Moron of the Day

Via Patterico comes this priceless quote from the LA Times about the bailout bill:

“The late Jack Kennedy made a remark that sometimes, just sometimes, your party asks too much of you,” Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) told Republicans on the House floor. “Why they would ask you to vote against this, I will never know.”

How about because it is the most glaringly obvious symbol of your party’s malicious intent toward this country, Mr. Rangel? The bailout is downright insulting in how blatantly it steps all over any intended uses of the money and just goes hog-wild paying off every special interest group that worked to get the Democrats into power.

Now Obama’s making sure they get paid, even if it means putting a knife in the back of the nation.

Yeah, I have no idea why they’d vote against it.

Cox decides it wants to be hated like Comcast, too!

Techdirt and Ars Technica both reported this morning about a new plan unleashed on us poor Cox customers by the corporate talking heads: bandwidth throttling! And not even the innocuous “only when you’re using a lot” style of throttling, like Comcast uses (and got burned for), but the Jack-the-Ripper-style “whenever we feel like and only on certain kinds of traffic we don’t like” kind. The traffic they’ve moved to the “lower-priority” queue (read: throttled) so far includes:

  • File Access – Specifically FTP – this one makes no sense at all.
  • Network Storage – Bulk transfers of any kind – even less sense, if that’s possible.
  • P2P – Bittorrent, Limewire, and friends – because efficient distribution takes second seat to political correctness.
  • Software Updates – Windows Update and friends – you didn’t need that security patch any time soon, did you?
  • Usenet – Cox has hated on newsgroups for years. Big suprise here.

Cox was first to implement the three-strikes policy in regards to file sharing accusations, as well as lying about their reasons for doing so, and recieved what I found to be surprisingly minor backlash for it. Perhaps that lackluster response is what is prompting Cox to think they can get away with this relatively unscathed. Thankfully, in the meantime, Google has officially released its Measurement Lab, which aims to offer end users a good way to test their broadband connections and see what they’re really getting. This will offer customers a valuable tool, and give people like me who work in tech support a massive headache when everyone finds out their ISPs are shafting them.

Cox claims to be “your friend in the digital age.” With friends like these, who needs enemies?

Daily Hopechange – guns edition

Via the Rott comes this gem:

U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., is hoping to pass a firearm-licensing bill that will significantly rewrite gun-ownership laws in America.

Among the more controversial provisions of the bill are requirements that all handgun owners submit to the federal government a photo, thumb print and mental heath records. Further, the bill would order the attorney general to establish a database of every handgun sale, transfer and owner’s address in America.

It also forbids the transfer of “qualifying firearms” to anyone who is not a registered and licensed gun dealer or collector. What makes a “qualifying firearm,” you wisely ask? “[A]ny handgun or any semiautomatic firearm that takes an ammunition clip.” So basically… everything except revolvers or single shot weapons. I knew I liked those wheelguns for a reason.

Three guesses as to what his justification is for this travesty.

“to protect the public against the unreasonable risk of injury and death associated with the unrecorded sale or transfer of firearms to criminals and youth.”

For the chidren! As long as you can somehow tie it back to that, any violation of rights or liberties is justified – at least in the mind of your average politician.  The bill even starts off with a tragic tale of a boy who used his body to shield a girl in the line of fire of a lunatic who decided he was going to shoot up a bus. Unfortunately, even had this law been in effect, the result would have been the same. Why? Because criminals don’t obey laws. This is a crucial cognitive disconnect present in nearly every member of congress, and especially the Democrats – these sort of registries and transfer penalties and fines and fees do not work on those who ignore the law. The only people who this kind of legislation affects are the law-abiding ones who don’t need to be tracked in the first place. It makes it even more inconvenient to buy or own a firearm, which means those aforementioned law-abiding citizens will be less likely to have one, which in turn means that when the aforementioned law-ignoring citizens decide they want a crack at his home theater system, he is left helpless – or even dead.

Self-defense is a basic human right, outlined and explicitly declared in the Constitution of the United States. “[T]he right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” it says – and this law seeks, yet again, to infringe on that right. It seems so absurdly obvious that this would be the case that it never ceases to raise frustration levels in people like myself, Rott, and others – namely, people with basic cognitive skills who can recognize simple truths about reality. Unfortunately, very few of these sort of people get elected into public office.

Shotgun Linking – Obama Day Three Edition

Day three, still no unicorn.

Because I don’t have the energy to come up with a full-size post for each of these, I give thee a bullet list:

Obama isn’t even president and I’m sick of him already.

So apparently Obama is recreating Lincoln’s train route from Illinois to D.C., following in the late president’s footsteps as he continues to build himself up, complete with a vintage railcar to give him that “rustic” feeling.

I wonder if he knows that Lincoln took the route he did because he was afraid of being assassinated? Or that he was rushed under the cover of night from station to station to avoid assassins, avoiding the large crowds? Or that the whole thing caused him significant backlash in the eyes of the American public?

I wonder if he cares about little things like that. We know that, in his unicorn-infested world, the law doesn’t apply to him, so why should reality?

What shocks me most about this is how it shows he has totally bought into the hype surrounding him. I wonder if he truly considers himself a messianic figure, as so many of his followers do? The imagery, the throngs of screaming fans – it’s more than any rock star could dream about, and the last time we’ve seen this in history is a Godwin-invoking moment. People are already getting more excited and loyal to the idea of Obama than they are to America, and that is a very dangerous game to play.

Here’s hoping I’m wrong.