SOTD: Hinder - Lips of an Angel

SOTD: Neil Young - Ohio (live at Massey Hall 1971)

History doesn't repeat but it rhymes.

SOTD: Katie Melua - Just Like Heaven

How the News Works

Gambling in Vegas

Wow.

“Home Builders Research reported that new home sales through May are down 43.8 percent in Las Vegas from a year ago and resales are off by 34.7 percent....Meanwhile, the inventory of homes for sale on the MLS climbed to a record 23,642 in June, with about 40 percent of them sitting vacant."

From KVBC 3 in Nevada. “The numbers don’t lie and they can be sobering. Each month about 5,500 homes come on the market in Las Vegas and only 1,500 are sold.”

I guess no more news like this from three years ago:

Between the second quarters of 2003 and 2004, single-family home prices in Las Vegas shot up 52.4 percent, according to the National Association of Realtors. It was the greatest 12-month increase ever for any metropolitan area.

Maybe roulette would be a better bet.

SOTD: Lo Fidelity Allstars - Battleflag

PG Version.

Not So Great Minds Think Alike

Apparently President George W. Bush isn't the only leader who holds hands with the king of Saudi Arabia, chief sponsor of militant Sunni Islam. Here's another similarly insane world leader, Shiite nutcase Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.

SOTD: 8mm - Liar

Warning of the Day (WOTD)

Doh!

It's The Saudis, Stupid!

OK, George W Bush, seriously, here's a simple test for you.

You don't have to know any foreign leader's names or anything hard - it's an easy test...you can ask Dick for help...


Q: The Islamic fundamentalist death cult of Wahabiism, followed by Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, was born in, and is exported and funded by, what country?
A: Saudi Arabia

Q: What percentage of the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia?
A: 79% (seventy-nine percent; 15 out of 19)

Q: What percentage of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqi?
A: Zero percent (that means "none" - about the IQ of someone trying to implicate Iraq in the 9/11 attacks)

Q: What percentage of the 9/11 hijackers were Iranian or Syrian?
A: Again, zero percent. None. Zip.

Q: What percentage of foreign attackers of Americans in Iraq are Saudi?
A: 45% (that's almost half George).

Q: What percentage of those Saudi foreign fighters go to Iraq as suicide bombers?
A: 50% (that is half).

Q: What country's leader do you make it a practice to hold hands with?
A: Saudi Arabia.

Q: When you decided to invade Iraq in 2003, who did you tell about your plans first: Secretary of State Colin Powell or the Saudi ambassador to the US?
A: The Saudi Ambassador.

Q: Which US political dynasty has longstanding extremely lucrative business dealings with Saudi Arabia dating back decades?
A: The Bush family.

Q: What country's official government publications have statements such as:

Be dissociated from the infidels, hate them for their religion, leave them, never rely on them for support, do not admire them and always oppose them in every way according to Islamic law...never greet the Christian or Jew first. Never congratulate the infidel on his holiday. Never befriend an infidel unless it is to convert him. Never imitate the infidel. Never work for an infidel...[it gets a lot worse than that here].

A: Saudi Arabia

Q: Which nation's Constitution defines treason as

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.

A: The United States of America.

Q: Who is the worst, and possibly only treasonous, President of the United States ever?
A: This guy (the one on the left)

More Progress in Iraq

For the bad guys anyway...

A Baghdad bank was robbed of more than $300 million in cash by its own security guards, as the high levels of corruption in the Iraqi capital once again were exposed, officials said.

In what is believed to be the biggest single theft since Saddam Hussein's fall in 2003, the private Dar Es Salaam bank was found with its front doors unlocked and its entire haul of cash missing.

Police in Baghdad said the bank's employees discovered the theft when they arrived at the premises in the city's Karrada district on Wednesday morning. An additional $174,000 [in Iraqi money] had been stolen, employees reported.

Police suspect three missing security guards, who usually slept on the premises, and said they are among the only people with keys.

Instead of calling these entrepreneurs "bank robbers", perhaps we should refer to them as "independent contractors", like Halliburton, except more honest about their goals.

Fox commentators and Republican flunkies (interchangeable) will surely represent the "theft" as another example of progress, since now the money will "trickle-down" to the local residents (according to Republican economic theory), although the "trickle" may be in the form of shrapnel.

TTOTD (Terrorist Threat of the Day) - 19-Month Old Boys

Perhaps even more dangerous than the Giant Man-Eating Honey Badgers of Basra:

The mother of a 19-month-old boy says she and her son were kicked off a plane after she refused a stewardess' request to medicate her son to keep him from talking...

Garren kept saying, "Bye bye, plane," Penland recalled. And she said the stewardess objected. "At the end of her speech, she leaned over the gentleman beside me and said, 'It's not funny anymore. You need to shut your baby up"'...

Better send little Garren to Gitmo. Remember, we have to fight the 19-month old toddlers over there so we don't have to fight (or listen to) them here.

It's Thursday

Good post from Sudden Debt on how the stock market, like everything else, has been built on a bubble of easy credit.

From the OCRegister:

The Southern California Multiple Listing Service cites confusion and inaccuracies in deleting the age-of-listing figures from reports that agents give to home shoppers.

Yes, that's why they don't want you to know how long a house has been on the market. It's because realtors don't want to be confusing or inaccurate.

Meanwhile

Dumplings stuffed with cardboard and bogus rabies vaccines are the focus of the latest health scares in China, where the government has banned an industrial solvent used in toothpaste after a spate of global recalls.

And to think I thought that odd taste was just cat. What has the world come to when you can't trust Chinese rabies vaccine? Isn't globalization wonderful?!

Just when you thought Iraq couldn't get any worse:

THE Iraqi port city of Basra, already prey to a nasty turf war between rival militia factions, has now been gripped by a scary rumour – giant badgers are stalking the streets by night, eating humans.

Remember, we have to fight the giant badgers over there so we don't have to fight them here. Maybe this is the "gut feeling" the terminally incompetent Michael Chertoff was talking about.

Here's what NY firefighters really think of Rudy Guliani.

Mortgage brokers repeat after me: Would you like fries with your order?

And finally, some investment advice from Marc Faber to some Indians:

Go buy yourself a piece of land — which street, which city I can’t tell you — and learn to drive a tractor”. That’s the advice investment guru Marc Faber had for investors at a recent event organised by Reliance Mutual Fund. “At the end of the day, we all will make losses in equities,” he added.

Wall Street is very good at "making losses". Just ask Bear Stearns.

QOTD: Michael Moore

We're in the fifth year of his war. We defeated the Nazis and the Axis powers in less time than it's taken for us to secure the road to the airport to downtown Baghdad. And we went to war based on a lie and I can't think of any greater crime against humanity. Well, I'd say it ranks with genocide and slavery to lie to people to start a war.

SOTD: Aimee Mann - Long Shot (live)

SOTD: BlackBud - Barefoot Dancing

SOTD: Kelly Clarkson - Maybe

Donald L Luskin Is An Idiot

Proof?

His website.
He agrees with Larry Kudlow a lot on CNBS, I mean CNBC.
He thinks Warren Buffett is an "idiot".
He writes for the National Review.
His past investment record is as bad as his political & economic commentary.
He's awfully smug.

Joe Biden for President

I love it.

DES MOINES — Joseph Biden, the Delaware Democrat running for president, is a man of strong opinions. During a campaign event in a Des Moines backyard today, Mr. Biden had some choice words for President Bush and two of the Republicans running for the White House.

“This guy is brain dead,” Mr. Biden said to surprised applause and laughter from the crowd. “I know I’ll be quoted, I’ll be killed for that.”

“This is a guy who is on the balls of his heels, here’s a guy who is lower off in the polls than any president in modern history and he goes ahead and he does something that just flies in the face of the sensibilities of the American people.”

A few minutes later, Mr. Biden turned his sights on Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, and a Republican running for president. “I can hardly wait to debate Rudy Giuliani if he is their nominee,” he said. “Because I will eat his lunch. The next time I hear a Republican talk about us being tough on terror – give me a break!”

Finally, Mr. Biden’s target was Mitt Romney, the Massachusetts Republican running for president. “I found Romney’s statements yesterday profound – crazy —when he talked about going to war with Iran,” he said. “Why are we talking about going to war with Iran?”

Bush Pardons, um, Commutes Traitor

No surprise Bush commuted the sentence of complete freak and traitor "Scooter" Libby...take it away Keith Olbermann:

In that moment, Mr. Bush, you broke that fundamental compact between yourself and the majority of this nation’s citizens — the ones who did not cast votes for you.

In that moment, Mr. Bush, you ceased to be the President of the United States.

In that moment, Mr. Bush, you became merely the President… of a rabid and irresponsible corner of the Republican Party.

I really love Keith Olbermann...he continues and says it about as good as anyone:

I accuse you, Mr. Bush, of lying this country into war.

I accuse you of fabricating in the minds of your own people, a false implied link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11.

I accuse you of firing the generals who told you that the plans for Iraq were disastrously insufficient.

I accuse you of causing in Iraq the needless deaths of 3,586 of our brothers and sons, and sisters and daughters, and friends and neighbors.

I accuse you of subverting the Constitution, not in some misguided but sincerely-motivated struggle to combat terrorists, but instead to stifle dissent.

I accuse you of fomenting fear among your own people, of creating the very terror you claim to have fought.

I accuse you of exploiting that unreasoning fear, the natural fear of your own people who just want to live their lives in peace, as a political tool to slander your critics and libel your opponents.

I accuse you of handing part of this republic over to a Vice President who is without conscience, and letting him run roughshod over it.

And I accuse you now, Mr. Bush, of giving, through that Vice President, carte blanche to Mr. Libby, to help defame Ambassador Joseph Wilson by any means necessary, to lie to Grand Juries and Special Counsel and before a court, in order to protect the mechanisms and particulars of that defamation, with your guarantee that Libby would never see prison, and, in so doing, as Ambassador Wilson himself phrased it here last night, of you becoming an accessory to the obstruction of justice.

The Democrats should grow some huevos and impeach Bush/Cheney and maybe that would set the universe right again. Maybe. Or Bush/Cheney should show as much patriotism as Nixon did and just resign.

Thank you Keith Olbermann.

Bring 'em On

Four years ago today, our fearless leader, who fought so valiantly in Vietnam, I mean South Texas, had this to say to the evildoers:

There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is, bring them on.

Over 3,300 US Soldiers have been killed and thousands injured since then. And still no Osama. Heckuva job, Shrub.

Thanks ThinkProgress