Be sure to check out Friday Ark #104 as it continues to grow throughout the weekend. You’ll always find a litany of links to great animal photos and news.
This is just too damn cute! Three orange tabby kittens (juveniles, actually) hanging out in the window, but not just any window and not just hanging out on the windowsill. That middle photo is the best.
New satellite photos show Arctic ice is melting rapidly. “According to data from NASA’s QuikSCAT satellite, between 2004 and 2005 the Arctic lost an unprecedented 14 percent of its perennial sea ice (shown in white)—some 280,000 square miles (725,000 square kilometers), or an area the size of Texas. […] Since the 1970s summer ice in the Arctic has reduced at a rate of 6.4 to 7.8 percent per decade, the researchers write in the September 7 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters. This suggests ice loss may now be occurring up to 18 times more quickly.” See the link for the photos and additional, albeit disheartening, information.
Republicans are in deep shit at the moment, a fact threatening their chances of holding Congress in the November elections, so now they’re eating their own. Remember when Colin Powell spoke out against the president’s torture proposals? Bush didn’t let that slide and has come out swinging; he gave a speech making clear dissent is sedition and pointing out criticism like Powell’s represents “flawed logic” and is “unacceptable.”
While pounding Democrats as unable to protect the American public, the administration admits it can’t protect the American public. This is using both sides of the fear card as is usual for this party now. All they want is to scare the public enough so more votes go Republican than elsewhere.
Sad: “President Bush and Republicans have gained some ground in their bid to hold onto Congress as a sustained GOP effort to portray Democrats and Iraq war critics as appeasing terrorists has swayed voters.” Happy: “By a double-digit margin, likely voters say they still are more inclined to put Democrats in control of Congress after a dozen years of Republican rule.”
The Washington Post continues to amaze me with their apparently anti-Bush rhetoric of late. They’ve always been the propaganda arm of the GOP, yet lately they turned their backs on that role and began telling the truth. “Of course, Mr. Bush didn’t come out and say he’s lobbying for torture. Instead he refers to ‘an alternative set of procedures’ for interrogation. But the administration no longer conceals what it wants. It wants authorization for the CIA to hide detainees in overseas prisons where even the International Committee of the Red Cross won’t have access. It wants permission to interrogate those detainees with abusive practices that in the past have included induced hypothermia and ‘waterboarding,’ or simulated drowning. And it wants the right to try such detainees, and perhaps sentence them to death, on the basis of evidence that the defendants cannot see and that may have been extracted during those abusive interrogation sessions.” It’s a good analysis of the war now happening between Dubya and his own party, or at least those members of his party who no longer want to be seen as endorsing inhumane, un-American activities regardless of the target.
And finally, this entertaining tidbit on the economy. Bush says: “If the American people would take a step back and realize how effective our policies have been, given the circumstances. … I’ve strongly believed the reason it is because we cut taxes, and at the same time, showed fiscal responsibility here in Washington with the people’s money. That’s why the deficit could be cut in half by 2009, or before.” On the other hand, the organization within the federal government that must monitor and report on the budgetary process to Congress, the group of representatives actually responsible for implementing spending guidelines year to year, says something very different. From the GAO on the same day as King George’s remark: “GAO’s current long-term simulations continue to show ever-larger deficits resulting in a federal debt burden that ultimately spirals out of control. … [U]nder either optimistic (‘Baseline extended’) or more realistic assumptions, current fiscal policy is unsustainable. … The question is how our current imprudent and unsustainable path will end. At some point, action will be taken to change the Nation’s fiscal course.”