My Senator

Alter: Lieberman, Health Care, and Hurt Feelings | Newsweek Voices - Jonathan Alter | Newsweek.com

I'm not a public-option-or-bust guy. There's enough good stuff in the legislation that the loss of a public option, while damaging, wouldn't wreck the whole thing. I'm a bill-or-bust guy. If we need to fix the legislation later—Social Security was fixed several times after enactment in 1935—we can. But failure is not an option. I don't get the impression that Lieberman agrees. If the public option is defeated, he'll find something else to complain about. The only leverage Harry Reid has over him is the threat to take away his committee chairmanship. It may yet come to that. History is littered with big moments that turned on the pettiness of small men. Now the fate of the most ambitious social legislation in a generation may come down to the hurt feelings of one senator.

Look at the last 5 countries

CPI 2009 Table/2009/cpi/surveys_indices/policy_research

Corruption Perceptions Index 2009

• The Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) table shows a country's ranking and score, the number of surveys used to determine the score, and the confidence range of the scoring.
• The rank shows how one country compares to others included in the index. The CPI score indicates the perceived level of public-sector corruption in a country/territory.
• The CPI is based on 13 independent surveys. However, not all surveys include all countries. The surveys used column indicates how many surveys were relied upon to determine the score for that country.
• The confidence range indicates the reliability of the CPI scores and tells us that allowing for a margin of error, we can be 90% confident that the true score for this country lies within this range.

I feel very good about the fact that we are spending huge sums of money making Iraq and Afghanistan safe for corruption. What, you mean that isn't what the idea was?

Secret Service Take note

Biblical anti-Obama slogan: Use of Psalm 109:8 funny or sinister? | csmonitor.com

There’s a new slogan making its way onto car bumpers and across the Internet. It reads simply: “Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8”

A nice sentiment?

Maybe not.

The psalm reads, “Let his days be few; and let another take his office.”

Presidential criticism through witty slogans is nothing new. Bumper stickers, t-shirts, and hats with “1/20/09” commemorated President Bush’s last day in office.

But the verse immediately following the psalm referenced is a bit more ominous: “Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.”

I despised President G.W. Bush. I never wished him dead. This is fucking revolting.

Maybe I won't read it after all

INSTAPUTZ: Review: Going Rogue

Following American politics for the last two decades (and teaching about it for the last six years) I often feel like our political spectacles have taken on the air of an elaborate Dadaist performance piece, with each “Tea Party,” Fox News segment, and Republican Savior more egregiously blurring the lines between reality, farce, and surrealism. We watch each Sarah Palin or Bobby Jindal speech fully expecting Ashton Kutcher to appear and let us in on the joke, informing America that it has in fact been punk’d and laughing uproariously at our gullibility. Our collective capacity for credulity has been strained to breaking.

Now we are faced with the daunting task of wrapping our minds around the Palin memoir Going Rogue, appearing atop a bestseller list near you. Millions of copies will be sold of a book written by someone who can’t write, intended for an audience that doesn’t read, about the thoughts of a person who doesn’t think. God is dead.

If you are in a hurry, here is the succinct version of this review: Going Rogue is shit. It is groundbreaking in its banality and disregard for facts. If you are sentient, it will pain you to read it. Imagine watching your parents 69 one another while John Madden sits behind you and bellows out color commentary and you will have some idea of how excruciating and profoundly scarring it is to plow through each page of this wholly fictional monument to self-aggrandized mediocrity. Going Rogue is to the art of writing what the Holocaust is to the concept of a just God – the piece of disconfirming evidence so overwhelming that we are left questioning whether it can exist at all.

Can Easily Imagine This Scene

MediaPost Publications These Aren't The DROIDS You're Looking For 11/12/2009

You know that catchy little metallic "Droid" voice that emanates from the new Verizon/Motorola/Android device released last weekend? Guess when it stops being cute? About an hour into a traffic jam on I-95, while in a Mini Cooper with two women who have to pee.

"Oh my god, Dad, make it stop!" my daughter whined from the back seat. We took the DROID on a road trip from Wilmington, Del. to Baltimore to test its various geo-location features, including the turn-by-turn navigation system baked into the device.

Facebook app leaderboards

AppData.com - Facebook Application Metrics

Leaderboards for Sunday, November 15, 2009

#1, to no one's surprise I am sure, is FarmVille.

The subtitle says it all

Eek! Keep Those Scary Bra-Burners Away From My Sexy Feminine Self! : Thus Spake Zuska

Subtitle: It's really cool when feminists can help me advance my personal interests, as long as nobody sees me talking to them, 'cause, you know, they're ugly.

Zuska does a nice takedown of a preening little twit that thinks that feminists are icky despite the fact that she would not be where she is without them. I consider myself a feminist and I am male. A feminist, to me, is anyone that espouses equality of opportunity for the sexes, it is also what any sane person should be.

Especially amusing is when Victoria attempts to explain herself more fully.

Note: I am not saying the men and women are precisely the same because that would be delusional and, to be honest, not much fun for me.