It’s About Time March 8, 2009

Did you remember to turn your clocks ahead an hour last night? I like daylight savings time. I like the longer days and light filled evenings. Another good thing about DST is that now when I call my friend in St. Croix we are back on the same clock and I do not have to remember what time it is in her house. Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam and American Samoa do not turn their clocks. Hawaii and Arizona (with the exception of the Navajo Nation) do not change their clocks either. Hey, what’s with Arizona?  Marc Fisher, a blogger for the Washington Post, proposed the idea of double daylight savings time. He is suggesting not only that we observe DST but we push the clock two hours ahead and enjoy glorious light filled evenings. My favorite line of his was ‘President Warren G. Harding didn’t like daylight saving time. If people want more daylight, he said, they should just wake up earlier”.  Here is a site that will tell you who observes daylight savings time (and when) around the world.

–  Remember all the way back to the summer of 2001 when George W. Bush went for a month long vacation on his ranch to ponder the decision on cell stem research? Oh yeah – that was also the month he ignored that briefing entitled ‘Bin Laden determined to strike in US.’ What the f**k was he doing all that summer? Maybe he was working on becoming a dictator. Well, file this under one of the good things about turning back time. After the 8 years of Republican rule that obstructed and oppressed scientific research in the name of religious fanaticism, President Obama will start paying attention to scientific progress again – he is reversing this cave age policy on stem cell research.

–  Can AIG turn back the clock by changing their image? Blech. Rachel Maddow takes on AIG for their latest waste of our tax payer dollars. Hiring P.R. firms to try to shore up their image with the people who bailed them out. Put some more lipstick on that pig AIG and everyone will feel better about you helping to tank the entire world’s economy.

–  In an ‘its about time’ mode: There is a rumor afloat that the Obama adminstration is giving Howard Dean some consideration for the post of Surgeon General. I called out his name in this space last month. Now that Sanjay Gupta has withdrawn, maybe Howard Dean will get a chance. He deserves something BIG. Go Howard.

–  Here are some of last weeks timely late night jokes. Some of them are really funny.

– Doing more time. Poor former Democratic Alabama governor Don Siegelman, who was raked over the coals by Rove and company lost his appeal and will be heading back to prison. I hate Karl Rove.

– Bill Maher has some new rules. Stay tuned until the end.

– Time is running out for newspapers. With newspapers going under everyday they are getting more and more desperate. I too worry about them. We are in big trouble as a society if newspapers go away. Who will do the investigating of the all pervasive corrupted corporations, politician, etc? Bloggers are good – but newspapers are better. There was a good article in Friday’s NY Times about ‘Fair Use.‘   Since I do try to stick with the ‘fair use’ rules in this space, here is a paragraph on the issue of Fair Use from demconwatch.com ‘The basic question is what can news outlets and blogs disseminate of information that is not independently created? The issue of copyright. There were issues last year when AP was very concerned about people using their material without paying them for it. IN GENERAL Fair Use means that you can use facts from someone else’s work, with attribution, but you cannot wholesale “steal” their work. So if you want to cite poll numbers, by saying, for example, “Pollster A (link to their site) says that Candidate X is polling at B%, and Candidate Y is polling at c%” that’s fine. If you expropriate their analysis, that would be over the line’.

–  If you want to see a really cute joey tree kangaroo, a sea lion pup named Katie and some other fabulous faces,  check out my photos from the Bronx Zoo.

–  If I could turn back time…