BunkBlog

A former President and Vice President have publicly confessed to war crimes – the ordering of and condoning of torture, among other things. The current President says we must look forward, not backward.

A former Presidential candidate had an affair and misused campaign contributions. The current administration is going to nail his ass to the wall for that!

A government of laws, and not of men. – John Adams

Kobo announced the Kobo eReader Touch on Monday; Barnes & Noble announced the Nook Touch on Tuesday. Both use similar technologies, to the point I almost wonder if they’re basically the same device, except for the store each connects to.

Both weigh 200 grams, use a 6″ Pearl eInk screen, have one button on the bottom bezel, and use the nifty infrared touch screen technology that Sony introduced last year. If not for the four buttons on the Sony PRS-650, I’d wonder if both Kobo and B&N hadn’t just nicked Sony’s design. Well, that and the fact that Sony costs twice as much and doesn’t include wifi. The Kobo is $130 and the Nook is $140, while the Sony is $230.

So, this summer you’ll have four different 6″ Pearl eInk ereaders to choose from. Three are infrared touch-screens, and one has a keyboard and is a bit bigger than the other three. The Kindeal is $114 and has a great store integration. Kobo and Nook are in the ballpark and have their own stores as well as compatibility with ePub stores of old. Sony is odd man out, which is par for the course over the past fifteen years.

I can’t help but wonder what Amazon will do next in the ereader war.

“No more ignoring the law when it’s inconvenient. That is not who we are.” – Senator Obama, August 2007

Checks and balances? War Powers Act? I can’t hear you.* – President Obama, 2011

* – For the oblivious, this is not a quote.

And there goes another one! Mitch Daniels, who by all accounts is a reasonable human being with deep ties to the GOP establishment and no significant baggage to scare off independents, has declared he won’t run in 2012. This leaves Pawlenty as the only declared possible candidate in the GOP that won’t scare off either the base or independents. Of course, he’s also not very exciting and has to run away from his own record in order to throw red meat to the Tea Partiers, so it’s not a lock. Take all statements as if they include the caveat, “18 months before an election is just plain silly to be handicapping races.”

As an exercise, my coworker and I took a look at the history of the Democractic and Republican party primaries and eventual winners. Only once in the history of either party could we find an example of a candidate who lost the general and went on to win the general election years later – Richard Nixon. With that in mind, and realizing that the economy is no longer screaming downward like a fireball of doom, might the more “adult” and sane members of the GOP stay away from becoming the sacrificial lamb in 2012? Surely, any analyst came to the same conclusion we did from our comfy chairs – if you lose against Obama, give up on ever being President in the future. It seems plausible that Daniels and other reasonable people may be staying away just because they know that Obama is likely to win anyway, so they’re not going to go through the bother.

With that in mind, why not nominate the most entertaining person to the GOP candidacy, just so we can all have some fun next year? Come on, you know a Michele Bachmann/Barack Obama debate would be absolutely hilarious!

So, Newt Gingrich told Sean Hannity, “I know how to get the whole country to resemble Texas.” This was in the context of economic and business issues. Which parts of Texas’ economy does he want to duplicate?

Does he want to duplicate the 99% reduction in state funding for libraries announced recently? Does he want to duplicate the gutting of education? Would he like to duplicate our empty, hollow city centers where tumbleweeds outnumber successful small businesses? How about the $23 Billion budget shortfall – is that worth duplicating across the nation? Maybe he wants to make the rest of the country look like our elder care industry, where next year’s budget will lay off nearly 60,000 nursing home workers? Texas is 50th out of 50 states in uninsured children as well as uninsured adults – maybe that’s what he wants to spread (hey, look at that – we only have the third highest teen pregnancy rate)? To be fair, we’re #1 out of all fifty states in the amount of carcinogens we dump into the atmosphere (double the #2 loser state), so that’s something to be proud of.

Maybe, just maybe, Gingrich really just wants to duplicate the unassailable GOP majority in Texas. After all, the 2003 out-of-cycle unprecedented gerrymandering has made it all but impossible for any Democrat outside of Houston or Austin to be elected to an office higher than dogcatcher. Maybe that’s the great success story Gingrich wants to duplicate.

Once again, my imaginary friend Kenji has inspired yet another winning meal. If nothing else, he was able to produce a great recipe for the “Secret” sauce for a Big Mac. We only had larger sesame seed buns (there was no way I was going to glue hundreds of seeds to smaller buns), and thus we made 1/6 lb patties instead of 1/10 lb micropatties. Overall, a great success. Who knew that nuking onions on low for ten minutes made them mild? Yay Kenji!

Mike Huckabee, one of the most pleasant theocrats I’ve ever heard speak, has dropped out of the 2012 race. To be fair, he never actually said he was going to run, but c’mon! He was near the top of the heap in every straw poll, and he’s one of the few people polling above single digits that could be a credible candidate. So he’s gone now.

Donald Trump, one of the most unpleasant human beings I’ve ever heard speak, has dropped out of the 2012 race. Again, he never actually filed as a candidate, but he also polled near the top of most straw polls, although he’s definitely not in the credible candidate category by a long stretch. More »

NBC announced they are going to air a comedy this fall, based on Chelsea Handler’s memoir, starring Laura Prepon as Chelsea. I love Chelsea Handler’s drunk slut schtick, and Laura Prepon has been my imaginary girlfriend for a few years now (poor October Road, we hardly knew ye), but I have a hard time picturing Prepon as Handler. Prepon has played mostly good girls, who have sex and maybe even drink but aren’t the caricature of those actions that Handler has built a career on. And, Handler’s persona hardly seems fit for primetime; how much of her memoir could they air on network television – 10%? Of course I’ll watch it (I give many shows two episodes before evicting them from the DVR), but I don’t have a great deal of optimism. Oh, I just heard that my other imaginary girlfriend, Natalie Morales, will be on the show too. Can we get another season of Middleman instead?