Mock, Paper, Scissors

NNDB.com

Is it possible that all the bungling that took place in Microsoft’s entertainment and hardware division was actually sabotage? In World War II, Germany sent a secret “fifth column” behind enemy lines to disrupt defenses during its invasions. Corporations have engaged in similar activities, and a series of “mistakes” that were beneficial to Apple has me wondering who’s really been calling the shots in Redmond.

– World’s Worst Tech Pundit, the always wrong Rob Enderle

Google is phasing out the internal use of Microsoft’s ubiquitous Windows operating system because of security concerns, according to several Google employees.

– Financial Times of London

Rob Enderle does not fully disclose that he is a paid consultant to Microsoft and has been for years. Still, it’s pretty funny to see Apple conspiracy theories. Who knew that Apple studied German strategy, and if so, why not have The Desert Fox engage the Panzers in North Africa… Hogan!

I’ve never used an ATM, so I don’t know what the fees are. It’s true, I don’t know how to use one. But I could learn how to do it just like I’ve . . . I swipe to get my own gas, buy groceries. I know about the holograms.

–Senator Ben Nelson

Those comments came in response to a question about ATM fees. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) has been pushing for a vote on a proposal to cap the fees ATMs charge customers of other banks.

Maybe he should just stick to taking bribes from health insurers. What a moroon.

(TPM)

Rotund water-head and noted sci-fi fanatic of the right, Doughy Pantload, is excited to report that time travel is possible! He read something from Stephen Hawking, and thus it is proven:

Stephen Hawking says time travel — forward only, alas — is possible.

No d’uh Sherlock. A full minute has passed since I read your idiotic post.

(Fair Warning! The link takes you to the Blog at Poo Corner, the most intellectually dishonest rest station on the Information Super Hiway.)

KRISTOL: I doubt that it violates the Constitution, if it does, it’s a matter of federal preemption against state law. I don’t think it violates anyone’s civil rights. … I have actually read this bill it is not draconian. It is not going to lead to major civil rights violations. Will a few people get stopped perhaps because some policeman has reasonable suspicion that a person is illegal? Will he be stopped perhaps on the street and asked to provide his driver’s license? Yes. That is the huge horrible civil rights violation that’s going to occur 5 times or 8 times or 13 times in Arizona.

Because when noted legal scholar and Nostradamus-like Bill Kristol says something will not happen, what could go wrong?

(ThinkProgress)

Today is the day we celebrate the Nostradamus of the ossified brain stems everywhere, Charles “Chuckles” Krauthammer, who, for some reason, all the pinheads of the right think has the gift of second sight. Seven years ago today he said:

Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem.

So, Chuckles, will they find ‘em today?

(Crooked Timber via Rising Hegemon)

The Old Pornstache quiffs out yet another column in which he celebrates people who are already wealthy becoming wealthier by creating startups where they don’t hire anyone, and declares that it is what we need more of.

Here’s the short version: EndoStim was inspired by Cuban and Indian immigrants to America and funded by St. Louis venture capitalists. Its prototype is being manufactured in Uruguay, with the help of Israeli engineers and constant feedback from doctors in India and Chile. Oh, and the C.E.O. is a South African, who was educated at the Sorbonne, but lives in Missouri and California, and his head office is basically a BlackBerry. While rescuing General Motors will save some old jobs, only by spawning thousands of EndoStims — thousands — will we generate the kind of good new jobs to keep raising our standard of living.

Sounds reasonable until you read further: the Cuban and Indian immigrants are wealthy doctors and CEOs. The CEO is also the CEO of Trek bicycles, and he is already successful. So from what I can see, his favorite startup, EndoStim, does not hire a single American, and the handful of Americans that will profit from it — though they are immigrants — are already successful in their own careers.

So the magic formula that Friedman says is what we need to get Americans back to work is for fantastically wealthy Americans to make even more money by creating products that will no doubt be sold here (and thanks to the Health Care Reform Bill will likely be very successful), but hire and pay not a soul here in the States.

[Obama]‘s even less likely to use nukes than the president in Independence Day, and that Bill Pullman character first needed to mind-meld with one of the aliens to be extra-super-sure that they were evil conquerors. The fact that most of America’s — and the world’s leading cities — had been obliterated wasn’t enough. After all, it could have been a misunderstanding.

– Doughy Pantload

(And yes, he really wrote that, and no, you are not missing any context. Hat tip: Attaturk.)

If the Democrats now lose seats in the midterm elections, we’re headed for even worse gridlock, even though we still have so much more nation-building for America to do — from education to energy to environment to innovation to tax policy. That is why I want my own Tea Party. I want a Tea Party of the radical center.

What a stooge. The Porn’stache doesn’t see his role in any of this. He is the Mr. Magoo of pundits, just rolling along blindly wreaking havoc in his wake. The world isn’t flat, Friedman, but your head is.

Thomas Friedman is a cheerleader of everything that radicalized and immunized the right from the consequences of their actions. He has cheered ever factory closing, and every initiative that has made life more miserable for the middle class. Tax cuts for the rich – you bet (as he is married to the billionaire shopping mall heiress, I guess he benefits from that) — because in his world that money then becomes capital that will spur more money-making. Just not here.

The poor do not exist in his world, except to be exploited in third world factories as they compete in The Race To The Bottom. India is looking over its shoulder as China is now the preferred destination of multinational corporations; you can hire contracting agencies that use slave and prison labor there. Take that, little Sanjay — unless you are willing to work for free, that is.

The Porn’stache has been consistently and demonstrably wrong on everything. His words have given justification and comfort to the powerful in their quest to grab everything away from the rest of us, and now he says he wants a center movement? What, prithee tell, is the Center to the Porn’stache? He gives us a word-salad, a jumble of buzzwords culled from columns past:

The radical center is “radical” in its desire for a radical departure from politics as usual. It advocates: raising taxes to close our budgetary shortfalls, but doing so with a spirit of equity and social justice; guaranteeing that every American is covered by health insurance, but with market reforms to really bring down costs; legally expanding immigration to attract more job-creators to America’s shores; increasing corporate tax credits for research and lowering corporate taxes if companies will move more manufacturing jobs back onshore; investing more in our public schools, while insisting on rising national education standards and greater accountability for teachers, principals and parents; massively investing in clean energy, including nuclear, while allowing more offshore drilling in the transition. You get the idea.

Yes, we get the idea – give the little people a crumb, but give corporations tax breaks to move jobs back here. And let Big Oil have their way, and while we’re at it, let’s get Big Nukes a rim-job, too.

No, what you do is you tax the Bejeebus out of Off Shore Companies until they do move back here. Tax breaks when the effective tax rate is zero (or less) is no incentive for off-shore companies to do anything. And while you are at it, you re-negotiate NAFTA and all the other -Tas. You want to do something about illegal immigration – then fix NAFTA. You will cut illegal immigration and as a bonus, the drug wars will recede, too.

Anyway, nice try ‘Stache. You are such an out-of-the-box thinker.

The ol’ Neckbeard lubed up and banged out another one. Er, column that is. And it is a douzie.

You see, he doesn’t like the new Matt Damon flick, The Greenzone, because it does not cover the shades of gray of how we got into the Iraq War. “But the film itself, a slam-bang account of the hunt for weapons of mass destruction, has the same problem as nearly every other Hollywood gloss on recent political events: it refuses to stare real tragedy in the face, preferring the comforts of a “Bush lied, people died” reductionism.”

The narrative of the Iraq invasion, properly told, resembles a story out of Shakespeare. You had a nation reeling from a terrorist attack and hungry for a response that would be righteous, bold and comprehensive. You had an inexperienced president trying to tackle a problem that his predecessors (one of them his own father) had left to fester since the first gulf war. You had a cause — the removal of a brutal dictator, and the spread of democracy to the Arab world — that inspired a swath of the liberal intelligentsia to play George Orwell and embrace the case for war. You had a casus belli — those weapons of mass destruction — that even many of the invasion’s opponents believed to be a real danger to world peace. And you had Saddam Hussein himself, the dictator in his labyrinth, apparently convinced that pretending to have W.M.D. was the best way to keep his grip on power.

And in one paragraph Ross, you prove that the reductionism of Bush Lied, People Died is absolutely correct. Shakespeare would tell the truth, Ross. He always did. You might want to read some. Might I suggest King Lear?

Twitter is a gold mine, a true gold mine of snark, and Sally Quinn is the motherload.

Still plumbing the depths of being shallow! Apply for the job, Sally, you know you want to!

Fox News’ Glenn Beck has lost a claim that a website called glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com was registered in bad faith and in violation of his trademark rights.

But the best part is reading the smackdown letter that the owner of the site sent to America’s favorite nut, Noted Art Historian, Infamous Spoon Worshipper, the capitalist clown who wants security and laughs, Free-Range Conspiracy Theorist and would-be poisoner of the Speaker of the House, Local Boy Gone Loco, music impresario, A Snake-Oil Salesman’s Dim-Witted Assistant, and now advertising-free, Glenn Beck. You can read it here – warning, it’s a PDF.

all of my time working for [Chimpy], I noticed that President Bush did not see people as “Muslims” any more than he saw them as Jews or Christians or Buddhists or atheists. He saw them as individuals, each with God-given value, each deserving the universal gift of freedom. The people of the Middle East should be treated with dignity not because they are Muslims, but because they are human beings. And it was on that premise that President Bush reached out to them.

– Barbie Doll Dana Perino

And in a nutshell, maybe that was the problem with Chimpy’s administration.

Anyway, it is good to see that the Blog at Pooh Corner is recruiting some new talent. Earlier today, they had this post up:

Which sums up the Blog at Pooh Corner really well.

…or lost some weight or something. And if you think this is far from the truth, think again.

(Hat tip: Pam’s House Blend via Jesus General on Twitter)

Noted homophobe and outrageous beauty queen stalker, former single mother and shill for hire, Maggie Gallagher, the auture of the much-ridiculed Gathering Storm ad opposing marriage equality, and nominal president of NOM is now terrorizing New York about the dangers of same-sex marriage.

As usual, her premise that marriage belongs exclusively between a man and a woman, cannot be argued on its merits, so once again she brings in kids to be virtual human shields. Besides using a more “ethnic” voice for New York (a first for the very, very white NOM), this time around they are citing single events that happened in California as what would be the standard if love wins the state.

Well, see for yourself:

But I must counter this premise of kids finding out about love in all its different guises: so what if kids learn that they can marry whoever they want? I don’t understand the problem here. I think what Maggie and the haters are really trying to say is that marriage equality takes away their right to take away the rights of others, or something equally confusing.

Noted wearer of bow ties and frozen TV-dinner heir and Maven, Tucker Carlson, has decided to see what journalism is all about! Yay! Another well-funded idiot wants to compete with NRO, HuffingtonPost and The Daily Beast!

But here’s the money shot, if such words have ever been used in conjunction with Tucker Carlson (and if they have, I don’t want to know about the context):

Carlson, a former conservative and libertarian pundit (most notably on CNN), touted his site as a home for basic reporting.

“Tell the truth, and be accurate,” Carlson said of the venture’s goals. “It’s very important to live up to the basic standards of journalism.”

Tucker Carlson, we salute you in your endeavor to live up to the basic standards of journalism.

UPDATE: Hello to everyone visiting from the Society for Professional Journalists — I’m honored and flattered to have you here.

“Small unmarked, non-sequential bills – $10s and $20s. Thanks Blam-Blam!”

“Can I have my seniority back?“

When last we left notorious baby-mill operator and future resident of Bedlam, Bachmann-the-Nut was stating, for the record that she found it interesting the last swine flu pandemic happened under Jimmy Carter, except of course it was Gerald Ford.

So imagine my delight when reading the delightful Dump Bachman the following letter to the editor in a Minnesota newspaper:

I find it interesting that the first confirmed Minnesota case of H1N1 Influenza A occurred in Rep. Michele Bachmann’s district. I’m not blaming this on Michele Bachmann, I just think it’s an interesting coincidence.

– AMY HUSTON, EAGAN

With all the noise surrounding Virginia Foxx’s crazy rant that Matthew Shepherd was not gay bashed to death, our favorite Crazy, famed baby mill operator and future resident of Bedlam was quietly spewing her own special brand of hate:

Apparently people who are practicing pedophiles would be considered protected under this legislation, but not, I understand, veterans, not, I understand, pregnant women, not, I understand, 85-year-old grandmothers would be protected under this law. But who would be protected? A pedophile, someone who considers themselves gay, someone who considers themselves transgender, someone who considers themselves a cross-dresser? That is who is protected.

Baby mill operator and future resident of Bedlam, Bachmann-the-Nut, has consulted with the finest physicians in the world and concluded that Democratic presidents are a factor in swine flu epidemics, noting that the last outbreak happened in the ’70s under Jimmy Carter.

Except that it didn’t.

It happened under Gerald Ford.

The GOP good-will ambassador to the third world’s boy bordellos and notorious spokesmodel for better living through chemical dependency, Rush Limbaugh, continues his putsch to rid the GOP of, well, just about anyone who disagrees with him.

A lot of people say, ‘Well, Specter, take McCain with you. And his daughter. Take McCain and his daughter with you if you’re gonna… …It’s ultimately good. You’re weeding out people who aren’t really Republicans.

– Rush Limbaugh

We here at Mock, Paper, Scissors applaud you, Rush, and we hope you continue your effort to make the GOP “pure” enough that, as Grover Norquist famously once said, we can drown it in the bathtub.

Anatomy of a Column

ust before the alarm clock would start to ring at the stroke of eleven, Peggy Noonan’s hand dropped the ether canister and swatted the alarm’s off button, as if on its own. As she rolled over, Noonan discovered where she left “Mr. Pinky,” her little D-cell friend, still twitching admirably. “If I were an oyster,” she thought, “I’d have a pearl by now.”

Noonan wanted to feel something, anything. The numbness, the numbness. Ever since the torture memos were released, nothing but numbness, numbness. The ether, usually so effective, so friendly, did not bring its usual clarity. Reagan’s “City on a shining Hill,” Bush the elder’s “Thousand points of light,” all of Noonan’s greatest hits had followed a good ether binge. But today nothing, she noted as she checked her typewriter, just empty paper.

Clutching her pearls with her little bird-like claws, she shook her head as she looked about her little Manhattan aviary, as she liked to call her apartment. So chic, so spartan (the new chic – she even said so), and yet the gloom on the horizon was still there: the torture memos. “Oh, Mr. Pinky, make it go away,” she whispered to herself.

When she stood up and adjusted the Lanz of Salsbury flannel nightgown, which was somehow on backwards, she spotted the tear-stained copy of the torture memos, passages, indeed entire pages highlighted in baby doll pink by her assistant, glowing malignantly in the corner where she had thrown it the night before while making a pitcher of Mai Tai’s.

Life had been so easy the past 8 years. You believed what wanted to believe, no reality to get in the way. George Bush had kept us safe, his inarticulateness (as Noonan had once postulated) was the sign of a great thinker, fighting them over there so that they won’t be fighting us over here, the brilliance of John Bolton at the UN, all of it was true because she willed it to be true. And now, numbness, numbness. All brought about by that man, that likable man, who forces reality-based ugliness on us all.

Picking up the ether canister and the soft, organic cotton batting, Noonan poured a good dose and inhaled deeply.

“Past, President and Future” by Peggy Noonan

Weepy, the oddly orange-hued member of Congress (R-Crybaby) and notorious boner-maker, goofed yet again and forgot to say “harsh interrogation tactics.” This is going to earn him a stay at Blam-Blam’s Re-Education Camp and Grouse Hunting School.

They’ve decided to close the detainee base in Cuba without having any plan for what they are going to do with those terrorists who are hellbent on killing Americans, and then last week they released these memos outlining the torture techniques, and that is clearly a political decision, and ignored the advice of their director of national intelligence and their CIA director. The bigger question is, what is the administration’s overarching plan to take on the terrorist threat and to keep America safe? The world didn’t suddenly become safer in January of 2009.

Perez “You dumb b—tch” Hilton is typical of the new face of the gay-marriage movement in America. (Joining Frank “you are all bigots” Rich among others). And I would like to nominate Miss California as the new face of the marriage movement. Much better than mine! “Truth and love will prevail over lies and hate.”

But beauty never hurt.

– Maggie Gallagher, Founder and President of NOM

The stress of going 24×7 of ugly and stupid is finally hitting Maggie “I hate Murphy Brown” Gallagher, notorious paid (and undisclosed) shill of the Chimpy McStagger marriage initiatives and budding auteur of the “Gathering Storm” instant camp classic internet movie, which has spawned a thousand mockeries.

Gallagher has time and again established that she has questionable ethics, questionable morals, and questionable intellect, has now established that she has a thin skin, too.

ark Penn awoke from a cheap bourbon drunk, wiped the sweat off of his upper lip. His bloodshot, porcine eyes, scanned the room looking for the ice pack. Standing, unsteadily, he looked at the empty tumbler still in his hand. His enormous mass shuddered three times, he made a deafening roar and he missed the glass. He didn’t care, he was going to change into his Gap Khakis anyway. “At least,” he thought, “I don’t need to wash my hair.”

Arriving at the office, he nudged Noonan in the elevator and whispered the 3 words she loved to hear, “Whiskey Sours, noon.” She smiled enigmatically, clutched her pearls and exited the car. “What are you looking at, Will?!” he snarled to the other occupant.

The computer in his office was already on, and a thermos of black coffee, a jug of ice water, and three aspirin were next to the mouse. Penn’s mail was sorted into the micro-piles he demanded, and his daily calendar was flipped to the day’s date. Everything was ready for Penn to write his column. His assistant, Lars, was efficient, but Penn knew that if he checked Lars’ blog that there would be another snide post about him. “The fucker blogs for free, too. I just don’t get it.”

Sitting down he dwarfs the desk, his sausage-like fingers, as if on their own, started banging out words in staccato bursts.

America’s Newest Profession: Bloggers for Hire

Frank Rich tears into the Gathering Storm:

WHAT would happen if you crossed that creepy 1960s horror classic “The Village of the Damned” with the Broadway staple “A Chorus Line”? You don’t need to use your imagination. It’s there waiting for you on YouTube under the title “Gathering Storm”: a 60-second ad presenting homosexuality as a national threat second only to terrorism.

Glenn Beck discusses his miracle healing touch, and the Butt Monkeys of Fox News are praising his performance when one of his guests passes out on the show, presumably from the lack of oxygen that Beck demands to keep teh preternatural crazy going..

Or how can you not reminisce about a childhood where you began each day with the Pledge of Allegiance as little kids lined up in the schoolyard and then marched in two by two with a flag and a crucifix in each classroom?

–Clarence Thomas

Methinks he has some revisionism going on there.

…that passes out during Glenn Beck. Or Beck.

(AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

“…to buy a vowel.”