Please make a soundboard of these Obama MP3′s which I found over here via over there.

• obama_blam
• obama_complicated
• obama_fries
• obama_ignorant
• obama_number
• obama_that_guy

UPDATE: And boom goes the proverbial dynamite: http://obamasoundoff.com/

We were more than a little upset when the plug was pulled in mid-2006, having a happy ritual pulled out from under us so abruptly. But, with the dial already set to the left, it literally took no more than a few days to warm up completely to their replacement, Rachel Maddow, and she continues to win people over, now suddenly the new darling of the talking-head-o-sphere.

And if you haven’t heard: this is must-see-tv. Intelligent, level-headed, and informative news commentary, with some light humor and deft handling of the issues. Check it out. Here is a snippet from one of the many latest raves about her:

Unlike so many televised liberals, who seem almost physically pained by the combative cable-news format, she obviously enjoys herself. A good example came during an election-night panel discussion of Obama’s victory in the Nebraska and Idaho primaries, which Buchanan tried to delegitimize by saying that Obama could only appeal to liberals. Without missing a beat, Maddow responded, “In what kind of a world do Idaho and Nebraska represent the left lane?” She had the entire panel laughing outright. A chastened Buchanan could only manage a wan joke about Marxists.

Not to be trolly, but…. if you substitute the sentence

Apple should design a phone the remains intact when you drop it 3 feet.
to
Microsoft should write an operating system that blocks spyware when you download porn.

would the reactions change from calls for “personal responsibility” to “down with the man!”? I like apple products and all, but try holding them to any quality standard and it seems you’ll get shouted down faster than somebody saying “retard” in a movie.

previously

Jonathan Segura, in support of his novel Occupational Hazards, blogs about Omaha at Powell’s, including a nod to the “miraculously” alive Dave Sink at The Antiquarium (which last I head was going out of business… guess not, just a new location)

Ernie Chambers, no longer in the legislature, is looking for his day in court versus God, seeking an injunction against the violent acts of tornadoes & earthquakes: “If there is a ruling against the existence of God, it will be by the court and not by me.”

Every day there are countless factual errors in your newspaper. I forgive most every one–it’s surely hard work to meet a deadline day in and day out. Every day there are also a handful of cringeworthy efforts at cleverness. These gratuitous wastes of ink are, with rare exception, less forgivable. And when these cloying turds are combined with errors, I feel it my duty to ask you to, please, knock it the fuck off.

You could have been cute by saying something something about “moving the decimal point a few notches to the left” but, no, you had to bring the square root into the equation. (See that, clever pun, eh?). But rest assured, the square root of 1% is 10%, so, good sir, you fail in this sentence: “But for decades he struggled to reach enough people, even though he lowered the necessary figure to the square root of 1 percent. ”

No transcendence for you.

PS: while we’re on the subject of square roots, I dust off my favorite math joke:

Q: What’s the square root of 69?

A: Ate something.

…I continue to love Ernie Chambers:

(09-17) 16:15 PDT Lincoln, Neb. (AP) –

Fed up with the threats, tired of natural disasters, the state’s longest-serving state senator is using his legal muscle against who he says is the culprit — God. State Sen. Ernie Chambers of Omaha sued the Almighty in Douglas County District Court last week.

Chambers, who skips morning prayers during the legislative session and often criticizes Christians, said he filed the lawsuit to show that anybody can file a lawsuit against anybody.

That, he said, was recently illustrated by a federal lawsuit he said triggered his lawsuit against God.

Tory Bowen, 24, sued a state judge who barred the words “rape” and “victim,” among other terms, in the trial of Pamir Safi, who Bowen says sexually assaulted her. Bowen said Lancaster District Judge Jeffre Cheuvront violated her free speech rights.

Chambers said Bowen’s lawsuit is inappropriate because the Nebraska Supreme Court has already considered the case and federal courts follow the decisions of state supreme courts on state matters.

“This lawsuit having been filed and being of such questionable merit creates a circumstance where my lawsuit is appropriately filed,” Chambers said. “People might call it frivolous but if they read it they’ll see there are very serious issues I have raised.”

U.S. District Judge Richard Kopf, in an order last week, expressed doubts about whether Bowen’s lawsuit “has any legal basis whatsoever” and said sanctions may be imposed against Tory Bowen, the accuser, and her attorneys if they fail to show cause for the lawsuit.

The Associated Press usually does not identify accusers in sex-assault cases, but Bowen has allowed her name to be used publicly because of the issue over the judge’s language restrictions.

Cheuvront declared a mistrial in Safi’s trial in July, saying pretrial publicity made it impossible to gather enough impartial jurors.

Chambers says in his lawsuit that God has made terroristic threats against the senator and his constituents, inspired fear and caused “widespread death, destruction and terrorization of millions upon millions of the Earth’s inhabitants.”

Chambers also says God has caused “fearsome floods … horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornadoes.”

He’s seeking a permanent injunction against God.

We craft our identity through pointing all the time. Language is mostly about pointers (“signs”). The list of favorite TV shows, movies, and music on social network sites are a linguistic pointer to these cultural referents. Yet, in a multimedia world, instead of having to just reference them by name, I can reference them by image, video, and audio, pulling a much more rich set of content into the fold. In some senses, these practices are the same as they both involve constructing a semiotic pointer to a cultural object. Yet, because multimedia referents are “hosted”, multimedia pointers can be altered. Furthermore, there’s a perceived cost to pointing (namely, bandwidth). And, besides, we never think of uttering the linguistic referent as making a “copy.”

As remix is ridden with questions of legality, I can’t help but wonder what the legal ramifications of pointer remix might be. We live in a world obsessed with copyright and IP, but isn’t pointing to something fair use? Imagine how ridiculous the world would be if you could only consume, but never link (linguistically or through html)

There’s room for interesting debate about open culture, etc…. this preview [youtube] for a documentary grabs my attention, too… if for no other reason than hearing GWB “sing” Imagine and Walk on the Wild Side.

(more at the OpenSourceCinema page on youtube)

So when it comes to the CDC report, why should you and I be so protective of the feminist message – that women are more than just baby-makers – that we’re willing to risk the health of the babies who are going to be born from unexpected pregnancies whether we like it or not. Yes, there’s a quantitative difference between the outcomes (cancer vs. low birth-weight) but philosophically speaking, isn’t the outraged reaction of both parties to the science-based health-care approach they disapprove of morally fundamentally the same? This isn’t a rhetorical question. I’m willing to believe that my analogy is wrong if you want to talk me out of it.