Media Matters patiently cleans up the latest spewage from the puke funnel.
(h/t: Wonkette)
OPINION »
Op-Ed: Confessions of a Liberal Gun Owner
How a hurricane changed my mind about firearms.
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Good thing we had an election, then, isn't it?
Okay, yeah, so it's just more grousing about Teh Librul Media. But for one brief, exciting moment, I thought we had a genuine Kinsley gaffe.
Drat. And I always thought I looked rather come hither in my french maid's outfit.
According to science:
More Housework, Less Sex: Married men who spend more time doing traditionally female chores, like cooking, cleaning and shopping, report having less sex than husbands who don’t do as much, reports The Houston Chronicle. Conversely, men who did more manly chores, such as yard work, paying bills and auto repairs, reported having more sex.
On the other hand, maybe husbands who are secure enough to do "women's work" also feel less compelled to exaggerate how much they're getting.
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Line of the Day: 2013-01-29
This might be the first time ever that right-wingers accused a black man of not having a gun.
-- Eric Kleefeld
In memoriam: Sugarfoot
Right now, I only see a brief notice from the AP, so here's an extended version of one of my earliest favorite songs. Sugarfoot, aka Leroy Bonner, is the one with the double neck guitar and the baddest of the bad-ass afros.
Never give up. Never surrender.
Okay, maybe just this once.
It is not yet known whether the Transportation Department plans to compensate by issuing each NYC resident one additional middle finger.
And we would have succeeded, too, if it weren't for you meddling kids
Just passed 200k likes on Facebook.on.fb.me/5GZrQF So much for the progressive left's efforts to silence black Conservatives...
— Allen West (@AllenWest) January 28, 2013
Allen West: Now reduced to second billing in Wonkette posts starring Victoria Jackson.
Most boring NY Times piece ever?
Don't click. It's everything you fear it will be.
Move over, "How Shamu Saved My Marriage By Convincing Me To Buy New High-FiberAntioxidant Running Shoes That Would Cure Cancer End Hunger In Africa Get My Kid Into A Better Carbon-Neutral Preschool."
Monday, January 28, 2013
Line of the Day: 2013-01-28
Rightbloggers pitched in, too, in direct responses or in reactions to Hillary Clinton's Congressional hearing, the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and gun control, proving that whatever lesson there is to be learned from 2012, they will do whatever it takes not to find it.
Oh yeah, that's Roy Edroso, just getting started, wrapping up the week in wingnuts.
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Both sides are just the same!!!1!
Or ... are they?
The More Republicans Know About Politics, the More They Believe Conspiracy Theories
Dems, on the other hand, are more gullible the less they know.
What, no hearing protection FOR THE CHILDREN?
Other than that moment of amusement, I was not particularly happy with my decision to check the NYT's headlines this morning.
Here's one measure of how crazy desperate to oppose all things Obama some rich wingnuts have become:
The most mysterious of the new groups is Use Your Mandate. Portraying itself as a gay rights group, it has sent mailers to voters in seven states — including New York, New Jersey, Maryland and Montana — and run television ads against Mr. Hagel in New York and Washington. It has sent out posts on Twitter questioning his gay rights record and asking, “Is this what we worked so hard for?”
Which seems like it'd be about as effective as becoming a drag queen to boost Tupperware sales. Oh, wait.
Another measure of their desperation? Michael Goldfarb is a fundraiser in this anonymously funded campaign to Save America From Hagel. If you're giving money to Michael Goldfarb, you've really lost your mind.
I confess I could not make it very far through the article about the pushers.
The pages of Junior Shooters, an industry-supported magazine that seeks to get children involved in the recreational use of firearms, once featured a smiling 15-year-old girl clutching a semiautomatic rifle.
What, and not in high heels and a bikini?
Saturday, January 26, 2013
Sinking ship to squeaky rat: GTFO
In case you haven't heard, FoxNews made He®self a contract renewal offer that even she was able to refuse.
Friday, January 25, 2013
A note of hope
Here's something of an antidote to the previous post: Tim Egan's latest, "The Tomorrow Majority."
Still think "American Taliban" is hyperbole?
Take a few minutes to look at this, from Roger Ross Williams.
We've noted the American Christianist activities in Uganda a couple of times already, but it's worth keeping an eye on this sort of religiously justified hate.
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
I don't actually care about gun control, but ...
... a post responding to Chunky Jonah Goldberg is always a delight, especially when it comes from a master like Thers.
[Added] Schadenfreude of the Day, also from Thers (from last week). Allen West news! You must.
Probably a premature declaration of victory by @TomJunod ...
... but his guest post on Pierce's blog, about watching the inauguration on FoxNews, is a fun read, filled with vivid phrases that are almost impossible not to steal.
(h/t: General Armchair)
[Added] A response.
Deep thought
Whence came the expression hailing from (as in "originally hailing from Australia and now living in Los Angeles")?
Because we never say snowing from or sleeting from or raining from.
Well, reigning from, maybe.
The example above had nothing to do with the previous post. Rather, I was Googling in response to the next post.
There is a simple answer to this stupid New York Times question
No.
There is no Room for Debate. The prefix a- means not. Atheism is not a religion any more than asymptomatic is symptomatic, atonal is tonal, or amoral is moral.
And it's not a "belief system," either, any more than not seeing any evidence that unicorns exist is a branch of zoology.
As for awe, I marvel at everything from the back of my hand to pictures taken by Hubble. For meaning, I look everywhere, to science and art and my own linty navel. For comfort? Okay, yeah, I do occasionally get a warm fuzzy when realizing that I'm no longer in thrall to a set of superstitions that many in the Taliban GOP would like made mandatory. But far more often, I turn to beer and chocolate.
And kittens.
And nice people.
And books. And music. And ... oh, hell, there's a whole universe of comfort out there, too.
A link, if you absolutely must. But I will tell you this: there are as many charlatans among the faitheists as there are among the fundies.
Friday, January 18, 2013
If you swore to read nothing more about the Manti Te'o whoop-dee-do, ...
... stick to that pledge, right after you read this.
Now don't you feel all warm and fuzzy inside? Me, too.
A phrase ripped from context
But even in context, it still caused me momentary brain-lock:
... middle class and wealthier white men — the population that tends to submit DNA data to recreational sites ...
[Added] And here's another:
A computer motherboard called Grouphug ...
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Nice to see the old man having such a good time
Here is "Custard Pie" from one of those nights. Pretty much a straight-up version of the original recording -- the song remains the same, one might say, were one prone to cheap and obvious jokes -- but it's fun to see Page smile and bounce around, even, and to hear a backing band who obviously grew up on his stuff tear it up so well.
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout
He's coming to take your guns, haha! He's coming to take your guns, hoho, heehee, ha-haa!
Trending topics right now: ATF, #guncontrol, #FastAndFurious, NRA, #POTUS & President Obama.Wingnuts: relax. Your precious guns are safe..
— bjkeefe (@bjkeefe) January 16, 2013
[Added] Also, the NRA has a new ad out, posing the entirely reasonable question, if the President's daughters have Secret Service protection, then why can't your kids have armed guards in their schools?
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Deep Thought
There will come a time when a young person whom you otherwise love will proclaim an affection for "that song by El Eee Dee Zeppelin."
This, of course, will also be Obama's fault.
Because some people really do not have enough to do
Yep ...
Disinvite Beyonce from singing the Star Spangled Banner at the Inauguration
... that's recently up on the "We The People" petition-the-White-House site.
The best argument against democracy is ...?
Monday, January 14, 2013
Lede of the Day
Around 11:45 on Monday morning, Justice Clarence Thomas broke almost seven years of silence during Supreme Court arguments. But it was not entirely clear what he said.
Line of the Day: 2013-01-14
“Entitlement costs”, if I understand the term correctly, means “one side of any contract on which the Republicans would now like to renege”. It is a way of branding as greedy bludgers the people who are claiming the unemployment insurance or pensions for which they have paid.
I will take the term “entitlement costs” seriously when people start applying it to farm subsidies or defense-industry corporate welfare. Or for that matter, to the rent, when the landlords demand their entitlement according to the tenancy agreement.
-- herr doktor bimler
Bonus: delicious-sounding recipe at the same link, if you scroll up to the top.
"... sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative."
The post title is a fragment from the late great Aaron Swartz's "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto." Following is the whole thing.
Sunday, January 13, 2013
Oh, no. Oh, fuck, no.
Aaron Swartz is dead, apparently by suicide.
To the extent that it is possible for someone half your age to be a hero to you, Aaron was one to me.
Read Doctorow and Lessig for personal notes, and the NYT for the straight news report.
Hope someone is busy archiving his site.
[Added] Also, this (via, via).
[Added2] Glenzilla also considers him a hero.
[Added3] Rick Perlstein has a very good piece up. (h/t: Noam Cohen)
Saturday, January 12, 2013
Wingnut mail fail
Last line of something just in:
This message has no links to help it get through spam blockers. If you are interested in the subjects being discussed, please search the Web for more information.
Back up top:
In conclusion, Google is liberally biased.
Oh, wait. You wanted to read the whole thing? Okay!
Friday, January 11, 2013
Next version of Firefox will include "built-in, secure PDF viewer"
Sounds like a good idea. You can try it right now if you want to download the latest Firefox beta (v19.0b1), or just wait a few weeks.
Here's a screenshot of what it looks like on my machine when viewing page 8 of Philip Hazel's memoir.
Pipes
Just happened across BadTux in Comments over at M. Bouffant's house, and thus came across this:
BadTux99 says this about that:
Phoebe Snow sings “Just To Be With You”. I’m pretty sure this is a Muddy Waters cover, though it may be BB King’s arrangement. If she ever recorded it on an album, I can’t find it, but at least we have this YouTube video of her performance.
Nobody seems to have noticed that she died on April 26,2011. Granted, she was mostly active in the mid to late 1970′s, but still, she was only 60 years old…
Sad news, but thanks for the memorable recording, BT.
This'll shock you: FoxNews agrees with Jim Hoft about how fake this whole global warming thing is
liberal media denialist wolverines.
Document the atrocities.
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Recurring, but still makes me laugh
Different car this time. Bumper sticker:
LIBERTARIAN
More Freedom Less Government
And yes, it was parked in a handicapped parking spot.
The driver clearly needed it. I wonder if she appreciated that the spot was there for her only because of, you know, FREEDUMB-ROBBING BIG GUMMINT.
Wednesday, January 09, 2013
Heating up follow-up
Despite the report noted yesterday, about 2012 being the hottest year on record, by a lot, for the continental US, there is still no shortage of denialism.
We wish it were solely the Stupidest Man on the Internet, ...
... but he's only an example.
[Added] See?
(pic. source: some Breitbart fan site, which means they think the above is a flattering picture)
Just lovely prose
I have not yet finished reading Daniyal Mueenuddin's "Sameer and the Samosas," which appears in the 3 December 2012 issue of the New Yorker, but I had to stop to share a bit of it before I could turn the page.
This is from the story of a young man from Pakistan, who went off to Dartmouth College in the US, who returns home after graduation and decides to take over one of his father's farms.
My God, how penny-bright and clueless I was, arriving at the farm that day in 1987, to be met by the managers—the Committee, as I came to think of them. (Because they or their progeny still carry weight in the environs of the farm, I have assigned them fictitious names.) They should have been standing there in order of size as my jeep chugged up the drive: tall, volatile, vicious Shakil at one end of the line—in a cartoon, he would be the slavering Doberman, no brains but lots of bad muscle between the ears—and, at the other end, dumpy, lame Shafik, the accountant, born to be a sidekick to some rogue, who spent the next four or five years trotting around me in circles as I struggled to understand the double-entry bookkeeping system he had devised expressly to be intelligible only to him. In lore and reality, these managers are a type as well defined as the English butler, but of a very different temper. Every absentee landowner has them, and most believe that theirs alone are honest.
In those days, I drove—I rolled in—an ancient Pakistani-made Naya Daur jeep. The name means New Era, and its production, at least of the one model built before production collapsed, did indeed signal a new day, a flowering of Pakistan’s newly organized kleptocratic command economy of Bhutto's nineteen-seventies, built with a shoddiness that would have drawn an appreciative whistle from a Soviet metalworks manager. That first day, rumpled and dust-covered after the ten-hour drive from Lahore in this crate, I was met, as I would be met each time I drove back in the early years, by these suave, ruthless, cunning operators, lined up in the farmhouse portico and waiting to embrace me, size me up, and then retire—like a conclave of Renaissance cardinals—to plot my confusion.
Sorry that the digital version is available only to subscribers, but here's a link to the article's abstract, if you like. I encourage you to seek out the whole thing.
You might also have a look at Daniyal Mueenuddin's website.
Still need me to explain what #SCLM is?
Here's a bit from Pareene's Hack List 2012, in which the Sunday yakfests placed fourth.
FAIR is the organization that has most recently sorted and tallied the Sunday show guests, and yet again, the shows skew white and conservative. FAIR looked at the guest lists for ABC’s “This Week,” NBC’s “Meet the Press,” CBS’ “Face the Nation, and “Fox News Sunday” from June 2011 through February 2012. They found:
Of one-on-one interviews, 70 percent of partisan-affiliated guests were Republican. Those guests were overwhelmingly male (86 percent) and white (92 percent).
The broader roundtable segments weren’t much more diverse: 62 percent of partisan-affiliated guests were Republican. More broadly, guests classified as either Republican or conservative far outnumbered Democrats or progressives, 282 to 164. The roundtables were 71 percent male and 85 percent white.
U.S. government sources — current officials, former lawmakers, political candidates, party-affiliated political operatives and campaign advisers — dominated the Sunday shows overall (47 percent of appearances). Following closely behind were journalists (43 percent), most of whom were middle-of-the-road Beltway political reporters.
Media Matters tallied the guest lists in 2005 and 2006 and came up with very similar results. There are never labor leaders, scientists, academics, activists or public policy experts on these shows, ever. There are scarcely any women or people of color. The Sunday shows are broadcast live from the cocoon.
When you imagine how many millions of people congratulate themselves for not getting all of their information from FoxNews, because they get a big chunk of it from Dancing Dave, et al, you start to understand how an asylum run by the inmates still gets to call itself one of our two major parties.
Tuesday, January 08, 2013
Thus proving once again that Al Gore is fat
It’s Official: 2012 Was Hottest Year Ever in U.S.
The numbers are in: 2012, the year of a surreal March heat wave, a severe drought in the corn belt and a massive storm that caused broad devastation in the mid-Atlantic states, turns out to have been the hottest year ever recorded in the contiguous United States.
How hot was it? The temperature differences between years are usually measured in fractions of a degree, but last year blew away the previous record, set in 1998, by a full degree Fahrenheit.
A dab of extra security. Yahoo!
Should you do it? Yes, you should do it. Especially if you access your Yahoo Mail wirelessly, and particularly, if you do so from public wifi hotspots. Even if you only use your Yahoo Mail once in a while. Just do it now. Won't take but a minute.
Unless there is something truly pathological about your computer set-up, you should notice no difference at all, except for the appearance of a lock icon in your browser's address bar, as shown above. Things aren't going to get noticeably slower, you won't need to type in extra passwords, etc.
What is HTTPS? Basically, it's a more secure way to connect to a Web site. When you visit a site whose URL begins with https:// instead of plain old http://, information transmitted between your computer and the site is encrypted automatically before being sent. This makes it virtually impossible for someone else to eavesdrop on you. More details (than you probably want) are available on Wikipedia.
(h/t: Access)
From Nate Silver's AMA on Reddit
[–]sharilynj 151 points 3 hours ago
What's been the strangest experience you've had due to your sudden fame?
[–]NateSilver538[S] 413 points 2 hours ago
When I was in Mexico last week, I got recognized at the top of the Sun Pyramid at Teotihuacan, which I'm pretty sure really is a sign of the Apocalypse.
(source)
(h/t: Kris E. Benson's RT)
Monday, January 07, 2013
Line of the Day: 2012-01-07
Apparently, Ross Douthat is still hand-wringing for the Grand Ole Par-tay (that never was). This provokes a response far more worth linking to.
If you want to save the Republican party, leave it. Find common cause with centrist Democrats; Lord knows you've got enough. You're gonna have to admit that the only sovereignty over a woman's reproductive system belongs to her own brain, and you're going to have to admit that the government can do good things, and really ought to pay lip service to the poor, the sick, and the needy while it stockpiles carrier fleets. That is, you're going to have to appear sensible,, and you're going to have to get your Bronze Age impulses cut down to where they'll fit in your own garage again.
-- Doghouse Riley
No word on whether said garage is allowed to have car elevators and such.
Predictions are hard
Compounding the hilarity: I got to the above thanks to the site's auto-recommendation mechanism, the if you liked that post you just read you'll probably also like these posts thing.
The post I did read to completion, however, is well worth a look, for geeks of all flavors.
(h/t: MK, via email)
Currency conversion is hard
From the paper of record:
Iliad reported third-quarter revenue of €819 billion, or about $1.1 billion.
Screenshot:
Or, who knows. Maybe the euro actually did lose three orders of magnitude in value while I wasn't paying attention.
Friday, January 04, 2013
Still not tired of being a poor winner, concerning the recent election? ME NEITHER.
Click it to big it, and then print 5000 copies, and then wrap them all around a large brick, and then send that postage-collect to your favorite wingnut. Repeat for your second-favorite wingnut. &c.
Or! You could buy them each a coffee cup find out their credit card numbers, and order them each a gross of coffee cups.
Move over, supplemental serotonin and norepinephrine-dopamine reuptake inhibitors! Or ...
Welcome to Obamacare!!!1!
- START READING IT ON YOUR KINDLE IN UNDER A MINUTE.
Makes a great bathroom book!- Order your copy right now!
(h/t: Dr.KennethNoisewater and Another Angry Woman) … wait, that didn't come out right
__________
[Update/Related] Satan Loves Anal Sex, according to "ex-gay" ex-pornstar (? ← WE never heard of him) Joseph Sciambra, posted by OnKneesforJesus4 (great avatar!), and all of this addendum is entirely to be blamed on Evan Hurst.
Thursday, January 03, 2013
Ceci n'est pas un autoportrait
I don't claim to be that big of a deal.
(Image swiped from Plognark, whose work you may have recognized in the previous post.)
Stop saying "as per usual." Please.
... you will be able to read them on your Kindle as per usual ...
As usual. As usual. As usual.
Not that Erez Zukerman is solely guilty. (RIGHT, ROY?). He's just the latest.
[Added] vacuumslayer weighs in.
Wednesday, January 02, 2013
Smoke 'em if you got 'em
You've probably heard that each cigarette takes eleven minutes off your life (for various values of eleven).
But here's the real killer!
... according to a large study of Western adults, “Every single hour of television watched after the age of 25 reduces the viewer’s life expectancy by 21.8 minutes.”
Actually, given the amount of agita that mere seconds of exposure to ®eality teevee or FoxNews causes me, I'm surprised it's that low.
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