A Spork in the Drawer

Robbing Peter To Pay Paul

posted by gyma

Or in this case: robbing students to pay overcompensated academic windbags. Even the Regents at the University of Colorado are unhappy about being lied to last year when they agreed to a 9.3% tuition hike. They believed some of the money raised by the tuition hike would be used as a merit-based salary pool to reward overperforming faculty and staff.

But what did CU do with the money?

They increased the Chancellor's salary from $340,000 to $389,000 because it's hard to find a good Chancellor these days.They also gave the freakin' Human Resources Director a $30,000 raise, increasing her salary to $240,000.

In addition to these two, 7 more top administrators received pay raises in excess of $10,000.

So what are they going to do now? Ask for a 15.7% increase in tuition next year, because lord knows you can't live comfortably on $390K!

Here's An Excellent Use For Post-Its

posted by gyma

I actually have a post-it note covering the lens on my computer's webcam. I put it there a couple of weeks ago when I was setting up a webinar and didn't want to see myself on the monitor. I left it there and since reading this article in GQ, I'll likely not remove it.

Not that I ever do anything at my computer or in my office I wouldn't want broadcast to millions of viewers.

This is a very scary story about hacking into computers with webcams and virtually stalking you. This guy was so good he knew everything about the people he hacked. He had access to not only a view of the room where the computer was, but also helped himself to everything on the hard drive and remotely installed keystroke logging software so he could access password-protected accounts. He also claimed to have figured out a way to disable the glowing LED light so you'd never know when he was watching.

By the time authorites tracked down the hacker he had amassed over 15,000 webcam-video captures, 900 audio recordings, and 13,000 screen captures from more than 230 victims.

As 'smart' as this guy was he did one thing wrong. He failed to protect his identity when registering domain names!

Would Livestreaming Voters In The Act Prevent Voter Fraud?

posted by gyma

Vladimir Putin seems to think so. Or he has a financial interest in the company that will be doing the livestreaming. He's talking about installing more than 90,000 web cameras at polling stations at a cost of $840 million. (I'm thinking about investing in web camera technology!)

I expect Republicans to introduce similar legislation any day now.

Magic Underwear Not Belonging To Mitt

posted by gyma

For some reason unbeknownst to us, Newtie isn't going after Mitt's magic underwear. But once Rush Limbaugh hears the claim that Michelle Obama spent $50K on lingerie, all hell's gonna break loose.

At least she isn't using taxpayer money for it! And as far as we know, the only people benefiting from it are the POTUS and FLOTUS.

And like most things about the Obamas, it's probably hogwash.

Warped At An Early Age

posted by gyma

This politician was warped at a very early age and not much has changed since then. As the story goes, one of his young friends would pretend to beat him up and leave him crumpled at the curb. When cars would stop to see what was wrong, this prankster would jump up and yell, "Surprise!". It was so much fun they'd do it over and over and over again.

(photo/Robin Nelson/ZUMA)

Guess who?

This Crap Just Pisses Me Off

posted by gyma

Must be a rounding error:

(CNN) -- The U.S. Defense Department cannot account for about $2 billion it was given to cover Iraq-related expenses and is not providing Iraq with a complete list of U.S.-funded reconstruction projects, according to two new government audits.

[snip]

The Iraqi government in 2004 gave the Department of Defense access to about $3 billion to pay bills for certain contracts, and the department can only show what happened to about a third of that, the inspector general says in an audit published Friday.

Republicans, of course, want us all to believe Obama is gutting, gutting the military. Considering the sloppy handling of their budget, perhaps this is a good thing.

 

There Are Nice Libertarian Islands Being Built For People Like That

Athenae.

.

Because It's Sunday

posted by gyma

Lookin' for redemption? Here ya go!

I'm thinking that's a mirror on Jesus' belly. If not, this is the first pregnant Jesus I've ever seen!

And if you think this is a joke, you'd be dead wrong.

Saturday Palate Cleanser

Milk gives you pep and energy!

.

Words, They Are A-Written

George Fwill:

Obama, an unfettered executive wielding a swollen state [...]

People marching in serried ranks [...]

fused into a solid mass by the heat of martial ardor [...]

proceeding in lock step [...]

obedient to orders from a commanding officer [...]

Mr. Will also uses the word "equipoise", which isn't common, and clearly indicates intelligence, even verbosity, and has nothing to do with horses.

.

Id

What fuels them:

"I think it’s about time the Republican Party put somebody up not because it’s their turn,” said Carroll Jaskulski, 63, who works in real estate, “but somebody who will get in the opposition’s face."

[...]

“I got up out of my couch when he did what he did in South Carolina,” said Stephanie Garlin, 49, a real estate agent in Fort Lauderdale, recalling a standing ovation for Mr. Gingrich. “There’s something I feel about that man — that he has the strength and the ability and the forcefulness to win this election.”

Feeling important is what's important.

.

"Chuck"

Did Fedak and Schwartz intend us to hate the last five years of our lives?

The invasion of Italy back in '43 was less painful.

.

Sweet, Sweet Music

posted by gyma

I saw this the other day somewhere else and failed to bookmark it. I don't know that much about Steve Schmidt other than he was an advisor to the Grandpa Walnuts 2008 presidential campaign. Failed presidential campaign, I might add.

Regardless, he sat down and talked to Rachel Maddow recently and had this to say about Newtie:

Not only are we not moving toward a coalescing of support with the establishment of Newt Gingrich, we're probably moving toward a declaration of war on Newt Gingrich by the Republican establishment. And if Newt Gingrich is able to win the Florida primary, you will see a panic and a meltdown of the Republican establishment that is beyond my ability to articulate in the English language. [emphasis added]

People will go crazy. And you will have this five week period until the Super Tuesday states that will be just as unpredictable, tumultuous as any period in modern American politics. It will be a remarkable thing to watch, should that happen in Florida.

Heh. Popcorn, anyone?

 

I'll Give The Right This

They forced me to read Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals.

I fail to see what the hubbub is.

.

That Stupid "Angry Drunk Bureaucrat" Said Something Stupid

And this is the result:

Wait...I'm the one who did all the Photoshop work! Curses! You've bested me for the last time, O!

.

Petard. Hoist. Own.

It's tempting to gloat about Citizens United biting its sponsors on the ass but it's still a nasty bit of legislation judiciaryness.

.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 7.14AM, 53°F

Things are passing strange.

.

I've Got Nothing Today

So here's Stephen Colbert's two-part interview with the brilliant (and very cranky) Maurice Sendak:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Recommended viewing!

.

Me And The Mittens

posted by gyma

How depressing. Mitt makes my annual salary in less than 15 hours. AND he isn't even doing anything productive in those 15 hours!

Go here and you too can be depressed.

Scalping Funeral Tickets

posted by gyma

I wonder if this is a first?

Local newspaper Centre Daily Times reports that free tickets were distributed for admission to the 16,000-seat stadium where the service is being held. Then, it seems, greed kicked in. “It took only minutes more for pairs of the tickets to start showing up on eBay,” the article says.

[snip]

At least one seller tried to get around eBay’s ban on selling free tickets by throwing in a T-shirt commemorating Paterno, but eBay pulled the listing anyway — although not before bidding had climbed to $80,000.

Holy cow, $80,000?

I Guess I've Never Flown Alaska Airlines

posted by gyma

I'm fairly certain I would have remembered these if I had flown AA:

Alaska Airlines flight attendants will cease a 30-year practice of handing out prayer cards with meals this February, the Seattle Times reports. The religious notes, which feature quotes from the Book of Psalms, began as a marketing campaign to put passengers at ease during the 1970s.

My first reaction was, "They still serve meals?". Further reading makes it clear the cards have only been handed out to first class passengers since 2006 when they stopped serving meals to the peon class.

Would you be surprised to learn the airlines gets more complaints about this than compliments?

_________

ADDED: One of the co-founders of Starbucks says in the link that his immediate reaction was that the airlines must be worried something bad was going to happen if they were giving out these cards. And if they were worried, he was worried. Heh.

Smile!*

posted by gyma

Anyone remember something called Fukushima? It hasn't been in the news much of late, most likely because Mitt and Newt are sucking all the oxygen out of the news cycle. And we all know reporting about the political horse race is so much more fun than say, reporting about how your government is fucking you over when it comes to radiation!

From The Big Picture:

Nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen says that high-level friends in the State Department told him that Hillary Clinton signed a pact with her counterpart in Japan agreeing that the U.S. will continue buying seafood from Japan, despite that food not being tested for radioactive materials.

So yeah, the above is hearsay so it's difficult to vouch for its veracity. But what if it's true?

Remember which way the ocean currents flow and you'll understand that soon even seafood caught along the west coast of the U.S. might not be safe for consumption. But you'll never know.

Ha, the joke's on you! Seriously, go read the entire post at the link.

*

 

The Liberal-Communist-Nazi Conspiracy To Control Your Garden

It's getting warmer:

On Wednesday, the Department of Agriculture unveiled what most gardeners have known for years: a new plant hardiness zone map that shows generally warmer low temperatures for winter than the department’s previous map from 1990.

For what it's worth, my crocuseses came up a couple of weeks ago and a few started to develop flowers. A cold snap and five inches of snow put an end to that - despite the fact that two days later it was 55° of Fahrenheit and sunny.

.

Normally This Would Be Good News

posted by gyma

The problem I have with this news is that I have little faith In who Obama would choose as his replacement. Lloyd Blankfein?

Newton Leroy Gingrich, Dreamer Of Small Things

The Moon?! Think big, Newt:

.

Theocracy Wow!

Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally sing a creationist anthem:

[Via AV Club.]

.

Separated At Birth?

posted by gyma

Any "The Office" fans out there?

[via]

This Is Outrageous

posted by gyma

Well, in fairness it would be outrageous if the pin were on the other lapel. I find it interesting that since Republicans trained Democrats, pavlovian style, to dutifully wear flag lapel pins, they've stopped wearing them.

(AP photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

See how Biden and Obama are both wearing flag pins but Boehner isn't? How long before Republicans start whining about how Democrats are desecrating the flag?

Go ahead and laugh but this is what Republicans do.

What The Hell?

posted by gyma

In the week that saw Gabby Giffords resign from Congress, Democratic state lawmakers in Missouri found crosshair stickers stuck to their office doors and a Democratic campaign manager came home to a dead pet cat with 'liberal' scrawled across it.

WTF is the matter with these people?

WTF Wednesday

posted by gyma

This week is a different kind of WTF. Not weird, but amazingly unbelievable. I've never, ever seen anything like it. You have to watch to the end to get the full effect.

I tried finding a better quality video but this was the best I could find.

[first seen at kottke]

Brave

The vaguely lifelike Callista Gingrich saves her husband's life.

.

Brave New World

Land of the free.

Corporations own your identity; the government owns everything else.

.

No Escape

Be evil:

[Google] announced Tuesday that it plans to follow the activities of users across nearly all of its ubiquitous sites, including YouTube, Gmail and its leading search engine.

Google has already been collecting some of this information. But for the first time, it is combining data across its Web sites to stitch together a fuller portrait of users.

Translation: KA-CHING!!!

The move will help Google better tailor its ads to people’s tastes. If someone watches an NBA clip online and lives in Washington, the firm could advertise Washington Wizards tickets in that person’s Gmail account … [w]hen someone is searching for the word “jaguar,” Google would have a better idea of whether the person was interested in the animal or the car. Or the firm might suggest e-mailing contacts in New York when it learns you are planning a trip there.

Google says that "consumers could … benefit"; one has the admire the passive, squishy phrasing.

The changes take effect 1 March. There will be no op-out whatsoever.

[Via Kevin Drum.]

.

Beyond Parody

An Oklahoma state senator introduces a bill to outlaw the use of human fetuses in food. Sen. Ralph Shortey says, "I don’t know if it is happening in Oklahoma, it may be, it may not be".

Anything I could add would be superfluous.

.

Sarah Palin On Chris Christie On Newt Gingrich

posted by gyma

Here I was hoping Sarah Palin had decided life wasn't worth living and had relegated herself to an ice floe adrift in the Bering Sea. Sadly, that is not the case.

Every now and then Roger Ailes feels sorry for Palin and lets her speak her mind. Her most recent word salad had something to do with Chris Christie getting his 'panties in a wad' because he said something negative about the man who is going to make her Secretary of State (or something) if he becomes President.

What I want to know is, why does Sarah believe Christie even wears panties instead of these?

And also, too, panties?!

Proud American

posted by gyma

Mr. Wingnut himself is touting the fact that Romney supports a very strange religion more than he supports his country, because the charity referred to in that tweet is the Morman church.

Hell yeah, America First!

Brilliant Ideas

posted by gyma

Just another one of Newt's brilliant ideas:

Before Newt Gingrich left Congress, he sponsored a piece of legislation that ought to haunt him to this day: the Drug Importer Death Penalty Act of 1996. Had it passed, anyone convicted of bringing drugs into the United States above a modest threshold -- more than two ounces of marijuana, for example -- would have automatically been imprisoned for life. Repeat offenders would be executed.

O-Kay.

Ezra Klein claims this harsh penalty would apply to those bringing into the U.S. two ounces or more of marijuana.

Sounds about right.

 

Congratulations Are In Order

Steve Benen

.

Bushland? Gingrichland?? Cheneyland???

posted by gyma

Which one of our failed politicians should we use as a theme park? The French have chosen Napolean.

The Battle of Waterloo, which put an end to Napoleon's rule in France, is expected to be recreated on a daily basis and visitors may even be able to take part in the reenactments.

They will also be able to take in a water show recreating the Battle of Trafalgar.

A museum, a hotel, shops, restaurants and a congress are all expected to be built at the park.

Planners are also hoping to recreate the killing of Louis XVI, France's last King, who died after being guillotined during the Revolution.

And in another attraction visitors may be able to ski around the bodies of soldiers and horses frozen on the battlefield.

Oh, the possibilities!

Moneyball

posted by gyma

I fell asleep after about 30 minutes of this movie and although Mr. gyma watched the entire thing he didn't give it high marks. So...

Will someone please tell me why everyone's talking about this movie? Do I need to see it again?!

This Is Why We Won't Get Single Payer Health Care

posted by gyma

Because the majority of our elected officals can afford this type of health care, they don't really see the need for providing reasonable health care for us schlubs:

The bed linens were by Frette, Italian purveyors of high-thread-count sheets to popes and princes. The bathroom gleamed with polished marble. Huge windows displayed panoramic East River views. And in the hush of her $2,400 suite, a man in a black vest and tie proffered an elaborate menu and told her, “I’ll be your butler.” It was Greenberg 14 South, the elite wing on the new penthouse floor of New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital.

Waterfalls, grand pianos, Bose stereos, mushroom risotto with heirloom tomatoes. Well you get the idea.

 

Sad Facts

posted by gyma

According to this terrific essay in The New Yorker by Adam Gropnik, we've effectively institutionalized slavery:

More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

According to Gopnik, [edited to fix typo] the number of incarcerations in this country have more than tripled in the last 30 years. And in the last 20 years the amount spent on prisons is 6 times greater than the amount spent on higher education. Imagine what the unemployment rate would be without such harsh incarceration rates.

Smoke a joint, get caught, go to jail. In many cases you can no longer vote (not that it means anything these days, but still...) and you'll likely not have any luck getting hired. So you commit another crime, this one more serious than smoking a joint, because your options are so limited.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

That and this is why we can't have nice things.

The New GOP Stupid

Lead isn't harmful to people.

Next up: "Mercury: Gateway to Neurological Health!"; "Your Friend, Dioxin!"; and "Hemlock: Good enough for Socrates, Good enough for You!".

.

Or Not

No, I've never thought 9/11, I've always thought Saul Bass. Perhaps the producers/designers were intentionally referencing the Day that Changed Everything™ - it wouldn't surprise given the time - but the sequence evokes (to me, at least) "falling" as a psychological state (one misstep and it's Failuresville), not to mention the well-worn cliché of businessmen jumping to their deaths after the Great Crash of 1929. Mostly, though, I just find the exercise of Reductio ad Nineëlevenum to be tedious and unproductive.

"Mad Men":

Saul Bass:





(Click images to embiggen.)

At any rate, I like the typically minimalist fifth season poster:

.

My Annual Reminder

This is the day I take to reflect on my hearty dislike for President Woodrow Wilson. He was the dumb bastard who decided to make a tradition of presidents showing up before Congress to deliver the State of the Union - and this was before Wilson turned himself into a nasty authoritarian.

Of course, it was another president, Ronald Wilson Reagan, who turned it into to nauseating PR display we have to live with now; oh look, there's AN AMERICAN HERO! sitting with the First Lady and important campaign contributors her friends!

While you're busy watching the festivities tonight, or drinking heavily, or both, reflect on the speech that Obama should give, courtesy of Squatlo. I'd pay real money to see that. Hell, I'd even vote for the guy.

The Villain

.

It Would Never Happen Here

Too many companies' profits would be lowered by a percentage point or two:

The [European] regulation would compel Web sites to tell consumers why their data is being collected and retain it for only as long as necessary. If data is stolen, sites would have to notify regulators within 24 hours. It also offers consumers the right to transport their data from one service to another — to deactivate a Facebook account, for example, and take one’s trove of pictures and posts and contacts to Google Plus.

[...]

One of the most contested provisions of the European law is the so-called right to be forgotten, which refers to an Internet user’s right to demand that his or her accumulated data on a particular site be deleted forever. “When a citizen has asked to get it back, then the data has to be given back,” Ms. Reding said in the interview. “When an individual no longer wants his data to be processed, it will be deleted.”

American companies are great believers in "self-regulation" - meaning they do what they want when they want - because actual regulation would be a "hindrance to innovation" - meaning they would be unable to do what they want when they want. And given that our entire political system is devoted to maximizing the profits of future lobbyists - hello, Chris Dodd! - and the generally accepted proposition that the business of America is business - hello, Calvin Coolidge! - I would expect neither hope nor change anytime soon. Or in this lifetime.

.

Popcorn Time

2008 McCain campaign manager Steve Schmitt:

Look, I think, not only are we not moving towards a coalescing of support by the Republican establishment for Newt Gingrich, we're probably moving toward the declaration of war on Newt Gingrich by the Republican establishment. And if Newt Gingrich is able to win the Florida primary, you will see a panic and a meltdown of the Republican establishment that is beyond my ability to articulate in the English language.

Works for me.

.

Noted Without Comment

Okay, one comment: no old-timey gold prospector doll? That's a pity.

[From TPM2012.]

.