Quickies

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A round-up of news items, articles, columns and blog posts that caught our eye this past week.







When your career has pretty much become known for how much swearing is in your tirades.

Thinking about sitting out this election? Or maybe voting for Romney just for the hell of it? You may want to think twice. If the above video is any indication, Samuel L. Jackson may appear out of nowhere to give you a profanity-laced nursery rhyme about the dangers of voting Republican this November.

Ostensibly a parody of his viral-ready rendition of the children's-book-for-adults "Go The F*ck To Sleep," Jackson magically shows up in the homes of seniors, young people and other disaffected voters to encourage them to start paying attention, using colorful language that, we can only assume, is not approved by Barack Obama.

The Academy Award nominee, 63, comes as a natural and unapologetic surrogate for the Obama campaign. Earlier this year, he caused a stir when he told Ebony that he voted for Obama in 2008 "because he was black."

“Wake the eff up!”



Besides the inappropriateness of the entire clip, two things grabbed us about this particular campaign cry: 1) is that not a peculiar slogan for an incumbency? 2) Rather ironic considering the zombified support Obama has enjoyed from his base ever since he announced his candidacy back in 2007.







B-Daddy on the state of California's new and creative way to steal workers' money.

A pension plan administered by a board of folks mostly selected by the governor... what could possibly go wrong?







Leslie of Temple of Mut was kind enough to pass along to us this fun little info graph displaying what out beer preferences say about our politics:



(click to enlarge)

Alas, our anecdotal suspicions have been confirmed: craft beer drinkers are generally politically engaged libs. sigh.






Congrats, gang, all those years of camping out in a ditch somewhere outside of Crawford, Texas has really paid off...

The ACLU released a report this week that shows that under Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder, warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of American's electronic communications is "sharply on the rise."

After months of litigation and Freedom of Information Act requests, the ACLU obtained documents from the federal government proving that real-time monitoring of electronic communications inside the U.S. has climbed 60 percent since 2009 and far surpasses monitoring under President Bush.

The ACLU reports that the Dept. of Justice used "pen register" and "trap and trace" techniques 23,535 times in 2009 and 37,616 times in 2011.

A "pen register" captures outgoing data from a phone or email account while "trap and trace" captures incoming data.

During that same time period, the number of people whose telephones were the subject of pen register and trap and trace surveillance more than tripled. In fact, more people were subjected to pen register and trap and trace surveillance in the past two years than in the entire previous decade.

(ACLU's bold above)

"The number of authorizations the Justice Department received to use these devices on individuals' email and network data increased 361% between 2009 and 2011," the ACLU said.

but... but... but... Hopenchange!


Losers





OK, gang, a combination of a wonky connection and being very under the weather has tested our patience so we're going to cut things short for today. See you all tomorrow.

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