Twinsies

This post over at TPM inspired me. Others have already pointed out Newt's resemblence to Baron Harkonnen of Dune, but I didn't know was that Newt is also working with Glossu 'Beast' Rabban. His campaign makes perfect sense to me now.

Didn't make the cut

I haz a sad that my blog didn't make the list of intertron sites that the DHS monitors to "gauge the mood of the online populace."  Maybe this will help:

Mood of the populace:  Pissed off.

I'm also really curious how you get to be on the team that monitors those sites.  Job posting:  "wanted, people willing to trollbrowse blogs all day.  Horrible spelling is a must."

And are Facebook (and Myspace?  Really?) on that list just so that any fed when caught updating their profile at work can just say "This? Oh, this is just a little project I'm working on for DHS."

And the fact that they "monitor" Youtube actually makes me hope all they're doing is watching funny animal videos all day, because if they actually read any of the comment threads over there they're going to get a very, uh, interesting view of the world... Hmm, that could explain some things now that I think about it. Crap...

Coming soon to a protest near you!

Has pepper-spraying non-violent protesters lost its charm? Do you long for that adrenaline rush you felt the first time you bashed some hippy in the head, but no matter how many heads you bash, it's just not the same?

Have no fear! Our delightfully precocious military is developing all sorts of exciting new "non-lethal" weapons that will soon be "trickling down" to your local campus police force and average rent-a-cop.

Will zapping hippies with microwave guns or the awesometastic-sounding "Distributed Sound and Light Array" give you that same rush? We'll have to wait and see, but I'm sure the average authoritarian rent-a-thug is already furiously masturbating while imagining the screams and sounds of sizzling hippy-flesh as he anticipates these exciting new developments in weapon technology.

Happy new year!

What the fuck, Ron?

I'm normally quite supportive of Oregon's Senators, but this is just fucking ridiculous.

Brilliant plan there Ron, jump into bed with the biggest Ayn Rand freakizoid in the Republican party to "help fix" a popular social safety net program. You know, the safety net program that Randians hate with a burning passion and would do anything to destroy. I'm sure that'll turn out just fine. Gah!

I really, really hope there's some unseen cunning plan of Wyden's that I'm just not seeing, but I don't think there is.

Fuck.

What could possibly go wrong?

Yeah, the Obama administration is really pro-regulation. Sure:

under a new two-year pilot program at the USDA, regulators are training the world's biggest biotech firms, including Monsanto, BASF and Syngenta, to conduct environmental reviews of their own transgenic seed products as part of the government's deregulation process.

I'm sure that will work out just fine, just like every instance of an industry regulating itself. And I have this really nice bridge for sale, with some prime swampland too!

Less war? Moar War?

I know I'm pretty harsh on the Obama administration's continuation of shrub's "all war, all the time" plan, but I gotta give them props for actually, hopefully, getting out of Iraq like we promised we would. I must also give a hearty "whew, glad that worked out OK" to the efforts in Libya -- looks like things there surprised me as well. I'm very happy to be wrong on that one. Well done on both those.

Now, can we please stop bombing the crap out of Pakistan? We've already been poking the hornet's nest that is "our ally" for a while, with mixed results. Can we finish up our other ongoing wars before we start one with a nuclear-armed country? Pretty please?

I'll just leave these here

That was posted by somebody 5 years ago. Some of the photos at the end make sense in that context, but not so much now.



That song was recorded by Steve Earle in... 2004