Comment Re:Lame Gov (Score 2, Funny) 465
It's like kicking someone trying to commit suicide in the shin.
It's like kicking someone trying to commit suicide in the shin.
Firefox has an extension called Scrapbook that allows you to save to your cache entire copies of a webpage without saving screenshots to your hard drive. Your browser automatically downloads all pages from a website within a link depth that you set, and you can direct the process to be restricted to one domain.
I spidered www.whitehouse.gov on January 20 and January 21, 2009 to a link depth of 3. I wish I remembered to do the same thing with Blagojevich's webpages before they were changed.
"As long as they get to over-hype whatever story they want"
Isn't the idea of overhyping based on whoring out integrity to whatever sells, which would be the opposite of what is going on here? Just why are they overhyping if they aren't doing it for ratings?
Why is it that when there's funding for a new fleet of presidential cars with increased fuel efficiency from Tesla---mind you, the Secret Service has been getting a new fleet of cars every year already, weirdly---on the basis that buying from them will ease mass production costs, the Republicans call it "massive wasteful earmark pork barrel spending", but when funding for a new presidential helicopter fleet with security features like shooting frickin' lasers is cut, there's also a massive backlash?
The cynic in me, considering that laser plane that is also being canceled in 41 states, says it all has to do with what states the companies are based in that the funding is going toward. When Republicans stop debating proposed projects on their merits or lack thereof, and instead just blankly categorize them with, say, a fake vomit factory in New Mexico, they just want it to go to the states they represent instead.
That's fine, relatively speaking; they're just trying to grab as much as they can for their constituencies at the expense of the welfare of the whole nation, and it's not anything new. It's not even the hypocrisy that's new, since 45% of the earmark spending comes from the Republicans, and half of the top ten earmark-getters in the Senate are Republicans. It's the cowardly way of throwing whatever they don't like (funding for the Smithsonian, volcano monitoring, etc.) into the category of wasteful spending without explaining why it is such, and using shock tactics of making you look like you're trying to fund a plastic beaver factory in Idaho if you dare question them. To turn your back on your colleagues in the body in which you represent the people, and take your case to people you know will agree with you on FOX News, is the essence, if not the definition, of partisanship.
In the sciences, we are now uniquely priviledged to sit side by side with the giants on whose shoulders we stand. -- Gerald Holton