The Early Post - 21 May 2009
May. 21st, 2009 05:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptSo, neat thing to start with today. Whoopi Goldberg eviscerates Glenn Beck, calling him a lying sack of dog mess, and Beck then admits he doesn't fact-check things, either, or at least, that's what I heard and the Coutndown transcript confirms it.
Not so neat - Apple has been rather slow to patch a known Java vulnerability issue that allows for execution of arbitrary code outside the Java sandbox.
Also receiving top billing, a primer on how expensive it is to be poor, because everything costs more when you don't have the means to make it cost less. It takes more in time, in peace of mind, and in money, too, because more time working is not necessarily meaning more money to save up, or you have to pay loan sharks and other places to do bank services, for which fees and percentage fees eat up what little money you might have left.
Internationally, the United States Army burned several Christian Foundational Writing books translated into the local Afghan dialects and sent to a soldier on duty there by a cult. Which naturally invited comments about how the country should be incensed that the Army was burning the Holy Writ, and the more sane commenters saying, "Do you want more soldiers to get killed? If not by the locals, then by their COs who will string them up by their genitalia for behaving like a stupid Crusader." Perhaps this sign about the life and death of Jesus would be the appropriate local response, were the soldiers actually distributing such material.
President Obama approved a sale of nuclear technology to the United Arab Emirates, making them into a nation with the capacity to produce civilian nuclear power. The worries are, of course, that this will spark an arms race in the Middle East and nations will go all crazy pointing nuclear warheads at each other.
Domestically, a former CIA head says that the CIA is always and always has been truthful, honest, and open to the Congress. If that were really the case, then there would be very few secrets for the Agency to have, and they would feel like they weren't getting anything done. The CIA may not feel like it lied, but I'm betting it hasn't hesitated to omit or redact when it suits the purpose. They were destroying tapes, after all.
Skepticism from CNS about the figure Vice-President Biden cited on how stimulus money is creating jobs. Speaking of the stimulus, Lousiana lawmakers have voted to override Gov. Jindal's veto of stimulus dollars, although the article suggests that some lawmakers were unaware of what they were doing when they did so. Which is politics as normal, certainly, but people who do such things should be reprimanded if not censured or stripped of their office.
Further appeals on the Plame outing are dismissed by Justice, believing nothing wrong happened at the lower courts that rendered the initial judgment on the matter.
Hitting our stride in the opinions, the Republicans have an offering for an alternative health care plan - shift subsidization from insurance companies and employers to individuals themselves - in essence, tax credits so that each individual can then purchase a full-price insurance policy of their own, rather than depending on their employer or the government for insurance, although many will continue to see coverage through their employer, it seems. So, the Republican proposal is... to maintain the status quo, with a little bit of possible yay to those who can afford their own plans - they'll get some part of it back as a tax credit. Assuming they can get in, and assuming they can pay the premiums.
I'm getting precisely one side of this story - Mr. Boortz reprints a letter he received about a Dodge dealer who is apparently having his franchise name seized and then given to another dealer, leaving him with cars and parts, but no ability to use the Dodge name or do warranty service on the cars. And the blame for this is somehow on President Obama, when it is the Chrysler Corporation that is making these decisions and deciding to remove their brand name from certain places. Congratulations, sir, you just became an independent vehicle dealer! You're free to stock and sell whatever you like! Enjoy your newfound freedom, and pull yourself up by your bootstraps into becoming the successful businessperson that Republicans want you to be. Let Mr. Jenkins complain about how unions will run Chrysler into the ground and the WSJ complain about how higher fuel efficiencies are not what consumers want, because fuel efficiency is for small cars, and Americans want the biggest thing on the road.
Of course, if you're Mr. Gordon, the government can't run any sort of economic enterprise, because it seeks headlines instead of profitability, is run by politicians instead of entrepreneurs, ignores competition, spends money other than its own, and thus, based on its current record of failing everywhere it goes, the government shouldn't be allowed to keep trying. Only greed for profit and competition with others for a bigger share of profit keeps businesses running well, we're told. Otherwise, we run into the gangs of D.C., interested solely in keeping and increasing their own power. And the end result, will be, of course, unsafe, unliked, fuel-efficient cars that taxpayers are propping up because nobody wants to buy them, with the evil collusion between the government, the automakers, and the UAW continuing until there is no competition or choice left and we're all forced to drive unsafe, tiny, unliked, fuel-efficient cars, which cost too much and will kill us if we get them in an accident.
Mr. Jeffrey intends to take the President to task for not defending the CIA against Nancy Pelosi, but really, Mr. Gerson makes the point he was aiming for - that the Democrats are systematically destroying our intelligence capacity by accusing the CIA of lying, and thus making the country less safe. Not to mention that the ones making the accusing are at variance with the CIA's official account, and thus they must be the liars.
Mr. Bolton is seeing nuclear boogeymen in the closet, with his usual warnings that Iran and North Korea will continue testing missiles and then Surprise! Buttsecks! the United States, Israel, or Japan with a pre-emptive nuclear strike. Apparently, the fears the China will hack us all will soon be less founded than they were before.
However, in competition for the pastry, The WSJ uses Sri Lanka as an example of what they believe to be a maxim - you must defeat terrorists militarily before you can negotiate with them politically. With the associated costs of death, destruction, and war waged on the civilians around where the government and the Tigers clashed. And as we have done and are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a sense, this generally requires stomping a terrorist group militarily to be "worth it" before engaging them. Yet the WSJ believes that all groups should receive such a stomping before they will stop, instead of foiling them the more conventional way.
However, winning the bronze honor is Ms. Malkin, who points at a New York Times decision to spike a story about the sharing of campaign donor lists between the Obama candidacy and Project Vote, a subsidiary of ACORN, on the night before the election as proof that the NYT is a biased champion of Obama and liberalism, using the fact that the Times has made significant money with Obama-related merchandise as her support that the paper has no interest in actually reporting the news. It was supposedly a story with documentation and everything, ready to go right before it got passed on by the editors. The suggestion from the NYT is that there was no fruit coming from the story, so perhaps the expose was slow in gathering (or manufacturing) the evidence it needed to present, and took too long to get its ducks in a row. Thus, evidence-gathering first, media contacts later. Besides, with as fringe as Ms. Malkin has been in the past, an accusation from her that the NYT is biased against conservatives holds as much water as a steel sieve. She'll need more than one spiked story and some merchandise to convince us.
Gaining silver, Boss Limbaugh issues a challenge to the MSNBC network to go thirty days without mentioning him once, believing that MSNBC is piggybacking on his great fame and addicted to poking at him because they have nothing substantive to stand on themselves. Setting aside the hubris of believing an entire network is jealous of you, the responses came back - Mr. Olbermann said "Sure, if you'll go thirty days without boasting or mentioning anything that you've done or said on your own show". The host of The Ed Show, Ed Schultz, said he'd do it if Limbaugh refrained from making derogatory or hateful comments about the President for thirty days. Suffice to say, the war continues on apace. Because he's the boss of the Republican Party, he warrants a silver for singling out MSNBC and having the hubris to believe, much like Bill'O does, that MSNBC is building itself on the back of any conservative organization, whether it be him or Fox News.
The Republican Party almost made it to the winner's circle today. Almost. Why? They wimped out on a resolution that would have demanded the Democratic Party change its own name to the Democrat Socialist Party, instead settling for a much milder condemnation of the Demcorats taking us on a march toward socialism, with language indicating "the Democratic Party is dedicated to restructuring American society along socialist ideals," and has a "clear and obvious purpose in proposing, passing and implementing socialist programs through federal legislation". Would have been better, I think, for the Republicans to go for it, so they could truly resign themselves to being a fringe party, and some other coalition could begin the work of building themselves up into a Loyal Opposition. As it is, we're still stuck with two dysfunctional entities.
The Unabashed Feminism Department Bureau Chief has a pair of opinions that deserve that immaculately-baked quiche to be thrown into their writer's FAAAACE! Or, yes, these are the winners. First up, women who are childfree or don't want children are not to be trusted, tells a mom and ex-boss, because they're weird for not having three kids right out of high school! And, apparently, the childfree are all the bitches in the office (is that because they're constantly being harangued about not having kids?). But don't worry! After a mere 50 years, women grow out of being bitches! It's true, it's true, and the pastry-paults are sending those beautiful prizes on their way across the pond.
In science and technology, males will be a distant memory in the next, oh, five million years, KOBIAN, a robot that attempts to express emotion with full-body movement and gestures, instead of just facial movement, designing protocols to make robots stealthy, memory material that could last longer than human males, and "five-dimensional" optical writing to increase storage greatly, and new IBM software to find correlations in giant data sets, which is something the computers can do a hell of a lot better and faster than the humans can. Oh, and a dutch Go computer beat two professionals in two different matches, pictures (of a sort) of a black hole, and the beginnings of Super Soldier Serum starting, well, at least, it looks that way.
At the end, however, remember, there's a monster at the end of this book. Always. Luckily, he doesn't look anything like these potoatoheads.
Not so neat - Apple has been rather slow to patch a known Java vulnerability issue that allows for execution of arbitrary code outside the Java sandbox.
Also receiving top billing, a primer on how expensive it is to be poor, because everything costs more when you don't have the means to make it cost less. It takes more in time, in peace of mind, and in money, too, because more time working is not necessarily meaning more money to save up, or you have to pay loan sharks and other places to do bank services, for which fees and percentage fees eat up what little money you might have left.
Internationally, the United States Army burned several Christian Foundational Writing books translated into the local Afghan dialects and sent to a soldier on duty there by a cult. Which naturally invited comments about how the country should be incensed that the Army was burning the Holy Writ, and the more sane commenters saying, "Do you want more soldiers to get killed? If not by the locals, then by their COs who will string them up by their genitalia for behaving like a stupid Crusader." Perhaps this sign about the life and death of Jesus would be the appropriate local response, were the soldiers actually distributing such material.
President Obama approved a sale of nuclear technology to the United Arab Emirates, making them into a nation with the capacity to produce civilian nuclear power. The worries are, of course, that this will spark an arms race in the Middle East and nations will go all crazy pointing nuclear warheads at each other.
Domestically, a former CIA head says that the CIA is always and always has been truthful, honest, and open to the Congress. If that were really the case, then there would be very few secrets for the Agency to have, and they would feel like they weren't getting anything done. The CIA may not feel like it lied, but I'm betting it hasn't hesitated to omit or redact when it suits the purpose. They were destroying tapes, after all.
Skepticism from CNS about the figure Vice-President Biden cited on how stimulus money is creating jobs. Speaking of the stimulus, Lousiana lawmakers have voted to override Gov. Jindal's veto of stimulus dollars, although the article suggests that some lawmakers were unaware of what they were doing when they did so. Which is politics as normal, certainly, but people who do such things should be reprimanded if not censured or stripped of their office.
Further appeals on the Plame outing are dismissed by Justice, believing nothing wrong happened at the lower courts that rendered the initial judgment on the matter.
Hitting our stride in the opinions, the Republicans have an offering for an alternative health care plan - shift subsidization from insurance companies and employers to individuals themselves - in essence, tax credits so that each individual can then purchase a full-price insurance policy of their own, rather than depending on their employer or the government for insurance, although many will continue to see coverage through their employer, it seems. So, the Republican proposal is... to maintain the status quo, with a little bit of possible yay to those who can afford their own plans - they'll get some part of it back as a tax credit. Assuming they can get in, and assuming they can pay the premiums.
I'm getting precisely one side of this story - Mr. Boortz reprints a letter he received about a Dodge dealer who is apparently having his franchise name seized and then given to another dealer, leaving him with cars and parts, but no ability to use the Dodge name or do warranty service on the cars. And the blame for this is somehow on President Obama, when it is the Chrysler Corporation that is making these decisions and deciding to remove their brand name from certain places. Congratulations, sir, you just became an independent vehicle dealer! You're free to stock and sell whatever you like! Enjoy your newfound freedom, and pull yourself up by your bootstraps into becoming the successful businessperson that Republicans want you to be. Let Mr. Jenkins complain about how unions will run Chrysler into the ground and the WSJ complain about how higher fuel efficiencies are not what consumers want, because fuel efficiency is for small cars, and Americans want the biggest thing on the road.
Of course, if you're Mr. Gordon, the government can't run any sort of economic enterprise, because it seeks headlines instead of profitability, is run by politicians instead of entrepreneurs, ignores competition, spends money other than its own, and thus, based on its current record of failing everywhere it goes, the government shouldn't be allowed to keep trying. Only greed for profit and competition with others for a bigger share of profit keeps businesses running well, we're told. Otherwise, we run into the gangs of D.C., interested solely in keeping and increasing their own power. And the end result, will be, of course, unsafe, unliked, fuel-efficient cars that taxpayers are propping up because nobody wants to buy them, with the evil collusion between the government, the automakers, and the UAW continuing until there is no competition or choice left and we're all forced to drive unsafe, tiny, unliked, fuel-efficient cars, which cost too much and will kill us if we get them in an accident.
Mr. Jeffrey intends to take the President to task for not defending the CIA against Nancy Pelosi, but really, Mr. Gerson makes the point he was aiming for - that the Democrats are systematically destroying our intelligence capacity by accusing the CIA of lying, and thus making the country less safe. Not to mention that the ones making the accusing are at variance with the CIA's official account, and thus they must be the liars.
Mr. Bolton is seeing nuclear boogeymen in the closet, with his usual warnings that Iran and North Korea will continue testing missiles and then Surprise! Buttsecks! the United States, Israel, or Japan with a pre-emptive nuclear strike. Apparently, the fears the China will hack us all will soon be less founded than they were before.
However, in competition for the pastry, The WSJ uses Sri Lanka as an example of what they believe to be a maxim - you must defeat terrorists militarily before you can negotiate with them politically. With the associated costs of death, destruction, and war waged on the civilians around where the government and the Tigers clashed. And as we have done and are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a sense, this generally requires stomping a terrorist group militarily to be "worth it" before engaging them. Yet the WSJ believes that all groups should receive such a stomping before they will stop, instead of foiling them the more conventional way.
However, winning the bronze honor is Ms. Malkin, who points at a New York Times decision to spike a story about the sharing of campaign donor lists between the Obama candidacy and Project Vote, a subsidiary of ACORN, on the night before the election as proof that the NYT is a biased champion of Obama and liberalism, using the fact that the Times has made significant money with Obama-related merchandise as her support that the paper has no interest in actually reporting the news. It was supposedly a story with documentation and everything, ready to go right before it got passed on by the editors. The suggestion from the NYT is that there was no fruit coming from the story, so perhaps the expose was slow in gathering (or manufacturing) the evidence it needed to present, and took too long to get its ducks in a row. Thus, evidence-gathering first, media contacts later. Besides, with as fringe as Ms. Malkin has been in the past, an accusation from her that the NYT is biased against conservatives holds as much water as a steel sieve. She'll need more than one spiked story and some merchandise to convince us.
Gaining silver, Boss Limbaugh issues a challenge to the MSNBC network to go thirty days without mentioning him once, believing that MSNBC is piggybacking on his great fame and addicted to poking at him because they have nothing substantive to stand on themselves. Setting aside the hubris of believing an entire network is jealous of you, the responses came back - Mr. Olbermann said "Sure, if you'll go thirty days without boasting or mentioning anything that you've done or said on your own show". The host of The Ed Show, Ed Schultz, said he'd do it if Limbaugh refrained from making derogatory or hateful comments about the President for thirty days. Suffice to say, the war continues on apace. Because he's the boss of the Republican Party, he warrants a silver for singling out MSNBC and having the hubris to believe, much like Bill'O does, that MSNBC is building itself on the back of any conservative organization, whether it be him or Fox News.
The Republican Party almost made it to the winner's circle today. Almost. Why? They wimped out on a resolution that would have demanded the Democratic Party change its own name to the Democrat Socialist Party, instead settling for a much milder condemnation of the Demcorats taking us on a march toward socialism, with language indicating "the Democratic Party is dedicated to restructuring American society along socialist ideals," and has a "clear and obvious purpose in proposing, passing and implementing socialist programs through federal legislation". Would have been better, I think, for the Republicans to go for it, so they could truly resign themselves to being a fringe party, and some other coalition could begin the work of building themselves up into a Loyal Opposition. As it is, we're still stuck with two dysfunctional entities.
The Unabashed Feminism Department Bureau Chief has a pair of opinions that deserve that immaculately-baked quiche to be thrown into their writer's FAAAACE! Or, yes, these are the winners. First up, women who are childfree or don't want children are not to be trusted, tells a mom and ex-boss, because they're weird for not having three kids right out of high school! And, apparently, the childfree are all the bitches in the office (is that because they're constantly being harangued about not having kids?). But don't worry! After a mere 50 years, women grow out of being bitches! It's true, it's true, and the pastry-paults are sending those beautiful prizes on their way across the pond.
In science and technology, males will be a distant memory in the next, oh, five million years, KOBIAN, a robot that attempts to express emotion with full-body movement and gestures, instead of just facial movement, designing protocols to make robots stealthy, memory material that could last longer than human males, and "five-dimensional" optical writing to increase storage greatly, and new IBM software to find correlations in giant data sets, which is something the computers can do a hell of a lot better and faster than the humans can. Oh, and a dutch Go computer beat two professionals in two different matches, pictures (of a sort) of a black hole, and the beginnings of Super Soldier Serum starting, well, at least, it looks that way.
At the end, however, remember, there's a monster at the end of this book. Always. Luckily, he doesn't look anything like these potoatoheads.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-05-22 05:12 am (UTC)~M~
no subject
Date: 2009-05-22 10:09 am (UTC)Without going into expletive detail, people like her are the reason I, as a 30-something childless female, have such a problem at interviews. They think I am in my brooding phase, when I am in my "first job and new career" phase. Argh. What's a CF girl to do?
no subject
Date: 2009-05-22 02:28 pm (UTC)