Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

You passed on an opportunity to be offended? What are you even doing here?

An almost top 10,000 blog!

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

There are times when telling just part of the truth is effectively a lie.

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

Speaker Mike Johnson is a vile traitor to the House and the Constitution.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

This fight is for everything.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Too little, too late, ftfnyt. fuck all the way off.

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

All hail the time of the bunny!

75% of people clapping liked the show!

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

The willow is too close to the house.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

You are here: Home / Archives for 2014

Archives for 2014

Senator Obvious Checking In

by | 110 Comments

This post is in: 

Mary Landrieu is winning the contest for the least objectionable statement of fact that will rile up wingnuts, and it’s surprising that a stalwart defender of the truth like Edwin Edwards disagreeing with her:

Specifically, Landrieu told NBC News that the “South has not always been the friendliest place for African-Americans. It’s been a difficult time for the president to present himself in a very positive light as a leader.”

Edwards told TPM on Saturday that Louisiana is “a rather liberal state in racial nations and there always will be some people who have problem with people of a different race — Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, what have you,” but “by and large people will accept a person based upon his policies and performance.”

“Now look, I’ll be honest,” Edwards continued, “I’m sure there are some people who don’t like [President Barack Obama] and never will because he’s black. But I don’t think that’s a significant amount.”

Landrieu better just keep her mouth shut, because if she says that water is wet, or sunshine is bright, some of these assholes might stroke out.

Senator Obvious Checking InPost + Comments (110)

It’s testing

by | 10 Comments

This post is in: 

The New York Times reported that the SHOP exchange soft launch has run into a few small problems:

The Obama administration has discovered a number of defects in the online marketplace that will offer health insurance to millions of small-business employees, but federal officials said the problems could probably be fixed before the website goes live on Nov. 15….Testing began last week in Delaware, Illinois, Missouri, New Jersey and Ohio…

some health insurance plans approved for sale on the exchange did not show up on the website. The site worked well with some web browsers, like Chrome, but not with others, like Internet Explorer and Firefox. Premiums and other charges for some plans were erroneously displayed as percentages rather than dollar amounts — 350 percent rather than $350, for example. For some households, the principal subscriber was listed as a dependent, or vice versa.

I’m not worried. This type of crap is what user acceptance testing is supposed to find.  A mostly functional deliverable with little bugs, quirks and glitches that can get quickly ironed out.  This is what should have happened last year with Healthcare.gov where users were invited in early and told to break the damn system.  As we saw with the rapid recovery where it was mostly functional by December 1, 2013, the problems were widespread, but basic functionality was within reach.  Testing should discover problems, coders and systems analysts should slap themselves in the forehead, write a tweak, and put it back into the testing environment before the production promotion.

I would be worried if the SHOP exchange was not subject to end user testing before production promotion, but that is not the case here.

 

 

 

It’s testingPost + Comments (10)

Monday Morning Open Thread: Second Call for Calendar Photos

by | 36 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

joy cutter

I have been remiss in my nagging duties, since Beth S. tells me we’ve only received a handful of pet pics for the 2015 Balloon Juice Pet Calendar. To repeat, here are her rules:

the usual rules apply: you have a pet (or six) and you send me a photo (or six) and your pet(s) makes an appearance in the 2015 pets of balloon juice calendar. tell me his/her/its name and i will put it on their photo. the highest resolution photo you can provide is best. i accept the usual photo formats. any questions, don’t hesitate to send me an email.

send photos here: [email protected]

Deadline for photo submission is next Saturday, November 8 — you still have time to take some new pics, if you decide none of the ones on hand do your animal companion(s) justice.

Any questions, post a comment, or email me (click on my name in the right-hand column, or annelaurie (at) verizon (dot) net).

All pets welcome (if you look at previous calandars, we’ve had rabbits, ferrets, horses, turtles, at least one iguana… )

Photo of Cutter by commentor Joy.

Monday Morning Open Thread: Second Call for Calendar PhotosPost + Comments (36)

Just Rotten to the Core

by | 50 Comments

This post is in: ,

Remember when the authorities in Ferguson asked for a no-fly zone, and all of assumed it was to make it harder to document their criminal activies? We were right:

The U.S. government agreed to a police request to restrict more than 37 square miles of airspace surrounding Ferguson, Missouri, for 12 days in August for safety, but audio recordings show that local authorities privately acknowledged the purpose was to keep away news helicopters during violent street protests.

On Aug. 12, the morning after the Federal Aviation Administration imposed the first flight restriction, FAA air traffic managers struggled to redefine the flight ban to let commercial flights operate at nearby Lambert-St. Louis International Airport and police helicopters fly through the area — but ban others.

“They finally admitted it really was to keep the media out,” said one FAA manager about the St. Louis County Police in a series of recorded telephone conversations obtained by The Associated Press. “But they were a little concerned of, obviously, anything else that could be going on.

At another point, a manager at the FAA’s Kansas City center said police “did not care if you ran commercial traffic through this TFR (temporary flight restriction) all day long. They didn’t want media in there.”

FAA procedures for defining a no-fly area did not have an option that would accommodate that.

“There is really … no option for a TFR that says, you know, ‘OK, everybody but the media is OK,'” he said. The managers then worked out wording they felt would keep news helicopters out of the controlled zone but not impede other air traffic.

The conversations contradict claims by the St. Louis County Police Department, which responded to demonstrations following the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown, that the restriction was solely for safety and had nothing to do with preventing media from witnessing the violence or the police response.

Is every one in that city power structure a criminal?

Just Rotten to the CorePost + Comments (50)

Long Read: “Clay Aiken Doesn’t Sing Any More”

by | 84 Comments

This post is in: , , , ,

Allison Glock, in Esquire:

… For him, it is a question of solemnity. “I recognize there is a little bit of preposterousness to me running for office,” Aiken says as we drive away from the fundraiser and past the lantern-lit Kinkadeian houses of Southern Pines, one of the more conservative hamlets in an already absurdly gerrymandered district. “People like me. But I need them to take me seriously.” (A struggle his campaign team dubbed WTF mountain.) “It’s still a laugh line: ‘Clay Aiken running for Congress? Ha ha ha!’ But when I’m done here, the people of North Carolina will know I’m serious. That this is real.”

Aiken has been the butt of the joke since grade school, where other kids tormented him “like it was their job.” He was poor, raised by a single mom, wore glasses and cheap, clunky tennis shoes, had freckles, walked with his toes pointed east and west, was redheaded and clumsy and effeminate. He was a nesting doll of vulnerabilities, a bully’s fever dream, but especially in the South, where the signifiers of masculinity do not stretch to include musical theater or kindness to Down-syndrome kids…

Part of his unease came from his being in the closet, as much to himself as anyone else. But the more salient truth is that Clayton Holmes Aiken was never constructed for modern celebrity. He was a natural introvert with a soft spot for kids who struggled, and if you’d asked him in middle school what he wanted to be when he grew up, he would have said a teacher or possibly Senator Terry Sanford.

“There was no man I admired more than Terry Sanford,” Aiken recalls, his enunciation crisp and deliberate, as if to mirror his respect for the North Carolina politician who built the community-college system and founded the first U. S. state-run arts school. As governor, Sanford was also the first southern politician to fight conspicuously against segregation in the sixties. In eighth grade, Aiken interviewed him for a school paper. “I didn’t know what my deal was yet, but I knew I was different. And here was this man who was looking out for people who were different.”

show full post on front page

Long Read: “Clay Aiken Doesn’t Sing Any More”Post + Comments (84)

Open Thread: Dinesh D’Souza Seems to Be Hallucinating in Public Again

by | 68 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

From sports website Deadspin:

Earlier today, we reached out to the Sacramento Kings to find out if they really were running an in-arena promotion with disgraced ’80s relic/wingnut Dinesh D’Souza, as D’Souza had claimed on his Twitter account. The Kings told us they were not affiliated in any way with D’Souza, who then sent another tweet promoting a similar partnership with the Philadelphia 76ers….

***********
May all Republican “triumphs” be as illusory as D’Souza’s jeenyus marketing, she said piously. Apart from lying liars, what’s on the agenda as we wrap up the weekend?

Open Thread: Dinesh D’Souza Seems to Be Hallucinating in Public AgainPost + Comments (68)