"Going Rogue"- The Cover

Holy schmoly. Via Ben. Below is my very first thought on seeing this.

Revealed: the secret evidence of global warming Bush tried to hide

By GottaLaff

UPDATE: Check this out.

The Ugly Bush Stain may be indelible this time.

My jaw just hit the floor... and then I staggered to a chair and collapsed. Just... read:

Graphic images that reveal the devastating impact of global warming in the Arctic have been released by the US military. The photographs, taken by spy satellites over the past decade, confirm that in recent years vast areas in high latitudes have lost their ice cover in summer months.

The pictures, kept secret by Washington during the presidency of George W Bush, were declassified by the White House last week. President Barack Obama is currently trying to galvanise Congress and the American public to take action to halt catastrophic climate change caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

One particularly striking set of images - selected from the 1,000 photographs released - includes views of the Alaskan port of Barrow. One, taken in July 2006, shows sea ice still nestling close to the shore. A second image shows that by the following July the coastal waters were entirely ice-free.

The photographs demonstrate starkly how global warming is changing the Arctic. More than a million square kilometres of sea ice - a record loss - were missing in the summer of 2007 compared with the previous year.

Nor has this loss shown any sign of recovery. [...]

The phenomenon threatens to set off runaway heating of the planet, say climatologists.The latest revelations have triggered warnings from scientists that they no longer have the funds to keep a comprehensive track of climate change. [...]

The Obama administration has already taken steps to tackle America's flagging scientific lead. The president's economic recovery plan allotted $170m (£100m) to help close the gaps in climate modelling. The NOAA is seeking an additional $390m in its 2010 budget to upgrade environmental satellites, and help make data more available to researchers and government officials.

See for yourself:

(click on image to enlarge)

I get frustrated with the ObamAdministration at times, but this is one area (among many others) where I support him 1000%. He gets it.

And BushCo, once again, has put all of our lives in danger.

Sarah Palin's pick for Alaska's Attorney General: “If a guy can’t rape his wife…who’s he gonna rape?”

By GottaLaff

UPDATE, HIS RESPONSE HERE.

UPDATE, what the Alaska legal community thinks about him.

Once again, Sarah Palin's common sense, taste, and sense of responsibility are, well, striking:

March 26, 2009, Anchorage, Alaska – Governor Sarah Palin today announced the appointment of Wayne Anthony Ross as Attorney General.[...]

Ross, currently in private practice, will fill the vacancy created last month by the resignation of Attorney General Talis Colberg. [...]

“Wayne Anthony Ross will be a great defender of Alaska and the people he serves," Governor Palin said. "With his vast legal knowledge, experience and integrity, he will make an exceptional Attorney General."

"Who's that?" you may be asking, "And why should I care?" Via Mudflats, we get the answer:

Tomorrow House Judiciary Committee will meet and take citizen testimony on the nomination of Wayne Anthony Ross to be our next Attorney General.

Leah Burton is on with CC, sharing her testimony regarding Wayne Anthony Ross. She is a former citizen lobbyist who worked on behalf of families and children concerning child support, child custody, domestic violence, child abuse and sexual assault.

She discusses a meeting of the group DADS, being run by Wayne Anthony Ross, and what she heard.

Numerous comments were made that were appalling, not the least of which were remarks by Mr. Ross which included the following: “If a guy can’t rape his wife…who’s he gonna rape?” and “There wouldn’t be an issue with domestic violence if women would learn to keep their mouths shut.”

Other members made their own contributions such as, “We have the right to discipline our wives and children without the interference of government in our lives!”

These comments were greeted with laughter and affirmative responses by the group. Given the fact that they had referred to me in recent months as a “femi-nazi”, the comments I was witness to at this meeting, while abhorrent, were unfortunately not surprising.

This announcement by Governor Palin is a slap in the face to all single parents who have no choice but to rely upon the State Department of Law to support court orders for child support, as well as those persons who need the Department to enforce criminal laws against sexual assault and domestic violence. Mr. Ross is the antithesis of the type of person that should be the Attorney General. This has been clearly demonstrated by his own words and actions in public.

In closing, I am not alone in my assessment that anyone who condones, and contributes to that type of hateful and harmful discourse clearly does not have the judgment necessary to represent the people of the State of Alaska as their Attorney General.

You can read her entire written testimony HERE.

To anyone out there who has accused me of being too hard on Sarah Palin, read this post again. If there's still the slightest question in anyone's mind about why she deserves the critical, snarky treatment she gets, then maybe those few should either reevaluate their own value system or go elsewhere.

Palin is fair game anyway, but after this particularly horrifying example of her total lack of judgment, my posts about her won't be going away any time soon, and the tone will most likely intensify. She just made sure of that.

The Queen approves. Okay?

By GottaLaff

What part of this does CNN not understand?

A Buckingham Palace spokesman who asked not to be identified because of palace policy said he could not remember the last time the queen had displayed such public affection with a first lady or dignitary.

"It was a mutual and spontaneous display of affection," he said. "We don't issue instructions on not touching the queen."

Today's top stories include: The G20 summit, President Obama's speech, Blagojevich is indicted, the House approves a budget blueprint, the economy, the economy, the economy, Afghanistan, Iraq, tobacco products will be regulated, the truth commission is on its last legs... okay, I'll stop here.

Whaddya think? Could those stories fill an hour of cable "news" [sic]? In Tee Vee Machine time, that's about 44 minutes, maybe less on cable. If you answered yes, and I answered yes, then why didn't CNN? Anderson Cooper devoted an entire segment to interviews with everyone he could drag in front of a camera about whether or not Michelle ::gasp!:: violated Queen Elizabeth.

Hold everything. No way. Anderson is at it again. It's seven minutes before the end of his show, and he's all over The Touch... again. The second time in an hour. Un. Be. Lievable.

The inconvenient truth hurts

By GottaLaff

This is why it matters who is in the White House. To all those Neanderthal ignorami who scoffed at Al Gore:

Even if by some miracle the nations of the world could bring carbon dioxide levels back to those of the pre-industrial era, it would still take 1,000 years or longer for the climate changes already triggered to be reversed, scientists said Monday.

Not 10, not 100, but 1,000 years. 1,000.

The gas already here and the heat that has been absorbed by the ocean will exert their effects for centuries, according to an analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Here are a few examples of Bush's war on science. Out of contact with reality much? While tin-eared naysayers were busy protecting special interests, things were getting seriously out of hand.

No, BushCo isn't solely responsible for this crisis, but they wasted 8 precious years ignoring the Inconvenient Truth and destroying the environment with their ugly Bush stains.

[C]hanges in rainfall patterns will bring droughts to the American Southwest, southern Europe, northern Africa and western Australia comparable to those that caused the 1930s Dust Bowl in the U.S.

"People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide, the climate would go back to normal in 100 years, 200 years," lead author Susan Solomon, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said in a telephone news conference. "That's not true."

The changes will persist until at least the year 3000, said Solomon, who conducted the study with colleagues in Switzerland and France.

Scientists familiar with the report said it emphasized the need for immediate action to control emissions. [...]

"The policy relevance is clear: We need to act sooner, even if there is some doubt about exactly what will happen, because by the time the public and policymakers really realize the changes are here, it is far too late to do anything about it," Trenberth said. [...]

The slowness with which ocean water circulates is central to the new findings. [...] That gas accounts for about half of the global warming caused by greenhouse gases, but the other gases are removed from the atmosphere more quickly. Thus, the long-term influence of carbon dioxide will have the greatest effect on climate change, the report said.

Moreover, heat absorbed by the ocean is released slowly, and will continue to contribute to global warming even if the concentration of greenhouse gases should decline, the authors said. [...]

Melting of the icecaps could increase sea levels even more, inundating low-lying islands and continental shorelines, but the effects are too uncertain to quantify, Solomon said.

Reductions in rainfall would also last centuries, the report said, decreasing drinking water supplies, increasing fire frequency and devastating dry-season farming of wheat and maize.

Sleep well.

Worst. Video. Ever. Brought to you by Ralph Nader

By GottaLaff

Wow. No, seriously. Wow:



Boo.

Kentucky In Play?

Well bless my buttons and call me Mildred.

Tom Daschle told me last night that the playing field could get even broader, in our story on Obama's offense, and McCain's defense:

Obama is weighing broadening a map that already appears big and red into four more states. A top adviser, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, said Obama is considering expanding his active campaign back into North Dakota and Georgia, from which he’d shifted resources, and into the Appalachian heartland of West Virginia and Kentucky.

“Those states are much more in play than they were a week ago,” Daschle said.