Woof!

Among the many things that my friend Belinda has taught me over the years is that rescuing greyhounds is a Very Good Thing.

Once, long ago, I'd been to the dog track, didn't much care for it, had a vague sense of unease about how the dogs are slaughtered when they've outlived their professional usefulness, and that's about it.

A decade or so later, I met her new adoptees. I was amazed, right off, to see up close their unworldly built-for-speed look, the raked ears and massive rear thighs, especially. I got a few chances to play with them in their big backyard, and I want to tell you, seeing these things fly by from up close is truly jaw-dropping. But I was most surprised to learn what a gentle nature they have. Ten minutes of furious activity per day seems to be their routine, followed by a bout of ferocious slobbering in the water bowl, followed by two hours of trying to pretend that they are lap dogs.

See a couple of nice paintings of some old west coast friends of mine: Hey, Wanna Split a Sandwich? and Red Carpet Retirement.

Cuddle This

Let's say you were a president with approval ratings in the toilet, casting about for something, ANYTHING, to create an impression that you were actually not completely evil. Hmmm …

Hey, I know! Cute animals! Let's get do some photo ops with cute animals!

Not this president. Instead, plans are ongoing to gut the Endangered Species Act.

From Salon:

In recent months, the Fish and Wildlife Service has gone to extraordinary efforts to keep drafts of regulatory changes from the public. All copies of the working document were given a number corresponding to a person, so that leaked copies could be traced to that individual.

[...]

Many Fish and Wildlife Service employees believe the draft is not based on "defensible science," says a federal employee who asked to remain anonymous. Yet "there is genuine fear of retaliation for communicating that to the media. People are afraid for their jobs."

[...]

Under his reign, the administration has granted 57 species endangered status, the action in each case being prompted by a lawsuit. That's fewer than in any other administration in history -- and far fewer than were listed during the administrations of Reagan (253), Clinton (521) or Bush I (234).

[...]

… during this administration, nearly half of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees who work with endangered species reported that they had been directed by their superiors to ignore scientific evidence that would result in recommendations for the protection of species …

The evil of this administration knows no bounds.

The whole story [S$], however depressing, is worth a read. One problem with the tendency of the news to focus on the scandal du jour is that the ramifications of the core mission of the Bush Administration -- to do whatever the oil, mining, and logging interests want -- often slip under the radar.

And Yet I …

Two from The Department of "I'm Probably the Last Person on the Planet To Have Noticed This, But Here Goes Anyway":

1. If you highlight some text while surfing with Firefox, and then right-click, one of the options on the context menu is "Search <engine> for <text>," where <engine> is whatever search engine you have set in the navigation toolbar, and <text> is whatever text you just highlighted.

How long has this been going on? (In my own defense, I am slavishly devoted to keyboard shortcuts, so it's not like I actually get to see the context menu all that often. In this context.)

2. Do you know The Defective Yeti? Here are a couple of three lines from recent posts …

This game is to free time what whales are to krill. (source)

The 2008 presidential race is as engrossing as "Mile two" of the Boston Marathon. (source)

A Google search indicates that no one has ever formed a heavy metal Christian band called "BC/AD." (source)

… and two quick posts that must be read in their entirety: Fool And His Money and Will Wonders Never Cease?.

Bookmark or subscribe. But keep track of the Yeti.

Not Anonymous Bosh

I have ranted in the past about anonymous posting and how lame I think it is. As with all sweeping generalizations, of course, there are valid exceptions. Here's one: "My National Security Letter Gag Order."

Bear in mind that there have been tens of thousands of these National Security Letters issued in the past three years.

We gave up liberty. Do we feel more secure?

Thanks to Chris Suellentrop for the link.

Soup Ream!

Q: How do a liquid diet and 500 pieces of paper relate to anything topical?
A: Not my job!

You'll have to excuse me. I just having finished today's NYT crossword puzzle.

To clarify: this week's Wait Wait … Don't Tell Me! has Soup Ream Court Justice Stephen Breyer on to play "Not My Job."

I'm not going to say he killed, but when you've got Paula Poundstone asking you questions, it's probably just best to play the straight man. And he did get off a couple of good lines.

Listen to that segment, or the whole show, by visiting this page.

(P.S. If you want to hear a "Not My Job" guest who did kill, check out the Aug 2005 show featuring Barack Obama.)

Another Thought for the Day -- 2007-03-25

… practically everything that our government does, plans, thinks, hears and contemplates in the realms of foreign policy is stamped and treated as secret -- and then unraveled by that same government, by the Congress and by the press in one continuing round of professional and social contacts and cooperative and competitive exchanges of information.

-- Max Frankel

Here, Frankel is quoting a memo that he wrote in 1971, when he was the chief Washington correspondent for the NY TImes, arguing to the NYT's lawyers that they should not knuckle under to the Nixon Administration's request that the NYT halt publication of the Pentagon Papers. His article in today's paper, which recalls that memo, compares those times with the Libby trial, emphasizing the insider politics and leak strategies of all Washington players. Well worth your time.

Thought for the Day -- 2007-03-25

I have always considered it absurd to judge anyone solely on the basis of the police reports and denunciations — to believe that, in a country in which everything was a lie, the security services were the only institution guided by an evangelical respect for the truth.

-- Adam Michnik

Prof. Michnik is talking about Poland here, but it's not much of a stretch to think of the U.S., is it? Especially in light of the USA PATRIOT Act, warrantless wiretapping, "extraordinary rendition," "national security letters," confessions obtained via torture, and stories such as this.

Bald Truth

Here's a budget analysis that you should read.

Well said, Matt Taibbi.

Understatement of the Day: 2007-03-24

I am a tenured faculty member at a large state university. My teaching efforts primarily consist of delivering statistics lectures to social science majors. These experiences have colored my perspective somewhat.

-- the "About" section for the Angry Professor

And don't miss the AP's response to a letter from Admin, which certainly qualifies for an award, too.

Eye Candy for the Day: 2007-03-24

Have a look around the site called dhteumeuleu. The current default that loads on the home page doesn't do much for me, but there's plenty else to see. Try clicking the"random" or "gallery" or "demos" links. Some amazing stuff awaits you. Most of the images react to your mouse movements. You may need to let the pages fully load before they respond properly, but they're not hugely bandwidth-intensive.

Tip: make sure the volume on your computer isn't cranked before visiting. The pages serve up music to accompany the images.

Thanks to Jinnet for for the link.

Retronym and Neologism of the Day -- 2007-03-24

In the same article, no less!

The retronym: artificial artificial intelligence

The neologism: crowdsourcing

I like 'em both, although I'm a bit mystified about why the NYT is treating Amazon's Mechanical Turk as a new thing. It's so 2005.

Upgrade!

It seems that I am close to being able to tell the world that I now drive a Porsche.

Wonder if I can get a new key fob for ostentatious display in the singles bars?

Hand Wringing?

The lede:

A sharp debate within the Bush administration over the future of the Central Intelligence Agency's detention and interrogation program has left the agency without the authority to use harsh interrogation techniques that the White House said last fall were necessary in questioning terrorism suspects, according to administration and Congressional officials.

[...]

Until the debate is resolved, C.I.A. interrogators are authorized to use only interrogation procedures approved by the Pentagon.

My reaction:

You say that like that's a bad thing.

Is it just me, or does the story following the above lede have a tone worrying that we don't have enough legal ways to torture people?

Line of the Day -- 2007-03-22

Despite my personal regret at having to set aside yet another attempt to protect our children from harmful material, perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection.

-- Lowell A. Reed Jr., Senior Judge of Federal District Court, in his ruling striking down a 1998 Internet pornography law (source)

Mac Software Updates -- 2007-03-21

Apple has released two recent upgrades. OS X Tiger v 10.4.9 is now available (74.4 MB) and iTunes 7.1 (27.5 MB). Get them through Software Update under the Apple menu, as usual.

If you launch iTunes before doing Software Update, you might also get notified of its new version that way. Also, launching iTunes on the PC will likely provoke the same message -- it did for me, anyway. But you'll need to run Software Update for the OS upgrade.

The OS upgrade adds a bunch of stuff, including some security fixes. (Details here.) The update worked without a hitch for me. One minor note: the required post-upgrade reboot seemed to take a bit longer than usual. This seems to have been a one-time thing, probably having to do with completing the installation; the next restart did not take as long. Just so you know.

The Firefox update that I mentioned earlier is also available for the Mac. The patch in this case is considerably larger than the one for the PC, for reasons beyond my understanding -- it's about 16 MB.

I'll not rant further about the bloatiness of Mac software updates. You're probably still reeling from the last time.

Understatement of the Day: 2007-03-21

The Bush administration has few equals in its commitment to a broad conception of executive authority …

-- Adam Liptak

On a related note, I have only two words in response to the President's accusation of "partisan fishing expeditions:" Ken Starr.

John Backus

John Backus died this past Saturday. He was the inventor of Fortran, the first higher level programming language. For as much as programmers these days like to make fun of it, Fortran contributed as much as to the fact that you're now reading this post as Gutenberg's invention did to bring books to the masses. I cut my teeth on that language, as did many of my friends and colleagues, not to mention the gurus who moved the state of the art on from there.

There's a good remembrance of Backus in yesterday's NYT. Thanks for the link, Dan.

Firefox 2.0.0.3

Mozilla has released a set of security patches for Firefox (details), bringing the latest version to 2.0.0.3.

If you don't have automatic updating or notification enabled, do the usual:

Help -> Check for Updates

Seemed like a quick one to me, and it occurred without a hitch.

---

Update

2007-03-21 12:31 EDT

BTW, if you're still running Firefox 1.5, there's an update for that, too. This one brings you to v. 1.5.0.11.

O, Brother

What could be worse than losing a brother?

How about losing a brother and then having to deal with wing nuts at the funeral?

TUA has put up a couple of great posts, the first describing finding out about his brother's untimely death, and the second describing the funeral.

Tough to read, but well worth it.

Neologism of the Month -- 2007-03

You've probably heard this one, but I wanted to set it down for the record once I came across the original* source.

Inspired by Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales's recent heavy use of the passive voice -- "mistakes were made" -- CNN senior political analyst William Schneider said that Washington had developed a whole new grammatical tense: the past exonerative.

Nice.

* Original link broken. Here's an archived version.

Sign of the (Slightly Improving) Times

Have you driven through Connecticut lately?

Check out the new road sign!

Thanks, KK.

A Small Political Solution

You know those wing nuts that want to plaster Ronald Reagan's image everywhere, including on our money?

Here's my proposal: put him on the next dollar coin.

That should either gain acceptance for a dollar coin (which I would like to see) or shut the Gipperphiles up once and for all (which I would like even more).

(Brief pause while everyone chimes in with the counter-proposal to put W on the three dollar bill.)

A Small Silver Lining

I was watching Ryan Lizza and Joshua Green on BloggingHeads.tv this morning -- one of the best "diavlogs" that site has posted -- and I had a minor thought: One of the few good things about the endless presidential campaign is that it gives Barack Obama (just to pick a favorite candidate at random ;^) ) an opportunity to weather any scandals from his past long before it matters. I've already mostly forgotten the details about that stock deal thing, and I can't imagine anyone being able to use it against him when it matters.

You know, like 20 months from now.

Reading Recommendations: 2007-03-17

Nothing Irish about this list. I am occasionally as irritated with St. Patrick's Day* as many African-Americans are about "Black History Month." That said, all but the first entry on this list are screamingly funny with a large nugget of truth, which, your host possibly excluded, is what the Irish do best.

• One Number That Will Ring All Your Phones

David Pogue's review of a new service called GrandCentral, which offers you one phone number for life. This to me is both intriguing and tempting. Arthur Clarke (or as Clare would correct me, Arthur C. Clarke) predicted this scenario a couple of decades ago. What GrandCentral offers appears to be the realization of Clarke's idea, with an additional bunch of cool features.



• Horseshoes and Hand Grenades: Joel Johnson Returns...to Spank Us All for Supporting Crap

An excellent rant, featuring the characteristic blend of this genre: incoherence, thrashing about for targets of blame, and several telling points, all of which make for a funny read.



• Us to George -- sure, whatever

Bill Maher, in an op-ed for the LA Times. No need to sell Maher, right? He's the man. Thanks to TC for the referral.



• The Pain -- When Will It End?

The web site for a weekly cartoon from Tim Kreider, which/who I had not known about until following a link from a post on "The Blog that is not Dan's Data," which is worth a read in itself.

My bulleted link points to the home page, which gives you the latest of Kreider's cartoons. Visit his archives for more. Most of the archived pages have links pointing to the next and previous cartoons, so if your sense of humor overlaps mine, you can easily spend a happy hour or two here. (If your sense of humor doesn't overlap mine, you might find some of the cartoons a bit offensive -- Kreider is refreshingly frank about sex and religion.)

Here are five that I particularly liked:



• Jesus vs. Jeezus -- says it all about the brand of Christianity that those in power in the US would have the rest of us adopt.
  
  
• What You Can Do To Fight Against The War on Sex -- one of the ones that Dan pointed to.
  
  
• V-I Day -- Posted right after W's "Mission Accomplished" photo op on that aircraft carrier.
  
  
• Scientists Riot! -- a fantasy for those of us in the reality-based community.
  
  
• Winning of Hearts & Minds -- posted about a month after 9/11. Here, it's less the cartoon than the Artist's Statement that appealed to me.
  
  

---

* For example …

Triangulate This

Need another reason to dislike Hillary Clinton?

No?

Oh, just play along.

According to the NYT blog The Caucus, Sen. Clinton was asked on ABC News today whether she thought homosexuality was "immoral." The Caucus reports that she declined to answer, giving a classic weasel in response, leaving it for "others to conclude."

I have no doubt that Sen. Clinton is not a homophobe, and I understand the political calculus that underlies her every breath. It may even be that she was misunderstood, as later spin from her camp seems to suggest. Nonetheless, this is yet another case of her being so eager to unoffend that those of us with any moral fiber at all can do nothing but cringe.

To recall the famous words of another infamous First Lady, here's some succinct advice, should the question ever get asked again: "Just Say No."

The Miers Nomination, Take 2

Reflections after reading the lead story in today's NYTimes

One of the memes that we used to hear ad nauseum was that loyalty counted for everything in the Bush Administration. George Bush's loyalty, it was often said, was the reason why guys like Brownie and Bremer and Rummy got or kept their jobs, despite clear demonstrations of incompetence. Bush's loyalty was also trotted out to explain why a certain thoroughly unqualified White House counsel was once nominated for a seat on the Supreme Court.

As with most politicians on the defensive, though, it turns out that loyalty for George Bush is an ice cube: Turn up the heat, and watch it vanish.

With the Occupant-in-Chief safely out of the country, guess who's being groomed as scapegoat -- back in Washington -- for the burgeoning scandal concerning all those fired U.S. Attorneys.

Hint:

With Mr. Bush traveling in Mexico, the White House insisted that the president's role had been minimal and laid the blame primarily on Harriet E. Miers, who was White House counsel when the prosecutors lost their jobs …

[…]

… the White House scrambled to explain the matter by releasing a stream of e-mail messages detailing how Ms. Miers had corresponded with D. Kyle Sampson, the top aide to [Attorney-General Alberto] Gonzales who drafted the list of those to be dismissed.

Mr. Sampson resigned Monday. On Tuesday afternoon, at a news conference in an ornate chamber adjacent to his office, Mr. Gonzales promised to "find out what went wrong here," even as he insisted he had had no direct knowledge of how his staff had decided on the dismissals.

He said he had rejected an earlier idea, which the White House attributed to Ms. Miers, to replace all 93 United States attorneys, the top federal prosecutors in their regions.

Nice. Blame it all on Harriet Miers, who has been gone since 31 January of this year. Bonus points for floating the unsubstantiated idea that it could have been far worse ("we only fired seven out of the 93!"), a tactic familiar from this Administration. Think about the way they spin the budget deficits, for example.

In case Miers's shoulders are too narrow to bear all the blame, it's clear who's the fall guy on deck:

The White House took the unusual step of having [new White House counsel Dan] Bartlett conduct a hurried briefing with reporters in Mérida, Mexico. He said the president had "all the confidence in the world" in Mr. Gonzales …

Being assigned to the spotlight of a press conference to push a weak stopgap position while a spokesperson in another location simultaneously says that your boss has "all the confidence in the world" in you is usually the kiss of death in politics. Call him Gone-zales.

The wholesale firing of the U.S. Attorneys is a serious matter and deserves thorough Congressional investigation. In the meantime, though, I can't help but cackle. It's fun to watch the rats turn on each other.

+ + + + +

Update

Just noticed this other article in the Times. More on the loyalty meme.

That Proves It!

In the 9 March edition of the download.com newsletter, one of the featured downloads is:

Internet Explorer Add-ons: Fox News Toolbar 4.6

It's not such a complex world after all, is it?

(Two, count 'em, two, Rudy Cheeks references in one post!)

DST Update

As I mentioned a few days ago, Daylight Saving Time in the U.S. starts earlier this year -- today, 11 March. Here's how my various computers/OSes handled the change in date:

• Windows 2000 SP4: system clock remained on Standard Time (as expected; see earlier post). Followed the somewhat clunky update procedure described on Microsoft's site a few minutes ago (i.e., several hours after the change point), and then things seemed okay.
• Windows XP SP2: system clock moved ahead two hours. Sync'ed with network time server, corrected time.
• Ubuntu 6.06: remained on Standard Time. Sync'ed with network time server, corrected time.
• Mac OS X Tiger (10.4): correctly adjusted clock.

Kudos to Apple. Boos and hisses to Ubuntu. This should have been fixed as part of the usual updating. As I recall, there was a kernel upgrade provided within the past few weeks. Even if time isn't maintained through the kernel, this would have been a good point to add a patch. Boos and hisses to Microsoft, also, and for two reasons: First, the Win2000 procedure should have been implemented as a standard patch accessible via Windows Update. Second, it is unbelievable that the "correction" on XP didn't work properly. Evidently, it was applied twice.

Your war stories?

Free Bumper Sticker

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Visit this page on MoveOn.org.

My Verdict

Scooter Libby: lies about Iraq :: Lynndie England: Abu Ghraib

The analogy breaks down slightly: I expect Libby to be pardoned.