Thursday Night Thread

Chat away.

Whines From The Basement

After doing this for (please kill me) 10 years and posting a dozen+ posts per day, the one which always gets me is "why are you posting about X??"

South Philly Parking

This comment is pretty awesome.

ok, here's what i used to do when i lived in south philly & parking was at a premium. let the tickets rack up. they won't threaten to boot until it's at least a couple thousand. once you start getting the letters threatening to boot, change you tag. go to the corner title & insurance store. tell them soneone stole your tag. get a new one. the clock starts ticking all over again. F-the PPA. I will never pay a PPA parking ticket.

Stuff I Think I'm The Only One Who Noticed When It Was Relevant

John Kerry licks his lips frequently in a creepy way.

John Edwards eerily resembles Kenneth from 30 Rock.

That is all.

Happy Hour Thread

So be happy.

Resigned

I imagine he'll be taken care of.

In Defense Of The Spin Room

Contra Pareene: at least one person liked The Spin Room. Me! It was like every other crappy cable news program on at the time, except it had a pomo awareness that it was a completely crappy. It made clear that The Politics Show of that era, our politicians and the media that covered them, were ridiculous and awful. It wasn't parody, just the distilled essence of all that crap.

And Then He Scratched A Backwards 'B' On His Face

Weird psychology here.

JOE NICOLETTI was amazed at the anger spewing from David Toledo as the two sat in Toledo's living room in January, talking about the lowlife who got his rocks off by slashing their neighbors' tires.

"Some of the things he said were almost a vigilante-type thing," Nicoletti said.

Cops say Toledo is the tire slasher.

I Don't Know How To Classify This One

shemustbeadyke!!@#@!@$!$@!

Conservatives just don't have their brains wired up correctly.

Doomed

The powers that be really do want to destroy the world.

Lunch Thread

enjoy

The Annual Ritual

Every year we get a bit of good news in January or so, everyone declares victory and takes their ball home, and then....

The odds that the economy has fallen into a spring slowdown – for the third straight year – rose this morning.

There was a bit more reason for optimism this year, but we still never had the "crazy" job growth that would signal a healthy recovery. Just a bit of good news and some wishful thinking.

It Would Be Horrible If We Had Two Different Political Parties

Pieces like this remind us that the political establishment - including the press - really hates the idea of having two different political parties that actually disagree about stuff, and maybe even provides an actual real choice for voters. It's much better when people are elected on personality and image, and the consensus policies of the Wise Old Men Of Washington can be implemented without any troubling disagreement or, god forbid, notice by the voters.

You Know

Unless we're talking about some weird clerical error, you know if you have your doctorate or not.

The University of Pennsylvania placed the vice dean of its Graduate School of Education on administrative leave late Wednesday after The Inquirer began asking questions about his false claim to have a doctoral degree.

But the guy is involved with all of the Right sorts of things, so no harm no foul.

Since joining Penn, Lynch has become a lightning rod for controversy. He has pushed entrepreneurial methods and supported programs such as Teach for America, which puts bright college graduates who lack education degrees in some of the nation's toughest public schools for a two-year commitment.

A February 2011 feature on him in Penn's alumni magazine said: "What happens when you unleash an entrepreneurship evangelist on an education school? Meet Doug Lynch, the vice dean bent on making Penn GSE a hub for social entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and next-generation educational reform."

Penn professor John Puckett said Lynch had unfairly been targeted because he is trying to shake up the graduate school and make it better. He said Lynch had made an "honest mistake."

Lynch, he said, told him that the chair of the dissertation committee at Columbia had assured him not to worry about the changes he was being asked to make.

"Doug's a little sloppy. He moves from one project to another in a great hurry," Puckett said.

All I know is what I've read in this article, but my spidey sense tells me there's something deeply corrupt going on here.

Diversity On The Teevee

I haven't seen Girls and have no opinion about anything to do with the show, and don't quite understand why that show in particular has inspired the latest round of discussion about diversity on the teevee, but I got hit with a cluestick years ago when someone pointed out that the issue wasn't simply that all of the lead actors of some shows were white. That might be problematic, but the kind of problem which can be justified or explained away (not necessarily satisfactorily explained, but that there were explanations). A major issue was that you had these shows that would take place in San Francisco, Los Angeles, or New York (for example), and all of the background characters - the extras - were white.

"All" is generally an exaggeration, but the point is that even when shows are set in places with significant racial diversity, it's often the case that the world they portray, and not just in the foreground, is a lot whiter than reality.

Thursday Is New Jobless Day

388K new lucky duckies.

Not so good.

And All Is Right As Right Can Be

The plan is credible, you see, no matter how many lives it destroys.

Yet Mr Osborne insisted yesterday that he would not sanction more borrowing, even with the economy slumping again.

"The one thing that would make the situation even worse would be to abandon our credible plan and deliberately add more borrowing and even more debt," he argued. Even in the grip of a double dip, there is to be no "Plan B".

There's evil involved, but Osborne is quite clearly a stupid, stupid man.