Author: swanksalot

Some additional reading September 10th from 13:33 to 23:01:

• Palin relied on earmark system she now opposes – Los Angeles Times – " Alaska has been the largest beneficiary of the earmark system through the years and its most senior legislators, including Stevens and Rep. Don Young, also a Republican, were among its most ardent defenders.

  The money that the state of Alaska requested for 2009 includes $25 million for "Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery" and $3.2 million for seal and sea lion biological research, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense."

• TPMMuckraker | Talking Points Memo | So What Did Palin Request in Federal Earmarks? Seal DNA Research! – "Sarah Palin was not quite as conservative as she claims in her requests for earmarks. And here's a great example from just this year.

  According to Alaska's 2009 catalog of earmark requests the state's sea life are in great need of federal money. As Politico points out, Palin's office requested $2 million in federal monies to study crab mating habits; $494,900 for the recreational halibut harvest and $3.2 million for seal genetics research."

  Of course, reporting this means that Obama is sexist, or something ridiculous

• Distractions or what? – As Jon Stewart memorably said, paraphrased, the Corporate Media is like a bunch of 6 year olds playing soccer. Whatever the topic of the moment is, every talking head immediately runs over there, in mass.

  Quoting myself, though with the dreaded link-rot

• Media Matters – Does anybody really know what time it is? – Quote of the Day: "A special thank you to our friends in the liberal media establishment. Who knew they would come through so spectacularly? The ludicrous media feeding frenzy about the Palin family hyped interest in her speech, enabling her to win a huge audience for her smashing success Wednesday night at the convention. Indeed, it even renewed interest in McCain, who seems to have gotten still more viewers for his less smashing — but well-received — presentation the following evening." — Bill Kristol

  Quote of the Day 2: "I admit it. The liberal media were never that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures." — Bill Kristol

• Why is lying an acceptable tactic, asset, even, in campaigning for the most important job in the world? – John McCain "would have been better off passing legislation allowing the Federal Trade Commission to fine political campaigns for purveying obvious falsehoods in their advertisements. I'm not talking about claims over which there can be a reasoned dispute. I mean claims that are just obvious lies, about which all reasonable persons would agree as to their plain falsehood.

  After all, food and drug companies are not allowed to make false claims on the public airwaves. Isn't who is president potentially as vital a question for your health as whether Kevin Trudeau can lie to you in his infomercials?

  The president of the United States can still start a nuclear war with an ill-considered policy, leaving tens of millions of people dead and threatening all life on earth with a nuclear winter.

  That doesn't deserve the slightest due diligence from our regulatory agencies?"

• New books in 33.3 series – B12 Solipsism – So when *are* these books coming out? Seems slower than anticipated.
• Better Than Teapot Dome! – "The Bush scandals are out there in plain view, and yet people don't see them.

  Yes, this has got the Harding Administration beat all to hell. The Bushies don't even have to hide their scandals in closets."
  Amazing, really. And John McCain would add four more years to this legacy.

• PALIN FAMILY SHOCKERS: WHAT SARAH'S REALLY HIDING! – Celebrity News | Gossip – National Enquirer – Ahh, family values:
  "The ENQUIRER has learned exclusively that Sarah's oldest son, Track, was addicted to the power drug OxyContin for nearly the past two years, snorting it, eating it, smoking it and even injecting it. And as Track, 19, heads to Iraq as part of the U.S. armed forces, Sarah and her husband Todd were powerless to stop his wild antics, detailed in the new issue of The ENQUIRER, which goes on sale today.

  THE ENQUIRER also has exclusive details about Track's use of other drugs, including cocaine, and his involvement in a notorious local vandalism incident."

  Again, would I care about a non-hypocrite family that had these problems? Nope, would be private. However, Palin is a social conservative, and wants to jail drug offenders. Just not her own kids, only others kids.

• What Are You Doing Here? – "what is all this campaign journalism for? A few news organizations still maintain large bureaux in Baghdad. They do this, it seems, to inform people about events in Iraq. But if lying works as a campaign strategy, rather than backfiring and getting the liar branded as an untrustworthy character, then what’s the campaign journalism for? …. But what’s the campaign press doing? It seems to me that if the practitioners of campaign journalism can’t figure out a way to make it so that lying is punished, rather than amplified and rewarded, by the press then they ought to pack up their bags and go do something else. Pretty much all the other branches of the press — from the film critics to the foreign correspondents to the weathermen to the investigative reporters to the “news of the weird” guys — seem to have a clear role in the ecology."
  Amen brother, amen!
• Balloon Juice – IOUSA – "The total national debt, as I write this, is $9,679,000,000,000.00 (nine and a half trillion).

  The Budget for 2008 is close to $3,000,000,000,000.00 (three trillion).

  Our budget deficit for this year is going to range in between $400-500,000,000,000.00 (four hundred to five hundred billion, give or take a few billion).

  The total value of wasteful earmarks in 2008 (according to CAGW) will be approximately $18,000,000,000.00 (eighteen billion).

  In other words, when McCain talks about earmarks, he is talking about 3% of our annual budget deficit, .6% of our annual budget, and a number too small to even report when discussing our national debt. Or, put another way, he is talking about two months in Iraq, something he wants to keep going indefinitely.

  Not only are they lying about Palin’s involvements with earmarks, they are just not being serious about the horrible economic problems we face. These are not serious people."

• pandagon.net – drop it like a sock – Shorter Lisa Schiffren – "If Obama read from Palin’s autobiography, with no comment whatsoever, the right would accuse him of character assassination."
• Nikon AF-Nikkor 50mm F1.4D Lens Review: 1. Introduction: Digital Photography Review – I use mine a lot, especially late at night when I don't want to use a flash
  "The AF-Nikkor 50mm 1:1.4D is Nikon's current version of their fast 'standard' prime lens, and while this specific model was introduced in 1995, the basic optical design dates back to the manual focus 50mm 1:1.4 AI of 1977. It features a traditional layout of 7 elements in 6 groups utilizing spherical surfaces only, which Nikon claims will deliver distortion-free images with superb resolution and colour accuracy, plus high contrast even at maximum aperture. The 50mm focal length classes it as a 'standard' lens on the FX format, with none of the 'perspective distortion' characteristic of wideangle or telephoto lenses, whilst on the vastly more popular and widespread DX format it behaves like a short telephoto, ideal for portraiture."
• infinite-sushi.com – Passing the torch – "After 6 years of developing, maintaining and improving ecto, I felt it was time to move on. From now on, the new owner of ecto will be illumineX, inc. Instead of one guy working on your favorite blog client part-time, you'll now have a team of developers working on ecto full time. Before I decided to sell ecto, I had a long correspondence with Gary Longsine, the CEO of illumineX. I wanted to make sure it will continue to be in good hands. I found Gary to be a great guy and he convinced me that his team has many new ideas that will keep ecto growing in functionality and power."

  I hope so, ecto has been constantly running on my Macs since what seems like forever (when I used Blogger, when I used TypePad, when I used MovableType, and now, when I use WordPress). Adriaan has always been most helpful whenever troubles occur.