Weekend Open Thread
Welcome to your weekend open thread. I’m starting my vacation now, so posting may be spotty. What’s on your mind today?
The Ph.D. Challenge is pretty amusing:
An apparently anonymous group of graduate students created “The Ph.D. Challenge,” an annual contest designed to get grad students to do something original, very original:
All men and women who are currently graduate students at an accredited University or Institute of higher-learning are welcome and encouraged to participate. The idea of the PhD Challenge is to have students perform some task that the average graduate student is too timid to perform. It takes a unique caliber of student to overcome adversity and the ire of their adviser in order to complete this challenge.
There’s a different challenge every year. The task this year was to get the phrase “I smoke crack rocks” into a peer-reviewed academic paper.
The 2010 winner is Gabriel Parent, a master’s degree student in Language Technology at Carnegie Mellon University.
I wonder how Parent’s advisor felt about seeing “I smoke crack rocks” in a paper with his/her name? I really wish I had known about this when I was a student. Actually, secret messages in papers is not that unusual. I think it shows how few people actually read the papers.
Congratulations Republican Party and obedient mainstream media! “Lie of the Year” honors are well-deserved.
In the spring of 2009, a Republican strategist settled on a brilliant and powerful attack line for President Barack Obama’s ambitious plan to overhaul America’s health insurance system. Frank Luntz, a consultant famous for his phraseology, urged GOP leaders to call it a “government takeover.”
“Takeovers are like coups,” Luntz wrote in a 28-page memo. “They both lead to dictators and a loss of freedom.”
The line stuck. By the time the health care bill was headed toward passage in early 2010, Obama and congressional Democrats had sanded down their program, dropping the “public option” concept that was derided as too much government intrusion. The law passed in March, with new regulations, but no government-run plan.
But as Republicans smelled serious opportunity in the midterm elections, they didn’t let facts get in the way of a great punchline. And few in the press challenged their frequent assertion that under Obama, the government was going to take over the health care industry.
PolitiFact editors and reporters have chosen “government takeover of health care” as the 2010 Lie of the Year. Uttered by dozens of politicians and pundits, it played an important role in shaping public opinion about the health care plan and was a significant factor in the Democrats’ shellacking in the November elections.
I wonder if the media will have a soul-searching at being the main vehicle for promoting this year’s lie of the year (just like last year’s death panels). Nah, who am I kidding. The media loves them some Republican propaganda. So will Democrats ever learn how to fight this? I guess not, they can’t even make hay of Republicans ignoring 9/11 first responders.
Tags: Open Thread
Umm, Delaware won.
So the Nor’easter is going to miss us, but we have an opportunity for a white Christmas.
BTW, trying to keep up on the Senate and DADT from very cold (hard to txt) UD stadium today was challenging. It was great to get good news from the field and from DC in the same afternoon!
All the more reason why we need to keep Wikileaks in business.
Julian Assange = Maureen Dowd
Editorial from today’s NYT on tax-cut deal:
“When deficit reduction begins in earnest, tax increases and cuts in big-ticket programs — Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and defense — will be the focus. Before that, Mr. Obama must not be drawn into nickel-and-dime cuts that will not solve the deficit problem — and will impede recovery. He made a deal with the Republicans. Now he has to get them to live with it.”
The money quote is “Now he has to get them to live with it.” As we have seen, the R’s are totally without honor or any sense of responsibility to the American people. Time and time again we have seen them serve their self-interests and their corporate masters.
Yeah. Republicans don’t care about “the deficit.” That is fairly obvious. But then again, neither do most Americans, so I’m not sure that being the champions of higher taxes and program cuts is where the Democrats want to be.
This comment belongs in the Congressional Oxymoron post.
This comment is about Michelle Bachmann’s appointment to the Intelligence committee, which, although it may be lost on some, appears to be the topic of this post. Where is the “crayon” tag so I can explain it to the slower folks.
See, if Michelle Bachmann creates mischief in the Intelligence Committee, which seems likely, I would like Wikileaks to be in existence so I might read about Michelle Bachmann’s Intelligence Committee activities, or the results of them. Wikileaks, or at least the principle of leaking, would serve as a check on Michelle Bachmann’s activities on the Intelligence committee.
WikiLeaks: Cuba banned Sicko for depicting ‘mythical’ healthcare system
guardian.co.uk Friday 17 December 2010 Amelia Hill
Cuba banned Michael Moore’s 2007 documentary, Sicko, because it painted such a “mythically” favourable picture of Cuba’s healthcare system that the authorities feared it could lead to a “popular backlash”, according to US diplomats in Havana. The revelation, contained in a confidential US embassy cable released by WikiLeaks , is surprising, given that the film attempted to discredit the US healthcare system by highlighting what it claimed was the excellence of the Cuban system.
As is so common among conservatives, Ishmael has bought into a fiction. “Sicko” was not banned in Cuba, as is easily shown by even a cursory bit of research. As is so often the case, the US State Dept. (at the time under GWB) made up this bit of nonsense.
See the full debunking by Michael Moore himself:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-moore/viva-wikileaks-sicko-was_b_798586.html
What this really illustrates is that our media have for the most part given up all pretense of trying to ascertain the facts of any given situation.
In order to have safe skies, the TSA gets to touch your junk. If you want to bring a loaded glock on a plane, you are good to go – x-rays be damned.
Anon – when you start running this blog, you can decide what goes where. As the author of the post you cited, I felt you were off topic and decided to move your comment to the Open Thread. If you don’t like it, there are other places for you to go and troll around.
Speaking of the TSA – I thought I would share this romantic story with you all…..
“He grasped me firmly but gently just above my elbow and guided me into a room, his room. Then he quietly shut the door and we were alone. He approached me soundlessly, from behind, and spoke in a low, reassuring voice close to my ear.
“J…ust relax.” Without warning, he reached down and I felt his strong, calloused hands start at my ankles, gently probing, and moving upward along my calves slowly but steadily. My breath caught in my throat. I knew I should be afraid, but somehow I didn’t care. His touch was so experienced, so sure. When his hands moved up onto my thighs, I gave a slight shudder, and partly closed my eyes. My pulse was pounding. I felt his knowing fingers caress my abdomen, my ribcage. And then, as he cupped my firm, full breasts in his hands, I inhaled sharply. Probing, searching, knowing what he wanted, he brought his hands to my shoulders, slid them down my tingling spine and into my panties.
Although I knew nothing about this man, I felt oddly trusting and expectant. This is a man, I thought. A man used to taking charge. A man not used to taking `no’ for an answer. A man who would tell me what he wanted. A man who would look into my soul and say … “Okay, ma’am,” said a voice. “All done.”
My eyes snapped open and he was standing in front of me, smiling, holding out my purse. “You can board your flight now.”
From The New York Times:
So sweet!
@jason – the touchdown or the “touch-down”?…..