Links (most recent first) that caught my eye, but did not warrant full-blown blog entries ….
- This Blessed Isle
- Tom Tomorrow on Why the Democrats Lost – SIGH
- Nearly 59 million lack health insurance: CDC (Reuters) – But let’s be sure that, despite the American public soundly being behind alleviating this shameful condition, we do everything in our power to abort the dreaded ObamaCare, so that private for-profit insurers can fix our problems for us, cross-their-hearts.
- Balloon Juice » Blog Archive » How The Founding Fathers Taxed The Country (and/or I Would Seriously Have Ben Franklin’s Baby) – “Franklin would have been appalled. He knew, as plenty do still, that achieving great common purpose takes cash and commitment from the whole damn society. When the wealthiest opt out, take their stacks of coins and go home, they may protect their short-term interests – but they kill, however fast or slow, whatever hopes we may have of advancing to that ‘more perfect union’ he and his first imagined.”
- Campaign in Poetry, Govern in Prose – “When an elderly man pokes a finger at his congressman’s chest and yells, ‘Keep your government hands off my Medicare!’ he embodies everything that is so wrong with our politics. As a long history of public-opinion research has made clear — and as events continue to remind us — Americans are ‘symbolic conservatives’ but ‘operational liberals.’ In other words, they like the idea of limited government, but they also like just about everything government does.”
- Boeing 777 to 707 (Jasen Miller’s Flickr) (via jfhanavan,… – Cool.
- It’s the ‘far left’s’ fault that Glenn Beck’s fans are becoming violent and attacking the left – “It’s actually an evil plot by liberals to make conservatives look bad — by, apparently, killing and maiming liberals, and then blaming it on the conservatives who only SEEMED to encourage the violence with vicious rhetoric all year long. Right. That’s the ticket.”
- Knights of Columbus understand civil marriage distinction (**is something I could’ve written in 1958*) – “Civil marriage laws are necessary, of course, in a society which includes the unreligious as well as the religious.” Yet the basis for most challenges to gay marriage is the idea that unless civil marriage matches the protester’s idea of what is sacred, it cannot be allowed.
- I am like some kind of genius at predicting stupidity – And the publishers will soon, in their financial decline, decide to blame “pirates” (or perhaps “ninjas”) for their problems.
- House Republicans Name Program That Already Expired As First Spending Item They Would Cut – So a program that the GOP already helped to kill will be their centerpiece in … programs they will kill to balance the budget. Keep dancin’, boys!
- This Is Why Bristol Is Still On DWTS – So much for rugged individualism, personal responsibility, meritocracy, and fairness as virtues amongst the TP contingent.
- Why Does US Have Worst Fatality Rate From Kidney Dialysis? – Spoiler: government pocketbook + for-profit corporate providers with a duopoly + plenty of CYA document secrecy + a problem that “disproportionately afflicts minorities and the dispossessed” = craptastic medical care. Huzzah for the Best Health Care System in the World!
- National Gaming Day at your library: US libraries invite patrons to get their game on – Ooooh …
- Photographer: I got griggs’d 4.5 million times by Texas – I suspect Texas only cares about intellectual property when it belongs to large corporations (that make large donations).
- Feds admit to storing tens of thousands of images from naked scanners – unknown number leaked back to manufacturer – At the risk of sounding like I’m defending the TSA, the revelations (so to speak) here are not about airports, but about the US Marshals Service, which handles security for federal courthouses. That said, it’s also an example that if data can be collected, someone will, and if collected data can be mishandled, it certainly will be.
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