Magpie

Saturday, August 20

This certainly isn't any surprise.

Faced with mounting opposition to his military adventure in Iraq, Dubya is going on the road for five days to convince the US public that the war is necessary. From the very beginning of his very first 'support the war' speech' today, Dubya gave a clear signal of the direction in which his persuasion will be going:

In a few weeks, our country will mark the four-year anniversary of the attacks of September the 11th, 2001. On that day, we learned that vast oceans and friendly neighbors no longer protect us from those who wish to harm our people. And since that day, we have taken the fight to the enemy.

We have combated terrorists on the home front by disrupting terror cells and their financial support networks. We're fighting the terrorists in Afghanistan, Iraq, and around the world, striking them in foreign lands before they can attack us here at home. And we're spreading the hope of freedom across the broader Middle East. By advancing the cause of liberty in a troubled region, we are bringing security to our own citizens and laying the foundations of peace for our children and grandchildren....

[For more on the 'hope of freedom' and 'cause of liberty', see the previous post.]

Our troops know that they're fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere to protect their fellow Americans from a savage enemy. They know that if we do not confront these evil men abroad, we will have to face them one day in our own cities and streets, and they know that the safety and security of every American is at stake in this war, and they know we will prevail....

In case you missed Dubya's subtle reasoning, here's the equation he's using:

War in Iraq = War on Terrorism = Al Qaeda = 9/11 = No American is safe from evil

Of course, Dubya is saying this in the face of overwhelming evidence pointing to the lack of a connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. But getting the facts wrong has never bothered this president when attempting to achieve a political end, has it?

You can read the Prez's whole speech here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:44 AM | Get permalink

No comment.

The morning brings us this report on the Iraqi constitutional talks:

U.S. concessions to Islamists on the role of religion in Iraqi law marked a turn in talks on a constitution, negotiators said on Saturday as they raced to meet a 48-hour deadline under intense U.S. pressure to clinch a deal.

U.S. diplomats, who have insisted the constitution must enshrine ideals of equal rights and democracy, declined comment.

Shi'ite, Sunni and Kurdish negotiators all said there was accord on a bigger role for Islamic law than Iraq had before.

But a secular Kurdish politician said Kurds opposed making Islam not "a" but "the" main source of law — a reversal of interim legal arrangements — and subjecting all legislation to a religious test.

"We understand the Americans have sided with the Shi'ites," he said. "It's shocking. It doesn't fit American values. They have spent so much blood and money here, only to back the creation of an Islamist state ... I can't believe that's what the Americans really want or what the American people want."

Via Reuters.

More: While we didn't comment, Jeanne did

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:11 AM | Get permalink

Friday, August 19

Dubya's a winner!

As of today, he's just broken Ronald Reagan's record for the most days away from the White House for a US president. It took Reagan all eight years of his presidency to accumulate 235 days. Dubya, on the other hand, has amassed 236 days in less than five years.

Amazing what the guy can do when he really makes an effort, ennit?

[This Washington Post article discusses the count as it stood at the beginning of August.]

Via Daily Pick.

More: A reader correctly points out that Dubya's record is for a recent US president, not for all presidents. Sorry for the mistake.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:46 PM | Get permalink

Why did Casey Sheehan die?

Since Dubya won't meet with Cindy Sheehan and explain why her son died in Iraq, journalist Aaron Glantz offers up what he knows. Glantz was an unembedded journalist in Sadr City during the US attempt to crush the movement of Shi'ite cleric Muqtada Sadr. Casey Sheehan was killed during that fighting.

Via IPS.

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:44 AM | Get permalink

In the forecast ...

More stolen elections, says Paul Krugman in his current column looking at books and reports on fraud in the US elections of 2000, 2002, and 2004.

We aren't going to rerun the last three elections. But what about the future?

Our current political leaders would suffer greatly if either house of Congress changed hands in 2006, or if the presidency changed hands in 2008. The lids would come off all the simmering scandals, from the selling of the Iraq war to profiteering by politically connected companies. The Republicans will be strongly tempted to make sure that they win those elections by any means necessary. And everything we've seen suggests that they will give in to that temptation.

If you were on Mars or someplace during the last three elections, Krugman's column will help bring you up to speed on the dirty deeds that were done.

Via NY Times.

| | Posted by Magpie at 7:45 AM | Get permalink

Thursday, August 18

Oh, what shall I be?

Given our vast native charm and beauty, perhaps we should go to charm school and become a model?

In Mapgie's future?

Ooops! We forgot about some of those nasty problems that crop up from time to time.

Maybe not.

Maybe we'll settle for being a blogger, instead.

The images are from a mid-1960s game called 'What Shall I Be? The Exciting Game of Career Girls.' And exciting it is. There are so many careers to choose from: Teacher, Model, Dancer, Actress, Airline Hostess, and Nurse. The mind just boggles.

There's general info about the game here. And bradley's almanac has even more pictures of the game here.

Via Boing Boing.

More: From Bitch Phd, here's a link to the boys' version of the game. It's no surprise that the boy careers are: Statesman, Scientist, Athlete, Doctor, Engineer, and Astronaut.

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:35 AM | Get permalink

Something to hide, perhaps?

Yesterday, we posted about how the official police story about the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes is falling apart. De Menezes, you'll remember, is the Brazilian man who police shot and killed in a tube station in the belief he was a terrorist.

Today, the UK Guardian reports that Scotland Yard head Sir Ian Blair attempted to stop an independent investigation of the shooting:

Sir Ian wrote to John Gieve, the permanent secretary at the Home Office, on July 22, the morning Jean Charles de Menezes was shot at short range on the London tube. The commissioner argued for an internal inquiry into the killing on the grounds that the ongoing anti-terrorist investigation took precedence over any independent look into his death.

According to senior police and Whitehall sources, Sir Ian was concerned that an investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission could impact on national security and intelligence. He was also understood to be worried that an outside investigation would damage the morale of CO19, the elite firearms section working under enormous pressure....

Later that same day, after an exchange of opinions between Sir Ian, the Home Office and the IPCC, the commissioner was overruled. A Whitehall insider said: "We won that battle. There's no ambiguity in the legislation, they had to do it."

But a statement from the Met yesterday showed that despite the agreement to allow in independent investigators, the IPCC was kept away from Stockwell tube in south London, the scene of the shooting, for a further three days. This runs counter to usual practice, where the IPCC would expect to be at the scene within hours.

The continuing revelations of police misconduct during and after the shooting is not going over well — especially with de Menezes' family. The family's lawyer, Harriet Wistrich, has called for Sir Ian Blair to resign:

The lies that appear to have been put out, like the statement from Sir Ian Blair, for instance, are clearly wrong. And nobody has stepped in to correct the lies.

"From the beginning, the most senior of police officers and government ministers, including the prime minister, claimed the death of Jean Charles to be an unfortunate accident occurring in the context of an entirely legitimate, justifiable, lawful and necessary policy.

"In the context of the lies now revealed, that claim has become even less sustainable and even more alarming."

Via UK Guardian.

| | Posted by Magpie at 8:09 AM | Get permalink

Could we borrow the lesbian, please?

A public library in Malmo, Sweden has added some unusual items to its collection. In an attempt to help break down prejudice and help city residents gain insight into people from other backgrounds, the library is letting borrowers 'check out' people.

A homosexual, an Imam, a Muslim woman, a gypsy and a journalist will be among nine people available for members of the public to borrow this weekend. Easy to locate within the Dewey Decimal System, lenders will borrow the human items for a 45 minute chat in the library's outdoor cafe.

The project is being launched in the hopes of altering such preconceived notions as all animal rights activists are aggressive, all lesbians are sexually frustrated and that journalists are a bunch of know-it-all sensationalists.

This is a really great idea, and deserves better than the rather cutesy treatment it received in most of the media reports we've seen. [A nice exception is this piece produced for 'The World Today' on Australia's ABC Radio.] We hope there are follow-up stories on how the 'borrowing' went.

Via librarian.net.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:01 AM | Get permalink

Ooooooh, shiny!

Astronomers have long thought that our home galaxy, the Milky Way, had a spiral form much like the Andromeda Galaxy. However, a newly completed structural analysis of the Milky Way using the Spitzer Space Telescope shows that it's actually a much rarer [and quite beautiful] barred spiral galaxy, as shown in the artist's conception below.

The Milky Way's new look

The Milky Way's new look
[Illustration: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC/Caltech)]

Using the orbiting infrared telescope, the group of astronomers surveyed some 30 million stars in the plane of the galaxy in an effort to build a detailed portrait of the inner regions of the Milky Way. The task, according to Churchwell, is like trying to describe the boundaries of a forest from a vantage point deep within the woods: "This is hard to do from within the galaxy."

Spitzer's capabilities, however, helped the astronomers cut through obscuring clouds of interstellar dust to gather infrared starlight from tens of millions of stars at the center of the galaxy. The new survey gives the most detailed picture to date of the inner regions of the Milky Way.

You can read more about the research that led to the new view of our galaxy's structure here. You can look at a much larger version of the illustration if you go here.

Via Follow Me Here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:00 AM | Get permalink

Wednesday, August 17

Adding insult to injury. And then injuring 'em again.

That's pretty much what's happening to the Kelo 7 at the hands of the New London Development Corporation (NLDC).

Before your brain short-circuits from confusion, let's go back a few months to the US Supreme Court's decision in the case of Kelo v. New London. In that case, seven property owners in New London, Connecticut were fighting a decision by the city's redevelopment agency (the NLDC) to use its power of eminent domain to condemn their property so that the city could build a convention center and upscale housing on the land. Despite the Kelo 7's argument that that the need for economic development was not sufficient justification for the city's use of eminent domain, the Supremes found that the condemnations were constitutional.

So the Kelo 7 lost their fight and, obviously, their property. You would think that it couldn't get much worse, could it? Obviously you hadn't taken the lovely folks at the NLDC into account.

As it stands now, not only are the Kelo 7 having to give up their homes, but the NLDC is demanding that they pay five years worth of rent to the city — covering the time from the condemnations in 2000 until the Supreme Court decision earlier this year.

An NLDC estimate assessed [property owner Matt] Dery for $6,100 per month since the takeover, a debt of more than $300K. One of his neighbors, case namesake Susette Kelo, who owns a single-family house with her husband, learned she would owe in the ballpark of 57 grand. "I'd leave here broke," says Kelo. "I wouldn't have a home or any money to get one. I could probably get a large-size refrigerator box and live under the bridge."

Plus the city wants to pay for the condemned properties not at their current values, but at the year 2000 values (which are considerably lower).

"I can't replace what I have in this market for three times [the 2000 assessment]," says Dery, 48, who works as a home delivery sales manager for the New London Day . He soothes himself with humor: "It's a lot like what I like to do in the stock market: buy high and sell low."

Plus the NLDC is threatening to sue the property owners if they don't cave into these demands right now.

Ain't it great to live in the Land of the Free?

Via Fairfield County [CT] Weekly and The Gadflyer.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:18 PM | Get permalink

Another strange thing from the Cambrian.

A half-billion year old fossil from China is confounding scientists' efforts to classify it.

The animal, called Vetustodermis planus, was originally discovered in 1979. Vetustodermis was a relatively small creature (5?10 cm/2#150;4 inches long with a flat body and horizontal fins that it may have used to support itself while moving along the sea floor. It also had a pair of eyes at the end of stalks.

The problem with Vetustodermis is that its bundle of features don't fit comfortably into any known animal family. Initially, it was classified as an annelid (a group that includes modern worms). Soon, however, other scientists argued that it was a crustacean (think lobsters) or an arthropod (ditto spiders).

What kind of animal is this?

Vetustodermis planus

According to the latest study, the weird creature seems closest to molluscs, primarily because it had a snail or slug-like flat foot. However, the researchers say, it does not sit happily in this group.

"Phyla are defined by an organism having a set of features called characters, and currently there are no animals that we know of which contain the set of characters that Vetustodermis has," co-author David Bottjer, of the University of Southern California, US, told the BBC News website.

"The phylum with which it shares the most characters is the Mollusca, but squeezing Vetustodermis into the mollusca is a somewhat messy job."

Since Vetustodermis requires some "pushing and pulling" to force it into any known phylum, Professor Bottjer and his colleagues are tempted to speculate it belonged to a different group entirely; one which flourished and faded within the Cambrian....

Jonathan Todd, a palaeontologist from the Natural History Museum, London, UK, is also mystified by the baffling animal.

"It is an intriguing beast," he told the BBC News website. "It is another strange thing from the Cambrian. It doesn't look much like an arthropod and I don't find it molluscan affinities particularly convincing."

Personally, we think Vetustodermis looks like Spongebob Squarepants' pet Gary, but then Gary probably doesn't fit easily into any known animal group, either.

Via BBC.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:15 PM | Get permalink

Lies and more lies.

Reports in the UK press say that almost everything that British police have said about the shooting death of a Brazilian man believed to be a terrorist isn't true. Jean Charles de Menezes wasn't wearing a heavy padded jacket that was out of place in the warm weather (he had on a denim jacket); he wasn't running (he didn't even know he was being followed); and he didn't jump a ticket barrier (he was in so little of a hurry that he stopped to pick up a free newspaper).

And, as even the police have admitted, he wasn't a terrorist.

Needless to say, many people in the UK are demanding an explanation from police. PM Tony Blair, who defended the actions of the police in the days following the shooting, has so far had no comment on the new reports.

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:28 AM | Get permalink

Nothing suspicious here. Oh no.

Earlier this week, an Iraqi woman showed up at Cindy Sheehan's protest camp in Crawford, Texas to support the US presence in Iraq. This same woman, May Hassan Lamotte, later appeared on the MSNBC program 'Hardball' to express these views. [Crooks and Liars has the entire CNBC interview with Lamotte here.]

Who is this woman, anyway?

Who exactly is this woman, and why was she in Crawford?

From the press coverage, it would be hard to tell much. For example, here's an excerpt from an article about Sheehan's peace campe that appeared in several California newspapers:

One of the attendees, an Iraqi woman who recently moved to the United States, drove with her husband from Washington, D.C., to thank Sheehan for her sacrifice. But the woman, May Hasan Lamotte, 37, did not agree with Sheehan's call to pull the troops out of Iraq.

"I came after reading about Miss Cindy. They think their children are dead for nothing, and I am one who got freedom," Lamotte said. "I am grateful for her son and American soldiers. Everybody thinks (Casey) died for nothing. He gave his life as many other brave soldiers have to give me and my country freedom," she said.

Sounds like Lamotte and her husband just got so fired up about Sheehan's activities that they had to drive halfway across the country to oppose them. But who is the husband? The article didn't say.

The MSNBC interview gave a bit more information, identifying the husband as a 'journalist.' But his affiliation wasn't mentioned.

The rather important piece of information that the article and the interview didn't include is the fact that Lamotte's journalist husband is Greg Lamotte, who currently works for the Voice of America, a propaganda arm of the US goverment. VOA is forbidden by law from directly broadcasting to the US people — a restriction intended to keep the federal government from having a domestic broadcast outlet. Isn't it just a little suspicious that an employee of a government broadcaster and his wife decide to take a trip to Texas to oppose Cindy Sheehan, and that the wife just happens to get interviewed on 'Hardball'?

Let's make it clear: We're not saying that May Hassan Lamotte didn't have the right to go to Texas to oppose Cindy Sheehan, and that she didn't have the right to go on national television to make that opposition known. What we are saying is that MSNBC and the print media who covered Lamotte's comments had the responsibility to tell readers/viewers about who Lamotte's husband was. And we'd suggest that the print and electronic journalists who reported on her comments should have looked into why Lamotte and her husband 'just decided' to drive on down to Texas to oppose Sheehan's activities.

Personally, this story reminds us a lot of those reports before the first Gulf War about how the Iraqi occupiers of Kuwait were killing babies in hospital incubators. The grieving woman who appeared on television to make those charges turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US.

Via The Sideshow, Daily Kos, and Crooks and Liars.

| | Posted by Magpie at 8:10 AM | Get permalink

Making up.

Ted Rall has some ideas for how Halliburton can atone for overcharging in Iraq

Halliburton atones!

[Cartoon: � 2005 Ted Rall]
You can see the rest of Rall's suggestions here.

Via The Nation.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:05 AM | Get permalink

Guilty pleasures.

You know, the really guilty ones that you don't want anyone to know about. The hidden pleasures that, if revealed, will eliminate any chance of being cool. Ever.

Here, let Elaine Corden explain:

On a recent Wednesday, the broom and I were performing our usual pas-de-deux when the phone rang. I answered, without turning down the cranked stereo, to find one of my editors on the line. Not just any editor. A rock-snob, controller-of-an-uber-hip-music-rag editor. I turned the stereo off, but it was too late. He had caught me listening to "Emotions". Not even the BeeGees version. The schock-o'-the block Destiny's Child cover. I felt vaguely like a teenage boy caught in the, er, exploratory phase of adolescence. Shut the Door! Shut the Door!!! Turn the stereo down!!!

[Feeling guilty yet?]
But it was too late. There I was, caught red-handed with the musical equivalent of the Sears catalogue. My guilty pleasure was exposed.

The guilty pleasure is a singularly decadent weapon in the arsenal of personal musical satisfaction. Its very nature is an indulgence in individual desire, a delight not shared with friends or lovers, but rather furtively enjoyed when we think no one else is listening. Unlike revered legends or critically adored buzz bands, the crap we crank up on the sly is perhaps the truest indicator of who we are, or who we'd like to be, if just for a moment.

I guess what I'm saying, is, somewhere deep down inside my pasty-white, nerdlinger self, I long to be bootylicious.

Yes, even though we hate to come clean about it, this magpie has a veritable raft of guilty pleasures: Herman's Hermits. The Monkees. Boston. Heart (ooooh, 'Magic Man'!). There's more and worse, but that's all we'll admit to right now.

How about now?

[How about now?]
Now that we've confessed, how about you? Hmmmmmmm?

Via The Tyee.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:04 AM | Get permalink

Tuesday, August 16

We're not making this up. Honest.

The US Department of Homeland Security apparently thinks that the San Francisco Bay Area Puppeteers' Guild is harboring terrorists [PDF file].

For those not familiar with this dangerous organization, it's been implicated in the rise of known subversives such as Jim Henson of Muppets fame.

Via Boing Boing.

| | Posted by Magpie at 6:40 PM | Get permalink

Equal pay for women is such a radical concept.

If you're Dubya's nominee for the current vacancy on the US Supreme Court, that is.

Newly released documents make John Roberts look increasingly like a right-wing ideologue instead of a 'moderate' conservative. In a memo to White House counsel Fred Fielding (then his boss), Roberts expressed some pretty neanderthal notions about whether women should receive equal pay for equal work.

In a Feb. 20, 1984, memo, Roberts took sharp issue with a request by three female Republican lawmakers — then-Rep. Olympia Snowe of Maine, then-Rep. Claudine Schneider of Rhode Island, and Rep. Nancy Johnson of Connecticut. They had urged the administration to accept a federal district court decision requiring such pay in the state of Washington and wrote a letter to the White House saying "support for pay equity ... is not a partisan issue."

Roberts pulled no punches in his response. "I honestly find it troubling that three Republican representatives are so quick to embrace such a radical redistributive concept" as equal pay for comparable worth. The pay gap can be explained by seniority of male workers and the fact that women leave the work force for extended periods, he said.

In a separate memo to Fielding on Feb. 3, 1984, Roberts wrote, "It is difficult to exaggerate the perniciousness of the 'comparable worth' theory. It mandates nothing less than central planning of the economy by judges."

Olympia Snowe, incidentally, is now one of the US senators from Maine. She hasn't said how she'll vote on Roberts' confirmation.

Via SF Chronicle.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:20 PM | Get permalink

Is that all?

Jeez, we thought the Iraqis were dealing with the really big stuff ....

No biggie.

Thanks to Tom Tomorrow for the tip. We also shamelessly stole his image of today's NYT front page.

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:21 AM | Get permalink

Howdy!

A big Magpie howdy-do to some excellent blogs that we should have added to the blogroll long ago:

I Blame the Patriarchy
gendergeek
BOPNews

And finally, a blog for which we can offer no excuse for the fact that it's taken years for us to add it to the blogroll. We corvids really need to stick together!

Riba Rambles: Musings of a Mental Magpie

Go check 'em all out!

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:00 AM | Get permalink

Monday, August 15

No sensitivity award for the Prez.

Here's how Dubya responded to a question from the press, asking whether he'd take some time during the current week (in which he has no work scheduled) to meet with meet with Cindy Sheehan:

"I think it's important for me to be thoughtful and sensitive to those who have got something to say," he said. "But I think it's also important for me to go on with my life, to keep a balanced life."

We heard about Dubya's comments on the radio earlier, but somehow seeing them in print makes them even more obnoxious. If our brain wasn't already hurting from this post, Dubya's self-centered obliviousness would certainly have it throbbing full-throttle.

Via Washington Post.

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:44 PM | Get permalink

Bits & pieces.

One of the bigwigs in the Southern Baptists says that marriage means having children:

Willful barrenness and chosen childlessness must be named as moral rebellion. To demand that marriage means sex -- but not children -- is to defraud the creator of His joy and pleasure in seeing the saints raising His children. That is just the way it is. No kidding.

The fundamentalist Christian right couldn't make its agenda regarding marriage and birth control any clearer, could they? [Thanks, MetaFilter!]

Feminist Daily News reports that the incidence of female genital mutilation may be much higher in Iraq than previously believed.

Cartoonist Scott Bateman keeps adding to his Sketchbook of Secrets & Shame:

Scott Bateman cartoon

Climate researchers warn that pollution and land use changes in India could turn off the monsoon. [news@nature.com]

Russian authorities are warning that migrating birds may carry the avian flu virus to Europe and the Mideast in the next few months. The virus has just shown up in Chelyabinsk, which is just across the Urals from European Russia. [Reuters]

Cat and Girl investigate the mysteries of class structure:

Bump!

Always wanted to play the highland bagpipes? Now you can make a set of pipes for five bucks. {Thanks, Grow-a-brain!]

A little bird tells Arianna Huffington that John Bolton visited NY Times reporter Judith Miller in jail. Miller, you'll recall, is in jail for contempt of court because of her refusal to reveal the source(s) of her information about outed CIA operative Valerie Plame. It'll be interesting to see if this story has legs.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:40 PM | Get permalink

Guess what happened to this cartoon...

... on the way to US daily newspapers? (Hint: Right wingers weren't going to like it.)

You can read the full story of why there is another version of this Dan Piraro cartoon here.

You probably didn't get to see this cartoon

You probably didn't get to see this cartoon

We thought the last part of Piraro's comments was particularly interesting:

Piraro said King Features has never tried to censor him or caused him any trouble with the content of his cartoon. But it is a fact of life, he said, that people in the "heartland" have much more conservative views. And they are not afraid to complain if they see cartoons with references to things like gay marriage, abortion or the war in Iraq.

"It's different with a comic strip like Doonesbury," he said. "That's billed as a comic strip with a political voice. Bizarro is not, so we get a lot of complaints and screaming when I get even vaguely political."

Most of the complaints, he said, come from editors. Not generally from readers.

Putting that together with the rest of that story, it's clear that what happened to the cartoon is that some newspaper editors were afraid that there would be a bad reaction from right-wing readers. Not that there had been reaction, just that there might be some bad reaction.

Our brain hurts.

From SF Chronicle, via Romenesko.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:57 AM | Get permalink

Ooooooh, shiny!

A color-coded map of thousands of English nouns.

It's not a city, it's nouns.

The artwork is an interactive map of more than 33,000 words. Each word has been assigned a color based on the average color of images found by a search engine. The words are then grouped by meaning. The resulting patterns form an atlas of our lexicon.

The real map is bigger, and clickable. You can zoom in on any noun, and see different sets of related words. It's so cool!

You can find out more about the map here.

Via MetaFilter.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:00 AM | Get permalink

Sunday, August 14

Happy birthday to us!

Yep, it's this magpie's birthday!

(No, we won't tell you just how old we are. But one of our housemates just told us that our age today now makes us officially 'older than dirt.')

Although we don't like to talk about personal stuff here, the reason we haven't posted much for the past few weeks is because of the rough time we've had due to the demands of our cruel employer and wretched job. This past week, we finally gave up on the job and resigned, effective at the end of the month. While the end of our misery is now in sight, this magpie can definitely use some cheering up to get us through the next couple of weeks at work. That's why no amount of shame or embarassment can prevent us from trawling for birthday greetings in the comments.

Remember: Happy magpies post more often! (Depending on how you feel about our posts, that's either a promise or a threat.)

And if you happen to know of a nice writing or editing gig that can be done remotely from Portland, Oregon, that info will be gratefully accepted. If we land the gig, we'll name our next cat or first-born child after you (your choice).

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:59 PM | Get permalink

What Fox News and the right-wing echo chamber would have done to Rosa Parks.

Cenk Uygur has the whole story:

Limbaugh: "What did I tell you folks? These libs like Parks would rather live in France where they can sit anywhere they want on the bus. They hate America. They want special privileges to be able to sit anywhere they want. They hide behind the color of their skin to try to undermine this country."

[Note for the historically challenged: You can read about Rosa Parks' role in the US civil rights movement here.]

Via Huffington Post.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:14 PM | Get permalink

About that economic 'recovery' in the US.

It sucks, says yet another US government agency — in this case, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In a new report [PDF file], the NY Fed says that the current recovery is the worst in recent US history in terms of creating jobs.

Employment growth has been much slower than it has been in all post?World War II recoveries — including the 1990s recovery, when employment also took an extraordinarily long time to rebound. Typically, employment growth lags business cycle recoveries by three to four months. In the 1990s recovery, the lag was a little more than two years. In the current recovery, the lag is three to four years and, at the time of our writing, the labor market has not yet clearly recovered. [...]

The poor recovery in the labor market goes beyond sluggish job growth. While the rate of unemployment has been moderate, the duration of joblessness has been high three years into the recovery, and an exceptional proportion of persons not participating in the labor market want to work. In addition... a large share of jobs created in the recovery were temporary. Almost 30 percent of new jobs created from November 2001 to December 2004 were in the temporary-help services sector. During the 1990s recovery, only 10 percent of new jobs were in temporary-help services.

None of this information is new, particularly, but it bears repeating given the neverending rosy economic pronouncements from the Oval Office. What is especially important about this new report, as Hale Stewart points out at BOPNews, is that this is the third government report in the past few months to give the economy a failing grade. [The other reports came from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Congressional Budget Office.]

As the NY Fed points out elsewhere in its report, these bad economic numbers aren't just of academic interest: the ramifications of the sluggish economy can be grim for US workers:

The United States has only a limited safety net for workers. Those who lose their jobs risk losing health care or seeing their family drop from the middle class into poverty.

Of course, none of this seems to matter to Dubya and the other happy-talkers in his administration.

Via BOPNews.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:41 AM | Get permalink

You bloodthirsty human scum, we will transform your country into a sea of fire!

Your only chance to save yourself from annihilation is to check out the North Korean insult generator!

Via NK News.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:01 AM | Get permalink