The Tory Party

Movie Title

Stop everything and watch this for film education + hard LoLs:

Via cracked.com via The Daily What

Inspector Collie

I found you a present:

This has been on my desktop a while making me happy.

I think it came from an email forward — otherwise I would credit the source for the extreme amount of happy it produces.

Random Thoughts: Programming Edition

I’ve been radio silent the last week or so due to being purty busy at work, so here are some presents:

• Unit Testing Achievements: A Github suite that shares your unit test achievements with the world. My favorite? Heisenbug: when a passing test fails on unchanged code.
• Onion: Man Who Enjoys Thing Informed He Is Wrong. Reminds me of how I hated Shutter Island so bad I was determined to explain to people who liked it why they were wrong. Not one of my more attractive qualities. Today I respect that other people can enjoy Shutter Island AND THAT IS OKAY.
• Also, unrelated, you deserve this today:
  
  If this doesn’t cripple you with giggles then I don’t know my Internet.
• You know what I like? The Pill. For when your uterus is trying to kill you, so you convince it it is slightly pregnant all the time, and then somehow that makes it happy. It is like giving a dog a toy doughnut so it will stop begging for your real doughnut. Biology is weird.

Then, later, a cookie:

Obama vs. the Kool-Aid

No wonder that some [White House] officials have occasionally found themselves thinking heretical thoughts. “From the crassest political viewpoint, we would be better off if we had 25 fewer House members, if those marginal seats were held by the Republicans right now,” one told me last fall. “Then we’d have 25 people who, instead of feeling like they have to demonstrate their independence by being independent of us, they’d have to demonstrate it by being independent of the Republican leadership, which means we could be bi-partisan on everything.”

The Lesson of Scott Brown’s Election — New York Magazine

Very interesting article. Lucky that Barack Obama is a golden god — young, beautiful, master orator, scandal-free in an unprecedented way — so he may be successful the in major peeing-up-a-rope he has undertaken.

Two wars?

Near-zombocalypse financial meltdown?

Massive budget deficit created by George W. Bush’s face-palming incompetence? (If you want a balanced budget, elect a Democrat.)

A Democratic party full of wet noodles because they drank the Moral Majority Kool-Aid in the 90s fractured and frustrated, giving the overall impression of wet noodles?

An opposition party whose leadership seems to be losing their minds? (McCain pro-torture? WTF!?)

A health care crisis coming to a head?

Major global problems we should be leading the charge in mending, but we’re tied up with putting out our own fires?

If you look at the path America has been on and see today we’re all still here, you may be as convinced as I am that BARACK OBAMA WAS SENT FROM GOD TO SAVE AMERICA.

Whoo! Excuse me! The GOP Manifest-Destiny Kool-Aid just looked so refreshing…

Why Honor the Rights of Terrorists?

We should do it not because we wish to coddle terrorists. We should do it not because we view them as anything but evil and terrible. We should do it, Mr. President, because we are Americans, and because we hold ourselves to humane standards of treatment of people no matter how evil or terrible they may be. America stands for a moral mission, one of freedom and democracy and human rights at home and abroad. We are better than these terrorists, and we will win. I have said it before but it bears repeating: The enemy we fight has no respect for human life or human rights. They don’t deserve our sympathy. But this isn’t about who they are. This is about who we are. These are the values that distinguish us from our enemies, and we can never, never allow our enemies to take those values away.

Senator John McCain, 2005 (emphasis mine)

It makes me emotional to read this. THIS is what’s at stake when we make decisions about torture (the topic of McCain’s quote), or legal jurisdiction (as we decide where to try self-professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.)

THIS is why Newt Gingrich’s words on Tuesday’s Daily Show made me so confused and hurt and angry. The idea that American values are just for Americans is so wrong-headed, so self-contradictory… so Animal Farm: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

If there’s a better analogue for Squealer than Newt Gingrich, I’d like to hear it.