Author: swanksalot

Always good to have a second user look at things

McCain and Gordon Liddy

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Talk about criminal associations! Gordon Liddy is a convicted criminal, and domestic terrorist, and a close friend of John McCain.

McCain has been friends with another violent political extremist: Gordon Liddy.

Liddy, who worked for President Nixon’s campaign, was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison for multiple crimes in burglarizing the Democratic National Committee office in the Watergate building–part of a broader plot to steal the 1972 election through sabotage, illegal spying and other dirty tricks. He even planned the murder of a journalist, though that idea was overruled. Bombings? He proposed the firebombing of a liberal think tank.

Liddy, now a conservative radio host, has never expressed regret for this attempt to subvert the Constitution. Nor has he developed any respect for the law. After the 1993 raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, he endorsed the shooting of federal agents: “Kill the sons of bitches.”

Yet none of this bothers McCain. Liddy has contributed thousands of dollars to his campaigns, held a fundraiser for McCain at his home and hosted the senator on his radio show, where McCain said, “I’m proud of you.” Exactly which part of Liddy’s record is McCain proud of?

[From Steve Chapman | Chicago Tribune | Blog]

So if you are eight years old, you have to exercise better judgement than when you are actively running for President? Double standard much?

Bookmarks for October 6th

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Some additional reading October 6th from 07:41 to 21:50:

Bookmarks for October 5th

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Some additional reading October 5th from 14:51 to 19:56:

  • Daily Kos: The Guilt By Association Game – “with John McCain facing the prospect of getting his ass handed to him in November, he has decided that the mavericky thing to do is to swift boat Barack Obama by playing the guilt by association game. Great idea, Senator Straight Talk…but it’s no fun to play alone, so let’s add a couple of more players:”
  • Daily Kos: Rabid Republicans in Rural MO: We. Hate. Her. (Updated) – “turns out that they really, really, really, really did not like the fact that Palin flat out did not answer many of the questions. They found that to be outrageous. After all, the entire reason they were watching the debate was to see her answer questions, doggone it.They also did not like all her attempts to be folksy. To them it just came off as, um, I think the word they used was “phony.” In fact, the candidate who seemed to them to be real and more like them was not Sarah Palin but Joe Biden.

    The women, in particularly, did not like Palin’s flirty, winky act. That went over like a lead balloon. And both the men and the women did not like her “Can I Call You Joe” schtick. They found that to be disrespectful to Senator Biden.”

  • Sound In Motion: Acoustic Submarine – “an AMAZING bootleg of The Beatles, culled from several (unfortunately unlisted) sources, but this 39 track collection is excellent in sound quality, song selection, and really, just rarity.”
  • boxee blog » xbmc/boxee on Apple TV – maybe if I get bored in the long winter months, I may try installing this on my Apple TV.

Bookmarks for October 4th through October 5th

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A few interesting links for October 4th through October 5th:

  • Day 28 – D & I often talk about a mandatory civilian corp too, we think its a great idea for our nation to get itself back in shape. Works in Israel, Holland, and elsewhere.

    "I'm all for a mandated year-long stint in the military or for some sort of civilian re-construction/community service corps for EVERYONE, right out of high school. I think it would have benefitted me. For this years' service (or two years?), you get college funding. T. definitely looked like a new person, and my home room was suitably impressed by her demeanor ("who dat Mr. G? She look cool!"). T. said she's passing all her classes at the Doug, something she was capable of last year but unfortunately we couldn't give her an environment conducive to learning.

    We need something to re-establish a sense of community in this country, to rinse off the years of "me and my own over everyone else" created by two and a half decades of dominant right-wing bullshit"

  • Obama's Favorite Restaurants: Food: Centerstage Staff: CenterstageChicago.com – For some reason, have never eaten at RJ Grunts. The rest of these Chicago restaurants I can vouch for (well, my disgust with Sepia notwithstanding). If pressed to narrow to one, I'd say Spiaggia, but Topolobampo would be a close second.

Bookmarks for October 3rd

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Some additional reading October 3rd from 09:28 to 18:09:

  • SuperSonicSoul on Economic Meltdowns, Stadiums, and NBA Owners – "The time has come for this country to quit subsidizing billionaires on the backs of taxpayers. If stadiums were such a great investment – as owner after owner tells city after city – then why are there so few owners willing to build stadiums? They certainly have no trouble coming up with the hundreds of millions to purchase the team, so why can't they come up with at least part of the money needed to house them?

    The answer is simple – because they play us for fools"

  • Winky Dinks – "She said what she wanted to say, and she was so relaxed she even winked at one point. Really! An actual wink during a national debate, when she said she was going to try to get John McCain to change his mind about not drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

    I hope that wink wasn't a lurid signal that Palin plans to bestow oral sex on her running mate to get him to change his mind about ANWR, breathily promising him that she'll show him the true meaning of drilling in Alaska if only he'll say yes. That would be so wrong on so many levels.

    Perhaps she intends only to "wink him off," to paraphrase the famous joke told by Jack Nicholson in The Last Detail. But even that would be a dismayingly inappropriate way to further the cause of domestic oil exploration, in my opinion. "

  • Fake pollsters' scare tactics target Obama | – "Barack Obama's campaign for the White House is receiving increasing complaints about scam pollsters involved in dirty tricks operations to discredit the Democratic candidate.

    Victims claim the fake pollsters work insinuations into their questions, designed to damage Obama. Those targeted in swing states such as Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania include Jews, Christian evangelicals, Catholics and Latinos."
    Criminals. Should be prosecuted.

  • There's something wrong with these people – Rich Lowry obviously doesn't go outside much if he thinks Sarah Palin was at all sexy when she winked at the television audience. Creepy, if you ask me, like a used-car salesman. But Lowry thought she was hawt!
    " I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, "Hey, I think she just winked at me." And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America"
  • More Random Debate Thoughts – "I'm sure I'm not the only female in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, rolled her eyes and thought: oh, dear God. We have all seen just that wink deployed at guys like Rich Lowry. We have all watched in amazement as it actually works, despite its transparent manipulativeness. What, we all wonder, could those guys possibly be thinking? (What the winking women are thinking is usually altogether too clear.) I'm betting that for every male vote that wink picked up, it lost at least one woman."
    Those winks were the most irritating debate tick I can ever remember, and even as a hetro male, irritated me beyond measure. Winks usually mean you've got something stuck in your eye, or you are suffering a stroke.
  • Macworld | Geotag your digital photos – still no perfect solution for a DSLR, but…
  • G.O.P. Holds to Firm Stance on Abortion – NYTimes.com – "The Republican Party platform this year will reassert the party’s opposition to abortion. And again it will not allow for exceptions in the cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother"
    pathetic
  • Pam's House Blend:: Biden, Palin and that pesky marriage thing – "Joe Biden's answer boxed in Sarah Palin, forcing her to give a feeble, confusing answer that probably left her supporters on the far right unhappy. One — she holds the same position on marriage as Obama/Biden, so that was off the table. Two — it left her to use a "some of my best friends are gay" position, and acknowledged that gay and lesbian couples deserve some rights. [BTW, the Log Cabin Republicans have no basis to say that Palin's comments reflect any evolutionary thinking on McCain/Palin's part, it only raises the question of what rights they intend to deny gay couples. …
    To have her say this before millions had to give James Dobson, Lou Sheldon, Gary Bauer and Tony Perkins agita. "
  • Over Van Alles En Nog Wat. » Blog Archive » The 10 big news stories the mainstream media IGNORED – "The daily dispatches and nightly newscasts of the mainstream media regularly cover terrorism, but rarely how fear of attacks is used to manipulate the public and set policy. That’s the common thread of many of the unreported stories last year, according to an analysis by Project Censored."

The Body as Bacterial Landlord

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Robert Lee Hotz has written an extremely fascinating look at our bacterial over-lords. If I wasn’t so busy, I’d love to create a treatment of this concept for a possible sci-fi thriller. Or something. Too interesting not to research further.

When scientists discovered that bacteria, not stress, caused most stomach ulcers, the insight overturned a century of medical dogma, transformed clinical practice and garnered a 2005 Nobel Prize for the two researchers who made the connection so many others had missed. After people adopted antibiotics to treat gastric distress, though, microbiologist Martin Blaser and his colleagues at New York University began to document an odd medical trend.

Ulcers did drop dramatically, as expected. So did the incidence of stomach cancer. As the bacteria, called Helicobacter pylori, virtually disappeared among children, however, cases of asthma tripled. So did rates of hay fever and allergies, such as eczema. Among adults, gastric reflux disease became more common, as did some forms of esophageal cancer, researchers noted.

To Dr. Blaser’s way of thinking, antibiotics and other sanitation measures are eliminating the harm these bacteria cause at the expense of the protection they provide us.

The human body teems with so many microbes that they outnumber our own cells ten to one. Vast schools of bacteria are in us and around us, like fish nuzzling a coral reef. “They are not simply along for the ride,” says Stanford University microbiologist David Relman. “They are interacting with us.”

Yet almost all of them are still unknown to science, since most cannot be grown and studied in the laboratory. In ways mysterious to medicine, this microbial menagerie of fellow travelers in and on us is controlling our health, affecting obesity, cancer and heart disease, among others.

[From The Body as Bacterial Landlord – WSJ.com]

Our constant interference with the body through use of anti-biotics has real consequences:

…As many as 500 species of bacteria may inhabit our guts, like H.pylori. Maybe 500 or so other species make themselves at home in our mouth, where each tooth has its own unique bacterial colony, Dr. Relman recently determined. No one knows how many species we contain in all. This past August, researchers at Kings College London identified yet another new species of oral bacteria between the tongue and cheek.

Until recently, half of humanity harbored these H. pylori stomach bacteria, according to a 2002 study in the New England Journal of Medicine. Indeed, we appear to have evolved together. Among those born in the U.S. during the 1990s, however, only 5% or so still carry these microbes, largely due to the indiscriminate use of antibiotics.

After analyzing health records of 7,412 people collected by the National Center for Health Statistics, Dr. Blaser and NYU epidemiologist Yu Chen reported this summer in the Journal of Infectious Diseases that children between three and 13 years old who tested positive for H. pylori bacteria were 59% less likely to have asthma. They also were 40% to 60% less likely to have hay fever or rashes.

Bacteria has evolved for billions of years, and is now an essential part of the human body

Last week, University of Chicago immunologist Alexander Chervonsky and his collaborators at Yale University reported that doses of the right stomach bacteria can stop the development of Type 1 diabetes in lab mice.

“By changing who is living in our guts, we can prevent Type 1 diabetes,” Dr. Chervonsky says.

Other bacteria are just as crucial to our well-being, feeding us the calories from food we can’t digest on our own, bolstering our immune systems, tending our skin and dosing us with vitamins, such as B-6 and B-12, which we are unable to synthesize unaided.

And there is work being done attempting to categorize the bacteria, and figure out what exactly each contributes to our body:

For the first time, researchers are attempting to identify and analyze the types of bacteria that live within us, in an effort that makes the Human Genome Project look like child’s play. Instead of sequencing the genes of one microbe at a time, researchers in a five-year, $125 million NIH effort called the Human Microbiome Project are analyzing entire communities of mixed bacteria at once, in a technique called metagenomics.

To start, researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., and the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md., are sequencing the genomes of 200 microbe species isolated from 250 healthy volunteers. They are sampling bacteria from the skin, gut, vagina, mouth and nose, then attempting to identify them by cataloging variations in a single gene sequence that all bacteria share.

If I was in school right now, this might be a very tempting field to enter.
[Digg-enabled access to full article via this link]

Bookmarks for October 2nd

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Some additional reading October 2nd from 17:19 to 23:58:

  • What's missing from this election? Molly Ivins – "The late buckaroo populist and freedom fighter would have had a ball with the insanity of this current news cycle."
  • Palin Debate Preview: The Primer – "That kind of incoherent word spray (or "word salad," if you like) is the result of GOPAC training, but Palin has created her own, supercharged brand of it. And as a result it's turned into a trademark hook that results in the opposite effect from that intended. Instead of smoothing over and hiding a candidate's unpreparedness on any (or in this case, every) given subject, it instead highlights it, and makes it jump out of your TV"
  • Biden Wins, Hands Down – "According to a CBS poll, 46 percent of uncommitted voters who watched the debate tonight thought Joe Biden was the winner. 21 percent thought Sarah Palin won, 33 percent thought it was a draw.
    According to a CNN poll, 51 percent of voters though Biden won, compared to 36 percent for Palin."
  • pandagon.net – shaver razorback palin – Amanda Marcotte finds some die-hard Palin supporters deep in the heart of Austin (near Wheatsville Co-op, I presume). There's always been plenty of rednecks in Austin, just usually they don't mingle with sane folk.