Month: February 2010

the much more important question is why Microsoft, America’s most famous and prosperous technology company, no longer brings us the future

Dick Brass, a vice president at Microsoft from 1997 to 2004, who seems to think that Microsoft at one time did “bring us the future” as opposed to bring us lightly re-warmed ideas stolen from somebody else and grafted onto a vertical monopoly made possible through ruthless, anti-competitive techniques found to be illegal time and time again. Honestly, where would Microsoft be without an Apple or VisiCalc out there to crib ideas from and a IBM-derived business equipment monopoly to inhabit, corrode, and ultimately seize from the software flank (IBM’s maginot line being hardware, natch)? Not where it is today, I can tell you that much.

There’s a scene early on in [Avatar] where one of the scientists walks across the lab carrying the “mobile computer slab of the future.” We’ve seen one of these in almost every sci-fi movie of the last 50 years. It comes free with a jetpack, I suppose. Except this time, one month later, my 12 year old son turns to me and whispers “Look Dad, it’s an iPad.”

Mike Monteiro definitely gets it.

Code Brown

Boston NPR was predictably atwitter this morning on the news that Scott Brown accelerated his swearing in. What they got through without ever saying, even once, is that he most likely was doing so such that he can be there to vote in lockstep with the GOP to block such critical world-changing policy points as who is going to head the NLRB. Goddamned Liberal Media bias working against us once again.
Brown is genuinely staving off the utter collapse of The Republic by keeping somebody notionally pro-union out of the chairman’s seat over to the labor board. So this “independent” will undoubtedly go 0-4 on the independent thinking front in week one, likely also helping to stop a jobs initiative. And, as Lord Jesus well knows, politically independent Americans have no taste for job creation, no matter how anemic or government sourced those jobs may be. We just don’t want new jobs. Why can’t the fat-cats in Washington understand that? Probably because many of them don’t drive trucks.

Will he be asked about this 0-4 first week, even once? Of course he won’t. Will the Globe add a front-page feature counting days, months, years without a non-GOP lockstep vote on Brown’s part? Of course they won’t. Will enterprising reporters get into his face this week and ask for the deep policy explanations that underlie his supposedly independent stance that just happens to perfectly align with GOP political plays this week, and thus be ready to call him out as either a fool or a fraud? Of course they won’t.

Here’s your Scott Brown “independent” vote counter, brazenly predicted two years in advance and carved into the electronic firmament for all to see: 0.

If we don’t pass [healthcare reform] I don’t know what differentiates us from the other guys. It’s nice to believe good things, but no one keeps their home, or pays for their doctor visit, because Democrats believe good things. If anyone is searching for an answer to the lessons of Massachusetts, I promise you, it’s not to do nothing.

Barack Obama, President of these United States.
Absolutely goddamned right, as usual.

PAM McCain

10-2006 McCain: “The day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, ‘Senator, we ought to change the policy,’ then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it,” McCain said in October 2006 to an audience of Iowa State University students.
2010 McCain: [Gates told the Armed Services Committee, “I fully support the president’s decision.”] In response, McCain declared himself “disappointed” in the testimony. “At this moment of immense hardship for our armed services, we should not be seeking to overturn the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy,” he said bluntly, before describing it as “imperfect but effective.”

[Tea Party members] are people who’ve been gouged for years by the deregulated banking, mortgage lending, and commodities trading business, and when Obama sends down very weak, watered-down regulations to deal with those problems, they howl that he’s against “private enterprise” because that’s what they’ve been told to think by the Glenn Becks of the world.
Did you [tea partiers] know that insider trading isn’t even illegal in the commodities trading business? Do you honestly think gas prices were high in 2008 because we weren’t drilling enough in the Gulf of Mexico?
You idiots are being used. Think for yourselves. If the Fox Network believes it so wholeheartedly, how could it possibly be in your interest? They’ll take your ratings, sure, so they can sell you Charmin and $5 footlongs. I mean, Jesus, how can you not see that? If you had real allies that powerful, don’t you think someone would have taken care of you by now?

Matt Taibbi

Smaller government: Federal employment grew by 61,000 during Reagan’s presidency—in part because Reagan created a whole new cabinet department, the department of veterans affairs. (Under Bill Clinton, by contrast, federal employment dropped by 373,000).
Smaller deficits and debt: Both nearly tripled on Reagan’s watch.
Lower taxes: Although Reagan muscled through a major tax cut in 1981, he followed up by raising taxes in 1982, 1983, 1984 and 1986. In 1983, in fact, he not only raised payroll taxes; he raised them to pay for Social Security and Medicare. Let’s put this in language today’s tea-baggers can understand: Reagan raised taxes to pay for government-run health care.
Then there’s plank number five: Reaganite candidates must “oppos[e] amnesty for illegal immigrants.” Really? Because if you look up the word “amnesty” in Black’s Law Dictionary, you’ll find a reference to the 1986 bill that Reagan signed, which ended up granting amnesty to 2.7 million illegal immigrants.
Then there’s foreign policy. Plank number six demands that candidates back the surges in Iraq and Afghanistan. But what did Reagan do in his biggest confrontation with jihadist terror? When Hezbollah murdered 241 U.S. servicemen in Beirut in 1983, the Gipper didn’t surge; he withdrew the remaining American troops, and fast.
Plank number 7 calls for “effective [read military] action to eliminate” Iran and North Korea’s nuclear programs. But Reagan condemned Israel’s 1981 preventive strike against an Iraqi nuclear reactor.
And plank number nine requires steadfast opposition to abortion. Yet two of Reagan’s three Supreme Court nominees voted to uphold Roe v. Wade.

Peter Beinart on the “Reaganite” purity test modern fucktards so desire.

We know, we know—it’s hard to believe that the path to impeachment could have been paved at a 1993 dinner party. […] But Establishment Washington—aka, The Village—has operated by very strange rules over the course of the past several decades. And now, years later, along comes Quinn—and she points to that very same dinner.

Bob Somerby, discussing this. Truly beyond belief; not-coincidentally also the rotting core of our dangerously dysfunctional system and the essence of the environment that makes the GOP noise machine possible.

And if you look at the policies that we’ve seen over the course of this year from the administration and his Democratic colleagues in Congress, they’re all these leftist proposals.

John Boehner ®, House minority leader, who clearly took to heart the President’s words about corrosive and nonsensical framing of Obama’s center-right legislative record as some sort of “Bolshevik plot.”