First Friday of the year - woo hoo! Everyone grab a hair of the dog and settle in for the nightly moronic round table.

The Top Viral Videos of the Last Decade Compilation
Who could forget the Star Wars kid? It's been a while so I'm guessing he must have finished college and therapy by now.

Posted by: Open Blog at 05:55 PM | Comments (762)
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I'd have to say Hayden is a walking embodiment of the 1960's "red diaper doper babys". Redder than Chairman Mao, thicker than a neutron star, and totally sworn to "the cause".

It's time to strip the Obama sticker off my car. Obama's escalation in Afghanistan is the last in a string of disappointments. His flip-flopping acceptance of the military coup in Honduras has squandered the trust of Latin America. His Wall Street bailout leaves the poor, the unemployed, minorities and college students on their own. And now comes the Afghanistan-Pakistan decision to escalate the stalemate, which risks his domestic agenda, his Democratic base, and possibly even his presidency...

If you're looking for a nice one-stop shopping list of who all the major hard left players are, its hard to beat the list on the right side of this site. Of course they think the only way democrats can avoid losing in 2010 is to continue lurching to the left.

Yea guys. Go with that.

[UPDATE] I forgot to add that it is painfully obvious now that Hayden must be some sort of racist hater and closeted member of StormFront or Aryan Nation.

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 02:14 PM | Comments (285)
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Video from enoxo.

Had an angioplasty angiogram but there was no cardiac episode.

Rush Limbaugh just addressed the media in Hawaii where he told reporters he did undergo an angioplasty, but he's doing just fine.

He did not suffer a heart attack or any kind of coronary episode and test show nothing wrong.

But in sad news -- I am really, really hung over.

Posted by: Ace at 01:02 PM | Comments (158)
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Dissent is the highest form of patriotism, except between January 20, 2009, and January 18, 2013.

Remember when dissent was supposed to be patriotic? Well, it seems that only applies when a Republican is president. Now that Barack Obama is in the White House, criticism of him is "un-American" and "traitorous." This new "tolerant" view of dissent comes from Joan Walsh of Salon.Com as you can see in this Hardball video from Wednesday. Below is the Walsh money quote but please be sure to also watch the video since it is important to watch as she drops any facade of liberal tolerance and lets her true dogmatic soul reveal itself in both her face and voice which seems to border on dementia:

The climate right now is that Republicans use everything they can to undermine and delegitimize this president. And it‘s actually un-American. It‘s traitorous, in my opinion. Do you want to give aid and comfort to our enemies? Continue to treat this president like he wasn‘t elected and he doesn‘t know what he‘s doing! He knows what he did. He knows what he‘s doing. I‘m proud of him. I believe that he has the stalwart, resolute nature to get this done...

Video at the link.

Traitorous? Really? To quote this for the hundredth time, here is Gary Kamiya, writing in Joan Walsh's Salon webzine, soon after the fall of Baghdad:

I have a confession: I have at times, as the war has unfolded, secretly wished for things to go wrong. Wished for the Iraqis to be more nationalistic, to resist longer. Wished for the Arab world to rise up in rage. Wished for all the things we feared would happen. I'm not alone: A number of serious, intelligent, morally sensitive people who oppose the war have told me they have had identical feelings.

Some of this is merely the result of pettiness--ignoble resentment, partisan hackdom, the desire to be proved right and to prove the likes of Rumsfeld wrong, irritation with the sanitizing, myth-making American media. That part of it I feel guilty about, and disavow. But some of it is something trickier: It's a kind of moral bet-hedging, based on a pessimism not easy to discount, in which one's head and one's heart are at odds.

Many antiwar commentators have argued that once the war started, even those who oppose it must now wish for the quickest, least-bloody victory followed by the maximum possible liberation of the Iraqi people. But there is one argument against this: What if you are convinced that an easy victory will ultimately result in a larger moral negative--four more years of Bush, for example, with attendant disastrous policies, or the betrayal of the Palestinians to eternal occupation, or more imperialist meddling in the Middle East or elsewhere?

Wishing for things to go wrong is the logical corollary of the postulate that the better things go for Bush, the worse they will go for America and the rest of the world.

So, if I have this right, wishing for greater numbers of US war dead is "patriotic," and criticizing Obama for screwing up everything he does -- something that already has a bodycount associated with it -- is "traitorous."

Ohhhkay.

Via this guy right here.

BTW I am so hung over.

Posted by: Ace at 11:30 AM | Comments (212)
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I know this isn't much of a sorts blog, especially hockey (you people can be cretins some times) but we did it last year and it was fun so have at it...the 2010 NHL Winter Classic from Fenway Park.

Turning a baseball field into a hockey rink.

This is probably the only thing the NHL has gotten right in years but when are they going to this in NY, Montreal or anywhere in Canada?

Old Time Hockey!

If Gary Bettman had his way, all footage of this incident (which just celebrated its 30 anniversary) would disappear.

BTW- Best sports movie ever? Slap Shot. On this can be no argument. Well, you can argue against it but you'll only make a fool of yourself.

Posted by: DrewM at 09:03 AM | Comments (219)
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Not just because 7 brave Americans died but there simply are not a lot of experienced CIA field operatives.

Wednesday's attack on a U.S. compound in Afghanistan devastated what has been a hub of counterterrorism and intelligence operations for the spy agency.

...Among the casualties was the agency's base chief, former intelligence officials said. There had been only four publicly acknowledged CIA fatalities in Afghanistan prior to this attack.

The Taliban claimed responsibility Thursday for the bombing, which was carried out by suicide bomber wearing an Afghan National Army uniform. Some senior officials think the bomber may have been given access to the base because he was believed to be an informant, said two former intelligence officials.

Several former intelligence officials described the attack in Afghanistan as "devastating" to the agency. A number of the officers killed had been counterterrorism operatives since before the 9/11 attacks.

...Forward operating bases typically house hundreds of soldiers, and Afghan forces and private contractors also often live on such bases. But CIA outposts on these bases are usually small—no more than 15 or maybe 20 people, so 13 casualties is likely a majority of the CIA base personnel, said one former agency official.

Add to that the fact the bomber was thought to be someone they could trust and there's going to be a breakdown in relations between the remaining officers and their Afghan partners.

According to one former CIA agent, the kind of people who volunteer for this type of duty aren't the sit on their ass at Langley or play bureaucratic games. Unfortunately, they are fairly few and far between.

CIA employees in Afghanistan are a special breed. With more than 90% of CIA employees living and working entirely within the United States , the burden of wartime service falls heavily upon a patriotic few. Newly trained CIA officers who volunteer for service in Afghanistan or Iraq do so by joining either the CIA division responsible for the Middle East or the CIA division for counterterrorism. Once assigned to these divisions, choices for subsequent duty stations tend to be limited to hardship locations. It's common for a CIA officer finishing a tour in Afghanistan to be assigned to a tour in Iraq . By contrast, it's common for an officer in the European division to finish a tour in Brussels and then be assigned to Paris .

More than 90% of CIA officers are office workers? Yeah, we're going to need Zombie William Donovan stat.

7 more stars on the wall, untold family and friends in mourning and a war effort set back. Damn.

Posted by: DrewM at 08:06 AM | Comments (100)
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Don't really know what's going on. But you guys deserve cheer: more...

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 07:23 AM | Comments (227)
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Mayo says the U.S. government does not pay enough to cover the cost of care.

More than 3,000 patients eligible for Medicare, the governmentÂ’s largest health-insurance program, will be forced to pay cash if they want to continue seeing their doctors at a Mayo family clinic in Glendale, northwest of Phoenix, said Michael Yardley, a Mayo spokesman. The decision, which Yardley called a two-year pilot project, wonÂ’t affect other Mayo facilities in Arizona, Florida and Minnesota.

Obama in June cited the nonprofit Rochester, Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio for offering “the highest quality care at costs well below the national norm.” Mayo’s move to drop Medicare patients may be copied by family doctors, some of whom have stopped accepting new patients from the program, said Lori Heim, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, in a telephone interview yesterday.

“Many physicians have said, ‘I simply cannot afford to keep taking care of Medicare patients,’” said Heim, a family doctor who practices in Laurinburg, North Carolina. “If you truly know your business costs and you are losing money, it doesn’t make sense to do more of it.”

Bloomberg couldn't get the White House to comment, but some utopianist from a "health policy" think tank says that the complaint that patients cannot pay is "overstated." He then says the decision to forgo Medicare patients is all about money. He apparently didn't connect those particular dots.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 07:16 AM | Comments (93)
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Boy, 1-1-10 looks way wrong. But that could also be because that dead stripper in the corner keeps staring at me.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 06:51 AM | Comments (47)
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Dismisses entire case.

Urbina said the prosecutors ignored the advice of senior Justice Department officials and built their case on sworn statements that had been given under a promise of immunity. Urbina said that violated the guards' constitutional rights. He dismissed the government's explanations as "contradictory, unbelievable and lacking in credibility."

Contradictory, unbelievable and non-credible explaining probably seemed like a good idea at the time.

In news closer to home, it's really really hard to rob people in Idaho.

Cornelson quickly whipped out her 9 mm Kel-Tec firearm -- a Christmas present from her husband -- scaring the teen off before calling police.

Guys, there's still time to find that perfect after-Christmas gift for your gal. Merry Christmas sweetie!! [via the Man of Substance]

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 06:26 AM | Comments (54)
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