Politics and other nightmares

My other favorite TV experience of the last two days was the clip, showed over and over again, of President Obama's one-handed fly kill, followed by the exclamation, "I got the sucka." Naturally, PETA can't let something like this go by -- the wanton cruelty followed by such pride in the kill:

The best technological news of my lifetime is that "1984" turned out to be wrong.  The totalitarian thugs have not had control of ever-more sophisticated means of communication, with which they can keep an eye on all of us and even rewrite history to keep us in line. The information revolution hasn't strengthened the oppressors. If anything, it's helped liberate the masses. Remember way back in 1991, when the fax was cutting-edge technology?

This must be my day to pick on Bloomington -- here's another nutty idea from the town that complements IU's gown:

Bloomington - Joie Canada has been keeping shop on the south side of the Bloomington square for almost forty years.

She and her father are pictured in a book, "Goodbye Mom and Pop." The book preserves in print the vanishing locally owned and operated store.

Hope you enjoyed the Indianapolis 500 while it lasted:

We haven't been able to turn on the TV for the past year without being bombarded by digital-conversion hysteria, and still some people don't get it?

Starting in the morning and going into the night, TV stations across the U.S. are cutting their analog signals Friday, ending a six-decade era for the technology and likely stranding more than 1 million unprepared homes without TV service.

A bitter white supremacist has killed a guard at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, and we all need to take steps to make sure something like that doesn't happen again. So we have to reach out to the moderates in the white community -- those who think affirmative action is wrong, those misguided souls who still think judging people on merit alone isn't racist, those who pretend to have philosophical arguments against Sonia Sotomayor -- so that the extremists can see no harm is meant to them, and they will come back into the fold.

You might be worried that the Obama administration is going to get more and more involved in the private sector, so you might be comforted by these words of reassurance:

Talking tough but stepping gently, the Obama administration rejected direct intervention in corporate pay decisions Wednesday even as officials argued that excessive compensation in the private sector contributed to the nation's financial crisis.

Good luck with that:

"We have proven that money is not the answer to great education," says Dr. Tony Bennett (R) Indiana's Superintendent of Public Instruction. Since taking office in January, Bennett has pushed schools to spend more efficiently, "We put a lot of money in education over the last 4 or 5 years in terms of increases and we've really had negligible results."

[. . .]

The city and county haven't always gotten along as much as they should, even when both were run by Republicans. Now, the city seems set on undoing one of the few good city-county cooperative efforts:

Allen County officials have begun to prepare for the city's move from the building that the two governments have shared for four decades.