January, 2009 archive
Lancing the Boil of Republican Rule 0
Let the healing begin.
“First, I can say without exception or equivocation that the United States will not torture,” he said. “Second, we will close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and determine how to deal with those who have been held there.”
Christian Terrorism 0
Yes, right here in River City:
(snip)
“We think it’s intentional because of Roe vs. Wade,” Panos said. “He’s not saying much. He was praying or chanting when the officers arrived.”
Via Glomarization.
Now, He Has No Life 0
’nuff said:
After 26 years of trying, Parker finally managed to solve the Rubik’s cube that confounded him. Now, you may be thinking that he only occasionally picked up the puzzle, slowing his progress—but the reality is that he obsessed over it day after day, night after night.
Via Wait! Wait!
Hitting the Ground Running 0
Acting to address several promises he made during his campaign, Obama met with top generals about speeding the withdrawal from Iraq and gathered his senior economic advisers as he continued to push for a massive spending bill to create jobs.
He also signed a series of executive orders and directives intended to slow the revolving door between government service and lobbying, and ordered his administration to share information more freely with the public.
But wait! There’s more! Dan Froomkin.
Parallels 1
Bill Shein review compares the lives of Lincoln and Obama:
But it’s less-well-known that both Obama and Lincoln named their children Sasha and Malia, something that Lincoln biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin says is “absolutely not true.” At least when she’s asked during repeated late-night prank phone calls to her home.
There are countless other links between 1861 and 2009. It’s been widely reported that President Obama used Lincoln’s Bible while taking the oath of office. But did you know that thanks to special arrangement with the Smithsonian Institution, on Tuesday, soul legend Aretha Franklin wore the actual hat worn by Mary Todd Lincoln during her husband’s first swearing-in?
One hopes that his column will do to such comparisons what Airplane did to the loathsome and hackneyed Airport series.
End them.
Stray Thought: Ettiquet Dept. 1
If you don’t tell me why you’re calling me in the message you leave, I’m not calling you back.
Splitsville 0
I was saying this in an email just last week. Glad the Toimes caught up with me in theorizing that the Chief Justice flubbed to oath because he doesn’t understand English grammar:
Among these fetishes is the prohibition against “split verbs,” in which an adverb comes between an infinitive marker like “to,” or an auxiliary like “will,” and the main verb of the sentence. According to this superstition, Captain Kirk made a grammatical error when he declared that the five-year mission of the starship Enterprise was “to boldly go where no man has gone before”; it should have been “to go boldly.” Likewise, Dolly Parton should not have declared that “I will always love you” but “I always will love you” or “I will love you always.”
Any speaker who has not been brainwashed by the split-verb myth can sense that these corrections go against the rhythm and logic of English phrasing. The myth originated centuries ago in a thick-witted analogy to Latin, in which it is impossible to split an infinitive because it consists of a single word, like dicere, “to say.” But in English, infinitives like “to go” and future-tense forms like “will go” are two words, not one, and there is not the slightest reason to interdict adverbs from the position between them.
Not all he doesn’t understand either.
Bushonomics: The Hangover 0
“The evil that men do lives after them”:
And the ripple effect:
Despite paying lower benefits to its jobless residents than other Northeastern states, the state’s unemployment fund has been borrowing about $90 million a week from the federal unemployment trust fund, state officials said. The deficit has already reached $212 million and is expected to exceed $2.5 billion by the end of 2010, they said.
I Me a River 8
In my quest for a media player that supports OGG (the open source audio format) because some of my favorite podcasts no longer do mp3, I finally settled on an iRiver E200 from JR’s via Amazon. I stuck it in my shopping cart at Amazon to think about for a couple of days and, in that period, the price went down 25%.
I have it working under Linux. Here’s how.
Stray Question 3
Why does every device that comes with a USB cable say, “Use only the cable that came with this [device name]”?
Inauguration Reflections 0
Yesterday, I went to a luncheon organized under the auspices of Moveon.org (Shake it off. Move on, already, for heaven’s sake. Stop wanking and fix the damn problems. That is what “move on” means.)
I started tearing up on the way there (about 15 minutes down Washington Street from here).
So, I’m sitting there at the table with my head bent and my left hand over my eyes trying to hold back the tears, as the telly vision showed images of bigwigs filing onto the West Front of the Capitol (where I used to take lunchtime walks when I worked up the street from there) when the lady sitting next to me touches me on the shoulder and asks, “Are you okay?”
“I’m better than I’ve been in eight years.”
“I thought it was emotion, but after a while, I decided I should check and make sure you weren’t choking or something.”
The House Is Ablaze and People Are Wondering If the Petunia Needs Watered 0
The smallness of what passes for contemporary political thought is mind-gagging.
H/T Karen for the link.
Showstopper of the Day 0
Frankly, I think the Reverend Lowery stole the show.
And his roots are deep. He was one of the founders of the SCLC.
Most white folks didn’t realize–as a white folk, I didn’t realize until I heard about it on CNN–that he quoted liberally from the “Black National Anthem.”
He put Rick Warren’s arrogant pomposity in its place.
