Exactly How Stupid is Michelle Bachmann?

Posted: March 12, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, just because, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , | 37 Comments

Michelle Bachmann

Have you heard the latest imbecilic quote from Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann? During a speech in New Hampshire this morning she said the following:

“What I love about New Hampshire and what we have in common is our extreme love for liberty,” Bachmann told the audience. “You’re the state where the shot was heard around the world in Lexington and Concord.

“And you put a marker in the ground and paid with the blood of your ancestors the very first price that had to be paid to make this the most magnificent nation that has ever arisen in the annals of man in 5,000 years of recorded history.”

Um…no. Lexington and Concord are in Massachusetts. Do you suppose she knows that the Boston Tea Party took place in Massachusetts too? I’m guessing no. The Boston Globe has more:

The remark demonstrated a surprising lack of basic facts about the historic events from which Tea Party derives its name. It is likely to go down as one of the bigger missteps of the early primary season.

Bachmann is touring the country and testing the idea of running for president. With her strong conservative views and sharp one-liners, she has gained a big following around the country. A number of people from Massachsuetts drove up to Nashua for the later fundraising event.

“We see you on Fox all the time! Keep up the good work!’’ called out Valerie Lallas, a retrired [sic] teacher from Lynnfield, as Bachmann signed autographs after her speech.

“I’m on CNN, too,’’ Bachman replied.

“But we don’t watch CNN,’’ Lallas said.

Her fans aren’t exactly the sharpest tools in the shed either.

What are your favorite stupid politician quotes? Dig them up and post them in the comments. Or treat this as an open thread.

Kewl Science

Posted: March 5, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , | 8 Comments

There’s always been a hypothesis out there in science world that argues that meteors may actually have planted the seeds of life on earth.  It appears NASA has evidence that this hypothesis may make it theory status.

That’s the stunning conclusion one NASA scientist has come to, releasing his groundbreaking revelations in a new study in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology.

Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, has traveled to remote areas in Antarctica, Siberia, and Alaska, amongst others, for over ten years now, collecting and studying meteorites. He gave FoxNews.com early access to the out-of-this-world research, published late Friday evening in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology. In it, Hoover describes the latest findings in his study of an extremely rare class of meteorites, called CI1 carbonaceous chondrites — only nine such meteorites are known to exist on Earth.

Though it may be hard to swallow, Hoover is convinced that his findings reveal fossil evidence of bacterial life within such meteorites, the remains of living organisms from their parent bodies — comets, moons and other astral bodies. By extension, the findings suggest we are not alone in the universe, he said.

“I interpret it as indicating that life is more broadly distributed than restricted strictly to the planet earth,” Hoover told FoxNews.com. “This field of study has just barely been touched — because quite frankly, a great many scientist would say that this is impossible.”

This has a lot of exciting implications.  It may mean that all us earth critters probably have a bunch of weird cousins out there on other planets that share basic DNA.   This goes a long way in showing that we’re not alone.  Kind’ve interesting to contemplate the finger of ‘god’ in that photo as bacteria.

You can consider this an open thread.  

Oh, and Tashi Deleg!  It’s Tibetan New Year!!!!

FYI: WordPress Errors

Posted: March 3, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , | 5 Comments

If you’re getting odd error messages and problems here it’s part of a bigger problem.  There is a Hacker attack underway against WordPress.com and DDoS.

You have no idea how hard it was to get this post up, as WordPress.com, our blog host, is currently under a denial of service attack. It’s been almost impossible to access the TechCrunch backend for the past 10 minutes (everything seems to be stable now) and users have been receiving a “Writes to the service have been disabled, we will be bringing everything back online ASAP” error message.

From the VIP blog post:

WordPress.com is currently being targeted by a extremely large Distributed Denial of Service attack which is affecting connectivity in some cases. The size of the attack is multiple Gigabits per second and tens of millions of packets per second.

We are working to mitigate the attack, but because of the extreme size, it is proving rather difficult. At this time, everything should be back to normal as the attack has subsided, but we are actively working with our upstream providers on measures to prevent such attacks from affecting connectivity going forward.

We will be making our VIP sites a priority in this endeavor, and as always, you can contact us via xxxxx@wordpress.com for the latest update. We will also update this post with more information as it becomes available

WordPress did not mention the origin of the attack (DDoS =! Anonymous) and I have contacted founder Matt Mullenweg for more information. WordPress.com currently serves 30 million publishers, including VIPs TED, CBS and TechCrunch, and is responsible for 10% of all websites in the world. WordPress.com itself sees about 300 million unique visits monthly.

Update: Automattic and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg tells us that this is the largest attack WordPress.com has ever seen, and is likely to be politically motivated:

“There’s an ongoing DDoS attack that was large enough to impact all three of our datacenters in Chicago, San Antonio, and Dallas — it’s currently been neutralized but it’s possible it could flare up again later, which we’re taking proactive steps to implement.

This is the largest and most sustained attack we’ve seen in our 6 year history. We suspect it may have been politically motivated against one of our non-English blogs but we’re still investigating and have no definitive evidence yet.”

Consider this an open thread.

HB Gary Federal CEO Resigns in Wake of Anonymous Attack

Posted: February 28, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: just because, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, Wikileaks | Tags: , , , , , | 4 Comments

Aaron Barr

After being turned into a laughingstock by the Wikileaks-defending activist hacker group “Anonymous,” HB Gary CEO Aaron Barr has stepped down.

The announcement comes three weeks after Barr became the target of a coordinated attack by members of the online mischief making group Anonymous, which hacked into HBGary Federal’s computer network and published tens of thousands of company e-mail messages on the Internet. HBGary did not respond to telephone and e-mail requests for comments on Barr’s resignation.

In an interview with Threatpost, Barr said that he is stepping down to allow himself and the company he ran to move on in the wake of the high profile hack.

“I need to focus on taking care of my family and rebuilding my reputation,” Barr said in a phone interview. “It’s been a challenge to do that and run a company. And, given that I’ve been the focus of much of bad press, I hope that, by leaving, HBGary and HBGary Federal can get away from some of that. I’m confident they’ll be able to weather this storm.”

Good luck with that. For a nice, lucid explanation of what happened, along with numerous informative links, please refer to Sima’s recent post, Opening the Hive.

Here’s a quick and dirty summary of what Barr did to invite the attentions of Anonymous:

Barr had found himself at the center of a scandal that began when he told the Financial Times he planned to reveal the names of some “leaders” of the hacker group Anonymous. Anonymous responded by hacking HBGary Federal’s site, stealing 71,000 emails from the company and its sister firm HBGary, and defacing Barr’s Twitter account.

[….]

But the worst was yet to come. Anonymous posted HBGary’s emails in a searchable format, and the ensuing press scrum exposed a darker side to HBGary Federal’s business that offered a variety of dirty tricks on behalf of clients. In a proposal intended for Bank of America and written on behalf of a law firm referred to the bank by the U.S. Department of Justice, Barr suggested borderline illegal tactics that aimed at responding to a potential release of the bank’s documents by WikiLeaks. Those methods included cyberattacks, misinformation, forged documents, pressuring donors and even blackmailing WikiLeaks supporter and Salon journalist Glenn Greenwald. In another deal, HBGary suggested similarly a shady response to the Chamber of Commerce in its campaign against the Chamber’s political opponents including non-profit organizations and unions.

Another corporate buffoon bites the dust. Good riddance. Of course there are probably plenty of others like him still employed by HB Gary Federal.

There’s Something Happening Here… There… Everywhere

Posted: February 21, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: just because | 90 Comments

One World, One Pain

Hello news junkies, so how’s your Presidents Day going? This post basically picks up where BB’s morning reads left off. Minkoff Minx also has a live blog on the protests going. I don’t know about you, but the world is spinning so fast right now, it’s hard to keep up, and I need all the help I can get. I’ve been perusing reads from around the blogosphere to fill in the gaps on what I missed last week and what’s been cooking this morning. I thought I’d share a bit of what I found (see below the youtube of Buffalo Springfield), in case it might save anyone else trying to catch up a little legwork. 

Something Happening Everywhere: Midday Monday reads

Libya Live Updates (The Guardian), 5:12 pm, Evening summary:

  • Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, “may have gone to Venezuela”, British foreign secretary William Hague has said (see 4.43pm).
  • Two Libyan fighter jets and two civilian helicopters have landed in Malta (see 4.41pm).
  • There are reports of gunfire in Tripoli and of the navy bombing parts of the capital (see 5.07pm).
  • The Bahrain grand prix has been cancelled because of anti-government protests there (see 4.42pm).
  • Five people are dead after riots in Morocco (See 4.20pm).

In Women’s rights news:

US protests:

Something Happening Here: Sky Dancing catchup

  • Quixote summed up the essence of the current fight over unions really well in a comment she left on my Saturday morning post: “You don’t have to be pro-labor to support unions. Anyone who cares about the right to assemble should be defending people’s rights!This isn’t about busting unions. It’s about busting basic rights.”
  • If you didn’t catch Bostonboomer‘s read the other night about the “national security” secret of Dennis Montgomery and the eEtreppid software fiasco, be sure to check it out. It’s a horribly depressing state of affairs, but the way BB covered it, at least you’ll laugh while crying.

Something Happening There: Stuff from other blogs

  • Taylor Marsh has this interesting read up right now: American Oligarchy, in which she asks, “Reagan and Clinton both bit the tax hike bullet, but will Obama?” My wild guess on that is No.
  • Over at The Widdershins (via chatblu’s Saturday morning post), Cream City came up with a great little quip: “Walker to Wisconsin: Let them eat cheese.” Cream City also shared some helpful WI media links in the comments at TW: wisopinion.com (aggregates left/right blogs, editorials, etc), wispolitics.com (news), jsonline.com (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, conservative), madison.com (combined Madison papers, you can guess the political leaning of those) Pat Johnson wrote a very beautiful post this morning at TW as well, about the woman in that Great Depression photo. You know the one. Oh, and yesterday chatblu put up a wonderful thread ahead of Presidents Day and got a great chat and youtube exchange of movies going — Lazy Sunday: Political Pictures.
  • Peter Daou: Witnessing history ... “Every age has its historic events and moments, but it’s hard to deny that we’re living through an epic time in history. Here are just a handful of the things we’ve seen in the past few years: The amputation of Manhattan’s skyline… One of the most destructive tsunamis ever recorded (Indian Ocean)… One of the deadliest earthquakes ever recorded (Haiti), One of the worst environmental disasters ever (Gulf spill)… The emergence – and denial – of the biggest threat to human life (climate change)… The most successful U.S. presidential campaign ever by a woman… The election of the first U.S. black president… And now, the 2011 Middle East and North Africa uprisings…”
  • Last but not least. Provocative read from the Black Agenda Report/Bruce A Dixon: The New Black Politics: All We Want Is A Black Royal Family, Not Jobs, Peace, or Justice. Snippet: “When black Americans used to identify with the world’s oppressed and down-trodden, they were at least identifying with people like themselves. Now we are more likely to see ourselves in Michelle Obama, who takes six or eight vacations a year in some of the world’s most expensive resorts, than in a poor greiving Palestinian or Congolese mother.”
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