Last Call

Republicans could pass jobs legislation.  Or stimulus legislation of any kind.  But they'd rather name useless arbitrary crap after Ronald Reagan.  You know, like America's coastal waters.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is floating legislation that would name most U.S. coastal waters after former President Ronald Reagan.

Issa reintroduced his bill Wednesday to rename the country’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), which generally extends from three miles to 200 miles offshore, as the Ronald Wilson Reagan Exclusive Economic Zone.

The late Reagan, a Californian like Issa, established the EEZ with a 1983 presidential proclamation that declared the nation’s sovereign rights for exploring, exploiting and conserving offshore resources, including energy.

The irony is when coastal cities flood due to global climate change, the Reagan Exclusive Economic Zone will be in your house, killing your dudes.  It's a pretty good metaphor for what Reagan did to this country anyhow.

Space, The Final Frontier

Faith in an orderly universe that will function long after I'm gone:  restored.

Today In Useful Idiocy

Today's hit on the Obama campaign from our "morally superior" friends on the left who have nothing but scorn and hatred for President Obama trying to win comes from Columbia law professor Georges Ugeux at HuffPo (of course) in a breathless rant entitled "The Obama Campaign Is Unworthy Of A Democratic President".

Opening salvo:

As a Democrat and a staunch support of Barack Obama, I am completely disgusted by his campaign. Are we talking about the President of the United States? Are we talking about a principled man who has boosted our ideal for a fair and equitable America? Does this have anything to do with the American people?

Wait, what?

Everybody takes turns to bombard us with e-mails, phone calls to chip in for one reason or the other. Even those of us who asked to only receive selective information. 

He's mad because he gets Obama campaign emails asking for money?  Well hell, impeach the man.

The subjects for whom we are approached are generally a teaser to get to money. If we want to wish Happy Mother's day to the First Lady, a link to the payment process is attached.

The e-mail from the President "I will be outspent" is disgraceful. Is that how Barack Obama judges his campaign? Does he truly believe that he will lose his reelection on the fact that it might be outspent? "We can win a race which the other side spends more than we do. But not this much more".

Oh yes? Is that what we expect to hear from the President of the United States? Is this the way the democrats are judging themselves, using the weaponry of the Republicans to self-flagellate? Is our yardstick of value the money we collect and the money we spend?

Yes, you moron.  Because the Republicans and the media they are bribing with the billionaires who are buying our country are more than happy to convince Joe Six-Pack that the President is a secret Muslim socialist fascist who will round up white people in a second term.   I prefer to fight back rather than remain supine and let the Republicans run roughshod all over us, but I'm pretty sure as a Columbia law professor and CEO of your own consulting firm there Georges, you'll be okay under a Romney administration and GOP Congress.

In fact, I'm sure you'll have plenty of consulting advice you'll be glad to sell us.

The people you are using all have one characteristic in common: they are unable to imagine a Presidential campaign without narrow solidarity with the advertising industry and the media. Are they really brain-dead?

Why do we need to respond to the most disgusting Romney direct or indirect TV ads by other TV ads? Why don't we take the high road? And answer to those ads in a different way. Responsibly. And stop feeding Madison Avenue.

Because the votes of the brain-dead crappy FOX-fed zombies out there count exactly as much as ours, and high score wins.  Get it?

You can't be this stupid, man.  You're selling something just like the rest of the Useful Idiots, and that something is principled resistance to a GOP-controlled America.  You need that GOP-controlled part for that to work.

Odd how that works out, huh.  Yes, the Village is terrible, the media is terrible, and we have to do something about it.  That "something" cannot be "play to lose".

The Price Of Carelessness

A four-year-old child was left to die in the heat in a van.  In Dallas, which is hellish this time of year.

Dallas police said doctors at Baylor pronounced him dead at the hospital.

Family members have gathered at the hospital and identified the child as 4-year-old Benjamin Price.

Dallas police Lt. Scott Walton said the little boy was left in the van outside the day care after a field trip.

So yeah, again... utterly preventable.  A painful, horrible thing.  This is why daycares have head count and other procedures to double check and make sure kids aren't left behind.

** Note: other sources are saying three years old.

Big BOOOOOBS!

Now that I have your attention, this story really is about Big Boobs.

Microsoft has contributed thousands of lines of code to the Linux kernel, the open source software at the heart of the widely used Linux operating system. And now, the software giant has contributed some controversy too.

Sometime over the past few years, as Microsoft beefed up the Linux kernel with code related to its Hyper-V virtualization software, one unidentified developer needed a name for a piece of code used by the software, and for some unknown reason, he went with this: 0xB16B00B5.

That’s leetspeak for “Big Boobs.”

Microsoft issued an apology that seemed completely sincere, and will be removing the code in an upcoming patch.  It happens, no hard feelings against Bill's House for this one.  One developer nailed it on his blog, showing he gets the real problem, however.

Red Hat kernel developer Matthew Garrett is not impressed. “At the most basic level, it’s just straightforward childish humour,” he wrote on his blog. “But it’s also specifically male childish humour. Puerile sniggering at breasts contributes to the continuing impression that software development is a boys club where girls aren’t welcome.”

Thank you, sir.  Well said.

In bonus awesomeness, a link from the article lets you translate any phrase you choose into leetspeak, binary, ASCII, even Morse code.  Enjoy!

From Way, Way, Waaaaaay Downtown

Sports-crazy Australia has something of a Olympic-sized brouhaha brewing:  seems the men's basketball team flew to London in business class...and the women were stuck in coach.

Sports Minister Kate Lundy called for more equitable arrangements after learning that the Australian Opals, captained by global star Lauren Jackson, a WNBA three-time Most Valuable Player, flew premium economy.

“My view is that team travel should be equitable for our male and female athletes,” Lundy told the Sydney Morning Herald.

Basketball Australia said each national team was allowed some discretion over how their funding was spent — including on travel arrangements — but noted the inequality needed to change.

“The simple fact is when a policy results in gender inequality, it’s very clearly not the right policy going forward,” acting chief executive Scott Derwin said.

“I am putting in place a review of our Olympic travel policy with the goal of ensuring there is equity between travel arrangements for the men’s and women’s teams attending future Olympics.”

Kristina Keneally, who takes over from Derwin next month, welcomed the review as she hit out at the long-standing policy under which men are reportedly allowed to fly business class for flights longer than three hours.

“In this day and age, there’s just no excuse for men’s and women’s sporting teams to be treated differently when they both compete at the same world class level,” she said.

Glad somebody caught that little discrepancy.  It's bad enough flying coach when you're a big guy like me, but when you're over six foot, coach is a nightmare.  I can certainly see why your average basketball team would like nicer seats...but sticking the women in coach is one hell of a technical foul, Oz.

Glad the refs made the right call here.

By The Time I Get To Arizona (It'll Be All White With You)

The ACLU is going after the surviving "Papers, please!" provision of the state's draconian SB 1070 immigration law.  The Supreme Court upheld the provision on the grounds that there wasn't any legal reason to throw that particular law out on strictly face value.

Unless say, somebody (say, like the ACLU) could come along and prove the law was designed specifically for racial profiling as the main intent of the law.  The ACLU has gotten its hands on 10,000 or so emails from the legislation's authors through the Freedom of Information Act, and they've found some really awful discussions about the bill from lawmakers who apparently knew damn well that the law was designed to harass and intimidate Latinos.

Some low-lights of the ACLU's data dump:

• “Last week, Denver’s illegal aliens sang our national anthem in Spanish and bastardized the words of OUR country’s most sacred song.”
• “Battles commence as Mexican nationalists struggle to infuse their men into American government and strengthen control over their strongholds. One look at Los Angeles with its Mexican-American mayor shows you Vincente Fox’s general Varigossa commanding an American city.”
• “They create enclaves of separate groups that shall balkanize our nation into fractured nightmares of social unrest and poverty.”
• “Corruption is the mechanism by which Mexico operates. Its people spawn more corruption wherever they go because it is their only known way of life.”
• “Tough, nasty illegals and their advocates grow in such numbers that law and order will not subdue them. They run us out of our cities and states. They conquer our language and our schools. They render havoc and chaos in our schools.”
• “We are much like the Titanic as we inbreed millions of Mexico’s poor, the world’s poor and we watch our country sink.”

Oh it gets worse.  Racism and the perception that the law was racist was a hot, hot topic among the law's authors in one email entitled "What is racist?":

• “I’m racist because I don’t want to be taxed to pay for a prison population comprised of mainly Hispanics, Latinos, Mexicans or whatever else you wish to call them.”
• “I’m a racist because I believe the News Media has a duty to tell us the names and race of criminals.”
• “I’m a racist because I object to having to pay higher sales tax and property tax to build more schools for the illegitimate children of illegal aliens.”
• “I’m a racist because I dislike having to push one for English and/or listening to a message in Spanish.”
• “Factual is not racial. Realism is not racism. The new definition of racist is anyone winning an argument with a liberal, minority, pacifist, bible banger, or moron.”

They don't even view Arizona's Latinos as human, let alone entertain the concept that they might be taxpaying citizens who contribute to the state and country.   The Supremes all but screamed to the heavens that they needed a case involving SB 1070 violating people's civil rights.  They'll get it thanks to the ACLU.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• Newly minted Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer has netted a pay package reportedly worth $71 million over five years, and could be worth $120 million.
• Former President George W. Bush will be skipping the GOP Convention in Tampa this year, he would rather "enjoy his time off the political stage."
• The International AIDS Conference will kick off in Washington DC this weekend, in a city with the worst HIV infection rate in the country.
• Aurora, Colorado shooting suspect James Holmes reportedly got around federal gun sales reporting requirements by not purchasing more than one gun in the same store in a five day period.
• Google has purchased Apple platform email company Sparrow and its eponymous email program, folding it into Google's Gmail team.