I was having a drunken conversation with a friend last night, and he made a good point about team sports: we’ve invented them all. Basketball is the newest sport that’s played by organized professional teams, and it was invented over a hundred years ago. MMA is newer, but it’s not a team sport. Can anyone think of a counterexample?
Read a fucking book.
mistermix has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2010.
Doubting Thomas
I’m just guessing that Clarence Thomas would still vote with the conservative court majority whether or not his wife was the head of a right-wing group that got $550K in donations from unnamed sources. Ezra Klein said it pretty well the other day:
I’ll only add that the arguments being tossed around by the two sides are essentially meaningless. There’s no “right” argument here. No one doubts that health-care reform would be constitutional if Antonin Scalia decided to pursue his passion for beekeeping and allowed President Obama to appoint his replacement. The only reason there’s any question about the law’s constitutionality is that conservatives appointed five of the nine sitting justices, and conservatives have organized against the constitutionality of a proposal they once considered not just constitutional, but desirable as a matter of public policy.
And so it goes. Politics is politics, and the Supreme Court is, at this point, deeply and unquestionably political. I continue to think it unlikely that they will want the sort of direct confrontation with the political system, and with the Democratic Party, that overturning health-care reform would entail. But only time will tell.
If there’s any better reason to vote for a Democrat than the need to nominate and confirm decent Supreme Court justices, I don’t know what it is.
If Only We Had Bill to Kick Around
According to the editors of the New York Times, what the world needs now is a bunch of Republicans firing up the nostalgia machine, wishing they had Bill Clinton back:
In many ways, Republican nostalgia for Mr. Clinton is a brew of selective memory, convenient disregard for the bitter partisan battles that marked his tenure and longing for a time when major bipartisan legislation, like the North American Free Trade Agreement, was possible.
Yes, if only the planets aligned again, the weather cleared, and the appropriate forms of sacrifice were offered up to the gods, then we could once again have a time where major bipartisan legislation was possible. Because bipartisanship is elusive, like a will o’ the wisp –it can’t be brought about by mere human agency, and, as President Obama has shown, it tends to recede when approached. Apparently, it is also followed by impeachment of the leader who brings it about, but let’s not let that unpleasant reality intrude on our 1,000 word thumbsucker.
Gold Weed
Sully has been tracking the price of good pot, and it’s clocking in between $250-500.
If pot is legalized and farmed (rather than “grown” as a cottage industry), I’d imagine that price will go down by a factor of as much as 1000. Once a bunch of Dakota farmers plant a few quarters (160 acres) of weed, the unit of measure will be the bale, not the bag. And I doubt that quality will go down much. Hydroponic vegetables just aren’t as good as those grown outdoors, and with a real market for pot, the fertilizer and seed companies will come up with strains and chemicals matched to growing conditions.
We could be the world’s reefer basket, instead we’re putting millions of people in jail.
No Love in Loveland for Blowjob Jesus
Some nutcase took a crowbar to Blowjob Jesus, breaking the picture frame and tearing the print. The woman was from Kalispell, Montana, 950 miles from Loveland:
“It was very loud,” said Kathy Leonard of Loveland, who was touring the exhibit with her husband. “She was lifting the crowbar over her head, and smashing it down, yelling ‘Filth! Filth! Filth!’”
Leonard said she picked up the crowbar after Folden dropped it.
“I didn’t want her to come back for it, and perhaps hurt someone,” she said.
[…]Folden was wearing a T-shirt printed with the Christian slogan, “My Savior Is Tougher Than Nails.”Loveland resident Larry Jones, who was in the gallery during the attack, said someone shouted “call the police” as Folden was completing her act.
“Then the woman said, ‘Yes, call the police. I’m ready,’” he said.
Leonard said that as the police arrived, Folden “lay down on the floor next to the exhibit and spread her arms outward, like she had been crucified.”
Folden was a long-haul truck driver. Wonder who she listens to on the radio?
(via cleek in the comments)
Stupid.ly
The Libyan government owns the .ly Internet country code, and since they don’t like pr0n, they took down Violet Blue’s url-shortening domain, vb.ly. Mittens, who was using mitt.ly, dropped it like a hot potato once he realized that it was subject to Sharia law and/or the whims of Muammar al-Gaddafi.
The whole URL shortener phenomenon, which is driven by Twitter’s 140 character tweet limit, has led to all kinds of unholy alliances driven by the ability to create a memorable URL from a country code. bit.ly is one of the biggest, and it’s also registered in Libya. The New York Times shortener, ti.ms, is registered in Monserrat, go.to uses a Tongo registrar, and is.gd is registered in Grenada.
URL shorteners are a necessary evil on Twitter, but they were starting to be used in the rest of the Internet because they allow the person making the link to track the number of times it was clicked. I don’t like them, because they make it impossible to know what site you’re visiting without actually clicking on the link. I hope the dawning realization that they exist at the pleasure of some pretty sketchy governments will keep them in Twitter where they belong.
More Deep Thoughts from the Republican Philosopher (would-be) King
Newt says that the road to victory for the GOP is based on food stamp demagoguery:
[…] Gingrich more than most people knows that Washington tends to lock itself in intensely wonkish policy squabbles–need one say more than “budget reconciliation”?–that simply don’t resonate with the rest of the country. So to make it simple, Gingrich and his political action committee are sending a“close the deal” memo to Republican candidates, spelling it out in über-simple terms. What do you want more of: paychecks or food stamps?
In addition to the obviously inhumanity of making the poor the scapegoats in every election, this stupid demagoguery is actually contributing to long-term poverty.
I mentioned the McDonald’s $2,000 health “insurance” plan that ED wrote about last week to a friend of mine who works with poor inner-city single moms. My friend noted that it really does suck to transition from being poor enough to receive social services to being a member of the working poor, and many of her clients avoid the transition by working under-the-table jobs.
She pointed out that the unemployed poor mom can stay home and take care of her kids, and she and her kids will have a relatively good health insurance program (Medicaid), as well as food stamps and other programs. If she gets a job, she’ll either go without insurance, or pay a good percentage of her salary to buy an almost useless “mini-med” policy. She’ll also need to find daycare for the kids, and subsidized daycare is the always getting cut (as it was this week in Rochester). She might lose her food stamps, and depending on her income, she might have to pay a co-pay for her kid’s S-CHIP, since that’s also income-based.
I don’t know if there’s any research on this, but I have to assume seeing their mom hold down a job will create an expectation in her children that they should get a job. My friend is convinced that most of her client’s kids would be better off in a decent daycare, where they’ll get away from the TV for a while, be exposed to reading, and have a nutritious meal. We’re probably better off as a society paying more to have a poor mom work than to have her remain unemployed. Of course, great conservative thinkers like Newt don’t buy this, so they’ll continue to support a system that gives poor single moms an incentive not to work.
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