August 2004 Archives
Fafnir and Giblets are live from the RNC! Just in time too...I had completely lost all hope for civilization.
Take last night when firebrand maverick John McCain spoke an broke away from his prepared remarks an insteada sayin "George Bush strong, 9/11 Iraq, Michael Moore fat," he started goi on abot how George Bush was a weak an ineffectual president who had blown the war on terror an urged Republicans to unite behind a strong competent leader with the focus an intelligence to defeat the terrorists. An then he exploded on stage!
This will be a great way to get unfiltered coverage of the Republican National Convention. I demand that J. Bradford DeLong comment on the return of Fafblog at once! If not sooner...
Here is a text transcription (any typos are mine) from the PDF (via boingboing) of the letter George Soros sent to House Majority Leader Dennis Hastert:
31 August 2004
The Honorable J. Dennis Hastert
Speaker of the House of Representatives
235 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515Via Fax: 2002.225.0697
Dear Mr. Speaker:
Your recent comments implying that I am receiving funds from drug cartels are not only untrue, but also deeply offensive. You do a discredit to yourself and to the dignity of your office by engaging in these dishonest smear tactics. You should be ashamed.
For the Speaker of the House of Representatives, even in the midst of an election season, to descend to a level of political discourse where innuendo and slander replace reason, truth and argument is unacceptable.
This past Sunday, on national television, you suggested that I might be a criminal simply because I have exercised my First Amendment rights to dissent from the policies of the Bush Administration.
I am playing a role in this election because I share the concerns of many Americans and believe President Bush is leading our nation in a ruinous direction on both economic and foreign policy.
I will continue my work despite this administration's ongoing efforts to intimidate and bully a long list of people who disagree with it, from Paul O'Neil to Joe Wilson, to Richard Clarke, to John Kerry.
I must respectfully insist that you either substantiate these claims--which you cannot do because they are false--or publicly apologize for attempting to defame my character and damage my reputation.
Sincerely,
George Soros
It's for real.
The color scheme was boring me to death. Same layout, new colors. Whoop-de-do.
Warren Ellis put an interesting quote at the end of "The Walk" from Transmetropolitan (see TPB "Gouge Away").
"The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are."
H.L. Mencken
Smart Set Magazine
December 1919
My, don't I have an over-inflated sense of self-importance today.
They get pulled. When they do, they hurt. Sometime last week, probably during a lunchtime basketball game, I pulled a ligament in the area of my right scapula. I was in meetings most of the week and didn't get a chance to get on the court until Thursday. Once I got out, I knew that I was in trouble. I was tossing air-balls from the free-throw line. There was no sharp pain when I tried to shoot, it was like the muscles just wouldn't work.
Later that day I went and got it check out and got the diagnosis. Treatment: 1 week off with 800mg of "Motrin" 3 times a day, with food of course.
Tech Support
In other news, no fix in sight for the laptop screen. It could possible be the backlight. I was ready to walk into the campus bookstore and buy a new 15in Powerbook (with a SuperDrive of course) but they were out. I guess there was a mad rush on powerbooks when school started. I'm sure Apple will still be going out of business any day now.
Politics still sucks.
The campus Young Republican could was out the other day (along with most other campus groups) and I wanted to ask them for their best pitch. "Give me your best sell for a 2nd term of 'Dubya.'" But I didn't. Ryan seemed to think that it would mostly be about why I shouldn't vote for Kerry. But a 2nd term is a referendum on the incumbent more than anything else. The Seattle Times is not happy with Bush. They endorsed him in 2000 and can't do it today. They have their doubts about Kerry for sure, but they have no doubts that Bush can't or won't do what he says he will.
Jobs
My job is going great. Kat's, not so much. Budget problems may be looming large soon...
Golf
On hold until the shoulder heals up.
The House
Kat is about to enter a painting frenzy. Which means I should get lots of photos for the coming Before & After Extravaganza. The leaves are starting to think about falling off the silver maple in the backyard. Ugh.
Currently Reading
I finished American Gods. Starting on Hey Rube. I also got the last TPB for Transmetropolitan, so I'm re-reading that whole series. Damn it's good.
The screen on my trusty 15" G4 500Mhz "died." It's not completely dead, but the brightness is stuck on the lowest possible setting.
This blows.
Atrios wants answers to why MoveOn and SBVT are supposedly equivalent organizations, and if they are why do they get different media coverage?
The question I wanted answered is why "coordination" has suddenly become a "murky" term. This is the 2nd day in a row that some commentator has gone on the so-call-liberal NPR and decried the campaign finance law wording as "murky" or some other such nonsense. Then they move on to say that if the Swifties coordinated with the Bush campaign then surely MoveOn has coordinated with the Kerry campaign. Except that there is actual, you know, evidence against the Bush campaign and nobody, that I know of, has presented any against the Kerry campaign. But they are obviously the same...
...also why are 'up until August 19th, 2004' members of Bush/Cheney04 workers allowed to appear in ads made by "shadowy" organizations?
Rafe Colburn has (temporarily I hope) thrown in the towel on this election. He think Bush has won it and the Swifties helped. Rafe was doing what he could. He was collecting links through a swiftvets tag (RSS) in del.icio.us. He and his wife even gave to the DNC, and a door-to-door canvaser at that! (Update: Towel not thrown in.)
The swiftvets attack has been working, but I don't feel that it can succeed in saving the election for President Bush. All it can do right no is demoralize people that weren't strong Kerry supporters but were "voting donkey" anyway and maybe give a few people moments of pause when they are getting polled. There are a number of things that the ads cannot and will not change, and these are the reasons why President Bush will loose.
The Economy (aka The War on 98% of Tax Payers)
Things aren't going so hot. Even the president has abandoned his oh-so-catchy phrase "turned the corner." Jobs, consumer confidence, oil prices, Cayman Islands headquarters and how can we forget that the "give people their money back tax relief" has turned into an increased tax burden for 98% of the country.
Iraq (aka The War Without Reason)
In order of appearance:
- Weapons of Mass Destruction (Does only Richard Perle remain in the group of true believers)
- Terrorists (Sure, it's true that they flooded in after we invaded, so?)
- Democracy
No weapons. No terrorists until we opened the door. Democracy at the barrel of a gun. I think Lewis Black had the right take on this.
I think it's really phenomenal that we're bringing democracy to Iraq. I can't wait to see how we do it. What? Do we give them our civics books? "Read this, it's crackerjack material!" We'll be back next Thursday, we'll give you a test you little f***s.
The Environment (aka The War on Terra)
As dirty air and water continues to affect families, the results (remember, they matter) of Bush administration policies, written by industry leaders to benefit the very industries they work for, will be seen for what they are. They are trading the health of the American people for short-term profits.
The War on Terror (aka Ace in the Sleeve)
There hasn't been another terrorist attack on the United States, and more than likely some have been foiled. Although the cynic in me has to feel that if one had been truly foiled the Bush adminstration would crow about it from now until the end of time. The real problem is that we have basically ignored the root cause of terrorism and have fallen under the false belief that you can kill all the terrorists. As if there were a finite number of them. The idea that you can kill all the current ones and scare anyone else from becoming one is ludicrous, and yet it seems to be our national strategy.
Good questions from HST in his new book.
How long, O lord, how long? This blizzard of shame is getting a little old, isn't it? Just how low do we have to fall before the voters catch on?
Indeed. How many times can a man be robbed--on the same street, by the same people--before they call him a Rube? Bob Dylan said that, in a tattered old song called "Blowin' in the Wind." Read it and weep, you poor bastards--because Dylan was yesterday, and George Bush is now.
I asked Fafnir, "Who would win in a fight between Cthulhu and The Medium Lobster?"
He replied:
Oh wow. Well I have met both an I gotta say Cthulhu's a whole lot shorter than you'd think. He only sounds big cause yknow all his talk about devourin the earth an arisin outta R'lyeh when the stars are right an whatnot. Well from what I have seen I can tell you he is (1) very small so I think the Medium Lobster could take im on a pure pound to pound basis not even accountin for everythin the Medium Lobster does not project into our linear universe an (2) Cthulhu's real lazy. That is why you will not see any arisin or earth-devourin any time soon. He is sittin on the couch watchin his stories most a the time. So he really does not have the drive to take on ML I personally think.
I love Canon digital cameras. I've had an S110 for over three years and I've taken over 4,000 pictures with it. It's an amazing little machine and I'm drooling over the latest Digital Photography Review rundown on the Canon EOS 20D. But there was an old little editorial tacked on the front of this one.
Phil: Although this announcement should be new to everyone the importance of it has been softened by a 'leak' of press images yesterday on the Canon USA website. As with almost every recent important Canon announcement here was another 'accidental' leak on a Canon website days before the embargo. All this does is punish us and reward those sites which aren't under NDA.
While I have no idea what the back story on this is. It does appear on the surface to be pretty lame of Canon. Luckily their cameras still kick ass.
Man, what does it take to get into Open Secrets? I've given to Dean, Kerry and MoveOn this year. I live in the 95926 zip code. WTF mate?
"Untrusted by the youth of America since 2003."
Now, only 35 years left until retirement...oy! In other words, happy birthday to me.
Sometimes the bold talk of company executives doesn't really match up with what you see on the "front lines." But hey, that's why they get paid the big bucks, right?
Come on, he's begging for it...
Post dumb pictures. It is a weblog after all...
So I grab my subscriptions from Bloglines as OPML. They encode in UTF-8. I'm not sure if this is entirely correct though:
<outline title="BBC Science\x2FNature World" ...snip... />
But since I know next to nothing about UTF-8, I'll assume that this is the right way to do it, where \x2F is a slash (/).
I'm using libxslt to convert the OPML into HTML, but these UTF-8 characters are getting on my nerves. How do I tell libxslt to translate these to something that is grokable in rendered html?
Update Aug 17, 2004: Bloglines is no longer including \x2f characters in their OPML. All is well, although I still don't know how to deal with it next time...
There is a lot to be said for meeting expectations in politics. The Bush teams spends an inordinate amount of time before big events making sure the bar is on the ground so that Bush clears it by a mile, even if he trips over it. It was the key to his success in the debates with Gore.
With Kerry in the lead in a number of polls, and with a number of pundits calling it his race to loose, I can only guess that this is exactly where the Bush campaign wants to be. There is even the whispers of Democrats getting their hopes up, only to be crushed again.
But the expectations game can be tricky to play. Eventually people may think that you are sandbagging or that you are being honest about how bad you suck. So if the reports about Oregon are true, and 60,000 people showed up for a Kerry rally, Karl Rove may have just lost the expectations game.
Lefty wonks have been screaming this since Howard Dean starting beating the point home, Bush has effectively raised taxes on a large percentage of the population. The Washington Post writes that the CBO confirms it.
Since 2001, President Bush's tax cuts have shifted federal tax payments from the richest Americans to a wide swath of middle-class families, the Congressional Budget Office has found, a conclusion likely to roil the presidential election campaign.
Indeed. Download the report and read it yourself though.
From a reliable source:
The ACLU recently reported that 325 communities in the USA have passed
resolutions opposing the USA-PATRIOT act. Tonight I attended a packed city
council meeting in Nevada City, located deep in California's conservative 4th
district. On the agenda was a resolution of the type above. After lengthy
public input, the city council voted 4-0 in favor of the resolution with one
abstention. I am proud to announce that the total of communities with
resolutions against the unconstitutional provisions of the USA-PATRIOT act has
just increased by one to 326.For those who are interested, the text of the resolution can be found here (PDF).
It was a really amazing experience watching grassroots democracy in action,
where the overwhelming support by the public overcame reluctance on the
part of the city council.If you are so inclined, I would encourage you to find a number of politically
savvy helpers and push for such a resolution to be passed by your own local
city or county political body.
O'REILLY: You know that the No Child Left Behind Act and all of the federal money that has poured in to try to help the kids -- which, you know, everybody wants to help the kids, right? -- states can't spend the money. Most of the states are gonna have to give it back to the Treasury. They just can't spend the money.
Mr. O'Reilly, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Brad DeLong uncovered a glimmer of home in the Republican party. Even though I'm a Liberal (I used to consider myself a moderate/centrist but the country has been dragged so far to the right that it seems I'm out here with all the smelly socialists) I still think that a one-party system is crap and would do great harm to the country. Just look at what Bush has managed to do. As Brad puts it, "policy incompetence" is a grand understatement, and that's putting it mildly.
Anyway, I wish the conservative pirates good luck in retaking their party back. The party of Lincoln deserves better than what they have now.
Of course the Vast Left Wing Blogosphere was all over Alan's firm stance on carpet bagging and moshing. The GOP easily swated down those cowardly character attacks.
U.S. Republican Representative Dan Brady says while Keyes has criticized other candidates for running in states where they don't live, these circumstances are different. And that Keyes will have to try to appeal to voters. (emphasis mine)
A true GOP talking point if I ever heard one: It's different for us.
Of course Obama would do well not to under-estimate Mr. Keyes in a debate. That being said, Barack should keep running his strong campaign and not look back.
It seems Fafnir had a little party and invited Paul Krugman, Matthew Yglesias and Juan Cole over for chips. They talk about Iraq the whole time! Man, I miss all the good parties. Fafnir was stocked up on Cooler Ranch™ and Nacho Cheesier™ Doritos.
I have 4,235 digital photos in my iPhoto library. 2,484 are unrated (59%) and 2,891 have no comments (68%). I'll need comments to help me put them in context when I'm senile and I need the ratings to make viewing my photos something enjoyable. They do have metadata that my camera was good enough to stick in the photo, such as the date and time. But when I'm senile that probably will not do me much good. "Who is that? Who did I know in August of 2002?" Rating photos at the clip of 100 per day would still take me almost a month and that's not including any pictures I happen to take in that month.
Cory ranted about metadata roughly 3 years ago. I want my own pack of metadata ninjas.
Don't even ask about the 20,242 songs in my iTunes library.
Q Scott, Tim Ripley, a writer for Jane's Defense publications, said blowing the cover of an al Queda mole, "smacks of either incompetence or worse." Why was his cover blown?
McCLELLAN You'll have to address those questions to the Department of Homeland Security.
"...America is safer."
KENNEBUNKPORT, Maine (Reuters) - President Bush on Saturday warned Americans this week's terrorism alert was another sign the country was still not safe but said he was taking steps to prevent future attacks. (emphasis mine)
Granted you can go on at length about how both of these statements are technically true. But the point is that at one stop Bush will hammer home the point that we are "safer" while waiting for another stop to pull out the terror card. Relax...BE AFRAID! Relax...BE AFRAID!
Which is it Mr. President?
Brooks scribbles about their being no beef in either candidates plan. Atrios wonders if he's read the plan the Kerry/Edwards campaign released. Surely he must have gotten the press release about it. I know I did and I'm not a writer for the New York Times.
Is it just popular to pick on both candidates for seemingly having the same flaw, in this case "no plan?" If so, Mr. Brooks would do well to watch The Daily Show and take notes on how picking on candidates is really done. First you tell people what the candidates wanted you to think. Then you carve away all the BS that the campaign has slathered on and then finish the joke with what the candidate actually did. The jokes practically write themselves.
While it's certainly true that presidents don't have direct control over the economy, it never stopped Bush from taking credit for any scrap of good news he could find. Consensus was that we would add 240k, even though Bush's tax cuts are supposed to grant us over 300k a month. We got 32k.
If Bush insists on pimping his top 2% tax cut as economic stimulus, he then must also take the blame when things go bad.
Also, is somebody leaking reports to big traders?
(original map via Marya Lieberman via Google Images)
Next Monday (Aug. 9th). Holy crap!
I guess TDS is the place to go if you're pimping a political book. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess he'll get two segments.
You should really understand the difference between quoteSmart and escapeSimple before you start cramming data into your tables.
I was mistakenly using quoteSmart instead of escapeSimple to prepare a SQL statement for an insert and then was confused as to why when I pulled all the data out 'it' 'had' 'single' 'quotes' 'around' 'every' 'field.' Yes, I was quite dumb. Hopefully you will be smarter than me.
The Daily Show has declared war on talking points from both parties. Is Jon Stewart really the only media person out there with any spine?
From KnowledgeNews:
He is a Patriot who prefers the Happiness of the Whole, to his own private Advantage . . . He is a Patriot, the ruling Object of whose Ambition, is the public Welfare: Whose Zeal, chastised by Reflection, is calm, steady and undaunted . . . Whom no partial Ties can prevail on to act traitorously to the Community, and sacrifice the Interest of the Whole to that of a Part.
Oooooh.... so that's what it's all about.
A little birdie:
...tomorrow Activision is going to announce that DOOM 3 has been shipped to retailers.
I guess that's like, big or something.
It's incredible to read about people getting their panties in a bunch about the Vatican being "out of touch" and "behind the times" with regard to feminism. I mean really, this is the Vatican. You know, home of the Pope, where apologies and understanding come hundreds of years later.
Sure, this time it's statements about blaming feminism for gay marriage in what can only be described as a parody of a Calvin and Hobbes strip about their GROSS club. I also understand that people want the Vatican to be "in touch" and "with the times" but it just isn't and it probably never will be.
