"No longer like a toad in these foul cellars will I secret the venom of hatred -- for you shall bring me love!" - Erik
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« June 2009 | Main | August 2009 » July 31, 2009Poor puppy This is basically a non-issue, but i thought one of the comments was funny: [image: a sad-looking puppy] "Kay Bailey Hutchison: wrong for search engines, wrong for Texas." By fnord12 | July 31, 2009, 8:55 AM | Ummm... Other?| Link
He won the lottery when he was born He won the lottery by being born Jesus greets me...looks just like me... By fnord12 | July 30, 2009, 7:54 AM | Music| Link
Love Medicare, hate government run healthcare. Krugman reacts to this oddity: Because they don't know they have it. A commenter points me to this: "I had to politely explain that, 'Actually, sir, your health care is being provided by the government,' " Inglis recalled. "But he wasn't having any of it." One of the truly amazing and depressing things about the health reform debate is the persistence of fear-mongering over "socialized medicine" even though we already have a system in which the government pays substantially more medical bills (47% of the total) than the private insurance industry (35%). Meanwhile Matthew Yglesias provides data that shows that older people are the least likely to support universal healthcare. As he says: I assume that were seniors not in a position to benefit from a special, wildly popular "universal health care for old people only" program that they would look more kindly on creating a universal health care program. By fnord12 | July 28, 2009, 12:09 PM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (1) | Link
Jersey This is the simplest write-up I've seen of the recent string of arrests in Jersey. By fnord12 | July 27, 2009, 5:00 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link Gaming the system This may be technically legal, but how does it provide any value to society? By fnord12 | July 27, 2009, 1:22 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link Stand down, India. China, get ready for war. TPM: "Senator Cornyn misspoke saying 'India' when he meant to say 'China,'" By fnord12 | July 27, 2009, 10:56 AM | Liberal Outrage| Link 'He is there to pass health-reform--not make us post-racist, or post-police power, or post-whatever.' I guess i was pretty impressed with Obama's defusing of the Gates situation, and was only a little disappointed with the fact that (the appearance is that) he's backing down off his original "the police acted stupidly' stance. Ta-Nehisi Coates flips that perspective on me: The rest of us are left with a country where, by all appearances, officers are well within their rights to arrest you for sassing them. Which is where we started. I hope Crowley, Gates and Obama get that beer soon. They need to pour out a little something for Shem Walker. We can't all go to Harvard. By fnord12 | July 27, 2009, 8:53 AM | Liberal Outrage| Link
Whatever happened to Honduras? Remember that? Some sort of coup or something? The US still hasn't officially called it a coup or cut off funding. Could it have anything to do with the fact the Hillary Clinton is Secretary of State, and her former campaign mouthpiece Lanny Davis is now a lobbyist for the pro-coup interests, could it? This was reported by TPM on the 14th (link above) with little impact. Mark Weisbrot, in the LA Times opinion section, follows up. By fnord12 | July 24, 2009, 10:19 AM | Liberal Outrage| Link Senate 'delays' healthcare reform Link: A delay won't help the process. A delay will push the vote on this bill to a time when they're all too worried about getting re-elected to take a stand on anything. And opponents of health care reform are well aware of that; it's why they're delaying. The Patriot Act was signed a little over a month after September 11th. It was 100s of pages long. It contained sweeping changes to complex laws around law enforcement, surveillance, and counter-terrorism. And yet they were able to get it through Congress in no time at all. Obama campaigned on health care reform. It's been 8 months since he was elected. Democrats have been trying to pass healthcare reform since Harry Truman. There are plenty of existing models (Canada, Massachusetts,etc.) to draw upon. What excuse is there for a delay? By fnord12 | July 24, 2009, 9:59 AM | Liberal Outrage| Link
Screams break the silence Bark at the moon Years spent in torment Bark at the moon They cursed and buried him Howling in shadows And when he finds who he's looking for By fnord12 | July 23, 2009, 8:41 AM | Music| Link
Nice to see an op-ed like this in the Washington Post Centrist Democrats' opposition to health reform verges on the incoherent. A caucus (the Blue Dogs) formed ostensibly to promote balanced budgets now disapproves of the proposed taxes that would cover the expenses of the new programs. The congressional centrists say, commendably, that they want to squeeze more economies out of the system, but they oppose giving more power to an agency that would set the payment scales for physicians. Read the whole article for the bonus: "Distribution, si; production, no!" By fnord12 | July 22, 2009, 8:48 AM | Liberal Outrage| Link
The good news is you can't do anything worse to Star Wars than what Lucas has already done By fnord12 | July 21, 2009, 1:26 PM | Star Wars| Link
Marvel Sales By fnord12 | July 20, 2009, 3:17 PM | Comics| Link Still the best game of all time Civ III. By fnord12 | July 20, 2009, 3:15 PM | Video Games| Link
Recap #27 By min | July 17, 2009, 9:57 PM | D&D| Link
He's a real nowhere man, Doesn't kave a point of view, He's as blind as he can be, He's a real nowhere man, By min | July 16, 2009, 12:13 PM | Music| Link
Do You Know What Time It Is? It's Peanut Butter Jelly Time!!!!! Das right. By min | July 10, 2009, 10:07 AM | TeeVee| Link
One in Five Admit to Peeing in Pools How many more actually do, but wouldn't admit it? Besides being just plain gross, filthy pool practices can lead to unsafe swimming conditions. Urine -- as well as sweat and even sunscreen -- contain nitrogen, which eats up a pool's free chlorine. Free chlorine is what kills waterborne germs that could make you sick if ingested. So if too many people are peeing in the pool or diving in while sweaty, that could mean less chlorine's available to wipe out nasty critters. The article goes on to list some "tips" to protect yourself and others. One of them is to not go swimming when you have diarrhea. We've hit a new low when that actually needs to be said.
By min | July 9, 2009, 2:24 PM | Science | Comments (2) | Link
In my eyes
Boiling heat Black hole sun Stuttering
Black hole sun Hang my head By min | July 9, 2009, 10:08 AM | Music| Link
Bodypaint With what little they show, they might as well have just put them in their normal uniforms. By min | July 2, 2009, 3:18 PM | Ummm... Other?| Link Animal link blogging! Ant colony takes over the world! And this one's older, but: Baby hippo and its Tortoise step-father! By fnord12 | July 2, 2009, 2:08 PM | Science| Link Wrote a letter to the M.T.V. We all like it - Rock And Roll We got lots of stations By fnord12 | July 2, 2009, 8:34 AM | Music| Link
  You could probably get ten people around that thing. Puts mine to shame. By fnord12 | July 1, 2009, 5:34 PM | Video Games | Comments (1) | Link And the children who lived in the shadow of the mean Toys R Us executive's building were the saddest children of all  (Finally got back the ability to download pictures off my phone). By fnord12 | July 1, 2009, 5:31 PM | My stupid life | Comments (3) | Link Switcharoos Walmart - which currently encourages its employees to go on Medicaid so that it doesn't have to provide affordable health insurance - has just come out in favor of employee mandates that force employers to cover all employees. It's a move that has pro-health reform advocates scratching their heads. I'm not necessarily interested in the employer mandate; i just want a public option that will cover anyone who wants it. But it is a policy that is favored by most progressives, so it's interesting to see Walmart support it. The 'common ground' may be that it will be a likely strain on small businesses, which will be to Walmart's advantage in driving out the competition. Meanwhile, Joe Lieberman - who, when welcoming him back into the Democratic caucus, Harry Reid told us that he was a good Democrat on everything except the Iraqi war - has come out against the Public Option. So basically our enemies are our friends and our friends are our enemies. If we're naive enough to have believed that Lieberman was ever our friend, and if we don't suspect Walmart of having an ulterior motive. By fnord12 | July 1, 2009, 1:27 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link www.data.gov There's been a lot of (justified) mocking comparisons between Obama's call for greater government transparency during the campaign and his actions as president (continuing to use 'state secrets' and 'national security' to avoid releasing evidence in court cases, refusing to release the torture photos, keeping the White House visitor log a secret), but this looks like it could be a big deal. Jay Ackroyd at Atrios says: It's live, it's beta, it's "iterative." They say they launched with 47 data feeds. Now it is over 100,000. Exciting! And hard to undo by a future administration. And here's a summary. This could wind up being almost as important as the Freedom of Information Act. By fnord12 | July 1, 2009, 9:50 AM | Liberal Outrage| Link You know it's true A comment* at Balloon Juice: *Yes, i'm quoting a comment quoting a comment. By fnord12 | July 1, 2009, 9:43 AM | Liberal Outrage| Link |