I had cause to revisit the Pomegranate Phone this afternoon, and appreciated anew just how awesome it is. As I've said before: that is web design at its very finest.

(Be sure to click "Release Date" in the upper-right-hand corner once you've finished playing with the rest of the phone's features. Very nicely done, Nova Scotia.)

Two thoughts that I saved-as-drafts a year or so ago but never got around to posting:

• I'm currently watching (and enjoying) Ken Burns's "Civil War," but I thought I should stop long enough to point out that it should actually have been called "[How George McClellan Tried to Lose the] Civil War." That would have been a more accurate title. Because that dude was spectacularly bad at being a general.
• "Playing politics" is almost always a tediously stupid thing to accuse a professional politician of, but its tedious stupidity rises to new heights in the case of people who accuse Arlen Specter of "playing politics" because he chose to switch parties. Of course he's playing politics. That's like cheering for Michael Phelps as he swims the length of the pool in one direction, but then immediately beginning to boo him once he makes the turn and heads back the way he came.

Mark Halperin and John Heilemann are really, really fond of the Edwardseses:

Edwards aides, Mr. Heilemann and Mr. Halperin write, felt that their boss had become increasingly megalomaniacal and narcissistic over the years, and that while the aides had sympathy for Mrs. Edwards’s struggle with cancer, they regarded her as a badgering, often irrational presence on the campaign. "The nearly universal assessment among them," Mr. Halperin and Mr. Heilemann write of the Edwards aides, "was that there was no one on the national stage for whom the disparity between public image and private reality was vaster or more disturbing. What the world saw in Elizabeth: a valiant, determined, heroic everywoman. What the Edwards insiders saw: an abusive, intrusive, paranoid, condescending crazywoman."

Emphasis added, because, I mean... good heavens.

Wonkette makes me laugh:

"Osama bin Laden’s whole goddamn strategy has always been to draw the United States into a direct confrontation with Al Qaeda on as many fronts as possible. Our crack team of analysts have determined that he has been successful in this pursuit over the past decade. Because it’s been so easy. And it’s just getting easier! At this point a Mexican or Filipino can throw an orange through a storefront screen anywhere in the United States and it will be labeled muslin terror because some other Mexican in “Yemen” maybe e-mailed him at some point and was probably in Al Qaeda and we will have to bomb Jordan and Syria and Lebanon and Turkey, to save airplanes."

Jesus H. Christ:

Senate Majority Leader Reid apologized today for a comment during the presidential campaign in which he praised then-Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., as politically attractive because he was a “light-skinned” African American “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” The comment was reported in “Game Change,” a new book about the 2008 campaign by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. In a statement, the Nevada senator said, “I deeply regret such a poor choice of words. I sincerely apologize for offending any and all Americans, especially African Americans for my improper comments.” After Reid's statement, Obama said he accepted Reid's apology and praised his “passionate leadership" on issues of social justice.

Added Obama, "Plus, I like him because he doesn't sound too Mormony."

(Quoting CongressDaily, which is behind a paywall.)

Interesting point:

And given that nearly a quarter of mortgages are underwater, and that 10 percent of mortgages are delinquent, White, of the University of Arizona, is surprised that more people haven’t walked. He thinks the desire to avoid shame is a factor, as are overblown fears of harm to credit ratings. Probably, mortgagees also labor under a delusion that their homes will quickly return to value. White has argued that the government should stop perpetuating default “scare stories” and, indeed, should encourage borrowers to default when it’s in their economic interest. This would correct a prevailing imbalance: homeowners operate under a “powerful moral constraint” while lenders are busily trying to maximize profits.

Oh, yeah: I'm back, baby!

Some guy at The Corner whines about how hard it is to pronounce Sotomayor's name, and Wonkette rightfully and humorously makes fun of him. Circle of life.

I love it when op-ed writers write things that I've been saying for years.

The Obama administration is spending $2.4 billion from the stimulus package on carbon capture and storage projects -- a mere down payment. Imagine what that money could do if it were spent on solar, wind and other renewable energy sources. Imagine if we actually tried to solve the problem rather than bury it.

I've mentioned my disdain for the phrase "judicial activism" once or twice in passing, but even within the universe where that's a legitimate objection to a judicial nominee [and it is not], objecting to judicial empathy is spectacularly stupid.

(Clips from the Daily Show segment linked above.)
Ed Gillespie: I may have empathy for the little guy in a fight with the big corporation, but the law may not be on his side.
Sen. Orrin Hatch: "Empathy." What does that mean? Usually that's a code-word for an activist judge.
Laura Ingraham: That is a singularly loopy idea for a qualification for a justice.

They're like caricatures of themselves, these people.

(I'd like to try to put myself in their shoes, but I'm worried that would disqualify me from ever holding judicial office.)

So, seriously, have these people never even heard of the tobacco industry?

For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.

But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.

"The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied," the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.

"Oh, and, uh... doubt is our product," the experts added.

This is too great.



In case it gets taken down (which it surely will once Barton figures out why it's gotten a couple of hundred times more views than any of his other videos), here's a helpful transcript:

Rep. Barton: You’re our scientist. I have one simple question for you in the last six seconds. How did all the oil and gas get to Alaska and under the Arctic Ocean?
Sec. Chu: (laughs) This is a complicated story, but oil and gas is the result of hundreds of millions of years of geology, and in that time also the plates have moved around, and so, um, it’s the combination of where the sources of the oil and gas are–
Rep. Barton: But, but wouldn’t it obvious that at one time it was a lot warmer in Alaska and on the North Pole. It wasn’t a big pipeline that we created in Texas and shipped it up there and then put it under ground so that we can now pump it out and ship it back.
Sec. Chu: No. There are–there’s continental plates that have been drifting around throughout the geological ages–
Rep. Barton: So it just drifted up there?
Sec. Chu: That’s certainly what happened. And so it’s a result of things like that.

(Note: if you're just reading the transcript, you don't really get the full benefit of the sarcasm dripping off of Barton's words when he asks, "So it just drifted up there?")

Anyone can lack a basic understanding of geology. To be so out of it that you think you've stumped the Nobel Prize-winning Energy Secretary with a question from 8th-grade science class -- a question that you yourself clearly cannot answer? Well, that takes a Republican from Texas.

(First seen at Wonkette. Helpful transcript via Twitter Room.)

Joe Nocera argues a point on the A.I.G. bonuses that I've been trying to articulate for a couple of days. Worth a read.

There are times when anger is cathartic. There are other times when anger makes a bad situation worse. "We need to stop committing economic arson," Bert Ely, a banking consultant, said to me this week. That is what Congress committed: economic arson.

I wouldn't go quite as far as "fiddling while Rome burns" (Nocera would, and does), but I think we're definitely well into the realm of "focusing on a tiny, contained fire while a much larger, scarier one is taking over the rest of the town." (Which, unbeknownst to most people, is something that Nero also did.)