Month: May 2010

Gov. Brewer removes AG Goddard from immigration law defense.

Let me put it a different way: Gov. Jan Brewer (R, AZ-GOV) removes AG Terry Goddard (D-CAND, AZ-GOV) from the defense of the illegal immigration law that the former supports and the latter opposes.

Late Friday night as the Memorial Day weekend began, Arizona’s Republican Gov. Jan Brewer, in effect, suspended the state’s Democratic attorney general from defending the new law in upcoming legal challenges. The measure, known as S.B. 1070, is due to take effect this summer and, among other things, allows local police under federal guidelines to check the immigration status of people they stop.

[snip]

The governor’s abrupt action against Terry Goddard, her likely Democratic opponent in this fall’s gubernatorial election, came after months of disputes between the two and at the end of a long day of legal maneuvering in both Arizona and the nation’s capital.

Continue reading Gov. Brewer removes AG Goddard from immigration law defense.

Simultaneous Volcanic Eruptions in Central, South America.

Coincidence?

In Guatemala, the Pacaya volcano began spewing lava, rocks and debris on Thursday, killing at least two people and injuring more than 50 others.

In Ecuador, the Tungurahua volcano forced the evacuation of seven villages and shut the airport and schools in Guayaquil, the country’s largest city.

There is no suggestion the upsurge in volcanic activity is related.

Interestingly, there’s a report that another volcano – this one, in Iceland – is showing signs of a possible eruption. It’s apparently going to be a Year of the Volcanos. Mind you, all of these are on different tectonic plates… which I fully expect to be told doesn’t matter, for various arcane scientific reasons. Ach, well, it saves me the time of spending four hours looking it up for myself.

Moe Lane

#rsrh Giant oily super-hurricanes of DOOM.

(Via AoSHQ) So, CNN wants you to know that SOMETHING COULD HAPPEN:

A predicted busy hurricane season this summer is on a collision course with an unprecedented oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the results are anyone’s guess, weather experts say.

…and then they proceed to guess the three or four worst-case scenarios, ranging from destruction of the undersea life to and oily super-hurricane of DOOM aimed straight at Haiti. Which, admittedly, is a possible scenario; that it’s also a scenario guaranteed to increase hitcount for CNN is not really addressed.

And, shoot, it worked, didn’t it?

Moe Lane

‘Word Up.’

My God, it’s like they took every single cliche from 1980s music videos and put them onscreen. I cannot believe that I have never seen this before; they must have locked in a vault until the stars were no longer right.


Word Up, Cameo

And yes, that’s apparently Levar Burton in there. No doubt praying that nobody would ever notice him afterward. Which is a reasonable prayer; the man’s best known role had him wearing a headband over his eyes.

Mark Twain’s autobiography to be published.

Now, I know what you’re saying. You’re saying, “So what? The Autobiography of Mark Twain has been out for almost a century.”

No no no no no. That was something they cobbled together out of a bunch of manuscript pages. This is the whole thing, which Mark Twain supposedly insisted not be published until he’d been dead for a hundred years. If you’ve read Twain’s later works and know a little something about his later life, you may understand why we might have something a bit… controversial here.

Moe Lane

SF throws a protest and everybody comes.

Good God but this hurts my head:

If you can’t watch that video, it’s of the San Francisco protest against Obama… which had freaking everybody. And I mean everybody: they had the full protest spectrum out*. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard conservatives chant “Hey hey ho ho: Barbara Boxer’s got to go.” At least, I think that’s what they were chanting.

Fausta also links to Zombie, who has more pictures of the protest. The very, very surreal protest.

Moe Lane Continue reading SF throws a protest and everybody comes.

I wonder who got fired over the Birnbaum oopsie.

Actually, knowing this administration, I wonder if somebody got fired for it:

It was a remarkable moment in President Barack Obama’s press conference Thursday: just hours before, the head of the Minerals Management Service had left the top post at the agency that oversees offshore oil drilling.

And yet, the president said he didn’t know whether Liz Birnbaum had resigned or been fired.

If he or she didn’t get fired… well, the First Commandment of the White House Staff has always been Thou Shalt Not Make The President Look Like A Blithering Idiot* In Public.  It would be positively uncivil of me to try to encourage the executive branch of government to regularly transgress said commandment, at least until we get a President from my party in the Oval Office again.

Moe Lane Continue reading I wonder who got fired over the Birnbaum oopsie.