Oops. Turns out Scooter Libby lied. Who’da thunk?

Conservatives have been trying to convince us that anyone and everyone blew Valerie Plame’s cover other than someone in the White House. The press blew her cover. Libby didn’t tell the press, the press told Libby. No? OK, then Joe Wilson blew her cover. Plame blew her own cover. And so on. But now we’ve learned something more important: Libby got Plame’s identity from Dick Cheney, and Cheney got it from George Tenet, director of the C.I.A.

Now think about that. It was exactly the time when Cheney was asking for information on Wilson because Wilson was challenging Bush’s Niger claim, and a month before Bob Novak made Plame’s C.I.A. status public. George Tenet just “happened” to mention to Cheney that Wilson’s wife was an undercover C.I.A. agent, then Cheney “happened” to mention it to his chief of staff, Libby, who then “happened” to mention it to a half dozen reporters. Um, yeah.

Now, there’s no proof that either Cheney or Libby knew that Plame was undercover and her status was classified. There’s no proof that Cheney or Libby sought to distribute the information in order to attack Wilson and ruin his wife’s career. And there’s no proof that Hillary Clinton is considering a run for the White House in 2008. But in all three cases, it is glaringly obvious that what appears to be the case is without any doubt whatsoever actually the case.

But Ness got Capone on tax evasion, and Fitzgerald (whose straight-shooter status is strong and firm) appears to at the very least have Libby on perjury. I’ll go for that, if we can’t nail them on the traitorous crimes we just as surely know they committed.

And while this new information may not provide prosecutable evidence against Cheney, it sure pulls aside the curtain and leaves little doubt that he was deeply involved, and the whole idea was to smear Wilson and anyone else who got in the way.

One thing’s for sure, it will be very interesting to see what Fitzgerald comes out with this week.

Just a few more photos from the past of interesting English spotted in Japan. The two main entries have to do with bargain sales in Japan. Here, the shopkeepers thing in terms of how much they take off the normal prices; 10% off, 20% off, and so on. So, naturally, this is the kind of sale they sometimes have:

It seems that “off” is the “big” word. Literally:

I assume they are selling clothes. But I didn’t check, just in case. Not that I would have really turned down a chance to see the “Ladies’ Big Off” on the first floor, but they were closed.

This last one doesn’t really fit into today’s category, but serves as a kind of similar coda with last week’s “Keep the Left” direction photo. From Kobe, many years ago:

And in case anyone has forgotten about Iraq amongst all the Miers and Plame talk, things are not going at all smoothly in the wake of the election–American soldiers are being killed at the highest rate in almost a year, with many of those casualties coming in the last week after the vote. 1,996 Americans have now been killed in Iraq.

In case you still had any idea that Harriet Miers is in any way qualified to be a Supreme Court justice, read this article from the L.A. Times. The article describes the reception to Miers’ recent submission to a standard questionnaire, in particular an answer she gave regarding the Equal Protection Clause. Miers claimed that while on the Dallas City Council, “the council had to be sure to comply with the proportional representation requirement of the Equal Protection Clause.”

One small hitch: the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that proportional representation does not apply to the Equal Protection Clause.

I can imagine right-wingers will try to shrug this off as a minor slip. However, this is not an informal quiz. Even on a regular job resume, an applicant’s failure to correctly describe basic qualities of the position would greatly impress the employer: in something as serious to an individual as a resume, any slip-up is considered significant. If I were to apply for a position at a university as a Writing professor and had a glaring grammatical error in my resume, that alone would likely disqualify me, on the grounds that I should have thoroughly checked that one of all documents. And this is Miers’ application to become a justice on the Supreme Court. If she can’t get even the most basic question right on something as vital as this, how can we possibly see her as qualified?

Legal experts agree; New York University law professor Burt Neuborne said, “If a first-year law student wrote that and submitted it in class, I would send it back and say it was unacceptable.” Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan agreed, saying that “Any halfway competent junior lawyer could have checked the questionnaire and said it cannot go out like that. I find it shocking,” adding that it almost seemed like the White House was setting Miers up.

The White House, however, tried to cover up her mess, saying that Miers’ wording is “amenable to different meanings,” and that her “experience” was more important than her “terminology,” which is Washington weasel-wording at best.

At some point, Bush is going to have to face the fact that Miers is a lost cause, and will only do more damage than good. With indictments likely forthcoming against senior White House officials in the Valerie Plame case in the next few weeks, certainly having Miers self-destruct in front of Congress is the last thing they’ll want to have. Not that I’m complaining, of course, and it’s easy to give advice when Bush is facing a more or less lose-lose proposition, as withdrawing Miers would be damaging as well. But this is a time when in complete honesty I can say that Bush would be better off cutting his losses and naming someone well-qualified and right-of-center.

[Update: One day later, it’s not getting any better.]

But I’d still be happy watching the Bush administration continue its downward spiral. They certainly can’t count on Congressional Republicans much: too many of them are busily setting themselves up contrary to the administration in light of its massive unpopularity right now. Not that that will help them very much, with so many of their own mired in scandal and facing indictments. And many Republicans not even up for re-election are getting tough on Bush: on Monday, Brent Scowcroft, former Bush 41 National Security Advisor, is reportedly going to rip Bush a new one.

But I am withholding my schadenfreude for the moment; when these things result in Republicans losing an election and the power they now hold, then I’ll celebrate.

Crap. It had to happen sometime, with winter not too far off. Already I’ve got a headache with the new Yaki-imo (hot sweet-potato) seller, who has a new loudspeaker on his truck and blares away at volumes deafening even by politicians’ standards, stopping for three minutes right outside my window every time he comes by. No one buys from him, but he comes always nonetheless.

But the kerosene seller, while projecting less volume, is even more annoying. The tune the truck plays is a god-awful, mind-numbing abomination of single-electronic-note “musical” dreck. But what makes it worse is the winding path it takes; while the yaki-imo seller passes through with only one stop, the kerosene truck drives at walking speed through every last driveway in the entire complex. Worse, people buy from the truck, which then stops for a few minutes, never turning off the tune. It can be a half hour before the truck is gone, and even then you can’t be sure–it seems to have left at times, but really it was behind a building and the noise was only temporarily blocked, and then it comes back out again.

At the very least, why can’t these people choose some sound that isn’t so jarringly, stupefyingly odious? How about some nice shamisen music? Something like that, which makes a nice background sound, and is easily heard and distinguished? Why do these loudspeaker trucks have to use the worst possible music–as if blaring noise all the time itself isn’t bad enough?

Boy, the appearance of this moon almost freaks me out. I mean, it almost looks like a diseased, pockmarked vegetable pod split open rather than a moon of majestic Saturn. This photo of Hyperion courtesy of the NASA Cassini orbiter probe, taken Sept. 26, 2005 while 62,000 kilometers from the moon. Click on the image below for a larger (1024-pixel-square) version of the photo.

This raw, unprocessed photo from a few days ago, meanwhile, looks like something right out of a science fiction movie: the small moon Prometheus hovering just above Saturn’s ring plane, while another moon (Dione?) passing in front of what I assume is Titan (again, click for the larger image):

I love this stuff.

The Republicans would like little more than to smack down Hillary Clinton, and the best way to do that would be to defeat her in next year’s senatorial election. However, there’s a little snag: the Republican candidate, Jeanine Pirro.

First, when she announced her candidacy, she made a major gaffe. While giving a prepared speech in which she attempted to savage Hillary, she lost page ten of her speech. Now, Bill Clinton gave his first State of the Union address off the top of his head when his TelePrompTer showed the wrong speech, and nobody even noticed; any good politician should be ready to wing it in cases like this. Not Pirro. She finished the text on page nine with the words “Hillary Clinton…” and then spent 32 seconds (Quicktime video) trying to find page ten. Not exactly your standard electrifying, crowd-charging, go-getter kind of political sex appeal you might be looking for when opening your campaign.

More recently, Pirro has shown she is unable to raise enough money–while Clinton raised more than $5 million in the past three months, Pirro raised less than a tenth of that over the past two months. And maybe it has to do with her mailing list, which is out of date: she sent out a fundraising letter, asking for funds to unseat Hillary Clinton… and a copy was sent to Hillary Clinton. Not only that, it was sent to Hillary Clinton at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Either that’s out of date, or it’s ironically prescient. The letter even had the special computer-generated insert-recipient’s-name-here function, and read: “But today, Hillary, I need to know if I can count on you to stand by my side in my campaign against Hillary Rodham Clinton.”

When Hillary didn’t send a check, Pirro got a bit of money elsewhere–like $1,750 from Salvatore Promuto, accused in an anti-trust investigation in trash hauling; $4,200 (the maximum allowed contribution) from a company owned by Robert F. Ferrucci, accused of bribery; as well as several other close friends of Pirro’s husband, many of whom gave the maximum amount. And yes, her husband Al Pirro was convicted on 66 counts of tax fraud in 2001. In short, a large chunk of the small amount Pirro has raised comes from her husband’s business connections, many of whom have alleged mob affiliations. Nor has she done well with money in general–she used three full-time police officers as drivers and bodyguards, paying them a great deal in overtime for political events without reimbursing the county, at a time when money was so tight that six prosecutors were laid off.

And now Pirro has put her foot in her mouth with her latest charge: that New York Democrats want nothing more than to see violent sex offenders molesting children and murdering women. Yeah, that’s right–I think that was on the Democratic party platform, in fact! Yeah, that’s the ticket! Why, I was telling that to my wife, Morgan Fairchild, just the other day! (Apologies to Jon Lovitz.)

Now, Pirro’s campaign manager is claiming that her words were “taken out of context.” The quote was: “That’s a difference between Democrats and Republicans – we don’t want them next door molesting children and murdering women.” Now, I could not find the full text of her statement, but it’s kind of hard to see how that could be taken out of context, unless the words she spoke just before were “I would never say something like….” Which I doubt.

In short, Pirro is doing just fine. From Hillary’s point of view, of course. From the Republican party’s point of view, she’s a disaster and an embarrassment. And she might be the best thing to give Hillary a landslide and propel her on to the White House. At which time, maybe she can respond to that fundraising letter.

It’s getting late and I have to give midterm exams tomorrow, so I won’t say much. But I will say that I am not disappointed that I went ahead and bought my Powerbook when I did, four months ago. The new upgrades that came out just a few hours ago are not really much to write home about. They have higher-resolution displays (1440 x 960 on the 15-inch, as opposed to my 1280 x 854, for example) which are supposed to be brighter; they allegedly have a longer battery life, but these claims are always highly questionable, no matter who makes the computers; and they have made the optical Superdrive standard for all Powerbooks, which just means the lowly 12-incher now has one, too.

Aside from that: pretty much nothing. No processor upgrade, not even the smallest speed bump. Essentially, they improved the display and juiced up the battery a little. Ho-hum. Apparently they couldn’t get squat from IBM for the last of the G4 PowerPC Powerbooks.

The Power Macs, on the other hand, have what may be a more significant upgrade: dual-core CPUs. The CPU clock speeds also remain the same, like in the Powerbook, but the dual core has got to count for something. Already, the G5 performs very well, hertz for hertz, compared to Pentiums; a dual-core, dual-processor “Quad” Power Mac will likely be an impressive beast. 4 MB of L2 cache, yikes. Of course, the price matches the hardware: $3,300 for the top-of-the-line Power Mac Quad, and that’s before shelling out at least $300 for at least another 2 GB of RAM (Apple’s 512 MB included is clearly not intended to be enough for anyone–it’s a given people will add RAM by the gigabytes).

But hey, I shelled out that much on my last Powerbook, the Titanium, three and a half years ago. If I did not need a portable for work and could spend the money for a home computer, this one would not in the least be a disappointment for me. It’d certainly make my Powerbook’s single-core single-G4 CPU look, well, pathetic. Not that I’m complaining. And frankly, I wouldn’t use the speed and power enough to justify going that far. But raw CPU power for a computer geek is like raw engine power for a car geek. It’s just so cool to have.

I was just wrapping up things at the office when we all felt a strong, long swaying quake. The swaying seemed to indicate it was distant, and so it was–and it was strong, a Magnitude 6.2 on the Richter scale, located about 40 km off the coast of Chiba and Ibaraki, about 140 km distant from central Tokyo, where I am now. Looks like it was a “4” or so in Tokyo.

Update: turns out it was a 6.5, and the damage was minimal. There have been quite a few medium-sized quakes in the recent past, prompting me to wonder: does an increase in the number of quakes mean that pressure on tectonic plates is being relieved, increased, or is not being affected one way or the other? Are these smaller quakes alleviating pressure that would otherwise be released all at once in The Big One? Or are they precursors to The Big One? Or am I just putting too much into all this?

I recently reported on Apple’s increase in market share, which has been qualified since then: Apple’s increase was 30%, not 50% (Apple increased sales by about 45% as the market as a whole saw an increase of 17%). Apple’s market share has increased from 3.3% to 4.3%. This may seem small, but even beyond the fact that many individual PC makers would like that kind of market share, the increase has significance.

This is particularly significant considering something that nobody seems to be mentioning now: just a few months ago, people were predicting the Mac’s doom because Jobs announced that Apple was switching to Intel one year later. The idea was that Jobs had gaffed into an Osborne Effect in that no one would want to buy Apple computers until the new model came out, thus sending Mac sales into the toilet. Obviously this didn’t happen–in fact, the opposite was the result.

Add to that the fact that Apple has now and has traditionally held the top spot in customer satisfaction, often scoring way higher than any other maker.

And now we’re getting Apple’s third new-product-fest in six weeks tomorrow, where new high-end Power Mac and Powerbook models are expected to be announced (the last ones before the Mactels come, according to Apple’s standard 9-month product cycle)–and there may be another “one more thing” surprise, as Apple has the biggest exhibitor’s space at the PhotoPlus Expo in New York. No one is sure what Apple is planning to release, though the venue suggests it may be a digital camera of some type (Apple not-so-successfully marketed a QuickTake camera years back), or perhaps new photo-editing software (biting the hand of Adobe which so well feeds the Mac?).

So many people have written Apple’s obituary so many times, so consistently over the years that it has become a bit of a running gag. Who’ll be next?

This is one of those things that many people don’t have a name for, and so different people who have a name for it tend to call it different things. I first heard it described as “ice cream headache” on Roseanne, and years later as “brain freeze” in the movie Shallow Hal. A colleague gave the name “chill brains.” I asked many Japanese people, and all immediately reported that there was no specific name for it in the Japanese language.

According to doctors, this is caused not by chilled blood in the throat traveling behind the eyes, but rather by the contact of cold substances against the roof of the mouth; nerves there signal for the blood vessels in the head to dilate, causing the headache.

So what do you call it?

You really should read the article by Dr. Hulihan, if for no other reason than to see a professor say things like “It would be of interest to determine whether antimigraine drugs that modulate serotonergic pathways have any effect on ice cream headache.”

Simply out of curiosity, why are half of all Chinese-American women named “Michelle,” and most of the other half named “Catherine”? Just wondering, having noticed.

I’ve been promising this for a while, and didn’t get around to it until now. Here is a quick rundown of the better birding spots I’ve come across in the Tokyo Area.

Bayside

In geographical order, from east to west:

Toyko Port Wild Bird Park (東京港野鳥公園), a.k.a. Oi Wild Bird Park: Located near Haneda Airport, this park features both freshwater and saltwater/mudflat environs. There is a visitor’s center (air conditioned in summer), and many small scopes for the visitors to use. The saltwater mud flats can be viewed from the visitors center or from two blinds, and a great variety of birds visit there. Another blind overlooks a freshwater lake and marsh that attracts grebes and ducks as well as swallows and kingfishers. All of this is on the east side, beyond the admission building. Opposite that, on the west side, are a few small gardens, trees, and a freshwater lake, but I have seen few if any interesting birds there. I have been told alternately that low tide and high tide are best–low tide because the birds come in at that time, and high tide because the birds are all out on the bay at low tide and this is higher ground.

Admission is ¥300, not much at all, and you are given an English-language pamphlet with good illustrations as well as an English checklist. Access by train is from the Ryutsu Center station on the Monorail, third stop out from Hamamatsu-cho, which can be reached from the Yamanote Line. Vehicle access is on Kan-Nana Blvd., stay to the left after you pass Route 357. Here is the location on Google Maps.

Kasai Rinkai Park (葛西臨海公園): The east side of this park is dedicated to a bird sanctuary and viewing area with a good number of blinds. There is an open viewing structure in the middle, and a walkway dividing the two water areas. The “lower lake” area, on the east side (not the one with the cormorants) has mud flats and some excellent viewing spots, one in particular favored by birders, on the north side. A good many waterbirds can be seen here (including less-common sandpipers, stilts, even curlews), and in the winter, they say it is overflowing with ducks.

There is no admission, so no literature (as is the case with most parks). Access by train is by the Keiyo Line (not the Keio Line), five stops out of Tokyo, or by car off of Route 357. It’s right across from Tokyo Disneyland. Here is the location on Google Maps. If you look at the map, you’ll see the east side lake is shaped like a duck; the favored viewing blind is by the “tail” on the top.

Niihama Bird Park, or “Bird Paradise” (野鳥の楽園): A lesser-known bird park just a bit farther east off of Route 357, accessible from Ichikawa-Shiohama Station on the Keiyo Line. I actually have not been inside this park yet–I went on a weekday, and it’s only open on weekends. The peek I did get seemed to indicate that it was mostly occupied by cormorants. I will have to try again sometime soon–perhaps in winter there are a lot more ducks there. There is, however, a very interesting bird hospital on the west side. Serious birders will be less excited as the birds are in captivity, but there were dozens of very interesting birds in there, including Green Pigeons, Cattle Egret, and a Peregrine Falcon.

Here is the location on Google Maps. The bird hospital is marked by a small circle on the waterside road on the lower left side, the title of the location extending into the water. I am not sure how much admission is.

Yatsu Higata Salt Flats (谷津干潟): a much more popular birdwatching area. Essentially a large, rectangular area where saltwater is brought in to create saltwater flats for the shorebirds to enjoy. A wide variety of birds visit here. There is a visitor center with a small restaurant, but some of the better viewing can be done outside where there are benches and overhangs built, along the edge of the flats.

There is no admission. Access by train is by the Keiyo Line (again) from Shin-Narashino Station; ask for directions at the station. By car it is again off of Route 357. Do not assume that access is from the park on the north edge of the flats–it is not. Here is the location on Google Maps.

Inland

Tama Reien Cemetery and Sengenyama Park (多摩霊園、浅間山公園): Tama Reien is a huge, one-kilometer-square cemetery in the middle of Western Tokyo, straddling Fuchu and Koganei Cities. It has a good amount of shrubbery and not a few trees. The smaller but more verdant and hilly Sengenyama Park is adjacent to the cemetery’s southwest corner. Together they are one of the best inland birdwatching areas within the Tokyo city area, without having to go all the way into the mountains somewhere. I’ve spotted Hawfinches, Grosbeaks, Long-tailed and Varied Tits, a few different Thrushes, Partridges, and a Japanese Green Woodpecker.

There is no admission. Access by train is by the Seibu-Tamagawa Line, which starts from Musashi-Kasai Station on the Chuo Line. Take that line to Tama Reien-Mae Station. By car, Shin-Koganei Road off of Route 20 takes you by Sengenyama; a turnoff will take you to the main entrance of Tama Cemetery. Here is the location on Google Maps.

The Tama River (多摩川): I know this is very general, but it’s a long river and there are many good birding spots along it. I live in Inagi, and there is one place where I have spotted a lot of birds, including the most recent Bull-headed Shrike. You can find it here on Google Maps, less than a kilometer east of Minami-Tama Station on the JR Nambu Line running from Tachikawa to Kawasaki. I’ve also spotted terns, greenfinches, sandpipers, a lot of wagtails and egrets and herons, a good supply of winter ducks, meadow buntings, greenfinches, and others.

Experienced birders I’ve asked have told me that this spot along the river, at Seiseki-Sakuragaoka (on the main Keio Line) is the best place, but my luck has been less than great there. I’ve seen some good birds at this spot myself.

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Other than these two places, my birding inland has been limited to various local parks and pocket valleys occupied by farms, none of them notable as bird cornucopias–just the occasional lucky sighting. I’ve heard that going up to the Oku-tama valley way out in northwestern Tokyo is good, and of course Mt. Takao out of Hachioji is supposed to be very good as well. I tried places marked as “Bird Sanctuaries” on my maps, but these places tend to be more sanctuary-oriented, and less watching-oriented, like the sanctuary in Koganei Park.

If you have any suggestions for other good birding spots in Tokyo, I am eager to hear them and try them out. I will likely re-publich this list in the future if I find any other good spots. Keep in mind that I’m still an amateur birder and so have probably missed some significant locations, particularly inland. So your help and support would be greatly appreciated!

Look for a new landmark in Iraq to come in the next week or two. And no, not a constitution. It’ll be the 2,000^th American soldier killed in Iraq. The total today is 1,975, with 42 having died in the past two weeks.

About the constitution? I see it as only slightly more relevant than the other half-dozen “momentous occasions” we’ve been sold over the past few years. I sincerely hope it all goes well from here, but I just as sincerely doubt it will. The Iraqis will still not be free, the “Democracy” is a thinly-veiled puppet state, our soldiers will still be fighting and dying there after Bush leaves office in three years, and there is anything but the semblance of order or stability there. And a constitution will not mean much in the middle of all that, any more than the multiple “handovers of power, the prior election, or any of the other milestones we’ve been told will make All The Difference.

First, an ad for a gas station in Japan called “ENEOS.” Here is an ad for a car-related product which might seem reasonable in Japan, but which has quite obvious negative connotations in America:

To an American, the probably impression is that of a “lemon” car. This ad, however, is intended to express a sulfur-free gas–yellow for the sulfur (presumably), and the green outline and the leaf design to show environmentalism.

Next, from my early travels in Japan in the early 80’s, and from an era of much funnier T-shirts and sweaters:

It speaks for itself. Other T-shirt and sweater English from the time: “Retro-Dandy BIP MEN,” “Hysteric DOG,” and the ever-popular “SLURP! Is that your foot?” One shirt had a bit of English on it, with one part reading “Beat his monkey ass till it ain’t no fun.” We didn’t know at the time that these were Public Enemy lyrics, and so on a Japanese T-shirt they were hilarious.

And then there was this sign in a train station in Aomori which seemed to also be a political statement:

More of this coming very soon.

From the reports I’ve seen, a 5.0 or 5.1 M quake hit southwest Ibaraki Prefecture (36.048N 139.932E) 5 minutes ago at 4:05 pm Japan time. That’s about 40 km perhaps north of Central Tokyo. It was felt as a Japanese “4” in northern Kanto, and as a “3” in Tokyo. Some parts of Tokyo felt it as a “4,” and frankly, it was pretty strong where I am. Maybe not a “4,” but very close to it.

No reports of great damage so far, or warnings of Tsunamis.

For reference: two good Japan quake reportage sites include Hinet and Tenki. They tend to have quake reports up within a few minutes of the quake. The Hinet site has copy-and-pastable map coordinates which you can then plug into Google Maps Japan to see where the epicenter was.

And the Japan Life List (photographed) gets to 77. I went down to the river not expecting to get much, and my expectations were met–a ton of Tree Sparrows, a few Great Tits, two common Spot-billed Ducks, one Egret, some Crows and Bulbuls, and a few Wagtails. Very pedestrian. But then a bird flew into a nearby tree and nearly posed for me, and I could see from its size and basic shape that it was probably something new–and it was. It’s not too rare a bird, but it’s the first time I have seen the Bull-headed Shrike (Mozu • モズ).

Here’s another one of the same bird, deeper in the tree. If you click on it, there’s a 1000-pixel-wide blowup.

At first, I thought it was a Brown Shrike (harder to tell from behind), but there’s a very small white spot on its wing which tells the difference.

In another Right-Wing Power Grab, Schwarzenegger and the Republicans want to curb union contributions or actions:

Proposition 75 would require public employee unions to seek written permission from members before using dues for political purposes.

Another Republican play at a Democratic power base, under the guise of “fairness.”

They want fairness? First issue a law prohibiting corporations from using any corporate funds for political purposes unless they get written permission from stockholders. Yeah, like that’s gonna happen. It’s kinda hard to think of what other way Republicans can steal power–redistricting, impeachment, recalls, court manipulation, and outright election fraud and theft… some say that the Republicans took only 10 years in power to become as corrupt as the Democrats did in 40 years, but quite frankly I find it difficult to believe that the Democrats were anywhere near this corrupt.

Except this time it’s the courts the Republicans want to redistrict. Already in Texas and other states, Republicans have gone on a non-census redistricting spree in state congressional districts in order to grab more power and control in Congress. Supposedly-“moderate” California Governor Schwarzenegger has been pushing hard to redistrict California to more Republican-friendly standards, even though the Democrats control the legislature. They always state non-political “reasons,” but in the end it’s always proposed by Republicans and only in states where Republicans would gain by it. In California, the redistricting measure is called “more fair,” but Republicans never call for “fairness” in states where they already control redistricting–they would fiercely oppose the exact same measure in Texas, for example.

Now it’s the courts they want to gerrymander. The 9th Circuit has always been a thorn in the Republicans’ paw, being the most powerful liberal federal appellate court. So two Republican Senators, Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and John Ensign (Nevada) want to split the 9th Circuit so that the more liberal side can be contained, and an expansive new 12th Circuit made up of more conservative states can take away their influence. The 9th Circuit has already expressed disagreement, and one of its members, a former Alaska Supreme Court justice, has testified that it would be more effective to simply add judges than to split the court.

Only after the Republicans call for “fairness” in states they already control, or redistrict the deeply conservative 5th Circuit court, I’ll agree to look at such standards in California. Until then, it is blazingly evident that this is nothing more than a highly partisan power grab by the right wing.

So the predictions were right, and it was a video iPod that Apple came out with today (along with some new iMacs, which was less predicted). And there’s a lot of hoopla about the video, in that you can download not only movie previews and music videos, but TV shows as well–in particular, Lost and Desperate Housewives. (It seems pretty clear that Jobs used his Pixar influence on Disney to open up their video vault to Apple for this.) The price: $2 an episode, or $35 per season. Not bad pricing, similar to a DVD set. And like with music on iTunes, you can download them to your iPod (if you have the new video iPod, of course) for portable viewing; you can share them between five computers; and you can burn them onto a CD for safekeeping.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? However, most people who have checked the details aren’t too impressed, and I’m one of them. First of all, how impressive is video on a 2.5-inch screen? Not very. If you don’t mind a tiny picture in exchange for watching TV on the train, then OK. But I don’t think many will really be wowed by that, at least not consistently. And with the iPods already bearing color screens, who didn’t fully expect them to go video at some point? The bigger draw for videophiles would be the ability to watch video on one’s computer, and perhaps hook it up to the TV for viewing.

The key advance here is the TV and movie downloads (the music videos are a step, but a small one). It would mean that video is going the way of music: instead of downloading TV shows and movies via BitTorrent or other piracy networks, people could download them via iTunes and pay a nominal fee for it. It would be a great alternative for people like me living overseas where some media takes forever to get here. The pricing scheme is just about right (on the high side of “right,” however). Buying a DVD set would have advantages, like the special features (commentary, subtitles, special videos, outtakes, etc.), but the iTunes version would allow for immediate downloads of the episodes a day after they air–on-demand availability that will be key for a true video downloading paradigm.

There is one big caveat, however, and it will be a deal-breaker for most, including myself: video quality. If you go to Apple’s web page for the new video feature, they studiously avoid mentioning anything about the video quality on a computer screen, aside from the highly misleading claim that the video are in “high-quality, H.264 QuickTime format.” That’s misleading, because people will think that “high quality” refers to the size of the video. It doesn’t. HDTV quality is 720 pixels tall on a computer screen. 480 pixels tall is commensurate with non-HDTV size, and would look great on a normal TV screen. But that’s not what you get with the new videos–instead, it will be 240 pixels tall, and 320 wide (see image at top of this entry as an example). That’s 1/2 of regular video, and 1/3 of HDTV. You pay for the DVD, for example, the 1st season of Lost, and not only is the quality much higher, but you get a truckload of special features to boot, and the price is only $4 more.

Apple and Disney would have to make the quality a lot better and the special features present before a lot of people will buy into this. Right now it has more curiosity appeal than anything else, but that will soon pass. One can only assume that the small video size is mostly to guard against piracy. OK, fair enough. But you’re probably going to drive more people to the pirated videos, which can be downloaded in 720-pixel HDTV format, and the DVD special features are often available for download as well. People who already pirate won’t be tempted to go legit, and some people who were not aware of video downloads on demand actually might be attracted to the idea but will want more quality and could be led to download the content from BitTorrent instead.

That’s why the iTunes music sales model has worked so well: the quality is as high as or higher than the pirated stuff, and it’s easier to get. If the iTunes Music Store provided music with low-quality audio, no one would buy it. If Apple and Disney really want to fight video piracy, they have to offer something at least as good or even better than BitTorrent. Not worse.