Triple, Triple, Toil & Trouble

Today we cannibalize Eleanor Clift, mostly to steal this lovely triptych:

Fiorina, Whitman, McMahon: Three Faces Of Evil

These aren’t moms in tennis shoes, or earnest reformers who got their starts on the school board or with the League of Women Voters, or, on the right, women who cut their teeth in the right-to-life movement. They’re playing from the men’s tee, elbows out and with their own money. Whitman is outspending her opponent in the California gubernatorial race, Democrat Jerry Brown, 86 to 1. One report said she spent more in one day than he has during the entire campaign. She has already dropped $100 million and is on track to become the biggest spender in a state with a long record of affluent people seeking office on the coattails of their money. According to a survey done earlier this year by The San Diego Union-Tribune, only one of 18 self-funded notables running since 1964 got elected, and that was Arnold Schwarzenegger, who spent “only” $6 million of his money, a pittance compared with Whitman.

No, far from "earnest reformers," as the (non)voting or registration records of these three indicate.

What it is all about:

Democrat Richard Blumenthal, the state’s attorney general, says she’s turning the race into an auction by vowing to spend up to $50 million of her money. Asked to respond to the charge, McMahon says it’s money she earned, and that she’s investing in herself as a public servant.

Democracy at work. Why should candidates wait for voters to invest in them, when they can invest in themselves? Eliminate the middle-person. Kick 'em in the nuts, even. Hell, it's the American way.

Nest Of Vipers In Eagle Rock!

Not the same house. Next door.

Mom-Owned!

A nice woman, not her fault, really.

For today's young Disney© Prin-cess.

Two Items Today!

Backstage at the art factory.

Behind the scenes, also.

Bee info.

So old, the after-party starts at 2300. (Why not "post-party?")

We're surprised any rocks remain in the Arroyo Seco.

Ask & You Shall Receive

Note below where we advised you NOT to ask us for a butt.

Didn't happen at the fountain (didn't even go there) but as we wandered the streets of Highland Park from the train to Chicken Boy, smoking, we were hit up for a butt three damn times by low-lifes. Damn!!

Personal Appearance (& Warning)

We'll be here later. If you spot us, do not approach. We can be dangerous!

UPDATE (1605 PDT): Wandering the webs when we encountered a photo essay of/babble on where we'll be taking a cigarette break during our expedition.

Yes, near the fountain. DO NOT ASK US FOR A CIGARETTE, EITHER!!!

Captain America Major Disaster

That's What You Got

Fri. 13 music (not that Fri. isn't per se awful: The squares still gainfully employed suddenly furloughed from their cells, the streets already crowded w/ wknd. hippies, college students & show biz lice):

No show biz then, just grit.The rap starts about (4:20). Cut down, baby!

What's The Matter W/ Ohio Up-Date

Courtesy Green Eagle.

Terror, Baby!

Little Skippy Silverspoon

We're Fat Too. What About It?

NEW YORK (AP) — Floods, fires, melting ice and feverish heat: From smoke-choked Moscow to water-soaked Iowa and the High Arctic, the planet seems to be having a midsummer breakdown. It’s not just a portent of things to come, scientists say, but a sign of troubling climate change already under way.

The weather-related cataclysms of July and August fit patterns predicted by climate scientists, the Geneva-based World Meteorological Organization says — although those scientists always shy from tying individual disasters directly to global warming.

The experts now see an urgent need for better ways to forecast extreme events like Russia’s heat wave and wildfires and the record deluge devastating Pakistan. They’ll discuss such tools in meetings this month and next in Europe and America, under United Nations, U.S. and British government sponsorship.

“There is no time to waste,” because societies must be equipped to deal with global warming, says British government climatologist Peter Stott.

He said modelers of climate systems are “very keen” to develop supercomputer modeling that would enable more detailed linking of cause and effect as a warming world shifts jet streams and other atmospheric currents. Those changes can wreak weather havoc.

The U.N.’s network of climate scientists — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — has long predicted that rising global temperatures would produce more frequent and intense heat waves, and more intense rainfalls. In its latest assessment, in 2007, the Nobel Prize-winning panel went beyond that. It said these trends “have already been observed,” in an increase in heat waves since 1950, for example.

Still, climatologists generally refrain from blaming warming for this drought or that flood, since so many other factors also affect the day’s weather.

Stott and NASA’s Gavin Schmidt, at the Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York, said it’s better to think in terms of odds: Warming might double the chances for heat waves, for example. “That is exactly what’s happening,” Schmidt said, “a lot more warm extremes and less cold extremes.”

The WMO pointed out that this summer’s events fit the international scientists’ projections of “more frequent and more intense extreme weather events due to global warming.”

In fact, in key cases they’re a perfect fit:

RUSSIA

It’s been the hottest summer ever recorded in Russia, with Moscow temperatures topping 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 degrees C) for the first time. Russia’s drought has sparked hundreds of wildfires in forests and dried peat bogs, blanketing Moscow with a toxic smog that finally lifted Thursday after six days. The Russian capital’s death rate doubled to 700 people a day at one point. The drought reduced the wheat harvest by more than one-third.

The 2007 IPCC report predicted a doubling of disastrous droughts in Russia this century and cited studies foreseeing catastrophic fires during dry years. It also said Russia would suffer large crop losses.

PAKISTAN

The heaviest monsoon rains on record — 12 inches (300 millimeters) in one 36-hour period — have sent rivers rampaging over huge swaths of countryside, flooding thousands of villages. It has left 14 million Pakistanis homeless or otherwise affected, and killed 1,500. The government calls it the worst natural disaster in the nation’s history.

A warmer atmosphere can hold — and discharge — more water. The 2007 IPCC report said rains have grown heavier for 40 years over north Pakistan and predicted greater flooding this century in south Asia’s monsoon region.

CHINA

China is witnessing its worst floods in decades, the WMO says, particularly in the northwest province of Gansu. There, floods and landslides last weekend killed at least 1,100 people and left more than 600 missing, feared swept away or buried beneath mud and debris.

The IPCC reported in 2007 that rains had increased in northwest China by up to 33 percent since 1961, and floods nationwide had increased sevenfold since the 1950s. It predicted still more frequent flooding this century.

UNITED STATES

In Iowa, soaked by its wettest 36-month period in 127 years of recordkeeping, floodwaters from three nights of rain this week forced hundreds from their homes and killed a 16-year-old girl.

The international climate panel projected increased U.S. precipitation this century — except for the Southwest [Fuck! —Ed.]— and more extreme rain events causing flooding.

ARCTIC

Researchers last week spotted a 100-square-mile (260-square-kilometer) chunk of ice calved off from the great Petermann Glacier in Greenland’s far northwest. It was the most massive ice island to break away in the Arctic in a half-century of observation.

The huge iceberg appeared just five months after an international scientific team published a report saying ice loss from the Greenland ice sheet is expanding up its northwest coast from the south.

Changes in the ice sheet “are happening fast, and we are definitely losing more ice mass than we had anticipated,” said one of the scientists, NASA’s Isabella Velicogna.

In the Arctic Ocean itself, the summer melt of the vast ice cap has reached unprecedented proportions in recent years. Satellite data show the ocean area covered by ice last month was the second-lowest ever recorded for July.

The melting of land ice into the oceans is causing about 60 percent of the accelerating rise in sea levels worldwide, with thermal expansion from warming waters causing the rest. The WMO’S World Climate Research Program says seas are rising by 1.34 inches (34 millimeters) per decade, about twice the 20th century’s average.

Worldwide temperature readings, meanwhile, show that this January-June was the hottest first half of a year since recordkeeping began in the mid-19th century. Meteorologists say 17 nations have recorded all-time-high temperatures in 2010, more than in any other year.

Scientists blame the warming on carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases pouring into the atmosphere from power plants, cars and trucks, furnaces and other fossil fuel-burning industrial and residential sources.

Experts are growing ever more vocal in urging sharp cutbacks in emissions, to protect the climate that has nurtured modern civilization.

“Reducing emissions is something everyone is capable of,” Nanjing-based climatologist Tao Li told an academic journal in China, now the world’s No. 1 emitter, ahead of the U.S.

But not everyone is willing to act.

The U.S. remains the only major industrialized nation not to have legislated caps on carbon emissions, after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid last week withdrew climate legislation in the face of resistance from Republicans and some Democrats.

The U.S. inaction, dating back to the 1990s, is a key reason global talks have bogged down for a pact to succeed the expiring Kyoto Protocol. That is the relatively weak accord on emissions cuts adhered to by all other industrialized states.

Governments around the world, especially in poorer nations that will be hard-hit, are scrambling to find ways and money to adapt to shifts in climate and rising seas.

The meetings of climatologists in the coming weeks in Paris, Britain and Colorado will be one step toward adaptation, seeking ways to identify trends in extreme events and better means of forecasting them.

A U.N. specialist in natural disasters says much more needs to be done.

Salvano Briceno of the U.N.’s International Strategy for Disaster Reduction pointed to aggravating factors in the latest climate catastrophes: China’s failure to stem deforestation, contributing to its deadly mudslides; Russia’s poor forest management, feeding fires; and the settling of poor Pakistanis on flood plains and dry riverbeds in the densely populated country, squatters’ turf that suddenly turned into torrents.

“The IPCC has already identified the influence of climate change in these disasters. That’s clear,” Briceno said. “But the main trend we need to look at is increasing vulnerability, the fact we have more people living in the wrong places, doing the wrong things.”
___
AP Correspondents Michael J. Crumb in Des Moines, Iowa, and Christopher Bodeen in Beijing contributed to this report.

As stolen from The Daily Caller, our source for every story the AP breaks & crap. Bet it chapped their hides to run it.

Crap, Friday The 13th Already

Again?

All In The Family

Let's not forget Ben's mom, Marilyn, as photographed on 28 January 2009.

The eyes follow you around the room.

We'd laugh, but that woman just below this was elected.

Texas Scold 'Em

She didn't know she was going to be grilled.Bear in mind that this bottle-blond (Why does she hate Gawd & His plan for her hair?) Peggy Noonan-looking woman is a State Senator. An elected official. Chosen by a majority of those in her zone who voted. Wrap the brain around that for a few seconds. Then you can pretty much abandon all hope & wander off for a drink.

There too. (Internet trad w/ which we're familiar, but why? Legitimized self-promotion? Who has gone there, or come here, to re-read any of this? Assuming there was reading occurring at all.)

Civil Dis

Could just one of these jerks explain why sneering at people who richly deserve a thorough sneering is so damn wrong?

"Finally, A Way for Liberals to Sneer At People" by Little Davey Weigel. What he considers sneering:

We are amused.

Have any of these "be nice" assholes ever had anything to do w/ these "people" they find so deserving of their abstract (& meaningless) respect? We sincerely & sneeringly doubt it, because if they had, they'd be sneering at the fucking jerk idiots right along w/ us & the other rational members of society.

And in the false equivalence world of "Oh, the other side does the exact same things too, all the time," where is the recognition that virtually every actual policy & program proposed by actual Republican office-holders (Not profit-seeking T-shirt merchants!) is a full-blast, two-tone, diamond-encrusted sneer at around 95% of the American people. (To be followed by an actual fucking of the sheep if the policy, program or whatever becomes law.)

We believe ourself to be absolutely justified in expressing a sincere & sneering FUCK YOU! to Mr. Weigel & his fellow Politeness Nazis.

Crossly posted at Whiskey Fire.

Nap After Football?

OK, another cuppa joe & a slice of pizza

& we'll see if we're up to producing (Creating? Oh, come on.) anything.

Nope, just feeling sick. And tired. And now you've suffered too.

Mob Scene Up-Date

30,000(!) people at Michelle Malkin's imagined mob/riot, types the Journal-Constitution. That many people crowded together to cash in on the free money, you'd think something would have burned down. Guess not.

Still, officials of East Point declared the day a success. Nobody was arrested and nobody was seriously injured, they said.

Dep't. of Dependence & Entitlement: Stuff from hud.gov reprinted, for the detail-oriented.

Moving pictures, for the less detail-oriented.
TL; DW:

Music From Guam

KUAM. Country & Western influenced.

Beyond The Fringe

What is it about Columbus, Oh. that attracts these people?

In this June 24, 2010 photo, James T. McBride discusses his governmental beliefs during an interview in Columbus, Ohio. As a member of the Sovereign Citizens movement, McBride contends the U.S. government has not had authority over citizens for more than a century.(AP Photo/Jay LaPrete)

By ANDREW WELSH-HUGGINS, Associated Press Writer – Thu Aug 12, 12:23 am ET

COLUMBUS, Ohio – They call themselves sovereign citizens, U.S. residents who declare themselves above state and federal laws.

[...]

At the heart of their belief system: The government creates a secret identity for each citizen at birth, a "straw man," that controls an account at the U.S. Treasury used as collateral for foreign debt. File enough documents at the right offices and the money in those accounts can be used to pay off debt or make purchases worth thousands of dollars.

[,,,]

"These people really seem to feel that filing certain kinds of legal papers that are connected to their theories will somehow also magically have the power to alter relationships and grant things that otherwise would be unobtainable," [Barkun] said.

[...]

Martin Smith, 48, a civil engineer in Carthage, Mo., lost $8,000 to a father-and-son company in Columbus called Liberty Resources that pitched a method to eliminate credit card debt based on a theory that national banks aren't authorized to issue credit.

"We just became convinced that each of the parts of the puzzle that Liberty Resources ... was telling us existed would work," said Smith.

[...]

Jim Jarvis is Ohio coordinator for the Restore America Plan, which shares similar beliefs with the Guardians group. He maintains the country has lacked a legitimate government since Congress failed to adjourn properly in 1861.

The people who are crazy, he says, are those who won't do the research to find out what's really going on in the country.

[...]

In a 2003 document Jerry Kane filed in a county recorder's office in Ohio, he said he was not a "Fourteen Amendment Citizen." Many sovereign citizens believe the 14th Amendment created a new class of citizens, people who had no constitutional rights but were instead slaves to the government, according to Mark Pitcavage, investigative researcher for the Anti-Defamation League.

McBride, the jailed sovereign citizen, came across anti-government beliefs while in federal prison in Michigan on a 1992 cocaine importing conviction.

Over the years he developed his own tenets, including a revised history of the United States that says the country was secretly organized as a general post office in 1789.

He dismisses any accusation that the programs he pitched were fraud, arguing he's not subject to the laws of the U.S., which he calls a corporation along the lines of a car company.

"General Motor's laws don't affect me because I'm not an employee of them," McBride said. "Same with the state of Ohio and the United States."

Today, McBride is headed back to federal prison after prosecutors said he cashed bogus checks and refused to cooperate with his parole officers following a 2004 bankruptcy fraud conviction.

Foaming of the first water. Superfluous snark would only ruin the magical legalism. Pictures, however ...

In this July 2, 2010 photo, a store front housing a business operated by James T. McBride, a member of the Sovereign Citizens movement, is shown in a shopping plaza in Columbus, Ohio. McBride runs a business from this location providing information about his anti-government views in exchange for donations.(AP Photo/Jay LaPrete)

FWIW: AP offers the Southern Poverty Law Center as a source.