In an interview with Fox News' "Hannity," [Ann] Coulter went after the "hucksters" and "shysters" who are "ripping off the Republican Party for their own self-aggrandizement, for their own egos, to make money."
Coulter and Hannity, complaining about hucksters ripping off the GOP.
Boggles.
What "conservatives" thought about Medicare when it was passed:
Ronald Reagan: “[I]f you don’t [stop Medicare] and I don’t do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” [1961]
George H.W. Bush: Described Medicare in 1964 as “socialized medicine.” [1964]
Barry Goldwater: “Having given our pensioners their medical care in kind, why not food baskets, why not public housing accommodations, why not vacation resorts, why not a ration of cigarettes for those who smoke and of beer for those who drink.” [1964]
Bob Dole: In 1996, while running for the Presidency, Dole openly bragged that he was one of 12 House members who voted against creating Medicare in 1965. “I was there, fighting the fight, voting against Medicare . . . because we knew it wouldn’t work in 1965.” [1965]
What they thought about Social Security when it was passed:
A Republican congressman from New York, for example, charged: "The lash of the dictator will be felt, and 25 million free American citizens will for the first time submit themselves to a fingerprint test."
Another New York congressman put it this way: "The bill opens the door and invites the entrance into the political field of a power so vast, so powerful as to threaten the integrity of our institutions and to pull the pillars of the temple down upon the heads of our descendants." A Republican senator from Delaware claimed that Social Security would "end the progress of a great country and bring its people to the level of the average European."
Any of that sound familiar?
Hidden in a dusty trunk in an abandoned and looted Englewood home, the papers of Harvard’s first black graduate, Richard T. Greener, had long been thought lost to history.
So when the Sun-Times reported last year that 52-year-old contractor Rufus McDonald found them while clearing out an attic near 75th and Sangamon, he was praised as a hero who’d unearthed forgotten details of a pioneering African-American intellectual’s life.
Several museums and Harvard University itself expressed a keen interest in the historically significant 140-year-old Greener documents. An excited Gates, who leads Harvard’s W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African-American Research, even said the discovery gave him “gooseflesh.”
But now McDonald says the irreplaceable collection could go up in flames — literally.
McDonald — who recently sold just two of the documents for $52,000 to the University of South Carolina, where Greener also studied and taught — is threatening to torch the rest unless Harvard offers him more cash.
“I’ll roast and burn them,” an angry McDonald said Tuesday, saying Harvard offered an “insulting” $7,500 for a collection that includes Greener’s 1870 Harvard diploma and was appraised at $65,000.
The article does not say how many tea party rallies the man has attended in the past.
I've just learned that the bluetooth phone <-> car hookup in my new car means I can now get telemarketer spam in my car!
Yay!
Mmm...?
A Japanese firm with the unfortunate name Fukushima Industries found itself the target of mockery on social media after unveiling a new mascot with an even more unfortunate name: Fukuppy. The company—an Osaka-based maker of industrial cooling equipment with no connection to the nuclear plant of the same name—described the egg-shaped mascot as curious and kind with "a strong sense of justice," reports the South China Morning Post.
In a post about a book about The Beatles, Marklow writes:
When you ask a kid to imagine a world before television, what they will actually imagine is a world in which they can no longer watch television (how awful!), not a world in which nobody cares whether or not they can. But, of course, the latter was far closer to the case. We grant the past its dignity by not imagining that people lived in a world without this invention or that idea. They lived, like everyone, in the present, and the fact that their present has become our past is hardly their problem.
Indeed.
And tangentially, that reminded me of the way biological evolution is often discussed. In popular science books about evolution, there are interesting species and then there are "transitional" species. An interesting species is one that captures our imagination in some way: a T-Rex, a sabre-toothed tiger, a human. A transitional species is one that sits between two interesting species, it's one that starts to exhibit the characteristics that a subsequent interesting species will have as its hallmark. One of the most famous "transitional" species, archeopteryx, had wings and feathers, but it wasn't quite a bird yet. It was still mostly a dinosaur. Or, that's how it's always discussed.
Wiki:
These features make Archaeopteryx a clear candidate for a transitional fossil between dinosaurs and birds.[6][7] Thus, Archaeopteryx plays an important role, not only in the study of the origin of birds, but in the study of dinosaurs.
But, (granting them conscious self-reflection for the sake of argument) no archeopteryx ever thought of itself as being a transitional species in any way. Every archeopteryx that ever lived spent his life trying to be the best archeopteryx he could be, and not a one sat around aspiring to become a bird. It's only humans' need to turn evolution into a story, with certain species selected as plot points, that makes archeopteryx any more transitional that any other species. When you get right down to it, every species is transitional, in the long run.
Multiple governors, including those in Utah, South Dakota, Arizona and Colorado have written to the Obama administration asking permission to reopen parks, citing economic needs.
Utah Gov. Gary Herbert (R) said that the tourism industry in his state is hurting as a result of national park closures, according to the AP.
"The current federally mandated closure is decimating the bottom line of bed-and-breakfast business owners and operators in Torrey (Utah), outfitters at Bryce Canyon City and restaurant owners in Moab," Herbert wrote in a letter to President Barack Obama.
I thought I'd share this, in case anyone wants to duplicate it.
Programming stuff follows...
Two New Hampshire men were killed in an explosion after allegedly trying to steal fireworks. According to police, the victims, both 21, were using a blow torch to break into a metal container that had fireworks inside.
Umm?
Or whatever.
(wouldn't it be awesome if, at 1:40, he looked into the camera and his eyes turned to fire?)
Looks like Mr. DNS has sown his wild seed and the new home of ok-cleek.com (sharing electrons with Balloon Juice on Hosting Matters) is open for non-business.
Not many changes. I had to lose the Web's Golden Bounty thing due to WordPress incompatibility. And that's sad because I really liked those mini-posts. And, the theme is a little different because not all of my settings copied over correctly. But, it looks like it's at least functional.
Let's see how it goes...