Michelle Malkin is a whore

Last year, the world watched, aghast, as history's greatest superpower struggled to provide water and food to tens of thousands of people stranded in a metropolis. They were the victims of a predictable natural disaster, and they starved as their president strummed a gi'tar and the VP was golfing. The media wanted access to the gruesome photos and video of people suffering, dying, and adrift. The Bush administration, masters of image and marketing (but of little else), naturally fought to keep such images buried.

So on the 4th anniversary of 9-11, Michelle Malkin decries the "mainstream" media's thirst for gore:
"So the MSM wants to see bodies? On this fourth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America, let's remember these: (picture after picture of 9/11)

The "MSM" (which includes you, Michelle, and your handlers at Fox, "the nation's highest-rated cable news network") doesn't want to see bodies. They want to show the extent to which this government has utterly failed its tax-paying citizens. They want to show that all the cowboy talk of "bring it on" and "courage" and "stay the course" have real costs. They want to show that appointing Brownies and ignoring reality leads to tragedy.

How dare you use the images from 9/11 to support your president's sheer incompetence. What is it that we are supposed to "Never, never forget"? "Never, never forget that when your ratings tank, you can evoke memories of 9/11?" "Never, never forget that no matter how bad you screw up the country, you didn't actually pilot a plane into the WTC?" "Never, never forget that the American population hates Osama more than Bush?"

For shame.

Final report: No WMD

The CIA has issued its final report: There were no WMDs in Iraq.

From the article:
“After more than 18 months, the WMD investigation and debriefing of the WMD-related detainees has been exhausted,” wrote Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group, in an addendum to the final report he issued last fall.
“As matters now stand, the WMD investigation has gone as far as feasible.”

I still remember when all this started. I remember driving through Wellington Circle (Rt. 16 & the Fellsway) on my way back from Target, and tuning in to NPR to hear Rumsfeld's live address about how we couldn't wait for a "smoking gun". I still remember my shock at hearing the NYTimes reporter relate Condileeza telling him, "Don't waste your reporting on the inspections; Iraq has already been decided" more than half a year before the end of the inspections. I still remember consciously deciding to give the government the benefit of the doubt. Now, almost two years and almost 2000 American lives later, I have learned my lesson.

I guess that you can argue the Machievellian angle on this: it's fine for the government to tell the citizens whatever it needs to, in order to sway public opinion so they can do the Right Thing. Who knows what level of wheeling and dealing had to take place behind the scenes with our allies to get them to agree to feed the WMD cock-and-bull story to their public and their constituencies. At the end of the day, though, one has to ask: is this approach right? I don't see how it can be, in a government of the people and by the people.

Open government will always have its liabilities. But, to paraphrase the Israeli Supreme Court, "Although a democracy must fight with one hand tied behind its back, it nonetheless has the upper hand."

Not sure how this works

So... Osama bin Laden planned and coordinated a devastating attack on our country. President Bush vows to get him "dead or alive". Three years later, he's still alive, and he sends us a lecturing videogram 5 days before the election.

And yet... everyone expects this to HELP the President in the polls? WHAT?

OH right because despite their inability to distinguish bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, the teeming masses are SCARED WITLESS by the sight of the turbaned terrorist mastermind, and when the masses get scared, they rally behind whatever authority figure happens to be there, even if he is incompetent and worthless.

From the street at the RNC

Here are some tidbits from Johann Hari's report from the RNC. If you call yourself a Republican, why not see what some of your bedfellows are saying?

The Two Americas begin to collide. Small and bloated and red, Rubin Israel, a 43-year old businessman from the South, is surrounded by a sweaty posse of NYPD officers. His banner says, "Trust in Jesus Christ and President Bush - 2 Chron 7.14". I asked him what that passage of the Bible actually says, "Thou Shalt Not Vote Kerry"? "Yeah, somethin' like that," he says with a shrug.
...
"Would you like a bandage, honey?" she asks. "They're John Kerry bandages. We're telling delegates to give themselves a little scratch, take a bandage and demand a Purple Heart for their courage." She pauses, then says: "There's no way that man was brave in Vietnam. He speaks French. Fluently. If you ask me, I think he shot himself just so he could talk about it in the campaign. He's cunning and he thinks ahead. Like the Japanese. Probably speaks that too."
...
The most animated ones are wearing fogeyish clothes: bow-ties and blazers. I approach the most handsome and ask him why he is a Republican. "Uh, because I believe in freedom. I like Bush. He's strong." These three sentences take him several minutes. I ask around; he's typical. I ask them what books have influenced their political thought. They look at me as though I am insane. These frat-boys seem harmless airheads, then I glimpse a sign boasting that they have raised $10m for the Bush campaign.
...
The Republicans particularly love any gag about killing Muslims and/or left-wingers. A comedian called Jeff Wayne says: "There's a huge bounty on Osama's head - it's like, $25m - so I shot 10 guys who look like him. Unfortunately, I was in a 7/11 in Minnesota." The audience cheered. "Shall I go on with the Muslim-bashing?" the comic asked. "More! More!" they cried, but he shifted the subject. "You know those tree-sitters? The hippies who sit in trees so they can't be cut down? Well, in my town a woman fell 150ft to her death last week doing that. Good. Now we can chop the tree down. I suggest we make a casket for that dumb bitch."

Supreme Court redaction

This is what happens when we, as Britney encourages us to do, "trust our government". Ashcroft's Justice Department has recently redacted (that's "blanked out" in legal speak) a portion of the ACLU's filings against it in an ongoing battle about free speech rights. They have this ability because, wisdom says, it's important that we don't make public sensitive information that could threaten national security. What was it the text that the Justice Department felt was a threat to national security? It was part of a 1972 Supreme Court ruling that says:

"The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect 'domestic security.' Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent."

Read more at The Memory Hole.

He doesn't owe anyone an explanation

The Washington Post has a pretty balanced column about Bush's "leadership style", citing both supporters and critics, inside and outside the White House. A particularly choice quote:

Some administration officials complained that one problem with Bush's reliance on his gut instincts is that often officials who have to sell or implement a policy are unsure how he arrived at it. The president told Woodward in "Bush at War": "I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel I owe anybody an explanation."

And this, the following, is perhaps the single most infuriating thing I've heard come out of George W. Bush's lips:

"I know who I am. I know what I believe in," Bush said. "The good thing about democracy, if people like the decisions you make, they'll let you stay. If they don't, they'll send me back to Crawford. Isn't all that bad a deal, by the way."

The whole presidency is just a wonderful game! And if he does well, we'l let him stay! If he does poorly, he just has to go home to his ranch! Isn't that a great deal? Isn't it great that his decisions, good or bad, won't actually cost anyone lives or have any real ramifications? Oh isn't being president just peachy keen?

Floridian Voting

What good is the right to vote if your vote doesn't get counted, or gets dropped into the Gulf of Mexico? Slate has a depressing article about the sorry state of electoral affairs in Florida.

Gov. Bush's own task force on the 2000 election recommended that the Legislature change county election supervisors from elected to nonpartisan positions. But the Legislature did not act on this recommendation, nor on the suggestion of election reform groups that the secretary of state also be selected by a nonpartisan commission, to ensure the necessary firewall between election officials and politicians.

There are excellent reasons for this recommendation. Following the contentious 2000 recount, e-mails on former Sec. of State Katherine Harris' computer revealed that she had been in contact with Jeb Bush during the recount, contrary to both their claims. Miami Herald reporter Meg Laughlin discovered that e-mail messages sent to Jeb Bush from Harris had been deleted after the recount. Harris then had the operating system of her computer changed, a procedure that erased all its data. "What was odd about what she did," said Mark Seibel, an editor at the Herald, "was that they installed an old operating system—not a new one—which makes you wonder why they did it."

Bush Administration's Junk Science

The Junk Science of the Bush Administration. Infuriating. 'Nuff said.

Politics vs. Science

In their latest efforts to reduce the size of government and increase freedom, the Bush Administration has required that government scientists appearing before the World Health Organization must be cleared by an administration appointee. Some might worry that this is just the most recent in a number of steps the Bush administration has taken to politicize science. They argue that this requirement is merely a way for the administration to censor the expert, scientific opinion of, for instance, public health scientists who think that abstinance-only programs are far from effective for reducing rates of STD and unwanted pregnancy.

The optimists among us will realize that there is nothing insidious going on here. The administration just wants to make absolutely sure that the World Health Organization gets the best possible scientific advice it can!

“It’s in no way politicized,” Pierce said. “This is a policy to make sure the WHO has the very best the federal government has to offer when it comes to our experts.”

Because, kids, science isn't some sort of ad-hoc, democratic system where peer review leads to excellence -- can you imagine what sort of anarchistic rubbish that would lead to? No, science always works best when the State appoints someone to oversee what is "good" science and what is "bad" science. Yep...

The Religion Gambit

The Bush re-election campaign has sent out emails to thousands of churches in Pennsylvania, a critical swing state, seeking to locate 1600 congregations friendly to the campaign and asking for volunteer coordinators in these congregations to use their churches to "distribute information to supporters".

The Interfaith Alliance, an organization that promotes the positive, healing role of religion and counterbalances the fundamentalism of the radical religious right, is having a major cow: "The Bush-Cheney campaign has dropped any pretense of honoring the separation of church and state mandated by the Constitution, and puts in jeopardy the non-profit status of 1600 houses of worship by asking them to engage in partisan politics."

Vertigo in Boston Sucks

My friend Brad tried to stop some meathead bouncers at Vertigo from beating up his friend, and he ended up with a bloody nose and swollen lips. Read about his encounter with bouncer brutality at Vertigo and why he won't ever return to Vertigo in Boston. He also has some tips when bouncers attack.

Eject..eject...

I really, really, really, need to find a good term that means, definitively and unequivocally, "someone who is JUST NOT HELPING". Grade-A drivel: Trinity, part 1 An sampling of the gems of economic and social theory to be found within:

Get this through your heads, you socialist ninnies! There is not a big, limited pot of wealth that is filled with the Magic Sweat of Authentic Third World Laborers, that America uses its military to steal from when we run out of wealth here at home.

You did not have to steal $999,898.69 from a farmer in Angola.

Oh, I get it now... so if I get my friend Bob to pay me $200 for spitting on the sidewalk, and then I pay him $200 for pissing on a tree, then we've created $400 of wealth? THAT explains why our country is number 1! Yay! Go USA! Go Capitalism! Go Monsanto and ExxonMobil and Enron and Halliburton and Carlyle Group!

Britney's Trust

From Time.com's "Verbatim" pages, here's what Britney Spears has to say about the war:

"Honestly, I think we should just trust our President in every decision that he makes, and we should just support that."

Afghanistan Today

Warning: this article on the state of affairs in Afghanistan is highly depressing. Don't miss it. Excerpts:

"Two girls who went to school without their burkas were killed and their dead bodies were put in front of their houses," she said. "Last month, 35 women jumped into a river along with their children and died, just to save themselves from commanders on a rampage of rape. That is Afghanistan today; the Taliban and the warlords of the Northern Alliance are two faces of the same coin. For America, it's a Frankenstein story - you make a monster and the monster goes against you. If America had not built up these warlords, Osama bin Laden and all the fundamentalist forces in Afghanistan during the Russian invasion, they would not have attacked the master on September 11 2001."
...
The Taliban were offered 15 cents for every 1,000 cubic feet of gas that passed through Afghanistan. Although these were the Clinton years, pushing the deal were the "oil and gas junta" that was soon to dominate George W Bush's regime. They included three former members of George Bush senior's cabinet, such as the present vice-president, Dick Cheney, representing nine oil companies, and Condoleezza Rice, now national security adviser, then a director of Chevron-Texaco with special responsibility for Pakistan and Central Asia.

Condoleeza Rice was a director of Texaco?!? WTF?! Is a healthy crude oil habit a pre-req for serving in the Bush White House? "Scotch? No thanks, the President is strictly on the wagon. Hey, how 'bout some 89 octane?"

NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!

This is what I get for reading the Internet so much. Rumors:

"As for DiCaprio and Scorsese, they are now believed to be planning a biopic of Howard Hughes at IEG. The duo also is out to studios with a feature pitch based on four science fiction books from novelist Dan Simmons : "Hyperion," "Fall of Hyperion," "Endymion" and "Rise of Endymion." The project is said to have attracted bids from three competing studios but is not yet set up.

Actor Leonardo DiCaprio (Titanic, The Gangs of New York) is interested in the role of "Raul Endymion" in the movie adaptation of Hyperion (proposed in treatment form by Dan Simmons as one film or three), and is currently meeting with directors and studios to discuss the proposal. DiCaprio, who would both star and co-produce the feature, met on July 5 with Martin Scorcese, director of DiCaprio's new film The Gangs of New York."

Please... not Kate Winslet as Aenea... please dear God... no....

Top 200

Here is the ROSKO list of the "hardcore 200" spammers who are responsible for 90% of all the spam in North America and Europe. Die die die....

Family Research Council

Brad sent me this brainfart from the Family Research Council. Delicious quote from the essay:

This change was brought about by the sexual liberationists' constant rhetorical emphasis on the autonomy of "consenting adults," by the promotion and ultimate triumph of the notion that anything sexual is morally permissible, so long as it takes place between "consenting adults." The older sexual culture placed all kinds of restrictions on what grown-up people could do with themselves, but the new liberationism rejected all that. Why, after all, can't two (or, for that matter, three or four) adults do what they want, so long as no one is coerced? What "consenting adults" do together is no one else's business.

This rhetorical emphasis on consent implies an utter rejection of the old understanding of the nature of sex itself, which was the basis of the severity of the old mores. ... That old understanding held that there was an objective moral structure to sex, and that there were right and wrong ways to use it--regardless of whether the parties making use of it were consenting adults or not.

I hold there is an objective moral structure to the HTTP protocol, and there are right and wrong ways to use it, this piece of drivel being an example of the latter.

I <heart> Microsoft

or, A Tale of Two Operating Systems

...in which Peter faces software droppings from the Beast of Redmond and reflects on how much easier things are on his Mac...

First OS: Mac OS 10.2

After my return from Italy, I noticed my Powerbook G4 acting a little strangely (possibly because of a compact-flash-card-removal-induced kernel panic whilst on the trip). Thus, I decided to reinstall Mac OS 10.2. This essentially involved three steps:
1. Back up my user data and preferences.
2. Re-install the operating system and apply all the software updates.
3. Restore my user data.

Backing up my data was trivial - I plugged in a firewire drive and copied my ~pwang folder into it with a single drag-and-drop. Also, since most Mac applications don't install fragments of themselves all over your hard drive, they are entirely self-contained inside their own folders in the Applications folder; backing up my applications was a simple matter of highlighting all the applications and copying them to the firewire drive as well.
Then, I re-installed the operating system, applied all the software updates (required about 2 or 3 reboots), and copied back my applications. I also copied back my user data, and upon one final reboot, I was back up and running. My screen saver, desktop, iPhoto, iTunes, MS Office, etc. preferences were all there, and my machine looked the same as before the reinstall.

Second OS: Windows 2000 SP4

Last week, the Internet was clogged and thrashed by several worms and virii. Since these only affect Windows machines, I decided I should make sure my Windows 2000 machine was up-to-date on the patches. Thus, I launched Internet Explorer, went to www.windowsupdate.com, downloaded and installed the patches (took 2 or 3 reboots), and felt much better...

...until I tried to burn a CD. I realized that my CDRW and DVD drives had both disappeared. I launched Device Manager, and sure enough, they both had yellow exclamation points on their icons. Apparently these devices were not working properly because "Windows cannot load the drivers required". I clicked on "Re-install driver" and opted to download new drivers from WindowsUpdate (I double checked and the drivers in question were generic CD and DVD drivers). The reinstall completes, and I am informed that "The driver for this device is now installed, but may not work correctly. This device is not working properly because Windows cannot load the drivers required (Code 31)." Lovely.

Next I try uninstalling the devices and rebooting, hoping that Windows will try to re-install them and get the driver crap right. I do this, but after a reboot and a few more attempts are updating the drivers, I still have no working CD drives.

Finally, in a fit of desperation, I remember that there is a "Repair" option on the Windows 2000 install CD. I insert the CD, reboot, and select the repair option. (This is proof that the CD drive is not broken - thank God Microsoft didn't write the BIOS.) The Windows 2000 automatic repair did its thing and rebooted my machine. I double-clicked "My Computer". Still no CD drives.

Of course, Windows Repair somehow managed to reset a bunch of stuff with drivers and and registered applications and crap, so all of the sudden 4 or 5 Windows Installer dialogs pop open, informing me that the system can't find the installer files for various applications, and would I please select another location for them, or press Cancel. Oh, and if I press cancel, these applications (some of which I installed years ago) might not work. What?!

I do my best, but most of the installer .MSI files are located - haha - on application installation CDs, which - guess what - require a working CD drive. One of the applications that has magically ceased working is Microsoft Office. So not only am I up a creek without a paddle, I am also apparently without a boat, and without any steel underwear to protect my fragile anus from being raped some more by Microsoft. I think I will have to re-install Windows 2000 in order to make all this work. Of course, that means losing all of my preferences and going through a laborious re-install of all my applications.

My name is Peter Wang. I'm a system administrator, and as soon as I get enough money, I'm buying a Mac.

Deregulation of Utilities

An article amusingly entitled Power Outage Traced to Dim Bulb in White House, Greg Palast examines the efforts at deregulation:

Most important, FDR banned political contributions from utility companies -- no 'soft' money, no 'hard' money, no money PERIOD.

But then came George the First. In 1992, just prior to his departure from the White House, President Bush Senior gave the power industry one long deep-through-the-teeth kiss good-bye: federal deregulation of electricity. It was a legacy he wanted to leave for his son, the gratitude of power companies which ponied up $16 million for the Republican campaign of 2000, seven times the sum they gave Democrats.
...
California fell first. The power companies spent $39 million to defeat a 1998 referendum pushed by Ralph Nader which would have blocked the de-reg scam. Another $37 million was spent on lobbying and lubricating the campaign coffers of legislators to write a lie into law: in the deregulation act's preamble, the Legislature promised that deregulation would reduce electricity bills by 20%. In fact, when San Diegans in the first California city to go "lawless" looked at their bills, the 20% savings became a 300% jump in surcharges.
...
According to Dr. Anjali Sheffrin, economist with the California state Independent System Operator which directed power movements, between May and November 2000, three power giants physically or "economically" withheld power from the state and concocted enough false bids to cost the California customers over $6.2 billion in excess charges.

While I am all for free enterprise and free markets, I am also against violatiing contracts - including the very fundamental contract of basic ethics, such as no fraud, no lying about costs, etc. It seems the energy lobby should use the term "anarchization" instead of "deregulation". Hey, the Wild West was pretty darn deregulated, and we know that was a model capitalist economy.

Berkshire and the Pro-Lifers

This article incenses me. It's fine for the woman to be unhappy with part of her employer's dividends going to pro-choice charities. It's fine for her to ignorantly ignore the portion of the dividends going to pro-life charities. What pisses me off is this:
For her part, Coughlon is "just delighted with the decision." But she says she won't be satisfied until the man she deferentially refers to as "Mr. Buffett" stops donating to pro-choice causes. "Now," she says, "the focus is on him."

Abortion stops a beating heart. Wait... so does sushi.

Trust Big Brother?

What if Big Brother can be hijacked? Easily? Repeatedly? The next time someone tells you they are willing to let the government take away some privacy because it gets them security, refer them to this article.

Carnivore and PC Anywhere

From a Cringely article:

The DCS-1000 or Carnivore system is apparently rife with security defects, starting with the fact that it is a Windows 2000 box exposed to the Internet, typically not behind the firewall, at the ISP and remote-controlled from the FBI office using PCAnywhere. The data it captures are downloaded insecurely in the PCAnywhere session. In fact, the FBI admitted that some significant e-mail intercepts concerning Osama Bin Laden were "contaminated" and were not legally usable (the technician reportedly was ordered to destroy all the intercepts) due to technical problems with the box.

...The fact that Microsoft was chosen just this week by the Department of Homeland Security to provide $90-million in software for the agency's 140,000 desktops and servers does not make me feel any safer.

Thanks Mr. President!

Lies, damned lies, and statistics... If only these numbers were a lie:

Fuzzy Math

Bush has apparently succeeded in branding Democratic criticism of his tax cut proposal as "class warfare." Polls show that statements like these have helped to raise support for his tax cut by 10% in the last two weeks.

Bush took another preemptive strike yesterday during a speech in Albuquerque when he told a small-business audience, "Oh, you'll hear the talk about how this plan only helps the rich people. That's just typical Washington, D.C., political rhetoric, is what that is. That's just empty rhetoric."

As for whose rhetoric is empty, take a look at the numbers from the Brookings Insitution, hardly a bastion of left-wing ideologues:

Those same middle-income households would receive a tax cut of $452 and an income boost of 1.1 percent, while millionaires would receive a cut of $93,537, enough to increase their after-tax income by 4.4 percent.

So if you're a millionaire, you can buy a couple of Lexuses with your tax cut. If you're a middle-income household, then hip-hip-hooray! that's just over half a month's worth of housing for a family of four. That's money your family will barely notice.

Anyway, I suppose my point is this: if you want to cut taxes for ideological reasons--for example, because you dogmatically believe in trickle-down economics, or because you want to bankrupt the government in order to limit the scope of its responsibility--then be up front about it. It's too bad that a president who makes so much of personal morality is so intellectually dishonest.

GODDAMNED PIECE OF SHIT FUCKING REPUBLICANS

Why the HELL does anyone think that renaming "French Fries" to "Freedom Fries" is a good idea? I mean, WHAT THE FUCK?? These are the same sorts of people that name their socialist tyranny "The Free People's Happy Democracy of Elbonia" while raping and shooting and gassing their proletarians.
And check out the picture of representative Walter Jones (R-NC) proudly displaying his little framed announcement about this name change.

Lemme tell you something, Walt. Can I call you Walt? Good. The world at large does not CARE what you call french fries. See that lady in line behind you, looking at you like you're a moron? It's because your ignorance is trailing behind your pea-sized brain like browned toilet paper stuck on a smelly shoe. You might want to look into that. Oh, and by the way, your state is full of inbred hicks. You might want to look into that, too, before you start decrying a woman's right to choose - you don't want mutants for future constituents.

(For those who are wondering, that was not ad hominem, because my classification of a hominid requires more intellect than these idiots have. Call it ad retardedem, if you want.)

In retaliation for all this stupidity, I'm going to refer to the so-called "PATRIOT Act" as the "French Act" since it's French in its bureaucratic nature and the word "patriot" comes from the French word "patriote". Yeah, brilliant effing PR, Rumsfeld. And while we're at it, we can call the GOP the "Freedom Fighters". And we'll re-christen George W. Bush, the greatest, freest, bravest, most patriotic of all presidents, "Frenchie P. Appletree". ("The P is for sucks.")