Well, he's more qualified than Miers

...and a potted plant... or the Tooth Fairy, but as far as fucked up conservative ideology goes, well, he's right on the money.

First things first: Alito was born on April fool's day (1950). I'm still waiting for the punch line.
He did his undergrad at Princeton and got his law degree from Yale, (Which should make Bushie's daddy happy), then he did some career building type things, like a clerkship and a four year stint as a bull-dog federal prosecutor for New Jersey. After that he held some position with the Office of the Solicitor General, (whatever the hell that is) where he worked for four years to help decide what position the Reagan administration would take in cases up for review by the Supreme Court.

He then worked for three years as a deputy assistant attorney general. In 1987, Alito was appointed U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, until he was asked by Bush I. to join the 3rd Circuit.

The publicans dig this guy because he has voted consistently conservative on all the hot-button issues.
People are calling him "Scalito" (Little Scalia) because when asked of his judicial philosophy, he appears to adopt a WWJSD? (what would Justice Scalia do?) approach.

I want to make a bumper sticker that says "Scalia is Scary". But no one would get it, so I won't.
Anyway, this Scalito guy wouldn't mind setting our country back about 50 years as far as women's rights go.

Alito doesn't like abortion much, for any reason. He was the only justice who dissented in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which the 3rd circuit struck down a Pennsylvania law requiring women to notify their husbands prior to getting an abortion.

Alito argued that the law should have been upheld, saying that "the Pennsylvania Legislature could have rationally believed that some married women are initially inclined to obtain an abortion without their husbands' knowledge because of perceived problems -- such as economic constraints, future plans or the husbands' previously expressed opposition -- that may be obviated by discussion prior to the abortion."

Alito seems most comfortable as a dissenter. In nearly every 3rd Circuit case from Casey to Sheridan, a case involving gender discrimination, Alito has always maintained the conservative voice of dissent in the face of his more liberal counterparts.

Needless to say, we liberals aren't happy, but what else did we expect? A harry pitted, saggy breasted, justice with a NOW membership card? Maybe in 50 years or so.
alito

I was just curious...

My blog is worth $2,822.70.
How much is your blog worth?

It's about damn time

*sniff "I know when I'm not wanted."

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Harriet Miers took her name out of consideration for the Supreme Court on Thursday amid a brewing showdown over White House documents. But some lawmakers and observers suggest that the impasse was simply the most graceful exit possible for a floundering nominee.


Miers never served as a judge and her critics said her background as an attorney, a former head of the Texas State Bar Association and as a Dallas city council member provided few clues to her judicial philosophy.

Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee had asked for documents she had worked on as the White House's top lawyer. The president refused, calling the request "a red line I'm not willing to cross."

In a letter to the president on Thursday, Miers said she was concerned that she would be called upon to testify about her service as White House counsel, which she said would jeopardize the independence of the Executive branch.

"I am concerned that the confirmation process presents a burden for the White House and its staff and it is not in the best interest of the country," she wrote.

In a statement issued by the White House, Bush said, "It is clear that senators would not be satisfied until they gained access to internal documents concerning advice provided during her tenure at the White House -- disclosures that would undermine a president's ability to receive candid counsel."

But Kansas Republican Sen. Sam Brownbeck suggested the line could have been drawn somewhere else to avoid the impasse.

"We were not asking for documents regarding attorney-client privilege -- or privileged communications," he said. We were saying 'show us documents of policy issues discussions,' so we could get some framework of her policy views."

Also, the White House learned from a key Capitol Hill ally Wednesday night that opposition to the nomination was building, CNN's Ed Henry reported.

In a blunt assessment, Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, Miers' main advocate in the Senate, told high-level White House aides that the nominee faced stiff opposition from conservatives, and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist called White House Chief of Staff Andy Card to tell him that Miers did not have the votes to be confirmed, sources told Henry.

Miers has been under fire since her nomination was announced, with critics arguing that she was being appointed because of her close relationship to the president, rather than her legal credentials or her knowledge of constitutional law.

Some of the harshest criticism came from members of Bush's conservative base who were furious that he did not choose to replace Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the swing seat on the court, with someone who clearly would shift the court to the right.

"When the president announced this nominee, I expressed my tentative support, based on what I was able to discover about her. But I also said I would await the hearings to learn more about her judicial philosophy," said James Dobson, head of the group Focus on the Family. "Based on what we now know about Miss Miers, it appears that we would not have been able to support her candidacy. Thankfully, that difficult evaluation is no longer necessary."

The White House tried to reassure Dobson and other social conservatives, by stressing Miers' evangelical Christian faith, but the effort was unsuccessful.

Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, suggested in a column in last Friday's Washington Post that the White House press the documents issue as a face-saving way to withdraw the nomination.

"That creates a classic conflict, not of personality, not of competence, not of ideology, but of simple constitutional prerogatives: The Senate cannot confirm her unless it has this information. And the White House cannot allow release of this information lest it jeopardize executive privilege," he wrote.

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, who said he had recommended that Bush nominate Miers, blamed "the radical right wing of the Republican Party" for killing her nomination.

"Apparently, Ms. Miers did not satisfy those who want to pack the Supreme Court with rigid ideologues," the Nevada Democrat said.

Sen. Trent Lott, R-Mississippi, said Bush now "should nominate a strict constructionist conservative."

"That's what he is and ran as as president," Lott said. "He said if you elect me, this is the nominee you will get."

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New Jersey, urged the president to choose a nominee in the mold of O'Connor instead of someone from what he called the radical right.

Conservative columnist Ann Coulter told CNN that the Miers controversy proves that Bush should appoint someone further to the right, instead of reaching out to Democrats.

"This does show the power of the radical right wing, as Democrats call it -- normal Americans as I call it -- in this country," she said.

Activist Phyllis Schlafly, founder of the Eagle Forum, echoed those sentiments.

"The president did the right thing in withdrawing her and saving her from further embarrassment. I now hope he'll deliver on his campaign commitment to pick a judge in the mold of [Justices Clarence] Thomas and [Antonin] Scalia."

A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll conducted over the weekend found that 50 percent of Americans surveyed said they disapproved of the pick.

Forty percent of respondents said they approved of the choice in the survey, which had a margin of error of +/- 3 percentage points.

Only 20 percent of respondents said that they thought Miers was one of the most qualified candidates for the court. Forty-nine percent said they thought she was qualified, but that others were more qualified and 22 percent said she was not qualified.

In the survey, 70 percent said that it was a negative that little was known about her views on major issues and 66 percent said her lack of experience was a negative.

(Story here)
harriet miers

Paper Clip Holocaust Project

What a great way to get a bunch of white southern kids to feel the gravity of the greatest of human tragedies.

A Measure Of Hope: The Whitwell, Tenn., Holocaust Project Has Spread Far Beyond the Classroom
By Dita Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 7, 2001; Page C01



WHITWELL, Tenn. -- It is a most unlikely place to build a Holocaust memorial, much less one that would get the attention of the president, that would become the subject of a book, that would become an international cause.

Yet it is here that a group of eighth-graders and their teachers decided to honor each of the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust by collecting 6 million paper clips and turning them into a sculpture.

This is remarkable because, for one thing, Whitwell, a town of 1,600 tucked away in a Tennessee Valley just west of the Smokeys, has no Jews.

In fact, Whitwell does not offer much opportunity to practice racial or religious tolerance of any kind. "Our community is white, Christian and very fundamentalist," says Linda Hooper, principal of the middle

school, which has 425 students, including six blacks, one Hispanic, zero

Asians, zero Catholics, zero Jews.

"During coal-mining days, we were a mixed community," explains the town's unofficial historian, Eulene Hewett Harris. "Now there are only a handful of black families left."

Whitwell is a town of two traffic lights, 10 churches and a collection of fast-food joints sprinkled along the main drag. It was a thriving coal town until 1962, when the last mine closed. Some of the cottages built by

the mining companies still stand, their paint now chipped and their cluttered porches sagging. Trailers have replaced the houses that collapsed from age and neglect during lean economic times.

Only 40 miles up the road is Dayton, where the red-brick Rhea County Courthouse made history during the 1925 Scopes trial, the "monkey trial," in which teacher John T. Scopes was convicted of violating a Tennessee law that made it unlawful "to teach any theory that denies the story of Divine Creation" and to teach Darwinian evolutionary theory instead. Almost eight decades later, most people in this Sequatchie River Valley hold firmly to those beliefs under the watchful eyes of their church leaders.

"Look, we're not that far away from the Ku Klux Klan," founded only 100 miles west, in Pulaski, Tenn., says Hewett Harris. "I mean, in the 1950s they were still active here."

Such is the setting for a memorial not only to remember Holocaust victims but, above all, to sound a warning on what intolerance can wreak. The Whitwell students and teachers had no idea how many lives they were about to touch.

Math and History

The Holocaust project had its genesis in the summer of 1998 when Whitwell Middle's 31-year-old deputy principal and football coach, David Smith, attended a teacher training course in nearby Chattanooga. A seminar on the Holocaust as a teaching tool for tolerance intrigued him because the Holocaust had never been part of the middle school's curriculum and was mentioned only tangentially in the local high school.

He came back and proposed an after-school course that would be voluntary.

Principal Hooper, 59, loved the idea. "We just have to give our children a broader view of the world," she says. "We have to crack the shell of their white cocoon, to enable them to survive in the world out there."

She was nervous about how parents would react, and held a parent-teacher

meeting. But when she asked the assembled adults if they knew anything

about the Holocaust, only a few hands went up, hesitatingly. Hooper,

who has lived in Whitwell most of her life and had taught some of the

parents in elementary school, explained the basics.

Just one parent expressed misgivings: Should young teenagers be shown terrifying photos of naked, emaciated prisoners? Hooper admitted she wasn't sure. "Well," the father asked, "would you let your son take the class?"

Yes, she replied, and the father was on board.

There wasn't a question about who would teach it: Sandra Roberts, 30, the English and social sciences teacher, always a captivating storyteller..

In October 1998, Roberts and Smith held the first session. Fifteen students and almost as many parents showed up. Roberts began by reading aloud -- history books, "The Diary of Anne Frank," Elie Wiesel's "Night" --mostly because many of the students did not have the money to buy the books; 52

percent of Whitwell's students qualify for free lunch.

What gripped the eighth-graders most as the course progressed, was the sheer number of dead. Six million. The Nazis killed 6 million Jews. Can anyone really imagine 6 million of anything? They did calculations: If

6 million adults and children were to lie head to toe, the line would stretch from Washington to San Francisco and back.

One day, Roberts was explaining to the class that there were some good people in 1940s Europe who stood up for the Jews. After the Nazis invaded Norway, many courageous Norwegians expressed solidarity with their Jewish fellow citizens by pinning ordinary paper clips to their lapels.

One girl -- nobody remembers who it was -- said: Let's collect 6 million paper clips and turn them into a sculpture to remember the victims.

The idea caught on, and the students began bringing in paper clips, from home, from aunts and uncles and friends. Smith, as the school's computer expert, set up a Web page asking for donations of clips, one or two, or however many people wanted to send.

A few weeks later, the first letter arrived. One Lisa Sparks from Tyler, Tex., sent a handful. Then a letter landed from Colorado. . . .

By the end of the school year, the group had assembled 100,000 clips.

It occurred to the teachers that collecting 6 million paper clips at that rate would take a lifetime.

Help From Afar

Unexpected help came in late 1999 when two German journalists living in Washington, DC, stumbled across the Whitwell Web site. Peter Schroeder, 59, and Dagmar Schroeder-Hildebrand, 58, had been doing research at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, tracing concentration camp survivors to interview.

Schroeder-Hildebrand was author of "I'm Dying of Hunger," a book abouta camp survivor who devised imaginary dinners to survive; Peter had written "The Good Fortune of Lena Lieba Gitter," about a Viennese Jew who escaped the Nazis and devoted her life to civil rights.

The Whitwell Web site came up during a routine search under "Holocaust." The idea of American children in a conservative Southern town collecting paper clips intrigued the couple. They called the school, interviewed teachers and students by telephone, then wrote several articles for the nine newspapers they work for in Germany and Austria.

Whitwell and the Schroeders were hit with a blizzard of paper clips from the two countries. The couple soon had 46,000, filling several large plastic containers. The thing to do, they decided, was to drive them to Whitwell, 12 hours away.

They received a hero's welcome. The entire school showed up.

None of the eighth-graders had ever met anyone from outside the United States, let alone anyone from Germany, the country of the Holocaust perpetrators. At the end of the four-day visit, the students told their principal, "They are really quite normal."

The Schroeders were so touched they wrote a paperback about Whitwell. "The Paper Clip Project," which has not been translated into English, was published in September 2000, in time for Germany's largest book fair in Frankfurt.

The blizzard of clips became an avalanche.

Whitwell eighth-graders came to Washington in March last year to visit the Holocaust Museum. They went home carrying 24,000 more paper clips collected by the Schroeders. Airport security had trouble understanding why a bunch of teenagers and their teachers were transporting boxes and boxes of paper clips to Tennessee.

Linked to the Past

Just a year later, the Holocaust project has permeated the school. The after-school group is the most favored extracurricular activity -- students must compete in an essay contest for its 20 to 25 places. They've become used to being interviewed by local television and national radio. Foreign countries are no longer mysterious, with hundreds of letters bearing witness to them.

The group's activities have long spilled over from Robert's classroom. Across the hall, the students have created a concentration-camp simulation with paper cutouts of themselves pasted on the wall. Chicken wire stretches across the wall to represent electrified fences. Wire mesh is hung with shoes to represent the millions of shoes the victims left behind when they were marched to death chambers.

And every year now they reenact the "walk" to give students at least an inkling of what people must have felt when jackbooted Nazi guards marched them off to camps. The students are blindfolded, tied together by the wrists, roughly ordered onto a truck and driven to the woods. "I was truly scared," recalls Monica Hammers, a participant in last year's walk. "It made me think, and it made me realize that I have to put myself into other people's shoes."

Meanwhile, the counting goes on. It is daunting. On a late winter day, as the picturesque valley floor shows the first shimmer of soft green, 22 students gather for their Wednesday meeting. All wear the group's polo shirt, emblazoned: "Changing the World, One Clip at a Time." The neat white shirts conform to the school's dress code: solid-colored shirts devoid of large logos, solid-colored pants, knee-length shorts or skirts, worn with a belt. Many of the girls have attached colored paper clips to their collars.

These are no loose-mannered kids -- they reply "yes, ma'am" and "yes, sir." Even lunch in the cafeteria is disciplined and relatively quiet. Yet, there is an obvious and warm bond between students and teachers.

The group's first item of business is opening the mail that has accumulated during the past three days. That takes half of the two-to three-hour meeting. A large package has arrived from Germany, two smaller ones from Austria and more than a dozen letters. Laura Jefferies is in charge of the ledger and keeps a neat record of each sender's address, phone number and e-mail address. One group of students responds to the e-mails sent via their Web site, www.Marionschools.org.

Roberts opens the packages, which have been examined in the principal's office to make sure they contain nothing dangerous. "We've had a few negative letters from Holocaust deniers, but we have never received a threat," says the silver-haired Hooper. "But even if we did, we would go on. We cannot live in fear; that would defeat the entire purpose."

The large package, from a German school, contains about 40 letters, with paper clips pasted onto each page. Roberts sighs. "This is a huge amount of work," she says. "There are days when I wished we could just stop it. But it has gotten way beyond us. It's no longer about us. There is no way we could stop this now."

When the students fall behind, it's Roberts who spends hours sorting and filing.

The students crowd around Robert's desk and receive a letter at a time.

They carefully empty all paper clips onto little piles. Drew Shadrick, a strapping tackle on the football team, is the chief counter and stands over a three-foot-high white plastic barrel, about the size of an oil drum.

He counts each clip, drops it into the barrel, keeping track on a legal pad.

Two other barrels, which once contained Coca-Cola syrup and were donated by the corporation, are filled to the rim and sealed with transparent plastic. "It takes five strong guys to move one of those barrels," says Roberts.

Against the wall this day are stacks and stacks of boxes. In early February, an Atlanta synagogue had promised 1 million paper clips, and sure enough, a week later a pickup truck delivered 84 boxes bought from an office supply store. Half are still unopened.

All sorts of clips arrive -- silver-tone, bronze-tone, plastic-coated in all colors, small ones, large ones, round ones, triangular clips and artistic ones fashioned from wood.

Then there are the designs made of paper clips, neatly pasted onto letter paper. If removing the paper clips would destroy the design, the students count the clips, then replace them in the barrel with an equal number purchased by the group. The art is left intact.

Occasionally a check for a few dollars arrives. The money goes toward buying supplies. Both Roberts and Smith won teacher awards last year, and their $3,000 in prize money also went toward supplies, and helping students pay for what has become an annual trip to Washington and the Holocaust Museum.

The students file all letters, all scraps of paper, even the stamps, in large white ring binders. By now, 5,000 to 8,000 letters fill 14 neat binders.

The letters are from 19 countries and 45 states, and include dozens of rainbow pictures, and flowers, peace doves and swastikas crossed out with big red bars -- in the shape of paper clips. There are poems, personal stories.

"Today," one letter reads, "I am sending 71 paper clips to commemorate the 71 Jews who were deported from Bueckeburg."

One man sent five paper clips to commemorate his mother and four siblings murdered by the Nazis in Lithuania in November 1941.

"For my handicapped brother," says another letter. "I'm so glad he didn't live then; the Nazis would have killed him."

"For my grandmother," says another. "I'm so grateful she survived the camp."

"For my son, that he may live in peace," wrote a woman from Germany.

Last year, a letter containing eight paper clips came from President Clinton. Another arrived from Vice President Gore, a native of Tennessee, thanking the students for their "tireless efforts to preserve and promote human rights," but including no clips.

Every month, Smith writes dozens of celebrities, politicians and sports teams, requesting paper clips. He gets many refusals, form letters indicating that the addressee never saw the request. But clips came in from Tom Bosley (of TV's "Happy Days" fame), Henry Winkler (the Fonz), Tom Hanks, Elie Wiesel, Madeleine Albright. Among the football teams that contributed are the Tennessee Titans, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the Indianapolis Colts and the Dallas Cowboys.

So many clips in memory of specific Holocaust victims have come in that one thing has become clear: Melting them into a statue would be inconceivable. Each paper clip should represent one victim, the students believe, and so a new idea has been hatched.

They want to get an authentic German railroad car from the 1940s, one that may have actually transported victims to camps. The car would be turned into a museum that would house all the paper clips, as well as display all the letters.

Dagmar and Peter Schroeder plan to travel to Germany next week to find a suitable railroad car and have it transported to Whitwell.

They are determined to find such a car and the necessary funding. Like counting the clips, the task is daunting.

Whitwell's Legacy

Whatever happens, for generations of Whitwell eighth- graders, a paper clip will never again be just a paper clip, but instead carry a message of patience, perseverance, empathy and tolerance.

Roberts, asked what she thought she had accomplished with the project so far, said: "Nobody put it better than Laurie Lynn [a student in last year's class]. She said, 'Now, when I see someone, I think before I speak, I think before I act, and I think before I judge.' "And Roberts adds: "That's all I could ever hope to achieve as a teacher."

She gives this week's assignment: "Tomorrow, I want you all to go and sit next to a person at lunch whom you never talk with, a person that nobody wants to sit with at lunch. I want you to stop one of those people in the hall and say: 'Hi! What'd you do last night?' Now, don't make it obvious --they may know that it's just an assignment. That would hurt."

Drew pipes up: "Well, I've already tried that, but that kid -- that, you know, he just sits there and stares, what can I do?"

"Keep at it -- don't give up," says Roberts.

Class dismissed.

Latest count: 2,108,622 paper clips. 3,891,378 to go.

Paper clips are gratefully accepted by: Whitwell Middle School, Holocaust Project, 1130 Main St., Whitwell, TN 37397

(c) 2001 The Washington Post Company

holocaust

Biff Sniff

There is something wrong with these guys, but they crack me up. It reminds me of The Far Side, but sicker.

biff sniff

Unicef Smurfocide

Oh the humanity smurfanity!


This is going to give me nightmares now.

The people of Belgium have been left reeling by the first adult-only episode of the Smurfs, in which the blue-skinned cartoon characters' village is annihilated by warplanes.

The short but chilling film is the work of Unicef, the United Nations Children's Fund, and is to be broadcast on national television next week as a campaign advertisement.


The Unicef advert, which shows the Smurfs' village being bombed
The animation was approved by the family of the Smurfs' late creator, "Peyo".

Belgian television viewers were given a preview of the 25-second film earlier this week, when it was shown on the main evening news. The reactions ranged from approval to shock and, in the case of small children who saw the episode by accident, wailing terror.

Find the article Here.

Find the video Here.

smurf film smurf unicef

My Supreme Court Justice Nomination

This guy is WAY more qualified than Miers.

He's religious, conservative and has more experience in court than Miers does.
He has way better hair too.

If you're on the run, Dog is gonna get you.
Dog is Duane Lee Chapman, owner of Da Kine Bail Bonds in Honolulu and self-proclaimed "Greatest Bounty Hunter in the World." Six thousand-plus captures over the past two decades have earned this highly intense, charismatic ex-con and born-again Christian such a distinction.

He is the modern-day Billy the Kid -- minus all the weaponry. "Regulators," he'll often bellow to his supporting cast of bounty hunters, which often includes family members and friends, "mount up!"
He's also the king of comebacks -- a modern-day hero who was once a zero after serving time in a Texas prison for first-degree murder. It's a conviction he claims was unfounded and later candidly discusses, for the first time ever, with MidWeek.
"I am what rehabilitation stands for," claims the man who's been profiled on such TV shows as The Learning Channel's Secret World of Bounty Hunters and Court TV's Anatomy of a Crime, and whose Predator's Predator column at www.crime.com receives a bevy of hits on a daily basis. "I did time in prison, and that made my mother and father -- not to mention the public -- very ashamed of me."

And so as part of his penance, he vowed to help make America a safer place for all.
"It's why I hunt men -- fugitives of the law," says Dog, who also spends a good portion of his time tracking bail jumpers, or skips, between Hawaii and Colorado -- where he owns three additional bonding companies. "This is a game of good guy versus bad guy. And I must capture the bad guy!"


harriet miers supreme court nomination

Bush Defrocked?

God, I hope not. I don't want to see the tiny-little Texas pee-pee under that dress.

Top ten reasons Bush sucks today:
1. Harriet Miers nomination
2. He sold his soul to Karl Rove
3. John Roberts
4. His administration's poor disaster management skills
5. Faith-based politics
6. Iraq
7. The mo-fo still can't say 'nu-cle-ar'.
8. Where the hell is the "new Iraqi Army?"
9. He doesn't get that it doesn't matter if they keep catching the "top Al Qaeda operatives". Those guys are like an ant colony. If their queen dies, they just pick a new one.
10. He's got a worse approval rating than Richard Nixon just before his arse was impeached.

This is from the Frank Rich (New York Times article) Faith-Based President Defrocked (Thanks to Ed Strong)

"The best way to get the news is from objective sources," the president told Brit Hume of Fox News two years ago. "And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world."

Thus does the White House compound the sin of substituting propaganda for effective action by falling for the same spin it showers on the public.

Beware of leaders who drink their own Kool-Aid. The most distressing aspect of Mr. Bush's press conference last week was less his lies and half-truths than the abundant evidence that he is as out of touch as Custer was on the way to Little Bighorn.


The president seemed genuinely shocked that anyone could doubt his claim that his friend is the best-qualified candidate for the highest court. Mr. Bush also seemed unaware that it was Republicans who were leading the attack on Ms. Miers.

"The decision as to whether or not there will be a fight is up to the Democrats," he said, confusing his antagonists this time much as he has Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

Such naked presidential isolation from reality was a replay of his response to Hurricane Katrina. When your main "objective sources" for news are members of your own staff, you can actually believe that the most pressing tragedy of the storm is the rebuilding of Trent Lott's second home...

...Chances are that the number of Americans who still have faith that the light is at the end of either of these tunnels is identical to the number who believe Harriet Miers is the second coming of Antonin Scalia and that Tom Cruise has found true love.

bush defrocked harriet miers

WTF is Web 2.0 ?

I've been curious about this web 2.0 thing for a while. The hype surrounding it seems to be slightly reminiscient of they Windows 2000 hype. Windows 2 what? Right. I think I smell a dot.com bubble being blown.

Ok, so really now... wtf is web 2.0? Is this going to be a modern day Stone Soup parable? It sounds like another marketing buzz word. It fits right in between 'think outside the box' and 'mission statement'.

This is what oriellynet.com said about the subject:

1. The Web As Platform
Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesn't have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core. You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from that core.

They even have this handy dandy visual:



Maybe I'm just daft, but web 2.0 just looks like a repackaged version of the internet that Al Gore invented in the early 80's.

Find out what it really is from the expert

web 2.0

Meet The Fuckers

Buy the t-shirt here.

Apparently, nail clippers, bombs, guns, lighters and scissors aren't the only things that will get your butt thrown off a plane.
At least they landed first.

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Southwest Airlines kicked a woman off one of its flights over a political message on her T-shirt, the airline confirmed Thursday, and published reports say the passenger will sue.

Lorrie Heasley, of Woodland, Wash., was asked to leave her flight from Los Angeles to Portland, Ore., Tuesday for wearing a T-shirt with pictures of President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and a phrase similar to the popular film title "Meet the Fockers."

The CNN story is here.

meet the fuckers southwest

Another Politics Quizz

Apparently, I'm about to single handedly over-throw the government, and I don't even know it.

You are a Social Liberal (71% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (5% permissive) You are best described as a: Socialist Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test