Per aspera

That quotation is from Cory Doctorow’s entry on BoingBoing about the latest security flaw found in Diebold voting machines.  This one is the most impressive yet.
SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA — “This may be the worst security flaw we have seen in touch screen voting machines,” says Open Voting Foundation president, Alan Dechert. Upon examining the inner workings […]

John Rogers:
The anecdote … it was stirred by the latest from famous lawyer Alan Dershowitz, in which he argues that there is a scale of innocence, and anyone but the infirm and elderly who has not fled forthwith from Israel’s assualt on Lebanon is some sort of Hisbollah collaborator. Not may be. IS.
To wit, we […]

So I was farting around on YouTube again, watching some Ramones videos, which goddamn. The debt we all owe to the Ramones is tremendous.
And then for whatever reason, YouTube threw me a link to some Stevie. It must have known.

Besides the fact that holy balls is Stevie Wonder a national treasure, I’d like […]

A commenter at Firedoglake explains to Digby that Condi’s “birth pangs” comment wasn’t merely ridiculous, it was actually quite deliberately crazy:
I brought up the Condi Rice “birth pang” comment in passing and one of the commenters pointed out that it’s actually Rapture talk, if you can believe that.
I checked it out and over at the […]

Breaking news:
Farmers Use Bull Semen to Inseminate Cows
“Buford! Pull up your overalls and come read this article in the Times! Hell, we been goin’ about this all wrong!”
(via Crooked Timber)

Via Tom, I learn that Anthony Bourdain was apparently filming an episode of No Reservations in Lebanon when the bombing started. As of Monday, he was still there, in Beirut, and has posted to the forums at eGullet about it. I’m just going to quote pretty much the whole thing, because I can’t […]

Check it.  After a show full of medievalry (and baroquiness, among other things), he appears to take his bow dressed as an astronaut.
I consider this latest fashion decision a significant step up from that gypsy Eskimo thing he used to do.
(Via Making Light)

Tom tells me that the Samuel Adams brewery has come out with a four-pack of authentic turn-of-the-revolution beers called the Brewer Patriot Collection.  Jesus.  They already gave those of us lucky enough to live here in the birthplace of freedom Boston 375, which was tastier than a mu’fucker (it was, in the words of a […]

From Sisyphus Shrugged:
The functioning portion of Ken Lay’s heart failed this morning at his vacation home in Colorado.
You know he knows people who can get their hands on that poison that causes a death indistinguishable from a heart attack, which you always read about in the finest spy novels. Think he got the hookup […]

Hey, remember back on the old blog, when I was the A-number-one google hit for “fucking dominicans?”  Turns out Per Aspera currently holds the “I’m Feeling Lucky” title for “Bill Bennett shithead.”
Magnificent.

When I were a lad, my mom had a boxed set of the Boston Pops doing — wait for it — popular songs. Among them was one of her favorites (a family favorite, really), “Mah-Nah-Mah-Nah.” Family consensus regarded the Boston Pops version as a cover tune, though. Everyone knows that if “Mah-Nah-Mah-Nah” […]