Way to go, Newt.

Not to be outdone by the new radical fringe of the GOP, Newt Gingrich decided to suggest that the HCR bill will lead to the same kind of political fallout for the Democrats that Civil Rights legislation had in the 1960's:

But former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich said Obama and the Democrats will regret their decision to push for comprehensive reform. Calling the bill "the most radical social experiment . . . in modern times," Gingrich said: "They will have destroyed their party much as Lyndon Johnson shattered the Democratic Party for 40 years" with the enactment of civil rights legislation in the 1960s.

Am I reading this right? He's basically gloating about the fact that Democrats suffer for taking on unpopular, but morally righteous, legislative tasks, right?

I like to imagine he was skinning a possum as he said this.

[via Washington Post]

A Refreshing Bit Of Sarcasm

Via Defamer:

There is no more personal act in the contemporary society than compiling a Best Of List. Since Congress decreed that people could no longer have personalities and substituted cultural pastiche for humanity, the choices we make in terms of what we put on our year end best lists has said everything about who we are and more importantly, whom we'd like people to think we are.

In Your Face, Unwarranted Influence, Whether Sought or Unsought, From The Military-Industrial Complex!

I was incensed a while back by a particularly lame SNL cold open where Fred Armisen's Obama rattles off the lack of accomplishments so far. (It hasn't even been a year.) GITMO may still be open, but less flashy positive developments are under way:

White House officials say Mr. Obama took advantage of a rare political moment to break through one of Washington’s most powerful lobbies and trim more weapons systems than any president had in decades.

Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said Wednesday that the plan was to threaten a veto over a prominent program — in this case, the F-22 fighter jet — “to show we were willing to expend political capital and could win on something that people thought we could not.”

Once the Senate voted in July to stop buying F-22s, Mr. Emanuel said in an interview, that success “reverberated down” to help sustain billions of dollars of cuts in Army modernization, missile defense and other programs.

[Via the NYFT,B's!]

PSA: "Mafia Wars" and "Farmville" Are Probably Going To Scam You

This Goes Out To All My Friends Who Routinely Invite Me To "Zombie Gangster Vampire Bite Them" or Sign Up For Some Other Mind-Numbing App On Facebook: Your credulousness is going to lose you money and is, in fact, a large part of Facebook's lazy, dishonest revenue stream. Just listen to Gawker's Ryan Tate:

[S]ocial network games like Mafia Wars and Farmville disguise old-school scams, Mike Arrington has been demonstrating over at TechCrunch this weekend. High-revenue don of social networking games Zynga, which makes the aforementioned Mafia Wars and Farmville, gets one-third of its revenue from various shady "commercial offers" and lead-generation systems, Arrington reports. Here's how HotOrNot founder James Hong described the social networking cash scene in a TechCrunch comment:

The offers that monetize the best are the ones that scam/trick users.... i'm pretty sure most of the money ended up getting our users hooked into auto-recurring SMS subscriptions for horoscopes and stuff.

Examples, via TechCrunch:

• "Users are offered in-game currency in exchange for filling out an IQ survey... They are told their results will be text messaged to them... and are texted a pin code to enter on the quiz. Once they've done that, they've just subscribed to a $9.99/month subscription."
  
• "Users are offered in game currency if they sign up to receive a free learning CD... The user is told they pay nothing except a $10 shipping charge. But the fine print, on a different page from checkout, tells them they are really getting a whole set of CDs and will be billed $189.95 unless they return them."

[Via Valleywag]

Important Blog Reading Message [Not Spam]

My friend Adrian Chen is in a gladiatorial blogging competition with other members of the chattering class for an open editorial position at Gawker.

SO: Click on all his posts! Read them! Comment upon them! Go Biz-0nk3rzzzz!

It totes won't be a waste, because someone there already posted about him being funny, like a whole year ago!

ACORN Videomaker James O'Keefe's Funder: Facebook Investor Peter Thiel

I'm really glad this aspect of the story is out now.

Leftovers from the reported volume of money "Paypal don" Peter Thiel gave O'Keefe for his previous stunt in February could have easily been used to fund the ACORN videos filmed this summer.

There's just no way that the February "Taxpayers Clearing House" thing cost $30,000. [via The Village Voice; another fun story about Thiel's politics here at Valleywag]

Great Moments In Manufactured Youth Culture

Also: I strongly consider looking at my friend's piece on the last Polaroid film in existence being sold at Urban Outfitters.

Someone Had To Say It.

But because this is a Washington Post editorial by a "reasonable" Republican no criticism of the conservative movement may be proffered without a "pox on both houses" attack on Democrats for doing the exact same thing, all the time, but worse.

Because Nancy Pelosi (D-Boogeyman) accused town hall disrupters of "carrying swastikas" (they were). And because unnamed "liberal antiwar protests" were chock-full of Hitler mustaches. Because Michael Moore said something dumb about the Patriot Act. And because Representative Brian Baird decried "Brownshirt tactics."

Here's the thing about that last one: the people intentionally disrupting town hall events and trying to turn them into anarchic carnivals of rage and possible violence are literally, actually guilty of "Brownshirt tactics."

Both the Nazis and Mussolini had Brownshirts and Blackshirts, their violent followers (many of whom were angry, disenfranchised-feeling war vets resentful of elites), attack socialists and union leaders, often on behalf of capitalists unhappy with leftist governments. Brownshirts marched through socialist strongholds in order to provoke attacks, and then they ginned up more support by holding up those who were attacked as martyrs. Does that sound familiar?

Thanks for this, Pareene. [via Gawker]

On The Boston Globe's Big Picture Blog

[Via the Awl]

Each year, the New York Times presents in-house awards, called the Punch Awards, to recognize great contributions from the staff. This year they quite rightly recognize the inventor of The Big Picture, the genius Boston Globe-hosted photography weblog. Unfortunately, the owners of the Times are forced to note that staffer Alan Taylor (a software engineer) “developed and promoted the blog largely on his own time.” Perhaps in the future the newspaper company will encourage the development of their most successful products on, say, staff time.