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The McCain campaign is currently mocking Obama by sending out “Obama Energy Plan” tire gauges to contributes. I suggest Obama also send out tire gauges to supporters. The tire gauges should read:
“Obama. Simple, common sense solutions to the mess republicans have gotten us into.”
Just an idea… not sure if it would fit on a tire gauge.
As a wii owner for nearly a year now I’ve yet to feel like it’s a solid video game console. Sure I still have fun with people playing wii sports and to a lesser degree wii play. I even like to pick up some single player monkey-ball once in a while. I’ve yet to try some of the sports games like The Bigs (baseball) and Super Mario Strikers (soccer) and I expect them to be passable but I’ve never defined my gaming experience by sports games and I doubt I ever will. So where are the wii games that I want to play?
I had very high hopes for Metroid, I’ve always loved first person shooters (even on consoles) and I was psyched to use the nunchuck wii-mote as the natural fps controls that they are (I liked the controls of call-of-duty wii, but the game was lame). So along comes Metroid and I was expecting something solid, and maybe it is, but it certainly isn’t fun. I suspect I had too high of hopes, I really expected multi-player. It was on the DS Metroid, why wouldn’t the wii have it? I have no idea. I’d have rather had a multi player only Metroid than a single player only, alas.
Metroid is a puzzle game disguised as an action game and with out a really fast puzzle-solve-time an fps is a terrible interface for puzzles. Apart from the anti-intuitive design concept the game is full of other crappy game things like back tracking and looking for differences in textures to identify hidden shit. I want to shoot things not spend my time combing levels through a black and white filter that requires me to hold a button for about three seconds every time there is something that might be necessary to complete the next section but usually isn’t. Please. In the review by Game Informer (a Minnesota grown gaming magazine) the editor had the balls to suggest that there wasn’t enough back tracking in this game and that the backtracking is what made Metroid special… I’m canceling my subscription.
I guess there’s still some hope. There’s a new resident evil coming, a shooter on rails that looks promising. There’s also a new Fatal Frame being made by Suda-51 the guy who gave us Killer 7 one of the strangest games I’ve ever had the opportunity not to finish. Apart from that powder is of importance.
Since I’ve been biking to work I’ve found that when wearing business clothes during the commute it’s helpful to apply a powder to strategic areas. At first I used some powder I found laying around–Goldbond. I liked the effect but Goldbond has a distinct mediciney smell that I’m not fond of. Sometime later my significant other was heading to the drug store so I requested that she pick up some powder that was a little less mediciney, a little more manly and a little more sexy. She brought me a big bottle of Vagisil powder. She still claims this meets my criteria… I disagree.
The surge is not working.
With today’s helicopter crash, the Department of Defense will add fourteen more to their list. Right now the official number the media’s reporting is
“at least 3,721 members of the U.S. military who have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003.”
Inver Grove Heights, Richfield, Cottage Grove, Shakopee, Roseville, Fridley. These are cities in Minnesota that all have one thing in common: Their population is equivalent to the number of reported casualties in the GWOT. There are over thirty other cities in Minnesota with fewer citizens than casualties in the GWOT.
How can this be? It’s because the media is reporting the corpse count of U.S. military personnel who have died in Iraq. The media has a slightly higher corpse count than the DoD. But if one were to examine the raw numbers the DoD is reporting, one would simply need to add some columns to get the real casualty report.
The surge is not working.
Total deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan: 4,129 dead U.S. soldiers. This count is not designating between combat deaths and non-combat deaths because after all, the families aren’t any less distraught that their son or daughter died from non-hostile action.
The number of soldiers who were wounded but returned to duty is at 15,751, and the number of soldiers who were wounded but could not return to duty is 13,254.
If you add all three together, the total number of casualties as reported by the DoD is 33,134 (source: DoD website defenselink.mil).
To put this in perspective, it would be the equivalent of taking all the citizens of a large metro-area suburb, killing 4,000 of them and wounding the rest, half of which could go back to their daily routine (albeit injured) and the other half which would require a hospital stay. All of them would likely need psychological treatment.
So when Fox news (the only media source with the headline “Positive Surge Results…”) or one of the other mainstream media outlets suggests that the surge is working, you can tell them they are dead wrong.
The surge is not working.
A bridge in America just shouldn’t fall down.
-Senator Amy Klobuchar D-MN
The Mississippi bridge had a 50 out of 100 rating.
49 would mean it has to be replaced.
Road infrastructure in Minnesota is paid for by the gas tax. Minnesota’s constitution requires that gas tax be spent solely on ROADS not trains, not busses. ROADS! The gas tax in Minnesota has not been increased in 20 YEARS. This is because republicans have spent the last 20 years running on the primary issue of TAX CUTS.
Tim Pawlenty has been vetoing attempts at increase spending on transportation since 2003. The republican party gets support by claiming that raising taxes on gas would raise the price of gas. Consider that Wisconsin pays more than 10 cents more tax per gallon than Minnesota and their gas prices are exactly the same (while big oil makes record profits).
When you hear a republican say “Government is the problem.” Remember that someone needs to maintain food standards, someone needs to educate our children, someone needs to make sure OUR BRIDGES DON’T FALL DOWN. If someone running for office, for a place in government says “GOVERNMENT IS THE PROBLEM” how can we expect them to govern well? Obviously we can’t.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales gave testimony in front of congress today and was presented with a recent poll stating that a majority of American’s (53%) lack confidence in him and believe he should resign. He stated that he wasn’t aware of the poll and that he didn’t believe it.
As an American I certainly don’t believe he’s capable of prosecuting anything in a non-partisan way. I’m also concerned that he’s eroding our civil liberties and guilty of getting in front of the Senate and now Congress and lying through his teeth.
I think we should all contact the attorney general and let him know that we don’t have confidence in him, that he should step down and turn himself into the authorities for abusing his office for partisan purposes. Here’s his contact info:
Email: AskDOJ@usdoj.gov.
If you feel extra motivated you can give him a call and let him know how much he sucks: 202-353-1555
In addition here’s his address if you wish to longhand a message to him:
Scientists have announced that a new rock floating through space, Gliese 581 c may be a habitable planet. If this is the case, we will need to start thinking about ways to get there. Hell, we’ve been thinking about it as a species for years but we need to put aside social and political differences and really work toward finding a way to migrate to a new habitable planet. We don’t even need to live there really. We just need to be able to grow food on the planet until we find more planets capable of sustaining life.
Once we discover a planet capable of supporting farming, we can send our robo-workers to do do all the heavy lifting and humans will make future livings as Teamsters. Only we’ll all be piloting space ships delivering foodstuffs and repair parts back and forth. Ice Pirates anyone? It may have been an entertaining farce in 1984, but if we as the human race want to go out with a bang, not a whimper, then we really need to start making real progress into deep-space exploration and migration.
We need inter-galactic spaceships capable of traversing millions of miles a la Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek.
Think of it as science fiction if you must…but things change. Sometimes, fantastic stories that were once considered fiction lead to discovery.
Dear Anybody On Earth Running For President In The Next Election,
First of all: TOO SOON!
1) If you announce that you’re running for office more than a year before the election I’m not voting for you. Consider that you have to give stump speeches for longer than a year. With Youtube and bloggers you’re going to have to keep thinking of new material and that’s going to be very difficult. Even if you have the creative chops and miraculous speech writers the longer you run the more likely you are to say something stupid (drop out now Biden). If you’re reading this and you’ve already announced your candidacy DROP OUT. Perot dropped four months before the election and joined up again a month before and almost won. If you drop out now people will forgive you, especially if you say something about how these damn campaigns are starting TOO SOON and costing TOO MUCH MONEY. Re-enter 3 months before the election, you’ll be fresh you’ll have a ton of money (just invest what you have now in Apple, Google and Nintendo) and people will love it. I’ll love it. I’ll vote for you.
Now that that’s said I’d like to get to the real reason I’m writing this letter, Political Cliché Reform. Political Cliché’s are stupid, they make you look stupid, they make the people listening to you feel stupid, they make our children stupid, they make our enemies think we’re stupid, etc…
If you use any of the following clichés I will not vote for you:
2) “_________ the course” Stay, Change or otherwise. Say it and lose my vote.
3) “Talk the talk” or “Walk the talk” or any other variation that is always used incorrectly and always sucks. I definitely don’t vote for people who can’t even use a cliché properly.
4) “America is the greatest country!” This is racist. I don’t vote for racists.
5) “The world changed on 9/11″ This is technically true but so is “the world changed on 9/10″. Don’t use a disaster to justify fear (leads to the dark-side). I don’t vote for fear-mongers… or Sith.
6) “Flip-Flop” Unless you’re referring to shoes I’m voting for someone else.
7) “Keep all of our options open” everyone knows this means, “we will bomb them if we feel like it,” just say that. I won’t vote for you in either case, but the latter is more honest.
“Terrorists” this word is officially a cliché. It’s used for anyone who fights for a cause that we don’t like–no criteria beyond that. Putting this on my list is likely to make it so I can’t vote for anyone… *sigh*
9) “Islamo-Fascists” This makes no sense and using it means you don’t know what fascism is. I won’t vote for someone who doesn’t know what fascism is.
10) “Fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here” the dumbest one on this list. It would be equally valid to say “Eat pudding so we don’t have to fight them here”. Anytime I hear someone repeat this, a little piece of my soul dies. I don’t vote for people who kill my soul.
Anyone who attended CENTCOM’s presentation entitled “The Long War” at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute knows that top leaders at CENTCOM were not aware of the National Intelligence Estimate that stated America was less safe from terrorism after the botched war in Iraq. And, yes, it was/is botched.
Now comes this Marine Corps intelligence report stating that the American military has lost control of the crucial Anbar Province in Western Iraq, and basically that the rest of the population centers will follow.
From the article paraphrasing the report:
Between al-Qaeda’s violence, Iran’s influence and an expected U.S. drawdown, “the social and political situation has deteriorated to a point” that U.S. and Iraqi troops “are no longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency in al-Anbar,” the assessment found. In Anbar province alone, at least 90 U.S. troops have died since Sept. 1.
Ugh. What is the answer?
Girl Talk. Download - pay what you can. - #
Phish reunites to tour in 2009. - #
Here's a helpful and depressing tutorial on the current financial crapstorm, in cartoon form. I'm having a hard time figuring out who did the video, but it was linked to on Cosmic Variance. - #
MoveOn.org is giving away free Obama buttons. Almost 2 million ordered so far. - #
If I had married Tea Leoni and starred in film and TV with Gillian Anderson, I would have the exact same problem. How many love children do you have David? - #
