2007 archive

Actually, that’s a line from an old Firesign Theatre album.

Arms for the most unstable region in the world? That’s a line from the latest Bushie desparate attempt to climb out of the pit.

Dana Garrett dissects the insanity.

There’s an old story about the rich alumnus who is touring his alma mater in the company of the college president, who is trolling for an endowment. At one point the alumnus expresses a desire to see his old dorm room.

The prez and the alum walk into the room, admitted by a very flustered student.

“Ah,” he says, “the same old room.”

Then he opens the door of the closet. There’s a girl hiding behind the clothes.

“Oh my,” he says, “the same old girl.”

“She’s my s-s-s-sister, sir,” stutters the student.

“Ahhhh,” says the alumnus, “and the same old lie.”

I’ve been just too disgusted to say anything about Gonzo.

I guess I’ve got Bush Fatigue.

It’s just the same old lie.

Addendum, 7/29/2007:

Dick Polman analyzes the debacle (emphasis added):

But perhaps Gonzales said it best in his latest testimony. When asked whether he thinks it was appropriate to importune Ashcroft, he replied: “There are no rules governing whether or not General Ashcroft can decide ‘I’m feeling well enough to make this decision.’”

Question: Even when the guy is under sedation?

Gonzales: “There are no rules.”

There are no rules…That’s the Bush administration, in a nutshell. For once, Alberto Gonzales was telling the truth.

I’ve discussed Ashley’s ability to sleep before.

I wish I could sleep like this:

(It’s hard to see for all the fur, but she has both hind legs propped up on the step and then corkscrews around under the entertainment center.)

The answers to this post are in the first comment.

Phillybits has been tracking Conservapedia since it first burst ignorantly on the scene to spread ignorance.

Now comes El Reg with the news that Conservapedia has competitionedia.

Those among you who feel that Conservapedia – the “conservative encyclopedia you can trust” dedicated to countering liberal bias – is not sufficiently tough on Marxist-Leninist dogma are directed forthwith to Metapedia, the “alternative encyclopedia dedicated to the pro-European cultural struggle”.

No, I’m not linking to it. If you want to see what it’s like, follow the link to El Reg.

It’s interesting.

The goal of Wikipedica is to provide a compendium of knowledge, how imperfectly the execution.

The goal of Conservapedia is to slant knowledge. They proceed virtually unnoticed, except by their patrons, because, frankly, what’s another rightwing propaganda outfit when we have Fox News?

The goal of this Metapedia outfit is to push knowledge off a cliff.

Drexel University sets up shop in cyber space:

This online Drexel universe – which gets 100 visitors daily – exists in Second Life, a program created by San Francisco-based Linden Labs in late 2003. Second Life is used for both academic and social endeavors, with more than eight million users worldwide interacting with one another and buying e-property to develop sites for uses from academic settings such as Drexel’s to a museum promoting artwork.

Looks like the Jesuits won’t be far behind:

Jesuit missionaries may soon venture into Second Life, intent on saving virtual people from virtual sins.

Writing in the Italian Jesuit journal La Civilta Cattolica, whose contents are approved by the Vatican, Father Antonio Spadaro has told fellow Catholics that they shouldn’t be wary of venturing into Second Life’s virtual world, arguing that the online alternate universe might be the perfect place to land converts, Reuters reports.

Pretty soon won’t be much of a life left in First Life.

Illuminating diagram from The Nation showing who owns what.

Via Susie.

The boat starts.

Tomorrow we shall find out if the boat floats.

The Next Day:

Don’t know if it floats. But the cover kept the rain off it today.

I realized a little while ago that the three magazines to which I subscribe all have names that start with “P.”

I am not referring to the publications that come as a result of memberships and contributions, such as the AARP rags, the Boat US mags, or the SPLC Intelligence Report. I am referring to publications to which I write a check “payable to the order of.” They are PCMag, Playboy, and Psychology Today.

The most recent issue of Psychology Today (I’ve been waiting a month for this to become available on line–a print subscription allows you to see stuff first) analyzed the candidates’ presentation of themselves.

You can learn a lot about a politician by how they hold their hands—or how much they talk about the future, or their feelings, or themselves. We live in an age of relentless focus-grouping, but a candidate’s unvarnished attitudes and values still peek through in every microexpression and personal pronoun. Content analysis can ferret out aspects of a person’s political agenda and personality based on word and gesture alone. Psychology Today asked a range of experts to scrutinize the 2008 front-runners. They uncovered a great deal, from the messages candidates want voters to know—Giuliani won’t let you forget that he’s a crisis manager, Hillary wants to seem middle-American—to the traits they’d rather hide: a negative worldview, a meandering message, an inability to connect with voters emotionally.

(snip)

Content analysis, though, has real predictive power. Optimism, for instance, is assessed by examining how people attribute cause and effect in the world, or by tallying their use of positive and negative words. In the 20th century, the most optimistic candidate won 18 out of the first 22 presidential elections, says Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania. Recent elections have been trickier, but in 1996, the sunniest candidate by far was Bill Clinton. This time around, says Seligman, it’s Hillary Clinton who emerges as the most optimistic candidate. (Giuliani is the least.) Hillary also exhibits the emotional tone voters tend to like the most. While it’s still far too early to predict which of the candidates will win, it’s high time we pegged their style.

The candidates selected were Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, John Edwards, Rudy Guiliani, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. Fred Thompson was still–actually, is still–discussing things with his agent.

The categories analyzed included

• Rhetorical style
• Body language
• Self-definition
• Emotional tone
• Political values
• Universal values

Just for grins and giggles, I will quote below the analysis of rhetorical style for all six candidates. See if you can match the comments to the candidate. Or you can go read the article and find out the answers for yourself.

Answers tomorrow (Fair use: The material below is adapted from a small portion of the article, “Decision ’08: Reading Between the Lines,” Psychology Today, July-August 2007):

1. (He or she) uses more familiar words than any other candidate. (He or she) roams the political landscape and talks about a lot of different things rather than staying on a very narrow track. (He or she’s) not picking one particular argument, or one particular language pattern. It could be that (he or she’s) seeking, trying to define (him- or her)self, and hasn’t quite gotten there yet.

2. Rhetorically as politically, (he or she) is middle of the road. (He or she’s) in the middle of the group on almost all 40 variables of language style—(he or she) employs a cautious, not very distinctive style. In general, (he or she’s) very low profile, rarely referring to (him- or herself) and avoiding overstatements.

3. (He or she) is off the charts on realism (concrete language), insistence (the tendency to stay on script), and certainty. It’s, “We can do these specific things together, and we can do it with great assurance.” It’s a good style for a (party name), because it’s a language of the people, feel-good kind of style.

4. (He or she) has the most distinctive verbal repertoire—(his or her) language is active, assured, and full of references to (him- or herself). (His or her) message is that (he or she’s) going to personally lead you (high activity) and (he or she’s) going in this direction and no other direction (high certainty). It adds up to a take-charge kind of (guy or gal).

5. Compared to the other candidates, (he or she) rarely mentions (his or her) own life experience during policy discussions. (He or she) has a restrained, formal, less folksy style. There’s not a lot there for people to find out who (he or she) is. (He or she) also has the highest space/time ratio—the extent to which a person refers to geographical matters (Iraq, the region, home) compared to references to time (this morning, the future, the ’50s). For (him or her), this campaign is about Iraq and the United States. This stands to reason since (he or she’s) focusing on issues of the homeland.

6. (His or her) hortatory gusto—(his or her) use of adjectives, religious imagery, patriotic language, and references to voters—embodies old-fashioned, all-American, Fourth of July kind of language. It’s most often used by someone without a platform because it gives them something to talk about.

My first grandchild was born last night, about 800 miles from here.

Everyone is okay.

Nothing to add:

A Navy man who got mad when someone mocked him as a “nerd” over the Internet climbed into his car and drove 1,300 miles from Virginia to Texas to teach the other guy a lesson.

As he made his way toward Texas, Fire Controlman 2nd Class Petty Officer Russell Tavares posted photos online showing the welcome signs at several states’ borders, as if to prove to his Internet friends that he meant business.

When he finally arrived, Tavares burned the guy’s trailer down.

Great website here.

Great place to send your email to impeach Gonzo.

And his evil masters.

Water main break halfway down the street. You can see it bubbling up in the bottom picture:

. . . Bushie style:

Frustrated by delays in health care, injured Iraq war veterans accused VA Secretary Jim Nicholson in a lawsuit of breaking the law by denying them disability pay and mental-health treatment.

The lawsuit against the Department of Veterans Affairs, filed yesterday in federal court in San Francisco, seeks broad changes in the agency as it struggles to meet growing demands from veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Suing on behalf of hundreds of thousands of veterans, it charges that the VA has failed troops on numerous fronts. It contends the VA failed to provide prompt disability benefits, failed to add staff to reduce wait times for medical care, and failed to increase services for post-traumatic stress disorder.

And it’s worse if the troops are female:

As more military women return from fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, they are finding that veterans services aren’t meeting their needs. An estimated 8,000 female veterans are homeless and others suffer from mental illness. Female veterans discuss their unique experiences and the rising concern about the services available to them.

I urge you to listen to that segment from Talk of the Nation. And consider how you would react if it were your daughters.

Or sons.

Glenn Greenwald on John Yoo:

In defending the President, Yoo’s Op-Ed yesterday touts the grave importance of Executive Privilege and makes all the claims one would expect. He stresses the “president’s right to keep internal executive discussions confidential”; proclaims that “without secrecy, the government can’t function”; compares Bush’s assertions to George Washington’s; and concludes that by asserting Executive Privilege (nowhere mentioned in the Constitution), Bush “has the Constitution on his side.”

But this isn’t the first Op-Ed Yoo has written on the topic of Executive Privilege for the Wall St. Journal. Back in 1998, when Bill Clinton was asserting the same privilege to resist Congressional demands that his closest aides testify about the President’s deliberations in responding to the various Lewinsky investigations, Yoo became one of the leading spokespeople denouncing the assertion of this privilege.

On March 2, 1998, Yoo wrote an Op-Ed (sub. req’d) for the WSJ Editorial Page (which back then also opposed the privilege only now to depict it as the anchor of a Free Government). In denouncing Clinton’s executive privilege assertions, Yoo began his op-ed this way:

James Madison wrote that a “popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy, or perhaps both.”

In other words, Clinton does it, bad. Bush does it, good. The sliding scale of Neocon morality strikes once again.

Pardon me, I think I need to throw up now.

Via Atrios.

One of the joys of working out of my home is being able to see the incoming phone calls. Caller ID is your friend.

(I’m trying to remember the last time I got a real phone call on my land line. Oh, yeah, the church secretary called me today. She doesn’t have my cell phone number. And Second Son called this weekend, because you can’t make collect calls to cell phones, but that’s about the crop for July.)

I’m not getting phone calls or mail any more trying to sell me a mortgage. And the one-half of my mail that used to come from Ameriquest has disappeared.

Actually, it looks like Ameriquest is on the way to disappearing too. No great lost.

Now, it’s mainly “Eric,” trying to sell me satellite television, with a free digital recorder thrown in.

Life’s too short to spend it recording television shows, at least since Hogan’s Heroes went off the air.

I’m quite happy with my cable provider (unlike many of their customers, I know, but I think they give me value for my dollar) and the cable internet connection that never drops (of course, I don’t have any premium channels–you don’t need them to watch Law and Order reruns), and, frankly, if I never hear from Eric again, it will be too soon. But I know he’ll be calling me tomorrow. . . .

Here (click the thumbnail to view):

(click here to view)

John Sherffius Jul 23, 2007 EditorialCartoonists.com

Dan Froomkin:

President Bush is having no success in getting the American public to support him on Iraq.

White House aides have pulled out all the stops in what may be the last and most important sales job of the Bush presidency. They’ve assembled friendly audiences in rebuttal-free zones all across the country so that the self-styled ” Educator-in-Chief” can “help our fellow citizens understand why I’ve made some of the decisions I’ve made” and remind them of this salient fact: “I’m an optimistic person.”

Much of the media coverage — particularly on TV — dutifully relates his constantly repeated assertions and predictions as if they were new and credible. Still, it doesn’t work.

His optimism is falling flat because it’s untethered from reality. The public is rejecting his message because it doesn’t believe him or what he’s selling. In fact, according to the latest polls, an overwhelming majority of Americans have lost faith in both the war and the president’s ability to lead it.

Of course no one believes him. He’s a liar.

Some cartoon the other day (I think it might have been Bizarro) went sort of like this:

“What do you call a gathering of celebrities?”

“Rehab.”

I don’t pay too much attention to celebrities other than reading the daily gossip column in the local rag as I progress through the magazine section to the advice column, then to the highlight of my newspaper day (the comics) or to see what has recently been posted to alt.binaries.multimedia.nude.celebrities (I’m a newsgroup kind of guy).

But I did get seduced to follow the Huffington Post link to this:

Lindsay Lohan was arrested for drunk driving in Santa Monica early this morning — her second bust in less than three months.

According to the L.A. County Sheriff’s Dept., 21-year-old Lohan was nailed around 2:15 AM near Pico Boulevard and Main Street early Tuesday morning.

And I had just one thought:

If she were some poor black or brown girl from the Southbridge or Riverside districts, she wouldn’t see the light of day for years.

Instead, she’s back on the streets.

Some truck decided to catch on fire on I-95 between here and there and all the roads are clogged, even the escape routes I used to use when I commuted up that way.

Darn it.

Now I’ll have to sit here and try to be creative, when I was planning the drink liberally.