Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Isn’t as funny as I was told it was.
Burn After Reading isn’t funny at all. Burn after filming would have been a better idea.
Talk about some bad movie picks on my part.
I would link to both of these movies, but some prick would tell me in the comments I have gone commercial and am just trying to make a buck off Amazon, so you all can just google them your own damned selves.
Also, I thought I told you all to get off my grass?
You don’t exactly have to be Nostradamus to know what is going to happen when Big Media Matt writes the following:
I say this as someone who likes their show and watches it almost every day, just like I hope people like my blog and read it every day.
He was talking about Morning Joe.
In the off-chance he was unintentionally trolling his commenters, that is even better.
*** Update ***
Also, if there is anything better than starting the vacuum right underneath the couch a sleeping cat is on, I don’t know what it is. SPROING!
Look, I am as excited as anyone about Obama getting elected, but the media coverage of this is starting to get absurd. I know that it is a historic moment, and I know a lot of the enthusiasm is relief that we are simply pushing C plus Augustus out the door into the dustbin of history, but the fact that the media is doing live, non-stop commentary on the train from wherever to DC is just ridiculous. Shut up, already.
You don’t have to be a bitter Republican to think the glowing media coverage is over the top. Protip: the economy is still going to suck on Tuesday at 1 pm.
*** Update ***
And while I am at it, let me also grump about the experience I had at several stores this morning. I don’t know if this is because everyone is cutting back employees because of the economy, but every store I went to this morning, I had to stand for 15-20 minutes waiting for help. In every case, I stood by a register waiting for someone to show up, in two cases after paging the help, no one showed up, and I said “To hell with it, I will order it on Amazon.”
Also, get off my grass, you damned kids.
For Christ’s Sake, He Isn’t the MessiahPost + Comments (182)
Like most right-thinking people, I am stunned by how little factual content there is in New York Times opinion columns. It’s pretty remarkable that Tom Friedman can write entire columns (possibly entire books, I haven’t read his books) about the wonders of free trade without citing a single figure. And it’s more remarkable still that David Brooks regularly posits solutions to societal ills that are backed up only by his own vague unsourced armchair sociological theories.
But apparently these aren’t quite fluffy enough because there’s a new feature — a few months old — wherein Gail Collins and David Brooks blag at each other about whatever strikes their fancy. I have been banned from the comments section of this feature for suggesting (rightly, in my opinion) that the only good that could come out of putting these two together is a possible murder-suicide. Here’s some of the highlights of today’s discussion which revolves around Brooks’ love of Obama’s “bipartisanship” and Collins’ concern that Obama is being “too bipartisan”:
Collins: David, Happy New Year! My resolution was to buy you a cheesy memento from every airport in the country but here I am in Birmingham, Alabama, and the gift shop is closed.
[…]But a lot of Americans went to the polls hoping to do more than get rid of the small-minded aspects of partisanship. Maybe it was just me, but didn’t John McCain and Barack Obama have really, really different programs for very large problems like taxes, health care, Social Security reform? And didn’t the Obama versions win?
[…]Brooks: For example, that night with us, he had an elegant dinner filled with sophisticated ideas and complex policy conversation with a bunch of right-leaning commentators. Then the next day, he had a meeting with some liberal commentators where, I presume, he was just as fluid while using much simpler sentences, shorter words and serving Froot Loops and Hostess Twinkies.
So what are Collins’s specific concerns about what Obama has proposed? I think the size of Obama’s proposed tax cut as part of the stimulus package would be one good example, but on health care he’s signaling that he’ll be more aggressive than many had thought. But that’s not really the point here: the point here is that she mentioned nothing specific and that there is simply no value in having millionaire pundits exchange content-free witicisms. What possible value does this kind of thing have?
Via James Joyner, more lunacy in the drug war front:
The strip-search case was brought by the mother of Savana Redding, who in 2003 was an eighth-grade student at a public middle school in Safford, Ariz. Another student, found with ibuprofen pills in violation of a strict school policy, said Savana had given them to her.
School officials searched Savana’s belongings, made her strip to her bra and underwear, and ordered her, in the words of an appeals court, “to pull her bra out to the side and shake it” and “pull out her underwear at the crotch and shake it.” No pills were found. The pills that prompted the search had the potency of two over-the-counter Advil capsules.
A trial judge dismissed the parent’s case against the school officials, ruling that they were immune from suit. After a divided panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed that decision, the full appeals court agreed to a rehearing. By 6 to 5, a larger panel of the court reversed the decision, saying the suit could go forward against the assistant principal who had ordered the search.
“It does not require a constitutional scholar to conclude that a nude search of a 13-year-old child is an invasion of constitutional rights of some magnitude,” Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw wrote for the majority, quoting a decision in another case. “More than that: it is a violation of any known principle of human dignity.”
Judge Michael Daly Hawkins, dissenting, said the case was in some ways “a close call,” given the “humiliation and degradation” Savana had endured. But, Judge Hawkins concluded, “I do not think it was unreasonable for school officials, acting in good faith, to conduct the search in an effort to obviate a potential threat to the health and safety of their students.”
While James and the Supreme Court are focusing on worthwhile Constitutional issues, this seems to me to be missing the point, and akin to trying to cure heart disease by making better defibrillators. We need to look at what got us to this point that school officials would even CONSIDER performing a strip search for over the counter medication. This is a manifestation of decades of drug war mania and the ensuing zero tolerance idiocy.
This sort of thing should never have risen to the point that it is a constitutional issue, as this is an issue of common sense. It makes no sense to strip search kids for a pill they can buy at any store without any questions asked, yet this sort of nonsense happens every single day (albeit perhaps not to this degree). This is the school equivalent of the TSA pouring out breast milk because they are worried about lactating mothers blowing up planes. It is insanity, and zero tolerance is shorthand for zero thinking.
That seems to me to be the bigger issue.
I hate starting these Windows v. Apple fights since I own both, but somehow I have done something improper and now all I can get out of my speakers is background sound and not the voices of the singers. It is like it is treating my front speakers like rear speakers, and for the life of me I do not know how to fix it and IT IS MADDENING.
*** Update ***
This is the Windows machine. Somehow I had set it to 5.1, but it is fixed. Now I can hear James Brown say it loud that he is black and proud. All is well.
And sweet jeebus, the grammar in this post was atrocious. I think I was having an out of body rage experience when I wrote the earlier post.
The titles says it all, you dorks. Not that there is anything wrong with that.
Also, this:
Once you get used to Windows, it isn’t that bad, kitty.
Making a steak salad for dinner with home made blue cheese dressing. Is excited. Monk tonight, too. AND NO WORK ON MONDAY!
*** Update ***
I forgot. I picked up a four pack of this. Happy dance.