Nose-spur warning: put down the coffee. [h/t Kids Prefer Cheese ]

Soccer-induced fatigue rendered me incapable of producing any posts for nearly two days. No, not me: my daughter's team, the Western Family YMCA Bandits, won the statewide Kohl's Cup Tournament for rec leagues on Sunday, going 4-0-2. My daughter (who would like you all to know that she has not been infected with that libertarian thing ) plays goal and allowed exactly zero goals in six games. [The Bandits also won the regular season in their league, due in no small part to her .33 goals against average.] The weather was wonderful this year, but then--moments after winning--we had to rush out to the Charter School of Wilmington open house [for both of the twins]. This is high-school shopping season in Delaware, where choice and charter combine to produce a cross between selecting a college and a sorority/fraternity rush experience. It's kind of like speed-dating with high-school teachers. So I've been a bit behind in everything, and--frankly--I'm still exhauste...

... because some of our commenters have the strange idea that belonging to any organization whatever makes you responsible for any sins ever committed by that organization or removes all credibility from your views. They also seem to believe that belonging to any organization represents a blanket public statement that you endorse every single idea ever put forth by that organization. So I thought it would be important to list for my readers those organizations with which I have been involved that engage in genocide, oppression, homophobia, or discrimination, so that everyone can understand why my views on virtually any subject are completely worthless. 1) I spent twenty-one years of my adult life as a member of an organization that engaged in relentless genocidal wars across the North American continent, has on many occasions bombarded innocent civilians, has used nuclear weapons against undefended cities, and which has engaged in personnel management policies which have (or, in severa...

Via Alphecca : Some people are like slinkies…They don’t really have a purpose, but they still bring a smile to your face when you push them down the stairs.

Yep, once their server stops being attacked, the United States of Earth's new online game 2011: Obama's Coup Fails will be going gangbusters among players like DarthMal, FirstInfantryUnit, and EnemyWithin , all of whom quite evidently have too much time on their hands. [DarthMal has, at last check, assembled a Patriot Army of over 7,000,000 loyal supporters.] The game is really a quite capitalist enterprise aimed at bilking survival fantasy and gaming addicts out of their money ala World of Warcraft. You can play for free, but you cannot really get ahead until you start spending money. [ David Corn, writing for Mother Jones , notes that despite the Obama coup and Glenn Beck's death of an aspirin overdose in a FEMA relocation camp, the notion that [Ron] Paul can become president may be the most far-fetched fantasy of their entire enterprise. ] And, I'd argue, the money that these guys are spending on the game won't be going to GOPAC or to stockpile ammunition. S...

From Mark Trodden of the University of Pennsylvania on recently taking his US citizenship test: While the interview is relatively straightforward for someone like me (English speaking, with a long and continuous employment record, and married to a US citizen for well over a decade), one does have to go through the civics exam, in which one is asked ten questions chosen randomly from a list of one hundred, which one can study in advance from a booklet. The questions are not particularly difficult, and one only needs to get six correct to pass. However, being a good nerd, I studied dutifully, and made sure I could answer all one hundred correctly if necessary.... The ... problem for the geek taking the citizenship test is that if you get six correct before the examiner reaches ten questions, he just stops asking, and tells you you’ve passed. One must then avoid the temptation to say “No, come on, ask me the rest! I know the answers, honestly, just try me!” Pathetic, I know. ... because ...

... that she should become a Libertarian because (a) the GOP will handle human sexuality about the time hell freezes over; and (b) the Libertarian Party badly needs a poster girl. And yes, today I am pretty much exactly that shallow.

How DOES he do that?

Some readers know that I am also a union president. Right now I am involved in contract negotiations, which is stressful at the best of times. Even though I am president, I am not chief negotiator, because I have an officer who is better at that, with loads more experience. I generally sit in the second chair, and it is often my role to be "bad cop." Nonetheless, in participating in these kinds of negotiations now for the better part of a decade, I have learned some rules of thumg that serve me well, particularly when you know that you have to work with the people on the other side of the table before, during, and after the negotiations process. Rule One: Know what you need, what you want, and what you'd just like to have --and understand that it will often be necessary to give away things you like or want to get what you need. Novice negotiators decide on their priorities during negotiations; experienced and successful pros sit down with their teams and rank order t...

Via Alphecca from other places: Insane killer escapes on field trip to county fair A criminally insane killer from eastern Washington is on the run after escaping during a field trip to the county fair that his mental hospital organized. Pretty much leaves no room for additional comment, does it?

Just think of it as my daily contribution to the coarsening of the American dialogue on the Second Amendment. [h/t Real World Libertarian ]

One of the songs on the Zach Brown Band's album Foundation is a cover of The Band's The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down . Here's a snippet: Joan Baez also covered the song: Of interest here is that Joan got the lyrics wrong. You can hear her plainly sing when so much cavalry came in the opening lines. Actually, the line is when Stoneman's cavalry came , a reference to Major General George Stoneman's 1865 cavalry raid through southern Virginia and North Carolina. You can hear it clearly when the great Johnny Cash covering the song: But as much as I love Cash, nobody--and I mean nobody --is ever going to touch The Band, especially in a live concert setting [this is the clip from The Last Waltz ]: As the man said in the beginning of the clip: Naw, it's not like it used to be . A little music, rather than politics, to end off a lazy Saturday evening....

[h/t Real World Libertarian ]

To see how it was done (at least partly) visit Kids Prefer Cheese and click through to this explanation .

... or Jonathan Swift was right . [h/t Kids Prefer Cheese ]

To be clear: though we can go at it hammer and tongs, Dana and I are friends. And when he writes something so prescient as this paragrap h on President Obama's waffling on the public option question, he deserves props: It sounds as though the President is trying to have it both ways for the time being. He wants to keep the favor of the liberals and progressives while signaling to Congress and Americans afraid of the public option that he is willing to drop the public option in favor of a relatively more bi-partisan approach: viz., the co-ops. He doesn't want to take a stand. Less than two days later it becomes apparent that the White House Press Secretary uses Delaware Watch as part of his regular background briefing material: WaPo : White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, speaking to reporters returning to Washington from Phoenix, said Obama has not shifted his position, suggesting that the president's support for a public option had never been absolute. "The goals...

This was one of the lines today in Rhonda Graham's column in the WNJ that almost made me spit Mountain Dew through my nose [and many of you know just how painful that can be]: You have to wonder if team Obama has gotten so blinded by the historical significance of his election, that like a caged hamster, the administration can't seem to get off the spin wheel of creating historic moments. It wasn't until I actually pulled up a hamster-related Barack Obama picture that I got really worried: It is true: you can find anything on the internet.

Just curious, because this is what I see on a daily basis. In the mornings, when I first log onto this site I generally see a Technorati rating of 57. But in the afternoon or evening when I drop by, the Technorati rating has mysteriously dropped to 40. If it happened once, it would be theoretically possible. Back when we were all arguing about a bunch of militia and DHS report stuff, I picked up a lot of links to some of those stories which, if the linking sites never found anything else they liked, would have all evaporated at about the same time. But for the past two weeks I have been noticing this fluctuation every single day. To drive me even crazier, Alexa insists that there are 68 blogs linking to this site. Anybody know why this is happening?

In the midst of what passes for political discourse and policy debate in this country today, there is (perhaps not so strangely) little room left either for politics or policy. What politics used to be was the art of the possible, the recognition that people of different values and interests represented legitimate American constituencies, and the necessity for creative compromise. Today public, popular politics has become an existential, zero-sum-game war: winning and losing from an ideological perspective--even just scoring points--is more important than good outcomes, because outcomes can always be spun after the fact to have been good, or at least not to have been our fault . [A digression: some people blame Rush Limbaugh and the rise of talk radio for this. I disagree: Rush and what he represents (as, in another incarnation the counterweight that the Daily Kos represents) are symptoms rather than causes . Personally, I blame Sixty Minutes and the introduction of Point/Count...

.... on so many levels that I don't even want to think about it.