2011 archive
Republican Candidates in Twaddling Clothes 0
Daniel Ruth considers the Republican field. A nugget:
Really now, can you remotely fathom Dwight Eisenhower, or Abraham Lincoln, or Barry Goldwater, or Teddy Roosevelt, or Bob Dole, or Ronald Reagan or even Richard Nixon sharing a debate dais with the current crop of GOP candidates and not thinking to themselves: “Holy Toledo! These people are certifiably full of twaddle.”
Read the rest.
Facebook Frolics, Timeline Edition 0
What most users don’t know is that the new features being
The medicine show breaks in a new grift. Follow the link for details.
The name itself is cleverly designed to conceal the fact that your profile no longer arranges information chronologically. Yes, things are laid out by year and by month. But, when it comes to what’s displayed to your social circle at any given time, other metrics, including direct payments to Facebook itself, will now influence the ranking and placement of stories. This payola will be a crucial part of the graph rank, the new metric for placement that the social network uses to determine what appears on your profile.
The Entitlement Society 0
At SFGate dot com, the San Francisco Chronicle’s website, Leland Faust, a man who has gotten rich investing, considers what’s wrong with the Wall Street banksters. Using Jon Corzine’s ill-fated stewardship of MF Global as an example, he cites ten failings.
1. The cult of a Wall Street superstar.
2. Gambling disguised as investing.
3. The bail-me-out syndrome.
4. Enormous conflicts of interest.
5. Leverage on a grand scale.
6. Failure of regulators and the reform law.
7. Misappropriation of client funds.
8. Worthless rating agencies.
9. Golden parachutes soaring high.
10. Breakdown of morality: Even if something is legal, that doesn’t mean it is right.
Follow the link to see the examples supporting each point.
Retrospective 0
If you like World’s Dumbest, this is right up your alley.
Aside:
A news commentator in one of the snippets says that one of Mitt the Flip’s statements made him seem like Thurston Howell III.
This insults Thurston Howell III. Mitt the Flip has neither his humanity nor his sense of humor.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Always be polite to the help at the coffee shop.
The 17-year-old had received the gift, a gun, from her dad for Christmas. He encouraged her to carry it so she’d be safe.
Facebook Frolics 0
“oh so you keyed my car? well your karmas gonna be a wholeee lot worse that that”
The next morning, the girl, 16-year-old Allie Scott, found herself in big trouble.
The Pinellas school district suspended her for three days. The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office charged her with stalking.
The girl’s parents have hired a lawyer and are threatening suit.
“Stalking” does rather seem to be overkill.
No word on the search for the anonymous car-keyer.
Twits on Twitter 0
Stock car twits spinning out on the curves.
QOTD 0
Thomas Carlyle, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):
The aristocracy of feudal parchment has passed away with a mighty rushing, and now, by a natural course, we arrive at aristocracy of the money-bag.
And Just How Do They Plan To Enforce This? 0
The Republican Party has become a deeply anti-democratic party.
Anyone who wants to vote must sign a form at the polling place pledging to support the eventual Republican nominee for president. Anyone who refuses to sign will be barred from voting in the primary.
Words fail me.
Via Raw Story.
The Voter Fraud Fraud Fraudsters Come to Virginia 0
I get mail about Republican attempts to keep out the vote.
The Republicans in the Virginia legislature are preparing to suppress the vote; a snippet from my mail:
The nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice has reported that as many as five million Americans have been disenfranchised by statutes such as HB 9 and SB 1. In a December 9, 2011 commentary in the Richmond Times-Dispatch entitled, “Voter ID laws recall Jim Crow”, Neil Pierce notes a 2006 study by the American Research Corporation that found that 25 percent of African Americans, 18 percent of senior citizens, and 18 percent of young adults (ages 18-24) do not possess photo IDs. Senate Bill 1 and HB 9 would make it much more difficult for young adults, low income people, senior citizens, and people of color to vote.
SB 1 would eliminate voters from using their state issued voter registration card as an approved form of ID used to cast a vote. Both SB 1 and HB 9 would require voters to cast a provisional, not an official ballot if they did not bring an approved ID. Voters would have to later present the appropriate ID in order for their vote to count. Why are lawmakers making it harder to vote?
To echo the writer’s question, why do Republicans fear the electorate?
Learn more here. Sign the petition here.
Image via Balloon Juice.
Voter Fraud Fraud Fraudster 0
The failure of most Republican presidential wanna-bes to qualify for the Virginia Republican primary has been much in the news.
Now some political bigwigs want to retroactively change the rules because, apparently, rules are for other persons. But that’s not where I was headed . . . .
Buried in a long story about a retroactively-change-the-rules trial balloon is this tidbit.
If one uses the same reasoning that Republicans applied to ACORN’s occasional submission of invalid voter registration forms (and, remember, ACORN tried to flag forms it suspected of being improper), this means that Newt the Gingrinch is guilty of election fraud and must be destroyed as ACORN was destroyed
But that would require applying a single standard, wouldn’t it? We can’t have that, now, can we?
In Wingnut World, rules are for other persons (I guess that turned out to be where I was headed after all).
Nothing To Do, Nowhere To Go 0
Still under 400k.
(snip)
The number of people continuing to receive jobless benefits rose by 34,000 in the week ended Dec. 17 to 3.6 million. Those figures do not include the number of Americans receiving extended benefits under federal programs.
The number of workers who’ve used up their traditional benefits and are now collecting emergency and extended payments fell by about 7,800 to 3.5 million in the week ended Dec. 10.
As usual, no attempt to quantify how many persons have fallen off the grid and no longer qualify for benefits of any sort.
Endless War, Endless Guff 0
A few days ago, Chicago Tribune columnist Dennis Byrne invested energy in attempting to justify the Great and Glorious Patriotic War for a Lie in Iraq. Here’s a bit:
And a good way to calculate the benefits is to ask: What if President George W. Bush and Congress had decided in 2003 not to attack the tyrannical and murderous regime of Saddam Hussein? With the support of much of the American public.
He proceeds to waste a couple hundred words trying to prove that sending persons to die for a lie is somehow a worthy exercise in the common weal.
I suggest you read it. We are likely to hear more of this sort of revisionist drivel from the “war is always good” crowd over the coming years.
Click for a larger image.
