So let’s go back to [disgraced former Speaker Newt] Gingrich’s original sentence. “One of the things in the health bill is 16,000 additional IRS agents,” he said. First, that’s not a “thing in the health bill.” It’s an extrapolation from a CBO report. Second, the word “is” is wrong, as even the original GOP spin only used the word “may.” Third, the number 16,000 is wrong. Fourth, the word “agents” is wrong. But if the statement gets no credit for truth, it’s at least efficient: Not just anyone could pack four falsehoods into 13 words.

Steve is showing a completely interactive ad here, almost like a sub-app inside the application. Embedded video, toys to play with. Really impressive as far as mobile advertising goes. If that kind of thing excites you.

Joshua Topolsky, liveblogging the iPhone OS 4 event.
He hits on the key point: advertising, no matter how great, only excites the advertiser, generally not the advertisee (though in narrow circumstances: of course, you’re glad to hear about something that interests you. 99.9% of all web-based advertising I’ve ever seen would interest no one). Nothing poses more of a hazard to the platform than opening this sort of floodgate for intrusive, platform-wide ads than does iAd.
Which Apple itself introduced today.
The examples shown seem tame enough, but then it always seems tame to start. Advertisers simply will not content themselves with opt-in advertising tucked away inside an app, and the new suspend/resume function means there’s no escape, the interrupting ad will still be waiting for you when you return; these are the people to whom you’ve just given the keys to the kingdom, and it has the capacity to make the crown jewels (the information-driven apps) totally unusable.
Pundits keep thinking Apple is going to “closed” itself out of the mobile market just like they all have convinced themselves that Apple did in the PC market. They won’t. But if it’s not careful, Apple will ultimately advertise itself out of the market.

Repeal, Replace, and Recur

The Onion gives the GOP (and you, the ‘Merican people) a little taste of what running the 2010 campaign on a complete repeal basis will look like:

“Republicans have no greater ally in this fight than leukemia,” said Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), who was flanked by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), and the abnormal increase in white blood cells. “Denying insurance to Americans with preexisting conditions and ensuring that low-income Americans stand no chance of receiving quality health care are just a few of the core beliefs that the GOP and leukemia share.”

“And believe me, if anyone is angrier than the Republican Party that children can no longer be denied coverage for having preexisting conditions, it’s leukemia.” DeMint continued. “We’re a match made in heaven.”

[…]

“I look around and I see Sen. Bob Bennett, Sen. Saxby Chambliss, eosinophilic and megakaryoblastic leukemia, and Sen. Pat Roberts, and I think, ‘This is what the Republican Party is all about,’” Sen. McConnell said. “We don’t like this new bill. We don’t like that it will cut the national deficit by $1.3 trillion over the next 20 years. We don’t like that it’s now illegal for insurance companies to suddenly drop a parent for getting deathly ill. That’s why we’re so very proud to be working with leukemia.”

I’d say that about nails it. The Democrat ought to use that line about “what the Republican Party is all about” unedited and in its entirety, read by that scary voice dude, and superimposed on pictures of the sick and dying, lying about in the streets. Where the GOP wants them to go die. That’s how you push back against the right wing noise machine. And it’s the only thing your GOP opponent will really understand. Once that level of pushback happens over anything, John McCain will get his wish: everyone will suddenly sit down and agree to cut out all the shit. Until that day, nothing will change in the GOP. Just like a schoolyard bully, they badly need their nose bloodied.

(h/t jasencomstock)

In the end, I’m left with a box. It contains the buckram sample case and the die used to stamp the cockeyed spine printing. It also contains a stack of wonderful, kind letters from a man who has meant as much to readers as any writer ever can. I have not looked at those letters in years; to reread them would be too painful. Nor will I sell them. That, at least, I can do.

Red Reagan

Ronald Reagan’s Memoirs: [F]or the eight years I was president, I never let my dream of a nuclear-free world fade from my mind.
Rudy Giuliani, 2010: A nuclear-free world has been a 60-year dream of the Left, just like socialized health-care. This new policy, like Obama’s government-run health program, is a big step in that direction. President Obama [just like that stinking hippy Reagan] thinks we can all hold hands, sing songs, and have peace symbols.

Hot out there

By my gauge, it’s currently 86° in sunny Boston, MA. NOAA says we goin’ to 92° (though that figure clearly represents a government takeover of weather forecasting). Today’s low will likely turn out to have been 57°, four degrees above the average high.

This is all terribly embarrassing for the climate change deniers. I’m sure they will be called to account for this deviation from their unsubstantiated by any data ever collected anywhere “nothing’s changing” stance. How can “nothing’s changing” possibly account for the fact that it is warm today? I demand to know. ‘Merica demands to know. Also, Al Gore is fat.

Tax and Spend

  • GE 2009 pre-tax earnings: $10.3 billion. Tax paid: $0. Tax refund $1.1 billion.
  • ExxonMobil 2009 pre-tax earnings: $19.3 billion. Tax paid to the US: $0. Subsidies received: 122
  • Just two examples. Let’s count how many times we hear about this sort of thing in the 2010 election cycle. I’m boldly setting the over/under at 0.

    Old McDonnell’s Farm

    The previous post seems irretrievably glib and insufficient when compared to this:

    […] not only does McDonnell venerate those who took up arms against their own country, he does so without acknowledging that the institution for which they fought was the right to preserve the right to own human beings as slaves. He then papers over the horrors of reconstruction, lynching, and Jim Crow that followed.

    This isn’t a coincidence. There is no place in which a frank acknowledgment of the realities of the South prior to the Civil War or immediately following can possibly coincide with a veneration of the Confederacy. So McDonnell just leaves that history out. When McDonnell talks about “all Virginians,” it becomes painfully clear that he isn’t.

    (h/t jasencomstock)

    Old McDonnell’s Farm

    NOW, THEREFORE, I, Robert McDonnell, do hereby recognize April 2010 as CONFEDERATE HISTORY MONTH in our COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA, and I call this observance to the attention of all our citizens.

    Robert McDonnell, governor of Virginia.
    Early returns on this move have the GOP 7% whiter and 12% angrier.