How to Defeat United Airlines' Kiosk Lies

We had a flight today going from LaGuardia to New Orleans, with a connection in Chicago. Upon our check-in, we were told that the flight had been delayed and I would miss my connection. The only available flight was one that connected in Denver, and took 11 hours to complete. A glance at the agent counter revealed an unmoving line full of frowny faces in the same situation as ourselves. So as to not get completely stranded, we accepted the Denver tickets and made our way back home. Of course, a simple Orbitz search showed many other United flights with much less Sisyphean connections. Changing our flight to one with a short layover in Philly, Charlotte, or DC should be taken care of by a simple phone call, right? Well, it did just take a phone call, but it was far from simple.

Co-opted Pagan Holidays are the Best

How was your Easter Monday? Dry? Did family members simply greet you instead of inviting you outside to see your water bottle? No water bucket traps set on top of doors, right? What's that? You didn't get thrown in a pond? In Poland, Easter Monday is celebrated as śmingus-dyngus, a day where it is OK to throw water on anybody, as if to cleanse the very shame of humanity from them. Or, because it is fun. We tried to find the quintessential Dyngus video on what the kids these days call The You-Tube, but really they are all the same blurry, forced motions involved in any family holiday.

Breaking Down the New Orleans Email SCANDAL

As we constantly refresh NOLA.com, looking for the stories that will have the most outlandishly racist comments, stories about some sort of email scandal within the city government kept showing up. Email? Haugh? Now, I'm not a member, but does that have something to do with the Whole Food?

Inside jokes aside, at first this looked too boring to read about, but after enough repetition we finally gave in and read enough to understand this tedious scandal. Since you have a life, we will simply give you the gist of it:

1. Stacy Head, known in some circles as a City Council member and in others as the recipient of the 2006 Mitch Landrieu consolation prize, wants to score as many easy political points as possible before losing re-election and running for a statewide office that a majority of white people vote for. So at a city council meeting she accuses Sanitation Director Veronica White of not sharing every address receiving sanitation service, even though she totally asked for it a bunch of times before. In the parlance of The Wire, this is known as "pulling a Carcetti". Veronica White says that she didn't and after having her job threatened without any good comebacks, leaves in a huff.
2. What could possibly get to the bottom of whether Stacy Head had asked for list before or not? Email! Enter Tracie Washington, activist lawyer, rabble-rouser, citizen journalist, provocateur, ironic Bill Jefferson-supporter, who puts in a public record request for emails sent by city council members, but not all of them:

   After all, her request did not apply to the three black members of the New Orleans City Council, only to their four white counterparts. Likewise, she sought the e-mails of the highest-ranking white member of the recovery office, Jeff Thomas, but not his boss, Ed Blakely, who is black.

   Washington declines to directly say why she sought only white council members' e-mails. That's "beside the point, " she said.

3. Veronica White cuts through all the bureaucratic red-tape, and goes above and beyond her duties as Sanitation Director. She personally goes straight to the IT department, gets the requested emails, and sends them to Washington. Logic may indicate that she wouldn't be so quick to fulfill this request unless she thought something incriminating would be in them, or maybe she is just still angry. Washington wants to put them online for the sake of government transparency, and totally has a Xerox machine that can scan to .pdf really fast ready to go. But then then some bureaucrat shows up and tells her she can't release them yet.
4. Nagin who has likely been under federal corruption investigation since Katrina, without nary a Pampy uncovered, isn't corrupt. But nobody likes having their email read by strangers, and seeing the writing on the wall he pre-emptively deletes all of his old email. Everyone has a new reason to hate on him all over again. We're guessing his day-to-day life is depressing like a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode lately. Another term as Mayor and he could probably give Joe Lieberman a run for his money in a Droopy Dog contest.
   

Leaked! -- The REAL Bobby Jindal Speech THEY Didn't Want YOU to Hear

Good evening, and happy Mardi Gras. I'm Bobby Jindal, governor of Louisiana.

Tonight, we've witnessed a great moment in the history of our republic. In the very chamber where Congress once voted to abolish slavery, our first African-American president stepped forward to address the state of our union.

I was also at one time a skinny kid with a funny name, so I grew up and made everyone call me Bobby. Like the tribal armband tattoo I got in the late '90s, it made sense at the time. I would have kept my real name if I had known it would become such a trendy political asset.

Have Some Human Dignity, For Free

Like a confrontation over a plush Mardi Gras throw coming to blows, Americans like nothing more than doggedly and irrationally pursuing a 'free' item. "Make some noise!" for a free, low thread count t-shirt that will never be worn? Shit, we'd stuff a lit M-80 into our trachea if that would catch the attention of the fluffy mascot with the shirt cannon.

Handling Tools

We're sure this article will get more attention than at our little damp, uninhabited corner of the internet, so we'll keep it brief. But we could not ignore this article from cnn.com, which includes more double entendres than a bad sitcom. They might as well as written an Onion article, and these researchers seem to be aiming straight for the illustrious Ig Nobel Prize. Princeton(!) researchers have proven, scientifically, that upon viewing pictures of women in bikinis, increased activity in the area's of men's brains that correspond to "handling tools" results. Something like that deserves to be quoted for emphasis:

New research shows that, in men, the brain areas associated with handling tools and the intention to perform actions light up when viewing images of women in bikinis.

People have reactions of avoidance toward the homeless and drug addicts, and the opposite for scantily clad women.

We have some good proposals of our own, you know:

• Upon smoking marujuana, is there increased activity in the part of the brain that controls desire for Doritos?
• Why do people not mind the smell of their own farts? Oh, did we just make your mind explode, NIH?
• Scientifically speaking, how bad of pizza will drunk people in the L.E.S. still pay $3 for at 2AM?
• Is there any experimental correlation between female attractiveness and male desire to carry large objects?

If any large governmental funding agencies are willing to fund these groundbreaking research ideas, please deposit the grant money directly into DBB's UBS account.

Did We All Forget How Much Tom Daschle Sucks?

Tom Daschle withdrew his nomination to various Health-related cabinet posts, and some people seem downright wistful about him:

"It really sets us back a step," said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill. "Because he was such a talent. I mean he understood Congress, serving in the House and Senate; he certainly had the confidence of the president."

"I was a little stunned. I thought he was going to get confirmed," said Max Baucus, D-Mont., chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, the panel that would have voted on Daschle's nomination. "It's regrettable. He's a very good man."

"Tom made a mistake, which he has openly acknowledged," Obama said Tuesday. "He has not excused it, nor do I. But that mistake and this decision cannot diminish the many contributions Tom has made to this country."

We always remembered Daschle as the Senate majority leader that was so afraid of being seen as not sufficiently patriotic or tough on terrorism that he led his party to vote exactly like Republicans. Soon enough, with such spineless submissives like him representing the Democratic crème de la crème, people figured they might as well vote for actual Republicans. They lost the majority, and he lost his seat. Basically, Tom Daschle was Jay Bulworth before his crisis of concience in that inspired, shitty movie from the 90's. He was a bigger tool than Carson Daly and Matt Lauer combined.

And now, like that venereal disease you thought you took care of with an entire tube of Neosporin, he returns years later wearing the most douchey red glasses possible. Listen Tom, you are not Thom Daschle, respectable art curator. You're a scumbag lobbyist for the health care industry who would be one of the last people on Earth to effect real health care reform. You had to drop out of effecting fake-change because, rest assured, more shit than free limo rides would have floated to the surface. Tear down those glasses, get some comped Lasik, and keep popping klonopin every time someone says DeLay. A better takedown than ours was done by Matt Taibbi, an actual political reporter:

When Obama picked Tom Daschle to be the HHS Secretary, I nearly shit my pants. In Washington there are whores and there are whores, and then there is Tom Daschle. Tom Daschle would suck off a corpse for a cheeseburger.

It's February, and we are already pretty tired of fake change we have no better option than to accept. As Bulworth himself once opined, "What are you going to do, vote Republican?" The obvious first choice for health care reformist, Howard Dean, must have turned down the fake-change czar nomination before it was offered to Daschlebbychleb. Either that, or Daschlebbychleb was owed a favor by Obama in some sort of Wire-ish scheme.