Nolite Te Bastardes Carborundorum

My cat shares far too many traits with a goldfish. I’ve heard that a goldfish swims constantly around their bowl mostly because they have such short memories that by the time they have swum around their bowls, they have forgotten what they saw before, and are now again fascinated by the same things they just saw. This morning I was petting my cat, then she wandered too far off for me to reach from the breakfast table, and she got interested in something else. So I called her again and held my hand out, IMMEDIATELY she comes running back, as if this was the possibility for something great to happen. This happened about 5 times in a row, after which she got interested in a fly and chased it across the house and then I couldn’t get her to come back any more. Maybe the same thing is wrong with people. Maybe tv commercials and modern TV shows and their constant refocusing of our attention has made us so dependent on being told “look at this!” over and over that we forget everything that just happened and are willing to do the same wrong thing again. After a presidential campaign where tax cuts managed to somehow get past the OMGDONTTAXME enough to actually be the bad guys in the winning candidate’s campaign, here we are again with the stimulus bill. How do we fix the economy? Tax cuts. Unemployment? Tax cuts. Seriously, this approach hasn’t worked on any problem since, what, JFK times? Somehow, the peeps have already forgotten that tax cuts don’t help anything. I don’t wonder why the republicans in congress always push for tax cuts. They aren’t confused about how effective they’ll be in fixing the world. They just don’t care. I don’t believe for a second that they are do gooders trying to make the world a better place and are just so misguided that they really believe tax cuts are going to do the job. They just want more tax cuts so they can make more money, and their donors will make more money, so they can stay in power. But how in the world do they sell that crap to their constituents? I think it’s the goldfish phenomenon. They saw a flashy thing and they got distracted for a while, now you can use the same story on them you used 20 minutes ago. The failure of the last 30 years washed clean in seconds.

Krugman:

“research sponsored by the Commonwealth Fund shows that achieving universal coverage with a plan similar to Mr. Obama’s campaign proposals would add “only” about $104 billion to federal spending in 2010 — not a small sum, of course, but not large compared with, say, the tax cuts in the Obama stimulus plan.”

One of many many many reasons tax cuts really aren’t the way to go. Never mind the other day TPM reported that to get them we lost Mass Transit.

via TPM…

GOODBYE RETIREMENT! CRASH CRASH CRASH!

Dowd has a conversation between Obama and Bartlett, written by the master himself.

From a NYtimes article about Palin’s Bush-like secrecy/loyalty preference:

Interviews show that Ms. Palin runs an administration that puts a premium on loyalty and secrecy. The governor and her top officials sometimes use personal e-mail accounts for state business; dozens of e-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that her staff members studied whether that could allow them to circumvent subpoenas seeking public records.

Rick Steiner, a University of Alaska professor, sought the e-mail messages of state scientists who had examined the effect of global warming on polar bears. (Ms. Palin said the scientists had found no ill effects, and she has sued the federal government to block the listing of the bears as endangered.) An administration official told Mr. Steiner that his request would cost $468,784 to process.

When Mr. Steiner finally obtained the e-mail messages — through a federal records request — he discovered that state scientists had in fact agreed that the bears were in danger, records show.

NUTS! Sounds like someone we want in charge! Oh wait, that’s who we already have in charge. If you have time you should read this whole article, paints a scarier picture than you might already have in your head of a Sarah Palin administration. As if it wasn’t scary enough already eh?

From today’s Friedman op-ed:

Who cares how much steel John McCain has in his gut when the steel that today holds up our bridges, railroads, nuclear reactors and other infrastructure is rusting? McCain talks about how he would build dozens of nuclear power plants. Oh, really? They go for $10 billion a pop. Where is the money going to come from? From lowering taxes? From banning abortions? From borrowing more from China? From having Sarah Palin “reform” Washington — as if she has any more clue how to do that than the first 100 names in the D.C. phonebook?

emphasis mine. Funny.

Kind of a crazy thing at that, it’s something that could be turned on and off literally at the flick of a switch. How strange is that eh? Via Yahoo EcoGeek.

I started reading Broadsheet on salon randomly after clicking on the wrong link looking for Glenn Greenwald one day and I like it. I had to mention it today because my honest to goodness real life girlfriend in real life (irl) has a little interview thing on it today. I haven’t gotten to hear it yet because I’m at work and my options here are limited and crappy, but I’m sure she’s wonderful as always. GO CHECK HER OUT!

http://www.thetanooki.com/2008/04/15/super-mario-theme-played-with-rc-car/