Posts from — October 2006

First off, two non-critical address changes for Fanatical Apathy and James Wolcott. They are non-critical because the old addresses are re-directed to the new sites, but if you change to the new addresses they will load faster:

http://fanaticalapathy.com/

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/blogs/wolcott

Now for the browser updates: Both Internet Explorer and Firefox have new versions.

If you are using Windows XP with Service Pack 2, will you get IE 7.0 delivered to you as part of the automatic updates. If you are unsure what version of Windows you have, you can find out by clicking on the Start menu, highlighting Settings, selecting Control Panel, and then clicking on System. The pop-up will display your version information. You need Service Pack 2 to use IE 7.0.

Firefox 2.0 is available here, if you can’t wait any longer.

Steve Bates of Yellow Doggerel Democrat has been watching these releases because he is currently working on a project that has to support the latest browsers, and, as luck would have it, the definition of latest has changed.

Steve links to a Houston Chronicle article that compares the two browsers, but has written his own, more complete, reviews of Firefox 2.0 and IE 7.

Maru at WTF is it now? has a post [scroll up to see it] about Clay Shaw [R-FL-22] running radio ads touting his experience working with the Big Dog.

Apparently Mark Foley’s neighbor in Florida [adjoining districts] and Washington [they live in the same neighborhood] would rather be associated with William Jefferson Clinton than George Walker Bush in the minds of local voters.

[Politics makes strange bedfellows – what did you think I was implying? You people have dirty minds.]

Today is the 61^st anniversary of the founding of the United Nations.

It would be a good day for someone to explain to the current administration that the purpose of the UN is not to ratify every crazy concept that occurs to the resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Dr. Cole wonders why Mulla Omar is still able to threaten US and allied troops in Afghanistan. He was supposed to have been part of the package when we went after Osama.

Osama is now making personal appearances in Republican campaign commercials reminding people that 1862 days after the Shrubbery said he would get him “dead or alive”, Osama still has a thriving career in the video market.

[Update: Keith Olbermann has a special comment on the Republican TV ad.]

People might have thought that having harbored al Qaeda, Afghanistan would have been on the US list of state sponsors of terrorism, but you can’t get on the list unless the US recognizes the government, and the US never gave official recognition to the Taliban government.

Okay, so the Taliban must be on the State Department list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations? Not a chance. That’s for the ruling party of the Palestinian Authority, and Lebanese political parties, not for armed groups actively at war with US troops.

You might think that this whole War on Terror™ is FUBAR…and you would be right.

Early this morning the BBC had an interview with Dr. Sergei Khrushchev [Сергей Никитич Хрущёв] the son of the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev [Никита Сергеевич Хрущёв], about the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

Dr. Khrushchev said that one of the main issues in his father’s mind when he made the decision to send tanks into Hungary was the Second Hungarian Army, which served with the Germans at the Battle of Stalingrad.

Khrushchev was a political officer on the Southern Front during World War II and saw the fighting around Stalingrad personally. He wasn’t prepared to show the Hungarians any more mercy than he felt they showed the Soviet Army on the Southern Front. He personally felt the Hungarians were as bad or worse than the Germans.

While Dr. Khrushchev didn’t mentioned it, having denounced Stalin at the 20^th Congress of the CPSU [КПСС] only eight months earlier, his father could not afford to look weak to the Central Committee.

Eric Alterman proves science types have a sense of humor with Bushcronium. It is funnier if you have a familiarity with particle physics, but it stands up if you just read it through.

Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. The BBC has a nice interactive site, Timeline: Hungarian Revolution, for more details and Jams O’Donnell of Poor Mouth has a piece on the effect it had on the Communist Party in Britain.

Unfortunately, while the Hungarians were trying to get rid of their Communist government, Israel, Britain, and France went to war with Egypt over the Suez Crisis. While world attention was focused on the Middle East, Russia sent in a tank army and crushed the revolution.

American troops had to sit in place on the border and watch because the expected order to provide assistance to the Hungarians never came.

As Glenn Greenwald of Unclaimed Territory, among others, has noted the Shrubbery keeps claiming that protection from threats is the President’s most important job, and justification for anything he wants to do.

If you read the preamble to the Constitution, it is obviously not the case:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Defense comes in at number 4, not number 1.

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DARPA has announced that because of the wording in the latest Defense spending bill, the DOD won’t award cash in the next robot race.

We can spend billions on the missile defense system that has given us no indication that it will ever work, but cannot award a $2 million dollar prize to a group that actually accomplishes a stated goal that will lead to robotic vehicles for use in combat.

Understand that this is the latest in a series of races, and if no one accomplishes the task, as has happened, no prize is awarded. The DoD is forbidden to reward competence, but can give billions to people who fail to fulfill their contracts? I guess you need an MBA from Harvard to understand this reasoning.

Minou at French Tidbits is not thrilled with the latest browser from Bill. To be fair, she could not give it a full evaluation because it’s too bloated to run on her computer.

It’s looking like the newest offerings from Microsoft are not going to happy with less than a 2 gigahertz processor, 1 gigabyte of memory, a 100-gigabyte hard drive, and a DVD drive.

I spoke too soon when I told Jack at the Grumpy Forester that we had taken care of our ballot initiatives during the primary election, because there are six of them on the sample ballot.

I will be voting for Number 3, which increase the percentage of voters who must approve a constitutional amendment to 60% and Number 8, which reins in Eminent Domain.

I don’t think the state constitution should be amended by a bare majority of people who vote in an election and we already have too many extraneous provisions in the constitution.

For the newspaper editors in Florida who don’t think eminent domain proceedings to transfer property to private developers on the promise of tax increases is a problem: get on the Internet; go to Google.com; enter “eminent domain florida lawsuit” and start reading the 400,000+ sites that you get in response. CRAs all over the state have been abusing the power and it’s time for the abuse to stop. Understand these sites only cover the people who have the resources to “fight city hall,” and not the hundreds of small landowners who give up when threatened with eminent domain by developers. The threats have happened locally to people I know personally, so don’t try to tell me: it’s not a problem.

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CBS News is reporting that the senior UN envoy in Sudan has been declared persona non grata by the government for his comments in his personal blog.

Sudan Evicts U.N. Envoy For Blogging:

The Sudanese government Sunday ordered the chief U.N. envoy to leave the country within three days after he wrote that the Sudanese army had suffered serious losses in fighting with rebels in northern Darfur.

The official Sudan News Agency said the order was issued against the envoy, Jan Pronk of the Netherlands, because he had demonstrated “enmity to the Sudanese government and the armed forces” and was involved in unspecified activities “that are incompatible with his mission.”

Telling the truth with get you in trouble every time. He should have blogged in Dutch.

1. For those who are unfamiliar with the term: dooced

Florida License Plates

Beneficiary

A weekend feature of Why Now.

As has been occurring frequently, Blogger is again down.

It’s beginning to look like a coordinated attack against them rather than isolated problems.

Update from Blogger Status:

Saturday, October 21, 2006

Wow. Ok. So it hasn’t been Blogger’s weekend. Blogger was down for a little over three hours this evening, due to the near-simultaneous failure of a critical component and its backup. This outage also impacted the loading of many Blog*Spot blogs, which rely on Blogger for a CSS file.

We apologize profusely for this outage. Blogger should be working as normal now. The new version of Blogger in beta was not affected.