September, 2009 archive
Drink Liberally 0
Noz, Glomarization, and Mithras have all reminded me that this is the fifth anniversary of Drinking Liberally in Philadelphia. It was three years ago this month that I attended my first meeting there. For the first year or so I showed up sporadically, about every four to six weeks, but later became pretty regular, about three weeks a month.
Lately, my attendance has tailed off because my personal life has taken an unexpected and very pleasant turn, but I’ll be there tonight, if only to get away from my own cooking.
Triumph Brewing Company, 2nd and Chestnut (ample meter parking on Front), 6 p. m.
It’s downstairs tonight.
Good food, good drink, good fellowship.
Brendan Writes a Column 0
At Philly Weekly, in which he holds his pinky out as he remembers a tea party.
Aptly Named 0
Congressman Jerry Lewis.
In Plain English 0
Glomarization translates a judge’s ruling.
Wolf. Sheep’s Clothing. 0
I just got a come-on in the mail from some outfit trying to bamboozle me into getting a mortgage I don’t need at a rate I’m not interested in for reasons that have nothing to do with me.
It was breath-taking in its nerve and detachment from reality.
ACORN 0
Brad Friedman at the Guardian:
But when a few actual low-level bad apples – who happen to be African-American, and working for a group fighting for the American Dream for all Americans – commit petty stupidity, the entire organisation must be brought down in order to save the country.
ACORN helps poor people. We can’t have that, now, can we?
Blog Insurance 0
Apparently, it’s the coming thing. A nugget:
“You’re not going to inadvertently defame someone in the course of describing your lunch or how drunk you were last night or posting photos of cats with silly captions,” said Elizabeth Spiers, a founding editor of Gawker.com. “And that’s 99 percent of blogging.”
According to the article, you may be covered by your homeowner’s policy, unless you make money. In that case, the blog (or twitter or whatever) becomes a commercial enterprise.
Malware Circulating via Facebook 0
Beware of Facebook messages asking whether you are in a video and purporting to link to a video; you aren’t and it doesn’t.
They may take you to a fake Facebook page that tries to pwn your computer.
I wrote about my investigation at Geekazine.
Racism and the Right 5
Update: The post at Kiko’s House seems to have disappeared. H/T to Karen for letting me know.
Update Two: Via the comments, Shaun Mullen tells me the post is available now.
Over at Kiko’s House, Shaun Mullen has written a very thoughtful post on the place of racism in rightwing politics. My two or three regular readers know that this is one of my hot buttons.
I won’t try to excerpt or summarize his post, just recommend it. I make this comment:
He is more generous than I. Though I do not believe that all Republicans are racist–not by any means, for I know those who are not, or who are at least as non-racist as any of us can be having grown up in a society where race is seldom far from the surface–it is unquestionable that the Republican Party set out to woo racists and now is full of them.
It was called the Southern Strategy (PDF).
And it has succeeded to the point that those Republican “strategists” who wished to exploit white racists, who were fleeing the Democratic Party because Lyndon Johnson betrayed his kind (as it was phrased back then), now find themselves captive to them.
The Republican Party chose to romance the racists. Now it is wed to them.
Addendum:
Alex Goodall brings another perspective.
Sign the Teabagger Pledge 0
Over at Delaware Liberal.
Digital Dominance 0
The library at the Virginia Wesleyan University is selling off its collection of vinyl albums.
