I’ve just finished recovering from a pretty annoying bug and have started through my back episodes of Countdown and Rachel Maddow in iTunes. Mostly it’s just for laughs since most of them are from The Administration That Shall Not Be Named, but the ones in and near the 20th are still interesting.

On the episode of The Rachel Maddow Show just a day before the inauguration there was a moment where I had to laugh. There are some folks out there that knew exactly where they were and where the shot was and took a moment to say what a large number of people have been wanting to say loudly and on TV for a while.

It’s more visible in motion, but it’s “Arrest Bush for Murder”.

Well done.

There are some rumors going around the Internet from stupid, panicked mothers that blindly share another stupid, panicked mother’s interpretation of a law she didn’t understand. Here, please listen:

Some people are claiming the new child safety laws make reselling children’s clothes and toys illegal. Please read the official statement. It’s up to the makers to certify them, not the store selling it. You can resell anything you can obtain, but children’s things that have their first-sale after the effective date must be certified lead-free. That’s it. What’s on the market is on the market; second-sale doctrine is intact.

Listen: when there’s news of a “crazy new law” that would destroy large parts of the American economy, it’s best to presume the person telling you about it is an idiot first and then research it rather than spreading it like butter. This is yet another example for that rule.

There’s a reason “second tier” candidates poll badly.

This comes from a poll on Polling Point, advertised on a website, that appears to be from Clinton wondering why people hate her.

They waste space with Gingrich, Frist, Jeb, and Allen rather than include Huckabee, Tancredo, or Paul? They clearly do not understand the current landscape. Huckabee and Paul are starting to take points from many other players and stand a good chance at upsetting elections. It would be worth knowing how people perceive her against them, I’d think.

Oh well. Things will be done as things have been done.

Okay … get this shit:

Al Qaeda is stepping up efforts to sneak terrorists into the U.S. and has rebuilt most of its capability to strike here, an intelligence estimate states, according to The Associated Press.
CNN Email Alert

Now, if we know this, are we supposed to feel safer now that the government knows this, more scared that they could attack, or furious as hell that they know and have done nothing about it despite taking away every damned freedom they could in the past six years?

I vote furious.

The president’s ratings have fallen through the floor, hovering somewhere around a 30% approval these days. We, as a people, strongly dislike where he’s taken the nation, and greatly fear the fact that he is completely and intentionally oblivious to what the American people want him to do. He feels that he’s American’s God-given-and-directed leader and that he can do no wrong. We feel he’s a lunatic jackass hell-bent on destroying American’s hard-earned goodwill in the world.

Why aren’t we, the people, looking at kicking his ass out?

With enough support from the public (it would need a lot) we could get the Democrat-controlled congress to put forward a vote to initiate a recall election for the presidential office. We have that power. We’re not just sitting idly by in this carriage and waiting for the ride to be over; we can end this now with the power of our own governmental system.

Consider the following:

• The iPhone is said to run a reduced version of Mac OS X that is “well under” a gigabyte in size, perhaps even as small as 512MB, while keeping Core Animation.
• The tv has animations and transitions a la Core Animation as well as handling protected file formats, QuickTime-powered video, and talking to other Macs and PCs over the network to synchronize files and store them on a (probably HFS+) internal drive.

• The new AirPort Extreme not only handles printer sharing, but disk sharing over AFP and SMB with folder-level access controls for multiple disks. This effectively makes this little base station a network-attached storage device for the home. User-upgradable as well.