Remember a few days ago when I mentioned Jim Greer, the Florida Republican who made that over-the-top rant about how Obama’s stay-in-school speech was really an attempt at forced socialist liberal political indoctrination?

There once was a political operative who loved to tell crowds he had a simple way of explaining to children the difference between Republicans and Democrats.

“Republicans get up and go to work,” he would tell his son. “Democrats get up and go down to the mailbox to get their checks.”

This man not only talked to his son about Republican values, he went into public-school classrooms and talked about them as well.

That man is Jim Greer — the same Jim Greer who, as chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, just threw a nationwide hissy fit, claiming that the classroom is no place for politics and Barack Obama’s “indoctrination.”

One Seminole County mother, Barbara Wells, remembers the day Greer spoke to her son’s sixth-grade class. “My son said he made some sort of Hillary Clinton joke,” she recalled.

Aren’t Republicans classy?

ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC will all carry Obama’s address to Congress on health care. Guess which network will not carry it? Not hard to figure that one out, is it? While the Republican Party’s propaganda machine will refuse to carry the speech, Republican leaders nevertheless are demanding that they be given network time as well.

At this point in time, it is looking more and more like Obama will wuss out and pass on the public option. One wants to hold out hope that Obama will discover his spine and use the address to pull an American President: tell the nation that the opposition is no longer credible, that there have been too many bald-faced lies, too much opposition for partisan political purposes, that he tried everything he could within reason and got nothing in return–no return of good faith, not even a gesture–just more attacks, smears, and lies. So he’s putting back in everything he thinks is right, what the nation needs–and if the Republicans want to block the bill, they do so at their peril, with the responsibility for failed health care reform on their heads.

He won’t, of course. He’ll take the whipping the right wing has been giving him with forced praise for their in-fact-non-existent “bipartisan efforts,” remove even more major stuff the right wing has been objecting to, and call for a weakened, watered-down bill that will be reform in name only. And the Republicans will not thank him for it–they will take it for the sign of weakness it is, and only ramp up their lies and attacks. They will use Obama’s concessions as a rallying point, taking everything and giving nothing, and then start attacking even more of what little remains of the bill, only heightening their cries against anything Obama puts forward.

Let’s face it: Obama doesn’t have the guts to abandon the whole bipartisan angle even after the right wing has made it painfully clear that they will object to anything for the sake of winning midterms next year.

And let’s face another fact: Obama blew it. He let the health care bill wander into Congress slowly, and let it linger for so long that Republicans were able to beat it to a bloody pulp. He should have worked out most of it behind the scenes, quietly working out major details with Democratic leaders, and then presented it up-front as a vital, lives-are-at-stake issue which has to pass within just 2-3 weeks. And every time the Republicans objected, all he’d have to do is pull two or three names from the large pool of people who died because they didn’t have insurance, have their families stand behind him, and remind the nation that every day the Republicans delay, they are killing more and more Americans.

He should have known full well that he’d never get Republicans to go along, and could have used their back-stabbing on the stimulus bill to (a) point out that bipartisanship would not work because the GOP had precluded it, and (b) he was right on the Stimulus, it worked without Republicans, and if he has to pass health care reform without them too, that was their choice–he would do what he knew was right. Even if there was a huge outcry, Obama still could have gotten away with it, with midterms being so far away.

Instead, Obama fumbled, bumbled, tried to appear bipartisan long after that dog died, and continued to let the right wing flog him while he smiled and took it. And nobody, no one on the left, right, or center will respect him or give him any credit for it. What the hell is he thinking?

I still hold out that faint hope for him to grow a pair and take a leadership role this coming Wednesday. But I fully expect for those hopes to be dashed.

A 4.5 hit about 30 miles due east of us a few minutes ago. Shook the building for a minute. We could tell it was local because it was more of a bouncing quake than a swaying one. Nothing big.

A few more notes about Snow Leopard. First, small changes in the UI have crept in that don’t necessarily affect functionality. They are, however, very welcome and often convenient. Take the language switching, for example; when you switch languages using the keyboard shortcut, you get an on-screen change indicator similar in ways to the application switcher. I am not sure if plain-Leopard used to allow you to hold down the Command-key and switch through several languages by keyboard alone, but you can now, and you can see the languages as they come.

Another small but even nicer change is in taking snapshots of the screen. It used to be that each screen capture was called “Picture 1,” “Picture 2,” and so on. Now, they are titled by date and time. This is a nice difference because of naming conflicts. Say you took ten screen caps, named Picture 1-10. Then you dropped them into a different folder, Then you took more screen captures–they would start naming themselves starting with “Picture 1” again, as the previous set are no longer in the directory where screen caps are sent. But if you try to drop the new batch into the same folder as the previous set, they won’t go–filename conflict. You either over-write the original set, or you have to rename them all. Nice touch.

Another small but perhaps very significant change: the Keyboard Viewer is now resizable. For those who don’t know about it, the Keyboard Viewer has been around for years, showing what keys will type when special keys are depressed. For example, if you want to find out how to make the √ sign, open the Keyboard Viewer (Input menu) and hold down the Option (Alt) key; all of the characters that can be typed with the Option key depressed are shown on the virtual keyboard.

So why is it significant that this viewer can be resized? Because of the implications for the rumored touch-screen tablet. While I suspect that such a tablet’s virtual keyboard would be a bit sexier than the long-standing viewer, it is potentially significant–as is the fact that they viewer can now be activated via the Keyboard System Preference pane, as well as by the Language & Text pane.

One last point I found: auto-spell correction.

When activated, this will not fix all errors, but it will fix a lot of them. It does not even appear to be part of the new text-substitution feature, but a fully separate feature. It does not depend on common spelling errors in an MS-Word-like AutoCorrect mode, but instead seems based upon the spell-checker–if there is a spelling error and the spell-checker finds a strong correct-spelling suggestion, it simply switches it in. In this paragraph I have been intentionally misspelling many words, watching them all correct themselves. Sometimes they change to the wrong correct word, but usually it’s very accurate.

More as I notice it….

Holy crap.

Sometimes, even in the best of health care systems, you get horrible doctors. I originally had an expert eye doctor to help me with a problem I was experiencing, but he was pretty far away from home. So he recommended me to another expert at a local hospital who was pretty good.

However, I was unable to catch this doctor one time (she was on vacation) and got stuck with another doctor who I found less talented, but acceptable. As he was treating a new condition, I agreed to a second appointment with him. That was today.

The wait for the doctor was unusually long–one of those situations where they slip people ahead of you. You know, you’re fifth in line to see the doctor, and then after five people are called in, you are third in line. People came in well after I had settled to wait and went in ahead of me. That’s annoying enough, and I wound up having a wait time of 90 minutes for what was supposed to be a pre-set appointment time.

But what was really bad about today was the doctor. Instead of the substitute doctor, I was assigned to a third doctor whom I had never heard of before. When I finally got to see her, she was very abrupt, almost to the point of being rude. She took a quick glance at my record, not even close to long enough to understand what I was in for, asked no questions, and simply went ahead with an exam–during which she damn near tore my eyelids off.

Now, as I have explained, I have seen three other doctors before this and was examined for a variety of reasons, and never before have I ever experienced anything like what this doctor subjected me to. She did not even warn me; she took my upper right eyelid (the problem with with the lower left), grabbed the flesh of it, pulled it out, and then twisted it. It was so severe that out of reflex I yanked my head backwards. I figured that she slipped or something, but no, she intended to do that. When I had taken the relatively inoffensive, standard puff-of-air-on-the-eyeball test with the assistant an hour earlier, she warned me about the puff of air despite it being a test they give you every time. This doctor nearly yanked my eyelid off my face without so much as an “excuse me.” It hurt like hell–and then the doctor acted all put off and offended at my reaction, saying, “Well then, I just won’t check your eyes, is that OK?”

After she finished, she just half-shouted “ALLERGY!” at me like I was an illiterate moron–despite the fact that I had come in for something completely different. I tried to explain my previous problem–as she seemed to think it unnecessary to study my file to find out herself–but she persisted in focusing on the “allergy” problem, despite the fact that I told her that (a) my eyes did not itch and felt OK (at least they did before she abused them), and (b) the problem I needed help with was specific to one eye and not related to allergies. She then insisted that I had allergies, probably because I was “reading too much”–is that even possible?

I asked what happened to the doctor I had been scheduled to meet; she simply said that he quit. I then asked why I could not see the original doctor I had been assigned to, and she told me it was a scheduling problem–which, when I pressed her on, she admitted it was not, apparently having made up that excuse.

So I just made an appointment to see my original doctor and ignore everything this one did and said. But sheesh, I do not recall ever meeting a worse doctor, except possibly for the dentist who destroyed one of my teeth and then blamed me for it.

Let me just say that this was a very atypical experience. Usually the waits are much less than an hour, the doctors are competent, the service good. I just happened to get shuffled to a terrible new intern or something.

At least this visit only cost me eight bucks. But after an hour, my eyelids still hurt.

This NYT article lead-in is horribly written:

Conservatives See Need for Serious Health Debate

By JIM RUTENBERG and GARDINER HARRIS
Published: September 2, 2009

WASHINGTON — The roiling debate over health care this summer has included a host of accusations from opponents of the plan that have been so specious that many in the mainstream news media have flatly labeled them false.

First of all, the headline: “Conservatives See Need for Serious Health Debate”? Are you freaking kidding me? That’s the last thing that most conservatives “see” or want. It’s what high-level conservatives claim, which would be a more honest way of expressing it, but it’s is most decidedly not even close to what they actually want. More to the point, the article is not actually talking about conservatives in general, but instead a small minority of health care experts on the right–which shows up the headline as starkly misleading.

The next problem: the first paragraph, shown above. It seems reasonable until you catch on to the fact that it is a subtle understatement as to how reluctant the media is to speak the truth about conservative dishonesty. It plainly implies that the media will not report that Republicans are lying unless the lies are so egregious that they cannot help but call them for what they are. And even then, stark lies are, at worst, sometimes timidly referred to as “false,” as if they are too fearful of pointing out any of the blazingly obvious intent to deceive.

While the article in general leads into a serious discussion on health care reform, the thesis that conservatives are somehow the responsible party when it comes to talking about health care is so outrageously misrepresented that it isn’t even funny. Sure, I don’t doubt for a moment that there are some prominent conservative health care experts who would prefer to have an honest debate. But that’s not what the article’s introduction suggests, nor does it obviate the fact that you have to go pretty damn far down the conservative line before you get to these relative voices of reason.

Here’s the problem: when the GOP and the right wing in general acts so astonishingly insane on a regular basis, when it makes such egregious lies with amazing shamelessness and regularity, it becomes harder and harder to focus on the merely stupid and insipid stuff. Think about it: if your neighbor spent the entire summer running up and down the street half-naked, screaming like a banshee that aliens from Neptune are eating his brain, and hitting passers-by over the head with tupperware, it suddenly seems irrelevant that his dog pooped in your front yard.

Nevertheless, let’s see what dog poop is being issued from the GOP today. According to a press release from the Florida Republican Party Chairman Jim Greer, Obama cannot speak to children. Well, maybe that’s too strong–Greer said that he “support[s] educating our children to respect both the office of the American President and the value of community service.” And certainly, Obama’s speech, which will emphasize the importance of staying in school and getting an education, seems like a great thing to talk to children about. Okay, that all sounds quite reasonable. So, what’s the problem? Well, essentially the rest of Greer’s press release.

Greer claims that Obama’s speech is an “invasive abuse of power” which will be “using our children as tools to spread liberal propaganda.” He says that kids will be forced to “agree with our President’s initiatives or be ostracized by their teachers and classmates.”

Greer goes on to say that “taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama’s socialist ideology,” because “school children across our nation will be forced to watch the President justify his plans for government-run health care, banks, and automobile companies, increasing taxes on those who create jobs, and racking up more debt than any other President.” (It even feels almost beside the point to mention that Bush racked up way more debt than Obama.)

How exactly a speech about staying in school, not dropping out, and studying hard is “socialist ideology” and “liberal propaganda” is not exactly explained. Apparently Greer believes that the stated topic of the speech is a ruse, and once Obama has the poor children penned up, sitting in chairs with special devices keeping their eyelids open a la Clockwork Orange, he will put them under a hypnotic spell and start drilling into them on health care and economic agenda talking points.

Some of his motivation peeks through when he complains that “Democrats” refuse to allow prayer in school and that “Christmas Parties are now Holiday Parties.” I could go on about both of those points, and have in the past. But to stay on topic, Greer clearly is annoyed that he cannot institute forced religious indoctrination in public schools–his use of the word “indoctrinating” in the last paragraph is another hint to that effect. More telling is his reference to children being “ostracized” by teachers and classmates–that’s almost lifted verbatim from the argument against school prayer, and little tickles a conservative more than to smugly use his opponents’ arguments against them, oblivious to how nonsensical the application is.

Of course, the primary reason for this is to take yet another jab at Obama. I don’t think that Greer, Florida Governor Crist (who posts the press release on his site), or anyone else in the GOP truly believes a word of this; they just want to smear Obama some more, and don’t give a crap about the fact that the speech could actually have a positive effect on school kids. Nope, it’s way more important to take Obama down than let him be a positive influence on the young–which is probably what they really fear, deep down, that their kids might actually get to listen to Obama and they might think he’s not so bad after all. We can’t have that. Nor can they allow Obama to be effective in his job.

A bigger problem here is that many parents seem to be believing this claptrap; there are reports nationwide of parents threatening to keep their kids home from school on that day. Yes, these are probably the birthers and so forth, but the media won’t touch on that, and will instead grant yet another GOP smear campaign legitimacy.

Well, I have fixed most of the printing issues. I re-established network printing at the office by discovering the color copier’s IP address and setting it up as an LDP printer. That got it back, and I could shut down the old Powerbook and put it away again.

At home, I opened Airport Utility and under Manual Setup, arranged for printing to be available over the Internet using Bonjour. That made the HP psc 2450 I have show up when adding a new printer. Those two were the big issues; now I can print at home and at work.

Still, many people are having printing issues; seems like Apple didn’t quite get that point straight before releasing the OS. But if you’re familiar with OS upgrades, then you know that printers are usually the first thing to go, and one of the last things to get cleaned up.

Big chink in the Snow Leopard armor: network printing is more or less gone. Apple finally killed off AppleTalk, which is what a lot of network printers depend on. Despite Apple’s claims that printing is now “easier” (USB printing was already dead simple, couldn’t get any easier), network printing is now pretty much decimated, requiring workarounds until the printer manufacturers get around to updating the Mac OS software and firmware–which usually means it’ll be a few years before it all gets back to being accessible again.

Before Snow Leopard, my Mac could easily detect the network printers even without any drivers, and the Add Printer software could easily pick up the drivers to allow detailed use of the advance printer features. Now? The printers simply don’t show up at all, and having the drivers installed won’t help even a bit (the drivers only make it possible to finely control the printer, and have nothing to do with detecting them in the first place).

Apple tech support was singularly un-useful, claiming no knowledge of how to cope with the issue (BIG oversight–they should have known that banishing AppleTalk would cause lots of problems with network printing), and the best they could do was (a) tell me to transfer files to a computer that could print, and (b) suggest that it was a problem for the printer manufacturers and that Apple didn’t have anything to do with it. That’s unacceptable: the printer makers did not change anything, Apple did. At the very least they could arrange an easily accessible suggestion for a workaround.

What worked for me: I happened to have my old Powerbook handy, and it could still see the printer. So I set that up and activated Printer Sharing. My Macbook Pro was then able to print by doing it through the older computer. A kludge (the printing is much slower than before), but it works for now. I’ll have to see if I can get shared printing from any office Windows boxes, but the downside is that the sharing computer has to always be turned on.

Wow.

The LDP, Japan’s dominant political party for most of the past 65 years, has just gotten it’s butt kicked, hard. With 30% of the contests still undecided, the Democratic Party has won 52% of the seats in the all-important Lower House of Parliament (or about 70% of seats decided so far). If they keep this rate up, they could be looking at about 65% of all seats in the house, giving them firm control of government.

This has been pretty clear in coming, but still, it’s quite a pasting.

For those unfamiliar with the Japan Democrats, they are not analogous with the American Democrats; they are more liberal than the LDP, but I do not get the sense that they are flaming liberals or anything. They campaigned on some points similar to the Obama campaign, such as transparency, fiscal responsibility, and generally overthrowing the corrupt bastards in power. They are also free-market, promise to decentralize government and put a good deal of power back into the hands of the people (local governments, from what I can tell). They ran on human rights, pacifism, and a focus on good international relations.

Whether any of this will translate into actual change… we’ll see.

I broke down and decided to install Snow Leopard on my Macbook Pro. The main reason was that I found an alternate type of ad blocker which is not related to the SIMBL plug-in.

As it turns out, there is even more functionality than I imagined: you can use an App’s “Get Info” dialog box to set it to open in 32-bit mode and to use Rosetta for backwards-compatibility. This almost fixed PithHelmet, which refused to load because it didn’t recognize Safari 4.0.3; I believe it did allow SIMBL to work. But Rosetta allowed my text-swapping app to work, so no problem there.

In fact, most of the experience in Snow Leopard is pretty much the same as before–it’s just faster, slicker, and has some new functionality. This held true on my MBP, which I did not wipe-and-restore, so good for Snow Leopard.

Alas, the transition is not without a few bugs. The most notable is that the Mail app no longer recognizes as viable my outgoing (SMTP) server, and my ISP is one of those that absolutely insists that you use that SMTP server and nothing else, so for the moment my outgoing POP3 email is not functioning; I’m calling Apple tomorrow to see what they say about it. (Update: I just tried setting my SMTP port to 25, and SMTP now works. Strange, as 25 was one of the ports that it supposedly was using to start with. Anyway, problem solved.)

However, there are a few improvements in Mail, the most notable being that it now checks all of your accounts simultaneously. Previously, it would only check 3 or 4 accounts at one time, waiting for each one to finish before allowing the next account to start its check. Additionally, you can now view messages in threads–though I must admit that I am not 100% sure that that was not available before. Other than that, none of the many obvious lacks in Mail have been addressed.

Safari is noticeably faster, but does have a few things I don’t much like. I don’t care much for the “Top Sites” panel you get with a new tab or window; it never appealed to me, and I don’t see a way to turn it off (I’ll have to check to see if the 3rd-party hacks are still available). Also, I don’t really love the new tab setup with the invisible-until-you-hover-over-it close buttons. And SIMBL not working is more than just about losing ad blocking; I had grown quite used to SafariStand’s feature of allowing keystrokes to move you from tab to tab. I also miss not having the pages from the last session preserved.

I like Exposé’s new setup, including how it now lines up the windows instead of the previous scatter arrangement. It’s also interesting how it now lines up minimized windows as well, in addition to maintaining the largest possible size for smaller windows.

So far, so good; Snow Leopard has mostly delivered nice improvements with relatively few hiccups–not bad for a transitional OS.

Some years back, I had a fairly pronounced string of bad-luck experiences with hardware, stuff breaking down on me all the time. Not my Apple gear, but other appliances and 3rd-party computer peripherals. One 17-inch CRT I used with my desktop PC crackled, sparked, emitted black smoke and died on me, for example. More recently, my luck has been pretty good. Not that nothing breaks, but it breaks just in time.

For example, my last Macbook Pro developed a minor screen problem–nothing big, a slight darkening in the lower corners, but I was worried that it might worsen over time. And it happened just before the 1-year warranty expired. Apple fixed it (even letting me wait until after the warranty expired for a convenient time to have the replacement done), swapping out the screen with a brand-new one. Cool. And no problems since then.

My iPhone also had some glitches a bit back, about 6 months after I got it, I think. Took it in to SoftBank, they didn’t even ask what was wrong, they just replaced it. Nice.

With my iMac, having a 24-inch screen made me nervous–if that sucker broke, it’d be expensive as hell to get fixed. So I took out an AppleCare extended warranty on it. And it worked fine, up until just now–just a month before the 3-year warranty expired. I started experiencing graphics glitches, and after a very brief phone call with Apple Support (no waiting, even for an English-speaking operator in Japan), the operator told me that he felt it was a problem with the graphics chip, and without even telling me to do a clean re-install or anything (I had not reinstalled and added Snow Leopard yet), he made an appointment to have the iMac picked up. No big hassle–we’ll just take in your computer and fix it. It’ll be out for three days, is that OK?

While I was at it, I mentioned the wireless keyboard that I gave up on a few years back. OK, he said, we’ll ship out a free replacement unit. Didn’t even ask me to test it out–heck, he didn’t even ask what was wrong with it, just like with the iPhone.

I think I’ll call in and ask them to also check out the DVD drive while they’re at it, see what happens. It hasn’t failed, but I have used it a lot and those things are notorious for limited lifetimes–and it does make a slightly funny sound nowadays.

And now I have noticed a little flicker in my current Macbook Pro screen–when I am using the lower-power graphics chip, the top part of the screen flickers black for a fraction of a second every so often. Warranty expires in November, so I have time. For that one, I’ll either ask them to wait to fix it in December as I’ll need the machine every day in school, or will take it in to the Genius Bar so they can give me a first-hand diagnosis of what might be wrong.

Call me an Apple fanboy, but I do like their service–and have been having very nice luck in the timing of what small stuff does go wrong.

I just installed Snow Leopard on my iMac, doing a complete wipe and re-install of the hard disk drive–something that should be done with a computer every year or two anyway (more often if you use your computer more like I do). And the change is extremely noticeable.

First, I should say that I had not wiped the disk and reinstalled the OS for a few years, so that makes a lot of the difference right there. Crashes, errors, and just plain hard use over a few years will introduce enough glitches in the OS and with the hard disk that will slow your computer down significantly enough. Still, I don’t remember it being this fast before. I know, subjective, but still. Safari pages load fast, very fast indeed.

One of the first things to note about Snow Leopard is the footprint: Apple claims that you’ll save 6GB of disk space because they have slimmed down the system so much. When I installed, I customized it so that it would add in all printer drivers plus other software that Snow Leopard does not install by default, so as to remove any slimming-by-defeaturing. I started out with a hard drive with 219.5 MB of free space. After Snow Leopard was installed, it showed that I had 243 GB of free space. Whoa! Did I just get 24 GB of extra drive space?

Alas, no. But I did get the advertised 6GB. With Snow Leopard, Apple has also changed the way hard disk drive space is reported: in Snow Leopard, they switched from base two (binary) to base ten counting. When you buy a 250GB hard drive and plug it in to your computer, it only shows something like 238GB available; this is due to the difference in counting systems. Now that Snow Leopard uses base ten, just like the hard drive sellers, when you plug in a 250GB hard drive, it’ll show 250GB available.

That’s where I got the bulk of my “extra space” from, and this difference became clear with a simple test: I shut down my Snow Leopard iMac, tethered it to my non-Snow Leopard Macbook Pro, and held down the “T” key on the keyboard while restarting the iMac, making it start up (in just a second or two) as an external drive to my MBP. And on the MBP, the free disk space is listed as 225.14GB–almost exactly 6 gigabytes lighter than it was before I installed Snow Leopard.

So far, I have not had much chance to test the whole system out. Startup certainly goes a lot faster, and the icon-resizing slider is very cool. I have not used the new Exposé features much yet, but they seem to work as advertised. I tried out the new system-wide autotext replace feature (type in a text string and have it be replaced by another), and it works, though disappointingly weakly. It does not work in some places (such as, disappointingly, any text window or box in Safari), nor does it not allow you to control how it swaps the text (it only swaps after a space has been typed). It’s kind of a very weak version of the text-swapping software I have used–and suspect will no longer work in Snow Leopard.

And that leads up to the big thing, the reason why I might not be installing Snow Leopard on my Macbook Pro just yet: some software doesn’t work yet. I have become heavily dependent on two things: my autotext replace utility and PithHelmet, my ad blocker for Safari. PithHelmet doesn’t work either–I tried to install it, but apparently SIMBL doesn’t work in Snow Leopard yet. And for me, that’s a big deal–after having blissfully quiet web pages for so long, going back to pages filled with all those dancing, flashing ads is a jarring experience, not to mention an incredibly annoying one.

I’ll report more on Snow Leopard after I test it out some more, but it may be a week or two–Apple is taking in my iMac this week, something I’ll cover quickly in my next post.

Right-wingers recently have been very big on the rights to religious freedom in the public square, as well as the right to keep and bear arms in the public square. They want to be able to show their faith as publicly as possible (which for me is fine so long as it does not involve government association), and they want to be able to openly bear arms in public, even with assault rifles in situations where such weapons are clearly of no practical use.

In fact, they have become so vehement about these rights that you have churches challenging the no-political-endorsement rules during elections and conservative Christians all over claiming that there are “wars” being waged against them, wars on Christianity, wars on Christmas, etc.; in addition, you have people now attending Obama events armed to the teeth. How’s this for a combo: a pastor openly announces prayer with his congregation for Obama to die, and one of his followers then attends an Obama event bearing an assault rifle.

On the open worries that we may be looking at incipient right-wing extremist terrorism, conservatives defend these people by saying that they are simply patriotic American citizens exercising their free rights. When the government put out an alert about extremist right-wing terrorism, conservatives shouted it down as playing politics with national security (goodness knows they’d never do that!).

So a good question is, do these people really believe in these rights, or are they just interested in their own specific rights, for Christians to have the right to express their beliefs in public, or for right-wingers to bear assault rifles at Democratic political events?

Here’s a test: the next time a Republican politician holds a rally connected with a conservative Christian organization, have the crowds outside be populated with a few dozen Americans of Arab descent, bearing semi-automatic rifles and signs announcing “Muslim, American, and Proud” while also protesting the politicians at the event.

See how much the conservatives laud the freedom of public religious expression and arms-bearing then.

Let it not be said that right-wingers are not respectful to the dead. In their own, dark, twisted, hateful way, that is. While a few tasteful right-wing blogs simply noted Senator Edward Kennedy’s passing and added a quiet “Rest in Peace” (I have found no prominent right-wing blogger who posted only positive comments beyond the simple RIP), and a few more waited several minutes after a quiet respectful post to begin eviscerating his legacy, many simply began tearing into him right on the spot. The less honest bloggers couched it in terms that made it sound like they were being all respectful and solemn, while at the same time being their usual asinine selves.

Here is the always-charming Michelle Malkin on the death of Ted Kennedy:

The U.S. Senator from Massachusetts succumbed to brain cancer at the age of 77 tonight. Put aside your ideological differences for an appropriate moment and mark this passing with solemnity.

There is a time and place for political analysis and criticism. Not now.

Yes, there will be a nauseating excess of MSM hagiographies and lionizations — and crass calls to pass the health care takeover to memorialize his death.

That’s no excuse to demonstrate the same lack of restraint in the other direction. Not now.

Even as she ‘urges’ others not to do political analysis and criticism, she herself immediately does exactly that, slipping in not only criticisms of Kennedy himself–as if he does not deserve recognition for his long service–but insinuations of a Liberal Media™ giving him far more than his due. As I said, charming.

Redstate didn’t even try to be uncritical, couching their hatred only in recognition of tradition:

It is traditional, upon the passing of an important and famous person – however controversial – to find some good words to say. This is not an easy task in the case of Ted Kennedy, a man whose personal life ranged from alcoholism to debauchery to sexual harrassment [sic] to (sadly, uncharged) second-degree murder, and whose public career entailed the embrace of nearly every foolish, ruinous and cruel political idea of the past five decades and whose most enduring legacy is installing the bitterly polarized modern Supreme Court confirmation process.

But a few words are nonetheless in order to recognize the man’s work.

“News”Busters was predictably snide:

Expect many, many kind words about the “royal family” and so on to come. It’s clear that Kennedy was a historic figure in the Senate and an inspirational leader for American liberalism. We’ll be watching for statements (like the NBC anchor’s) that don’t ring true.

InstaPundit, like so many in the right wing, immediately began harping on the “Wellstone Effect.”

Outside the Beltway reprinted several media obits, and then gave their comment:

That the Chappaquiddick scandal didn’t make the first several paragraphs — or even first page — of several of these obits is quite remarkable. It would be like writing an obit for Richard Nixon that didn’t mention Watergate or one for Michael Jackson that glossed over repeated allegations of pedophilia.

Have they forgotten their shameful and shameless politicization of Reagan’s death just five years ago, how they tried to use it to boost their 2004 election results?

And in case you were wondering, the liberal bloggers generally showed respect without hate. Here’s Josh Marshall speaking only of a “revered” president, Kevin Drum linking to an article detailing what liberals admired him for. The only snide post I could find among left-wingers at the announcement of Reagan’s death was on the always-rabid DailyKos. And even when you compare the liberals criticisms just after Reagan’s death to conservative criticisms after Kennedy’s, there is a stark difference: liberals restrained their criticisms to politics and legacy, whereas most right-wing attacks on Kennedy after his death have been on his person and character, most notably accusing him of murder at Chappaquiddick, and for drinking and womanizing.

In general, liberals were immeasurably more respectful when the shoe was on the other foot. Sure, we criticized quite a bit in the days following. But for the most part, we bowed our heads and showed actual respect on the day.

A post at Sean’s blog brought back to mind the dangers of doing business with online firms, especially ones with recurring charges. Many people are nervous enough using their credit cards to pay for anything online; where you have to be most careful, however, is when you sign contracts for an ongoing service.

Ten years ago, I signed on to a web host, and like most people, I did not read the long service agreement that they tell you to read. This right here is a pet peeve of mine–that businesses know damned well that people don’t read these, and take advantage of that fact to introduce terms that they know most people would never agree to, or at least would start questioning.

I strongly support the idea of plain-language, bullet-point summaries where standard consumer contracts are concerned. If it’s a business-to-business deal where each side has lawyers to protect the interests of the clients, that’s one thing–but when it’s the average consumer just trying to buy into a simple service, that’s something else. This may not be workable in real life for some reason, but saying that the user “should” read and understand the terms of every single EULA a person agrees to is over-simplistic and ignores basic realities.

Think of all those agreements you skip past and click “I agree”–every update of iTunes, for example, requires this. If you stopped and read through every single such agreement so that you understood it fully, it would make online purchasing a horror. Imagine going to the supermarket and having to read a long, obscure, boring legal document to sign before you paid at the checkout counter. If it’s not reasonable there, why should it be reasonable with documents you sign electronically all the time?

Now, you do have to do this in brick-and-mortar shops, but mostly just with recurring payments (web purchases almost always have lengthy terms, even for one-time purchases), and there is a service person right there to answer whatever questions you have. Online transactions require these long contracts far more often (frequently with one-time purchases equivalent to supermarket visits) and there is no one easily available to help you without a long-distance telephone call where you expect to be put on hold for twenty-five minutes. Not to mention that there is a common perception that clicking “I Agree” is not as weighty as signing your name on the bottom line; to get that effect, you’d have to call it a “digital signature” or something along those lines.

Additionally, the language of these documents is difficult to understand. This may be necessary for legal reasons but there is no reason whatsoever that the same terms cannot be simplified and listed at the top, with the caveat of the fine print being the main determiner of what was agreed to (so long as the bullet points are not misleading or completely different).

The fact that most people don’t read these is clearly evidence enough that the current standard is not something the average person would be inclined to do, thus preventing reasonable expectation of a true meeting-of-minds.

These terms should be boiled down so that the salient points stand out in clear, easy-to-read bullets. True, one could go the full distance and say that such contracts must be written so that the biggest idiot in the world could understand, thus making a mockery of the whole idea. However, the alternative is to leave it as is, where the contract is deliberately dense and long enough to cause most people not to fully read or understand the terms–which is just as much a mockery, just going in the other direction. A reasonable middle can and should be found.

To get on with my original point, I found out about the perils of ignoring such agreements when I signed up for web hosting services with a place called “Aitnet.com”. When you sign up, they have a service agreement which is depressingly boilerplate–you can find dozens of firms, mostly web hosts, with virtually the exact same language.

In this “agreement,” there is a clause, usually down near the bottom after most people who even tried to read the whole thing gave up, which is alarmingly permissive for the business to rip you off. Here is the language–and keep in mind that this is a business which you have given permission to automatically bill you:

12. CHANGES IN TERMS OF AGREEMENT: [company name] reserves the right to make changes to the terms and conditions of this Agreement at any time, and to the on-line application/order form, to include pricing of the Services, advising of the change and the effective date thereof by publishing it to the appropriate [company name] Web site, but with changes in fees being effective only at the end of any period for which Customer has prepaid. Utilization of the Service(s) by Customer following the effective date of such change(s) shall constitute acceptance by Customer of such change(s). Customer is solely responsible for staying informed with respect to changes in this Agreement, to include the application/order form, the AUP, and the BP, all of which are published on-line, as indicated above, and are readily available for public viewing.

Did you get that? Boiled down, it means that the business can, at any time, change the terms of your contract, setting any price they desire, and they do not need to contact you in any way to inform you of this–all they need to do is change a few words in the online agreement. You are responsible for reading and re-reading the agreement every single month and noticing whatever small, unflagged changes may have been made in the contract which consists of many pages of dense legalese.

For example, they could decide to triple your charges and commit you to a year-long contract instead of the month-long contract you agreed to. If you fail to faithfully visit their site and read the agreement in time to catch the change, then you’ll be legally obligated to pay whatever they decided to charge you.

This is along the lines of what happened to a lot of people who signed on to AIT many years ago: AIT suddenly changed their standing contracts from one-month contracts to six-months contracts. Neither I nor anyone else on the service who I spoke to received any email notifying us of this; it may have been buried deeply in some spam-filled monthly ‘newsletter’ that no one reads, but the point is, AIT was not even legally obligated to do that. All you had to do was not carefully check their online agreement for 30 days, and whammo–you’re theirs for another six months and you didn’t even know it.

Now, I can imagine a rational argument for this particular contract clause: a company often needs to make changes in a contract, and though they can make an honest best effort to notify everyone by email, there will inevitably be those who don’t get it. If they promised email notification, that would be kind of messy. So instead, they make it the responsibility of the user to check.

The problem with that, of course, is that it is completely unreasonable to expect regular people to check the long, dense legalese every month for changes of a few words. That is far more unreasonable than expecting the company to dutifully notify everyone by email.

And it’s not as if reasonable solutions could not be found. For example, instead of requiring readers to read the entire contract each month and catch even the smallest of changes, the revisions could also be posted on a central web page dedicated to pointing out such things. It would not be unreasonable to ask customers to check a page like that every month. Alternately, one could have a grace period of one or two months after the new contract is charged to their account where the customer could back out of the agreement when they get their billing for the month and notice the change for the first time. Not that they’d necessarily get a full refund, but they could get back the difference and/or be allowed to terminate the contract with pro-rata refunds.

The way things are now, contracts are slanted heavily in favor of corporations, which can get away with pretty nasty stuff, especially if they are on a decline and expect to be out of business soon–and their executives would like to pick the pockets of their remaining customers for one last, big bonus for themselves before declaring bankruptcy.

Sure, consumers can complain, report them, criticize the publicly, maybe even try to sue them, but corporations know that most people won’t; putting up a small amount of resistance can gain them a lot of money. Just say “no” until a customer really threatens big action, then give in.

These clauses, one would expect, are allowed on the basis of corporations using them in good faith–for example, they have to make some minor, niggling change for circumstances beyond their control. For them to suddenly introduce a major price hike, change the length of contracts significantly, or otherwise do something that any reasonable customer would want to know about beforehand, they should not be able to hide behind the legalese and slip in the change in the fine print, knowing that a vast majority of customers will not notice until too late.

That good faith, in my opinion, was abused by AIT when I dealt with them. Especially coming at a time when many people were getting more and more buggy service, experiencing more and more problems, to suddenly increase the contract length sixfold is not what a reasonable person would expect without a greater effort by the company to inform people. It did not help their image when they maintained the one-month contract period on their main web page, and certainly did not make them look too honest when many customers started reporting over-billing and double-billing upon trying to leave the service.

That’s what happened to me, though the circumstances were kind of bizarre. Actually, AIT’s screw-ups worked to alert me to why I should leave them, and just in time. Despite the fact that I has signed on for automatic payment and my credit card info was in order, and despite the fact that they had already quietly slipped me into their 6-month contract, they suspended my account and shut down my web site for “non-payment” (which they kindly plastered on placeholder on my own domain). When I told them to bring me back up, they billed me for previous “non-payment” which I had actually paid, and then double-billed me for that, all around the time I was making it clear that I wanted out of there. When my complaint became loud enough, they agreed to refund my money–but when I got the “refund,” it was nothing more than store credit, meaningless to someone who is quitting a service.

It was hard for me to get anything done with my site or my account, however, as they had their customer “support” and billing people contradicting each other three times daily in a long-distance telephone hell while consistently shutting down my services in a variety of annoying ways while denying that anything was wrong. This went on for a few weeks, wreaking havoc with my blood pressure.

In the end, I fired off a direct email to their top execs threatening to file a formal complaint to the Better Business Bureau–at which point they promptly closed my account as requested and refunded all overcharges. For a longer version of the whole story, you can see the page I created back at the time.

Just one other pet peeve about online transactions: stopping them. Sure, when you want to sign on to a service, they are very happy to take your money after just a few minutes and some basic info. But when you want to stop paying them, suddenly they don’t trust you anymore, and require a far more difficult set of forms and other hoops to jump through. In the case of AIT, I had to sign a physical piece of paper, fax it back to them, and then wait two days for them to carefully inspect it. As if not taking your money was more of a security risk for you than it was to take it. Clearly they just want to discourage customers from leaving. There should be a consumer law stating that there be no more effort to quitting an agreement than there is to entering into one.

What I guess I am trying to say here is, as always, caveat emptor. That is not a cliché without good reason: it is the nature of businesses to take the upper hand and to wring as much money out of customers as possible (yes, Apple too). That’s simply a given. What makes a good business is when they try their best to deliver a good product or service. But the bad businesses are far too common, and are given far too many tools to rip you off.

Sorry to have been away for so long–maybe the longest break from blogging for five years. Sachi and I went to her hometown to meet the folks, and then took a few days in the resort town of Karuizawa nearby. Add in a day at the office, a few more days prepping for classes, and a dash of simple laziness here and there, and before you know it, a week has passed.

Back to the grind…

Back before 2006, Republicans reacted so strongly to Democrats’ using the filibuster to stop the nominations of Bush nominees that they nearly “went nuclear,” to use their phrase. Now, Republicans had allowed only 81% of Clinton’s court nominees to be confirmed in his first four years, whereas Democrats let in 95% of Bush nominees in the same time period; Democrats were far less obstructionist with Bush than any Congress had been with a president for a while. But that kind of stuff doesn’t matter when you vent fake outrage; Republicans became outwardly furious with Democrats, and called their method of blocking extremist judges–the filibuster–“unfair” and even “unconstitutional,” insisting that a straight, up-or-down vote with a 50%+ majority deciding was the only honest and American way of doing things. The filibuster represented “tyranny by the minority,” Bill Frist said, which must be “thwarted.”

All that changed, of course, when they lost power; suddenly, they abandoned all their angry rhetoric about the filibuster and instantly fell in love with the procedure. With Democrats in power, Republicans started using the filibuster constantly, setting historical records with its use, doubling the number of times it had ever been used in a session of Congress. They were using the cloture vote as a political cudgel, using it early and often; it was their new best friend.

So, it would be hard for Republicans to get more hypocritical than that, right?

Well, never underestimate the Republican propensity for outdoing themselves.

Chuck Grassley, the Senator who recently made waves after Obama praised him as looking for real solutions, promptly went nuts and starting riffing on the “Death Panel” theme. And now he’s saying that the “straight up-or-down” 50%+ majority vote that his party, just a few years ago, claimed was the only “fair” and “constitutional” way to go, is not enough; he’s saying that even the 60% super-majority using the filibuster is not enough. No, now he’s saying that if Democrats want to pass health care reform, they should have to produce an 80% super-duper-majority:

The final healthcare reform bill to make its way out of the Senate should have as many as 80 members voting for passage, one of the lead Republican negotiators of the health package said Wednesday.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, said it’s his preference to see the vast majority of his colleagues on board with a final healthcare bill.

“It ought to be from 80 people in the center of the Senate, I would think,” Grassley said during a news conference with Iowa reporters.

Nor was that a misstatement; Grassley repeated the exact same sentiment to the Washington Post, and Orrin Hatch chimed in to agree. (Both Hatch and Grassley previously hailed Republican bills passing with fewer than 60 votes as “bipartisan.”) He even is coupling this talk with calls for “bipartisanship.” Apparently, Republicans have departed from their ugly definition of “bipartisanship” meaning “when we are in power, you do whatever we say,” and now define the term as, “you do whatever we say all the time, no exceptions.”

Anyone from the right want to up the crazy from that?

If only all birther-deather town hall infiltrators were treated with such well-deserved mocking and scorn as this one was, especially in the media where they are give far too much respect.

Perfect.

Every last Republican politician should be asked the following questions:

Question: Do you oppose socialized medicine?

Probable Answer: Yes.

Question: Then you favor shutting down Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veterans Health Administration.

Probable Answer: No!

Question: You can’t have it both ways. Medicare, Medicaid, and the VHA are all socialized medicine. If you oppose socialized medicine, then you oppose those three programs. So, you either support government-run health care–in which you should support the “Public Option”–or you oppose it–in which case you must state your opposition to Medicare, Medicaid, and the VHA.

Probable Answer: [any number of variations on bald-faced lies, squirming out of answering, changing the subject, etc.]

Any self-respecting journalist would have to ask this question. Too bad we have a Liberal Media™ in which Republican politicians are allowed this flagrant, hypocritical inconsistency, while Democrats are grilled on “euthanizing grandma.”

Damn Liberal Media™!