Santa’s Privacy Policy [McSweeney’s, via TechCrunch]

A dozen years ago, during one of our many Past Lives, we wrote a column for the local alt-weekly explaining how while nobody on the Internet may know you’re a dog, it’s very easy to find out where your paws are coming from.

The secret sauce is your computer’s Internet Protocol address, or IP. If the Internet is going to send something from Point A to Point B, it kinda helps to know where those points are. The IP address is roughly equivalent to your computer’s phone number — no number, no connection.

(In the interest of not frying your brain, we’ll skip the nuances and complications introduced since 1998, especially regarding wifi and mobile networks. Oh, and IPv6. That too.)

The existence and purpose of IP addresses may not quite be popular knowledge (as defined by “Does Mom Know About This?”), but they are Internet 101, the kind of thing anybody even tangentially involved in a field like — oh, let’s pick something at random — national security might be expected to know about.

Then again, we don’t recall anybody ever accusing the TSA of knowing from security:

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We’re not sure when “Democrat” became pejorative for “Democratic”.

For that matter, we’re not sure how. Or why we should even care.

We do know that “Democrat” gets under the thin skins of liberals. Just try it around one, and watch how fast you’re corrected. The Ic Factor is strong — almost as strong as when you call a Progressive the L Word.

But really: Can we just drop the fuss? We suspect that “Democrat” keeps being used because it works — because it brings out the peevishness in its target. Hey, if we could annoy our enemies that easily with Sounds Like Rat, you know we’d be all over it.

Which brings us to this week’s outbreak of resentment over “Obamacare”:

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We woke up Monday with a curious revelation:

We no longer trust Barack Obama.

Really, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. We stopped calling him Unicorn back in summer 2008. We were deeply bummed by his symbolic decision to invite a Proud Bigot to his Inaugural. We were an early bungee jumper into the Enthusiasm Gap. We heartily assent to all the nasty things Glenn Greenwald has said about him, to the point of wondering whether Obama is creating the most oppressive national-security state in American history — which would be quite a feat, considering the competition.

So it’s not like our canoe suddenly tipped over.

And it’s not like we have a habit of trusting Our Nation’s Preznits in the first place. Hey, we grew up with Nixon, after all. We only watched the Watergate hearings because they pre-empted the Match Game.

And we’ve long said that any politician who aspires to the highest office in our land, much less achieves it, is inherently untrustworthy. Decent people don’t do that. Those who try have so severely compromised their souls, it’s a miracle they don’t burst into flames when they take the oath of office.

But with all that, with all the evidence we’ve been noting ourself, somehow we hadn’t quite yet cut the cord. Hadn’t given up. Hadn’t completely lost faith.

Hadn’t yet reverted to our default position.

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So, about last night… Here’s all you need to know:

Reid and McConnell are now negotiating the terms of a short-term spending bill that can pass unanimously, punting the issue of federal funding into next year when the Republican House will likely demand significant spending cuts.

In other words, if you’re looking forward to a replay of the 1995 Clinton-Gingrich Rumble in the Jungle, time to start stocking up your Netflix queue instead: The 112th Congress hasn’t even begun, and already Democrats are scrambling in fear of a threatened government shutdown.

What failed last night because of shocking! Republican intransigence was the bog-standard annual spending bill, a $1.1 trillion cornucopia festooned with earmarks from both parties, but still meeting Mitch the Turtle’s budget target. (Democrats are adorable for taking Republicans at their word!)

The bill failed — with a majority, of course, because that’s what the Founders wanted.

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Is Fox defecting on the “War on Christmas”? [Media Matters]

On our list of potential morning topics we had DADT repeal, the danger of using freeware hacking tools, a Fourth Amendment email victory, the DeviantART database crack, and a brewing CPAC scandal.

So, naturally, we went with the German children’s toy dachshund that poops.

[via Sully]