The Nappy Cat Chronicles

Dear MSNBC,

There is no “win” if there is no election. There is no “election” if there is no democracy. There is no democracy if there is a dictatorship.

Do think harder next time,

WJZ

I hate lists like this one. 30+! Must-have! Updated! Missing are the arguments as to why you should be using any of those Firefox 3 plugins. It’s a perfect example of Digg-bait.

There are many plugins to be had but a plugin is useless if you don’t need it. The following are the Firefox plugins that I use and why I use them:

• Adblock (The Original): For an unknown reason, this Firefox 3 incompatible began working with my installation. Though Adblock Plus is just fine if the original does not work with your Firefox 3, I find the original to be more user-friendly and less bulky than Adblock Plus. Now, why should you use either of these? If you like avoid seeing 99% of internet advertisements, these plugins are for you.
• ColorZilla: For the web designer, this enables you to know the html color of any element on a webpage. This is super-neat because it presents you with multiple formats from which to copy the color code. So, for “white”, you can choose between the rgb, white, #FFFFFF, and FFFFFF.
• Download Statusbar: When you’ve downloaded a file through Firefox 3, have you thought, “Damn, that popup window is obtrusive.”? Download Statusbar relegates the downloader to its own bar just above the Firefox status bar. Or, if you prefer, it can add a small icon to the status bar instead.
• Forecastfox: While surfing the internet, have you regularly thought, “Damn, I need to check the weather.”? Arguably the best Firefox plugin, Forecastfox adds weather information to the Firefox status bar. You can go as crazy as you want with current conditions, daily forecasts, extended forecats, weather alerts, and radars.
• IE View: Not all websites play nice with Firefox. Some videos refuse to work in Firefox. IE View adds “View This Page in IE” to your right-click menu. This enables you to open the current webpage in your Windows Internet Explorer.
• Image Zoom: Have you ever thought, “Damn, I wish I could zoom in on that section of this image.”? Image Zoom enables you to do that.
• OpenBook: OpenBook solved a Firefox 2 bookmarking annoyance. It works with Firefox 3 but I have no idea what it does now.
• Pearl Crescent Page Saver Basic: Have you ever needed to take and save a screenshot of an entire webpage? Though it can get hungup on very long pages (such as Mypace profiles), Page Saver Basic enables you to create a screenshot that has adequate image quality.
• QuickDrag: QuickDrag enables you to, first, drag a highlighted word on a webpage and have the word be searched for by whatever search engine you have chosen for the search bar located in the top right corner of your Firefox browser. Second, it enables you to “[s]elect something on a webpage that looks like a URL and then drag-and-drop it anywhere to open the URL in a new tab.” Finally, when you click on an image, drag it, and let go of the mouse button, QuickDrag saves the image to your chosen download folder.
• Sxipper: Sxipper is an incredibly useful plugin that puts your personal profile information and your plethora of username and password combinations at the tip of your fingertips. If you have ever thought, “Damn, this Firefox login manager is the most useless piece of shit in the history of the universe.”, give Sxipper a try.
• Tab Mix Plus: Have you ever looked at the Firefox tab bar and thought, “Damn, I wish I could do this or that with with these tabs.”? Tab Mix Plus might just enable you to do this or that.

If you haven’t read about Democratic Representative Bill Delahunt’s snarky rejoinder to the Republican chief of staff to Dick Cheney and neighborly sociopath David Addington, you can fascinate yourself here. Via John Cole, the red army is so utterly outraged that it’s gonna do something:

This discourse — a member of Congress glad Al Qaeda has a face it can pursue — is beneath the dignity of the Congress and beneath the dignity of civil discourse in this country.

If you do not call your Congressman today and demand the House of Representatives, at the very *least*, censure Congressman Delahunt, well damn us all. We have no right to carry on our fight.

What I hear is the usual “Outdo us on stupid! We’ll show ya!” chatter. So, hell, let’s take a short trip through Republicans-say-the-darndest-things history:

• Bill Frist on Terri Schiavo: “I question it based on a review of the video footage, which I spent an hour or so looking at last night in my office here in the Capitol.”
• Grover Norquist on Barak Obama: “John Kerry with a tan.”
• Bobby Jindal on his support of intelligant design: “I’d certainly want my kids to be exposed to the very best science.”
• Michael Reagan on Howard Dean: “Howard Dean should be arrested for treason and either hung or put in a hole until the war’s over.”
• Danny Bonaduce on Rosie O’Donnell: “Personally I think at this point if anyone had a rope thick enough, I think that Rosie should be strung up for treason…I think you can…If you are offering aid and comfort to the enemy.”
• Michele Malkin on Rachel Ray’s scarf: “[M]any readers have e-mailed about, Dunkin Donuts’ spokeswoman Rachel Ray’s clueless sporting of a jihadi chic keffiyeh in a recent DD ad campaign. I’m hoping her hate couture choice was spurred more by ignorance than ideology.”
• Tom Delay on gun violence: “Guns have little or nothing to do with juvenile violence. The causes of youth violence are working parents who put their kids into daycare, the teaching of evolution in the schools, and working mothers who take birth control pills.”
• Hugh Hewitt on football… and President Obama: “By the way, I — I’m still trying to find two tickets to the Ohio State-USC game. And none of the USC people will give up their tickets to me. I’d pay fair price. They — they know Ohio State’s gonna slaughter the Trojans. They know that they’re gonna slaughter the Trojans, and therefore they do not want me there at the bloodbath, since it’s probably the last football game we’ll ever get to see before the United States gets blown up by the Islamists under Obama.”
• Burt Prelutsky on Michelle Obama: “[A] nasty, bitter, openly racist ingrate.”
• Dick Cheney lying about Chinese oil drilling: “[O]il is being drilled right now 60 miles off the coast of Florida. But we’re not doing it, the Chinese are, in cooperation with the Cuban government. Even the communists have figured out that a good answer to high prices is more supply.”
• Dinesh D’Souza on American leftists: “In reality, the left already has a foreign policy and a strategy, and it is called working in tandem with bin Laden to defeat Bush…[T]he left is the domestic insurgency that provides a counterpart to the Iraq insurgency. It is at least as dangerous as any of bin Laden’s American sleeper cells.”
• James Dobson on disciplining little dogs: “I had seen this defiant mood before, and knew there was only one way to deal with it. The ONLY way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works. I turned and went to my closet and got a small belt to help me ‘reason’ with Mr. Freud.”

On a Wednesday a few weeks ago, I wrecked my car. The next day, I began searching the internet for a car. I considered the Toyota Prius but, as neat as it is, it’s out of my price range. I eventually settled on the Toyota Matrix S. It was the color (Sundance Metallic) that caught my eye.

It’s more car than I’ve ever had and it’s been good to me so far. The 2.4 liter engine gives me plenty of pickup and the storage space is great.

John McCain today:

I will veto every single beer[.]

In other news, today, new polling indicates that John McCain has lost all support among white working class individuals.

Mary Grabar

An Obama presidency would signal the final salvo by the Left in the culture wars. Obama’s advance troops have already taken over our college campuses, have bound and gagged our conservative professors, have ravished our virgins, have pillaged our stores of wisdom, and have ensconced themselves in the thrones of power in deans’, presidents’ and department heads’ offices.

The victory cry is heard across the land in the cheers of Obama’s constituency on college campuses.

This has been going on under the very noses of the Republicans…

[T]he traditions may lead back to the communist ideology of the nineteenth century and then through the heyday of radicalism in the sixties, but the means for inculcation are entrenched…

Obama, with his scantly resume, is an affirmative action candidate. But his record as a “community organizer” places him at an advantage with those who believe in “social activism” in the classroom.

War general? Check. Communist? Check. 60s radical? Check. Welfare nigger? Check. Scare quotes? Check check. Delusional yearning for a time that never existed? Incomparable.

The post-concession articles that I am looking forward to the most are the inevitable insider accounts of the long collapse of the Clinton campaign. Based upon even a cursory review of Clinton campaign news, you have to believe that there are many bruised egos and, if you believe that those involved in her campaign had them, hurt feelings.

All of the above would have been deemed worthwhile by all involved parties had their candidate obtained the Democratic nomination, which, because of the formidability of the Obama campaign and because of the high odds of a general election win by a Democrat, was the political equivalent of winning the ‘08 Super Bowl.

Today, The New York Times is out of the gate with a 5-internet-page article. Some highlights:

The Clinton campaign called a supporter for help. “I’ve got an angry president here and a candidate who wants to know whether or not she won,” a local campaign representative told the mayor, Thomas McDermott Jr. of Hammond, Ind. Mr. McDermott could hear Mr. Clinton railing in the background. “It’s not very often you basically have a former president yelling at you to get the numbers out,” he recalled.

Backed by Bill Clinton, Mr. Penn pushed for aggressive attacks on Mr. Obama, something other advisers resisted. At one point, Mr. Penn argued that Mrs. Clinton should find subtle ways to exploit what he called Mr. Obama’s “lack of American roots,” referring to his Kenyan father and his childhood years in Indonesia and even the offshore state of Hawaii, the campaign officials said. Mr. Penn recommended that Mrs. Clinton own the word “American” — she should talk about the “American century” and her “American Strategic Energy Fund,” and so forth. She should add flag symbols to her logo, he suggested.

In private, Mr. Clinton was making matters worse. On the night of the South Carolina primary, Mr. Clinton called and Mr. Clyburn said he told him to tone down his rhetoric against Mr. Obama. Mr. Clinton responded by calling him a rude name that Mr. Clyburn would not repeat in an interview. Mr. Clinton called back a few days later for what Mr. Clyburn called “a much more pleasant conversation,” but the damage was done. “Clinton was using code words that most of us in the South can recognize when we hear that kind of stuff,” Mr. Clyburn said.

The campaign shifted to a contest for the superdelegates, or party elders and elected officials like Mr. Altmire who can vote at the convention. Mrs. Clinton was too far behind to catch up to Mr. Obama among delegates selected by primaries and caucuses, so she hoped to persuade the superdelegates that she would be the stronger candidate in the fall. Only then did she agree to start calling superdelegates personally, something Mr. Obama had been doing for months.

While Mr. Penn had pushed to go on offense against Mr. Obama, seeing that as the only way to change the dynamics of the race, Mr. Garin steered in the other direction. “There were lots of people who spent a lot of time thinking about what to say about Barack Obama and not enough people waking up every morning thinking about how to make the case for Hillary Clinton,” he said in an interview.

Election night brought home the varied complex personal and political dynamics at play. Mr. Penn, once the most influential voice in the Clinton universe, showed up at campaign headquarters outside Washington to watch the returns but virtually no one would talk with him and he left early.

Joe Andrew, a former Democratic Party chairman who had switched allegiance to Mr. Obama from Mrs. Clinton, faced the wrath of her supporters firsthand when he drove up to the Washington hotel where party officials were meeting last weekend to resolve how to count Florida and Michigan delegates. Protesters shouting “traitor” descended upon his Chrysler minivan, denting it with punches and kicks, he said.