spinline.net: The Blog

So Drudge has linked to this story headlined “Local Woman Convicted of Drug Fraud Joins Obama at the Podium.” Obama had given some speech at the Rose Garden calling for Congress to extend unemployment benefits. He has a few unemployed people up there with him as props. Now it comes out that one of them, Leslie Macko, has some sort of drug conviction in her past, which is apparently supposed to be scandalous.

Well, who cares? I guess that’s a little embarrassing for Obama, but OK, shit happens. What really caught my eye was this snippet from his speech:

We need to extend unemployment compensation benefits for women like Leslie Macko, who lost her job at a fitness center last year, and has been looking for work ever since. Because she’s eligible for only a few more weeks of unemployment, she’s doing what she never thought she’d have to do. Not at this point, anyway. She’s turning to her father for financial support.

God forbid!

Seriously? Obama thinks that government benefits should be extended so that people don’t have to turn to their own families for help?

The “not at this point, anyway” is telling. See, once we hit a certain age, it just isn’t dignified to ask for help from Mom and Dad. The social stigma of taking government handouts has now sunk below that of turning to your own parents for support, I guess.

Given Obama’s base of support among the coastal urban under-40 set, it probably wasn’t a bad idea for him to say what he did.

Hey, y’all’ll want to check out the “crazed sex poodle” t-shirt and accessories store.

You want one.

On that subject, my question is, did she keep the stained pants? My next question after that is, in a civil suit, can you subpoena your opponent’s DNA?

Here at spinline.net: The Blog, we strive not only to bring you entertainment, amusement, and thought-provoking commentary, but also to provide important news exclusives.

For example, earlier tonight I went to an American Cause event where Tom Tancredo spoke, and several newsworthy things were said that I will now share.

(I know it’s uncool to say mean things about the iPhone, but the iPhone camera sucks, as you can see here.)

First, Tancredo spoke about his recent UNC speech that was shut down by violent protesters. He remarked that he was relieved that nobody was injured save one — himself: a cop who was escorting Tancredo out of the melee stepped on his foot, breaking his toe. OK, that was exclusive #1. Pretty good, huh?

Second, after the talk a questioner spoke of his belief that the famously corrupt (and currently imprisoned) congressman James Traficant was railroaded or framed because of his unyielding populism or something like that. Tancredo replied that he basically believes Traficant “did it” but then, reminiscing about what a character he was, he recalled how Traficant, being a tall guy, would on occassion grab (short guy) Tancredo’s head in the halls of Congress and give him a noogie. That’s exclusive #2. Rep. Traficant (D-Ohio) gave Rep. Tancredo (R-Colo.) noogies.

Oh, and I also met Bay Buchanan, who seems like a very nice person. That is all.

Team name misspelled on Nats’ jerseys. Nice.

You’ve got to admire this organization’s 100% dedication to futility. For their next act, maybe the groundskeepers could plant dandelions in the infield.

Have you ever noticed that when you do a Google search for something, often among the top five results will be something from a site called Yahoo Answers, and it is invariably useless? It’s a place where boneheads post their dimwitted questions and random Internet boobs provide nonsensical answers, one of which is chosen by the original asker or similarly clueless voters as the “best answer.” Meanwhile, Google crawls the page and its vaunted ranking algorithm judges it to be among the most valuable pages on the Web so that it can pollute our search results for years to come.

How many thousands of hours have been lost due to this worse-than-useless Internet offal and its inexplicably high Google rankings?

Ban Yahoo Answers, Obama!

This is a pretty good one. The AP posts videos to its own official YouTube channel. Some guy embedded AP videos at a site he was editing, and he subsequently got a cease and desist from an AP lawyer, who is apparently unaware that the whole point of YouTube is that you’re supposed to put videos up there that everyone in the universe is encouraged to embed all over the place.

Did this the AP’s law-talkin’ guys miss this language from YouTube’s terms of service?

You also hereby grant each user of the YouTube Website a non-exclusive license to access your User Submissions through the Website, and to use, reproduce, distribute, display and perform such User Submissions as permitted through the functionality of the Website and under these Terms of Service.

OK, so the AP could conceivably have a separate agreement with YouTube that modifies these terms, but:

1. Still. It’s YouTube, people.
2. Occam’s Razor suggests that we should chalk this one up to stupidity.

Good April Fools fare at Taki’s, including this blog post purportedly by NRO’s Kathryn Jean Lopez. The only clue that it isn’t really written by Lopez: it’s coherent.

And then there’s William F. Buckley’s e-mail from Purgatory. C’mon, people… it’s just a joke! OR IS IT!!?!?

In the grand tradition of Comics in My Pants and Garfield Minus Garfield…

Madness is rare in individuals -
but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.

It’s The Nietzche Family Circus! Go there immediately.

Jeffrey Tucker of mises.org wrote a piece on LRC a few years back about the scourge of shaving cream dependency.

Why is the world hooked on this stuff? Here’s what happens. Early on in a person’s life, when whiskers and stubble begin to appear on the skin, the young teen is presented a razor and a can – a can with a squirting top that releases a foam. It is a charming little foam. The child is taught to rub it on and then shave it off.

Oh how funny looking it is when the foam is on us! And how fun to zap it off. We are left with clean and smooth skin. Pure magic. But the magic doesn’t last.

It never occurs to this child – so innocent, so naïve, so trusting – that he or she has been hooked into a lifetime of shaving hell. That foam, that sweet looking puff of magic, is in fact the great enemy of a good shave – black magic that relies on perpetuating dependency and ignorance.

I stumbled across this manifesto recently and it inspired me to cast off the shaving cream yoke, and I can confirm that it has been a life-changing experience. Better shaves, no shaving cream, no cuts. It’s been a revelation!

As a bonus, by eliminating a periodic expense, this also dovetails nicely with my recent decision to cut my own spending as an act of civil disobedience from the President’s Krugmanite stimulus stratagem. Take that, Obama!

From the NYT:

And yet, Mr. Blagojevich, 52, rarely turns up for work at his official state office in Chicago, former employees say, is unapologetically late to almost everything, and can treat employees with disdain, cursing and erupting in fury for failings as mundane as neglecting to have at hand at all times his preferred black Paul Mitchell hairbrush. He calls the brush “the football,” an allusion to the “nuclear football,” or the bomb codes never to be out of reach of a president.

Look, it’s a blog  called “Headset Hotties” dedicated to gathering stock photos of comely call-center lasses. What will they think of next?

You know what we could do with less of? Saturation coverage of the space station urine recycler. This story was worth about 5 seconds of snickering over on cable news. It’s time to move on.

I interrupt this brief blogging hiatus to bring you this important news. Scientists estimate that the effort to produce a live woolly mammoth will cost only $10 million. At that price, we can’t not do this. Just think of it. Mammoths!

This is an important national priority. I assign the task of securing funding to Hank Paulson. No one will notice if a measly $10 million is whisked away from that $700 billion TARP fund.

Daniel Larison translates Palinese. Impressive! Learning Arabic was just his warm-up act.

AP:

Indiana state police said that after a mother was arrested for drunken driving, the three relatives who came to pick up her 1-year-old son also had all been drinking. A state trooper stopped a minivan for speeding early Saturday on U.S. 30 in Schererville in northwestern Indiana. He arrested the 24-year-old woman on a drunken driving charges.

The boy’s father arrived later to pick him up, but officers determined he was intoxicated and also arrested him on a drunken driving charge.

Police said the boy’s grandparents then arrived. Both of them also had been drinking, state police said, but the grandmother who was driving was not over the legal limit, so officers escorted them home with the child.

Something tells me that this kid has inherited the alcoholism gene.