2011 archive
Trying To Outfox Alan Grayson 0
Update: Thanks to Joe Vecchio for pointing out that I misplet “Grayson” as “Simpson.”
Representative Grayson repeatedly fails to fall for the misdirection play.
Watch the interviewer totally miss and twist the point, while portraying a philosophy of “I’ve got mine” that is rather staggering:
Via The Richmonder.
Legacies 0
What Jason330 said: Bush Beyond Thunderdome.
Facebook Frolics: Breaching the Wall 0
into another wall. (Warning: Short commercial at beginning.)
No, I’m not planning to join Google+.
I am considering Identi.ca.
Pick-Up Lines 0
Like the wolf at the bar trying to pick up the girl next to him, Mitt the Flip says whatever he thinks will work right now.
In the Chicago Trib, Steve Chapman surveys Mitt’s recent history of incantations and recantations and sums them up:
Follow the link for to see the evidence.
Mitt the Flip: There’s no there there.
The Galt and the Lamers, Competition Dept. 2
Price competition in health care: The fee hand of the market at work.
Such “trade secret” clauses are standard in the medical world and exempt from public records laws, they say. But the secrecy means that Jackson can’t compare its prices to what many other hospitals pay. That’s like a consumer going to buy a flat-screen TV and not knowing what others are paying for the same brand, said Curtis Rooney, president of the Health Industry Group Purchasing Association. “We call them gag clauses. … People can’t find out the best price.”
Free market.
Competition.
It is to laugh.
The Voter Fraud Fraud 0
I remember my Daddy talking about paying his poll tax. He had already passed his literacy test. He was white. That guaranteed a passing score.
President Clinton calls out the voter fraud fraud: The revival of Jim Crow voting restrictions.
Video via the Brad Blog.
Afterthought:
Why do Republicans fear voters?
App Decision 0
And one of the best subheads ever:
Apple fails to get US ‘App Store’ trademark injunction Judge backs Amazon against fruitbite cargo cult
“Fruitbite cargo cult,” indeed.
A snippet form the story:
This claim was rather undermined by Apple’s own Steve Jobs, who called Apple’s app store: “the easiest-to-use largest app store in the world, preloaded on every iPhone”: a claim which suggests that there are other app stores and that people understand what that phrase means.
In other news, Apple is reported to be mulling plans to trademark every entry in the OED because words are used in iGadget menus.
When Too Much Is Never Enough 0
Harold Meyerson comments on the Republican Party’s intransigence and sees an unlikely parallel with another movement for which ideology trumped reality.
A snippet (emphasis added):
(snip)
When zeal runs amok, the sense of proportion suffers. Today’s Republicans remind me of some leaders of the American Communist Party whom I got to know decades ago, after they’d left the fold. “We believed in the party line, in its infallibility, so completely,” one ex-commie told me, “that we’d forget the larger strategy for the momentary tactic.” So it was with Communists of yore; so it is with Republicans today.
Indiana Jones Was a Piker 0
Wow.
According to the story, this has lain undisturbed for years and years:
Much fascinating detail and history at the link.
It’s being kept under guard.
Dewing Justice 0
The resident curmudgeon at my local rag felt it necessary to sound off on the Casey Anthony case in this morning’s fishwrapper.
In the last paragraph of her column, she quotes a local lawyer as saying:
“But you go outside and the grass is wet. That’s pretty good circumstantial evidence that it rained.”
Unless it were the dew or the underground sprinkler system.
And that is “reasonable doubt.”
Nothing To Do, Nowhere To Go 0
For all practical purposes, this is no change from last week:
Supply-chain disruptions from Japan’s March earthquake, European default concerns and gasoline prices that neared $4 a gallon prompted some companies in recent weeks to fire workers, further weighing on the consumer spending that makes up two thirds of the economy. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg forecast the Labor Department will report tomorrow that the unemployment rate in June held unchanged at 9.1 percent.
The decrease in persons receiving extended benefits is meaningless, as many persons are still unemployed but are aging out of benefits into destitution.
Brendan Does the Arithmetic 0
In which Boo + Hoo = 171,274.
QOTD 0
Dave Barry, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):
Thus the metric system did not really catch on in the States unless you count the increasing popularity of the 9mm bullet.