when I read this bit : 1. I really like Ari Fleischer. I never had any fondness for McClellan or that tool Snow. But Fleischer was good. 2. I really don't like Helen Thomas. Sure, maybe she was blitzed and yeah she's old and we know she's not all that sharp anymore, but I"m not sure this one slides.
A really fascinating read : "The political system is broken partly because of Internet," Barlow said. "It's made it impossible to govern anything the size of the nation-state. We're going back to the city-state. The nation-state is ungovernably information-rich." I like it because it challenges the notion that the 'new media' is always inherently good or 'better' than it's 'old' media counterpart. It's not a universal truth. It never was. It will never be. ...
Link : Sometimes you read something, and you know there's some bad statistics going on somewhere. You can just smell the problem there: The top four big cities in America with the lowest rates of violent crime are all in border states: San Diego, Phoenix, El Paso and Austin, according to a new FBI report. "the top 4 big cities". Really? Austin? San Diego? Wow. Austin is a 'big city' now? Who the hell figured this out? Barney Fife? Don't get me wrong: I like...
Link : Comedy Central's "JC" is currently in development, which means it's still a couple steps away from becoming a Go project. The show is about Jesus trying to live as a regular guy in New York City and wanting to escape the shadow of his "powerful but apathetic father" (more details here). With Comedy Central having recently censored frequent parenting group target "South Park" for trying to portray the Prophet Muhammad, some Christian leaders see the ...
I think I should probably agree with this piece in the NYT : For all the criticism BP executives may deserve, they are far from the only people to struggle with such low-probability, high-cost events. Nearly everyone does. “These are precisely the kinds of events that are hard for us as humans to get our hands around and react to rationally,” Robert N. Stavins, an environmental economist at Harvard, says. We make two basic — and opposite — types of mistakes. When an event is difficult to i...
Maybe I've been living under a rock, but this is the first I've heard of this : About 2.4 billion people live in “water-stressed” countries such as China, according to a 2009 report by the Pacific Institute, an Oakland, California-based nonprofit scientific research group. Water scarcity and pollution reduce China’s gross domestic product by about 2.3 percent, the World Bank said in a 2007 report. The article goes on to talk about chip manufacturers and soda companies are taking up...
This is pretty typical of deliverables I see every day. Well, it's not always that bad---usually people can at least take the time to do some alignment. But you get the point. Text really isn't great for something like this because you really can't clearly see highs, lows, trends, whatever. It just is. It's a pretty good place to use a chart, but if you're not a chart ninja, odds are your output will be the defaults, which isn't that much better. You'd actually ha...
Well put : The movement scored a big win this week in South Carolina, where state Rep. Nikki Haley romped past a four-term congressman to win the GOP nomination for governor. Still, for all the attention the tea party movement has gotten and all the passion of its followers, a rough accounting at the ballot box shows the movement has just about as many losses as victories. Money has proved an impediment. Organization — or, rather, the lack of it — has become another. &qu...
Carey Roberts is like a 9000 year old man. He totally hates women, especially those uppity feminist bitches . Seriously, this guy is a sick twisted individual . I read Carey Roberts because he reminds me that as the father of a 2 year old girl, I have a parental responsibility to maintain awareness that people like him exist and to mock him mercilessly for being old and deservedly waking up in piles of his own excrement due to having lost control of his bowels sometime during the late 80'...
Matt Miller in the WaPo does a good job of pissing in everybody's wheaties . The fascinating thing is that both groups are correct about the obsolescence of the other side's key premises, yet blind to the staleness of their own. What partisans on neither side seem to sense is that events are poised to consign many traditional priorities of both conservatives and liberals to the ash heap. You'd never know this from the phony way public life is conducted. While independents a...
Oh god. You, may remember candidate Sharron Angle who told us that we're getting close to violently overthrowing the United States government and that 'the first thing we need to do' is to 'take Harry Reid out' . Now she's letting us know exactly what she thinks about the unemployed : "We have put in so much entitlement into our government that we really have spoiled our citizenry and said you don't want the jobs that are available," OHHHHHHHH HELL YES. HELLLLLLLLL YES. T...
Ouch. A humdinger from EJ Dionne. Read the whole thing. But, a money shot: But conservatism is a diverse movement with many philosophical threads and tensions. Successful conservative politicians such as Ronald Reagan (and George W. Bush in his first term) kept the peace among economic, social and big business conservatives while moderating the movement's public rhetoric. In opposition, conservatives often manage to bury their differences. But conservatism has flown apart when its compone...
Oh this is just delicious : BP chief executive Tony Hayward took a day off Saturday to see his 52-foot yacht "Bob" compete in a glitzy race off England's shore, a leisure trip that further infuriated residents of the oil-stained Gulf Coast. Ouch. Ohhh yeah, that one is going to hurt. I know. I know. There's a tiny vocal majority who's still in a post orgasmic state from Joe Barton's heart felt apology. I'm sure they're going to look at this yacht fiasco and babb...
Matt Yglesias: Public Wants More Stimulus talking about the results of a recent gallup poll. Nuts and bolts of the poll: Those surveyed want the gov to spend money to make jobs, tinker with the energy industry to save us from global warming, regulate the shit out of the banking industry and kill Obama care. The quote: Obviously just because the public supports something (health care repeal, for one) doesn’t mean congress shouldn’t do it. But many members of congress—and, indee...
If you're a Linux user or you're looking for a good excuse to come over to the darkside, Google CL Tools seems pretty good . Looks like they're supporting quite a few google services already . Actually, it appears to be just a python script, which probably means somebody could either run it on windows or port it to windows without much hassle. I don't know about anybody else, but my productivity bend has lead me to become quite the fan of being mouse free where ever possible. It's real...