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We all remember the Muppets growing up and we all have our favorite sketches.  The Mahna Mahna sketch has long been one of my favorite.  Well move over Snowths, and make room for Queen, who was the inspiration for this soon to be viral video.

Pure gold…

I wasn’t aware of this previously, but according to the recovery.gov website that tracks the spending of stimulus funds, Minnesota has a 00th Congressional District.  I’m not aware that anyone else has declared their candidacy so I am.  I’m officially running for US Representative for Minnesota’s 00th Congressional District.  I’d like to start by announcing that I support increase funding for cemeteries because I assume the dead are one of the bigger voting blocks for this Congressional District.

Since I’ll presumably be busy running for this newly announced office, you’ll have to satisfy yourself with some linkiness.

There is something else to the polls besides what they say.  If you look at them together they tell a hell of a story.  Originally only Rasmussen had Obama below 50%.  Then Quinnipiac did and then Gallup did.  Here is why that’s interesting and meaningful.  Rasmussen uses likely voters in it’s polls, making it the most accurate election-wise.  Quinnipiac uses registered voters, less accurate and tends to favor Democrats.  Gallup and others use adults, which heavily favors Democrats and is virtually meaningless to predict what an election will say.  Which means that Obama was already doing poorly where it counted.  The cancer has spread amongst independents and now he’s doing poorly even by measures where he should be heavily favored.   This anti-Obama sentiment is here to stay and it’s spread to independents and moderate Democrats.  Good luck in 2010 Dems.

Yet another reason why I don’t give to political parties, only candidates.  Quite frequently the people that run parties are incompetent boobs.  Here is another fumble by the King Boob.

The Lacey Act is a great example of government overreach gone insane.  This act alone makes virtually anything you do a federal crime.  Now thanks to an overlooking passage in the last Farm Bill, I think I can safely say we are ALL felons according to the law….unless, of course, you own nothing that is made of wood.

About himself, the president speaks loudly. For America, he carries a small twig.

No wonder the global warming scare mongers keep claiming the science is settled.  It’s easy for that to be the case when you manufacture all the science.  Here’s a pretty good index into some of the more interesting (damning) emails.

Surprise, Al Gore sucks at science.

Amazing.  Democrats insist we treat illegal aliens just like citizens, granting them all the benefits of that status.  Apparently the exception to that is paying taxes, as Reid’s health care bill penalizes citizens with additional taxes, but illegal aliens are specifically exempt from paying health care taxes.

Wow, this ACORN thing isn’t over.  Now Breitbart has hold of a big stack of papers that they apparently dumped in a public dumpster right before the Attorney General visited their office.  Plus apparently there are more videos of ACORN people doesn’t naughty things….and if Eric Holder doesn’t investigate, Breitbart will release them right before the election.  I don’t think there is enough popcorn in the world to handle this political theater.

Obama is breaking the middle class tax pledge….again.

The law of unintended side effects….this healthcare boondoggle is going to make something as pure and altruistic as blood donation very expensive.

It’s not going to be abortion, or deficit spending or the public option that kills healthcare.  It’s going to be the cuts to Medicare that will invoke the wrath of seniors and kill this bill.

Apparently Democrats have already forgotten that they spent the last eight years waving pictures of Hitler around and calling our President Chimpy McBushHitler

Palin now has a higher favorability rating that Obama.

So when a ship was unarmed it got hijacked by pirates.  When they armed the ship and pirates tried the second time they were repelled.  Why aren’t we arming ships again?? I mean besides pansy-assed Europeans wetting themselves at the idea of firearms.

Rep. Cleaver wants today to be complaint-free Wednesday.  Come on Cleaver, with this Congress if I took a day off of complaining

Five Terrible Cruelties of Liberalism

90,489 jobs not really created “or saved” by the stimulus

FoxNews is the most balanced of the networks, here’s the data to support.

Wow, you know things are bad when even the communists in China are concerned about the breadth of Obama’s socialistic ideas.

Obama is STILL blaming Bush for the state of the country….wonder how long that will last….two years? Four? Ten?  Never realized Bush, a mere mortal, was that all-powerful….I guess I would have thought a Messiah could top that.

And you thought Janet Reno was funny on the dance floor.

The Large Hadron Collidor is….well, colliding.  World still hasn’t ended.

Is your Hope fading?? Take what little Change you have left and buy this T-shirt.

Chicago politicians prove that gun control laws are only for the little people (you and me), but apparently don’t apply to politicians.  Their reason is they need them for “self defense”.  Apparently the rest of us were going to use them for door stops.

The Congressional Budget Office had predicted that the recession would start to recover by the second half of 2009 without the government doing anything. Well we’ve spent all this money, it’s fair to see how it’s working out.

Per statistics from the Department of Labor

Well hell, I’d feel pretty silly right now if I had voted for the guy.

[H/T House Republican Caucus]

Earlier this month, President Obama tried to put aside concerns that those that choose not to participate in the government’s take over of health care would be subjected to fines and possibly prison terms.  It’s a very real concern, as under the House bill you very well could do jail time for refusing to participate in the government’s so-called “public option”.  President’s Obama explanation for this? Well, about as competent as you’d expect.

“What I think is appropriate is that in the same way that everybody has to get auto insurance and if you don’t, you’re subject to some penalty, that in this situation, if you have the ability to buy insurance, it’s affordable and you choose not to do so, forcing you and me and everybody else to subsidize you, you know, there’s a thousand dollar hidden tax that families all across America are — are burdened by because of the fact that people don’t have health insurance, you know, there’s nothing wrong with a penalty.”

It’s a comparison that’s easy to make, and it’s easy because it’s intellectually lazy (I thought only Bush did that) and ignores a not-so-subtle difference between the two.

With auto insurance you are required to have it if you own an automobile and intend to drive it on public roads.  If you only use public transportation, there is no requirement to buy auto insurance.  Or if you intend to only drive on private roads, say a dirt track in your backyard, you are similarly not required.  These all present a basic choice, if you want use public roads you have to agree to certain conditions.  Conditions such as speed limits, traffic laws and auto insurance.

Whereas health insurance is required if…well if you are breathing.  And while I suppose one has a choice on whether they do that, it’s not much of a choice, what with death being the consequence.  Wow, when you really look at it, this whole public health insurance thing is just full of “death panels” isn’t it?

For a President that is supposedly supposed to be super intelligent and certainly nothing like the supposed simpleton like Bush, making such a lazy and easily refuted justification for criminalizing your simple existence is just plain stupid.  Particularly when you consider that apparently the simple act of existing is more worthy of criminal prosecution than illegal aliens violating actual laws.

So a couple days after the Droid was released I picked one up and since then I’ve had a number of people ask about it.  I’ve had a few weeks to get used to it so I thought I’d toss up a review.  Keep in mind I’ve been aggressively opposed to smartphones in the past and only very reluctantly admitted the need for something other than a phone that simply dials numbers.  So while I’m a computer geek, I can be a bit of a technophobe at the same time.

Hardware

It’s solid, and by that I mean heavy for it’s size.  For me this is a plus.  I’ve had phones I thought were going to fall apart in my hands and I hate that.  With the droid it’s solid and I have no worries about whether I should pack it in cotton to keep from breaking it.  The plastic case is solid and I’m not worried about it getting cracked by any day-to-day activity.

Only thing I was concerned about was the display, seems every phone with an external screen I’ve had gets scratched up just from being in my pocket.  Within a year it’s barely readable.  But they did have “screen protecters”, basically a thin film you apply to the screen that they gave me with the phone.  However, after viewing this video my worries are vastly misplaced.

One complaint is the placement of the camera/flash on the back of the phone.  If you’re comfortably holding the phone it’s placement is at a natural point where your fingers are likely to wrap around back of the camera.  More than once I’ve tried to take a picture only to see a black screen as my finger is covering the camera.  This is also a problem when not using a camera because it uses the camera reticle to detect the brightness of the environment to set how bright the room is.  Fairly often in a bright room my phone display has gone very dark as my finger has accidentally slide over the camera reticle.

Keyboard

A slide out keyboard that is impossibly thin.  Some have described it as clunky but I’m pretty happy with it.  It’s by no means especially comfortable but then again any keyboard smaller than a full sized ergonomic really isn’t that comfortable.  But the buttons are about as small as they could be and still be usable by men’s fingers. There is a “clicking” feeling when pressing the keys so you know that you succeeded.  In fact that biofeedback is a common, and very welcome, feature through the phone.

There is also an onscreen keyboard via the touchscreen but I haven’t used it much as it seems a bit silly using a cramped onscreen keyboard when I have a full slide out available.  And it is cramped and my fat fingering gets the wrong letter fairly often.  But it does have keyword suggestion while you type which is nice.  In fact it would be nice if the physical keyboard had the same feature.

Touchscreen Display

Quite frankly the screen is huge and is incredibly sharp and readable.  I honestly have no idea what the resolution is but it must be incredibly high as maps (especially satellite images) are impressively sharp.  I don’t think my desktop screen is this sharp.

The touch feature is pretty nice, although it prefers a light touch as opposed to jabbing.  On the plus side though a heavy touch isn’t necessary as once again biofeedback, called “haptic feedback”, cause the phone to slightly vibrate when you select something.  It’s such a natural effect I didn’t even notice how much it helped until I accidentally turned it off once.

The screen presumably uses the heat of your fingers to detect your touches, and it’s not very sensitive because this will not work if you are wearing even thin leather gloves.

Software

Overall very good, the Android OS is solid and fast.  Response time is good.  Stability is actually fairly decent.  I have had a few times where I had to force an app to close via the OS but I’ve never had a hard lockup.

Battery Life

The Achilles’s Heel.  If there is a major minus for the droid, this is it.  Although to be fair it’s been hard for me to judge and I’ll explain why.  First week I had it I was deer hunting,  I was in backwoods and swamps a lot, not exactly hospitable signal wise so I was forgiving lack of battery life.  But when I got back and spent most of my day in the office, frequently I would notice my phone blinking red in the afternoon indicating the battery was at less than 15%.  Half a day taking only the occasional call is not cause for a battery to drain, especially considering the factory specs say it should last 9 hours of constant use.

I did my research online and found plenty of others with the same complaint, although some of them exchanged the phone for a new one and had much better results.  After calling and confirming this with Verizon, I went into a store to do exactly that.  Only in the store I was told there were restocking fees and all sorts of paperwork.  What I wanted was what I paid for….a working phone.  Only after much arguing did I get them to mail me a new battery.

I installed it and so far it’s worked pretty decent.  Although I also did a little more research and learned that the Droid ships with all the bells and whistles turned on.  And if you turn some of them off, it greatly assists in battery life.  This is an area for improvement by Motorola.

Camera

The camera is very respectable for a phone camera, but it’s not going to replace your regular camera.  Camera is 5 megapixels and uses a flash.  Press down the button halfway and it auto-focuses, press it all the way to take a picture.  The button is a little quirky that way in that the halfway point is very subtle.  But it’s not bad.

Connectivity

Here is one huge point the Droid has over the iPhone, the Verizon network, biggest 3G network of all the providers.  The network has speeds up to 1.4 MBs, which means that for most of your functions you’re in good shape but I wouldn’t do any major web browsing with it.  The 3G connection is a bit quirky as it seems to fluctuate on and off a bit but it’s always reliable.

It also has wifi capabilities, and when it detects a wifi connection it knows how to connect with it automatically switches to that rather than the 3G Verizon network, which gives you greatly improved speed.

Bluetooth

Like every other phone it does bluetooth, but it seems to be a step backwards from my old phone.  On my old phone the phone interacted with the buttons on the bluetooth headset.  A click of the button activated the voice recognition software of the phone, or if in a call it hung up the phone, making hands-free calling very easy.  With the Droid it seems to ignore any button presses on the phone and has no settings to do otherwise.  Pretty disappointing for a phone marketed with the phrase “In a world that does, Droid does”.

GPS

It’s fully understandable why Garmin’s stock plummeted when the Droid was announced.  In fact anyone that buys a Garmin at this point either has too much money or is just plain stupid.  The phone is a wonderful GPS device and more than comparable to ANY other GPS device.  The phone is hundreds cheaper than any GPS device and rather than having to pay extraordinary fees to update the maps, Google is updating the maps for free.

The driving directions are pretty good as well.  I’ve driven to several destinations with the Droid and my Garmin side-by-side, and the Droid performs just as good or better on most everything.  The Droid has the advantage of automatically taking traffic into account which allows it to truly plot you a faster route.

That traffic calculations are probably the one downside of the Droid’s GPS.  On trips to rural areas where Google doesn’t have traffic information, the Droid seems to assume moderate traffic.  Hence, at first, the Droid says a two hours drive from western Minnesota is going to take three hours.

Email

You use GMail by default but it lets you setup up a POP3/SMTP email account.  And to be honest setting it up is easier than Outlook Express.  You can use a combined inbox of setup separate inboxes for each account.  Simple and easy to use.  Can’t ask for much more.

One downside is that when you delete emails off the server, they delete from your Droid inbox as well.  Would be nice if there were an option not to auto-sync quite that completely.

Calendar

Integrates very nicely with Google’s calendar.  Hard to say much more.  It does exactly what you want and expect it to do.

Messaging

Text messaging conversations are organized into threads with previous messages sent/received from a contact being displayed just above.  Very well organized and very intuitive setup.

Contacts

This was one of those areas in which I took a double take and asked “How did it do that”.  I had put my Facebook login into the phone so I could use it to check Facebook before I got around to tweaking my contacts.  When I got to my contacts I found the Droid had synced all my contacts with the information on their Facebook page, including their picture.  Very nice especially since I didn’t have to do anything to make it happen.

Voice recognition

It’s less than what I expected, especially on contact names.  The accuracy could use some improvement.

Phone

Clear sound, easy to use.  When dialing it pops up the name, picture and number of the person you are calling.  Allows you to turn on/off bluetooth, mute or speaker phone right from the interface.  While the call is going on the screen darkens to saves battery.  That is a little inconvenient if you need to do something on the phone during the call, such as look up another person’s number.  But it’s a mild inconvenience for saving battery life, which as I mentioned before requires all the help it can get.

Browser

Proprietary browser of Google’s design specifically for Android.  Does all the basics…bookmarks, history, cookies, save passwords, etc.  You can use tabbed browsing, with up to six tabs.  Double tap to zoom and use a flicking motion to move around the page.  It seems to automagically detect column widths, because the zooming seems to automatically zoom just enough to fill the screen with the main part of a webpage.  Very nice implementation.

The Market

This is where you can download additional apps, and there are apparently thousands of apps.  Although this is an area people keep saying the iPhone dominates the Droid, in the number of available apps.  I just don’t see it.  Perhaps I’m just not using my phone to it’s full potential, but I haven’t found something I couldn’t find an app for in Droid’s Market.

Only real improvement I might like is a desktop interface for the market.  Sifting through thousdands of apps on the droid can get tedious and it would be a lot easier at a desktop and then have it push the app to the Droid via the USB interface.

Overall

Excellent phone.  You won’t be disappointed if you can deal with the battery issue, or if that gets resolved.  Put it on the charger each night and turn off the features you won’t use.  If you’re going to use it heavily, it might not be a horrible idea to grab an extra power cord and charge it occasionally from your work PC during the day.

I think I just permanently scarred my neighbor’s kids.

We wanted the antlers off the buck my uncle got deer hunting this year.  Instead of just cutting off the antlers the butcher basically gave us most of the head.  So I was in my backyard sawing off the part I wanted.  I was having a tough enough time trying to saw (fractured skull from a head shot), and didn’t notice five kids lined up at the fence watching.

I noticed when I lifted up the head to check my cut and some stuff (you guess) came out with a splat and I heard a chorus of “eeeeewwwwhhh!”.

Damn, hope they didn’t hear me cussing.

“About himself, the president speaks loudly. For America, he carries a small twig.”

– Mark Steyn

Construction contractor Dan Powers, of Burnsville, has announced he intends to challenge Rep. John Kline, for Minnesota’s Second District, in 2010.  And from his statements so far, he’s fully embraced the sacrificial lamb role for which he’s destined.

Powers says Kline’s stance against earmarks has hurt the district. He says he wants universal health care and a public health insurance option.

Universal health care with a public option?? The same plan that turned out people at townhalls all over the country and has been polling absolutely horrendously for months.

But his signature issue seems to be earmarks, also known as pork, in which he wants as much as he can get.  Which is an odd stance to take since even President Obama famously lied, “Absolutely, we need earmark reform. And when I’m president, I will go line by line to make sure that we are not spending money unwisely.“  He has declared that he won’t sign bills with earmarks on them, something he’s broken over and over but rhetorically he is against earmarks.

Perhaps Powers would like to explain with both Kline, Obama and the American people against earmarks, how he could possibly regard them as a good thing.

It seems that Powers platform can be summed up as “I’m for whatever the public doesn’t want”.

Best of luck Powers, you’re going to need it.

I haven’t been much of a fan of Senator Graham for, well ever, as near as I can remember.  However, he summoned intelligence, foresight and outright cleverness in completely destroying Attorney General Holder in committee.  There really is no other word for it.

Holder’s lack of intelligence and/or preparation are laid bare for all to see in this exchange.  And quite simply it is adequately demonstrated that as much as Holder likes to claim otherwise, there was little to no research done before decided that KSM would be tried in federal court instead of military court.  Having demonstrated that the only explanation for this reversal is that this was purely a political ploy….but one that may have dangerous implications for our national security, both none and in the future.

In the meantime we get to watch and snicker at Holder.  Although to be quite honest I almost feel a little bad for him about halfway through.  Graham knows he’s got him and just keeps piling on.

I think he might be trying to pull off the “thoughtfully contemplative” defense.  You know it, or at least you’ve seen it, when you or someone else is sideswipped with a question you weren’t expecting and you pretend to be deep in thought to stall for time in hopes of a miracle.  It’s also a ploy that Obama frequently uses in speeches to give him a intellectual aura.  Obama pulls it off, Holder just looks dumb.