There's a message board I'm active on - I've mentioned it in the past. I'm one of the standard bearers there for old-fashioned liberalism and the Democratic party, but sometimes it's a bit like tilting at windmills. The rightists on this board love to toot the Lieberman horn, and are insistent that the Democratic party is going to fall apart over Dean. They're nuts, obviously, but they're convinced that The New Republic and Al From speak for most of the party. (For the beginnings of a great attack on TNR, check out Kos, btw) Someone posted something attacking Gore's "the people vs the powerful" message from the '00 elections, claiming that's why he lost. Here's my response:
Al Gore busted out the populist speeches at the convention, and in the next couple weeks afterwards. He toned them down after they'd done their job - gotten him up in the polls. The "people vs the powerful" message resonated well, polled well, etc... Gore weakened again when he started charting to the "middle" again. That said, Gore also was hurt by running away from Clinton. It's important to note, though, that he wasn't running away from Clinton's policies or politics, but from Clinton personally. That was a mistake - Clinton, personally and politically, was still very popular through the election, and if he'd been running instead of Gore, the election wouldn't even have been close - Clinton would have whomped Bush like he whomped Dole four years earlier.
It is in the best interests of the Democratic Party to have a coherent message, to explain how we (I'm techincally a registered Democrat) present an alternative version of what government is for as compared to the Republicans, etc. We've done a shoddy job of that for the last few years. While Clinton's policies often resembled Republican policies, the reasons he gave for those policies were often very different - he was willing to change things if they weren't working, but he was still dedicated to the idea of a just and equitable society in the New Deal/Great Society model. He just had a different idea how to get there. On the other hand, Al From and the current DLC leadership have moved away from that worldview. But they're very, very much in the minority in the party as a whole - look at Edwards, Kerry, Dean, Clark, Daschle, Pelosi, and so on. While the average Democrat voter may no longer be as left-wing as they used to be (and actually, I'd debate that on a national level, since we've shed most of the conservative white Southern vote), but they're definitely still liberal in their sense of what the role of government is. Problem is that very few prominent politicians do a good job at articulating it. Edwards has actually done the best job, in my opinion, which is why I initially supported his candidacy. Clark is still getting his political sealegs, but he definitely feels strongly about how government can and should help the less fortunate. Dean's not very coherent on this - his primary message has been as opposition to all things Bush, which isn't really what I'm looking for. But associating himself with people like Gore, who HAS been cohesive and consistent in his message over the last couple years, should help.
Regardless - there'll be no Democrat civil war. Joe's a dickhead, and not particularly relevant. You want to see political party infighting? Wait 'til the Republicans lose the White House, or until the Senate goes 50-50 again (which would almost certainly lead to a Chafee defection) - there is one hell of a fight to come between the moderate Republicans (Snowe, Voinovich, Pataki, McCain, etc...) and the DeLay/Bush wing of the party. That's going to be far more intense and divisive than anything happening today in the Democratic Party.
Just saw Lost In Translation - it bumps Underworld out of the top five, no question. Splendid movie - very deliberate, well-thought out, poetic. I really liked it.
CNN's got a story with this headline - Reports: Saddam talking about guns, money. What, nothing about lawyers yet?
Something you may not have known: Jackie Robinson, the first African-American to play in the modern major leagues, was a Nixon supporter in 1960, and a Goldwater supporter in 1964. He said that his efforts to end the segregation of baseball wouldn't mean anything if the political parties were segregated, too. But in 1968, he switched to support the Democrats. Why? Spiro Agnew and the entire "southern strategy", basically. Here's what he said at the time:
I think what the Republican Party has forgotten is that decent white people are going to take a real look at this election, and they're going to join with black America, with Jewish America, with Puerto Ricans, and say that we can't go backward, we can't tolerate a ticket that is racist in nature and that is inclined to let the South have veto powers over what is happening.
Sadly, of course, Jackie was very, very wrong. Since '68, we've seen no one but southerners and Republicans get elected to the White House. But he's right in pointing out why that was a mistake.
There's been quite the little furor over Dean saying that bin Laden should get a fair trial. Honestly, I can't see any reason to have a problem with that statement, except for purely partisan purposes (hey! alliteration!). I see it as not just a moral imperative (bin Laden committed a crime, so he should be brought to trial with the same rights and privileges as any other criminal in the American courts) but as a source of triumph. What better way to defeat bin Laden than to show him that our system is stronger than anything he can dish out? If he can't survive to see the fall of the US, I'm sure his next choice would be martyrdom - either death in the field or death at the hands of the US government, following a show trial that would not be accepted as legit by his followers. So let's give him a fair trial. Provide him with the best defense, let him make his case. I'm confident that the prosecution can win a guilty verdict. Let's beat him by playing the game OUR way, not his. We're better than him, so let's show it.
I bought a couple CDs yesterday - Underworld's remixed 1992-2002 collection, and an album that I *thought* was the new UNKLE album, featuring a large chunk of the ex-Stone Roses. But in fact, it was a weird soundscape/mix CD called "Big Brother Is Watching You", two discs, no track listing... I've found track listings for one version of it, but what I've got is *very* different from those listings. It's cool, nifty sounds and remixes (including a mash-up of DMX and Tears for Fears that works remarkably well) but I wish I could tell what was what once I've ripped it...
From: A blog doesn't need a clever name (permalink)The 10 best movies of 2003. From the eccentric, intimate "Lost in Translation" to the epic nobility of "Return of the King" to the rough-hewn affirmation of "In America," Salon critics Stephanie Zacharek, Charles Taylor and Andrew O'Hehir list 2003's best films. [Salon Headlines]
I haven't seen enough movies this year to do a top 10, but here's a quick-and-dirty top five, no particular order, with links to Salon reviews (when possible):
U.S. Traces Mad Cow Case to CanadaThe Agriculture Department announced today that a cow found to be infected with mad cow disease may have been imported from Canada.
Now I'm not saying this isn't possible/likely/whatever - but it is pretty convenient AND funny to implicate our neighbors to the north for our little mad cow situation, isn't it?
Gays in the MilitaryGAYS IN THE MILITARY....Via Not Geniuses, a new Gallup polls shows 79% support for allowing gays to serve openly in the military. Even better, the figure for 18-29 year olds, the folks who are actually doing the serving, is 91%....
Have any of the major candidates straight-up called for the end of Don't Ask Don't Tell? They should.
I am NOT making this up: from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Cloned half-asses from Idaho hold promise for livestock industry. No further comment needed or possible.
So three Air France flights to the US have been cancelled - it might be more, not sure yet. I'm going to Prague with Arwen in March, and I'll be honest - I'm scared about the flight. Eep.
First US case of Mad Cow found in Washington State. Japan has already banned imports of US beef. This is going to cause one hell of a panic.
While driving into work (late) this morning, I heard a piece on the always-better-than-any-major-American-news-media BBC World Service, looking at the power major public protests have (or don't have) now, after the largest co-ordinated protests in history failed to have an impact on the Bush drive to war in Iraq last spring. Two people were talking to the BBC moderator/interviewer - a British professor and an American, one of the leaders of Not In Our Name. The professor's argument was very coherent - the big western protests (i.e., in Western Europe and North America, on globalization, war, etc...) are composed of people who, by and large, are not politically active outside of those protests. They're motivated by emotional reactions, and don't generally have a political alternative to that which they're protesting against. The Not In Our Name guy? Well, he came across like an idiot. He kept talking about the "resistance" and arguing that the anti-war protests did actually have a large impact - that they educated people, blah, blah...
I almost threw something at the radio.
Seriously, does anyone think that the anti-war protests did anything but make those of us who were there feel better? The majority of people who were at the ones I went to in Boston were definitely politically active normally - we're talking college students primarily. We didn't EDUCATE anyone, that's for sure. What's more, back in the '60s and '70s, a lot of the big protests were organized and led by people whose views were not outside of the American normal range - MLK being the best example. Sure, there were the fruitloops, but the civil rights marches and the later Vietnam protests were broad-based. The protests now? Led by lunatics without any connection to reality. ANSWER is, of course, the worst of the bunch, but listening to this Not In Our Name guy talk, I've gotta say that it's not just ANSWER that's living on another planet...this guy actually attacked the Afghanistan invasion, along with his repeated references to some mythical "resistance". I'm a leftie - a social democrat, a supporter of the welfare state, universal health care, gay marriage, taxing the hell out of the rich, etc... But people like that make ME look mainstream. These are the people I went to college with, dilettantes living off Mommy and Daddy while fighting The Man for a few years. We're not going to have a socialist revolution in this country. Ain't gonna happen - if it didn't happen in the late 1800s or the 1930s, it's NEVER EVER going to happen. But a good-sized chunk of the leftie activists actually seem to think they can bring that revolution to fruition. How can we have a strong protest movement, fighting for causes that can be won, when these nutcases hijack the microphones?
Then I read something like this and I wonder if anything can be done to stop this country from careening off the tracks.
Nader Will Not Run As GreenRalph Nader "has decided not to run for president next year as the candidate of the Green Party but is still contemplating a presidential race as an independent," the Washington Post reports....
Yay. I can be proud to support the Green Party again - I was worried that they'd back him again...
Paranoia runs rampant! They're all out to get us! Hell, some rightist talking head on CNN was saying that this is more proof of why the court ruling on Padilla was so wrong, that we need to define EVERYWHERE as part of a "zone of combat" - so Americans can be detained without legal cause EVERYWHERE! GO AMERICA!
Sorry. Just pissed off. I have a very, very hard time believing anything these shitheads say any more.
Well, it probably wasn't the flu, because I'm ok now. Christmas shopping is now done, thank God. And nothing is quite as bad as bad Chinese food. Eugh.
Feeling fluish. Probably accentuated by being out late last night at the Celtics game - the game started at 8 and ran late, so I missed the 10:40 train and didn't get home 'til around 1am. That, and I wandered around in the rain for a while before the game and screamed my brains out during it - Celtics won 105-103 over the Mavericks in Antoine Walker's first game back in Boston since being traded. Great, great game. But I'm sick now. Heading to bed in a bit, trying to drink a bunch of cranberry juice and hope I can be mobile tomorrow - got a bunch of stuff to do tomorrow AND I really want to see Arwen, whom I haven't seen since Sunday...so this is all for today. Hope you understand. =)
So the Red Sox-Rangers Manny-for-A-Rod trade talks keep going, and going, and going...it'll happen, I'm pretty sure of that, and Nomar will move on - probably to LA, though he could go through some place like Chicago on the way. But what I'm really fascinated by is the continued growth of the Internet's role in all this. Trade rumors that hit local TV news and sports radio around the country used to be something I assumed had basis in reality. Now I know that's not true - they just emerge from the 'Net. Last week, Jayson Stark of ESPN listed the Red Sox as one of a number of teams that might be interested in trading for the Angels' Troy Percival - so every sports radio station reports that the Sox are in talks about Percival. No actual basis for this, of course. And then a guy on a message board says he heard a rumor about the Phillies getting involved with the Sox-Rangers talks, turning it into a three-way deal. There was never any further corroboration to this theory, yet it dominated an hour or two of talk on the radio. Just nuts.
But this takes the cake - check out this MSNBC.com story, which is largely cribbed from an earlier AP story. Specifically, look at this section:
Red Sox owner John Henry hasn't responded to e-mails or calls from The Associated Press. But following a series of skeptical postings about the trade on a Red Sox fan Web site, a participant identified as "JohnWHenry" said, "Come on now. Don't start to waver on us. It’s the holidays. Be of good cheer! It's going to be just a great, exciting season. Hang in there."
The postings came at 4:26 a.m. Henry has confirmed that he uses that screen name for the "Sons of Sam Horn" bulletin board.
And yes, that really was John Henry, the billionaire currency trader and Sox owner. Of course, his day job as a currency trader explains why he was up at 4:26am - European/Japanese trading, etc... but still. The only word out of the owner of the Sox since last week, and it's on an Internet message board. And then it's quoted in an AP article. Things are definitely changing in terms of the relationship between ownership/management and the public in sports - Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks being the best example, but John Henry's definitely there too.
From: John Robb's Weblog (permalink)Congrats to UserLand on the new management team. I wish I had a team this large and skilled with me when I was there, but the environment was much more difficult then (a software depression, no VC money, and Dave's operation). I am glad that my contribution was to enable the hand-off a viable company that this team can build on. Good luck guys.
While I still remain inherently skeptical of anything coming out of UserLand after my various problems with Radio, I have to say this does look like a good move for them. That said, while they've now got an honest-to-god management team, they've still only got the two developers. But I feel slightly more positive about Jake Savin now that I've discovered he has similarish origins to myself - he's a graduate of Reed College, one of Oberlin's peer schools (music composition major, though, which is more hardcore than me), and he's spent time as a release engineer, which is, of course, what I do now. However, I like this better than software development and have no plans to go back. Especially if it means working for Dave Winer. =)
As we speak, the Celtics may (or may not) be making a trade. There's no high quality Celtics discussion forum equivalent to the Sons of Sam Horn for the Sox - I'm subscribed to a couple mailing lists, but they're nowhere near SoSH's caliber. But as best as I can tell, this is a general thing about pro basketball as compared to pro baseball - there's just not that much of an online community for smarter fans. Baseball Primer provides something like that for all teams in baseball - posting news items with long-running discussions about them. I've considered registering basketballprimer.com and setting up something comparable for NBA hoops, but I'm not sure if there's enough of an audience. I know that only a couple people who read the blog are interested in basketball, but if you are - would you be interested in a Primer-like site for basketball? Do you know others who would be?
AAARRRGGGHHH!!!AAAAGGGGHHHHH!!!
Somebody in Canada, please adopt me, now!
Rayne's loving Bush's press conference, as you can see from this excerpt... =)
From: John Robb's Weblog (permalink)WSJ. In one of the largest moves to "offshore" highly paid U.S. software jobs, International Business Machines Corp. has told its managers to plan on moving the work of as many as 4,730 programmers to India, China and elsewhere... Some workers are scheduled to be informed of the plan for their jobs by the end of January. After that they will be expected to train an overseas replacement worker in the U.S. for several weeks... Unlike low-wage manufacturing, the U.S. computer-services jobs to be moved overseas by IBM typically pay $75,000 to $100,000 or more a year, according to one person familiar with the operations. In contrast, hiring a software engineer with a bachelors or even a masters degree from a top technical university in India may cost $10,000 to $20,000 annually, analysts say.
Ouch. Over 4,700 coders lose their jobs AND have to train their replacements. Harsh, man. So far, at least, Cisco's used outsourcing to prevent needing to hire more people in my business unit, as opposed to replacing people we already have. That's potentially bad enough, but sending nearly five thousand already-existing jobs overseas? Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. What jobs are there that WON'T end up overseas in the next 10 or 15 years? Do I need to go back and get trained as a construction worker or something?
MetaPicklerWhen Atrios writes like Nedra Pickler today, he fails to mention that a poster on Yahoo! Sports' message boards didn't start off his day's posting with jubilation over Saddam's capture, instead preferring to talk about the NFC North race.
Other critics on the message boards pointed out that although the poster, ILikesDaVikes84, raised many points about the weaknesses of the Green Bay Packers' quarterback, Brett Favre, this season, he failed to discuss Roger Clemens' impending move to the Houston Astros.[Pandagon]
Woah. This whole Nedra Pickler thing is beginning to melt my brain. Pickler, if you're unaware, is a truly whacky writer for the AP who has a propensity for sentences along the lines of the ones above - "When [Democrat says something bad about Bush], he fails to [say something else unrelated and possibly untrue but positive about Bush]." It's all very strange. Atrio has decided to spend today talking like Nedra Pickler. I'm going to spend today trying to decipher other people talking like Nedra Pickler. It's all a little confusing...
The new Guantanamo?Politics: The punishment of Saddam Hussein - a dream for George Bush - could prove a minefield for Tony Blair, writes Tom Happold.
Things are going to be getting very interesting regarding Saddam's punishment - the Iranians are getting war crimes proceedings ready, though they'll never get a shot at him in person, Blair has suggested that the Iraqis try him - which may create problems for him due to the death penalty issue, and it's still not clear what the Bush administration plans to do with him. I think it's a foregone conclusion that Saddam CAN NOT be tried by a US-run court. If that happens, the entire world will get pissed - and rightfully so. We are just about last in line for having a crack at Saddam, behind his own people, the Iranians, the Kuwaitis, etc... I don't think Bush is going to be stupid enough to do that, though, so the issue will most likely be whether he's tried by the Iraqis or an international tribunal. I'm in favor of an international tribunal - it just seems appropriate, given that his crimes are on an international scale. It'd be a great publicity coup in Europe for Bush if he gave Saddam over to an international court, but I doubt it'll happen.
First - yay. Saddam Hussein is a monster who deserves to be put on trial in Iraq, by the Iraqi people. The world is unquestionably better - and hopefully safer - without him on the lam. But I'm going to be obnoxious here and call for NOT imposing the death penalty. The Iraqi war crimes courts will have the authority to impose, though not execute, the death penalty - actually kiling war criminals will have to wait until after the provisional government comes online. But I think we should press hard to prevent the death penalty from being an option. Obviously, I'm in the minority here, but it's an issue that matters to me...
I've been having waaaaaay too much fun today - my copy of the Alias Season Two DVDs came in yesterday, and I've been watching them since I woke up, basically - I'm over half way through the season in one solid fix. By the end of the day tomorrow, I should be done, ready to move back to my copy of the complete Firefly DVDs. =)
From: Scripting News (permalink)As I read this headline on the Dean weblog: What Can You Buy with $61 million? I thought this was the amount that Dean had raised, or expected to raise, and they were about to tell us they were going to do something imaginative, instead of giving it to smelly media companies so they can run television ads. No such luck. What would you do if you had $61 million and wanted to make America a better place? Could $61 million make a difference?
Sorry - this is just an ongoing reason that I want to slap Dave upside the head. He's got this obsessive belief that Dean shouldn't be spending his money on tv ads, because they're "unclean". Of course, if that money was instead spent on something that made Dave happy - like what, anyway? Banner ads? - it wouldn't have near the impact that tv ads will. Dean's going to try to win the election, Dave, and that means using every tool available to him to pull it off. Which means - shock and disgust! - buying tv ads.
Unelectable
[Eschaton]
Yes, it's Google-bombing time. And I swear I had something else to say, but now I'm blanking. Gah. Been busy - lots and lots of coding and testing. The new permissions system goes into beta tomorrow, so it's not going to calm down for a while yet to come. So for now, I'm gonna try to relax... I need it. =)
...if I might steal a line from Rayne... =) I'm in the crunch-time coding/hacking/debugging/testing on a project I've been working on for a few months, and I'm going balls to the wall to get it completely done and in production before Christmas, so I'm not going to be that active for the next week or so. Can you all ever forgive me? =)
Primal Scream's Screamadelica is a fantastic album to hack code to. It's got great beats at a perfect relaxing-but-persistent pace, and a generally positive feel. It's working quite well for me so far this morning. =)
I'm not going to bother with a link, because you can find more than enough out there already. =) I'm not sure that this ends the race, but it definitely puts Dean in an even better position. I still think Clark is the right person for the job, but I'll get behind Dean if that's how it ends up. However, I think it's just about necessary that Clark be involved/in charge of foreign policy in a Dean administration, either as Super VP - with Holbrooke as Sec. State - or as Sec. State, depending on where Dean goes with the VP slot and what Clark wants. He's got too much on foreign policy to be sent back to the talk shows.
Point/Counterpoint: Web services for collaboration
P.J.: Despite what some may think, I'm about as platform-neutral as they come. But here's the problem: There's still no agreement on how presence shall be presented as a Web service. On one side are the proponents of XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol), an XML-based outgrowth of the Jabber project, which doesn't seem to be supported by anyone bigger than Novell. On the other, I see IBM and Microsoft agreeing on something for the first time since OS/2 1.0 was released: that SIP (Session Initiation Protocol)/SIMPLE (SIP Implementation for Messaging and Presence Leverage Enhancements) is the way to go. So, I'm curious, Jon: What side are you on?Jon: Both, for different reasons, but it doesn't matter for the purposes of this discussion. I know several developers who are using Jabber as a SOAP transport, and I'm told that the new breed of SIP-oriented IP PBXs offers SOAP interfaces. It's not a question of whether Web services will turbocharge the next generation of collaboration, but how. And there are two big answers. First, Web services will provide a general means of access to the messaging substrates. Second, Web services will help us unify metadata (message headers, aka context) and content (message bodies, aka documents) under a common data-management discipline: XML. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]...
I have friends here working on this kind of stuff. They do weirder things with our IP phones than I can imagine - but it's definitely nifty stuff. Wish I understood it. =)
Major League Baseball is now offering a number of classic games for downloading at about 4 bucks a piece, as well as a large chunk of the 2003 regular season and the entire playoffs. They don't have the game I most want - Boston at Cleveland, Game 5, 1999 ALDS - the Pedro game - but hey, maybe they will soon. Now we just need the NBA to do this - I'd pay five bucks for the triple overtime Phoenix/Boston game from the '76 Finals, no question...
EDIT - (good point, Rachel - nothing to see here! Move along!)
There seems to be a definite weirdness here - a consistent relatively empty space devoid of major snowfall hovering over my apartment. My mom, down in Arlington, 20 or so miles away, has gotten around 8 inches of snow...we might have gotten two, maybe three so far here. There's a line between the remnants of the first storm, which came from the south, and the second storm, which came from the west, and they seem to have been bouncing off each other for a while, with the dividing line generally running from Portsmouth, NH to Bridgeport, CT. Arwen crashed here last night, and left again at 10:30am - NSMT really doesn't like to cancel shows, so she's working wardrobes on Christmas Carol as we speak...hopefully, they'll realize that they need to get the hell out of there and that no one's going to drive to Beverly for a musical during near-blizzard conditions. I've already moved my car into the parking garage across the street - it's free parking during snow emergencies - and I really don't like the idea of Arwen out on the roads today...ah well...
I went out for lunch after dropping the car off - walked over to The Old Court, an Irish pub run by actual Irishmen. I've always liked it - there's no smoking, at least not in the main bar/restuarant area, which makes me happy. I was the only customer there for a while, and I could not for the life of me figure out what the bartender/proprietor was saying - HEAVY Irish accent. It got even better - EPL was on the bar tv via Fox Sports World - Leeds v. Chelsea, with Leeds pulling out a draw. I miss FSW - I rather enjoyed being able to watch real football, which is definitely my second favorite sport to watch on tv, following basketball. I love baseball above all things, but don't really enjoy watching it as much as I do talking about it, writing about it, thinking about it, and analyzing it. Anyway - FSW is great, but I couldn't get it a la carte, so I had to pay about $30 more than I'm paying now for stuff I didn't care about, more movie channels than I could ever need or want, and FSW. I stopped that, obviously. But there's something really fun to watching EPL in an Irish pub in Lowell, MA, with a nice fish and chips, listening to an Irishman at the bar trying to explain the intricacies of football substitutions, injury time, and the ranked leagues in European football. I dunno why, but it felt nice and homey. Yeah, I'm a Europhile - wanna make something of it?
The rest of today should be pretty pleasant - I've gone a little nutty TiVoing movies in the last day or so, so I've got Spy Game - a so-so-but-I-really-liked-it spy flick with Redford and Pitt (which I'm watching right now), True Romance - which I've never seen and now that I should, Wit - a warm-up for Angels in America (starts tomorrow night on HBO - both are adaptations of stage plays, directed by Mike Nichols, with Emma Thompson in a major role, made for HBO), and, currently recording, The Last Picture Show - another in the list of movies that I *know* I need to see but haven't yet. Oh, and there's all kinds of wackiness going on with the Red Sox - John Henry, primary owner of the Sox, has had direct conversations with Alex Rodriguez and they're (in theory) working out a way to rework his deal (hinging on the final three player option years of his deal, which he COULD waive and then resign for at a lower rate) to make a trade feasible. AND there's strong hints of serious trade negotiations that could send Nomar to LA or Anaheim...interesting times. Should be a fun day.
Or so they say. Looks like a good 36+ hours of snow, with some breaks in between, totalling up to 18 inches. Eh, so be it. I don't have to do any shoveling, so it just means I'll be stuck in the apartment all weekend...there are definitely worse fates. I've only spent maybe two days doing nothing in the last month and a half, so a couple days of enofrced sitting-and-reading, combined with some DVD watching. It's a shame my Alias Season Two DVDs aren't here yet, though...
Ancient fossil penis discoveredComputer scans show that a tiny fossil discovered in 425-million-year-old rocks could be the oldest male animal yet found.
I love science.
You SO need to read Pandagon's top 20 most annoying conservatives of 2003. Here's a sample -
I've come up with two possible explanations for the existence of Ann Coulter. Either she's the insane, alternate-reality version of Eddie Izzard, from a universe where biting, clever stand-up is replaced with blood-red anger, or she is Vultron, the shrewish, mentally unbalanced version of Voltron constructed of five bitterly angry gnomes, all of whom, for some unknown reason, have shaggy pageboy haircuts.
There are no words to describe how insanely goofy this stuff is. Go. Now.
*Plastic* Turkey for BreakfastThis is too rich. In the most famous picture from his trip to Baghdad, President Bush had himself artfully photographed to look like he was serving turkey to the troops. The image was emblazoned on front pages throughout the country...
Oh, and after a brief bit when they were saying that the supposed airplane that supposedly saw Air Force One was a non-British Airways UK operation, they're now saying it was a non-UK operator's plane - and that they saw Air Force One behind their own plane. Which is hard to do, since airplanes don't have rear-view mirrors.
New History BlogRalph Luker has teamed up with several other historians with impressive credentials to form a new team blog called "Cliopatria." Ralph's co-bloggers include: Timothy Burke who teaches at Swarthmore and specializes in African history; Oscar Chamberlain who lectures on ante-bellum...
ooooh...Me like history blogs. There should be more of them. And this one should have an RSS feed. =)
So the Yankees are about to/have recently signed Tom Gordon to a 2 year, $7.25 million deal, and Paul Quantrill to a 2 year, $6.4 million deal. They're both relief pitchers. This gives the Yankees those two, Mariano Rivera, ($8.89 million in 2004), Chris Hammond ($2.4 million), and Steve Karsay ($5 million) under contract in their bullpen. That means the Yankees will be spending more than $23 million on their bullpen next year. I think they may have also resigned Felix Heredia, but I can't find proof or numbers on his contract. Still - wow. That's unreal.
Write the Law, Get Hired by the WinnersUnbelievable-- read this and weep. An official helps dish out hundreds of billions of dollars to private industry, even as...
You've GOT to be kidding me - the head of Medicare is leaving the government and going to one of a number of firms that advise health care, insurance, and drug companies. Jesus CHRIST. When a Pentagon official wsa found to have been in job negotiations with Boeing while also negotiating terms of a massive air tanker deal between the Pentagon and Boeing, heads rolled at Boeing, and yesterday, the deal was put on hold from the Pentagon side. As huge as that deal was, it's nothing in comparison to the Medicare bill...and now we find out that one of the key writers of that legislation is going to work for the beneficiaries of the bill. Even better? He got a waiver from the HHS ethics office to continue working on the bill while interviewing for jobs. That office must have a completely different definition of ethics than the rest of us.
Some anti-gun control nut at a message board I go to linked to a stupid gun violence study from the Fraser Institute, who seem to be a right-leaning think tank in Canada. Well, they're dumb, if they publish this goofball. The author throws out numbers out of context and without expalanation (the violent homicide rate is falling faster in the US than Canada! gun violence rose 35% in the UK in 2002!) to back up the preconceived notion that gun control doesn't reduce gun violence. Which is a bloody stupid notion in the first place, of course, but this guy takes the cake. Look at the examples I mentioned - since Canada has a much lower violent homicide rate in the first place, there's not near as much room for it to fall than the US rate, and the gun violence rate in the UK is so small that a 35% increase is relatively miniscule. I'd call this pap intellectually dishonest, but that's ascribing way too much intelligence to it and its author.
EDIT: it's even worse than I thought - take a look at the full paper and its astonishingly dishonest graphs of homicide rates in the UK, Australia, and Canada alongside the US rate - using different scales on the same freakin' graph. Unreal.
Yeep. We get a few pesky snow squalls, and traffic throughout northeastern Massachusetts/southern New Hampshire goes to hell. The highways are just shot - jackknifed tractor trailers, "minor multi-car accidents" just about every five feet. It took me twenty-five minutes to get to just before where the Lowell Connector (little side-highway from US 3 and I-495 to downtown Lowell) feeds into I-495 (my route to work) and Rt. 3 (one of the two main arteries from the southern New Hampshire suburbs towards Boston and the Rt. 128 tech belt), and then I saw that traffic was stopped well short of the ramps. I turned around - got back to my apartment in maybe five minutes. I'm going to try to get into the office later, but the roads are still basically in a standstill, an hour and a half after the last snow and hours after rush hour should be over.
If it's going to be THIS bad now, I'm really dreading what the commute's going to be like once we start getting REAL snow...
G.O.P. Option at Convention: Luxury LinerThe House majority leader, Tom DeLay, wants a luxury cruise ship to be a floating entertainment center for delegates to next summer's Republican National Convention.
New York would lose money if Mr. DeLay decides to charter the ship because it would draw visitors — and dollars — away from city hotels, restaurants and shops.
As for the more ephemeral issue of perception, the proposal to remove visitors from the hubbub of city life has been broadly received as a slight — a suggestion that the city's hotels and restaurants, not to mention its people, are not quite good enough for Republicans from out of state.
Republicans are not necessarily happy, either. Many say the cruise ship could undermine one reason New York was chosen for the first time in the party's history as the site of its convention: to help advance the idea that Republicans are the new big-tent party, trying to embrace all voters.
Instead, Republican strategists say, being docked on the Hudson River would send out the message that they are a bunch of elitists who will not mingle with city residents — and just might be ducking New York's laws, including the one that prohibits smoking in public places (a cruise ship might be exempt, or at least unwelcome territory for a city health inspector).
Interestingly, the article doesn't mention the possibility that Delay is pushing the cruise ship idea because it'll make it a lot easier to avoid the massive numbers of protestors sure to be out in the streets of NYC during the convention. Of COURSE, he doesn't want to be anywhere near the hoi polloi of New York - they're all dirty and liberal and such. Hopefully, this'll help show New Yorkers who've had some illusions about the national Republican party due to their relatively humane local Republicans (Pataki, Giuliani, Bloomberg, et al) that a vote for a Republican Congressman, even if you like the guy, is also a vote for Tom Delay, and you almost certainly DON'T like THAT guy.
In the next phase of the ongoing Sons of Sam Horn saga, things have gotten just plain bizarre. Schilling has shown up for another chat, and is starting to post regularly. Yet more coverage has shown up nationwide - an Arizona TV news report namechecked SoSH and praised Lanternjaw, the head Dope, who's also been getting quite a lot of press coverage. And now, John Henry, Red Sox owner, talks about SoSH in the Boston Globe:
Henry also credited Schilling for spending time during the negotiation process communicating with Sox fans on Internet sites such as Sons of Sam Horn. Schilling even held a chat on the site Saturday night, more than 24 hours after the talks ended.
Henry said he occasionally posts his thoughts on Sons of Sam Horn and sometimes relays ideas or analyses from the site to Sox officials.
"They frequently have good, strong ideas and viewpoints," he said. "I do not recommend the site, however, and caution parents against having their children visit the site simply because the language there sometimes is unnecessarily obscene. If it were to clean up its act in that one area, it would become a respected institution among fans. Adults cannot get a better, more informed or timely discussion of important Red Sox issues anywhere."
There's what's sure to be a brief controversy over the naughty language comment and the explicit not recommending the site, but I see no problem with that at all - there is a lot of colorful language, and the owner of the Red Sox can't recommend any non-Sox-owned websites without implying a certain affiliation that doesn't exist here. But still...wow. There's at least 300 people in the application queue, trying to get posting access as we speak, while there's maybe 1500 members. That's just gonna get worse, too. I'm part of something biggish. =)
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