If your personal relationship with God is threatened by someone saying "Happy Holidays," then either your relationship with God is very weak or your God is very weak. Choose one.

The thing that's always amused me about the peak oil doom-and-gloom crowd is that they seem to assume that nothing will change. They assume that no inventions or developments to change energy production or usage are possible, that everyone will just politely fold their hands and do nothing, and absolutely no one will seek any sort of advantage by finding another way to do things. The really funny thing is they send forth those lofty pronouncements from their laptops and iPads to the internet via blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, without even the slightest apparent twinge of irony. Meanwhile, I look at the history books. Like, for example, Professor, your area. The California Gold Rush would have seemed impossible to most people at the start of 1848. Anyone could have told you there was no way you could move 300,000 people plus supplies into that area in that quick a time. But it happened. Somewhere out there is a future billionaire who is now finding much better things to do with his or her time than, say, reading George Monbiot.

From McAvity in the comments to Rosenberg's Salon article: "Cutting the deficit amounts to austerity economics, the opposite of the Keynesian approach, which keeps deficits high when the economy is struggling, letting public-spending demand take up the slack of missing private sector demand, in order to hasten recovery. Classic Keynesian policy calls for cutting back deficits only after economic recovery is well established — a point we are still far from reaching roughly three years after PPC’s surveys were conducted." God is a Keynesian. Genesis 41: 33 “And now let Pharaoh look for a discerning and wise man and put him in charge of the land of Egypt. 34 Let Pharaoh appoint commissioners over the land to take a fifth of the harvest of Egypt during the seven years of abundance.35 They should collect all the food of these good years that are coming and store up the grain under the authority of Pharaoh, to be kept in the cities for food. 36 This food should be held in reserve for the country, to be used during the seven years of famine that will come upon Egypt, so that the country may not be ruined by the famine.”

http://electionresults.virginia.gov/resultsSW.aspx?type=HOD&map=CTY There are 100 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates. Of those 100 seats, 33 of them had Republicans running with no Democratic opposition. In 14 other races, the Republican won by less than 10 percentage points over his or her Democratic opponent. Nine of those races were decided by five points or less, and in four of those races the Democrat drew 49 points. A Dean-style effort to contest every district and someone better than McAuliffe at the top of the ticket would have resulted in a better night for Democrats at the bottom of the ticket.

The Tea Party ran one of its all-stars against a Democratic fourth-stringer and still lost. I like that, even if I don't like Terry McAuliffe.

I'm just going to point out that Terry McAuliffe is bringing in Bill Clinton, while Ken Cuccinelli is bringing in Rick Santorum. Scoreboard.

"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else." - Winston Churchill Sadly, Churchill's own land is also suffering. As a strategy, unemployment isn't working.

I'm in Washington state, also, but I haven't even applied yet. Why, yes, I am good at procrastination. Why do you ask?

Yeah, sticky navs are annoying. I'd also like to block Outbrain and Taboola. I have no interest in celebrity gossip or the same lame "Billionaire Warns" article that's been flogged already for a year. If someone can write some code to swap out Facebook baby pictures with coll photos, someone can write some code for this. I might not be able to donate as much money as Felix Salmon, but I sure would buy them some pizza.

It always amuses me when people use social media to bash social media and the irony goes sailing right past them like Team USA 17.

Is that the one guy in Atchison, Kansas? Did you know Atchison is the birthplace of Amelia Earhart? Here's what I wrote elsewhere a few months ago: Earhart lived in worse times than ours -- the Great Depression was worse than today's woes, and the storm clouds were gathering for World War II. But people like her didn't hide in a cave and huddle around their guns and suck their thumbs. She, and others like her, looked confidently toward the future, and tried to see what was possible. Did it cost her her life? Yes. But we remember Amelia Earhart. We'll rightly never take note of anyone on that guy's sucker list.

Is that the one guy in Atchison, Kansas? Did you know Atchison is the birthplace of Amelia Earhart? Here's what I wrote elsewhere a few months ago: Earhart lived in worse times than ours -- the Great Depression was worse than today's woes, and the storm clouds were gathering for World War II. But people like her didn't hide in a cave and huddle around their guns and suck their thumbs. She, and others like her, looked confidently toward the future, and tried to see what was possible. Did it cost her her life? Yes. But we remember Amelia Earhart. We'll rightly never take note of anyone on that guy's sucker list.

"The perfect is the enemy of the good." -- popularly attributed to Voltaire.

ilsm, I wonder if this is the incident you're referring to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_States_Air_Force_nuclear_weapons_incident Personally, I doubt that if the bomb had gone off that it would have started a nuclear war, for many of the reasons already discussed. It would have sucked for a good part of North Carolina's citizens, though. Because of that, what sort of impetus would we have had for disarmament if the bomb had gone off, and the world looked at the horror created? It's a fascinating question, and we'll never know the answer to it.

Why oh why can't we have a better re-enactment corps?

*from my Journalism 101 textbook*

The original article they're lampooning appeared in the New York Times. When I was young and dumb and wanted to be a sportswriter, I noted this exchange (which I'm going to have to quote from memory, since the book is in storage): A reporter for the New York Times asked someone about a charge someone had leveled at him. "It's just bullshit." "But Mr. Davis, we can't put 'bullshit' in The New York Times." "Why not? You do it every day." "No, I don't mean it in that sense. I mean it's a term we can't print." "Oh ..." I think of that exchange a lot when I see a lifestyle article in the New York Times.

Awww, man. That's why I always check my pockets. My mother didn't do this, but a friend's mother had the rule that if she found it in the pockets before throwing it in the wash, it was hers. The first time my friend lost a twenty-dollar bill that way was also the last time he didn't check his pockets.

I'm not as familiar with Oregon as I am with my home of Washington state, but a quick look at Wikipedia shows that a lot of Oregon's suburbs have gone from red to blue. The same has happened in Washington state: The districts on the affluent east side of Lake Washington that had trouble even getting a Democrat to run in the 1990s are now swinging through purple to blue. Folks in these suburbs may not have the same view on things as do the hipsters on Seattle's Capitol Hill, but they're not seeing the Republicans having any solutions to their problems. The GOP wants to build freeways despite there being no room for freeways, the GOP wants to attack the schools the parents want to make work, the GOP wants to trash the environment that's a major draw for many people, and the GOP wants to keep the person the next cubicle over from being able to marry their love just because they're gay. It's not too much of a stretch to suppose the same is happening in Oregon.

Now that is just some high-quality trolling.

The need for journalism is not going to go away. People still want to know what's going on and what it means, whether it's down the street or across the globe. How it happens, and how people make money off it, though, is still very much up in the air and will be for years to come until the new paradigm establishes itself. That being said, journalism's biggest enemy is itself and not the internet. Most Beltway journalists and pundits (Wonkblog is a happy exception) are worse than useless, as they prize access and cocktail parties far, far, far more than actually telling people what's going on. There was a time when reporters were considered crusaders for truth and justice -- it's no accident that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster made Clark Kent a reporter in 1938, and I just mentioned two-thirds of their motto for him. Fast-forward 75 years, and the New York Times seriously wonders if reporters should be truth vigilantes, and CNN openly roots for rapists. You don't see reporters -- print or TV -- cast as heroes anymore, and with good reason. I now wish I could go back in time three decades and slap some sense into my younger self, even though I wanted to cover sports rather than politics. Newspapers also need to realize they can't just cut costs indefinitely -- they're going to have to grow revenue. You can cut the advice column and half the comics and your music critics, but you'll lose the readers who picked up the paper for those features. Like it or not, the future of newspapers lies with Bezos and that fellow (I don't have the time to look it up) who bought the Orange County Register. They're going to be the ones who figure out how the new model works, and they really can't do any worse than the MBAs that have run journalism into the ground.

Hey, has anyone else besides me noticed that the Very Serious People never volunteer to apply austerity in their own lives? Somehow, austerity's always for other people. I guess they also serve who go to cocktail parties with Tina Brown, or something like that.

Graydon, that's an excellent way of putting it.

Oh, come on. The bear should be just fine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsaK6GGuTAk