So, you listen to this song…
Blister In The Sun, Violent Femmes
…and you say to yourself, You know, that was kind of a messed-up song, there. And then you watch their official music video (great flick, by the way), and then you say to yourself Well, that was even more messed-up than the song itself.
Guess you had to have been there.
“…Go on a march to protest at NYPD HQ, which is in charge of neither the military nor the IRS!”
(Via @allahpundit) I have to admit, there’s something fascinating about watching the Occupy Wall Street people flail about and try to imitate their betters in the Tea Party movement. It’s a slightly embarrassing, and not very complimentary, fascination; I imagine that it’s much like the feeling that people (hopefully) would have from watching those infamous videos where homeless people are liquored up and then egged on into fighting each other. I don’t want to encourage these doofuses (doofi?) to keep it up until the weather changes and they all have to go back to living in their parents’ basements… but I just can’t look away from the continuing train wreck.
Ach, well, it’s not like they were contributing to society anyway.
It’s official: the last remaining ostensibly politically viable member of the once-powerful Carnahan dynasty has decided to not seek a third term. I say ‘ostensibly’ because it was actually unclear that Robin Carnahan was ever going to recover from her humiliating shellacking at the hands of Roy Blunt in last year’s MO-SEN race (13 points is pretty bad). And I say ‘last remaining’ because her brother Russ Carnahan is, metaphorically speaking, a dead man walking: the Missouri legislature took the opportunity offered by redistricting to excise Carnahan’s seat in a heroic act of political eugenics.
As you may have guessed from the above, I am not particularly enamored of the Carnahan dynasty. Truth be told, I mistrust any American political dynasty that doesn’t have John Adams as a primary genetic ancestor: frankly, they tend to turn to the bad by the third generation*. So you can imagine that the news that Robin is not going to wait around to be tossed out of office is a pleasant one for me… particularly since it means that Tom Carnahan has a little bit of a patronage problem now for his wind boondoggle business. As in, a little bit of a lack of patronage problem. Continue reading MO Secretary of State Robin Carnahan (D) cuts and runs.
As follows:
That’s it.
I understand that, superficially, this makes sense:
…and @ExJon certainly has the right idea, which is to tick off the netrooters currently seething over their completely predictable and quite deserved betrayal. But Barack Obama is not a neoconservative. You see, the last eight years have left us to expect a level of competence at foreign affairs that the current President is simply not capable of maintaining reliably. At best, he’s a stopgap that we’ll just have to tolerate until such time as the adults are back in charge.
Just wanted to mention that for the record.
Moe Lane
After all, my following of baseball took a nosedive once I no longer had cable. Anyway:
It was the subtitle that did it for me.
Read the whole thing, particularly the second to last paragraph (language warning).
Whirring noise. Nothing else.
OK. I can go to Target.
Oh, look, Deus Ex: Human Revolution! What will the missus say, though… oh, right, the missus is off doing roboticist stuff for a week. I’m sure that this won’t be an issue… Continue reading So. The coffeemaker didn’t grind the coffee this morning.
See, I told you so. I freaking well TOLD YOU SO.
Congratulations, Congressional Democrats: you’ve managed to soak the working poor again.
Bank of America will start charging debit-card users $5 a month to pay for purchases. The move comes as the cards increasingly replace cash and as banks look for ways to offset the loss of revenue from a new rule that will limit how much they can collect from merchants.
Via Instapundit. You see, what happened here is that Senator Dick Durbin took a break from throwing minority kids out of private schools to extend his legislative magic to the field of merchant debit card fees. The plan? Force the banks to give up their greedy, greedy profits by limiting merchant-to-bank transaction fees, thus saving the merchants money, which they would then pass along to the customer in the form of lower prices. Which sounded… actually, it sounded stupid in theory, even then. It sounds really stupid now because Durbin and the rest of Team Jackass didn’t consider the possibility that their Congressional mishandling of the economy from 2007 to [2010] might have resulted in a poor economy in 2011. So what happened? Well, the banks still need the revenue – because of the economy – so they’re going to raise debit card fees to make up for it. And the retailers aren’t doing much better – because of the economy – so they’re not racing to lower their retail prices. Assuming that they do it at all. End result? Your monthly expenses are probably about to go up. Hope you have a job! …Oh. Right.
Oops?
Continue reading Bank of America, CARD Act, Dodd-Frank, and soaking the poor.
The Masochism Tango, Tom Lehrer
He’s not actually dead, you know: Tom Lehrer just spread that rumor around to keep people from sending him fan mail. He’s also a firm liberal, which makes my cheerful and blatant attempt to make a buck off of him via Amazon… a sincere attempt to emulate one of the masters of innocent, life-affirming viciousness, really.
…(Howard Tayler, Schlock Mercenary) would at least get a personalized rejection slip for his short story, instead of a form letter. Particularly when it’s been submitted to, and forgive me for saying this, an online SF magazine that is not perhaps as well known as Taylor’s webcomic.
Please understand, I’m not in any sort of nerdrage over this; for all I know, the story was crap. It’s just a little… startling that the publisher didn’t jump on the chance to get a “name.” Possibly it’s a good startling, but it’s startling all the same.
