Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

The words do not have to be perfect.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Being the leader of the world means to be the leader of peace.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

You cannot shame the shameless.

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

“More of this”, i said to the dog.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Everybody saw this coming.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

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Open Thread

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Grats to the Bears and the Colts.

As forme, I will be MIA today. I felt fine all day yesterday, but sometime around 11pm last night, I got sick to my stomache and now have some sort of flu. I am kinda pissed, as it has only been about 6 weeks since I last had the flu.

And no, it wasn’t Bill Belichik’s whiny, nauseating, childish post-game interview that made me wsick. That made me feel good, and confirmed what an asshole he is.

And my AOL IM still is not working. Dunno why.

Reader Interactions

32Comments

  3. 3.

    Teak111 (Angry Charger fan)

    Belicicks is an a-hole. Did you see him on the sideline, looked like he could eat bullets when the colts won. Now he has to return to that damned messy private life he has created. Be nice to see some stories about what a jerk the guy is now that he’s done winning. (Angry charger fan.)

  5. 5.

    Jonathan

    The 50 most loathesome people in America.

    43. Bill Gates

    Charges: Became the richest man in the world through intellectual thievery, stealing Windows and every other software package he ever made a billion on. Microsoft’s internal slogan with regard to competitors is “embrace, extend, and exterminate.” As founder and co-chair of The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he’s fighting global poverty and disease by investing in corporations that are the source of global poverty and disease. According to the L.A. Times, The BMGF has over $9 billion invested in companies whose activities contradict the foundation’s stated mission.

    Exhibit A: So cheap he downloads pirated movies and still won’t pay for a decent haircut.

    Sentence: Spanked in the Mall of America food court by Steve Jobs and the guys from Netscape.

  6. 6.

    Greg Greene

    Re: IM: try Meebo, which works sort of like a web-based Trillian. I tried it when I temporarily worked in an location where AIM was firewalled, and it worked like a charm. [Saves chat archives, too, if you prefer/need that.]

  7. 7.

    Rome Again

    Sorry you’re under the weather again John. You seem to get sick an awful lot, do you take vitamins? Just trying to help.

    Take it easy, hope you feel better soon.

  8. 8.

    Bill Belichick

    Here’s a tip for anyone laying cash down for the Big Pro Ball Game: Bet big on the AFC. Sure the team is top-heavy with Charger, but keep in mind that this game doesn’t mean a damn thing and it’s being played near a beach. Those soft wussies should be all cleaned up, noses wiped, tears dried, and ready to wow us all with their dance routines.

  11. 11.

    ThymeZone

    Steve Jobs and the guys

    Oops, you picked the one guy who might be a bigger prick than Gates. Just not as rich. Okay, you have to put Larry Ellison in there, too. So Jobs might be second.

    All those years of keeping the Mac wrapped up in a proprietary tech bubble, with inflated prices and lack of interoperability with the rest of the tech world ….

    What’s Apple’s PC market share? After twenty years, isn’t that called “losing?” Why does a guy who loses for twenty years act like he’s winning?

    There’s a reason why the world beat a path away from Apple’s door all that time, and still does.

  12. 12.

    Zifnab

    2. Richard Mellon Scaife

    Charges: The patron saint of rich radical right wing fuckheads. Thanks to a massive fortune bequeathed to him by his superior ancestors and an unhinged reds-under-the-bed paranoia, hateful billionaire Scaife has deluged the worst elements of conservative opinion ghettos with cash, creating an evil empire of artifice. If you’re a malicious prig who can’t distinguish between Democrats and Stalinists or you’re just an amoral mercenary asshole, hang around long enough and Scaife will give you a million dollars. Take a whiff of any breathtakingly cynical PR shitbomb fired at a Democrat since back when the Clinton impeachment was just a gleam in his eye, and you’ll detect Scaife’s noxious aroma. If it’s a fascist think tank with a deceptively benign name or an out and out attack machine with a story about Barack Obama and a dead underaged hooker, you can bet the house that Scaife is the shadowy son of a bitch behind the operation. Since illegally financing Nixon’s campaign in 1974 ($990,000 in $3,000 checks to 330 front organizations), Scaife’s given hundreds of millions to every major bullshit factory in America—The Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Arkansas Project, Accuracy in Media, the Media Research Center, GOPAC, the Cato Institute, the American Spectator, Newsmax and a hundred others, as well as a significant fraction of the other names on this list. More than any other individual, this black hole of integrity is responsible for the alarmingly powerful network of phony experts and coordinated liars devoted to tricking you into voting against your own self-interests in service of the richest people in the world—like Richard Mellon Scaife.

    Exhibit A: Scaife once dispatched a reporter from his comically Orwellian Pittsburgh Tribune-Review to Northern Pennsylvania to follow up on a “tip” that Russian soldiers had invaded Alleghany National Forest.

    Sentence: Drowned in George Soros’ excrement.

    Damn. Just… damn.

  13. 13.

    JWeidner

    It might be food poisoning.

    Heh. Made me think of the following exchange:

    Boy: “It might be a tumor…”

    Det. Kimbal: “It’s NOT a TUmah!”

  15. 15.

    srv

    I got sick to my stomache and now have some sort of flu.

    I get that way whenever I realize that we’re still 3 Super Bowls until we have a new president.

  16. 16.

    The Other Steve

    There’s a reason why the world beat a path away from Apple’s door all that time, and still does.

    No no! Haven’t you heard. Consumers didn’t leave Apple. They were forced to by Bill Gates!

    That’s why Gates is so evil, he forces consumers to buy and standardize on his product lines.

  17. 17.

    The Other Steve

    I’m at home today sick too… I got some sort of head cold.

    I blame it on the fact that I stopped drinking Mountain Dew on the 13th of January. Not just the Dew… I decided to cut out all caffeine, as it was the reason why i craved the Dew.

    Now I drink water… that’s why i got sick.

  18. 18.

    SeesThroughIt

    I actually missed the post-Colts/Pats game activities (the siren song of In-n-Out was far too powerful to resist). What did Belichick say/do?

  19. 19.

    Paul L.

    Quote of the Day

    State assemblywomyn Sally Lieber will introduce legislation this week to make spanking your child a crime punishable by a $1000 fine and up to one year in prison. However, stabbing a surgical vaccum into your baby’s skull and sucking its brains out will remain one hundred percent legal, as guaranteed by the Constitution.

  21. 21.

    Jake

    However, stabbing a surgical vaccum into your baby’s skull and sucking its brains out will remain one hundred percent legal, as guaranteed by the Constitution.

    It didn’t do President Bush any harm, what are you crying about?

    On this topic (I think) today is the day many parents show their concern for children by plonking their own in strollers and pushing them around The Mall while the mercury skulks in the bottom of the thermometer. Snowflake babies, indeed.

  22. 22.

    Krista

    However, stabbing a surgical vaccum into your baby’s skull and sucking its brains out will remain one hundred percent legal, as guaranteed by the Constitution.

    It didn’t do President Bush or Paul L. any harm, what are you crying about?

    Fixed for accuracy.

  23. 23.

    Dave

    All those years of keeping the Mac wrapped up in a proprietary tech bubble, with inflated prices and lack of interoperability with the rest of the tech world ….

    What’s Apple’s PC market share? After twenty years, isn’t that called “losing?” Why does a guy who loses for twenty years act like he’s winning?

    There’s a reason why the world beat a path away from Apple’s door all that time, and still does.

    Proprietary? What the USB ports, oh wait no, that’s standard…um FireWire! No that’s standard too. Um S-Video..no my DVD player has that. How about that pesky DVI port! No, PCs have that too.

    Oh wait! Maybe it’s all the Unix internals. Well Open Source isn’t really proprietary is it? Hmmm…

    So I’m trying to see what is so proprietary about my Mac. Must be that it doesn’t run Windows! Oh wait but my Core2Duo MacBook Pro does. In fact I can run windows apps side by side using Parallels Desktop.

    With all due respect TZ, your criticism was relevant about 10 years ago but not now; time to update your complaints. There are things I can bitch about the Mac, but being proprietary ain’t one of them. I have yet to go by a generic device, such as a USB hard drive and not have it work when I plugged it in. No drivers, no nothing. Just works. Oh and get ready for Vista: the feature set is pretty much a mirror of, you guessed, it that proprietary Mac OS.

    As far as market share? Who cares as long as Apple stays in business. My Mac does everything I need it to do, and with a low market share, I don’t worry about viruses and hackers and spyware, etc, etc, But to refute the notion that Apple is still loosing market share…here ya go.

  24. 24.

    The Other Steve

    So I’m trying to see what is so proprietary about my Mac. Must be that it doesn’t run Windows! Oh wait but my Core2Duo MacBook Pro does. In fact I can run windows apps side by side using Parallels Desktop.

    Show me a machine that is not sold by Apple on which I can run Mac-OSX.

    Oh and get ready for Vista: the feature set is pretty much a mirror of, you guessed, it that proprietary Mac OS.

    Doubtful. Mac OSX doesn’t even have the featureset of XP.

  25. 25.

    ThymeZone

    As far as market share? Who cares as long as Apple stays in business

    Sorry. When you get beaten 20-1 for twenty five years in a row, it’s time to admit you lost. Or at least stop strutting around and acting superior.

    It’s a little like rooting for the Arizona Cardinals. It’s cute, but let’s face it, until they win something, it’s pretty delusional.

  26. 26.

    Dave

    Show me a machine that is not sold by Apple on which I can run Mac-OSX.

    http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/a/windows/2005/01/18/PearPC.html

    Of course owning the box and the OS has numerous advantages like everything generally works without needing to configure it. Plus unlink Microsoft, Apple makes money off it’s hardware. Ip until recently you couldn’t run the OS on an Intel based box since it was PowerPC based.

    Doubtful. Mac OSX doesn’t even have the featureset of XP.

    Oh geez, like what? Anything important?

  27. 27.

    Dave

    Sorry. When you get beaten 20-1 for twenty five years in a row, it’s time to admit you lost. Or at least stop strutting around and acting superior.

    It’s a little like rooting for the Arizona Cardinals. It’s cute, but let’s face it, until they win something, it’s pretty delusional.

    Gee wasn’t aware that using a Mac means I lost. It’s a computer not a contest (or since this is a political blog, a war).

  28. 28.

    demimondian

    C’mon, Dave? Unix internals? The kernal of MacOSX isn’t Unix-based, it’s based on a closed form of Mach. *Some* of the userland utilities are based on FreeBSD (all bow before the great daemon in tennis shoes!), but that’s really all.

    Hell, Apple hasn’t even been as good about giving back to BSD as Google has been to Ubuntu.

  29. 29.

    John D.

    I don’t worry about viruses and hackers and spyware

    Not to get into an OS-war, but if you don’t worry about that — even on a Mac — you’re a fool.

    Macintosh computers are not inherently immune to attacks; it’s merely that there are 20 times as many Wintel boxen to attack, so the idiots concentrate their griefing there. Stay safe: use protection. We have enough zombies already.

  30. 30.

    Dave

    C’mon, Dave? Unix internals? The kernal of MacOSX isn’t Unix-based, it’s based on a closed form of Mach. Some of the userland utilities are based on FreeBSD (all bow before the great daemon in tennis shoes!), but that’s really all.

    Hell, Apple hasn’t even been as good about giving back to BSD as Google has been to Ubuntu.

    Source including the kernel is here

    It’s official name is xnu.

    And yes it’s technically not Unix. It’s “Unix-Like” OS. It’s posix compliant. I don’t know how much more Unix you can get without licensing the name, and with 10.5 will support the Single Unix Specification as well.

    In fact other than the fact that you can’t run the Mac OS easily on a generic PC, I’d submit that the Mac OS is more open than Windows.

    As far as contributing back, I do know for a fact that at least for the complier chain (gcc, et al) and it’s debugger gdb, they so submit patches upstream. I can’t comment on Google vs. Apple in contributing upstream, I honestly don’t know much about Google’s efforts. If I had to guess, yeah Google’s bound to be better.

    They’ve also opened Bonjour and others. I know Bonjour is the backbone of Tivo’s networking.

    In the end it’s pretty silly trying to compare Microsoft and Apple, as they are two different businesses with two different business models. Microsoft is a software developer (in the PC realm, so we’re not talking xBox, etc here). Apple is a hardware and software maker.

    For the record, here’s what I don’t like about the Mac OS.

    1) NetInfo
    2) Mach
    3) Spotlight (Vista’s search is better), and they didn’t leave the old search in place.
    4) That after 20 years they changed how Cmd-N works in the Finder.

    Off the top of my head there ya go.

    Lastly a computer is a tool. I enjoy Mac OS and am extremely efficient with it. Windows, not so much…at the end of the day that’s what really matters.

  31. 31.

    Dave

    Not to get into an OS-war, but if you don’t worry about that—even on a Mac—you’re a fool.

    Macintosh computers are not inherently immune to attacks; it’s merely that there are 20 times as many Wintel boxen to attack, so the idiots concentrate their griefing there. Stay safe: use protection. We have enough zombies already.

    Yes I know “security through obscurity” is not a sound policy. Yet there are no viruses in the wild, no trojans, nothing. When there are, I’ll install the appropriate software. Until then protecting myself against a threat that doesn’t exist seems silly to me, and kinda reminds me of the Bush foreign policy. :)

  32. 32.

    Glenn

    “I actually missed the post-Colts/Pats game activities (the siren song of In-n-Out was far too powerful to resist). What did Belichick say/do?”

    Yeah, is there a transcript out there (I couldn’t find one) or column about Belichick’s post-game conference?

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