Every once in a while Congress will try to slip a corrupt bill right past us. Sometimes it’s a big thing of recognizable nature, sometimes it’s hidden deep within a huge 1000-page bill forced into vote hours after it’s first introduced. But more often than not, it’s something that we just don’t recognize initially as being bad, and that’s what we have this time.

Three months ago, I wrote on a story Josh Marshall pointed out, about how the big Telecoms were fighting with consumer groups and a host of companies selling goods over the Internet over how the Internet should be run. The consumer groups and vendors were trying to preserve something called “Network Neutrality,” which says that every web site is equal to every other web site as far as communication lines go; no one web site should be given priority over others. The Telecoms, on the other hand, were trying to change things so they could give priority for telephone line usage, giving fast lanes of communication to those who paid a premium, and crappy quality to those who did not. The Telecoms tried to make the case that right now, Google and others are using their “pipes” for free–which is unadulterated crap, of course. Everyone pays for using telephone cables and Internet communication pipelines, the Telecoms now simply want to gouge for more. It’s as if the Telecoms suddenly wanted to charge you extra on your telephone bill for the quality of your phone service: if you pay AT&T an extra $20 a month, they’ll give you crisp, clear service; if not, then you’ll get crappy connections and your calls may be arbitrarily cut off, even though you’re already paying AT&T for what should be acceptable quality.

Well, guess who won the lobbying battle? Yep, that’s right, the Telecoms did. Now, three months later, the Congresspeople who are supposed to be serving you are once again selling your interests out to the highest bidder, once again taking bribes from corporations to pass laws which favor those corporations over you.

The new law will essentially hand over control of the Internet pathways to the Telecoms to use at their will. How will this affect you? First of all, it means that prices will go up without any increase in quality. The Telecoms will be charging more even though they are creating no new services–they will simply be charging more for favoritism. For example, Amazon.com will have to pay a great deal more to ensure that visitors to their site don’t get so bogged down in slow connections that their customers will give up and leave. That means Amazon would have to start charging you more for stuff you buy so they could pay off the Telecoms for the new extortion preferred connection.

Sites that are unwilling or unable to pay the “premium” would become slow and sluggish, especially sites which do not sell anything (like blogs) but have very high readership. Sites which you now take for granted as free resources would probably have to switch to paid membership, perhaps offering you a choice between free and slow, and paid and fast. Overall, your free Internet surfing would definitely be slowed down and made less accessible in general.

The fees could eventually be extended to hit you directly, forcing you to pay an extra surcharge for uploading photos to your web site, even though you already pay a premium for your faster broadband connection.

It also means that the Telecoms could shut off anyone they desired. Network Neutrality does not exist in Canada, where their Telecoms have the control American ones are trying to get, and they have already abused it to their private advantage, blocking access to a web site run by the Telecom’s worker’s union. The Telecoms gaining that power in the U.S. would have a far greater impact, as U.S. sites are far more central to the global usage of the Internet.

At the core of this issue is the decentralized and open, public nature of the Internet. Up until now, the Internet has remained largely neutral, mostly a free, public resource without a central controlling authority. Kind of like a free market, an open port. This is one of the greatest reasons why the Internet has been so successful, and how the Internet has helped the American and international economies as much as it has in recent years. Giving this control to the Telecoms is antithetical to the nature of the Internet, essentially taking a multi-trillion-dollar public resource and handing ownership over to the Telecoms without them paying a cent for the cash cow they claim is theirs to take.

The House committee which now controls the bill is leaning heavily toward giving the Telecoms what they want, though enough members are still undecided that the bill could be killed while still at this stage. Various attempts by members in favor of Network Neutrality to maintain that system have tried to implement changes to protect free use of the Internet, but so far have been shot down.

What can be done? Well, one web site has gone up giving news on the issue, with a page showing a map of the country displaying which members of the Commerce Committee have voted for or against the bill, and who has not yet made it clear where they stand, along with contact information for those representatives; you can find the representative in your area, if yours is on the committee, and give their offices a call to tell them how you feel.

The price of oil has skyrocketed under Bush from $35 per barrel in 2000 to more than $75 today, and prices at the pump are now more than double what they were when Bush took office. From the AP:

President Bush … halted for the summer the purchase of crude oil for the government’s emergency reserve.

The moves came as political pressure intensified on Bush to do something about gasoline prices that are expected to stay high throughout the summer.

Of course, back in 2000, when Bush castigated Al Gore for allowing oil prices to rise to the unthinkable level of $1.50 per gallon, Bush sharply criticized Gore for suggesting the national petroleum reserves be used to attenuate gas prices:

“The strategic reserve should not be used as an attempt to drive down oil prices right before an election,” Bush said. “It should not be used for short-tem political gain at the cost of long-term national security.”

And now we find ourselves right before an election, and guess who’s fooling around with the strategic reserve? Bingo!

What’s more, let’s look at the differences the two men would take to help the American public get by during the period of high oil prices. First Gore’s suggestion in 2000, along with the strategic reserve move:

Gore also called for the release of $400 million in emergency assistance for low-income families and tax credits for home heating oil companies. And he reiterated his support for the creation of a permanent home heating oil reserve for the Northeast, where cold weather last year led to chronic shortages.

Gore criticized oil companies, saying they were “profiteering” at the expense of American consumers.

OK, now fast-forward to 6 years later and see what Bush is doing:

President Bush on Tuesday ordered a temporary suspension of environmental rules for gasoline … Easing the environment rules will allow refiners greater flexibility in providing oil supplies since they will not have to use certain additives such as ethanol to meet clean air standards. The suspension of oil purchases for the federal emergency oil reserve is likely to have only modest impact since relative little extra oil will be involved.

So Gore wanted to use the strategic reserve to bring down prices, with his secondary plan being to give assistance to people who needed to heat their homes. Bush attacked Gore for playing with the strategic reserves–but now he’s doing not only that, but his alternate plan is to get rid of environmental safeguards so the oil companies can squeeze even more profits from their sales, with absolutely no guarantees or requirements that the savings are passed on to the consumer.

And while Gore correctly pointed out that oil companies were taking advantage of the situation to gouge consumers, Bush simply says he’ll look into the possibility of price manipulation. Seeing as how the oil companies have been doing this for all of Bush’s term to date and he’s done nothing but give them massive tax breaks while they reap record profits, it’s not hard to guess that Bush will in fact never find anything actionable.

I looked out the window not too long ago, and the sky was an alarming shade of yellow, as clouds covered the area. We’ve been having a rather intense thunderstorm, many lightning strikes, in the past half hour or so. I love thunderstorms. Caught glimpses of a lot of local lightning, too. Great stuff. But I hope it stops before I have to go for my eye exam in two hours….

After maybe three years of constant use, my XP was running extremely ragged. It’s always a good idea to reformat your hard drive and reinstall your software, probably once a year, once every two years on the outside, especially if you use it constantly and install various software on it. Otherwise, data corruption eats you alive. That’s what I was getting–the computer was becoming very slow even on startup, and if it was up for any length of time, things could slow to a crawl.

And here was where I found yet another Mac vs. PC distinction: Windows reinstallation can suck, big time. Maybe it works better on some machines than on others. It certainly wasn’t easy on mine.

Now, when you get a Mac, you get the Mac OS, and you get an install DVD. Not a “restore” disc, although in the past, restore discs have been included as an extra. But you definitely get the OS install discs just as if you’d bought the OS separately. And none of this “install disks will only install onto your specific model” baloney, the OS install discs will work on any Mac modern enough to handle it. In the past, Apple did that differentiation thing, but not for a long time now, to my knowledge. Well, I have an eMachines computer, a cheap desktop box, and that’s what the restore discs will work on, and nothing else. Well, fine for today.

Next, when you try to use the install disc, it’s simple to use, self-explanatory. If you put the disc in while the computer is on, then open the install icon, it’ll tell you exactly what to do–restart and boot from the install disc. It’ll even auto-target the disc so all you have to do is click “restart,” and you’re on your way. Simple.

Not so simple for the PC. I put the restore CD in the CD drive (the computer has separate CD-RW and DVD-ROM drives), and all I got was an auto-run that opened a simple text editor file that told me that the drivers were on the second disk. Well, fine. But I don’t want the drivers, I know they’re on the second disk, I want to reformat the drive and reinstall the OS. I put in the second disk, it’s just got the drivers, and no other instructions.

So after a while, I figure maybe I’ll leave the first install CD in the computer and restart. Aha! That’s what was needed! It now asks me if I want to restore the software. that’s great, but how many people would have thought to do what I did? There are no instructions to that effect on the CD label, nor on the CD content. Nothing. Nada. You gotta figure it out on your own. Stupid.

But at least I figured it out, and so now I’m ready. I select the “restore” option, read the warnings, and tell the machine to go ahead. Bzzzzt! Sorry! A program starts up called “Symantec Ghost 2.0.0.260”, and an error dialog comes up, stating “Single User Version cannot do multiple loads”; I press “OK,” and another error dialog comes up (“Cannot open GHOSTERR.TXT”), and then another (“Invalid dump file”). After clicking “OK” for these dialogs, the computer then helpfully reports that the restore process was successful and my new software has been installed. Yeah, right.

I try different variations, and always the same thing happens. I get a copy of my sister-in-law’s restore CD (they have the exact same model), and it fails. She can’t figure it out either. But something strange is going on: every time I try the procedure, after it fails but reports it’s finished, the DVD-ROM tray pops out. Now, left to my own self, I eventually would have figured out that the computer seemed to think that the restore CD was in the DVD drive rather than the CD drive, but in fact, my sister-in-law suggested it first. Sure enough, I pop the CD into the DVD drive, and everything works.

But again, we get a very non-intuitive process, and a stupid machine: why can’t it recognize which drive a CD is in? Why does it only work when the CD is in the DVD drive and not the CD drive? And why can’t the computer itself suggest to put the CD in the DVD drive?

This is what I’m talking about. The updates are similarly non-intuitive–I have to figure out where the software updater is, then update the updater, then install 19 updates, and only then does it suggest installing Service Pack 2, which is what I was looking for… oy. This is why I like Macs better. Sorry, but it is way easier to use. I just don’t see any way around that.

Who knows what Steve Jobs said or did, but for the time being, it looks like he convinced the major U.S. music labels (if not the Japanese ones previously) to stay with the universal 99¢ pricing system for iTunes. How Jobs did this is not clear, because it seemed that the labels were pretty serious about this, and some even threatened pulling their content from the iTMS if Jobs did not acquiesce. These are companies that consider themselves to be very powerful, and are used to getting their way; that Jobs was able to stare them down speaks to just how powerful Apple has become in this business, not to mention how important online paid downloads have become for the music industry. The iTMS has sold more than a billion songs so far, and has almost as complete a lock on the market as Microsoft has on the OS.

The labels wanted to change the pricing so that older songs would cost 60¢ to 80¢, while newer songs would be priced “more aggressively”–in other words, whatever the market could bear. They claimed that this was being done not for themselves of course, but instead for the artists and the consumers. Complete bull, of course–the labels have always ripped off both the artists and the consumers, the artists by making them sign usurious contracts that give them very little of the profits from their work, and the consumers by charging outrageously inflated prices.

Some suggest that Jobs wants the prices kept down so he can sell more iPods, but really this is closely connected to the sale of songs; Jobs makes money off of iPods if more songs are sold, and he’d make less money if the songs were priced too high. But then again, so would the labels. The disagreement is not over who makes money, it’s over who’s right about which business model will make more money for everybody.

[Editor’s note: sorry this was published late–I finished it last night but there’s a problem with my blog publishing software that I have yet to fully resolve.]

I never really cared much for the idea of the “Star Trek: Academy” movie, one which would take place a decade or two before the original series picked up, with a young Kirk, Spock and McCoy meeting at Starfleet Academy and going out on their first assignment. I’ve heard the concept for a very long time now, as far back as 1992, in fact. It’s a movie concept that has been dredged up time and time again, rumored about every time there’s a new Star Trek project in the offing. It just didn’t seem feasible to get actors who could really pick up those three roles and play them convincingly, not to mention the question of a movie about three young cadets having an adventure. I always figured it was nothing much more than a vehicle for some producer to get a movie made so they could cash in a paycheck.

There must be something to the idea, however. Why the sudden switch? J. J. Abrams has picked up the project and started running with it. You know, the guy who’s responsible for Lost, who’s directing the third Mission: Impossible film. Nothing like a name associated with success to breathe life into a project. Abrams will supposedly be co-writing the movie with writers from Alias, co-producing with Lost producers, and will reportedly be directing the film himself. Abrams has writing credits which include Armageddon in addition to M:I-3. Chances are that Abrams is simply a big Star Trek fan and wants to take on the franchise himself, at least for one movie. Hopefully Paramount will never give it back to Rick Berman, who drove it into the ground (Enterprise only started getting better after Berman took his hands off the series). The last Berman Trek Movie, Nemesis, was unspeakable dreck and flopped at the box office. There have also been rumors that Joe Straczynski of Babylon 5 fame might take over the TV franchise; either he or Abrams would undoubtedly do a far better job than Berman’s stale talents could provide.

Either way, the new movie at least has potential with the new blood. Who knows, maybe they’ll be able to make it work. By the way, I like TG Daily’s name for the film: Star Trek XI: The Inevitable. The film is slated for a 2008 release.

Must be a CBS News poll, right? Or maybe a Pew poll, they’ve had him really low when others didn’t. No? Nope.

It’s a Fox poll. Fox, the most stridently pro-Bush news organization you can imagine, has Bush with a 33% approval rating. You know things are bad when your #1 sycophant is putting your ratings in the cellar. Bush has been rated at 33% once and only once, in a CBS poll a month and a half ago. This is extremely bad news for Bush. Fox says it’s because his support among Republicans is slipping. Of course, that’s a no-brainer–his popularity is so low, that’s pretty much the only group he has left to lose from.

In comparison, the lowest approval number for Clinton was 37% (from 1993), a score tied by Bush 41 and Ford; Reagan and Johnson went as low as 35%. In the last half century, only Nixon went lower, to 24%, but then he had to resign.

In comparison, Fox News polls had Clinton with an approval rating of 68% at this point in his presidency (April 1998), numbers which he kept through the end of his term. Think about that: Bush’s numbers are less than half of what Clinton’s were at identical points in their tenure.

Now, here’s an article that gets it right. It talks about a survey of historians to get the general view in the field of how Bush will be judged by history. The result is apparent from the cover art of the Rolling Stone: Bush is the Worst President in History. Not that I needed the Rolling Stone to tell me that.

The survey was actually conducted in 2004, a poll of 415 historians taken by the nonpartisan History News Network. 81% considered the Bush presidency a failure; 12% called it the “worst presidency ever” outright. Remember, that was in 2004, before Katrina and the disintegration of the Iraq situation, and a myriad of other scandals and screw-ups.

The article continues, pointing out that a majority of the American people have now joined the historians in seeing Bush as a miserable failure, with only Bush’s inner core of right-wing diehards stubbornly clinging to their beloved leader’s broken image, standing second only to their undying wish to apotheosize their revered legend of Ronald Reagan. As I have noted before, this unbreakable core would still believe Bush was a living God even if he molested a young boy live on national TV. Not the rest of us, however.

The Rolling Stone article is as excellent as it is long, giving an exhaustive recounting of the Bush 43 presidency and why contempt for it is richly deserved. Give it a read. (You might also want to read the interview with Kiefer Sutherland, by the way.)

Remember how the GOP’s and Bush administration’s Medicare drug plan prohibited Medicare from negotiating for better drug prices? Well, lots of seniors are finding out how that’s affecting them. Some are discovering that their subsidized purchase of drugs via Medicare are more expensive (and sometimes come with more restrictions) than buying their drugs at Costco.

Bush and the GOP like to talk about how Medicare is “broken.” Well, it is now they’ve sabotaged it.

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It seems that finally a media company has figured out that in order to be successful in selling downloadable movies, they have to get rid of the ridiculous restrictions recently laid down by the big studios. Instead of limiting downloads to people with Windows, IE, and specific media players, instead of limiting the download to the feature attraction only, and instead of prohibiting the burning of the movie to DVD, one media company has boldly decided to allow customers to download the entire DVD content, with special features and all, and burn it to a DVD at home, for the same price as buying one at a store. The DVD will have some copy protection, but nothing the average consumer would notice unless they tried copying the DVD.

Who is this upstart media company? Vivid Entertainment Group. Who are they? They are an “adult entertainment giant.” That’s right, following a centuries-old paradigm that any popular new media concept will be first pioneered by the porn industry, Vivid will apparently be the first to sell downloadable videos without prohibitive restrictions. The big Hollywood studios are said to be watching this move closely (maybe in more ways than one), and if successful, they may emulate it. Where would we be without porn?

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The new Macbooks (formerly “iBooks”) should be arriving in about a month. If they’re priced right, then they should be a huge seller. These laptops are supposed to be outfitted with Core Duos, only slightly slower than the Macbook Pros, and will have a widescreen 13.3″ display that should make them large enough for most people’s wants yet small enough for those who desire compactness. They will also be able to run Mac OS X and Windows XP side by side, at relatively low cost. I think a lot of my students would buy this one, where they wouldn’t buy the iMac or Macbook Pro. I think a lot of other people will be that way as well. However, if you’re at the other end of the scale and like to splurge, the 17″ Macbook Pro is reportedly just a few days away from release.

Meanwhile, Apple is doing very well. Sales have more than tripled over the past six years, much of it due to the iPod and iTunes Music Store, which now account for about half of Apple’s sales. Apple has bought 50 acres of land in Cupertino to build a new Apple Campus, since they have rented every square foot of available office space in Cupertino and still need more. On news of Apple’s sales report, Apple stock surged $3 (almost 5%).

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Want to see something freaky? Go to this site and check out the video of the Robotic Chair. It collapses into six pieces, completely breaking apart. Then watch what happens. [WMV video; via Engadget.] The table videos are kind of cute.

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Not so cute is the FBI’s apparent new policy: when an investigative reporter dies, they get first dibs to view all the reporter’s notes and documents and classify whatever they want. Seems to me to be less a matter of national security and more an issue of hiding dirty laundry. Not to mention the dirty tricks they appear to be using to accomplish this.

Naturally, the media is in an uproar, blasting the FBI and shouting “no fair” from the treetops. My question is, why didn’t the media do this when they knew Bush was lying to the American people about Iraq? It seems the media only gets outraged when the government screws with them, but not when the government screws the people.

Right-to-Lifers just got a green light from a judge to go to a Florida clinic where abortions are performed and scream “murderer!” or whatever else they want right into the faces of women arriving for medical treatment. The judge in the case ruled it an issue of “free speech,” but I have doubts about this judge. In his ruling, he cited a “typical” police report that protesters were “peacefully limited to prayer and song,” but also noted that the clinic used its loudspeakers to broadcast “blasts [of] music to drown out protesters,” which would seem excessive if people were just praying and singing quietly on the clinic’s front lawn and not harassing the women walking in.

But the giveaway comes from a web search which reveals that the judge’s “typical” report does not consider this article mentioning pro-life protester Susan Pine who “normally” greets the women entering the clinic (which provides services other than abortion) “with a bullhorn, yelling that they should not kill their babies and handing out pamphlets with graphic photos of aborted fetuses.”

Methinks the judge in this case may be a wee bit biased on the pro-life side. Ya think?

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Scott McClellan “resigned” his position, a few weeks after reports that he would be fired made the rounds. No exact reason was given, but Amy Poehler quipped on SNL previously that “McClellan says he’d like to spend more time lying for his family.”

President Bush said McClellan had “a challenging assignment.” I will tactfully refrain from making jokes about this comment on the grounds that it would be ludicrously easy to do so, not to mention that you have undoubtedly come up with seven or eight yourself since you started reading this sentence.

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Republicans in Congress are working to allow religious schools to reject or expel students for being gay. Love thy neighbor and thy fellow man, unless he’s a God-forsaken homo.

I’m sorry, that’s unfair. Actually, the law would allow religious schools to discriminate on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age and disability as well.

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A driver in Colorado used a $100 gadget to give himself green lights all the way to work, and then some. The device is similar to those used by firefighters to switch traffic signals to green to get them to emergencies more quickly. The man used his version to switch lights for two full years, all over the state of Colorado, before he was caught by alert traffic engineers, who apparently go for years without noticing that traffic lights are being screwed around with. Actually, the heads-up came from other drivers who complained about traffic backups caused by the offender, who apparently used it every day at the exact same intersections.

The guy caught with the device said he used it because he was always late for work. He was fined $50.

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The Supreme Court gave the thumbs-down to Jerry Falwell. Falwell had sued gay rights activists over their use of the domain name fallwell.com on the grounds that some people might think that he wrote it. The gay rights activists’ site’s domain name adds an extra “L” to the name, and Falwell is pissed that people who can’t spell (presumably a large percentage of his ministry) might find out about his homophobia.

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Activists named Students Against War (SAW) protested military recruitment at UC Santa Cruz, and to teach them a lesson, right-wing nutjob Michelle Malkin posted their home phone numbers on the web. Granted, the amateur protesters had listed those numbers on the press release they handed out, but Malkin knew full well that printing them publicly was begging for these people to be harassed to no end; phone numbers on press releases are not intended for public release in the media but instead are a means for reporters to contact the people involved.

Well, the protesters got nonstop calls from Malkin’s minions, including numerous death threats. When politely asked to take down the contact information, Malkin spitefully reprinted the numbers–and then to make it look like she was the victim, she printed vicious email sent to her, as if (a) getting email is the same as your phone ringing off the hook, and (b) somehow that makes it OK for her to give the nod-and-a-wink to her fans to send off more death threats. Now, if she printed her own home phone number and invited people to make death threats to her, then maybe she could use the “I’m getting it just as bad” excuse, not that it would make her any less of a jerk.

My brother pointed out to me that Andrew Sullivan regularly assigns a “Michelle Malkin Award” for “shrill, hyperbolic, divisive and intemperate right-wing rhetoric,” but that Ann Coulter is ineligible, for the rather evident reason that if she were not, she would be the only one receiving the honor.

So another year comes, another group of students. Today was the opening ceremony for my college and our affiliate school, and as usual, it was quit the shindig. In Japan, people are big on ceremonies like this. For opening ceremony, all the new students and most of their families come. It’s held at a big hotel (the ANA Hotel in Roppongi, though we also use the Century Hyatt for graduations), and there are speeches (an hour and a half this time, including the speech by the Cultural Attaché from the U.S. embassy), followed by a buffet lunch and entertainment, including a string quartet, a guitar band, a marching band, and many musical and dance performances by students (the guy with the bagpipes didn’t show up this year).

So it was a lot of fun–hopefully setting a good, upbeat tone with our new students. And so starts another year. The beginning of my ninth, as it stands. Here’s to many more.

You must read this. If you’re already of the same mind, then find someone you know who still believes in Bush, ask them how they could defend Bush on Iraq. Inevitably they will bring up the troops somehow, as they always do, as if they somehow constitute a defense for Bush. Then show them this article, written by a former Marine captain who served two tours of duty in Iraq:

Three years ago, I was a Marine Corps captain on the Iraqi/Kuwaiti border, participating in the invasion of Iraq. Awestruck, I heard our howitzers thunder and watched artillery rockets rise into the night sky and streak toward Iraq — their light bathing the desert moonscape like giant arc welders.

As I watched the Iraq war begin, I completely trusted the Bush administration. I thought we were going to prove all of the left-wing antiwar protesters and dissenters wrong. I thought we were going to make America safer. …

What this former soldier says next is what they need to hear. Read it. Get them to read it. It needs to be heard. [Via Crooks & Liars]

Just as a quick example of spam proliferation–I have gotten spam on several occasions since late last year with a particular keyword in it. This happens fairly often, as spammers want some unique identifier they can use via Google to see which of their spam droppings got published, and how many Google has recognized. The one that I am speaking of includes the words “compliment whose” and then the word “wondered.” In the spam, those three words appear connected as one long word; I separated them here so they could not be found by the spammers via a Google search.

My point, however, is that if you do a Google search on that text string, you’d find Google reporting “about 130,000” hits. Considering that a great many of the spams sent get filtered by anti-spam software, including spam filters, registration, and captchas, then consider all of those that Google did not find, and you can estimate that just this one version of spam has been sent easily several hundred thousand times, probably millions–and it is very likely that this is just one of many different versions or types sent out by the spammer responsible. You will also find that blog or even newspaper posts which contain the keyword often have dozens if not hundreds of spam messages accumulated in the comments–this being the reason why spammers continue to spam so much.

Nothing huge or earth-shattering about this. I simply wanted to point out a small example of how outrageously prolific spammers can be, and some of the methods they use to check on their success. I’m still waiting for someone to institute a system that will do something to at least take the edge off of these people who take a valuable system of worldwide communications and use it as their own personal toilet.

The woman who inflicted George W. Bush on America and the world, the woman who stripped tens of thousands of law-abiding Democratic Florida citizens of their voting rights and so stole the 2000 election from all the American people, is going down. And she is going down in flames.

The latest Rasmussen polls–a polling outfit that consistently gives George W. Bush approval ratings 5-10 points higher than other polls–has Harris down by no less than thirty points in her bid for a Senate seat. After robbing Floridians of their votes and grievously abusing her office of Florida Secretary of State (while simultaneously being Bush’s Florida campaign co-chair) to repeatedly declare Florida for Bush–finally being backed up by the Republican majority of the Supreme Court–Harris was duly rewarded by the Republican Party, which gave her a Republican “safe seat” in the House of Representatives, where she stayed for four years.

She wanted to run for Senate in Florida in 2004, but was convinced not to by the White House–a wise choice for the GOP, as Harris would have lost the seat to Democrats (a Hispanic White House HUD secretary tapped for the race only narrowly won, 49%-48%). Harris was not so cooperative this year, however, as she decided to challenge incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson in Florida’s other Senate seat; the GOP tried to stop her, but was unsuccessful. After several meltdowns and a pledge to use a large chunk of her personal fortune to fund her dying campaign, she is now pegged at 27% to Bill Nelson’s 57%. The GOP still has about a month to enter another challenger, but it is unknown if they will be able to find anyone able or willing to challenge Nelson.

Either way, this will mark the disgraceful end to one of the most notorious political criminals of our day. Remember, had it not been for Harris, the 2000 election would not have been stolen. We would still be enjoying remarkable budget surpluses instead of record deficit and debt, Saddam Hussein would be safely contained and we would not be mired down in Iraq with 2372 of our soldiers dead. And despite how hard it is to imagine, 9/11 would most likely not have happened, as Al Gore would have continued the counter-terrorism practices of Bill Clinton that prevented the Millennium attacks in four American cities, and, as I have outlined, would have caught and stopped the 9/11 plotters before they struck. Gore would have engaged us in the Kyoto treaty and fought global warming from the start of the term he earned, the term that the American people granted him, the term which Katherine Harris despicably and illegally wrenched away, leading our nation to the ruin and despair we suffer today.

As you can probably tell, I have no great liking for Harris. And I will take no small pleasure in seeing her ignominiously crash and burn. It is far, far less than the punishment she so richly deserves.

Remember last week when two TV stations refused to air a factually correct political ad from MoveOn.org? Well, Republicans in Nevada are now running an ad with an easily-checked flat-out lie, and there’s no word of any station so far that’s refusing to air it.

“Reid’s Democrat allies voted to treat millions of hardworking immigrants as felons,” the ad says, “while President Bush and Republican leaders work for legislation that will protect our borders and honor our immigrants.” [Source]

The felon clause was written by Republicans, who later tried to change it to a misdemeanor to avoid being justly criticized. Some Democrats voted against the change on the grounds that they did not want there to be any criminal penalties at all.

While this ad fits the Republican habit of blaming Democrats for Republican misdeeds, it is still a blatant lie. But while NBC stations claimed to object to the veracity of MoveOn.org’s ads (while never specifying what was supposedly untrue), there is not a single media outlet reported so far that is even hesitating to take the money for this ad. More liberal media bias!

This just must not be a very good time for birding. I’m going out there, but I’m not finding much. No life birds, of course, but not much in the way of birds at all. My luck has been especially poor at the Tokyo Port Wild Bird Park; seems like every time I’ve been there for a long time now, I’ve come up dry, or nearly so. Just a long trip, some walking, and butkus. I finally came up with the idea of calling in first, and asking if the birds are out there–but only after I went this time. What I’d like to suggest next time is that they do a mailing list, if they have computers in the observation center. They could set up a mailing list which people could subscribe to automatically. Then, when the volunteers in the center saw a good number of birds, they could send out a mailing. Birdwatchers with an eye on their computers would get notice that it was a good time to go to the park. Alternately, they could send out regular messages two or three times a day listing the birds spotted at the time. The upside would be that they would get more visitors when there were birds. The downside, I suppose, is that attendance (and income from fees) would drop when birds were scarce. Still, I’m going to suggest it to them.

Actually, this trip was worse than usual: I headed out to the park on my scooter on Thursday, and fifteen minutes out from the park, my bike broke down. I thought it just ran out of gas, so I pushed it up a hill to the nearest gas station. But after filling it up, it still wouldn’t work. So I pushed it down the same hill and up another to a bike shop, and they tried changing the spark plug, to no avail; they said the wiring was probably bad, and being a Yamaha shop (mine’s a Suzuki), they couldn’t fix it. So I called the chain I bought the bike from, and they came and picked the bike up and dropped me off at the nearest station to get home. Turned out that the bike had been on recall for three different issues, and my bike broke down due to one of them. That’s nice. Good of them to call me up and tell me about it. Instead, they leave me to break down and waste a whole day.

In any case, they fixed all three issues, and so I had to take the bus and train to Kawasaki City, then walk a distance to pick up the bike–always fun when your foot is still healing from a bone break. After picking up the bike, I figured I was close enough to the mouth of the Tama River to check it out. Good thing, too–it was the best birding area I had been to all week. I didn’t see anything new (I think), but did see new plumage on an old find. Specifically, the Black-headed Gull:

Before, I had only seen them like this:

There was a whole flock of them further out, in fact, in various degrees of plumage change:

There were also a few other gulls. These two I caught together, for an interesting contrast in their size:

I think the big one is a Herring Gull, but am unsure about the lesser one. Could be any one of several species, an immature gull I suppose. I’ll try to find out which one somehow.

Other than the gulls, there really wasn’t much out there. Cormorants galore. Various ducks, mostly Spot-billeds, Tufteds, Widgeons, and some Teals. I spotted but could not photograph a Little Tern. The Dusky Thrushes are back. The Brown-eared Bulbuls and White-cheeked Starlings are freakin’ everywhere. And that’s just about it.

Aside from birds, there were a few other things. When my bike broke down, it was near a small park with a pond. In the pond were turtles (fairly common in these parts), but this one seemed unusually relaxed:

And when my bike broke down and I was pushing it up that hill, I passed a girl walking her pet. But the pet made me do a double-take: it was a monkey. Not too often do you see a girl walking a monkey on the streets of Tokyo. Later, when I was in the park, I ran across her again; she had met up with a guy who also had a monkey, a younger one. The two monkeys were cuddled together for a rest, and looked quite charming.

This is so Samuel L. Jackson:

New Line’s Snakes on a Plane, due to open on Aug. 18, has already produced an avid cult, “the first cult following created entirely by a movie’s title,” according to Canada’s Maclean’s magazine. According to the magazine, an uproar among the cultists ensued when studio executives decided to change the title to Pacific Air Flight 121. Even star Samuel L. Jackson joined in the ruckus, saying, according to Maclean’s: “We’re totally changing that back. That’s the only reason I took the job: I read the title.” The magazine said that in the end, not only did the producers restore the original name but that they “recently returned to Vancouver to film new scenes with profanity and gore, bringing the final product closer to the kind of garish B movie its name suggests.” [Bold emphasis mine]

I love that guy. He was totally outright about being way excited to act with Yoda, and about wanting a purple lightsaber. And most big-name actors would have a problem with being suddenly eaten by a mutant shark halfway through a film. Not this dude. (In fact, his characters have been killed in 13 different movies.) You just don’t get better than Sam.

Yet more lies. I know I said before that Bush & Co. lied their asses off, then lied about lying. I know I went to superlatives. But these guys just find ways to exceed themselves, to do it again and again and again. From the Washington Post:

A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq — not made public until now — had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president’s statement.

The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later were stamped “secret” and shelved. Meanwhile, for nearly a year, administration and intelligence officials continued to publicly assert that the trailers were weapons factories.

The bottom line: there is really little choice but to treat each and every word out of Bush’s mouth to be self-serving. He will go to any lengths to promote his agenda, and that means classifying as secret evidence that he is wrong. President Bush will lie. He will lie knowingly and repeatedly. With certain proof he is wrong clutched in his hands, he will hide it and lie to our faces. And this is not about his personal life. This is about life and death, this is about invasions and nuclear war.

What that means is catastrophe. What happens when you can trust the president to lie about anything he pleases, classifying the proof that he’s wrong, so even when you know he’s wrong, you can’t prove it enough to assert action to stop him? What happens is that you have an immoral lying bastard dragging you into disaster after disaster. What happens is a catastrophe.

I’m sorry, but I’m through being tolerant of the idiotic idea that “there are two sides” and we have to respect the other one. There is only so much you can take. This president has lied far too much, has destroyed far too much, has derailed our economy, trashed our military, broken the law, savaged the constitution, weakened the nation. When caught, he defiantly argues he has the power to do anything. He truly believes he is never in error. And now he’s planning nuclear war. Things have come so far that senior members of the military are close to resigning before going through with such insanity. And yet, because Bush controls what we see and hear, there’s no way to prove that Iran is not a threat. Iran could be a nuclear threat, but this president has lied so much we cannot know if he is not the greater threat to us. And yet we have this to deal with:

A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was “absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb” if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do “what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do,” and “that saving Iran is going to be his legacy.”

One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.” He added, “I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?’ ”

This president is megalomaniacal. He’s convinced himself that he’s going to conquer the Middle East, a modern-day Charlemagne establishing a new Holy Empire. He has become the over-the-top insane president of fictional works like The Dead Zone, convinced that he is destined to push the nuclear button and become the hand of God. He’s denying reality, classifying facts that disagree with his delusions. Global warming? Change the science. No WMD? Hide the evidence and lie. The military disagrees with the nuclear option in Iran? Have Rumsfeld hand-pick a council of yes-men and base your decision on their echo of your insanity. We will conquer Iraq and they will love us. We will nuke Iran and the people will rise up and greet us as liberators.

Supporting this president is supporting the ruin of our country and endangering the world itself.

Anyone who says they trust and support this president is indefensibly stupid, and I’ll say it to their face.

A recent acquisition of Google is an online word processing app called “Writely.” I had high expectations for the app, since it is capable of saving documents to your computer in MS Word, RTF, Open Office, or PDF formats. It also allows “collaboration,” meaning that more than one person can view and edit a document in an account. I thought this might be a great tool for the academic writing courses I sometimes teach at my college: students could write their essays online (no more forgetting to bring in their essay, or losing it because a floppy gets corrupted or lost), and then they would not even have to hand it in–I would simply log in and access the file, leave notes and corrections–everything done on line, but with the option of saving to a computer and printing it out there.

I signed up for an account but had heard nothing for some time, when a blogger who follows Google developments closely very kindly offered any readers an invitation, for the asking. I requested one and got it immediately (thanks, Googlist) and checked it out.

And while I still have hope that Writely will eventually become the tool I hoped for, it’s not quite there yet. A lot of features are not yet present or smoothed out enough, much more so than can be accounted for by the app’s beta status. For example, there are no options to set margins or paper size. You cannot set a first-line or hanging indent. The line spacing is sporadic at best, and is sometimes entirely lost on translation to an on-disk document. In short, the formatting is far from what is necessary for producing presentable documents. It is, in the end, limited to what can be presented on a web page with web standards. In this respect, it is a web page editor that can export its documents to a word processor, but it is not a word processor itself.

I attempted to write a document and then save it as an MS Word file. Double spacing got lost entirely. Margins (which can’t be set within Writely) came out as .79″ on the left, and all other margins were .39″–a strange set of defaults to use, and poor-looking at that. Paragraph breaks became line breaks, harder to handle in MS Word.

But Writely can also import documents, so I attempted to take a formatted MS Word file and import it into the web app. The document got pretty badly mangled. Tabs got translated to spaces, a header got distorted and appeared as normal text at the top of page one. Images lost word wrap formatting. Indents remained, but got distorted–first-line indents stayed at a half inch, while hanging indents went from a half to a whole inch.

When the same document was translated back into MS Word on my hard disk, it lost even more formatting. Hanging indents became full left-margin indents. The header reappeared, but jumped from the right to the left side. The margins got distorted into new proportions, with the top margin now 1.05 inches and all the others similar to Writely defaults.

The distortions after uploading to Writely and again downloading to MS Word were strange. Some stayed as MS Word had them, but some got changed to new values even though Writely does not allow you to change them. Any special formatting disappeared.

Clearly, Writely is not really a word processor along the lines of MS Word or any other disk-based app. It is really just a text editor, with web page formatting only. Importing from and exporting to MS Word is not very useful because the distortions make it easier just to copy and paste text from a web page to MS Word and apply formatting changes there. This app won’t work if things like margins and indents mean anything to you. And it’s absolutely not WYSIWYG.

I had expected Writely to come up with coded translations of all formatting at least available in the Rich Text Format; that the app would preserve all such formatting and then translate it into a web page that appeared in WYSIWYG style. I imagined that any change you made on the web page would be interpreted back into RTF, and that saving as RTF or MS Word would produce a clean document. Maybe Writely will become that in the future, but that isn’t what it is right now. Instead, any text document is simply made into a web page, with non-web formatting distorted or lost.

The main values I see currently are the ability to edit anywhere you have Internet access, and Writely’s ability to allow collaboration. You can add a collaborator simply by entering an email address. That person will get an email informing them, and if they are not already signed in to Writely, they will be given an account. They will be able to log on, then view and edit any documents shared with them by others.

Now, I would have known this had I read Googlist’s March review of Writely (that was before I found that blog), in which the new web app is carefully explained, deconstructed, and analyzed. Googlist explained it like this:

Writely is not a fully-featured, traditional desktop publishing program. It does not provide features like those in Word and InDesign that let you create custom paper sizes, apply multi-page layouts, design your own greeting cards, or import custom font families.

Writely is not (yet) a term paper machine. There is no support for automatically updating footnotes, automatically updating tables of contents, or page numbering for that matter. It’s just not that kind of app at this point.

Writely’s strengths are primarily in portability (you can edit a doc from any computer on the Internet) and collaboration. I am hoping that they beef up the formatting so academic essays can be produced, but it doesn’t look like it will get there for some time yet. Nevertheless, this is still a great concept, and I will be keeping my eyes on it over time. The development team has a blog which they post to every several weeks or so.

If you want an invite, I’d be happy to pass along the favor Googlist did for me–just leave an email in a comment; if it’s a straight request with email address, it won’t get published, I’ll just send you an invite.

Man… a lot has happened politically this week. First and foremost, Bush is again in the midst of a maelstrom regarding intelligence and the Iraq War, this time with Plame leaker Libby testifying that Bush authorized the leaking of selective portions of a classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) to reporters.

The argument for Bush is that the president has the authority to declassify anything simply by saying it (though there is a formal declassification process). But that’s not the issue. The issue is twofold: first, Bush did not authorize the leak of classified information for the purpose of national security or serving the public–the only valid reasons–he did so as part of a political attack in response to criticism (now known to be true) that he lied about intelligence used to justify the Iraq War.

Which leads to the second matter: Bush did not authorize the declassification of the entire NIE, he authorized the declassification of specific parts that supported his argument–while other parts of the NIE that worked against his argument were held back. In other words, Bush lied about our intelligence information on Iraq, then when he was shown up to be a liar, he declassified selective parts the NIE to make it seem like he was right when the whole NIE suggested he was wrong–in short, he used the NIE to compound the lie.

And that’s why people are objecting. Because Bush lied, and then used secret intelligence to lie again.

And get this quote from Bush after the leak which he authorized came out:

“If somebody did leak classified information, I’d like to know it, and we’ll take the appropriate action. There are too many leaks of classified information in Washington. And if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated the law, the person will be taken care of.”

So he leaks classified information for political purposes, then goes to the press and acts all righteous, saying he’s gonna catch the leakers. And he’s leaking.

I know what the remaining Bush apologists will say: at least he didn’t lie under oath. Like lying to the American people to make us go to war is OK, so long as he’s not doing it under oath. Interestingly, Bush and Cheney did testify to Fitzgerald on this matter–but they insisted that they not be sworn in to testify under oath. gee whiz, I wonder why they would ever do that? The answer is easy: they knew they would lie their asses off.

But the technicality that they lied while not under oath may not be enough–if Bush lied during his 70-minute interview with Fitzgerald on June 24, 2004, he could be charged with making false statements or obstructing justice, both of them felonies, not to mention impeachable offenses. That interview is not public at this time.

Furthermore, this marks the first time Bush has been directly implicated in the White House scheming that involved the leak which blew Valerie Plame’s cover. While there is no evidence (yet) that Bush authorized that specific leak, the fact is that Bush has now been proven to have lied repeatedly on this issue. How can anyone believe a single word from his lying mouth? How incredibly gargantuan a liar does this president have to become before the American people start disapproving?

Oh, wait, they are disapproving. Bush’s approval ratings remain in the toilet, festering in the mid-30’s. Right now, only Rasmussen, the poll that adores Bush, has him above 40, while the other dozen major polls have him between 33 and 38 (including Fox, at 36%). Which simply leaves the question, how do those 30-odd percent of Americans actually approve of this lawbreaking liar?

It gets better. We’ve also found out that Bush lied about lying about Iraq in other ways as well. Part of his pack of lies about Iraq concerned the infamous aluminum tubes he claimed were proof that Saddam was building a nuclear weapon. Of course, we found out that was false, the tubes were not used for that purpose; Bush later claimed that he’d been misled by bad intelligence. But Murray Waas of the National Journal discovered that Bush had been “repeatedly apprised” of grave doubts in the intelligence community concerning the validity of the claim:

Karl Rove, President Bush‘s chief political adviser, cautioned other White House aides in the summer of 2003 that Bush’s 2004 re-election prospects would be severely damaged if it was publicly disclosed that he had been personally warned that a key rationale for going to war had been challenged within the administration. Rove expressed his concerns shortly after an informal review of classified government records by then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley determined that Bush had been specifically advised that claims he later made in his 2003 State of the Union address — that Iraq was procuring high-strength aluminum tubes to build a nuclear weapon — might not be true, according to government records and interviews. [emphasis Waas’]

Just like his infamous “16 words” where he claimed Saddam was looking for uranium from Niger, Bush had been told before he used such claims in his State of the Union address that the intelligence was probably phony–and yet he used it anyway.

And then Karl Rove covered up the lies for the election.

And now, Joseph E. diGenova, a federal prosecutor under President Reagan, is saying that Bush may even dare to pardon Libby:

The special prosecutor [Fitzgerald] signaled in his court filing last week that he intended to call several former Bush aides as witnesses against Libby, including former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer — raising the specter of court proceedings that could lay bare the inner workings of the White House.

“I can’t imagine this case going to trial,” DiGenova said. “You’ll see a pardon first.”

I am dumbfounded at the idea that Bush could pardon Libby. Even Bush 41 waited until just before he left office to pardon high officials who could have implicated him in wrongdoing; if Bush 43 pardons Libby before an election, that would be an incredible abuse of power; frankly, I can’t see how Bush could survive that, how a pardon for Libby wouldn’t ignite a firestorm or criticism from all quarters.

What’s next on the radar? Bush is planning to nuke Iran. I wish I were joking. This idiot is out of control.