Digby Has A New Rule

It's a pretty good one:

Any deficit scold who doesn't put reducing health care costs at the very top of the agenda is just a demagogic crank doing the dirty work for the aristocratic overlords.

Basic Arithmetic

Blogging Takes Its Toll

Speed Bump by Dave Coverly

Speed Bump by Dave Coverly

I feel like a real blogger, but with wood

After a week where the only place I could blog was in the basement, I'm beginning to feel like the real deal.

If only it was my parent's house.

Does it count that I'm banished downstairs because we're having hickory floors installed on the first floor?

I guess not.

Maybe I should order some pizza.

Blogging and Typos

see more Funny Graphs

Via GraphJam

hilzoy Says Goodbye

Her voice of reason, moderation, and respect will be missed in the vast wasteland of bloggers for whom tirades and unsupportable accusations have become the wrenches and screwdrivers too often pulled from their toolboxes.

A couple of her farewell thoughts, why she got into blogging in the first place, help frame both the value of her presence and the void that will be her absence:

As I said before, one of the things that led me to start blogging in the first place was the fact that I thought the country had gone crazy, and one of the things that particularly bothered me was the sheer level of invective and hatred that people seemed to feel comfortable directing at one another. I hated this, not just in itself, but because I thought: this harms us all. 

And:

This matters for policy: you're unlikely to choose sound policies if you assume that anyone who disagrees with you is a depraved, corrupt imbecile. It's hard to learn anything from people you have completely written off. But it's also corrosive to any kind of community or dialogue to assume the worst about large numbers of people you've never met. It makes you less willing to try to take their problems seriously, and to try to figure out how they might be solved, or to try to understand what's driving them. 

And:

When I started blogging, I thought: with all the craziness and vitriol that's flying around, it's worth at least trying to do something like that. I wanted to make it as easy as possible for people to be informed, by covering stories that weren't being covered, and by always linking to my primary sources, so that only one of us had to spend time figuring out how to find some bill or GAO report, for instance; and to fact-check claims that struck me as dubious, and that were being accepted.

Let's hope that one hundred typists step up to fill her shoes.

Infuriating Rich People Are Better Than You

Let me begin by telling you a true story from my city.

My neighbor was explaining that some former residents of the neighborhood had moved on up to a much bigger house for their family of three, and they needed a plumber to put in a water supply to their new wet bar.

The neighbor recommended a good plumber who had installed an outdoor faucet for him previously, so the former residents decided to give him this plumber a whirl.

In the last year or so, the plumber had gone through a divorce, then lost his house as part of the breakup. He had hit a tough stretch, was living with his mother, and labored 10-12 hours per day to keep his head above water.

So the plumber shows up to install the water supply and notices that the homeowners lead a pretty luxurious existence. They are also very detailed and fussy about everything, providing excruciating detail about what they wanted, how they wanted it, tossing in their own ideas - just the thing that an expert working in a vocational trade like plumbing wants to hear.

The final straw was when the plumber was in the finished basement and they warned him not to make a mess on their newly installed dance floor.

They have a dance floor.

I admire the plumber's restraint. All he did was vent to my neighbor that he's working 12 hours a day to pull himself out of a crappy situation, and these folks have their own dance floor.

I thought this would be a good preamble to an article posted at Gawker concerning Peter and Billy Getty, heirs to the Getty Oil fortune, who have been deemed blog-worthy by the San Francisco Chronicle.

What's the blog's genre? What it's like to be rich.

Oh, yes. Begin heating up the tar and feathers.

Here's a little taste for you - get to know Peter Getty.

Since graduating from college in 1988, Peter Getty has flirted occasionally with real work, but finding it wearisome, has returned full time to his first love, watching television.

Not to be confused with serious responsibilities are Mr. Getty's infrequent forays into music and writing, nor is the obscure music blog he has kept pseudonymously for the past several years.

Make sure you add this blog, What The Butler Didn't See, to your feed reader. It will be perfect for those days when your blood pressure is running a little too low and needs a boost.

Spaghetti Hot Dogs

This is fairly revolting. I'm actually grateful that I don't speak whatever language the Live Journal is in.

Spaghetti hot dogs

Barack Obama's Teleprompter's Blog

With all the drummed-up, nonsensical drivel that's been pouring out of the right-wing punditry of late, the most inane thread has to be the gnashing of teeth over President Obama's frequent use of a TelePromTer.

Apparently, two arduous years of debates, town hall meetings, and numerous television appearances haven't convinced the right that Obama is capable of cogent thought unless it's spelled out for him on a glass screen.

To that end, it feeds my inner snark to discover that Obama's teleprompter now has a blog.

Gone are the days when this device languished in obscurity, secretly assisting Obama in his quest to mislead the American people by speaking in complete sentences.

God bless America. And God bless Obama's teleprompter.

Dogs that Blog

I was toying with the idea of setting up a blog for enlightened posts by our recent rescue, Radar, an adorable mix who came to live with us about six weeks ago.

Sadly, I'm not the first super-genius to stumble upon this concept, judging from the complete lack of availability of domains and / or blog names using various combinations of dog, blog, DogBlog, BlogDog, and so on.

I'm brilliant, but I'm also very slow.