Eleven foot Bill Clinton

Ooops! Wrong statue!

Last weekend, hordes of Albanians collected in Pristina’s main square to welcome Bill Clinton, the guest of honor at a statue-unveiling ceremony. The Albanians put up the statue to commemorate President Clinton's role in the Yugoslavian war of 1999.

“I never expected that anywhere, someone would make such a big statue of me,” Clinton told the cheering crowd as he removed the cover, revealing a eleven foot bronze likeness of himself.

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All Kramer's entrances on Seinfeld captured in a six minute, seventeen second video

It must have taken forever to capture and then edit this video. In six-some minutes, the video shows every single entrance Kramer made over the course of The Seinfeld Show. This is a fascinating labor of love.



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Jack Brummet - Point: "Why I miss the polling place" Pablo Fanque - Counterpoint: "You're stuck in the 20th century"

Point
By Jack Brummet
All This Is That creative director

It may be a sign of impending or fully-arrived codgerhood, but I already miss the polling place. Washington State has largely replaced the voting booth with mail-in ballots. On "Election Day," you no longer walk around the block to your neighborhood church or elementary school. You lick a stamp and then drop your secure ballot envelope into a mailbox or in the slot at the library. Yesterday didn't even seem like election day, at least until they "closed the polls" and began announcing vote totals after 8 PM.

I don't get to see the poll workers anymore, with their sometimes Parkinson's-trembling hands and shakily applied make-up, or the retired AFL-CIO workers, older party foot-soldiers, and stay at home moms who staffed the voting place on election day. I no longer get to watch as they try four times to find me on the voter list, or have me spell my last name three times.

There are no flags hung on the wall at the mailbox. Our children won't get to see democracy in action as we roll up to the drive-in mailbox. The strange grey steel analog voting machines where you actually pulled down a lever are long gone. Now, the "Austrian ballot" voting booth with the stiff curtain is gone too. Exit polls and political signage lining the street to within 200 feet of the polling place have disappeared. I no longer get to see my neighbors, or meet new ones at our neighborhood polling place at Our Redeemer's Lutheran Church.

The polling place has disappeared like phone booths, writing letters, mail order catalogs, and soon, newspapers and magazines, record stores and bookstores. You rarely find politicians at the retail level anymore, eating sfogliatelle, knishes, and hot dogs, kissing babies, and asking about your wife, as they press the flesh for your vote.

Progress doesn't always feel like progress. I think I liked it a little more when you had to actually do something, like walk to your poll and sign in. Sitting at your kitchen table filling out a ballot will never seem like voting to me. Roll back the stone!



Counterpoint
By Pablo Fanque
All This Is That National Affairs Editor

Really, Jack? You may not be that wrong when you point to your fully arrived codgerhood. America outgrew the polling place years ago. You don't seem to have a problem embracing other areas of technology that have changed our lives.

Mail in ballots dramatically raise the number of people participating in elections, and eliminate the costs of maintaining thousands of polling places staffed with workers. Jack, you're stuck in the 20th century, and after nearly a decade, it's time to leap into Century 21. Get out your stamps and pen.

And. . .if you want to meet your neighbors, well, they have doorbells, don't they?
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A charmingly sweet video: I love xkcd

What a lovely and sweet video. We don't see enough of things like this on the interwebs. Boom de ah dah...

I Love xkcd from NoamR on Vimeo.

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Two new profile picture candidates

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Seattle's Ravenna sinkhole, circa 1957

It was such a gnarly event, that even the New York Times covered the story - click to enlarge


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In Seattle's tree-lined (at least it seems tree-lined to me, a boy from the logged-off Ballard forest) Ravenna neighborhood, a massive sinkhole opened up in November, 1957, and threatened to suck the whole neighborhood down to the 145 foot deep sewer tunnel buried below.

These photographs are courtesy of the Seattle Municipal Archives. At the time, this was the biggest sinkhole, ever in the United States. You can read more about it here.

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America at work

This sweet flowchart is from Projectsidewalk.com




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Windows Memory Leak At SeaTac Airport

An arrival/departure board at SeaTac International Airport (Microsoft's home airport), today shows a Windows error message that it is running out of virtual memory.

It makes you hope that the air traffic control system does not also run on the Windows operating system. . .

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Twelve Mormon moms whip off their clothes for charity

Twelve Mormon moms have whipped off their clothes (sorta, kinda) to become pinups, and raise money for breast cancer research.

In the "Hot Mormon Muffins" calendar, a "Devout Dozen" moms share recipes and revealing glimpses of themselves in suggestive (sorta, kinda)poses. The calendars go for sixteen bucks, or roughly $1.33 a muffin.

"Miss May" sees no reason for her church to be upset. But it has clearly stirred up a little dust in the LDS community. "We're not all in a stereotype, we're not all the same. And I'm not a stereotypical Mormon for sure," Tami Roberts said (that's her holding the pan of muffins below).

She went on to say that this is not a breach of her faith, but a way to challenge the "misconceptions" of the Mormon Church. Her husband and two daughters approve. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints may not.

One reason Ms. Roberts posed in the calendar is that Chad Hardy, the calendar's creator, was denied his diploma from BYU, and excommunicated by the church when he published a 2008 calendar called "Men on a Mission," featuring partially-nude Mormon men.



You can check out the calendars, or even buy one, here. They also have a fan page on Facebook.
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self portrait No. 48 - Jack Brummet digital art

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Drunken Ewoks throw food, moonwalk, drink, dry hump Al Roker on Today show

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

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Joe Lieberman has finally made Richard Nixon seem warm and cuddly

Reporting and analysis By Pablo Fanque, All This Is That National Affairs Editor

Illustrations and digital art By Jack Brummet, All This that creative director

Sen. Joe Lieberman ("Independent," Conn.) said Tuesday that he’d back a GOP filibuster of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s health care reform bill. The most shocking thing about the fallout from the left is that they were surprised when one of the most despicable and treacherous turncoats in the history of the Democratic Party stuck it to them once again. I wrote about Lieberman's duplicity here, in December, 2005: With Friends Like Joe Lieberman, The Democrats Need No Enemies.

The sawed-off turncoat appears to have second
thoughts as he marches onto the Senate floor
to vote against his former comrades in arms

Lieberman, caucuses with Democrats (but officially broke away), and positions himself as a fiscal hawk on health care on any bill that includes a government-run insurance program — even if it includes a provision allowing states to opt out, as Reid's Senate bill will. Whatever the Dems propose will come out watered down, a husk of the dream. And yet the battle is not over. Who knows, we may see defections on both sides of the aisle. It's that kind of year.

"We're trying to do too much at once," Lieberman said. “To put this government-created insurance company on top of everything else is just asking for trouble for the taxpayers, for the premium payers and for the national debt. I don’t think we need it now." Interestingly, he fails to mention reduced profits for his good friends in the insurance business, or that he enjoys his gold-plated government health insurance just fine.



When asked about Lieberman’s threat to filibuster a final vote on the Reid plan, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said: "I haven't seen the report from Sen. Lieberman or why he's saying what he's saying. I think Democrats and Republicans alike will be held accountable by their constituents who want to see health care reform enacted this year.”

Lieberman said that he’d vote against a public option plan “even with an opt-out because it still creates a whole new government entitlement program for which taxpayers will be on the line." His comments confirmed that Reid is probably still short of the 60 votes needed to advance the bill out of the Senate

Lieberman said he “very much” wants to vote for health care reform but that he’s worried about stifling “the economic recovery we’re in” or adding to the federal debt. Really? It doesn't have anything to do with the dozens of insurance companies headquartered in Connecticut, or the "donations" from those companies that flow so often and richly into his campaign coffers

You know from previous articles on All This Is That that we consider him a Republicrat at best, and at worst, a rat, a Judas Goat, and a turncoat spoiler, leading Democrats astray in the guise of moderation. Is anyone even listening to him except the Republicans? No. And the GOP don't trust him anymore than they do their own turncoat, Senator Arlen Specter. Any sane Democrat wrote him off years ago; he reinforced our thinking with his bumbling and pathetic run for the Presidency in 2004. He was a disastrous pick as Gore's Vice President in 2000, and his 2007/2008 defense of, and cozying up to The Bush White House was a clear signal that he would switch parties the moment it was most politically expedient for him to do so.

The Democrats continue to caucus with him for no other reason than he votes with us once in a while. With friends like this sawed-off weasel, who needs enemies? It's difficult for even the most conservative of Democrats to forget his spirited defense of President Bush's handling of the Iraq war and his continual toadying up to President Bush and his hatchet-man, Dick Cheney.


And still, Joe Lieberman lives.

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