Times lays into to enviroconsumism: “That vision of an eco-sensitive life as a series of choices about what to buy appeals to millions of consumers and arguably defines the current environmental movement as equal parts concern for the earth and for making a stylish statement.” { previously }

Bad weekend for terrorists: two car bombs failed to go off in London and some frustrated retards set themselves and an SUV on fire and crashed into a Glasgow airport lobby (not our beloved check-in counters!), where they were taken down by a bunch of old Scottish ladies. We have to wonder if Bruce Schneier hired these people just to prove himself right about idiot terrorists. Update: Surprise surprise, he’s called it the UK terrorist special olympics.

Chatterbox notes that “Sicko” is like rain on General Motors’ wedding day: “Because of health-care obligations, the automaker that Moore pilloried in his first film, Roger and Me, is fighting for its life.” If the dumb belt can can be made to see socialized medicine in other countries as an illegal foreign subsidy that reduces our competitiveness, they will have to concede that it is advantageous.

You can get an iPhone with pre-pay if you have horrible credit or can fake having it: “to effectively ‘fail’ the credit check: enter 999-99-9999 as your social security number when asked during activation.” Of course we totally caved and got the phone last weekend, but only because one of us already had a regular highway-robbery voice plan and this way you get laser beams for an extra $20 a month. Anyway, pre-pay is even more cool if you have to pretend you’re a bankrupt illegal immigrant to get it.

The new two-hour long gay joke is GLAAD approved: “This is a film that will be enjoyed by Adam Sandler fans, and it’s a comedy that sends a message to this audience about the importance of family, marriage equality, and about treating others, gay or straight, with dignity and respect.” Great! Do the publicist’s cue cards come with a large cash donation? And how many of the other “films” tagged on IMDB as man-pretending-to-be-gay are so damn enlightening to straight people while giving them hilarious fake-gay antics to laugh at?

Though solidly in the iPhone backlash genre, An iPhone Changed My Life (Briefly) has one insight: “Day 4, Monday: More neighbors phoned and asked us over to play Scrabble—and to bring the iPhone if we felt like it.” Whatever, lady, we’re enjoying having people want to see “us.”

Famous-person reality shows have one redeeming effect: “a high number of the celebrities who have done reality shows have subsequently been arrested… Many of the reality stars have entered rehab, or fallen gravely ill. One of the stars is dead.”

NYT editorial board continues to disappoint on carbon taxes, but at least they concede that polluting must be made more expensive. Along with Lieberman, of all people, they’re endorsing a bureaucracy to (try to) fulfill that need, instead of a tax that would do it with less overhead and fewer loopholes. { previously }

NYPD surveillance wet dream: “If … a bag is left unattended for a certain length of time, or a suspicious car is detected repeatedly circling the same block, the system will send out an alert.” Prove that it can usefully detect planted bags on city streets in independent tests and not just someone’s sales brochure—we’ll eat a suspicious package. As for the block circling, we’ve never thought of that as terrorism, but if the city wants to send free parking trolls to Guantánamo that’s okay by us!

NYT Ed.: “Mr. Silver … could kill congestion pricing if he does not call his members back… He represents Lower Manhattan, which would benefit enormously from congestion relief.” Silver’s legislative contortions show that he represents only his own addiction to power. Nobody believes that a majority of downtown residents is against using congestion pricing funds to improve the subway. It’s hard hard to remember that he’s even supposed to be representing that district.

Slate user-generates some spoof one-liners: “Perhaps in tribute to ‘Live Free or Die Hard,’ which imagines a terror attack waged via the Internet, several readers incorporated new media into their catchphrases. From Demolicious: ‘Consider this negative eBay feedback.’ Michael Martin provides a variation on the theme with ‘Myspace friend add… denied!’” Those unwashed users are funnier than any of Slate’s regular writers, except Seth Stevenson.

Yay, Emily is writing good again: “Next we asked Choire, who is a single lady with a 25 lb cat, our burning questions. ‘Have you ever been unfairly stereotyped as a cat lady? Or are you comfortable with your catladyness? And do you think it is an impediment to your finding lasting luv?’ Bitch replied by popping offline and hasn’t been back on since.”

We are all x; x = Luddites: “It is possible to want a society in which new technology doesn’t demolish traditional ways of doing things. It is not possible to hold this view without being a Luddite, however.”

We agree with the Pope on one thing, at least. Religious pluralism is dumb: “ ‘former’ Nazi and current pope Joseph Ratzinger today announced that non-Catholic Christians aren’t really Christians because their churches aren’t really churches and lack the ‘means of salvation.’” Also, the fake faithful ruined our gay pride parade with their inclusive nonsense.

This is kind of hilarious: Spitzer Ties Assembly Salary Increase to Pricing Approval. (Headline Streetsblog’s.) The state Assembly would have to do something about auto congestion (other than pandering to the most wanton 5% of commuting New Yorkers) to earn a raise.

Although the great welfare state of Alaska attracts mostly rich boomers who want their welfare, too, we sometimes forget that at least fifteen Alaskans are sarcastic hipsters (who want their welfare, too). Please enjoy the video they made, Buy Back Alaska. [via boingboing]

Dowd rocks, Brooks sucks. So true! Ah, remember our first encounter with Brooks, that authoritarian tool? And Dowd, well, she plays fast and loose, and sometimes she’s as much fun to read as People magazine, but she sure knows how to land a kicker if you can make it that far.

Close call for Lady Surge! “An aircraft malfunction put the [U.S. congressional] delegation in Ireland during the attempted terrorist attack in Glasgow, Scotland, in the neighboring United Kingdom.” Yeah, our moms would have been freaking out too, but isn’t that just too stupid of a “coincidence” to put in print, St. Cloud Times? By the time you’re done explaining basic geography to your readers, the thrill of being within 1,000 miles of a lame terrorist attack has long passed. [sort of via Wonkette]

N.J. Governor Corzine swears off e-mail because pesky Republicans demand that some of his messages be made public: “We’ll go back to the 1920s, and have direct conversations with people.” Because that worked so well for him a few months ago, careening around the state over at 90 m.p.h. in a Chevy Suburban. (Do they even test those past 80?) What an efficient and safe form of communication—we hope he sticks to it! Though, his poor subjects had better watch their backs on those turnpikes, lest the blazing fast 8,000 lb. Corzine Internet kill them dead.

Trend piece implodes with the words, “I am the proud father of a ‘tween.’ Tweens, falling roughly into the 8-12 age group…” Though we are interested in early-onset consumerism, we can not read past yet another definition of the word “tween,” especially one that doesn’t cheerfully cite the word’s earlier use in animation. At least then someone, somewhere, would learn something.

Democrats refusing to do anything capitalistic to reduce driving in Manhattan must be on to something horrible: New Populism Spurs Democrats on the Economy. Let’s hope they can just raise taxes on upper incomes and shut up. Griping about the effects of “free trade” on the U.S. while Europe integrates so effectively is just pathetic.

The most disappointing thing about the Marxists coming out against congestion pricing is how bluntly their concern for the middle class (which they happen to be in) overrides their concern for lower classes. There is no doubt that congestion pricing’s reclamation of street space and funds for public transportation will be good for NYC’s poor. And it’s a net good for the blessed middle class, as realized by many of us in it who live here. It’s only backwoods liberals lacking backbones who oppose the measure, giving New York’s borough-politics-playing Democrats their lame intellectual cover. But please, don’t throw us into that briar patch—don’t link congestion pricing opposition to communism!

The Croc Epidemic: “How a heinous synthetic shoe conquered the world.” New York was the last holdout, but as O’Rourke reports from Paragon, some among our ranks have fallen for the “vegan” shoe. We can only hope that this summer’s tapering off of the flip-flops, everywhere! trend will dampen the Croc incursion.

On the congestion pricing Alamo in Albany: “So angered were Democrats that they decided to vote as a bloc to defeat the measure.” Great, that will make our voting easy next time around. As registered Democrats we’ll get to vote against those enviroflacks in the primary and general elections, as necessary. (Texas went on to win its independence, you know.)

How long have they been capitalizing homeland? It was bad enough as an invented common noun; spraying “Homeland” all over a government intelligence report is sloppy propagandizing, even for Bush. Also, we love Threat Level’s assertion that al Qaeda “is fighting a rear-guard and ultimately doomed fight against the onslaught of modernity and its squadrons of lattes, fashion trends and cultural dislocations.” If they could eliminate fluxury coffee without killing anyone that would be cool tho.

Speaking of when did this happen, The Onion is good right now: “If they put another eight hours in the day, I might be able to catch up on the laundry list of chores I have, or even just my laundry, if I were lucky. But you know who really gets it done? Homosexuals.”

NYT on congestion pricing: “Bloomberg and his aides conducted elaborate analyses and an intricate media campaign … Yet, despite ads on cable television, a video on YouTube…” Ahem. This video? When we recorded that off the TV and uploaded it to the YouTube, we didn’t realize we were such a key part of the mayor’s intricate media campaign. Hooray for us—too bad it didn’t work!

Bruni at Pong: “One evening a waiter asked a friend and me if we were ready to order. We said we hadn’t received dinner menus. He wordlessly pointed to a document in the middle of the table, a schoolmarm harrumphing at her hopeless pupils’ errors. The document was the wine list.”

Probably don’t e-mail Gawker asking them to remove all your shilling comments, because then they might run that as a story.

Twin terrorist towns on the hotly disputed Quebec-Vermont border don’t want a fence between them to help keep the Homelands safe: “They’re proud of their history. But because of what happened on September 11, 2001, we cannot do nothing. We have to react when there’s a threat.” Yes, we must react within six years or else.

Virginia tightens the screws: “Virginia began imposing huge new fines—some as high as $2,500—for residents caught driving 20 miles above the speed limit.” The fines are for revenue that, as one Virginian pointed out, would be better gathered through gas taxes. Like with $115 parking fines in New York (for wildly underpriced spaces), governments find it easier to collect needed use fees through violations that users think they’ll never get caught committing. The happy result is misallocated resources and personalized fiscal abuse.

Exquisite anti-pricing rant from a New Jerseyan who wants all our taxis and pedestrians to get out of his way so he can “drive and deliver to midtown all day long.” Also notes, “road repairs suck.” No kidding! And we just love footing the bill to fix the roads that New Jersey drivers help destroy.

Are Our Children Learning Enough About Whales? (video)

Gawker is pimping “Deluxe”, a book about mainstream luxury / trading up / whatever you want to call the phenomenon of hoi polloi expressing delicate tastes for Starbucks and Hermès. Fertile ground, but probably still a verbose waste of pages like every non-fic book out there! We’ll stick to the highlights: “there are Japanese girls who work as prostitutes to buy Louis Vuitton, Chanel, and Hermès bags.”

NYT declines to clear up for us what the congestion pricing deal means, offering only a few lines in a piece about campaign financing: “the final measure is fairly modest … it would require that any program expire in 2012, effectively turning any plan for ‘congestion pricing’ into a kind of pilot program.” Big loss there, considering the objective was a three year pilot program since the beginning. AP has some news that we hope is less wrong: “the administration was in touch with federal officials as the deal was reached.” So they’re actually giving us at least $200 mil for this freshly unbaked plan—you can’t say we don’t know how to sell here!

The ranks of the Log Cabin Republicans are certain to swell, judging from this video of the College Republican National Convention. It’s mostly about how they think it’s a great idea for everyone but them to fight in Iraq. Someone should tell the poor guy who can’t serve because of “asthma” (5:18) that being a huge queen gets you out too. But no one can top—or, anyone can top—the professed non-gay (3:30) who insists that everyone has “inclinations … towards others of the same sex.”

Software nerd weblog you’ve never heard of thinks Curbed's comments are the pits: “Look at this innocent post on a real estate blog. By comment #6 you’re already seeing complete noise. By #13 you have someone cursing and saying ‘go kill yourself.’ On a real estate blog. … Lockhart Steele, is this what you want Curbed to look like?” Dude. “Joel.” People do kill over New York real estate. Also, the post begins with the words “The orthodox Jews of Williamsburg…” and a photo with a bunch of Hebrew writing on it. Actually we can believe that that post on that “real estate blog” blew up. Curbed’s comments are crappily average for a popular weblog, no need to overstate the case.

Cleveland councilman learned everything he knows about scare quotes from Britney Spears: “Mr. Wilson, you have to be ‘dumber than mud.’ Don’t you know that one of your so-called friends from the ‘8th-Avenue’ gang ratted your stupid ‘ass’ out …” And so on. [via boingboing]

Last week we slipped into pessimism about congestion pricing (hey, it was only rejected three times by the state), but as Crain’s points out (quoted in Streetsblog) a commitment to a 6.3% reduction in vehicle miles traveled in the zone is effectively a commitment to pricing, as it’s the only method that has shown such an effect. We’re still a little nervous about trusting Albany to reason, but as long as the feds send us that $200 mil for our non-plan (which logic requires to be a plan for pricing—clever!) then our streets will no longer be an all you can drive buffet next year.

Hummer vandalism—it’s a wellspring of deep political thinking! Is it terrorism? As long as you consider assaulting unoccupied vehicles to be “violence,” then it fits the def better than most of the unscary domestic nonsense that people call terrorism. But we hope that you can disapprove of an instance of hummer-terrorism while enjoying the owner’s complaint that he can’t protect his truck because his mom’s garage “was built with this house 80 years ago when cars were much smaller.”

Worlds are totally colliding: “An armed gang of four kidnapped one of the world’s top RPG gamers after one criminal’s girlfriend lured him into a fake date using Orkut.” Those fake dates for gamers never end well.

A reality check for everyone acting all surprised that the iPhone is locked to a carrier and a contract: “nearly every familiar and popular phone … debuted as exclusively tied to a specific service provider.” Have our esteemed congresspeople even bought phones in this country before? Also, post explains how our retarded uncompetitive mobile market is just like our health care market.

What to tell idiots who want a python: “Do you really want a snake that may grow more than 20 feet long or weigh 200 pounds, urinate and defecate like a horse, live more than 25 years and for whom you will have to kill mice, rats and, eventually, rabbits?” And then escape and finish destroying the Everglades.