June, 2009 archive
QOTD 0
Grumpy Realist on theological coincidences as regards Mark “I’m David, she’s Bathsheba” Sanford:
Down at the Farm 0
Power failure. The UPSs held long enough for me to shut the webserver down in an orderly fashion.
Meanwhile, when I went to check on the details of the power failure at the electric company website:
Break Time 0
Off to drink liberally.
Coleman’s Lantern Burning Out 0
Minnesota Supreme Court rules that the winner of the election won the election.
Return of Beyond the Palin: Post Mortem 0
Vanity Fair explores Sarah Palin’s career and campaign. I know that some persons are suffering Too Much Palin Syndrome (Palin-drome?); nevertheless, it is a fascinating article.
A nugget:
Stray Thought, Rerun Dept. 1
Vincent D’Onofrio is looking more like Raymond Burr with every episode of Law and Order CI.
Advertising Fail 0
A local plumbing firm’s telly vision commercial includes a reference to their “family values.”
I guess that means they run around with other plumbing firms in the middle of the night.
They’d All Look Good in Orange 0
Richard Adams in the Guardian on Bernie Madoff as a distraction:
Wallops 0
In the early days of the US Space Program, Wallops Island, about 50 miles north of Pine View Farm, was a major testing site.
We used to go out back to watch the rockets go up during night launches.
It’s coming back to life:
This is a recent launch:
We Need Single Payer, Reprise 0
(snip)
Substitute health insurance for police and fire protection, and you have one of the best – and least-heralded – arguments for universal health care, according to a small but growing number of economists.
Read the whole thing.
And from The Nation:
“Male, pale, and stale.” I love it.
Seminal Research 0
Actually, I hate that phrase. It generally indicates a lazy linguist.
But there seems to be no other way to characterize this.
Drink Liberally 0
Live charitably.
Drinking Liberally Center City at Triumph Brewing Company in, natch, Center City Philadelphia, 2nd and Chestnut, Tuesday at 6 p. m.
I’m threatening to be there this week.
We Need Single Payer 0
which probably ain’t gonna happen, so we need a public option.
Brendan (warning: mild language but not as bad as you hear at any school bus stop):
Sales Tax Craziness 0
Details here.
Get Ready for the Noise Machine 0
Media Matters:
The bottom line is that the Supreme Court does not accept cases unless it thinks there is a legal issue worthy of consideration. This means that any case it accepts has a good chance of being reversed.
Further down the page, see the bottom line (emphasis added):
. . . it also would not be unprecedented for the court to reverse a ruling reached by a justice before his or her elevation to the Supreme Court. As an appeals court judge, Chief Justice John Roberts was a member of a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which, in its July 2005 unanimous ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, alBaswed a military commission to try Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Guantánamo Bay detainee.
Roberts was confirmed as chief justice several months later, in September 2005. Then, in 2006, the Supreme Court reversed the circuit court’s decision on a 5-3 ruling.
Moreover, contrary to the myth that it is unusual for the Supreme Court to reverse federal appellate court decisions, data compiled by SCOTUSblog since 2004 show that the Supreme Court has reversed more than 67 percent of the federal appeals court cases it considered each year, except 2007, when it reversed federal appeals court cases 61 percent of the time.
GIGO 1
Why is my telly vision subjecting me to an advertisement for a homeopathic remedy for doggy pain?
Homeopathy is crap. But it appears to be really lucrative crap.
