perfidy

I just heard him on On Point via public radio, WAMU in DC.

I was really stunned and impressed at his enthusiasm, optimism and outlook. I don't think I have heard such an uplifting guy in politics since the OTHER guy from Hope, AR.

You gotta love a guy that lost over a hundred pounds. That's transformation.

Politically speaking, I am not wild about Mike Huckabee at all. He's pro-life and frankly I'm enough of a one issue voter that there's NO FREAKIN' WAY I'd vote for him because of that position alone. But I found him remarkably in line with my thoughts about the stupidness of the creation/evolution debate. His feeling is that he takes his kids to church to indoctrinate them about religion and doesn't expect school to align with religious views because kids learn a great many things at school but do not take all of them to heart. HEAR HEAR. Give your kids some credit and let them think on their own about God! After all the beauty of God's gift of free will is that when faced with the notion that God perhaps didn't create the world exactly as we know it, you can either reject or accept it.

All of his kids went to public school for all twelve years. He's a guy who puts his money where his mouth is and I'm all for that.

I didn't listen to all of it in detail because I was busy doing some other blogging, but the parts I did hear left me with a good impression. I mean, if I have to choose between evils, the guy is looking pretty good.

So Scooter Libby, convicted by a jury of his peers, has been unconvicted by El Presidente. The ability of the President to pardon is enshrined in the constitution, and is generally constrained only by the ethics of the grantee of the power. Bush, determined to break down the agreements and conventions that have kept the country running for hundreds of years, has begun to pardon his inner circle. Under the Bush theory of the Presidency, any subordinate can commit a crime and be "pardoned", or have his or her sentence commuted in advance. This leaves us with the uncomfortable situation of having a rather unconstrained executive branch, to say the least. Near as I can tell there is only ONE remedy for a President that abuses his authority in this fashion: Impeachment.

The President can pardon like mad unless Congress decides to remove him from office; I wonder what it would take to begin the process. I've been curious about how the GOP intends to shield its minions from a pissed-off inbound executive. Pardons can only happen if a prosecution has taken place, so unless they get those prosecutions cracking now, they're going to be unshielded later on.

This is one of the highest profile cases on record that quantifies exactly how the dual system of justice in this country works.

Colleague Patton wrote not too long ago on this very topic, so I guess you could say that we disagree. The question remains: Where is the check and balance on the Executive when it comes to pardoning his own inner circle?

And just so we're clear, I believe that the GOP has, in this round of administration, done nothing less than break down the barriers between church, state AND party. When members of the executive are emailing each other on their GOP party accounts discussing the introduction of the church into policy, you've got quite a trifecta underway.

I bring you David Gross of San Francisco, who not only:

...asked his bosses for a radical pay cut, enough so he wouldn't have to pay taxes to support the war.

but

In any event, his employer turned him down and he quit.

Which, I guess, good for him, standing up for his convictions that way and all. Left unanswered, at least for now, is whether federal taxes are levied on the wages of "guests of the Federal Government". Why would I be curious about that? Because

Gross, 38, now works on a contract basis, and last year he refused to pay self-employment taxes.

All by itself, that doesn't distinguish him from a lot of people. The AP story notes that between 8 and 10 thousand people fail to pay their taxes for reasons similar to those of Gross. Contained in the story, at a meta-level, is the fact that this particular non-Rhodes Scholar allowed the AP to write a story about him evading taxes. Nothing like calling out the IRS by name to get them to leave you alone. Posing in two pre-mug shots for the story? A priceless addition, though I'm sure the Feds could already have found him whenever and wherever they needed to.

Of course, these days, he won't end up becoming a guest of the Federal Government:

Unlike the days when Thoreau was sent to prison in a tax protest against the Mexican-American War, modern war tax protesters rarely go to prison, according to tax resisters. The IRS may take their money from wages and bank accounts - with penalties and interest - after sending a series of letters.

"They're very polite, which makes it a little boring," said Rosa Packard of Greenwich, a longtime anti-war tax protester.

But if he thinks he is going to avoid collection of his taxes owed, by hook or by crook, after having trumpeted his resistance on a national newswire, he's perhaps not smart enough to be gainfully employed, as a contractor or otherwise.

Will his protest, and others like his, have the desired effect? As James Taranto said in the OpinionJournal piece where I first saw this story, "Something tells us the economy will survive."

(also posted at issuesblog.com)

...that we live in a world of plenty, nay, a decadent world. Did he really need that badly to see the innards of his new iPhone?

I don't think he's just trying to get his Bluetooth speakers working, either. At $500+ a pop, he must have been affirmatively pissed at his new toy. [wik] For any iPhoners who might find themselves irked at activation problems, don't worry, don't get mad, and don't bust your iPhone to smithereens. It seems that "DVD Jon" has already broken the activation process. [alsø wik] For those with WSJ subscriptions, further info on the myriad workarounds the first week of the iPhone's life hath wrought.

Found in today's NY Times:

Correction: Just Don’t Call Them Inexpensive

Published: July 5, 2007

An article last week about inexpensive dresses misstated the name of a clothing store on Broadway. It is Yellow Rat Bastard, not Dirty Yellow Bastard.
(Go to Article)

I haven't had time to post much lately, for which I abjectly apologize. But I have run across some interesting bits I'd like to call your attention to.

• Here's a nifty National Geographic piece on swarm behavior, or how while individual ants are staggeringly inept, ant colonies are not.
• While I certainly like the new iPhone more than Mapgirl, this guy is really down on the Jesus Phone.
• The Ministry has for some time now been trying to alert the public to the threat of robots. While humanity as a whole will certainly all experience the cold metal boot of robot domination, we probably won't all feel it at once. Among the first groups to feel the iron grip of robotic oppression might just be migrant workers. As if they didn't have enough to contend with.
• The New Yorker is occasionally interesting.
• The recent release of some old CIA documents has raised some eyebrows. And sent conspiracy types into overdrive. And it looks like we did after all try to get the mob to rub out Castro.
• Wired interviews Hans Reiser, linux guru and accused murderer.
• Times puff piece on cyberwar.
• Yes, it does.
• Mars or Bust! I think that terraforming Mars would be a fabulous idea. Of course, we need to get there first. One real advantage with Mars, is that we could use rather, uh, drastic methods in the period before we start setting the planet.

Enjoy, and I'll try to post something substantive real soon now.

Now this is my idea of a summer camp.

[wik] I wonder if they get to play with these:

Given even the slightest chance, the Bush administration has shown an amazing ability over the past several years to choose the worst of all possibilities presented to it in any given circumstance.

However, with last evening's commutation of prison sentence for Scooter Libby, they appear finally to have gotten one right.

Libby's head was hung on a pike for public political enjoyment (and no, I neither have time nor feel like going into the details), and his case has not reached even its first appeal. The happy dance so far engaged in by the judicial class in Washington DC has served to do nothing but continue the political theater and public shaming of Libby. The courts' having ordered him to begin his jail term with his appeal in process, while not unheard of, is far outside the bounds of standard practice in these matters.

For anyone who might disagree with that characterization, I've got two words for you, words that in any rational comparative world would cause snickers and insistence that Libby receive full exoneration and the apologies of the government for its having hassled him: "Sandy Berger". And the fact that they both have little-boy first names is only a coincidence.

Back to my point - Bush had several choices which would have made a hash of this matter, including doing nothing (wrong, not because it might have upset "the base", but wrong because loyalty and fairness dictated action of some sort), and issuing a full pardon (wrong, because he was convicted, however potentially wrongly, and his appeals have not yet run their course).

Deft handling of the matter, via a focus on the one ragingly unfair portion of the story - the immediate incarceration, was as welcome to see as it was surprising. I've come to expect the Bush administration to regularly puke in its own lap, and this time, they didn't.

The fine stays in place, along with the probation, all pending completion of the appeals process. If those appeals are unsuccessful, for the record, I'd react badly to an end-of-term full pardon, just so we're clear on things. Based on what I've seen of the judicial process so far, however, I expect Libby to eventually clear his name in the courts. Allowing him to do so outside of the Graybar Hotel seems quite fair to me.

For the first time in quite a while, then, I'm in a position to compliment Bush for not fucking up something simple. Which is a blessing and a shame, now that I think about it.

I happened to be near the Apple Store yesterday. (Buying a geek book for work down the street from it.) I wandered in. The hype crowd had cooled down but it was still hoppin' for a cool summer evening. A Monday no less.

Now I know Buckethead is drooling over the phone, but I've been interested in it because I am looking for a laptop alternative. I hate blogging inside my house on a nice day. I would love to go to a cafe and blog over WiFi and check out the jarheads on PT runs. What good is living near the Pentagon if you don't get gym queen eye candy? (Really, it's like living in the Castro in SF again, except the men are straight and not quite as ripped.) But I digress.

I really want a laptop and was seriously considering a MacBook, priced the damned thing and everything. Looked at the refurbs, offered to buy one off a girlfriend who hated hers. (She and I are of the same ilk, no lifting your hands off the keyboard to use the mouse. It wastes time.) But I thought maybe I should wait a see what this iPhone thingamabob is all about. You see, I have a 4GB Nano I won in a blog contest and I really don't use it. I have an indash 6-CD changer and usually that's enough music to last me months without a change. I even mislaid the thing for a few months because I just don't need audio white noise in my life. I abandoned my Palm V after I didn't have a desktop anymore to sync it to pull down articles from AvantGo and read them on the train and because I was a car commuter and didn't have the time to read anymore.

So here I am at the store. I looked at an iPhone and started to use it as instinctively as I knew how because a really great GUI doesn't need instructions. It should be intuitive and obvious. Right?

Well, I had heard a little about how the button gets you always back to the start page with your icons. I admit, it's a beautifully clear screen with great width, but it's about the size of my old Palm V and still feeling a bit large in the hand. (I use a KRZR right now, not crazy about it, but it's narrow, which I like.)

After about 30 seconds, I wanted to hurl the damned thing across the room. Luckily for Apple and its patrons, it was bolted down.

Excuse me, but this gadget was designed by men for men. Being the girly girl that I am, I keep my fingernails long. I like to scratch the itch. There's nothing more satisfying than bearing down and taking a layer of dermis off when you've got a terrible itch. Unfortunately, that precludes using this device. Period. End of story. I don't even need to proceed any further. If you are not a nail biter, you can never use this phone.

All the men around me thought it was the bomb. I glanced at their fingers. They were all effing nail biters. Shit. Even I AM a nail biter when I am bored at work, but I don't bite down to the quick. That's disgusting and makes your fingers bleed, an even worse biohazard. But of course their fat sausage fingers are greasy and skating right across the glass surface. The idea of that makes me nauseated and reach for the Windex.

All around me I heard was that it was amazing. Honestly, I don't think it's that great. It's still not going to replace a laptop and wireless connection for a person like me. Either I want a phone or I want a highly connective mobile device, but apparently what I really want is a sub-notebook about 4-6" across with a wireless card, and a full-size 110-key folding keyboard accessory. The Jesus phone doesn't cut the mustard at all. (I am seriously thinking of patenting that idea so if any of you are electrical engineers with experience in injection molded plastics, please contact me.)

I don't have chunky fingers and I was still mistyping out the wazoo. I literally had to hunt and peck with my ring finger (shortest fingernail) to type. The interface could not keep up with my speed. Also, for the auto guessing of words, I couldn't easily figure out at first which button would complete the fill because I could not accurately ascertain which one I was hitting. (Why does the return key actually do a carriage return after it autofills? That's crap. Auto fill with no line break.) I did try covering my finger with my shirt tail and typing, which was surprisingly effective, even through a couple layers of fabric. I hear that with gloves on, it's impossible to use, which sort of precludes outdoor winter use, say in front of a bar grabbing a smoke trying to get your friends to meet you inside in 15 minutes as they walk from the metro. (Who says the smoking ban in SF, NYC and DC sucks? At least you get clear signal outside!)

The other thing that really struck me as poorly done is that the screen automatically rotates the output for web browsing. Ok, that's pretty neat and a good idea. But when you use Safari and the top tilts 90 degrees to the right, that's great. I'm a righty and that instinctive for me. But when I was looking at the embedded YouTube application, IT TILTED THE OTHER WAY. Um, not cool to have to rotate it 180 degrees from the web browser just to watch video. That's insane. The Apple dweebie in the store insisted that I had done something wrong, however, a device should never automatically switch from one orientation to the other like that spontaneously. I should be able to set it to a righty setting and lefties should get their own setting. That's a pretty reasonable GUI expectation.

To be fair, my blog looked GREAT onscreen! So did my blogpal, David's blog (see the iPhone inputted comment I left there and the crappy typos). And PFBlogs.org. Three sites I would definitely visit if I had a mobile device. I have a PSP and I have tried to use WiFi to browse the web with it, but frankly it sucks. The iPhone is VAST improvement over that. The incoming sound over iPod headphones was ok. I didn't get a chance to hear back from anyone about how the phone messages sounded that I left for them. (Buckethead?)

OH. Word to the hygiene wise, if you wish to go to see this device, TAKE YOUR OWN HEADPHONES. It was vile to watch the unwashed masses use the the same headphones over and over. I happened to have my iPod in my purse and used my own self-defiled headphones, thank-you-very-fucking-cleanliness-much. I only wish I had Purell because I was touching that screen all over and was getting grossed out. I didn't want to put it up to my face to use lest my skin I break out from necrotizing faciitis. Really, you cannot be too careful around these Mac fans. While their brand image may be clean, oy vey, their clientele is not. And this is the NoVA, BMW-driving yuppie crowd. It was teh ick. And for those not in the know, I am not a clean freak, but basic public health demands some more caution. Thank god it came out in the summertime, because during flu season, it would be quite the vector for spreading germs. (Don't even tell me that these are special headphones with the mic in the cord, I don't care. It's gross. Do want me to breathe all over your food the next time we dine together?)

Ok, that's enough of my ranting. You get the point. I'm not throwing away money on this thing. I pity Buckethead who will probably shed tears of joy when he first gets it and the curse AT&T 6 months later for the poor service. (News tip, VERY VERY LATE on Friday afternoon, 6pm ish EDT, AT&T announced the purchase of Dobson Telecom, which will give them better coverage in flyover country, so in a year, complaints about spotty service around the US might actually be moot. I presume I will still not be able to get a signal from inside the anechoic chamber better known as my parents' home. I swear, the NSA doesn't even block radio signal that well. Only Verizon gets through there. Sprint, Nextel AT&T nothing. You have to walk down the driveway to the sidewalk to get signal.)

[wik] I really, really, really wanted to like this phone. I did. I really want to be one of the cool kids and I was hoping it would be suitable for what I want, but alas, it's not. I *heart* Steve Jobs and I'd give my left pinkie to go work at Pixar, even if that would slow down my typing, I'd do it. There's something hot about the turtleneck and the rimless glasses, but I bet he's another psycho behind the wheel of a black BMW, because he definitely is a megalomaniac.

Dave Kilcullen is one of the top commanders in Iraq. He's written a short piece describing current operations. It rings so much truer than the punditry we are almost forced to endure (but then we turn the TV off). I hope he's right -- it sounds like he knows what he's doing.