September 2009
67 posts
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Four Rejected Palin Book Titles
First: 87 Ways to Satisfy Sarkozy in the Sack (and Keep Him Begging for More).
Second: Palin's Digest: Recent Publications Summarized in 400 pages. (Yes, All of Them.)
Third: Annular Bragg Resonators: Beyond the Limits of Total Internal Reflection
Fourth: Bridge to Somewhere: 14 Fabulous Days with the McCain Campaign
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Invisible Hand
Ezra Klein puts this simple concept as well as I’ve yet seen:
Liberals don’t think that Congress will pass a bill outlawing private insurance. They don’t think the Supreme Court will render a decision naming WellPoint “cruel and unusual.” Rather, they think the market will, well, work: The public option will provide better service at better prices and people will...
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Common Experience
See if this rings a bell with regard to your typical visit to the doctor’s office:
A [patient] walked in and was generally walked right back into a physician’s office. They get good care. They are not rushed. They are examined thoroughly
[Patients] receive top-notch, wait-free care, and money is largely no object. [Patients] pay a flat annual fee of $503, and it covers all expenses...
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Why not 100 votes?
Ben Nelson, (D) of Fucktardia, has lots of fascinating thoughts to share on the healthcare fight:
Voters should be able to evaluate “what’s been done and what remains to be done” before they go to the polls, Nelson said. “Public debate can occur in the context of an election,” he added.
So, then, the outcome of the 2008 elections, the one held less than a year ago,...
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“[The public option is a] major step toward universal health care coverage.”...”
– Senator Jim Bunning (R) wondering why, when it comes to healthcare, someone won’t please think of the children
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More Americans believe in UFOs than oppose a... →
jimray:
And a scant minority are adamant in their demand for government reparations to those who have been abducted and/or probed by aliens.
Glenn Beck’s been saying that Obama wants reparations! It’s all becoming clear now…
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Page-tearing
Princeton has been running a Kindle-DX trial, in which several classes were selected, and the students in those classes were issued a Kindle-DX pre-loaded with the reading material (and whatnot) associated with that class. The article contains both the predictable and the WTF-able.
The predictable: Kindle is different than a book. It doesn’t have page numbers, for instance. Look at this...
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MM$
I never quite got why iPhone users were so hell-bent for MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service). Just send an email, for chrissakes. More characters, send pictures or whatever else you want (though, on an iPhone, the flexibility to send anything as an attachment is admittedly more limited than at a desktop). While you presumably add a bit more potential latency into the transaction, you’re not...
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“[I] was informed that Sarah Palin’s speech in Hong Kong ran for an hour and a...”
– Paul Krugman
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Explain that to me
Barack Obama reports, you decide:
“I was up at the G20 — just a little aside — I was up at the G20, and some of you saw those big flags and all the world leaders come in and Michelle and I are shaking hands with them,” the president said. “One of the leaders — I won’t mention who it was — he comes up to me. We take the picture, we go behind....
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Center-right (in Germany)
The MSM is lately trumpeting the German elections having created a “center-right” governing coalition as though that construction has meaning, or at least the same meaning in the United States as it does in Germany. And, of course, it plays to their MSM-preferred storyline that the “split-the-difference” solution is not just better politics, it’s better policy. Which...
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The Shahab of Iran
Why, why, why is context never supplied? Oh, right, because it might ruin a perfectly good (and preferred) story. In this case, the NeoCon paymasters of your MSM want you to be terrified of Iran. Likewise, the ever-powerful Israeli lobby. Thus, you are instructed to assume the world is near its end because Iran has tested the terrifying Shahab-3 missile.
But what is it, exactly? It’s a...
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How to Write With Style, by Kurt Vonnegut →
givemesomethingtoread:
Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings.
This is most of our current problem in the MSM. But, the linked article certainly serves as instruction as to why KV is top three to Lemkin, and, really, should serve as a guideline to anybody writing, well, anything (summarized, but read the whole...
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DFW
What I wanted as a reader […] was a chance to shadow him for a spell, and see the world like he saw it.
—3quarksdaily
This post contains spoilers for a while, and then doesn’t, so I’ve marked the end of spoilers. Book Clubs generally make me sad. Even at their best, what you’re likely to get, the best possible outcome, the thing that makes you go to and leave...
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Words →
mrgan:
Merlin celebrates writing:
…I clearly remember reading that first line of *Absalom, Absalom!* in 1988 and thinking, “Holy shit, I need to sit the fuck down, turn off The Smiths, and *just read this book*.”
I didn’t think about this for more than five second, but I didn’t have to either. Here’s a paragraph not so much written as shouted from the depths of Limbo:
“You bad woman!” I shout...
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Observe and Report
Bob Somerby:
… whatever a person may think of Van Jones, he simply wasn’t a major White House player. Glenn Beck ran a largely crackpot crusade against Jones, often disinforming millions of viewers in the process. Jones “went to prison and became a communist,” Beck would constantly say. (That clip comes from his August 4 show.) Cracker, please! That’s “apocalyptic” junk. And guess what?...
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“She must live in mortal fear that there’s somebody in the world living a...”
– The Big Dog, Bill Clinton, describes Maureen Dowd via Taylor Branch
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“[T]he time has come—and in fact, it is long overdue—for them to...”
– Ed Kilgore, Closed Vote; The New Republic
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Like Clockwork
Obama directs FCC to adopt “Net Neutrality” (and write any new or revised regulations accordingly). This policy is a 180 from the Bush administration position that can be boiled down to “whatever the big companies want, the big companies get,” and these changes would, without a doubt, foster the sorts of innovations and game-changing uses that people tend to use the word...
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“Super Mario Brothers will be to the eighties what Second World War was to the...”
– The New Yorker on the, er, slightly overheated reception of The Beatles: Rock Band.
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Femtocells
Glenn Fleishman reports for TidBITS on a new doodad from AT&T, the 3G Microcell, which offers to connect to your home network connection and then make a little bubble of 3G voice and data coverage right there to the house. You get better coverage (or, in some cases, you get coverage), and meanwhile:
Carriers love femtocells because they shift traffic (and the expense of moving calls and...
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The idiocy of Glenn Beck
Glenn Beck wants to have a national day of prayer and fasting, and points to Thomas Jefferson as someone who was all for that sort of thing. Fortunately, Thomas Jefferson weighed in on just exactly this sort of issue:
First, on the issue of prescribing such observances:
I consider the government of the U S. as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions,...
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“People [should] have called for the resignation of Tom Delay back in the day...”
– Ezra Klein commenter etdean1
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Obama interviewed by GOP Talking Points
Obama: George, you -- you can't just make up that language and decide that that's called a tax increase.... What if I say that right now your premiums are going to be going up by 5 or 8 or 10 percent next year and you say well, that's not a tax increase; but, on the other hand, if I say that I don't want to have to pay for you not carrying coverage even after I give you tax credits that make it affordable, then...
Stephanopoulos: I -- I don't think I'm making it up. Merriam Webster's Dictionary: Tax -- "a charge, usually of money, imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes."
Obama: George, the fact that you looked up Merriam's Dictionary, the definition of tax increase, indicates to me that you're stretching a little bit right now. Otherwise, you wouldn't have gone to the dictionary to check on the definition.
Stephanopoulos: I wanted to check for myself. But your critics say it is a tax increase.
Obama: My critics say everything is a tax increase. My critics say that I'm taking over every sector of the economy. You know that.
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“So why have you (unless you’re a massive news junkie) never have heard of...”
– Michael Tomasky (in this generally excellent roundup of the ACORN dust-up).
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The Flashpoint
“[Obama said] ‘everyone should get the same deal as members of Congress.’ But you take the text of these bills, and not only are you not getting the same deal as members of Congress, who get a dozen or more choices in the D.C. area, but people aren’t going to get any choice at all. It’ll be tethered to a policy that many people might think is pretty crummy. Some of those policies will be...
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Miller Time
If you’re in New England, you’d be well advised to go ahead and say your goodbyes to Buzzards Bay:
WESTPORT — Buzzards Bay Brewing will discontinue production of its eponymous microbrews.
“We’ve had a good run ” owner Bill Russell said, “but we have decided to head in a different direction.”
The surprise announcement Wednesday was influenced by a...
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Voight-Kampff (finally) Arrives
The Boston Globe heralds the arrival of the newest in new Terrrist detection services, the picture of which strikes me as slightly…familiar:
The article suggests some (clearly) half-assed potential questions for said interrogations. Might I humbly suggest these more patriotic replacements:
It’s your birthday. Someone gives you a calfskin wallet. How do you react?
You’ve...
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“Is the Earth flat or spherical? Opinions differ.”
– Time’s fellatory profile of Glenn Beck, via Media Matters
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iThink therefore iAm
Kottke talks about the iPhone (as a device-class, mind you, not specifically the device) impacting many, many more markets than just smart-phones or PDAs. It’s also a compact camera killer, to name only one segment touched on in his fine essay. And I think he’s basically right. But I want to talk about a point he makes in the second footnote (without going all DFW on you):
...
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WatchSay goodbye to the iPod Touch: Microsoft’s Zune HD is simply better in every way. Want to play chess? We think you’ll enjoy this 30-second full video commercial before that application opens. Whoops, email arrived? We think you’ll enjoy another commercial while you switch to that view and another one when you’re ready to switch back. It’s what we think today’s...
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“The president, like me, didn’t seem to be in love with any of the available...”
– George W. Bush (via former speechwriter Matt Latimer)
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GOPLand in Bad Decline
An excellent Boston Globe op-ed describes the current, historically bad state of the Grand Old Party, held hostage as it is by the most extreme elements of its fringe membership. I’ve even put it in graph form:
Pretty easy to gather that, compared to everybody else, Democrat and “Independent” alike, self-described Republicans hold very different views on the issues of the day....
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“I’m never quite sure with AppleScript just what’s supposed to work, though.”
– —John Gruber
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2010, the GOP, and Play or Pay
Greg Sargent pulls out some interesting figures from a recent WaPo poll:
* That Dems hold an overwhelming 20-point lead on which party is most trusted on major issues, with Obama preferred over Republicans by 12 points on health care.
* That a majority, 53%, agrees that “government reform of the nation’s health care system is necessary to control costs and expand coverage,” underscoring yet...
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Socialist Libraries →
Philadelphia closing theirs.
Finally getting big government out of our lives, I guess. Doesn’t everyone feel fitter, happier, and more productive?
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Cost Benefit Analysis (Result: Go Die in the...
Total spending on health care, per person, 2007: United States: $7290 United Kingdom: $2992 Italy: $2686 Spain: $2671
We must be getting the best outcomes, right? Think of all our technology!?! Think again:
As of the 2006 data (the most recent I can find), we ranked 27th in infant mortality, just behind the Slovak Republic, with Mexico nipping at our heels. Life expectancy at 65 for...
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GOP: Officially Defunct
There is no serious dialogue between the Democrats and the GOP. How can you possibly form any governing coalition between groups when one half of those groups refuses to accept empirical reality?
This is a post about Joe Wilson, but not about him specifically. But let’s start there. He’s the one who lied when he called out “You Lie!” in reference to coverage of illegal...
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You Lie! →
Your Liberal Media hard at work again. But one example from the link:
Politico’s Glenn Thrush hailed Wilson’s heckling as the night’s “defining moment” in a piece headlined, “Wilson’s rallying cry.” But was Wilson’s boorish accusation true? Did Obama “lie” when he claimed Democratic health care reforms would no offer up free care...
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Tablet Rasa Redux
Steve Jobs all but introduces the upcoming Apple Tablet (hopefully the upcoming Macintosh tablet, but time will tell) in these quotes from an interview with David Pogue of the NYT:
There are some things that I’m focusing a lot of attention on right now—to polish
[…]
We have some really good stuff coming up.
Keep in mind, Jobs has previously stated that he considers most tablet-type...
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Go to Queens
Sam Calagione, Dogfish Head’s founder and chief ideas-man (check this New Yorker profile for the rest of the story) apparently isn’t satisfied with exotic-wood-aged beers or ancient recipes beers. According to the NYT, he’s after the big banana: saliva-fermented beers. Well, partially saliva-fermented, anyway. Central American custom has one chew corn, spit it into a container,...
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