JABbering Stooge

As several of my fellow liberals (along with Media Matters For America) have pointed out, President Bush’s poll numbers for the first trimester of his second term are not good - 45% according to a recent Gallup poll (the same Gallup that oversamples Republicans). I have produced a copy of the polling data presented by Media Matters below in order to point out a caveat with the data:

The caveat is this: President Johnson ascended to the presidency in the wake of the assassination of JFK in 1963, so technically, he would’ve been in his first elected term as president. This makes him an outlier in the data. But even compensating for that, you have to admit that the evidence is pretty damning.

(See original post on the old blog here - originally posted Apr. 7, 2005 1:41 PM)

Tom DeLay is at it again - this time threatening the judges who decided (over and over and over and over again) the Terri Schiavo case. As the Houston Chronicle notes, DeLay had said:

This loss happened because our legal system did not protect the people who need protection most, and that will change. The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior, but not today. Today we grieve, we pray, and we hope to God this fate never befalls another.

Fortunately, there is still a Democrat with a spine in Washington: Sen. Frank Lautenberg wrote a letter to DeLay (who now aims his pesticides at those who dare to disagree with him) complaining about the former exterminator’s comments. A copy of the letter is available below.

(See original post on the old blog here - originally posted Apr. 4, 2005 6:21 PM)

The other night, my friend’s roomate introduced me to this Europop song with catchy beat and lyrics but a really crappy music video by a Romanian group called O-Zone. The song is called "Dragostea Din Tei" ("Love From the Linden Tree" in English).

You can see what I mean below (Click on the play button):

Note: Due to technical difficulties that have cropped up since this was posted, I am forced to resort to simply linking to the file, rather than embedding it in my blog.

(Courtesy of www.fobiopatel.com)

Update: I’m beginning to love YouTube…

For those of you who are wondering what the hell is being sung,the lyrics are available (in Romanian and English) at this location.

In reality,though,I suspect that the typical American’s exposure to this song would come from the Internet phenomenon created by 19-year-old Jersey boy Gary Brolsma,who posted a flash animation of himself caught on webcam dancing in his seat to the song. It will be interesting to see if the phenomenon becomes as well known and talked about as the infamous "All Your Base Are Belong to Us" craze of Winter ‘01.

Interestingly enough,the song,and the Internet craze it spawned have both earned mentions in the English Wikipedia. (And yes, All Your Base also gets a mention.)

(See original post on the old blog here - originally posted Apr. 1, 2005 5:46 AM)

City and state education officials didn’t seem to have a clue about what was going wrong. "Is it teaching?" asked state Education Commissioner Richard Mills. "Is it teaching practice? Is it the material? Is it the work students are doing? What are they reading? What are they writing? What kind of math problems are they doing?"

What are these people doing with our tax dollars if they don’t even know the answers to these questions?
Sean Hannity, Let Freedom Ring, pg. 145-146.

This little gem was recorded on page 88 of Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. And as Franken rightly points out, Mills was asking RHETORICAL questions, not looking to be led by the hand towards a solution, as Hannity suggests.