud in your eye

The McCain campaign has decided that, since it can't win on the issues, it wants to drag Obama into the mud. This weekend, Sarah Palin pulled out the race card and tried to pin Obama to retired Weatherman Bill Ayers. They also plan to exhume the corpse of the Jeremiah Wright "scandal," even though they said they wouldn't. Fine. Let's play that game, shall we?

Since we're on the subject of past associations with supposed terrorists, what might we find? For starters, McCain doesn't think bombing abortion clinics is terrorism. He also hangs out with several convicted criminals, such as G. Gordon Liddy, Carl Lindner and Ollie North who've all supported terrorists. When Clinton was trying to warn everybody about Osama bin Laden, McCain didn't think bin Laden was such a bad guy. And, of course Todd Palin's membership in a party that seeks Alaska's violent secession from the US should also be in our tally.

When it comes to rubbing shoulders with religious crazies, Obama can't touch McCain or Palin. McCain's associations with bigoted and unstable preachers such as John Hagee and Rod Parsley is well-known as is Palin's pal, witch-hater Thomas Muthee.

Oh, and McCain's oft-told war hero story might be not what it's made out to be.

Since the economy is on everyone's mind, the Obama Campaign made a little documentary on McCain's role in the Keating Five scandal:


McCain was supposed to be contrite about that and called it one of his worst mistakes. Seems that he's apparently only sorry he got caught. McCain is right; his only way to victory is to distract voters from the collapse of the free-market economy that he championed. The only problem is, if he's going to resort to cheap smears, Obama is rubber and McCain is glue.

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Winter wonderland

Nasa's Phoenix Lander has detected snow falling on Mars.

Mother of all geese

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Dasornis, an enormous relative of geese lived 50 million years ago in southern England. It had a 17-foot wingspan and teeth-like structures on its beak. It soared over the waves much like an albatross. I wonder what the white meat tasted like.


Image courtesy of Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum.