Shakespearean Daily Diss
“Who is so gross that cannot see this palpable
device?” —Richard III, 3.6.10-11
Entries Tagged as ''
Land of the Free
Using updated state-by-state data, the report said 2,319,258 adults were held in U.S. prisons or jails at the start of 2008 — one out of every 99.1 adults, and more than any other country in the world.
The steadily growing inmate population “is saddling cash-strapped states with soaring costs they can ill afford and failing to have a clear impact either on recidivism or overall crime,” said the report…
The nationwide figures, as of Jan. 1, include 1,596,127 people in state and federal prisons and 723,131 in local jails — a total 2,319,258 out of almost 230 million American adults.
The report said the United States is the world’s incarceration leader, far ahead of more populous China with 1.5 million people behind bars. It said the U.S. also is the leader in inmates per capita (750 per 100,000 people), ahead of Russia (628 per 100,000) and other former Soviet bloc nations which make up the rest of the Top 10.
Shakespearean Daily Diss
“A knot you are of damned bloodsuckers.” —Richard III, 3.3.6
You’re Not the Boss of Me
The RNC’s latest delaying tactic is a silly one: “thanks, but we’d rather not.”
After promising last year to search its computers for tens of thousands of e-mails sent by White House officials, the Republican National Committee has informed a House committee that it no longer plans to retrieve the communications by restoring computer backup tapes, the panel’s chairman said yesterday.
The move increases the likelihood that an untold number of RNC e-mails dealing with official White House business during the first term of the Bush administration — including many sent or received by former presidential adviser Karl Rove — will never be recovered, said House Democrats and public records advocates.
The RNC had previously told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that it was attempting to restore e-mails from 2001 to 2003, when the RNC had a policy of purging all e-mails, including those to and from White House officials, after 30 days. But Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) disclosed during a hearing yesterday that the RNC has now said it “has no intention of trying to restore the missing White House e-mails.”
No pretty justification, no excuses. Just no.
Shakespearean Daily Diss
“Thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stol’n forth of Holy Writ,
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.”
—Richard III, 1.3.336-38
Shakespearean Daily Diss
“Sin, death and hell have set their marks on him,
And all their ministers attend on him.” —Richard III, 1.3.293-94
Shakespearean Daily Diss
“Poor painted queen, vain flourish of my fortune:
Why strew’st thou sugar on that bottled spider,
Whose deadly web ensnareth thee about?”
—Richard III, 1.3.241-43
The Earth Is Doomed
Scientists agree:
But don’t blow your savings on an Apocalypse Party just yet, for astronomers say the planet’s demise is 7.6 billion years away.
The unusual calculations appear in the British open-access journal Astrophysics (on http://uk.arxiv.org/).
Robert Smith, emeritus reader in astronomy at the University of Sussex, southern England, previously calculated that as the Sun runs out of fuel, it will expand into a dangerous “red giant”.
But Earth — while battered and burnt to a crisp — would escape ultimate destruction, he had thought.
Smith, working with Klaus-Peter Schroeder at the University of Guanajuato in Mexico, has taken a new run through the figures. Sadly, for our home, the number is up..
Start your bucket lists now.
Shakespearean Daily Diss
“Thou elvish-mark’d, abortive, rooting hog,
Thou that wast seal’d in thy nativity
The slave of Nature, and the son of hell;
Thou slander of thy heavy mother’s womb,
Thou loathed issue of thy father’s loins,
Thou rag of honour!” —Richard III, 1.3.228-33
Worst. President. Ever.
This, of course, has been widely known for many years now, but the public have managed to catch on despite the media’s best efforts to prop up the Bush Administration:
The 2008 presidential race must be an incredibly welcome development for President Bush and his White House. That’s because the American body politic can only really focus on one thing at a time, and so there’s little time for anything else aside from the madcap antics of of Gilligan, the Skipper, the Millionaire and his wife, the Movie Star, the Professor and Mary Ann…and the rest. Some liberal blogs and right-wing talk radio are lined up in circular firing squads, and the op-ed columnists have trained their fire on Hillary’s lonely teardrops or Barack’s Church of the Poison Mind.
While no one was looking, the economy nosedived, gas prices have soared, the war in Iraq is as unpopular as ever and Osama bin Laden is still on the loose. And so while none of us were paying attention, our 43rd president just hit a major milestone.
George W. Bush is now the most unpopular president in recorded American history. (h/t Atrios)
The only thing worse than President Bush, it seems, is Vice President Cheneym which tends to forestall impeachment, even were Congress inclined to actual work.
