Sigh. The "cash for clunkers" concept is Schwarzenegger environmentalism. Seems mediocre but really is incredibly dumb.

Just look at how pathetic your mileage can be to qualify! 22mpg car, 18 truck? Why give money to people to buy such fuel inefficient vehicles at all? 22mpg is not an efficient vehicle, it is a completely ordinary one. 18 mpg is atrocious. A Lincoln town car gets 19 highway.

That is before one even gets into the massive emissions cost of building a car a few years early and how that is almost certain to outweigh the minor gas savings from this program. People with twenty or thirty year old cars (which is how old they have to be to really guzzle the gas) don't drive much and the most environmentally friendly thing they can do is surely to keep driving that old car a dozen miles a week until they die.

Does this plan even destroy the old vehicles or are they just going to be resold in the US or abroad?

I suppose it will be a boon to the car industry, but it is an anti-environmental policy.

More cars is not good environmental policy.

From the company press release: "Winchester Ammunition, like other ammunition manufacturers, has seen the demand for our products increase significantly since last fall. To meet that increased demand, our operations are running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week."

Favorite weapons and ammo in the U.S.

Pot in every pot and a weapons cache in every garage

Majority of California voters support legalizing pot

I wouldn't let an elected Repub anywhere near my kids.
I'd keep them away from Not Joe the Not Plumber, also.

Just look at how pathetic your mileage can be to qualify! 22mpg car, 18 truck? Why give money to people to buy such fuel inefficient vehicles at all?

Because your previous vehicle has to have been getting a MINIMUM of 10 mpg less for a car and 5 mpg less for a truck. Going from a car that gets 12 mpg to one that gets at least 22 mpg is a pretty decent savings.

Maybe if they called shooting a "gunpowder orgasm" it would make more sense.

No, not really, I guess.

Sigh.

If Jack Murtha isn't thinking about retirement, he should be.

Blue Girl doesn't appear to attribute her quote from this story, but I assume it is from this Washington Post piece.

What struck me most about the WaPo story is how suggestive it was with little evidence. A warehouse with no trucks in "several visits" the reporters made. Drawn blinds. Contracts with the pentagon (no-bid) . Murtha's nephew and owner of Murtech said Murtech's 17 employees "provide necessary logistical support" to Pentagon testing programs that focus on detecting chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats.

Should we be suspicious that Murtha has a nephew who becomes a defense contractor? Should we expect a lot of traffic in a warehouse that deals in testing WMD hazards? The story doesn't suggest that Murtha earmarks went to the nephew's company. It merely suggests that people have connections, and WaPo couldn't find out what the company actually does.

Mnemosyne: "Because your previous vehicle has to have been getting a MINIMUM of 10 mpg less for a car and 5 mpg less for a truck."

Read the next paragraph of the article. You only need a 4 mpg improvement for a car or 2 mpg for a truck to get $3500 bucks.

Making the bigger improvement you mention makes the voucher $4500.

If it was as you describe it would at least not be laughable.

You are exactly right Dan, and I am going to go drop the link in right now. Sorry for the oversight.

(Oversight has now been corrected and acknowledged.)

Deep snark...

...the virus has turned out to be milder than feared and the government decided to change its advice.

Does that mean McCain will unstrap his flu mask and stop agitating to close the border with Mexico?

Deeper snark...

Hey John, since you are your buds changed the tax code to encourage US companies to send manufacturing jobs offshore, do you know if our flu masks come from Mexico or China?

Human rights alert:

Samantha Orobator, a 20-year-old Nigerian-born British woman, has been imprisoned since August 2008 on charges of trafficking heroin. She has been held without access to an attorney until this week. After many protests, the Lao government is allowing a British attorney access to Ms. Orobator. Her "trial" has been scheduled for next week. There is evidence that Samantha was raped in prison, or coerced into sex by an officer in a position of authority, and forcibly impregnated. There is public admission by the Lao government that Samantha was denied access to an attorney, denied humane, safe living conditions while imprisoned, and denied a fair trial, all of which is in violation of Articles 5, and 8-12 of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. Why is the U.N.'s Lao PDR silent on this human rights issue? Why is the British government silent? Why is the U.N. Commissioner on Human Rights silent?

Why is our own Secretary of State silent? This is a Cabinet member who stood up and specifically pledged to help care for the world's most vulnerable women. Samantha Orobator is a citizen of a Commonwealth nation, who has been imprisoned without access to an attorney, who has been sexually exploited while imprisoned, and faces death by firing squad unless she gets a miracle.

Mike Pence really doesn't know what he's talking about.

Well, Steve, it looks like you and Chris Matthews will just have to agree to disagree. Tweety thinks Pence has a "high intellect", even though he danced around the question of whether he believes in evolution or science.
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Thanks, Blue Girl. Love your blog.

Don't ask don't prosecute...

Keori:

...all of which is in violation of Articles 5, and 8-12 of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. ... Why is our own Secretary of State silent?

"If it should turn out ... that the (U.S.) government and its authorities are not willing to prosecute those where we have enough evidence that they instigated or committed torture, then there is also an obligation on all other 145 states" party to the convention to exercise universal jurisdiction, Nowak said.

Impossible. Joe doesn't have friends...only people he uses or that use him. He is the face of Willful Ignorance and represents it quite well.

Irrational fears. We seem to have so many of them. Wonder why that is? Could it be cable tv?

Picture of the day...

I guess that's where the conscience part comes in...

The closest situation to Maine's is NH not Vermont. NH and ME had zero court involvement with regard to marriages and civil unions until the legislatures acted. True, the VT legislature voted for marriage equality, but that was 9 years after the VT Supreme Court issued a decision that led to civil unions.

What amazes me is how little attention the ME and NH cases are garnering. I guess if their governors sign the legislation, there will be more coverage, but still....compared to where we were less than five years ago, it seems like folks are treating this as fairly ordinary.

Over at Think Progress, Limpy's bragging about how he's never had a down year financially. Wasn't he on the dole in Sacramento? And, too lazy to mow the lawn? Franken's "...Big Fat Idiot" book has the details.

Spectral Boy Wonder -- a stink bomb a minute:
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/05/tongue_in_cheek.php

I personally am not ready to indict John Murtha.
He has brought a lot to the Johnstown region--a poor area of Pennsylvania.
I heard a local right wing radio station say they would be zeroing in on him, so reports could be suspect. This was just this past week.
I met him once, and he oozed sincerity.

Seemingly, this could be checked and authenticated, if untrue, right? From the NY Times article--specifically that the Texas company was about to lapse? That could seemingly be verified?

"...Murtech received its contracts primarily from the Army Space and Missile Defense Command in Huntsville, Ala., which has been generous to companies in John Murtha's district and enjoys a close relationship with the congressman through a mutual interest in breast cancer research. The Army command has won at least $200 million a year in federal funding for the cancer research, of which Rep. Murtha is a stalwart supporter. In a program called Missiles to Mammograms the command has collaborated with a contractor in Murtha's district, Windber Medical Center, in a multimillion-dollar project to explore using missile-tracking technology to detect breast cancer.

The command awarded its first storage contract to Murtech without competitive bidding, paying $1.4 million a year. Robert Murtha Jr. says the no-bid arrangement was "the government's choice" and occurred because the government "got itself in a bind." A contract with SA Scientific of San Antonio was about to lapse, and the command needed Murtech, then serving as a subcontractor to the Texas company, to store materials for the military's Critical Reagents Program. The program produces lab materials that can be used in handheld devices and sensors to detect the presence of biological toxins..."

Wurzelbacher's "defense" of his stand against homosexuality is that it is called "queer." He even attempted to quote the dictionary as proof that it isn't an epithet. "It's not like a slur, like you would call a white person a honky or something like that."

Oh. My. God. Where do I begin? I can't even wrap my head around someone who doesn't understand that human beings create mean words to describe people they are afraid of in order to humiliate, demoralize and control them.

I know Obama won and all and the Democrats are in power but the fact that a guy who was a plant during Obama's block walk, who used a fake name for a profession of which he is not even a member, and who claimed he had a business he didn't even own is still referred to by that fake name/business/profession and is now heralded as a hero. I am both upset by it and, well, kind of freaked out by it.

Also, it proves once and for all that there is no God.

Check this out at TPM the lead as I just read it says "Doof or Consequences "Senate Dems take away Specter's seniority."

Click on the link http://tinyurl.com/c5lov2 and you'll be taken to Washington Post article that TPM cites.

Memoirgirl pretty much summed up what I couldn't even draft earlier.
Sam the Farce!

drichmond, @23:22,

Thanks. It's nice to close the day on a smile. The SOB is also backpedalling his support of Coleman's seating (it was a mistake; I'm not yet used to my new quarters). Next thing you know, he'll be declaring himself a "loyal Democrat" again, promising to vote for EFCA (including card check) and public option in health care, as well as begging for a chance to recast his budget vote.

I wonder what his alleged gay friends were thinking hanging out with this guy?

I strongly suspect Joe the Plumber has the same gay friends as Sarah Palin. Either that, or it's just a couple of straight guys he occasionally watches football games with and calls "gaywad fags" when they root for some player he doesn't like.

For a moment, I thought there was some sarcasm in the post, and thought the "cash-for-clunkers" Jeffrey Leonard plan was some sort of diss to the baseball player Jeffrey Leonard.

.
Retire 'em all! Let Gawd sort 'em out.

Hope everybody had a happy Fifth of Tequila day!
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