It turns out that there is voter fraud going on: California police just arrested a guy for submitting a fraudulent voter registration form.

They guy: Mark Jacoby, head of a voter registration group hired by the California Republican Party (CRP). Yep, with McCain calling ACORN a threat to the fabric of Democracy, and the extremely-politicized Bush justice department investigating and leaking news at politically advantageous times, a chief Republican registration official is the one arrested for fraud.

If that’s not ironic enough for you, then how about the reaction of the Republicans? Money quote:

The CRP called the arrest “politically motivated.”

Wheee!! Look at irony, shattering into a million tiny pieces!!

Republicans wanted to start a nationwide dragnet to catch even the tiniest evidence of election fraud, even going so far as to fire any US Attorneys who refused to make that campaign their primary task. Well, as they say, watch out what you wish for: you just might get it! And they did–except the Californian authorities missed the Prime Directive of that campaign: only prosecute Democratic fraud. You’re supposed to let Republicans get away with it. Think I’m kidding? Witness Ann Coulter herself being guilty of the exact same voter registration fraud as Jacoby. Coulter was let off without so much as a slap on the wrist–it helps when the administrations in power are on your side, I guess.

McCain:

McCain also complained that the identities of people who contributed more than $200 million of Obama’s total take have not been reported, although that is allowable under federal law because the individual donations fall under the $200 reporting limit.

“I’m saying it’s laying a predicate for the future that can be very dangerous,” McCain said. “History shows us where unlimited amounts of money are in political campaigns, it leads to scandal.”

Ultimately, the only problem with raising such big amounts is that the politician will be beholden to the donors and will feel it necessary to repay them with access and special favors. You know, the kind that McCain is embroiled in up to his neck and higher, as evidenced that his campaign is riddled with lobbyists, his campaign manager being a major lobbyist for Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. McCain gets a great deal of support, monetary and otherwise, from these lobbyists and their big-player clients, and, totally by coincidence I am sure, his policies and Senate votes have fallen in line with these players’ interests. Being so close to the corruption, one can perhaps see why McCain is talking about the need for reform so much.

But what McCain is objecting to here is that Obama raised less than $200 apiece from more than a million average Americans; he calls this “dangerous.”

Um, Senator McCain? I think you need to go back and look up what the word “reform” means.

Not that it wasn’t expected:

Powell said he had watched both Obama and Sen. John McCain in the last “six or seven weeks,” since the national political conventions, and paid special attention to how they reacted to the nation’s worsening economic situation.

“I must say, he seemed a little unsure about how to approach the problem,” Powell said of McCain. “He didn’t have a complete grasp of the economic problems we have.”

Powell also expressed concerns about McCain’s selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. “I don’t believe she’s ready to be President of the United States, which is the job of vice president,” Powell said, adding that it raised “some questions in my mind” about McCain’s judgment.

As for Obama, Powell said, “I think that he has a definitive way of doing business that would serve us well.” “He’s thinking that all villages have values, all towns have values, not just small towns have values,” Powell said, in an apparent reference to remarks Palin made earlier this week that she enjoyed visiting the “pro-America” areas of the country.

The retired general said that “John McCain is as non-discriminatory as anyone I know,” but he expressed serious concerns about his campaign’s, and the Republican Party’s recent focus on Obama’s past association with William Ayers and robocalls the campaign has placed in battleground states this past week. “I think this goes too far. I think it’s made the McCain campaign look a little narrow. I look at these kinds of approaches to the campaign, and they trouble me. The party has moved further to the right,” he said.

Now, as a result of his performance at the U.N. leading up to the Iraq War, Powell does not have nearly the cachet today that he once had, far less with liberals, in fact. But he is still highly regarded by many independents and conservatives, and that could be critical in the next few weeks as many people in the center or just right of it make up their minds. Powell’s voice could swing votes to Obama, or at least lessen enthusiasm for McCain where McCain needs it.

To me, Powell is a tragic figure–a man who could have been the first African-American president, instead choosing to avoid the brutal fray of politics that Obama is now navigating, only to wind up badly damaged by the people he swore his loyalty to.

Signing up to serve in Bush’s cabinet was a colossal blunder for Powell. He was crassly used by that administration. His sage advice was largely ignored, he was cut off and disregarded–and then his gravitas, the respect everyone had for him, was abused by his boss, who knew he had a soldier who would follow orders. Powell lost a massive chunk of his credibility by the time he had left the Bush administration.

Like the tragic good-guy-turned-villain-turned-good-again in so many movies, this seems like Powell’s exiting grasp at righting some of what went wrong. I can only imagine someone altering the ending scenes from Return of the Jedi, putting McCain’s face on the emperor’s, shooting wicked rays at Luke Obama, and have Darth Powell turn on McCain and throw him down the shaft in a final act of remorse and heroism.

It will be interesting to see how McCain reacts to this.

Not that Sarah Palin hasn’t jumped the shark about ten times already, but here’s the latest, from a rally in North Carolina:

We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.

This, of course, clearly implies that there are parts of the United States which are not “pro-American.” Since Palin has spoken in pretty much every part of the nation by now, we should review something she stressed as a cardinal rule of politics:

I might add that, in small towns, we don’t quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they’re listening and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren’t listening. No, we tend to prefer candidates who don’t talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco.

But hey, let’s give Sarah Palin a chance to clarify her hypocrisy with a completely inconsistent, blather-mouthy, weaselly excuse, from, appropriately, Fox News:

Every area, every area across this great country where we’re stopping and where also the other ticket is stopping and getting to speak at these rallies and speak with the good Americans, it’s all pro-America. I was just reinforcing the fact that there, where I was, there’s good patriotic people there in these rallies, so excited about positive change and reform of government that’s coming that they are so appreciative of hearing our message, hearing our plan. Not, not any one area of America is more pro-America patriotically than others.

Uh huh. I won’t comment on this further because, you know, what really can you say that’s not blindingly obvious?

So I went to Akihabara today, after visiting some electronic stores in Ikebukuro, to see what I could find out about my alternatives for buying a new Macbook Pro. This was the first time I saw the units in person, and, as expected, the monitors were glossier than ever. I never really liked the glossy displays used up until now, but this one was even more reflective. The upside was that it protects the LCD screen better–the glass used makes it hard to disturb the picture by poking it–and the new LED backlighting makes the display a lot brighter than even the previous bright monitors, partially canceling out the glare issue. It’s not good, but not quite as bad as I’d feared.

The trackpad, on the other hand, is great. Very sensitive, very smooth, very large. I never liked having it in touch-tap mode before, but on all the units I played with it was active–and it worked a lot better than I remembered. I could get pop-up menus just by laying two fingers on the trackpad, very natural. And the click-anywhere feature is very nice, meaning you don’t have to aim and reach for the button location. Finally, the new gestures–three-fingered swipes to go to the next image/page, four-fingered brushes up and down to activate Exposé–felt easy to remember and execute. I would definitely miss having this new trackpad.

In fact, I also was pleasantly surprised by the keyboard; when I tried it out, it was smooth and effortless; I have problems with some keyboards, but I loved this one.

The Firewire port issue is not so bad; I even bought an 800-400 FW cable from a cable shop in Akihabara whether or not I wound up buying the new Macbook, figuring it could be used in my old Powerbook anyway.

The TV-out thing still burns, but there is a solution for me. I use my computer at work mostly in a lab, and can hook up via a VGA splitter box that’s in the lab under the teacher’s computer station. I’ll need to lug around a VGA cable, a long one in case I need to set my computer at a distance, but I found a fairly lightweight 5m cable at the same shop I got the FW cable from. For other situations, I can use the new LCD projector the school got if I really need to use a display in any other room. I won’t like not being able to plug into any TV I like, but I should be able to live with it.

All that, plus Apple claims that battery life is better–five hours, they say, but we all know that computer makers always pad that spec quite a bit. Still, the battery looks pretty easy to swap out, and now the HDD can be swapped out as well.

Nevertheless, I was still attracted by the thought of saving a bunch of money on a previous-model Macbook Pro priced down. However, that didn’t work out like I’d hoped. Despite being out of date and in clearance-sale mode, the old MacBook Pro still has a set price–everyone sells it for ¥184,800 ($1819), which is not all that great a savings off the Apple Store education price of ¥218,800 ($2153). Yeah, it’s lower, but not by as much as I’d hoped. Plus, swapping out the 2GB of RAM for my desired 4GB was more expensive than the Apple Store charges for the built-to-order model.

But here’s the kicker, which I didn’t think about earlier: the previous-version Macbook Pros on sale in stores now only come with the Japanese keyboard. And I really dislike that keyboard, a lot. I’d much rather deal with a reflective screen than a Japanese keyboard.

I played around with the idea of buying a refurbished 17-inch Macbook Pro with a U.S. keyboard currently selling on the Apple Store Japan site; it sells for the same base price as the new 15“ Macbook Pros at education prices. But they won’t swap out the RAM for the usual prices, and that would hike the cost higher–pus, although I’d love the huge screen, I don’t think I would be able to fit it in my backpack, and it might be heavier than I would like to schlep everywhere.

So it came back to the new Macbook Pros, with the screen problems. I was mollified by seeing it in person, the glare not being entirely as bad as I’d expected–but still bad–and the brightness overcoming that some. Using it as-is, I would definitely have to position it right to avoid having parts of the screen blocked out. In my current office situation, there’s a large window behind me, and that would be a deal-killer; however, in a week, we redesign the office layout, and I’ll have a wall behind me. Classrooms are similarly not a problem, as I’ll always have my back to a whiteboard and a wall. At home, it won’t be a problem, and I don’t use my laptop outdoors much.

One more possible solution: matte screen films. Just like the ones that take the glare off the iPhone, there are films for monitors as well. Having seen some displayed a stores, I can see it’s a bit of a risk: on some monitors, the film produces a gritty, grimy appearance in bright areas that are otherwise perfectly smooth and bright without the film; on other monitors, it’s perfectly acceptable. Finding a store where they could show me different brands was a chore, and at the best one, the floor guy seemed not to have a clue as to which films on display were which. So I might have to buy one or two before I find one that works–not too cheap, at about ¥1500 a pop or so. I’ll also have to buy a 17” film and cut it down to match the Macbook Pro’s screen size. I’m still not even sure I’ll wind up keeping it–I’ll use the Macbook for a week or two and see if I can live with the reflectiveness as-is.

So, in a few minutes I’ll put in my order–with options for 4GB of RAM and a 7200 RPM HDD, not to mention the U.S. keyboard. I’ll also get a video adaptor, probably Mini DisplayPort-to-VGA; Apple claims that you can’t add on other adaptors to that one, such as a VGA-to-DVI. They even claimed that a Mini DisplayPort-to-DVI cannot accept a DVI-to-HDMI adaptor hooked on.

But I have a sneaking suspicion that Apple just says all of this stuff to avoid being responsible for wiggy connectors. No one on the Apple discussions site claims to have tried this. I’m buying, of course, on the presumption that the adaptors won’t work… but I will still try all of them anyway.

Update: OK, the order is placed. They say 1-2 weeks shipping time (grouse), but it often comes on the early end of the estimate, if past experience is a guide here. I got the 4 GB of RAM, 7200 rpm hard drive, the Mini DisplayPort-to-VGA adaptor–and the U.S. keyboard as well. I even went in for the Mobile Me subscription, priced down to $60 with the Macbook Pro purchase. Naturally, you can bet that I’ll blog on it when it comes.

You have almost certainly heard of Joe the Plumber. Maybe you heard that his name is Samuel, not Joe, but Joe appears to be his middle name, and if he uses it, then it’s a non-issue and let’s move on.

And there is a lot to move on to. McCain apparently did not vet Joe the Plumber any more than he did Palin. But since McCain repeatedly talked about Joe the Plumber, he really should have gotten his facts straight. McCain thought that Joe would be a great way to attack Obama. Joe stopped Obama in Ohio and said that he was preparing to buy his boss’s plumbing company; he claimed that the firm’s income was more than $250,000 a year, and asked “Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn’t it?” McCain glommed on to this amateur attempt to show up Obama as unfriendly to the common man, mentioning Joe almost two dozen times in the debate.

The problem is, Joe’s question to Obama was not exactly legitimate.

First, Joe ain’t a plumber. He works for a plumbing company, but he’s not trained or licensed in the state of Ohio, where he lives. He says he works under his boss’s license, but (a) that appears not to be legal in many places in Ohio, and (b) if Joe bought the business he would not be able to work under his boss’ license anymore. He’d have to retake the training program he never finished and then get licensed first.

Second, Joe is highly unlikely to be able to buy the business in the first place. Records show that Joe makes around $40,000 a year and owes back taxes he hasn’t yet paid; he claims that he wants to buy a business that nets a quarter mill a year. Without a whopping big loan, less likely now than ever considering the bank loan crisis, Joe probably isn’t buying anything; his question to Obama was likely a fictional stretch in an attempt to make Obama look bad.

Third, the business he claims to want to buy probably doesn’t make “more than $250,000” in taxable income; people who know Joe’s boss, All Newell, say that his business is run out of a garage and couldn’t possibly net that much. Experts estimate the business’ net income at no more than $150,000 to $200,000 a year at the outside, where it would not be taxed more under Obama’s plan. As Obama explained it to Joe in that initial talk on the street, any income under $250,000 would not be subject to a tax hike–only the taxable income over $250,000 would be taxed. If, as Joe claimed, his imaginary business made $280,000, then only $30,000 would be taxed at 39% instead of 36%–a modest increase of $900. And frankly, on that level of income, you’re doing damned well enough to pay your fair share.

Fourth, Joe is not your average, independent, undecided Joe Voter. Joe is a registered Republican. He first claimed he was undecided, but eventually admitted that he is indeed a McCain backer. And to top it off, it appears that he hails from Mesa, Arizona, in McCain’s home state. This was not an honestly uncommitted voter trying to suss out the truth from a candidate, it was a McCain supporter trying to do a “gotcha” on Obama under false pretenses.

So in the end, we don’t have a hard-strapped independent everyman plumber who will be hit hard by Obama’s oppressive tax plan, we have a Republican McCain supporter putting forth a fake scenario intended to make Obama look bad, but who will actually not be hurt at all by Obama’s plan.

In fact, in the ironic capper to the story: Joe will make out better under Obama than he will under McCain. Recalling the candidates’ tax plans and Joe’s actual current income, Joe would get a 2.0% tax cut under Obama, but a 0.6% tax cut under McCain–that’s about $800 in relief from Obama and $240 from McCain.

But Joe seems to represent an ever-increasing segment of the American population: those who are actually helped more by Democrats, but vote Republican because they dream and fantasize about being rich and influential, under which circumstances they imagine they would benefit greatly from Republican policies.

The claim is that ACORN is a group with close ties to Barack Obama and is involved in a massive scam to register hordes of fake voters so as to throw the election for Barack Obama. McCain claimed in the debate last night that ACORN is “now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”

The truth, of course, is significantly different.

ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) is a voter advocacy group that holds registration drives, focusing on increasing participation among lower- and middle-class citizens. While ACORN often finds itself aligned with Democrats on the issues, it is not affiliated with any political party, and McCain himself was the keynote speaker at an ACORN rally, where he praised ACORN and its workers, saying, “What makes America special is what’s in this room tonight.”

ACORN is not involved in any vote fraud. The focus of the recent storm is something which has always plagued all registration drives by all such organizations of any size: workers scamming their employers for a little extra cash. ACORN, and many organizations like it, hire people to register citizens to vote. You’ve probably seen this many times, where a card table is set up somewhere in public with forms, and a few people are approaching passers-by and urging them to register. The people who work these tables are hired just like with any organization or company. They are paid to register people. And whenever you hire lots of people, some will be dishonest. In this case, some decide that it’s easier to simply fake registrations instead of signing up real people, which is how you get registrations for Mickey Mouse and Tony Romo.

This is not directed by or encouraged by ACORN, Barack Obama, or John McCain, it is not the fault of anyone except a few dishonest people for hire. ACORN, the actual victims of fraud here, do their best to flag such fraudulent registrations, but are not allowed to throw out even the most egregious fakes–all must be submitted. But this does not mean that this will result in any fake votes. This is a few people trying to get a few extra bucks by submitting forms with fake names and information.

There is no evidence–zero, zilch, none, not a scrap–that this is anything but what I have described above. So why is it such a big story? The answer is an old one: because it is a helpful red herring for right-wing efforts to commit real election fraud.

There is a real and penetrating effort by conservative groups to suppress the poor and minority votes, primarily due to the fact that these groups vote strongly Democratic. There are several ways to do this. One is to introduce new laws which challenge and restrict registration and voting by these groups, such as Voter ID laws, which discourage poor voters by throwing more obstacles in their path. Another way is to fight against laws which make it easier for these people to register, such as Motor-Voter laws, which conservatives have always fought against. Another way is to disenfranchise large numbers through a variety of dodgy, dishonest, and often contemptible means, such as voter caging; the most recent iteration of this is to challenge the registration of voters whose homes have been foreclosed.

How are these efforts helped by false claims of fraud by groups like ACORN? In truth, there is very little actual voter fraud amongst these groups; in light of that truth, there is little justification for the conservative efforts to suppress the vote. But by claiming massive voter fraud where there is none, such efforts are given a false veneer of legitimacy. Without any voter fraud happening, Voter ID laws don’t make much sense; by claiming voter fraud is rampant, you gain support.

In McCain’s case, the reason is more immediate: to not only sully his opponent and energize the base, but also to begin construction of a false narrative as to why the election will go the way it will go.

This whole situation is made much worse by the recently leaked news that the FBI is now launching an official probe into ACORN. Coming just a day after McCain made his big ACORN smear campaign official, the news smacks of dirty tricks, giving just such false legitimacy to the claims of vote theft. The real question here is why ACORN is being investigated while blatant efforts of real election fraud go uninvestigated and unpunished, from Katherine Harris’ 2000 fraud where she knowingly disenfranchised tens of thousands of Democratic voters in Florida under an intentionally-botched purge of felons from voter lists, to more recent caging efforts that target college students who are required to leave their dormitories during summer break, or even soldiers who are serving overseas.

These efforts result in the actual loss of voting rights by tens of thousands of real American citizens at the polls, as compared to the claimed ACORN fraud, which has very little if any impact at all on actual votes cast in any election.

But those real and significant cases of election fraud benefit conservative politicians–draw your own conclusions as to why they go uninvestigated.

While the prospect of the new Macbook Pro is overall very positive, there are a few significant down points. One of those is the glass screen–I see no real advantage here, and the reflectivity is a major down point. I never liked the glossy screens before, and these computers seem to be more reflective than ever. Had it been made glass so one could get touch-screen functionality, that I could understand. But without that, it’s a drag on the computer’s appeal.

Another down point is the lack of a 400 Mbps Firewire port. I mean, really? I have to buy pricey adaptors and new cables to use a bunch of equipment I own? Now, Apple does mercilessly phase out stuff which is no longer hip–they were among the first, if not the first, to ditch the floppy disc, for example–and I do understand that USB is winning the game. But it’s still a pain.

But one legacy ditch Apple executed with this model is one that makes zero sense to me: no more out-to-TV. Seriously. You can still use VGA and DVI, but if you have an old-fashioned TV set and need to go out to it, you are out of luck with the new Macbook line. No more cables going to composite RCA or S-Video. Kaput.

That’s a huge deal for me, as this is going to have to be a work computer, and we have no HDTVs at my work–all are old NTSC boxes. The new Mac would not be able to use those, at all. I would be limited to a single VGA input box I have set up in the lab, and our LCD projector, which can take VGA in. But that also means I am on a short leash, as long VGA cables are not an easy schlep.

What the hell, Apple?

My reaction: meh.

Yeah, “meh.” I was really expecting something better. The new form factor looks nice. Not incredibly cool, but nice. The black border around the screen is maybe the nicest touch, for me at least. The glass trackpad? I’ll have to try it and see. Probably it’ll be pretty good. But this is not the innovative upgrade I was expecting. No Blu-Ray. More Multi-touch, but no LCD trackpad or touch screen. Nothing that knocks my socks off, to be sure. Nice, but not great.

I will buy it, however. I have an aging 3.5-year-old G4 PowerBook, which has long been outclassed–even though it still stands up surprisingly well. I’ll even keep it, for its pre-Intel functionality, as kind of a bridge unit, a backup, something that can run a lot of the software I still would like to access once in a while (I might even downgrade the OS to something more Classic-friendly).

The new MacBook Pro (gotta have a 15-incher) will be a major upgrade for me. The ability to run Windows will be useful for my job. The 2.4 GHz dual-core low-end model will be quite sufficient, many times faster than what I’m used to, and the NVIDIA chipset will not be bad either. I’ll enjoy having a webcam on my portable, and the WiFi may even not suck like my current PowerBook’s does. I also like the fact that Apple is shaking me down a lot less than before on RAM–a 2GB upgrade to 4GB for $150 is not bad, and is even reasonable. I’ll take that, along with the 7200 RPM 250 GB drive that far outclasses the 80 GB drive I now suffer with.

Sure, it’s a big upgrade from my early-2005 model. Just not the barn-burner of a new release I was hoping for. So I’ll take it, but, you know, meh.

Update: While the “Apple tax” is imaginary, the “Living in Japan tax” is not. Even at the Education store, I will still have to pay about $300 more for the Macbook Pro here in Japan than it costs in America. True, half of that difference comes from sales tax which you can avoid in the U.S. by buying out-of-state, but it’s still a difference. And $300 is not quite worth it to put my family in the U.S. to the trouble of re-shipping a U.S.-bought machine here. Between the shipping costs and the import duty they’d slap me with the price difference would kind of disappear anyway. But it still sucks that you pay a premium for living closer to where the machines are actually produced. And ordering in Japan won’t save me time, either–getting the U.S. keyboard is a special order and usually adds a week to delivery time.

A Microsoft executive expounds:

…we’re also looking at the different things that you can get with Windows, and understanding what is really involved with what we call the “Apple tax.”

There really is a tax around there for people that are evaluating their choices going into this holiday season and going forward. There’s a choice tax that we talked about, which is, hey, you want to buy a machine that’s other than black, white, or silver, and if you want to get it in multiple different configurations or price points, you’re going to be paying a tax if you go the Apple way.

There’s going to be an application tax, which is if you want choice around applications, or if you want the same type of application experience on your Mac versus Windows, you’re going to be purchasing a lot of software. And even at that you’re not going to get the same experience. You’re not going to get things like Microsoft Outlook, you’re not going to get the games that you’re used to playing. There’s a technology tax–Apple still doesn’t have HDMI, doesn’t have Blu-ray offerings, doesn’t have e-SATA external disk drives that work at twice the speed of FireWire. And so you’ve got all of these things that are truly taxes.

You’ve also got an upgrade tax. The only machine, as far as I know, within the Apple lineup that’s actually upgradeable is the Mac Pro, the $2,800 version, which is (more expensive than) just about any PC configuration that you get from any one of our manufacturers.

Ah, where to start.

The primary fallacy in this entire rant is to take two platforms, list the faults of one and not the other, and call those faults a “tax,” as if there are no faults on the other side. The faults listed are lack of variety, limited number of applications, limited technologies, and limited expandability. All valid points to a degree, though several if not all have just as valid counterpoints, all of which you could have read here previously. With Windows systems–and the exec is talking about Windows plus PCs built for Windows, so we can take that as a group–there are just as many if not more faults. Lack of originality and style, being behind a few years in many of the more key capabilities, a horrendous resource-hogging OS, compatibility problems due to mismatched hardware and software, vulnerability to massive onslaughts of malware… I could go on and on (that’s not an impotent boast, if you read this blog then you know I can because I have). What we are left with is the question of which set of “taxes” are more onerous. You can guess which answer I would suggest.

Then there’s the fallacy of presuming customer desire. The exec talks about people wanting choices like a myriad of colors–as if color were the only element of style (that explains quite a bit)–and volumes of configurations. Apple tried to have a multitude of configurations once, and it almost killed them. They discovered that you should concentrate on a smaller number of configurations, but make sure that you get them right. There are a multitude of digital music players out there, but Apple has the lion’s share of the market, something it won because it made its product right (not the way Microsoft clawed to the top). People like cool gear, not just more colors. Apple has the cooler gear.

Similarly, the exec talks about expandability. But honestly, how many PC owners actually do that kind of thing? I would guess that more than 90% of computer owners don’t expand anything, not even RAM (which most people should). At best, this is one of those things people buy a product for and then don’t use, like most of the features on a cell phone. More often than Windows boxes, Apple tends to identify what most people will really use. A fingerprint scanner looks cool at first, but honestly, do you really need it? After a while, it just becomes this useless thing on your machine that you never use. Most of this appeal is to the geekier high-end users, not the majority of users.

Then there are the plain false claims, like the Mac Pro for $2800 being more expensive than “just about any PC configuration that you get from any one of our manufacturers.” A former student just asked me a question about this the other day so I looked into it. On the PC Connection site, I looked for dual-quad-core Xeon processor desktops at 2.8 GHz or better–what the Mac Pro has–and you have to go to the 8th lowest-priced system before you find something that’s not a Mac Pro (and it has slower CPUs and smaller hard drives, for $240 more than the lowest-priced Mac Pro). Whenever I hear of these special deals for PCs, they usually require multiple mail-in rebates and tie-on deals, and are the exception rather than the rule.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the Mac is not by any means perfect. It has its faults and weaknesses. There are many people for whom a Windows or Linux system is far more ideal.

But please, claims like this from Microsoft are just pathetically wrong.

They’re not fooling me! Seen today in Ikebukuro:

For all of McCain & Palin’s bluster about Obama raising “your” taxes, the proposals are pretty clear: Obama is proposing hefty cuts to the middle class which taper off as you reach $250,000 a year; he then starts raising taxes, those hikes becoming notable at the half-million mark and above. McCain, in contrast, wants cuts for everyone but gives the lion’s share to the wealthiest Americans. His cuts for lower and middle class Americans ($0 to $100,000) are less than Obama’s. Where Obama wants to tax wealthy people, McCain wants to give them yet another tax cut, and reserves the biggest windfalls for the richest people.

In that sense, their plans are diametrically opposed: Obama proposes a 5.3% cut for the poorest Americans which reduces to 0% around a quarter of a million dollars, then rises to an almost 8% rise for multi-millionaires; McCain gives the poorest Americans a paltry 0.2% tax cut which gradually increases with income until you see the wealthiest getting a 3% cut.

So the questions become simply: (a) should we raise taxes for rich people? and (b) should we lower taxes for the middle and lower classes?

Yes, there is a serious economic downturn. But that does not change the fact that if a person is making a million dollars a year, they are making a million dollars a year; if their income is still so high, then obviously the downturn has not made them poor yet. If the bad economy knocks you down into the middle class, then Obama has bigger cuts waiting for you there–this is a self-correcting mechanism. But if you’re still making lots of money, then the downturn only helps you, as your relative purchasing power has become stronger. If you could afford those tax hikes last year, you can afford them this year.

I have always believed in bottom-up economics. Top-down is ludicrously flawed, because the money tends to stay at the top. Money tends to circulate up, not down, as those who have money use it to keep it and to continue taking it from people with less money. Bottom-up makes sense as a system of circulation and economic health because people at the bottom can’t hoard money like people at the top can; people with little money usually have to spend it, else have it work for the local economy while they wait to spend it.

Then there is the cumulative view: over the past 30 years, taxes for wealthy people have been slashed, while the middle class has gotten far, far less–and possibly is paying more for less by this point. Obama’s plan works toward coming closer to a balance.

The plan Obama proposes makes sense on just about every level–it is less of a burden on the deficit and debt than McCain’s plan, stands to jump-start the economy (hopefully along with minimum wage increases and other legislation which corrects past imbalance) by getting money back into circulation, and is far more fair and even-handed than the “fair” tax cuts for the rich that Bush and the GOP used to help wreck the economy in the first place.

An etymologist criticizes the use of the third person plural as an indefinite singular pronoun.

I’ve always been of the opinion that while rules are a necessary part of language, it is speakers who drive the rules, and not the other way around. Many who speak dialects which are associated with low education may be remonstrated by their teachers at school for speaking “ungrammatically” or using “wrong” language. The thing is, if the language a person speaks follows a set of rules, then there’s nothing wrong with it. “Ain’t,” for example, is perfectly appropriate so long as it is used consistently according to linguistic rules recognized by the group of people who use it. The double-negative is not intrinsically incorrect–it used to be acceptable in mainstream English, in fact–it just happens to be out of vogue.

Language changes. New structures are introduced and played with, sometimes at the fringe of society, and sometimes driven from its core. But it is people who decide what makes sense to them, what feels right, what they prefer to use. Complaining that the new structure does not follow what we have decided previously is not good enough.

Language is not grammatically or otherwise “correct” because it resembles language spoken in the past, it is “correct” because the majority of speakers agree on a rule and apply it consistently. That’s why I have less objection to the “new-cue-ler” pronunciation for “nuclear”–so many people use that pronunciation that it is now becoming part of the living language.

I use “they” or “their” regularly to refer to the indefinite singular chiefly because it makes sense to me, and sounds better. The context makes clear that I am speaking of a single person, so there is no danger of being misunderstood, and it neatly corrects an imbalance in the language which, for all of the whining about “political correctness,” nevertheless is much more accurate and far less grating gender-wise than the traditional form.

But the truth is, you don’t need these reasons to change the language; changes can be made on whim, and need neither rationale nor even internal consistency–as seems evident from much of the language now deemed “correct.”

You can rail against the use of new structures because you don’t like them, but you cannot say that they do not belong in a language because they don’t follow past example, or because you don’t like the logic or lack of same that the new structures represent. If people use them, that’s all that’s necessary.

After McCain loses the election in November, will he revert back to his former self? Discuss amongst yourselves.

With McCain and Palin whipping their crowds into frenzies, getting them so worked up that they are now regularly shouting stuff like, “traitor!” “terrorist!” and “kill him!!” one conservative commentator suggests that Obama represents a potential “thugocracy.”

A few days previous, Hans Von Spakovsky–the Bush administration’s vote-suppression pit bull whose nomination held the Federal Election Commission hostage for many months–bemoaned “how partisan and politically-biased the Justice Department and other federal agencies would be under an Obama administration.” This after years of the Bush administration blatantly saturating the bureaucracy with die-hard loyalists, going further than any administration in history to politicize what had been considered completely off-hands to partisanship–with Spakovsky himself being a poster-boy for that very movement.

Hypocrisy? Projection? Working the refs? Blindness? Uber-partisanship? All of the above, and then some?

In this case, Sarah Palin is the party head, and a fully bipartisan council made up of 10 Republicans and 4 Democrats judged that Sarah Palin abused her power while governor. While some of her actions were excusable, many were not. And while the council made no recommendations for action–and there may well be none forthcoming–it did state rather definitively that Palin broke ethics laws. The problem is, Republicans have been doing so rather blatantly for years, and as we have witnessed, no one ever gets sent to jail for it, and few ever even get indicted. If they do, then they just fail to respond to the indictment, and Republicans in executive authority don’t act on it.

As usual, there is a double-standard at work. Republicans have promised investigations and perse prosecutions of Democrats if they maintain power–McCain, for example, promised to take legal action against Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, and maybe even Obama as well. But if Democrats are elected into power, then they had better not even dare think of taking any legal action against any Republican, no matter how solid the evidence that they broke scores of laws–because such investigations would just be political payback. A beautiful system–we won’t prosecute our own crimes, and if anyone else does, it’s playing politics.

Perhaps this focus on the fictional Democratic “responsibility” for the banking crisis is McCain’s way of distracting attention away from the fact that his VP candidate broke the law (joining McCain in doing so, after he broke FEC laws earlier this year). Or maybe he’s just flailing about–goodness knows that there’s little else he can do at this point.

Or maybe McCain was comfortable with Palin for just this reason, that she had scandals lurking–after all, Palin is simply keeping the faith here, doing what Republicans do. It’s not as if Troopergate was unknown before McCain chose her–even with the most cursory of vetting, McCain still had to know about this. Maybe having the goods on her was considered a good point for them from the start–a handle of control, but something they felt they could get settled quietly if they needed to.

Hard to say. But like I said, Palin is simply echoing Republican tradition here. This is what they do. Which is why the GOP faithful won’t even blink at this. They don’t care if their leaders break the law; they believe in the Colbert-like fashion that the narrative is what is “real,” and the narrative says that Obama is a terrorist traitor, whereas McCain is a 100% honorable war hero and Palin is a pure-as-snow Alaskan hockey mom with impeccable morality and credentials. So the faithful won’t even notice this, except possible to dismiss it as an “attack.”

But the moderates are less bound to the narrative, and will probably notice this quite a bit more. So the margins of victory for Obama stand to be pretty big unless something rather astonishing happens. Even if the GOP does control the voting machines, they might not be able to do anything anyway–no narrative about getting the base out in numbers could make the numbers change that much.

Not that they wouldn’t try.

At the beginning of this campaign, John McCain solemnly and repeatedly vowed to run a “respectful” and “honorable” campaign, taking the high road and refusing to go negative on his opponent, instead leading with the issues.

John McCain pledged a “respectful campaign” Tuesday against either Barack Obama or Hillary Rodham Clinton, but said he is less confident about the influence of outside political groups.

I think we can safely call that promise broken. It’s gone way beyond being able to blame it on 527’s.

The thing is, McCain broke that promise long ago, maybe even before he started making up stuff like saying that Obama refused to visit wounded troops if no cameras were allowed, or that Obama would intentionally lose the Iraq War just to win an election.

Now, Obama is ahead in just about all of the polls. Fivethirtyeight.com has Obama so far ahead it’s not even funny–McCain now has less than a 10% chance of winning. A lot can happen in a month, but you’d be asking for a hell of a lot for McCain to turn things around.

Of course, that’s not the scary part. Nor is the idea that the polls may not be taking into account Obama’s full power in the upcoming election–that high turnouts by minority voters and vast numbers of new Democrats registering are not being fully factored into the numbers we’re seeing. More and more, it’s beginning to look like Obama is going to win this one.

Nor is the scary part the economy, though that’s plenty scary; Obama is not a miracle worker, and what he will be able to do may be limited, especially if when Republicans go into full-out obstructionist mode, blocking every scrap of legislation in sight and then calling Democrats “do-nothing” losers, the exact technique they have used to good effect (for them, not the country) for the past two years. It’s not quite so scary that Obama won’t be able to do much there because (a) presidents usually can’t do much good, but (b) they can do a lot of harm and McCain looks to do that harm and more.

No. None of that is so scary. So, what is they scary part?

The scary part is that the McCain campaign is starting to look less and less like a campaign and more and more like a lynch mob.

Think I exaggerate? Think again. The McCain campaign has gone almost 100% negative, doing nothing but attack, attack, and attack some more, and the attacks are not subtle; they are playing the “terrorist” angle to the hilt, running ads linking Obama to Ayers as if Ayers bombed D.C. and Obama was right there with him burning a flag. They echo this on the campaign trail. Mentions of Obama’s middle name have re-emerged, and crowds are shouting “Obama, Osama!”

This is made more significant not just by the disrespect, but the utter, complete lack of any respect whatsoever; referring to Obama as “that one,” making thinly veiled racial references, and painting Obama as “dangerous.” McCain and his people know who they are talking to. They know they have the fundie base energized, that they are more and more appealing to the extremist crowd. And they are playing it up.

The question is, how far will they play it up? The answer is, apparently, almost all the way. Maybe not to 11, but damned close. Now it is not uncommon for McCain to ask his crowds, “What kind of man is Obama?” and the audience members shout back, “terrorist!!” Recently, Sarah Palin was stoking the terrorism fire when an audience member shouted out, “Kill him!” In another Palin crowd, someone yelled, “Off with his head!”

In no instance did McCain or Palin rebuke such a response; they just kept on going.

These are not just wackos in the crowd that can be ignored; after all, how often have you ever heard of people in controlled political events shouting death threats against the opposing candidate? And if they did, would you not expect the campaign to go out of its way to disavow and condemn such things?

That’s the scary thing: that McCain and Palin are unabashedly whipping their supporters into angry mobs lacking only pitchforks and torches, though maybe not ropes to hang from trees. They know what they are doing and yet they keep on pressing forward with the attack.

This has gotten so bad that even people inside the McCain campaign are starting to publicly question the wisdom of stirring up such hostility.

In response, a McCain advisor simply said that they were “happy” with how the campaign is going.

I certainly hope that Obama’s secret service detail is beefed up and hypersensitive to all threats, because John McCain seems to be just one short step away from losing it and shouting to his supporters, “Go lynch him!”

Update: Saner opinions in the McCain campaign seem to have prevailed, as McCain has just suddenly hit the brakes on the “Obama is a terrorist” car. At a rally in Minnesota where the audience booed Obama, McCain called for “respect,” apparently thinking this would do the trick and erase the last several months of McCain issuing severe disrespect for Obama, repeatedly calling him in all but name a terrorist and a traitor.

But as is often true after one lathers up an angry mob, the mob has a momentum of its own and is not easy to slow down. Even after McCain’s appeals for respect, audience members “pushed back,” asking McCain to tell the “truth” about Obama (“you know, tell us all about his Muslim terrorist ways!”), and telling McCain that they feared an America led by Obama. McCain tried to reapply the “respectful” brakes, but again to little effect–a subsequent speaker from the audience started by announcing that she is scared of Obama because he is an “Arab terrorist.” McCain actually had to grab the microphone away from her and state that Obama is a “decent family man.”

McCain is suddenly discovering that lynch mobs are not quite as easy to reign in as he may have thought.

Later Update: Here’s a video of the aforementioned rally, which shows that TIME slightly misreported, but that clarification just makes it stranger:

The woman did not say that Obama was an “Arab terrorist”; she said he was an “Arab,” and then stopped–maybe she wanted to go on to say terrorist, but she didn’t. She just said “Arab.”

What is strange is that McCain took the mic back and said, “No ma’am. He’s a decent family man citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what this campaign is all about. He’s not.”

Umm… “He’s not an Arab, he’s a decent family man citizen”? So, Arabs are not decent?

One can understand why the TIME blogger thought she said “terrorist”: because McCain answered as if she had. At least he’s in tune with his crowd that much.

The rumors have been out for some time now. They started a month ago with reports of something called a “brick,” which everyone thought was a small box, maybe a replacement for the Apple TV. But recently, the general rumor community started to coalesce around the idea that “brick” referred to carving a laptop case out of a brick of metal, describing a new manufacturing process for Apple’s new line of MacBooks and MacBook Pros.

The rumors seemed to solidify when photos were leaked showing images of the purported MacBook cases, indeed carved from a single piece, with no seams.

Just this afternoon, I warned a student not to buy a Mac laptop too soon, as Apple is scheduled to release new ones in the next month or two–reportedly very soon, but potentially as late as January. I speculated that in part due to this new manufacturing process that could save money, and perhaps in part because the recent economic crisis and stock drop, laptops costing significantly less were a good possibility.

Just tonight, the rumor was released that 12 separate Apple laptop models (there are currently 8 models) are to be released soon, with prices ranging from $800 to $3100–significant since the current low price is $1100.

Still, there were doubts, as the rumors all said that the new laptops would be released October 14th, and here it is October 9 and no announcement of an Apple event. Obligingly, Apple released this announcement just an hour or so ago:

Notably: the date and time for the event is October 14th in San Francisco at 10AM PST.

So, the rumors seem true. If so, then by this time next week we’ll be seeing a whole new line of Apple laptops. The question is, what will there be beyond the cases? Just that? A slightly different form factor but otherwise just a speed bump? Unlikely–Apple releases speed bumps casually, not with big events. Could the casing alone be worth an event? Possibly. More likely the price drop will be the prominent focus.

Some rumors, however, tell of an LCD trackpad. From there, your imagination can run wild.

My current laptop is now about three and a half years old One of the oldest pre-Intel laptops. Already time to buy a new one. No matter what the news, I am almost certainly going to buy one. If it has more than just a new case and a low price, that will be a spiffy bonus. The only question will be, which one?

Did McCain just say that we’re all prisoners? Hmmm…

If you use your iPhone in Japan and have used the Ekitan app, you may have noticed that they have pulled out the rug from under you: they are no longer a free service. If you try to use your free version, they let you input stations and times like before, but when you attempt a search, you get a message telling you that “the service has terminated” (サービス終了しました。). When you dismiss the message, you are taken to a web page explaining that the app is now being charged for and you must re-download it from the App Store. The free version seems to still be available and can even be updated–but it won’t work. You gotta pay ¥350 for the working version.

Well, that might have been unfortunately necessary, except that now there’s an alternative: Yahoo Transit, available from the Japanese iTunes Store, for free. What’s more is that the Yahoo app is a lot better–I would have switched anyway, had I known about it. All the more mysterious that Ekitan should suddenly start charging for their app (unless they added new features themselves, but I don’t feel like going to the trouble of translating the whole description just to find out).

The Yahoo app has everything that Ekitan had, but includes some nice new extra features. One is the ability to use GPS to scan for nearby stations instead of typing them in, an excellent time-saver (and even a good way to locate nearby stations you may not have been aware of). The top field (greyed out) is where you tap to enter a station name; the second field is where you tap to get a list of local stations. (The third multi-line field is the list of stations you searched previously.)

Unlike Ekitan, where you have to navigate a Hiragana menu to find your station name, you can just type in your station name directly–a much easier way, most times. Another nice point is the ability to type in names in English and have them resolve into Japanese, just like on the Yahoo Transit web site.

Of course, if there are several stations with the same name or partial name, you can choose from the list:

Like Ekitan, Yahoo Transit remembers stations that you searched for before, so as to maintain a handy quick-find list of often-used stations. Unlike Ekitan, Yahoo’s app allows you to erase station names you don’t want to keep–a very nice addition.

And finally, the app allows you to search additional transportation services, including domestic airline and expressway bus lines–good for long-distance travel. Also, you can turn any one of these off.

And then, of course, you get the results, with all the needed info.

Like I said, a very nice app. I’m kind glad Ekitan shut me out, now I have a much nicer alternative.