Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

It’s a doggy dog world.

Putin dreamed of ending NATO, and now it’s Finnish-ed.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

There’s always a light at the end of the frog.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

Biden: Oh no. We’ve upset Big Pharma again.

White supremacy is terrorism.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

Fight them, without becoming them!

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

Bad news for Ron DeSantis is great news for America.

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Republicans would impeach Biden if he bit into a whole Kit Kat rather than breaking the sections apart.

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

“woke” is the new caravan.

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Archives for April 2010

Teabagger Revisionism

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McClatchy has a good debunking of some of the “history” that teabaggers believe is fact.

Some examples: Teddy Roosevelt was a socialist, Joe McCarthy exposed liberals for the communists that they really were, Jamestown was a socialist settlement, and Alexander Hamilton was a small-government conservative.

And don’t miss this Bachmann gem:

It’s long been debated how well Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal government programs countered the Great Depression, but now a prominent conservative has introduced the idea that Roosevelt CAUSED the Depression.

“FDR took office in the midst of a recession,” Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., told the Conservative Political Action Conference in February. “He decided to choose massive government spending and the creation of monstrous bureaucracies. Do we detect a Democrat pattern here in all of this? He took what was a manageable recession and turned it into a 10-year depression.”

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iPad Saturday

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On the first day of iPad availability, here’s my prediction: more iPhone than iPod. In other words, it will be an interesting, widely-adopted gadget, but Apple won’t own the whole category.

Two big reasons that Apple owns the portable music player market are sync and the music store. When iPod was introduced, no other manufacturer had a sync program that came close to iTunes. iTunes moved the portable music player from the category of fiddly tech gadget to must-have device. And, pre-iPod, the only way to get legal downloads was to rip your own CDs. The iTunes Music Store changed that, and iTunes DRM makes it tough for people who have purchased music from Apple to change players.

iPhone is successful device, but it’s not a market-owner like iPod. In North America, Blackberry outsells iPhone by almost 2:1. Worldwide, Nokia eats everyone else’s lunch in the smartphone market. Part of the reason that iPhone isn’t the number one US smartphone is contract lock-in and AT&T exclusivity. But people still buy Blackberries on the AT&T network, and Nokia smartphones worldwide, so having an existing, decent set of competitors cut into iPhone’s smartphone share. On the low end, the reason everyone doesn’t have an iPhone is cost: a regular cell phone still makes calls and texts. iPhone is more luxury than necessity.

Like iPhone, iPad is an optional device. Most people already have a PC or laptop that does a lot of what iPad does. And, like iPhone, Apple’s competitors aren’t asleep. Equipment manufacturers can, and will, make pad devices that run either Google Android or Chrome, without paying a cent to Google. Expect the market to be flooded with these devices by the end of the year.

It may sound like I’m addressing a straw man: of course everyone isn’t going to run out to buy a $500 electronic device in the middle of almost 10% unemployment. If you think that, you probably haven’t spent much time around the tech blogs lately. They’re treating this device like the second coming.

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Mistakes Were Made

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Some interesting news:

The U.S. Justice Department said on Thursday it sued the Houston-based military contractor KBR Inc (KBR.N) for alleged false claims act violations over improper costs for private security in Iraq.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., alleged that KBR knowingly included impermissible costs for private armed security in billings to the U.S. Army covering the 2003-2006 time period, the department said.

KBR has been the U.S. military’s largest private contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan. It has been criticized for cost overruns in Iraq, and lawmakers in Congress last month questioned the Army’s continued use of KBR for logistics work.

The company said it had to hire private security because the government failed to protect its employees, and added that it believed the government filed the lawsuit to avoid reimbursing it for security costs.

The Justice Department said the case, which seeks unspecified damages, was brought as part of an initiative to crack down on procurement fraud.

Has there ever been a definitive analysis examining whether private contractors actually are cheaper than having a larger military?

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A commenter on the Catholic Church abuse scandal

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Longtime commenter ThymeZone has written here about his own experiences with abuse within the Catholic Church. I am passing it on because it is a courageous and thoughtful comment.

I’ve recently retired from my longtime career-job-occupation, so that gives you and idea of the age group I am in. And in the 50-plus years since the aforementioned mistreatment, I have spoken of those events with maybe half a dozen other people, including two shrinks and a few other people I was close to at one time or another. Let’s just say, I really don’t enjoy talking about much. And from adolescence until about age 40, a period of around 25 years or so, I pretty much blocked out the entire experience and all the events around that time in my life, so that the thing just was a dark blank space in my memory.

So, to the topic at hand, which I address here with some trepidation. Over all those years and some considerable therapy, I have come to only a very few conclusions. One of them is that I long ago forgave the person who mistreated me. I compared my own pain at being a part of his pain, with his, and decided that there was a good chance that he was more tortured by it than I was. Maybe, maybe not. I really have no way of knowing that for sure. But the point is, I don’t know, and I couldn’t see the point of carrying anger and resentment around with me for the rest of my life. Life is hard enough without adding to the inventory of painful things. I just let go of the anger, forgave the poor man, and over a not very long period of time my own shame and fear of the thing faded away too. A fairly effective pill, forgiveness, and for me, without much in the way of side effects.

I have no dog in the fight over what is happening the Catholic Church, but when it comes to the simple matter of how people treat other people, when it comes to the mysteries of sexuality, I refuse to be judgmental and carry grudges. At the risk of seeming odd and being unpopular in an age of triumphant sex police on every corner, I just don’t want to join in the condemnation of other people unless there is some really compelling reason to do so. The Church has its own work to do, and I have no advice for it on how to go about doing that work. I wish it well, I hope it turns out as well as possible for everyone under the circumstances. In my own experience, by far the most painful part of what happened to me was the hysterical reaction of adults around me to the events. If they had been okay with it all, I would have been much better off. A seven year old can’t understand much about sexual behavior, but he can sure understand fear and overreaction on the part of adult figures in his life. Whatever value there is in that message, I hope it helps somebody else. I’d have had no reason to feel horrified and ashamed of what happened to me if the adults around me hadn’t been so sure that horror and shame were what I ought to be feeling.

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Early Morning Open Thread

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It’s worth the effort to see How to Train Your Dragon in 3D (or, if you’re lucky like me, IMAX 3D). If you’re any kind of an animation fan, you’ll enjoy it — it’s a step up for directors Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders (cool interview for the completists among us), whose last picture was Lilo and Stitch (which I adored). I think Dragon has a stronger story line than UP (which was, in my eyes, just okay), and better character development than Avatar (not that difficult, admittedly). The flight scenes are beautiful, the fight scenes are properly hectic, and the hero(es) suffer genuine consequences for the choices they make. (There’s at least one Bambi’s-mom-level cute-character-in-peril scene that might be too scary for really young children, but things work out okay in the end.)
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Who Knew Titty Bars Had Such Strict Dress Codes?

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No Armani, no Louboutin, no service? Lindsay Beyerstein, at AlterNet, finds “Trendy Fashion Buys Reimbursed as ‘Office Supplies’ to RNC Finance Officials”:

Listed on the report in the category of “office supplies” are purchases from a New England winery and a Capitol Hill liquor store, as well as more than $3,800 from a Florida clothing store. The category of “meals” also seems to extend to the sartorial, with a $450 purchase from a high-end Manhattan boutique — one that has no restaurant or take-out shop on the premises — falling into that category, as listed on the RNC’s reports to the FEC. That purchase, as well as one for more than $500 from the Florida clothing store, are attributed to RNC Deputy Finance Director Debbie LeHardy, who, according to the report, was reimbursed for them.
[…] n February, as the RNC’s finance chiefs gathered in Boca Grande, Florida, for their Finance Leadership Meeting — the meeting at which the RNC’s “fear” strategy for donors was revealed in a telling PowerPoint presentation — the RNC made purchases totaling $3817 at Fugate’s. On its report, the RNC labels the purchase as “office supplies,” but Fugate’s general manager Nancy Blank says her store doesn’t sell office supplies. Fugate’s sells men’s and women’s clothing and accessories, Blank told AlterNet. “We’re a specialty department store,” she said.

Okay, so I guess the upscale Boca Grande restaurants must be too exclusive to have a spare sports jacket and an couple of ugly ties stashed behind the hostess station for lowly RNC drones who show up in khakis and polo shirts. At least the Fugate’s customers didn’t have to catch their own dinners….

Records also show that LeHardy received reimbursement for $282 spent at Boca Grande Outfitters, which bills itself as “the area’s most complete saltwater fly fishing and light tackle outfitter.” The report designates the reimbursement for “meals.” Aaron Sutcliffe, a clerk at BGO, said the store doesn’t sell food.

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