Fish. Barrel. Bang.

Hip-hop is too target-rich an environment for Weird Al.

Quote for the day

Roughly $822 million was spent in support of President Bush in 2004, compared to $925 million spent on behalf of Sen. John Kerry.

So much for two of the fundamental lies behind campaign-finance reform. One, that McCain-Feingold, or any other piece of legislation, can "get money out of politics." Two, that "money rules." It turns out that sometimes, strangely enough, elections are decided by voters weighing the issues and making up their minds based on the candidates' positions.

Ryan Sager at Tech Central Station.
We at WUTT! have asserted the latter point for some time. Nice to be proved right in a big race that counts.

Though it certainly helps, money can't buy an election. It's necessary but not sufficient.

Addition to Wish List

One more thing I want to add to my Beggars-Would-Ride wishlist, of things that are achievable but not available for immediate purchase:

I want somebody to offer to recycle old, intermittent, half-lighting strings of Christmas lights. There's too much valuable copper in there for this sh1t to just get shlepped off to a landfill. We're about to ditch a few hundred feet of them because half of the light and they are virtually immune to troubleshooting.

The bulbs can be ground and melted into glass cullet to fill out concrete park benches. The plastic, well, it's probably as valuable as the copper, kilo for kilo, and it could make nice Tyvek envelopes for FedEx someday if it were recovered. The problem, as usual, is identifying what kind of plastic it is so it can be recycled effectively, even if in some cases recycling translates into removal of halogens prior to conversion to Number 2 Diesel fuel.

Here's your bumper sticker:

My Huge SUV burns otherwise-unusable recycled plastics