Read it.

An interesting article, but notice the not-so-hidden assumption: Unless you’re using the very latest black-turtleneck-and-pierced-body-parts technology, you’re living in the Dark Ages. Never mind that government technology, except in the military, is typically twenty years or so behind the “private sector”. The “six-year-old versions of Microsoft software” is XP, the same software most major corporations (including my employer) use.

Stuck in the next-to-last paragraph, however, is the most significant thing: ”

But there were no missing letters from the computer keyboards, as Bush officials had complained of during their transition in 2001.” So apparently the Bush administration doesn’t have the same proportion of arrested adolescents that the Clinton administration did.

Read it.

An interesting article, but notice the Hidden Assumption: Unless something is “supervised” at the federal level, it isn’t really “supervised”.

Read it.

Slow news day.

No one can ever bribe or twist

A noble mainstream journalist;

But seeing what they tend to do

Unbribed, there’s just no reason to.

Read it.

Slow news day.

Read it.

We used to have journalists. Those were great days.

Read it.

No more Bush to bash, apparently. We won, so it isn’t news any more.

Once upon a time, we had journalists. Those were the days.

Read it.

And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.

Read it.

I was only mildly suprised, a few weeks ago, when I found ABC News peddling a fake video Q&A with President Bush, in which segments of his answers to two different questions were spliced together, out of order and out of context, with no indication that this surgery had been performed (“In president, out president, fake president”, 12/5/2008). Perhaps I should have been more indignant, but I’ve learned not to expect much in the way of journalistic ethics from broadcast news organizations.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

And I accepted, years ago, that even first-rank newspapers like the New York Times routinely fabricate virtual quotations in textual form, by splicing together out-of-context fragments from widely separated parts of an interview.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

Read it.

Note that nowhere on the entire first page of the article does it mention the word “annulment” or explain what the legal issue is.

We used to have journalists. Ah, those were the days.

Read it.

The solution proposed by researchers such as Harvard’s Thomas J. Kane and Dartmouth’s Douglas Staiger is not to raise teacher qualifications but to lower them—hiring “anyone with a pulse and a college degree,” Mr. Gladwell says—and then impose a rigorous yet flexible system of assessing new teachers in the classroom and weeding out the bad ones. That would mean adjusting teacher salary scales and ending automatic tenure, among other sweeping changes in the profession.

An idea so absurd that only an intellectual could believe it. We’re already doing the first part and the second part won’t ever happen while we have (a) Democrats and (b) education unions. Bzzt! Thank you for plaing.

Read it.

Those are certainly my priorities.

Read it.

Poor iddle babies.

Other tips in the Good Mental Health Rocks kit, which was distributed this month to about 30 schools in Queensland state, including apologising to students when necessary and asking pupils to conduct a “personal skills audit” where they focus on their individual strengths rather than their weaknesses.

Read it.

Really, these guys are as gullible as medieval peasants.

Read it.

If, of course, you accept their assumptions.

Read it.

Let us have a pity party….

OpenLeft blogger Chris Bowers went so far as to issue this plaintive plea: “Isn’t there ever a point when we can get an actual Democratic administration?”

Pardon me while I snicker. Dude, we’ve had Democratic administrations since Reagan left the White House. Where have you been? I guess he must be holding out for a statue of Lenin in the Rotunda.

Read it, and watch a “journalist” discover just what “progressive” policies do to leftoids like him.

Feel the love.

Read it.

Hey, those cabinets gotta come from somewhere.

Campaigners claim that modern methods of hunting cause the animals mental and physical stress, and that the chain should remove reindeer products from its shelves.

Somebody is unclear on the concept of “hunting”….

Read it.

Two powerful employee organizations are pressing the Bush administration to prove that in its final weeks, political aides are not improperly winning career government jobs at the expense of more qualified workers.

I don’t think this was written as a satire, since it’s in the Washington Post rather than The Onion, but I had to look to make sure, and I’m still not certain.

Read it.

Alan Scherr was an art professor with a comfortable life in the Maryland suburbs, but he spent 25 years studying Transcendental Meditation in a quest for something more. The search took him and his family to Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, where they shed their old life in Silver Spring and meditated in the complex of a New Age mystic.

So you know he’ll come to a bad end. If you saw this in a movie you would think, “Sheesh, what a hackneyed cliché.” And you’d be right.

As they mourned the deaths, family and friends struggled to comprehend how a man defined by his quiet spirituality had met such a violent end — along with the daughter who was raised in part by monks in the family-like atmosphere of the rural Synchronicity compound, 30 miles from Charlottesville.

Hint: There are evil people in the world, evil people who don’t give a shit about your search for peace.

Naomi, a high-achieving student who was home-schooled at the compound and planned to attend boarding school in New York next fall, was shot next, Lang said. “It’s hard for me to imagine the rationale for shooting a 13-year-old girl in the back of the head,” he added. “Naomi was the sweetest, loveliest, most innocent young girl.”

You don’t need to imagine it — just accept that there are others who do, who will gladly do it to you if given the chance.

Master Charles remains in India, where he escaped the attacks by spending 45 hours locked in his hotel room.

And that’s their response. if you close your eyes hard enough, you’ll become invisible.

And let’s not forget their enablers, people who write articles like this for the Washington Post.

Slate has a perfect example.

As a new middle-school teacher, I’m facing a challenge I never thought about before: assigning a list of school supplies for my students. My colleagues tell me that there’s a real downside to wooden pencils, since it gives students an excuse to get up every few minutes and use the pencil sharpener. But am I being environmentally irresponsible by asking parents to buy plastic mechanical pencils?

That’s the question. Answer at your leisure. Use both sides of the toilet paper if necessary.

Read it.

Look at the picture. Would you have guessed that this guy was ‘black’ if the article hadn’t said so? Seriously, I’ve got Italian in-laws that have darker skins than this guy.

Guys, guys, guys — Robert Mugabe is black. Thabo Mbeke is black. This guy is part Negro, the way some people are part Indian; i.e. just enough to brag about and not enough to matter.

Sheesh.

Read it.

Of course Democrats do this regularly and nobody raises an eyebrow.

Gee, this will raise the number of Republicans in the Civil Service from .01% to .015%. The horror….

Bias? What bias?

Read it.

It’s a hit piece, as one would expect from the New York Slimes, but one rarely sees anything about Phil Gramm in the news. The problems with de-regulation aren’t de-regulation but state officials who think “de-regulation” means “anything goes”.

Read it.

And if Obama had lost, how would they have characterized the riots that were threatened? If you run an explicitly racist campaign, people respond accordingly.

The election of a black president triggered at least 200 hate-related incidents, a watchdog group finds.

In a country of 300 million. The term “statistically insignificant” leaps to mind.

Read it.

There’s a shocker.

I smell “government grant” here….

Read it.

The oil price will shoot back through $100 a barrel as soon as economic conditions return to normal, and will break through $200 threshold by 2030, say officials at the International Energy Agency.

Remember, you heard it here first.

On the other hand, the Guardian are a bunch of leftists, and when did leftists ever have a clue about economics? So don’t take it too much to heart.

Read it.

I often read about and hear about how designers must have the courage to speak truth to power and how political dissent is one pillar of patriotism. These are tenets I firmly believe in, by the way. But I also find laughable the way many designers think they’re speaking truth to power by creating or showcasing design examples of Leftist political dissent, in books, in magazines, and on personal websites and blogs. I’m struck by the vacuity of how anyone in the design community can believe it takes courage to do these things when there is zero chance of suffering any negative consequences for doing so.

Hey, only rubes believe that “speak truth to power” stuff.

Read it.

Let’s see, which legislators does the WASHINGTON POST think might be crooks: 8 Republicans, 1 Democrat.

Bias? What bias?

Read it.

Things are looking grim for Obama when even the socialists at the Associated Press bad-mouth him.

Read it.

Turns out that rich people are anxious about the economy. Who knew?

Megan McArdle is confused.

I confess I still don’t understand why poverty is so increasingly linked with obesity.  The common explanation is to blame the paucity of excellent cheap grocery stores in urban neighborhoods. But poverty is not exclusively an inner city phenomenon; poor people in more rural areas share grocery stores with the rich.  Besides, while this explains the latitudinal data, it does not account for the longitudinal issue.  No one thinks that New York’s grocery stores, even in poor neighborhoods, have gotten worse since the 1970s; the evidence is that they’ve gotten better.  But the obesity rate has gotten much worse.

Uh, Megan, perhaps because the word doesn’t mean what you think it means? “Poverty” in the U.S. has come to mean “only one color TV” or “no high-speed broadband Internet”. This is not what people prior to the 1960s understood “poverty” to mean. “Poverty” means not knowing where your next meal is coming from. You don’t get fat on that kind of diet.

Read it.

But you knew that.

Read it.

The Obama campaign, in conjunction with the entire mainstream media, has been attacking Sarah Palin for letting the RNC spend $150,000 on her wardrobe, as she runs for Vice President of the United States.

But the Obama campaign spent 5.3 million dollars for that phony Greek temple in Denver’s Invesco Field. For one night.

Not a peep from the media.

Bias? What bias?

Read it.

The Ministry of Truth has spoken.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Read it.

What a thumbsucker. The Washington Post actually pays money for this stuff.

Read it.

Note that the reason is not because the AP stories are tendentious crap, which they are, but because they are competing with the tendentious crap that the newspapers are generating by themselves.

Well, it’s still progress, of a sort, I suppose.

Read it.

I’m glad they have nothing more serious to worry about.

Vote to Save the Planet: Your Guide to the Issues That Matter Jeff Schweitzer / Rvive Books / $7.95 / 9781935073000 / 1935073001 / Political Science / Political Process / Elections / Trade Paper / On Sale: Oct 01, 2008

Dr. Schweitzer, a former senior science advisor in the Clinton/Gore administration, well-respected speaker, and Huffington Post blogger, pulls no punches in making the case that we must vote for Presidential Candidate Barack Obama to SAVE THE PLANET.

All this for only $7.95. What a bargain.

This comes from the “Drop-In Titles” service of the Unshelved comic strip, which is very funny so long as you remember that, like most public employees, they’re tofu-brained socialists.

Read it.

Reefer Madness, part deux.

Read it.

In the past several weeks, the shift of press-corps sentiment against McCain has been stark and undeniable, even among heavies such as Matthews long accused by the left of being residents of the Arizonan’s amen corner. Jonathan Alter, Joe Klein, Richard Cohen, David Ignatius, Jacob Weisberg: all former McCain admirers now turned brutal critics. Equally if not more damaging, the shift has been just as pronounced, if less operatic, among straight-news reporters. Suddenly, McCain is no longer being portrayed as a straight-talking, truth-telling maverick but as a liar, a fraud, and an opportunist with acute anger-management issues.

Could it be that it’s because he’s actually running against a Democrat? Could it be that he’s no longer bashing his fellow Republicans? (Or, at least, not so much.) Did anybody truly not expect this? I know for a fact that Rush Limbaugh predicted precisely this when McCain ran against Bush in the Republican Presidential primaries.

Read it.

Read it.

Well, then, let’s rush right out and do it.

Perhaps painting black people white would end racism. Somebody get on the horn to Jesse Jackson.

Read it.

In 18 months of searching, Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine and Office of Professional Responsibility chief H. Marshall Jarrett have uncovered new e-mail messages hinting at heightened involvement of White House lawyers and political aides in the firings of nine federal prosecutors two years ago.

Well, duh. These prosecutors serve at the pleasure of the President. If he wants to fire them for wearing the wrong tie, he is perfectly entitled to do so. This is like saying “Warren Buffet implicated in the firing of one of his vice-presidents”.

Megan McArdle has reached her limit.

Preach it, sister.

Read it to find out what the Brahmins are obsessing on this week.

I wish that were the most serious thing I had to worry about.

Watch it.