Fresh Prince of Bel Air

Jimmy Fallon's picking up steam.

Jacues Pepin whips up a meal

This is a great story from the Washington Post. Jacques Pepin goes to Giant, spends $24 and comes up with a six course meal--including wine. All in 45 minutes of cooking time.

He jumped into prepping Golden Delicious apples with a simple combination of butter, sugar, lemon peel and water. While the apples were baking, he minced and smashed garlic cloves into a paste, then shredded about a third of the Savoy cabbage and tossed it with a garlicky Dijon dressing.

Half of the package of kielbasa went into a pan with oil and was paired with the other two-thirds of the cabbage for a quick saute. He peeled and cut up the acorn squash and cooked it until tender in a covered pan with water, then added vinegar and honey to give it a sweet-and-sour glaze. He pan-fried the short ribs, then cut store-bought nan into strips the size of the ribs. He washed baby bella mushrooms ("Do it right before you use them, and don't let them sit in the water"), then blurred them into perfect julienne. He sauteed them with Woodbridge by Robert Mondavi sauvignon blanc ($4.50 a bottle), poured from his glass.

The dishes, five of them, came out one after the other, and Pépin hardly broke a sweat. He sprinkled the squash and cabbage dishes with garnishes of parsley or carrot, spooned dollops of sour cream onto the apples and constructed open-faced sandwiches out of the nan, short ribs and mushroom mixture.

Obama's Purity Test

John Hodgman is awesome. I can't believe this didn't get more press...

Fiddle-tastic!

E-warfare

This article was a little nervewracking. It's one more thing on the plate we need to be watching.

From the article:

One day in late summer 2008, FBI and Secret Service agents flew to Chicago to inform Barack Obama's campaign team that its computer system had been hacked. ... The McCain campaign was hit with a similar attack.

The trail in both cases led to computers in China, said several sources inside and outside government with knowledge of the incidents. In the McCain case, Chinese officials later approached staff members about information that had appeared only in restricted e-mails, according to a person close to the campaign.

China is significantly boosting its capabilities in cyberspace as a way to gather intelligence and, in the event of war, hit the U.S. government in a weak spot, U.S. officials and experts say. Outgunned and outspent in terms of traditional military hardware, China apparently hopes that by concentrating on holes in the U.S. security architecture -- its communications and spy satellites and its vast computer networks -- it will collect intelligence that could help it counter the imbalance.

Westboro Baptist Church Goes to...

...the most Gay and Jewish friendly city on earth.


Watch what happens:

http://www.tnr.com/article/westboro-baptist-church-vs-new-york

The Post Office: Making Itself Even More Irrelevant To Future Generations

As NC said, kids can always just email Santa. Or Facebook him. Or just realize he doesn't exist.

Postal Service Limits Letter To Santa Program

by The Associated Press

Enlarge Sam Harrel/AP

A jolly old elf at Santa Claus House in North Pole, Alaska, holds children's letters to Santa sent this year. The U.S. Postal Service says it will no longer deliver the letters.

Starry-eyed children writing letters to the jolly man at the North Pole this holiday season very likely won't get a response from Santa Claus or his helpers.

The U.S. Postal Service is dropping a popular national program begun in 1954 in the small Alaska town of North Pole, where volunteers open and respond to thousands of letters addressed to Santa each year. Replies come with North Pole postmarks.

Last year, a postal worker in Maryland recognized an Operation Santa volunteer there as a registered sex offender. The postal worker interceded before the individual could answer a child's letter, but the Postal Service viewed the episode as a big enough scare to tighten rules in such programs nationwide.

Commentary

Is The Postal Service Writing Off Santa? Nov. 19, 2009

People in North Pole are incensed by the change, likening the Postal Service to the Grinch trying to steal Christmas. The letter program is a revered holiday tradition in North Pole, where light posts are curved and striped like candy canes and streets have names such as Kris Kringle Drive and Santa Claus Lane. Volunteers in the letter program even sign the response letters as Santa's elves and helpers.

North Pole Mayor Doug Isaacson agreed that caution is necessary to protect children. But he's outraged that the North Pole program should be affected by a sex offender's actions on the East Coast — and he thinks it's wrong that locals just found out about the change in recent days.

"It's Grinch-like that the Postal Service never informed all the little elves before the fact," he said. "They've been working on this for how long?"

It's Grinch-like that the Postal Service never informed all the little elves before the fact. They've been working on this for how long?

- Doug Isaacson, mayor of North Pole, Alaska

The Postal Service began restricting its policies on such programs in 2006, including requiring volunteers to show identification.

But the Maryland incident involving the sex offender prompted additional changes, even forcing the agency to briefly suspend the Operation Santa program last year in New York and Chicago.

The agency now prohibits volunteers from having access to children's family names and addresses, said spokeswoman Sue Brennan. The Postal Service instead redacts the last name and addresses on each letter and replaces the addresses with codes that match computerized addresses known only to the post office — and leaves it up to individual post offices whether they want to go through the time-consuming effort to shield the information.

Anchorage-based agency spokeswoman Pamela Moody said dealing with the tighter restrictions is not feasible in Alaska.

"It's always been a good program, but we're in different times and concerned for the privacy of the information," she said.

Moody stressed that kids around the world can still send letters to Santa Claus. The Postal Service still runs the giant Operation Santa Program in which children around the world can have their letters to Santa answered, and the restrictions do not affect private organizations running their own letter efforts.

But what will change are the generically addressed letters to "Santa Claus, North Pole" that for years have been forwarded to volunteers in the Alaska town. That program will stop, unless changes are made before Christmas.

Losing the Santa-letter cache is a blow to the community of 2,100 people, who pride themselves on their Christmas ties. Huge tourist attractions here include an everything-Christmas store, Santa Claus House, and the post office, where visitors can get a hand-stamped postmark on their postcards and packages if they ask for it.

Another issue raising the hackles on some locals is a separate recent change. Anchorage —- 260 miles to the south — is now processing the thousands of requests for North Pole postal cancellation marks on Christmas cards and packages from outside the state. It's a job long handled by nearby Fairbanks, about 15 miles away.

Moody said with as many as 800,000 items processed last year, Fairbanks is not equipped to handle the overload. Anchorage is the only city in Alaska with the high-speed equipment necessary to do the job without delay. Moody disagreed with the mayor's belief that the process creates a false postmark.

Santa Claus House, built like a Swiss chalet and chock full of all items Christmas, sells more than 100,000 letters from Santa, and one of the lures is the postmark.

Operations manager Paul Brown believes his business will be affected under changes to the volunteer Santa letter program because tens of thousands of letters are addressed to Santa Claus House, North Pole, Alaska.

Those letters will still be forwarded to volunteers, but it's unclear yet whether anything will be done with them. Those intercepted by the Postal Service will probably eventually be shredded.

Brown worries about misinterpretations of the changes, such as people believing it's no longer possible to get individual pieces of mail graced with the North Pole postmark.

Conduct a Latin Jazz Collective

Between Two Ferns: Schedenfreude!

Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis from Between Two Ferns

Terrorists are not Supervillains.

Ezra Klein nailed this on the head.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is not the master of magnetism

A poll today shows that New Yorkers narrowly favor trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in their city, and this is being treated as a surprise in some quarters. New York sure is brave! More baffling were the lawmakers who cowered when faced with the prospect of holding terrorists in Supermax prisons in the continental United States, as if hatred of America gave men super strength.

These guys took down a plane with box cutters. They used crude weapons to attack a far more sophisticated and effective fighting force. The most fearsome of them was captured at home, in his pajamas. It's not like we're putting Magneto on trial and need to keep him away from metal filings.

It's one thing to be afraid of terrorism. But there's no real reason to be afraid of terrorists, and as Daphne Eviatar argues, there's good reason not to look like you're afraid of terrorists:

The contrast of seeing these ordinary-looking men on trial in an orderly U.S. courtroom — where they’re accorded the right to a lawyer, the right to speak in their own defense and the right to call witnesses — could go a long way toward publicly revealing the absurdity of their cause, as well as the justice that a fair and functioning legal system can provide.

Trying these guys publicly, as well as holding them in normal prisons like common criminals, is good public relations. Being a terrorist is a more appealing prospect if the world's sole superpower appears to cower before your might than it is if you end up trapped in the American legal system, forced to submit to endless cross-examination and consultation with attorneys and other bureaucratic humiliations. Lots of people want to be super villains. But who wants to be a henchman? Being held on a fortified military island and tortured by a country that can't seem to get you to talk is a much more glorious finish than a long and dull trial that ends with you serving time in central New Jersey.

You know where she fits in?

America.

From Boingboing:

A 20-year old Shanghai woman of mixed race has sparked a discussion about race in China. Lou Jing is half black; she was raised by a Chinese mother and speaks and acts like any other Chinese girl. But when the aspiring TV anchor entered an American Idol-like contest and rapped on-stage, she attracted both sensational admiration and ignorant hate. The presenters adoringly called her "chocolate girl" on stage — meanwhile, on web forums, people called her gross and ugly and criticized her mother for having sex with a black person out of wedlock. In an interview with NPR's All Things Considered, Lou Jing says: "I've always thought of myself as Shanghainese, but after the competition I started to have doubts about who I really am." Lou Jing has never met her dad, who left China without knowing he had gotten her mom pregnant. She hopes to study journalism at Columbia University.

Get Festive Bastards!

VT sent this to me, from McSweeneys:

IT'S DECORATIVE GOURD SEASON, MOTHERFUCKERS.
BY COLIN NISSAN

I don't know about you, but I can't wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. I'm about to head up to the attic right now to find that wicker fucker, dust it off, and jam it with an insanely ornate assortment of shellacked vegetables. When my guests come over it's gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is—fucking fall. There's a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.

I may even throw some multi-colored leaves into the mix, all haphazard like a crisp October breeze just blew through and fucked that shit up. Then I'm going to get to work on making a beautiful fucking gourd necklace for myself. People are going to be like, "Aren't those gourds straining your neck?" And I'm just going to thread another gourd onto my necklace without breaking their gaze and quietly reply, "It's fall, fuckfaces. You're either ready to reap this freaky-assed harvest or you're not."

Carving orange pumpkins sounds like a pretty fitting way to ring in the season. You know what else does? Performing an all-gourd reenactment of an episode of Diff'rent Strokes—specifically the one when Arnold and Dudley experience a disturbing brush with sexual molestation. Well, this shit just got real, didn't it? Felonies and gourds have one very important commonality: they're both extremely fucking real. Sorry if that's upsetting, but I'm not doing you any favors by shielding you from this anymore.

The next thing I'm going to do is carve one of the longer gourds into a perfect replica of the Mayflower as a shout-out to our Pilgrim forefathers. Then I'm going to do lines of blow off its hull with a hooker. Why? Because it's not summer, it's not winter, and it's not spring. Grab a calendar and pull your fucking heads out of your asses; it's fall, fuckers.

Have you ever been in an Italian deli with salamis hanging from their ceiling? Well then you're going to fucking love my house. Just look where you're walking or you'll get KO'd by the gauntlet of misshapen, zucchini-descendant bastards swinging from above. And when you do, you're going to hear a very loud, very stereotypical Italian laugh coming from me. Consider yourself warned.

For now, all I plan to do is to throw on a flannel shirt, some tattered overalls, and a floppy fucking hat and stand in the middle of a cornfield for a few days. The first crow that tries to land on me is going to get his avian ass bitch-slapped all the way back to summer.

Welcome to autumn, fuckheads!

From FMyLife.com

Today, my five-year-old came home from summer camp crying because her friends and counselors had all laughed at her when she couldn't identify colors correctly during a game. My husband then confessed that he had taught her colors wrong because he thought it would be funny. FML

Two Thumbs Up. Way Up.

Vintage Siskel and Ebert. From this blog, which I represent.

Click pic to enlarge.

Afghanistan Strategy

Andrew Sullivan on President Obama rejecting the war options for Afghanistan: "What strikes me about this is the enormous self-confidence this reveals. Here is a young president, prepared to allow himself to be portrayed as 'weak' or 'dithering' in the slow and meticulous arrival at public policy. He is trusting the reality to help expose what we need to do. He is allowing the debate -- however messy and confusing and emotional -- to take its time and reveal the real choices in front of us. This is politically risky, of course. Those who treat politics as a contact-sport, whose insistence is on the 'game' of who wins which news cycle, or who can spin each moment in a political storm as a harbinger of whatever, will pounce and shriek and try to bounce the president into a decision. And those who believe that what matters in war is charging ahead regardless at all times will also grandstand against the president's insistence on prudence."

AHGHGHGHGH

man vs. bear

We are all fools to Ricky Jay.

I read this at Kottke.org a while back:

The playwright David Mamet and the theatre director Gregory Mosher affirm that some years ago, late one night in the bar of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Chicago, this happened:

Ricky Jay, who is perhaps the most gifted sleight-of-hand artist alive, was performing magic with a deck of cards. Also present was a friend of Mamet and Mosher's named Christ Nogulich, the director of food and beverage at the hotel. After twenty minutes of disbelief-suspending manipulations, Jay spread the deck face up on the bar counter and asked Nogulich to concentrate on a specific card but not to reveal it. Jay then assembled the deck face down, shuffled, cut it into two piles, and asked Nogulich to point to one of the piles and name his card.

"Three of clubs," Nogulich said, and he was then instructed to turn over the top card.
He turned over the three of clubs.

Mosher, in what could be interpreted as a passive-aggressive act, quietly announced, "Ricky, you know, I also concentrated on a card."

After an interval of silence, Jay said, "That's interesting, Gregory, but I only do this for one person at a time."

Mosher persisted: "Well, Ricky, I really was thinking of a card."

Jay paused, frowned, stared at Mosher, and said, "This is a distinct change of procedure." A longer pause. "All right-what was the card?"

"Two of spades."

Jay nodded, and gestured toward the other pile, and Mosher turned over its top card.

The deuce of spades.

A small riot ensued.

Here's a couple of Jay's tricks:

Star Wars Design FAIL

This is hilarious:

I'll come right out and say it: Star Wars has a badly-designed universe; so poorly-designed, in fact, that one can say that a significant goal of all those Star Wars novels is to rationalize and mitigate the bad design choices of the movies. Need examples? Here's ten.

R2-D2
Sure, he's cute, but the flaws in his design are obvious the first time he approaches anything but the shallowest of stairs. Also: He has jets, a periscope, a taser and oil canisters to make enforcer droids fall about in slapsticky fashion -- and no voice synthesizer. Imagine that design conversation: "Yes, we can afford slapstick oil and tasers, but we'll never get a 30-cent voice chip past accounting. That's just madness."

C-3PO
Can't fully extend his arms; has a bunch of exposed wiring in his abs; walks and runs as if he has the droid equivalent of arthritis. And you say, well, he was put together by an eight-year-old. Yes, but a trip to the nearest Radio Shack would fix that. Also, I'm still waiting to hear the rationale for making a protocol droid a shrieking coward, aside from George Lucas rummaging through a box of offensive stereotypes (which he'd later return to while building Jar-Jar Binks) and picking out the "mincing gay man" module.

Lightsabers
Yes, I know, I want one too. But I tell you what: I want one with a hand guard. Otherwise every lightsaber battle would consist of sabers clashing and then their owners sliding as quickly as possible down the shaft to lop off their opponent's fingers. You say: Lightsabers can slice through anything but another lightsaber, so what are you going to make a hand guard out of? I say: Dude, if you have the technology to make a lightsaber, you have the technology to make a light hand guard.

Blasters
A tactical nightmare: They're incredibly loud, especially for firing what are essentially light beams. The fire ordnance is so slow it can be dodged, and it comes out as a streak of light that reveals your position to your enemies. Let's not even go near the idea of light beams being slow enough to dodge; that's just something you have let go of, or risk insanity.

Landspeeders and other flying vehicles
Here's the thing: In the Star Wars universe, there are no seatbelts. And maybe if you're flying your hoity-toity vehicle on Coruscant, you have, like, a force field that keeps you flying out of your seat. But Luke's X-34 speeder on Tatooine? The Yugo of speeders, man. One hard stop, and out you go.

Stormtrooper Uniforms
They stand out like a sore thumb in every environment but snow, the helmets restrict view ("I can't see a thing in this helmet!" -- Luke Skywalker), and the armor is penetrable by single shots from blasters. Add it all up and you have to wonder why stormtroopers don't just walk around naked, save for blinders and flip-flops.

Death Star
An unshielded exhaust port leading directly to the central reactor? Really? And when you rebuild it, your solution to this problem is four paths into the central core so large that you can literally fly a spaceship through them? Brilliant. Note to the Emperor: Someone on your Death Star design staff is in the pay of Rebel forces. Oh, right, you can't get the memo because someone threw you down a huge exposed shaft in your Death Star throne room.

Bad design in Star Wars is not just limited to stuff; evolution here seems wacky, too. Three choice bits:

Sarlaac
A monstrous yet immobile creature who lives in an exposed pit in the middle of a lifeless desert, waiting for large animals to apparently feel suicidal and trek out to throw themselves in? Yeah, not so much. Not every Sarlaac can count on an intergalactic mob boss to feed it tidbits.

That Asteroid Worm Thing in Empire Strikes Back
So, large space worm lives in asteroid, disguises itself as a cave and waits for unwary spaceships to fly by so it can eat them? Makes the Sarlaac look like a marvel of natural selection, it does.

Midi-Chlorians
Oh, man, don't get me started. Except to say this: If in fact a high concentration of midi-chlorians is the difference between being a common schmoe and being a dude who can Force Choke his enemies, the black market in midi-chlorian injections must be amazing.

Who isn't watching 30 Rock?

This is an awesome article about Tina Fey's Top 10 moments from the show.

Armistice

From Iconic Photos:

“On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” of 1918, an armistice was signed, ending “The War to End All Wars”. With the military morale in its ebb and revolution brewing at home, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated two days before on 9 November. The German government had decided to negotiate an armistice with the Allies starting 7th November, when the German Army Chief of Staff Paul von Hindenburg exchanged a series of telegrams with the Supreme Allied Commander Ferdinand Foch.

In the forest of Compiègne, In the railcar given to Foch for military use by the manufacturer, Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, the armistice was signed. The photograph was taken after reaching an agreement. The diplomatic situation was terse: The German signatory, Matthias Erzberger made a short speech, protesting the harshness of the terms, and concluded by saying that “a nation of seventy millions can suffer, but it cannot die”. Foch then refused to shake Erzberger’s hand and said, “Très bien“.)

Although it was signed at 5 am, the terms of the agreement didn’t come into effect until six hours later at 11 am. The hour was chosen by Admiral Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, First Sea Lord and Britain’s official delegate to oversee the Armistice. He was explicitly ordered by his Prime Minister David Lloyd George to delay the terms until 3 pm to coincide with parliment sitting so that PM could get the credit of announcing it officially to the house on the hour. Weymss thought the delay would cause unnecessary killing and decided that the eleventh hour would add to the poignancy of the date. Lloyd George was furious. Erzberger, too, was not kindly received back–he was assassinated later by a right-wing extremist group, Organisation Consul for signing the Armistice. Foch on the other hand was elected to the Académie des Sciences on the very day of the Armistice [and ten days later, to the Académie française].

In the above picture, front row from left to right: Rear-Admiral George P.W. Hope, Wemyss’s deputy; General Maxime Weygrand, Foch’s righthand man and one who read out the armistice conditions; Wemyss; Foch and Royal Navy captain JPR Marriott, attache to two admirals. On the train, clockwise from top right: Interpreter Laperche, Captain le Mierry, Commander Riedinger, and General Desticker, Foch’s ADC. The German delegation was notably absent. The photo was taken at 7:30 am as Foch was about to return to Paris with the signed documents in his briefcase.

Although Germany had insisted that it would only enter into negotiations on the understanding that U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s so-called ‘Fourteen Points’ would form the basis for a settlement, the armistice terms were nevertheless punitive. The Allies agreed to an armistice only on the basis that Germany effectively disarm herself; the cause preventing the latter from renewing hostilities backfired spectacularly: her ignominious “reparations” agreement sowed the seeds for the rise of a nationalist movement and subsequently the Second World War.

WTF

Via Boingboing:

Michael Jackson's funeral cost one million dollars. His final outfit cost $35,000, and the flowers cost $16,000. Lord. Obviously I'm no MJ anyhow, but when I die, if there's a mil lying around? Feel free to bury me in nekkid dirt and use the rest to feed pie to starving kids.

True that.

Indoor Synchronized Bike Riding

This both mesmerized me and made me sick to my stomach.

Also, who are those guys setting up for an indoor soccer match at the end? What dicks.

Tram-pam-poline.

I'd say this was BS, with some funky editing. Then I found out Oli Lemieux (the fellow doing the cool ninja stuff) is with Cirque du Soleil. Then it all made sense.



All in all, much better than this.

Protest on Sunday

From PoP:

Apparently the Israeli PM is in town, and there were some anti-Jewish/anti-Israel protesters of the worst kind. Ok, so be it. There's tons of crazy people out there and that's the price we pay for freedom of speech.

But seriously, "You will eat your babies?" That's just funny. I want to go to every protest with that sign.

Chris Ware Animates This American Life

Public Diplomacy

This is a 36-second wax cylinder recording of Walt Whitman reading a few lines from his poem, America. It's being used in Levi's new ad campaign.

We spend lots of money trying to make people all over the world like us. I don't know why we don't just invest more money in stuff like this. If this doesn't sum up the American experiment, I have no idea what does.

Put This On

Put This On, Episode 1: Denim from Put This On on Vimeo.

I hope this series runs a long, long time.

The fact that they started with jeans, which many of you know catch my fancy, only endears me to them more.

What to do with the Postal Service.

Postmaster General Jack Potter likes to point out that the Postal Service has more retail outlets than McDonald's, Starbucks and Wal-Mart combined. I wonder what those companies do when they are as deep in the red as the Post Office is?

Article here.

Save the Internet!

Urlesque recently did an awesome bit on Net Neutrality. Dear friend CC works this shit day and night for the rest of us--like a superhero-- and when she stays with me I like to pretend I'm helping fight the good fight.

In the same vein here's the poop on net neutrality:

Net Neutrality! It's a big issue! Super-important! I'm not sure why but everyone else is shouty about it so I'm being shouty too!

1. Learn the basics

Okay, Net Neutrality is the principle that internet service providers shouldn't treat some web traffic differently than other traffic. That means that Verizon can't deliberately make Yahoo load slower than Google, or that Time Warner can't charge you extra to get access to certain websites.

Right now, net neutrality is an FCC policy. Congress is looking at bills to either make net neutrality into law or to outright kill it.

2. Know the sides

Here's where the real reasons for net neutrality become clearer. The main opponents of net neutrality are the ISPs, who argue that they'd never use their power to limit service, charge more or control information. That would make more sense if Comcast hadn't gotten caught last year doing those things.

Speaking for the ISPs is John McCain, who totally takes back that comment about not knowing how to use a computer, and who isn't at all thinking about the $894,379 the telecoms donated to his various campaigns! He's introduced a bill called the Internet Freedom Act.

Of course some heavyweights support net neutrality: Google, Amazon, Yahoo, and other companies that want their content to get out to users without paying the telecoms extra. Granted, they already have an advantage: Google has enough servers to deliver a web page far faster than a smaller company. But once it goes into the pipeline, all traffic is the same.

Alongside these companies are groups like MoveOn.org, the AARP, Gun Owners of America, the Christian Coalition, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU, the Parents Television Council, and loads of other organizations. This is clearly not a traditional partisan battle. These groups are convinced that net neutrality will help maintain the freedom of information we enjoy online today. So are Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the internet and the web.

Too long, didn't read? Let Jon Stewart explain it.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
From Here to Neutrality
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

3. Picture the consequences

Here's another even simpler explanation: Know how a cable bill depends on which channels you order? Well a Reddit user named quink mocked up the sort of plan that would be legal without net neutrality:

Check out the full version. Yep, that's just a total of $80/month to get most of the internet you already use! What a deal. And that's being generous; Comcast knows you'd pay more for your porn and music.

4. Do something!

So what can you do? First, you can tell your Congressman: Here's a super-simple e-mail you can copy and paste to fight McCain's anti-net-neutrality bill, which would preempt any net neutrality laws. This page even links to the directory of Senate email addresses so you can get in and out in two minutes. (Here's more about McCain's bill.)

You can also sign the "Save the Internet" petition to register your support alongside all those organizations I mentioned. You can be on a list with the Christian Coalition and the ACLU at the same time!

Oh and you can get laid, if you're into Belgian girls with awful YouTube shows.

5. Dig deeper

Net neutrality is a complicated topic. Even neutrality supporters at the Electronic Frontier Foundation are worried about doing it right, so we don't accidentally give the FCC the ability to censor the internet. So when you're asked to support any particular plan, check who supports it and who's against it. There's a right way to save the internet.

Budgets

From Ezra Klein:

A good, well, tweet from Chris Hayes:

Anyone notice that the pres signed a $680 BILLION defense approp bill in the midst of our debates about $90b a yr for hc?

That $680 billion, incidentally, doesn't count the cost of the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.

You could say a lot about this juxtaposition, but among other things, it's a reminder that there's real rhetorical power in the time frame that gets chosen for a given policy. The stimulus, for instance, was explained as a two-year cost, so it was $800 billion, rather than $400 billion a year. Health-care reform is being sold as a 10-year cost, so it's $900 billion, rather than $90 billion a year. The defense appropriation is explained in terms of single-year cost, so it's $680 billion, as opposed to the $10 trillion or so that it would cost if you took into account expected growth.

There are reasons for all this. The stimulus was going to be spent over two years. Health-care reform is being balanced in the 10-year budget window. The defense bill is a single-year appropriation. Washington's professional wonk set knows all that. But most people just hear the numbers, and they don't necessarily know that the "trillion dollar health-care bill" the GOP keeps talking about will actually cost $90 billion a year, and it will cut the deficit. Standardizing all costs to an annual cost would do a lot to help people figure this out. And explaining things in terms of the federal budget -- how much is $90 billion as a percent of what we'll spend this year? How about $680 billion? -- would do a lot to help people put it all in context.

Now I'm a strong believer in a strong national defense, (Strong!), but I have to agree the juxtaposition is astounding. If we didn't buy every new toy on DOD's wish list would we really by screwed? Couldn't we forego a few new toys for a healthier populace?

Coolest White House Ever?

It's really more of a song than it is a rap. And it would have been better with a DJ rather than a piano player, but still. This is as close as we'll probably get to my dream image of Wu-Tang performing in the White House.

"Witty Kid. Wonder how you'll feel when I just slap a check plus on there?"

P-P-P-Poker Face

From BBC1. Christopher Walken nails Lady Gaga's Poker Face on his first reading.