BILL CLINTON: Save Haiti . . . vote for Coakley?

UH OH: “For mega multinational behemoths like Intel, the economy is really starting to get good again. But for the little guy, not so much.”

FUNNY: Press corps torments Gibbs again with questions about transparency. Plus, from the comments: “Who would have EVAH thought that we’d have a press secretary who made Scott f-ing McClellan look good?”

MY EARLIER POST ON THE “GEEK SHORTAGE” causes reader John Lunde to write:

This is something I foresaw when home computers quit being shipped with BASIC: <10 PRINT "HELLO"> seduced a generation. When finding out if programming is interesting costs a couple of hundred dollars up front (and weighs seven pounds), though, not many will try. Not that it has to be BASIC, of course, but there ought to be some ‘easy’ language supplied with home computers to inveigle potential geeks.

Excellent point. Computer sellers out there — including BASIC on stuff you sell wouldn’t cost much, and would be a big public service. Snap Circuits can’t do it all. (Related item here).

UPDATE: Reader Scott Atchley writes:

Please no BASIC. There are languages that do not need a compiler that are available for free download such as Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, etc. These come standard on non-Windows computers (MacOSX, Linux, etc.) and are available for Windows.

I did not mention Fortran which looks like BASIC without line numbers but you need a compiler which adds complexity and potentially cost.

I remember BASIC fondly, but then it was actually the most advanced computer language I ever learned — can you say FORTRAN and COBOL? It would be nice, though, if entry-level computers, at least, had a prominently available introductory programming language; it can be whatever those crazy kids are using these days . . . .

TINA BROWN: Our candidates are lunatics.

Or as I wrote back when InstaPundit was young, “Just Crazy Enough to Want to be Your President!”

LETTERHEADY: A blog devoted to letterhead. It’s cool.

CLAUDIA ROSETT: Haiti: U.S. Sends Help, U.N. Wants Money. “In Haiti, the UN has been reporting that it has some personnel working on the ground, and is preparing to mobilize more. But the basic picture so far is that once again the American military is shouldering the chief burden of immediate relief. The UN’s clearest activity to date has been to call for money to start pouring into the UN — with a ‘flash appeal’ today for $562 million.”

UH OH: A global fiasco is brewing in Japan. “2010 will prove to be the year that Japan flips from deflation to something very different: the beginnings of debt monetization by a terrified central bank that will ultimately spin out of control, perhaps crossing into hyperinflation by the middle of the decade.” Let’s hope not.

A CHRISTIAN RESPONSE to Pat Robertson.

UPDATE: More here: “Just chuckle at Pat and wish the Marines well in Haiti. Pat no more knows that God caused this as a result of their wickedness than Danny Glover knows that it occurred as a result of global warming.”

HUGH HEWITT CALLS FOR an airlift of injured Haitians to U.S. hospitals.

SISSY WILLIS: Just a gal sitting in our living room in our virtual pajamas.

UPDATE: Reader EMB Whitton writes: “Sissy Willis for president!” I think she’s much too sane to want the job.

I’VE SUSPECTED THAT THIS WHOLE “ELECTROSENSITIVITY” THING WAS CRAP, but here’s some evidence: “Residents in Craigavon, South Africa complained of ‘[h]eadaches, nausea, tinnitus, dry burning itchy skins, gastric imbalances and totally disrupted sleep patterns’ after an iBurst communications tower was put up in a local park. Symptoms subsided when the residents left the area, often to stay with family and thus evade their suffering. At a public meeting with the afflicted locals, the tower’s owners pledged to switch off the mast immediately to assess whether it was responsible for their ailments. One problem: the mast had already been switched off for six weeks. Lawyers representing the locals say their case against iBurst will continue on other grounds.”

RON RADOSH: Health Care And The Fall of Obama.

SOMEHOW, I’M SURE IT’S BUSH’S FAULT: Haitians Wait Desperately for Relief That Hasn’t Come: Helpless Victims Wait in the Streets as Aid Remains Unorganized and Slow.

AT AMAZON, it’s the Friday Sale.

MARTHA AND SCOTT: Was it “Rape-Rape?”

FROM CHUCK SIMMINS: Some Haiti Relief Fundraising Numbers.

UPDATE: Stan “Wild Kingdom” Brock and Remote Area Medical are taking a DC-3 (yes, that’s right) full of supplies to a stricken outlying area of Haiti.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Thoughts on the DC-3 from reader John Kahn:

I work for a regional aircraft manufacturer as a pilot and tech support engineering specialist. Interesting thing about the DC-3. As we all know, in engineering and especially in aviation, development of a product is more or less by committee and involves thousands of trade offs and compromises. Usually the compromises have some kind of imbalance that limit a product’s effectiveness and service life. However, like a monkey throwing down alphabet blocks where on some rare occasion they spell a word, sometimes, the compromises just happen to come together in a state of balance resulting in a machine that, for its intended use, is something close to perfection. This is the DC 3.

Imagine, a complex transportation machine designed almost 80 freaking years ago (the DC 2 upon which the 3 is based first flew in ’33), that a businessman can purchase today, not as a tourist attraction, but as a business tool that can still be put to work to make money hauling freight in North America (and in the case of an operator in northern Canada, run a daily scheduled passenger service!).

I can’t think of any other transportation device, and very few machines of any kind, that can still function as a profit making business tool nearly 80 years after they were designed. This incredible aircraft gets my vote as the greatest transportation conveyance of modern times.

Good point.

MORE: On Facebook, Xeni Jardin comments: “Man, we should ship Gnl Russell Honoré to Haiti on one of them cargo loads, stat. View from my sofa looks like NoLa clusterfuckery x1000.”

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: “The reason for today’s vast discontent, presaged by spontaneous national Tea Party opposition, is not that Obama is too cool or compliant but that he’s too left. It’s not about style; it’s about substance.”

EDITORS AND FACT-CHECKERS: “The 27-year-old’s cheeky personal style, which he uses in his books, on his blogs and in real life, has helped him accumulate more than 306m hits on his blog, a larger online following than any other personal blog in China and probably in the world.”

Ahem. Well, maybe that’s in the past year or something, though the story doesn’t say that.

FOOD, WATER, SHELTER, now “pouring into Haiti.”

HEH: Obama personally joins Massachusetts quake relief.

REPORT: BROWN’S INTERNAL POLL SHOWS HIM UP BY 11.

That’s nice, but I note that Coakley’s still favored on Intrade. Nice polls kid — don’t get cocky.

DID A MISSILE TEST spark Chinese UFO reports?

FROM XENI JARDIN: A Haiti News Roundup.

HEH. Living well is the best revenge . . . .