Triage

Click image for full Bruce Beattie/Daytona Beach News-Journal cartoon.

Third degree

Click image for full Bruce Plante/Tulsa World cartoon.

Nerds needed

The discovery of Jaycee Dugard after nineteen years happened in an office. Two police officers (o.k., reading between the lines, Lisa Campbell is apparently not a sworn officer, but whatever) left their bullshit detectors running, and Phillip Garrido would have set off even a fully squelched bullshit detector. They were tech savvy enough to confirm immediately that Garrido warranted scrutiny.

None of the many law enforcement personnel who went to Phillip and Nancy Garrido's doorstep over those nineteen years discovered Jaycee because they were insufficiently informed and insufficiently suspicious. They never looked at the extent of his backyard. Here's a property record they could have pulled up from their very own city's geographical information system:


This is basic preparatory information that I found in less than 30 minutes, despite the crudeness of Antioch's search function. Don't cops all have laptops in their patrol cars? Don't parole officers have access to the Internet?

Armed with this plat and with the fact that Garrido was a registered and paroled serious sex offender, law enforcement could have taken neighbor reports seriously enough to really look into all the blue tarps and sheds.

There's a wealth of information on the web that could help prevent law enforcement errors. (Think, never enter the wrong house to execute a warrant again!) What we need are more nerds in any position that requires access to information.

Missing in action

Hop across the big pond for this report (h/t R. Neal on KnoxViews) on threats against President Obama. Maybe overwork is why the Secret Service couldn't be troubled to arrest William Kostric.

Who's MIA? The American media.

Light summer reading

Hey, is that a thriller?

Click image for full Rob Rogers/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette cartoon.

Thinks he's Stevie Wonder

Using primitive religion to buffalo and bullshit irrational followers - who would do that?

Click image for full Tim Eagan/Press-Democrat cartoon.

On Paine of death

Glenn Greenwald lays a smack-down on pro-torture right-wingers. Support for torture is a mainstream Republican principle. They have surrendered their founding American ideals - if they ever had them.

Teddy's dead

Ted Kennedy was human, flawed like the rest of us. I know other people who have been in fatal traffic accidents. I know other people who have made bad and selfish career decisions. I know lots and lots of people who have drunk too much. I know other people who have divorced and fooled around, often not in that order. I know other people who lived as long as they could with terminal brain cancer. I know other people who have healed their fractious families even when they needed healing themselves. In fact, there are many of these people in my own family.

Without the riches and reputation of his family, Ted would never have had the chance to do what he did. But given that chance, he made a tremendous difference. Who cares that greatness was thrust upon him! He then worked his whole life to achieve greatness all over again.

I remember a Kennedy floor demonstration at a Massachusetts Democratic Party convention some years ago. We delegates were of course cheering and stamping our feet, but Ted's people flowed in from the wings with signs to make as much joyful noise as they could. They were different from the delegates. They weren't the polished public people who get voted to go to the convention. They were the halt and the lame, the laborers and the fishermen, the grandmothers and the families. They were people that Ted had helped, and they were loyal to him, as he was to them.

I met Ted Kennedy just once, at Kennedy's Pub (no relation) in Marlborough, where he was playing second fiddle to Luis Tiant. He was obese and drinking seltzer or a soft drink. He leaned firmly against a high stool backed up to the wall in order to ease the pain in his back. He seemed to love what he was doing. How else could he have done it so long and so well?

Ted achieved the distinction of living out his natural life making America a more perfect union. I'll miss him.

Who speaks for the bank man?

Well-paid lobbyists! Free market conservatives on both sides of the aisle. TV shills.

Click image for full Tom Tomorrow/Salon cartoon.

Split the difference between lies and arguments

The utter failure of the America press to write the truth is on display here. Republican bullshit gets pride of place in the first three paragraphs, ending with:

The [Seniors’ Health Care Bill of Rights] includes protecting Medicare from major cuts, preserving the doctor-patient relationship, banning any rationing of care or interference in end-of-life decisions, guaranteeing that seniors can keep their current coverage, and protecting current veterans’ health care programs.

The rest of the story is limited to Medicare cuts, the sole real issue, leaving five lies unrebutted.

One silver lining: The DNC is finally attacking what should already be the non-existent credibility of the entire Republican Party:

“It should be no surprise that the Republican Party - which whipped many Americans into a frenzy at town hall meetings on health care this month by spreading one lie about reform after another - has now taken to scaring seniors who have nothing to fear and much to gain from reform,’’ Brad Woodhouse, spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement.

Baldwin on points

The first round of Alec Baldwin vs. Joe Lieberman goes to Baldwin. Lieberman started with a tiresome old Reaganesque chestnut, badly delivered:

“You know, make my day.”

Baldwin, who disclaims any intent to run, offers this rejoinder:

"Part of me would hate to see Lieberman go, because there are so few moderate Republicans left in the Senate today."

Lieberman is going to need better writers, at least until Democrats get a candidate.

007 percent solution

James Bond health care. No, not NHS. Say live and let die.

Click image for full Jeff Danziger cartoon.

When liberals attack

Click image for full Joel Pett/Lexington Herald-Leader cartoon.

Shocking exposé

Everything the skeptics claimed about the Bush administration has turned out to be true. Only the lunatic Lyndon LaRouche conspiracy theorists overestimated the Bushists' criminality, and now they're hand in glove with the teabaggers.

Click image for full John Cole/Scranton Times-Tribune cartoon.

Coming distractions

The VA was handing out piles of bonuses to technical employees in 2007 and 2008. A grandstanding Republican Congressman (yes, all sorts of redundancies in those three words) wants, nay, demands an investigation:

"I am extremely troubled by the Inspector General's findings," said Richard Burr, R-NC, the ranking Republican on the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee. "I believe Congress should use its oversight authority to further investigate these matters," he said in an e-mail to CNN.

The point that will likely be forgotten about this: It happened during the reign of the Bushists, when Burr and the rest of the Republicans opposed anything resembling oversight of the executive branch.

The next step in the laundering of bullshit into conventional wisdom will be some wingnut blogger blaming this on President Obama.

Note: The VA, which is socialized medicine, delivers better care more cheaply than the dominant semi-private part of American health care, even with these bonuses.

Different kind of tail-chasing

My hiking experience has almost entirely been in heavily forested mountains, where it's just as impossible to go in a circle as it is to go in a straight line. In mountains, topographic features are what matter to navigation.

Still, it's easy to get disoriented in mountains, especially when you're a tiny little ant on the feature and it's too large to use it to orient yourself. The reported finding, in keeping with long anecdotal experience, is one more feature of human behavior to watch for when navigating without the crutch of a GPS.

Well-known advice bears repeating:

“Your job as the lost person is to sit down,” [Carroll M. Ware, a licensed guide in Maine,] said. “By moving you make everybody’s job more difficult.”

This is good advice even if you're still oriented to the local features. It's very easy to over-exert, even if you don't panic, and make a little trouble into a lot of trouble.

Where does the money go?

This is why we need single-payer - no sweeteners needed to purchase insurance company approval. Single-payer is the only way to get costs in line with world-wide norms - and in time there will be no way we can escape that unless we decide that half our population can do without non-emergency health care.

A real public option is the only proposal that could possibly evolve over time into single-payer. That's why the Blue Dog Democrats and the Republicans are fighting so hard on behalf of their insurance industry sponsors to kill every competitive public option.

Someone's lying

Maybe it's both of them. They are, after all, both Bushists.

My natural inclination is to believe anything plausible that casts the Bushists in a bad light. I already believed that they manipulated threat levels for baldly political purposes. They manipulated everything for baldly political purposes, right up to the stove-piped intelligence they used to manipulate the people and the Congress into the panic that put us stupidly into Iraq.

Mass hysteria

Happily, no!

Over budget but a success and not very costly - not 40% of the budget, not 4% of the budget, 0.4% of the budget.

Biconservativeship

Republicans are thrilled with bipartisanship just so long as it's the effort to find the sweet spot of compromise between the center-right and the extreme right. Otherwise, they'll take their ball and go home.

It's long past time to fight back.