Epic rapping duo DJ Mayhem and MC Mouthmaster Murf AKA The Anomalies of Robocop / Terminator 2 / Predator (RIP) rap fame add Aliens (and Alien 3) to their growing list of amazing movie rap-ups with this 10-minute ditty. Finding a workable rhyme for “xenomorphe”? That’s some straight up talent right there.
President Yoda's inner Ninja just emerged, on cue:
"So just in case there's any confusion out there, let me be clear. I am not going to walk away from health insurance reform. I'm not going to walk away from the American people. I'm not going to walk away from this challenge. I'm not going to walk away from any challenge. We're moving forward.''
His voice rising, he added: "We are moving forward!''
The Dish pays tribute to Brendan Burke. Please pray for his family and all inspired by his leadership.
He looks like a woman. Why do they photo-shop these people to make them seem so, er, plastic?
Jake Weisberg makes the case:
We want Washington and the states to fix all of our problems now. At the same time, we want government to shrink, spend less, and reduce our taxes.
We dislike government in the abstract: According to CNN, 67 percent of people favor balancing the budget even when the country is in a recession or a war, which is madness. But we love government in the particular: Even larger majorities oppose the kind of spending cuts that would reduce projected deficits, let alone eliminate them. Nearly half the public wants to cancel the Obama stimulus, and a strong majority doesn’t want another round of it. But 80-plus percent of people want to extend unemployment benefits and to spend more money on roads and bridges. There’s another term for that stuff: more stimulus spending.
The Dish’s exasperated post on the same lines here.
My own anecdotal evidence suggests that there are two classes of people with respect to sleep: those with kids under ten and the rest of us. A new Gallup survey doesn't disprove this, but it does show how the working poor and women are – surprise! – among most exhausted. The one genuine surprise: the over 65s say they are less rested than the rest of us.
Each newspaper in Kenya is typically read by fourteen people, and those who can’t afford to buy a paper sometimes “rent” one. My neighborhood news vendor charges the equivalent of thirteen cents for thirty minutes with one of the major dailies, all of which are in English. That compares with fifty cents to buy one, a significant sum even to office workers earning $20 a day, and out of reach for the far more numerous casual workers who generally earn no more than $2.
A reader writes:
As someone who has experienced the awful pain and humiliation of infidelity I can't bring myself to blame Elizabeth at all for making decisions she saw as benefiting her family and not necessarily the country. I spent one terrible night reading emails from my husband to his internet lover, looking at the dirty photos they sent each other and reading about how he would ditch me and she would ditch her husband and live happily ever after. The next day I woke up and could not remember a single thing about it. I walked through my house not recognizing anything, like I was in a dream.
And to think that infidelity is the very least of the trifecta of heartache and bad luck this woman has endured is just beyond my comprehension. I imagine that losing a child fundamentally changes who you are. It changed both of them. If Elizabeth tried to pretend that her world was not falling apart, that her husband of 30 years did not just rob her of the chance to die well-loved in the bosom of an intact family, I can't fault her. The mind does funny things to protect us.
It's a tiny little thing, but as a longtime fan of Drudge as the pioneer of online journalism, it saddens me. Now and again, he has a shorthand when a newspaper's news pages or editorial board takes a position. Today, for example, we read:
Paper: The Great Global Warming Collapse
I'm a longtime Drudge-junkie so my first thought was this was a Brit tabloid headline. No! It's just an op-ed by a writer for Canada's Globe and Mail, Margaret Wente, by all accounts an excellent and feisty columnist, but one often regarded as a bit of a maverick at her paper (not that that's a bad thing for an opinion writer). My point: Drudge is implying she now represents an entire largely liberal, non-denialist on climate change newspaper? Sigh.
Sit down and try to relax:
The Dish 