Live Vote: Give President Obama a grade
Found this via a Facebook comment from SJ Rozan.
The teabaggers are giving Obama an F grade. (Currently 44% – F)
Want to leaven the results? Vote!
April 20, 2009
March 2, 2009
Limbaugh to Steele
Update: Steele to Rush: I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. … There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership. Sorry!
February 27, 2009
Let us now gaze down on the Port of San Francisco
Specifically, Piers 23, 19, and 17. (Click on the photo to get an enlarged version.)
Note the pilings on the north apron of Pier 23.
Note the shabby temporary patches on the roof of the Port building facing the Embarcadero where Pier 21 would be, if there were a Pier 21.
Check out the pilings on the north apron of Pier 19. You can barely see the pair of orange cones keeping you from accidentally walking where the worst of the damage to the apron is. (The apron has crumpled and is no longer horizontal.) What you can’t see in the picture very well is that the bulk of the apron to the west of the orange cones has disintegrated and fallen into the drink as well.
Check out the pilings at Pier 17 (the last pier you can see in the picture). They don’t look in very great shape either, do they?
To quote from a SPUR document, published in The Urbanist in August, 2007:
The Port’s 10-year Capital Plan is based on a comprehensive survey of the physical condition of all Port properties under its ownership. The Plan identifies the cost of bringing the Port into basic compliance with health, safety, seismic and Americans with Disabilities Act regulations, as well as fulfilling waterfront open-space needs, at nearly $1.5 billion. Almost one-third of the costs identified in this Capital Plan are for substructure repair and seismic strengthening of the Port’s pile-supported structures.
Something must be done.
What will it be? What to do, what to do, what to do. …
February 3, 2009
Justice Rehires Attorney Fired Amid Gay Rumor : NPR
Justice Rehires Attorney Fired Amid Gay Rumor : NPR
This should never have happened. That she’s been rehired is a good thing, but for pete’s sake, how can anyone justify this to begin with?
Off with their heads! May the people responsible be ineligible for another legal position for the rest of their lives! How dare they mess with this attorney’s life like this?
February 2, 2009
Mormons donated more to California’s Prop. 8 campaign than they’d previously copped to
Mormon church reports $190,000 Prop. 8 expenses.
Mormon church officials, facing an ongoing investigation by the state Fair Political Practices Commission, Friday reported nearly $190,000 in previously unlisted assistance to the successful campaign for Prop. 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California.
Now there’s a huge surprise.
Up until Friday, the Mormon church had denied any direct financial support for the campaign beyond a reported $2,078 spent for bringing church Elder L. Whitney Clayton to California.
Church officials complained that Karger’s complaint was full of errors and that the church had “fully complied” with California law.
The report filed Friday contained few details about how the money was spent.
[...]
While the deadline for the report, which covers the period from July 1 to Dec. 31, is Monday, many campaign contributions by major donors and independent committees must be reported within days after they’re made.
The final reports are due today, because U.S. District Judge Morrison England late last week refused to exempt the yes-on-8 campaign from making their filings today.
If the Prop. 8 campaign was exempted from disclosure because of reports of harassments of individual donors, said Deputy Attorney General Zackery Morazzini, the same case could be made for any controversial initiative. Courts would have to “keep the entire California electorate in the dark as to who was funding these ballot measures,” he said.
England agreed.
He noted that some of the reprisals reported by the Prop. 8 committee involve legal activities such as boycotts and picketing. Other alleged actions, such as death threats, mailings of white powder and vandalism, may constitute “repugnant and despicable acts” but can be reported to law enforcement, the judge said.
Even if there have been illegal reprisals, that would be insufficient reason to grant a wholesale exemption for a multimillion-dollar initiative campaign, England said. He also rejected the Prop. 8 campaign’s argument that the $100 disclosure limit established in 1974 should be increased for inflation, saying some states require reports of contributions as low as $25 and the Supreme Court has never invalidated them.
[ref:Prop. 8 campaign can’t hide donors’ names]
Interesting to see what comes out today that the yes-on-8 campaign was so anxious not to have come out.
January 28, 2009
Blagojevich — just "an exploration of ideas and thoughts"
“You should be able to do that in a free country that guarantees the right of free speech especially when you’re doing it in what you think is the sanctity of your home and you want to do it out of your home phone because you don’t want any interconnection with the government lines so someone thinks you’re talking politics on a government phone …”
Charming.
Rachel Maddow is that good. …
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
January 22, 2009
Don’t let the door hit you on the way out! Buh buh bye, George!
You taught me the meaning of “preemptive strike.”
January 20, 2009
US Presidents – George Washington to Barack Obama
US Presidents – George Washington to Barack Obama
44 US Presidents from George Washington to Barack Obama morphed to the music Boléro by Ravel
Must admit that I don’t really know what each and every president looked like.
James K Polk was a surprise. He had a sly grin look about him. Reminded me of Baryshnikov somehow. Also reminded me of the They Might Be Giants song.
James Monroe I couldn’t’ve picked out of a crowd.
And then there were the “He’s on the $xxx bill” presidents.
John Tyler. Had I ever seen a picture of him that wasn’t in a heads-of-all-the-presidents poster?
Grover Cleveland looked like a well-fed beermeister.
Entertaining.
gekko talked about the smiling/not-smiling aspect of the morph. I was more fascinated by the facial hair. Chester Arthur. Whoa.
[hattip to gekko, who posted this link on Usenet but I’m using a link to her blog instead of a link to that post.]
January 15, 2009
eightmaps — oh, my Prop 8
A mashup of pro-Prop8 donations and Google maps.
Want to know if your neighbors donated to the Yes-On-Prop8 campaign? Here’s your click.
(None of my neighbors donated according to this site, but then I live in a very not-Republican sector of town …)
(Oh. Here’s a student who donated $500 to the yes-on-8 campaign. Gosh. I wish I’d had that kind of money when I was a student.)
Obama vs. The Fear
Obama vs. The Fear / Grin and be enthralled, or tremble and stuff dollar bills into your mattress?
[...]
This seems to be the bottom line, at least for now. We have, for the first time in just about forever, an enormously ambitious, confident, risk-taking president so full of grand and even borderline radical ideas they barely fit into a single generation, much less a single speech, and we have him at a time when we need, well, someone exactly like that.
That he just so happens to be tremendously intelligent, progressive, serene as an oak tree and utterly magnetizing? I guess you just call that a bonus.
What he (“he” being Mark Morford) said.