... is perhaps a kinder description than the more accurate "horrifying dank basement for $695/month."

A truly bad-ass cover, and a truly bad-ass video. I'd never heard of Pomplamoose before, but I am now officially a fan.



(Via kottke, of course.)

This seems like a pretty good idea to me.



Photo by Flickr user cliff1066

The most populous district in America right now, according to the latest Census data, is Nevada’s 3rd District, where 960,000 people are represented in the House by just one member. All of Montana’s 958,000 people likewise have just one vote in the House. By contrast, 523,000 in Wyoming get the same voting power, as do the 527,000 in one of Rhode Island’s two districts and the 531,000 in the other.

That 400,000-person disparity between top and bottom has generated a federal court challenge that is set to be filed Thursday in Mississippi, charging that the system effectively disenfranchises people in certain states. The lawsuit asks the courts to order the House to fix the problem by increasing its size from 435 seats to at least 932, or perhaps as many as 1,761. That way, the plaintiffs argue, every state can have districts that are close to parity.

“When you look at the data, those are pretty wide disparities,” said Scott Scharpen, a former health care financial consultant from California who has organized the court challenge. “As an American looking at it objectively, how can we continue with a system where certain voters’ voting power is substantially smaller than others’?”

This may be the best music review I've ever read. A sample:

1967 proved to be a turning point for the Beatles—the overwhelming lack of public interest made touring a fiscal impossibility, subsequently forcing them to focus exclusively on studio recordings. Spearheaded by the increasingly mustachioed Fake Paul, the four Beatles donned comedic Technicolor dreamcoats, consumed 700 sheets of mediocre acid on the roof of the studio, and proceeded to make Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a groundbreaking album no one actually likes. A concept album about finding a halfway decent song for Ringo, Sgt. Pepper has a few satisfactory moments (“Lovely Rita” totally nails the experience of almost having sex with a city employee), but this is only B+ work.

I should say up front that I'm a huge fan of Timmy so maybe I'm oversensitive, but isn't this kind of a weird thing to say?

In the same way that a child's bedroom isn't the same without a favorite old teddy bear or a beloved, threadbare old blanket, Fenway Park isn't the same without Tim Wakefield.

Threadbare?

Photo by Flickr user Darren Hester

This is almost entirely wrong-headed: the point of stimulus aid to state and local governments isn't to save state and local government jobs. The point is to provide fiscal support so that states, which generally have to balance their budgets, don't make pro-cyclical spending/service cuts or have to enact tax increases during a recession.

Photo by Flickr user JOE M500

I'm honestly confused about why I'm not supposed to shop there. I understand that CEO John Mackey is kind of a libertarian goofball and that he's recently expressed opinions about health care reform that are consistent with his goofball libertarianism.

But: is Whole Foods, as a corporation, lobbying against health care reform? I haven't seen any reporting that this is happening. Are we honestly boycotting Whole Foods in an attempt to change John Mackey's mind? That seems like a pretty unlikely outcome, and a pretty staggeringly disproportional tactic.

Who cares what the guy says in the Wall Street Journal? And why should I base my grocery shopping on it?