Phoning in a post

• A couple weeks back I mentioned that the first person to say that Kerry had been winning instead of Dean in the primaries because of a nefarious plot by Diebold deserved to get smacked. Well, I fear I must direct your attention to Atrios. No, Atrios himself doesn’t say that Diebold won the vote for Kerry, but he noticed some wonky numbers at CNN and posted about them. His theory is that “some monkey at CNN could have just entered the wrong numbers,” but the comment thread doesn’t get fifteen comments in before theories about how Diebold shafted Dean, and how this related back to Skull and Bones, begin to swill. Someone please remind me that these people aren’t representative of Dean’s support at large.

  Then again, in an interview with Salon Dean said:

  It seems to me there’s a little of George Bush in John Kerry. George Bush says the most blatant things that are just plain false. No Child Left Behind leaves every child left behind — something that Senator Kerry also voted for. How many rationales has George Bush given us for the Iraq war? Well, how many rationales has John Kerry given us for the Iraq war (which he also supported)? So I’m beginning to see a pattern. Maybe they shared a little more than just brotherhood at Skull and Bones, I don’t know.

  Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised.

• Speaking of Dean, Deaniacs, and Salon, that magazine has an article up speculating about whether or not Dean’s disappointed voters will vote for the eventual Democratic nominee.
• Raznor is looking for nominations for his first ever Raznor Awesome List. The subjects of this list are the best anti-war songs written between 1965 and 1975. Go! Now! Cast your votes!
• Good news! The AP is reporting that the Massachusetts High Court ruled that only full marriage for homosexuals would be constitutional. Groovey.
• The Mad Cow story gets weirder. The man who killed the only “mad” cow in the United States, Dave Louthan, is quoted by the New York Times as saying that the infected cow in question was not a downer cow (a cow that’s too sick to get up, in case you’ve not been following the story) but was up and walking around. According to Mr. Louthan, the cow was found by “a fluke” rather than through routine inspection.

  The part of the story that really gets me, though, is this one:

  In his new role as bloody-handed industry critic, Mr. Louthan argues that too few cattle are tested for mad cow to say with certainty that beef is safe. “One mad cow is a scare, but two is an epidemic,” he said. “They absolutely, positively don’t want to find another.”

  Ed Curlett, a department spokesman, said about 83 a month were tested at Vern’s from October to December. (The testing began only in October, when the government starting paying $10 a brain sample.)

  The department has not changed last year’s plans to test 40,000 cows nationwide this year, out of 30 million slaughtered. Janet Riley, a spokeswoman for the American Meat Institute, which represents slaughterhouses, called that “plenty sufficient from a statistical standpoint.”

  The government has to pay these people to test for Mad Cow disease? I thought that the marvel of the free market was that the industry could self-regulate better than the government would ever be capable of.

• Women’s eNews has an article up about how this year’s Oscar nominations have a surprising number of female-related nominations. I say female-related nominations (female-related program activities?) because the article takes into account nominations in the Best Actor category for men who were in movies directed by women.

  Unfortunately, I’m not as happy with the nominations as Women’s eNews. The Best Actress award this year will likely go to Charleze Theron for her turn in Monster, which doesn’t make me happy because, as Christopher Null at filmcritic.com put it:

  [Naomi] Watts is an outstanding choice here, but Charlize Theron did the two things that Oscar loves its starlets to do: Gain weight and cry. Non-glamorous always earns the statues. Think Halle Berry in Monster’s Ball… and this year another Monster will do the trick.

  Monster hasn’t deigned to grace my hometown, yet, so maybe I’ll just be floored when I see Ms. Theron’s performance, but I can’t ignore that every article about it has gone out of the way to point out how much had to be done to Ms. Theron to make her “ugly.” The critics are lauding the performance, but they also said that about Halle Berry’s shrieking, hysterical, amateur-hour (but oh-so-unglamorous) Oscar-winning performance in Monster’s Ball. (Women’s eNews article via Ms. Musings.)

• Wampum has a post about a story in the January 31st issue of Le Monde which told the story of a Frenchman who was arrested for making a bomb threat… When really it was just a misunderstanding of language. I’d laugh if I wasn’t at least slightly appalled.
• Trish Wilson has a long, thoughtful, and, of course, good post about “paternity fraud” and it’s origins and implications.
• I have to confess to finding these IBM ads for Linux to be cool, stylish, and intriguing. Then again, I’m a fan of Linux and other open-source projects. If I could find a windowing system that I liked as much as Mac OS X (and an open-source program that could make Flash movies) I’d be sorely tempted to convert.

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