[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]

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 American Bird Conservancy estimates that up to 500 million birds are killed each year by cats — about half by pets and half by feral felines. ‘I hope we can now stop minimizing and trivializing the impacts that outdoor cats have on the environment and start addressing the serious problem of cat predation,’ said Darin Schroeder, the group’s vice president for conservation advocacy.” [NYT]

[MSNBC]

Back in March 2003, as we were settling in to what would prove to be a month-long CNN marathon, we had a single thought:

Don’t fuck this up.

Our opposition to Shrub’s War, hopeless to begin with, had been rendered moot by the launch of Shock & Awe. Whatever Bush did, we were stuck for the ride, and could only hope that he would prove competent at the task. We’re old enough to remember when “quagmire” was part of contemporary political jargon, not a Family Guy character.

As it happens, eight years to the day after Dubya announced that war to the nation, Barack Obama launched missiles into Libya. Maybe we’ll get lucky this time, and there the comparisons will end. Beyond that, we’re absolutely fucking clueless what to think.

We know what others think, and unless they’re John McCain, they generally don’t think well of it. It certainly sets a bad precedent — or, more to the point, continues a long string of bad precedents. After all, we also remember “Imperial Presidency” the first time around. And “War Powers Act”.

And “Three Mile Island”, come to think of it. Seriously: We thought Seventies Nostalgia was over.

In the end, all we can think for certain is what we thought eight years ago:

Don’t fuck this up.