Here’s a story of a guy who lost his iPhone while visiting Chicago, and tried to use the new Find My iPhone feature–and it worked. In this case, he left his phone at a restaurant, where a dishonest person walked off with it, fairly clearly intending to keep it for himself. The owner had just activated the “Find My iPhone” feature, and though it showed no activity in the first day after it went missing, it eventually started working, showing the phone’s general location.

Despite multiple messages to the phone, there was no attempt to return it. The owner asked for the phone’s return, and even offered a $50 reward. When he went to the neighborhood where the phone’s GPS showed it was located, he noticed it was a Spanish-speaking community and even drafted a message in Spanish. He could see that the messages were getting through and showing on the phone.

So they instead attempted to track the thief. Initially, the phone simply showed as being in a large area that contained many large buildings. They messaged that they were in the thief’s neighborhood, naming streets. The culprit perhaps panicked, leaving his building (where GPS could not function accurately) and going on to the street (where GPS works much better). The owner could see the movement, and even better, the increased GPS reception narrowed the phone’s location. Eventually, they tracked the phone down to a bus stop and found the guy, who gave back the phone. Score one for the iPhone!

One thing about this story reminded me of a personal experience which is still a particular peeve with me today: people who steal stuff and then claim they intended to return it. That’s what happened in this story. However, such claims are usually not only false, but remarkably transparent lies. What, the guy found the iPhone on another customer’s table and didn’t think it was a good idea to give it to the restaurant manager? Or to look up the phone number of the person or one of his contacts and call them to make sure the phone got back to its owner? Bull. The guy was a thief, or else the world’s worst and laziest “good” Samaritan.

The same thing happened to me in college, except with a calligraphy set. The set was not too valuable, but contained a large, square marble hanko (“chop” or seal) which held great sentimental value to me.

I had been walking to the parking lot and for some reason had stopped, put the case down, did something else, and then walked away. The walkway was out in the open alongside a building and was unpopulated at the time. When I arrived at the parking lot, I realized I had left the case, and in a small panic, ran back for it–and it was gone. The walkway was again empty, though I had passed a few people on the way back from the parking lot–I didn’t focus on them at the time, but I did pass someone.

About ten days went by, no returns to Lost & Found. So I published a reward for it in the school paper. Soon after, the “finder” called me to claim the reward. When I met him to get the case back, he lamely asserted that he had fully intended to bring the case to the college Lost & Found but “hadn’t gotten around to it.” He said that he had picked it up to “make sure no one would steal it” (ha!), but didn’t immediately return it to Lost & Found because he was on his way to the parking lot to leave school. Which means that, if true, he was one of the people I passed on the way back. He found a lost item, then saw someone scrambling back to that spot, and didn’t think to shout out, “hey, missing something?” And then he failed to return or report the item for ten days, but “just happened” to be scouring the school paper for rewards a few weeks later and noticed my ad.

The kicker: he actually complained that I was paying by check instead of cash, as if I could not be trusted.

The right wing, especially people like Pat Buchanan, have been attacking Sonia Sotomayor in many ways, one in particular by suggesting that Sotomayor got her academic credentials via Affirmative Action when she did not in fact deserve them. Buchanan recently said this at a conference to rebuild conservative political power:

Judge Sotomayor is up there at school in New York, she gets a scholarship to Princeton, she’s graduated with all these big honors and awards they said she never won. What’s she doing there in the summer? They said her adviser told her to read children’s classics so she can learn English better. How do you graduate number one in Princeton if you’re in the summer and you’re reading Rumpelstiltskin and Snow White? [laughter]

In other attacks, Buchanan added the idea that Sotomayor had to study “basic grammar” as well. More has been said on the topic, of course, but that’s the essence: Sotomayor’s English was so poor that she had to read children’s books in order to get up to speed. How could her English be so bad and yet she’s graduating summa cum laude at Princeton? Must be Affirmative Action, Buchanan concludes. More evidence of the liberals supporting minorities by helping them get undeserved credentials just because of race.

Naturally, that’s not the reality. Here’s the snippet from the New York Times article upon which Buchanan and the others base their argument:

She spent summers reading children’s classics she had missed in a Spanish-speaking home and “re-teaching” herself to write “proper English” by reading elementary grammar books. Only with the outside help of a professor who served as her mentor did she catch up academically, ultimately graduating at the top of her class.

Is this true? Well, in Sotomayor’s own words:

“First I found that my vocabulary and writing skills were poor and I didn’t know anything about the classics. … So during my college summers, I retaught myself basic grammar, learned 10 new words a day and set up a program of reading all the books I had missed.”

A ha! Buchanan was right! Sotomayor was illiterate! Hmm, let’s see.

Sotomayor was born and raised in the Bronx, but during her formative language years (age 0-6) she was in primarily a Spanish-language environment; she only became “fluent” in English after her father’s death. But still, she grew up in the U.S., went to schools where English was the language of instruction. Here’s WikiPedia’s summary of her early education:

For grammar school, Sotomayor attended the parochial Blessed Sacrament School in Soundview, where she was valedictorian and had a near-perfect attendance record. Sotomayor passed the entrance tests for, then commuted to, the academically rigorous parochial Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx. … At Cardinal Spellman, Sotomayor was on the forensics team and was elected to the student government. She graduated as valedictorian in 1972.

What can we glean from this? Obviously, she was no academic slouch. Her language skills were also probably not so bad; you don’t get through all that without the ability to speak English fairly well.

So, how do we reconcile Sotomayor’s statements about poor language skills and re-learning basic grammar? The answer is easy: it’s all relative. When she entered Princeton, she found that she could no longer get away with small errors in grammar or less-than-perfect choices in vocabulary. When she says “poor vocabulary and writing skills,” she means “poor vocabulary and writing skills by the standards of Princeton academic requirements.” That’s a pretty significant distinction.

What Sotomayor referred to was not that she was unable to string together sentences like “see Dick and Jane run with Spot,” but that she sometimes made subtle errors in grammar and word choice which in normal language are excused, but which in demanding academic prose can cause some difficulty. Her reading of childhood classics was likely more to learn the flow and cadence of words; her vocabulary building to learn greater variety, not the basics; all of this to recognize and use the subtle distinctions rather than the gross ones. She described (pdf) her English not as simplistic, but rather as “stilted and overly complicated,” and was sorting out the subtle differences between terms such as “authority of dictatorship” and “dictatorial authority.” Hardly Dick-and-Jane-level stuff.

A lot of the left-wing criticism of Buchanan and others tends to focus on which books Sotomayor read–she read Huckleberry Finn, not Snow White, they point out–but miss the whole fact that the “re-learning basic grammar” was not about how her language was poor or admission standards lax, but instead was about how strenuous and demanding her new learning environment was. Sotomayor’s story was not one of remedial education, but of an incredibly difficult and top-notch college program in which Sotomayor excelled so much that she graduated at the top of her class.

Some conservatives might still try to attack Sotomayor for her language problems–even if she wasn’t learning how to write “See Dick and Jane” level material, she still made mistakes, right? How do you get to call yourself literate and yet still make errors that don’t even stand up to those pansy-ass liberal-elite college standards?

Well, it turns out that even the English-only crowds sometimes make an error here and there. Here’s Pat Buchanan standing under a banner at his organization’s conference:

Note the spelling of “conference” in the banner. And keep in mind that these folks are taking jabs at Sotomayor’s English and going on about how the U.S. should shun Spanish and maintain English as the official language.

I think some tolerance for a certain level or error-making is in order here, don’t you?

I was just at the dentist (paid $1.20 for a consult after a whole 2-minute wait–damn that socialized medicine!), and they wanted to arrange for my next checkup in December. Thing is, I couldn’t remember the December schedule at my school. I didn’t have the work calendar on hand, and had not added the information to my iCal app.

iPhone to the rescue. Specifically, a new feature in 3.0: mail search. The calendar I was sent a few months ago would not be on the phone still, but the new mail search feature goes back to the mail server and searches there, too. And there it was! I downloaded the PDF file quickly and made the appointment without trouble. Cool.

Here’s an exchange from the right-wing echo chamber, between Greta van Susteren and Karl Rove, as an example of what sheer levels of hypocritical revisionism and, yes, pettiness they stoop to naturally:

VAN SUSTEREN: All right, Karl, I have to confess that from time to time, I hold a grudge. I got to confess to that. Now let me ask you about President Obama. I don’t know if you’ve been following this, but he will not come to FOX News Channel, and he took a little swipe at us the other day, and we’ve sort of teased him back. But this whole idea that — that, you know, the largest audience is on cable — of all the cable news is on FOX News Channel — what do you make of this little spat he has with us?

ROVE: I think it’s petty stubbornness. I mean, here’s a man who seems to be willing to go sit down with Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong Il, but he won’t sit down with Greta or O’Reilly or Sean Hannity. I mean, it strikes that this guy might be a little fearful of — of having tough questions asked of him.

You know what? Hillary Clinton had the same attitude until the primary, when she came on FOX, found she was treated fairly. And I can’t tell you how after that, how many people came up to me with my travels around the country and said, I’m a Hillary Clinton fan, and I appreciate what FOX did in giving her a fair shot and a fair venue on television.

The President of United States should not be afraid of coming on FOX News, nor should the President of the United States diminish his office by seeming to engage in a petty fight with the — with the — with a network himself.

I know that they have to maintain the ridiculous fiction that Fox is not the propaganda arm of the Republican Party, and as such, Obama would be opening himself to brazen attack every time he let Fox get a shot at him. But the sheer gall of hypocrisy and revisionism they exhibit here is pretty over-the-edge here.

First, we have Susteren claiming that “Obama” has a “little spat” with Fox. Hoo boy. Let’s see, Fox, for the past year or more, has savaged Obama like no one else, calling him such vile names as one could not previously imagine a news network calling a president before, making accusation after bald, unfounded, hysterical accusation. Communist, Socialist, Nazi, attacking America, destroying America… the drumbeat of smear, attack, and rage-filled hysterical rant has been constant for quite some time now. But Obama takes a little jab at Fox at a correspondent’s dinner where jabs are the main course, and suddenly he’s “petty”?

Next, Rove claims he “won’t sit down” with people like Sean Hannity. Aside from the fact that Hannity is one of the most rabid anti-Obama nutballs out there, Obama has sat down with Fox News and with people like Hannity–he went on Fox News and allowed Bill O’Reilly to have a clear shot at him. And O’Reilly did, treating Obama like a hostile witness in a trial, shouting at him with such antagonism and disrespect as to make it impossible to believe that a president would ever subject himself to that again. When did anybody treat Bush like this?

So, Obama has the stones to come on O’Reilly and hold his own–tell me, did Rove ever send Bush to be a guest on Olbermann?–and then whines that Obama never sits down with Fox News personalities because he’s “afraid” and “fearful” of “tough questions.” What utter stupidity and lies.

Then Rove claims that Obama will, of course be treated “fairly.” Like this, I suppose:

I know that I’m hardly revealing anything new or surprising here–Fox is, always has been, and always will be a festering cesspool of wingnut blathering and smears. But it never hurts to speak truth about these people a bit more often in the hopes that more people will realize the toxic effect these bottom-feeders have on the American political scene.

In what was probably music to the RIAA’s ears, a jury found in its favor and awarded it $1.9 million in damages in a file sharing retrial in Minnesota.

The bad news for the RIAA, even if they don’t realize it or don’t care, is that this verdict makes them look far worse then they ever did previously, which is saying a lot.

First, the evildoer they have crushed is a single mother of four. So, not exactly the poster girl for evildoers. She is low-income, so she is not likely to be able to pay even a fraction of the fine. Then there is the idea that this penalizes her kids just as it does her, and considering the relatively pedestrian nature of the “crime,” it comes across as chopping off someone’s hand for stealing a piece of penny candy. No, for stealing the discarded wrapper of a piece of penny candy.

Second, the judgment was so outrageous that most people will recoil: $80,000 per song, or $1,920,000. For downloading 24 songs, and maybe a few people downloaded them from her. Actual damages to the RIAA, at most, were probably well under a hundred bucks. Hard to imagine how the jury didn’t gag on that verdict–one can only assume that they were simply following a set of rules and did not allow reason to interfere.

And third, the verdict is likely to cause a legal challenge more powerful than before, under the proposition that such an award is “grossly excessive.” You can be sure that we haven’t seen the last of this case yet. After all, this was a retrial–the first trial ended with a $220,000 award for the RIAA, but the case was thrown out because the judged ruled that award to be “wholly disproportionate,” “unprecedented and oppressive.” The new punitive damages are roughly a hundred thousand times the actual damages. Frankly, I find the minimum penalty of $750 per song to be excessive–no doubt carrying the force of law only because RIAA lobbyists bribed enough congressmen.

With luck, a challenge will rule the standing law to be unconstitutional–the Eighth Amendment says, “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” How many people think that an $80,000 fine for downloading a single $1 song is not excessive? In fact, the law allows for $150,000 per song. Perfectly reasonable, right?

But one can be fairly confident that the folks over at the RIAA are smugly patting themselves on the back right now, because they don’t give a crap about any of the above. What they wanted was to scare the hell out of file sharers, making it easier to shake them down, and to scare people into buying the overpriced music they monopolize. That they took someone who was about as inoffensive as they get and derailing their life, crushing them for a petty offense, means nothing to them. This verdict is likely to frighten more people into caving to the RIAA’s extortion and coughing up thousands of dollars to avoid this kind of trial–despite there being no real evidence that they did anything wrong.

One can only suppose that the RIAA has given up on presenting any semblance of having any good will or image; they have likely decided that people need their music, even if they have to buy it from scum-sucking fascist fat cats.

I downloaded the upgrade and am now running it. So far, so good; nice feature improvements, some desired features are lacking, and though there are no bugs to report, there is one very ugly development for Americans living abroad. But first, the Good and the Bad.

The Good:

Copy and Paste. If rushing it would have resulted in a less usable interface, then perhaps it was worth the wait. Just double-tap, then expand. Or just press down for a second then release, and get the option to select a word or select everything visible. Very nicely executed.

Push. Now, when I make a change in, say, Calendar, it automatically syncs just that data, right away, and it shows up on my iPhone within a minute. Just as promised… a year ago. Better late than never!

App Store: preview pics of apps no longer require a separate screen to load; just swipe right or left right inside the app description.

Search: very nice and nicely done–though I am not in the habit of using it, and don’t immediately foresee doing so. But it’s nice to know that it’s there.

One way which the search feature can change the way you use your iPhone: to launch apps. Instead of swiping through screen after screen, just do a search and after typing the first few letters, you’ll probably have your app. This actually meshes with another new feature:

Limitless Apps. Even though the number of app screens is increased to 11 from 9, you can have more apps if you want: just keep adding them. When you max out your screens, the new apps will (reportedly) still load–they just won’t be visible. But you can still access them via Search. I haven’t tested this yet, but can think of a few potential problems: for example, what if you fill up and then some, and then you want to add an app which will reside on one of your screens? Unless the overflow apps appear on a screen, pushing visible apps into the invisible section, I don’t see how that could be achieved, short of trashing enough apps to make the last invisible one visible. It could also be problematic if you can’t remember the name of an app, or even that it exists on your iPhone. True, you can always check via iTunes, but it’s a messy situation to be in.

A great missing feature would be to have the ordering controlled within iTunes–have the app icons the same size as your iPhone (instead of the big ones displayed in the Applications section) with ‘virtual’ iPhone screens, then allow for re-ordering there instead of on the iPhone. That could be much faster and easier than what is currently done.

What’s new but not widely spoken of:

Strange that nobody seems to have noticed this: Mail finally has the option to not load remote images. When you get a spam email, it often has images which were not sent as attachments; instead, they instruct your Mail app to go to the spammer’s web site, grab the image from there, and then place it seamlessly into the email. Usually you don’t even notice that it’s happening. So, what’s bad about that? What’s bad is that (a) it has no utility for you, as you download the image either way, (b) it is never or almost never used by people you know, and far more importantly (c) the spammers use this as a way to spy on you: when your Mail app comes for the image, they identify you from the request and now know you read their email. It’s like you just sent a loud message to the spammers, saying “Here is my name and email address, I am reading your crap, send me lots more!” With the ability to not load remote images, you cut off that nuisance and don’t have to worry about accidentally viewing spam and inadvertently alerting the spammers to your activities.

I have not seen anyone mention this on the web, though it seems like a significant feature for the Mail app, which itself has otherwise seen the least improvement where improvement is needed.

The Not-Quite-So-Good:

Find My iPhone. The first piece of bad news is, this only works if you pay for Mobile Me–fine for me, but probably many people failed to notice that little caveat.

Actually, this feature is terrific if you lose your iPhone for real, but that’s pretty rare. As insurance, it works great. But I think that a lot of people expected this to be more than just that. As a phone locator when you misplaced your iPhone, it’s rather useless; since GPS doesn’t work indoors–where your phone is likely to be if misplaced–you can’t really find it on the map. Instead, it just shows you the last place you took a GPS reading, and after a few minutes of trying to update, it’ll probably fail to show the current location. Lame, really, when it should be able to use cell-tower triangulation to locate the phone even if GPS isn’t an option. Find My iPhone on Mobile Me will update your location if you activate the iPhone and find yourself on Google Maps, for example, but that’s worthless if you’ve actually lost your iPhone.

Worse, the notification sound that you can send from Mobile Me has a stupid flaw: it will ring if you are in silent mode, but even with the ringer turned on, it will not ring if the ringer volume is turned down to zero. It’ll buzz, but no sound. Oops. Frankly speaking, it’s far easier simply to call your iPhone to see if you can make it make noise and thereby locate it.

While Find My iPhone will do wonders for you if you actually lose your phone, outside of that rare situation, it’s not very useful at all. I’m pretty sure that most people, hearing of this feature, have higher expectations; if you do, then don’t.

Speed hits: Just after installing 3.0, I noticed some areas where the phone lagged. A few apps slowed down significantly, and screen swipes were sometimes jerky. But that may just be initial shake-down slowness, at times, things seem just as fast as ever, if not faster.

What’s Missing (a.k.a. The Bad):

Among the missing are a slew of much-needed improvements in Mail, with two features missing rather glaringly: first, the ability to quickly mark emails as “read” (as opposed to “unread”). Alternately, to simply mark all emails as read. In order to clear your Mail app’s badge count (showing the number of unread emails), you have to go in and display each and every single email in order to have all of them marked as “read.” You should be able to batch-mark them just like you can batch-delete them. This was a no-brainer, and should have been easy to implement.

Second, the ability to bundle accounts, or view all accounts simultaneously. I monitor about 10 accounts, maybe 5 or 6 with frequent traffic. To move between accounts, I have to go out from the Inbox in to mailboxes, then out to the list of accounts, then into the list of mailboxes for the other account, than into the Inbox of the other account. Sometimes four or five times. Not a very convenient system. You should have the option of either bundling selected accounts, or just having all the accounts in one place. Another no-brainer.

A third detail missing from Mail which is not quite as important is the ability to choose the sound you want to play when you get a new email. Same goes for other sounds–sent mail (the airplane swoosh), new voicemail, or calendar alerts. These should be customizable.

Add to that the fact that turning the ringer volume down silences everything, even when “silent” mode does not. You should be able to choose which sounds get through and which don’t. I usually have my sound turned all the way down because apps I use sometimes have annoying sound effects that I can’t turn off; but this has the effect of silencing everything on the phone. You should have separate sound options for apps, the telephone ringer, and various alerts.

The Ugly:

Clamping down on geo-purchasing. Yes, you can switch iTunes Store accounts directly on the iPhone now. But that comes at a price. Apple seems to have caught on to the fact that some people living abroad use their U.S. credit card accounts to access the U.S. iTunes Store. With the upgrade to iPhone 3.0 software, Apple forces you to sign an agreement to only purchase apps–even free ones–in the app store of the country where you are actually located. And they check, immediately, where you are, and enforce it. Which means that if you travel overseas, they’ll see you and switch off your ability to buy apps. For me, it means that unless I’m traveling in the U.S., I no longer have access to the U.S. app store. If you try to even so much as update an app bought in the U.S. app store, you are brought back to the iTunes license agreement, again and again, every time you try to update the app, in a loop that allows you to do nothing but waste time.

I am guessing that this was aimed at media downloads–TV shows and movies–but it now affects everything, and as such, is a huge pain in the ass. It also means that access to various apps is now cut off, and I am forbidden to use them. AOL Radio, for example, is not available in the Japan App Store, and after I synced my iPhone to the Japan Store, as predicted, it would not allow me to use that app anymore. Now I am restricted from using a whole class of apps I used to be able to use freely. Thank you, Apple.

Slightly more annoying is that I am now locked into the Japanese pricing structure–and Japan is always more expensive. Apps that cost 99 cents now cost $1.20. Songs that cost 99 cents now cost $1.57. And that’s if they’re available, which is now fracked up and dependent upon bizarre choices of what media the content owners think Japanese people want to buy, and all kinds of stupid convoluted DRM-related licensing agreements.

This last point is a pretty big down point to the upgrade for those living overseas–not a deal-killer by far, but a black mark for sure.

One late addition: on at least one app I had bought from the U.S. store, when I tried to upgrade, I got the message about “this app is only purchasable from the U.S. store.” Not only did it no longer try to make me agree to the license agreement yet again, but a few minutes later, when I decided that I wanted a screen shot of that message, I tried to upgrade the same app–and it worked. Hmm. Maybe it will be possible to maintain the U.S.-store apps I already own. This area will have to be explored.

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Side note: Did you know that you can sync your iPhone without backing up? I didn’t. It takes my iPhone about 20-30 minutes to Sync because it has to spend most of that time backing up every little scrap of data. There have been times I have had to leave within a few minutes but I want to sync something, like a single song, onto the iPhone. No luck, pal–if you don’t have 20-30 minutes free, you’re screwed. Unless, of course, you happen to know that the little “x” in the iTunes status window will kill the backup but continue with the Sync. Now, usually, Apple is smart when it comes to design, but this is stupid; the natural assumption is that if you click the “x” then it will stop the entire process, backup and sync. I am guessing that most people miss this and needlessly sit there waiting for a backup of everything on their iPhone despite the fact that it just backed up the exact same data an hour ago. Apple should have a note on the screen saying, “Click the ‘x’ to skip backup and continue with syncing” or some such. Either that or settings and/or controls to achieve the same effect.

While the Republicans may have done a lousy job of convincing the American people that Obama is to blame for the deficit, their long-term efforts to blame Democrats in general seem to have been successful. Witness the results of an NBC/WSJ poll (PDF):

Which ONE of the following groups do you feel is most responsible for the federal budget deficit?

Obama: 6%
Bush: 46%
Republicans in Congress: 7%
Democrats in Congress: 21%
Everybody: 13%

It’s fairly encouraging that only 6% truly believed that Obama could cause “most” of the damage seen in the federal deficit in just a few months in office than Bush could in eight full years; one can discount the 6% as the lunatic conservative fringe. “Everybody” is not a bad answer, either.

But look at the congressional numbers: Republicans 7%, Democrats 21%? When the Democrats have been in charge of the House for just over two years, barely in charge in the Senate for most of that time, the Republicans filibustering everything in sight, and Bush dominating things until just recently? That wins them 21%, while Republicans in Congress–who are in fact just as responsible as Bush, oversaw the majority of the deficit-building, and were guilty of extravagant pork and deregulation, only got 7%?

That has to be a result of either (a) Democratic respondents blaming Bush while Republican respondents blame Democrats, or (b) the successful job conservatives have done of making people believe the fiction that Democrats are to blame for spending no matter what, and that Republicans are fiscally responsible. It’s a given that Democrats in Congress have not distinguished themselves as fantastic budget-cutters, but to assign three times more responsibility for the current deficit to them than to Republicans in Congress is rather ludicrous.

Surprisingly, I have not heard much comparison between what is going on in Iran and what happened in the Philippines in 1986–namely, the “People Power Revolution” that threw out the Marcos regime. In both cases, there was a stolen election which led to mass protests which lasted for a few weeks until the regime collapsed. The two cases are hardly identical, but there are some interesting parallels.

One of those parallels is communication. In the Philippines, the government controlled communications, but one channel–Radio Veritas–was in the hands of the opposition. Those involved said that “Without Radio Veritas, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to mobilize millions of people in a matter of hours,” and “Radio Veritas, in fact, was our umbilical cord to whatever else was going on.”

In Iran, Twitter is the modern equivalent; it is being used to maintain communications, organize events, and keep the outside world informed of what’s going on inside Iran–even as the American media virtually ignore what’s happening. Twitter is of such value, in fact, that the U.S. State Department specifically asked Twitter to delay maintenance on their servers that would have caused downtime in Iran.

There are a lot of gun advocates who say that their guns are ultimately the only things which keep an oppressive government at bay; I think that this idea is simplistic and wrong. (In fact, we have seen quite clearly that all to many gun nuts are willing to allow the the dismantling of civil rights, so long as they can keep their guns; the dictator will be welcomed by the armed, not fought by them.) Of the revolutions in the last hundred years that unseated oppressive governments, most–if not almost all–were achieved by an unarmed populace. In fact, I don’t know if there has been a single overthrow of a government using personally-owned firearms in the last century. Armed uprisings that have been successful have probably been armed from the outside, not from mantlepiece firearms.

No, what truly makes the dictator tremble is communications. Communications can make or break an uprising far more surely than any number of firearms.

The uprising in Iran right now may ultimately fail, but if it succeeds, it will owe a lot to a software package with a silly blue bird mascot.

With Bush in office, Iran became polarized to the extreme, terror-related Hamas won Palestinian elections, Hezbollah had a controlling coalition in Lebanon.

Obama takes office, and very soon after making a brilliant, hopeful, and conciliatory speech in Cairo, Hezbollah loses a key election in Lebanon and Iran’s Ahmadinejad has to steal an election in order to keep the more pro-Western Mousavi from winning and transforming the country.

Some of this might be coincidence in timing, or representative of changes in progress, but I think it’s very hard, if not impossible, to discount Obama’s impact on this. Bush galvanized people who hate us, and Obama’s talent for words and statesmanship is bringing the Middle East to a more reasonable position.

Not that the wingnut echo chamber would ever recognize this; in a few years, if we’re seeing a recovering economy, a shrinking deficit, and real progress in the Middle East, they’ll give full credit to Bush, and to themselves for “pushing” Obama in the right direction–but to think of Obama as doing any of that, well, their heads would explode.

Despite Obama’s faults in other areas, he’s doing damned well on the diplomacy front, achieving more in five months than Bush did in eight years. Not wholly undoing the damage Bush left behind, but clearly on the right path.

One of the best things you can be as a politician is a victim. It’s a great popularity booster. The other side looks nasty, vicious, and mean, while you stand there looking noble and hurt. Most politicians love it when they get insulted, the more offensive the better; they know how well it plays for them. Politicians will even reach way, way beyond reasonable interpretations to try to wrench insults from an opponent’s innocuous statements, like a soccer player falling down and expressing excruciating pain because an opposing team member tapped them on the shoulder. In U.S. politics, you get lots of points for being a victim–unless, of course, you look grabby and greedy about it, like you’re trying to milk it for all its worth. Which brings us to Sarah Palin.

David Letterman made a joke, which he himself admitted was in bad taste–par for the course when it comes to late-night jokes. His gag:

One awkward moment though during the game, maybe you heard about it, maybe you saw it on one of the highlight reels. One awkward moment for Sarah Palin at the Yankee game, during the seventh inning, her daughter was knocked-up by Alex Rodriguez.

Now, listening to that joke, not knowing who was or was not at the game, who would you have assumed Letterman was referring to? There’s no question here–Palin has only one daughter known for being knocked up, and that’s Bristol. Show that joke to 100 people on the street who know about the Palins, ask who Letterman was talking about, and all of them would say Bristol–no one would have thought it was Willow, Palin’s 14-year-old, in part because no one really knows that daughter, and in part because she’s not the one famous for being knocked up out of wedlock.

But Sarah Palin saw an opportunity and she jumped on it. Oh, she could have accepted it for what it was, a jab at Bristol, with a side reference to Willow being the one at the game and “I hope Letterman wasn’t trying to say that!” But no, she pulled out the heavy artillery–like that soccer player pretending a mortal wound after a casual brush, she acted like Letterman had joked about her 14-year-old daughter being raped.

See, that’s the thing: if you’re the victim, then you act like the noble victim–you say you’re offended, and act like it. You act hurt, you do the “more in sorrow than anger” thing, you keep a level tone, and then you leave it. That’s about all you can do without looking like you’re milking it. If the story lives on its own after that, all the better for you.

Palin? None of that–she gleefully pounced on Letterman’s joke, and has made a full-blown media campaign out of it. Just watch her appearance on the Today show, you can clearly see that she is relishing this.

As it turns out, Bristol was not at the game, and Willow was. Of course Palin knew full well that Letterman was in error on that point, or was just making stuff up; either way, there was no question, in reality, about whom Letterman was referring to. But Palin had a great new opportunity: by claiming that Letterman was intentionally referring to Willow, she accused Letterman of making jokes about statutory rape, and made the clear implication that Letterman should be a registered sex offender.

The difference between her and Letterman is, Palin wasn’t joking. Letterman made a joke about Bristol getting knocked up–tasteless, sure, but fair game as Palin took her own daughter, pregnant out of wedlock, after emphasizing abstinence-only education at that, and paraded her at the convention and on the campaign trail. Palin made a serious accusation, knowingly false, that Letterman is a pervert and a sex offender and should be “kept away” from young girls. Doing some Google searches to find the original joke quote, it was clear that the right-wing blogosphere and many of the pundits are running with this like mad.

Had Palin simply acted offended in a more reasonable way, it could have been a big plus–especially if the blogosphere and the pundits kept the story alive for her. But no, she dove in for the close-quarters fighting, kept trying to shove Dave’s head under water time and time again, thrashing him soundly while screeching, “I’m a victim, I’m a victim!!!”

Palin’s shallow attempt at being above the fray came when she was asked if she was offended or she deserved an apology; her answers were along the lines of, “Shucks, I don’t want or need an apology, but hey, he should apologize to all those other folks…” like women everywhere, because Letterman jokes about “rape.” As if she were not trying to blow this up and milk it for her own political aggrandizement.

The thing is, Letterman’s joke, while edgy, was not truly that far over the line. As stated above, it was clear to anyone not trying to make political hay over this that he was referring to Bristol–and Bristol is fair game. Had Palin, like Obama, actually kept her children out of the spotlight save for the obligatory family moments, it would be a different story. But that’s not the case here, for two reasons.

First, Bristol was directly connected to Palin’s politics via the abstinence-only issue. Palin had publicly declared that abstinence-only works, and that she brought her own children up with that. So far, no problem–you can’t start talking about the kids based just on that. But then it came out that Bristol was pregnant out of wedlock, a teenage mother–and that changed everything. Since Palin had used her daughter as an example of a political issue and the daughter’s actions proved contrary to that policy, Bristol was suddenly fair game. If a politician takes a hard stance against drug use and claims that his kids would never use drugs, and then it turns out they did–fair game. Including (or especially) for late-night comedians.

Second, after this came out, Palin did not demand privacy for Bristol, which she still might have been able to do. No, instead, she dragged Bristol out to center stage and shot a spotlight on her. Instead of absorbing the embarrassment and keeping Bristol’s situation private, she instead brought Bristol and the teenage father of her child to the convention and had them make appearances. Since then, Bristol has been out there in public, making media appearances and going on public campaigns for abstinence education.

No argument for privacy or protection from jokes can possibly be made.

Not to mention that the organization sponsoring Bristol’s abstinence-only tour (“Candie’s Foundation”–advice to young girls: “Be sexy!”) has, well, rather slutty ads, the newest ones featuring Britney Spears in suggestive poses in swimsuits and high heels–ads aimed at “tweenies,” girls just like Willow Palin in fact, suggesting this is what they should look like. We’re talking girls from age 7 to 16, and even younger. Aside from the rather weird juxtaposition of sexually suggestive ads from a foundation promoting abstinence-only education, where was Palin’s sensitivity and feminism when her own daughter ran with, well, this:

See? Nothing wrong with that! Advertise sexual abstinence to “tweenie” girls with sexually suggestive photos of someone who is supposed to be these girls’ role model, from a company that makes sexy apparel for 7- to 16-year-olds.

No, instead she opportunistically lies about an interpretation of an off-color joke and calls the comedian a pervert and a sex offender who jokes about rape and demeans women everywhere. Classy. But then, Palin’s a class act, isn’t she?

You betcha.

Here’s a beaut: the right-wingers are trying to claim that James Von Brunn, the man arrested for killing a guard at the Holocaust Museum, was a left-winger. Glenn Beck retorted, “How did it happen that you look at people that are Nazis and you say that those are right wing? It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever!” Yeah, those Nazis were so damned liberal. Von Brunn is a left-winger because he believes in evolution and doesn’t like Christians. A Freeper claimed he was a registered Democrat in Maryland, but offered no evidence; now the idea is being widely reported around the right-wing blogosphere, but the “evidence” always points back to itself, in echo-chamber style. Make a claim, then claim it’s true because you claimed it.

There’s a lot to suggest he was right-wing by association; for example, he apparently posted on Free Republic, an ardently right-wing web site. Even if the user “wannabegeek” is not him, then that poster and the people who commented in response to him were clearly fellow travelers.

But for proof that von Brunn was a right-winger, just do a quick review of the man’s web site (in Google’s cache only, now). It shows pretty clearly who he was, and he was definitely not a leftist. Aside from claiming right-wingers as people who shaped who he is, and as employers, co-workers and friends, he wrote this:

The RW [right wing] does NOTHING BUT TALK. It offers no Goal, no short or long-term objectives, no plan of action against the well-known enemy. There is no strategy, no tactical advice. Only the warning: DO NOTHING, BREAK NO LAWS, SIT TIGHT (as it has for almost 100-years).

Exactly the advice Marxists/Liberals/Jews want to hear.

Hard to get more definitive than that. (Aside from being a disturbing sign of the man’s thought processes leading up to the shooting.) He dislikes the “right wing” not because he disagrees with it, but because it doesn’t go far enough. Ergo he was a right-wing extremist. He disliked the “right wing” only because it usually does not take the radical or violent action he feels is necessary.

Note his statement immediately afterward which lumps Marxists, Jews, and Liberals together into a group he clearly hates. Not to sound flippantly obvious, but he was clearly not a liberal.

Just because this guy doesn’t fall exactly in line with everything mainstream right-wingers believe does not mean he was not a right-winger himself; again, that’s what the “extremist” part is about. But saying that he was a left-winger because he believed in evolution and didn’t like Bush is like saying that the S.L.A. was right-wing because they used guns and didn’t like Lyndon Johnson. It doesn’t track.

Case closed.

Steve Benen, amongst others, makes an excellent point: Limbaugh, Fox News, and others on the right wing went ballistic when a DHS report [PDF] from early in the Obama administration warned of right-wing radical extremists who might commit violent acts. They cried persecution, and accused the Obama administration of injecting politics into homeland security. (Let’s not even get into that bit of hypocrisy, or look into the fact that a Bush administration official authored this particular report.)

From the report:

Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration. …

Proposed imposition of firearms restrictions and weapons bans likely would attract new members into the ranks of rightwing extremist groups, as well as potentially spur some of them to begin planning and training for violence against the government. …

Prominent among these themes were the militia movement’s opposition to gun control efforts, criticism of free trade agreements (particularly those with Mexico), and highlighting perceived government infringement on civil liberties as well as white supremacists’ longstanding exploitation of social issues such as abortion, inter-racial crimes, and same-sex marriage. …

…recent state and municipal law enforcement reporting has warned of the dangers of rightwing extremists embracing the tactics of “leaderless resistance” and of lone wolves carrying out acts of violence.

As I mentioned, the right wing ranted that this was nothing but a bald-faced political attack against the right wing.

Now?

• Richard Poplawski, a right-wing extremist, shot three police officers dead partly because he feared Obama would institute a gun ban (though this happened just 3 days before the report was issued, it stands within a body of recent evidence)
• Scott Roeder, a right-wing pro-lifer, shot dead Dr. George Tiller in a church
• James Wenneker von Brunn today shot and killed a guard at the Holocaust Museum; von Brunn is a right-wing white supremacist who also belonged to the “birthers,” the group holding that Obama was not born in the U.S.

Note the last two happened within a week or so of each other. Kind of hard to dismiss the DHS warning now… Some of these people are scary, and now that the whole wingnut wedge is going into moonbat overdrive, more and more of the armed violent extremists are falling off the edge and into the headlines.

How long before they become a full-fledged terrorist group? That question, sadly, is no longer asked in levity.

As for how this makes the right wing look? Well, this is the bed they have made for themselves–and they continue to be unapologetic in their hate-filled rants of rage and tinfoil-hat conspiracy-spinning. If anything, they are ramping it up. They have no one to blame for appearances except themselves.

A new Gallup poll shows what has been fairly clear: while Obama is the clear leader of the Democrats, the Republicans are pretty much a headless chicken right now. Even amongst Republicans and rightward-leaners, Limbaugh, Gingrich, and Dick Cheney all stand out about equally as people who speak best for their party. That’s their own definition of who leads them now.

Sucks to be them, don’t it?

A chart from the New York Times showing where the current deficit comes from. I have altered the colors so that Bush’s deficit is shown in red, Obama’s in blue. It is worthy to note two things: first, that most of what we see here has taken place over a relatively short period of time, over the last year or so. Second, that the lion’s share of Obama’s deficit consists of actions needed to fight off Bush’s recession. When you subtract continuing costs incurred by Bush policies (like the recession and the Middle East wars), Obama’s contribution is limited to that tiny arrow at the bottom right.

In any case, if you ever encounter a tea-bagging wingnut screaming that he wants to secede from the union because Obama is creating a deficit that’ll cripple us, show him this chart. He’ll ignore it, of course, or otherwise claim it’s irrelevant (or Clinton’s fault), but others in the room will see him for the idjit he is.

Once we get out of the current recession, expect to see us do something that Bush could not do: rise up out of this deficit.

A photographic technique that you see a lot of these days is the tilt-shift. Essentially, the process is very simple: take a photo (a long shot works best, like a shot of a landscape from a height) and blur only the top and bottom of the image, the blur being feathered to a fair degree. What results is an image that makes everything in it look tiny, like a scale-model set.

This effect tricks the eye because of our natural perception of depth-of-field. When taking an image, the camera is focused on objects within a specific distance. For example, if I take a photo of a person standing ten feet away, I want to be focused on that person. But the camera will catch anything between, say, eight feet and twelve feet away as focused; the rest will be out of focus, the farther it is from that range. This is depth of field.

The more the camera’s shutter is closed (higher aperture, or f-stop), the greater the depth of field becomes and more is in focus. The wider the aperture, the narrower the depth of field becomes. This is used in portrait shots, where you want only the person you’re shooting to be in focus, with the background out of focus.

Depth of field, however, is most noticeable when you are close-up to something. If you take a photo of objects at a distance of,say, more than 30 or 40 feet away, it becomes harder to create a depth-of-field effect. When you take a landscape shot of objects far away, creating depth of field is virtually impossible. Therefore, our minds relate depth-of-field with closeness–if there is a gradient of focus, we assume that what we see is within a few feet of our eyes.

Thus, when you see photos like the ones below, you automatically think it must be a scale model:

These are not the best examples of the technique, but they were easy to make: I just took snaps of the view from my balcony window, emailed them to myself, and then uploaded them to Tilt Shift Maker, a web site that will make the transformation quickly and easily. Just upload the image, select an area to blur, and a few more clicks will send the altered image back to you.

Adobe Photoshop CS4 has the feature built-in, but I don’t have that version. You could still do the effect in other versions of Photoshop (select a band of the image and feather by a large amount, invert the selection, then apply a gaussian blur effect; otherwise you make a gradient mask in a more complex process), but the web site was just easier.

For added effect, I took the images above into Apple’s free Preview app and goosed the color saturation (scale models are usually painted with stronger colors than in real life).

For some reason, I never heard about this being used before Adobe came out with the feature in CS4. But now you see it a lot, including in the opening credits for the new TV show Dollhouse.

Anyway, a fun little tool if you want to play with it. Here’s a page with some good examples of tilt-shifting, and you can find tons more on the net with a simple search.

Palm just released the Pre a few days ago. The lines were less than spectacular, which Palm played down, but there was that tension–will the next-gen iPhone one-up the Pre?

The answer seems to be, you bet. The new iPhone 3GS has 2x the memory, about 50,000 more apps, longer battery life, much faster web browsing, a video camera (the Pre doesn’t have one), an internal compass, and a snappier OS. The Pre can run more than one app at a time and has GPS navigation free as opposed to having to buy an app (so you spend $10 more, big deal), and it has an LED flash. Both for the same price. Ouch for the Pre.

The Pre has a physical keyboard, and for those who need one, that’s a clincher. But Apple’s soft keyboard, frankly, works beautifully for me–I can type almost normal speed on it–and it has the flexibility to go landscape mode and to change languages, something a physical keyboard can’t do.

Add a $99 iPhone 3G which comes close to beating the Pre, and Apple catches the lower-end market at the same time.

The Pre has been hyped for months as a serious contender, and now Apple has sucked all the air out of the Pre’s debut.

Me, I’m wondering what extra costs Softbank will ask for upgrading the phone after only half my previous contract is up….

When visiting Germany, Obama shunned plans to visit a concentration camp, instead insisting on a visit to a cemetery where Nazi SS soldiers are interred. Even after it became clear that no U.S. soldiers were buried at the cemetery, Obama defended his decision to visit the site and not to visit a concentration camp: “Hey, let’s remember that the soldiers in the Nazi SS were victims, just like the Jews killed in the Holocaust. They were forced to carry out Hitler’s orders, so I’m sure they suffered just as much.” Obama later, reluctantly, added a quick stop at a concentration camp to his itinerary.

Oh, no wait–I have that mixed up. It was Reagan who did everything I wrote about above. In 1985. But just think of how the right-wingers would be reacting if it had been Obama and not their savior!

From Ars Technica:

Louisiana residents may find themselves paying an extra fee on top of their regular Internet costs if the state’s House of Representatives has its way. The House voted 81 to 9 in favor of the 15-cent monthly levy Thursday, with the bill’s sponsors arguing that the money would go towards fighting Internet-related crimes in the state. …

Naturally, the measure is largely being pitched as a way to save the children. “I don’t think that 15 cents per month is too much to ask for our children’s protection,” Representative Simone Champagne (D-Jeanerette) told the House floor, according to WWL-TV.

This smells of scam. Remember when they started instituting state lotteries? Remember that they pitched it as an education initiative, that the money would go to pay for schools and stuff like that? Well, now there are so many cash-cow lotteries run by states that our kids should be going to schools that resemble palaces. Are they? No? Hmm, wonder what happened.

What happened was that the whole thing was a scam. The idea of lotteries was unpalatable at first, so they sweetened it by making it seem like it was all to benefit the little kiddies. But mostly what happened was nothing except the cash going to other purposes. What voters don’t think about is that while a special program can put more money into one specific target, like education, there is nothing stopping the state from taking away the same amount of money from the usual education budget and then using it for something else. Result: the money is used elsewhere and education got screwed. I’d love to hear about any state’s education budget getting a huge boost from lottery income and suffering no reductions elsewhere–spending more now as a percent of the budget than they got before the lotteries. Somehow I don’t think you’ll find examples of that anywhere.

So Louisiana wants to tax Internet usage to fund a program to fight crime against kids? And, what, without the tax, they would let that type of crime run rampant? Not to mention that this is completely atypical and inconsistent–taxing specific populations for specific law enforcement tasks? Do they tax your credit card to pay for investigations of credit card fraud? Do they tax gun sales to investigate gun crimes? Maybe they’ll start taxing condom sales to fund the vice squad. As far as I can figure, no other area gets a special tax to pay for any specific anti-crime task force. More reason to believe that they just want to create a new tax and need to justify it somehow. And by taxing Internet usage, they probably figure that there are enough people who don’t depend on the Internet who will be glad to hear that someone else, not them, is paying the tax.

What Louisiana, just like everyone else, should do is simply fund the program normally. But then, they’d have to raise regular taxes, which is harder. I swear, Americans are such wusses and idjits when it comes to taxes. We expect service but don’t want to pay the bill. Man up, America.

During the Bush administration, Republicans launched scathing attacks against Democrats for having the temerity and gall of criticizing Bush while he was on foreign soil.

March 25, 2002:

President Bush yesterday accused the Democratic Party of “petty politics” for using its radio address to attack him on foreign soil, saying the president was “pandering” to Hispanic voters by touring Latin America. … White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer was even more critical of the Democrats, who used their weekly radio address to attack the president’s four-day trade trip to Mexico, Peru and El Salvador. … “This would mark the second time that the opposition party has attacked the president on a trip abroad,” he said. “That’s not a part of the tradition that has been afforded to presidents when they leave the country before.”

He added: “When the president left for his trip to Europe in June of 2001, he was also attacked by a member of the Democratic Party.”

November 18, 2005:

Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) declared: “Murtha and Democratic leaders have adopted a policy of cut and run. They would prefer that the United States surrender to the terrorists who would harm innocent Americans. To add insult to injury, this is done while the president is on foreign soil.”

The criticisms? When Bush was in Europe in 2001, Tom Daschle said Bush was engendering an isolationist policy. Ooooo, nasty. Daschle later apologized, by the way. While Bush was in Central America, the speaker emeritus of the California State Assembly (what a high-level Democrat!) said Bush was pandering to Hispanic voters. Later, Hastert complained about Murtha when Murtha did not even directly criticize Bush, but simply called for the return of American soldiers.

But the point is, Republicans are very sensitive about matters like this, protocol and respect for the office of the President of the United States of America, and if the tables were turned, say if Obama was in the Middle East and Europe making important speeches and trying to smooth relations with other countries, you can be absolutely certainly that Republicans would never, ever do anything even remotel

House Minority Leader John Boehner blasted Obama’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian question. …

Boehner’s Republican colleague, Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana, added that “there was a sense in here of a moral equivalency between those who are driving for a Palestinian state and the state of Israel.” …

Marc Thiessen, a former Bush administration speechwriter, noted that Obama … “is naïve and dangerous.” … Thiessen was sharply critical of Obama….

Republican strategist and CNN contributor Ed Rollins said Obama may have further soured relations with Israel.

…former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney — an often-talked-about 2012 GOP presidential candidate … said that Obama needs to stop using foreign soil to apologize for U.S. relations, in what he calls a “tour of apology.” … Obama’s plans to trim the missile defense budget [are] a “grave miscalculation” that puts the nation at risk….

That’s just from one article.

Republican Senator Jim Inhofe called the president “un-American” and said, “I just don’t know whose side he’s on.”

Sarah Palin attacked Obama on domestic issues, saying he wants to “control the people” with the stimulus bill.

Newt Gingrich criticized Obama several times, on issues both foreign and domestic.

The list goes on, but the point is clear: Republicans are utter, flaming hypocrites. When Democrats, any Democrats, even local Democrats, even timidly criticized Bush while he was abroad, or even said things that seemed to criticize Bush, Republicans lashed out in outrage at such affronts, and accused Democrats of violating protocol.

But when Obama goes overseas, Republicans seem to criticize Obama even more than usual, which is saying a lot. Almost every major Republican keeps up the constant blast of attacks, even to the point of calling the president “un-American”.

And do not expect any apologies to be forthcoming.

Yes, yes, I know–we should not be surprised that Republicans are incredible, bald-faced hypocrites, they are always doing stuff like that, I shouldn’t be surprised. But nevertheless, it should always be pointed out and never excused, marginalized, or let go.

A lot happening, a lot to talk about… but various things to take care of have made it a bit difficult to post over the past several days. Sorry about that.

One interesting point: in an encouraging sign, 345,000 people lost their jobs in May.

It is, of course, encouraging only in the context of 345,000 being way below estimates (the prediction was for 520,000 jobs lost), and May’s numbers showing the lowest job loss numbers in more than six months. As you can see from the chart on the right, there seems to be a trend from January that suggests we are quickly heading out of this recession. If you follow the trend line, we could actually be seeing job growth in three or four months–if the trend line holds or improves.

Is Obama responsible? Well, Obama passes a stimulus bill, and within a month or so job losses slow dramatically and the stock market gains 2000-plus points. Not proof positive, but it’s pretty hard to dismiss.

However, ever since Obama got elected, Republicans have been trying to blame him for anything and everything that smacks of bad news. Seriously, even after he was nominated as the Democratic candidate, Republicans have tried to pin stock market drops on him, as if the traders were going into wild panics at even the thought of Obama maybe becoming president.

And when Obama took office, Republicans took no time at all to go into full-blast blame-Obama mode, despite forgiving Bush for years of bad economic news because it was Clinton’s fault. A few weeks after Obama took office, the market dropped, and that was immediately jumped on. For example, in February, Malkin reached back to a November high to contrast the February low, blaming Obama for the stock market tumble. Even counting from January, when Obama took office, there was an apparent plummet that right-wingers wasted no time in laying at Obama’s doorstep.

Naturally, when the stock market then immediately regained and actually rose above the level it was when Obama took office (just a few weeks after the “ineffective” stimulus bill passed), the same bloggers’ thundering silence was hard to miss.

By the right-wingers’ own standards, Obama should be responsible for the first encouraging upswing since mid-2007. We’re still waiting for their congratulatory praise, their admission that the stimulus bill indeed stimulated the economy. After all, if Bush had gotten such immediate, positive results, the same people would be shouting this from the rooftops–but when Obama pulls off a relative economic miracle, they claim he is an abject failure.

Instead, Bush was supposedly not responsible for the downturn in the market at all–a lie easily proven false when one tracks back to stock market activity before the election. It’s kind of hard to miss the fact that the biggest losses came well into the remains of the Bush administration:

Malkin’s blaming of Obama for a 4-month, 2000-point drop kind of loses significance when one sees Bush suffering a 2,400-point drop in just ten days in October. In fact, the very temporary one-month drop looks insignificant when compared to the market’s activity in the last six or nine months of Bush. And I don’t think that Malkin has yet congratulated Obama for the 800-point rise relative to when he took office.

And let’s not forget that the change in payroll job loss numbers is kind of hard to miss–that the moment Obama took office, the numbers immediately switched from accelerating downward to slowing considerably, pointing to a possible end of the recession with such rapidity that Bush’s faux “recovery” will look ridiculously slow in comparison.

At which point, I have no doubt that the right-wing bloggers would yet again do a 180-degree double-flip-flop and again assert that the previous president’s influence is what should be credited with the economic performance a year or two after the next president takes office–completely ignoring their previous claims that anything after November 2008 was completely Obama’s fault.

As for now, the right-wing blogs are mostly ignoring the encouraging job news altogether. The few wingnut blogs that are talking about May’s job numbers are pretending like the payroll numbers don’t exist or don’t matter, and instead focus on the unemployment numbers, which rose more than expected. From Hot Air:

The unemployment numbers for May hit earlier this morning, and it looks like Barack Obama didn’t save many jobs at all. Despite claims from both Obama and VP Joe Biden that the Porkulus package had saved 150,000 jobs, unemployment went up another half-percent to 9.4%, setting a new record for the past quarter century. … Why is this important? It demonstrates that the President and his economic advisers have gotten pretty much everything about this economic collapse wrong.

Outside the Beltway does mention the job numbers, but only at the end of their post about the unemployment numbers, and only to make the claim that they don’t matter:

Going by the Household Survey the number of unemployed increased by 787,000. This makes this recession as bad as 1957 and not quite as bad as 1948 in terms of unemployment. So despite the very mild good news yesterday about new jobless claims this data more than offsets it.

Even this grasp at painting the worst possible picture is hollow and false. As the NYT Economix blog patiently explains, the reasons for the unemployment numbers rising are not so dire–and may even be encouraging. While some of the number hike is due to the fact that 345,000 lost their jobs–still a loss, despite the great improvement in numbers–another part of the rise in unemployment is due to the fact that a much larger number of people than usual are trying to re-enter the job market. These are people who lost their jobs under Bush and had stayed unemployed for so long, they had dropped off the charts altogether–but now have reappeared because they apparently have new hope that jobs can be found. As for jobs Obama has saved, if you use Bush’s last numbers–700,000-plus jobs lost in January–as a baseline, Obama has saved about three-quarters of a million jobs already. Not that I take that claim seriously, but it conservatively follows the logical pretexts that right-wingers laid down.

So, the May payroll job numbers are about 175,000 jobs better than forecast and show a greatly encouraging trend toward rapid exit from recession, and even the higher unemployment numbers signal widespread confidence that jobs can be found, and people are out there looking for them–but all the right-wingers claim to see is bleak prospects–or nothing at all.

Not surprising.

As I recall, back when Bush was in charge and anyone tried to claim things weren’t going so well, they were accused by the right-wingers of trying to talk down the economy, of trying to make things worse so they could criticize Bush.

And now?