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Here's my last rant on the recent death of Robert "the conscience of the Senate" Byrd and all the fawning over the ex-Klansman which ensued.Speak no ill of the dead? Well, let me simply say that the racist, populist, larcenous bigot of a Senator - a man who robbed the American tax-payer to pave his state with baubles and bribes - is not going to be much mourned in these parts.And John Howting's piece in Human Events sums up my frustration quite succinctly:
Good Riddance, Robert Byrd
Filibustering the 1964 Civil Rights Act for over 14 hours straight. To this day, the American left vilifies Sen. Barry Goldwater for voting against this legislation but where is criticism of Byrd? Goldwater had a strong pro-civil rights record coming out of the 1950s that included voting for civil rights legislation and working with the Arizona NAACP to desegregate Arizona’s public schools. Goldwater voted against the 1964 Act only because he believed that Title II was not within Congress’ power to regulate interstate commerce and was also an abridgement of the 10th Amendment.Robert Byrd did not have the same civil rights record, far from it he was a Klansman. And, Byrd was never able to make a legitimate argument that he rejected the 1964 Act on constitutional grounds alone because while he filibustered the bill he quoted The Mind of Primitive Man by Frank Boaz. He cited Boaz’s study which concluded that the white man’s brain weighed more than the black man’s brain and therefore the white man is smarter. He also insisted that the writers of the Declaration of Independence did not intend for their words to be taken literally because they must have understood that all men are not created equal ...that the darker man is clearly inferior.
"I hate to admit it, but this iCroc is all marketing hype."Here are the actual winners:
I hate to kick a guy when he's down, but Robert Byrd has always been a hot button of mine. As usual, notice how this one sentence is buried in the last paragraph: "A former member of the Ku Klux Klan, Byrd later became a champion of civil rights."Sen. Byrd, 92, hospitalized; condition called 'seriously ill'
Longest serving U.S. lawmaker was first elected in 1952
Sen. Robert Byrd, the longest-serving member of Congress, is "seriously ill" and has been hospitalized, a spokesman for the West Virginia lawmaker said Sunday.
Police Said to Taze Grandmother
Police Tasered an 86-year-old disabled grandma in her bed and stepped on her oxygen hose until she couldn't breathe, after her grandson called 911 seeking medical assistance, the woman and her grandson claim in Oklahoma City Federal Court. Though the grandson said, "Don't Taze my granny!" an El Reno police officer told another cop to "Taser her!" and wrote in his police report that he did so because the old woman "took a more aggressive posture in her bed," according to the complaint.
The Holy Grail of web marketers is to somehow find a way to get their site “ranked high” in search engines results. And by “high,” people usually mean being listed in the top three dozen results for a particular search (hopefully, within the top ten). Since the GREAT majority of users don’t look past the third page in any given search, anything short of that is a waste of time.
The other aspect of getting a site ranked higher is the type of content on that site. Quality content is one of the fundamental KEYS to attracting links from other sites which in turn secures superior search engine rankings. This is the only strategy condoned by Google, Yahoo, and MSN. 
Nurse in V-J Day kiss photo dies
A nurse famously photographed being kissed by an American sailor in New York's Times Square in 1945 to celebrate the end of World War Two has died at the age of 91, her family said on Tuesday.The V-J Day picture of the white-clad Edith Shain by photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt captured an epic moment in U.S. history and became an iconic image marking the end of the war after being published in Life magazine.
The identity of the nurse in the photograph was not known until the late 1970s when Shain wrote to the photographer saying that she was the woman in the picture taken on August 14 at a time when she had been working at Doctor's Hospital in New York City.
"It's for you."I was sure someone else got that in before me and made it to the top three. Instead, the "winners" were:
Revisiting my comments about past Mad Men episodes is often a cringe worthy exercise. Like chapters in a book, each episode is part of a collective whole. It’s easy to over emphasize many individual plot trees that ultimately turn out to be of minor significance in the forest of Season 3. That said, one motif I continuously harped on was the juxtaposition of the colors blue and green. I saw many examples as having a deliberate symbolic importance rather being simple arbitrary production design decisions. Specifically, blue seemed to represent traditional social mores and institutions in existence at the start of the sixties which, like the fall of Rome Gene reads about, give way in Season 3 and force the character to face change in their lives. This is often depicted by the use of green tones....Full Post at Basket of Kisses.
If and when the current administration's Department of Justice prosecutes BP for the Gulf oil spill, expect the current administration's Department of the Interior to be called in as a defense witness. BP was a finalist for the 2010 "SAFETY Award for Excellence" which recognizes "outstanding safety and pollution prevention performance by the offshore oil and gas industry."
Here's a new definition for genius: selling running shows to consumers in the ever-growing baref00t jogging market.Solar flashlight anyone?The typical human foot is an anatomical marvel of evolution with 26 bones, 33 joints, 20 muscles, and hundreds of sensory receptors, tendons and ligaments. Like the rest of the body, to keep our feet healthy, they need to be stimulated and exercised.
That’s why we recommend wearing FiveFingers for exercise, play, and for fun. Stimulating the muscles in your feet and lower legs will not only make you stronger and healthier, it improves your balance, agility and proprioception.
We all play the game, and when we dareLight years ahead of today's Taylor Swifts and Lady GaGas.
We cheat ourselves at solitaire
Falcon 9 rockets into space in dramatic maiden flight
Powered by 10 engines and the vision of an Internet entrepreneur, an untried Falcon 9 rocket blasted off Friday and successfully boosted a dummy payload into orbit on a maiden voyage intended to help pave the way for commercial missions to the International Space Station.
In a major milestone for the commercial launch industry, the two-stage Falcon 9's nine first-stage Merlin engines, fueled by liquid oxygen and RP-1 kerosene rocket fuel, roared to life at 2:45 p.m. EDT.
Mock James Cameron's display of smug, self-importance if you will. When we're attacked by killer robots from the future, you won't be laughing!Director James Cameron says BP turned down help offer
Film director and deep-sea explorer James Cameron said on Wednesday that BP Plc turned down his offer to help combat the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
"Over the last few weeks I've watched, as we all have, with growing horror and heartache, watching what's happening in the Gulf and thinking those morons don't know what they're doing," Cameron said at the All Things Digital technology conference.
Cameron, the director of "Avatar" and "Titanic," has worked extensively with robot submarines and is considered an expert in undersea filming. He did not say explicitly who he meant when he referred to "those morons."
