Politics
clock | October 19, 2008Once she loses in November (and perhaps gets impeached as the Governor of Alaska), Palin can get a permanent job on Saturday Night Live. She fits there well, is just as good as the rest of the crew, and we can continue NOT watching the show, just like we have not for years now:
clock | October 18, 2008For some reason, my (rare) posts in which I make direct comparisons between Serbia and the USA (usually about politics) tend to become wildly popular (as in: spreading like wildfire on digg, redditt, stumbleupon, etc.). See, for example: Bush is Milosevic, Comparative Wingnuttery, Darwin in Serbia, More about me, The Warriors, Never Again!, Sixteen years ago today, We are now officially living in a dictatorship and When religion goes berserk! for examples of my typically inflamatory prose on the topic ;-)
Let me take a stab at another one, connected to the current US election. I'll try to…
clock | October 18, 2008Joe Killian is a reporter for Greensboro News&Record. Friday, he went to a Sarah Palin rally at Elon University and filed a report from there for his newspaper.
But he also got assaulted - the first reporter so far - and then blogged about the incident.
Pam has more details.
Joe lived through the ordeal and joined us all at ConvergeSouth for a while.
More local discussions here, here, here and here.
grrlscientist | October 18, 2008
Obama in Manhattan, NYC.
Image: GrrlScientist 18 September 2008 [larger view].
I was working on some writing when this .. erm, vehicle .. pulled up in front of my coffee shop to pick up a volunteer who was selling Obama buttons from a small portable table on the street corner. This is not the first time I've seen this vehicle driving around while wearing Obama decorations, and this serves to draw attention to the fact that I have never seen enthusiasm for the McCain/Palin ticket that is even vaguely similar to that shown for Obama/Biden.
I live in a low-income, primarily Spanish-speaking…
clock | October 18, 2008I am back from the 4th ConvergeSouth, the do-not-miss Greensboro conference about the Web, blogging, journalism and community (and the model/inspiration for our own science blogging conferences, including the third one) . Big kudos to Sue Polinsky, Ed Cone and the cast of thousands for putting together the meeting again, making it better and better every year. And of course, thanks to Dave Hoggard for hosting the legendary BBQ with (even more legendary) banana pudding.
I rode to Greensboro with Kirk Ross and came back home with Anton Zuiker, having interesting conversations with each.
Dave…
gregladen | October 18, 2008
Oh. It's you....
Well let's see. If you put lipstick on a pig, she still raises her kid to be like Michele Bachmann. Or something like that.
I got this here, thanks to SZ for telling me about it.
razib | October 18, 2008Check out Howard Fineman's new column, Why Is the Race So Close?. His method of "analysis" is simple; list a number of factors which should favor the generic Democrat, and then contend that Obama's average 6 point lead in the polls is not large enough. Actually, I put the 6 point lead part in there, Fineman uses no real numbers in the column aside from McCain's age, it's all qualitative hand waving. Now compare this sort of intellectual production to what pollster.com went about doing, Is Obama Underachieving?:
Despite the fact that pundits have claimed that Obama is not performing as well…
clock | October 18, 2008Close Enough To Honest:
CNN lies about ACORN 54 times which is certainly better than, say, a billion.
Nuts About ACORN: Believing in vote fraud may be dangerous to a democracy's health.:
As far as "gotcha" stunts go, the right-wing feeding frenzy over the vile vote-fraud treachery of ACORN has yet to yield much fruit. Investigations are indeed under way. But then, they are always under way this time of the year--and as the indefatigable Brad Friedman points out, so what? Evidence of voter-registration wrongdoing is no more a sign of widespread, Obama-sanctioned vote fraud than evidence of…
clock | October 18, 2008TPM explains the origin of the term, what it evolved to mean, and who in the U.S. punditocracy is on the tire, who is off for good and who's off but yearns to get back on:
Meghan McCain: "It was a really fun experience.... Everybody really relaxed. It was fun to kind of see big journalistic figures, like Holly Baily swinging on the tire swing and Jon Martin helping my dad grill ribs."
clock | October 18, 2008Scoble goes for a walk through Rep.Brad MIller's precinct, canvassing the neighborhood and talking about politics:
pharyngula | October 18, 2008Michele Bachmann is a great fundraiser…for Democrats. Since that creepy video of her calling everyone who isn't a rightwingnut "anti-American" has spread all over, money has been pouring into the Elwyn Tinklenberg campaign. Check out Tinklenberg's ActBlue page: he has received over $100,000 since yesterday. I opened the page a few hours ago and just checked again, and it had shot up about $20,000. Add a few pennies to the total, if you can!
gregladen | October 18, 2008
And Pat Buchanan too. Buchanan is a thousand times smarter than Bachmann (as is the ant I just stepped on by accident in the garage). But Buchanan is scum. Sku-fucking-um.
Just in case you are interested in contacting MSNBC to respectuflly ask that Pat Buchanan be dropped from the team, click here.
Just in case you want to help show Michel Bachmann the door, consider donating to her opponent's campaign, click here.
evolvingthoughts | October 17, 2008
The Labor plan to interrupt Australian internet access, which I have previously excoriated, has been, as I feared, extended. Electronic Frontiers Australia reports that the government has a second, secret, list that even opting out doesn't free you of. So the technical overhead is still there and there's no control or oversight on what gets put on that black list. Who gave the government this power?
As I said last time I mentioned this:
And of course once it's in place, no government will be able to resist blocking other unpleasant sites, like those that, say, give the Arab perspective…
gregladen | October 17, 2008John McCain has got to be the biggest moron this side of stoopidville. For so many reasons. The latest is his very public cozy-ing up to the now famous "Joe the Plumber."
We are at war in two countries. The economy is in a state not seen since the beginning of the Great Depression and no one really knows why. America's standing in the world is at a nadir, at a low point never ever seen in our entire history. And the best John McCain can do in the final debate with his Democratic opponent is to leverage the yahooistic ramblings of a man named Joe who claims to be a plumber but is not,…
gregladen | October 17, 2008UPDATE: Since Bachmann's appearance on Hardball, the Tinklenberg Campaign has received over $30,000.00 in donations! Much of this could be because of the link from Pharyngula, but I think a fair number of people also watch Hard Ball.
I'm sure Tinklenberg would appreciate more...
pharyngula | October 17, 2008If you think Sarah Palin is bad, try listening to
Michele Bachmann for seven minutes. This is her interview with Chris Matthews, in which she accuses swarms of people of being "Anti-American".
One thing is amusing. Intermittently, Matthews tries to pin her down in her blanket screeds against liberals, and asks her to state specifically whether some Democrat is actually, literally anti-American. You can see her expression lock in place, her eyes stare blankly out, and you can imagine her tiny brain doing little shuddery spasms of confusion in the vast and roomy vault of her cranium…then <…