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QFT
Ezra:
To really understand the importance of Maliki's comments, you need to consider their opposite. Imagine if Maliki had walked in front of the cameras and said, "at this stage, a timetable for withdrawal is unrealistic, and we hope our American friends will not bow to domestic political pressures and be hasty in leaving Iraq just as the country improves." It would be a transformative moment in this election. John McCain would talk of nothing else. The cable shows would talk of nothing else. Magazines would run thousands of covers about "Obama's Iraq Problem." Obama would probably lose the race.
This, as we all know, is completely impossible and must be a typo, as John McCain is the expert on foreign policy and Barack Obama is completely inexperienced. Because the teevee people said so.
Meanwhile, on Earth, John McCain is now claiming that we won the war in Iraq. I know, I had no idea either, right? Especially since this victory is the type of one where the soldiers keep getting killed and don't get to come home. I guess, like Barack Obama, I just don't understand foreign policy at all.
The world is just awesome
This is the trailer for the new Mega Man game. It's downloadable for Wii and the XBox 360.
This is not a joke. Capcom decided to make Mega Man 9 an 8-bit game.
I need to sit back and contemplate the idea that I might have to buy a $300 video game system for that.
Forgiving the Japanese Watch continues
(Sigh) again. Simple question.
The Japanese. World War II. They waterboarded Americans. We tried, convicted, and sentenced them for war crimes.
Why haven't we issued a formal apology yet? Clearly they did nothing wrong.
Still waiting for Mitt Romney's answer too.
Those damn Slowskis
Apparently Comcast is pulling MSNBC from the standard channel lineup in a lot of major markets. I actually noticed this last week when the cable guy installed my new service here in Atlanta. It's actually worse than Pittsburgh here: MSNBC is channel 120 on Comcast's digital service, meaning you can't even get it with the standard digital package (which covers the first 80 channels or so) - you actually have to pay for "Extended Digital" which is like twenty bucks more a month to get all the stations from 80-150 or something like that. I don't get BBC America anymore either. Kinda miffed.
The other thing that I notices is even weirder- I've had Comcast in every placed I lived in D.C. - four different places of residence. And in every one of them, subscribing to the digital service meant I could get the regular basic channels on any other TV I connected to a spare outlet. Not so in my Atlanta apartment. I actually can't watch TV without the digital receiver. This is really annoying because I don't have the DVR meaning I can't actually record stuff on my VCR anymore. And of course, forget about a second TV without paying for a second digital box. Has this occured for anyone else? If they tried this in group-house-heavy D.C. their market cap would plummet.
Comcast, honestly, is starting to become the airline industry of telecom. They know that alternatives are non-existent (apartments don't let you install a satellite dish) and pretty much decided early on that they just need to see how much they can push you and still get your money... and then keep pushing. Ugh.
Whatever, that magazine deserves all that free publicity anyway
The only thing that pisses me off about the entire New Yorker cartoon thing is that Matt Bors did the damn cartoon four months ago, only he did it both clearer and funnier.
"The iPhone refugee"
There's this thing I have with my sister where we used to be driving around and she'd say something that was just really silly or so ridiculous that I literally had to slow down the car and stare at her for a second. This week's cartoon is dedicated to a moment like that, only instead of it being something humorously nonsensical my sister said, it was something so insanely stupid that I couldn't even comprehend how people can simultaneously be so obtusely blind to the actual world and have somehow managed to acquire a position at a major publication in which you talk about the world around you on a daily basis.
You know, I really don't think Megan McArdle is an idiot. And I'm sure she has to be a nice person in real life, given the vast number of people that seem so inexplicably impassioned* in defending her from criticism of what appear to be repeatedly inane observations like this. But I digress: this was a really friggin' stupid thing to say and we should all laugh at it repeatedly. Let's!
*And Ezra I definitely like. But Jeebus that's funny.