5 Thoughts for December 29, 2016

1. The Bloggers You Should Be Reading: If you want to cut through the bullshit of the news media and its piss-poor coverage of the real stories in politics, you'll want to read Josh Marshall over at Talking Points Memo and Kevin Drum at Mother Jones. On a daily basis, you will learn more about what's going on in politics and the truth behind the lazy headlines from these two guys, than from watching an entire day of broadcast news. Don't forget to read the comment sections! There are some particularly astute and extremely smart folks who engage in regular conversations. No one is 100% right, but through these blogs and their related discussions, the knowledge imparted will greatly increase your IQ by osmosis. Mind you, there are a lot of other blogs out there that are important to read, but they do not offer the daily churn that these two do.
2. Let the Emperor Take Credit: Emperor Donodus, in all of his glorious narcissism, has been trying to take credit for market movement and job announcements. I say let him. When the guy wants to take credit for the market, he's only thinking about the publicity of the 'now'. As I've said repeatedly, we're already reaching the tail end of the longest (time) economic expansion on record as we're now closer than ever to full employment (peak business cycle); by taking responsibility, his "actions" will now have "consequences" that he and the GOP have no means to disown. I'll do a separate post on this issue, later.
3. Summary of Russia Hacking Evidence: US Intelligence released its report and the two basic takeaways from it are, (1) The Russian hacks followed the same methods as previous ones (full diagram of the process); (2) They got lazy / sloppy and left bits of code that were the "signature" of prior hacks by the Russians. If you were paying close attention to all this, you'd realize that this isn't exactly new -- Crowdstrike basically offered up the summary a while back, but lacked some of the specifics included in the US Intel report. With the new, specific details released, Emperor Donodus will undoubtedly have to switch from offering up excuses (aka lies) about who did the hacking and outright defend the hacks -- Emperor Donodus, after all, must defend his foreign hacker allies as they were the ones who had his back.
4. College Basketball Rules: This is how retarded college basketball rules are: An Oregon State men's basketball player stomped on the leg of a USC player who was on the ground, and got called for a technical, but an OSU player who left the bench (5 feet away) got booted from the game. Is that nuts or what? In college football, both players would have been ejected.
5. Brother Printer: My printer is pretty good, except for one particularly gnawing issue: It auto-cleans so often that I've wasted an entire set of ink cartridges even though I haven't printed more than a couple dozen sheets at most within the past year. I think it has to do with keeping the printer in standby mode instead of just turning it off.