Motley Moose – Archive

Since 2008 – Progress Through Politics

A Sense of Humor ~ Open Thread

I figured we needed another open thread and, since today is my birthday (blech!) I figured I’d start one.

The title is for this which I find very funny:

Photobucket

Yes, this is official campaign gear; donate at least $25 bucks and you can get one.  I’ll be placing my order on Friday.  Apparently, Drudge Report is already offended.  I ain’t linkin’ to that trash; you know where to look if you want to give the hits.

and this:

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Found this via Fred at Balloon Juice; originally belongs to blackwaterdog.

Talk amongst yourselves.


Categories: Uncategorized.

/ 65 Comments

65 comments

  2. Shaun Appleby

    Sadly my recent suggestion that Fukushima reactors Nos 2 and 3 also suffered complete meltdowns seems likely:


    Data shows meltdowns occurred at the No. 2 and No. 3 reactors of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, creating huge problems for the plant operator that had presented a more optimistic scenario.

    And like the No. 1 reactor, the melted fuel appears to have created holes in the pressure vessel of the No. 3 reactor, according to the data of Tokyo Electric Power Co. released May 16.

    Goshi Hosono, special adviser to Prime Minister Naoto Kan, acknowledged the likelihood of meltdowns at the No. 2 and No. 3 reactors.

    “We have to assume that meltdowns have taken place,” Hosono said at a news conference May 16.

    Meltdowns also likely occurred at No. 2, No. 3 reactors of Fukushima plant Asahi Shimbun 18 May 11

    The likely upshot is that it will take at least ten years to recover the cores and decontaminate the site, at enormous cost.  The funny part?  TEPCO’s response, “We have yet to be able to grasp the entire situation at the plant.”  We hear that.

  5. janicket

    Sometimes unlikely-looking ones:

    9.5.09.054h

    But whatever they look like, they’re good to hang out with:

    8.8.10.048n

    Don’t have to talk, even, just hang together, chillin:

    7.12.09.064h

  6. janicket

    And damn fine-looking, too:

    11.26.09.015h

    The fine-looking ones can look magnificent even when they’re fat and grubby:

    11.5.09.050h

    But even the finest-looking horse has it in him to look like a total doofus:

    5.25.09.088h

  8. HappyinVT

    A wonketteer’s campaign t-shirt suggestion:

    fuflans 106p ยท 5 hours ago

    they should do :

    ‘they killed osama bin laden and all i got was this lousy t-shirt’

  10. Shaun Appleby

    It may be that the greatest risk is the damage to the Japanese economy over time.  I’m guessing that recovery from the earthquake and tsunami would have been swifter than expected, but this…  The long-term consequences of what is starting to look like a worst-case scenario really shake up the odds.

    Japan had one of the worst GDP to debt ratios in the developed world before this tragic disaster.  Where they are going to come up with the billions to restore a significant fraction of their domestic agricultural and maritime food economy remains to be seen.

  11. spacemanspiff

    Love ya tons. Reading your posts always make me smile.

    I’ve said before you’re the spark under the Moose ass (lol!).

    Sending the most positive vibes your way.

    Huge hug!

  12. HappyinVT

    The Alaska Supreme Court has suspended the law license of former U.S. Attorney Wevley Shea, finding “clear and convincing evidence” that he violated professional rules of conduct.

    The high court on Wednesday adopted the recommendations of a disciplinary board, which called for Shea’s Alaska license to be suspended for 25 months. The board also said Shea must demonstrate that he is “mentally fit” to return to practicing law before applying for reinstatement of his license.

    snip

    Bar counsel Steve Van Goor said that if the court believed that type of conduct had occurred, it would have been reflected in the opinion. It wasn’t. Van Goor said that in his 28 years as bar counsel, he’s never seen the Supreme Court issue an order in a disciplinary case so soon after oral arguments as it did in this case. He said his read on that is the court felt it needed to take action as soon as possible.

    snip

    Shea is a former U.S. Attorney for Alaska who served in the early 1990s. Later, when Sarah Palin was governor, he helped draft ethics reform recommendations for her administration.

    Read more: http://www.adn.com/2011/05/18/…

  14. HappyinVT

    We’ve staffed basically down to the bare bones.  We’ve had to take at least three weeks unpaid vacation and there is more “consolidation” coming in the next 18 months or so that may land me either out of a job or part-time.  Subscriptions are down, advertising is down, customer satisfaction is down, USA Today is no longer the #1 daily paper.

    But Gannett CEO is feeling no pain…

    Photobucket

    I really need to pull my head out of my ass, get some personal stuff cleared up, and find another frakin’ job.

  15. HappyinVT

    I, for one, would hate to see Newt Gingrich withdraw from the presidential scramble so early. There’s still so much damage left to do — notwithstanding the titantic self-destruction his party has already wrought — and Newt was, I thought, the man to do an outsized share of it. Circus clown Trump is gone, revivalist Huckabee is out, Palin is confined to her panic room, and virtually everyone else on the mere edge of temptation, such as Mitch Daniels, is too smart to engage what promises to be an apocalyptic election year for the GOP.

    I persist in the decidedly minority opinion that the eventual loser to Barack Obama will be Tim Pawlenty, assuming Pawlenty doesn’t doze off or put the Republican base to sleep before the nominating convention. I’ve been saying this since at least August, 2009, and I’ve yet to see any formidably countervailing forces arise. Jon Huntsman has potential, but so far, unlike Pawlenty, he’s shown a resistance to degrading his former respectable self; which leaves Mitt Romney, who, despite $10 million days, has a functioning ticker called RomneyCare in the bomb-case of his campaign. http://pmcarpenter.blogs.com/

    The rest of the piece is pretty good, too.

  16. HappyinVT

    Ovide Lamontagne who is apparently a conservative newly-minted kingmaker as a former almost-won Senate candidate.  I guess he’s testing the waters but how he gets out of the primaries is beyond me.

  17. HappyinVT

    Conservative elites swoon over Mitch Daniels’ fiscal conservative bona fides, but the Indiana governor says he’s “probably not” ready for a foreign policy debate with President Barack Obama.

    Daniels passed on a chance to criticize Obama’s Afghanistan troop surge Tuesday, telling reporters in New York that the commander-in-chief is privy to top secret information he does not have. The comments came as he’s on a three-day East Coast swing, with a major education speech at the American Enterprise Institute set for Wednesday afternoon in Washington.

    The group of reporters included National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru, who reported Daniels’ frank “probably not” response to the question of if he could engage Obama in a foreign policy debate at the moment.

    “His foreign-policy details are TBD,” Ponnuru wrote.

    Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/s…

    or this?

    Daniels accepted an invitation from those 55 students to meet at a spacious bar several blocks away after the event; he sipped Woodford Reserve bourbon as he asked them about their own lives and families. In return, they asked him who he might like to tap as his vice presidential nominee if he runs.

    Hypothetically, he told them, he’d like to pick Condoleezza Rice. http://www.realclearpolitics.c…  

    There is also the issue of his wife running off to California with another woman’s husband (and divorcing Mitch) before coming back.  I don’t care but some voters might.

  18. Shaun Appleby

    And interesting to see Geithner in a different context:


    Geithner expanded on a framework for $4 trillion in savings over 12 years laid out by President Obama in April, beginning with a substantial down payment of spending cuts and the closure of tax loopholes this year, and a debt fail-safe that would force lawmakers to take action in 2013 to stabilize the debt. Failure to act would mean automatic cuts in spending and the closure of tax breaks; implicit in the deal is the expiration of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.

    “The size of the remaining cuts in spending will depend in part on the future of the Bush tax cuts, which without new legislation will expire at the end of 2012,” Geithner said. Overall, the framework would bring deficits down to 3 percent of the gross domestic product in 2015, enough to stabilize the national debt as a share of GDP and begin reducing it over time as the nation’s economy grows.

    Alternative plans to solve fiscal problems, Geithner said, were not viable.

    Tim Fernholz – Geithner, Defending Obama Plan, Says GOP Owns Potential U.S. Default National Journal 18 May 11

    Never saw him as a man of the people but maybe others in the Goldman-Sachs crowd are in on this too, given the circumstances, and alternatives.  Republicans are scaring everybody, it seems.  And he said, “the GOP would “own” the ensuing economic consequences, which include a potential default on the government’s debt.”  I’m guessing they would, too.

    I’m guessing the Bush tax cuts and tax loophole battle is coming our way, thanks to the Republicans scare-mongering over the deficit.

  19. fogiv

    Is truth stranger than conspiracy-theory fiction? A new book on Area 51 that’s already generating a ton of buzz says there was no alien spacecraft that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. Instead, Stalin did it–maybe.

    According to Annie Jacobsen, the reporter who authored “Area 51,” the spaceship was actually a Soviet spy plane that came down during a storm. Jacobsen claims it was filled with bizarre, genetically engineered child-sized pilots. Then-Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was hoping, Jacobsen alleges, that the news would cause widespread panic in the U.S.

    http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_…

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