I have got to start being nicer on Twitter.

I love this and all its tweeness

Voting

hellbox:

Is it glib to say that it is our civic responsibility to vote? Or maybe it’s just lame. Not fashionable. Who has the time? It doesn’t change anything, right?

My pal Martin has smart things to say about civic engagement.

Jon Stewart’s closing remarks from yesterday’s rally

You are 6 times more likely to die from hot weather than from a terrorist attack

—The only thing you have to fear is what agenda driven fear mongers tell you to fear. [hat tip, Paul Smith]

Microsoft favoring HTML5 over Silverlight

Says Silverlight has shifted as a platform for Windows phone and specialized media applications but that HTML5 is the only truly cross platform solution.

The Holocaust was the result of murderous ideological fanaticism of the kind not to be found in leaders forced to face re-election every four years. It was not the result of a policy meeting.

Similarly, back in June Glenn Beck said that children singing for Barack Obama was “out of the playbook … of the Third Reich ….This is Hitler Youth.” One can assume that not all of Beck’s listeners and viewers know what the Hitler Youth was. Beck himself, an astute, if cynical, student of history, certainly does. The Hitler Youth was the ideological training grounds designed to prepare German boys for a glorious career in the SS murdering anyone who stood in the way of the Führer’s dream of a vast and racially pure German Reich. It was not a dictator’s private children’s choir.

—From an editorial in Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine warning of the dangers of the tea party view of history.

tweeql is a Python app for querying the Twitter API just like SQL

With handy functions for determining location and even sentiment. Looks quite well done.

UPDATE: My pal and self-declared Yahoo fanboy Ryan “I’ve got your Jerry Yang right here” Bateman points out that YQL does something similar across a whole bunch of web services, like Flickr, Facebook, Yelp, etc. Thanks, Ryan, and good luck with that purple exclamation point tattoo!

I swear to Christ, whatever happened when the “Urban Woodsman” alpha rolled the Metrosexual and hugged him super tight until they made a beautiful, beautiful baby is seriously doing it for me. I maybe want to make love to this baby

—Mary HK Choi, over at The Awl’s sister site The Hairpin, thinks it sucks that dudes have suddenly learned how to dress themselves. Blame Jesse and Adam, I guess.

A new Washington Post canvass of hundreds of local tea party groups reveals a different sort of organization, one that is not so much a movement as a disparate band of vaguely connected gatherings that do surprisingly little to engage in the political process.

The results come from a months-long effort by The Post to contact every tea party group in the nation, an unprecedented attempt to understand the network of individuals and organizations at the heart of the nascent movement.

Seventy percent of the grass-roots groups said they have not participated in any political campaigning this year. As a whole, they have no official candidate slates, have not rallied behind any particular national leader, have little money on hand, and remain ambivalent about their goals and the political process in general.

—

The Washington Post actually did the legwork to track down the tea party and it turns out that what we’ve anecdotally suspected all this time is actually true: it’s not a movement, it’s not even organized, more like an incoherent, cacophonic, amoebic mass. Worse yet, for all the needless media attention that they’ve garnered, this so-called groundswell is nothing more than a front for the usual players and dirty machinations of Karl Rove and other political sociopaths more concerned with winning the political game than actually governing.

This should be the final word on the supposed tea party, a hapless group of useful idiots who don’t even realize just how dangerous their own shortsighted stupidity really is. The millions of dollars funneling into elections this year aren’t the result of an outpouring of mad-as-hell constituents, it’s a well orchestrated, finely tuned campaign by political insiders stretching back generations. The fingerprints are all there – Rove and Dick Armey, has beens from an ousted political dynasty, continuing to pull the strings while being funded by the usual suspects of crooks and looters, foreign and domestic, now unchecked by even modest campaign finance regulation. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the supporters of simpletons like Michele “Carbon Dioxide is natural!” Bachmann are actually being funded by none other than polluter of the century, British Petroleum. Almost makes the days of Abramoff and Tom DeLay seem quaint.

The only bright side is that the tea party is already well on its way to being nothing more than the footnote in history they so rightfully deserve to be. These rubes are simply another rebranding and repackaging of the same rightwing, ultra-religious, gun-loving, anti-tax, homophobic, racist elements that seem to come out of the woodwork every election, all too happy to vote against their own prosperity to help the rich pile on their fortunes.

You can call them the silent majority, the Christian right, Nascar dads, values voters, it doesn’t matter, it’s the same people and there are thankfully fewer of them every election. The social wedge issues from just a few cycles ago aren’t working any more so Republicans had to channel the anger over an economy they destroyed (then conveniently blamed on the black guy) and high unemployment – scratch that, high white unemployment because these people never gave a fuck about years of double digit minority unemployment – into a short lived, pyrrhic victory. It gets better, though, because these people are about the furthest thing possible from a movement. They’ll disperse once the damage is done, after they realize they have no plan to lead. The future will leave them and their hate and their ignorance behind.