Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes – NYTimes.com
The NYT brings some interesting stuff to light. This article engendered 1000 comments, and notes that Alaska legislators were so annoyed at Palin’s frequent absences from the state capitol that they took to wearing “Where’s Sarah” buttons.
The story on this image: David and I were doing something we rarely do – watching TV more or less “live”, and even more unusually, we were watching a network show and not bothering to zip through the commercials. This one came on for a product called Botox Cosmetic — with the tagline “it’s all about freedom of expression!” We had to pause the TiVo just to laugh. Apparently, the makers are quite proud of their product and address the troubling question of “Will I be able to make facial expressions after using Botox-Cosmetic?”
Yeah, right. Aaaaanyway.
My husband David said “there is something so wrong about a product ad that says “toxin.” I said “I thought botox gave you freedom FROM expressions.” As we looked at each other, we both made the same facial expression… the “I’m so blogging this” expression.
We both dove for a blogging appliance.
Mine got posted first but got mangled in the process. David’s was more polished but lacked the visual impact. You decide.
UPDATE:GRRR! Something about the WordPress 2.6.2 is causing WP to strip all the angle brackets, at least from posts that come in via the “Blog This Photo/Moblog” template from Flickr. And of course, my beloved drop shadows depend on the wrapped divs to make my lame photos all shiny. This behavior is similar to something WP used to do a long time ago – it would transform the angle brackets into character entities.
David thinks there should be a bugfix for this out there somewhere. In the meantime, in order to “moblog” I’ll have to do it direct from the iPhone. And as those posts tend to have unique CSS identifiers on the images, it should be possible to add a little border/white frame styling so the images are not all nekkid. I’d been meaning to get around to that anyway. For now, I have to “fix it in post.”
Ginny
I can has iPhone?
Via: Flickr Title: Botox: Freedom FROM Expressions!/> By:
Originally uploaded: 13 Sep ’08, 8.45pm CDT PST
i
TPM notes that Obama’s campaign hit McCain where he lives.. on the “honor and integrity” meme that’s part of his maverick-hero image. This is after his appearance on The View, where Joy Behar told McCain that a lot of his oft-repeated campaign statements are lies. Right to his face. I love Joy.
Today on “The View,” John McCain defended his campaign’s latest ad campaign, which has been debunked repeatedly as both false and sleazy. In running the sleaziest campaign since South Carolina in 2000 and standing by completely debunked lies on national television, it’s clear that John McCain would rather lose his integrity than lose an election.
A TPM commenter noted approvingly that criticizing McCain on the meme will gar-on-tee a response, and that McCain will over-react, thus demonstrating his legendary temper.
Then over on Kos, they have a different quote by a different Obama spokesperson.
Sleazy and Dishonorable
“We will take no lectures from John McCain who is cynically running the sleaziest and least honorable campaign in modern Presidential campaign history. His discredited ads with disgusting lies are running all over the country today. He runs a campaign not worthy of the office he is seeking.”
There again, comparing it to the previous least honorable campaign in modern Presidential campaign history… yes, that whisper campaign in the 2000 election that Rove [click Enter Salon] ran against McCain. Actually, there was the “questions about McCain’s mental health, hot temper, and skin lesions” one first, and then there was the really nasty one about his adopted daughter in South Carolina. McCain certainly seems to have learned from these experiences… at least enough to pick up some of the same personnel that pulled this crap and put them on his payroll.
I guess you can teach the old dog new tricks, but you might not like the ones he decides to learn.
And I’d just like add an imprecatory prayer or two on behalf of good old Karl, who deserves a special place in the Afterlife for some of the other things he’s done.
One Utah » Blog Archive » McCain Caught Lying Again, Today. Yep, it turns out there are no official estimates of the size of the crowds he’s attracting to his rallies. His campaign staff cites fire marshals and Secret Service personnel, but actual fire marshals and Secret Service spokespersons contacted by reporters deny supplying the McCain people with crowd size estimates.
Meanwhile, his staff now insist it’s never been about the size of the crowds, it’s what McCain does with them that counts.
Audience envy. It’s not pretty.
First, NPR did an audio story direct from a pig farm in Virginia. Yes, they put Ruby Red lipstick on a black-and-white pig. It was a piece that left much to the imagination, and perhaps it’s better that way.
Because apparently now it’s a trend: news organizations are falling all over themselves putting lipstick on pigs. Here’s the link to the Chicago Tribune video (yeah, they do video on their website. And they prove, unequivocally, that there’s really no amount of artful makeup techniques or products that can improve the appearance of a porker.
With the possible exception of a particular shade called “Honey Glaze,” that is.
Finally started uploading photos from my very large backlog of photos to Flickr.
Via: Flickr> Title: By:
Originally uploaded: 13 Sep ’08, 1.27pm CDT PST
Washington Memorials: Photos from a morning walk around the memorials in Washington
Oh yes, it’s time to draft the Wild Party (Python Ltd.) candidate…
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/jf1y9s73Nos" width="400" height="326" wmode="transparent" /]
Incidents :: Chicago :: Traffic.com
At US-12/US-45/Mannheim Rd (#2) – flooding – Troopers planning to shut down I-190 to OHare Airport.
Flood – The Illinois Tollway Authority and Illinois State Police are reporting numerous flooded roadways and underpasses on the area tollways. The flooding is due to overnight rain. Be cautious when driving, and be aware of standing water.
Yeah. Last night I wasn’t sleeping well, and about 330pm woke up to the sound of heavy rain. It went on all the rest of the night, and it’s still raining with no letup in the cards until at least Monday. Tomorrow we’ll catch the remnants of Ike. We got a bit of Gustav last week.
David’s down in the basement playing around with the sump pump – we had an Aquanaut installed a couple of months ago when we had the foundation crack sealed, and so David’s testing the emergency switch by cutting the power to the normal sump pump. He and our friend Steve were chatting away on the speakerphone, being geeks about sumps. Steve has two sumps (he has a very deep basement at the end where his fancy-schmancy media theater is) and so he was entertaining us by letting us hear the sound of his pump alarms going off.
Also entertaining: hearing his conversation with his dog Polly Wolly Labra-doodle Dog as she did some bidness outdoors before they headed inside to check on the sumps. We’ll see Steve tomorrow when we head over to watch Stargate: Continuum in his thea-tah with a few other people. Who cares if the weather sucks?
Yes, this is exactly how I felt yesterday morning at work; my second call of the day was from a client flying on Continental Airlines, who had let a ticketing deadline expire. I had to call the airline to get a waiver code, and although I was confident I’d be given the okay to issue at Thursday’s rate, I groaned as I dialled their number. Why? Because due to Hurricane Ike’s merry romp towards Houston, CO had announced that they were closing down operations for a couple of days. Which meant that their reservations lines would be jammed with calls as travelers and agents scrambled to rebook people who’d been routed via CO’s hub at Houston Intercontinental (I try to avoid calling it “George Bush International, it will always be IAH to me).
Even though my client was going nowhere near Houston and was flying internationally, meaning I was callling an international res line, I knew the hold times would be long, as all their agents would be handling a huge amount of extra call volume.
Sure enough, when I got through, there was a warning announcement about “unusually high wait time” and then an automated voice said, “Your approximate hold time will be…[BLANK]”
Yeah, that’s a good sign when the hold time exceeds the announcement’s capability to relay it.
40 minutes later, I got through to a surprisingly cheerful agent named Diane, who was happy to help with my problem, as it required very little effort on her part and did not involve being sworn at or cried by a traveler whose plans had been ruined by Continental’s stupid insistence on caution in the face of a little old rainstorm.
It took all of five minutes for Diane to get the code generated for me, and my record was soon stored with the special formats that put the previous day’s price in so the ticket could be issued. It was easy for Diane to give the waiver, because it was a business class fare, on a corporate client of Continental’s with their own internal “hey, it’s me, I’m important” ticket designator code. No problem.
But those 40 minutes, although productively spent working on other tasks while I listened to Continental’s very short loop of “please hold” mood music. It was so short that it must have repeated dozens of times. After finishing up with “stuff I can do while on hold,” my brain slowly went on hold, too. Just like in the picture.
Lolcats ‘n’ Funny Pictures of Cats – I Can Has Cheezburger?