July, 2012 archive
Ask the Commander Guy 2
The innerwebs alert me that, in Newsweek, Michael Tomasky asks, “Is Romney a wimp?”
And the Commander Guy answers.
Mittsteps Abroad 0
Der Speigel considers the Mittsteps in Europe:
The remark didn’t come after the Republican presidential candidate’s snafu-filled European tour over the past week. He made it after spending two years as a missionary for the Mormon Church in France in the 1960s, according to his biographers Michael Kranish and Scott Helman . . . .
Fast forward to last week in Europe, and things haven’t really gone any better for Romney. His visits to Britain, Israel or Poland didn’t go very well. The result has again been rejection of one kind or another. And the candidate has only himself to blame for this gaffe-filled tour.
Facebook Frolics 0
Frolicking through the wingnutosphere.
Meebo No Go 0
I have escaped from that vile Meebo bar that’s crawling through the internet like some sort of evil slime mold.
Don’t think that clicking to hide it makes it go away. It’s still following you around in its seedy trench coat; you just don’t see it.
I installed the NotScript extension in Opera and the No Script extension in Firebox. (I primarily use Opera, but sometimes use Firefox.)
The Opera Not Script extension displays a little pyramid in the address bar. Clicking the icon displays the settings dialog. It may need for you to modify your Opera preferences for storing user script information; Opera’s default is no storage space. If it does require the change, clicking the message (which shows when you click the pyramid) will take you to the entry that needs modification and tell you what to enter (5000–the value is in kilobytes).
Both extensions allow you to configure them to allow scripts to run on pages where you find them useful. For instance, the WordPress post editor uses Java to handle the menu, so I allowed scripts from my own domain.
In Opera’s Not Script, I did that by clicking the pyramid for the dialog and selecting to allow scripts on from pineviewfarm.net.
Firefox’s No Script displays a message bar at the bottom of the browser window if scripts are present on the page; clicking the “Options” button to the right displays the settings menu. You can click to allow scripts there.
I took a quick look in Microsoft Internet Exploder, but could find no such functionality. Plus Internet Exploder tried to reset my default search engine to Bing! (Hoick! Ptui!) without asking permission.
I haven’t needed “no script” extensions before because my hosts file was sufficient for my needs, but Meebo make me go over the edge.
The Voter Fraud Fraud 0
It’s a Republican thing:
Dr. Republican, M. D. 0
I think I posted this once before, but it turned up in my RSS feed and is worth rerunning.
Warning: Almost as tasteless as the old white men in the Republican Party.
Cavalcade of Spots 0
Mike Gruss, columnist for my local rag, is fed up with the political commercials, and the conventions haven’t even happened yet. A snippet:
Those commercials were the building blocks of the American dream to get fat and stupid. But in the wrong hands, (dramatic music here) and during the wrong season, television commercials are miserable and force us to do things like read books or play Solitaire on our phones.
(Out of context black-and-white clip from cable news here.)
Candidates promise to make America better, but then they go on TV and make everything worse by playing their stupid ads over and over again. Is this the America you think we want?
Death of a Dream 0
Shaun Mullen drafts the obit.
Twits on Twitter 0
The Guardian on your legal right (in the UK, at least) to be a twit:
(snip)
When emails were a novelty, however, few parliamentarians paid attention to e-freedoms – unaware they had anything to do with day-to-day life. Well, now they do – and so merit the old vigilance. Tweets may invite rage or ridicule. But a tweeter’s right to make a fool of themselves must be defended to the death.
Read the rest.
Mitt the Flip’s Song of the South 0
Chauncey Devega mercilessly dissects Mitt the Flip’s Southern Strategy Dixie dog whistles.
A nugget:
By proxy, these racially driven attacks on Barack Obama are really an assault on Black Americans. We are positioned in the White Conservative political imagination as perennial outsiders and second class citizens. As the late Joel Olson smartly observed, in the American political tradition, and in a country founded as a herrenvolk society, to be black means to be an “anti-citizen.”
He’s quite right, you know.
I’m a Southern boy. I know how to decode the damned code.
Aside:
We recently came into possession of a DVD of Disney’s Song of the South. Until then, all I had seen of the movie were the animated bits about Br’er Rabbit that used air on Walt Disney’s television show when I was a young ‘un.
The casual implicit racism, which was quite mainstream when the movie was filmed less than a long lifetime ago, made my skin crawl.
That is the America of the Southern Strategy and the Republican Party.
I doubt that I could watch the movie again, however amusing the animated bits might be (and even the portrayals of the animals in those fables was infused with racist imagery).
Mittiquette 0
Dr. Gerry Mander explains British manners to Mitt the Flip the Brits the bird:
It is not uncommon for Americans visiting Britain to be surprised at the extent of cultural difference between us. You say sidewalk, we say pavement. Our pants are something you wear underneath your pants. But when it comes to transatlantic diplomacy, the important thing to bear in mind is that, in this country, when you are invited to a “tea party”, it means a polite exchange of anodyne chat over a hot beverage brewed from leaves, not a deranged nationalist cult based around hatred of government, guns and religious fanaticism.
Follow the link for more advice from Dr. Mander.
