Month: August 2004

received:
* dome tent (used a couple of times already, after some repairs)
* beat-up adult bicycle (a work in progress but soon to be in service)
* nine kid’s bicycles (donated to others)
* string trimmer (no charger, so I freecycled it myself)
* Apple Stylewriter II (oops, I was hoping this was a DC model so I could get another old one working)
* bunch of kid’s school supplies (donated to others)

given:
* point and shoot camera
* underbed storage drawers
* string trimmer (the same one)
* sliding closet doors
* laptop battery charger
* glass outdoor table top
* Epson stylus printer
* HP deskjet printer
* camcorder

And more to go.

USATODAY.com – The GOP doesn’t reflect America:

I’ve often found that if I go down the list of “liberal” issues with people who say they’re Republican, they are quite liberal and not in sync with the Republicans who run the country. Most don’t want America to be the world’s police officer and prefer peace to war. They applaud civil rights, believe all Americans should have health insurance and think assault weapons should be banned. Though they may personally oppose abortion, they usually don’t think the government has the right to tell a women what to do with her body.

There’s a name for these Republicans: RINOs or Republican In Name Only. They possess a liberal, open mind and don’t believe in creating a worse life for anyone else.

So why do they use the same label as those who back a status quo of women earning 75 cents to every dollar a man earns, 45 million people without health coverage and a president who has two more countries left on his axis-of-evil-regime-change list?

I asked my friend on the street. He said what I hear from all RINOs: “I don’t want the government taking my hard-earned money and taxing me to death. That’s what the Democrats do.”

Money. That’s what it comes down to for the RINOs. They do work hard and have been squeezed even harder to make ends meet. They blame Democrats for wanting to take their money. Never mind that it’s Republican tax cuts for the rich and billions spent on the Iraq war that have created the largest deficits in history and will put all of us in hock for years to come.

True enough. Perhaps it’s time to take the political compass again: I think everyone should take it. It’s a less pointed way to get at what Moore is getting at, but I sometimes wonder if people really vote the way they believe.

<update> Economic Left/Right: -5.88, Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.54

The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > Tunes, a Hard Drive and (Just Maybe) a Brain:

“Everyone was rocking out,” Mr. Angus said. “Then Elton comes on and kills it – it was like strike No. 1 against my manhood.”

I have been playing with Shuffle mode on my ‘Pod since I read this last week: it has brought up some interesting juxtapositions. I guess I am surprised that people don’t know what it means to have everything in their collection potentially cued up to play. Still more surprising is how long it takes to learn from one’s mistakes:

Once when [Angus] and his girlfriend were together in his bedroom, he said, his iPod started blasting the Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep Till Brooklyn.”

“I jumped out of bed as fast as I could,” he recalled. “But it had already wrecked the mood.” In the future, he said, he will try not to let his iPod run wild.

Mine is stocked with 1,523 tracks, on 156 albums, in 22 genres by 86 artists. So there’s a chance for some real taste collisions. But I haven’t anything really disastrous: worst case, something comes up that I have heard too recently and I fast forward past it.

What I have learned from this is that the iPod != the Walkman. The Walkman and its imitators, even today’s flash-memory-based players, let you carry some music around, but you had to think about what you wanted. Your study tunes might not be your workout tunes which might not be your make-out tunes. The iPod lets you out of the choice: given enough disk space, you take it all with you. I’m getting close to have to decide what will stay on the iPod and what will remain at home, but even then, I doubt I’ll ever find myself with nothing to listen to.

Nieman Watchdog > Ask This > What sort of ownership society?:

Economist Brad DeLong says that when Bush rolls out his plans for an “ownership society” this week, reporters should insist on details. Does he have any idea how he would actually accomplish any of these things? It’s the press corps’ job to find out.

Does it get any easier? A top-flight economist writes up the questions, supplies enough of a context to explain why they’re important, and I bet they still don’t get asked.

This is worth checking in on, and yes, they get it: they offer an RSS feed.

The goal of watchdog journalism is to see that people in power provide information the public should have.

The Nieman Watchdog Journalism Project grows from this premise and this goal: to help the press ask penetrating questions, critical questions, questions that matter, questions not yet asked about today’s news. NiemanWatchdog.org seeks to encourage more informed reporting by putting journalists in contact with authorities who can suggest appropriate, probing questions and who can serve as resources.

New York Daily News – Politics – Lloyd Grove’s Lowdown: GOP has dol-fun with Dems:

LOOSE-TONGUED SPEAKER? Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert – having already enraged some New Yorkers with his remarks about local office-holders’ “unseemly scramble” for federal money after 9/11 – yesterday opened a second front. On “Fox News Sunday,” the Illinois Republican insinuated that billionaire financier George Soros, who’s funding an independent media campaign to dislodge President Bush, is getting his big bucks from shady sources. “You know, I don’t know where George Soros gets his money. I don’t know where – if it comes overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from,” Hastert mused.

An astonished Chris Wallace asked: “Excuse me?”

The Speaker went on: “Well, that’s what he’s been for a number years – George Soros has been for legalizing drugs in this country. So, I mean, he’s got a lot of ancillary interests out there.”

Wallace: “You think he may be getting money from the drug cartel?”

Hastert: “I’m saying I don’t know where groups – could be people who support this type of thing. I’m saying we don’t know.”

I don’t know for sure where Richard Mellon Scaife, the “funding father of the Right” got his money, either.

They must really be afraid of the guy if they’re prepared to bring up allegations like that. Say what you like about him, the only drug he can be accused of dealing in is currency. Seems to me the capitalist tools who create these GOP talking points should be OK with a guy who exploits market opportunities.

It’s noted elsewhere that Hastert bounced 44 checks in the House bank scandal of 1992[1]: these checks were essentially no interest loans, as they were cashed with no verification that there were funds backing them.

And it’s not like much has changed: apparently, it’s not uncommon for senators, former senators and other officials to “dine and dash” for a total of $189,545 in 2003. I’m not sure bringing how one gets and spends is a safe topic.

fn1. http://www.txstate.edu/cpm/hobbyscorner/house_banking.html

MJG’s Political Blog » Reflections:

I do admit, I talk a lot of trash. I went to Grab The Mic because it expressed/s good Kerry/liberal point of views, and started to post comments on that site to have a ‘sort’ of rivalry between sites. However, instead of my trash talking rivalry idea, I got people personally upset at me.

Well, perhaps not everyone is into trash-talking, name-calling, and the like. I admit I called this guy a dweeb and a troll (he fits the Jargon File defintion to a T, even by his own admission) but it’s hard to react civilly to someone who writes broadsides about you on his website but never finds a good reason to sign his name to anything, anywhere. I’m not into anonymity, especially if you want to be taken seriously.

As for debate, his own site is just a bunch of “rip-and-read” press releases from the BC04 website or the GOP. Not much original thought there. That and falling back on “if you don’t agree with me you’re clueless and ignorant.” How insightful.

One of the things that’s becoming clear to me is that ideologues like this guy assume that since they take their leaders seriously and brook no debate or dissent, that the other side is just as blinkered.

Sadly, I’m slow to realize this, but it has always been one the truisms about the liberal vs conservative ideology: liberals argue amongst themselves, bicker, and in general look like anything but a political party. Conservatives, by contrast, favor discipline first and foremost: internal debate is muted and outward dissent is forbidden.

Underlying this is the reason, perhaps, why one gets involved in politics in the first place: for progress or for power. Not for nothing are liberals called progressives, and I don’t think anyone can reasonably argue that conservatives are more interested in power than policy.

So Mark J. Graham (hmm, Google finds someone by that name in Springfield OH: wonder if it’s him?), otherwise known as MJG, doesn’t want to debate unless it’s on his terms, where he can accuse people of spinning or direct his little friends to visit websites he hangs out in for “trash talking.” And evidently one or more of them decided to pollute my logs with a couple of hundred bogus requests, and then talk about my comments on it (sadly, their IPs were blocked by then, so they may not have seen it). He may not have asked them to do it: I would never claim that, but perhaps some of his dimmer contemporaries mistook his playful sense of humor as real animus. I don’t much care.

It’s not he’ll be missed. And if any his vast readership links through to me, they’ll be referred to MoveOn.org [heh heh].

And at the end of the piece [Novak] writes::

“Schachte said he never has been contacted by or talked to anybody in the Bush-Cheney campaign or any Republican organization. He said he has been a political independent who votes for candidates of both parties.” Apparently, he’s the kind of independent who gave George W. Bush a thousand bucks in 2000 and in 2004. He’s also the new law partner of one of the guys running the Republican National Convention.

As I’ve said before, I think, I got out of journalism years ago, and one of the reasons I didn’t like it was all the fact-checking and due diligence: I wasn’t trained in the field so I was picking it all up on the job and I found it was hard work. At the time, I lacked the perseverance to keep asking “why” until I ran out of things to question. Now, I see that if I have just held on, I could have gotten a job at any large media outlets and never worried about facts or intellectual curiousity again. In the case of far too many big league reporters, taking things at face value seems to be par for the course. They never suspect they’re being spun or even flat out lied to: they just write it up and file it.

In this case, Novak could have gotten an intern to look into this if he felt it was beneath him: the facts were there.