Charles Pierce has a bit to say concerning the upcoming debates:

What do people expect from Romney at this point? He did the fan dance for his lunatic base, and it got him the nomination, but it boxed him in on so many issues that it made running in the general election an almost impossible task even for a good candidate, which he is not. On what issues can he be expected to “knock the president out”? Now, he’s got advice pouring in from the likes of N. Leroy Gingrich, Definer of Civilization’s Rules and Leader (Perhaps) of the Civilizing Forces, whom, it should be pointed out, Romney beat like a drum just at the moment in which Gingrich’s dark star seemed to be ascendant.

Some days, Mr. Pierce is the only reason I have any hope left in the media.

I was trying to install Microsoft Visual Studio Express 2012. I could actually install Visual Studio Professional 2012 with my license. But Visual Studio Professional 2012 is not supported in my arcane, ancient, outdated operating system. You see, this dinosaur still lumbers on on the mummified limbs of Windows Vista. An infinitesimally small number of computers are still equipped with this. According to Wikipedia, a completely insignificant 1 in 12 computers uses Vista. Of course, the Microsoft business model depends critically on releasing a buggy new criminally-overhead-intensive operating system every few years to prevent a truly stable OS from ever existing. In order to induce the rubes customers to step into a fresh pile of Microsoft droppings, all new software should be backwards incompatible. I really dislike Microsoft.

If you think any of the following are true, you should be under professional supervision:

1. Joe McCarthy was not a power hungry drunk with sociopathic tendcencies.
2. Communism has been a serious threat to this country in the past couple of decades.
3. Barack Obama’s birth announcement was falsely entered into the Honolulu Advertiser a couple of days after his birth in Kenya in August of 1961, because a half black/half Jew was pretty much a shoe-in to win the 2008 United States election.
4. “Gold Standard” does not equate to crazy.
5. The use of words “nigger,” “wetback,” “kike,” and numerous epithets related to the female anatomy is appropriate whenever you think none of “those people” are around.

I could keep going, but I think we all know where I am headed with this.

Today, the shuttle Endeavor crossed over Southern New Mexico one last time. It flew from Biggs Army Airfield over White Sands Missile Range and west from the NASA facility on WSMR’s western boundary towards its final resting place at the California Science Center in Los Angeles, CA.

I watched the mated behemoths of the Boeing 747 and the obsolete spacecraft fly directly overhead on its path to eternity. I had seen one space shuttle prior to this day. On April 6th, 1982, I watched as a similarly configured tandem pulled in to Barksdale AFB, LA (or was it Eglin AFB, FL?) on its way from White Sands Missile Range. That vehicle had been the space Shuttle Columbia, which would disintegrate over Texas two decades later.

So my contact with the space shuttle program began and ended with White Sands Missile Range, NM.

This, a short time after the deaths of Sally Ride and Neil Armstrong, makes me mourn the U.S. space program.

Republican politicos count on working class and middle class (for that matter, the lower tiers of the upper class) people to vote against their own financial interest. That much is clear. What is not so clear is why the Democrats allow their opponents to play this game (perhaps it is related to the gelatin-based spinal column of the typical Democratic politician). How difficult would it be to point out that, say, regular people like me individually pay exactly the same amount in payroll taxes as billionaires? We all pay exactly the same percentage of purchases in taxes (subject to some caveats that aren’t germane to this discussion). As long as the uninformed can be led to believe that any major issues exist beyond the direction of wealth redistribution, the Right will win.