So, to try to defend themselves in the Foley scandal, Republicans have tried to blame the media for conspiring to hold back the story until just before the election; the Democrats for doing the same; the homosexual “Velvet Mafia” for doing the same; and the victims, the pages, for doing the same. They have tried to claim that the emails were nothing, just over-friendly, then that they were consensual, and the pages were egging Foley on, and then that the Democrats had enabled Foley and sexual predators in general. They have claimed that this is a dirty trick, and that they didn’t really know anything about it, but they’re looking into whether their aides and staff did anything wrong.

They have also tried to smear the Democrats with the same brush; apparently, due to their success in blaming the purely Republican Abramoff scandal on Democrats, diffusing their own culpability by making it appear that Democrats are equally corrupt, they felt that they could do the same thing in this scandal as well. I have heard Republicans mentioning everything from the William J. Jefferson of Louisiana scandal (where he hid bribe money in his freezer), to the ever-popular joint-party page scandal of 23 years ago, as they try to present the idea that Democrats are just as bad as Republicans.

Apparently, none of that is working; people aren’t buying that Democrats were either involved in this scandal, or that past scandals make them just as bad. Republicans are falling in the polls, and the number of GOP “safe seats” in the upcoming election are dwindling, as Democrats take bigger and bigger leads.

So, perhaps in desperation, another Republican is reaching ever farther back into the scandal bag, and has actually dredged up Chappaquiddick. Defending his seat in Connecticut’s 4th District, Christopher Shays found an opportunity to defend Speaker Hastert when Ted Kennedy came to support his Democratic challenger, Diane Farrell.

“I know the speaker didn’t go over a bridge and leave a young person in the water, and then have a press conference the next day,” said Shays, R-4th District, referring to the 1969 incident in which the Massachusetts Democrat drove a car that plunged into the water and a young campaign worker died.

“Dennis Hastert didn’t kill anybody,” he added.

How long before some Republican is reaching back to Woodrow Wilson? “I know for a fact that the Speaker didn’t sign the Treaty of Versailles! Dennis Hastert didn’t start World War II, like the Democrats did!”

The title of this post is, of course, an oxymoron. What I refer to, specifically, is a statement Speaker Hastert made to the press today in which he said that he would fire any of his staff if it turned out that they hid information on Foley’s behavior from him. If you recall, a few days ago, Hastert loudly pronounced that “The Buck Stops Here.” Of course, at that time as well, he laid out the possibility that his staff might have been responsible.

It is plainly apparent, from their use of the vocabulary, that Republicans either have no understanding of the meaning of the words “responsibility” and “accountability,” or, more likely, that they use the words in crass falsehood, simply as props to make them appear that they are something which they are not.

Take Katrina, for example. Two weeks after Katrina hit, Bush publicly announced that he “took responsibility” for the government “not fully doing its job right.” However, in the two weeks prior to that, Bush and his administration tried to claim they were blameless, and if anything had gone wrong, it was because of the Democrats, the victims, or people lower on down the chain of command. They tried to blame everyone and everything except themselves, and only after none of it worked did they try that last-minute attempt at “responsibility”–and even then, it was couched in language that suggested that he hadn’t done much, if anything, wrong.

Furthermore, accepting responsibility and accountability does not simply mean that you have a press conference and stand there looking noble and get credit and kudos, and nothing bad happens to you. That’s what you hope will happen, because you are being so brave in taking responsibility. Real responsibility and accountability means that you pay a penalty because something wrong happened and you are the one to blame.

Among Republicans, however, the concepts of responsibility and accountability, when applied to themselves, has no penalty; they simply want you to admire them for being so responsible and accountable, and it ends there.

We’re seeing a replay of this with Hastert. He, his staff, and his proxies, after trying to claim that nothing wrong happened at all, have tried to blame the Foley matter on everyone except themselves. They tried to blame the Democrats (on several tacks: for breaking the story, or for enabling Foley, or for enabling immorality in general, or for having scandals themselves decades ago), the victims (they egged Foley on, they knew what they were doing), homosexuals generally or specifically (the “Velvet Mafia”), the media (conspiracy theories about holding back the story for timing effect), and finally, the old stand-by, the staff member or members who held back the story and didn’t tell the poor Republican politician about any of this.

I noted this behavior a year and a half ago:

So yet again, blame the Democrats, and when that fails, fall back on the villainous legal aide who single-handedly commits the deed without anyone else in the GOP knowing a thing about it. I gotta tell you, by now the GOP is rife with dastardly legal aides. They should do something about this infestation, ’cause it’s really making them look bad.

So Hastert’s current attempts to claim “responsibility and accountability” in the matter fall entirely flat. You can’t claim you are bravely taking responsibility and accountability only after trying to blame everyone else first. You can’t bravely take responsibility and accountability while at the exact same time claiming you did nothing wrong, and if there was anything wrong, it was your staff and not you. “The Buck Stops Here” means something entirely different.

As I went shopping at the local supermarket today, I saw something that I hadn’t seen before in Japan: a substantial Halloween display.

Halloween has never been a holiday of note in Japan. I have never seen trick-or-treaters, and outside of some communities with heavy American populations, I don’t think there has been any in Japan.

Not that this display suggests will will be any costumed kids. Yes, the Kit-Kats on sale are bags of the mini-bite-sized variety one stocks up on for costumed visitors, but note the rest: pre-packaged candy boxes, already full. Likely this is just like many other imported holidays in Japan: a commercial excuse for sales. A gimmick, in short.

As my sister-in-law noted in her blog recently (and I noted three years ago), Christmas is done much the same way in Japan. While a few people have taken to putting up Christmas lights (even the local hilltop tower is lit up), people in Japan generally don’t get a Christmas tree, don’t exchange presents (not for Christmas, anyway), and don’t decide whether to unwrap gifts Christmas Eve or Christmas morning. But a lot of “Christmas cakes” are sold, along with foam-cast stockings/boots filled with candy–very much indeed like some of the candy items shown in the photos above.

At least Christmas in Japan has some odd angles to it–for example, it’s considered “the thing to do” for men to take their girlfriends out to expensive restaurants and them for them to spend the night at a love hotel. And–god knows why–Kentucky Fried Chicken is the dinner of choice for huge numbers of people, to the extent that you have to wait hours to get an order filled. How that got to be a popular pastime is beyond me.

So far, all I’ve seen of Halloween outside of novelty shops in Japan is what you see above–but it was a bit of a shock to see. Kind of like, the confection companies of Japan, wanting another payoff holiday like Valentine’s Day (women give chocolate to men), White Day (a domestically contrived ‘holiday’ acting as kind of a ‘reverse’ Valentine’s day, where men give cookies and other baked goods to women), and Christmas (cakes and candies), have suddenly decided to push Halloween in Japan as well, hoping it’ll take.

I didn’t see many people buying. I’ll have to ask around to see if it’s catching on.

From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer Opinion Column:

Voters may be too embarrassed to vote Republican in November

Not that they shouldn’t have been embarrassed just as much in ’04, it’s just that this year’s Republican salad bar has blemishes and rat droppings far more commonly seen as repugnant. It’s easier for conservatives to be embarrassed by the Republican leadership covering up for and effectively enabling a sexual predator of teenage boys than it is to be embarrassed about a president who lies to the public and drives us into a war that kills hundreds of thousands of people, weakens our military, and makes us into an international pariah.

Such are the sensibilities of the right wing.

Giants acting peevishly: Target has now joined Wal-Mart in opposing Apple’s entry into the movie-selling market. Their lament:

U.S. retail giant Target has joined rival Wal-Mart in expressing concern regarding the adverse effect digital movie sales could have on the DVD business. Like Wal-Mart, Target is less than pleased that Apple’s wholesale price for new movies from Disney is several dollars less than the wholesale price charged to Target for DVDs, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

Let’s see. When Apple sells a movie, they do not need to have a physical DVD, the packaging that wraps it, the physical plant to create the DVD and the packaging, nor the distribution network to deliver the physical package. Plus, there is less content (no extras, like director’s commentary or other features). That’s why Apple gets the movies for less.

Maybe the giants saw this story about Tower Records going under and started sweating a bit. Still, it’s time for the retail giants to stop whining like children, and accept that someone else can take a tiny bite out of them, like they destroyed giant swaths of small businesses. It’s called “competition.” I know they don’t like it, but they might actually have to deal with it.

---

Apple has released three new “Get a Mac” ads. Cute, as usual.

---

I’m certainly not the only one who sees Vista’s “spyware” (anti-piracy measures) as a disadvantage. The question is, how severely will this hurt Windows, and how well will it play to the Mac? Stan Baer reports:

It’s a pity that I feel compelled to write an article like this. However, the thought of being forced to pay through the nose to upgrade to a highly configured PC running Vista, only to face the prospect of constant check-ups from some server in Redmond about the validity of my software has me a little spooked not to mention outraged.

No doubt there are plenty who disagree and believe that SPP is necessary to stamp out software piracy. To them and Microsoft, I say don’t try to fool yourselves. The vast majority of software pirates are in second and third world countries. Many will find a way around SPP and those that can’t will probably turn to Linux.

In fact, Microsoft’s decision to try to nab Vista software pirates using spyware may be the best thing that ever happened to Linux and Mac OS X.

The more we see PC users talking about stuff like this (Baer also explains how you can run Windows on a Mac easily), the more chance there is that the Mac market will expand. It is certainly possible that Vista will be the best “Get a Mac” ad ever.

---

A couple of new Mac blogs out there to pay attention to: Google now has a Mac blog to go with their regular blog. A good way to get tidbits of general info in addition to keeping on top of what Google can offer your Mac.

And an Apple worker writes anonymously in the new blog, “The Masked Blogger.” Not a hit piece nor necessarily a love letter, it could be interesting.

---

Not really Mac news, but big nonetheless: Google (video) just bought a big competitor, YouTube. YouTube will continue on as-is for the time being; no hint of what Google plans to do with it. In the meantime, the owners of YouTube now can enjoy a cool $1.65 billion for their past few years’ work.

---

Finally, this is really not Mac-related… but I figured I’d tack it on. From the people at FG, a report on the new Star Trek… Pachinko game.

Your head may now explode.

Now that North Korea says it has performed a successful nuclear test, the GOP is undoubtedly giving up a huge sigh of relief. Not only will this push the ever-increasing Foley scandal and the terrible news about Iraq off the front pages, but it might even stoke up enough fear to make voters rush for the cover of the false claim that “conservatives are better on security.” That’s a lie they can push more easily than the myriad lies they’ve flailed about on the Foley scandal.

Of course, the North Korean revelation should not be seen as a plus for Republicans; the Bush administration failed on this point, alternately ignoring and mishandling North Korea to the point that they are now setting off nukes, which could seriously destabilize the region. Despite being a member of the “Axis of Evil™,” the Bush administration’s handling of this country has been abysmal. Bush sapped our military strength, killing thousands of our people and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in a geopolitical war falsely based on imaginary WMD–all the time while blithely sitting by and watching–in some ways, practically egging on–North Korea developing a nuclear program. While making clearly faked claims of Iraq’s connections to al Qaeda (Hussein and al Qaeda hated each other), they stood by and did nothing as North Korea’s real terrorist ties went unchecked.

In a just and alert world, the Bush administration should be massively criticized for today’s turn of events. Instead, it gets rewarded.

Another spam deluge. I have been getting a dozen or two blog comment spams which have been blowing past all my filters, mostly with blogspot addresses. Even if I blocked all blogspot addresses (which I don’t want to do anyway), it still wouldn’t get all of them. I though I could wait the deluge out, but it’s been almost a month now, so for the time being, I’m setting the number of allowed links in the comment text to zero.

You can still leave links though; both in the URL window (less attractive to spammers because it’s a dynamic link which give no Google juice), and in the comment text as straight text; any URL without hyperlink code (the “a href” command) will be OK. In the comment window, leave out the “http://”–just type beginning with “www…”

Furthermore, if you write the URL out in plain text, I will turn it into a hyperlink myself during moderation. So few of my visitors leave URLs that this will not be a problem–and it will certainly be easier than manually deleting the dozens of comment spams that come through in any case.

As always, thanks for your patience in this regard.

Nancy Pelosi has the right idea–instead of bashing the Republicans on the Foley scandal (they do it well enough all by themselves), instead give the people a better alternative. She’s released what she would do in her first 100 hours as Speaker of the House:

1. Tear down the lobbyist-legislation connection (okay, nobody believes she’ll be able to, but it’s a good start, and points out how Republicans have been on the biggest spending-and-corruption spree in history)
2. Enact all of the 9/11 Commission recommendations (a good idea and a great reminder that Republicans haven’t)
3. Raise the minimum wage to $7.25/hour (without the Paris Hilton tax cut this time)
4. Cut interest rates on student loans in half
5. Make it so that government agencies can negotiate prices with drug companies (absolutely no reason, beyond Republican corruption, why that shouldn’t already be the case)
6. Broaden stem-cell research
7. Institute pay-as-you-go (try to beat back the massive Bush/GOP-driven deficits)
8. Reverse the massive tax cuts for the rich, keeping tax cuts in place for earners making less than a quarter mil per year

You can bet, of course, that the Republicans will take the minimum wage and tax cut ideas and try to paint them, respectively, as small-business killer and Democratic tax-and-spend disasters. It’ll be a weak argument, though; Pelosi chose the list well, with assertive, popular points that suggest a strong, constructive agenda while at the same time passively pointing out Republican weaknesses and corruption. I would have liked to see a point about Iraq in there as well, but I guess Pelosi, as with most Democrats, is still somewhat scared of the whole they’ll-label-me-as-soft-on-terrorism angle. Still, with this list, Pelosi has the exact right idea. Problem is, the news media won’t give it much play. More Democrats have to come out and echo this; we still need the big get-together photo op.

---

In the meantime, Bush’s numbers are going south like a duck in winter. After riding a surge since July that took him into the stratospheric low 40’s, Bush has plummeted nine points in just a week and a half. Among the culprits are the NIE report and Woodward revelations, but I’ll bet the Foley scandal is also spilling over onto him.

Around 9/24, CNN, Fox, and Diageo had him at 42%; at the end of September, CNN and NBC/WSJ had him at 39%; around 10/4, AP, Pew, and TIME had Bush at 38%, 37%, and 36% respectively; and a new poll dated October 5-6 from Newsweek has Bush at 33%. This is clearly not a blip.

---

Hastert is already in big trouble, and is providing the Democrats with a new Newt-Gingrich-like punching doll, but it looks like there’s even more scandal ahead. The national media is still ignoring it, but details are coming out about how Hastert had his own Whitewater affair. Apparently, he bought 196 acres of land for cheap in Illinois in 2002, then added land via a real estate trust with the local GOP chief and a campaign contributor. Then Hastert pushed for a new highway to be constructed going right past this property, over the objections of the public and of the Illinois Department of Transportation, who did not want it. The land owned by Hastert’s trust skyrocketed, and in 2005, three years after Hastert’s original purchase, a developer bought the land, and Hastert got 5 times what he paid for the land.

The source for the moment is The New Republic, which, while left-leaning, is relatively respected, and they seem to have their facts straight; nevertheless, take the source for what it is. It certainly doesn’t bode well for Hastert, and if it comes out big, it might even put his now-presumed-safe seat in jeopardy.

---

If this story is true, then you have got to have incredible respect for those kids, and probably the Amish in general.

Okay, it should be Friday–actually, it was Friday, in the U.S., when I took these photos–but the kittens didn’t present themselves until this afternoon. It’s not certain if the cats are noraneko (strays) or kept pets, as there are some local strays. One of them had a collar, which read just “Chibi” (“runt”), and they were approachable, so it’s likely they’re pets (even though the housing project forbids pets–a rule many ignore).

When I first saw them, I saw a group of kids admiring them, so naturally, the cats had retreated to the undercarriage of the closest car. But after the kids left, I was able to approach them and pet them for a little. They weren’t overly friendly, but they didn’t scatter if you approached slowly enough, something unusual in Japan, even for pet cats.

All photos except the close-up of the black kitten can be enlarged if you click on them.

There is one down point to having the kittens around: they love my scooter seat. There are several scooters that park in the bike port, some with larger and softer seats, but the cats always leave the most paw prints on mine, for some reason. The night before I took these photos, there was a big storm, so the bike seat was a lot muddier than it usually might be. The paw prints were even all over the bike’s dash, which was strange, as it it small, smooth, and angled, not easy to stand on even for a cat, I’d guess.

A bit of unrelated cat language trivia: in the U.S., when we want to say that a space is small, we might use the expression “not enough room to swing a cat.” In Japan, the expression “neko no hitai” is used; literally, it means, “[as small as] a cat’s forehead.”

One more shot at the Mac-Windows world of today, and I’ll probably come down off the topic for a while (unless something newsworthy comes out).

When it comes down to it, is there really any comparison between the Mac OS and the Windows OS? One in which Windows doesn’t come across exceedingly poorly, that is?

Let’s take a look at Vista’s features:

Eye-candy interface
Improved search
Better security
Internet Explorer 7
Windows Media Player 11
Sync & Sharing
Live Taskbar Thumbnails
Windows Flip and Windows Flip 3D
Sidebar
Backup & Restore
64-bit native
Collaborative Meeting Spaces
Intensified DRM (“Genuine Advantage,” “Plays for Sure”)

On that list, only the last four features are not already on the Mac. Backup & Restore will be coming in Leopard as “Time Machine,” with a much better interface, and Leopard will also be 64-bit native. Of the remaining two, the Collaborative feature will likely be of interest only to businesses, and the DRM is more a hindrance to users than a “feature.” Everything else, as far as I can tell, is already part of Mac OS X Tiger. The eye-candy interface, better security, sync & sharing, and live thumbnails have been around for multiple OS X releases, in fact.

Effectively, Vista is little more than a game of catch-up–with Tiger. Meanwhile, a few months after Vista hits store shelves, Leopard will be coming out, putting the Mac OS even further ahead of Windows. Leopard’s known features include:

Time Machine (very nicely executed Backup & Storage)
64-bit native
Improved Search (Spotlight)
Spaces (multiple desktop management)
Mail will be significantly improved and integrated with other software
iChat will be significantly improved and integrated
iCal will be significantly improved and integrated
Safari will be significantly improved and integrated
Dashboard will be significantly improved and integrated
Core animation will significantly improve built-in graphics management

Additionally, the following features are likely to appear as well:

iTV (as a separate product, but well-integrated)
Front Row 2.0 (integrated and possibly merged with iTV)
iPhone (as a separate product, again well-integrated, probably working closely with Mail, Address Book, iCal, iChat, iTunes, and iPhoto)
Improved Finder
Possible integration with Google Maps & GPS for iLife and other apps
Possible Boot Camp upgrade with Fast user switching to avoid rebooting
Possible release of Spreadsheet app to finish the Apple office suite (as a separate product)

And seeing as how Apple did a pretty good job of keeping a lot of stuff secret, there will probably be one or two more surprises in there. I know I mentioned some products that are sold separately (iTV, iPhone, Spreadsheet app), but they will be integrated and/or central to Apple’s independence as a fully self-contained computing package, without need for reliance on Windows to some degree.

But there is one more aspect that Windows advocates fail to mention when they go on about all the advantages of Windows: Macs can do Windows, too. For an extra hundred bucks or two, you can get everything the Mac offers and everything that Windows offers as well. That, right there, catapults the appeal of a Mac far beyond simply Windows alone.

Yes, I know I am as biased for the Mac as I am biased politically, but I just don’t see the advantage of buying a Windows box, unless you want to go dirt cheap and don’t care about much else than that.

Historically, safeguards against pirating have been unsuccessful. Perhaps the only real ironclad anti-pirating scheme has been the dongle–a small device you plug into a peripheral port (USB today, Serial in the past) which must be present in order for the software to work. Naturally, this cannot be used often (else we’d have twenty or thirty dongles hanging off our machines); it has been used mostly with specific, often professional-level, and usually expensive software packages. But since it requires a specific piece of hardware, it has been a good protection against piracy–perhaps the only one.

One of the problems with anti-piracy is that you risk alienating the customer. At most, the paying customer should have to type in a serial number at the start, and then not have to worry about anything else while using the product. But serial numbers can be copied, and usually are. New versions can be released that reject the often-used serial numbers that get distributed by pirates, but new serial numbers just get passed around. On the Mac platform, there is even a special piece of software, called “iSerial Reader,” that reads a data package called “Serial Box,” which someone updates and releases every month; the list of software included in pretty exhaustive. For Windows, there are similar lists, and there are also “keygen” programs that will dynamically generate serial numbers for software.

More stringent forms of anti-piracy have been tried, but they usually backfire: hackers always find a way to get around the protections, so pirates are not affected, while legitimate, paying customers are much more inconvenienced. Many schemes have been tried in the past, and honest people have often gotten burned–software that locks up, software that can’t be re-copied if your system is re-installed, so forth and so on. Microsoft and Adobe are among the companies that have tried “activation,” which requires you to contact the company and effectively tie your copy of the software to your machine, after confirming the actual purchase. But there are activation cracks and patches all over the ‘net now, meaning that while you, who shelled out hard-earned cash for the product, are waiting on hold to talk to a service rep to activate your software, pirates have already breezed through on their own.

One very controversial way to stop pirating is to use the user’s connection to the Internet. Since most people log on to the Internet every day, why not put a feature in the software that, when the software is opened, it looks for the Internet connection, and when it finds it, it calls home. Then the software company can collect data on who has unique serial numbers and clean software, and which of the users are being naughty. Adobe tried this, as did other companies. The problem: it is considered spying, and an illegal breach of privacy.

Microsoft’s recent solution, however, is a variation on that theme. Since any company will release new software updates on a regular basis, why not use that window of opportunity? So when you want to get Internet Explorer 7, for example, you have to wait a moment during the installation process while Microsoft comes at you through your DSL connection, searches your computer for pirated software, and then gives you the all-clear to go ahead and get the new goodies. I’m not sure why people who would not accept the “call home” invasion of privacy would be just fine with this new “wait while we validate all your software” scheme, but it seems to be sailing through without a firestorm of any sort, despite being almost as intrusive. In fact, since the process potentially allows Microsoft to check not just the software being installed, but virtually all the software on your system, it seems far more intrusive. But, so far, I haven’t heard any objections beyond a few simple comments of distaste.

So we now get to the original question: will Microsoft’s new scheme actually work? Or will pirates find a way to circumvent all of this strip-search stuff while the paying customer has his hands up against the wall and hears the latex snap? If history is any guide, the answer is easy: of course they will. If not immediately, then over time. They always have, except for the dongle solution.

I recall a story from a few years back, where a giant corporation spent huge amounts of money developing a copy-protection system for optical discs with media on them. After spending untold millions, after many years of research, followed by a big public debut where they claimed the system would stop pirates cold, the copy-protection scheme was defeated in a matter of hours by a hacker, using nothing more than a felt-tipped pen. Apparently, all you had to do was cover over the part of the disc that had the copy protection on it, and the whole thing was defeated.

Microsoft’s new system may be a bit harder to beat than that, but one rarely loses money gambling on the resourcefulness of pirates. They will very likely soon find a way to patch the license files in a way that will fool Microsoft’s activation measures, even if it has to be dynamically updated each time Microsoft catches on–though it’s more likely that the pirates will find ways to make it too hard for Microsoft to differentiate between pirates and legitimate users. If Microsoft’s system is much better than that and can’t be beaten dynamically, it might even force pirates to create what you might call “pirate system environments”–instead of interacting with Microsoft to get updates which require validation, instead you wait for the pirates to hack each update as it comes out, adding it to your system after it becomes defanged. This would circumvent the validation process and keep Bill Gates’ nose out of your underwear.

In the end, it may just be necessary for these big corporations to be satisfied with the billions they make, and stop obsessing on every dime they miss–mostly because they don’t really miss out on much. After all, just as with shoplifting, the cost of software piracy is included in the legitimate price of the software. Already bearing that burden, it’s the legitimate users who, in the end, are most inconvenienced by the anti-pirating measures anyway. And let’s face it, the software giants who will benefit from Microsoft’s new scheme are very hard to feel sympathy for, despite recent attempts to look all doe-eyed and weepy.

Microsoft is now announcing, in defense of their new scheme, that “software piracy is not a victimless crime.” Yeah, but when the victim is Bill Gates, and the crime leaves him with fifty billion dollars instead of sixty billion dollars, it’s kind of hard to get all worked up about it, especially when Gates says that the answer is the crawl up your backside with a microscope after you forked over hundreds of dollars to him.

Did I miss something? Why are we even talking about torture, much less condoning it? I thought that it was considered pretty solid that torture is considered ineffective by most people with experience in the area.

So why is the government going so far out of its way to push torture as our last only hope?

This off the news wire:

House Speaker Dennis Hastert yesterday took responsibility for the growing congressional page scandal but said he has done nothing wrong …

“The buck stops here,” Hastert (R-Ill.) said at a press conference outside his office in Batavia, Ill., adding that he will let the numerous investigations determine whether anyone — including any of his aides — did anything wrong.

Ah, I see. After spending a week contradicting other Republicans’ claims as well as his own, and blaming everyone else in sight, Hastert now becomes Trumanesque and puffily pronounces “The Buck Stops Here” whilst simultaneously denying he did anything wrong, but he’ll check to see if his staff broke any laws.

How bizarrely contorted can an admission of not taking responsibility be?

Maybe he wasn’t supposed to do this, but one Apple developer wrote an article on his blog about new features in Safari 3.0 that have not been released publicly yet. Apparently the information is valid; some say they heard about these features soon after developers received their copies of Leopard. However, this is the first time the features have been released in so much detail, so openly. The guy’s web site is now giving a “Forbidden” error message, but a mirror of the post is still available at the time of this writing. The site is probably down because of the Slashdot Effect, though one could easily imagine more sinister reasons having to do with Apple legal.

The features the author points out are very cool, though it should be pointed out that they are not necessarily unique. Other browsers have them–but usually as plug-ins or extensions, sometimes even requiring payment to activate. To have them come standard in a browser is very nice indeed.

One of the features the blog covers was made public some time ago, though not thoroughly demonstrated: a new Find feature. People have compared it to Firefox’s Find, but I like Safari’s implementation a lot better. In fact, I have always been annoyed by the Firefox implementation. I don’t want to have to focus on the bottom of the page, and I’ve never liked the annoying sound it makes when the term I’m typing suddenly doesn’t match anything on the page (I hope Apple doesn’t copy that part). I am still partial to the floating find box, but I’ll take Apple’s top-of-the-page placement over Firefox’s bottom; it simply makes better design sense, being more consistent with usual find actions.

But Safari does one better: it highlights all instances of the term simultaneously. When you type something in the find box, the search bar immediately shows you how many times the term appears on the page, while it highlights the first instance in the page. Hit the Return (Enter) key, and the page goes dim with all instances of the search term remaining bright. You can then roll through all the instances, making the one you focus on bright orange (in line with Leopard’s new style). You ask me, I think that’s a better way to run the show–though they could tone down the orange box a little bit.

But the features that I’m really looking forward to are the other two. First, the lesser one: resizable text boxes. This addresses a particular pet peeve of mine. I hate it when I go to a web site where they ask me to type something in a box, and they made the box so tiny that it’s virtually impossible to write comfortable. Reviewing what you typed is extremely uncomfortable. I have often figured that some web sites do this intentionally–for example, business sites where they want to force you to keep your message short so they won’t be so troubled by your complaints or what not. But this is also a common failing in blog comment areas.

The new feature in Safari allows you to resize the text box to whatever feels comfortable to you. Each box will sport a resize handle in the lower right corner; just click and drag, and you have the size you want. I would love to have that feature. Interestingly, some web page designers hate it; apparently, they want to dictate such things to you, and if the reader changes that aspect, the designers feel that the reader is “breaking” the page. I say, nonsense. The web is supposed to be democratic, even anarchistic, not totalitarian. I would actually like to see this philosophy extended to all aspects of the web site. Often the sites break on their own, because everyone seems to design for IE; if you don’t use IE, you know what I’m talking about, with page elements sometimes drifting over others, blocking stuff and generally looking bad and being inconvenient. The ability to simply grab the page element and place it where I like would be fantastic. The ability to select an ad and delete it would be heaven. But for now, I’ll settle for the resizable text box.

The last feature is the one I’ve been waiting for, though. I’ve seen it available before, but only as a paid software upgrade; if a free version exists, let me know. This is what the blogger called “Tabs on Steroids.” The image at right doesn’t really show the feature well, partly because of the low quality of the streamed movie, but also because the feature doesn’t “photograph” well. What the image shows is the ability to re-order tabs. If you have many tabs open and you’d like to rearrange them, move a few to the left, some to the right, this lets you do it.

But again, Safari goes one better: you can drag a tab fully off the window. You can then either let it go independently, where it will form a new window with the tabbed URL, or you can drag the tab to another existing window and add it to the tabs there. Safari also allows you to combine all tabs in all windows into one window, consolidating all of your pages in one place.

Like with the resizable text box, this follows the paradigm of allowing a flexible web experience, letting the user dictate what happens rather then letting the application or the web page decide. One other new pet peeve I wish they’d implement along these lines: a working version of setting a default text size, one that overrides CSS settings. I don’t know why they don’t have this–but hey, maybe Safari 3 does. Right now, I find myself sitting in front of my 24-inch iMac, constantly hitting Command-plus two, three, or even four times every time I load a page. Strangely, that command overrides CSS text sizes, but not the default font size preference.

I’m sure there’s more to Safari 3 than this, but what I see, I like. I very much look forward to January, when we will probably get the rest of the scoop on what Leopard overall will bring.

You may have been reading this in the news lately, if you pay attention to the computer section: Microsoft is up to its old tricks again. With Windows 98, MS used its ownership of the operating system to lock out its competitors. By deciding that only its own Internet Explorer browser would appear on the Desktop, and further, integrating the browser into the operating system itself, it dealt a crushing blow to Netscape, the browser that once dominated the market.

Go ahead, ask any PC user which browser they use. When most of them reply “Internet Explorer,” ask them if they chose it after making comparisons and finding the best-quality software. Of course, they’ll simply tell you that they use it because it’s the one that was on the Desktop when they bought the computer. Fact is, Internet Explorer 6, which most people still use, it the single crappiest browser out there, and the most dangerous to boot. The fact that it’s the most popular is a testament to the crippling power of owning the dominant OS.

And now Microsoft is doing it again. With Windows Vista, MS is using its ownership of the operating system to lock out competitors; this time, it’s the anti-virus crowd, where Symantec and McAfee are the big boys. Now, I have no great love for those companies, as you may have noticed; they often release malware warning about the Mac that are loaded with hyperbole and scare-mongering designed to sell product, rather than to protect computers. But then, I have no great love for Microsoft, either, and my biases don’t stop MS’s action from being just as wrong now as they were in the 90’s.

Ever since SP2 for XP came out, you’ll have noticed that Windows now has a highly intrusive “Security Center.” Consisting of a “Firewall,” “Automatic Updates,” and “Virus Protection,” the system makes it well known to you that all kinds of security-related stuff is going on. This system hugely annoyed me when it was installed in SP2. I turned most of it off because I didn’t need it. I don’t download software that might have spyware and adware, and I do almost all my browsing and email on my Mac. I left the Firewall on, but that was it. So I discovered that when you turn off the “protection” that the security center offers, Windows relentlessly reminds you, several times each session, that your computer is not protected. It could take you a bit to figure out how to turn all that junk off.

But if you want to use a third-party anti-virus solution, you might have to figure out how to do just that. Symantec and McAfee are complaining that consumers will be confused because their own “dashboards,” or control panels, will be overshadowed by Microsoft’s, and that to use the third-party software smoothly, each user would have to figure out how to turn off Microsoft’s Security Center, at least to some degree. Having dealt with that myself, I have to admit that it’s not the easiest process in the world.

Furthermore, the anti-virus makers complain that Windows Vista cuts off their access to the OS’s kernel, the core of the operating system, making it more difficult for them to protect against malware. They called it, “locking out the good guys.”

Microsoft sells its own anti-virus software, called “Windows Live OneCare,” a $50 package that includes Windows Defender (which is included in Vista). MS’s “OneCare” software would supplant Symantec’s and McAfee’s software.

And surprise, surprise: Vista’s welcome screen includes a link to OneCare. Almost an exact replay of the Desktop placement of Internet Explorer. I can’t find any information on what MS’s future plans may be insofar as OneCare getting kernel access or even Desktop placement, but it doesn’t take much imagination to figure out why the other anti-virus vendors are ticked off.

But that’s not the only reason you might have to be dissatisfied with Microsoft’s new security “improvements.” It has been long known that as far as piracy and DRM are concerned, Vista is a monument to favoring industry over the customer. Vista effectively assumes you are a criminal, and treats you accordingly. Another aspect of that is that MS is getting plain nasty with anything that even looks like pirated software.

With its new programs, such as IE7 and the new WMP, Windows does an automatic “validation” of the OS. With Vista, reportedly, Microsoft will “lock up” any system that it finds to be non-valid. You’ll find that your anti-spyware software will not work, your system will have limited capabilities, and you’ll be given 30 days to cough up cash to Microsoft, during which time, you’ll get “reminders” to pay with increasing frequency. After 30 days, the OS will allow access to the browser only, for one hour, presumably to let you contact MS and lay an offering of money at their feet. Even after the OS has been activated legitimately, validation checks for pirated software will continue to be made.

Of course, many will find all of this to be unacceptably intrusive, and there is pretty much no doubt that the system will inaccurately identify legitimate users as pirates, causing yet another I’ve-got-to-call-Microsoft-support headaches for paying users.

Are you still not convinced that you should get a Mac?

From Crooks & Liars: Fox News ran this graphic twice on TV, three times on the web, incorrectly identifying Mark Foley as a Democrat. C&L’s John Amato wonders coyly if it was intentional. I don’t. Obviously it was intended, else it was a “willing error,” something they did because they wished it so, which is almost the same thing.

But knowing Fox, and considering that it was from O’Reilly’s show, I’d put big money on the idea that they did it intentionally, either as a snark, or as a serious attempt to place the idea in people’s minds. After all, right-wingers have been working like mad to somehow blame this on liberals: Democrats leaked the story as a dirty trick, the “liberal” media withheld the story until just before elections, liberals are responsible for the type of behavior Foley showed, a Democrat was in a House page scandal 23 years ago, et cetera, et cetera.

Suck it up, conservatives.

Man, the political news today is weird.

• On the Tenet-warned-Rice story from Woodward’s book, Tenet is now denying that Rice brushed him off, but it has by now become very well established that (a) Tenet did indeed strongly warn Rice about an al Qaeda attack in the meeting, and (b) the 9/11 commission covered it up, apparently agreeing to withhold damning evidence against Bush until after he was out of office. Not only did the story about Tenet’s briefing add to the list of reasons why Rice should have been able to stop 9/11 had she tried even a little, it also calls into question what else the 9/11 commission knew and covered up.
• Mark Foley, apparently having had limited success blaming his sexual-predator actions on alcohol, is now adding homosexuality and the claim that a Roman Catholic priest abused him as a child. Oh, sorry–he actually announced that he had no excuse for his conduct and was not blaming it on these new revelations–he just happened to want to mention that he was gay and that a priest molested him, just to keep you informed. You know, FYI.
• In the meantime, more revelations make it clearer that Foley’s tastes in young pages was well-known among the pages themselves.
• The same people at CBS who refused to let Bill Maher give his view on religion, allowed a speaker to blame school shootings on abortion and separation of church and state.
• Hastert refuses to resign as calls for his resignation increase; he goes on Rush Limbaugh’s show and accuses the Democrats and/or the pages of timing all this to hurt him.
• Turns out that the Bushies lied when they blamed the Navy for the “Mission Accomplished” sign. Not only was it their idea, but Rumsfeld now claims that it was even in the speech, but he was able to get that part out, at least.
• And perhaps the most bizarre: in a Saddam-Hussein-like moment, Rep. Tom Reynolds, implicated in the Foley scandal, surrounded himself with kids to shield himself against questions about the scandal, refusing to let the kids leave so reporters could ask questions the kids shouldn’t hear.

Kind of. If you hear news about a “Mac Exploit in the Wild” and they represent it as a reason to see Macs as an insecure platform, take it with the usual grain of salt. It’s not a virus, and the chances that anything will happen to your computer are pretty much zero.

What it is is a weakness that can only be taken advantage of by someone who has been granted access to the computer already, someone who has logged into your Mac with a password. The exploit allows this user to take full control of the computer, but the risk, really, only relates to the lack of trust you have in people who you have already trusted enough to give a password to log into your Mac in a limited manner. Not to mention that said person must have hacking skills. Needless to say, the chances of any of this happening to you are virtually nil.

Furthermore, the exploit has been patched by Apple’s latest security update, so even if there is a chance for you, it no longer exists.

I think that now would be a very good time for that group message the Democrats need to send. Maybe wait until next week, give the Foley & Woodward issues just enough time to burn out their big fires in the media, and just when everyone takes a breath, show a few hundred Democratic candidates standing on the steps to the Capitol building, all agreeing on a central, core message, advocating Democratic hopes and values, what they want to achieve. Doesn’t have to be a contract or anything. Just a united front.

It’s the perfect time: the American people would see the Republicans, on one side, crashing and burning, and the Democrats, on the other, standing united and hopeful. A fantastic contrast. The Republicans have skyrocketed their negatives, now the Democrats should grab the chance to skyrocket their positives, to show an affirmative, constructive, optimistic alternative. Not to mention they could keep a firm grip on the news cycles.

They won’t do it, of course.

Alcohol has long been blamed by many people for inappropriate behavior, but recently it seems to be getting tagged as the instigator for more and more specific behavior. When Mel Gibson was arrested for drunk driving, he blamed his anti-semetic remarks on the alcohol. Of course, the natural question was, “how could alcohol be responsible for anti-semetism?” The answer, of course, is that alcohol releases inhibitions, things you might not otherwise say or do–but alcohol does not create the urges that exist in the first place. Mel Gibson obviously has anti-semetic feelings; the alcohol didn’t create them.

But that’s not stopping Republican ex-congressman Mark Foley from trying to use alcohol as an excuse. I mean, seriously–alcohol made him turn into a pedophile sexual predator? Please. But I suppose that there’s simply not much else Foley can do to try to defend himself–as stupid and inane as the claim is, it’s probably his only best defense against an indefensible position. Though one might think that there is an alternative: confession, admission, penitence.

Sorry. For a minute there I forgot that I was talking about a member of the Republican Party.

Which brings us to GOP luminaries like Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the House. From what we know so far, Hastert was told specifically, and claimed to work on the issue, but nothing ever came from it. Hastert was told there was a member of his own party sending sexually inappropriate messages to teenage boys working for the House. Hastert apparently took no action against the perpetrator, allowing him to continue these actions. Someone told pages to steer clear of Foley, but it’s not clear that even that feeble action came from Hastert.

So what is Hastert’s reaction? Naturally, there is a three-fold strategy: I never heard anything about it (blame the staff), It wasn’t such a bad thing, at least when I heard about it (how could I have known?), and I demand an immediate investigation to get to the bottom of all this (blame those who should have called for the investigation long ago, hoping nobody will notice I was the one who should have done it). Hastert doesn’t even have alcohol to fall back on; he has to hope that he can kick up enough dust, create enough confusion and doubt, that people will give him the benefit of that doubt, believing that maybe he had never heard about it before.

However, it’s not so likely that Hastert will get away with this one; already, conservatives are calling for Hastert to resign as Speaker.

Other Republican politicians are having similar woes–Reynolds and Boehner especially. But Republicans as a whole will get hurt bad by this, as a party tends to be seen as an individual in many ways. I haven’t seen any polls out there which are post-Foley, but I bet they won’t look too great for the GOP.

What’s also interesting is the take on all this on conservative blogs. Now, were this to be a Democratic scandal, I wouldn’t want to post on it myself, I have to admit; some blogs are taking that route, like Blogs for Bush, which says that since they blog for Bush, and not for Congress, they don’t have to blog on this scandal. Which, of course, is a huge, hypocritical weasel, because their page is filled with stuff that’s not just about Bush; they blog on parties and congress all the time. A lot of the bloggers are noting that Democrats are taking advantage of this politically, which is correct, and I’m sure I would be just as quick to note were it the other way around; after all, if it were a Democrat who sexually targeted teens and Nancy Pelosi covered it up and allowed the offender to keep going for ten months, do you think that Republicans wouldn’t be making at least as much hay? So that criticism is hardly cogent.

There are a number of conspiracy theories out there, some of them blaming Democrats for releasing the information at the worst possible time for the GOP politically. If that’s true, then the Democrats have out-GOP’d the GOP, and shown a skill and acumen at political dirty tricks which is fully and completely unlike them. Not that it’s impossible, but you just don’t expect Goofy McDoofus to hit a beautiful home run over the center field wall after striking out so pitifully several dozen times. Rush Limbaugh is championing this conspiracy theory, suggesting not only that Democrats “got to the page and said, you know, we want you to set Foley up,” but that Democrats approve of this kind of thing and have “defended” it over the years.

However, there’s no getting around that despite the timing of the release of this news, the GOP was responsible for the actual events that happened–not that Republicans haven’t successfully blamed their own failings on the timing of the release of the news, like Bush did so successfully when his drunk-driving arrest became public just before the 2000 elections.

Another more interesting conspiracy right-wingers are talking about is that this is all the result of the conniving liberal media: that many media outlets knew about all this a year ago, but withheld the story until just the right time to screw Republicans over. Now, a general bias is absolutely possible, and maybe one specific media outlet sitting on a story (though to sit on a story this juicy for so long is highly improbable, considering the worry that another media outlet would report it first). But several separate news organizations all getting the story, and all independently deciding to incubate it until election time? Or, just as unlikely, they all met in a dark room and agreed to keep quiet until they could screw over the GOP? That’s getting well into paranoid territory. You can blame the media for not reporting it earlier, but that still does not absolve or take away responsibility from the GOP leadership for covering it up.

Lacking a way to smear Democrats as being “just as dirty” in the scandal like they tried with Abramoff, right-wing blogs are taking the closest thing they’ve got: digging back 23 years into the historical archives to try to refresh the last page scandal, that time involving both a Republican and a Democrat. Talk about straining yourself to share the blame! Again, a lame tactic, but there’s just no graceful way out of this for conservatives.

Say what you want, the Democrats come out of this beautifully. The GOP can’t blame them for any of it (their favorite default position), because the GOP specifically kept them in the dark about it.

Hey, maybe this is the “October Surprise” that Karl Rove was talking about. You think?

Update: via C&L, here’s a scenario for the October Surprise that Rove may have been referring to: having laid the groundwork for war with Iran over the past year and more, Bush’s people engineering a Gulf-of-Tonkin-like incident that would start a crisis with Iran. Scary idea, and hard to see how it would really work. Almost paranoid in itself–but then, again, we’re talking about Bush and the GOP here. Frankly, I doubt it–I thought that something similar might happen in 2004 before the elections, and that didn’t come to pass. Sure, the GOP is more desperate now, but I still think it’s a huge long shot. But, as I said two years ago, if something like this does happen in the next five weeks, it will be more easily recognizable for what it is.