Invasive Species

post from jobsanger on 16 September 2010 01:03:00 AM. © jobsanger

Political Cartoon is by Adam Zyglis in The Buffalo News.

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In the Clouds

post from Talking Points Memo on 16 September 2010 01:02:30 AM. © Talking Points Memo

An interesting nugget from PPP. According to their latest poll, Republicans are extremely bullish on their chances for recapturing Congress -- 74% think they'll capture the House and 62% think they get the Senate. That's pretty optimistic for the[...]

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Devastating Reverse

post from Talking Points Memo on 16 September 2010 01:02:30 AM. © Talking Points Memo

The day after the Florida Senate primary on August 24th, our Eric Kleefeld suggested that Kendrick Meek's victory over mogul-Democrat Jeff Greene might be very bad news for Charlie Crist, who to that point, running as an independent, had been in a[...]

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Down Ballot Races Heat Up In Texas

post from jobsanger on 16 September 2010 01:02:00 AM. © jobsanger

It looks like Democratic candidate for Agriculture Commissioner, Hank Gilbert, has pushed his opponent's buttons a bit. Gilbert had a press conference last Monday where he revealed pictures of at least 20 gas pump inspection stickers (see above) that were were so old they showed the pumps hadn't been inspected since 1997 when Gov. Rick Perry was the Agriculture Commissioner. Gas pumps are supposed to be inspected regulary by the Texas Department of Agriculture to make sure they are accurately dispensing gas and not ripping off consumers.
Staples, the incumbent Ag. Commissioner, had claimed that the inspections were being done on a regular basis and 94% of pumps were in compliance. Gilbert showed that to be a lie claiming, "We found more than 20 stations in Tyler and Smith County that didn't have current inspections or had no inspections at all. His number doesn't take into account the stations that are slipping by the wayside because TDA doesn't have enough inspectors on the ground to do the job the people of Texas need and state law requires."
Several newspapers and local TV stations carried the news about the uninspected gas pumps, and that seems to have upset Staples. News media noticed that all 20 of the stations had been visited by TDA inspectors since Gilbert's news conference (and one inspector admitted they were ordered to target the 20 stations Gilbert had named). Staples also had TDA attorneys send threatening letters to at least two of the TV stations that carried the story according to Gilbert campaign chief Vince Liebowitz.
Sounds like Staples is trying to cover up for not seeing that the inspections are done in a timely manner. And using TDA lawyers to threaten the media is an outright abuse of power by the Commissioner. Is Staples starting to run scared? Sure looks like it.
-------------------------
Meanwhile, Democratic candidate for Land Commissioner, Hector Uribe, is also trying to up the ante on his opponent -- Republican incumbent Jerry Patterson. We already know about Patterson's attempt to sell off public land in the Christmas Mountains to private entities (even though when the land was given to Texas promises were made that the land would always remain available for public use). Patterson doesn't seem to think he has to honor promises made on behalf of the citizens of Texas.
That would be enough of a reason to dump the current Land Commissioner -- to keep him from completing his nefarious plan to sell off the state land. But now we hear that he's allowed five of Texas major bays and estuaries system get in peril because he took no action to protect them (which is his job). I'll let Uribe tell you about it in his own words:
According to the National Wildlife Federation, five of Texas? seven major bays and estuaries systems are in peril. Only the Upper Laguna Madre and the Copano / Aransas bays are considered healthy by the well-respected organization.
Texas Bay Map For the most part, the threat to our bays and estuaries is upstream. Because our bays and estuaries are at the very end of the line of our state?s public rivers and streams, they?re last to share in the fresh water flow.
Although the bay and estuaries have no legal claim to a specific volume of fresh water flow, our current two-term, land commissioner could and should have been an effective advocate for our bays and estuaries. He has witnessed their deterioration and failed to intervene effectively. As a steward of our state?s natural resources it was his job to seek solutions and oppose the diverting of water from our state?s rivers and streams by developers. As your next land commissioner I won?t be a passive witness to their destruction.
Texans want strong protections for Texas? rivers and estuaries. For example, the National Wildlife Federation suggests that the issuance of the permits could have been opposed because the applications requested more water than was needed for development.
Fresh water flow is the lifeblood of our bays and estuaries. As Commissioner of the Texas General Land Office I will ask the Texas legislature to recognize the importance of our bays and estuaries by allocating a sufficient flow of water to insure the health of our bays and estuaries for all time. Since the water in certain rivers has not yet been allocated, I will also seek legislation that permanently sets aside flows from those waterways to preserve fish and wildlife habitats.
Finally, I will encourage our Texas legislators to enact legislation that regulates and restricts development along our major waterways and require all communities along our state?s waterways to adopt strict water conservation measures.
Hector Uribe

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Open thread for night owls: Snarling while
smiling

post from Daily Kos on 16 September 2010 01:01:30 AM. © Daily Kos

ScienceDaily reports:

Want to know how a Japanese person is feeling? Pay attention to the tone of his voice, not his face. That’s what other Japanese people would do, anyway. A new study examines how Dutch and Japanese people assess others’ emotions and finds that Dutch people pay attention to the facial expression more than Japanese people do.

“As humans are social animals, it’s important for humans to understand the emotional state of other people to maintain good relationships,” says Akihiro Tanaka of Waseda Institute for Advanced Study in Japan. “When a man is smiling, probably he is happy, and when he is crying, probably he’s sad.” Most of the research on understanding the emotional state of others has been done on facial expression; Tanaka and his colleagues in Japan and the Netherlands wanted to know how vocal tone and facial expressions work together to give you a sense of someone else’s emotion.

For the study, Tanaka and colleagues made a video of actors saying a phrase with a neutral meaning—“Is that so?”—two ways: angrily and happily. This was done in both Japanese and Dutch. Then they edited the videos so that they also had recordings of someone saying the phrase angrily but with a happy face, and happily with an angry face. Volunteers watched the videos in their native language and in the other language and were asked whether the person was happy or angry. They found that Japanese participants paid attention to the voice more than Dutch people did—even when they were instructed to judge the emotion by the faces and to ignore the voice. The results are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

This makes sense if you look at the differences between the way Dutch and Japanese people communicate, Tanaka speculates. “I think Japanese people tend to hide their negative emotions by smiling, but it’s more difficult to hide negative emotions in the voice.”

• • • • •

At Daily Kos on this date in 2009:

After months of applauding and enabling the thinly (and not so thinly) veiled racist attacks against the President, the Republican Party has come out swinging against the suggestion racism drives a good portion of their base. Here's RNC Chairman Michael Steele, demanding that Obama repudiate Jimmy Carter:

Characterizing Americans’ disapproval of President Obama’s policies as being based on race is an outrage and a troubling sign about the lengths Democrats will go to disparage all who disagree with them. Playing the race card shows that Democrats are willing to deal from the bottom of the deck. Our political system has no place for this type of rhetoric.

But what did Carter actually say?

I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man. That he's African-American.

If Michael Steele wants to argue that the birther, Kenyan, Muslim, un-American, monkey, witchdoctor attacks against the President, made by the elected and unelected arms of the Republican Party, have anything to do with policy disagreements then let him try make that laughable case. But he can take his outrage and his straw man and shove it.

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The Watchdog

post from jobsanger on 16 September 2010 01:01:00 AM. © jobsanger

Political Cartoon is by David Horsey in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

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VIDEO: Hand dancing (freaking cool)

post from AMERICAblog News on 16 September 2010 01:00:54 AM. © AMERICAblog News

video details and more

(Hat tip to HuffPost Hill, that keeps me informed, laughing, and weird.)

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Late Late Night FDL: Going Down Slow

post from Firedoglake on 16 September 2010 01:00:13 AM. © Firedoglake

Honeydripper All Star Band -- Going Down Slow.[...]

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Wednesday Stuff

Hey, keep dumping on The Orange One - works for me (and every word of the ad is true)...

video details and more

...and the title of this little number embodies my wish for the Repugs (another lesson in lousy bathroom acoustics).

video details and more

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Open Thread and Diary Rescue

Welcome to Diary Rescue. Tonight's Rangers are grog, Louisiana 1976, Got a Grip, shayera, YatPundit and sunspark says, who also is once again running the edit machine.

It's September 15. On this date in 1853 Reverend Antoinette Brown Blackwell was ordained becoming first female minister in the United States. 102 years later, in 1955, Betty Robbins became the first woman cantor. One decade later, in 1965, "Green Acres" premiered on CBS TV. Women were clearly on an unstoppable roll.

Here are tonight's treasures rescued from the flotsam of cyberspace by your kindly rangers. Enjoy them and send them all kinds of kudos.

praenomen tells a tale of friendship and the housing bubble in Too Toxic To Survive. (shayera)

JDWolverton looks at the other extreme of treating aches and pains in the system: Strained Care - Health Care Over Spending. (grog)

With a hat-tip to to Sheryl Crow, Miep shares the anxieties of being a 50-something in No One Said It Would Be Easy. (YatPundit)

QuietObserver looks on the grocery shelf and calls a charade a charade in Children of the (High Fructose) Corn (Syrup). (sunspark says)

Is this the end of "Drill, baby, drill"? kgosztola discusses how O'Donnell's Victory Renews Her Fight Against the Scourge of Sex in America. (sunspark says)

jotter has High Impact Diaries: September 14, 2010.

sardonyx has Top Comments: Downticket Races Edition.

One last word about September 15, sans comment.

In 1995, The U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women was held in Beijing, where the One Child policy had been in place since 1978, resulting in untold instances of female infanticide.