Wonkette
- Barack Obama’s in the pocket of Big Ethanol. [New York Times]
- Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai withdrew from the presidential runoff election in Zimbabwe; it is hoped that other African nations or the U.N. or somebody will now intervene in this mess. [New York Times]
- America, meet your new Barack Obama for the first time: a hopeful non-Muslim who is not naive. [Washington Post]
- More people are riding mass transit these days and remembering why they always avoided it: because service is crappy and infrequent. [Wall Street Journal]
- How to woo black voters without alienating hard-working white Americans? [Los Angeles Times]
- Chinese hackers infiltrated a number of computers belonging to members of Congress. [The Hill]
But, but, but…I thought Barack Obama was in MY pocket. I mean, I clicked the Donate button and everything. Lemme look in there…crap! He’s gone! Nothing but lint and this big, heavy gold ring.
Summary of the mass transit article: the author is a pussy.
Damn Chinese Hackers and their ability to snag Congressional Passwords.
Note to Congress, using Password as your password isn’t all that smart.
I guess the Chinese are curious about Congress’ porn habits. Beware Chinese, as someone here once famously said: “What was seen can not be unseen.”
ManchuCandidate:
While the Chinese are sorting through Congress’s immense kiddy porn collection, maybe we could hire them to retrieve all that missing White House email.
Damn, the Bitters are riled up about the Obama piece in the Post.
NotNotLickingToads: Seriously! A pussy who can’t read a map, or a schedule.
That Zimbabwe shit is just sad. Don’t we have an elite team of assassins somewhere who are officially unaffiliated with any government who can take care of this problem? Or am I thinking of a movie?
NotNotLickingToads: Sara K. Smith: Lord, the writer of that transportation article is an absolute dipshit. Does he want the bus to make potty stops for him, too?
Gee, isn’t that a shocker. Americans for decades decide mass transit isn’t a priority for this country, and now that gas prices are up and they actually might want to use it, they complain that mass transit isn’t as good as it should be.
Surprise, surprise!
In other news, it’s been weeks since Wonkette got the new site up and running, and comments with Opera are *still* broken…
Sara K. Smith: He’s right about one thing, though. Unless you live in a major metro near a subway stop, public transportation is not a viable way to get around (unless you have hours of time on your hands). If I couldn’t afford to drive in Atlanta, I’d do what I did in Norfolk in the ’80s and go by bicycle. It’s faster and WAY more convenient than the bus most of the time in most American cities. Buses need to run at least every 20 minutes to really be usable, and in most places I’ve lived, most routes are once an hour except during rush hour.
Now, if you commute 50 miles each way and spend four hours a day in a car, the train/express bus would be a good idea. But when gas hits $10 a gallon, I think that lifestyle is going away.
confusionanddelay<: Having lived in the South for my entire life, I have never actually had the pleasure of using public transportation save for a couple of times in high school. Still, I think even I understand how the system is supposed to work better than the author of that article.
ManchuCandidate: Those Chinese hackers were probably looking for PageBoyPorn.
>>Don’t we have an elite team of assassins somewhere who are officially unaffiliated with any government who can take care of this problem?
Sounds like a job for Blackwater.
He wants buses that can broadcast their location to customers’ wireless devices, and a Wi-Fi system so riders can work on their laptops en route.
Also, complimentary coffee and snacks and an International Herald Tribune for everyone on the bus. And a business class lounge at every bus stop.
4tehlulz: I don’t think that word ‘elite’ means what you think it does. Give Blackwater the job, and we’d wind up with a hostage crisis in Africa. And a bill for One Billion Dollars.
I’m sad to see how Zimbabwe is turning out. I had hope for change. But that might only work here
AzDownboy: Like Cheney isn’t watching every second of news coverage of the Zimbabwe debacle and taking notes with the hand he isn’t beating off with.
This is where i’d usually go on a tirade about what a monster Robert Mugabe is but im just too lazy this morning…
Zimbabwe is a real mess and probably going to be for a damned long time.
Why does it always seem that the dictators who need to be whacked are never the ones who live on top of oil?
Lazy Media: They’re elite. They’re one of the few that actually would get the money.
Heh, you guys just gave me an idea for a great username.
SUGAR CANE ETHANOL, goddamit. Who do I have to whack to get the message across?
Also, our policy towards Africa will (probably) change dramatically once Hopey gets in office. He has strong feelings, according to ‘Dreams from My Father’. Strong, I say. Strong.
RE: the author of the mass transit article “bushwhacking” his way from the bus stop to the back door of his office. Way to go, bwana, successfully navigating the urban jungle. Ooongawa, you idiot.
This is a better avatar for my new persona.
Lazy Media: As someone who lived in the Hotlanta metropolitan area for most of my life, and whose parents still reside in that area, it’s their own damn fault. I’m not sure if you recall the debate over extending MARTA…to sum it up, the white suburbanites were convinced that bringing mass transit their way would bring with it a huge influx of crime (read: Black People).
Also, Atlanta is in Georgia, and its planners and developers are mostly good ol’ boys who didn’t give a lick of consideration to the implications of bad design when they were busy turning every square inch of available property into subdivisions. And before gas became an issue, most inhabitants were more than willing to subject themselves (one person per car, of course) to hellish traffic in order to go home to their little slice of homogenized suburban my-family-has-three-SUVs utopia.
BrandonMills: You forget: mass transit means that you aren’t in control of your schedule, and that you have to MINGLE with other people! Back to my prior comment, in Atlanta, yes, mass transit was greatly regarding as something that only Teh Blakz use. It was a class divide type thing.
Summary of the mass transit article: The author is a pussy who is afraid of ethnics and poors.
Obama is a “ruthless fundraiser”?! WTF is a “ruthless fundraiser”? What does that even mean?
nhunter: Carjacking? Drug running? Whores?
Wow, Obama’s position on Ethanol really sucks.
(I’m only stating the obvious because almost no one who commented previously has.)
Godless Liberal *: “Don’t we have an elite team of assassins somewhere who are officially unaffiliated with any government who can take care of this problem?”
There’s no oil in Zimbabwe.
ALIVE!: If it’s entirely true as written. Which it may not be. Obama may not be Change McHopey, but he is damn smart. It’s unlikely that he doesn’t understand the very real drawbacks to corn-based ethanol. And maybe I’m naive, but I can’t see him as being so corrupt as to support it just because his state grows it - after all, he’s well on track to getting elected President, so pleasing his own state’s growers is not as vitally important as it would’ve been were he running for a second Senate term. Even if the corn growers become dissatisfied with him, it’s not like he won’t carry the state in November. It’s silly to base an energy policy on a bet against yourself. And it’s not like they either give him oodles of money or he even needs their oodles of money.
So why corn?
I guess he doesn’t want to import sugar cane from Brazil because that doesn’t make for good domestic energy policy in his mind - why send money down south, even it buys a lot of fuel, when we should be becoming energy-independent? Is he banking on pushing corn growers onto switchgrass in his own good time?
nhunter: confusionanddelay<: Democratic voter lists + tire irons = millions of small, hobbling donors.
AxmxZ: When I give up eating bonbons and watching tv all day and return to work defending the public I will refer to my drug dealers, robbers, and whores exclusively as aggressive fundraisers.
AxmxZ: Don’t forget that Florida sugar barons are also big fans on cane sugar tariffs as well (which is why corn syrup is so popular to begin with). Oil, corn, sugar… whatever happened to good ol’ fashioned uranium? Those lefty, swishy Frenchies use it all the time! Throw up some nuke plants, use the excess to crack water into hydrogen, and everybody’s happy except Nevada, which nobody cares about!
confusionanddelay<: No, the tire iron is the “aggressive fundraiser.” Just like in late 80s in USSR, the newly introduced nightsticks for ‘crowd control’ at peaceful demonstrations were publically dubbed “democratizers.”
Guppy06: I have an even harder time seeing him in cahoots with the Florida sugar barons. Have they been donating to him a lot?
Instead of Big Ethanol, can we say Obama’s in the pocket of Big Corn? Because that makes me giggle.
As much as it pains me to write it, McCain’s ethanol policy (lifting tariffs on imported sugar cane ethanol) makes more sense than Barry’s. It’s probably true that John just wants cheaper tank and bomber fuel, but whatever.
TGY: Yeah, I agree. McCain has a good energy policy overall, too. However, Obama at least has the balls to be for nuclear power and against the gas tax holiday and drilling, so whatever.
By the way, Big Corn is almost as evil as Big Oil because it’s actually leading to increased food prices around the world, playing a pretty big role in the current starvation crisis. But at least it’s domestic!
Hopey is sucking the corn-tassle tit? Say it ain’t so!
Big-ethanol actually is a problem. Currently the means of ethanol production is in the hands of corn producers. You can actually get ethanol out of almost any plant with a decent sugar content. Corn actually sucks from a CO2 perspective because it uses tons of fertilizer, and the ethanol yield is comparable to what you get from non-food crops like switchgrass.
Sorry, I spent two days last month at a bio-fuels conference.
Cicada: Yeah, corn has monopolized this gig and fucked it up, just like it permanently fucked up a huge segment of the American population - and with them the American health care, and with it the economy - with the fucking corn syrup.
AxmxZ: All hail our new corn overlords!
*I actually just realized that I actually used the word actually way too much in my last post. Gah!
Cicada: New? There’s nothing new about our corn overlords. They’ve been in power for decades. The only drawback to their rule, as visible to them, is that their subjects have become too rotund to execute proper prostrations.