Posts from — October 2006

As numerous outlets have reported, Virginia Republican Senator George Felix “Macaca” Allen blasts Webb novels for sex scenes.

James Webb can’t avoid his past any longer. He needs to stand up and admit he was a Republican when he wrote those sex scenes. I know he has seen the light and repented, but he needs to be honest about his problem and act as a model for others, enabling them see the light and make the change in their life. Show Republicans that they too can be saved from a life of ignorance and fear that leads to inserting gratuitous sex scenes in otherwise good novels so they’ll be purchased by other Republicans.

Jim, if you had done this earlier you might have saved Representative Mark Foley (R-FL-Resigned in anticipation of Indictment) from his novel Turning Pages: My Life in the Congressional Cloak Room.

Mustang Bobby at Bark Bark Woof Woof and dozens of others have written about the New Jersey court decision. My reading is not nearly as dramatic as many. From what I have read the court ruled that the New Jersey constitution says everyone has to be treated equally. The state has created a class of partnership agreement called “marriage” that discriminates against a group of people. The legislature needs to fix this problem.

The quick fixes are to change the name to civil union and open it to everyone, or to get the state out of “marriage” altogether. I can’t see the second option being pursued, as there are too many voters who enjoy the benefits of “marriage.”

As predicted the Reich is out in force to use this decision to stir up the “base.”

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Apparently Cheney wants detainees to take regular baths:

“You know as a matter of common sense that the vice president of the United States is not going to be talking about water boarding. Never would, never does, never will,” [Presidential press secretary Tony] Snow said. “You think Dick Cheney’s going to slip up on something like this? No, come on.”

In an interview Tuesday with WDAY of Fargo, North Dakota, Cheney was asked if “a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives.”

The vice president replied, “Well, it’s a no-brainer for me, but for a while there I was criticized as being the vice president for torture. We don’t torture. That’s not what we’re involved in.”

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I have noticed people [Eccentricity and Sideshow ] have been wondering how a company like Diebold, that produces thousands of ATMs, can make a product as flaky as the electronic voting machine they sell.

The first thing you need to know is that Diebold didn’t develop the voting machine in-house, they bought a small company that created them. After the purchase they kept the sales and marketing people and fired the technical people. The assumption was that Diebold’s own technical people could deal with the new product.

The technical people working on Diebold’s ATM equipment have a stable, proven platform that was created to exacting standards and reviewed by technical people from the banking industry. There are no cutting edge technologies in a Diebold ATM, everything is bullet-proof and over tested.

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Robert C. of Interstate 4 Jamming wonders: Have Public Officials Gotten A Huge Case Of The Stupids Lately?

Yes, they have. It is a well know facet of Stalinism, that the ruling elite don’t feel constrained by mere laws.

When Education Secretary Rod Paige calls the National Education Association a “terrorist organization” and Representative Peter King (R-NY) calls AARP and the NAACP “radical organizations”, it is an extension of the Stalinist policy of attacking dissidents. When you fail to follow the Party line, you have to be minimized because you are an “enemy of the people.”

Glenn Greenwald of Unclaimed Territory complains about Monday morning quarterbacks among the pundits.

Glenn, when you are a pundit, you have to be ready to airbrush the losers from the pictures when the winds change. Punditry is predicated on short attention spans and bad memories. You only have to keep up the pretense until the “history” is adjusted to prove you have always been right. The Shrubbery may be gone in two years, but the Party is eternal.

Glenn is also concerned about networks refusing to accept ads that “disparage” the Shrubbery. Self-censorship is one of the most powerful tools of the propaganda machine. When you control the news long enough, you find that people censor themselves and the “correct message” is always presented.

What Do You Mean, Your Chair?

Well, if you would make Dot share the seat, you could have the back.

[Editor: While Ringo is more than capable of jumping from the floor to the back of the chair, she prefers to climb it like a tree.]

Friday Ark

So far the only commercials I’ve seen for governor are attack ads about Jim Davis’s attendance record in Congress.

There have been no real ads about what either candidate is going to, other that Crist saying he’s going to “stay the course” plotted by JEB Bush, and Davis is going in a new direction.

Both are complaining about the cost of property insurance, and the Republicans have to take the blame on this one. Although Davis doesn’t have a detailed plan, it is rather obvious that “stay the course” and “business as usual” aren’t going to cut it in Florida. The insurance situation is a mess and the taxpayers are going to be holding the bag, no matter what’s done. Insurance companies can’t claim they need new increases while they are racking up huge profits.

The big issue would seem to be whether or not Charlie Crist is gay. I have no idea why this would make a difference in how he does his job, and taxpayers will certainly save on not providing all of the benefits that go with a “first lady.” Given the multiple embarrassments caused by the current “first family” and their problems with the laws of Florida and the United States, having a single governor could be viewed as a major plus for the state.

Davis doesn’t seem to be a very exciting guy, but it’s time for a lack of excitement. I don’t think Florida needs any more departments headed by imported fundamentalists, or people tied to major state contractors. I would hope that Davis appoints some people who want to do their job, without all of the incompetence and corruption we’ve seen under Bush.

Update: Both Mustang Bobby and Robert C. have proclaimed the Crist-Davis debate a snooze, about as exciting as a cheese sandwich from a vending machine.

A bit loggy today so I checked Blogger Status and discovered:

Thursday, October 26, 2006

Sincere apologies for the short notice but we will take down both blogger.com and blogspot.com at 2 PM PST today to replace the piece of network equipment that was causing the outages in the past couple of weeks. The outage will last 60-90 minutes, we will try to get done as fast as we can. Blogger beta will be not affected nor blogs that are hosted on the beta except for a few static images that we pull from www.blogger.com.

Posted by Pete at 09:38 PDT

Representative Jim Davis (D-FL 11th), the Democratic candidate for governor, received an A from the IAVA and 100% from the DAV.

The Reptilicon ads claim he’s never at work, but he seems to show up for veterans issues and a lot of other things, like the offshore drilling votes, when he votes the way a representative of Florida should.

The Shrubbery has hinted that more troops will be going to Iraq after the elections. We don’t have any more troops, and 4,000 of the people in Iraq today are on extended tours, so the message is that people are not going to be rotated out when their replacements arrive.

They have been calling up every warm body they could locate in the Reserve and just about used up all of the deployment time available for the National Guard without changing a number of laws, so the regular forces are going to be extended, and they know it.

The people who are near to the ends of their enlistments know they are going to be retained by “stop-loss” orders because many of the new enlistees can’t be trusted with a broom, much less a weapon.

The Reptilicons brought this on themselves by drawing active duty military personnel into partisan political activities. They have broken down a very high and long-standing wall between the military and anything political, and now they are reaping what they sowed.

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Blogger has issues today, but it looks like they are swapping equipment out, so it should be back quickly.

This is based on the error messages I’m receiving, because Blogger Status is also down.

The bigger sites should still be available because they seem to be on a separate system.

Blogger Status is back:

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

We are experiencing some troubles with one filer. This affects publishing to some of the blogs and they will not be available for viewing on blogspot.

Posted by Prashant at 11:24 PDT

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Tomorrow we will have an outage of 60 minutes from 2p to 3p (Pacific Time) as we perform some hardware repairs. Posted by Pal at 15:39 PDT

Update from Jack, the Grumpy Forester in comments:

I just discovered that, having switched to Blogger Beta, I can no longer comment at non-Beta Blogger sites that use Blogger comments. skippy would be an example of a site where my comments are rejected. A fix is supposedly in the works…

Kevin Hayden at American Street provides a an introduction and link to a MSNBC report: Gitmo interrogations spark battle over tactics.

Before you go read part one of a two-part report there is something you should know that isn’t totally clear from the article. These investigators are the military’s criminal investigators who gather evidence for courts martial, not civilian criminal cases. The administration was talking about creating military tribunals to try those charged as “enemy combatants” and these people worked under the military’s rules of procedure for trials, which are a bit different than those of civilian courts.

These investigators are complaining about tactics that are unacceptable for military trials and they complained all the way to the top of their chain of command, Rumsfeld himself.

These complaints went up the chain of command early in 2002, well before the Iraq war. The DoD can’t claim they didn’t know what was going on, because they had been told about the techniques in use almost two years before Abu Ghraib was revealed.

The investigators told them this would blow up on them, but they did it anyway.

Update: Part 2 is now available.

It’s not just UN Day, it’s Michael at Musing’s musings birthday!

Jim in comments has located the original for Bushcronium: Administratium.

Billmon regarding the “lumpy junky” and his comments on the Michael J. Fox ad – Expert Testimony:

I don’t know where Limbaugh got the idea that telling scurrilous lies about one of America’s favorite celebrities — and someone who enjoys a huge amount of public sympathy to boot — was a shrewd political move. But the Dems should be damned glad he did. Considering how razor-close the Missouri race appears to be, Rush may have just single-handedly booted away a Republican Senate seat.

Fox isn’t an addict or a criminal and has played roles that endeared him to millions of people. Now he is sick with a debilitating disease and he has been attacked. In the science of politics this is known as a no-no.