Jeff Carlson (.Thought)

Palin's Problems, in Her Own Words

Here's what I love/hate about Sarah Palin: Within the space of a few words, she can completely destroy her own point, and yet sound as if she isn't. Today's use of the term "blood libel" to talk about how the mean ol' media is victimizing her after the Tuscon shooting is reprehensible not only because of its historical context (see here for background), or that she likely doesn't know what it means, or because it was something that apparently burbled up from a wide swathe of right-wing blogs. But what's getting missed in the "blood libel" name is what she said around it:

"Acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own. They begin and end with the criminals who commit them, not collectively with all the citizens of a state, not with those who listen to talk radio...."

And two paragraphs later:

"Especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn."

So, to sum up: Criminals act alone, without persuasion or influence from outside elements. But journalists and pundits somehow have the power to incite the hatred and violence that she just said resides solely within the criminal. Sorry, you can't have it both ways—and yet I'm sure millions of her followers nodded their heads and went back to watching Fox News.

My favorite comment about this so far comes from Josh Marshall at Talking Points Media:

Today has been set aside to honor the victims of the Tucson massacre. And Sarah Palin has apparently decided she's one of them.

Palin just can't function without being portrayed as the victim.

Maybe Bush Did Do One Thing Right

One of the more popular of my blog entries is "What Has Bush Done Right?" from 2004. I spent the entire slog through Bush's second term asking myself that question, and honestly never really came up with a good answer. Bush was a bad leader, an idealogue, and is, I believe, directly responsible for a lot of the mess we're in now. However, an article yesterday gave me a sliver - an extremely tiny sliver - of respect for the man: "Aides Say No Pardon for Libby Irked Cheney (New York Times).

Dick Cheney spent his final days as vice president making a furious last-ditch effort to secure a pardon for his onetime chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., leaving him at odds with former President George W. Bush on a matter of personal loyalty as the two moved on to private life, according to several former officials. The officials said Tuesday that Mr. Cheney’s lobbying campaign on behalf of Mr. Libby was far more intense than previously known, with the vice president bringing it up in countless one-on-one conversations with the president. They said Mr. Bush was unyielding to the end, already frustrated by a deluge of last-minute pardon requests from other quarters.

For a quick reminder, here's what "Scooter" Libby was convicted of:

Mr. Libby was convicted of four felony counts in March 2007 for obstruction, perjury and lying to investigators looking into the leak of Valerie Wilson’s employment with the Central Intelligence Agency. Mr. Bush commuted Mr. Libby’s sentence, wiping out the 30-month prison term imposed by a judge.

Since Bush removed the prison time, this isn't a big win for him, but I think everybody assumed that Libby would get a pardon. Cheney and others think Libby was railroaded, that he was made a scapegoat. But Libby's case exemplifies the problem of the Bush Administration, and Cheney in particular: there was no respect for the rule of law. Libby was tried, found guilty, and sentenced using the laws that Bush and Cheney promised to uphold. Libby broke the law, and his actions endangered America's safety. But Cheney thinks laws apply only when they're convenient. The article goes on to quote insiders who tone down the idea that Bush and Cheney are somehow fueding over this, but then wraps up with what I think is a good insight:

Kenneth L. Adelman, another Bush supporter turned critic who has called for a pardon for Mr. Libby, said he believed “Bush got it in his head that he did not want to leave office like Clinton did,” a reference to the disputed pardons that President Bill Clinton issued in his final hours.

For eight years, Bush and the Republicans did so much to distance themselves from Clinton, when they never needed to. I think Bill's ghost hung over them at all times, which is a nice image. So it's entirely possible that Bush did something right without meaning to. I'll take it. Goodbye Dubya, and an especially hearty goodbye to perpetually Cranky (and Paranoid?) Cheney. May you never be heard from again, unless it's in the context of legal action against you.

You've Got to Be Fucking Kidding

I don't throw that out there as a title lightly:

The U.S. Military is demanding that thousands of wounded service personnel give back signing bonuses because they are unable to serve out their commitments.

To get people to sign up, the military gives enlistment bonuses up to $30,000 in some cases.

Now men and women who have lost arms, legs, eyesight, hearing and can no longer serve are being ordered to pay some of that money back.

Again, anyone who says the Bush administration supports the troops is deeply deluded, full of shit, or both. (And I know it's "the Military" doing this, but guess whose desk that falls on?)

Mac Journalism, or When Emotion Clogs the Brain

Glenn Fleishman and I wrote a review of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard that appeared in the Seattle Times last week (we both write a bi-weekly column called Practical Mac). Depending on the topic, we get a little email here and there from readers and the occasional request for advice that has nothing to do with the topic. And every once in a while we receive letters from people who are writing based more on their gut assumptions or feelings and very little to do with what was published. This week has seen several of these, and I'm a bit perplexed.

By far the biggest response has come from a section talking about the security improvements in Leopard, which are significant. I'm posting the entire section below as reference.

Beefed-up security. Microsoft received a lot of due credit for some significant changes in Vista's underlying structure that prevent entire categories of viruses and worms.

The Mac has proved more resistant to attacks, partly through a lack of attention by crackers until recently, but the threat is still a possibility. Apple has taken a page from Microsoft's book and added new security features that should improve the odds of deflecting future attacks.

Leopard will now record information about any program you download over the Internet and provide those details to you the first time you run it. This should prevent attacks that rely on ignorance or a program launch that carries out malicious intent before you know what hit you.

Apple also added digital signatures as an option, where encryption is used to verify a program is unchanged since it was produced by its developer.

Apparently, even mentioning Microsoft means we're anti-Mac (as one person wrote). The latest email (which is titled "Do you work for M$?" which is a pretty clear sign that it's not going to be friendly) starts, "After reading your article, 'Apple's latest cool cat,' I was not sure. Your article was very biased towards MS/Windows."

Let me point out that the section quoted above is about one-sixth of the article, which gives our mostly-positive impressions about the major new features in Leopard. If you read through this block, we're essentially saying that Microsoft has had to deal with attacks; Apple has been immune so far but we know that won't always be the case; and Apple has implemented a few technologies that appeared in Vista first.

Going back to the letter, where the author reveals his colors at the end: "The plain truth of the matter is, Apple has made the finest desktop Operating System for over a decade. What they have not been doing is ripping their customers of with predatory pricing, and SW licensing fees." (Incidentally, most of the letters followed a similar pattern: Start with a concern that we've gotten something wrong, maybe with a backhanded "you did make some good points, though" thrown in; make a case that's only tangentially related to what was originally written; and end with a screed that finally gets to the person's longstanding grudge, whether that happens to be "Microsoft is evil" or "Gaming on the Mac sucks because I can't play my favorite game from 1997 on it". I think this is the Mac reader equivalent to "monologuing" from The Incredibles.)

Look, I don't like some of Microsoft's business practices (they did engage in monopolistic behavior after all), but that doesn't make them evil. Microsoft made a huge strategic mistake in not addressing security early or thoroughly enough, and they're paying for it. Apple knows that Mac OS X isn't going to be immune forever (currently hackers are exploiting a security hole in the version of Mac OS X that runs on the iPhone in order to unlock the phone), and frankly, anyone that thinks the Mac is infinitely rock solid is delusional. What keeps the Mac secure is not a BSD Unix foundation; it's Apple being diligent and staying on top of exploits that are discovered.

Another recent example of how emotion clogs the brain was a short news piece we ran at TidBITS a couple of weeks ago. It involved an Apple board member whose high-profile usage of Macintosh technology aided in a huge amount of media coverage. Of course, I'm talking about the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Peace to a number of researchers including Al Gore. Mark Anbinder wrote the piece, I edited it, and we both actively focused on what was news: Apple board member receives international recognition.

Here's the entire two-paragraph article:

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, whose documentary film "An Inconvenient Truth" won an Academy Award (or "Oscar") and who himself won an Emmy Award for his Current TV channel, last week added the ultimate award to his resume. The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize would be shared between Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Such announcements are normally outside what we cover in TidBITS, but both Gore and his film are deeply connected to Apple and the Mac industry.

In fact, while we were hoping for other news from Apple's PR machine (see "Leopard Slated for October 26th?," 2007-10-04), they instead spent the day touting Gore's achievement, customizing Apple's home page and linking to multiple news reports on the Hot News page. The one-time politician, named to Apple's board of directors in early 2003, has frequently been linked to the company's products. He has for years been an avid user of Apple's Final Cut Pro software, and he used Keynote to assemble the material presented in "An Inconvenient Truth."

We specifically noted that this isn't the type of thing we cover in TidBITS, but the connection between Apple and Gore are significant in the Mac industry. (We even correctly wrote that the film An Inconvenient Truth earned the Academy Award; Gore himself did not receive the award, as he was not one of the filmmakers, only the film's subject.)

And yet, we were treated to several vitriolic emails and TidBITS Talk posts about how terrible Al Gore is. The words "Al" and "Gore" seem to make some people froth at the mouth no matter what context. A sample: "Come now. A 'one-time politician'? Gore hasn't stopped being a politician for 50 years, and can't stop. If Apple wants to use its time PRing a politician/board member, let them do it. But TidBits [sic] time is too valuable to use even mentioning a politician (any politician) in its pages. Please save that for the news channels."

I understand that people have strong views, and I want to encourage freedom of expression. But ranting for the sake of ranting is just a waste of our (your and my) time. I understand why mainstream journalists who don't cover the Mac get defensive and start throwing out words like "Mac zealots" and "cultists" when they cover Apple; they no doubt get much, much more volume of this type of email and don't know how to handle it.

To try to encourage better communication here are a few suggestions for people who feel compelled to write:

• Ask yourself, "Am I writing to correct a factual error or to provide constructive information?" If so, send it along! If not, then assume you're ranting.
• If you're ranting, ask yourself, "Does my rant directly deal with what was written, or am I just pissed?" If you're just pissed and writing a response helps get that out of your system, do it but don't send it. (Or, look at it tomorrow after you've slept on it and then decide whether to send it.)
• Threatening or insulting the person you're writing to doesn't help your case. In fact, it's a sure bet that I'll just toss it out. If you're compelled to make a statement about how well portions of my anatomy are operating, I won't pay any attention to whatever else you might say, even if it's legitimate. As Glenn wrote to one person, "You can't start nasty and expect a dialog."
• If you're writing because you think I'm somehow in bed with Microsoft or anti-Apple (or fervently pro-Apple) or that I'm getting some back-room kickback, know that I'm not. Glenn and I are freelance writers expressing our opinions. No one is pressuring us, no one is paying us (aside from the publication for whom we're writing for), no one has set up some cushy retirement fund that we get to tap into if we write X or Y.
• And if you legitimately have a concern with something we've written, and you can express it in a civil way, let us know and we can talk about it. (However, if you're just looking for random tech support, we don't have time to troubleshoot everyone's issues; Google search is your friend.)

Emotion doesn't have to clog the brain, and the best part is that even when it does (and I know it does), it's not a permanent affliction. A little bit of consideration will ensure that your time and mine aren't wasted.

NBC Yanking TV Shows from iTunes

Macworld: iTunes Store to stop selling NBC shows in September

NBC: "Thanks to Apple and iTunes, we're making money we otherwise wouldn't have made, so now we're greedy bastards."

I suppose some people might be compelled to try the new Fox/NBC Hulu.com service, which I read somewhere will require that you're online to watch. But I'll bet this action is going to push a lot of people — people willing to pay honest money for the convenience of downloading from iTunes — to the P2P services to download pirate copies. (It's not encouraging that the Hulu page includes an image for the series Drive, which Fox cancelled after four episodes.

I give it 9 months before NBC announces a return to iTunes.

Goodbye Gonzales. Dems, Don't Screw This Up, Too

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced his resignation today (effective September 16), eliciting a collective sigh of relief across the nation. The term "incompetent" gets thrown around too much these days (and isn't that a statement on the political climate we're living in), so I'm not going to say that Gonzales was incompetent - he was just horribly, embarrassingly bad at his job. Or rather, his second job. His first job and main priority over the years has been to protect George W. Bush, which he's managed to do in spades, to the incredulity of nearly everyone. It's just that he was terrible at his second job, which was to serve the American people.

Within the last few weeks, Bush's brain trust (I use the term loosely) has started to unravel. Rove is exiting, Gonzales is headed out, not to mention all of the other administration lackeys who've suddenly realized that they need to spend more quality time with their families. It's surely a blatant attempt to head for cover now that there's real heat in the air (subpoenas, and all those pesky facts that have been suppressed for so long which are now finally emerging), in the hopes that they'll be passed over and people will forget all about it.

So, subpoena-power wielding Democratic legislators, once again we're at a point where your country is begging you: don't fuck this up. Don't go easy on these law-breaking bastards in the name of attaining some higher level of political consciousness. Defend your Constitution, and punish people for the crimes they've committed. Political goodwill is fine when you're dicking around with minor partisan matters, but we've reached a point where the current administration has clearly and unashamedly undermined the Constitution, the government, and the American people in its pursuit of power (and don't kid yourselves thinking that it hasn't been a giant six-year power grab by the Republican party at every level of government it can get its hands on). Do you want to stay in power yourselves? Do the right thing and crack down on the law breaking and corruption (and that includes members of your own party; you've seen what covering up for criminals and pedophiles in their ranks has done for the Republicans).

Screwing the Troops (Again/Still)

Henceforth, I don't want to hear anyone make the claim that the Bush Administration "supports the troops." It's already established that Bush claims to listen to his generals, but then does what he wants (and fires the generals who disagree with him). And that he uses the troops that he commands as PR shields, propping himself up in military bravado while the injured languish at Walter Reed hospital. But now, this is the last fucking nail: Bush Threatens Veto Over Troop Pay Raise, Military Widow Benefits.

I've never served in the military, never had any interest in it, and don't know if I'd have the aptitude for it. But it pisses me off that "Commander Guy" can't provide for the people who are, literally, suffering and dying for him.

The Bush administration today threatened to a veto a House defense spending bill over a 3.5 percent pay raise for U.S. soldiers and a $40/month increase in benefits for military widows, among other provisions. The legislation passed the House today 397-27.

ThinkProgress noted last night that the White House opposed the pay raise for troops:

Troops don’t need bigger pay raises, White House budget officials said Wednesday in a statement of administration policy laying out objections to the House version of the 2008 defense authorization bill. […]

The slightly bigger military raises are intended to reduce the gap between military and civilian pay that stands at about 3.9 percent today. Under the bill, HR 1585, the pay gap would be reduced to 1.4 percent after the Jan. 1, 2012, pay increase.

Bush budget officials said the administration “strongly opposes” both the 3.5 percent raise for 2008 and the follow-on increases, calling extra pay increases “unnecessary.”

The White House says it also opposes:

– a $40/month allowance for military survivors, saying the current benefits are “sufficient”

– additional benefits for surviving family members of civilian employees

– price controls for prescription drugs under TRICARE, the military’s health care plan for military personnel and their dependents

House Minority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) said today he was “shocked and disappointed in the President’s threat,” noting that Bush’s problems with the bill are over measures that benefit “the very people who sacrifice the most in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and who serve at home and overseas.”

UPDATE: VoteVets chairman and Iraq veteran Jon Soltz adds:

Believe me, even with the current benefits that get paid out by the Department of Defense and insurance that many troops buy into, those who lose spouses in Iraq aren’t sleeping in mounds of cash. The increase proposed by Democrats will mean a hell of a lot. At VoteVets.org, we’ve heard absolute horror stories on the type of cutbacks that widows and widowers have had to make because the government doesn’t provide enough to those who lose a loved one in war.

"Won" or "Lost" Isn't the Issue

Josh Marshall has an excellent, succinct post about the misguided thinking about whether the war in Iraq is "lost," as Harry Reid has said, or is able to be "won," as Bush and the Republicans hollowly maintain. As usual, what's being talked about is the smoke that obscures the reality, something Americans have been subjected to for, oh, going on six years now. Sorry for the long quotation, but it's worth it:

Frankly, the whole question is stupid. Or at least it's a very stilted way of understanding what's happening, geared to guarantee President Bush's goal of staying in Iraq forever. A more realistic description is President Bush's long twilight struggle to see just how far he can go into one brown paper bag.

We had a war. It was relatively brief and it took place in the spring of 2003. The critical event is what happened in the three to six months after the conventional war ended. The supporters of the war had two basic premises about what it would accomplish: a) the US would eliminate Iraq's threatening weapons of mass destruction, b) the Iraqi people would choose a pro-US government and the Iraqi people and government would ally themselves wtih the US.

Rationale 'A' quickly fell apart when we learned there were no weapons of mass destruction to eliminate.

That left us with premise or rationale 'B'. But though many or most Iraqis were glad we'd overthrown Saddam, evidence rapidly mounted that most Iraqis weren't interested in the kind of US-aligned government the war's supporters had in mind. Not crazy about a secular government, certainly not wild about one aligned with Israel and just generally not ready to be America's new proxy in the region. Most importantly, those early months showed clear signs that anti-Americanism (not surprisingly) rose with the duration of the occupation.

This is the key point: right near the beginning of this nightmare it was clear the sole remaining premise for the war was false: that is, the idea that the Iraqis would freely choose a government that would align itself with the US and its goals in the region. As the occupation continued, anti-American sentiment -- both toward the occupation and America's role in the world -- has only grown.

I would submit that virtually everything we've done in Iraq since mid-late 2003 has been an effort to obscure this fact. And our policy has been one of continuing the occupation to create the illusion that this reality was not in fact reality. In short, it was a policy of denial.

...

Of course, the damage that's been done over the last four years of denial is immense -- damage to ourselves, to the Iraqis, damage to Middle Eastern security and our standing in the world. So walking out of the bag isn't easy and it won't fix things. But the stakes alleged by the White House are largely illusory. Most of the White House's argument amounts to the threat that if we walk out of the bag that we'll have to give up the denial that the White House has had a diminishing percentage of the country in for the last four years. The reality though is that the disaster has already happened. Admitting that isn't a mistake or something to be feared. It's the first step to repairing the damage. What the president has had the country in for four years is a very bloody and costly holding action. And the president has forced it on the country to avoid admitting the magnitude of his errors.

I wonder if the remaining 28% of the country that fervently supports Bush will ever stop and realize that they've been fed nationalistic lies since he came into office. I doubt it. Bush and his administration is firmly tapped into the base of world-fearing warmongers (start with Dick Cheney and move on down), so facts aren't likely to intrude on their reality.

Camping Out in Cafés

In a post's comments, reader Rick writes:

RE: your recent review of Seattle coffeehouses and how nice it is to do work in them: Grr... Jeff, hate to say it, but it's people like you, i.e. those folks who camp out in Seattle coffee houses all day to do their day jobs or homework, that take up 00% if not all the available seats and ruin it for the rest of us. The decor of our coffee houses is now a sea of laptops surrounded by textbooks and workpapers on all the tables. These selfish ones studiously ignore us regular people, who wander the isles looking for a spare seat or corner of a table to hang out for a while with a cup of joe.

  Dean's Office B.A. 
  Originally uploaded by Jeff Carlson.

Actually, Rick, I agree with you. There are a lot of people who camp out for hours at a time. I've found that I can do maybe up to two hours of work in a coffeeshop before I need to move on, but usually I've gone to a cafe as a change of pace, not as a second office.

I'm glad to see that places like Caffe Ladro and Fremont Coffee Company are using a system where you get a code from the counter to get onto their wireless networks, which expires after a set amount of time (usually 1-2 hours). My colleague Glenn Fleishman wrote an article for the New York Times about Victrola when they decided to turn the Wi-Fi off on the weekends.

It's true that some people will just park at a table, laptop or no, and hang out all day. I don't know what can be done except to find ways to discourage them (politely) from doing so. It does annoy me when one person is taking up a four-person table with all their crap. But I'm sure they had this problem in the early coffeehouses in England, too.

The Commoditization of Starbucks, by Howard Schultz

Because I live in a great, coffee-abundant city, I can be a bit disparaging toward our hometown heroes, Starbucks. I have nothing against the company, and they rightly deserve credit for pushing up the quality of espresso in America. But I find their coffee to be just okay. One of the company's biggest advantages is the fact that a Starbucks latté tastes pretty consistent whether you're in Seattle or Los Angeles or Humboldt, Tennessee.

Over the past couple of years, Starbucks has retooled its equipment, abandoning their La Marzocco espresso machines in favor of super-automatic machines that deliver espresso at the push of a button. On the surface, you'd think this would be a good thing: the time it takes to make a latté (or, more importantly, several hundred lattés during peak hours) is drastically reduced, and you get a level of consistency in temperature and other settings that, as I understand it, tend to fluctuate more with the La Marzocco or other machines. But coffee from a super-automatic often tastes a bit watery or flat to me.

People who really know coffee have expressed this point of view for a while, but now there's a new voice, one that carries quite a bit more weight: Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz. In a memo this month to the Starbucks CEO and others (which Starbucks has verified is legitimate), Schultz notes that the switch to automatic machines is having unintended negative effects:

Over the past ten years, in order to achieve the growth, development, and scale necessary to go from less than 1,000 stores to 13,000 stores and beyond, we have had to make a series of decisions that, in retrospect, have lead to the watering down of the Starbucks experience, and, what some might call the commoditization of our brand.

Many of these decisions were probably right at the time, and on their own merit would not have created the dilution of the experience; but in this case, the sum is much greater and, unfortunately, much more damaging than the individual pieces. For example, when we went to automatic espresso machines, we solved a major problem in terms of speed of service and efficiency. At the same time, we overlooked the fact that we would remove much of the romance and theatre that was in play with the use of the La Marzocca machines. This specific decision became even more damaging when the height of the machines, which are now in thousands of stores, blocked the visual sight line the customer previously had to watch the drink being made, and for the intimate experience with the barista.

He also talks about store design:

...one of the results has been stores that no longer have the soul of the past and reflect a chain of stores vs. the warm feeling of a neighborhood store. Some people even call our stores sterile, cookie cutter, no longer reflecting the passion our partners feel about our coffee.

However, I think the heart of this criticism is that the stores are so similar everywhere, not that they're necessarily sterile. I'd rather sit in a Starbucks for the atmosphere than a lot of little coffee outfits, but maybe that's because I'm not a fan of linoleum tile and garage-sale furniture.

Schultz concludes with something that tells me he's on the right track:

I have said for 20 years that our success is not an entitlement and now it's proving to be a reality. Let's be smarter about how we are spending our time, money and resources. Let's get back to the core. Push for innovation and do the things necessary to once again differentiate Starbucks from all others.

The question becomes: Will the company follow the founder's advice, or streamline its way into McDonald's style blandness? I'm hoping for innovation.