Barrow's "cynical" endorsement of Obama: February, after the Georgia primary.

Thomas's endorsement of Obama: when was it again, Glenn?

This has nothing to do with issues and everything to do with rewarding loyalty. As "cynical" as a February endorsement may have been, it pales in comparison to the cynicism of waiting till it's over. Thomas--for her OWN political reasons--put it off. Now she's paying for it, which is a shame, but that's politics.

What a poster says:

"This lifelong Dem"

What a poster means:

"This Freeper"

Otherwise the crowds with the pitchforks and torches gathering around the other negative reviews at Rotten Tomatoes will come for you too.

PS--You're wrong, by the way.

It will be interesting, I confess, to see how they place this one. But I do think Stephanie is amongst the reviewers who don't see the forest for the variety of trees: there is a unified vision here, and not everyone saw it. It is an ironic vision, but not bitterly so, because it is also redemptive. Those who don't do multivalence very well are going to think it's disjointed as a result.

BTW--the most melancholy animated movie ever was actually the "Valse Triste" segment of Allegro non Troppo.

So while we were watching the film and absorbing the message that our careless creation of waste is killing us and the planet, we were creating waste. Ugh.

Or perhaps, while you were creating waste, you were absorbing a message that undercuts the creation of waste. The sword cuts both ways. To get a message with anti-mass media undertones (amongst a dozen other things) out, one must by necessity employ the mass media. Ideological purity means abandoning any hope of actually making a difference. Welcome to Paradox 101.

It's a parable for a lot of things. To wit: is Disney co-opting Pixar's sould with its marketing machine, or the other way around? I suspect when Disney bought Pixar, it unwittingly planted the seeds of its own change. Time will tell.

Ah, but you see: if they include biodegradable crap instead of the normal crap, it pushes it towards the simple "message film" some critics (not Stephanie) evidently wanted it to be. Another paradox: the louder a message is shouted, the easier it can be to ignore.

I would actually bet that the Pixar folks see the project (insofar as they have anything other than a storytelling agenda) as being more about the end results of humans cutting themselves off from each other and the world, including the symptom of environmental degradation, than a purely "green" message per se.

But that's just a guess from their other work, which, as others have noted, has always been about loss and the fear of loss. If we lose ourselves: to stuff, to mindless media, to the eternally hungry maw of the now, we will of course lose the Earth and everything else too.

Cold. Toddy. Method.

Spotting occurrences of the "As a life long Democrat," macro in troll posts. Seriously, once that phrase appears, you can skip the rest, because nothing they say after it can possibly matter. It's a no-longer-secret code, people. I'm sure it's something they learned at Freeper Troll school, but it's gotten so obvious they need a new one.

Anyone have any suggestions? I'm thinking "As a former campaign worker for Dukakis" or "As a former member of the Peace Corps" myself.

Don't place the changing table next to a wall with a power outlet or phone jack. Trust me.

Blizzard, the game company that owns and runs WoW, kicks people out of the game for buying or selling gold for real currency. They've taken steps to make many of the tools used in the process no longer function in game. That hasn't stopped the activity, but it does put a different light on the exploitation angle, although it shouldn't take much effort to see other historical analogs...

I'm not sure which would be more of a challenge, the old dead Greek guy who didn't know what a cell was or the invisible superhero in the sky who always says what a certain select group of folks need him to.

Was just that, a strategy, not a short-term one-election tactical plan. The goal was to flip enough states this election to make flipping a few more next election more likely, while building political infrastructure in states where we (the Democrats) had none or close to it. You can't sell anything if you don't have people on the ground to distribute it.

There are tactical benefits as well, of course: scaring the GOP enough in places like GA to force them to tack to the crazy right with someone like Palin, a move which has begun to sour independents in a lot of more unsettled states, and which I believe will end up being a net negative when the EVs are counted. That's how you play chess, as opposed to tic-tac-toe, sir.

It does have the special glasses in some theaters. She got that right.

Everything else is up for debate. ;)

Bond was more Danforth than Ashcroft, with bona fide reformer credentials. But power corrupts, and the GOP corrupts absolutely.

PV was originally designed for the space program, wasn't it? Where, ironically, space was (and still is) at a premium? In small scale applications, like running a single laptop or trickle charging a car battery on a parking lot, it's more practical than solar thermal.

When you're talking stuff at the size of a house, or power plant, though--applications where there's room for plumbing--thermal solar concentration starts looking pretty good. I recall research being done on this back as far as the 80s, by McDonnell Douglas of all companies.

Oh, wait, wrong pointless argument. :D