Alkahest

Almost three months ago to the day, I wrote about the senate health care reform (HCR) bill, how they had achieved cloture and would vote on Christmas eve.  Since December, things haven’t looked all that good for HCR.  A weak candidate in Massachusetts lost to a republican underwear model (not that there’s anything wrong with [...]

So maybe in my last post, I was a bit hard on Louisiana because it’s the state I’ve left.  It’s not like we don’t have our own wackos in NC.  Two examples: One of NC’s representatives, Patrick McHenry (R) has proposed that we put Reagan’s face on the $50 bill.  Maybe for his work on [...]

Every once in a while, something from Louisiana will catch the national attention, or at least the political bits that I care about, and I’m once again reminded of why I’m happy to have left.  The latest?  Apparently, the Bossier Parish sheriff is creating himself a militia.  No really.  It’s called “Operation Exodus,” which according [...]

Speaking of Festivus, I should note a recent sighting of a genuine Festivus miracle… they still had a quart of Maple View Farms eggnog at the grocery store! Er, actually, a better Festivus miracle is that today the senate democratic caucus reached the 60 votes needed for their final cloture vote and will vote on [...]

In the most awesome [1] display of legislative ineptitude since they presented a budget with no numbers on April Fool’s Day, the republicans have released their plan for health care reform.  Now, keep in mind that as scored by the CBO, the democratic plan will increase coverage from 83% to 96% of the legal population [...]

In computer security, one of the most difficult and annoying problems is the distributed denial of service attack (DDoS).  The idea behind a DDoS attack is straight forward: the attacker tries to prevent legitimate use of the service by using a large number of other computers.  Usually these other computers have been compromised (hacked) and [...]

also, I’m glad I’m not the only one who went there

I haven’t paid much attention to Sarah Palin in the year since I first heard of her.  Okay, periodically I’ve laughed at her.  And Palin As President was pretty funny.  But last night I was commenting to K that this line from her resignation speech was pure Zen: “In the winter time it’s the frozen [...]

It looks like the average IQ of democratic senators and the average IQ of republican senators have both declined today.  Hopefully there will be a 2010 challenger in the PA democratic primaries.

Tomorrow is April 15th, tax day.  And in case you’ve missed it, republicans, flat taxers, gold fetishists, racists, defense nuts and other extreme conservatives are planning to host tea parties tomorrow.  Tea parties?  Yep.  Protests, harkening back to the days of the Boston Tea Party when proto-American patriots dumped tea into Boston harbor to protest [...]