Me: Frank Lynch

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Somehow this reads more like harassment than practicing medicine. The Oklahoma legislature passed a bill — and overrode their governor's veto — forcing pregnant women who want to abort to view their fetuses through a sonogram while a doctor described its physical features. Doesn't matter if the health of the mother is at risk, or if the woman is a victim of rape.

I'd ask why they don't do something similar to patrons in a bar, forcing them to view films of drunk driving wreckage... but they already have some of the strictest alcohol laws in the country. Has the GOP ever had its Presidential convention in Oklahoma?

Link | | | 7:43 PM | Home

Recycle your phosphorus? Phosphorus is an important component of fertilizer, and some are projecting eventual shortages, leading to food shortages and so on. Unmentioned and waiting in the wings is the concept of using perfectly good food to fuel cars: meaning deciding whether it's more important to feed people or cars.

But supposedly wasted phosphorus can be recycled, according to an article at Foreign Policy, linked within. And in that article, we learn that FDR warned that American soil was losing its phosphorus content back in 1938.

Some initial analyses from scientists with the Global Phosphorus Research Initiative estimate that there will not be sufficient phosphorus supplies from mining to meet agricultural demand within 30 to 40 years. Although more research is clearly needed, this is not a comforting time scale.

Cutting back on our meat consumption would help, too: industrial cows eat a lot of corn, grown with fertilizers...

Link | | | 7:40 AM | Home
 

Lindsay Graham's latest huff and puff. Because Graham (R-SC) thinks that the Senate is moving too fast on an immigration bill, he's decided to withdraw his support for a climate bill.

Of course, immigration and the climate have nothing to do with each other; nothing. It's tough to speculate why Graham is trying to connect such unrelated issues together. My only guess would be that he felt he was taking enough political risk by allying with Kerry and Lieberman on climate, and didn't want to have to do so on another issue at the same time.

The legislative process needn't be "we can only do one thing at a time." Perhaps the Republicans have made it look that way with their 52/24/7 filibuster threats, but I don't see why they can't filibuster more than one critically important issue at a time. (Maybe it's because of past knee-jerk "No's" like some of them did on Franken's defense contracting amendment.)

Link | | | 10:44 AM | Home
 

Trashcan Sinatras. Okay, I'm an altar boy. Their new CD, In The Music, comes out in the US next week. I like it, it's got a different feel than their other CD's, and on the whole is better than most else out there. This was the single when it came out in the UK. Yes, it sounds like a single.

Link | | | 7:08 PM | Home

Because Obama controls the planets themselves he was clever enough to announce offshore drilling before the rig explosion:

David Rainey, a vice president for Gulf of Mexico exploration for BP, said: "If there is any other oil that's coming from the well, it would be coming from the subsurface, so it would be coming from below the seabed. The well was just over 18,000 feet deep, and we don't know from where in that 18,000 feet it would be coming."

Fearing a potential environmental disaster, BP announced Thursday that it was dispatching a flotilla of more than 30 vessels capable of skimming more than 170,000 barrels of oil a day to protect sea lanes and wildlife in the area of the sunken platform.

See, this way Obama gets the benefit of now pleasing the environmentalists by withdrawing the expansion of off shore drilling, while still pleasing the Drill Baby Drill types that at least he tried. This is how politics works, and when you're dealing with the all-controlling, all-knowing One, it becomes ever more important to connec the dots and see how dirty Chicago politics get deployed on a national level.

(If anyone thinks I'm serious...)

Link | | | 10:12 AM | Home

Maybe you have nothing to hide, but why should we care? I mean, do you aspire to be the next Leopold Bloom or something?

SAN FRANCISCO -- Mark Brooks wants the whole Web to know that he spent $41 on an iPad case at an Apple store, $24 eating at an Applebee's, and $6,450 at a Florida plastic surgery clinic for nose work.

Too much information, you say? On the Internet, there seems to be no such thing. A wave of Web start-ups aims to help people indulge their urge to divulge -- from sites like Blippy, which Mr. Brooks used to broadcast news of what he bought, to Foursquare, a mobile social network that allows people to announce their precise location to the world, to Skimble, an iPhone application that people use to reveal, say, how many push-ups they are doing and how long they spend in yoga class.

I am so not into this, even from my friends and associates. Save it for when we have you over for dinner, or we'll be reduced to talking about the weather.

Link | | | 9:39 AM | Home

For some reason, the word "conspiracy" comes to mind:

A Senate panel investigating the causes of the nation's financial crisis on Thursday unveiled evidence that credit-ratings agencies knowingly gave inflated ratings to complex deals backed by shaky U.S. mortgages in exchange for lucrative fees.

(Read more...)

And of course ratings beget asset valuations, which beget leverage, and risk perceptions, and confident investors, and willingness to invest, and on and on and on on and on.

(Are you reading Yves Smith's ECONned yet?)

Link | | | 8:22 AM | Home
 

The silence of the Liz. Have you noticed a relative silence from the daughters of any former Vice-Presidents lately? I don't know if the backlash about Al Qaeda "defenders" in the DOJ is the root cause, but with the Iraqis' recent plunking of Al Masri, this certainly doesn't seem like a good time to remind America that dear old dad thought Obama was being foolish by adhering to Bush's withdrawal time line. And while we still keep our fingers crossed that sectarian violence won't erupt, the news today of the way that the Iraqis' attacked al Masri reads like a country exerting itself. And not like a company still nursing at our teats. Good for the Iraqis.

Link | | | 7:16 PM | Home
 

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