Jeff Carlson (.Thought)

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.

Goodbye 2006

The new year's arrival echoed most of 2006: it happened almost as an afterthought. Kim and I stayed home New Year's Eve, she with a cold and me with work to do, and our good friend Shannon came over to see what a Carlson New Year's Eve was like. Fortunately, she didn't have high expectations, and we delivered. We were playing a board game when the skies outside turned into a barrage of thumps and booms, and we realized that 2007 was here. (I must point out that the fireworks here in Seattle are nothing like the battlezone we experienced in Renton; that was downright scary some years, and I had a mental map of where the supplies were located in case I needed to hose down the roof should it catch fire.)

Okay, 2006 wasn't a terrible year by any means. But personally, I was often frustrated in terms of productivity (work output, which was lower, but also my capability to focus on tasks without a giant deadline looming) and a few personal issues that came up (which have worked out fine in the end, but weren't much fun to deal with).

I find myself greeting 2007 with a sigh of relief and some small measure of gratification that I'm hitting the new year in motion. In fact, I'm busy as hell, working long hours and drinking a lot of coffee. I'm more than halfway through a book update that I thought wouldn't get off the ground (my fault), I'm preparing to give two presentations at Macworld Expo next week, and at least one, but possibly two, books right around the corner. As those of us in the freelance world know, it's good to be busy, and I'm starting 2007 in an accelerated state.

All this is to say: Happy New Year, and I'll try to blog more. Which is what everyone is saying right now, but still.

A Word to the House Dems

According to the latest news reports, the Democrats have taken power in the House. This is extraordinarily satisfying, because hopefully this means there's going to be some positive force in government.

But we (and here I actually mean you, House Democrats) can't get cocky. Oh sure, we want to. The big Republican bully, the one that's called us names and equated us with terrorists, has been kicked to the curb. He's wounded, but there is still power to grab and scores to settle, and he does still control the White House (and the Senate, although hopefully that might change by tomorrow).

You're going to be getting lots of advice in the coming days, but read mine first.

1. Go ahead and call it a mandate, just to piss off George Bush. But only do it once.
2. Check your house before you enter the House. By this I mean: there can be no skeletons, no dirty tricks, no backroom shady deals. The Republicans are losing because they've failed to govern, yes, but it's also because they're corrupt. Extremely corrupt. And they've done whatever they can to hide that corruption. House leadership means actual checks and balances, and I'm hoping to see a whole host of subpoenas and investigations to root out the grubby crap that's infested the government. It's vitally important that the corruption sticks with the Republicans. Don't think that because you're in power you can start to get away with the same shit. If a Democrat is embezzling funds, beating his or her spouse, profiting from legitimate shady land deals, or has someone's head in a freezer, discipline them severely and appropriately. You need to prove to the country that the Democratic party is not what the Republicans have sneered, and that the good of the country comes before the good of the party or the individual.
3. Do not, at least at first, push all the Republican enmity under the rug in the name of mending fences and bipartisanship. Yes, I want us all to get along, but the best way to do that right now is to prove that Democrats can lead and govern, and that's not going to happen if you become the pansy-asses that you know you can be. Take the reins and make it work.
4. I don't know how to say this nicely: cast Lieberman out. He lost his party's primary, but couldn't handle losing his power, so he ran as an independent. His words and actions indicate that he'll say anything to keep that power, and that he's a Bush Republican in everything but name. So, let him walk in the wilderness. No high-ranking committee appointments (if that's an option). Personally, I suspect that he'll just turn Republican, although he's been the best mole in the Democratic party that a Republican could hope for, so maybe he'll try to stick with that role.
5. Finally, work hard, be honest, and don't fuck this up.

Authors on the celebrity circuit

So, after I appeared in the Seattle Times yesterday, I got an email from my father who points out that my officemate Kim Ricketts appears in today's edition: "Authors on the celebrity circuit". The article is about the types of literary events that she puts on, where an author comes to town and speaks to private groups at Starbucks or Microsoft (like the Al Gore event last week). Naturally, that's countered with the notion that somehow these events are going to put traditional bookstores out of business. Third Place Books manager Robert Sindelar takes that role, saying:

But Sindelar insists that a large part of his business is attracting people like Winters, who might not otherwise make their way to a bookstore after work. "If we can get them to our parking lot just once — that's the hard part — then we can give them the experience of being in a bookstore, which they're not going to get anywhere else," he says. A high-profile author like Albom is the best way to lure those "unlikely bookstore people" into his store.

I love a good bookstore as much as the next person, but one problem is that "the experience of being in a bookstore" often varies considerably. Will the staff be responsive or surly? If I'm listening to an author, will I be able to hear him over the sound of the people milling around but not part of the event? Will I have a place to sit down?

The problem I see with this dichotomy is that booksellers seem stuck in the mindset that everything is against them, that every new approach to selling books is an intentional jab at closing bookstores. Rather than making an effort to advance with the times and do something innovative to sell books, they retreat into a defensive posture, claim that everyone is out to get them, and moan that people just don't appreciate the "bookstore experience."

Well, times change, and you need to change with them. If you want big-ticket authors to take the time out of their book tours to come to your venue, make it worthwhile for the author, and make it worthwhile for the reader. Unfortunately, Sindelar doesn't appear to get it:

But Sindelar insists that, when it comes to buying and selling books, "There's a philosophical issue to consider: Is there a substitute for walking in to a bookstore? Is there a substitute for experiencing the physical book, browsing a few titles, rubbing shoulders with other book lovers, picking up books by authors you wouldn't have heard of?"

"I don't know," he says. "But I hope not."

Yes, there are lots of alternatives, and people are taking advantage of them. If I know I want to buy a certain book, it's often easier (and cheaper) to order it from Amazon. Sindelar paints a nice picture of the bookstore experience, but it's a romantic notion that fewer people have the opportunity to experience. The fact that he doesn't appear to know about the alternatives, even in a philosophical sense, tells me that he's not willing to accept the present and future.

Cutting and Running from 'Stay the Course'

Josh Marshall succinctly makes one of the most obvious comparisons: Bush the president and Bush the failed CEO/entrepreneur are exactly the same:

Fundamentally, it doesn't have to do with military strategy or ideology. It has to do with coming to grips with the monumental failure he has wrought, which of course he can never do.

Setting aside the vast costs in human life, national treasure and regional stability, I see President Bush's adventure as a failed business venture, a start-up that went bad -- an analogy that, come to think of it, he could probably relate to.

A failed company can lose money for a very long time before it makes money and becomes a success. It only really fails when the investors decide that the problems aren't transient but terminal. They decide to stop throwing good money after bad. And then that's it.

If we look at the matter in those icy terms, that moment of reckoning came at least two years ago, certainly before the 2004 election. By then it was depressingly clear the whole matter was never going to come to a good end. But President Bush got the country to reinvest and the country has kept on doing so since then with some factor of lives, money and time.

...

But President Bush's interests are not the same as the country's. He's maxed out, in for 100%. If Iraq is a failure, a mistake, then the same words will be written right after his name in the history books. A country, though, can take missteps and mistakes, course corrections and dead ends, and move on. We've done it before and we'll do it again.

But President Bush can't and won't withdraw from Iraq because when he does, under the current conditions, he'll sign the epitaph, the historical death warrant for his presidency. Unlike in the past there are no family friends to pawn the failure off on and let them take the loss. It's all his. So he'll keep kicking the can down the road forever.

To My Republican-Supporting Friends and Family Members

Due to a bill that passed in the Senate today, I want you to understand just what you've been supporting since electing George W. Bush as President. I suspect that you've bought into the drumbeat, forced into your consciousness, that Democrats are terrorist sympathizers and are interested only in "cutting and running." But let's look at what today's legislation has produced.

The United States now legitimizes torture. Despite evidence that tortured individuals will do or say anything in order to make the torture stop, the government believes that it can be like a great big Jack Bauer and beat the evil out of anyone it wants to. Today's legislation gives them the power to do it. Legally.

"But," you may be saying, "that's not going to affect me, so why should I care? It's all happening on the other side of the world."

However, it's likely going to happen to someone you know who's serving the United States over there. Our government has just given a free card to any terrorist group that kidnaps American soldiers that says, "Torture our men and women, because we'll do the same to you." It's bad enough that our government, as admitted by the President, has been rendering people to secret prisons for the past year (or more). Now it's legal.

So, instead let me bring these actions home. The powers granted by the House and Senate this week give the President of the United States singular tyrannical power. Let's suppose, next year or in ten years, that someone calls the government - the NSA, Homeland Security, CIA, FBI, whomever - and says that your spouse or your child participated in terrorist activities. It doesn't matter to what extent those activities entail, or even if it's true; the call is made.

The government, acting on behalf of the President, can arrest your spouse or your child and detain them. Detention could mean being sent to the facilities at Guantanamo Bay. And then, because of the laws passed today, you may never see your spouse or your child again. He or she would have no right to, or method to, refute the charges; he or she would not even need to be told what those charges were. While in indefinite detention, your spouse or your child could be legally subjected to torture. Not that you'd ever know about it.

Of course, this could happen to you, too. It's all up to the President, currently the man who's done more to damage this country that Bin Laden or Al Queda could have ever hoped.

I'm pissed and demoralized and wonder how the simple question of "Is torture okay?" turned into a yes.

(See: Glenn Greenwald, New York Times)

Forget false "compromise": block torture altogether

Glenn Greenwald, writing at Salon, notes why all the talk of a Republican compromise over the detainee interrogation bill that Bush wants passed is bunk ("The president's power to imprison people forever"). The fact that the government is actively trying to legalize torture is amazing to me, and proves that the country is off the rails.

Bilal Hussein is an Associated Press photographer and Iraqi citizen who has been imprisoned by the U.S. military in Iraq for more than five months, with no charges of any kind. Prior to that, he was repeatedly accused by right-wing blogs of being in cahoots with Iraqi insurgents based on the content of his photojournalism -- accusations often based on allegations that proved to be completely fabricated and fictitious. The U.S. military now claims that Hussein has been lending "support" to the Iraqi insurgents, whereas Hussein maintains that his only association with them is to report on their activities as a journalist. But Hussein has no ability to contest the accusations against him or prove his innocence because the military is simply detaining him indefinitely and refusing even to charge him.

Under the military commission legislation blessed by our Guardians of Liberty in the Senate -- such as John McCain and Lindsey Graham -- the U.S. military could move Hussein to Guantánamo tomorrow and keep him there for the rest of his life, and he would have absolutely no recourse of any kind. It does not need to bring him before a military commission (the military only has to do that if it wants to execute someone) and as long as it doesn't, he is blocked from seeking an order from a U.S. federal court to release him on the ground that he is completely innocent. As part of his permanent imprisonment, the military could even subject him to torture and he would have no legal recourse whatsoever to contest his detention or his treatment. As Johns Hopkins professor Hilary Bok points out, even the use of the most extreme torture techniques that are criminalized will be immune from any real challenge, since only the government (rather than detainees) will be able to enforce such prohibitions.

Broke. The. Law.

President Bush today vowed that he would overturn yesterday's ruling that the government's warrantless wiretapping program is, in fact, illegal. The best part of the ruling is this:

We must first note that the Office of the Chief Executive has itself been created, with its powers, by the Constitution. There are no hereditary Kings in America and no power not created by the Constitution. So all 'inherent power' must derive from that Constitution.

Glenn Greenwald has been all over the story with analysis, and it's highly recommended reading.

I've been screaming at my computer screen all along: What part of "broke the law" does Bush not understand? The administration claims that the secret wiretapping of United States citizens was essential to fight the war on terror, but the FISA court exists to provide just that capability. Yet the Bush and the NSA went around the court.

I know it's a pipe dream, but I really want to see Bush and the whole gang of crooks handled like criminals over this and other abuses of executive power. They are not above the law.

Best rant on this is from Aravosis at AmericaBlog delivers my feelings exactly (thanks to Ags for pointing it out):

I've had it with this idiot.

We've got the president of the fucking United States of America lecturing a US court of law that it's supposed to reach decisions NOT based on the rule of law, but on "the nature of the world we live in."

[...]

You have the nerve to claim Osama and the terrorists hate our democracy? They got nothing on you and your fellow "Republicans." Do you people even believe in freedom? Do you believe in the Bill of Rights? Do you believe in our Constitution? Do you fucking believe in anything other than your absolute power to do whatever the fuck you want like some two-bit communist dictator rather than the president of the greatest country on earth?

We live in a democracy, you incompetent ass - one that is quickly eroding because half the people of this country elected a moron to the presidency (twice) and now are so embarrassed by their vote that they refuse to stand up and demand an end to your idiotic reign of terror.

These are judges you're demeaning. American jurists. The people in charge of our laws. And you speak of them like they're nothing more than crap. You and your party have contempt for our entire system of jurisprudence, the entire system of checks and balances our democracy is based on, because you can't get your way 100% of the time. Well boo-fucking-hoo. We are a country of laws, you stupid stupid man.

Nuke the Messenger

I've long believed (in any administration), that when you start blaming the media, it's a clear sign that your problems are your own, and the media is just a convenient way to distract attention from yourself. Bush and the Republicans have taken that to the extreme this week by claiming that the New York Time's articles about the government's secret bank account monitoring are directly aiding terrorists, with some pundits suggesting that the reporters involved should be tried for treason.

Read Dan Froomkin in the Washington Post (link via Atrios), who asks, "But not once has the White House definitively answered this question: How are any of these disclosures actually impairing the pursuit of terrorists?"

How does it possibly matter to a terrorist whether the government got a court order or not? Or whether Congress was able to exercise any oversight? The White House won't say. In fact, it can't say.

By contrast, it does matter to us.

This column has documented, again and again , that when faced with a potentially damaging political problem, White House strategist Karl Rove's response is not to defend, but to attack.

The potentially damaging political problem here is that the evidence continues to grow that the Bush White House's exercise of unchecked authority in the war on terror poses a serious threat to American civil liberties and privacy rights. It wasn't that long ago, after all, that an American president used the mechanisms of national security to spy on his political enemies.

So, as usual, Bush can't make a case for actually thwarting terrorists or protect the United States, but instead trots out fear to mask his administration's blatant, dangerous, and ongoing power grab.

Sigh. Two and a half more fucking years.

Delusional, Paranoid Dick Cheney

In an interview with CNN, Dick Cheney said:

Neither an immediate nor phased withdrawal would confer any protection on the United States, Cheney said. "If we pull out, they'll follow us," he said of terrorists.

Does he really believe that maintaining a failing presence in Iraq is keeping terrorists away from the U.S.? That there's some magical barrier that prevents them from coming into our unprotected ports or under-manned borders?

Oh wait, he contradicts himself almost immediately:

"It doesn't matter where we go. This is a global conflict. We've seen them attack in London and Madrid and Casablanca and Istanbul and Mombasa and East Africa. They've been, on a global basis, involved in this conflict.

"And it will continue -- whether we complete the job or not in Iraq -- only it'll get worse. Iraq will become a safe haven for terrorists. They'll use it in order to launch attacks against our friends and allies in that part of the world."

Dick Cheney solidifies his position of Frightener in Chief, and exposes himself as a pants-wetting paranoid. Never mind the fact that the attacks which spurred all of this had nothing to do with Iraq (the 9/11 terrorists were linked to our good buddies Saudi Arabia), or that the reason Iraq is currently a safe haven for terrorists is because the U.S. invaded on falsified intelligence.

Shut up, Mr. Boogeyman. Peddle your fear elsewhere, because people aren't buying it anymore.

"Killed in a brutal way"

Two soldiers who had gone missing were found today, and it appears that they were "killed in a brutal way and tortured," according to an Iraqi military official. This is terrible, but is it a surprise? Expect Bush and others to decry the treatment of these soldiers, and not mention the government-sanctioned torture that's been going on for years at Guantanamo, at Abu-Ghraib, and no doubt elsewhere. Expect to see this happen more often, as repayment for this administration's disregard for human rights—hell, disregard for humanity.

The Constitution Is Important When It's Directed at You

Wanted to pass this along from Dailykos, which sums up what I think too:

Pardon my cynicism for a moment. But in the wake of the raid on Congressman Jefferson's office, all the flutter in the legislative and executive branches about concepts like the "separation of powers" and "constitutionally protected areas" has a tangibly synthetic feel to it, does it not?

So Dennis "Don't Tell Anyone I'm Under Investigation" Hastert suddenly dusted off his copy of the Constitution. And Bill "Ongoing SEC Investigation" Frist wants procedures in place to know "exactly what will happen if there is a similar sort of thing." Of course he does.

...

And let's look at Alberto Gonzales, who didn't resign over Bush's domestic spying program, who didn't resign over his laughably dishonest definition of torture, who didn't resign when he was caught perjuring himself before Congress--he now threatens to resign if he has to hand back a few papers? Please, spare me the political theater. I agree with Steve Soto over at the Left Coaster. This is all utter bullshit.

Imprisoning Journalists

This is simultaneously chilling and yet not surprising:

The administration's assault on a free and vital press took a huge leap forward this weekend, when Attorney General Alberto Gonazles announced on national television that the Bush administration has the power to imprison journalists who publish stories revealing conduct by the President which the administration wants to conceal (such as the warrantless NSA eavesdropping program, which he specifically cited). Gonazles went further and made clear that the administration is actively considering prosecution against journalists who publish such stories. The video is here.

It really is hard to imagine any measures which pose a greater and more direct danger to our freedoms than the issuance of threats like this by the administration against the press. If the President has the power to keep secret any information he wants simply by classifying it -- including information regarding illegal or otherwise improper actions he has taken -- then the President, by definition, has complete control over the flow of information which Americans receive about their Government.

Schneier on Security: The Value of Privacy

Security expert Bruce Schneier puts it best: The Value of Privacy

Last week, revelation of yet another NSA surveillance effort against the American people has rekindled the privacy debate. Those in favor of these programs have trotted out the same rhetorical question we hear every time privacy advocates oppose ID checks, video cameras, massive databases, data mining, and other wholesale surveillance measures: "If you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?"

Some clever answers: "If I'm not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to watch me." "Because the government gets to define what's wrong, and they keep changing the definition." "Because you might do something wrong with my information." My problem with quips like these -- as right as they are -- is that they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It's not. Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.

Go read the whole thing.

Dictatorship

Writing about the Angry Liberal Guy Rant yesterday allowed me to vent some steam, but then I got roiled up again by today's news that the NSA has been monitoring billions of domestic phone calls without court approval, something that is clearly against the law. From USAToday:

The NSA's domestic program, as described by sources, is far more expansive than what the White House has acknowledged. Last year, Bush said he had authorized the NSA to eavesdrop — without warrants — on international calls and international e-mails of people suspected of having links to terrorists when one party to the communication is in the USA. Warrants have also not been used in the NSA's efforts to create a national call database.

In defending the previously disclosed program, Bush insisted that the NSA was focused exclusively on international calls. "In other words," Bush explained, "one end of the communication must be outside the United States."

As a result, domestic call records — those of calls that originate and terminate within U.S. borders — were believed to be private.

Sources, however, say that is not the case.

Of course, it's not the evesdropping that's the key issue here, though that's terrible enough (are you a possible terrorist? The government thinks so). It's that the Bush administration has no regard for the laws of our country.

Jack Cafferty on CNN:

Cafferty: We all hope nothing happens to Arlen Specter, the Republican head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, cause he might be all that stands between us and a full blown dictatorship in this country. He's vowed to question these phone company executives about volunteering to provide the government with my telephone records, and yours, and tens of millions of other Americans.

Shortly after 9/11, AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth began providing the super-secret NSA with information on phone calls of millions of our citizens, all part of the War on Terror, President Bush says. Why don't you go find Osama bin Laden, and seal the country's borders, and start inspecting the containers that come into our ports?

The President rushed out this morning in the wake of this front page story in USA Today and declared the government is doing nothing wrong, and all this is just fine. Is it? Is it legal? Then why did the Justice Department suddenly drop its investigation of the warrantless spying on citizens because the NSA said Justice Department lawyers didn't have the necessary security clearance to do the investigation. Read that sentence again. A secret government agency has told our Justice Department that it's not allowed to investigate it. And the Justice Department just says ok and drops the whole thing. We're in some serious trouble, boys and girls."

Think that's overreaction? Let's put some of the pieces together: Bush believes that the President is not bound by laws; according to The Boston Globe, Bush has appended signing statements over 750 times during his presidency, "...official documents in which a president lays out his legal interpretation of a bill for the federal bureaucracy to follow when implementing the new law.... In his signing statements, Bush has repeatedly asserted that the Constitution gives him the right to ignore numerous sections of the bills -- sometimes including provisions that were the subject of negotiations with Congress in order to get lawmakers to pass the bill."

The President also has the power to declare anyone an "enemy combatant" and hold them without trial. And despite the reassurances of the White House's military order (Detention, Treatment, and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens in the War Against Terrorism), the government has engaged in torture and extraordinary rendition against those held as potential terrorists.

And, the White House has been actively consolidating government power under the military (most recently, transferring many of the duties of the CIA to the Department of Defense).

You say, "Well, I'm not a terrorist, and if I keep out of trouble it doesn't affect me." Except that it's not your decision to determine whether you're a law-breaker, or a potential terrorist. Maybe you spent some time in a remote cabin in Oregon (hotbed of terrorist training camps!). Maybe you were talking to a friend on the phone and mentioned that you don't like the President's policies. Maybe you share the name of a real suspected terrorist on the government's secret no-fly list. Whatever the case, if the government detains you as an enemy combatant, you're gone. No lawyer, no rights granted under the Constitution.

So here's my prediction. I've not really wanted to voice this over the past couple of months, because it seems too absurd to take seriously, but now I don't think it's absurd at all. Bush is putting pieces into place to get around the two-term limitation of the presidency, and working to ensure that America is run (not governed, but controlled) by his people. After all, in their eyes, they haven't succeeded in Iraq, or the economy, or [pick your Republican failure] because the Democrats, the media, or [pick your powerless boogeyman] haven't let them. So, enough with this two-party system and three branches of government nonsense. Just rule.

We all say, "They wouldn't do that," because we're rational people. But we thought they wouldn't fabricate reasons to go to war with a country that wasn't threatening us. We thought they wouldn't spy on honest, law-abiding Americans.

But they have.

I wish I could just say it's creeping paranoia, but the facts suggest otherwise.

Angry Liberal Guy Rant

Via Boing Boing, C.B. Shapiro writes about why there seem to be "angry liberals" (count me among them), making a list of exactly why he/we/I think that our country is in far worse shape than it was before the Bush administration:

I’ve compiled a short (and by no means complete) list just so I could see it all in one place:

I’m angry about the shredding of the constitution…illegal wiretaps…falsified intelligence…secret prisons… use of torture as an accepted means of interrogation…Terry Schiavo…the war on science…denial of Global Warming…the fascistic secrecy of our elected officials… presidential signings that declare the President above the law…the breakdown of the wall between church and state…the outing of a clandestine CIA agent for purely partisan political gain…the corrupting influence of K Street… the total sell-out of the legislative process to corporate interests… appointments of unqualified cronies at every level of government…Harriet Miers…Brownie…Abu Ghraib… Scooter …the complete mismanagement of the war in Iraq…the lies about the complete mismanagement of the war in Iraq…the grotesque budget deficits… the pathetic response to Katrina… a civil rights division dedicated to undermining civil rights…an environmental protection agency that refuses to protect the environment… (Take a breath, Angry Liberal Guy.)

One of the things that cuts me to the bone about Republican/conservative responses to, well, everything these days is that they throw out these nebulous projections: the liberals will give in to terrorists; Democrats will raise taxes and force straight people to marry gay people; whatever. It's their only fallback argument, because they're standing on a massive record of failure, which, having been in power the entire time in all areas of the government, is entirely their fault. Read that list above again. Those aren't projections, they're not what-if scenarios, they're real, documented, colossal failures. When Bush became president in 2000, I distinctly remember saying that he was going to ruin the country, but that was bluster at the time. I had no idea I'd be so, so right.

The Wrongness Singularity

My knowledge of physics is shallow at best, but I grasp enough to recognize that this blog post is pure geeky genius: The wrongness singularity | Cosmic Variance.

So in fact, Reynolds has managed to fit five units of wrongness into only four declarative statements! This is the hackular equivalent of crossing the Chandrasekhar Limit, at which point your blog cannot help but collapse in on itself.

John Gruber Eviscerates Mac FUD Article

I saw the article yesterday splashed on front pages of news outlets, "Viruses Catch Up to the Mac," and knew immediately that it was uninformed FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt). Not only because I follow the Macintosh world, where, in fact, viruses have not caught up to the Mac, but because it starts out with the story of one guy who did some vague actions.

Benjamin Daines was browsing the Web when he clicked on a series of links that promised pictures of an unreleased update to his computer’s operating system.

Instead, a window opened on the screen and strange commands ran as if the machine was under the control of someone — or something — else.

In reality, a few proof-of-concept viruses have been created which have extremely limited scope of damage. The vulnerabilities have mostly been addressed. Oh, and it sounds like the virus that this guy ran into happened in January or February, so apparently the timeliness of the article hasn't caught up to the Mac, either.

What really gave it away for me was this bit at the end:

With new Macs running the same processor that powers Windows-based machines, far more people will know how to exploit weaknesses in Apple machines than in the past, when they ran on the PowerPC chips made by IBM Corp. and Motorola Corp. spinoff Freescale Semiconductor Inc.

Quick reminder: The viruses and spyware on your PC take advantage of Windows vulnerabilities, and have nothing to do with processors.

But don't take my word for it. Read John Gruber's excellent deconstruction of the article: Daring Fireball: Good Journalism.

Who exactly is touting the Mac as “immune to such risks”? Goodin doesn’t say, but his word is good enough for me. I’m sure whoever they are, they’re experts.

I, on the other hand, had never been under the impression that the Mac was either magically or technically “immune” or “invulnerable” to viruses, Trojan horses, spyware, adware, malware, and so forth. Rather, I thought it was simply the case that, for whatever reasons, such software isn’t a problem for Mac users and hasn’t been for the last 15 years or so. I.e. that Macs aren’t magically protected, and that in theory, malware could be written to target the Mac, but that the point is that in practice, in the real world, they aren’t.

On the other hand, Macs do happen to be immune to Windows viruses and spyware and adware and Trojan horses, thousands of which are discovered every month. But why sweat the details?

Final quick reminder: Yes, the potential for Mac viruses does exist. No, they've not appeared in any meaningful way on the Mac yet.

Bonus: Go watch Apple's new Get a Mac ads; "Viruses" and "Restarting" are particularly enjoyable.

Democratic Narrative and Looking Beyond Self

Markos at DailyKos looks at an essay by Michael Thomasky of The American Prospect about the need for the Democratic party to have a philosophy. It's good stuff, touching on something that I feel in my bones but which I haven't seen articulated: we're no longer looking toward the common good.

So what does Tomasky suggest? He thinks the moment is ripe, historically, for a return to the politics of the greater good, that asking people to stand and work for something bigger than themselves is a political winner.

The Republican party has succeeded, I believe, in taking this approach. The kicker, of course, is that it's all been bait-and-switch: the "common good" has turned out to be good for the wealthy and powerful, but bad or neutral for the poor and middle class people who believe that their leadership is working in their interests. The problem with the Democrats (which seems obvious to everyone but the people in charge) is that the party is a collection of fractured constituencies.

But it's clear that the future of the Democratic Party isn't the current collection of constituency and issue groups. It's committed, movement-building progressives who fight for higher principles than narrow self-interest, and sell that vision to an American public that isn't as selfish and self-centered as Republicans would have everyone believe.

Narrow self-interest has given us a government mired in corruption and lies, gotten us into a failed war, and ruined our standing in the world community. It's time for a new philosophy.

Real Security and Hard Facts

Here's something way-too-long time coming: the Democratic party today unveiled Real Security, a full-on assault on the misconception that Democrats can't handle America's security. The Republicans are turning to this attack because they don't have much left: under the Bush Administration and a Republican-led government, things have gone to shit. Security, emergency response, corruption, the economy, you name it. So when they get backed against a wall, they trot out the idea that no matter how badly Bush has screwed up, the country needs to stick by him because he'll protect us. Or something.

Well, it's bunk, and the Democrats are calling them on it. See Harry Reid's Democrats' Record on Real Security vs. The Bush Republican Record of Dangerous Incompetence for specific examples of how the Republicans have blocked meaningful legislation and military funding that would actually help in the war on terror.

Here's an example:

Democrats Are Fighting to Meet Mental Health Needs of Returning Troops. With up to one-third of Iraq war veterans possibly suffering from some degree of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Democrats are fighting to meet the needs of returning veterans. [UPI, 1/27/06] In the House, Democrats, as part of the New GI Bill of Rights, have proposed to improve mental health support for returning soldiers [HR 1588] through enhanced education and outreach, improved screening, and effective treatment and counseling for veterans and family members.

Bush Republicans Rejected the Democratic Effort to Provide an Additional $500 Million per Year for the Next Five Years for Mental Health Services for Veterans. [RC 343, Boxer Amdt. 2634 to S.2020, 43-55, 11/17/05]

I know someone who works with veterans, and he's told me that the VA is seeing a huge amount of trauma among soldiers coming back from Iraq. It's not just the physical wounds, it's some of the horrific things they've seen. It completely boggles my mind every time I see a car with a "Veterans for Bush" sticker on it. Maybe "Veterans in Denial for Bush" would be more appropriate.

A Timeline of War in Iraq

As Bush starts to rattle the sabers about Iran, let's look to what the last three years in Iraq have been like: Think Progress » THREE YEARS OF WAR IN IRAQ: A TIMELINE.

And a thought I had yesterday: if you're a Christian and support Bush, I would argue that you've renounced God.

Twenty Years

The space shuttle Challenger exploded 20 years ago today. I wrote about this date on my original "blog," 6 years ago, and the memory is still fresh. The New York Times has an audio-visual commentary that's worth checking out.

Cornered, Bush Snaps Back

Bush gave a speech today showing that he's resorting to the only tactic he seems able to wield: when faced with facts, attack someone. In this case, he's refuting critics' (Democrats') claims that he and his administration misled the country into war in Iraq. Here's the phrase you're going to hear over and over and over:

"That's why more then a hundred Democrats in the House and the Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power," Mr. Bush said.

Seems pretty forceful, but as always it's the framing: as I understand it, Cheney's Office of Special Plans and the White House Iraq Group cherry-picked the intelligence before the House and Senate saw it, so those Democrats that voted to give the president the option to use force (which, by the way, was not a command to go to war) saw the intel that the Bush administration wanted them to see.

I find Bush's arrogrance especially galling, saying:

"While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decisions or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began," the president said in a Veterans Day speech in Tobyhanna, Pa.

Who's rewriting history? This is coming from the guy who said the threat was weapons of mass distruction, and when that didn't pan out (after the war was started, mind you, not because weapons inspectors were allowed to find out beforehand), switched the rationale to spreading democracy, or removing a brutal dictator from power, etc.

What also really steams me is that Bush is saying, again, that (in the words of the New York Times) the critics "are undercutting U.S. forces on the front lines." Enough of that crap: Bush undercut his own forces by sending them off to a non-essential war, and did so without proper force or protection (how are we doing with that body armor, by the way?). For him to do this on Veterans Day is deplorable.

[Update] Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus provide more details in the Washington Post.

Bush: "We do not torture."

I almost choked on my breakfast when I saw this article at CNN: Bush defends detainees policy. And my first reaction was, "He actually SAID that?"

"There's an enemy that lurks and plots and plans and wants to hurt America again," Bush said. "So you bet we will aggressively pursue them but we will do so under the law."

He declared, "We do not torture."

I suspect that Bush's idea of "torture" is more akin to having someone in his inner circle tell him the truth about something. But this is a great opportunity for him to do something right. Back up your words, Mr. President. Provide compelling, empirical, unbiased evidence that your administration does not torture. Let international inspectors visit the detainees (such as at the recent "black sites" in eastern Europe). We no longer believe what you say, so show us.

Hey, I can dream, can't I?

Zoe Williams: My way or the highway

Approaching the end of week 3 in a sling, I can't help but look wistfully at the cyclists who zip past the bus I take in to work. In the meantime, my wife sent me the following link to an amusing article from The Guardian (a UK paper): Zoe Williams: My way or the highway.

Opinion is divided on the efficacy of cycle helmets. Steven Norris once famously claimed they made no difference. Boris Johnson wears one. You see! On even this small matter, the Tory party is irrevocably split. I met an anaesthetist who said the difference between a wearer and a refusenik, upon admission to A&E, was the difference between giving them an aspirin and teaching them how to relearn the power of speech.

What It Might Be Like at the White House

Paul Begala, former counsel to President Clinton, writes about what it must be like at the White House now with several top people under investigation related to the Valerie Plame scandal: TPMCafe || What It's Like. Although there's a lot of focus on the higher-ups and what indictments against Rove and Libby and others could mean, there's still a country to run, and lots of people at the White House in the process of running it. Although indictments are on everyone's minds, things still need to get done. It's interesting reading:

Tom Petty was wrong. The waiting is not the hardest part.

Sure, all of what Eric Alterman dubbed "the punditocracy" has a severe case of indictus interruptus, but for President Bush and his White House staff, the worst is yet to come. To be sure, waiting on a decision to indict is an exquisite form of torture. But what lies ahead is worse. If special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald does choose to indict one or more senior Bush White House officials, they will be the first top White House aides to be indicted in a decade and a half.

Criminals

I quote Digby for an excellent roundup of the current state of our government:

So, we have a federal probe implicating the president's number one political advisor and the vice president's chief of staff in the violation of laws protecting CIA agents and possibly lying to federal investigators.

We have a multi-pronged investigation into a lobbyist who happens to be a very close associate of Tom DeLay,Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed, Karl Rove and the entire Republican leadership going back to their youth as members of the College republicans. This lobbyist is now implicated in a mafia murder plot and has been arrested on charges affiliated with that crime.

A member of the Bush administration who is a good friend and associate of all of the above was arrested this week for lying to the Feds about his good friend the lobbyist.

The majority leader of the Senate is now officially under investigation by the SEC and federal prosecutors for insider trading involving potentially many millions of dollars.

The majority leader of the House was just indicted by a Texas Grand jury for violating laws prohibiting the use of corporate money in campaigns.

I am so relieved that the Republicans restored honor and integrity to Washington. There hasn't been even one blow job in that town since they took power.

And I'm sorry, but didn't everyone see this coming? Power corrupts, absolutely, and we've been witnessing it firsthand for five years.

Brown's Soft Landing

When "Brownie" resigned as head of FEMA, I remarked to several friends that it wouldn't be long before he was hired as a consultant for some other Bush-friendly firm or organization. But even I didn't think that would be... FEMA: Daily Kos: Guess Who's a New FEMA Consultant.

CBS News correspondent Gloria Borger reports that Michael Brown, who recently resigned as the head of the FEMA, has been rehired by the agency as a consultant to evaluate it's response following Hurricane Katrina.

No one in this administration fails. There's always a soft cushy landing (or Presidential Medal of Freedom if you REALLY fuck up; if the PR wasn't so bad over Katrina, I'll bet Brownie would have gotten one of those, too).

Tell that to the tens of thousands of people who've lost their jobs while their big employers enjoyed government tax breaks. Who's providing a soft landing for them?

Schneier on Future Emergency Funding

I've been utterly agog at the Hurricane Katrina aftermath, mostly due to the massive and clearly preventable loss of life. Security expert Bruce Schneier talks good common sense in an editorial in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

Funding security based on movie plots looks good on television, and gets people reelected. But there are millions of possible scenarios, and we're going to guess wrong. The billions spent defending airlines are wasted if the terrorists bomb crowded shopping malls instead.

Our nation needs to spend its homeland security dollars on two things: intelligence-gathering and emergency response. These two things will help us regardless of what the terrorists are plotting, and the second helps both against terrorist attacks and national disasters.

You'd think this would be obvious. It seems obvious to me and everyone I know, and it's been obvious since 9/11/01. And yet we end up with silly precautions like banning nail clippers on airlines and incompetent and unqualified boobs like Michael Brown running FEMA. After this terrible episode, there's no way anyone can credibly argue that the government, this government under Bush, has the American people's best interests at heart. "The American people" are just tools to further power grabs.

Broken Levees

Bush continues to say "we're fighting terrorists in Iraq so that we won't have to fight them at home." But the war in Iraq is actively killing people here in the U.S., in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Although you can't control when a natural disaster is going to hit, you can prepare for it. And as detailed in the article (linked from Atrios), "Attytood: When the levee breaks," we see that diverting money and resources to the debacle in Iraq contributed to the broken levees that are causing massive flooding and loss of life in New Orleans.

It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us.

-- Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 8, 2004.

The article wraps up by saying:

"We probably have 80 percent of our city under water; with some sections of our city the water is as deep as 20 feet. Both airports are underwater," Mayor Ray Nagin told a radio interviewer.

Washington knew that this day could come at any time, and it knew the things that needed to be done to protect the citizens of New Orleans. But in the tradition of the riverboat gambler, the Bush administration decided to roll the dice on its fool's errand in Iraq, and on a tax cut that mainly benefitted the rich.

And now Bush has lost that gamble, big time. We hope that Congress will investigate what went wrong here.

The president told us that we needed to fight in Iraq to save lives here at home, and yet -- after moving billions of domestic dollars to the Persian Gulf -- there are bodies floating through the streets of Louisana. What does George W. Bush have to say for himself now?

Sunlight of a Public Trial

Absolutely compelling entry at DailyKos about the sentencing of Ahmed Ressam, who was arrested at the Canada/Washington border on his way to bombing LAX airport. The judge's comments are required reading:

Despite the fact that Mr. Ressam is not an American citizen and despite the fact that he entered this country intent upon killing American citizens, he received an effective, vigorous defense, and the opportunity to have his guilt or innocence determined by a jury of 12 ordinary citizens.

Most importantly, all of this occurred in the sunlight of a public trial. There were no secret proceedings, no indefinite detention, no denial of counsel.

Rove, GOP vs. National Security

Kos sums up my attitude about Rove and the mindless GOP response. This isn't about partisanship: our country is demonstrably less safe thanks to the Bush administration's outing of a covert CIA agent and subsequent pattern of lies attempting to cover it up for two years.

Given what we know of the case, we know that Rove violated his non-disclose agreement. We know that Rove acted unethically, without regard to the consequences of his actions. Whether a crime has been committed remains to be seen, but shouldn't matter a whit.

... Right-thinking people -- even Republicans -- should look at these unfolding events with horror. I would certainly feel betrayed and angry if a Democratic administration thusly endangered national security and undermined our non-proliferation efforts. I wouldn't make apologies for it. I wouldn't rationalize it, attempt to distract with irrelevant, tangential points. I would demand accountability.

But to modern-day Republicans and their apologists, they can do no wrong. No Republican's action is worthy of scorn or censure. ... Republicans have now sent notice that they place allegiance to party and power above their allegiance to the United States of America. To them, the elephant flies above the Stars and Stripes.

Disney, Gays, and Europe

As reported in an article at Salon.com, Southern Baptists stopped boycotting Disney parks and products, which started because the company provides benefits to gay employees (Southern Baptists end Disney boycott over benefits to gay workers). The reasons sound pretty flimsy, such as, "We believe for the boycott to be effective, it had to have a beginning and an ending," according to Gene Mims, the chariman of the committee that brought the proposal before the Southern Baptist Convention. But the real howler is this one:

"It's just devastating to me what's happening to our children," said Robert Dreyfuss, an SBC member from Florida. "We're going to look very much like Europe looks."

Oh no! What a terrible idea! Let's see, what does Europe look like?

• Generally tolerant of racial and religious backgrounds
• Sensible for not supporting Bush's failing war on Iraq
• Open-minded
• Modern
• Inquisitive

Boy, we don't want traits like those. It would mean giving up our arrogant, self-centered, bullying, hypocritical, pre-emptive, violent, Faith-over-Reason lifestyles! Better to stick our heads in our asses and keep praying for the Rapture to take away all the bad things.

In 10 or 20 years, people like Mr. Dreyfuss are going to be wondering and complaining about why American companies can't hire qualified people and why all the high-tech innovation and jobs were lost to other countries that didn't spend years stifling science and free thought.

Misdirected Email

I frequently receive misdirected email intended for New England Coffee Company because they're necoffeeco.com, while I'm necoffee.com. Usually the emails are things like, "I need to order [X number of] pounds of [coffee blend name]," and I have a boilerplate response that I usually send back.

One email today was a bit unexpected and funny to receive:

From: [name and email withheld]

To: [someone]@necoffee.com

Christ, you call your office and it’s like calling the white house “your call may be monitored…… and know I find out that all of you losers spend your time e-mailing jokes to each other. It must be tough…. get me a job over there!?!?!? Oh yeah, I forgot you have no pull!!!!!! Talk to [name], shithead, and get back to me.

Ahh, the state of corporate email today. The funny thing is that the email came from a law firm.

Murderball and Walter Reed Hospital

For my birthday on Monday, my wife took me to see Murderball, an excellent documentary about the sport of wheelchair rugby and the men who play it. The gist of the sport is that paraplegics and quadriplegics compete to move a ball down a basketball court and through a goal. They zoom around on heavily-modified wheelchairs, and the way to stop an opponent from advancing with the ball is