Such a Good Idea For Obama and Clinton to Back Blanche Lincoln

The latest poll has Blanche Lincoln down 25 points to Republican John Boozma, but not to worry, Lincoln's campaign says that their internal numbers have her down by only 9 points:

You know it's hard out there for an incumbent Senator when she has to stave off bad news by releasing an internal poll showing her down by nine to her Republican challenger. But that's exactly what Sen. Blanche Lincon (D-AR) has done, attempting to respond to yesterday's poll showing her down by 25 points to Rep. John Boozman (R) with numbers of her own showing her losing by a lot -- but not as much.

According to Lincoln's numbers, Boozeman leads the race 45-36 with 18% undecided. A third party candidate draws 6% of the vote. The survey of 700 voters was conducted June 22-24 and has a margin of error of 3.7%.

The rule of thumb is that undecideds break for the challenger by at least 2:1, which gives us a 57-42 blowout, and the the average other polling shows Lincoln down by over 20 points.

This was foreseeable, but you know how it is, Washington insider and incumbent protection Über Alles.

Yet another reason not to give to the DSCC, they will doubtless waste money on her, and that is throwing good money after bad.

Curry Will Save the World

Case in point, it reduced greenhouse emissions from the digestive tracts of ruminants, like cows and sheep:

Curry spices could hold the key to reducing the enormous greenhouse gas emissions given off by grazing animals such as sheep, cows and goats, scientists have claimed.

Research carried out at Newcastle University has found that coriander and turmeric – spices traditionally used to flavour curries – can reduce by up to 40 per cent the amount of methane that is produced by bacteria in a sheep's stomach and then emitted into the atmosphere when the animal burps.

Working rather like an anti-biotic, the spices were found to kill the methane-producing "bad" bacteria in the animal's gut while allowing the "good" bacteria to flourish. The findings are part of an ongoing study led by Dr Abdul Shakoor Chaudhry at Newcastle University.

It also means that when you have lamb or beef curry, it's already marinated.

Cowards.

When people talk about DFH^* bloggers hating on the Obama they seem to think that its all about Obama being a pragmatist. It isn't about his being a pragmatist.

It's about his, and his people being abject cowards, who soil themselves when someone on the right wing shouts out a lie.

Case in point, Shirley Sherrod, USDA Georgia Director of Rural Development, who was just fired for a yet another deceptively edited video from professional bigot Andrew Breitbart.

You see, she gave a talk about how when she was working helping farmers, when the first white farmer came to her for help, the thought crossed her mind was not to help, because they were white, but she realized almost as soon as the thought hit her that it was wrong.

Well after excerpting 30 seconds out of a 45+ minute speech (see below), so that Fox News could go "Oh noes! N*****s are trying to take over America."

The response of the Secretary of Agriculture was to fire her before any real facts came out.

I am with what Digby said:

"Her decision 'rightly or wrongly" will be called into question" because some right wing hitman put out an edited tape that makes her sound as if her point is the opposite of what it is, so she had to be fired.

They are telling wingnuts everywhere that all they have to do is gin up a phony controversy (especially about a black person, apparently) and the administration will fire them so as not to shake confidence that they are "fair service providers."

This is sheer cowardice.

This is what pisses people off.

Video after break

^*Dirty F%$#ing Hippies.

Bloody Morons

So, the Senate, now that Byrd's temporary replacement has been sworn in, but they got it wrong.

They extended benefits through November. You should have extended it only to October, and then jam up the Republicans when they vote against it just before the election.

I understand that Congressmen don't like to be in DC in October of an election year, but being there to vote for an unemployment extension is the best campaigning that you can do.

US Broadband is Now So Bad……

That even in the phony metrics commissioned by the US incumbent carriers, the United States is no longer in first place:

The United States has lost the top spot in Nokia Siemens Networks' annual broadband development index, the Connectivity Scorecard, to Sweden.

The Connectivity Scorecard is, as Stacey Higginbotham reports for GigaOM, a favorite measure of the telecom industry, since it paints the America in a particularly favorable light.

It's gotten so bad that even when using the bogus metrics favored our the telco incumbents who took billions in government dollars and gave us nothing, we still cannot win.

It's time to stop bribing the monopolists, and start actually instituting real regulations that require real performance.

Economics Update

Well, if consumers are 70% of the economy, the fact that the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan consumer confidence index numbers fell to a nearly 1 year low.

This, along with a falling consumer price index, which indicates that a deflationary spiral may be nearer than we would like, are not good news.

Additionally, notwithstanding heroic/stupid efforts to prop up the housing bubble, home builder confidence has hit a 15 month low.

On the brighter side, Moody's survey of commercial real estate prices is rose in May, and the National Association for Business Economics' latest survey of employers is showing that employers are looking to hire more than they were a year ago, though admittedly, that is not saying much.

I Really Cannot Wrap My Head Around this

As much as I rag on the Washington Post, there is some reporting of real value amongst the dross, including Dana Priest, who, along with William M. Arkin, have published an extensive investigative report on the burgeoning world of the American security-industrial complex:

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

Basically it points to a picture of a state security apparatus run amuck, where there are so many players, generating so much analysis, from so many sources, that it is impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff, or as Glenn Greenwald notes:

So it isn't that we keep sacrificing our privacy to an always-growing National Security State in exchange for greater security. The opposite is true: we keep sacrificing our privacy to the always-growing National Security State in exchange for less security.

(emphasis original)

More than ever, we need to ensrhine into the constitution something analogous to the the Swedish concept of Offentlighetsprincipen (openness), because right now all that our paranoia is generating is a massive trail of profiteers/contractors without generating much in the way of security.

It should be noted that reigning in this will not be easy. You can be sure that when the budgets are in jeopardy, the various wings of the state security apparatus will come up with scary stories to subvert any effort at real reform, and the current administration is terrified of being labeled, "soft on fillintheblank," so they do not have the inclination to even bend the curve.

I'll be going through the story, and the supporting material, to see if I have anything to add.