Twitter is a website with excessive valuation, no value and repugnant values.  They up and censored @Sarahs_View, our helpful utility designed to present Sarah's viewpoint on a wide range of issues.

This flagrant act of censorship must be refudiated.  Fortunately, our ace fictional lawyer, Burt Wainwright, is building an airtight case even as we speak.  Prepare for a subpoena, Biz Stone!

In the meantime, you can entertain yourself by watching the Taiwanese view of Sarah:

If I want to watch the news in NYC, I tend to watch NBC 4 News.  I'm not really sure why, considering how terrible their website has been.

The site still has their Facebook-like status update at the top of their page (this time: "Locals are intrigued by bed bugs"), and has almost no news.

8 million people here, and THESE are the "Featured" stories in New York City today?

Need cash quick?  Here's some despicable sales tactics culled from real life headlines.*

1. Troy Poughkeepsie of Pottawattamie, Iowa married Albany Syracuse in order to earn her trust.  After convincing her to purchase a novelty ice cream scoop, Troy pocketed his $.30 in commission and disappeared into the night to find another sucker on whom to repeat the scam.
2. Tina Dickweed of the Southeast Ypsilanti McDonalds convinced a fat customer to super-size his meal by smiling at him, even though she was born without emotions and does not understand the actual value of a smile.
3. The East India Trading Company forced the dodo bird into extinction, then disbanded  into several subsidiary "dodo commemorative plate" shops.
4. Brutus Punchenheimer sold Myron Nerdleton a "not getting your face kicked in" in exchange for "all your lunch money."  This was widely considered unethical because Myron paid but never received his "not getting your face kicked in."
5. Urrr the Cavewoman sold cave insurance policies to Triceratops, even though Urr the Cavewoman did not understand the meaning of the word "cave insurance." 
6. God and her priestly cohorts have reaped tons of money from the marriage industry simply by creating a species hardwired to pursue monogamous relationships.  The especially nefarious part is her foreknowledge that the wiring was faulty and in most cases the marriages were destined to fail and/or cause misery in one or both parties.
7. Major investment banks like Goldman Sachs made billions of dollars by peddling faulty business deals to the rich and the poor alike, collapsing the global economy, and shaking down taxpayers in the form of a bailout.  This is awesome, and the only item on this list you should try at home.
8. Professor Doomsday, the evil mastermind behind the sinking of Udwajala Island and Auckland's dreaded spork rain, made millions selling an antidote to "Death Flu," even though he never bothered to engineer the supervirus in the first place.
9. Previous generations sold themselves on investing in the potential of their children, then screwed themselves by raising their kids to be rotund, helpless pukes.

To get more of these, put $1000 in unmarked, non-consecutive bills in an envelope and give it to me.

* My imagination

I was very happy to hear about the Journo-List mini-scandal, an alleged left-wing conspiracy.  Basically, a bunch of lefty reporters and bloggers, led by man-child Ezra Klein, formed an email list to coordinate strategy and messaging.  Perennial outsider Tucker Carlson got jealous and started leaking these e-mails on his website, the Daily Caller.

As no stranger to elitist e-mail lists, it was easy for me to reconstruct how the typical JournoList email chain went: 

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From: Ezra Klein
Subject: Global Warming

Is it just me, or are things getting hotter... aww yeah!

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Reply From: Paul Krugman

Ezra, please remember to post [NSFW] in the subject line of any email with explicit material.  The NY Times HR desk says I'll be fired if I'm caught looking at porn at work again.

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Reply From: Ezra Klein

Sure thing Paul.  On an unrelated note, you might enjoy this list of US Postal +4 Codes reverse sorted by gross GDP.

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Reply From: Paul Krugman

Fool me once, shame on you, Ezra.  Fool me six times, shame on me.

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Reply From: Matt Yglesias

While we're on the subject of global warming, I find it somewhat fascinating that implementation of carbon taxes would be politically not dissimilar to implementation of cap and trade. Of course, theres many facets that are actually dissimilar, and the political aspects are not the only aspects meriting consideration.  There's also things about it which I find to not be fascinating, or which somebody other than me may not find fascinating.  However, as a general rule, one could assert with at least some confidence taht it's at least somewhat fascinating, except for when it's not.

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Reply From: Nate Silver
Attached File: GlobalHeatRecord.xlsx

Good points, Matt.  I thought this relevant.

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Reply From: Ezra Klein

Attached File: GlobalHeatRecord.jpg

 

Not everybody has the latest copy of Excel, poindexter.  I've attached a copy everybody should be able to read.

 

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Reply From: Paul Krugman

 

Ezra!  Cut it out!

 

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Reply From: Jeffrey "Danger" Toobin

 

sup dawgs. bumped into tucky c at the clizzub last night.  he wants to score a hookup to jlist.  told him to SIZZUCK DEEZ NIZZUTZ!!!!!

 

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Reply From: Nate Silver

 

FWIW, I ran transcripts of Tucker Carlson's latest 55 media appearances into a simplistic regression model I constructed which considers factors ranging from word usage, partisan leaning (sometimes referred to as house bias) and bowtie color.  I caution that the results are preliminary, and may change as the model gains sophistication and rigor.

 

At a 95% confidence level, I can place Tucker Carlson's ideology between the spectrum of "somewhat liberal" and "somewhat conservative."  (For more rigor as to the definition of these terms, I direct you to my blog).  To translate into plain English, with a margin of error of just a few percentage points from the mean ideological affinity of "moderate", there's a greater than 95% confidence that 99% of the time Mr. Carlson will express an opinion within three standard deviations of the median.  This means he's liable express an opinion on, say, tax incentives, but unlikely to call for something extreme like nuking Mexico.

 

What does this mean for our e-mail listserv?  I'm not basing this on any kind of numbers, but my hunch is that he likes us and wants to be our friend.  I'd recommend admitting him, as it could ultimately slant the ideology of his Daily Caller website in our favor.

 

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Reply From: Ezra Klein

 

Nate, you're annoying me.  Look behind you, a three.

 

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Reply From: Nate Silver

 

Really?!?  Where!!!  BRB...

 

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Reply From: Matt Yglesias

 

To change the subject briefly, has anybody else noticed that Republicans can be less than honest in their negotiating tactics?  I've been thinking about it lately, and it seems like sometimes they say things which later turn out to be untrue.  Perhaps this is a series of accidents, but I'm starting to think it's happening regularly enough to be not be deliberate.  

 

But if this is indeed true, I can't figure out what Republicans would stand to gain by speaking dishonestly in negotiations.  After all, everybody knows honesty is the best policy.  And if people start to distrust them, then it would leave them in a weaker negotiating position.

 

The only logical course of action is to continue to negotiate in good faith with the Republicans.

 

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Reply From: Ezra Klein

 

Geez, you all are such a bunch of weenies.  Have you never read anything by Machiavelli?

 

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Reply From: Paul Krugman

Dammit Ezra!

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I've always had trouble getting into James Joyce.  So I fantasized... what if he had written something I was already familiar with, and simply translated it into his bizarre speak.

Fortunately, as with most things, there's an RPN for that.  So without further ado, I present highlights from the James Joyce mashup versions of other famous literary works.

A Portrait of the Artist as the Invisible Man

"Admiring the three months tied up the window before the lower part of sodawater syphons and was not I had sallied forth ten minutes ago as it before Marvel was lit and he looked more. In a hot time it seems to go back to walk in the road yelped and bless me some way had really hurt me people. Like what I ran round the band too discouraging. Then the sunset light and were full of stone his burden. My pipe is to the afternoon throng of five minutes he ain't never she said the big spectacles they settled the band too discouraging. Spurted sir! And he said Mrs. Mrs! A gentleman killed besides his mouth. he said the shoulder as she rain. Hall. His face thud thud came hoarse and I swung the crowd chanting in the hill? He held a seeing man. Hall was still bright day in answer to the northward corner of the cab and her retreating feet. My pipe is out of a moment I followed in a bit by me nose down to have suffered was arrested."

The Old Man and the Ulyssea

"Tell it: He is what they spoke politely about him carry them. Well may eat at and then dropped off and it made fun of the Mosquito Coast and the worst form of the sea were the sturdy fibered guano and I cannot see the top into the east a fish and it was a lucky boat shiver and of the end of unlucky and it junipery or did not leave me in Havana. Of course. Stay with two men staggering at and a fishless desert? The successful fishermen of his hands had taught the boat! Can you hook something that made the shortlegged bergins off the old man's shack. Can I am a boat. He does not. The brown blotches ran well down and I put them. Iknow where we caught three weeks- Others of the gaff and were the boy had never went down to carry them! There was not like the Sacred Heart of the sardines, But he was made me. Two the pyre in some money! There was in the boy had attained humility."

Earlier today, Real Clear Politics claimed not only that Hillary knows where Bin Laden is, but also that Vice President Joe and Osama are apparently in cahoots.  Or as they're known in tabloids... Joesama Biden Laden.  

Sadly, they've since retracted their claim.  And even worse, they continue to ignore the real story on the Mel Gibson / Bin Laden connection!

Not sure about you, but I'll admit it -- I'm addicted to Foursquare, the new(ish) social media game that's rapidly gaining a huge following.  You can collect badges on Foursquare for visiting ("checking in" to) various places around your city.  You can collect badges for checking in to museums, restaurants, parks, and more.

I always want more badges.  As a New Yorker, I'm lucky, because there are more badge opportunities here than any other city or town in the world.

Lately, I've been thinking about other kinds of Foursquare badges that we could create.  Here are some we ought to try:
 

I keep getting these creepy advertisements in the mail from Time Warner Cable.  In an effort to get me to know how much they care about me, they've been sending me customized postcards, such as these: 

I double-dog dare you to make a better one (and by better, I mean creepier).

My iGoogle homepage has a CNN tab to keep me abreast of recent news; the top stories this morning were as follows:

This selection wonderfully illustrates CNN's ratio of newsworthyness - a single celebrity injury is worth more than 43 dead foreigners, which in turn are roughly equal to 10 injured Americans. For future reference, here is CNN's secret NewsWatch advisory system: