I’ve turned off a couple of auto-post features for now, at least through the end of the political season.
The Twitter Tools plugin has a “create daily or weekly post from tweets” feature, I’ve turned off the weekly tweets posts as my usage has spiked, probably to an annoying degree, on my main account. I’ll migrate the political and topical news commentary and reaction to a different account, and pare my “follows” back to more personal topics on the main account.
I’d rather not irritate my real-life friends and acquaintances further with my current interest with the political process. It’s only going to get signal-to-noisier.
The Facebook Connect plugin has a “publish to Facebook” feature that I’ve turned off, but I can kick it off manually on individual posts. If you want to read everything I post, which lately isn’t that much since I got into Twitter, read it here or via the feed.
According to my comments archives my only readers are spammers and bots anyway, so nobody is likely to be affected by these changes. 😉
Ran across this just now via a Twitter link, great site and nice formatting, too.
I’ve been wondering about this false narrative of failure, too. It’s another example of political projection; they’re still sore that “George W. Bush was a miserable failure” in the Googles.
Obama has been a lot more successful than Republican obstructionism ought to have allowed him to be; guess we can add “Republican obstructionism is a miserable failure” to their list of dubious accomplishments
In Republican reality, President Obama is a failure. You’d only suggest otherwise for purposes of making a joke. But in reality, the only people who consider an unmitigated failure are those who consider George W. Bush a success. President Obama didn’t blow the surplus, invade the wrong country and preside over the worst financial crisis in half a century. But he did end the war in Iraq, get bin Laden, save the auto industry while passing student loan, credit card and health care reform. Accomplishments like a law mandating equal pay and ending Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell aren’t impressive to the right wing. But to most Americans the improvements have been palpable. The stock market, for instance, has skyrocketed, which is no consolation to those still out of work. But it means security for the millions of Americans with 401ks.
On a whim, I looked once again to see if there’s a way to set WinAmp up to “scrobble” streaming radio, and it appears not… but one word at the Last.fm support site said simply “clementine” and that seems to do the job nicely. Built in support for Last.fm, Grooveshark, Spotify, and a few other services. There’s a ton of Internet radio stations to explore, and it’s relatively simple to set up playlists with my favorite Radio Riel streams, plus stations I’ve encountered on trips and local stations too.
The Last.fm feed is put into my sidebar using a plugin called WPLast.fm – it’ll pick up oddities like on-air ads and station IDs, and some songs miss the feed but are visible at my Last.fm page
I’ll try to move the political stuff and noise elsewhere. I can’t blog during the workday – that goes without saying. But I can certainly have music playing. I’ve moved some of the “stats” stuff to the About page, which could use some work but it clears up some white space on the main page and post pages.
Clementine runs well on the old laptop, it’ll get installed on the main desktop machine too, so that when I’m online in the evenings, I can listen to whatever I want and scrobble tracks.
Still need to carve some time out to upload a few batches of photos to Flickr from the last 2 trips. More later.
My dad was redheaded, so was his brother and (I think) his father. His mom had dark hair but there was some redheadedness on her side. My mom had auburn hair and heard a few family jokes about being the red-headed stepchild (the trait was lurking on both sides). My redheadedness genes die with me as I never felt the least stirrings of parenthood, but now I feel less genetic guilt about not passing along my recessive genes. Yay!
As a redheaded science journalist, I hear this “fact” a lot. Reality is, though, we arent going anywhere. Yes, as Cara Santa Maria points out at Huffington Post, redheads represent only about 1% of the worlds population. And this hair color is related to a recessive gene. Both your parents have to have a copy in order for you to be a redhead, so a redheaded person can have non-redheaded babies. But thats not the same thing as going extinct. Because heres our little secret: We redheads are stealthily infiltrating the rest of humanity. Only 1% of humans are redheads, but 4% of humans carry a copy of the gene that makes redheads. You could be a carrier and not even know it. So could your spouse. Two redheads are unlikely to make a brunette, but two brunettes can make a redhead. Good luck wiping us out. Insert evil laughter here
The opportunity for Equity Specialty Holdings was simple. Its management could invest in insurers that badly needed to cover losses due to 9/11, and reap enormous benefit from the increased fees that the surviving insurance companies could then charge. The results were astounding: “Over the next nine months, the company generated a net income of $63.5 million. By the end of 2003, the company was reporting net income of $263.4 million.â€The Romney family disavows any knowledge or responsibility for this investment, saying that their money is in a blind trust. Famously, Romney dismissed Ted Kennedy’s identical response in 1994, ridiculing blind trusts as an “age-old ruse.â€
This lack of empathy is one of the creepy-chilling things about Romney, and is an insight into the way he would interact with the kinds of people he is not programmed to understand.
Romneybot2012 understands “family” to mean man-woman-children. Romneybot2012 has no comprehension of why anyone would choose not to follow this plan, which comes from God and must not be rejected.
No matter how they try to make Romney appear to be a warm, caring human being they will never succeed in changing his core program. He’s a political-advantage calculator in Mom Jeans.
I’ve read the account of what happened in his office when the LGBT activists confronted him about the Massachusets gay marriage law. What he said was… unconscionable. And he is incapable of seeing why it’s so very offensive and disrespectful.
Does this post demonize Romney? It certainly mocks his socially awkward image, and it criticizes his socially backward worldview. But demonize? Please – try Googling “Moochelle” or any similar right wing racist nut job nickname for President Obama, and then try complaining about “demonization.” Ann Romney gets no sympathy from me.
“I looked him in the eye as we were leaving,†recalls Goodridge. “And I said, ‘Governor Romney, tell me — what would you suggest I say to my 8 year-old daughter about why her mommy and her ma can’t get married because you, the governor of her state, are going to block our marriage?’â€
His response, according to Goodridge: “I don’t really care what you tell your adopted daughter. Why don’t you just tell her the same thing you’ve been telling her the last eight years.â€
Romney’s retort enraged a speechless Goodridge; he didn’t care, and by referring to her biological daughter as “adopted,†it was clear he hadn’t even been listening. By the time she was back in the hallway, she was reduced to tears.
“I really kind of lost it,†says Goodridge. “I’ve never stood before someone who had no capacity for empathy. It went behind flat affect. It was a complete lack of ability or motivation to understand other people.â€
While Goodridge cried, Romney brought the press into his office to give his take on the meeting.
This excellent quote from President Dwight D. Eisenhower (R-Reality) was buried in the comments of the Daily Kos post on the Medicaid issue gaining traction. It would be very interesting to see either Romney or Ryan squirm while attempting to comment on this. Their rigidly imposed frame of reference prevents them from seeing that the GOP is in danger of becoming just such a negligible, stupid party, if it hasn’t already.
“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.†-Dwight Eisenhower
I saw this on Digby’s blog and read and re-read it several times today, trying to figure it out.
On NBC’s “Meet The Press,†Romney dodged multiple questions about which deductions or credits he’d target, saying only that he’ll get rid of “some of the loopholes and deductions at the high end†while seeking to “lower the burden on middle income people.â€Pressed for one specific example, Romney replied, “Well, the specifics are these which is those principles I described are the heart of my policy.â€
After seeing a lot of tweets yesterday about Up with Chris Hayes and the Melissa Perry-Harris Show, I finally watched both shows (or most of Up and all of MPH) via TiVo. I’ve never watched political wonk shows before (comedy shows like Jon Stewart and Bill Maher shouldn’t count, but they do), and it was fun!
They’re shown Saturday and Sunday mornings and seem to have an enthusiastic fan base that hang out on Twitter under hashtags #uppers and #nerdland respectively. A lot of dumb sex-link spambots and anti-factists hang out too, so I quickly learned who was reality-based and who had drunk the anti-truth serum.
One thing about this election cycle; the thugs are desperate not to lose to the black man again so my tag line (and the Karl Rove-attributed quote that inspired it) keeps showing up in my newsfeeds. But that’s a whole other blogpost.
President Obama’s former protege, Tammy Duckworth, is running against Tea Party extremist Rep. Joe Walsh in the district, and she will speak at the convention again. Good, I hope to volunteer at a phone bank for her. Walsh is useless in office, unreasonable, and famously irrational when confronted by constituents armed with inconvenient facts (see video below).
He’s an embarassmen and a waste of Congressional space. Tammy is rational, calm under fire (hero! hero! Hero! Nyah Nyah Nyah!) and solid on policy and getting the work done. Hope she does well in her speech, which will probably only be seen on C-SPAN by the wonk types. As long as she doesn’t let any cranky old white men offer her an empty chair, she’ll be fine. She may have prosthetic legs (because, HERO) but she stands on her own two feet. And Joe? Keep it classy. You can see Joe’s famous tirade yelling at unhappy constituents at that link, highly recommended.
Oh what the heck, here it is:
Another good development: It’s likely that 2 of the 3 most corrupt Democrats in the Illinois delegation aren’t going. On Up with Chris Hayes, they had several young-ish candidates explaining their positions, and they all struck me as competent, real, and mammalian frontal cortex thinkers.
I know, right?
Most of today’s GOP and Tea Party extremists seem to be reptilian hind-brain thinkers; that’s why the phrase “red-meat Republicans” makes me think of the Tyrannasaurus Rex strips in Calvin and Hobbes. Anyway, all these Bright Young Things were asked to give their Last Word (a regular feature) on what needed to change in Washington.
Arizona State Senator Kyrsten Sinema (@kyrstensinema), Democratic congressional candidate in Arizona’s 9th district, answered succinctly “elect different people.” Not just “get rid of the other team/tribe/faction,” but replace the lot. Presumably you’d clear out the deadwood on both sides and get a do-over on competence.
Illinois’ famously corrupt political “system” (and despite the Right’s best efforts, Obama was not a team player in that game) isn’t quite as influential as it was, since Blago got his orange jumpsuit and Daley has left office. There’s more that need to go, but maybe the Better Government Association will keep working on weeding out corruption, at least at the entry level.
In 2008, the inaugural Obama presidential campaign was so fearful of being associated with the tainted Blagojevich that it denied him a speaking role. This year’s Obama-orchestrated convention will feature speeches by Mayor Rahm Emanuel as well as congressional candidate Tammy Duckworth. Unlike the Republican convention, where no Illinoisans addressed delegates, Duckworth is making her second consecutive appearance before the Democratic convention audience. A second-time candidate for Congress, Duckworth is challenging tea party-icon freshman Republican Rep. Joe Walsh in a northwest suburban district drawn for her by Democrats. Walsh chose not to attend the GOP convention. Duckworth, a former assistant secretary of Veterans Affairs in the Obama administration, is among several prominent women given a speaking role. Obama and Democrats are attempting to take advantage of the controversy over Missouri Republican Senate nominee Rep. Todd Akin’s remark that victims of “legitimate rape†have an internal body mechanism to prevent pregnancy. Democrats have sought to use the comments to reheat their allegations that Republicans are waging a “war on women.â€
