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Braaaains. Braaaaaaaains! If you don't go vote tomorrow, you've got no braaaaaaains. Most of you, however, are at least passingly intersted in the process and the candidates.
As for the people you might have seen yesterday, well, we can neither confirm nor deny that there was a festival day about zombies or anything, and it's certainly not that the zombie demographic has grown so significantly in past years to warrant their own advertising section, or that people are finally catching on the presence of the ETs in their midst. Not at all.
The costumers out and about last night, some of them had very good brains in their heads, and some are trying to make money on being bad stereotypes of a lot of things.
And speaking of a lack of brains, an Arkansas school board member will resign his seat after anti-QUILTBAG comments he posted on his Facebook page got him a much wider audience than he wanted.
Library systems are looking into (and already have) placing lockers in locales so people can pick up requests at places convenient to them that would be too expensive to fully staff and place a branch there.
Last in the headlines, Brad Bird, director at Pixar, takes time out of his schedule to answer a young fan's questions about his career.
Out in the world today, expect more security theater in the wake of attempted explosives sent through shipping systems and cargo planes, in addition to things already in place such as the option between having a naked picture taken of you or going through an aggressive pat-down that stops only when it meets your testicles, if you're a male, or...something if you're female. (Yes, even though authorities believe they have identified the person responsible and the system worked by stopping the stuff before it went to its destination. Because if you can't inspire fear at how close of a call it was, then you can't push for more funding and more draconian measures.)
Despite theoretically opening the borders to asylum seekers from countries where being gay or lesbian is criminalized, the Australian court system is remarkably hostile to actually letting them inside. Soem of it is anti-immigrant hostility, but there's also a good deal of thinking that there is such a thing as the Homosexual Agenda that any truly gay person could quote chapter and verse from, or that if they just weren't so open about it, everything would be just fine. Elsewhere in the world, a Cambodian detention camp that has allegations of beatings, rape, abuse, and horrid conditions also has indirect UNICEF and NGO funding, used when those NGOs give money in grants to the social ministry of the country.
Inside the country, a woman is suing LDS Family Services for insufficient oversight when one of the therapists attempting to help her told her that a sexual relationship with him would cure her of her ills.
The Deepwater Horizon disaster? The one that nobody supposedly could have forseen, and that nobody knew how to actually fix? Someone knew this was likely to happen - because they actually looked at BP's record and had to fight them on compliance, safety issues, and all the other contributing factors for years. Even before the spill happened, Haliburton people knew the cement that was responsible for the blowout wasn't safe and went ahead with it anyway.
Several retired chaplains of the Armed Services say their actively-serving counterparts will be unable to serve both religion and country should the law barring open gay and lesbians from serving in the armed forces be struck down. Some churches, such as the Southern Baptist Convention, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Orthodox Church in America raised the objection that they would be prevented from expressing their religious views against gay and lesbian people, claiming those chaplains would be disciplined as bigots. Churches for whom same-sex relationships are considered sinful may withdraw their support to the chaplain program, which would prevent clergy of that church from serving as chaplains. Proponents of the ban say that the middle ground between duties to the service and duties to deity could still be found and negotiated to acceptable compromises everywhere.
As the economy recovers, those who are more flexible about wages and able to relocate to work are getting jobs. With the headline on it, it will be used as an anti-immigrant "They're takin' ur jaaaaaaahbs!" screed, but the actual data is simply "Those who can afford to take pay cuts and move will get back to work faster than those who cannot", to the benefit of their employers and the detriment of their salaries.
Comedy Central headliners Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert held the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, drawing big crowds at the event and in the satellite events. As with any rally, the signs came out in force, but instead of making angry statements, they made funny jokes. While billed as nonpartisan, looking at it from the conservative viewpoint, it was obviously a liberal love-fest and a Tea Party bash bash.
And then the regular politics and stuff that you should note when you vote tomorrow - and you should vote. Ohio McDonalds workers were sent a handbill written on corporate stationery telling them to vote Republican or they would receive no raises or increases in benefits. When confronted with this (as it is illegal to do), the person sending it said, "Oh, if you were offended by it, then I apologize." To examine a scan of the original document(s), have a look and decide for yourself whether that's employer intimidation.
Further politics - Four reasons why Democrats should receive support in the elections - they're making progress on several of the important issues...and they don't participate in re-enactment that lionizes the SS.
in Wisconsin, Russ Feingold achieves a singular honor - endorsement by all the state's largest newspapers. The comment squad seems unimpressed, however, by such an achievement.
And on issues that you may or may not see on your ballot tomorrow, a marijuana legalization group offers $10,000 USD to anyone who can disprove three statements about the relative dangers of alcohol and marijuana - "Alcohol is significantly more toxic than marijuana, making death by overdose far more likely with alcohol.", "The health effects from long-term alcohol consumption cause tens of thousands of more deaths in the U.S. annually than the health effects from the long-term consumption of marijuana.", and "Violent crime committed by individuals intoxicated by alcohol is far more prevalent in the U.S. than violent crime committed by individuals intoxicated by marijuana only." Anyone wanting to claim the prize will have to fend off a study that claims, overall, that alcohol outranks crack cocaine and heroin in terms of lethality.
Technology opens with driverless vans completing an Italy-to-China trek successfully, making me think that once they figure out how to miniaturize and mass-produce it, we'll all have our driverless cars.
Amazon is making it technologically possible for users of their Kindle device to loan purchased books to each other, although the decision on whether there will be any actual loans is up to the rights holder of the book in question. So they're building in the capacity, but until rights holders decide that the grip they have is killing the bird in their hands, there probably won't be much for loans.
For those looking for appropriate steampunkiness, or a good spook, or to feel like a hard-boiled detective playing similar sorts of interactive fiction, The Automatypewriter is a typewriter that can type by itself, as well as accept input to a computer, so that when you see "You are likely to be eaten by a grue", you can type as fast as possible to get it all to work before the Grue gets you. Can imagine how many reams of paper would be eaten on a Nethack ascension.
Welcome Blekko into the fold, a search engine that aims to be better than Google by improving the signal-to-noise ratio of your standard web search, through decisions on authority and through the use of search constructions that narrow the field. One can also hope they have a better record at not being evil than Google, who finally admitted that their Street View antennae captured data being transmitted over unsecured wireless networks.
Last for tonight, some USB ports sticking out of walls, intended perhaps as a way of dropping and picking up interesting files anonymous-ish. Of course, as with any public port, make sure that you practice good security befor you plug anything in.
The beginning of opinions: Mr. Sowell continues in his "Brass Oldies" series, this time declaring that if something isn't in the wording of the Constitution, then it doesn't count and should never be used for deciding questions of Constitutional law. His target is "separation of church and state", the concept expressed by Jefferson as to how he saw the establishment and free exercise clauses of the First Amendment working. Most people that I know of that want to interpret strictly also say that one should go back to the writings and sayings of the Founding Fathers to determine their intent. Apparently on this one segment, Jefferson doesn't count because "everyone knows" that when the founders wrote those clauses, they meant only that there would be no Church of America, and rogue judges intent on imposing their will on the people have twisted things since. So, since Mr. Sowell is fond of the exact wording of the Constitution, here's a quote for him to chew on -
Mr. Pendry says the people should go vote against anyone potentially establishment, and that the two races where the defeated Republican remained and the one where the RNC initially thumbed their nose at them are perfect examples of how the machine works to thwart the will of the people. He believes that the people sent to Congress should be mouthpieces for their people and their districts, rather than bringing their own brains to bear on the running of government, because that is an "I know better than you" attitude that should be dispensed with immediately. I still think that most people want to elect someone smarter than they are to do the hard business of government - but they also apparently want them to appear to be just as stupid as they are so they can "have a beer with him" and feel like they can connect. Mr. Rassmussen agrees - everyone has been voting against the people in power for the last three election cycles, he says, rather than voting for anybody, because nobody has actually been for what the people want.
Which always suspiciously aligns itself with what corporate interests want, whenever it's mentioned. And more often than not, the Will of the People is painted as Wal-Mart's playbook on running a business - pay the employees as little as legally possible, without benefits of any sort, routinely intimidate them against joining unions, or closing stores and departments where collective bargaining successfully happens, promote only certain races and genders, sell stuff that's unhealthy for you and for the environment, squeeze your suppliers ruthlessly, buy almost all of your stuff from outsourced factories, and then expect the customers to be happy and the wage slaves to be bright, shiny, and sparkly in dealing with the customers. That, they tell us, is The American Way and The Will of the People. The Tea Partiers, when they rail against big government, "Obamacare", and other entities like the Department of Education are trying to take you back to a time when the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was the norm. Their Corporatist buddies in the Democrats and the Republicans are more than happy to oblige them, and to support their crusade against social programs and such things as the ability to terminate a pregnancy legally. The corporation wants all of this, because it can make more profit that way. The Will of the People is not that of the robber barons or the CEOs, and for all their faux populism, the Tea Party, the Republicans, and a disturbing number of the Democrats will choose the corporation over you. Every time.
Some people are running a much more inflated self-worth sort of campaign, claiming the entirety of the Republican success and re-election will be whether or not they signed a pledge to work toward the repeal of the health care bill in any way they can, whether by legislation or through budget insistence that no money can be used to enforce the law or do what it says. If that results in a government shut-down, all the better for the Republicans, supposedly, as they will successfully be able to blame all the not-working problems and stuff on President Obama for having passed the bill they're single-mindedly focused on getting rid of. Good freaking luck. Especially if the actual debt-to-income of the United States is far, far worse than anybody is actually telling us.
Mr. Greenwald looks at the reaction to the latest Wikileaks release and notes the trend of "The U.S. government should just kill Julian Assange and leave the world a better place" with horror. Not only do peopel accept that the President and government should be able to do whatever they want, but they should be able to do it to whomever they want, citizen or no. Sounds familiar? Maybe some of those tea-partiers-in-Republican clothing need a closer look. And then, for ultimate...something-that-is-not-irony (for Bender's sake, we will not use the word improperly), perhaps hypocrisy, those people clamoring for Julian Assange to die are repulsed by the idea that someone might use graphic violence of schoolchildren exploding to make a Swiftian joke or make a documentary about people who intended to kill others.
On the eve of an election, the WSJ continues to say that the health care bill is an albatross that nobody likes, still not distinguishing between the people who hate it because it's too far and those who hate it because it's not far enough, and blaming the bill for the actions of insurance companies and employers to raise their rates and drop their coverages in relation to the new mandates of the law. At the end of all of this, they found a conservaDem to help it appear like both sides are blaming Pelosi, Reid, and Obama for the inevitable destruction of the Democrats. As well as positioning Marco Rubio to be the pleasant, Reaganesque, upbeat face of the Republican Party, the one that can charm the people into voting for him...as he deploys the Tea Party platform to the national government and thumbing their noses at the media personalities that pointed out all the Republican scandals of the last few years while they laugh. Apparently, scandal only matters when it's a Democrat.
Last out of election politics, we end with the columnist we began with, Mr. Sowell, making a curious claim that this election is about whether or not we want to continue allowing the Obama administration to be able to arbitrarily make rules, rush legislation past legislators, bestow and withold favors, retaliate against their enemies after disclosure forces them to identify themselves, and to do nothing to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear-weapons state. Considering how much Mr. Obama has followed in the steps of his predecessor, there's more that I have to give him than I want to, but at the same time, I think he may be exaggerating for effect. And/or that he's anticipating what will happen when the Republicans get back in charge and decide those powers they hated are actually kind of useful.
On non-political opinions, Mr. Ramanathan speaks what most people already think - that for most people, the maths they learn in their required schooling is sufficient maths for their life, and thus, they don't need anything more, despite what colleges and universities peddle. On the other side of that argument, Mr. Krugman quotes a comment that talks about how the market is beign run by fresh-out-of-school people who are trying to make enough to get promoted or off to some other business withing a few years, and thus any long-term plan meets with a yawn or a panic. Something suggests that those people not only need more and better math, the investors need more and better math to know how to steer away from those speculators. Assuming they can.
And finally, Bill O'Reilly campaigns for the defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and NPR, saying they should have to compete in the private market like anyone else who has ideologically slanted programming. If that was all that PBS and NPR did, then he might have a leg to stand on, but public broadcasting does a whole lot more than just political programming, Bill. As you mentioned and have as an image, PBS helps with Sesame Street and all the other educational television programs that young children gather skills and knowledge from. Public radio stations are often the only source for classical music and non-ideological programming such as, oh, Car Talk, A Prairie Home Companion, Whad'Ya Know? (Not much, you?), This American Life, and several other programs that bring new music and quite a bit of comedy to the airwaves, as opposed to talking heads, religious services, and the top 40 rotation that plays one song for every five commercials that the Corporate Masters demand. Yes, it supports political stuff, too, like, oh, KCRW's Left, Right, and Center, where there's a regular conservative guest and they talk rather sanely about issues, unlike your own program on Fox. To defund PBS, NPR, and public radio stations is to doom the airwaves to the screaming talking heads and the vapid pop stars. Surely, as someone nominally interested in raising the level of the discourse, if only long enough to hammer in that all liberals are pinheads, you wouldn't want to get rid of one of the few oasis points on the dial where that discourse can be raised?
Last for tonight, speaking of creeping horrors, the practice of love locks is not dead, but possibly undead, and spreading...
As for the people you might have seen yesterday, well, we can neither confirm nor deny that there was a festival day about zombies or anything, and it's certainly not that the zombie demographic has grown so significantly in past years to warrant their own advertising section, or that people are finally catching on the presence of the ETs in their midst. Not at all.
The costumers out and about last night, some of them had very good brains in their heads, and some are trying to make money on being bad stereotypes of a lot of things.
And speaking of a lack of brains, an Arkansas school board member will resign his seat after anti-QUILTBAG comments he posted on his Facebook page got him a much wider audience than he wanted.
Library systems are looking into (and already have) placing lockers in locales so people can pick up requests at places convenient to them that would be too expensive to fully staff and place a branch there.
Last in the headlines, Brad Bird, director at Pixar, takes time out of his schedule to answer a young fan's questions about his career.
Out in the world today, expect more security theater in the wake of attempted explosives sent through shipping systems and cargo planes, in addition to things already in place such as the option between having a naked picture taken of you or going through an aggressive pat-down that stops only when it meets your testicles, if you're a male, or...something if you're female. (Yes, even though authorities believe they have identified the person responsible and the system worked by stopping the stuff before it went to its destination. Because if you can't inspire fear at how close of a call it was, then you can't push for more funding and more draconian measures.)
Despite theoretically opening the borders to asylum seekers from countries where being gay or lesbian is criminalized, the Australian court system is remarkably hostile to actually letting them inside. Soem of it is anti-immigrant hostility, but there's also a good deal of thinking that there is such a thing as the Homosexual Agenda that any truly gay person could quote chapter and verse from, or that if they just weren't so open about it, everything would be just fine. Elsewhere in the world, a Cambodian detention camp that has allegations of beatings, rape, abuse, and horrid conditions also has indirect UNICEF and NGO funding, used when those NGOs give money in grants to the social ministry of the country.
Inside the country, a woman is suing LDS Family Services for insufficient oversight when one of the therapists attempting to help her told her that a sexual relationship with him would cure her of her ills.
The Deepwater Horizon disaster? The one that nobody supposedly could have forseen, and that nobody knew how to actually fix? Someone knew this was likely to happen - because they actually looked at BP's record and had to fight them on compliance, safety issues, and all the other contributing factors for years. Even before the spill happened, Haliburton people knew the cement that was responsible for the blowout wasn't safe and went ahead with it anyway.
Several retired chaplains of the Armed Services say their actively-serving counterparts will be unable to serve both religion and country should the law barring open gay and lesbians from serving in the armed forces be struck down. Some churches, such as the Southern Baptist Convention, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Orthodox Church in America raised the objection that they would be prevented from expressing their religious views against gay and lesbian people, claiming those chaplains would be disciplined as bigots. Churches for whom same-sex relationships are considered sinful may withdraw their support to the chaplain program, which would prevent clergy of that church from serving as chaplains. Proponents of the ban say that the middle ground between duties to the service and duties to deity could still be found and negotiated to acceptable compromises everywhere.
As the economy recovers, those who are more flexible about wages and able to relocate to work are getting jobs. With the headline on it, it will be used as an anti-immigrant "They're takin' ur jaaaaaaahbs!" screed, but the actual data is simply "Those who can afford to take pay cuts and move will get back to work faster than those who cannot", to the benefit of their employers and the detriment of their salaries.
Comedy Central headliners Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert held the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, drawing big crowds at the event and in the satellite events. As with any rally, the signs came out in force, but instead of making angry statements, they made funny jokes. While billed as nonpartisan, looking at it from the conservative viewpoint, it was obviously a liberal love-fest and a Tea Party bash bash.
And then the regular politics and stuff that you should note when you vote tomorrow - and you should vote. Ohio McDonalds workers were sent a handbill written on corporate stationery telling them to vote Republican or they would receive no raises or increases in benefits. When confronted with this (as it is illegal to do), the person sending it said, "Oh, if you were offended by it, then I apologize." To examine a scan of the original document(s), have a look and decide for yourself whether that's employer intimidation.
Further politics - Four reasons why Democrats should receive support in the elections - they're making progress on several of the important issues...and they don't participate in re-enactment that lionizes the SS.
in Wisconsin, Russ Feingold achieves a singular honor - endorsement by all the state's largest newspapers. The comment squad seems unimpressed, however, by such an achievement.
And on issues that you may or may not see on your ballot tomorrow, a marijuana legalization group offers $10,000 USD to anyone who can disprove three statements about the relative dangers of alcohol and marijuana - "Alcohol is significantly more toxic than marijuana, making death by overdose far more likely with alcohol.", "The health effects from long-term alcohol consumption cause tens of thousands of more deaths in the U.S. annually than the health effects from the long-term consumption of marijuana.", and "Violent crime committed by individuals intoxicated by alcohol is far more prevalent in the U.S. than violent crime committed by individuals intoxicated by marijuana only." Anyone wanting to claim the prize will have to fend off a study that claims, overall, that alcohol outranks crack cocaine and heroin in terms of lethality.
Technology opens with driverless vans completing an Italy-to-China trek successfully, making me think that once they figure out how to miniaturize and mass-produce it, we'll all have our driverless cars.
Amazon is making it technologically possible for users of their Kindle device to loan purchased books to each other, although the decision on whether there will be any actual loans is up to the rights holder of the book in question. So they're building in the capacity, but until rights holders decide that the grip they have is killing the bird in their hands, there probably won't be much for loans.
For those looking for appropriate steampunkiness, or a good spook, or to feel like a hard-boiled detective playing similar sorts of interactive fiction, The Automatypewriter is a typewriter that can type by itself, as well as accept input to a computer, so that when you see "You are likely to be eaten by a grue", you can type as fast as possible to get it all to work before the Grue gets you. Can imagine how many reams of paper would be eaten on a Nethack ascension.
Welcome Blekko into the fold, a search engine that aims to be better than Google by improving the signal-to-noise ratio of your standard web search, through decisions on authority and through the use of search constructions that narrow the field. One can also hope they have a better record at not being evil than Google, who finally admitted that their Street View antennae captured data being transmitted over unsecured wireless networks.
Last for tonight, some USB ports sticking out of walls, intended perhaps as a way of dropping and picking up interesting files anonymous-ish. Of course, as with any public port, make sure that you practice good security befor you plug anything in.
The beginning of opinions: Mr. Sowell continues in his "Brass Oldies" series, this time declaring that if something isn't in the wording of the Constitution, then it doesn't count and should never be used for deciding questions of Constitutional law. His target is "separation of church and state", the concept expressed by Jefferson as to how he saw the establishment and free exercise clauses of the First Amendment working. Most people that I know of that want to interpret strictly also say that one should go back to the writings and sayings of the Founding Fathers to determine their intent. Apparently on this one segment, Jefferson doesn't count because "everyone knows" that when the founders wrote those clauses, they meant only that there would be no Church of America, and rogue judges intent on imposing their will on the people have twisted things since. So, since Mr. Sowell is fond of the exact wording of the Constitution, here's a quote for him to chew on -
Article III, Section 2 of the United States Constitution:That seems pretty black and white to me - judges have the power to interpret the law and the Constitution, and are not limited to ruling by rote. They will do so in ways that you favor and in ways that you disfavor, sometimes within the same lifetime, and occasionally on the same issue when different questions arise about it. But that power is theirs. If you want to change the law so that they have a clearer rule to read from, then by all means, go ahead and try. It would actually be pretty interesting to see the workings of a Constitutional convention and ratification attempt.
The judicial power shall extend to all cases, in law and equity, arising under this Constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made, or which shall be made, under their authority;--to all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls;--to all cases of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction;--to controversies to which the United States shall be a party;--to controversies between two or more states;--between a state and citizens of another state;--between citizens of different states;--between citizens of the same state claiming lands under grants of different states, and between a state, or the citizens thereof, and foreign states, citizens or subjects.
Mr. Pendry says the people should go vote against anyone potentially establishment, and that the two races where the defeated Republican remained and the one where the RNC initially thumbed their nose at them are perfect examples of how the machine works to thwart the will of the people. He believes that the people sent to Congress should be mouthpieces for their people and their districts, rather than bringing their own brains to bear on the running of government, because that is an "I know better than you" attitude that should be dispensed with immediately. I still think that most people want to elect someone smarter than they are to do the hard business of government - but they also apparently want them to appear to be just as stupid as they are so they can "have a beer with him" and feel like they can connect. Mr. Rassmussen agrees - everyone has been voting against the people in power for the last three election cycles, he says, rather than voting for anybody, because nobody has actually been for what the people want.
Which always suspiciously aligns itself with what corporate interests want, whenever it's mentioned. And more often than not, the Will of the People is painted as Wal-Mart's playbook on running a business - pay the employees as little as legally possible, without benefits of any sort, routinely intimidate them against joining unions, or closing stores and departments where collective bargaining successfully happens, promote only certain races and genders, sell stuff that's unhealthy for you and for the environment, squeeze your suppliers ruthlessly, buy almost all of your stuff from outsourced factories, and then expect the customers to be happy and the wage slaves to be bright, shiny, and sparkly in dealing with the customers. That, they tell us, is The American Way and The Will of the People. The Tea Partiers, when they rail against big government, "Obamacare", and other entities like the Department of Education are trying to take you back to a time when the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was the norm. Their Corporatist buddies in the Democrats and the Republicans are more than happy to oblige them, and to support their crusade against social programs and such things as the ability to terminate a pregnancy legally. The corporation wants all of this, because it can make more profit that way. The Will of the People is not that of the robber barons or the CEOs, and for all their faux populism, the Tea Party, the Republicans, and a disturbing number of the Democrats will choose the corporation over you. Every time.
Some people are running a much more inflated self-worth sort of campaign, claiming the entirety of the Republican success and re-election will be whether or not they signed a pledge to work toward the repeal of the health care bill in any way they can, whether by legislation or through budget insistence that no money can be used to enforce the law or do what it says. If that results in a government shut-down, all the better for the Republicans, supposedly, as they will successfully be able to blame all the not-working problems and stuff on President Obama for having passed the bill they're single-mindedly focused on getting rid of. Good freaking luck. Especially if the actual debt-to-income of the United States is far, far worse than anybody is actually telling us.
Mr. Greenwald looks at the reaction to the latest Wikileaks release and notes the trend of "The U.S. government should just kill Julian Assange and leave the world a better place" with horror. Not only do peopel accept that the President and government should be able to do whatever they want, but they should be able to do it to whomever they want, citizen or no. Sounds familiar? Maybe some of those tea-partiers-in-Republican clothing need a closer look. And then, for ultimate...something-that-is-not-irony (for Bender's sake, we will not use the word improperly), perhaps hypocrisy, those people clamoring for Julian Assange to die are repulsed by the idea that someone might use graphic violence of schoolchildren exploding to make a Swiftian joke or make a documentary about people who intended to kill others.
On the eve of an election, the WSJ continues to say that the health care bill is an albatross that nobody likes, still not distinguishing between the people who hate it because it's too far and those who hate it because it's not far enough, and blaming the bill for the actions of insurance companies and employers to raise their rates and drop their coverages in relation to the new mandates of the law. At the end of all of this, they found a conservaDem to help it appear like both sides are blaming Pelosi, Reid, and Obama for the inevitable destruction of the Democrats. As well as positioning Marco Rubio to be the pleasant, Reaganesque, upbeat face of the Republican Party, the one that can charm the people into voting for him...as he deploys the Tea Party platform to the national government and thumbing their noses at the media personalities that pointed out all the Republican scandals of the last few years while they laugh. Apparently, scandal only matters when it's a Democrat.
Last out of election politics, we end with the columnist we began with, Mr. Sowell, making a curious claim that this election is about whether or not we want to continue allowing the Obama administration to be able to arbitrarily make rules, rush legislation past legislators, bestow and withold favors, retaliate against their enemies after disclosure forces them to identify themselves, and to do nothing to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear-weapons state. Considering how much Mr. Obama has followed in the steps of his predecessor, there's more that I have to give him than I want to, but at the same time, I think he may be exaggerating for effect. And/or that he's anticipating what will happen when the Republicans get back in charge and decide those powers they hated are actually kind of useful.
On non-political opinions, Mr. Ramanathan speaks what most people already think - that for most people, the maths they learn in their required schooling is sufficient maths for their life, and thus, they don't need anything more, despite what colleges and universities peddle. On the other side of that argument, Mr. Krugman quotes a comment that talks about how the market is beign run by fresh-out-of-school people who are trying to make enough to get promoted or off to some other business withing a few years, and thus any long-term plan meets with a yawn or a panic. Something suggests that those people not only need more and better math, the investors need more and better math to know how to steer away from those speculators. Assuming they can.
And finally, Bill O'Reilly campaigns for the defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and NPR, saying they should have to compete in the private market like anyone else who has ideologically slanted programming. If that was all that PBS and NPR did, then he might have a leg to stand on, but public broadcasting does a whole lot more than just political programming, Bill. As you mentioned and have as an image, PBS helps with Sesame Street and all the other educational television programs that young children gather skills and knowledge from. Public radio stations are often the only source for classical music and non-ideological programming such as, oh, Car Talk, A Prairie Home Companion, Whad'Ya Know? (Not much, you?), This American Life, and several other programs that bring new music and quite a bit of comedy to the airwaves, as opposed to talking heads, religious services, and the top 40 rotation that plays one song for every five commercials that the Corporate Masters demand. Yes, it supports political stuff, too, like, oh, KCRW's Left, Right, and Center, where there's a regular conservative guest and they talk rather sanely about issues, unlike your own program on Fox. To defund PBS, NPR, and public radio stations is to doom the airwaves to the screaming talking heads and the vapid pop stars. Surely, as someone nominally interested in raising the level of the discourse, if only long enough to hammer in that all liberals are pinheads, you wouldn't want to get rid of one of the few oasis points on the dial where that discourse can be raised?
Last for tonight, speaking of creeping horrors, the practice of love locks is not dead, but possibly undead, and spreading...
