Groupon is a site where people can get significant discounts on stuff, with one significant limitation: There have to be enough people taking advantage of a particular Groupon deal for the deal to take effect. If not enough people join in the offer, it is rescinded. The Groupon site works as a great way to provoke word of mouth, as people communicate with others about the deal in order to make sure that the discount is activated.

I’m happy to note that there’s a great Groupon deal for one of the businesses we work with: Skreened. Skreened is a shirt retailer that only sells shirts that are made in the USA, free of sweatshop labor. They’re a super-ethical company, and so they take a portion of their profits and make Kiva microloans to people in developing countries as well.

On top of that, when you buy from our particular Skreened shop, Irregular Apparel, we’ll make a Kiva microloan of our own, plus another donation to a progressive organization. Good things happen all over when you order one of our Skreened shirts.

For the next 7 hours, a special Groupon offer allows you to claim a coupon for a 50 percent discount on a Skreened shirt. The offer is good for a year from the time you claim it. So, you don’t even have to need a tshirt now – just so long as you’ll know that you’ll be wanting a tshirt within the next year, you’re covered.

Today’s Groupon Deal for Skreened has already been activated, too. A minimum of 25 participants was passed hours ago. 123 people are now participating. Why not join in?

What do you call a mineralogist who got fired from the University of Ottawa after he stopped teaching the subject matter of the science courses he was assigned and let his students talk about whatever they wanted in class and gave them all an A+ anyway, who declared that physics is a scientific scam out to get you and that students should refuse to read scientific course curricula, who got arrested when he refused to leave campus, and who blamed the whole episode on “the Israel lobby”?

If he has announced that he thinks global warming is a hoax, and if you are global warming denier Jo Nova, you call him a “physicist” and “former professor and environmental science researcher” and laud his expert opinion. You also treat this as a new scientific defection when actually the story’s kind of old. Anything to make it look like serious science says global warming isn’t real.

Last night I wrote about the Arkansas Tea Party, Inc., a group organized out of a boat manufacturing business that sponsored its own U.S. Senate candidate but has never risen above four-figures in fundraising. While GOP-sponsored “Tea Party” groups operate on multi-million dollar budgets and call themselves “grassroots,” this smaller organization has busted.

Moving next door to Alabama, if we looked strictly at the Section 527 Alabama Tea Party organization, we’d similarly conclude that it was defunct: after incorporating itself in 2007, the group has filed no further reports of any contributions or expenditures, quietly fading into nothingness.

But outside the IRS’ disclosure, another group calling itself the Alabama Tea Party has a Twitter feed that simply retweets Heritage Foundation and Michelle Malkin posts, but its Facebook and website pages are active and have announced planned meetings in five communities over the last three months.

Contrast this to the North Alabama Patriots Tea Party, a website with an event calendar chock full of multiple opportunities to support the Republican party and local Republican candidates.

The more I look at entities using the label “Tea Party,” the more firmly I conclude that there is no single “Tea Party” movement. There are ghost organizations that no longer exist but continue to issue traceable records. There are very large, very well endowed Republican Party front groups. And then there are small groups of people meeting locally on a regular basis, without visits from Sarah Palin or representatives appearing on CNN. I wouldn’t be surprised to see these different sorts of groups heading in different directions in the future.

“And, ladies and gentlemen, while I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as active members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring. I have here in my hand a list of 205–a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in that State Department.

One thing to remember in discussing the Communists in our Government is that we are not dealing with spies who get 30 pieces of silver to steal the blueprints of a new weapon. We are dealing with a far more sinister type of activity because it permits the enemy to guide and shape our policy.” — Senator Joseph McCarthy in Wheeling, West Virginia, February 9 1950

“RT @marklevinshow: The list of known members of the left-wing now-defunct JournoList listserv http://fb.me/E3icTBfz” — Sarah Palin on Twitter, July 21 2010

The following are the wedding notices selected for publication by the New York Times on Sunday, July 25 2010.

The Weddings that Matter
(in order of appearance)

• A couple who met at Harvard, graduating cum laude
• A son of the Ferrers of Southampton and an associate of the Warburg Pincus investment house, to a daughter of the director of the Princeton University Press and a noted author. The couple met at first at Princeton, and again at a get together in the Hamptons.
• A lawyer with the New York firm Debevoise & Plimpton and daughter of a Philip Morris executive, to a Senior Vice President for a company that raises money for hedge funds.
• A documentary producer, author and Fulbright scholar, to a cinematographer. The couple met at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
• Two doctors, one in infectious disease and the other in opthalmology, who met at Penn State.
• The public relations director of the French Institute Alliance Francaise, daughter of the owners of the Kutsher’s Country Club of Monticello, NY, to the executive managing director of the New York stock trading firm Koyote Capital.
• A clinical social worker and therapeutic counselor, to a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects.
• A publicity writer for the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board, to an editor at National Public Radio’s “Weekend Edition.”
• Owner of a marketing company in New Rochelle, New York, to the President and CEO of a bank in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
• Vice President of a New York and Boca Raton interior design firm, to a freelance illustrator and graphic designer.
• Associate with the New York office of Handel Architects, to a senior architect with Herzog & de Meuron Architects.
• Senior tax manager in mergers and acquisitions with Deloitte, to the owner of an art gallery and recent director of retail development for Estee Lauder.
• Advertising and marketing manager for Coca-Cola, to a senior employee benefits consultant. The couple met at Princeton.
• A seventh-grade English teacher, to a high school English teacher. The couple met at Middlebury College in Vermont.
• Medical director of the Neuroscience Intensive Care Unit at Mount Sinai Medical Center, to a computer engineer for Bloomberg.
• Entertainment manager for the New Jersey Nets and summa cum laude graduate from Harvard, to the creative director for Spike TV.
• Special events coordinator for the Peace Corps and daughter of Senator Bill Nelson, to a partner in a Miami law firm.
• Law student, to the director of the Office of Public Affairs at the Justice Department.
• Mathematics teacher, to a legislative assistant for U.S. Representative Jay Inslee.
• 4th grade teacher at the Town School in Manhattan, daughter of the Vice Chair of Young & Rubican and a creative director at Benton & Bowles (two New York advertising firms), to a Vice President at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
• Bond analyst at Citigroup, to a risk management consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers.
• Senior manager of the Sony real estate portfolio in North America, to the North American sales manager for Moreover Technologies.
• Guitarist for Def Leppard, to a representative of a company offering VIP tickets at entertainment events.
• Executive director of a charter school, to a Vice President for Operations in Citigroup.
• Law student, to policy counsel for Free Press.
• Operations analyst for STG Capital Management hedge fund and daughter of the COO for Ernst & Young, to an investment analyst at Marathon Asset Management.
• Elementary school teacher, to a certified public accountant for the New York Times.
• Daughter of a writer for Sports Illustrated and Conde Nast and an estate historian and author of a book about the du Pont family, to a PhD student in cultural geography.
• Daughter of the owner of Lender’s Bagels and president of the United Jewish Appeal, to the head of middle school at a Quaker School in New York City.
• Assistant director of procurement at Stanford Hospital and daughter of the director of emergency department at Exerter Hospital and the program director at the Endowment for Health, to a pediatric oncologist and son of an operations specialist at Deutsche Bank.
• Nursery school teacher, daughter of an investment banker and coordinator of charity events, and descendant of New York Mayor and Columbia College President Seth Low, to an MBA student and son of a managing director at Goldman Sachs.
• Masters’ student in math education and daughter of a private lawyer and a partner at the McGladrey & Pullen accounting firm, to a PhD candidate in computer science.
• Gastroenterology fellow at Boston University Medical Center, to an emergency medicine doctor and clinical instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
• A pair of dancers/choreographers who met at the Merce Cunningham Studio.
• Freelance fashion stylist, to the television director of New York Knicks telecasts.
• Supervisor of clerical staff at the New York Times and playwright, to a news assistant at the New York Times Sunday Business section.
• A pair of rabbinical students at American Jewish University.

The Maine Democratic Party, the Maine Democratic Party Facebook Page, and the Maine College Democrats have called for GOP gubernatorial candidate Paul LePage to account for his apparent support for legalized discrimination:

Tuesday, Maine Democrats called on Paul LePage to clarify his controversial statements on human rights and to reject his Party’s ultraconservative platform. Following the GOP convention in May, LePage was one of only two Republican Candidates for Governor who refused to even reject planks of the platform. Mayor Paul LePage, has openly called for the repeal of the Maine Human Rights Act. The Act prohibits discrimination based on one’s race, color, sex, sexual orientation and religion. The sexual orientation clause was an amendment to the Act that passed with broad support from Maine voters in 2005. Yet Mr. LePage has said, “My thinking would be it clearly needs to be brought back and reformed. It should be challenged and brought back to the legislature.”(http://recordings.talkshoe.com/rss52956.xml)

The problem is, as of this evening the text of that quote can only be found on those three Maine Democratic Party websites and nowhere else. I always like to see the full context of a quote, and that context is unavailable in written form.

What about that hyperlink http://recordings.talkshoe.com/rss52956.xml? Well, it isn’t a direct link to the transcript of Paul LePage’s remarks, the audio of Paul LePage’s remarks, or the video of Paul LePage’s remarks. Unfortunately, it’s a link to a big, long xml file: a list of dozens and dozens of shows of the Aroostook Watchmen, each lasting about an hour. A large number of them might feature remarks by Paul LePage.

In the interest of getting a proper source and context for this quote as quickly as possible, let’s declare a contest.

The first person to post a comment to this post that directly links to the full text, video or audio of Paul LePage’s comments regarding the Maine Human Rights Act wins the contest. The winner gets a free political button direct from me: either the anti-LePage button you see here, any of the other buttons we sell, or even a completely new button that we’ll design and ship for you.

No matter who finds the source for this quote first, we all win. Let’s hop to it!

My 3rd grade son came to me this morning and asked me how to spell the word warrior. I was about to answer, but I gave it a second thought, and told my son that he should look the word up in the dictionary. We have one of those great big dictionaries that has the tabs built into the edges of the pages, so that it’s easy to find each letter.

I got a big scowl when I presented my son with the dictionary. When I came back to check on him a few minutes later, I saw that I had received something else as well: This nice note left on top of the dictionary.

Not helpfull? Maybe it would have been more helpful if he had looked under the letter H.

Yesterday morning, a team of Washington Post journalists unveiled a major new resource called Top Secret America: A Hidden World, Growing Beyond Control. A series of connected web pages identify and connected various government agencies and private companies that are engaged in erecting a new classified surveillance structure in the United States.

The amount of information contained in these pages is initially overwhelming, and it may be hard at first to figure out how useful the information might be. For instance, below is a static copy of Top Secret America’s “interactive” map — to zoom in and use other features, click on the map to be taken to the original website:

Unfortunately, the “zoom” and search by city features are of limited utility because zoomed-in maps (with the notable exception of the Washington, DC area) don’t provide any more detail. It’s perhaps understandable, but there aren’t any names and addresses of facilities or involved corporations or government agencies on the map, no matter how closely one zooms in. But even in the national aggregate, the map tells us a lot. For instance, while these classified organizations are clustered around Washington DC, they’re also distributed in every state, no matter how small that state is in size or population, making these classified industries part of the constituency for members of Congress from every state. The bar below the map with the distribution of classified installations for various government agencies tells us that the parts of government that are least accountable to democratic processes are most in charge of classified activity.

The aspect of the Top Secret America website I think will be of most use is the search function which allows one to find companies or government agencies by type of work or location. Using this function, I can quickly generate a list of 32 government agencies and 36 companies involved in classified activity related to the “War on Drugs”. For each of those agencies and companies, I’m informed of headquarters location and other contextual information. This kind of data would prove useful in determining, say, whether a correlation exists between campaign contributions from companies involved with the “War on Drugs” and a congresscritter’s policy actions regarding the same.

The Washington Post has written a series of news articles connecting the dots in this data in various fashions as well:

… In June, a stone carver from Manassas chiseled another perfect star into a marble wall at CIA headquarters, one of 22 for agency workers killed in the global war initiated by the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The intent of the memorial is to publicly honor the courage of those who died in the line of duty, but it also conceals a deeper story about government in the post-9/11 era: Eight of the 22 were not CIA officers at all. They were private contractors.

To ensure that the country’s most sensitive duties are carried out only by people loyal above all to the nation’s interest, federal rules say contractors may not perform what are called “inherently government functions.” But they do, all the time and in every intelligence and counterterrorism agency, according to a two-year investigation by The Washington Post.

What started as a temporary fix in response to the terrorist attacks has turned into a dependency that calls into question whether the federal workforce includes too many people obligated to shareholders rather than the public interest — and whether the government is still in control…

If you’re interested at all in the expansion of the Homeland Security state, this resource is worth more than a casual look.

Last winter, when there were snowstorms:

Ihatethemedia.com wrote: “Snow, blizzards, ice. Damn that global warming… guaranteed to depress Al Gore. And just as guaranteed to give us a certain amount of perverse pleasure.”

TalkCarswell.com wrote: “I had to push / dig the car out of the snow the other night. Not much evidence of global warming in Essex this week.”

Pubsecrets.wordpress.com wrote: “After this winter, the good folks of Great Britain might be grateful for a little global warming. As for now, even the temperate south of England is about to look like Alaska… Yet I’m sure Prime Minister Gordon Brown will insist on carrying out his mad, economy-killing plans to fight global warming, while elderly Britons have to burn books to stay warm.”

Dailysquib.co.uk wrote: “There have been blizzards and snow storms reported back in Washington DC where Barack Obama is set to return any day after visiting the minus sixteen degrees freezing Global Warming climate of Copenhagen.”

Anhonestclimatedebate.wordpress.com wrote: “SNOW CHAOS: AND THEY STILL CLAIM IT’S GLOBAL WARMING”

The sarcastically named howtohelpsavetheenvironment.com wrote: “Global Warming? 50 Percent Of The U.S. Is Covered In Snow And 80 People Have Died In Europe From The Bitter Cold Just This Month”

Conservative-elephant.com wrote: “Snowstorm Dumps On Global Warming Protest”

Climatechangefraud.com wrote: “As one of the worst winters in 100 years grips the country, climate experts are still trying to claim the world is growing warmer.”

Reformedmusings.wordpress.com wrote: “Record snow fall helps debunk global warming”

Last week, when the entire USA was covered in a heat wave, the south of England blistered, and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration announced that the first half of 2010 was has been the hottest January to June period ever recorded:

Ihatethemedia.com wrote nothing.

TalkCarswell.com wrote nothing.

Pubsecrets.wordpress.com wrote nothing.

Dailysquib.co.uk wrote nothing.

Anhonestclimatedebate.wordpress.com wrote: “One More Look at the Coming Cooling”

howtohelpsavetheenvironment.com wrote nothing.

Conservative-elephant.com wrote nothing, and closed comments on its previous article.

Climatechangefraud.com wrote “As for the declaration that we are experiencing the ‘hottest’ year — this is a purely political statement.”

Reformedmusings.wordpress.com wrote nothing.

Postscript: Last winter was actually one of the warmest winters on record, even though there was snow on some days.

The National Organization for Marriage kicked off its anti-gay bus tour against marriage equality in Augusta, Maine three days ago — and was outnumbered by people showing up to show their support for marriage equality.

If you can’t get actual people to come out and support your cause, you can always pay stock photographers to create a Potemkin village on wheels:

Choose your stock photos wisely and you can take a stand against interracial marriage, too.

“Wood persists in our lives because it is full of surprise and wonder. It was once a living organism that we can grow again and again, knowing that it will be different no matter how hard some of us try to make it uniform. About the only way to get uniformity in wood is to slice it or grind it up and reconstitute it as something else – chip board, oriented strand board, and so forth.”

These thoughts come from the epilogue of Wood: Craft, Culture, History, a book by Harvey Green.

As a proponent of irregularity, I feel sympathetic to Green’s celebration of the inherent nonconformity of wood to the expectation of the human world of mass production. However, my skeptical side also feels compelled to question Green’s judgments.

If we truly value the suprise and wonder of wood, then why are so few of the things in our lives made from wood any longer? Why is so much of the wood we use of the reconstructed sort?

What are the downsides of the hunger for surprise and wonder – for irregularity – that lead us to conclude that it’s better to live in a world dominated by uniform materials and design? What is there in the idea and delivery of regularity that we refuse to relinquish?

What are the implications of these dynamics for the design of Irregular Times? In an online world filled with automatic, processed material, how can we persist in being more wooden?

Back in 2006, the Unity08 corporation formed to select its own candidates for President and Vice President of the United States. Unity08′s pitch: why not have a bipartisan team of one Republican and one Democrat working together in the White House? Given that the office of the President is imbued with power while the office of the Vice President is famously “not worth a bucket of warm spit,” Americans on the left side of the electoral spectrum were naturally suspicious about which party might end up on top when they found that Unity08′s initial incorporation and IRS filings listed Unity08′s place of business as Peak Creative Media and the President and CEO of Unity08 as Jim Jonas, the founder and head of Peak Creative Media. Jim Jonas and Peak have been and still are media consultants for Republican political campaigns. Until registrations were changed to hide this information, Unity08 websites listed Jim Jonas as the registrant.

After this information came to light, Unity08 got itself another, less obviously partisan President and CEO. But now that we’re in the same spot in the presidential election cycle, Unity08′s antecedent finds itself in the same boat all over again.

The two main website names associated with the yet-to-go-online Unity12 Task Force — unity12.com and unity12taskforce.com — have privacy options set for them so it’s impossible to tell who registered them in a direct sense. But Unity12′s new quarterly IRS disclosure posted today tells us a great deal more.

We know that the Unity12 Task Force is headquartered at 1775 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Suite 1212 in Washington, DC: a choice location just a block from the White House. But what else has claimed residence at 1775 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Suite 1212 since the Unity12 Task Force incorporated?

The following is the text of a public whois search for the web site unityforamerica.com, a web site registered for the first time on May 27, 2010 and updated on July 12, 2010:

Registrant:
Americans Elect
1775 Pennsylvania Avenue
Suite 1212
Washington, DC 20006
United States

Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: UNITYFORAMERICA.COM
Created on: 27-May-10
Expires on: 27-May-11
Last Updated on: 12-Jul-10

Administrative Contact:
Jonas, Jim infoamericanselect.org
Americans Elect
1775 Pennsylvania Avenue
Suite 1212
Washington, DC 20006
United States
+1.7202488438 Fax --

Technical Contact:
Jonas, Jim infoamericanselect.org
Americans Elect
1775 Pennsylvania Avenue
Suite 1212
Washington, DC 20006
United States
+1.7202488438 Fax --

And the following is the text of a public whois search for the web site americanselect.org, a web site registered for the first time on June 10, 2010 and updated on July 12, 2010:

Registrant ID:CR51838128
Registrant Name:Jim Jonas
Registrant Organization:Americans Elect
Registrant Street1:1775 Pennsylvania Avenue
Registrant Street2:Suite 1212
Registrant Street3:
Registrant City:Washington
Registrant State/Province:DC
Registrant Postal Code:20006
Registrant Country:US
Registrant Phone:+1.7202488438
Registrant Phone Ext.:
Registrant FAX:
Registrant FAX Ext.:
Registrant Email:infoamericanselect.org
Admin ID:CR51838134
Admin Name:Jim Jonas
Admin Organization:Americans Elect
Admin Street1:1775 Pennsylvania Avenue
Admin Street2:Suite 1212
Admin Street3:
Admin City:Washington
Admin State/Province:DC
Admin Postal Code:20006
Admin Country:US
Admin Phone:+1.7202488438
Admin Phone Ext.:
Admin FAX:
Admin FAX Ext.:
Admin Email:infoamericanselect.org
Tech ID:CR51838133
Tech Name:Jim Jonas
Tech Organization:Americans Elect
Tech Street1:1775 Pennsylvania Avenue
Tech Street2:Suite 1212
Tech Street3:
Tech City:Washington
Tech State/Province:DC
Tech Postal Code:20006
Tech Country:US
Tech Phone:+1.7202488438
Tech Phone Ext.:
Tech FAX:
Tech FAX Ext.:
Tech Email:infoamericanselect.org

Thank goodness we have the public Whois search available: otherwise we might think the organization’s name was American Select. But the whois tells us more than that. We now know that although Jim Jonas is maintaining his old Denver telephone number (out of area code 720), he’s organized at least two websites for an entity that makes its home at 1775 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Suite 1212. From IRS filings, we know this entity is Unity12.

We can find out more than this. Those are awfully recent whois registration updates, aren’t they? Let’s look at the Google cache for that registration and see what it tells us. The old cached whois information for unityforamerica.com won’t stick around for long, so here’s the full text of it:

Registrant:
JKJ Consulting
8020 E Cedar Avenue
Denver, Colorado 80230
United States

Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: UNITYFORAMERICA.COM
Created on: 27-May-10
Expires on: 27-May-11
Last Updated on: 27-May-10

Administrative Contact:
Jonas, Jim jim.jonasme.com
JKJ Consulting
8020 E Cedar Avenue
Denver, Colorado 80230
United States
(720) 256-8956 Fax --

Technical Contact:
Jonas, Jim jim.jonasme.com
JKJ Consulting
8020 E Cedar Avenue
Denver, Colorado 80230
United States
(720) 256-8956 Fax --

What’s JKJ Consulting? It’s not easy to tell right away: after all, a web search for “JKJ Consulting” at 8020 E Cedar Avenue in Denver turns up nothing at all.

Now hang on a moment. The city of “Denver” seems awfully familiar, and an address search might turn up something. But goodness me, we don’t need to go so far as that. If we look back at the new Unity12 quarterly report, we can see that JKJ Consulting was paid $28,000 by the Unity12 Task Force in May and June for “Strategic Planning Services,” “Travel Expenses,” “Software,” and “Domain Name Registrations.” And the listed agent for JKJ Consulting on that whois cache result? None other than the friend of Unity since 2006, Jim Jonas.

It’s been four years since Unity08 started its say-this-do-that, sneaky-Pete, hidden-agenda shell game of a campaign. We can always hope that when the “new” Unity12 debuts its media presence some time later this year, it will ditch its old practices. But then I see this web trail of hidden associations with a Republican consultancy, accompanied with the news that Unity12 has been wholly funded by a corporate takeover artist who’s named himself Chairman.

Well, let’s just say I’m not going to hold my breath.

As Irregular Times has been gathering and sharing a greater depth and breadth of information on the U.S. Congress lately, the possibility of sharing that information over more than one platform has occurred to me. There are a lot of iPhone users out there, and I’ve been interested in writing an iPhone app to share our information on the Congress with those iPhone users.

Actually, it would be more accurate to say that I was interested in writing an iPhone app on Congress. My interest is in the past tense now that I’ve learned that any developer for the iPhone must use a Mac computer with not just OS X but the very latest operating system (OS X Snow Leopard, released less than a year ago) installed. The cheapest new Mac, the anemic Mac Mini, runs at $700, and the cheapest refurbished Mac sells for more than 900 smackers on the Apple website. After that, you’ve got to pay Apple $99 a year for the privilege of creating programs for their users. $799 plus another $99 every year in order to develop a free app for the iPhone? Somebody stop me!

I started off my programming life on the Apple II, but left Apple and the Macintosh brand in the 1990s after I found myself needing utilities and programs that Apple and its approved partners just didn’t make available. The reason why such a variety of programs weren’t available for Macs is the same reason I won’t be writing an app for the iPhone: while anyone can offer an application (what “apps” used to be called) for a Windows or Unix or Linux or Android or (soon) Chrome machine, you have to jump through hoop$ to develop for Apple.

Over at the Apple forums, Apple sympathizers drip with derision as they respond to others voicing my same concern. If you want to develop for a piece of hardware, they write, you need to use a piece of that hardware — and if you don’t think you’ll be selling your application and making enough money back to be paying for the hardware you buy, then they say you shouldn’t be writing an application.

Of course, a Mac desktop is not the same thing as an iPhone handheld device. On top of that, the Apple sympathizers seem to have missed the open source movement. The internet is bespeckled with great programs like PHP, WordPress and Inkscape and OpenOffice and GimpShop that are authored by people who charge no money for them and make no money off them. These programs are available across multiple platforms to boot.

Even in the phone market there is open source software, most notably Google’s Android operating system. The Android software development kit (SDK) is available to dowload for free onto a number of operating systems and even includes emulators for testing on multiple environments. For people who have an idea but are uncomfortable with programming languages, there’s even the user-friendly App Inventor. You can offer your Android apps however you choose; if you want to sell your apps in the official Android market you can enter it for a one-time registration fee of just $25.

If I do end up developing congress-related apps for smartphones, I’ll be developing for Android. Maybe big-budget companies consider an entrance fee of $800 to be chump change, but I’m just not prepared to pay the big cover charge for the iPhone app dance.

He could have been alive even now, through he died 43 years ago. Woody Guthrie was born 98 years ago today.

I’m going to take this occasion as an opportunity to share the last three verses of Guthrie’s most famous song, This Land Is Your Land. These verses are very rarely sung by school children, because they’re too political.

“Was a high wall there that tried to stop me
A sign was painted said: Private Property,
But on the back side it didn’t say nothing,
This land was made for you and me.

When the sun come shining, then I was strolling
In wheat fields waving and dust clouds rolling;
The voice was chanting as the fog was lifting:
This land was made for you and me.

One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple
By the Relief Office I saw my people,
As they stood hungry, I stood there wondering if
This land was made for you and me.”

That last line brings a conclusion of doubt in the very idea proposed by the previous verses. It brings the idea of manifest destiny and American exceptionalism into question. No wonder it’s so often censored out of the picture.

How often do you think today’s Tea Party libertarians have heard these verses?