So, why did Palin resign? There are several different theories:

1. She was telling the truth. Just from her record alone, we can pretty easily dismiss this one outright. Palin is, for the most part, congenitally incapable of telling the truth where her record and policies are concerned.

But truthfully: the media hounding her and political enemies calling for investigations? Please. Even if we accept Palin’s worldview and ignore the fact that she has personally invited every single jab in the media and every single investigation into her wrongdoings, either by making a huge deal of herself or by literally welcoming scrutiny, then what this says about her is that she can’t take the heat. If she is so weak a politician that she can’t stand up to the media, how can we believe that she’ll be capable of standing up to a serious opponent? How would she deal with North Korea? Resign from office because they’re being so mean?

2. She wants freedom to run for president in 2012. If this is true, then Palin is even more of a schizophrenic moron than I thought she was. Nothing says “presidential material” more than quitting in mid-term because you just can’t take all that negativity from the media and the ethics investigators.

She may just as well tattooed the word “QUITTER” on her forehead, because that’s what every opponent–especially her fellow Republicans–will label her as if she tries to run against anybody from now on.

But she might actually believe that this is the right move: that by doing this, she will be a victim (which played very well for her in the Letterman affair), a martyr who sacrificed herself for the people, the party, and her cause. She may actually believe that her speech defused the whole “quitter” stigma just because she tried to call “quitting” “winning.”

If this scenario is true, then she’s in for a bit of a disappointment.

3. Something Big is coming. There is a huge scandal that we haven’t heard about yet, and Palin resigned so as to avoid the worst of its consequences.

This seems to be the best theory because nothing else makes sense; the other two theories are so lacking in credibility that it is commonly assumed that this must be the real reason. We just haven’t seen the other shoe drop yet.

This makes sense on many fronts. First of all, Palin not only lies, steals, and breaks the law, but she has done it so transparently that it defies belief. As we just found out in Vanity Fair:

After one meeting between the governor and legislators in 2007, Lyda Green, then the president of the state senate, returned to her office to catch up on some paperwork. She caught Palin on the news. “And she comes on TV and says, ‘I want to once again confirm that neither I nor my staff ever holds closed-door meetings.’ Well, we had just been in a closed-door meeting for an hour and a half!”

That Palin does this suggests that she may simply have no “ethical filter,” that she simply cannot tell right from wrong, or truth from lie–or else is so blindingly arrogant that she just believes she can get away with anything without even trying to hide it. Either way, it makes it much easier to find her guilty of something. And that may be what happened: that she did something so illegal or unethical that it’s coming to bite her in the ass.

Second, the way she resigned seems tailor-made for pre-emption. She set the stage by making multiple claims that her political enemies were out to get her with false accusations, wasting all that taxpayer money. She’s a victim, she’s trying to tell us–so that when charges come out, she can say, “See! Just what I was talking about, what a coincidence!” and pretend like it’s just another false charge that her enemies have trumped up.

Third, if she quits before charges are made, she removes the scrutiny of being an office-holder. If a huge scandal erupts while you’re governor, then being in office is a liability. If you’re an ex-governor, then it’s old news. She can claim that all of that is behind her, hope that people forget it, and then run for office after it’s all gone away. And let’s face it, you can get away with murder while in office–all you have to do is resign and suddenly investigations collapse.

Sure, quitting and then having a damaging scandal revealed aren’t exactly career-builders, but it may be that she simply has no choice–that staying on as governor would be far worse. If there’s a big scandal coming, then this could be Palin’s best chance to salvage her career.

Of course, there are two more theories:

4. Palin is a total wimp. This is an alternate reading of theory #1, above. Maybe she just can’t take it any more. In which case she doesn’t belong in politics. Or:

5. Palin is batshit insane. This could simply be the act of a completely stupid and crazy person doing things for reasons that only make sense to her. We certainly cannot rule out that possibility. Crazy people don’t need good reasons.

Any other theories?

Late thought: I forgot to mention something that had been rolling through my mind: the timing. Palin announced this on “Take Out the Trash Day,” Friday before a holiday weekend. If this was a push where she really wanted to ride the wave of publicity, she would not have made the statement on a day perfect for burying news stories, a day famous for killing the momentum of news stories.

Another reason not to buy into the idea that she is “gearing up” and “reloading both chambers” for a new political offensive–unless, of course we return to the “crazy” or “stupid” scenarios, in which Palin is showing extremely bad judgment.

Later Update: The Brad Blog is following the stories that the “iceberg scandal” is the reason why Palin resigned, and that it has to do with upcoming federal indictments for embezzlement. Short version: Palin is in trouble for her relationship with the building contractor, Spenard Building Supplies, which has been under investigation by federal authorities. The Wasilla Sports Center and the Palins’ home are both part of the focus. These reports have been circulating for a while, but nothing solid has come out about it yet. Keep in mind, this could just be baseless speculation–people searching for a ’scandal,’ latching on to an investigation that may or may not be going anywhere, that may or may not even involve Palin herself.

If it is what pushed Palin out, then I have another prediction: seconds after the official announcement is made, the Right Wing will explode in conspiracy theories about how Obama directed the FBI to sabotage the career of his most likely rival in 2012.

I could be wrong; any takers on that bet?

For the time being, the right-wing blogs are speculating on much friendlier theories, like ’she wants to spend more time with her family,’ or ‘there is a grave illness, and won’t those nasty liberals feel like crap when it comes out.’ Other are still on the ‘brilliant political play’ theory that she’s getting ready for 2012.

This is what I get for reading the news last. I get up every morning and check out batches of web sites–the computer batch, the entertainment batch, the blogs batch, and the news & commentary batch. Sometimes I check the non-news sites first, but when there’s a big story, it gets referenced elsewhere and I find out about it second-hand, as if it’s already old news. I found out about Jackson’s death on Gizmodo, and today read about Palin’s resignation on Pharyngula. PZ Myers did a nice Monty Python “Brave Sir Robin” sendoff, and for a minute I thought he was making the “Palin resigned” story up.

But no, Palin did resign, as I’m sure you know by now. What’s very interesting is to read her official statement, as originally posted, with all the quirky formatting bits.

Right from the beginning, she sets the tone, using the story of Alaska’s purchase by the United States. In essay writing, this is known as an introduction technique, an anecdote that is supposed to be interesting and which (in this case revealingly) supports the thesis statement:

But [then Secretary of State Seward] endured such ridicule and mocking for his vision for Alaska, remember the adversaries scoffed, calling this “Seward’s Folly”. Seward withstood such disdain as he chose the uncomfortable, unconventional, but RIGHT path to secure Alaska, so Alaska could help secure the United States.

Palin, from the start, sets out to define herself as an Alaskan and American hero unjustly maligned by fools. It’s worthy of note that Palin identified Seward as “a member of President Abe Lincoln’s cabinet,” despite the fact that he arranged the purchase two years after Lincoln’s assassination. No good conservative could fail to throw in a Lincoln reference somehow to add oomph to their Republican creds. Palin continues:

People who know me know that besides faith and family, nothing’s more important to me than our beloved Alaska.

So, I’m quitting.

So to serve the state is a humbling responsibility…

So humbling that I’m quitting.

My administration’s accomplishments speak for themselves. We work tirelessly for Alaskans.

Right up until we quit!

Palin then drones on about her masterful achievements, including some of her classic whoppers:

And we made common sense conservative choices to eliminate personal luxuries like the jet, the chef, the junkets… the entourage.

The jet that she (didn’t) sell on eBay (for a $600,000 loss)? Oh, and the chef who was “eliminated” first to a make-work job, and then to cook for the legislative lounge (because Palin moved to Wasilla and didn’t need a full-time chef anymore), saving Alaska nothing. And the “junkets”? They must have been ginormous under her predecessor for Palin’s to claim that she “eliminated” them; As of 2008, Palin had made 72 trips including cross-country travel to places like Texas and New York (and let’s not forget Kosovo), and even had the state pay for her children traveling with her on ten of those trips. Alaska paid $43,490 for Palin’s husband and children to travel, and Palin herself claimed $16,951 in “per diem” payments she was not entitled to for “travel” which was actually her just staying at home in Wasilla. As for frugality, shall we even get in to the $150,000 wardrobe? The RNC paid for that, but it kind of made a joke of the whole “we’re frugal” business.

And the Lt. Governor and I said “no” to our pay raises.

Like the 46% pay raise she got her first day in office? She said “no” to that? Funny, there’s no record of her turning that down, and indeed that was her salary.

Actually, Palin is talking about another pay raise that was suggested by a panel whose members she hand-picked. A cheap stunt–get a panel to recommend a big pay raise right after you got a huge pay raise so you can turn down the smaller one and act like you’re being “frugal.” Not to mention that Palin tried to get that money by other means, like the per diems.

Palin then proceeded to her central thesis:

But you don’t hear much of the good stuff in the press anymore, do you?

That awful “Liberal Media™” taking a fantastic governor down just because of a few dozen scandals, several violations of law, multiple abuses of power, and dozens and dozens of brazen, bald-faced lies. How dare they!

She then blabs on about how she’s been victimized by evildoers; here’s the distilled version:

Political operatives descended digging for dirt, their weapon of choice, frivolous ethics violations dismissed. We’ve won! State has wasted THOUSANDS of hours of YOUR time and shelled out some two million of YOUR dollars to respond to “opposition research” - political absurdity, the “politics of personal destruction” … these silly accusations? Spending other peoples’ money in their game, pretty insane - I promised no more “politics as usual.”

Palin then edges toward her surprise:

If I have learned one thing: LIFE is about choices!

Like quitting!

Here’s the money quote, the one everyone has been talking about–where Palin goes up-is-down and white-is-black:

Life is too short to compromise time and resources… it may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: “Sit down and shut up”, but that’s the worthless, easy path; that’s a quitter’s way out. And a problem in our country today is apathy. It would be apathetic to just hunker down and “go with the flow.”

Nah, only dead fish “go with the flow”.

Or, as Josh Marshall quipped, “Quitters stick to it. Winners quit.”

The most sympathetic reading of that statement I can come up with is, “I have been taking a horrible, undeserved beating from my political enemies who want me to just sit there and take it; I won’t quit the fight by staying on as governor and letting them keep using me as a piñata, so instead I am resigning so I can fight those bastards without having my hands tied by public office.” Which is pretty absurd, when you think about it–why can’t she fight back as governor?

But no, she has to leave, which, for another few paragraphs, she explains as being what is RIGHT to HELP people in a PROUD and INSPIRED manner (using LOTS of CAPITALIZED words JUST like in the BIBLE when referring to the LORD!).

She also takes some time explaining, in a rather meandering way, how she decided to leave office at the end of her term, but didn’t want to be a lame duck, so she decided instead to leave right away. Um, yeah.

But the essence of what she’s saying is this:

My choice is to take a stand and effect change - not hit our heads against the wall and watch valuable state time and money, millions of your dollars, go down the drain in this new environment.

She’s going to fight, but not from the governor’s office, where she can’t do anything. That makes sense. Governors are pretty powerless and ineffective.

Of course, she’s claiming that she can’t do anything because of the environment, that being the damned Liberal Media™ dogging her every move and making it impossible for her to get anything done.

So… what’s the real reason? Analysis in my next post.

As I have mentioned before on this blog, I have noticed a repeating patten in the Mac OS’s acquisition of market share. Every first half of the year, usually from January to July, Mac OS market share stays steady, with occasional small ups and downs–but then, starting in August, it rockets upwards and keeps going until December. (Note in the chart below: light blue denotes the late-year growth season, darker blue denotes the early-year doldrums.) And so far, this pattern, which I noticed a few years ago, has held true.

Currently, the Mac OS is hovering less than 10%; if the past trend holds true, we’ll be seeing the Mac market share rise to 11.5% or 12% by December 2009.

I made a similar prediction almost exactly a year ago, guessing that the Mac market share could jump to anywhere from 9% to as high as 10%. Seeing the graph above, you can confirm that I was pretty much right on target: the Mac’s share stopped just shy of 10%. My prediction the previous year that the Mac OS would have an 8% share by the start of 2008 was a bit high, but close–it topped out at about 7.6%. So I am fairly confident that by January 2010, we could be seeing a 12% share, and a year later, maybe 14%. This also would track with my prediction in 2007 that we’d see the Mac market share rise to between 12% and 15% by 2010. As I mentioned before, if that trend continues, Apple could have 30% of market share by 2015–ten times what it had in 2005.

Also, at this rate, the iPhone is set to overtake Linux as an OS by the end of 2010.

Glenn Beck (again, yes, he’s a tool) agrees that America “needs” another al Qaeda attack to save us from the evil that is Obama. But watch to find, at the end, the (certainly) unintended pro-Obama statement:

See? According to Glenn Beck, as long as Obama is president, we’re safe from attack. Take that, Dick Cheney!

This does not, however, provide enough comic relief to make it less than tremendously scary that Fox and their fellow travelers are using such extreme, over-the-top, inflammatory language so as to send out the message: “Obama must be stopped!” It seems that they have learned the Tiller lesson all too well: attract and then inflame the extremists, describe all kinds of hellish crimes that are being committed, tell them the world is going to end unless something radical is done by somebody, and then sit back and wait for the bullets to fly, claiming innocence when people of sense tell you that you went too far. Seriously, Fox should simply rename itself the “Get Obama!” channel and be done with it.

I love how so many of these “Liberal Media” headlines read, “Coleman Concedes Seat to Franken,” as if Coleman was the one ending this with grace or something. The Minnesota Supreme Court, a week overdue in giving its decision, voted unanimously that Norm Coleman was an ass.

Well, they didn’t quite go that far. In fact, amazingly, they bent over backwards to give Coleman the chance to drag this out even further, and did not direct Governor Pawlenty to certify the results. But Coleman and Pawlenty get no points for passing on that chance; they have already gone to asinine lengths to keep Franken away from his Senate seat, at the cost of the people of the state.

Coleman is quoted as saying, “Further litigation damages the unity of our state.” Oh, yeah, right; and Coleman’s wholly capricious and petty campaign to deny Minnesota half it’s voice in the Senate for six full months, long after it was a foregone conclusion that Coleman had lost–that didn’t even dent the “unity of the state.” It has been clear for months that Coleman had no chance, that Franken was the winner.

Lest we forget, waaay back in November, when Coleman loudly declared victory after the initial count put him a few hundred votes ahead, he–Coleman–said: “If you ask me what I would do, I would step back. I just think the need for the healing process is so important. The possibility of any change of this magnitude in the voting system we have is so remote, but that would be my judgment.” Coleman intimated that Franken should “waive his right to a recount,” in part because it would cost the people of Minnesota a whopping $86,000. All of this despite the fact that it was not Franken’s “right,” but Minnesota law said that a recount at that margin was mandatory.

When the mandatory recount gave the election to Franken, and when the process was so honest and above-board that even Republicans were expressing surprise as how honest and well-run the recount was, when it became clear that any further challenges were useless and all the votes had been counted as fairly as possible and there was really no chance for things to be reversed–Coleman suddenly turned hypocrite and, in a path that was not at all mandatory and which cost the people of Minnesota far more than $86,000, started a series of legal challenges which, from the start, were a transparent attempt to tie up the election results and deny Franken his seat in the Senate for as long as possible.

Again, Coleman gets no points for not taking this to the ridiculous extreme of appealing to the federal courts; had he done so, any hope that might be left of his ever again running for office would have been severely damaged. Coleman conceded for his own sake, not for Franken, and certainly not for the people of Minnesota.

The fundamentalist Christian “Liberty” University sparked some controversy when they banned the College Democrats club based on the fact that the political party the club stated affiliation to supports freedom of choice in reproductive rights and other such unacceptable heresies. The Republicans were allowed to continue with their club. Well, now an agreement has been reached: the club can start up again, but none of the political clubs will be allowed to use college funds.

The irony here is that a major complaint of fundamentalist Christians is that they are not allowed nationwide to engage in religious activities which use public (often school) funds. Faced with a similar problem where they are the administration–using their own funds provided by a body which may disagree with how they are spent–they came up with exactly the solution they decry as discriminatory and unfair when applied against themselves.

How about that.

A high school assistant principle had a 13-year-old girl strip-searched for painkillers after a fellow student accused her of handing them out, and a search of her backpack and outer clothing produced nothing. The other student had been caught with one over-the-counter pill and four prescription-strength Ibuprofen pills, and accused her classmate of providing them to her. The accused girl was made to strip to her underwear in front of a female administrative assistant and a nurse, then pull out her bra and underpants, shaking them, to show there were no pills there.

In what most would call a “no-brainer,” the Supreme Court ruled (PDF) that this constituted an unreasonable search. In loco parentis or not, you don’t strip-search 13-year-old girls for pain medication on the strength of an accusation by another teen, especially when that teen may be trying to shift blame to escape harsher punishment. Since the search went so far as to expose the student’s breasts and pelvic area, the court ruled that it violated the Fourth Amendment protection of privacy. Although the pills found were prescription-strength, they were also common pain relievers and not a serious health threat–we’re talking Ibuprofen–not heroin, not even Oxycontin.

I might better understand this because I have served as a school administrator, albeit for a college, not a high school. But to order one of the female staff members to take a student to a private room and make the student strip solely on the strength of a few other students claiming that she had provided aspirin to them, against school rules or not, is so ludicrous as to defy belief. That is was “prescription strength” drugs, in this case, is not mitigating; Ibuprofen at 400 mg per tablet may be prescription strength, but you can get it over the counter at 200 mg and take two of them for the exact same effect. As I said, we’re talking about nothing more dangerous than aspirin here. You don’t make a 13-year-old girl strip to the point of even brief nudity on the claims of classmates who were facing punishment based on their testimony. If you want to control an incipient drug problem, there are other ways of doing it. If a strip search is truly necessary, then call in the police.

So the ruling was obvious–but not unanimous. It was 8 to 1. Guess who dissented? Yep. Clarence Thomas. He wrote:

The majority imposes a vague and amorphous standard on school administrators. It also grants judges sweeping authority to second-guess the measures that these officials take to maintain discipline in their schools and ensure the health and safety of the students in their charge.

It’s “vague and amorphous” to say that you shouldn’t strip search 13-year-old girls for aspirin? Really? I think that this is sufficiently over the line of “reasonable” as to be comfortably beyond “vague.” Don’t strip-search teenage girls if all that’s at stake is aspirin. How much more specific should it be? Souter was pretty clear:

The very fact of Savana’s pulling her underwear away from her body in the presence of the two officials who were able to see her necessarily exposed her breasts and pelvic area to some degree, and both subjective and reasonable societal expectations of personal privacy support the treatment of such a search as categorically distinct, requiring distinct elements of justification on the part of school authorities for going beyond a search of outer clothing and belongings.

Got it? When you require a teenage girl to strip to that extent, you need far more pressing circumstances. The line to be crossed is “no nudity.” It is perhaps nebulous only in that it doesn’t specify how serious a situation has to be to allow for a strip search, but a good indicator would be that you have to call in the police. In my opinion, Souter doesn’t go far enough in restricting the degree of strip searches, but I suppose that he was simply being cautious.

As for “second-guessing school authorities,” that’s a specious claim. Second-guessing is, by definition, what the Supreme Court does. Thomas is effectively saying that school administrators should be allowed to act without review or oversight, a wholly unreasonable and intolerable alternative.

Thomas justifies the search first by establishing that a general search was warranted–something the majority did not dispute–but then uses fallacious contributory evidence to make the circumstances appear more dire, speaking of unrelated matters such as a razor blade on another student’s person and illnesses of students from taking drugs that were not as innocuous as the aspirin the student who was strip-searched was accused of providing. He then works up to his argument as to why the strip-search was justified:

Because the school officials searched in a location where the pills could have been hidden, the search was reasonable in scope under T. L. O.

If you define as “reasonable” simply by the standards of any location where the pills “could have been hidden,” then the absurd but logical conclusion would bring you to vaginal exams and stomach purging to see if the student used those locations to hide drugs in small baggies. Drugs can be hidden there, Q.E.D. Thomas is trying to eliminate a line which can be crossed, the line which the majority clearly saw.

Thomas claims that the majority overstepped their bounds; that when they claimed that a “greater level of particularized suspicion” would be necessary to allow for such an invasive search, they went too far. “There is no support for this contortion of the Fourth Amendment,” he wrote. Actually, there is: the word “reasonable.” It clearly allows for collective judgment to be used to decide what is and what is not allowable, based upon standards decided by common sense.

In short, Thomas did what he and his colleagues often do: ignore both the word and the spirit of the law to allow their own personal ideas of what should and shouldn’t be to supplant the actual law.

This is, in fact, the classic “legislating from the bench” that people like Thomas claim to hate so much. But people like Thomas don’t really hate legislating from the bench–they simply hate civil rights that offend their own conservative worldview. To be frank, I am not as much surprised that Thomas ruled this way as I am surprised that his conservative colleagues, especially Scalia, did not.

Microsoft has announced pricing:

On Thursday, the software giant said it would offer through several retailers an upgrade from Windows Vista or XP to Windows 7 Home Premium at $49.99 or to Windows 7 Professional for $99.99. The discounted OS is already a best-seller in Amazon’s software category.

The company said the normal price for the Home Premium upgrade will be $119.99, compared to $129.99 charged for Vista. The Windows 7 Professional Upgrade will be priced at $199.99, and the Windows 7 Ultimate Upgrade at $219.99.

A lot of Windows advocates will compare the $50 upgrade price to Apple’s $30 for Snow Leopard. What the $50-to-$30 comparison fails to note is that Apple’s OS doesn’t come in “versions”; when you buy OS X, it’s not partially crippled. Which means that a more fair comparison is Snow Leopard’s $30 to 7’s $220. Not to mention that the $50 price for Windows is for pre-order only; miss that deadline and you’ll pay $120 for an upgrade to Home Premium.

The “Top Tech News” article says this, however:

Baker pointed out that Apple’s Snow Leopard upgrade will be $29 for one user license and $49 for five users. Some observers have suggested, however, that Snow Leopard is more of an upgrade, while Windows 7 is a new OS.

You know, I wasn’t going to go in to this–honestly, I wrote that I wasn’t going to, before I looked back at the article and saw the above paragraph. But now I have to.

Windows 7 has many of the same boasting points as Snow Leopard–improved performance on multi-core processors, improved boot performance, kernel improvements and the like. But Snow Leopard goes a lot further. The entire OS has essentially been rewritten, dramatically reducing it’s footprint and installation time, and notably improving performance–in addition to the improvements listed for 7. Windows 7’s improvements are incremental in comparison, and has not unfairly been called a “service pack release” of Vista.

Both upgrades also boast of improved bundled apps. Windows 7 speaks of Windows Media Center, a refined calculator, new gadgets; Snow Leopard speaks of Safari 4, QuickTime X, improved iChat, better Time Machine.

Both upgrades talk about new features making the OS easier to use. Windows 7 has Jump Lists, Snap, Aero Shake and Peek; Snow Leopard has improved Exposé and Stacks, a more efficient Finder, better Disk Eject, and faster wake-up and shut down.

Both improve accessibility; Windows offers Home Group sharing, Apple has more efficient file sharing and faster joining of Wireless networks.

In fact, when you go down the lists of improvements, the two OS’s have a surprisingly similar set of improvements. To call 7 a “New OS” as opposed to Snow Leopard a mere “upgrade” is patently false. Neither is a “New OS” in the traditional sense; Windows 7 only pretends to be, while Apple is more honest in both its labeling and the change in pricing.

But if one offers more than the other, it is unquestionably Snow Leopard. In addition to significant performance upgrades, Snow Leopard is a remodeling in preparation for significant future improvements; Windows 7 is an attempt to salvage the previous disaster of an OS release while pinning some new features on top. One is a streamlining, the other is a repair job. If Windows 7 is a better improvement over its predecessor, then that is only because its predecessor was such a failure to begin with. You don’t get extra points for not sucking nearly as badly as you did before.

The article (strangely, considering its title) goes a long way to pump up Windows 7 and make the Mac OS look more expensive. Why mention the $49 family pack for Leopard, for example, without noting that getting 5 upgrade licenses for Windows 7 Home Premium after the pre-order would cost $600? Or the “Ultimate” upgrade for a whopping $1100? Because you want to make the Mac OS sound more expensive, that’s why. But let’s not go into that, or the fact that the Mac OS is without serial numbers or copy protection, while Windows demands that you “Activate” your product every time you upgrade your RAM.

Patrick Ruffini, a Republican, argues that Mark Sanford should not resign, and complains that Republicans are unfairly put upon:

At the core of the Sanford and Ensign episodes is the cloud of “hypocrisy” that hangs over any Republican who strays from the bonds of their marriage. (Quickly forgetting that all who commit adultery are hypocrites, having taken a solemn vow of marriage.) Because Democrats are perceived as more socially libertine, they get off easier.

This is a structural disadvantage that, on the margins, hurts Republican officeholders, forcing them into resignation or disgrace more easily than their equally adulterous Democratic counterparts.

Simply put, it is a strategic error to sanctify the idea that it’s worse when Republicans cheat. The hypocrisy charge exacts a double penalty on Republicans where none exists for Democrats — first, in the accusation of hypocrisy itself, and second, in the media whipping social conservatives into a frenzy in a bid to belatedly “enforce” their moral code — exactly the thing the secular media believes you shouldn’t do 364 days out of the year — to hound a Republican out of office.

Some will argue that conservatives should enforce a higher standard upon themselves. In cases of corruption or illegality, I have agreed. The stench of systemic corruption can be grist for severe electoral losses, as it was in 2006, and from a party-strategic perspective must be purged immediately. But adultery is different — a human failing that strikes Democrats and Republicans equally, and one in which there is a certain presumption of privacy unless there is illegal behavior (Clinton, Spitzer) or it affects job performance (Sanford). Do Republicans want to purge their ranks based exclusively on a test of personal moral conduct? How exactly does this help solve the (inaccurate, IMO) perception of the Republican Party as intolerant and dominated by the religious right?

There are many things wrong with what this guy is claiming. Let’s go through the list.

The hypocrisy charge exacts a double penalty on Republicans where none exists for Democrats

What Ruffini glosses over is the key point in why Republicans pay a double penalty: they exalt themselves as the party or moral virtue, they claim they are the guardians of family values, and they conspicuously make one of the greatest issues in politics today the idea of the sanctity of the institution of marriage and how gay marriage threatens that sanctity. Mark Sanford himself was a strong opponent of gay marriage, and was even scheduled to be a speaker at the “Values Voters Summit” which would focus, among other things, on the sanctity of marriage. Not to mention that Sanford, like most other Republicans guilty of adultery, is on the record openly criticizing Bill Clinton and others for their adultery. Democrats in general do none of these things–and if one did and was caught in adultery, he or she would be just as–if not more–sharply condemned for the hypocrisy.

In short, the “double penalty” Ruffini complains about is amply justified and richly deserved.

Because Democrats are perceived as more socially libertine, they get off easier.

What, like Bill Clinton? John Edwards “got off” only because he was no longer in any position of responsibility when he was discovered–he was no longer a candidate nor an office-holder. But quite frankly, I don’t see any evidence of Democrats “getting off easier” (no pun intended, I am sure), and Ruffini conveniently provides none.

This is a structural disadvantage that, on the margins, hurts Republican officeholders, forcing them into resignation or disgrace more easily than their equally adulterous Democratic counterparts.

Really? Like Vitter, who didn’t resign? Or Craig, who refused to resign? Ensign doesn’t seem likely to, just as Sanford likely won’t. The only Republican adulterer of note who’s resigned recently for his affair is Eliot Spitzer. (Oops. Spitzer is a Democrat. Seriously, that was not an intentional goof. It only just happens to make my point even sharper.) Fact is, Republicans usually don’t resign when they’re caught in adulterous affairs, even when the hypocrisy in their particular case is as striking as it is in Sanford’s. The claim by right-wingers that Democrats are not hurt or are even helped by adultery is specious and unsupported.

…the media whipping social conservatives into a frenzy in a bid to belatedly “enforce” their moral code — exactly the thing the secular media believes you shouldn’t do 364 days out of the year…

The obligatory attack on the secular liberal media. Again, no evidence or examples of exactly how the media (1) is secular, (2) pushes a moral code, (3) fails to live up to that code, or (4) believes people shouldn’t abide by that code. As you can see, Ruffini’s statement here is convoluted on inspection. It’s what happens when you have a long-standing criticism that is based on an unstructured, unevidenced, and ultimately false set of accusations.

But adultery is different — a human failing that strikes Democrats and Republicans equally…

Here’s the old False Equivalency charge. Initially used most by the media in attempts to be seen as “not liberal,” it has been picked up by conservatives trying to explain off all the Republican malfeasance: if Republicans are found guilty of something, claim that Democrats do it just as much, so it’s a problem with politics or people in general, and not a Republican issue. This was rife during the last election; McCain and Obama went equally negative, right? Or how about the old biased media canard–compare Fox News with Dan Rather and the National Guard story–the two are equal, right? The Bush administration guilty of torture? Hey, Nancy Pelosi is just as guilty, right? On and on and on.

But in this case, does it stand up? After all, people are people, right? Well, if so, then it should be supported by the facts. And in this case–not really. Look at senators who are in office or have recently held office. Who are the ones with a history of adultery? On the Republican side, there is Mark Sanford, John Ensign, David Vitter, John McCain, Larry Craig, Bob Dole, and Elizabeth Dole (they were in an adulterous affair before they got married). All adulterers. On the Democratic side of the aisle? John Edwards is the only one I can find.

Keep in mind also that two of the Republican front-runners in the last election–including the actual candidate–were not only adulterers, but serial adulterers, and Gingrich, who was rumored to want to run and is likely going to in 2012 is also an adulterer. The non-titular head of the Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh, is an adulterer. The fact is, adultery is conspicuously rife in conservative circles–as is divorce and remarriage. There is the general stereotype and assumption that Democrats are the philanderers, but the evidence says otherwise.

How exactly does this help solve the (inaccurate, IMO) perception of the Republican Party as intolerant and dominated by the religious right?

Inaccurate in your opinion? Your evidence, Mr. Ruffini? None? Gee whiz, really? I wonder why not.

The thing is, Republicans are usually the ones calling for such people to resign because of the marital infidelity. Democrats in general tend to forgive the adultery part altogether. At my office, which tends to be pretty liberal, the attitude was that there was no problem with the guy’s adultery, but leaving his post for five days like that was unforgivable.

If Sanford had not committed the hypocrisy–had he publicly forgiven others who had affairs, had he not made the sanctity of marriage a political issue–then there would be little if any criticism on the left about him specifically, save for those who did not know his views and/or spoke of conservative values in general. Had he not gone AWOL for five days and lied every which way about it in silly and stupid way, there would be no criticism on that, either.

If you have an affair, that’s a personal issue; it doesn’t speak well for your character, to be sure, but it doesn’t speak to your performance in your job. That tends to be the liberal view of the issue, which is why liberals are not tagged as hypocrites as much when caught in adultery. It is decidedly not the conservative view on the issue, which is why conservatives are seen as hypocrites when they have affairs.

Near the end of his article, Ruffini stops dancing around the phrase and gets to his central thesis, calling this a “double standard.” But this is not a double standard; a double standard is when you have two different sets of consequences for the same failing.

If I say that drinking is bad and you say it’s no big deal, and we’re both caught drinking, is it unfair to call me a hypocrite? Nope. If the shoe fits and all that.

According to Rushbo, that is:

This is almost like, ‘I don’t give a damn, the country’s going to Hell in a handbasket, I just want out of here.’ [Sanford] had just tried to fight the stimulus money coming to South Carolina. He didn’t want any part of it; he lost the battle. He said, ‘What the hell. I mean, the federal government’s taking over — what the hell, I want to enjoy life.’ …

The point is, there are a lot of people whose spirit is just — they’re fed up, saying, ‘To hell with it, I don’t even want to fight this anymore, I just want to get away from it.’

Why does Limbaugh think this is true? Because Sanford’s affair “defies logic,” because his actions made no sense. Therefore, logically, Barack Obama caused Mark Sanford to have sex with an Argentinean.

Logical! Mr. Spock would be proud. Never mind that the affair started before Obama took office, and probably before Obama was even elected.

But this is not surprising, as conservatives tend to see cause-and-effect as this incredible thing that links whatever they don’t like to all the bad in the world (the economy under Bush? All Clinton’s fault!), or, contrarily, whatever they do like to all the good in the world (the Soviet Union falling? Reagan’s magnificent oratory!).

But they have a special talent for linking liberalism to any and all of the world’s ills. Tom Foley? Liberalism! Virginia Tech shootings? Liberalism! Catholic priests molesting boys? Liberalism! 9/11? Liberalism! I’m not making these up, folks.

As an example of how tenuous a connection can be sure-fire proof for conservatives, remember how this guy tried to blame the recent economic collapse on secularism (which, of course, is in lockstep with liberalism), based upon nothing more than the idea that a few business started using the expression “Happy Holidays” instead of Merry Christmas.

The reasoning is all the same: Liberalism (or its agents) are destroying everything, thus causing people to lose their morals, thus causing everything bad.

What can I say? The calculus is undeniable.

If you have an iPhone 3G in Japan and are interested in upgrading to the 3G, then bad news: SoftBank is not offering you any special deals. If you have the 3G, then that means you still have at least one year left on your contract-with-subsidy, and you can receive subsidy for only one phone at a time. Getting the new iPhone now would mean paying full price, or about 65,000 yen. That would be spread over 24 months, and maybe (maybe, I’m not sure) a discount would apply in the last 12 of those months, reducing the cost some, but it would still be pretty expensive. So I’m waiting for the next model.

Another tip: if you got your 3G in Japan before the price drops a few months ago, you should go to SoftBank and get your contract adjusted. When the subsidized price for the 8GB 3G fell to 0 yen (and the 16GB version’s price was cut in half), they also lowered the cost for the data plan, from ¥5,985 to ¥4,410 ($62 to $46), but don’t be fooled into thinking that the new price applies to you; if you signed up before that price was instituted, then you’re still paying it. You have to go to SoftBank and apply for the new price plan. And while they’re at it, they demand that your contract be extended to two years after the change. If you’re intending to get the next iPhone after your first two years are up anyway, then there’s no problem with that, and it won’t affect your ability to get the next iPhone’s subsidy–the contract extension and the subsidy discount are not linked. Or so they told me, and I was pretty specific in the questioning.

Sheesh…

Not that I expect Fox to be any better than the morons posting to Free Republic who automatically label any and every criminal/terrorist as “registered Democrat,” but still. All I can say is, we better not be hearing lame excuses about “accidents” in the Fox graphics department. Better to simply fess up to what is obviously intentional.

Are there any high-level Republican politicians who are not having an affair? OK, just a few right now–but expand the question to high-level Republicans who are not and have not been in an adulterous affair, and the question becomes less funny. Or more so, depending.

Another one: at which point do Republicans lose all credibility in opposing gay marriage on the strength of their dedication to respect and preserve the institution of marriage?

Third: for how long with “Hiking the Appalachian Trail” be a common metaphor for marital infidelity? My guess is that it’ll be an instant classic–it’s a doozy.

This semester, I am taking Intermediate Algebra. True, I passed it about 20 years ago–I think I got a “B” in the class–but I remembered nothing at all from the class so long ago. Nowadays, I am a teacher at a college myself; I teach a survey course in Computers along with a few Writing courses here at our branch campus in Japan. But I want to extend my computer science credentials, and learn programming.

Now, for a long time, we were kind of cut off from the home campus in some ways, but in the past few years a lot more connections have been made. Recently, they made us part of the program where we can take courses with no tuition–a courtesy extended to full-time faculty. Being in Japan, the commute is a bit tough, but the college has an extensive range of online classes. So this semester, I decided to take Intermediate Algebra. Technically, I probably didn’t have to; my passing grade from years back might have sufficed. But it’s a pre-requisite for the programming courses, and I wanted to actually know the stuff I’ll be needing. So here I am.

This is the first time I have ever taken an online course; it’s not too bad. The main activity at home is to read through the text and try to understand; the main online activity is to take part in the discussion group, like a forum or bulletin board, but limited to class members discussing problems. We have to post at least three messages a week: one question, one answer, and one other post which could be either.

And, we just had our first test. The score just came back–100%. Woo hoo! Since my participation grade is also 100% so far, it’s going swimmingly.

As for the subject matter, I have always had a Math phobia. Strangely, I am not bad at all with numbers–I just get nervous around anything more than basic math. And I honestly cannot say that “it’s all coming back to me”; I don’t remember any of this from when I took it before. But I’m getting it.

It helps to have been a teacher: I know what makes for a good student. One important point is to not just read the text carefully, but to take careful notes on your reading. It’s too easy to read without really understanding, but if you summarize what you’re reading, you are forced to comprehend what you summarize, not to mention that it helps you to memorize things as well.

The same goes for discussion: when others have problems, jump in and try to help. I have found through experience that the best way to learn something is to teach it. I learned this as a college student, when I joined study groups where all the other members were non-native speakers, so I was constantly explaining to others; the lesson was reinforced as a teacher, where I found myself picking up new subjects required by my teaching much faster than I would have as a student. The basic idea is that if you explain something to others, it forces you to organize the facts and simplify things. If you don’t understand it yourself, you can’t teach it, and so you really have no choice but to get it straight and then spell it out.

There is, perhaps, another reason to do well: it would be kind of embarrassing to not do well in a class as a student while I am also teaching students in a class of my own. So I’ve gotta keep things up–midterms coming up….

At his press conference today:

OBAMA: … As one of those options, for us to be able to say, here’s a public option that’s not profit-driven, that can keep down administrative costs, and that provides you good, quality care for a reasonable price as one of the options for you to choose, I think that makes sense.

QUESTION: Wouldn’t that drive private insurance out of business?

OBAMA: Why would it drive private insurance out of business? If — if private — if private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best quality health care; if they tell us that they’re offering a good deal, then why is it that the government, which they say can’t run anything, suddenly is going to drive them out of business? That’s not logical.

As people have said before, in answer to the criticism that a low-cost government plan will drive the private insurers out of business, one should say, “Good!” In this case, the anti-socialized-medicine crowd can’t win; they’ve painted themselves into a corner. If it’s an option to take the public insurance route, then if people don’t want it, they won’t take it. If government can’t run health care efficiently, then private health insurance should drive the public insurance out of business. And if the government can do health insurance better than private industry, then why shouldn’t it?

The right-wing criticism is that the government can’t run anything efficiently, but we’ve seen that proven false lots of times–until the Republicans get their hands on it and intentionally drive it into the ground, and then declare, “See!?”

Opponents of public health care ask snidely if people want politicians making your medical decisions for you. A stupid question, as politicians would meddle with your coverage far less than the insurance companies currently do; under a public plan, your doctor would have more control than now. And right now, lawyers working for the insurance companies are making your medical decisions based upon how much it profits them; how’s that working out?

The bottom line is this: health care should not be a lucrative, for-profit industry. We’ve seen close-up what happens when it is, when corporations can charge whatever the market can bear to save your life, and lie, cheat, and steal when it comes to living up to their end of the bargain. The whole reason there’s even a debate about this is because the private businesses have done such a horrific job. The insurance companies are running scared because they know that they can’t compete with a public health insurance option, not without cutting their profits to a reasonable margin, covering people the way they’re supposed to, and not denying them coverage at every possible excuse. They don’t want to lose all that.

Here’s a story of a guy who lost his iPhone while visiting Chicago, and tried to use the new Find My iPhone feature–and it worked. In this case, he left his phone at a restaurant, where a dishonest person walked off with it, fairly clearly intending to keep it for himself. The owner had just activated the “Find My iPhone” feature, and though it showed no activity in the first day after it went missing, it eventually started working, showing the phone’s general location.

Despite multiple messages to the phone, there was no attempt to return it. The owner asked for the phone’s return, and even offered a $50 reward. When he went to the neighborhood where the phone’s GPS showed it was located, he noticed it was a Spanish-speaking community and even drafted a message in Spanish. He could see that the messages were getting through and showing on the phone.

So they instead attempted to track the thief. Initially, the phone simply showed as being in a large area that contained many large buildings. They messaged that they were in the thief’s neighborhood, naming streets. The culprit perhaps panicked, leaving his building (where GPS could not function accurately) and going on to the street (where GPS works much better). The owner could see the movement, and even better, the increased GPS reception narrowed the phone’s location. Eventually, they tracked the phone down to a bus stop and found the guy, who gave back the phone. Score one for the iPhone!

One thing about this story reminded me of a personal experience which is still a particular peeve with me today: people who steal stuff and then claim they intended to return it. That’s what happened in this story. However, such claims are usually not only false, but remarkably transparent lies. What, the guy found the iPhone on another customer’s table and didn’t think it was a good idea to give it to the restaurant manager? Or to look up the phone number of the person or one of his contacts and call them to make sure the phone got back to its owner? Bull. The guy was a thief, or else the world’s worst and laziest “good” Samaritan.

The same thing happened to me in college, except with a calligraphy set. The set was not too valuable, but contained a large, square marble hanko (“chop” or seal) which held great sentimental value to me.

I had been walking to the parking lot and for some reason had stopped, put the case down, did something else, and then walked away. The walkway was out in the open alongside a building and was unpopulated at the time. When I arrived at the parking lot, I realized I had left the case, and in a small panic, ran back for it–and it was gone. The walkway was again empty, though I had passed a few people on the way back from the parking lot–I didn’t focus on them at the time, but I did pass someone.

About ten days went by, no returns to Lost & Found. So I published a reward for it in the school paper. Soon after, the “finder” called me to claim the reward. When I met him to get the case back, he lamely asserted that he had fully intended to bring the case to the college Lost & Found but “hadn’t gotten around to it.” He said that he had picked it up to “make sure no one would steal it” (ha!), but didn’t immediately return it to Lost & Found because he was on his way to the parking lot to leave school. Which means that, if true, he was one of the people I passed on the way back. He found a lost item, then saw someone scrambling back to that spot, and didn’t think to shout out, “hey, missing something?” And then he failed to return or report the item for ten days, but “just happened” to be scouring the school paper for rewards a few weeks later and noticed my ad.

The kicker: he actually complained that I was paying by check instead of cash, as if I could not be trusted.

The right wing, especially people like Pat Buchanan, have been attacking Sonia Sotomayor in many ways, one in particular by suggesting that Sotomayor got her academic credentials via Affirmative Action when she did not in fact deserve them. Buchanan recently said this at a conference to rebuild conservative political power:

Judge Sotomayor is up there at school in New York, she gets a scholarship to Princeton, she’s graduated with all these big honors and awards they said she never won. What’s she doing there in the summer? They said her adviser told her to read children’s classics so she can learn English better. How do you graduate number one in Princeton if you’re in the summer and you’re reading Rumpelstiltskin and Snow White? [laughter]

In other attacks, Buchanan added the idea that Sotomayor had to study “basic grammar” as well. More has been said on the topic, of course, but that’s the essence: Sotomayor’s English was so poor that she had to read children’s books in order to get up to speed. How could her English be so bad and yet she’s graduating summa cum laude at Princeton? Must be Affirmative Action, Buchanan concludes. More evidence of the liberals supporting minorities by helping them get undeserved credentials just because of race.

Naturally, that’s not the reality. Here’s the snippet from the New York Times article upon which Buchanan and the others base their argument:

She spent summers reading children’s classics she had missed in a Spanish-speaking home and “re-teaching” herself to write “proper English” by reading elementary grammar books. Only with the outside help of a professor who served as her mentor did she catch up academically, ultimately graduating at the top of her class.

Is this true? Well, in Sotomayor’s own words:

“First I found that my vocabulary and writing skills were poor and I didn’t know anything about the classics. … So during my college summers, I retaught myself basic grammar, learned 10 new words a day and set up a program of reading all the books I had missed.”

A ha! Buchanan was right! Sotomayor was illiterate! Hmm, let’s see.

Sotomayor was born and raised in the Bronx, but during her formative language years (age 0-6) she was in primarily a Spanish-language environment; she only became “fluent” in English after her father’s death. But still, she grew up in the U.S., went to schools where English was the language of instruction. Here’s WikiPedia’s summary of her early education:

For grammar school, Sotomayor attended the parochial Blessed Sacrament School in Soundview, where she was valedictorian and had a near-perfect attendance record. Sotomayor passed the entrance tests for, then commuted to, the academically rigorous parochial Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx. … At Cardinal Spellman, Sotomayor was on the forensics team and was elected to the student government. She graduated as valedictorian in 1972.

What can we glean from this? Obviously, she was no academic slouch. Her language skills were also probably not so bad; you don’t get through all that without the ability to speak English fairly well.

So, how do we reconcile Sotomayor’s statements about poor language skills and re-learning basic grammar? The answer is easy: it’s all relative. When she entered Princeton, she found that she could no longer get away with small errors in grammar or less-than-perfect choices in vocabulary. When she says “poor vocabulary and writing skills,” she means “poor vocabulary and writing skills by the standards of Princeton academic requirements.” That’s a pretty significant distinction.

What Sotomayor referred to was not that she was unable to string together sentences like “see Dick and Jane run with Spot,” but that she sometimes made subtle errors in grammar and word choice which in normal language are excused, but which in demanding academic prose can cause some difficulty. Her reading of childhood classics was likely more to learn the flow and cadence of words; her vocabulary building to learn greater variety, not the basics; all of this to recognize and use the subtle distinctions rather than the gross ones. She described (pdf) her English not as simplistic, but rather as “stilted and overly complicated,” and was sorting out the subtle differences between terms such as “authority of dictatorship” and “dictatorial authority.” Hardly Dick-and-Jane-level stuff.

A lot of the left-wing criticism of Buchanan and others tends to focus on which books Sotomayor read–she read Huckleberry Finn, not Snow White, they point out–but miss the whole fact that the “re-learning basic grammar” was not about how her language was poor or admission standards lax, but instead was about how strenuous and demanding her new learning environment was. Sotomayor’s story was not one of remedial education, but of an incredibly difficult and top-notch college program in which Sotomayor excelled so much that she graduated at the top of her class.

Some conservatives might still try to attack Sotomayor for her language problems–even if she wasn’t learning how to write “See Dick and Jane” level material, she still made mistakes, right? How do you get to call yourself literate and yet still make errors that don’t even stand up to those pansy-ass liberal-elite college standards?

Well, it turns out that even the English-only crowds sometimes make an error here and there. Here’s Pat Buchanan standing under a banner at his organization’s conference:

Note the spelling of “conference” in the banner. And keep in mind that these folks are taking jabs at Sotomayor’s English and going on about how the U.S. should shun Spanish and maintain English as the official language.

I think some tolerance for a certain level or error-making is in order here, don’t you?

I was just at the dentist (paid $1.20 for a consult after a whole 2-minute wait–damn that socialized medicine!), and they wanted to arrange for my next checkup in December. Thing is, I couldn’t remember the December schedule at my school. I didn’t have the work calendar on hand, and had not added the information to my iCal app.

iPhone to the rescue. Specifically, a new feature in 3.0: mail search. The calendar I was sent a few months ago would not be on the phone still, but the new mail search feature goes back to the mail server and searches there, too. And there it was! I downloaded the PDF file quickly and made the appointment without trouble. Cool.

Here’s an exchange from the right-wing echo chamber, between Greta van Susteren and Karl Rove, as an example of what sheer levels of hypocritical revisionism and, yes, pettiness they stoop to naturally:

VAN SUSTEREN: All right, Karl, I have to confess that from time to time, I hold a grudge. I got to confess to that. Now let me ask you about President Obama. I don’t know if you’ve been following this, but he will not come to FOX News Channel, and he took a little swipe at us the other day, and we’ve sort of teased him back. But this whole idea that — that, you know, the largest audience is on cable — of all the cable news is on FOX News Channel — what do you make of this little spat he has with us?

ROVE: I think it’s petty stubbornness. I mean, here’s a man who seems to be willing to go sit down with Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong Il, but he won’t sit down with Greta or O’Reilly or Sean Hannity. I mean, it strikes that this guy might be a little fearful of — of having tough questions asked of him.

You know what? Hillary Clinton had the same attitude until the primary, when she came on FOX, found she was treated fairly. And I can’t tell you how after that, how many people came up to me with my travels around the country and said, I’m a Hillary Clinton fan, and I appreciate what FOX did in giving her a fair shot and a fair venue on television.

The President of United States should not be afraid of coming on FOX News, nor should the President of the United States diminish his office by seeming to engage in a petty fight with the — with the — with a network himself.

I know that they have to maintain the ridiculous fiction that Fox is not the propaganda arm of the Republican Party, and as such, Obama would be opening himself to brazen attack every time he let Fox get a shot at him. But the sheer gall of hypocrisy and revisionism they exhibit here is pretty over-the-edge here.

First, we have Susteren claiming that “Obama” has a “little spat” with Fox. Hoo boy. Let’s see, Fox, for the past year or more, has savaged Obama like no one else, calling him such vile names as one could not previously imagine a news network calling a president before, making accusation after bald, unfounded, hysterical accusation. Communist, Socialist, Nazi, attacking America, destroying America… the drumbeat of smear, attack, and rage-filled hysterical rant has been constant for quite some time now. But Obama takes a little jab at Fox at a correspondent’s dinner where jabs are the main course, and suddenly he’s “petty”?

Next, Rove claims he “won’t sit down” with people like Sean Hannity. Aside from the fact that Hannity is one of the most rabid anti-Obama nutballs out there, Obama has sat down with Fox News and with people like Hannity–he went on Fox News and allowed Bill O’Reilly to have a clear shot at him. And O’Reilly did, treating Obama like a hostile witness in a trial, shouting at him with such antagonism and disrespect as to make it impossible to believe that a president would ever subject himself to that again. When did anybody treat Bush like this?

So, Obama has the stones to come on O’Reilly and hold his own–tell me, did Rove ever send Bush to be a guest on Olbermann?–and then whines that Obama never sits down with Fox News personalities because he’s “afraid” and “fearful” of “tough questions.” What utter stupidity and lies.

Then Rove claims that Obama will, of course be treated “fairly.” Like this, I suppose:

I know that I’m hardly revealing anything new or surprising here–Fox is, always has been, and always will be a festering cesspool of wingnut blathering and smears. But it never hurts to speak truth about these people a bit more often in the hopes that more people will realize the toxic effect these bottom-feeders have on the American political scene.

In what was probably music to the RIAA’s ears, a jury found in its favor and awarded it $1.9 million in damages in a file sharing retrial in Minnesota.

The bad news for the RIAA, even if they don’t realize it or don’t care, is that this verdict makes them look far worse then they ever did previously, which is saying a lot.

First, the evildoer they have crushed is a single mother of four. So, not exactly the poster girl for evildoers. She is low-income, so she is not likely to be able to pay even a fraction of the fine. Then there is the idea that this penalizes her kids just as it does her, and considering the relatively pedestrian nature of the “crime,” it comes across as chopping off someone’s hand for stealing a piece of penny candy. No, for stealing the discarded wrapper of a piece of penny candy.

Second, the judgment was so outrageous that most people will recoil: $80,000 per song, or $1,920,000. For downloading 24 songs, and maybe a few people downloaded them from her. Actual damages to the RIAA, at most, were probably well under a hundred bucks. Hard to imagine how the jury didn’t gag on that verdict–one can only assume that they were simply following a set of rules and did not allow reason to interfere.

And third, the verdict is likely to cause a legal challenge more powerful than before, under the proposition that such an award is “grossly excessive.” You can be sure that we haven’t seen the last of this case yet. After all, this was a retrial–the first trial ended with a $220,000 award for the RIAA, but the case was thrown out because the judged ruled that award to be “wholly disproportionate,” “unprecedented and oppressive.” The new punitive damages are roughly a hundred thousand times the actual damages. Frankly, I find the minimum penalty of $750 per song to be excessive–no doubt carrying the force of law only because RIAA lobbyists bribed enough congressmen.

With luck, a challenge will rule the standing law to be unconstitutional–the Eighth Amendment says, “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” How many people think that an $80,000 fine for downloading a single $1 song is not excessive? In fact, the law allows for $150,000 per song. Perfectly reasonable, right?

But one can be fairly confident that the folks over at the RIAA are smugly patting themselves on the back right now, because they don’t give a crap about any of the above. What they wanted was to scare the hell out of file sharers, making it easier to shake them down, and to scare people into buying the overpriced music they monopolize. That they took someone who was about as inoffensive as they get and derailing their life, crushing them for a petty offense, means nothing to them. This verdict is likely to frighten more people into caving to the RIAA’s extortion and coughing up thousands of dollars to avoid this kind of trial–despite there being no real evidence that they did anything wrong.

One can only suppose that the RIAA has given up on presenting any semblance of having any good will or image; they have likely decided that people need their music, even if they have to buy it from scum-sucking fascist fat cats.