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Bahrain mourner killed in funeral march clash
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-Short Attention Span Theater-
PBS Uses Cartoon Aardvark to Plead for Continued Funding
Life imitates Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
House Democrats made their case for continuing taxpayer funding of public media outlets such as NPR and PBS with a little help from Arthur the PBS cartoon character, who visited the Capitol Wednesday morning.

The friendly but silent aardvark
(the transcript of his testimony will make for interesting reading)
joined Democratic Reps. Edward Markey of Massachusetts, Earl Blumenauer of Oregon and others to hit back against Republicans who have pledged to cut the funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the next budget. “We need your help today,” Markey said as a person dressed as the character walked toward the Capitol building. “We can’t leave Arthur and all of his pals in the lurch.”
Arthur is--excuse me for being blunt here Mr. Markey, but this is an important point--he's a fictional character. He doesn't physically exist. He's just a series of pen-and-ink still images displayed at a rate of 24 frames per second, giving the illusion of motion due to a psychological effect called beta movement. ARTHUR IS NOT REAL!
The members stood behind dolls of Sesame Street’s Big Bird, Grover and Elmo. Behind them, House aides held up signs showing Bert and Ernie being handed a letter that reads, “GOPink Slip: You are fired,” and another that showed cartoon characters being tossed away from a scale weighed down by “Big Oil.”

“We’re here to create jobs, not lay off Bert and Ernie,” said Rep. Nita Lowey of New York.
Nita, can I explain something to you, dear? Well, I'm going to anyway whether you like it or not. Get your fingers out of your ears and stop saying "La la la la la!" like that.
That's better, dear.
Here's the thing: Sesame Street is produced by an outfit called Children's Television Workshop. It's technically a not-for-profit corporation, but that doesn't mean it doesn't make money. It licenses the characters of Bert and Ernie and all the other puppets to books, video games, a friggin' 14-acre theme park, and people who make toys, clothing, training pants, furniture, murals, postcards, neckties, samplers, stained glass windows, and tattoos for all I know. These people sell BILLIONS of dollars of Sesame Street-themed merchandise every year, and CTW gets a cut of the revenue from every Bert doll, Elmo car seat, Big Bird windbreaker, Oscar the Grouch deluxe picture book, and roll of Sesame Street easy-on vinyl wallpaper--as it properly should. The only reason this stuff is in such demand is because kids watch the show and love it and ask their parents and grandparents for the tie-in merchandise.
From that perspective, every hour of Sesame Street is a one-hour commercial for Sesame Street tie-in merchandise. PBS shouldn't be paying CTW for the show, CTW should be paying PBS for the airtime!
Posted by: Mike || 02/16/2011 15:54 || Comments || Link || [1 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Well, go public and run it as a for profit venture. Or at least a public service sans government funding where all the other "made possible by" funding they get is tax deductible for the corporations giving it. At very least they could break even.
Posted by: DarthVader || 02/16/2011 16:51 Comments || Top||

#2  So we're in the hole. At least Bert and Ernie have jobs.
Posted by: Fred || 02/16/2011 18:23 Comments || Top||

#3  It might be more appropriate to use the aardvarks from the Ant and Aardvark Pink Panther cartoon, Max Rebo, the blue aardvark from Star Wars, or Cerebus the amoral barbarian mercenary aardvark.
Posted by: Anonymoose || 02/16/2011 18:29 Comments || Top||

#4  No problem - directly fund CTW (of course, all Sesame Street licensing fees would then go to the US treasury). Cut Federal funding for all other NPR / PBS operations.
Posted by: CincinnatusChili || 02/16/2011 18:33 Comments || Top||

#5  People love it, but won't pay for it directly is an oxymoron.

Extortion funding for entertainment is an immoral aberration in a free country.
Posted by: Bright Pebbles || 02/16/2011 20:03 Comments || Top||


LA County employee dies at desk - not noticed for a day
Posted by: Frozen Al || 02/16/2011 00:00 || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  What a shame. She was only 51.
Posted by: Penguin || 02/16/2011 0:42 Comments || Top||

#2  I have a confession: Back in the 80s, I briefly worked for FEMA at one of their regional centers.

We had a supply clerk named Roger. He was a long-time career employee and was quite literally the laziest person I have ever encountered. His indolence was so great, so much in excess of what we normal goof-offs and goldbricks could manage, that it was actually admirable. He should be in the Guiness Book of World Records.

Roger was paid about $18 an hour (remember, this was over 20 years ago) to sit in his chair all day and briefly rouse himself if someone needed a new pencil or perhaps some sticky notes. He would sit there and stare catatonically at the wall for hours at a time.

Naturally he would doze off pretty frequently. I walked by one day and shook him. He awoke, startled, and demanded to know what I needed. I said “Nothing, I just wanted to make sure you hadn’t died on us. We’d look pretty stupid if you started to decompose before anyone realized it.”
He just said, “oh” and went back to sleep.

The San Francisco earthquake came along and the FEMA center was a beehive of activity. Several of us went to the Bay Area and worked about 100 hours a week taking relief applications. Not Roger, though. He had to do a lot more work, perhaps an hour or more a day, but they hired four temporaries to help him so he would not miss his rest.
Posted by: Atomic Conspiracy || 02/16/2011 3:06 Comments || Top||

#3  Does this mean there is no noticeable activity/work going in this job?
Posted by: JohnQC || 02/16/2011 10:31 Comments || Top||

#4  She's not dead. She is just pining for the afternoon break.
Posted by: SteveS || 02/16/2011 12:48 Comments || Top||

#5  Does this mean there is no noticeable activity/work going in this job?

At least not where she had to report to someone every 5 minutes.
Posted by: Pappy || 02/16/2011 21:51 Comments || Top||

#6  LOL. AC, we now know where Scott Adams got his inspiration for "Wally", the lazy character in the Dilbert cartoon strip. Wally has developed laziness into an art form.
Posted by: GK || 02/16/2011 22:39 Comments || Top||


-Signs, Portents, and the Weather-
Scientists connect global warming to extreme rain with biased data
Extreme rainstorms and snowfalls have grown substantially stronger, two studies suggest, with scientists for the first time finding the telltale fingerprints of man-made global warming on downpours that often cause deadly flooding.
They got to save their phony baloney jobs!
One group of researchers looked at the strongest rain and snow events of each year from 1951 to 1999 in the Northern Hemisphere and found that the more recent storms were 7 percent wetter. That may not sound like much, but it adds up to be a substantial increase, said the report from a team of researchers from Canada and Scotland.

The study didn't single out specific storms but examined worst-of-each-year events all over the Northern Hemisphere. While the study ended in 1999, the close of the decade when scientists say climate change kicked into a higher gear, the events examined were similar to more recent disasters: deluges that triggered last year's deadly floods in Pakistan and in Nashville, Tenn., and this winter's paralyzing blizzards in parts of the United States.
Ok, stop there a sec... You only took the data from 1951-1999 and didn't single out events... yet events that happened since then were singularly examined...

Now, it has been a while since I was a studying the scientific method... but THAT IS CALLED COOKING THE DATA AND CHERRY PICKING DATA TO FIT YOUR HYPOTHESIS!!!!,
Ok, the rest of the story I have to summarize, but cherry picked data... short time frame of study... no dissenting part of the paper... and all funded by foundations that have a remarkable interest in MMGW means that these studies aren't worth the paper they are printed on. More bullshit to push the goddamn Maxist takeover of economies in the name of saving the fucking planet.

These crooks need to be laughed out of the scientific world, sued for everything they got for the damage inflicted on the economy, then fired into the sun to reduce their "carbon footprint".
Posted by: DarthVader || 02/16/2011 16:56 || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Still no speck of proof that anything the human race changes in the next 50 years will affect weather any sooner than, say, 300 years from now.
Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 || 02/16/2011 18:17 Comments || Top||

#2  Then there's this, from a few days ago in the Wall Street Journal. The one group of researchers were already behind the times before they released their report, poor dears. Isn't science wonderful!

The Weather Isn't Getting Weirder
The latest research belies the idea that storms are getting more extreme.

Some climate alarmists would have us believe that these storms are yet another baleful consequence of man-made CO2 emissions. In addition to the latest weather events, they also point to recent cyclones in Burma, last winter's fatal chills in Nepal and Bangladesh, December's blizzards in Britain, and every other drought, typhoon and unseasonable heat wave around the world.

But is it true? To answer that question, you need to understand whether recent weather trends are extreme by historical standards. The Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project is the latest attempt to find out, using super-computers to generate a dataset of global atmospheric circulation from 1871 to the present.

As it happens, the project's initial findings, published last month, show no evidence of an intensifying weather trend. "In the climate models, the extremes get more extreme as we move into a doubled CO2 world in 100 years," atmospheric scientist Gilbert Compo, one of the researchers on the project, tells me from his office at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "So we were surprised that none of the three major indices of climate variability that we used show a trend of increased circulation going back to 1871."

In other words, researchers have yet to find evidence of more-extreme weather patterns over the period, contrary to what the models predict. "There's no data-driven answer yet to the question of how human activity has affected extreme weather," adds Roger Pielke Jr., another University of Colorado climate researcher.
Posted by: trailing wife || 02/16/2011 20:15 Comments || Top||


Economy
Chicago population shrinks to level not seen since 1920's
Posted by: Frozen Al || 02/16/2011 11:43 || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:


Home Front: Politix
Liberals launch anti-Darrell Issa crusade
Posted by: Fred || 02/16/2011 00:00 || Comments || Link || [1 views] Top|| File under:

#1  bring it, bitches

Issa can handle himself, and the subpoenas should start flying. Ima hoperin for some jail time for Holder and his racists at the DOJ
Posted by: Frank G || 02/16/2011 8:42 Comments || Top||

#2  I am just sick of this liberal tactic. If they can't beat them in the field of political ideas, they do their best to destroy people personally. They go after even the person's kids and family, which used to be off limits for everyone.

Keep it up, assholes. There is a platoon of really pissed off people waiting for you to step too far over the line into illegal territory.
Posted by: DarthVader || 02/16/2011 8:59 Comments || Top||

#3  The foaming at the mouth left wing "targets" anyone who disagrees with them and their agenda, anyone perceived as a threat, and anyone who might rise as a viable opposition candidate. Since most of these Trotskyites/Alinskyites are paranoid, this includes just about everyone. I use the word "targets" because they really go ape $hit whenever anyone uses the word but themselves. There are many, many people who are fed up with their tactics--more than they realize.
Posted by: JohnQC || 02/16/2011 10:26 Comments || Top||

#4  When you don't have the facts, argue the law.

When you don't have the law, argue the facts.

When you have neither, persecute the prosecutor.
Posted by: gromky || 02/16/2011 11:04 Comments || Top||

#5  Sarah Palin, Joe Arpaio and now Darrell Issa. It sure is easy to see who scares the weenies and it seems to be anybody who has the guts to stand up, ask the hard questions and tell it like it is.
Posted by: Abu Uluque || 02/16/2011 12:37 Comments || Top||

#6  A key subpoena has already been fired. From today's WSJ: Taxpayers wanting the whole story of how Countrywide Financial used its VIP loan program to grease politicians and reward its partners at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may soon have it. Thanks for this belated act of political hygiene go to House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, who Wednesday issued a subpoena to Bank of America, which bought Countrywide during the financial crisis.
House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa has issued a broad subpoena to Bank of America, which bought Countrywide in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis.

By March 7, the bank will need to produce all documents related to the company's VIP program, also known as the "Friends of Angelo" program in honor of former Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo.

The phoney liberal 'crusade' mentioned in the original article is a crude attempt to keep the lid on widespread official corruption. I don't care if Issa ate dead babies when he was 19, I do care if congressmen took bribes from Mozilo.
Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 || 02/16/2011 17:27 Comments || Top||

#7  A key subpoena has already been fired. From today's WSJ: Taxpayers wanting the whole story of how Countrywide Financial used its VIP loan program to grease politicians and reward its partners at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may soon have it.

wonder if there's extradition from Irish households holding a certain Connecticut Senator - the "other heel side" of the waitress sammich?
Posted by: Frank G || 02/16/2011 22:08 Comments || Top||


IRS Gives Tax Breaks for Nursing
I can conceive of no possible reason the Federal government should be concerned with how children are nursed.

None.

The ultimate (to date) nannyism.
Posted by: Fred || 02/16/2011 00:00 || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Fred, I take it you are past the age where you would be nursing a child, so perhaps you don't understand this as fully as some of our politicians seem to.
Posted by: gorb || 02/16/2011 0:37 Comments || Top||

#2  Do these tax breaks go for being on the mother's tatas or on the government's tatas?
Posted by: JohnQC || 02/16/2011 10:29 Comments || Top||

#3  I have both nursed and used formula. There is a built-in cost-savings for using what nature provides for free, not to mention that losing the pregnancy weight is easier. The Lamaze people are already involved in heavily promoting breastfeeding, no doubt much more effectively than government involvement.
Posted by: trailing wife || 02/16/2011 11:22 Comments || Top||

#4  I think this is to prepare the kids for going on the federal teat.
Posted by: CrazyFool || 02/16/2011 13:04 Comments || Top||

#5  I might be willing to take up breast-feeding again if there was money in it. I suppose it depends on how hawt the breasteses in question are, though. Or how much cash.
Posted by: SteveS || 02/16/2011 20:08 Comments || Top||

#6  "I've got nipples. Can you milk me, Fokker?"
Posted by: Frank G || 02/16/2011 22:08 Comments || Top||



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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.

Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.

Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has dominated Mexico for six years.
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Two weeks of WOT
Wed 2011-02-16
  Bahrain mourner killed in funeral march clash
Tue 2011-02-15
  Mufti warns of revolution in Saudi Arabia
Mon 2011-02-14
  Iranian protesters rally as Arab unrest spreads
Sun 2011-02-13
  Saeed Al-Shihri, Deputy Leader of AQAP Dead in Yemen
Sat 2011-02-12
  Police in Aden disperse ‘day of rage’ protests
Fri 2011-02-11
  Mubarak resigns
Thu 2011-02-10
  Mubarak still there
Wed 2011-02-09
  Suleiman: Mubarak Forms Panel to Pilot Constitutional Changes
Tue 2011-02-08
  Egypt sees largest demonstrations since start of revolt
Mon 2011-02-07
  Egypt: beginning of discussions between government and Muslim Brotherhood
Sun 2011-02-06
  Mubarak resigns as ruling party head
Sat 2011-02-05
  U.S. envoy to Egypt: Mubarak 'must stay' for now
Fri 2011-02-04
  Egypt PM Apologizes for Tahrir Square Clashes, Vows Probe
Thu 2011-02-03
  Mubarak's snipers flee Cairo square
Wed 2011-02-02
  Chaos in Cairo as Mubarak backers, opponents clash

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