un-american

Daily News Round-Up: Paint it Blue Edition

Thursday, October 23rd, 2008

Talking Points Memo has this awesome video with Brian Williams and Chuck Todd talking about a McCain/Palin interview. And, yes, Todd says, “They know that they’re losing.”

Over at Fox News, Brit Hume is titling his conversations things like, “Special Report Panel on Whether McCain Still Has a Chance.” Ha!

Hillary Clinton is apparently secure that the Prez needs no more campaignin’: she was in Minnesota yesterday campaigning for… Al Franken. (Fair is fair: she was in Florida and Nebraska for the main man the day before.)

Greenspan comes clean! The Former Federal Reserve Chairman admitted at a hearing on Capitol Hill today that maybe that deregulation thingy with the housing market was a stupid idea. The New York Times reports that Greenspan kinda, sorta admitted he made a mistake:

“I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms,” he said. ““I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact.”

Whoops!

Apparently, the “Un-American” meme that Rep. Michelle Bachman (R-Minn) tossed to the media on Hardball over the weekend wasn’t a one-off thing. CQ Politics is reporting that House Republicans have been slandering their Dem counterparts with the label for some time.

My anti-Mac colleague may be interested to hear this from Fortune, who says the iPhone is driving down stocks for its prime vendor, AT&T. Oops.

One more thing: I really don’t get the McCain attack line criticizing Obama for saying that he would cross Pakistani borders to kill “terrorists” (with or without permission), since we’re already there, killing people. This is covered under the umbrella of the Afghan war, though, so don’t worry that we’re on too many fronts. Good grief. If Obama is really a “savior,” he’ll keep us out of war with Iran.

Lunchtime Snacks: Daily News Round Up

Tuesday, August 12th, 2008

If a Gmail arrives in the Internet forest and no one is there to read it, does it really exist? The Internets were aflame yesterday when Google’s Gmail program, used by 10 million active users, went down for up to 15 hours. The centralized use of the company’s online apps, points to a significant Achille’s Heel in cloud computing. For those who don’t have 20 emails like I do, and solely rely on the Google program, not getting email for a significant portion of the day, can seriously thwart business. Though Google apologized for the outage, it’s hard to overlook the possible pitfalls of putting all your eggs in one basket—if you used Google Apps and relied on that for business interaction, as well as the Gmail program—you were up a certain creek without a paddle. That said, I found all the links for this news item on, where else?, Google.

Maybe there is such a thing as Obama Republicans: Fox News is reporting that there’s a host of former and current Republicans who would rather vote for a Democrat than hold their nose and vote for John McCain. What’s odd about this is that the reason many Republicans don’t like McCain is because in his more “maverick” days, he bucked the Republican M.O. and sided at times, with um, the Democrats. So siding with a Democrat because the Republican candidate is like a Democrat, strikes me as counterintuitive, no? Whatever, this just means more votes for the Dems in November and this (despite our claims to be unbiased) is a good thing! High profile GOP-ers coming out for Obama, include:former Iowa Rep. Jim Leach, former White House intelligence adviser Rita Hauser and
former Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chafee.

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