Category: Stupid

Pwn36*

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They paid someone to do this?

So, the Republican Party comes up with a URL shortener, the idea being that they would send people to the site, but put banners top and bottom that would advertise themselves and pranksters use it to link to pr0n:

The Republican party took down its innovative link-shortening tool Tuesday for several hours after pranksters had a field day using the tool to associate the GOP with bondage sites.

Having used Tinyurl and bit.ly for almost a decade, this is “innovative” only in the sense that House Minority John Boehner has a “human” complexion.†

As part of its new media strategy, the Republican party launched a new site called GOP.am on Monday. It’s a URL shortener designed to make it easy for conservative web surfers to exchange links to web pages.

This is what happens when people try to be hip and cool when they have not the slightest inkling what it means to be hip and cool.

So quoth the engineer, who has no clue as to what it means to be either hip or cool.

*Owned.
†Truth be told, if I didn’t know that he’s had it for years, I would have tagged it as jaundice.

VPR Audio: VPR News: Dean On Health Care: “Kill The Senate Bill”

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The Plum Line is breaking the story that Howard Dean is calling for the Senate bill to be scrapped, and for the house to push through reform via reconciliation, which only requires 50 Senators (+ Joe Biden) to pass.

VPR has a transcript of the interview:

This is essentially the collapse of health care reform in the United States Senate. And, honestly, the best thing to do right now is kill the Senate bill and go back to the House and start the reconciliation process, where you only need 51 votes and it would be a much simpler bill.

Yeah, but Republicans will call it a “Nuclear Option,” and say bad things about Barack….You know?

Great googly moogly.

link to audio

Facebook Founder Completely PWN36* By Facebook Privacy Policy

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Bummer of a birth mark, Mr. Zuckerberg

I check Facebook every day or soo, and I feed my blog there, albeit imperfectly, so when the came up with a privacy policy update, I didn’t pay too much attention, until I heard lots of people complaining.

Management there said it was no big deal, but then about 300 personal photos of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg were made public to the general public:

In a not-uncommon development for the social-networking leader, Facebook’s recently released privacy controls are leaving the company a bit red-faced. As a result of a new policy that by default makes users’ profiles, photos and friends lists available on the web, almost 300 personal photos of founder Mark Zuckerberg became publicly available, a development that had gossip sites like Gawker yukking it up.

Kashmir Hill, a blogger for True/Slant, first reported Zuckerberg’s new exposure, noting, “Either Mark Zuckerberg got a whole lot less private or Facebook’s CEO doesn’t understand the company’s new privacy settings.” Under the new privacy regime, user profiles are exposed to the web unless users are proactive about limiting access.

So, what did Morty make public?

  • His wall
  • His photo albums
  • The fact that he is a Taylor Swift fan
  • Graphic (!?!) photos of “The Great Goat Roast of 2009”
  • The time, date, and location of the Facebook corporate holiday party.

Oopsie.

*Owned.

The Kaplan Test Prep Company,* Yet Again

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So, the Washington Post put Sarah Palin on their their OP/ED pages yesterday, for what seems like the gazillionth time, but is most likely 2nd or 3rd time, and once again they show why all editorial pages, most particularly that of the Washington Post, really need to fact check their OP/Ed Pages. (No link, they don’t deserve it)

Of course, if they started fact checking OP/EDs, then Krauthammer and George Will would have nothing left after the editors got through with them.

Tim Lambert notes that the article is full of lies which can be verified via 10 minutes on “The Google”, while Media Matters goes a bit further in their research and notes that the lies are contradicted in articles published by……… wait for it ……… the Washington Post.

In fact, the links in Palins article actually contradict what she is writing.

While I like Matthew Yglesias’s snark that the editorial page editor of The Washington Post, Fred Hiatt, “wants the Washington Post to go out of business, I think that Atrios has what is the final word on this:

I can never quite get a handle on just what the Washington Post people – its publishers, Fred Hiatt, etc… – think that it’s for? Is it about providing a product people want to buy/advertisers want to advertise in? It is about informing readers, giving them factual information and analysis they want? Are these missions in conflict or do they coincide?

And why does it take bloggers to point out how absurd they are? Where are all the journalists who spend their days bitching about bloggers? Don’t they care that the product they’re defending is basically sh@#?”

(@# mine)

I would be remiss in not pointing the reader to Marc Ambinder’s point by point takedown.

*The Washington Post owns, and generates the vast bulk of its revenue, by owning and operating Kaplan, Inc., a company best known for selling courses to help teenagers game the standardized test process.

I Am Glad that I Pulled My Email(s) from the OFA Mailing List

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Because I don’t get the sort of blatantly dishonest fundraising pitches that Kos gets:

We will not back down

From: President Barack Obama to Markos

Markos —

As we head into the final stretch on health reform, big insurance company lobbyists and their partisan allies hope that their relentless attacks and millions of dollars can intimidate us into accepting the status quo.

So I have a message for them, from all of us: Not this time. We have come too far. We will not turn back. We will not back down.

But do not doubt — the opponents of reform will not rest. So I need you to fight alongside me.

We must continue to build out our campaign — to spread the facts on the air and on the ground, and to bring in more volunteers and train them to join the fight. I urgently need your help to keep this 50-state movement for reform going strong.

Please donate $5 or whatever you can afford today:

http://my.democrats.org/…

Let’s win this together,

President Barack Obama

I agree with Markos Moulitsas:

This is so freakin‘ obnoxious I can hardly stand it. We are about to get a turd of a “reform” package, potentially worse than the status quo. We have the insurance industry declaring victory, Republicans cackling with glee, and the administration is using that piece of sh$% to raise money?

($% mine)

I can think of no better way to demoralize the base than for Obama and His Stupid Minions™ to keep acting this way.

It’s enough to make me wonder if he is a Manchurian candidate, only it’s not bin Laden who’s backing him, it’s Dick Cheney….

And then the drugs kick in, and I feel much better…

Ass Covering: Secretary of the Treasury Edition

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So, now that there are an increasing number of people calling for his scalp, Timothy “Eddie Haskell” Geithner is talking tough about the banks:

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner disputed claims by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executives that the bank could have survived the financial crisis without government help and said it and other Wall Street firms should show some restraint in handing out bonuses this year.

“It is very important that we change the way these executives are paid, the form of compensation, this year,” Geithner said in an interview yesterday for Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt,” which is being aired throughout the weekend. “We have to end that era of irresponsibly high bonuses.”

So, the guy who, until now, said very little about bank pay, and:

Now he’s saying that none of the banks were solvent, and that they all survived only through government largess, and that they are overpaying their staff.

This is all about the calls to can him getting louder, not any “road to Damascus” moment.

You Know, This Might Bother Me Too…… If I Were an 8 Year Old

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8 Year old, see Emotional Maturity of

So, when Barack Obama gave his speech on Afghanistan, he preempted a showing of A Charlie Brown Christmas, and the Mayor of Arlington, Tennessee decided to throw a hissy fit on his Facebook page:

“Ok, so, this is total crap, we sit the kids down to watch ‘The Charlie Brown Christmas Special’ and our muslim president is there, what a load…..try to convince me that wasn’t done on purpose. Ask the man if he believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and he will give you a 10 minute disertation (sic) about it….when the answer should simply be ‘yes’….”

Yes, A Charlie Brown Christmas was on that Tuesday, and yes, it was preempted, and yes, it’s among the most sincere of the Christmas specials out there, but this sort of crap is beneath maturity level of a 9-year old, particularly when it’s showing tomorrow and next Tuesday too.

Oopsie!

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Fail!

So we see a front page editorial in the Mobile Press-Register calling for Northrop-Grumman/EADS to be given a fair shake in the tanker competition, which is far from surprising, since that is where the tanker would be assembled if the A330 wins, but they also have an editorial cartoon showing the “customers” of the tanker.

Notice anything?

Like the model of the aircraft?

It’s an F-15 Eagle made by Boeing whose 767 is competing against the A330 for the contract.

Considering the fact that there are 3 fighters currently in front line service with the USAF, and two of them are not made by Boeing, the choice here seems a big….Inopportune.

We Are Unbelievably Screwed

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It turns out that when General Stanley McChrystal was looking for filling in the dots on his Afghanistan escalation plan, he turned to the think tank Washington, DC, and created a “strategic assessment group”, among the members of that group, Fred Kagan and his wife, Kimberly Kagan.

If there is a bright shining center of intellect in the universe, anyone in the Kagan clan are located in a dank corner where people still believe that leeches cure cancer.

They are always wrong. All you need to look at is their history on Iraq, Saddam, and WMD.

On a more substantive note, this sort of lobbying, because when you look at the names on the group, they are largely idiots who are respected by the “very serious people” inside the Beltway, should be something that members of the military should not be doing.

The group was not about getting answers, it was not aboug evaluating potential options, it was about Beltway street cred.

What a Surprise

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Barack Obama has spent the past 9 months doubling back on promises and dissing the base voters, sucking up to banks and the pro-torture wing of the CIA, and doing nothing for those young voters who came out for him and now need jobs, and now we have a poll showing that his most stalwart supporters may stay home in 2010:

QUESTION: In the 2010 Congressional elections will you definitely vote, probably vote, not likely vote, or definitely will not vote?

The results were, to put it mildly, shocking:

Voter Intensity: Definitely + Probably Voting/Not Likely + Not Voting

Republican Voters: 81/14
Independent Voters: 65/23
DEMOCRATIC VOTERS: 56/40

Actually, these results are not shocking at all. Barack Obama and His Evil Minions™ have been scapegoating and ignoring his base ever since his election, so it’s no wonder that they are demoralized, so 2 out of 5 activists need to wash their hair today

Steve Singiser’s conclusion, “This enormous enthusiasm gap, as well as some polling analysis done by PPP (and analyzed well here by Nate Silver), seems to make passing legitimate health care reform an absolute political necessity for Democrats,” is actually rather weak tea.

While it’s clear that if voters are forced to pay insurance companies, and get nothing in return, they staying home or be voting for the crazy muthaf%$#as in the corner, it is also true that between the continuation of military tribunals, soft pedaling DADT and DOMA repeal, escalation in Afghanistan, etc. there is a lot going on to demoralize the base.

While I Take a Utilitarian View on IP Law…..

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I tend to see it as a public interest law (i.e to promote the progress of science and useful arts) at its core, and not property law, there are still people who should be busted for violating the exclusive licensing agreements associated with this.

Case in point, the Hartford Courant, which has taken to using articles from the smaller local papers without attribution:

Newspaper editors and reporters across the state are noticing a new trend: their local coverage is being copied daily by the Hartford Courant.

In most cases The Courant has been attributing the reporting to the newspapers being copied, which include the Journal Inquirer, The Bristol Press, The Herald of New Britain, the Register-Citizen of Torrington, and the Waterbury Republican-American.

In some cases The Courant appears to have lifted information from the other papers in its entirety without any attribution. But either way, editors say, the Courant is using for free and making money from a product other papers pay to produce, and they want it to stop.

It appears that someone at the Courant has taken it to a high enough level that the Journal Inquirer has sued them for plagiarism, which means that the Courant is not taking stories and writing them up, but taking stories and pasting them up.

If they had been accused of just taking the stories, it would be under a separate bit of case law, it involved Hearst and wire service stories during WWI, but I could not Google it, so this is unbelievably lame.

What a F$#@ing Tool

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Greg Mankiw, who argues that healthcare reform will be less efficient than the free market because poor people will get a better deal.

Seriously, even though the US spends more per capita, and more as a percentage of GDP than any other nation on earth, and even though the outcomes are worse than the developed worlds, and efficiency is results divided by resources, healthcare reform will make us less efficient.

He argues that higher marginal tax rates shrink the economic pie, even though the historical numbers belie that.

You see, he thinks that “fairness” means “reduced work incentives”, which, I guess is why we have to pay bankers hundreds of millions of dollars to screw up our economy.

At the end, he suggests that improving healthcare will result in, “future generations of Americans will likely spend more time enjoying leisure.”

What is going on, of course, is that people are terrified of losing a job and healthcare, and, you know, dying, and so are less likely to take part-time jobs and/or tell their employer to go Cheney himself.

We already know that our healthcare system is deterring people from becoming entrepreneurs, but people like Mankiw just want wage slave drones.

You know, with ideas like this, you’d think that he would have been a part of Bush’s Evil Minions™….Oh…Right…He was.

He was head of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors.

NASA: Lame Beyond Belief

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So, in an attempt to make NASA look cool again, they have signed up “The Rock”, the wrestler turned actor who now goes by his given name, Dwayne Johnson, in order to make space travel look cool again:

Perhaps space travel has become old. Perhaps people have come to take it for granted. It’s been seen in so many movies. So many space shuttles have taken off and returned to Earth that we think little more of them than we do of jumbo jets.

NASA therefore has to use its imagination to persuade tomorrow’s generations that space travel continues to be a large step for man.

One small step in this process is a new public service announcement featuring that fearsome space creature, “The Rock.” Dwayne Johnson himself, a man who has appeared in so many scientifically concocted movies such as WWF SmackDown, WWE Backlash, and WWE Crush Hour, is now telling kids that NASA is cool.

You know, going into space is cool, the fact that you have to lose an actor to convince people that it is is more of an artifact of your incompetence in running the space program than it is the fundamental coolness of space.

Learning to find one’s own ass with one’s own hands would be a good start.

Video below.

Gee, You Think?

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So, the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee’s minutes have been released, and there were concerns that abnormally low interest rates might fuel speculative excesses?

Really? How could could anyone conclude that after all the prosperity that Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan droping rates to unprecedented lows, and then keeping them there in order to keep George W. Bush in office deal with the hangover from the dotcom crash?

Yes, of course it’s a worry:

Federal Reserve officials said record-low interest rates might fuel “excessive” speculation in financial markets and possibly dislodge expectations for low inflation, according to minutes of their meeting released today.

“Members noted the possibility that some negative side effects might result from the maintenance of very low short-term interest rates for an extended period,” minutes of the Nov. 3-4 meeting said, “including the possibility that such a policy stance could lead to excessive risk-taking in financial markets or an unanchoring of inflation expectations.”

While policy makers agreed that the chances of such effects were “relatively low, they would remain alert to these risks,” the minutes showed. Fed officials at their meeting indicated the benchmark lending rate would remain near zero “for an extended period” as long as inflation expectations are stable and unemployment fails to decline.

But it appears that “fed officials” are going to use some more of their “Federal Reserve Fairy Dust”, to prevent this, or at least make sure that the chances of such effects are, “relatively low.”

Audit the Fed, then reform it.

The Excessively Employed

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Mark Halperin.

While I am not a fan of Mary Landrieu, and some days actually hope that the Southern squish Dems lose their battles for reelection so that the Senate is forced to play hardball (i.e. reconciliation).

I am even less enthused about Mary Landrieu’s ongoing act Hamlet act on healthcare reform, which seems to largely involve the desire to increase Medicare subsidies to Louisiana.

That being said, Mark Halperin’s most substantive writing on this issue, and Landrieu’s position on HCR is to post this photoshop job, which has since been removed by a journalist who has secretly infiltrated the corporate offices of Time.

It is, of course a reference to the unfortunate confusion between hair gel and semen made by Carmen Diaz in the movie There’s Something about Mary.

As many of you know, Mark Halperin is this babbling idiot whom Time magazine hired to cobble together this insipid web product called “The Page,” which is designed to scam people looking for trenchant, up-to-the-minute political news into giving Time many, many unnecessary ad impressions as you follow Halperin’s teasing links to his content. That content tends to be a really dumb listicle, or a one sentence piece of pure and unadulterated banality, or, if you are really lucky, a paragraph or two of analysis that’s either so conventional as to appear slam-dunk, or so witless that it’s completely laughable and wrong.

The post about Landrieu was titled, “There’s Still Something About Mary,” for the brain dead readers of “The Page” who would not otherwise get it.

Yes, this should be a firing offense, particularly after both Beck and Limbaugh literally called her a “prostitute,” but since it’s at the expense of a woman, I’m sure that the old boy’s club of journalism will just chuckle