As we browse a voluminous list of non-paywalled news sources each evening, looking for a story we feel like riffing on worthy of bringing to your valuable attention, we’ll often bookmark an item or two “just in case” — just in case, that is, we can’t find it in our soul to launch into a 2,000-word discourse analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of policy positions held by the most prominent of Our Nation’s hack bloviators public intellectuals.

Which is why, this fine spring morning, we’re proud to present fucking frogs.

[via Sully]

[via Jezebel/RML]

“REVEALED — THE LEFT’S ECONOMIC TERRORISM PLAYBOOK: THE CHASE CAMPAIGN BY A COALITION OF UNIONS, COMMUNITY GROUPS, LAWMAKERS AND STUDENTS TO TAKE DOWN US CAPITALISM AND REDISTRIBUTE WEALTH & POWER” [The Blaze]

Mr. Shatner was born on this day in 1931. You are now obligated to “sing” Rocket Man in his honor.

‘Talk Like William Shatner Day’ Video Contest [TrekMovie]

So what lies down this road? A world in which key positions can only be filled by complete hacks, preferably interns from the Heritage Foundation with no relevant experience but unquestioned loyalty.

In short, we’re on our way to running America the way the Coalition Provisional Authority ran Iraq.

–Paul Krugman

 

Because there’s always room for just a little more pessimism in our lives, I bring you the above throughts from Paul Krugman, who despairs over the way in which any technically profficient political appointee that Barack Obama nominates  is invariably blocked by GOP partisans.

Sooner or later, it had to happen: We’ve been nailed by a New York Times trend piece.

Not by name, of course. The New York Times would never lower itself to source us on a story. (Except for that one time it did.) No, they just identified something Everybody Is Doing, and we got caught in the net.

Or rather, something everybody isn’t doing: The telephone is dead.

Dead, that is, for people who once used it. We’re already a generation into a demo for whom it never really existed, except as something you text and tweet and Facebook on. Those of us who once engaged in its original Ma Bell function are now disengaging.

And why? Because it’s fucking annoying.

Especially, say, if you work for yourself, and you’re in regular contact with people who work for a salary. Dear gawd, do they know how to waste your time! We’ve been training clients for years to scribble it in an email, because it takes just a glance to determine what they want, instead of pleasantry-pleasantry-weather-pleasantry-request-pleasantry-sport-pleasantry-bye!-recover.

We can’t afford to talk, and that’s been going on for fifteen years. Nice of Manhattan to finally catch up with us.

Don’t Call Me, I Won’t Call You [NYT, via Kottke]

The U.S. Supreme Court announced today that it would hear an appeal from a death row inmate who is slated for execution in Alabama because of a mix-up in the mailroom of one of New York’s most prominent white shoe law firms.

Two associates at the law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell were representing pro bono a client in Alabama named Cory Maples in his death row appeals. An Alabama state court sent the associates two copies of a judicial order in Maples’ case, but since the associates no longer worked at S&C, the mailroom staff sent the orders back to the court unopened and stamped “Return to Sender.”  By the time Maples had found new counsel, the deadline for appealing from the court’s order had passed.  The 11th Circuit Federal Court of Appeals held that it was too late for Maples to appeal, even though the fault was completely that of his attorneys.

The New York Times notes that while the blame has been shifted to the clerks in the mailroom,

An Alabama lawyer, John G. Butler Jr., also represented Mr. Maples and also received a copy of the ruling. Mr. Butler said in a sworn statement that he was Mr. Maples’s lawyer in name only, serving as local counsel for the New York lawyers handling the case. He said he had not passed the ruling along to them or to Mr. Maples.

[WSJ Law Blog]

[NYT]