Pun Salad

The AP's headline reads "Diverse Group Allegedly in British Plot" And they name the people being held in the car bombing scheme: DeShawn Washington, Peggy Sue Brockelman, Lars Thorvaldsen, Patrick O'Reilly, Pierre Dubois, Nguyen Xuan Huong, Boris Golovastov, and Kumar Patel. Wow, that is diverse!

Oops, sorry. The actual suspects are Muhammad Haneef, Mohammed Jamil Asha, Marwa Asha, Bilal Talal Abdul Samad Abdulla, Khalid Ahmed, Sabeel Ahmed, and two suspects as yet unnamed, but it's safe to bet the names aren't Dave and Debbie.

Now that's not too shocking in itself, but who is the AP trying to kid with the "diverse" headline?

… she was just a little pissed. From tonight's local paper:

DOVER [NH] — A road rage incident that began on the Spaulding Turnpike Friday afternoon ended with a Barrington [NH] woman throwing a bottle of her boyfriend's urine at another motorist whose vehicle she had followed into the city's downtown, police said.

"That's an important statement by Bono."

Representative Mike Pence (R-IN) successfully added an amendment to the Financial Services Appropriations bill last week to prohibit funds from being used by the FCC to "impose the Fairness Doctrine on broadcasters."

We've railed against the move to resurrect the Fairness Doctrine and other "progressive" efforts to squash inconvenient speech before. (Here, here, here, here, and most recently here.) So the passage of this amendment is good news.

Better news: mine own Congresswoman, Carol Shea-Porter actually voted for the Pence Amendment. She joined all Republicans, and 112 of her fellow Democrats in doing so.

115 Democrats voted against. People in New Hampshire's other congressional district will want to know that Paul Hodes was one of them, joining such luminaries as Dennis Kucinich, John Conyers, and Barney Frank.

This is, as near as I can tell, the only time Ms. Shea-Porter has voted against the prevailing lefty-Democrat orthodoxy in her short House career. And just when I thought I had her pegged as someone who would never do that. So I'm pleasantly surprised, good for her. Any chance we could see more of that kind of independence?

At the redesigned American Scene blog, Matt Frost posts on "All Candy All the Time", riffing off the phenomenon of "Chinese Gold Farmers" who are paid actual money to play World of Warcraft or other big multi-user role-playing games, accumulating points (or "gold") for Western players. Those Western players want to get to higher levels in the game, but don't want to spend time actually playing the game at lower levels to accumulate the necessary points. So they effectively pay the Chinese to do that for them.

Bizarre! But what are the implications for—say—computer system administrators, who could also "farm out" mundane tasks to overseas cheap labor? Or—gulp!—perhaps their supervisors will do that anyway?

Dang, just when I was getting the hang of this job.

Anyway, Matt's short post has a lot of interesting twists and turns, and fascinating links you'll want to follow. But I wanted to quote this in particular about those gold farmers:

Through this Ricardian alchemy, players in wealthy nations escape days, even weeks, of drudge leisure.