Today's Hoot!

Perform your own Steve Jobs MacWorld keynote. Flash8 required.

Playboy officially jumps the shark

SIRIUS Satellite Radio Announces New Channel Lineup:

For men, another previously-announced new channel, Playboy Radio (channel 198), will be an opt-in SIRIUS offering, at no additional cost.

Why?

I'll bet he feels real bad

Yahoo's founder responds to China criticism:

Jerry Yang claims to feel 'horrible' about the arrests of Chinese Internet users, but says it's an acceptable downside to doing business in the country.

Full selfserving blather by following the link.

Yahoo has been accused of providing evidence to Chinese authorities that led to the imprisonment of two Chinese Internet users, including a journalist who was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
...
The arrests "are never things you go home and feel good about", Yang said. "We feel horrible about that... We have no way of preventing that beforehand... If you want to do business there you have to comply."

Sounds like a prostitute's rationale. Maybe a stint in a prison camp in the ole People's Republic would revise Jer's estimate of the downside.

Free at last. Almost.

Political bloggers may get federal protection:

Bloggers would be largely immunized from hundreds of pages of confusing federal regulations dealing with election laws, according to a bill approved by a House of Representatives panel on Thursday.

Democrats had blocked an earlier effort last November to enact the legislation, which would amend federal campaign finance laws to give Internet publishers many of the same freedoms that newspapers and magazines currently enjoy.

"We don't expect bloggers to check with a federal agency before they go online," said House Administration Committee Chairman Vernon Ehlers, a Michigan Republican, referring to the Federal Election Commission. "They shouldn't have to read FEC advisory opinions (or have) to worry about running afoul of federal election laws."

No word though on why ordinary citizens also don't have the "same freedoms as newspapers and magazines." I must have missed the part of the Consitution where publishers were set aside as a special class of citizen. As for the Donks and their buddies in the MSM who are against this, they are beneath contempt.

Everyone needs a hobby!

Reuters amazes with Dog poop girl is infamous in South Korea:

The young woman was riding on the subway with her small dog. The dog defecated and she did not clean up after her pet.

Someone caught the incident in pictures shot with a mobile phone. The photos were posted on the Internet with a brief description of what took place, and shortly thereafter "dog poop girl" became the most-searched phrase among South Korean Internet users.

Whatever floats your boat, I guess. The full article is filled with amateur sociology and whining angst about what the reporter views as Korean problems with free speech on the Internet.

While those South Koreans who actively take part in public debate over the Internet -- they are dubbed "netizens" -- were searching for the identity of dog poop girl, innocent people were mistakenly identified and their reputations sullied.

"The Internet is turning the whole society into a kangaroo court," the Korea Herald newspaper wrote in an editorial.

OMG, it's those pesky "netizens" cruising the "Information Superhighway" with Al Gore in a cage in the back seat. Pardon me while I catch a few winks. Best line:

Stars have left the country because of sexual scandals posted in cyberspace.

C'mon folks, deal with it.

Look who just crawled out from under a rock!

Democrats' Data Mining Stirs an Intraparty Battle:

A group of well-connected Democrats led by a former top aide to Bill Clinton is raising millions of dollars to start a private firm that plans to compile huge amounts of data on Americans to identify Democratic voters and blunt what has been a clear Republican lead in using technology for political advantage.

Privacy alert! Oh wait, it's the Donks, so the WaPo line is that the evil Republicans are already doing it. But look who's leading this effort - it's Clinton buttboy Harold Ickes!

The effort by Harold Ickes, a deputy chief of staff in the Clinton White House and an adviser to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), is prompting intense behind-the-scenes debate in Democratic circles. Officials at the Democratic National Committee think that creating a modern database is their job, and they say that a competing for-profit entity could divert energy and money that should instead be invested with the national party.

Ickes and others involved in the effort acknowledge that their activities are in part a vote of no confidence that the DNC under Chairman Howard Dean is ready to compete with Republicans on the technological front.

More whining from the DNC and Ickes by following the link, but the best part is that Ickes's company, Data Warehouse, is being funded by Number 1 himself, George Soros with some help from the SPECTRE slush fund over at the Democracy Alliance (sic). Since these folks aren't in it for the money, there's a natural suspicion:

Ickes's effort is drawing particular notice among Washington operatives who know about it because of speculation that he is acting to build a campaign resource for a possible 2008 presidential run by Hillary Clinton.

I'm shocked I tell ya! If the Clintons break wind, Harold Ickes passes out.

The whole point of this seems to be the Donk feeling they were beaten in 2004 by a Republican "get out the vote" (GOTV) effort on election day driven by sophisticated information on potential voters' preferences. Here's a clue guys, the Republican GOTV effort was driven by local volunteers who knew their communities. No matter how much data mining you do, sending the usual Donk collection of greasy hippies and paid union thugs door-to-door isn't going to help turn out voters unless they're the kind to whom you can offer a pack of smokes, but those folks already booked up to vote three or four times as it is.

Welcome the new neighbors and get 'em a cable modem

What do you do when you're a er, "guest in our country" who's plum tuckered out after a hard day doing the jobs "no one else will do?" Why of course you hop on the Internet with your Comcast cable modem:

Comcast has joined the ranks of U.S. Internet service providers offering programming packages for Spanish-speaking consumers, partnering with Terra Networks -- an online service with world headquarters in Madrid -- to create Comcast Latino.

The service melds Spanish-language news with Spanish versions of other Comcast high-speed Internet features, such as e-mail, that previously were available in only English.

Comcast claims to be "the nation’s largest broadband Internet provider." The "nation" part is only loosely speaking of course.

I feel so much better!

It's great to know that the local Powers of Political Correctness don't want to call the Jeep Jihadist a terrorist:

The local North Carolina news media, and adminstration at UNC Chapel Hill, and even the Daily Tarheel itself do not seem willing to call the "Jeep Jihadi's" Friday afternoon attempt to run down multiple UNC-CH students in the name of Islam an act of terror.

A quick cross-section of local media...

Hit the link for the details, but I'm feeling a lot better fer sure! I mean, here's Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar spouting the usual Islamofascist claptrap and he's not really a terrorist after all!

Of course, that begs the questions as to what these folks think ole Mo is, exactly. I suspect the story will be that he's "troubled" or insane. If so, there sure seems to be a lot of that going around these days. I guess one Islamofascist is a nut, but a crowd of them are just justifiably upset.

Today's Hoot!

Ann Coulter - SPEAKING TRUTH TO DEAD HORSES: MY OSCAR PREDICTIONS:

This is my first annual Oscar predictions column, for which I am uniquely qualified by not having seen a single one of the movies nominated in any category. I've never even watched an Oscar ceremony, except once when a friend called me 35 minutes into Halle Berry's acceptance speech and I managed to catch only the last 20 minutes of it.

I shall grant my awards based on the same criteria Hollywood studio executives now use to green-light movies: political correctness. Also, judging by most of the nominees this year, the awards committee prefers movies that are wildly unpopular with audiences.

Much more by following the link, but my favorite line is:

The best original screenplay will be "Good Night, and Good Luck" as Hollywood's final tribute to the old Stalinists (Hollywood's version of "The Greatest Generation"). George Clooney has been mau-mauing the awards committee by going around boasting that conservatives have called him a "traitor," although I believe the precise term was "airhead."