Not you, RSS reader. For my FB peeps.
Blow Up Your TV
I sympathize with Michael Madore [ABQJOURNAL OPINION/GUEST_COLUMNS: Get Government Out of TV, Radio], who resents his tax dollars going to NPR, PBS, and other services with an “offensive liberal slant.” However, he errs in comparing NPR, etc, to Fox. I resent a single penny of my money going to the War Department. Perhaps, Madore would be willing to imagine every penny of his taxes going to kill people overseas, while I imagine all my contributions going toward people enjoying and learning about nature and culture. I’m even willing to overlook the disparity between the billions spent destroying and the mere millions spent airing “liberal” (?) views like those of the McLaughlin Group.
Leave aside the madness of every citizen earmarking his tax money, which would surely result in no money at all for things we don’t know we need until it’s too late (you know, like Public Health). Leave aside that conservatives resent every penny of tax, while liberals accept there is a cost to having a nation. The electromagnetic spectrum is a public property. We, the People, lease portions of that spectrum to private industry, which uses those resources to sell you things that are ultimately bad for you, including philosophies that pour money into the pockets of a relatively few people. Here’s where FOX enters the picture: “my” airwaves are used to poison the minds of citizens against the commonwealth and the notion that we all must compromise, contribute, and get along. Pull the funding on NPR, etc, but pull the plug on FOX at the same time. Stop drinking the kool-aid sold by a foreign dictator.
Ken Jennings is still funnier than Watson – for now.
Watson has lots in common with a top-ranked human Jeopardy! player: It’s very smart, very fast, speaks in an uneven monotone, and has never known the touch of a woman. But unlike us, Watson cannot be intimidated. It never gets cocky or discouraged. …
Just as factory jobs were eliminated in the 20th century by new assembly-line robots, Brad and I were the first knowledge-industry workers put out of work by the new generation of "thinking" machines. "Quiz show contestant" may be the first job made redundant by Watson, but I’m sure it won’t be the last. …
But there’s no shame in losing to silicon, … [m]y puny human brain, just a few bucks worth of water, salts, and proteins, hung in there just fine against a jillion-dollar supercomputer.
Good joke aside, Watson has known the touch of at least one woman on the IBM development team.
Wisconsin Union Busting
ThinkProgress » Is Scott Walker Cutting Off Internet Access To Thwart Protesters?
According to pro-labor protesters in Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker (R) may be taking a page from former Egyptian Dictator Hosni Mubarak and cutting off internet access to key protest organizers within the state Capitol building.
If you are in the Capitol attempting to access the internet from a free wifi connection labeled “guest,” you cannot access the site defendwisconsin.org. The site has been used to provide updates on what is happening, where you can volunteer, and where supplies and goods are needed to support protesters. Administrators of the website were notified on Monday that the page is being blocked. Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman Mike Tate says that the site was put on a blacklist typically used to filter out pornography sites so that protestors inside the Capitol could not access this key site.
Former Wisconsin Assistant Attorney General Charles Hoornstra said that, if Walker is blocking the website, it could be a violation of state and federal laws concerning free speech laws.
ThinkProgress » Is Scott Walker Cutting Off Internet Access To Thwart Protesters?
The last time Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) went after public sector unions it had “disastrous results” for him and for taxpayers. As Milwaukee County Executive in 2009, Walker tried to get rid of the unionized security guards at the county courthouse and replace them with contractors, which he promised would save the county money.
As ThinkProgress has reported, the global conglomerate Koch Industries not only helped elect Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI), but is the leading force orchestrating his union-busting campaign. Koch gave Walker over $43,000 in direct donations and its allies aired millions of dollars worth of attack ads against his Democratic opponent. Then, Koch political operatives pressured Walker to crush labor unions as one of his first priorities. Tim Phillips, a former lobbying partner to Jack Abramoff and current president of Americans for Prosperity, a front financed by David Koch, told the New York Times that Koch operatives “had worked behind the scenes to try to encourage a union showdown.” A Koch-financed front group, the American Legislative Exchange Council, has prepped Wisconsin GOP lawmakers with anti-labor legislative ideas.
Today, the Koch group Americans for Prosperity announced that it will air an ad smearing the protesters in Madison and calling on the state to support Walker’s power grab.
Honk Angry If You’re!
Here’s one for the Albuquerque Journal’s blooper reel:
The garbled ALL CAPS text is bad enough. But I’m honking my horn over the confusing misuse of the lines (horizontal rules), which should be used sparingly to cluster related information, not separate a heading from its content. Traditionally, a horizontal rule tells the skimming mind that a transition has occurred and that all before is one piece and all after is another. It is a visual pause that says, hey, pay attention now. Yes, you can ignore (or be ignorant of) that and use the rule purely as decoration. The real issue is making a site easy to use. Well, not so for abqjournal.com, whose Web designer is locked in a windowless room and not allowed to look at other Web sites nor read about design. The powers that be at the Journal HATE the Web and it shows.
Although there are many ways to rework this example, I’d eliminate the text above each line and the line itself, making the text currently below each line the link. For minimal change, move the line above each link so that related content is kept together and separated from other content, although that’s still an overuse of the abused horizontal rule.
PS: I would not publicly castigate an individual for the look of a personal website. The Web belongs to us all and gives each of us real freedom of expression. But this site belongs to a corporation (the heroes of 21st Century AmeriCo) and the state’s largest paper. The Albuquerque Journal must be held to some standard higher than a teenager’s fan-blog (sorry to insult teenagers with the comparison).
Hear! Hear! Guns Do NOT Equal Freedom
ABQJOURNAL OPINION/SPEAK: Speak Up!
WHAT’S THIS? A people can topple their government without having any Second Amendment rights? Strange how we did not see protesters in the streets of Cairo with guns. The protesters were peaceful and not threatening to kill anyone in order to be heard. — C.E.
mjh’s blog — NADA
I created the NADA category on my blog during the darkest days of Duhbya’s Reign of Error: New American Dark Ages. I still find new items to add to NADA almost daily thanks to the frightened, angry, and willfully-ignorant ranting of the Radical Right Wrong. If politics are all that interest you … you may have a problem, but here’s your link: mjh’s blog — NADA. However, I recommend frequent breaks from the biliousness, so see the whole blog for photos, poetry, movies, etc. Thanks for reading. Let me know what you think (in comments or via email, if you’re civil).