FROM THE STILL BLOGLESS MRS...

...came an oft-forwarded e-mail with the kind of one-liners that you normally see on over-priced, never-bought novelty buttons. I did like these, though:

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I Have a Degree in Liberal Arts; Do You Want Fries With That? 

 FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION. It comes bundled with the software.

STUPIDITY IS NOT A HANDICAP. Park elsewhere!

The original point and click interface was a Smith and Wesson.
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Ya know, Hon, I can get you set up with Blogspot in 3.5 minutes. And God knows The Bartender is doing fine working with worse material...

QUOTE OF THE DAY

From Heather of Angelweave:

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The left is fond of taking responsibility away from individuals for their actions. Oh, person X "couldn't help himself" because of BLAH. And I can't stand for that. I've said it before - if you take away my responsibility, you take away my accomplishment.

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Amen, sistah.

MHEH

I'm stealing the first half from Boots & Sabers:

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Gun-Fearing Wussie: Why don't you gun nuts go away and start your own country?

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For the perfect response, you'll have to click the link.

SPAMMING FOR THE TROOPS

You know those annoying 100x forwarded e-mails you get from your friends with that cute dog joke or that scary virus warning that's just an urban legend? Well, Jay Solo has come up with an excellent idea for using this format for an actual worthy cause.

Front Line Voices is a web site containing unedited letters from our troops overseas, and lets you get a first-hand picture of what's actually going on in the War On Terror, without all that BS quagmire spin you get from the old-media-asshats like Rather & Brokaw.

Here's the suggested text for mass-mailing to your address book:

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Ever notice that the media seems to dwell on or overstate negative news from Iraq and elsewhere? Some of them have even admitted to it lately.

Yet if you see letters from individuals who are actually serving there, things sound far different, mostly positive and full of promise.

Now there is a place where letters and firsthand reports are collected, from Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. You can see the real news directly, bypassing the traditional media, or at least supplementing it with a sanity check.

It's called Front Line Voices and is at http://www.frontlinevoices.org. It's in weblog format, operated entirely by volunteers who wished to see extensive, realistic, unfiltered accounts published, positive and negative.

Check it out, and please feel free to pass this along so everyone will get the word.
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And don't forget to tag your e-mail with "if you don't immediately forward this to 10 people in the next two hours, you will become infected with nipple dysentary", or something equally compelling.

But seriously, FLV is the kind of thing that anyone who believes we're doing the right thing would love to hear about. Be a friend and let them know.

THE HOMELESS: ALMOST AS ANNOYING AS THE FRENCH

Boots & Sabers tells the story of how the homeless are shaking their stinky, unwashed fists in rage now that they can no longer piss inside and sleep outside of a library in Dallas. I hate to throw spoilers, but my favorite part is at the end:

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"It seems strange we're treated like third-class citizens," Mr. Blount said. "They have a space for everybody's car. Why can't they provide a place for me to put my bag?"

[Jed's comment]You are third-class citizens.  Now get off your ass and do something about it.

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Warning: reading the whole post could lead to muscle strain as you violently roll your eyes at such stupid things as:

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Ms. Morrison, 39, has moved away from the library – but just across the street.

"This is my living room," she said of the sidewalk at Ervay and Young streets.

Pointing across Ervay, she said, "That used to be my living room."

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[roll] OW! My sclera!

THE EMPEROR OF ICE CREAM

Via his Imperial Munificence comes this story on the best ice cream ever made, which begins:

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Ted Nugent endorses 'Gun Nut' ice cream Firearm-rights advocate hooks up with company battling Ben & Jerry's

Ted Nugent, rock musician, avid outdoorsman and defender of gun rights, has come out in support of "Gun Nut" ice cream, a new flavor unveiled by a company billing itself as "the conservative alternative to liberal Ben & Jerry's."

Star Spangled Ice Cream Company announced the new partnership yesterday in a statement.

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Yes, it's real, and yes, it's INSANELY expensive. But just for the privilege of owning an empty carton of "I Hate the French Vanilla", I have to admit that it's tempting.

And don't miss the "suggested flavors" in the comments like:

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Turbaned Tyrant Toffee Twist
Splodeydopin'Strawberry
Fatwah Fat-Free Fudge
Almond Allah Delight
Chocolate Suicide Cherry Bomb

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THUMBRULES

Right Wing News has some simple rules to tell Conservatives from Liberals. Here's the first few:

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-- Don't ever expect a conservative to get an even break from the mainstream media.

-- To the mainstream media and the left, every war is Vietnam.

-- You convince conservatives with logic, liberals with emotion, and moderates with a mix of the two.

-- A Conservative can't outspend a liberal on domestic issues, so he shouldn't bother to try. Conversely, a liberal can't out-cut a conservative on domestic issues, or outspend him on the military, so he shouldn't bother to try.

-- Conservatives turn on their own much quicker than liberals do and it serves us well because we usually don't end up dragging our image down in the public eye by defending the indefensible.

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He left out the part about liberals being mush-brained-morons who are easily distracted by shiny objects, but other than that, the list is pretty accurate.

SCREAMING LIKE A TEEN-AGE GIRL AT A BEATLES CONCERT

That's what I sounded like when I found out that His Magnificent and Benevolent Imperial Majesty, Emperor Misha I, Lord High Commander of the Rottweiler Empire has seen fit to blogroll...

me.

Right there in the Department of Entertainment & Satire.

This is my ultimate blogger dream come true. I've been stopping by Misha's place pretty much daily since I first stumbled on it sometime in 2002. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, delivers full-force-fury-flying-fists smackdowns on oh-so-deserving asshats & fuckwits like The Emperor.

NOBODY.

EVER.

When I first started blogging, he was one of my idols, and he's been on my blogroll since day 1 of Blogspot. And for good reason. Whenever I need to re-juice my righteous indignation, he's always there for me. And since 9/11, there have been a lot of times, usually when I've watched too much "old media" news, that I've felt down and depressed and started to question whether America was doing the right thing. Whenever that happened, Misha was there, ClueBatting idiotarian skulls, and standing up loudly and proudly for the adopted nation that has always been his home.

He has refueled my patriotism more times than I can count, and for that, I owe him an unrepayable debt of gratitude.

And to think that I could actually make him laugh... that I've done something to actually make his life a little better... 

I'm touched.

Thank you. You are too kind.

FREE STATE NEW HAMPSHIRE

I got an e-mail from the Free State Project today, and found some interesting numbers. They voted on their target state when their membership hit 5000. When those first 5000 signed up, no state had been chosen. There was just a list of about 10 states that they were considering. In order to be fair to enrollees, they were allowed to list states to which they would not move. Turns out about 1000 people had said "no way" to New Hampshire.

But, within 5 days of their announcement of New Hampshire as the target state, on October 1, they picked up an additional 250 or so members. I'm predicting that membership will continue to climb until the critical mass of 20,000 is reached. My guess would be about 2 years.

If you're even only vaguely curious about the Free State Project, try their new Free State New Hampshire site, as well as their main site. If nothing else, you ought to be aware of this now so that, in a few years, when NH elects it's first Libertarian governor & legislative majority, you'll know why it happened.

THAT WAS PAINFUL

Beloved Wife headed up north today to visit Grandma for a little while. To keep myself out of trouble, I spent the last 3 hours making some long-overdue adjustments to my blog.

On the left, you'll find category links to Love Notes and Filthy Lies. On the other left, you'll find monthly archive links for Bad Money in its entirety, as well as some of the (theoretically) more popular categories. I also went back through all 584 entries to make sure they were properly categorized, although I think I'm still missing a couple for the Bonfire & Carnival.

God, my eyes hurt.

GOD BLESS PHOTODUDE

I was just over there catching up, and saw this quote in his sidebar:

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As President of the non-existant radical anti-environmentalist organization Pave the Planet, I couldn't agree more.

MAKE IT COUNT

J of Quibbles & Bits has come up with the best solution I've ever heard to the problem of how to make sure votes get counted correctly. No more hanging chads, no more hacking the electronic voting machine. Here's his proposal for the Vote Box:

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Instead of the VoteBox tallying the votes and sending them off electronically, the VoteBox produces a chit with a print out of the choices made and a barcode that identifies the time and date of the vote along with a unique random identifier. The printout also includes a bar code or dot code that corresponds to the choices made. The chit is printed out right there for the voter, and presented for verification.

If the voter authorizes the chit as concurrent with his vote, the identifier for the chit is sent out electronically from the VoteBox to the VoteCounter. The Voter takes the chit and walks over to the VoteCounter. The voter deposits the chit into the VoteCounter, much the same way a paper ballot is stuffed into a ballot card reader. The chit is scanned and the validation code checked against the codes from the VoteBox. If the chit has a valid code, it's accepted and the votes tallied. If not, it's rejected. This makes falsified chits harder to manufacture, since the number is generated at the same time as the chit.

The chit is critical -- since it has the selections of the voter recorded for posterity, a re-countable record exists. Since the record is both an electronically readable (bar code) and human readable (print out of the selected candidates and state of yes/no votes), it can't be easily corrupted. There is some concern about other people looking at the chits, but you have the same problem with paper ballots. There are, of course, fraud issues, but they are nearly identical as well to the problems with paper ballots, and relatively easily addressed.

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Sheer brilliance.

UPDATE: Since great minds think alike, it looks like Silent Running independently developed a similar idea

READ THE SCRIPT

American Digest has an interesting theory, which I hope is correct. If you want to see how Arnie is going to govern California, just check his old movies. The clues are all there:

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Conan the Barbarian:
Long held by those with exquisite taste in films to be the best Arnold movie ever. A film in which the essential Arnold is first exposed (in more ways than one) to the world at large. A film that has too long been allowed to languish in B-movie purgatory as a two-fer-one with "Bucket of Blood" at Amazon.com. With the inaugural moment, Arnold will signal the touchstone of his political philosophy during a photo-op with the President:

George W Bush: Arnold, what is best in life?
Arnold: To crush Democrats, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the feminists!

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Kindergarten Cop:

“Oh come on... STOP WHINING! You teachers are soft! You lack discipline! WELL I'VE GOT NEWS FOR YOU, YOU ARE MINE NOW! YOU BELONG TO ME!”

Arnold has sworn to sift the crap out of the fouled sandbox that passes for public education in California.

Well, it is time to pass a note over the head of the local teachers’ union that says: JOKE TIME IS OVER.

Teachers’ Union: So who are you, man?
Arnold loads his shot-gun
Arnold: I'm the party pooper.

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Plenty more. Go and be amused.

PILSBURY DOUGHBOY HIT BY BUS

Blackfive's having another run of kick-ass karma. First he made Right Wing News' list of "up-and-coming blogs", then his beloved Cubbies took the lead in the playoffs with some of the wildest crap I've seen on the diamond in a long time. America's most beloved Irishman (feel free to put that quote on your blog, Matt) should stop by Starbucks again to see if there's a little bonus change coming his way.

By the way, Matt, be sure to look both ways before crossing the street. Those buses pounce like tigers.