A Halloween links round-up, via the WSJ Ideas Market blog.
Have a safe and happy Halloween!
Updates from October, 2011 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Jehuda
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The Onion Imitates Life: Remains Of Ancient Race Of Job Creators Found In Rust Belt.
And before too long, similar ruins shall surface in California…
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LUCKY DOG: Miracle Dog Survives Euthanasia.
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Heh: What does Google know about Mitt Romney’s chances that we don’t?
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Autumn afternoon with a neighbor’s dog…
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Street art item of the day. Don’t know how long this has been in the neighborhood…
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More on Moore’s hypocrisy from Prof. Douglas…
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Redistribution is a bitch, ain’t it? “Somebody cleaned out the PayPal account of “Occupy Portland” and it looks like an inside job”.
They couldn’t wait till after the revolution, I suppose…
Plus this: “Organizers of Occupy Portland…also say the group’s finance committee has hijacked the demonstration’s Internet domain name and filed for incorporation against the wishes of the group’s decision-making body.”
Irony is fun!
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RICH MAN, POOR MAN, YOU’RE NOT FOOLING ANYONE, MAN! MICHAEL MOORE: I’m Not Part Of The 1%!
I don’t know, Michael. How many people in the 99% do you know who’ve had their anti-capitalist documentaries made with Goldman Sachs’ backing?
Yes, you read that right. Goldman Sachs. The same Goldman Sachs who gives so generously to President Goldman Sachs…
Plus this: “It was a mistake to ever give me a dime from the day Time Warner actually gave me money to buy ‘Roger and Me.’ …I hope they rue the day that they ever allowed me up on a movie screens.”
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever. It’s not too late to correct that mistake, Michael. How about donating just enough money to the OWS crowd so that you can really be in the 99% and help them “up-end the system” in the process, as you say that you are trying to do?
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GOOD TIMES: Disastrous IP Legislation Is Back – And It’s Worse than EVER: “Under this bill, service providers (including hosting services) would be under new pressure to monitor and police their users’ activities. Websites that simply don’t do enough to police infringement (and it is not at all clear what would qualify as “enough”) are now under threat, even though the DMCA expressly does not require affirmative policing. It creates new enforcement tools against folks who dare to help users access sites that may have been “blacklisted,” even without any kind of court hearing. The bill also requires that search engines, payment providers (such as credit card companies and PayPal), and advertising services join in the fun in shutting down entire websites.”
Awful news for bloggers, webmasters, and anyone who hosts web content. I blame Hollywood…
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R.S. McCain on the GOP presidential field: Winners Never Quit.
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Don’t Believe the Hype: Above the Law: Obama’s ‘New’ Plans For Student Debt Are Not New In Any Way: “It’s all a bit patronizing. If the Obama administration had really been paying attention, they’d know that recent graduates want meaningful reform, not the piecemeal incremental efforts that we’ve seen so far…”
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World’s Smallest Violin: Michael Moore Calls Obama’s First Term ‘Heartbreaking,’ a ‘Disappointment’.
He can’t possibly be the only one feeling like this. But, evidently, we just can’t trust Michael Moore’s judgment…
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TRANSPARENCY: President Obama Holds Secret Meet-and-Greet with Hollywood Execs and Influencers.
Any chance they discussed this?
UPDATE: The San Francisco Chronicle has a word for it.
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European Design in the 21st Century? Ryanair Jetliner Caught In Duct-Taped Window Shocker.
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Cyberpunk Lives: Man Gets Smartphone Dock Built Into His Prosthetic Arm.
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Your Moment of Geek: Behold the Check DC Comics Wrote in 1938 for the Exclusive Rights to Superman.
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Going the Distance: Man Drives Honda 1 Million Miles.
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WITH VICTORIES LIKE THESE: Retreating With Our Heads Held High: “The humiliation of this retreat is compounded by the dishonesty of its presentation. Today, President Obama claimed that the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq was the centerpiece of the strategy he has been pursuing there since taking office. But that was not the sole or even primary objective of the strategy he announced five weeks after becoming president.”
It’s a foreign policy failure. Foreign policy is the one area where the Executive has plenary powers, so Obama has no Congress to blame; no “broken Washington” to whine about. He’s got nothing.
It’s the Obama White House at its most inept. He must spin it as a success.
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BEHIND THE CURVE: Actress Kathy Bates to CNN’s Piers Morgan: “Well, I think he’s got to indict these guys from Wall Street. Somebody’s got to pay for that mess.”
Yeah, but then who’ll pay for Obama’s campaign? They don’t call him President Goldman Sachs for nothing…
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I paid for *those* donuts, Mr. President!
Spotted on Facebook. The list is incomplete, of course. It omits rampant crony capitalism, pervasive unemployment, summary executions of U.S. citizens. I could go on. But that’s ok. They are all shameful things. Proves the author is human…and a hypocrite. Evidently, he or she must also believe that illegal wars become legal when there’s a Democrat in the White House.
It’s not a double standard. It’s the party line…
But the hurricane and “2nd Great Depression” things? Those are so ludicrous it’s pathetic. The author got desperate, it seems…
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Our neighborhood roadrunner, rewriting the old chicken-crossing-the-street thing.
The reason why this roadrunner crossed the street is that I stalked it across our front yard and into a neighbor’s so I could get a good snapshot of it; and it was trying to avoid me. The picture is heavily processed, obviously. Namely to disguise the annoying pixellation that resulted when I blew up the shot on my tablet. Thing is, all I had on me was my cellphone – which has a good-enough 8 megapixel digital camera in it – but not much of a zoom lens. The bird was barely noticeable in the frame. Had to do a blow-up…
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A dramatic moment at a stop sign, driving back from dinner last night…
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#OCCUPY WHATEVER: Not quite so useful idiots?
They don’t make them like they used to. It’s funny – and pathetic, too, I guess (and it must be especially frustrating for the Mother Jones/The Nation crowd out there) – that Obama can’t even get the class warfare payoff he’s been obviously working so hard to achieve. The community organizer from Chicago!
Alinsky – wherever he is – must be rolling his eyes and shaking his head. And has anyone seen Bill Ayers lately? If you catch a glimpse of an old man stomping on Old Glory while wearing a paper bag over his head, there’s a good chance that might be him….
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So, is the Iraq War over? Nope: Drones Mean the Iraq War Is Never Over.
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Resistance Is Futile? Facebook Building ‘Shadow Profiles’ Of Non-Members, Experts Allege.
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Yes, we can! President warns other Middle Eastern dictators that they could be next.
I think they call this the ‘Bush Doctrine’…
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Crime in the 21st Century: The Rise of ‘Flash Robs’.
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Joseph Bottum: The Destruction of Mexico.
Sad…
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Sheesh: Will Stunning Success in Libya Help Obama?
Only in the measure that the American electorate finds hypocrisy to be a desirable attribute, I guess…
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SHHH! Nobody tell Rolling Stone! Former U.S. Representative Arthur Davis (D-Alabama) [Wait? He's a Democrat? --ed. Yes. That's not a typo. Capital 'D'] : I should have supported Alabama’s voter ID law: “I think Alabama did the right thing in passing one — and I wish I had gotten it right when I was in political office.”
Plus this: “The most aggressive contemporary voter suppression in the African American community, at least in Alabama, is the wholesale manufacture of ballots, at the polls and absentee, in parts of the Black Belt.”
That’d be the principled view, anyway: voter fraud is disenfranchisement, just like voter suppression. We’ve enjoyed strong federal protection against voter suppression for decades, of course. Voter ID laws might be a novel idea by comparison, perhaps for obvious historical reasons. But the purpose of reasonable voter ID laws is to protect against voter fraud. And that’s a good thing, unless you don’t want voters to decide elections.
That’s why RS’s conspiracy theory du jour – that the voter ID laws that were enacted in several states recently are part of a “GOP war on voting” – is disingenuous, to say the least. In fact, voter ID would likely not be as popular a measure as it is today if in recent years ACORN hadn’t made a proverbial calling card out of voter registration fraud and other irregularities (for which scores of their employees nationwide got nabbed and convicted).
The shoe that’s yet to drop: How long before we hear that Mr. Davis is not “black enough”, you know, like some have been insinuating about Herman Cain?
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MOST ROMANTIC STORY OF THE
DAYMONTHYEAR: Couple Married 72 Years Dies Holding Hands: “He isn’t breathing. How does he still have a heart beat? The nurse checked and said that’s because they were holding hands and it’s going through them. Her heart was beating through him and picking it up.”You gotta admire that…
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FAILING UPWARDS: Keith Olbermann Is Paid $10 Million A Year to Lose Viewers.
Al Gore’s network is obviously getting robbed here, but that’s karma for you…
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The ‘What Percent Are You?’ Calculator: “An annual salary above $506,000 puts you in the top 1%, while you need to make less than $2,500 a year to be in the bottom 1%. Where do you stand?”
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Head in the Sand: Obama: “I believe all the choices we’ve made have been the right ones”.
Right for whom?
The GOP campaign ad just writes itself…
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Praise for Kelsey Grammer’s new series Boss, from THR: “Politics as a triumphant idea might have been a great forum for Aaron Sorkin to write soliloquies about tough choices and moral righteousness, but Boss strips it down to the ugly truth. Nobody is happy unless they win at all costs, ethics and morality take a beating when you’re trying to please constituents and stay elected, and people who seek power and then use it like a sword aren’t halo-wearing types.”
Sounds like a TV show for our times…
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Occupy This: Washington D.C. now richer than Silicon Valley: “Federal employees whose compensation averages more than $126,000 and the nation’s greatest concentration of lawyers helped Washington edge out San Jose as the wealthiest U.S. metropolitan area, government data show. “
Sounds like the federal government is experiencing more economic growth than the epicenter of American innovation. From a tech boom to a Fed boom in less than 2 decades. Good times.
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Telling Generation Y to get over themselves.
And as a proud Gen-X-er, I join in that sentiment…
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Shark Jump Complete: MTV Issues Casting Call For OWS Protesters.
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Frontiers of Advertising: Adweek: Could Mr. Hankey Become the Ad Mascot for Rectal Cancer?
