2012 archive
Mitt the Editorial Challenge 0
Shaun Mullen considers the task facing journalists, at least the ones willing to commit actual journalism:
“It’s time to find out what Mitt Romney would do as president.”
The reaction would be a room full of pained faces because Romney has been on every side of every issue of consequence since his failed 2008 run and he least of all knows what he would do as president.
The (Jobs) Creationism Myth 0
Mitt the Flip this Company, the Michael Milkin of today.
Alyona explores how “private equity” firms make money by forcing companies to cannibalize themselves:
Dog Days 0
On the Media analyzes the media’s fascination with Mitt Romney’s dog carrier, From the website:
Follow the link to listen.
Aside:
Frankly, I think the story has staying power because the idea of strapping a dog in a carrier to the top of a car is so outre that most persons would not have thought of it, let alone considered it seriously.
One of the commenters at the website (the comments are mostly–and surprisingly–sane) has this to say:
I wonder if the host of this segment is a Romney fan and/or has never had a dog he liked very much.
He spoke about the dog carrier as if it was a custom built carrier for car rooftops and that this misunderstanding is the root of the story’s staying power. . . .
Try doing some research (like a Google shopping search) and you’ll find that there is NO SUCH THING AS A “ROOFTOP DOG CARRIER!”
Never was.
Stray Question 0
Have you noticed how many Wall Streeters’ rationales for their rapacity boils down to “I’m rich; that proves my actions are virtuous”?
Romney’s Bain 0
Dick Polman considers Republican efforts to remove (or at least distract from) the stain of Bain:
The Republican establishment doesn’t like to hear this kind of talk uttered out loud. Rushing to defend Romney this week, it wants to squelch any suggestion that free enterprise is not intrinsically wonderful 100 percent of the time. The party regulars are very upset with Newt Gingrich, for example, because Newt is voicing blasphemies like this: “I think there’s a real difference between people who believe in the free market – and people who go around, take financial advantage, loot companies, leave behind broken families, broken towns, people on unemployment.”
(snip)
Most importantly, the GOP establishment wants to ensure that downscale voters continue to support the party that traditionally does its utmost to line the pockets of the rich.
Read the rest. It’s worth the three minutes.
History Repeats 0
Leonard Pitts, Jr., commenting on Little Ricky’s reception from college students in New Hampshire.
You will recall that they booed his homophobic homilies.
QOTD 0
Nikita Kruschev, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):
Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge where there is no river.
The (Jobs) Creationism Myth 0
Take two minutes out of your day and listen to the numbers shrink from “hundreds of thousands” to “thousands.”
(Warning: Short commercial at beginning.)
Via TPM.
Meta: Site Redesign, Fine-Tuning Dept. 0
It’s been a year since I redesigned the appearance of this site and it’s time to mop up some loose ends, as well as mix a few metaphors.
Since I started this blog, I’ve chosen to surround quotations with links, rather than to insert the link to the source elsewhere in the post, which is the more common practice. It seemed to me to indicate a direct quotation without requiring extraneous words–I have enough extraneous words already.
It was the first independent design decision I recall actually thinking about.
I finally took some time to figure out how to turn off the underlining in quotations, one thing I’ve wanted to do for some time now, because it truly clutters up longer passages.
It required changing this bit of css almost halfway down the stylesheet; the change took a lot less time than tracking down the culprit:
.posttext a {
/* text-decoration:underline */
text-color:blue
}
The “/* */” at the beginning and end of the second line “remarks out” (marks to be ignored) the underlining. The third line I added so that the text color would distinguish the link. (Remarking out the entry makes it easy to undo, if need be. Undoing is, fortunately, easier to do in HTML than it is IRL.)
I also changed the global “hover” quality (“hover” is when the mouse is held over an item) to display an underline by adding the third line below, for those who might have trouble distinguishing the color (the “color” line changes the color to a shade of red on hover). “Global” means this behavior will occur everywhere in this blog:
a:hover {
color:#753206;
text-decoration:underline
}
At this point, I have one more tinker for when that round tuit finally arrives–to make the dashes longer. (Update: Done!)
Peeing in the Wind 5
At the Guardian, ex-Marine and veteran of the Great and Glorious Patriotic War for a Lie in Iraq Ross Caputi considers war crimes and war crimes:
Follow the link for his story of some of the things he witnessed and participated in.
At the Denver Post, Alan Breed and Julie Watson research the history of battlefield misconduct, from Achilles’s dragging Paris around Troy through the Middle Ages up to our most recent wars. Two nuggets:
(big snip)
But Maynard Sinclair, a Marine veteran of Vietnam and the peacekeeping mission in Beirut, said the outrage shows the public’s naiveté about war.
“I did a hell of a lot worse in Vietnam than urinate on some dead bodies,” he said. “We cut left ears off and wore them around our necks to show we were warriors, and we knew how to get revenge.”
Thoreau summarizes the dissonance.
Despite the rhetoric of those who monger war, there is not now, nor has there ever been any such thing as a “neat surgical strike” in the killing fields.
If you click on only one of the three links, click on Thoreau’s.
“My Political Compass” 2
According to these folks. I think the quiz might have skewed things a little (but not much).
Note that they are not using the same definition of “libertarianism” as do the Paulistas. From the results page (emphasis added):
The usual understanding of anarchism as a left wing ideology does not take into account the neo-liberal “anarchism” championed by the likes of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman and America’s Libertarian Party, which couples social Darwinian right-wing economics with liberal positions on most social issues. Often their libertarian impulses stop short of opposition to strong law and order positions, and are more economic in substance (ie no taxes) so they are not as extremely libertarian as they are extremely right wing.
My guess would be that my high score on the “libertarian” scale came because of my strong views on civil liberties and privacy. Furthermore, I sometimes selected seemingly contradictory answers from one question to another, because a question said “most important value,” rather than “important value.” The word “most” could change my answer from “agree” to “disagree.”
I can’t link to my results page. As near as I can tell, the results page is dynamic, based on one’s answers to the quiz, so, to see their explication, you’ll have to take their quiz.
Via PoliticalProf.
Running Mitt Secrets 0
David Shuster analyzes Mitt the Flip’s required disclosure forms and divines why the Flipster won’t release his tax returns.
Update from the Foreclosure-Based Economy 0
It’s supply and demand. Foreclosures provide supply; cheap mortgage rates provide demand. Such bankster genius.
(snip)
Increases in the sales volume can be attributed in part to distressed sales, which played a major role in Hampton Roads in the past year. Last month, foreclosures and sales by homeowners whose homes are worth less than their mortgage balances – known as short sales – accounted for 33 percent of all sales.
“The market these days is being driven by distressed sales,” said Vinod Agarwal, an economist at Old Dominion University. “They’re selling faster and the non-distressed are not selling as fast.”
![[Two smiling people at a table. One is saying “I’m so happy we live in a world without slavery and imperialism.” There are boxes pointing to various objects around and on the people. They read:
COTTON: Picked in Uzbekistan where 2 million children as young as 7 are forced to pick cotton for 3p a kilo.
APPLES: Picked in California by Mexican migrant workers, not being paid minimum wage nor provided housing.
LAPTOP: Made in China by adults working 18 hours a day at 32p an hour. The laptop will end up back in China’s landfills, where children will dismantle it for its valuable metals including lead.
MOBILE PHONE: Gold, tantalum, tin, and tungsten mined in Congo in abysmal working conditions, causing disease and the regional conflict responsible for the deaths of over 5 million people and systematic rape of women.
ORANGE JUICE: Picked in Chile by women working 60 hours a week, below minimum wage.
FACE: Detoxed with Dead Sea salts sourced in occupied West Bank; land stolen by Israel from Palestinians, who are subject to continual and severe human rights violations.
COFFEE: Picked in Guatemala where entire families with children as young as 6 are forced to pick a 100-pound quota in order to get the minimum wage of less than £2/day
SHIRT: Sewn in India under forced labour conditions by people earning less than 25p an hour, for 16 hours a day, while being unable to send their children to school.
DIAMOND: Mined in Sierra Leone by children as young as 7, working in dangerous conditions for 10p an hour, six days a week.]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxp6bd9syN1qfu6vwo1_500.jpg)
Fumble Fingers 0
Offered without comment:
That’s what police say 19-year-old Alisha M. West did Wednesday while repeatedly texting messages to a wrong number. The day ended with her arrest.
Droning On 0
The FLOSS way:
Ground control systems at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, which commands the killer unmanned aircraft, became infected with a virus last September. In a statement at the time the Air Force dismissed the electronic nasty as a nuisance and said it posed no threat to the operation of Reaper drones, but the intrusion was nonetheless treated seriously.
Follow the link for details and links to screenshots.
Story found on LQ.