January 2010
55 posts
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Noises Off
Kevin Drum reacts to the 1.5-hour systematic refutation of GOP talking points by one Barack Obama today during the GOP caucus meeting (which you can see and read for yourself; Obama is particularly ferocious on healthcare and the preposterous rhetoric surrounding same. Also economic proposals. Worth your time.):
Right now Republicans have a built-in advantage when it comes to attack politics...
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“if you use it for just a few minutes, it becomes obvious that the iPad is not a...”
– John Gruber, agreeing with Lemkin.
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iPAM
Alright then, how did we do? We were basically calling for:
It makes much more sense going forward for Apple to abstract away the “I’m ready to sync” part of the current equation; you buy the app, it comes with an iPhone app, they are linked and automatically exchange info. Changes then sync next time you dock the phone or tablet or, presumably, automatically over the air if you so desire.
...
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Still in Charge
Print out and laminate, [annotated and extended for you convenience]:
[The Democrats in Congress] need to remember that they’re still in charge. Democrats have the White House and large majorities in both houses of Congress. They get to set the agenda.
Democrats have to understand is that they already passed health care; they own the legislation. [As such, they will be campaigning on...
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“I am thrilled to announce to you that iPad will start at $499”
– Steve Jobs. Going to sell a few of those after all, even with a largely non-functional (but also non-contract) AT&T 3G data network.
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“We’ve been able to achieve 10 hours of battery life. I can take a flight...”
– Steve Jobs. Methinks that we are “able to achieve” and “I can take a flight … to Tokyo” are utterly unrelated statements here.
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“It’s very thin — you can change the homescreen to whatever you want.”
– Steve Jobs. Consider me sold, Steve.
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“People would rather be with someone who is strong and wrong than weak and right.”
– Bill Clinton
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Free to vote
Democratic leaders in the Senate are asking colleagues who are reluctant to support Bernanke’s nomination for a second term as Federal Reserve chairman to nevertheless vote with them to end a filibuster and allow a vote on the actual nomination. The reluctant members would then be free to vote no to express their displeasure.
Of course, for everything else, a vote for/against cloture is...
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A Very Simple Question →
There is no proof that Scott Brown is a light skinned Cuban national that underwent cosmetic surgery and years of voice training to “pass” as an American? Yet. As of this writing, there is no proof that he is a deep cover Russian agent sent to infiltrate the US Senate from the inside? Is Scott Brown actually Canadian? We don’t know. We have not seen his long form birth certificate.
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A Celebration of David Foster Wallace →
peterwknox says (and I agree):
Nine peers pay tribute with a talk or essay. Strong suggestion.
Amy Wallace-Havens is David’s sister. She is a deputy public defender in southern Arizona. Bonnie Nadell is vice president of Frederick Hill Bonnie Nadell Agency in Los Angeles. Gerry Howard is an executive editor at large for Doubleday. Colin Harrison is a novelist, and a vice president and senior...
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“Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) said Monday that he would oppose any health care reform...”
– Carrie Budoff Brown Just for the record, it didn’t matter then, either. Just a lot of people convincing themselves it mattered. 59=clarity.
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Death Spiral
It occurs to me that:
The GOP categorically cannot resist getting behind bad policy with economically destructive end results, especially if and when they also increase suffering in the interim. It’s like their catnip.
The Democrat wants to crawl out from under insurance reform with “popular” sub-measures, the community rating being among the very most popular.
It is widely...
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Pass. The. Damned. Bill.
Today’s installment of What Paul Krugman Said:
A message to House Democrats: This is your moment of truth. You can do the right thing and pass the Senate health care bill. Or you can look for an easy way out, make excuses and fail the test of history.
Tuesday’s Republican victory in the Massachusetts special election means that Democrats can’t send a modified health care bill...
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“I have enough faith in my fellow creatures in [the United States] to believe...”
– Aneurin Bevan [lightly edited to contextualize], to the British Labour Party in 1959, following their general election defeat. Wow.
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Re-conciliation
File under “Great Fucking Idea” from Ezra Klein:
Democrats could scrap the legislation and start over in the reconciliation process. But not to re-create the whole bill. If you go that route, you admit the whole thing seemed too opaque and complex and compromised. You also admit the limitations of the reconciliation process. So you make it real simple: Medicare buy-in between 50 and...
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“…if America cannot grapple with its deep and real problems after electing...”
– Andrew Sullivan, seemingly channeling my underlying thoughts re: last post.
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Understanding:Salary::
The Washington Post notes what others have: there’s an absolute shit-ton of money sloshing around in these final days of the MA US Senate special election:
Independent and party groups were set to spend nearly $5 million on television ads in the final weeks leading up to Tuesday’s special election between state Attorney General Martha Coakley (D) and state Sen. Scott Brown (R)....
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Where Content is the King (of Late Night Comedy)
The last word on the late night dustup seems to have been ably provided by the Boston Globe’s Matthew Gilbert:
the late-night war of 2010 is about some of the more dated, lax, and artificial material that makes its way onto the small screen […] This [creative] inertia is part of the reason the “Leno Experiment’’ failed so miserably. What we saw when Jay Leno essentially relocated his...
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On looting
Is there something fundamentally wrong with the brains of those working in the national media? How else can you explain these very highly paid individuals discussing, often in the same sentence, that people in Haiti have been without food or water for days, and then expressing shock and horror that there is “looting” going on.
Listen very carefully. I’ll take it slowly so even a...
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“I don’t think Osama bin Laden sent those planes to attack us because he hated...”
– David Cross (via alex ryking)
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True Story
Pat Robertson, fucktard:
[S]omething happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. Napoleon the Third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, “We will serve you if you get us free from the prince.” True story. And so the devil said, “OK, it’s a deal.” They kicked the French out, the...
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Inverted Pyramid Power
Robert Niles provides an absolutely essential bit of reading for anyone in the content-delivery world. Also known as “traditional” media (Yes, you. You are all in denial.), re: their efforts to invent new revenue models for their 19th century, dead-tree product line [emphasis added]:
You’re wasting your time. Please, stop. There is no new revenue model for journalism.
Done...
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Metastasis
Simple Finder. It’s been around in one form or another since OS 7 or 8. Here’s what it looks like nowadays:
Remind you of anything? Starting to get some ideas about how the product line could be integrated by the iTablet? How such a device could be made to have just enough Mac in it to be useful while Macs could be made to have just enough iTablet and iPhone in them to be instantly...
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People of Earth →
After only seven months, with my Tonight Show in its infancy, NBC has decided to react to their terrible difficulties in prime-time by making a change in their long-established late night schedule.
This paragraph, amongst several in the letter, prove that Conan’s the most qualified man for the job he’s now going to leave (assuming, that is, that NBC doesn’t back off. They...
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Command and (Voice) Control
mrgan wants some new iPhone Voice Commands:
“What time is it?”
“Rate song three stars.”
“What’s the weather?”
“Notifications!” (“You have one unread message and two unread emails.”)
“Redial.”
“New voice memo…”
For all its vaunted software design, the iPhone is the victim of a few punishingly odd absences; for the record, I agree with all of these, especially time and song rating.
In...
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“Just when you think the news cycle can’t get any stupider, Mark Halperin...”
– Chris Hayes
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No change, same game
Jeff Zeleny runs down some of the bigger bullet-points coming out of the new book by the execrable Mark Halperin and “journalist” John Heilemann. Among them, this little tidbit:
In the days leading up to an interview with ABC News’ Charlie Gibson, aides were worried with Ms. Palin’s grasp of facts. She couldn’t explain why North and South Korea were separate nations and she did not...
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“This is the unusual case where a Dowd column actually provides some valuable...”
– Mark Kleiman
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What has Obama ever done for us?
squashed:
Torture memos released
No more waterboarding
White house visitor logs released
Iraq withdrawal in progress
Mexico City policy reversed
Certain arguments against DOMA rejected
Money set aside for high-speed rail
Environmental Protection Agency enforcement is up
Restrictions on Legal Services Funds eased
Being HIV+ no longer disqualifies people for a green card
Net neutrality
...
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“I tell people that if it’s in the news, don’t worry about it. The...”
– Bruce Schneier
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45 Seconds
Rachel Maddow touches on something critically important while discussing the GOP’s latest complaint: that Obama simply doesn’t use the word “terrorism” enough:
[Republicans are] lying in a way that can be obviously, demonstrably, embarrassingly proven by anyone who has a spare 45 seconds and the Google. When the people in the Republican Party who have the highest profile...
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How long is yours
Michael Kinsley wants to cut down newspaper articles by removing “legacy code,” overlong or overly florid lines that, while checking some traditional journalistic content box, don’t actually advance the story or inform the reader. Fair enough. Felix Salmon more or less agrees, again going on mostly about story length, noting that the Atlantic still does long stories in print (so...
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Stop Digging
Or: Brit Hume comes back for more.
You’d think he’d try to walk back his earlier call for Tiger Woods to convert to Christianity such that he might be saved. Instead, Hume doubles down when Bill O’Reilly asks:
“Was that proselytizing?” “I don’t think so,” Hume said, before reiterating his comments from Sunday that Woods should convert to...
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“On the Nexus One, only 190 megabytes of its total 4.5 gigabytes of memory is...”
– Walt Mossberg pointing out an astonishing fact. Seriously, how does this product ship with a limitation like this? Reminds me of the way Windows maps RAM here in 2010…I’ve got about 2.5x that storage limit on my 3GS, and I’m pretty parsimonious on the apps front. I put at least a...
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Oh yes.
In which Marco admits to stalking me:
[The entirely theoretical Apple tablet] can be the computer that we buy our parents or grandparents without worrying that we’re signing ourselves up for years of painful tech support calls as they “lose” documents by saving them in the wrong folder, think they can’t save any more files because the desktop is full of icons, delete their browsers’ icons and...
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“I don’t care what the educational political lobby and their allies on the left...”
– Don McLeroy, one of the conservatives rewriting history and science textbooks in Texas. Which, because Texas is a powerful market force, means your textbooks too. Reasoning and critical thinking are doomed in this country. It will already take 100 years to correct the damage these fucktards are...
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“But it’s also odd that Limbaugh would cite his experience in Hawaii as evidence...”
– Citing Experience In Hawaii, Limbaugh Says U.S. Health Care System Is ‘Just Dandy’ (via ryking).
So true. My recent voyage to Texas resulted in a similar experience: was asked how I expected I’d feel living under a mandate. Uh, we’ve had a mandate for TWO YEARS in Massachusetts. The...
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MPERUPIT
If terrorists successfully attack during a Democratic president’s first year in office (first attack on World Trade Center), it’s the Democrats’ fault, and the attack is good news for Republicans.
If terrorists unsuccessfully attack during a Democratic president’s second term, it’s the Democrats’ fault the terrorists even tried, and the attack is good news for...