alternative hippopotamus

Sam Fox was a major donor to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (alternatively, Swift Vote Bitterlings for Tooth), a group that orchestrated one of the most vicious political smears in known history. Bush appoints Fox ambassador to Belgium, a country located in Old Europe. Fox comes up for confirmation in front of a Senate committee that includes Kerry. Hilarity ensues:

Kerry: Why would you give $50,000 to a group you have no sense of accountability for?
Fox: Well, because if 527s were banned, then it’s banned for both parties. And so long as they’re not banned…
Kerry: So two wrongs make a right?
Fox: Well, I don’t know, but if one side is contributing then the other side…
Kerry: But is that your judgment? Is that your judgment that you would bring to the ambassadorship? That two wrongs make a right?
Fox: No, I didn’t say that two wrongs make a right, sir.
Kerry: Why would you do it then?
Fox: Well, I did it because politically, it’s necessary if the other side is doing it.

Not that it matters, but Fox represents everything that Belgians hate about Americans. Particularly, that he uses his money to push people around, and influence elections. So, I’ll bet Fox would be really happen in Belgium.

Who is the most unhinged of all?

Mirror says: Michelle Malkin, Wicked Witch of Montgomery County, drill sargent for the 101st flying monkey brigade:

Whatever your partisan leanings, an attack planned on the Vice President of the United States is an attack on America.

Some of our fellow Americans, however, can’t put their sneering hatred of the White House aside.

This is in response to a HuffPo article with the title: “Cheney ‘Targeted’ in Deadly Afghan Blast.”

Part of the reason she’s on the warpath is the use of quotes around “Targeted.” She calls them “sneer quotes.” Wait, a minute, see what I just did? When I used a quote, I put quotation marks around the quote. Might that be why the HuffPo put quotation marks around the word “targeted”? Actually the article says that Cheney “was a target,” so it would be more accurate to write “target”ed. Whatever.

Then she saw this comment and went on flying broomstick patrol: “You can’t kill pure evil. Like an exorcism you have to drive a stake through it.”

Malkin, like most deranged polemicists, doesn’t have a comment section. So, there’s no way I can judge how unhinged it is. I will say this. Whenever I get bored and want a good laugh, I’ll check out the comment section at JOM. Here’s a couple of my favorite comments from a recent thread:

• Dingell is the only thing in the House preventing Pelosi from “greenng” America–a/k/a taxing us all to death for energy use while Gore and Pelosi,Teresa and John, Barbra and Lear hog it up and pay “offsets” .Otherwise, I have no use for him, either.
• Cheney directed Libby to destroy Wilson’s credibility

  Perfectly legal, last I checked.

  leaking that his wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, was a CIA operative

  Also perfectly legal, unless she was covert, which nearly everyone now agrees she was not.

  IOW, Cheney stands convicted of playing bareknuckles politics. In Washington D.C.! So why are we in court again?

• FROM CAROL HERMAN

  Perhaps, in the UK, where the Kremlin runs everything; there’s a “covert canteen.” But if you’re at LANGLEY, you’re not covert.

  Because it goes with the first lessons new spies get. “NEVER GO TO LANGLEY!” Not ever! Not even to collect decorations. Or pins. Or awards.

  And, IF “proving” our-gal-val was “covert,” that information would have been out there! Front and center! It’s an empty hole, though. Because the only news you could get about “covert” is she learned some billing practices where she benefitted more than most; every time she and her husband wanted to travel to “frwance.”

  Where they were met, no doubt, by secret-french-spy-under-cover, Wife #2.

No, nothing unhinged there

Very interesting:

“The Lost Tomb of Jesus,” produced by Oscar-winning director James Cameron and scheduled to air March 4 on the Discovery Channel, argues that 10 small caskets discovered in 1980 in a Jerusalem suburb may have held the bones of Jesus and his family.

One of the caskets even bears the title, “Judah, son of Jesus,” hinting that Jesus may have had a son, according to the film.

[…]

Simcha Jacobovici, the Toronto filmmaker who directed the film, said that a name on one of the ossuaries _ “Mariamene” _ offers evidence that the tomb is that of Jesus and his family. In early Christian texts, “Mariamene” is the name of Mary Magdalene, he said.

I’m one of those people who don’t believe the historical accuracy of the Gospels is that important. What matters to people like me is the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth concerning how we interact with each other, sustaining this idea we mutually experience called “civilization,” or more basically “life on earth.” Of course that bit where Jesus talks about who is blessed and why is reasonably interesting as well.

It’s a shame that modern Christianity has become so focused on who can sleep with who, and how they can do it, and whether socialism is evil, or whether you can show pictures of naked people or use swear words on television. Christ had nothing to say about these things, so discussions along those lines can’t be called Christianity, per se.

Likewise the obsession with the literal truth of Christian dogma, which this documentary questions, is bound to draw fire, while a penetrating look at the parable of the mustard seed will go completely ignored.

The good news is that documentaries like this one will vex and distract the True Believers for a time, so they don’t bother people like me.

Next up: Was Jesus Gay?

I hope this an interesting anecdote. It concerns events that occurred between September 1998 and May 2001, when I stopped participating in “Country Retreat.” Why I did so is the story for another day.

A friend of mine had put together a series of extraordinary weekends at his home in New Ipswich, NH. Once a month about 20 of us would gather, and participate in what was called “Country Retreat,” or CR for short.

The basic premise was that we would make a very specific aim, or really a series of specific aims that would test our abilities to work together as a group. The aims we set were always of a practical nature: building new rooms, or planting a garden, or building a tree fort, things along those lines. Part of the group labored at putting together lavish banquets (my humble contribution was adding international dishes), part of us would do the construction, and then we’d talk about what had happened in the process. Sunday afternoons were usually devoted to discussing something someone had read recently, and I recall everything from Shakespeare to Dave Barry. Though, if the work had gone badly, we would keep the discussion short, try to learn from our experiences thus far, and complete our aims for the weekend.

All of us went into these weekends knowing that it would be extraordinarily difficult. We would be tested to our physical limits, usually with little or no sleep, and we’d get snippy with each other. Still, we wanted the best for each other in the process. Yelling at someone, or being yelled at, is often an act of kindness.

As an example I remember a Saturday afternoon when we were working on laying floorboard in the guest bedroom. If we didn’t get it finished, that meant we’d have no where to sleep Saturday night.

You have to understand that none of us had ever laid flooring before. And, all of us had been up since Friday night, and were not exactly on our best behavior. So, we spent an hour or so stumbling around trying to get how the machines worked, and how the tongue went into the groove of the next board, and got some sense of measuring the next board, while another person was nailing in the last one.

At this point, I was in as bad shape as you can imagine, and was starting to wear out my welcome. When I had sawed off about 4 boards too short, and was trying to make an awkward joke about it, some were looking at me like I might be the centerpiece for the Sunday brunch meal.

Then R, one of the most sensible members of the group called for a stop to all this, and we gathered for a quick discussion.

“Let’s take a look at where we are right now,” he said.
We looked, knowing we were in the middle of a disaster.
“I want 4 people,” he said, and 4 of us raised our hands, including me. R was one of those people who I looked up to tremendously, and I didn’t want to disappoint him.
“Good,” he said, “the rest of you should go help with dinner.” I remember feeling very glad that I was part of this. Even though I believed I wasn’t up to the task, R trusted me.
“In the next 45 minutes, we’re going to finish laying the floor for this room. Who’s with me?”

This was one of the strangest moments of my life. There was no way that the 4 of us could lay the flooring for the room in 45 minutes. It was impossible. He might as well of said: “In the next 45 minutes we’re going to swim the English Channel. And we’re going to do it without getting wet. Meanwhile, one of you is going to capture a unicorn.”

At the same time, I knew that his belief that it was possible was more powerful than my disbelief. All of us said “Yes, we can do it.”

What happened next was a blur of continuous motion. We sawed, laid hammered, nailed, pushed poked. The air was full of sawdust, sweat, and intense concentration. In less than 45 minutes, we had finished flooring a room that would have taken each of us individually a lifetime.

We toasted each other afterwards and had the best evening of our lives. Our bodies were broke, sore, and I couldn’t walk at all, but I had tasted something I had never experienced before.

Our discussion on Sunday was mostly about that experience. And none of us could really explain what happened. Someone who wasn’t there listened to us and reflected: “From what you say, you believed in someone’s vision.”

Today I had cabin fever. Washington, DC, while being a quirky city in many ways, definitely has mild winters going for it. This winter hasn’t been mild, per se, but more a study in extremes: the first couple of weeks in January were basically tropical, and then the last few weeks have been arctic. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if next week’s forecast called for frogs and locusts.

Seeing how it was supposed to be warm today, and except for a short thunderstorm, and heavy winds in the late afternoon, it was nice, I took some time off of work. I used the time during the thunderstorm to re-inflate the tires on my bike, and adjust the seat, so that right afterwards I was ready to embark for parts unknown.

I stopped for a late lunch at Guapo’s, one of DC’s better Mexican restaurants in a city not at all known for Mexican restaurants. But that’s a story for another day.

The point is that this is when I was accosted by a woman with a clipboard and $ signs in her eyes.

She said: “Are you an environmental supporter?”
I said: “Yes, I support it emotionally, but not in any financial sense.”
She said: “I’m from Greenpeace. What’s your biggest environmental issue? Global warming? That’s a big one.”

I really wanted to nip this conversation in the bud. I listened politely as I locked up my bike in front of Guapo’s. She said some more things about Greenpeace as I tried to extract myself from the conversation. I came up with what I thought was a good line.

I said: “I’m more of a Sierra Club type.”
She said: “But, I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but Greenpeace is international, which makes it more effective on issues like global warming than Sierra Club.”

That caught me off balance. You rarely hear one environmental group dissing another. I was intrigued. And, yes, there is an argument to be made that Greenpeace, as an international organization, has certain advantages. Advantages outweighed, I would argue by the Sierra Club’s use of local events like hikes, bike rides, clean-up days, etc., that make it part of the community. But, she had a point.

The problem was: I didn’t want to have an involved discussion about Sierra Club vs. Greenpeace. Or a discussion about Global Warming. Or a discussion about anything. This was one of those times when I wanted to be left alone. I call it “me time.” When I’m on “me time” I’m under no obligation to do anything. Because, if I were it wouldn’t be “me time” anymore, it would be “us time.” Or, even “you time.” I took the day off to do “you time”? I think not. Not if it means giving someone money.

So, I had to cut this short.
I said, not unkindly, but firmly: “Now, I’m going to go have my lunch.”
She said, crestfallen: “Alright.”

I had finished locking up my bike, and putting some things away, and looked up. This was the first time I noticed that she was on crutches. This poor woman on crutches had devoted her afternoon to talking about the environment to me, a stranger, and I’d just brushed her off. What do you do in that situation?

In this case I made a bee line for the bar at Guapo’s, and had myself a good lunch. And when I came out, and she was still there, hunched over next to my bike, I walked all the way around the block, through the Whole Foods, and up a side street, that’s how guilty I felt.

Our own Art Levine got a mention in a recent Salon article by Joe Conason:

In an interview with the Washington Monthly, Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., furiously excoriated the Bush administration for coddling its corporate friends. “In order to please their cronies in the chemical industry, the Bush administration is willing to put the health and safety of millions of people at risk,” he said of Perry’s handiwork.

Or as Art Levine himself put it in his article: “A flippant critic might say the father-in-law has been prosecuting a war that creates more terrorists abroad, while the son-in-law has been working to ensure they’ll have easy targets at home. But it’s more precise to say that White House officials really, really don’t want to alienate the chemical industry, and Perry has been really, really willing to help them not do it.”

The father-in-law mentioned above is none other than our Commander-in-Chief, Dick Cheney, the point of the article being that while your favorite cable channel may carry all the latest salacious gossip on who’s gay and having a baby , corporate and familial cronyism is running rampant.

The period between Bush’s “election” in 2000 and the Fall of 2003, when all of the WMD claims started to come undone was when I gave up on the Main Stream Media. It was obvious to anyone who had ears to hear that the NYT, the Washington Post, Time Magazine, and all of the usual prominent fixtures in our fair city had become courtiers in the Palais de Versailles.

Though streaming internet video was still a bit rough around the edges it ws during this same period that I began to watch Democracy Now. Amy Goodman struck me as a figure out of a distopian Science Fiction film, the last person to speak the truth. Even the way that the scratchy broadcast originated from a fire station in Manhattan could be a symbolic detail out of Bradbury or Vonnegut.

These days I listen to DemocracyNow on podcast. I missed this interview with Michael Gordon, author of the infamous aluminum tubes story for the NYT. But fortunately, Glenn Greenwald didn’t:

AMY GOODMAN: For example, David Albright, who is the U.N. weapons inspector, and I am quoting from Michael Massing’s letter to the editor, responding to your objection to his piece in the New York Review of Books. Albright writing that the Times’ September 13 story, which you also co-authored with Judith Miller, was heavily slanted to the C.I.A.’s position, and the views of the other side were trivialized. Albright says – and this is the man who contacted the Times. Let me just quote for our audience, this is Albright saying, “An administration official was quoted as saying that the best technical experts and nuclear scientists at laboratories like Oak Ridge supported the C.I.A. assessment. These inaccuracies made their way into the story, despite several discussions that I had with Miller on the day before the story appeared, some well into the night. In the end, nobody was quoted questioning the C.I.A.’s position, as I would have expected. He says.

MICHAEL GORDON: Are you going to let me talk now?

AMY GOODMAN: If you could respond to that, please.

MICHAEL GORDON: Yeah. You’re not well-informed on this issue, because – I don’t have any, you know, criticism of you as an individual, but you’re not very well informed on this, because if you were well-informed on this – I’m friends with David Albright. I think David Albright’s an upstanding person who is doing very good work. I’m actually not Judy Miller, so I’m not the person he had the conversation with, but David certainly took the view early on, and he deserves a lot of credit for this, that the aluminum tubes were not intended for nuclear purposes. That’s absolutely true, and as a person outside government, he did that analysis.

The real problem with the journalism that backed up the administration going into the Iraq invasion, so we learn from Michael Gordon, is that Amy Goodman wasn’t well-informed enough.

I wanted to catch at least a glimpse of the Libby trial. So, I snuck out at lunch time and caught this part of the defense closing argument. I thought it was pretty interesting. Basically, in the following Wells is trying to explain why he argued that there was a conspiracy within the White House when his client was charged with perjury:

Wells: … they make a good case. Hell, I almost felt pity myself! But, ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, I have one final thing I want you to consider. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk. But Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now think about it; that does not make sense!
Fitz: Dammit!
Walton: What?
Fitz: He’s using the Chewbacca Defense!
Wells: Why would a Wookiee, an eight-foot tall Wookiee, want to live on Endor, with a bunch of two-foot tall Ewoks? That does not make sense! But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does not make sense! Look at me. I’m a lawyer defending a chief of staff for the Vice President, and I’m talkin’ about Chewbacca! Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making any sense! None of this makes sense! And so you have to remember, when you’re in that jury room deliberatin’ and conjugatin’ the Emancipation Proclamation, [approaches and softens] does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense! If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests.

I recently purchased an HP Pavillion with Windows Vista pre-installed, and wanted to give a few quick notes of feedback:

• When reviews say that Vista is more Mac-like, what they mean is that panes now have a glassy look reminiscent of OS X 10.2 and above. I agree that it’s a more sophisticated look and feel.
• Now, down to the nitty gritty: how well do applications that worked on NT now work on Vista? On this day, Feb 19, 2007, I give Vista between a C and a C-. I’ll give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt here, and guess that most of my complaints will be fixed before February is out.
• Itunes deserves its own bit of commentary. DRM’d Audio and video that I purchased at the iTunes store works like a champ when I play it on the ipod. When I play it on my desktop it halts and starts, belches and moans, and for my money is completely unwatchable. Video podcasts aren’t synced to the ipod. I haven’t tried notes or calendar yet. After running for, say 2 hours, iTunes crashes on the PC telling me that a C++ error has occurred. I have a hard time believing that Microsoft’s testing of Vista didn’t include the iPod. My spidey sense tells me there’s a bigger story here.
• Google Earth works well. Yes, it crashed once, but I’d say it’s well within the realm of acceptable behavior for living on the bleeding edge. The companion program Sketchup, alas one of my favorites, installs but crashes on startup. Microsoft? Google? A little, please?
• As a compatibility test with NT I tried installing CivCity Rome. Nada. Maybe they should call it CivCity Nada.
• Firefox works well, but some of the functionality with del.icio.us has gone away. The buttons no longer appear as buttons, and when I highlight text and try to post it, it no longer shows up within del.icio.us correctly.
• Visual Studio works like a champ.
• Second Life on Vista is not too shabby. It’s harder to comment on this, as I know the grid has evolved at the same time Vista came into being.
• My Palm Treo software installed and I appear to be able to sync both with Treo and Palm T/X. I say “appear” since I haven’t tried syncing an mp4 file, for instance. Since this didn’t work all that well on NT, either, I’m not going to be all that critical even if doesn’t work. For the record, my best track record with getting large files like an mp4 to sync was to either use the wireless interfaces or to use pilotlink on my linux box.

Here’s why you may be interested in Vista, particularly if, like me, you’re hooked on media. The Media Center application is kinda cool. You get previews of upcoming shows on cable (think Comedy Central) and you can subscribe to DVD download services from the app. It’s a fair guess that Media Center is Microsoft’s answer to iTunes. Might this be why we haven’t seen a resolution to iTunes compatibility issues on Vista?

Think Progress follows the going on at Fox so you don’t have to:

News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch has announced that he will launch the new Fox Business Channel (FBC) in the fall. The channel is marketing itself as being “more business-friendly” than its rivals.

The post implies that a likely tack for FBC is to sex things up a bit. Here’s how Think Progress puts it:

Cavuto explained, “We’re going to be a channel for America — not for old white men with money.” No, instead, FBC will be “entertaining, informative, youthful,” Cavuto pledged. Given his record, we assume that only means more Playmates, pole-dancing, and nearly nude women.

My first thought was: this could be interesting. On Fox News Channel they could have Dobson going on and on about how liberalism has cheapened the mores of the US of A, while on FBC they could be making their living the hard way: a quarter at a time.

(okay, that’s a pretty obscure reference. There was a short film on Saturday Night Live about prostitutes satisfying their video game addiction. The punch line was they made their living “the hard way: a quarter at a time.” Those of you in the for-profit sector know that businesses release their data on a 3 month basis. Thus, again, they make their living a “quarter at a time” which, presumably, is the hard way. It’s all just a harmless play on words, and no one got hurt in the process.)