I wrote earlier about David Brauer’s observing a “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted McCain” bumper sticker.
Well, while I join most of my readers in believing Mac would have been a better president, that sticker doesn’t really sum things up all that well.
Let’s try this:
Or in convenient button form:
They’re available at my Cafe Press store. Like all the swag @ CafePress, it’s too friggin’ expensive, but that’s what I got…
More to come, if I’m bored enough.
…my true love gave to me:
Six tired chimpanzees,
Five torn-down Berlin walls!
Four epic tax cuts, three cheesed-off commies, two times for choosing, and a shining city on a hill!
From David Brauer’s Twitterage over the weekend:
Saw, for first time, “Don’t blame me, I voted for McCain” bumper sticker. Shoe, meet other foot.
I have a hunch someone could make a buck or two with…
…hm.
Wait just a doggone minute.
More on Monday in a few minutes.
So tune in to all six hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of sanity. You have so many options:
Plus the David Strom show from 9-11!
(Title courtesy My Ruin)
…my true love gave to me:
Four epic tax cuts, three cheesed-off commies, two times for choosing, and a shining city on a hill!
…stories of disc jockeys who took immense creative revenge on stations that fired them were legion; some locked themselves into the studios and staged epic rants (that, often, improved their careers); others merely beat the crap out of their management (or tried). Smart management started making sure they had security on hand after a few of these stories.
A lesson that IT management seems to be slow to learn:
Rajendrasinh Babubahai Makwana, 35, of Virginia, concealed the Unix script on Fannie Mae’s main administrative server on October 24, the same day the Unix engineer was terminated, according to court documents made public Tuesday. His script was programmed to remain dormant for three months, when it would greet administrators with a login message that read “Server Graveyard” and systematically replace all data with zeros on every production, administrative, and backup server in the company.Makwana was arrested on January 7 and released on $100,000 bond.
The plot? Well, it might have done Chloe O’Brien proud:
The allegations also lay out a cautionary tale about the risk of lax security practices at highly sensitive enterprises. Despite his dismissal on October 24, Makwana’s highly privileged computer access wasn’t terminated until late into the evening because of bureaucratic procedures in Fannie’s procurement department, according to court documents.
Shortly after Makwana was informed he was being fired, he logged in to Fannie’s main development server and embedded a series of malicious scripts inside a legitimate program. To conceal the malicious payload, he created a page worth of blank lines between the legitimate code and the malicious code.
“When the program ascertained it was January 31, 2009, it would copy the rest of the files from the ‘.soti’ file from the dsysadm01 server and run the .y.sh script,” a FBI special agent wrote in a sworn statement that referred to Fannie as ABC to protect its identity. “The .y.sh script would place a blocker on the monitoring system disabling any ABC engineers from receiving a monitoring alert for any problems on any machines in the entire ABC environment for 61 minutes.”
Makwana’s script would then disable logins to Fannie’s administrative and backup production servers; remove the root password appliance access; rewrite all data, including backup software, with zeros; and target any “high availability” software. It would then replicate itself to each of Fannie’s 4,000 servers.
Maybe he needs a government gig.
…don’t try this…
He bought about $20 worth of bacon and Italian sausage from a local meat market. As it lay on the counter, he thought of weaving strips of raw bacon into a mat. The two spackled the bacon mat with a layer of sausage, covered that with a crunchy layer of cooked bacon, and rolled it up tight.
They then stuck the roll — containing at least 5,000 calories and 500 grams of fat — in the Good-One Open Range backyard smoker that they use for practice. (In competitions, they use a custom-built smoker designed by the third member of the team, Bryant Gish, who was not present at the creation of the Bacon Explosion.)
Mr. Day said his wife laughed the whole time. “She’s very supportive of my hobby,” he said.
…then I sure can’t.
My intestines are rebelling just looking at it.
Although my taste buds are ready to go all Jack Bauer on my lower digestive tract…
To: President Barack Obama
From: Mitch Berg – American, Citizen, Accidental Constituent
Re: Geese and Ganders
Mr. President,
As a person with an innate notion of common sense and right and wrong, I don’t disagree that it’s really, really bad PR for Wall Street firms and banks that are asking for government bailouts to be giving out nearly $20 billion in bonuses.
The tongue-lashing you gave them…:
Summoning reporters after a closed meeting with Mr. Geithner, Mr. Obama blasted earlier news that Wall Street had paid out $18.4 billion in bonuses, calling it “the height of irresponsibility” and “shameful.””There will be time for them to make profits, and there will be time for them to get bonuses,” he said. “Now is not that time.”
The tough talk suggested a firmer stand from the administration in its oversight of banks. But it also had a political purpose: eliciting support for an expensive and unpopular bailout program that will likely require more cash from Congress.
…makes political sense.
On the other hand, the bonuses are attempts to retain top “talent” at firms that do drive this nation’s economic engine. Right? Wrong? I’m not sure.
But it’s certainly no worse than the hundreds of millions – billions – your administration is planning to give to ACORN, the National Endowment for the Arts, global warming cultists, unions, and Trojan-brand condoms – none of which brings a single job to this nation (other than, I suppose, at Trojan – although I suppose you know that recessions actually help the market for contraceptives, among other less-clinical goodies).
If I didn’t know better – and as a bitter, gun-clinging Jesus freak, you just know I don’t, right? – I’d almost thing you were trying an FDR-like bit of populist displacement, to focus the people’s attention on these (ill-timed) bonuses via the lens of your friends in tingly-leg media, to drown out questions about the pork your “stimulus” plan is shoveling.
Please get back to me. Thanks.
That is all.
Turn down your themostat, says Obama…
…as he turns the Oval Office into a greenhouse:
The capital flew into a bit of a tizzy when, on his first full day in the White House, President Obama was photographed in the Oval Office without his suit jacket. There was, however, a logical explanation: Mr. Obama, who hates the cold, had cranked up the thermostat.
In a visit to the Capitol on Tuesday, Mr. Obama surprised his former Senate colleagues by stopping to talk to reporters.
“He’s from Hawaii, O.K.?” said Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, who occupies the small but strategically located office next door to his boss. “He likes it warm. You could grow orchids in there.”
Hawaii?
So that whole Chicago thing was just a Bobby-Ewing-stepping-out-of-the-shower hallucination?
I remember nights just like the one recorded on this video – getting up on stage with a bunch of other drunk musicians and sloshing your way through covers with ten times more brio than talent.
I bet The Kings would roll over in their collective grave if they saw this.
UPDATE: Whoops. My bad.
To: Lou Reed
From: Mitch Berg, minimal fan.
Re: Sweet Jane observations
Mr. Reed,
You are on record from 20-odd years ago as saying that the Cowboy Junkies’ version of “Sweet Jane” is the best ever, and better than the original version you did with the Velvet Underground.
This is categorically incorrect.
Please see to correcting this error. Thanks.
That is all.
…my true love gave to me: four epic tax cuts, three cheesed-off commies, two times for choosing, and a shining city on a hill!
…and early this AM to do a whole lot of posting.
It’ll be on the light side today.
How bad is the stimulus?
Look – I’m a Friedman guy; free market uber alles. The only justification for any Keynesian frippery in this sort of situation is if it creates jobs, directly or (not very) indirectly.
Plenty of better bloggers than I have covered the overdose of pork that the stimulus provides; my associate editor Johnny Roosh has done a good job of that as well.
How bad is it, though? When you hear people saying “aren’t artists’ paychecks just as important as factory workers’ paychecks?”
No, they are not. Art is a good thing; I can even justify some public purchase of art on some level (say, public architecture). But art as a rule isn’t a job creator – certainly not in any major numbers. (And let’s not jobs at Broadway theatres, here; Broadway isn’t art, it’s commerce).
The good news? At least the Republicans sacked up and voted unanimously against the stimulus bill yesterday, for all the good it did.
But even some Democrats get it:
Senate Transportation Chair Steve Murphy has some big problems with the federal stimulus package working its way through the U.S. House of Representatives. The Red Wing Democrat said it spends far too little on transportation, while funneling money into education and health and human services, which will not generate the jobs needed to jump start the economy.
“That bill that came out of the House of Representatives is a pile of donkey dung. It’s not going to do any good,” Murphy said. “They’ve got their priorities bass-ackwards. The majority of that money should be for infrastructure.”
He’s pretty smart for a DFLer.
I bet he has an interesting time at his next convention…
The DFL wants to ban smoking in cars.
For the children, naturally:
…[U]nder a bill expected to be introduced today at the state Capitol, lawmakers will consider extending that prohibition to your ride.Backed by the same groups that helped enact the statewide ban on smoking in bars and restaurants, the new bill would prohibit smoking in cars when children are present.
“It’s our children who are breathing this air,” said Rep. Nora Slawik, DFL-Maplewood, chief author of the bill in the House. “That is a concern for all of us.”
So given that so many peoole start smoking so very young, what if it’s the kid doing the smoking?
…my true love gave to me: three cheesed-off commies, two times for choosing, and a shining city on a hill!
Here they go again:
Want to perk up your next social gathering?How about putting a bathroom scale in your living room and inviting guests to weigh themselves, while the whole gang watches?
Ah, that Joe Bodell sure knows how to throw a party.
UPDATE: I’m sorry, my bad. That was actually in a Strib piece by Kim Palmer. And there’s actually some history behind it.
If you hear me playing a solo on the electric guitar – and I’m having a good day and my amp is clicking on all six cylinders – I sound just a tad like David Gilmour.
But playing rhythm? Someone who knew my old band once told me I came off a lot like Dave Sharp. Which is odd, since my style was pretty well settled before I even heard the Alarm at any depth.
Anyway. Just saying. The guy has a style about him; like the Edge, but not quite as polished. Good example? Sure, here y’go. Heck, I’m feeling good – here’s another, and keep the change.
Sharp, the former guitarist for The Alarm turns fifty today.
Wait – did I just say Dave Sharp is fifty?
Oy. I believe I did.
Why does the left hate Limbaugh so much?
It’s not just that he eats their lunch in the marketplace (markets have no meaning to the left); it’s not that he “dumbs down” the American people (a Pew study last year showed that…:
…Limbaugh’s audience is often underestimated by critics who don’t listen to the show (only 3 percent of his audience identify themselves as “liberal,” according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People and the Press). Recently, Pew reported that, on a series of “news knowledge questions,” Limbaugh’s “Dittoheads” — the defiantly self-mocking term for his faithful, supposedly brainwashed, audience — scored higher than NPR listeners.
So intelligence doesn’t matter to them either.
No. It’s because Limbaugh is the one nationally-prominent ideological conservative who is unapologetic on the subject,and has the capability of leading people – as opposed to the party – back to where it belongs.
Todd Huston notices just how wrong that is:
I am through with Limbaugh’s supporting the long tradition of rugged American individualism, done with his harping on free trade, and up to here with his going on about the Founders and our American character. I am worn out with his bellicose talk of stopping terrorism, and so done with Limbaugh’s high profile as one of the most listened to conservative advocates in the country that I could just spit. I simply don’t want this Limbaugh character to be the sole voice of the GOP. Stop it now. Make it go away.Instead, it would be nice if just ONE of our actual, purported Republican politicians would be the voice of the GOP espousing all the conservative ideals that Limbaugh so eloquently expounds upon day in and day out. Wouldn’t it be grand if just one guy with the guts to back up the rhetoric with a voting record would become the voice of the party of conservatism?
Liberals have their Ted Kennedys and Nancy Pelosis that do no compromising. They have their “Baghdad” Jim McDermotts that cavort across the globe advocating for murderers and tyrants the world over. They’ve had their presidential candidates “reporting for duty” that have in the past been key members of committees advocating for putting our own soldiers in jail and indicting Americans for faux war crimes. For that matter, the left even has an actual ex-president that runs to the support of every tin-pot dictator in the world pretending at being a diplomat.
The left is unapologetic for its support of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, the biggest mass murderers in history. They are resolved to turn our foreign policy over to foreign bodies like the UN. The left is four square against freedom of religion and keen to remove uncounted numbers of our Constitutional rights from us. They hate capitalism, property rights and are against open debate in our schools… yet they say so proudly and their politicians cultivate voting records that reflect those beliefs.
There’s no “compromise” there. The left knows that politics ain’t beanball.
The Obama Administration is just like Lori Sturdevant; they want their Republicans to be nice and wishy-washy and pliable.
They want a party full of Chuck Hegels and Ron Erhards – worthless “moderate” vermin (politically speaking) who are of no use to dissenting from the majority agenda.
I figured before the election that Obama would overreach on things like the “Fairness” Doctrine, measures to silence opposition.
In my wildest dreams, I didn’t think he’d do it this fast.
I hope he continues. He’s clearly been reading his own press; he thinks he’s invincible; that he can get away with anything.
Good.
One of the most frustrating things about being in the Minnesota GOP is that the factionalism gets downright awful at times.
It’s unavoidable, of course; the GOP is the big tent party in this state, for better or worse.
But Reagan once said that to succeed as a party, we – the good guys who share a big tent, and disagree about a few things here and there – need to focus on the things we agree on -the 80 or so percent of conservative/Republican belief that most of us have in common.
Unfortunately, Minnesota Republicans tend to beat each other to death over the other 20%.
I’m not talking about the Override Six – because hammering out differences in opinion is for the run-up to elections and sessions. Once your party’s governor has stepped out onto the high wire is no time to untie one of the wire anchors. Screw the Override Six; two of them retired from politics, two got fumigated at the polls, and here’s hoping the other two get religion.
I am talking about how we hammer out consensus – almost a dirty word, in some GOP circles – among each other and, more importantly, how we proceed forward against the bad guys. And it’s something we need to wrangle out, because the next time I hear a “conservative” say he’ll never vote for Tim Pawlenty (as good as giving a vote to Mike Hatch or whomever) because he “isn’t a conservative” and ignoring the fact that he has done more to limit government growth and hold the line on taxes than any governor in recent history, I might not be responsible for my actions.
We know the things that separate us: some of us are spending moderates, others are tax hawks; for some gay marriage and abortion are the biggest issues, and for others they get nodding points; there are ideological purists and political pragmatists. We are a “big tent”, all right – and that’s not a good thing. The Democrats are a small tent in that you can be of any race, orientation or class, as long as you believe in redistribution and big government. We have to satisfy a lot of different demands – or resign ourselves to being like the Independence or Libertarian Parties.
What we need to do is find the things we agree on. And unite behind those things.
So what are those things?
A long time ago, True North posted our “manifesto“; we focus on:
Of course, True North is conservative, rather than Republican – so those are the things that we agree on.
So how about the party at large? Especially you pragmatists, all you moderates, and those of you who are more motivated by party than ideology? What do you agree on, to the point where you’d downplay your differences over other points for purposes of presenting a unified party with a positive message the voters?
What, in biblical terms, would it take to make the hawk lie down with the RINO?
No, I don’t expect this thread to drive any discussion in the GOP. But it’s something the party needs to think about. Short, positive messages sell – and Reagan showed that that message can be more robust than “yes we can” and still spark the imagination.
Which is what we need to do next year.
Note: Thread is restricted to Republicans – or at least to parties interested in this discussion Snarks will be expunged sooner than later.
Cato has published a full page ad from a swarm of serious economists who aren’t jumping on the stimulus bandwagon:
Notwithstanding reports that all economists are now Keynesians and that we all support a big increase in the burden of government, we do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance.
More government spending by Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United States economy out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. More government spending did not solve Japan’s “lost decade” in the 1990s. As such, it is a triumph of hope over experience to believe that more government spending will help the U.S. today. To improve the economy, policy makers should focus on reforms that remove impediments to work, saving, investment and production. Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth. Below you’ll find some recent Cato work on “stimulus” packages.
Click through. Read. Show it to your friends at the water cooler.
Obama’s “radical change” from Bush’s policy on Guantanamo cribbed almost word-for-word from Bush’s policy:
Earlier today, CJ posted his examination of the Executive Orders regarding the Guantanamo Detention Facilities. His conclusion is that it bears little difference than the way the Bush Administration has been handling the situation; and that there’s enough legal loopholes in the wording, as to allow President Obama an “out”, from following through with closing the facility, should the Administration fail to solve the dilemma of what to do with the remaining detainees.
So; the adminstration of “radical change” seems to be changing little to nothing about the nation’s foreign policy, is actively moving to squelch the civil liberties of its opposition, and has turned the Democrats – who spent the last four years pantomiming as “fiscally responsible” – into crack whores with stolen gold cards.
Si, se pudo.
…part of me retains the child-like hope that this clip is real.
I have dreams that end like this, every time I drive through Farmington.
(First four minutes basically the same; payoff after 4:30. Language not safe for work).
Remember when the giggling classes were in full smarm because John McCain didn’t have an IPhone (or whatever it was that aroused their shrill ire)?
Ahem:
Both outgoing and incoming [White House email] are out, the result, an aide explained, of an outage with the Outlook server. The aide said the outage goes beyond the press shop. The first lady’s office is also without e-mail, as are other offices.
There was no indication when the e-mail service would return. For the moment, the press office is making even more use of the loudspeaker in the briefing room.
And the executive orders that President Obama signed this morning were photocopied and are sitting on a table outside the briefing room.
I bet their websites are written in Fortran.
Bogus Doug has an excellent critique of Brit slang for those who’ve not encountered it.
More? Sure! Here you go.
