More silliness from the Bay State:
Governor Deval Patrick, even as he decried partisanship in Washington, said today that Republican opposition to President Obama’s agenda has become so obstinate that it “is almost at the level of sedition.”
We get it, OK? We can’t question your patriotism (and haven’t), but you can call us traitors any time you like.
But do you have to keep rubbing it in?
That health care bill nobody read before passing? The one with tax credits to encourage small businesses to hire? Yeah, that one?
Well, it turns out the tax credits are having the opposite effect — suppressing small-business job-creation.
It’s almost as if total ignorance can’t overcome the law of unintended consequences.
Who knew?
Am I reading too much into it, or did Peter Beinart really spend an entire column arguing that President Obama’s Afghanistan policy is just too-darned clever for West Point grads to appreciate?
So I read the headline, “Bill Clinton Rear Ended… ” and my first thought was, Who?
For some all-new uses, the future of the printed page is LCD:
Here’s an intriguing idea: author Neal Stephenson and a few friends (including Greg Bear and Nicole Galland) are going to be releasing a set of serialized stories as apps for the iPad and the iPhone. The project is called “The Mongoliad,” and is based on a world designed by Stephenson (author of the great novels Snow Crash and The Diamond Age).
The apps will present “an ongoing stream of nontextual, para-narrative, and extra-narrative stuff,” and even ask readers to interact and create their own stories in the universe with some “pretty cool tech.” Interesting.
My iPad cannot get here soon enough.
Did you see the story off of Drudge this weekend, about the Saudi religious police? Check it out:
When a Saudi religious policeman sauntered about an amusement park in the eastern Saudi Arabian city of Al-Mubarraz looking for unmarried couples illegally socializing, he probably wasn’t expecting much opposition.
But when he approached a young, 20-something couple meandering through the park together, he received an unprecedented whooping.
A member of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the Saudi religious police known locally as the Hai’a, asked the couple to confirm their identities and relationship to one another, as it is a crime in Saudi Arabia for unmarried men and women to mix.
For unknown reasons, the young man collapsed upon being questioned by the cop.
According to the Saudi daily Okaz, the woman then allegedly laid into the religious policeman, punching him repeatedly, and leaving him to be taken to the hospital with bruises across his body and face.
Of course, violence against legal authorities is always to be disdained. But the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice isn’t any legal authority as we understand it. They’re thugs, thugs with quasi-legal/religious authority and clubs. They once drove 15 schoolgirls back inside a burning building to die, because the girls weren’t modestly covered.
So it’s difficult to get too upset when you read that one woman took one small step toward liberation.
We’ve got the second-to-last man to walk on the moon on this week’s PJM Political — Harrison Schmidt — to talk about climate science. Who else? Ed Driscoll, Jennifer Rubin, James Lileks, PJTV’s Tracie Savage, California Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, and a whole lot of stuff about Rand Paul.
Here’s John Gruber on the Apple vs Google slugfest for dominance in smartphones — and eventually, in consumer electronics:
It’s exciting, vicious, fun to watch, and ultimately should prove to be excellent news for consumers. Competition drives innovation and innovation raises the bar for everyone. And the bar, for smartphones, is rising quickly.
Like any great rivalry, there are striking differences between the two competitors. Apple and Google are jostling to shift the comparison between the two platforms to their very different strengths. Apple’s strengths: user experience, design, consistency. Google’s strengths: the cloud, variety, permissiveness.
He’s right. But what’s interesting is who isn’t mentioned: Microsoft and Sony. Those two behemoths have been pretty much shut out already, and the contest is only just getting underway.
Just saw a Twitter claim that the AP has called Sestak the winner in PA, but can’t find the story.
Rocky Mountain Blogger Bash — Friday night.
In Arkansas, Blanche Lincoln got caught trying vote for herself, a second time.
Stacy McCain has boots on the ground in PA-12.
UPDATE: Meanwhile, in Kentucky, Dave Weigel tweets, “Guys, Trey Grayson is FROM Boone County and he’s losing it by 30 points. This is a slaughter. #kysen”
Now, Rand Paul’s a little too libertarian even for my tastes — but I think we need more voices like his in DC. I hope it is a slaughter.
UPDATE THE SECOND: AP calls it for Paul. And now, all eyes turn to Pennsylvania…
UPDATE THE THIRD: This is going to be an epic night, if the Guardian is already making the case that “November is still far away.” All I can say is, it’s later than you think.
Two medical stories out of Texas this morning. First up, Lone Star docs are dropping Medicare patients at accelerating rates:
Two years after a survey found nearly half of Texas doctors weren’t taking some new Medicare patients, new data shows 100 to 200 a year are now ending all involvement with the program. Before 2007, the number of doctors opting out averaged less than a handful a year.
“This new data shows the Medicare system is beginning to implode,” said Dr. Susan Bailey, president of the Texas Medical Association. “If Congress doesn’t fix Medicare soon, there’ll be more and more doctors dropping out and Congress’ promise to provide medical care to seniors will be broken.”
Next up, doctors willing to see Medicare patients are more and more likely to have come from Third World medical schools:
Of the roughly 1,500 doctors who have received fast-tracked licenses in the last three years in exchange for agreeing to treat the state’s neediest patients, nearly 40 percent were trained at international schools, everywhere from India and Mexico to Uzbekistan and Rwanda, and a quarter were trained in Texas. The Texas Medical Board fast-tracked more licenses for doctors trained in Pakistan than it did for those educated in Louisiana or Oklahoma.
And there you have it. The best and brightest doctors aren’t willing to work for slave wages (relatively speaking, but still), and the doctors who are willing — surprise! — might not be nearly as well trained.
Sure, Harvard will keep producing lawyers, but fewer of our best and brightest will be attending medical school. And that indicates lower overall quality of care for everyone down the line.
Of course, there’s a solution for doctors who won’t treat Medicare/Medicaid patients. It’s called “single payer.” That’s when, doctors either take government payment and nothing but government payment, or they stop being doctors.
That’s the Progressive dream, and an American nightmare.
But for PJTV? Oh, yeah.
On the new Hair of the Dog, we’ve got flying pigs, Megyn Kelly, and an all-new recipient of the fabled Dumbass Designation.
Check it out.
It took some time, but the Mainstream Media is, finally, starting to get sick and tired of being President Obama’s rubes. Here’s the latest example, from CBS:
There was some rich irony at the White House today — President Obama signed the Press Freedom Act, and then promptly refused to take any questions.
That’s the lede to a story on some puff-piece legislation for the State Department. After a two-line summary of the new law, there’s this:
Recall that last Friday the president refused to take any questions after delivering his angry statement on the oil spill in the Rose Garden. And he has not held a prime-time White House news conference in many months, despite much pleading from pundits and members of the media.
Put plainly, the story — the narrative — has changed. The press used to just spoon feed you whatever the White House wanted you to swallow. But now? Now, the story is becoming: “Obama treats us like crap.” Or, to put it more simply: “Waaaaaaaaaaah!”
MSM, I’m glad you’re finally catching on. But what took you so long?
You’ll never look at Sim City the same way again.
And I’m sure there’s a comment to be made here about social planning, but I’m too dumbstruck to make it right now.
If you missed the new Week in Blogs — what’s wrong with you? More seriously, one of this week’s picks was a photo essay on everyday life in Iran, before the Islamic Revolution. Happy people. Fun people. People who look a lot like, well, happy fun Western people.
Ed Driscoll was moved by it, and wrote some words you’ll want to read.
Dear Self-Defeating Fools,
You’re out of control, and it’s got to stop. You think you’re helping us. You think you’re helping your employers. Of course, what you’re actually doing as annoying us all to hell and making us hate your employer. Just because you can do a thing, doesn’t mean you should. Allow me to give you three examples.
Let a hyperlink be a hyperlink. When I want a link to open in a new window, I know the key combination to make that happen. When I want a link to open in a new tab, I know the key combination to make that happen, too. And when I want a link simply to take me to the got-dam link, I want it to do just that thing. Your tricky little HTML code to make my browser behave the way you want it to, just makes me hate your site. Mmkay?
Oh, and that goes double for Flash-based sites, where Whomever only knows what will happen at any given moment. Stop it.
Get out of my clipboard. Let me repeat that: Get out of my clipboard. Don’t put things in there I didn’t highlight myself. I’m talking to you, Politico. Want to know why I almost never quote Politico stories anymore? Look at this screencap from a Politico story, and take note of the highlighted text:
The highlighted text is what I expect to find when I paste. But take a look at what Politico’s idiot/rude/stupid/abusive webmaster has done:
That’s right — they’ve put an effing advertisement, and a working link, in my clipboard. Of course, the link doesn’t work as-is, when I post the text to VodkaPundit. So even if by some stupid chance I did want their ad, it doesn’t do me (or Politico) any good. So, every time I post text from Politico, they force me to delete a bunch of extraneous stuff.
In short, Politico’s idiot/rude/stupid/abusive webmaster makes it more difficult for me to send him traffic. Or as we call traffic here on the innerwebs: Money. So I don’t do it anymore, unless I absolutely must. Which is near-never.
Finally, get over the whole hover-command thing for ads/Diggs/Tweets/menus/etc. If I don’t click it, it shouldn’t pop up — just like every single other thing on my computer has behaved for almost 20 years. And if I didn’t click it, I certainly shouldn’t have to click it to make it go away. I’m sick and tired of having to spend half my time worried about where my cursor is, when all I’m trying to do is scroll down your page. And if I’m scrolling down your page, it’s to see if I want to quote it, and send traffic your way. Don’t make it a pain-in-the-rear for me to send you money. Dig?
Most of the smarter webmasters finally gave up on popover, popunder and click-the-monkey trickery. Now it’s time for you to give up on the rest.
Yours,
-Steve.
PS Bit.ly, this all goes triple for you — you suck now. I’m taking my business elsewhere.
We had so fun putting together this week’s PJM Political for Sirius/XM Satellite Radio. So much so, that now we’re putting it on the web so everyone can enjoy it.
On the big show, we’ve got James Lileks, Glenn Reynolds with David Kirkham, the good folks in Little Miami from Babalu Blog, advice goddess Amy Alkon, and a double dose of my unrequited voice-crush*, Dr. Helen Smith.
From The Hill:
The new healthcare law will pack 32 million newly insured people into emergency rooms already crammed beyond capacity, according to experts on healthcare facilities.
A chief aim of the new healthcare law was to take the pressure off emergency rooms by mandating that people either have insurance coverage. The idea was that if people have insurance, they will go to a doctor rather than putting off care until they faced an emergency.
People who build hospitals, however, say newly insured people will still go to emergency rooms for primary care because they don’t have a doctor.
Huh. So Obamapelosireid crammed a 2,700-page bill through Congress, without enough time to even read it, much less reflect on it, and yet somehow things aren’t working out how the Invisible Legislation Fairy promised they would?
Huh again.
It’s another exciting installment of The Week in Blogs!
As always — or at least as I’ve done lately — you’ll find the links in the comments section.
Governor Schwarzenegger’s proposed $12.4 billon in cuts to California’s budget would reduce state spending to levels unseen since… 2008!
Surely, Californians were suffering a from a dearth of government all those years ago.
In 2008, Barack Obama had John McCain playing defense in Arizona.
What are the odds President Obama will manage the same trick against the GOP candidate in 2012?
All your Ground Zero are belong to us.
It’s the last flight of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, so here’s a complete history of her hits and near-misses.
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