March, 2011 archive
(Micro)Twits on Twitter 0
Bing! Bang! Busted!
On! Wisconsin (Updated) 0
Consolidating the coup:
Republican Scott Fitzgerald saThe state Senate majority leader says votes by Democrats don’t count in committee because they remain in contempt.
Addendum, the Next Day:
The Republican Politburo has apparently decided that enforcing one-party rule was a bad PR move.
Driving while Brown 0
Truly classy, these Republicans. Right out of this week’s episode of CSI: Miami.*
According to the story, he said later, “I was just speaking like a southeast Kansas person.” Says something about southeast Kansas if he’s accurate.
You can hear him be classy at the link.
_____________________
*Yes, I know that CSI: Miami is one of the most over-the-top, melodramatic, poorly acted pieces of science fiction on the telly vision, but it has a certain unapologetic campy flair.
Update from the Foreclosure-Based Economy 0
Foreclosures feed the market in my area:
Gotta make those sales.
Different Perspectives . . . 0
. . . open the mind.
Chaunceydevega considers the difference between “white” and “White”:
Follow the link, read the whole thing, and bookmark the site.
The Incredible-osity of James O’Keefe 0
Back in the olden days, when I was a young ‘un, there was constant talk about the “credibility” of public figures.
Politicians and journalists had to have “credibility” (which, I note, was not the same as being “credible”).
The underlying tone seemed to be that there was some quality of credible-ness that existed separately from truthfulness.
If you spoke the truth yet lacked “credibility,” no one would believe you; you were as a tinkling bell or a sounding brass. (Alternatively, if you had “credibility” you could say any old damn thing you wanted to and get away with it. See “Southeast Asia: Domino Theory”). (I think this is roughly what “gravitas” means in political discourse today.)
Clearly, truthfulness and credibility have drifted either farther apart.
James O’Keefe’s maliciously edited videos cause people to lose their jobs, even though he has repeatedly proven that he and truth live in different zip codes.
Megan Carpenter comments on the recent kerfuffle involving O’Keefe’s recent NPR hatchet job (which even Glenn Beck’s website agrees is “heavily edited”):
Yet, O’Keefe’s lies are treated as truth.
Until they are not.
Elsewhere, appearing on On the Media, NPR’s own Ira Glass wondered why NPR refused to fight back.
As somebody who works in public radio, it is killing me that people on the right are going around trying to basically rebrand us, saying that it’s biased news, it’s – it’s, you know, it’s left wing news, when I feel like anybody who listens to the shows knows that it’s not. And we are not fighting back. We’re not saying anything back. I find it completely annoying and [LAUGHS], and I don’t understand it.
You can read the transcript at the link or listen to the interview here:
Republicans will continue the lies as long the lies get results.
Reverse Double-Spin Take Down 0
A citizen stumbled across the site and notified the police. Investigation ensues. Left hand, meet right hand and all that.
Buried down in the story was this little gem, which warmed my little Linux-loving heart:
The computer programmer also noticed that the “Precious Treasure Holiday Company” site appeared to have been designed using a 2003 version of Microsoft’s FrontPage. In retrospect, she remarked, the use of such outdated software should have tipped her to the fact that the site was a U.S. government production.
Persons who know what they are doing generally don’t use FrontPage.
Rich Millionaires 0
Where too much is never enough:
“Wealth is relative, and to some extent the more you have the more you realize how much more you need,” said Sanjiv Mirchandani, president of National Financial, a subsidiary of Boston-based Fidelity, that provides clearing and custody services to broker-dealers, in an interview before the survey’s release today.
Follow the link for a glimpse of a whole nother world.
QOTD 0
Plautus, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):
The gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish the hours! Confound him, too, who in this place set up a sundial, to cut and hack my day so wretchedly into small pieces!
Update from the Foreclosure-Based Economy 0
How to keep foreclosures up and foreclosers employed:
Ackiss knew he’d have to vacate his compact home in Bayview. He’d stopped making mortgage payments last June. He just wasn’t sure when he had to get out.
Twice, his home had been scheduled for foreclosure. Both times it was delayed, without anyone notifying Ackiss. Once more, the foreclosure was set, though Ackiss said he’d won approval for a more flexible “deed in lieu” departure.
Praying while Brown* (Update) 0
In my ex-local rag, Dick Polman looks that the Republican Party’s, and particular the loathsome Congressman King’s (R-The Dark Side) hearings this week.
He exposes the fraud behind the hearings, then zeroes in on their inherent hypocrisy:
The hypocrisy is most obvious when we examine Congressman King’s past loyalties to the IRA. On a number of occasions after the IRA bombed British facilities and killed innocent people, our counterterrorism chairman seemed fine with that.
(snip)
And while King carves out an exception for the IRA, the GOP stays true to its own DNA. These hearings predictably stigmatize an entire minority community, paint its members as The Other, and further stoke anti-Muslim hostility among those who think that mosques are hotbeds for terrorism and that any “radical” thought is a coded call to action.
_________________________
*Yes, I know that Muslims come in all colors. But I have a dollar to a doughnut that, if no Muslims were not-white, wingnuts would not be so committed to demonizing them as a group.
Addendum, Later that Evening:
See The Richmonder.
Japan 0
Amidst the inanity of most social networking comes glimpses of real pain.
Reuters:
“Came back home at 8 in the morning after the depressing night…Now, the nuclear power plant has exploded and we might already be exposed to radioactivity,” said a 23-year-old female office worker from Tokyo on a Facebook page.
“I just don’t know what to do, what’s coming next, and will I be alive tomorrow?” she asked.
The Key to the Mystery Key 0
El Reg:
The figures come from esure, who asked a thousand or so average people and discovered that women carry 10 keys, compared to a chap’s eight, but the girls are slightly better at remembering what they’re for – only 20 per cent mysterious compared to a man’s 23 per cent.
Not me. I went through all my keys last week and discarded a half dozen.
Follow the link. After the snark are some good hints on key safety.
The President’s Weekly Address 0
Recognizing Women’s History Month:
From the transcript:
Yet, there are also reminders of how much work remains to be done. Women are still more likely to live in poverty in this country. In education, there are areas like math and engineering where women are vastly outnumbered by their male counterparts. This is especially troubling, for we know that to compete with nations around the world, these are the fields in which we need to harness the talents of all our people. That’s how we’ll win the future.
Stray Thought 0
Republicans are fond of saying “The federal government is broke.” I just heard one say it on the Magickal Talking Box.
They don’t admit that they broke it.
Responsible Fiscals 0
Jamelle Boule comments briefly and incisively on the backwards nature of the budget debate.
Thinking the Unthinkable 0
Bill Maher:
The Libyan rebels this week kind of hinted to the United States that they could use a little help.
Right.
Like, America would just blunder around the Middle East killing people without all the facts.
That doesn’t sound like the America I know.
