All this talk of Mitt Romney (whose primary win in New Hampshire tomorrow and then in South Carolina and then in Florida will secure his nomination for president) and his previous work at the investment firm Bain Capital has made me think of a metaphor…
Mitt Romney = Bane.
The toughest match the Dark Knight has ever had to face.
Barack Obama = the Dark Knight
Once thought of as a hero, now thought to be a monster, he must return to fight for his ideals.
Commissioner Gordon = The Tea Party
Traditionalist called by a sense of duty to engage in a battle to preserve what is radically decaying before his eyes.
Catwoman = Occupy Wall Street
An otherwise uninvolved player, motivated by and attracted to chaos whose sense of entitlement brings her/them to class warfare and a life of law breaking they feel is morally justified cuz rich people have stuff and they don’t. She’s angry because she’s ignorant – mainly in her misunderstanding of economics, thinking of it as a pie with a finite amount of slices.
How does it all end?…
Take it either way:
Romney/Bane succeeds in doing what other more experienced contenders previously failed at and breaks the people’s hero?
Or
Obama/Batman gets broken by a strong challenger but ultimately wins in the end?
Santorum is doing well. He is making me doubt the things i’ve bashed him for:
Lobbyist? He says he approached a local coal company to lobby for them specifically to defeat Cap & Trade.
Voted Most Corrupt? He says that’s a charge sent by a liberal organization every election cycle just to smear conservatives.
hmm… there could be truth to both of those. Got me wondering…
Yahoo! has this question:
UPDATE: they fixed it…
Moderator asks okay question that rests on stupid premise: “only 2 of you have served [in the military] – do you think that makes you better suited to be President?”. This is so stupid. Didn’t work for George Bush Sr – didn’t work for Bob Dole – didn’t work for John Kerry – didn’t work for John McCain and although G. Dubya won twice, it wasnt at all thanks to his Air Force Texas and Alabama Air National Guard service. this issue is a dud.
Ron Paul refines his “chickenhawk” argument against Gingrich so it sounds more sane: says that if you got multiple deferments when you had the chance to serve then you shouldn’t order anyone into war. that makes total sense but is a big difference from the chickenhawk argument which smears everyone who did not elect to join the military as having actively hid from it. That is stupid. Paul is doing really well tonight. I wish he ran this good a campaign in 2008 and/or performed this well in the 08 debates.
Newt says it is “inaccurate and false” that he asked for deferments. I don’t care cuz I’m more annoyed that he said “inaccurate AND false”. They mean the same thing, dude…
[commercial break]
Do states have the right to ban contraception? what in the what? — oh shit – Romney is voicing my exact reaction and chiding Stephonopolous for asking it. The question was based on a court case but still asked oddly. — NOW Stepho cuts to the chase and asks whether the Constitution has a “right to privacy”.
Ron Paul on the right of privacy in the Constitution: it pertains to your personal belongings and the state meddling with them with warrentless searches and whatnot.
Question from Yahoo asker: Since you’re against same sex marriage, what do you want gay people to do with their partners?
Gingrich: Favors hospital visitation rights, will and similar sensible laws. just quibbles over the word “marriage”
Huntsman: “Civil Unions are fair and I support them”. Doing well until he uses the old trope by saying he doesnt believe his marriage is affected by gay couples or same sex marriage or civil unions or idk what he;s referring to there but either way its stupid because no one has ever said gay relations of any kind affect their marriage. dumb thing to say.
Santorum: Let the states decide – but then stops himself and says there should be a singular Federal law so people arent married in one state and not married in another. derp? Then says “this is a state issue not a federal issue” – double-derp? Moderator asks what happens to same sex marriages if Santorum passes a law saying marriage is one man one woman – Santorum doesnt answer. just repeats that if the law passes it passes.
Romney: says its a “wonderful thing” for people to commit to each other long term but they don’t need to call it “marriage” and receive approval from the state that way and I bite my nails because I like Mitt and that is almost the right answer but only if he follows it up with “BUT, lets give le gayz more legal rights” like what Newt said. Thankfully he did go on and is talking about those rights right now as I type this: basically favors civil unions, legal partnerships, etc and just wants to preserve the word marriage. I don’t care about the word marriage but I dont have a problem with this traditionalist-but-non-hater position. whew! glad he got it right and remained the only candidate to avoid saying things that I would be embarrassed by if I were to publicly support.
Gingrich comes back and asks (openly, not to any individual) whether the Catholic church (he is a convert to Catholicism) should be forced out of the adoption business because they dont adopt out to same sex couples. gets applause.
Romney agree’s and notes that that is exactly what happened in Massachusetts by a court order he disagrees with.
Stepho beats the dead horse of Ron Paul running as a 3rd party candidate even though he says he doesnt want to and has never expressed interest in doing so. Paul gives the same answer as always: he’s not doing it and has no plans to do it but won’t promise not to do it.
Ron Paul says he’s doing well in the polls and says with a warm smile that he’s getting “closer to Mitt every day”. People laugh. its a nice/friendly moment.
Perry is asked if everyone on the stage should rule out a 3rd party bid. Perry doesnt answer and instead says anyone on the stage is better than Obama and then goes back to same sex marriage and says he wants a Constitutional amendment to define marriage.
Romney and Huntsman on when to leave Afghanistan: Huntsman says leave right away and dont invest another penny in that boondoggle. Romney says get em out soon but no hard date cuz you’ve got to asses the details as President first.
Perry says to send troops back into Iraq… when pressed: Perry says we need to because Iran will move in “literally at the speed of light”. Holy shit, those are fast Iranians…
[commercial]
Romney says that there are things Government can do to help the job market – like fix bridges n shit, but fundamentally government does not create jobs, it can only encourage the private sector.
I miss these two:
Romney: bring down taxes to be competitive with other nations and give relief to people who need it most and mostly hurt by the Obama economy, the middle class. Reduce rates. Reduce the amount of exemptions. Simplify the tax code and broaden the base — God damn you Republicans who don’t love this guy are stupid. He’s SO your best candidate in decades…
blah blah boring stuff – im checking twitter for a few minutes…
Huntsman vs Romney on China: Huntsman pulls the “i know Chinese” card and says a sentence to Romney in Mandarin and doesn’t explain what it means. SO. fucking. Douchey….
Huntsman says Romney wants a trade war with China. Romney says “nigga, the fuck you talkin bout?” (paraphrase) and does a thing with his hands saying he doesnt want a trade war but “we sell China *this much* [higher raised hand] – they sell us *this* much [much lower hand gesture] – who do you think doesnt want the trade war?” – bam.
[commercial break]
oh. that’s the end.
Well that was one of the best ones they’ve had. Everyone did very well.
Post debate commentary by ABC panel: Donna Brazil, former Gore campaign manager said that it was a good night for Democrats because no one attacked Mitt Romney. When everyone on the panel gave a hearty “wtf?” to that comment she explained that the weakest candidate is the one that no one attacks and that was Mitt Romney so Democrats are happy. Everyone reacted in unison with a “nooo. you don’t mean that” in the tone of when you say “aawww, c’mon” when an elderly great aunt says something controversial but you want to brush it off and ignore it instead of deal with it.
UPDATE: here’s an out-of-context recap, but the clips are not at all in chronological order.
Camille Boivin and Philippe Aumond are a Canadian couple who drove 9 hours to get matching tattoos. Sounds stupid. Oh, but they did it to honor their 5 year old son… sounds even dumber if you ask me… Oh – but there’s more…
Their son Jacob has a cellphone in his lunchbox. Geez. at only 5? Don’t you think that’s a bit excessive? Well, it’s used for calling phone every day to calculate and program his insulin pump so it delivers the exact amount he needs based on his food intake. Jacob thought it was a cool gadget at first until he realized he was the only one at school who had it and that made him different and weird.
Jacob has to wear the pump at all times. Round the clock. His pancreas stopped functioning and needs the pump to deliver five insulin injections a day to survive.
His parents say they didn’t want Jacob to feel he was different from others so, in solidarity, they got matching tattoos. Of Jacobs pump. that say “forever linked together,” meaning to the pump and to each other. Heart melting yet?
Jacob was thrilled to get his pump in August 2010. He saw it as a personal machine that works for him, Boivin said. Then he wondered whether he was the only boy in the world to wear one.
“It broke my heart,” Boivin recalled. She told him all children have their differences, some wear glasses, others have braces or wheelchairs. There was one other adolescent in their region with a pump, but no one his age that reflected his situation.
While Boivin and Aumond couldn’t get real insulin pumps, they figured an ink version would help assuage their son’s solitude.
It had to be esthetic and look like the real thing, Boivin said, so the couple searched on the Internet for an artist and found Bruno Oeuvray in Joliette.
“Jacob was thrilled. It was magical to see his eyes,” Boivin said, her voice wavering with emotion. “Even today I have tears in my eyes.”
Aumond’s tattoo has barbed wire string where the catheter would be attached to the pump, a visual reminder of painful injections and “having to pierce the skin several times of day for a drop of blood” that the condition imposes on patients. Boivin’s tattoo catheter trails to her back where it transforms into an almond-tree branch with pink flowers.
“It’s a symbol of hope for a cure one day,” Boivin said of the almond blooms.
My cousin Steven drinks a lot of mineral water and since I spent Christmas and New Years with him and his family I tried some and I have to admit that I don’t get it. Why do people want bubbles in their water? So you can burp more? Then I got to wondering about the health effects: does bubbly water clean your insides out maybe? Or is the gas you’re drinking bad for you? It IS carbon dioxide, after all. The stuff we’re supposed to be exhaling and hurts our bodies when we inhale it directly through car exhaust or cigarettes (redundant?).
So I did some googling and found out that mineral water is good for you, cuz – duh- minerals, and is a good way for your body to absorb them if you can’t or don’t get them from other food sources. Okay. So that’s a go on naturally occurring fizzy spring-water – but what about artificially carbonated water? If the minerals are the only good thing about mineral-water then that doesnt make fizzy water good or bad for you.
So the question: Does carbonation make water, any tiny bit more unhealthy or dangerous?
How’s this for inventing a new drink: first, you discover an odd gas produced as a by-product of brewing beer. Next you pop some mice inside a bell jar containing the gas and observe that they all die. In a fit of inspiration you add the gas to some water and notice that it fizzes. Discovering that this sinister gas is, in fact, carbon dioxide – the very substance we make effortlessly when we breathe – you then try and persuade the world to drink the stuff. It sounds crazy but both Joseph Priestley and Jacob Schweppe thought it perfectly reasonable when they introduced 18th-century society to the joys of fizzy water.
The answer appears to be…. no:
There have even been studies looking at the effect of carbonated drinks on the stomach and gut. Among the many that showed there was no harm done was an American study on competitive cyclists. Even when exercising like lunatics and producing maximum amounts of CO2, consuming a little more of the gas via fizzy water made no difference to the bikers. And all of this is without even resorting to animal studies, such as the one from Poultry Science showing that fizzy drinks helped cockerels cope better with heat stress.
Unsurprisingly, given the hefty turnover of carbon dioxide our bodies deal with effortlessly each day, there remains no serious reason to think that carbonation makes water dangerous. Swapping a glass of plain old tap water for the bottled variety adds nothing save a little bit of sparkle.
PETA has always been good at producing provocative ads and commercials to get their message out, often sparking outrage or critical commentary that feeds the attention they’re trying to get, and since a lot of them fall under the category of “clever but stupid”, I sometimes can’t help but take the bait myself. So it’s not without knowledge of what I’m doing that I comment on this ad by the animal rights organization featuring adult film star Sasha Grey (catch her quick because she’s only got a Hollywood shelf life of another few months to a year before this post is outdated and no one knows who she is*).
“Too much sex can be a bad thing” – take it from someone who has it for a living. Wait, what? I mean, that’s obviously the joke, somehow, but…how exactly? Sasha Grey doesn’t actually think that too much intercourse is bad, obviously, so… like… what? I feel like this could have been clever if done properly but this just lazily uses a nude woman to make an animals-humping-and-producing-unwanted-babies point. Has Sasha had her tubes tied? Because otherwise there’s no “There” there. So…like… make your pet incapable of reproducing because a naked porn star told you so. um…ok?
Come on, PETA… this is not a bad concept, but you’ve gotta try a little with the execution.
—
*Which I’m not trying to be mean in saying, btw – she seems nice and smart and I don’t see horrible failure in her future – just a return to mostly-unknown status given the arc her career is taking. commentary more on the industry than on her.
Such a trustworthy source of truth and transparency could have possibly…. mislead us????
“When we conducted our own analysis by studying additives per cigarette – following Philip Morris’ original protocol — we found that 15 carcinogenic chemicals increased by 20 percent or more,” he said.
Additionally, in the independent study, the researchers discovered the reason behind Philip Morris’ failure to identify many toxic effects in animal studies: its studies were too small.
“The experiment was too small in terms of the number of rats analyzed to statistically detect important changes in biological effects,” Glantz said. “Philip Morris underpowered its own studies.”
The results of “Project MIX” were first published as four papers in a 2002 edition of Food and Chemical Toxicology, a journal whose editor and many members of its editorial board had financial ties to the tobacco industry. While Philip Morris was trying to get the papers published, the company scientist who led Project Mix sent an email to a colleague describing the peer review process as “an inside job.”
In the new study, the researchers used documents made public as a result of litigation against the tobacco industry. The documents are available to the public through UCSF’s Legacy Tobacco Documents Library.
Those banners on Wikipedia asking you to donate just raised $20 Million, sukkaaaz*…
*note that thats 20 million US dollars (currency) – comma – (pronoun) sukkaaaz. Not 20 million suckers. that’d be cool though. Im gonna have a lollipop drive. Imagine if lollipops could drive? I bet BlowPops would rock a Ferrari and DumDums would be in Chevy Volts. But seriously – whats the deal with airline food?
The San Francisco-based non-profit group that maintains Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia, officially closed its annual fundraising drive on Tuesday. The total amount raised: $20 million.
That’s a record, and a step up from the $16 million Wikimedia raised last year during a nearly two-month-long fundraising effort.
The drive garnered some big-ticket donations, such as $500,000 from Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his wife’s foundation. But according to Wikimedia, the majority of the pledges came from more than a million ordinary folks coughing up donations in the $20 range.
The money will help Wikimedia — whose more than 20 million Wikipedia articles are written and edited for free by volunteers — pay for the technology and infrastructure necessary to keep the service growing, develop new features for the website and bolster its legal defense fund.
Wikimedia’s record-breaking fundraising drive still isn’t enough to cover the 90-employee organization’s operating budget. According to Wikimedia communications head Jay Walsh, the operating budget for the 2011 fiscal year ending June 30 is $28 million.
This ad has everything you could want to send a “we are better than the competition” message as far as a food service that is branding itself as compassionate, healthier than the rest, and something you should feel morally good about buying. It’s also just good art.
I’ve been hatin on tricky Rick Santorum this election cycle but I gotta admit that he worked hard, gave a great speech with no notes, has a beautiful family and some okay ideas. its just that… the guy who beat him by just 8 votes also gave a great speech with no notes, has a beautiful family and a lot of GOOD ideas in addition to his okay ideas + doesnt freak me out and doesn’t hold any positions that would embarrass me out of publicly/vocally supporting him, so I’m gonna say good job and congratulations to Mr Santorum, but we’ve got a better choice (by a wide margin) in this race.
In other thoughts: Caucuses are weird and outdated and this emphasis on Iowa being the first in the country to vote for president is even weirder and more outdatederz. Shiz needs to change.
California doesnt vote in this process until June and the nominee is always chosen by then. Lame. Change it. Should be a lottery on which states go first. Iowa and New Hampshire aren’t representative of the rest of the country enough to have such an important role in this process.
The Daily Caller ran this headline and image above on their front page about this news item. Weird, right? That image of the woman outside the window is Congresswoman Wasserman Shultz and it is photoshopped. But it looks real, right? I wonder how many were fooled… Anyway – the point they were trying to make was that of the contents of this news item:
Democratic campaign officials are fighting to get onto the GOP’s Iowa podium, because they’re hoping to jostle the GOP candidates, trip up Mitt Romney and color the public’s image of the Republican coalition and the eventual winner.
Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz will be in Des Moines, Iowa, on Tuesday, where she’s expected to slam Romney as an out-of-touch elitist.
Brad Woodhouse, the DNC’s communications chief, was in the state Jan. 1. He worked to damage the former Massachusetts governor’s campaign by trying to shape reporters’ coverage of Romney‘s win or loss in the race.
“Romney has now predicted a win tomorrow. He’s been running for 5 years, is all in here and has spent millions to win. He sure better,” said a Monday evening tweet from Woodhouse.
Democrats also showed off their Iowa general-election organization in the hope of a getting favorable comparisons to the Republicans’ ill-funded, ramshackle campaigns.
The New York Times displayed a flattering video of campaign volunteers hard at work, but also downplayed Obama’s use of Wall Street donations to portray itself as a champion of Iowa’s middle class.
Okay. so… fine.. but I’m still calling fowl on the use of the term Photo-bombing with this photoshopped example of a photo-bomb. For context, here is a genuine photo-bomb below:
