Seamus, Mitt Romney’s dog on the car roof, now stars in a new children’s book “Hey Mitt, Dogs Don’t Go There!” (via Buzzfeed)
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
I played Peter King during debate prep on this campaign. Feld joined us on election night in Hicksville on Long Island, expecting victory. So did we. King had won repeated local elections with the voters knowing all about his activities. In a close race, no one was sure how the IRA connection would play if our candidate raised it on the attack. In 11 separate direct mail pieces and on the radio, it never came up. It was nine years before 9-11, and it might as well have been 100.
In the entire U.S. Congress, there is no one more loathsome than terrorist collaborator hypocrite and anti-Muslim racist Peter King of Long Island. I handled the polling for the Democrat who almost beat King when he was first elected in 1992, one of the bitterest failures of my years in political consulting.
Here’s a little more from the NYT article:
As Mr. King, a Republican, rose as a Long Island politician in the 1980s, benefiting from strong Irish-American support, the I.R.A. was carrying out a bloody campaign of bombing and sniping, targeting the British Army, Protestant paramilitaries and sometimes pubs and other civilian gathering spots. His statements, along with his close ties to key figures in the military and political wings of the I.R.A., drew the attention of British and American authorities.
A judge in Belfast threw him out of an I.R.A. murder trial, calling him an “obvious collaborator,” said Ed Moloney, an Irish journalist and author of “A Secret History of the I.R.A.” In 1984, Mr. King complained that the Secret Service had investigated him as a “security risk,” Mr. Moloney said.
And:
“I understand why people who are misinformed might see a parallel. The fact is, the I.R.A. never attacked the United States. And my loyalty is to the United States.”
Which is great comfort for all the people who were tortured, necklaced, etc., in the U.K.
Ha
Jon Stewart had something on King last night.
As I sat in the East Room last week watching a forlorn President Obama account for his shellacking, I listened with concern as he described the presidency as a “growth process” and suggested that the midterm setback was somehow inevitable. “You know, this is something that I think every president needs to go through,” he said.
It brought to mind Hillary Clinton’s 3 a.m. phone-call ad from the 2008 campaign, and her withering criticism of Obama: “When there is a crisis … there’s no time for speeches or on-the-job training.” I wondered whether Democrats would be in the fix they’re in if they had chosen a different standard-bearer.
Dana Milbank can STFU. As I started to read what he said about the 3am call, I wondered to myself, “gee, I wonder what he was saying at the time that ad ran.” And sure enough - he even links approvingly to what he was saying then: she had no chance and should get out. No previous Democrat running unsuccessfully for president - not Ted Kennedy, Gary Hart, Jesse Jackson, or Jerry Brown - was subjected to the heckling to get off the stage that Hillary was. All of those candidates took it to the convention. And she did have a chance - the superdelegates and uncommitted delegates could have given her the nomination; the popular vote was evenly divided and she was racking up victories from April through early June. Obama was getting creamed during that period, so his desperate backers in the press like Milbank desperately crunched their “delegate math” to prove Hillary couldn’t win. And they won the day, by making it politically impossible for unpledged delegates to support Hillary or to take her late victories into account. And by demonizing her as someone who was detached from political reality.
Now they are second-guessing themselves. Just shut the fuck up and support Obama instead of sniping about how Hillary would have been better.
I mean, Dana Milbank is the guy who did a video saying that Hillary would drink “Mad Bitch Beer” at a beer summit.
Jerry Brown’s YouTube ad that pairs identical statements from Meg Whitman and (unpopular) Governor Schwarzenegger has been redone as a “Director’s Cut.”
“upload pictures of yourself for instant style advice” = in the wrong hands marital evil
The Fashism iPhone app is now available in the iTunes store!
Congratulations! Anyone interested in fashion who hasn’t tried Fashism (where you upload pictures of yourself for instant style advice) yet should check this out.
We have a winner
If Cordoba House let its cattle graze on the lawn by Battery Park City, it would have a mosque cow on the Hudson.
The Moon is rich with water and in the commercial space age, we're going to be rich with the Moon. »
Following November’s news of the discovery of water in a crater on the south pole of the moon, recent data from a joint NASA/ISRO scan shows more than 600 metric tons (590 imperial tons) of water on the Moon’s north pole. The water likely settled there over the Moon’s long history, collected from floating dust and comet tails. What’s important about this discovery in light of the commercialization of the space industry is that it makes the Moon an attractive target of future business. The main components of rocket fuel are hydrogen and oxygen, meaning a rocket could take off from the Earth and fuel up at the Moon before taking off for elsewhere.
Our collective actions over the past few decades point to a future in which space is a Capitalism. The Moon provides a number of opportunities and it’s conveniently located right in our cosmic backyard. H20 plots could be claimed or bought and the raw materials harvested and refined for use by rockets—which, if the current trend continues, will be privately owned as well—leaving the Earth. More daring businesses could fund searches of the Moon for Helium-3, an isotope of Helium with two protons and a single neutron (as opposed to common Helium, which has two neutrons). Helium-3 can be used in nuclear fusion, the same process which takes place in stars like our Sun. Fusion produces significantly more energy than any other efforts we’ve made (including nuclear fission, the process which takes place in bombs and nuclear power plants). Due to a number of factors conveniently true of the Moon, Helium-3 should in theory be present in abundance but we’ve yet to make a significant effort to track it down. Helium-3 is our most promising hope for a clean-burning, non-fossil fuel that would satisfy our energy needs in vast excess.
There is a lot of money to be made on the Moon and discoveries such as this do well to increase its already high market value. It’s very likely that today’s students will be leaders of tomorrow’s lunar industry.
