McCain's Leadership?

John McCain seems to believe that Barack Obama does not have sufficient leadership experience to be president. For the most part, I have to agree with him. After all, once you throw out Obama's community activism, his teachings on constitutional law, his civil rights law career, and his 10-year stint as a legislator, there is really nothing else to lead you to believe that might make a good president.

However, McCain's focus on presidential leadership really misses the point: our recent presidents have been lacking as well.

• George W. Bush? A lifetime of commercial, political, and personal failures culminated in his being elected the governor of Texas, the second most powerful position in that state. Although he took refuge from his short workday with long breaks of video golf and solitaire, his friends still managed to fabricate a record of accomplishment.
  
• Bill Clinton? His main qualification was the governorship of Arkansas. Although he managed to look the other way while his state was the major transshipment point for Iran-contra cocaine, he couldn't stay completely clean either.

And what about McCain himself? His qualifications include a long career in the Navy and then in Congress, where he engaged in at least one bad act. Strangely, McCain's major character feature seems to be his status as a POW. I'm more than willing to go easy on POWs, but I found it more than a little disturbing that McCain has spent much of his career actually stopping any legislation aimed at determining the status of POW/MIA soldiers.

If anyone wants, I'll publish an article on the sordid details somewhere else, but in the meantime you can read pages 88-94 of this book.

Quote of the Day

Seen on the Internet:

"That amount of strange hurts my thinker. My thinker thunkered out."

Ouchie! Ouchie! Ouchie!

It's good to see motorcycle riders wearing helmets. It's not so good when you see some guy pop a wheelie with their girlfriend on the back of the bike. (Injury)

Spontaneous Right-Wing Hypocrisy

I cannot help but be amused when Fox News gets burned at their own game. Trying to muster a group slam against John Edwards' recent admission of infidelity, their plan backfires (between the 2:31 and 3:15 mark) when Ronald Walters and Alan Colmes bring up the fact that John McCain cheated on his wife. Watch the balance of the video to see how the moral majority explain away McCain's infidelity as somehow justified because he was a POW.

The Cornhole Song

I was recently introduced to the game of Cornhole. No, not the old fashioned, NSFW type of cornholing, I mean the new safe type of cornholing! Let this amusing video explain what I'm talking about.

Bootdisk.com

So you just finished rebuilding your home PC with Windows 98 (hey, it was the only free OS you had lying around) and you forgot that you needed to format the hard disk with the FAT32 filesystem first. Or, you needed to make a Windows XP boot disk to help you create a dual-boot system with Vista (yuck!) or Linux (_yawn_). What do you do?

Luckily, Bootdisk.com can help. Go to their website, download the appropriate file, and image your floppy disk (assuming that you didn't throw them all out back in 2002). It's worked for me several times.

Online Color Schemer

If you design web pages (or produce any type of digital art), then you might be interested in the Online Color Schemer. The company publishes other products, but this online color picker is free and often useful for finding the right color when you need it.

Give it a try.

A Junior Daredevil We Can Be Proud Of

The Internet is littered with young fools experimenting with danger. Sometimes, however, their feats of bravado are so extreme that you cannot help but appreciate these fools and the entertainment that they provide for us with their failures. (Likely injury)

Superdickery

One of my favorite websites is Superdickery.com.

This site has captured tons of old comic book covers and panels showing various superheroes (and assorted characters) in scenes that, well, don't look so innocent today. The name of the site comes from the Superman comics of the 1950s and 60s where he occasionally acted, shall we say, like a dick.

Give it a look and let me know what you think (click on Galleries first). You're sure to have some laughs.

Quote of the Day

(that I came up with myself)

"You're the man! In fact, you're two men!"

Wiretapping for Good

So I was wondering: if the U.S. government has no problems wiretapping U.S. citizens in lieu of a legal warrant or even probable cause (as evidenced by the sweeping, impersonal way in which the NSA collects data), then why can't it stop organized crime overnight?

I mean, if we can snoop the ether at random hoping to catch even a glimpse into organizations that might not even exist or that might not be planning anything even mildly interesting, then why can't they turn their prodigious data collection efforts towards something that is known to exist and that performs tangible bad acts every day of the week?

Yes, that was a rhetorical question.

Newlywed Game My Ass!

Back in the 1970s, I watched an episode of The Newlywed Game in which a contestant blurted out an answer that was both funny and shocking. By the early 1980s, my retelling of this incident stopped being funny and started sounding like I was making it up. By the late 1980s, so many others were passing along this story that I started to doubt it myself (did I really see that or am I just repeating what everyone else is saying?).

Thanks to YouTube, we can put this urban legend to bed.

Chris Markle, a Good Friend

A friend of mine, Chris Markle, died this past week. Chris had some struggles in his life, including some health problems, but the world was certainly a better place with him in it. As a teacher, he touched the lives of countless students, inspiring many of them to become better.

My thoughts and my love go to his wife Sophia and his daughter Zoe. Although Chris will be forever missed, we must remember that life goes on.