One of my favorite Google products is Google Notebook, and one of my more frequent uses of it is to keep track of particularly insightful or pithy posts that I read online. Sure, most sites have their own methods for doing this, but Notebook keeps them all in one place. Unfortunately, I never really end up doing much with all the stuff I save.

Earlier today I found myself reading through some of my notes, and thought I’d share a few. Any one of them could be an entry in itself, but honestly I think there’s little I can add to most of them, so I’ll just point you back to the originals and leave it at that.

On Hillary Clinton’s ‘Prayer Breakfasts’, by MetaFilter’s dw:

[…] Hillary attending the prayer meetings is all about triangulation for her. She knows where the business of the GOP elite gets done, so she’s just going to walk right in there. If they were into watching pre-op trans burlesque while drinking paint thinner, Hillary would show up at the door with a copy of The Crying Game and a gallon of turpentine. […]

boubelium had an insightful quip about the difference between politicians and economists:

[…] if a charismatic politician tells you that he has seen the economic future, he hasn’t. He isn’t smart enough or boring enough to undertake the effort.

“Tom Collins” of Tom Collins’ World Wide Web Log — sort of a ‘Fake Steve Jobs’ of the Beltway, with the best understanding of that milieu on the Internet — sums up everything you need to know:

“Veronica, this is the United States of America. With the exception of short period of reform that lasted about forty years during the last century, the entire history of this country has been nothing more or less than the work of lying, thieving, cheating, amoral, greedy, inhuman scum bags.”
“Which means?”
“That, given the chance, you should always go with the lying, thieving, cheating, amoral, greedy, inhuman scum bags. Do that, and you can’t lose - it’s the American Way.”

On a slightly less cynical note, Vorfeed has one of the better comments I’ve read about the gun control ‘debate’ in a while:

[…] A little less than half of US households (and about 25% of all US adults) own at least one gun, and yet only about 30,000 people are killed by them per year, and more than half of those are suicides. … Criminalizing 25% of the country in order to save 30,000 lives is a terrible trade-off — if saving lives is really the issue, we’d do much better if we built a huge public transportation network and then banned cars. … As far as I can tell, the “gun control debate” in this country serves merely to distract from the actual issue — that is to say, the problem is violence, not guns! Rather than myopically concentrating on the instrument used, both sides of the gun debate could probably benefit from some realistic, holistic thinking about ways to mitigate the root causes of violence.