2011 archive
Return of Beyond the Palin Meets the Dialectic 0
Jon Stewart undresses the word salad to reveal its internal contradictions. Even if her voice grates on you like parmesan on spaghetti, take the eight minutes to listen :
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Petty Woman | ||||
|
||||
Additional commentary (damned accurate commentary, by the way) here.
Via TPM.
Politifact Awards “Political Lie of the Year” 0
Republican Party continues to dominate the awards.
No Exceptions 0
Richard Wolff discusses American Exceptionalism in the Guardian.
First, a definition:
Follow the link to find out what happened next.
(Hint: The “almost no one got poorer” part–not so much no more.)
Seen on the Street 0
Foggy day yesterday on the CBBT:
This appears to be a vessel of the Military Sealift Command, perhaps the Big Horn or Kaiser.
Q. What’s the Difference between a Ponzi Scheme and a Patsy Scheme? 0
A. A patsy scheme does not promise a return on your investment.
Correct Question 0
To get relevant answers, one must ask the correct questions.
Kevin Cullen of the Boston Globe talks with a retiring firefighter. The discussion turns to public employee unions and to asking correct questions (emphasis added):
“People’s retirement plans took a big hit on the stock market. Then everybody looked at the public unions and said, ‘Hey, why I should be paying for their pensions and benefits when mine are being cut?’
“I think that’s the wrong question. The right question is, why are companies in the private sector so bent on profits that they don’t want to take care of their workers?
The relevant answer is “Bonuses, Stock Options, and Country Club Memberships.”
QOTD 0
Daniel Webster, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures.
Stray Thought 0
American Idol is the Gong Show with no sense of humor.
“Looks Like We Got Us a Convoy” 0
Automating everything:
The trials held on Volvo’s test track in Sweden slaved a single car to a lorry to test the platooning system.
Trains of cars under the control of a lead driver should cut fuel use, boost safety and may even cut congestion.
Contract on America 0
Shaun Mullen reads the fine print. A nugget:
Boehner knew that the $100 billion promise would be impossible to come close to keeping given the fine print attached to the pledge by party bigs even as they coddled the Tea Party acolytes among them. The fine print included Social Security, Medicare and defense and homeland security spending being off limits. In other words, the bulk of the budget.
If the budget-reduction promise was good political theater, the health-care reform offensive is worthy of a group Grammy. This is because . . . um, reality will once again rear its pug-ugly head.
Read the rest at the link.
Old Tea, New Bags 0
Tennessee Teabaggers want to whitewash (you will pardon the expression) slavery.
These folks are nuts.
Light Bloggery 0
Taking care of business.
QOTD 0
G. K. Chesterton, via Andrew Sullivan:
If I am made to walk the plank by a pirate, it is vain for me to offer, as a common-sense compromise, to walk along the plank for a reasonable distance. It is exactly about the reasonable distance that the pirate and I differ.
Rhetorical Question 0
On the Media devoted two segments to political rhetoric in last week’s show. You can find both of them at the show’s website.
The one I found particularly interesting was this one:
A nugget from the transcript (emphasis added):
GEORGE PACKER: The key part of this is where it’s coming from. It’s coming from leaders in the right wing political movement and their media heroes.
Let me just say one thing about Sarah Palin and the crosshairs campaign literature. By itself I wouldn’t think that that’s a particularly incendiary document. It’s first the context in which it appears, which is continual use of that kind of language of guns, of war.
And second, in retrospect, it just seems indecent. This woman was shot. Isn’t it regrettable someone once put a crosshairs on her district?
Now, these are people who, as Orwell once wrote, are playing with fire without knowing that it’s hot. They don’t seem to understand the toxicity of what they’ve created.
Follow the link above to listen or listen here (mp3):
Gather the Villagers! 0
Light the torches! Get the pitchforks!
It is time to storm the Wikileaks castle Domain Name Servers once more:
The data – which is not yet available on the Wikileaks website – was held on two discs handed over by Rudolf Elmer at a press conference in London.
(snip)
Although it was not confirmed what activities might be covered by the data, the Wikileaks head noted that previous data from Julius Baer provided by Mr Elmer had shed light on tax evasion, the hiding of proceeds of criminal acts and “the protection of assets of those about to fall out of political favour”.
The data covers multinationals, financial firms and wealthy individuals from many countries, including the UK, US and Germany, and covers the period 1990-2009, according to a report in Swiss newspaper Der Sonntag.
Atrios predicts the reaction:
Frankly, I suspect that those particular disks will never be seen again unless they are backed up in multiple secure locations.
Biblical Tongues 0
The two bodies of work said to have had the greatest effect on modern English are text messages and AOL Instant Messenger Shakespeare’s plays and the King James Version (KJV) of the Holy Bible.
They did not accomplish this in a vacuum; they came at a time when spreading literacy and the use of the printing press facilitated their ability to influence more than a few Oxbridge Dons and isolated lordly literary dilettantes. The article fascinates. A nugget:
“The translators seem to have taken the view that the best translation was a literal one, so instead of adapting Hebrew and Greek to English forms of speaking they simply translated it literally. The result wouldn’t have made all that much sense to readers, but they got used to it, and so these fundamentally foreign ways of expressing yourself became accepted as normal English through the influence of this major public text.”
Examples of Hebrew idiom that have become English via the Bible include: “to set one’s teeth on edge”, “by the skin of one’s teeth”, “the land of the living” and “from strength to strength”.
The President’s Weekly Address 0
Excerpt (no doubt the birthers are foaming over this):
. . . before we are Democrats or Republicans, we are Americans.
Up Is Down, In Is Out, War Is Peace 0
It does not honor Martin Luther King, Jr., to use his name in PR for violence.
Additional reading at Facing South.
Birthwrongs 0
Steve Chapman, writing in the Chicago Tribune, takes a look at the current rage in Wingnut World–repealing the citizenship provisions of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. He skewers the paranoid race-baiting that underlies that effort, including the bizarre fears of Manchurian pregnancies. A nugget:
Sure they are, congressman. And while they’re here, they’re putting LSD in the water supply. Unfortunately, the fear of “anchor babies,” as they are known among anti-immigration activists, is spawning not only weird fantasies but also actual legislation.