Major Source of Online Scams and Spams Knocked Offline - Security Fix:
"Two hours later, I heard from Benny Ng, director of marketing for Hurricane Electric, the Fremont, Calif., company that was the other major Internet provider for McColo.Hurricane Electric took a much stronger public stance: 'We shut them down,' Ng said."
(Via Security Fix.)
Hurricane Electric is a great service provider. Plenty of power. No frills. The dark side I guess is this is a spammer's dream.
The Word - Mad Men | Wednesday November 19 | ColbertNation.com:
""
(Via The Colbert Nation.)
Steve brings the moneytheism gospel.
The Word - Pity Party | Wednesday November 12 | ColbertNation.com:
""
(Via The Colbert Nation.)
Classic conservatism? Victims whenever they lose?
"It pains me to deliver this sobering news to those who think Obama will wave his hand and erase whole ghettos: Barack Obama is a black President, not black Jesus."
(Via Time Magazine.)
PREACH!
Op-Ed Columnist - How to Fix a Flat - NYTimes.com:
"‘In return for any direct government aid,’ he wrote, ‘the board and the management [of G.M.] should go. Shareholders should lose their paltry remaining equity. And a government-appointed receiver — someone hard-nosed and nonpolitical — should have broad power to revamp G.M. with a viable business plan and return it to a private operation as soon as possible."
(Via NY Times.)
Amen. Been saying this for all government bailouts. Incompetence should not be rewarded and put in charge of fixing itself.
Op-Ed Contributor - Anti-Gay, Anti-Family - NYTimes.com:
"Most ominous, once ‘pro-family’ groups start arguing that gay couples are unfit to raise children we might adopt, how long before they argue that we’re unfit to raise those we’ve already adopted? If lesbian couples are unfit to care for foster children, are they fit to care for their own biological children?The loss in California last week was heartbreaking. But what may be coming next is terrifying."
(Via NY Times.)
Why the so-called "pro-family" agenda is all anti-gay and very little family.
Decision 2008 - Gary & Gary Unmarried | The Daily Show | Comedy Central:
""
(Via The Daily Show.)
Embarrassment.
Washington Memo - Harsh Words About Obama? Never Mind Now - NYTimes.com:
"‘I don’t think that’s happened very often,’ Ms. Goodwin said. ‘The best answer I can give you is they don’t want to be on the wrong side of history, and they recognize how the country saw this election, and how people feel that they’re living in a time of great historic moment.’"
(Via NY Times.)
Biz Markie would be proud.
What an Obama Presidency Means for Technology — RoughlyDrafted Magazine:
"Rather than answering to big contributors, Obama now faces a different constituency: the people of the United States. The new president will now face an expectation for the same level of support that individuals have come to expect from companies on the web."
(Via Roughly Drafted Magazine.)
One of the sea changes this election made in my view is that Obama showed that technology can be a real democratizer. Accelerating this process will make government more transparent and directly accountable to the people.
Senior Iraqi backs Obama withdrawal plan - Yahoo! News:
"A senior Iraqi official on Thursday explicitly backed U.S. President-elect Barack Obama's plans to withdraw combat troops from the country by mid-2010, Baghdad's clearest endorsement yet of Obama's exit strategy."
(Via Yahoo! News.)
This was obvious to me. It seemed like Bush-McCain-Leiberman types all wanted to stay until "victory" could be declared. Whatever that meant. It seems to me that if you are fighting for democracy, you leave because the people say so.
Indecision 2008: America's Choice - Barack Obama Wins:
""
(Via Indecision 2008.)
It's deep when comics well up with emotion.
More on Prop 8 - Ta-Nehisi Coates:
"But if you believe black people are not just receptacles for bigotry, not just automatons programmed by centuries of racism, if you believe they consume oxygen like the Irish, that they ingest solid food like the Italians, that they enjoy a good drink like the denizens of Appalachia, that they like to party like gays of any color, that they like to dance like white women, then you understand that no group, anywhere, ever was ennobled by oppression."
(Via The Atlantic.)
Embarrassing on a day we should be about freedom.
I voted yesterday morning and had an emotional moment. I took my son into the booth and saw Barack's name with "President" underneath it. Everything else blurred out and all I could see was his name. I pressed the button and lit it up. I realized I was about to live history. I looked at my son and thought, "My son could do this." I pressed the "VOTE" button, left the booth, and my eyes welled up.
Yes We Can. This is why America is the greatest country in the world.
"Today it is conservatives, not liberals, who talk with alarming bellicosity about making the world ‘safe for democracy.’ It is John McCain who says America’s job is to ‘defeat evil,’ a theological expansion of the nation’s mission that would make George Washington cough out his wooden teeth.This kind of conservatism, which is not conservative at all, has produced financial mismanagement, the waste of human lives, the loss of moral authority, and the wreckage of our economy that McCain now threatens to make worse.
Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for president. (In fact, I made the maximum donation to John McCain during the primaries, when there was still hope he might come to his senses.) But I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.
Most important, Obama will be a realist. I doubt he will taunt Russia, as McCain has, at the very moment when our national interest requires it as an ally. The crucial distinction in my mind is that, unlike John McCain, I am convinced he will not impulsively take us into another war unless American national interests are directly threatened."
(Via D Magazine.)
Wow. Like the Reagan Democrats before them, prepare for the Obama Republicans!
An endorsement of Barack Obama | It's time | The Economist:
"For all the shortcomings of the campaign, both John McCain and Barack Obama offer hope of national redemption. Now America has to choose between them. The Economist does not have a vote, but if it did, it would cast it for Mr Obama. We do so wholeheartedly: the Democratic candidate has clearly shown that he offers the better chance of restoring America’s self-confidence. But we acknowledge it is a gamble. Given Mr Obama’s inexperience, the lack of clarity about some of his beliefs and the prospect of a stridently Democratic Congress, voting for him is a risk. Yet it is one America should take, given the steep road ahead."
(Via The Economist.)
A clear eyed endorsement. Contrast that with their succinct criticism of McCain. Remember when McCain claimed how no one could list any issues that he's flip flopped or relinquished his maverick street cred? Well, read on!
If only the real John McCain had been running
That, however, was Senator McCain; the Candidate McCain of the past six months has too often seemed the victim of political sorcery, his good features magically inverted, his bad ones exaggerated. The fiscal conservative who once tackled Mr Bush over his unaffordable tax cuts now proposes not just to keep the cuts, but to deepen them. The man who denounced the religious right as “agents of intolerance” now embraces theocratic culture warriors. The campaigner against ethanol subsidies (who had a better record on global warming than most Democrats) came out in favour of a petrol-tax holiday. It has not all disappeared: his support for free trade has never wavered. Yet rather than heading towards the centre after he won the nomination, Mr McCain moved to the right.
Effete Liberals, Bomaye - Ta-Nehisi Coates:
"No one has conspired to deprive us of power over the past few decades. The American people aren't stupid. We've sucked at articulating our message. If you have any interest in a more progressive country, we need to be honest. At the presidential level, at least, conservatives have hammered us. Give them their due. Don't blame Rush. Don't blame Kristol. Don't denigrate states you've never visited. Give them their due. Give them their respect. Study them, and then get better."
(Via Ta-Nehisi Coates - The Atlantic.)
Finally, to hear someone else speak some truth! Obama shows there is a difference between democracy and getting things done.
This is why all that hate mongering is dangerous. It is a double-edged sword.
Apple earnings, profits, and cash embarrass Microsoft — RoughlyDrafted Magazine:
"While Microsoft executives like to talk about Apple as an insignificant company with less than 5% of the worldwide market share of all PCs and servers sold, the company now has more cash than Microsoft and earns more than half of its profits and over three fourths Microsoft’s revenues."
(Via RoughlyDrafted Magazine.)
Minimum Wage Impacts on Employment: A Look at Indiana, Illinois, and Surrounding Midwestern States:
"These patterns in job growth between 2003 and 2005 indicate that Illinois' increasing minimum wage rates did not reduce overall employment growth for private employers and preliminary statistical analyses confirm this lack of an impact"
(Via Indiana University.)
Once again we see how ideology is soft-think. This is has been proven over and over, yet we see no public discussion on this at the pragmatic level. Just ideological back and forth. "Fairness" vs. "Jobs." Whatever. Try "reality."
AP INVESTIGATION: Palin pipeline terms curbed bids - Yahoo! News:
"Gov. Sarah Palin's signature accomplishment — a contract to build a 1,715-mile pipeline to bring natural gas from Alaska to the Lower 48 — emerged from a flawed bidding process that narrowed the field to a company with ties to her administration"
(Via Yahoo! News.)
The closer you look, the less mavericky she gets. Palin is more politician than maverick.
This guy is sick. I actually thought that Obama's visit to his ailing, perhaps mortally, grandmother would be sacrosanct. Not so apparently. More damage control for the GOP.
Ron Howard's Call To Action from Ron Howard and Henry Winkler:
See more Ron Howard videos at Funny or Die
(Via Funny or Die.)
Happy Days.
Understanding Real America in Wasilla | The Daily Show | Comedy Central:
""
(Via The Daily show.)
Jon Stewart can be stinging. Lesson to politicians: never try to win with a comedian.
"'I can’t believe the hype being given to iPhone... I just have to wonder who will want one of these things (other than the religious faithful)... So please mark this post and come back in two years to see the results of my prediction: I predict they will not sell anywhere near the 10M Jobs predicts for 2008.' - Richard Sprague, Microsoft Senior Marketing Director, January 18, 2007"
(Via MacDailyNews.)
Absolute comedy.
What Will Wall Street Look Like in the Fall of 2009? -- New York Magazine:
"And while any president will be an improvement over the current one, there is a growing belief on Wall Street that Barack Obama has the capacity to lead us out of this wilderness while John McCain does not. I’ll go a step further: Obama is a recession. McCain is a depression.
Wall Street usually favors Republicans when it comes to managing the economy, but this time around the financial community is skeptical. John McCain has done everything he can to avoid talking about the economy, lest he be tarred with the brush of George Bush’s ineptitude. And when McCain has attempted to step into the fray, he’s been far from reassuring. First, he insisted that the fundamentals of the economy were sound; then he turned around and told us it was the end of the economic world as we know it, and suspended his campaign to scramble back to Washington and save the day on the bailout bill—only to have little visible effect. For all his talk of being a maverick, McCain looks an awful lot like President Bush on the credit crisis: He doesn’t seem to understand Wall Street or Main Street, he is dogmatically anti-regulation, and his economic team is a joke. "
(Via New York Magazine.)
Boo yah!!!
`Anti-American' comments hurt Minn. rep's campaign - Yahoo! News:
"Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann spent months building her profile through appearances on 'Larry King Live' and other TV talk shows. It took only a few minutes of airtime, and one disparaging remark about Barack Obama, to undo it."
(Via Yahoo! News.)
She walked right into it on Hardball. Too many interviews with a net on Faux News, I guess. But Powell, in the following video, crushes her comments. Ouch.
Incoherence - Swampland - TIME:
"John McCain had a fabulously loony weekend, flipping out charges and attacks like a mud tornado. The truly remarkable thing about McCain's attacks, especially on Obama's economic policies, is that McCain, in each case, is 'guilty' of supporting some version of the policies he's attacking"
(Via Swampland - TIME.)
In these cynical times, it's easy to expect hypocrisy from our politicians. It's a bona fide occupational hazard. But there are times when even a politician has broken faith. This is a great piece slamming some of McCain's more egregious hypocrisies of late.
Obama revels in Powell endorsement and cash mountain - Yahoo! News:
"His backing came as the Obama campaign announced a fundraising take of more than 150 million dollars last month, demolishing its previous record of 66 million set in August."
(Via yahoo! News.)
The market has spoken and Powell along with it.
YouTube - John 'Deer in Headlights' McCain Stunned - Here's Your Fine, Joe The Plumber : $0:
""
(Via YouTube.)
Somebody forgot to do his homework.Op-Ed Columnist - Gordon Does Good - NYTimes.com:
"As I said, we still don’t know whether these moves will work. But policy is, finally, being driven by a clear view of what needs to be done. Which raises the question, why did that clear view have to come from London rather than Washington?"
(Via NY Times op-Ed.)
Ideology is soft-think.
PolitiFact | Not a radical group, and Ayers didn't run it:
"This attack is false, but it's more than that – it's malicious. It unfairly tars not just Obama, but all the other prominent, well-respected Chicagoans who also volunteered their time to the foundation. They came from all walks of life and all political backgrounds, and there's ample evidence their mission was nothing more than improving ailing public schools in Chicago. Yet in the heat of a political campaign they have been accused of financing radicalism. That's Pants on Fire wrong."
(Via Politifact.com.)
Still bald faced lying. Truly desperate.
YouTube - McCain Booed For Calling Obama A "Decent Man":
(Via YouTube.)
After about a week of letting Palin make outrageous attacks against Obama and getting into the game himself, it looks like chickens coming home to roost for John McCain. You can't make a deal with the devil and get off scott free. His campaign now employs Charlie Condon, the same guy from Bush's 2000 campaign who made disgusting racial smears against McCain. And we know how that turned out. McCain sold his soul to the devil, and is now trying to reverse course after he's starting to take heat for some of the worst hateful speech we've seen in campaigns in quite some time. I'm willing to believe that McCain's change is more a matter of principle than political expediency, but it's too little, too late. The train has left the station. McCain is now the candidate who is supported by racists and xenophobes. Sure it's but a small sliver of his base, but that's not how it looks. And in this game, looks matter. I feel bad for him but this is the price you pay for dealing with the Devil.
Anger consumes John McCain support as poll gap widens - Times Online:
"Events this week have been marked by ugly outbursts from crowds. In Clearwater, Florida, shouts of ‘kill him!’ could be heard amid a chorus of boos when Mrs Palin attacked the Democratic nominee over his links with 1960s radical, Bill Ayers.Journalists were reported to have been taunted with obscenities or racial insults from members of audience when Mrs Palin blamed the ‘mainstream media’ for what she described as her ‘less-than-successful’ - and much-parodied - television interviews.
At a rally on Monday in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Mr McCain asked: ‘Who is the real Barack Obama?’ A man in crowd screamed back the reply: ‘Terrorist!’"
(Via Times Online.)
It's turning ugly. My question is why not speak against such outbursts when they happen or perhaps later? Truly frightening these two.
CNN Covers Palin Rape Kit Story (VIDEO):
(Via The Huffington Post.)
I first heard about this on The Daily Show and was pretty shocked. It's a pretty crazy situation and disturbing. Not a smart move to attract women voters.
"Verdict: False. There is no indication that Ayers and Obama are now 'palling around,' or that they have had an ongoing relationship in the past three years. Also, there is nothing to suggest that Ayers is now involved in terrorist activity or that other Obama associates are."
(Via CNN Political Ticker.)
Palin supporters call her "real." My question is: Real what? Nasty? Liar? Honorless? A candidate for the presidency with terrorists? I can't even say it without laughing.
"More to the point, he noted that McCain has never explained how his policies would differ from Bush's on Iran, Lebanon, Pakistan, or Iraq. In other words, even if Palin is right that 2009 is Year Zero, what would she and her No. 1 do differently? She didn't answer the question, any more than McCain ever has, perhaps because there is no answer."
(Via Slate.com.)
About the only thing the McCain smacks of change is it's slogan which has as the campaign wears on. Now it's, "Change is Coming." Barack Obama is winning in the polls so I guess he's right.
I received this in the email today.
Dear Subscriber:We have retracted a portion of our article, "FactChecking Biden-Palin Debate," and have posted the following correction:
Correction Oct 3: This article originally faulted Biden for saying that McCain had voted "the exact same way” as Obama on a controversial troop funding bill. We said that McCain was absent for the vote and so didn't vote at all. Biden was however correct.
McCain did vote against the troop-funding bill in question, H.R. 1591, on March 29, 2007, when it originally cleared the Senate. The vote to which we referred, and which McCain missed, was a later vote on the House-Senate compromise version of the same bill, on April 26, 2007. McCain opposed the bill, which Obama supported, because it contained language calling for withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Biden was responding to Palin's accusation that "Obama voted against funding troops." Obama voted for the bill March 29 and April 26, then on May 24, 2007, following a veto by President Bush, Obama voted against a similar troop-funding bill, H.R. 2206, that lacked any withdrawal language.
Please accept our apology for our error.
-Brooks Jackson
This is why I trust them.
Watch Palin dance. Facts are tough!
Transcript of Palin, Biden debate - CNN.com:
"PALIN: People aren't looking for more of the same. They are looking for change. And John McCain has been the consummate maverick in the Senate over all these years.He's taken shots left and right from the other party and from within his own party, because he's had to take on his own party when the time was right, when he recognized it was time to put partisanship aside and just do what was right for the American people.
That's what I've done as governor, also, take on my own party, when I had to, and work with both sides of the aisle, in my cabinet, appointing those who would serve regardless of party, Democrats, independents, Republicans, whatever it took to get the job done.
Also, John McCain's maverick position that he's in, that's really prompt up to and indicated by the supporters that he has. Look at Lieberman, and Giuliani, and Romney, and Lingle, and all of us who come from such a diverse background of -- of policy and of partisanship, all coming together at this time, recognizing he is the man that we need to leave -- lead in these next four years, because these are tumultuous times.
We have got to win the wars. We have got to get our economy back on track. We have got to not allow the greed and corruption on Wall Street anymore.
And we have not got to allow the partisanship that has really been entrenched in Washington, D.C., no matter who's been in charge. When the Republicans were in charge, I didn't see a lot of progress there, either. When the Democrats, either, though, this last go- around for the last two years.
Change is coming. And John McCain is the leader of that reform.
IFILL: Senator...
BIDEN: I'll be very brief. Can I respond to that?
Look, the maverick -- let's talk about the maverick John McCain is. And, again, I love him. He's been a maverick on some issues, but he has been no maverick on the things that matter to people's lives.
He voted four out of five times for George Bush's budget, which put us a half a trillion dollars in debt this year and over $3 trillion in debt since he's got there.
He has not been a maverick in providing health care for people. He has voted against -- he voted including another 3.6 million children in coverage of the existing health care plan, when he voted in the United States Senate.
He's not been a maverick