evar.
Month: November 2008 Page 3 of 8
The original was compelling enough:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI94AsuvUUA[/youtube]
But you’d never have imagined that there would not only be one, but *two*, that would surpass it:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdZ7Kwn9psI[/youtube]
and
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2pNF_IXfyI[/youtube]
Updated to replace the Willie Nelson video, which Sony BMG – in keeping with its music fan hating principles – has disabled for embedding. It’s a shame so many of my old favorites are kept under lock and key by corps like Sony BMG. Absolutely idiotic.
And I’m not talking about Atrios’ DFH (NTTAWWT). The New Yorker takes a wonderful walk through the state of American beer from the perspective of (sorta) local brewer Dogfish Head. In case any local readers don’t know, DFH operates a bar serving many of their less-available brews out at Seven Corners. Of course, if you can bear the Bay Bridge, you can always check out the original brewpub in Rehoboth. The article shares a little bit about the history of that location:
As it turned out, there was a reason that Delaware had no breweries like Calagione’s. Prohibition had been over for sixty years, but it was still illegal for a pub to bottle and distribute its own beer. Calagione found this out not long after he’d signed the lease. Luckily, Delaware was also very small and very friendly to business. “I literally drove to Dover, asked which one is the House and which is the Senate, and started knocking on doors,†he remembers. “They said, ‘You want to do what, son? Well, write up a bill!’ †Six months later, the governor signed the bill into law. The only hitch had come when Calagione was applying for his liquor license, and one of the commissioners brought up his recent arrest for driving under the influence of alcohol. Calagione admitted to the incident—a few weeks earlier, on his way home from a restaurant, he’d run into a parked car and dislocated his shoulder—but added a small correction. The actual infraction was a P.U.I., he said: pedalling under the influence. “Commissioner, I was on a bicycle.â€
I’m sure that *none* of you could identify with that. At all.
and it will stay that way, no matter how much the rightwing noise machine would like to say otherwise.
I know Andrew Sullivan isn’t the best source to go to for HRC criticism, but he poses an excellent question – where was the HRC on Prop 8?
Looks like the Senate wanted to get out in front of Obama and be the first to disappoint us. Senate Democrats are rewarding Joe Lieberman for questioning the President-Elect’s most basic intentions, and keeping Lieberman in a chairmanship for which he has demonstrated little interest in actually using for the public good. Great job, guys.
Update: I think Jane Hamsher puts it well:
I hope this puts to rest the notion that this is all some master stroke of kumbayah, of keeping your friends close and your enemies closer.
This is about telling you that you mean nothing. Â That democracy is a nice word, but it should never threaten the entitlement of the most exclusive club in the world.
No matter what Joe Lieberman does, the people who are protecting him hate you much more than they hate him.
TPM highlights an op-ed piece at Defense News, which warns against of a number of bad ideas currently being put into action, not the least of which is:
The uniformed services are trying to lock in the next administration by creating a political cost for holding the line on defense spending. Conservative groups are hoping to ramp up defense spending as a tool to limit options for a Democratic Congress and president to pass new, and potentially costly, social programs, including health care reform.
[ . . . ]
Promoting overspending on defense in order to forestall popular social spending is undemocratic – it creates a false tension between national security and other public policy goals.
The informal alliance between the services and conservative think tanks threatens to further politicize the military. The abuse of national security arguments to win political arguments is both morally suspect and threatens the security of the nation by delinking strategic assessment from public policy.
Dangerous games.
The Washington Post has a press release story about the launch of something called the Future of Privacy Forum:
A group of privacy scholars, lawyers and corporate officials are launching an advocacy group today designed to help shape standards around how companies collect, store and use consumer data for business and advertising.
Well, okay. That’s certainly something that I’d like to see get more attention. But what does this group bring to the discussion that the Center for Democracy & Technology, EPIC, and the EFF don’t already? Oh, here’s the answer:
The group, the Future of Privacy Forum, will be led by Jules Polonetsky, who until this month was in charge of AOL‘s privacy policy, and Chris Wolf, a privacy lawyer for law firm Proskauer Rose [ed. note – and also one of AT&T’s law firms] . They say the organization, which is sponsored by AT&T, aims to develop ways to give consumers more control over how personal information is used for behavioral-targeted advertising.
Because AT&T cares about your privacy.  Also from the press release story:
Mike Zaneis, vice president for public policy for the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which represents online publishers such as Google and Yahoo as well as advertisers such as Verizon, said online privacy issues have long been debated and that “having another voice in this area could help.”
Yup. I think it’s probably a safe bet that we can look forward to this group muddying the waters of most any privacy policy discussion in the near future. That isn’t to say this is an entirely useless voice – it’s expected to generally argue for “opt-in” tracking – but anything they issue should be viewed with the question of how it will benefit AT&T.
If you’re at all interested in following the off-season roster-building of US domestic pro cycling teams (UCI continental and pro continental), check out this fantastic chart over at Podium In Sight. Pretty much a complete guide to who’s where. This is usually a subject of mild interest to me, but with so many changes this year (closing of Toyota-United, HealthNet, Symmetrics, opening of as yet to be named team including Landis), it’s been worth watching.