Apparently, the Fundie Wingnuts are on the loose in Maryland. Republican Donald H. Dwyer Jr., member of the Maryland House of Delegates (the lower house of Maryland’s state legislature), has been trying to force a same-sex marriage law on the state. Dwyer tried to impeach a Circuit Court judge, M. Brooke Murdock, because she ruled that a 1973 Maryland law banning same-sex marriage was unconstitutional. Dwyer wanted her impeached for “violating the public trust, abuse of power, incompetence, willful neglect of duty, and misbehavior in office.” The Maryland legislature at least had enough sense not to go for it.

But Dwyer wants to imprint his religious beliefs on the state constitution, calling for an amendment that would ban all but “traditional” marriages. This is, after all, an election year, and gay marriage has proven to be a winning straw-man issue for Republicans to stir up the base and smear their opponents. But it may be backfiring.

In a hearing held by the legislature, Jamie Raskin, a professor of Constitutional Law at American University, was asked to testify on the matter. It’s probably no coincidence that Raskin is running for state senate, and Maryland Republicans jumped at the chance to skewer the Democratic candidate by putting him on the stand and grilling him in an attempt to soil his name with the public. But it didn’t work out the way they wanted. Republican State Senator Nancy Jacobs lectured, “As I read Biblical principles, marriage was intended, ordained and started by God – that is my belief. … For me, this is an issue solely based on religious principals [sic].”

To which Raskin replied: “People place their hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution; they don’t put their hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible.”

Man, do I want this guy to be elected.

Scopes.com points out that Raskin was not the first to make this statement; Bill Maher said a year ago, relating to Bush’s rush back to Washington D.C. to sign the Terry Schiavo bill, “Does George Bush remember that he put his hand on the Bible to uphold the Constitution and not the other way around?”

Still, it’s a good quote, and true no matter who says it or how you state it. And a topic for the near future: what is “traditional marriage”? Maybe not what the Fundie Wingnuts think.

In the midst of a tidal wave of Republican lobbying and bribery scandals, the GOP is moving into action. Will they curb any of the lobbying? No. Censure any of their own who did wrong? No. Limit their own corrupt fundraising in any way? Of course not. Hell, they’re even supporting Tom DeLay for re-election this year, a Republican who has been indicted fer crying out loud. The GOP has simply shut down the Ethics committee, once used with gleeful impunity to attack Bill Clinton at every possible chance.

So what will they do to clean up their act? Why, cut off Democratic means of fundraising, of course! Specifically, the 527 groups, mostly effective on the Democratic side. Organizations like MoveOn.org, which advocate Democratic causes. Who cares if they’re not involved in any lawbreaking or corruption? Who cares if the GOP leaves their own sleazy money machine intact despite massive illegalities? Who cares if the only “reform” the GOP has implemented so far has been one that will only increase lobbying to fill GOP coffers? This is an election year, dammit! We have to break laws and fill up on bribes while cutting the other side off at the knees!

Politics is perception. So long as the GOP can be seen as going after some kind of political action group, they figure Americans won’t be able to tell the difference.

Are they right?

Bush’s numbers are in the tank. Even Fox has him under 40, along with NBC, CNN, CBS, Pew and the AP. In the past few weeks, only Rasmussen has him over 40, but the Rasmussen typically has Bush rated 5-10 points higher than the median. Pew has him at 33%, CBS at 34%. Even Republicans are starting to dump on him, and he’s getting hit from all sides.

Time for a new war!

I wish that were a joke. Bush responded quickly to the new Nixon-during-Watergate poll numbers by bombing the crap out of Iraq, proclaiming that pre-emptive strikes will continue, and hey, Iran is really mean. Think I’m kidding? Think again. It would be a massive blunder to invade Iran, a debacle that would make Iraq look like jaywalking. But Bush needs Poll Juice, and short of a war or a terror attack within the U.S., it looks like he’s not going to get what he wants. So this is the preliminary–bombing raids in Iraq and making noises like he’s a macho war president. And if that doesn’t work, get ready for bloodshed.

Remember those endlessly repeated videos of Saddam Hussein firing a gun in the air? Bush is trying to create that same kind of image, the tough guy, tough on Iraq, therefore tough on terrorism, remember that whole war thing, I’m the only one who can save you from terrorists, Saddam is evil, 9/11! 9/11! Heh heh heh.

One can only hope that this is simply posturing. Because it really would be a damn shame if tens of thousands more people had to die horrible deaths just because George can’t get his polls up. Happened before. Gonna happen again, apparently.

Isaac Hayes played the character “Chef” on the Comedy Central TV Show South Park for about ten years. Despite infrequent appearances (it must have taken him only an hour or so to finish a whole year’s work, I imagine), he is noted on the show as being a celebrity voice, at least at some level. And now Hayes is quitting the show in protest of its denigration of religion:

“There is a place in this world for satire, but there is a time when satire ends, and intolerance and bigotry towards religious beliefs of others begins. As a civil rights activist of the past 40 years I cannot support a show that disrespects those beliefs and practices.”

Apparently, Hayes was completely unaware of the content of the show for the entire ten years he worked on it. Never watched it, I suppose. The very first episode made fun of Jesus. If you watch the show at all, you know that they disrespect everybody. Get a sense of humor, Isaac.

Of course, Hayes isn’t quitting for his stated reason, that the show is disrespectful of religion. He’s upset because they disrespected Scientology, of which Hayes is a member. The Huffington Post actually has the offending episode on their site, via YouTube. Another episode two and a half years ago did a job on Mormons in a somewhat similar fashion to the recent skewering of Scientology. Hayes didn’t quit then.

Heck, South Park’s Parker and Stone skewer liberals far more often than conservatives, but that doesn’t offend me. These guys are immature jerk-offs who love toilet humor and being as offensive as humanly possible to as many people as they can conceivably manage. And I can’t wait until the next episode comes out.

Also, you gotta figure they’re not just going to let the Hayes thing drop without doing something with the chef character. That’s practically begging for them to have a go at it. Maybe they’ll show some respect for Hayes, maybe out of friendship. But it would be a first.

Just got back from the doctor, now three and a half months after breaking my fifth metatarsal in my right foot. Handed in the crutches, and the doc says that so long as I favor the injured area, I can walk more or less normally. For me, the problem will more likely be that I’ll be so used to favoring the whole foot, I’ll limp more out of habit than out of necessity.

With this whole thing coming to a close, I thought I might write about the experience from start to finish.

This started on December 3rd, as I was walking out my door. I was invited to a party with people from work, and I had spent the day before shopping for party food and learning the route (it was a long way away, three train transfers and two bus rides). I made sure I had everything, locked my door, and headed for the stairs. To get to the stairs, I have to take a u-turn from my front door. The concrete floor at the point of the turn is not only smooth, but also (as I discovered by observing later) is slightly inclined so as to allow rain run to a gutter. Add in the centrifugal force of the turn and that I was going a bit faster than usual on the foot-pivot, and the result is that I slipped and fell. My foot, however, remained level as it slipped, while my leg and body fell at an angle. That led to too much strain on the outside of the foot, and I heard a loud “snap” as the bone broke.

My first decision was whether or not to have surgery. As you can see on the original x-ray, the broken bone halves had separated quite a bit. I was shocked to hear the emergency room doctor suggest that simply leaving it to heal naturally would be an option. After talking to the doc and my immediate family, I decided to go with surgery to have pins put in. However, the decision was a bit complex.

The injury happened just ten days before I was scheduled to fly back home to stay with my folks, so flying back was one factor. And though I didn’t know it at the time, it is said that if you have surgery, then the chance of a thrombosis (a blood clot you can get from sitting in an airline seat for too long) increases dangerously. Then there’s the wound left by surgery, which could become infected, and I’d have to do it again later to have the pins removed. But my biggest worry was whether or not the break could heal properly. At last, a somewhat distant family relative in orthopedics got back with the advice not to have surgery. Knowing that it was possible for the bones to heal without help, going through all the extra hassle (and expense–at least $1000, with insurance picking up the other 70%) for the bones to heal a few weeks faster would not have been worth it.

So I traveled with crutches instead. Though the foot swelled up quite a bit when traveling to the U.S. (ten days after the break), my trip was otherwise pretty successful. Wheelchairs were provided at Shinjuku Station, Narita Airport Station, and at the airline check-in counter on the Japan side, and at the door of the plane upon arrival at SFO (my travel agent handled the airport wheelchairs, I arranged the JR help). The wheelchairs came with staff to push me and drag luggage (JR provided 2-3 people each time, the airlines one apiece), and I got taken through the crew/diplomatic lines, very short and fast. And of course, I got early boarding. So long as you arrange everything in advance, you can get some very good assistance to make everything breeze through.

Not everything went smoothly; the transfer from Keio to JR lines at Shinjuku Station was a nightmare, with an ignorant ticket gate staff sending me on a very long, unnecessary uphill hike with crutches. And the seating on the airplane on the trip out was disastrous–the bulkhead seating I had to fight the airline to get turned out to be the worst on the whole plane, with a regular economy seat near the back being more spacious. That’s partly how the foot got swollen; not only could I not elevate it, but I couldn’t even rest it comfortably.

Here’s a thought. They only allow physically fit people to sit in the exit rows of planes. The reasoning is that these people will be the ones to help others out. If you ask me, that reasoning sucks. I was seated about 8 rows back from an exit. Had there been some emergency and the plane caught on fire, I would be screwed. It would be hard enough for anyone to get out of the plane, but me, with a broken foot and my crutches stowed? Forget about it, it’d be hopeless. And why do the “helpers” have to sit right next to the door? Why all three people sitting near an exit? Seems reasonable to me to put the people with infirmities near the door so you can grab them and throw them down the escape slide. If you seat them everywhere else, they’ll be stuck and cause a traffic jam. Not to mention that the infirmed need that extra leg space, far more than anyone else. Someone should re-think that whole policy.

The trip back was better, partially because I got “Economy Plus” (i.e., a regular economy seat rather than a sardine-can “Economy Minus” seat like I got on the way out), but probably more because my foot was more healed by that time.

The timing of my injury was both good and bad. Bad because it zapped me just when vacation was upon me, forcing me to fly with a broken foot, and miss out on a lot of fun. Also bad because the best birdwatching season is December to February, the exact time I was out with the injury (and I had started birdwatching the previous February, just as that season was ending). The timing was good, on the other hand, because I had just finished my last class of the semester the day before. Final exams and the graduation ceremony I was able to sit out (I monitored the exams from home while others subbed for me). That’s good because it meant I missed the least amount of work possible. Work started again a month and a week later, by which time I could get around enough to come in to work. But then fortune struck again: by unusual chance, I happened to have a schedule that brought me in to work on Tuesdays and Thursdays only, meaning I could recuperate more and crutch around town less. In that sense, the timing was just about perfect.

Driving a scooter also helped immensely. If I were to use public transportation, it would mean crutching down a hill for ten minutes to a bus stop, and waiting for the bus. Then crutching through train stations, worst of all Shinjuku–the transfer from my train line to my work’s train line included a walk across the length of the station, which would probably take 15 minutes, with stairs along the way (ever tried climbing/descending stairs on crutches in a busy train station?). Then there would be the trip from the station to work. And at every juncture, I’d have to take elevators, which are often placed inconveniently. Then the same in reverse on the way back (ending in an uphill 10-minute climb). Had I had a 5-day-a-week schedule, I’d have to do that ten times each week. God, what a nightmare that would have been.

Instead, I had my scooter, thank God. Door-to-door transportation, sitting all the way. For short trips, I could just put the crutches on the floor board between my arms, leaning against my shoulder. For longer trips, the crutches went upside-down on my back, between my back and my backpack, like those samurai flicks where the guy has his hilt on his back, and reaches over a shoulder to draw his sword. A lot of people commented that it seemed dangerous to drive with an injured foot, but so long as I could place weight on the heel, there was no problem.

I also learned a bit about how handicapped people are treated. While sometimes people would give preference to me in public, all too often they did not. When I was going to the airport, after my seemingly endless hike at Shinjuku Station, I had to buy a ticket at a JR ticket shop. I was sweating like crazy, my arms and good foot in obvious pain–I was a wreck on crutches, and yet no one offered me to get ahead in line. When I first tried to go shopping at the supermarket, I tried to use a cart, which was extremely difficult–I’d have to crutch and then push the cart every step, alternating where my hands went–and people in traffic around me kept shoving in front of me, making it harder, not easier. Once, when I was entering a Subway Sandwich shop, I opened the door, only to have some guy try to shove past me and get ahead of me in line to be served. Not a lot of consideration sometimes, I’m afraid.

Then there’s the design of my apartment and the building it’s in. Japanese apartments are not good for disabled people, as they tend to be narrow. Fortunately, I had an old, small, armless office chair on wheels which I used a lot to roll back and forth from one place to another. But my bath/laundry area is elevated up a step, making navigation more difficult there, as is the toilet room, making it hard to access, especially when I was starting out.

But worst is the general staircase design outside my apartment. My building has an elevator, but the idiot who designed the building made it so the elevator stops at the half-floor, not on every floor’s level. Which means you have to walk up or down half a flight of stairs to go between your front door and the elevator. Stupidest design I’ve ever seen, and completely unnecessary to the building’s function. The only purpose I can see it having is to keep the elderly and handicapped from renting there.

The healing process in my case was slow. The doc originally said 6-8 weeks. But the x-rays taken every two weeks kept showing little improvement, and “another four weeks” was a recurring diagnosis every two weeks. Even now, with my crutches no longer needed, the x-rays don’t show the rebuilt bone every much–you have to work hard to see anything in the gap. But the doc insists it’s there. And the bone parts seem to be pulling closer together. I can still feel the jagged edge of one part sticking out a bit, which the doc says will be subsumed within a few years.

The foot still hurts some, but feels better all the time. The remaining pain is mostly in the non-injured parts of the foot, from atrophy and strain from hobbling. Hopefully that’ll decrease as time goes on. Who knows, maybe in three weeks, when spring break comes up, I’ll be good enough to start birdwatching seriously again. Maybe by May or June, I’ll be well enough to birdwatch up Mt. Takao. We’ll have to see. This was my first broken bone, and it was educational. Let’s hope I won’t have another such chance to learn ever again.

Northwest Airlines is looking to shake you down, or so it seems. There’s a plan to charge you an additional fee if you want an aisle seat, or a seat in an exit row, on domestic flights. They’re calling it “Coach Choice,” which effectively means that if you don’t cough up an extra fifteen bucks, then you get crappy seating. All I can say is, if they ever implement that plan on international flights, I am never going to fly them again. That’ll be on principle–depending on the circumstances, either United or Northwest tends to have the cheapest fare from Tokyo to San Francisco non-stop. So it may wind up costing me more to fly sometimes–but I’ll be damned if I’m going to be nickel-and-dimed like that, and I’m certainly not going to encourage it.

Fortunately, international flights tend not to fall prey to that kind of cheapskating. I hear about having to pay for alcoholic beverages, headphone sets, and other frills on domestic flights; these are never an issue on international routes, at least not the ones I take.

Of course, Northwest is already doing this to a certain degree, just in a different fashion. They have something called “Economy Plus,” which is about what economy used to be in terms of leg room. Then they scrunched all the other sets together some more, and relabeled that as regular economy. Then they charge people more for the “plus.” From what they told me, a hefty annual payment will make you eligible–but will not guarantee such a seat for any flight. “Coach Choice” seems to be a similar ploy–take what was usually for free and charge a premium for it, else you risk getting stuck in a crappy seat and suffering.

So I’m not totally confident that they’ll keep this away from the international flights. If they wind up implementing it there, then they’re going to lose customers, and I’ll be first out the door.

It was like this in February last year, when temps in the 60’s one day turned to snow the next. And so we had the same thing this week; temps in the high 60’s on Sunday, and then on Monday, it starts to snow. Not a big snowstorm like last year, only a flurry–but still enough to turn your head. Two straight years with this phenomenon at about the same time, maybe it’s a trend…

Cosmic Buddha noted the same variances, even more wild than what I observed here.

Why not? I’m sorry, but I don’t get the “evil” side to this concept, except that it varies from our Judeo-Christian majority background. Please explain to me where the harm is. Some gay rights advocates don’t want polygamy brought into the debate because they see it as an argument against them–that critics say gay marriage will lead to bigamy and polygamy. But to me, that sounds an awful lot like black people saying that they don’t want Hispanic rights grouped in with theirs because it might drag them down.

To me, the yardstick here is consenting adults. If you’ve got consenting adults and no one is being harmed (I do not count an outsider’s concept of “moral” harm to be a valid measure), then I say they should be able to. Of course, the conservatives go farther–they say this will lead to incest, bestiality and child molestation. That people will be marrying sheep and small children. Which, of course, is like saying that if you give equal rights to blacks and Hispanics, then mosquitos and lawn furniture will be next. Incest can cause real harm in birth defects, and child or animal relations are by definition non-consenting. That’s not an arbitrary boundary, nor a social or traditional one, it is a functional boundary with very clear demarcation.

Maybe it’s just the subversive influence that sci-fi author Robert A. Heinlein had on me; many of his books involve all kinds of marriage arrangements, exploring polyandry as well as the tradition many-wives flavor of polygamy, as well as line marriages and other varieties (read The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress). He made it sound reasonable, even sensible, arguing about the strong economic benefits and the more stable caring for children. Of course, Heinlein also wrote favorably about incest and cannibalism, not to mention that he was in real life an unabashed no-holds-barred gun-rights advocate and a near-fanatical anti-communist, so maybe he’s not the best role model here. But that doesn’t mean that some of his explorations held merit.

Frankly, so long as all the people involved know what they’re doing, give their full and enthusiastic consent, always have an option to leave, and are made happy by the arrangement, I see no reason to limit the forms of marriage. Alas, in our society, we’re probably not mature enough to evolve beyond the one-husband-many-wives standard of polygamy; men are still far too territorial in all but a few cases. Nevertheless, until someone provides compelling evidence that such marriages cause any more risk for harm than “traditional” marriages (i.e., marriages we’re used to in the very recent past–marriages beyond the recent past vary significantly from what conservatives now term as “traditional,” and polygamy is probably more “traditional” than monogamy anyway), I’m all for letting people work out what works best for them, and not trying to impose my own narrow standards on them “for their own good.”

There is a man in North Dakota whose anti-abortion actions have clearly crossed the border from simple harassment of women entering a clinic for abortions to the truly dangerous, life-threatening kind of campaign that can only end in violence.

Martin Wishnatsky is a pro-life activist of the sort that likes to go to abortion clinics and shove bloody photos into the faces of women entering while screaming “murderer!” at them. The kind who made necessary laws that restrict such “protests,” and requiring steps like the restraining order that prevents Wishnatsky from coming within 150 of the clinic. Naturally, Wishnatsky has found another way to harass the women, a way that may be temporarily, technically legal, but which is far more dangerous and chilling.

Like some sort of fetishist, Wishnatsky now stands on street corners at the edge of the restraining order perimeter, holding a camera with a zoom lens. He takes photos of all the women who enter the clinic, and their license plates if he can get them, and then publishes those photos on a web site.

This is chilling because this is exactly the kind of intimidation technique that has led to the assassination of doctors and other clinic or hospital staff similarly identified on web sites. Posting such photos is a clear invitation to the wackos, and is equivalent to painting a big target onto these women. The whole idea of the web site is clearly to identify the women to the public–a violation of their medical privacy, not to mention personal privacy–so that people who don’t like abortion can express their disapproval to the women in the photos. There is no other purpose for the site but public exposure. And if the past has taught us anything, it has taught us that the kind of people who look up these sites all too often include the kind who intend at the least harassment of the people targeted, and at the most, violence and even murder.

While it is not wholly clear if what Wishnatsky is doing is legal, it most certainly should not be. If it is, it is a hole in the legal code that should be patched immediately. It is even more intimidating than the up-front confrontations with bloody photos and shouting, and far more insidious. If it remains legal, it will soon lead to someone getting seriously hurt or killed.

What’s more–and not that this matters too much in the big picture–Wishnatsky has not even got any way of distinguishing who is going in for an abortion and who is entering for some other purpose not related to an abortion. According to the report, he is simply taking photos and posting them indiscriminately.

Wishnatsky, by the way, does not just limit his actions to threatening women. From looking at where he’s appeared in the media and in the courts, he is pretty clearly a fanatical religious zealot. He has suggested that the deaths of a lawyer and a newspaper editor were retribution from God for these men being pro-choice. He belongs to a group called “The Lambs of Christ” in addition to “Operation Rescue,” a well-known anti-abortion action group. He has fought to make abortion equal to first-degree murder, and is involved in other litigation regarding religious statues, even what appear to be frivolous cases like charging an assistant AG with battery because the AG closed a door that Wishnatsky was entering while a private meeting was taking place. In another case, he wanted to sue the state on First Amendment grounds to have a statue of a Greek goddess removed from public property, and he sued a lawyer (PDF file) for refusing to represent him due to a busy schedule. Wishnatsky has authored a few books (such as “Mormonism: A Latter Day Deception”), and even ran for president in 2004 (he got 11 votes in total).

A visit to his web site (I will not link) is pretty disturbing. Check out this excerpt from “prose” he’s published:

If you want to live,
Then respect what we say.
Five men in black
Can lay you away.

No one can stop us.
We’re bigger than all.
We’re ruling you now,
And you’ll answer our call. …

A man that kills babies
And says I don’t care
Has a future awaiting
In hell’s fiery lair. …

And forever and ever
The smoke will arise
From the judges who served
The father of lies.

Just as disturbing is his outright misogyny, in this diatribe labeling any woman using the title “Ms.” to be a whore:

“Ms.” means Miserable Sinner
A fornicatrix by name
She is not married, nor yet still pure,
But a mere harlot, nay a whore.

You can see where he could be the type of person who would go to any lengths to punish women he disapproves of, even if it leads to his web site getting women murdered.

This guy is a predator in pious clothing, and one can only hope that either laws will be amended to outlaw his photography and publication, or at least that the scope of the restraining order is widened to prohibit this activity as well. All I can say is that if I were pro-life, I would be ashamed to have someone like this on my side of the issue.

I was on the CBS News web site and this headline caught my eye–a rather unfortunate choice of wording for the video link. I’m pretty sure that they don’t show actual torture…

Remember Bush’s pledge to “restore honor and dignity to the White House” after eight years of the Republican Party machine in high gear trying to smear Clinton with everything they could think of? Well, Clinton may have been nabbed for having sex with an intern, but what Bush has brought to the White House is anything but “honor” or “dignity.” A president who lies to get us into a war and then loses the war? A president who has used false terror warnings as a political weapon, who betrays the American people in favor of wealthy corporations at every turn, who has dirtied the name and reputation of the United States of America all around the world. The first president to enter the White House with a criminal record, who lied about it repeatedly to the American people before he even took office. This is the man who said he’d “restore” such institutions as “honor,” “honesty,” “integrity,” and “dignity” to the White House.

But then, he never promised that he was a genius, that he would be the one with his hands on the wheel. He said that he would “surround himself with good people and build a strong team.” That was the promise to balance his oafishness, his clear lack of intellect: I may not be smart, but I’m a good judge of character, and the people I choose will do the job right.” Of course, he then surrounded himself with manipulative neocons, witless yes-men, and corrupt cronies. His own vice president, whom Bush allowed to choose himself for the job, swears like a sailor, sells the country out piecemeal to corporations, and betrays one of our own intelligence agents so he can dish out political payback. Bush’s chief political advisor, Karl Rove, a destructive, conniving political hack halfway on his way to prison. These are the “honorable” men he chooses? And does Bush act with honor in regards to them? When it was revealed that Rove had a part in revealing Valerie Plame’s CIA identity, Bush promised that anyone involved would get the boot–then reneged and backtracked, so that apparently Rove will have to be frog-marched in handcuffs out of the White House before Bush will ask him to resign. The one honorable man Bush did hire–Colin Powell–was disregarded and dismissed while he lasted, his integrity abused to spread lies to the international community.

And it goes on. Every once in a while, we get a peek at others Bush allows into his inner circle. Take, for example, Claude Allen (pictured at far left), a “top domestic policy adviser.” Allen resigned a month ago, ostensibly to “spend more time with his family.” What he did not say, and neither did Bush (it could not be more obvious that Bush knew at the time), was that he had been arrested for felony theft. Allen, whom Bush had appointed to handle the Katrina response team at the White House, and who advised Bush closely on domestic issues, was reportedly going to Target and Hecht’s stores in his spare time and stealing thousands of dollars worth of merchandise.

As explained by the police, Allen would go into the store and buy merchandise, then take it out to his car. He would then return to the store with the empty bag, and place new merchandise identical to that he just bought into the bag while placing additional items into his cart. He would then use his prior receipt to “return” the duplicate goods, and then leave the store with the money as well as the other items in his cart, items he did not pay for. If true, this would indicate a serious character flaw in the man, stealing a few thousand dollars from retail stores when the man makes a $161,000 salary in a West Wing office. Bush even tried to make him an Appeals Court judge, possibly on track for a Supreme Court nomination. (Democrats blocked him from taking the seat, however.)

These are the “good” people Bush surrounds himself with. Now, you might say that Bush can’t be held responsible for these people. However, that is exactly what Bush promised he would do. He promised that he would be responsible for the people he chose–and with that promise, he can’t be excused on the grounds that the people around him are incompetent cronies or corrupt thieves.

I recently commented on a spam deluge that hit my site, from a spammer who used a non-filterable style. All the spams had 3-4 links each to non-spam web sites (news, educational, movie web sites), and all had different fake IP addresses, emails, names, and messages. It seemed there was no way to filter the things. None got through and appeared on my site, mind you–but enough got through to moderation that I had to lower my limit of links allowable per comment as the only way I could figure to block the flood from littering my moderation queue. This kind of spam deluge happens every so often, and is probably a test by spammers to see whose blogs are most vulnerable to attack.

In my recent post, I noted that there was no way to filter the things outside of a straight URL count. Only after the flood ended a few days ago did I realize that there actually was a filterable, but I had missed it. It was subtle, and was undoubtedly the manner in which the spammer could search for which blogs fell prey to his little test. It was a bogus HTML attribute. Usually, a link command in HTML goes by the simple form: <A HREF=”address“>. “A” is the link command, and “HREF” introduces the address of the web page being linked to. Sometimes there’s a “TARGET” attribute which directs where the link will open into, as in a new window.

Well, this spammer sneaked an extra tag into one, and only one, of the the links in each spam; the tag was REL=”itsok”. The “REL” tag is supposed to describe the relationship of the link to the page. Some theorized that the “itsok” spam was intended to foul up anti-spam measures. The “REL” attribute in links can hold the value “nofollow,” which causes Google and other search engines to fail to recognize the link and therefore deny the spammer “Google Juice.” The introduction of a fake “rel” attribute might be intended to break the “nofollow” attribute. However, this spam flood only links to legitimate sites, not spam sites, so there’s no point in breaking the “nofollow”–unless, again, it is a test.

But others theorize that this kind of deluge is an attempt to corrupt the spam blacklists. When spam hits blogs, the URLs in the spam get reported to central blacklists that many people draw upon. The theory here is that if enough legitimate sites get entered into the public blacklists, then they will become useless as real sites will be blocked along with the spam sites.

When I did a search on Google Blog Search, I found three other bloggers who had found “itsok” attribute in a November-December spate of attacks. Others have found it as well. A regular Google search will find people talking about the attribute, but it will also reveal all the sites that did not block the spam–which is what the spammer undoubtedly used to beef up their spam lists. Add the word “spam” to the search and you’ll get a more pure list of people talking about the itsok spam.

I originally missed this whole “itsok” thing because my email program (where I see the spam being reported) translates the link code into an actual link, hiding the code. In the future, I’ll be sure to examine the spam much more carefully. Had I known, I could have just added “itsok” to my blacklist and avoided restricting links in comments. Oh well, live and learn.

So the Bush administration screwed up again. They didn’t pay attention to a deal being made that could affect port security, and they got caught with their pants down. You may not think that the UAE controlling the company that controlled the ports would be such a big deal, but this is the bed that Bush made for himself. He painted the scenario of fear, he made terrorism the bad guy, he touted even the thinnest connections of a Middle Eastern country to terrorists as a major threat–and then he approved the sale of U.S. ports to a country which has ties to 9/11.

So then Bush has to posture, because we all know the party line: Bush never makes a mistake. So instead of admitting that he was asleep at the wheel, he has to act like it’s no big deal. So when Democrats in Congress say they’ll try to block the Dubai ports deal, Bush says he’s going to use the veto for the first time in over five years. But the some Congressional Republicans see that this looks bad in the press, and that Bush is taking a major hit on this, and so they start turning against the deal. Soon enough there’s enough opposition to the deal that even a veto would be overridden.

Which means Bush is in a bind: he looks bad to the American people, is on the wrong side of the terrorism issue he himself defined, and then he’ll look weak and ineffective when Congress overrides his only veto. So does he finally admit a mistake? Or does he stand on his principles and back up his initial claim that it’s not a big deal and Congress is doing the wrong thing?

Neither. He goes behind the scenes and begs the UAE to take the initiative and pull out themselves. And so they do.

Politically, it was the best thing for Bush to do. But it does reveal what a shallow, inept, and superficial bunch these guys are. Bush will continue to pay for this, losing approval from his own base. Like I said, it doesn’t matter if you think that foreign control over U.S. ports is a harmless thing. Bush chose to make people afraid of terrorism; he chose to make people see links based upon tenuous evidence; he chose to make this all about perception rather than fact. He made his bed, and now he’s got to sleep in it.

Nitey-nite, George.

For more in the “people can be idiots” vein:

It was pointed out recently that the men who decided to ban abortion in South Dakota had overlooked something: the last time abortion was illegal they didn’t have DNA testing. Which means that preventing abortions, if it works, will create a lot more court orders for child support. Oops. So to compensate, the same self-righteous dicks who want to control women’s reproductive choices are now whining they they don’t have as many choices or as many rights as women do–so men should have the choice to “opt out” of paying child support. But it’s not so bad for the mother, they say–after all, if she can’t afford the baby, she can always give it up for adoption. What generous and fair-minded sweethearts those guys are.

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On a different front: fully half of Americans reject evolution, even as a tool used by God to develop life. They say it happened just like it says in the Bible. Which also means that pi equals three and if you eat shellfish then you’re going straight to hell. Not to mention that the universe, which is constructed to appear as if it has existed for billions of years, and the Earth, complete with billions of years of physical evidence of increasingly-complex life forms including dinosaurs and so forth–it’s all a big hoax perpetrated by God to test our faith. That’s right, the known universe of countless trillions of trillions of stars and planets is nothing more than a massive lie for the benefit of us on Earth, a trick invented by our Creator to see whether you will believe in (a) the infinite, magnificent grandeur of God’s own creation, or (b) a bunch of religious fanatics’ narrow interpretation of a book of legends and parable. Easy choice for the person lacking the reason God gave cement, but who has gobs of blind faith.

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Three college “pranksters” have been arrested for burning nine (possibly ten) churches in Alabama. Apparently, the first few church burnings were “just a joke,” and the others were the joke “getting out of hand.” After the first arsons, the three men lit the other churches on fire to throw investigators off the track. Good thinking.

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What report on morons would be complete without the ones populating our nation’s capital? The House just passed a bill that would strip warning labels off of food. Labels that tell consumers about minor, unimportant stuff, like “this water contains dangerous levels of arsenic,” “the candy you’re about to feed your kid is laden with lead,” or “if you eat this food you could die from an allergic reaction.” That’s right, the tired old bureaucratic minutiae that no one needs, and just breaks up the nice, smooth brand-name art that is packaging design.

The rationale? These warnings are required in some states and not others, which means that corporations which produce toxic products have to go to extra expense to make two versions–one that warns consumers of the dangers, and one that hides these facts from the people who live in states that don’t protect their citizens. Oh, the hardships the corporations must endure!

So to relieve the poor megacorps from such bothersome burdens, your Representatives want to just do away with state-by-state warning labels altogether. Of course, the products in question are, by definition, sold in many states and often nationwide–but your politicians apparently feel that protections some states have had the brains to put into place are not required at the national level. Yet another case of the Congress showing who they serve: no, not you, you idiot. They serve the people who pay them, not the ones who vote for them. Just like when they passed a bankruptcy bill that favored the credit and banking industry and shafted you. Or when they passed legislation that prevented the government from negotiating down prices of medicine, favoring big pharmaceuticals and costing you billions.

But they’re not the dumb ones. The people who vote for them are. The people who have plain evidence of a corrupt government right in front of them, evidence as plain as day that Bush, Cheney, and the GOP are screwing them blind, and yet still vote for them. But then again, this is the age of a faith-based America, an America that believes evolution is a myth, an America that believes the word instead of the world.

I hate to say that Americans who voted for Bush or didn’t vote at all deserve what they’re getting, because all the ones who voted against Bush don’t deserve this, and it’s painful to see any American suffer because too many are just too dumb to pound sand. But taken collectively, the American people are reaping what they have sown.

And the right wingers say that left-wingers are controlling social fascists. Read this story of a woman who worked for a sales and marketing firm in California. She had been working at the company for just three weeks, and had come to meet her boss on a Saturday to do some extra work. They met in a parking lot. Her boss saw a bumper sticker on her car for Air America Radio–and fired her on the spot.

So I turned on CNN today, wondering if it might have any content worth watching. Maybe starting again with Wolf Blitzer was a mistake. I watched the first several minutes of “The Situation Room.” This supposedly “liberal” network in the “liberal” media has a funny way of showing it. In the short time I watched, Blitzer referenced the Democrats twice–and both times he represented them as opportunists, while his reference to Congressional Republicans was respectful and positive.

Blitzer spoke of Congressional Republicans as standing up to Bush on the Dubai ports deal, and only laterally mentioned the election year. But when he spoke of Democrats, Blitzer acted like they were just posturing, and directly stated that they were “trying to take credit” for the failure of the ports deal, as if they deserved none.

Then Blitzer promoed a segment with Hillary Clinton teaming up with Trent Lott to deliver a message. While he said nothing of Lott, he characterized Clinton as doing this to position herself politically–again, making clear the inference that if it’s a Democrat doing something, the motives are purely to gain political advantage.

Darn that liberal media. Will they ever stop?

UPDATE: Here’s the transcript of that show. Here’s what Blitzer said on Clinton and Lott:

Plus, Democrat Hillary Clinton, a liberal, and Republican Trent Lott, a conservative — unlikely allies teaming up for a cause. We’re going to tell you what they want and why Senator Clinton is positioning herself — at least trying to position herself — as a centrist, new Democrat again.

See? If you read down the transcript, you’ll see that the “Clinton is positioning herself for a run for president” aspect to the story is only tangential–Blitzer only refers to it quickly before they go to the actual story, which is what Clinton and Lott wanted to talk about. But Blitzer kept selling the “Clinton is being political” angle as if it were the main focus of the story.

UPDATE #2: Via TPM, yet another example of the “left-leaning” CNN using language outrageously tilted to the right; see the graphic below:

I’m not including a link because this page, as is, will be gone in a matter of hours. But get a load of the headline: “Dems Indicted”? The word “indicted” refers to criminal charges being filed. To use it in the context of a Republican political smear being made is outrageous. This is a perfect example of what I’ve commented on many times before–headlines and other references on CNN and other news outlets commonly refer to actions made by Democrats as being politically motivated, while similar or even more outrageously political actions by Republicans are commonly reported in a far more favorable fashion. Had this been Howard Dean attacking Frist and Lott, the headline would have been something more like “Dems Make Attack on Republicans; Striving for Political Advantage.” But since it’s a Republican attacking Dems, the headline is preposterously favorable and cooperative to the GOP attack, making it sound like the Democrats are guilty of a crime–which is exactly what Mehlman was shooting for. Even though the subtitle to the headline above is somewhat less deceptive, it is still heavily slanted towards the GOP message.

Not to mention the rather strong attention being paid to what is, after all, just an early campaign publicity stunt. When was the last time any major media outlet put, as its banner headline, anything along the lines of: “McCain, Frist Indicted: Democrats charge that likely Republican candidates for president are unfit and incompetent.” Can’t recall? Hell, CNN didn’t give Howard Dean this kind of favorable spin when Dean was taking about actual criminal indictments of Republicans. I rest my case.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: liberal media, my ass. The media bias is clearly to the right.

If you recall, I recently posted on how shallow and uninformed most reporting is when it comes to Mac technical issues, and recent articles have borne out this view. A Swedish Mac enthusiast issued a challenge to see if anyone could hack in to the system from the outside and cause any damage. One user did so within 30 minutes, leading to articles like this one which decried the Mac a security sieve that could be easily attacked. There was a huge flurry of stories and again, the Mac’s reputation as a secure system appeared to be shot down.

But like with the “virus” outbreak, the reports turned out to be a load of bull, with the description “overblown” being an understatement. The articles made it sound like anyone could hack into your Mac via the Internet with ease. It turns out that the Swedish tester allowed people joining the challenge to access via a local access account–essentially, he granted everyone internal access, just as if they were sitting at the computer itself. This is like opening all the doors to your house and then expressing amazement at how easily burglars you invite in can carry off your TV set. What’s more, the challenge was to access a server, which is more vulnerable than a common consumer machine.

So the University of Wisconsin, which originally questioned the veracity of the initial contest, set up their own challenge. They hooked up the same computer, also as a server, to a high-speed Internet connection, and left it there for 38 hours with an open call for people to try to hack it. This time, they did not allow local access, representing a much more realistic environment. There were a huge number of attempts, but no one was successful.

So much for the “Mac is not secure” twaddle. If you think the Mac is an insecure platform because of malware or hacking, please take note that both flurries of reports to that effect were bogus. There are no Mac viruses, malware has been shown possible but does not yet exist (and the proofs of concept were lame to boot), and your Mac is not open to hacking from the outside–unless you work actively to allow people access.

Got that?

I have, in the past, joked wryly about how America’s new anti-terror laws are becoming as draconian as the Japanese system can be. But it seems like Japan might be changing in turn to become as oppressive in some ways as America is–as if the two countries are in a race to see who can blunt freedoms and become more of a police state faster.

In the U.S., new laws allow for people to be arrested without charges, held for an indefinite period of time, questioned without access to an attorney, and even tortured (though they’re usually sent overseas for the last). These somewhat resemble Japanese conditions that have existed for some time; in Japan, you can be arrested and held without charges and no access to an attorney for 48 or 72 hours, and then held for another 20 days without formal charges against you. During that time, you can be questioned incessantly, sometimes even denied food or restroom privileges, and stories of people being beaten are widespread. If the police want to keep you for longer, they can “release” and then re-arrest you and then keep you for another 22-23 days. This period is the cause of many of Japan’s famed forced confessions, which sent many innocent Japanese to prison for decades. So when the U.S. started allowing stuff like this, I thought that it was catching up with Japan.

But Japan, it seems, is not to be outdone; it is now taking on some American anti-democratic techniques. For example, in the U.S., many have been arrested for being critical of Bush, Cheney, or the administration in general, often times for something as innocuous as a t-shirt. People have been arrested on parade routes for nothing more than carrying signs that even might be anti-Bush. Cindy Sheehan was dragged out of the State of the Union address recently and arrested for her t-shirt. The charges? Usually something bogus, like disturbing the peace or trespassing. In the U.S., these charges are usually dropped after the evil t-shirt wearer has been deprived of their ability to speak freely, after the damage is done. And these laws are always enforced selectively, only arresting and detaining those who disagree with Bush, while supporters with approving t-shirts and signs occupying the same public space are never “disturbing the peace” or “trespassing.”

So how is this manifesting itself in Japan? Anti-military-deployment protests. Prime Minister Koizumi has sent Japanese soldiers to a war zone for the first time since WWII, a move opposed by 71% of Japanese people, though not protested so much–but what protests there have been have been reacted to aggressively. Koizumi and the conservatives have been extremely sensitive about this, as it represents a tentative new step in violation of article 9 of the Japanese constitution. So when three Japanese civilians were kidnaped in Iraq while doing humanitarian work, they were not hailed as heroes or praised for their sacrifice. Instead, Koizumi and his people viciously attacked them, made them pariahs in Japan for causing the country “shame.” The politicians vilified them, spread rumors about crimes they committed as youths, even sicced the ultra-nationalists on the poor trio as they returned to Japan after their harrowing ordeal–then billed them for air fare and medical expenses.

So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the Japanese government acts with open hostility to those who protest the Iraq deployment. A group called Tento Mura (named after tent villages that sprang up in anti-military protests in the early 70’s) distributed fliers in early 2004 to a housing complex in Tachikawa where families of Japan SDF (Self-Defense Forces, the Japanese military) personnel live. The fliers urged the SDF members and their families to oppose the SDF deployment to Iraq.

Technically, the protesters were trespassing; while the complex is open and unguarded, there is a sign prohibiting unauthorized access. However, no one pays attention to it. Like all other apartment buildings in Japan, the complex is visited daily by many part-time workers paid to stuff mailboxes with ads for pizza, real estate, and escort services, amongst other things (in Japan, it’s legal for anyone to put things in your mailbox). The protesters as well had visited the complex many times over the years. But when they tried to oppose the Iraq deployment, they were arrested for trespassing. The difference was not the crime committed compared to that committed by others, but in the message they were delivering. People are always annoyed by the pollution of their mailboxes with ads–but the people who deliver the ads at the SDF complex are never arrested for trespassing. (I wish they were in my building!)

But it gets worse: after being arrested, they were then detained for 75 days on the ground that the police “needed more information,” despite the fact that the protesters had confessed to all charges and all information was fully understood. The detention was purely for harassment, driven home by grueling 5-hour interrogation sessions. The police also confiscated the defendants’ computer, searched their homes, and notified their workplaces, where the protesters were suspended and docked pay beyond the time lost while incarcerated. The state aggressively prosecuted the case, demanding six months imprisonment, and when a lower court dismissed the case on the grounds that it was politically motivated, the state spent a great deal of money appealing the case. The Tokyo High Court later reversed the lower court, completely dismissing any consideration of freedom of speech.

Priests have also been arrested for the heinous crime of distributing fliers. One priest was distributing anti-war fliers outside an air base in Okinawa, completely legally. The police stopped him and handcuffed him to their patrol car–and then started to drive off with the priest still handcuffed to the vehicle. When the priest objected, he was arrested for police obstruction and held for 21 days.

And if arresting protesters on bogus charges isn’t Bush-like enough, Japan is going to start photographing and fingerprinting all non-Japanese who visit or live in the country. Want to come over for a visit? Better ink up your index finger first. But the real impact of this is that Koreans living in Japan, Koreans who were born and raised here and are Japanese all except for the ancestry and citizenship (refused on principle, usually as their grandparents were brought here as forced labor), they will be fingerprinted yet again. They used to be fingerprinted before, but fought for decades to have that stopped, and finally, just a few years ago, were successful. The fingerprinting stopped–but not for long, as it seems that Japan’s “anti-terror” movement is now a convenient excuse for the conservatives here to reinstate the fingerprinting, which brands generational Koreans in Japan as outsiders and makes them feel like criminals.

In short, the War on Terror™ is used as a political tool for social regression and oppression not just in the U.S., but in Japan as well.

In the past, I’ve blogged on many of the shows I’ve been watching; I wrote about The Simpsons, The West Wing, Boston Legal, the Stargate series, and 24; then about Galactica, then Commander in Chief and Boston Legal again, then on The 4400 and Lost, and finally on Invasion and Threshold. Two of those series, Commander in Chief and Threshold, have been cancelled; CinC not regrettably (it had devolved into a fluffy she-always-wins/family-melodrama), and Threshold more regrettably (though it was becoming a more dull adventure-of-the-week show, it had good characters and some promise). The West Wing is also going off the air, though maybe it’s time to. When Sorkin left, things sagged; though the show regained some of its bounce, it was turning into something it had not started out to be, and by necessity would have had to get a mostly-new cast anyway. At least in its final season, it did what I wished it did three years ago but glossed over: gone into the mechanics of a presidential election, in detail. And in its final season, it has done that admirably.

At a time when a lot of the shows I had liked went off the air, I thought I wouldn’t have as much to watch–but more and more good shows seem to be popping up all over the place. More recently, I’ve picked up House M.D., Surface, and My Name Is Earl.

House, M.D. is a new medical-detective show, in a way similar to CSI in that it searches for scientific evidence where people are trying to hide things. You get the same zoom-into-the-body-organ close-up gross-out effects, but instead of suspects, they have symptoms, and instead of solving a murder, they cure a disease or other illness. And of course, the characters are different, and in this series, there is no questioning that Hugh Laurie is the star. His character is critically flawed but highly entertaining to watch. Brilliant, cruel, bitingly sarcastic and caustic, but with a chewy chocolate center. The character, Dr. Gregory House, is a diagnostician who takes the cases that baffle other doctors. He is a tortured, miserable man who in a way covets his misery. Some years earlier, he suffered a clot in his leg that killed his muscle tissue, leaving him limping on a cane and in constant, severe pain. He treats the pain with Vicodin, which kills his pain but leaves him an addict (one of his trademarks is popping a pill almost constantly). His pain, misery, and anger resulted in the woman he (still) loves leaving him, adding to his grief. He will cut down anyone he sees as deserving (almost everyone) without mercy, slashing with insults and mocking irony, including his patients, whom he often calls “idiots” to their faces, when he’s not avoiding them like the plague. His credo is “everyone lies,” referring to the fact that patients always, through embarrassment, fear, or some other base reason, hide critical information which is key to solving the medical mystery.

House is assisted by three physicians, neurologist Foreman, immunologist Cameron, and intensevist (??) Chase, whom he regularly bullies and orders around, but allows them to have their best at him when they can. The show begins with some illness hitting someone in the teaser (there is always a red herring to keep you guessing, but that schtick gets old fast), and then House and his staff write the symptoms on the whiteboard, throw around possible causes, decide the initial testing, and the game is afoot. From there, they typically make several wrong diagnoses, but eventually, when some critical clue falls into place, they solve the dilemma. Usually the patient is cured, but sometimes at a price (Cuddy’s gardener lost a hand), and sometimes they lose the patient (as with the woman who lost her family then got rabies from a bat). House himself will inevitably violate one or two ethics rules, royally piss off half the people around him, and then deal with inane patients in the teaching hospital’s free clinic, when he can’t hide somewhere watching his soaps.

Along the way, we usually get input from Cuddy, the hospital administrator who fights to protect House from himself, despite his representing a monetary loss for the hospital, while keeping on his back about doing all his duties, especially clinic work. Then there’s Wilson, House’s only real friend, an oncologist who seems warm and innocent, but has his own skeletons in his closet and is inured to House’s abrasive ways.

You might wonder how one could like the main character, but Laurie pulls it off magnificently, knowing exactly how far to take the character, yet still maintain humanity and the hint of compassion behind his callous and uncaring exterior. And, in a twist that surprised me, Laurie is very much British; he does a perfect American accent on the show, enough to fool the producer when he first saw Laurie’s audition tape.

On the other hand, like CSI, this show takes artistic license with reality, causing real doctors some grief about how it will change the perception of doctors and medicine. Nevertheless, House, M.D. is a promising new show; let’s hope it can maintain and even grow on what it has established.

Surface caught me by surprise. I’d thought I was watching all the new alien-invasion series (the other two being Threshold and Invasion), but there it was. It just ended its 15-episode first season (yeah, I wondered at that number as well), and it promises some pretty interesting stuff in the future.

Lake Bell plays Laura Daughtery, an oceanographer who while investigating a volcanic vent on the ocean floor, stumbles upon a new, large vertebrate, a new ocean species no one has ever seen before–or so she thought. Soon, she finds herself under attack from what seems to be a shadowy branch of the government, with agent Davis Lee (Ian Anthony Dale) trying to keep her quiet about her discovery. She soon meets up with the character Richard Connelly, whose brother was dragged to the sea bottom and presumably killed by one of the giant creatures. He begins to have visions, leaves his wife and two daughters, and winds up chasing the mystery around the country with Daughtery. Meanwhile, dorky young teen outcast Miles Bennett finds a cache of mysterious eggs in the sea and takes one home to hatch. When it does, he and his friend name the “lizard” Nimrod and raise the little tyke–only slowly realizing that it is not a known sea creature, as it shows the ability to create electric shocks to kill its prey. Eventually, Nim and his gigantic cousins stop being a secret; Miles starts seeing a quirky and cool girl named Savannah, whose father runs the local aquarium where Miles and Nim take up temporary residence.

Throughout the first season, we slowly see a mystery begin to unravel [moderate spoiler warning!] as we discover that the species is not the natural lost-species we thought, and that the organization hunting down Daughtery is not working for the government, but is completely independent–and possessed of some highly advanced technology it developed secretly over many decades. Now, that organization seems to have almost James-Bondian aspirations, with the new Nim-species acting as its agents. We last see the secret organization heading off on a subterranean railway to the Mariana Trench (from the Carolinas?) as a giant tidal wave crashes into the east coast of the United States.

The series does a good job of making fairly credible what should be a rather incredible plot line–giant sea monsters, a boy and his pet alien, a secret conspiracy to destroy the world, and more. You get caught up enough in the story and the mystery that you allow disbelief to be suspended sufficiently to accept it all. But one of the things I like about the series is that by the end of the first season, the world is very much changed–something that few TV shows are willing to do. Most shows that have incredible plots make it so that no one but the core cast know about it, the rest of the world remaining blissfully ignorant, either to serve the conspiracy or to ‘protect’ them from panic. I like the idea of a show that changes everything, and then runs with it–kind of like The 4400 also does. But there are times when you start to gag at the silliness–like when Miles visits the corpse of Nim, on ice, and Nim comes back to life–a scene stolen straight from E.T., complete with the boy and the alien having a sympathetic psychic link.

And yet, I really like the show, and can’t wait for season two to begin–probably next September, possibly in the summer–though the decision about picking up the show for a second season won’t be made until May. In an interesting (but not really spoiler-ish) twist, the two character groups of the show–Laura and Richard, Miles and Savannah–meet by chance in the last few minutes of the season finale, leaving a lot to be explored between the new character dynamic, made up of four strangers thrown together like a nuclear family, complete with pet lizard. Not to mention a whole new world, and a still mostly-unexplained mystery. But the nice thing about this show is that you don’t feel like the writers are holding back information and doling it out with an eyedropper (like Lost or The X-Files)–things develop faster on this show, often in a more satisfying manner. Should be interesting.

And then there’s My Name Is Earl, a half-hour comedy about a bad guy gone good. Earl, played by Jason Lee, is a dumb, low-life criminal who discovers karma. He steals, hurts people, commits crimes at will–and his life sucks. One day, he buys a scratch-off lottery ticket and wins a $100,000 prize–and then is promptly hit by a car, losing the ticket and landing him in the hospital. While recovering, he sees Carson Daly on TV talking about karma (he assumes Daly discovered the concept) and realizes that karma explains why his life is so bad. He figures that if he keeps on going this way, karma is gonna kill him, so he writes a list of every bad thing he’s done in his life. The idea is that if he can right all his wrongs, things will go well for him.

In the show, karma is practically a character in its own right, having a strong and immediate effect, guiding Earl down the right path. It starts (when Earl vows to set things right) by depositing the wind-blown $100,000 lottery ticket at Earl’s feet, Forrest Gump-style. Armed with the cash, Earl and his (even more) dim-witted brother Randy begin to work through Earl’s list, one at a time, righting wrongs such as “stole car from one-legged woman,” “cost dad the election,” “stole beer from a golfer,” and “didn’t pay taxes.” Other recurring characters include Earl’s gold-digging slut ex-wife Joy whom Earl married while on a drunken binge, and Joy’s new husband, the ever-cool-with-life Darnell, a.k.a. “Crab Man.” Also along for the ride is the sexy Catalina, housekeeper at the motel where Earl and Randy now live.

It’s a great set-up, and should keep the show in concepts for the next many years (there are more than 300 items on the list, and Earl sometimes has to add new ones). The show is hilarious, often spilling out into the absurd, and while the characters are often nasty, selfish and mean, Earl’s new-found moral center keeps them all in check. It doesn’t hurt the comedic effect that they’re all dumb as cement.

One final show of note, though not a new one: Real Time with Bill Maher is back on, repeating its new-since-last-year double-set of a dozen shows each. This set is February to May, the second coming in August to November. The show, kind of like the deluxe cable version of Maher’s Politically Incorrect (now with swear words!), is still usually entertaining. Unfortunately, it suffers all too much from a descent into base punditry, especially when some talking-head guest has a loud mouth and a rehearsed set of talking points. Maher never does much research and often combats the pundit with nothing more than “that just sounds wrong.” Another sand-trap is when the comic-relief guest takes over the show with an irrelevant routine; maybe a little funny at first, it soon derails the rest of the show. And Maher himself will, once in a while, depart from his Libertarian core and run off on some strange tangent that will run for weeks until Maher quietly gives up on it, like giving Bush credit for bravely investing on Democracy in Iraq, or believing that it’s a good thing that the NSA is spying on Americans without warrants because he lives close to the L.A. ports and is worried about being attacked.

That said, when the show works, it works well. If the guests balance right, the show can be funny, entertaining, and sometimes educational (though not often for the latter). Maher often has good guests, though he has a strange caustic-attack combined with I’ll-let-you-get-away-with-selling-your-line-of-BS approach with some of the more radical guests. And Maher’s “New Rules” segment is more often entertaining as not, proportionally in contrast with his middle-of-the-show funny-photo mock-up schtick which bombs more than it hits. So the show is hit-and-miss, but hits enough to keep me watching.

For what must be the third or fourth time, this site is being barraged by tons of spam, about 30-50 a day all this week, in the form of fake glowing reviews of the site with three or more links to generic news, movie, and educational web sites that are of course unconnected to the spammer. These weird spam messages are of no use to the spammer, as they don’t link back to the spammer’s site–they just link to news sites like The Dallas News, The Globe and Mail, the BBC, to web sites for major movie releases, or for universities. So you’ve got to wonder what the spammer is up to. They get nothing from it–with the possible exception of massively annoying the blogger. I suppose it could be a form of test to see what kind of spam will get through the filters–generate huge amounts of spam and then check to see if any of it sticks. Stupid, but then it’s an automated program and likely costs the spammer next to nothing.

The spam is also hard on unprotected bloggers, because it can’t be easily filtered. Each email has a different (faked) IP address, a different (fake) email address, a differently-worded message, and different links to different legitimate sites. Nothing for some filters to grab onto. But not a problem here–I use SpamLookup, which has a great deal of flexibility in blocking blog comments that fit a number of different profiles. In this case, I adjusted the number of allowable links down to two per comment (it had been set at 3, which is why I noticed the spam attack in the first place). Presto, all the spam is blocked and I don’t even see it. In a week, I’ll check the spam logs to see if it’s still coming in, and if it has stopped, I’ll reset the filters to the higher limit in consideration of my guests.

If you use a Moveable Type blog, use SpamLookup. A very nice tool. I still use MT-Blacklist–but will probably upgrade to MT 3.2 soon, which Jay Allen claims will do a far better job of eliminating comment and trackback spam.