Amy Sullivan in a Time piece tells us that Shhh. Obama Repeals the Abortion Gag Rule, Very Quietly.

Excuse me, but if this was supposedly such a secret why is it one of the top 5 news stories at every US and foreign media site I visited today?

The foreign media tend to flag this story along with reversing the stem cell research funding ban, and the closing of Guantanamo as evidence that the US is regaining its sanity.

It was an executive order and it has to be published to take effect. At last report there were people called reporters working for organizations called the media who are supposed to let the public know about such things. It would appear, that in this case they did that.

What did Ms Sullivan expect, a grand gathering at the Mall with Obama coming down to the steps of the Capitol to announce his executive orders? The last I knew he was a bit busy at the moment.

I’m with Chris at Suburban Guerrilla Obama’s technical people can’t be worth much if they are having the vapors over being forced to deal with Windows XP and Office 2003.

They apparently don’t know what software can be upgraded. I would suggest they try this great new innovation called the Internet and find out with a couple of clicks.

They don’t know what machines have what permissions. You sign in as administrator and find out, or better yet, you assign the permissions to the people according to their need and right to know.

As far as the new whitehouse.gov site, great, you clowns hosed thousands of links because you don’t understand directories. By the way, find a real webmaster to create a real robots.txt file before you waste any more storage on search engines with your pathetic offering. If you want to fix it you can try robotstxt.org and then you can use Google’s tools to verify it, just like real webmasters do.

These are probably semi-competent new equipment people, but they aren’t geeks. They want to “slash and burn”, not fix things. Geeks use Macs for things they don’t want to waste time on, but they all have another “bubble gum and baling wire” box that is rarely the same for a month and it usually is running a flavor of -ix.

If the tech guys at the White House wanted to screw with you, they would have updated all of the software before they left. That would have been nasty.  There would be no way of telling what crashed the system.

It’s a good decision for his election, as he chose from outside of New York City.

CNN reports: “New York Gov. David Paterson on Friday appointed relatively unknown U.S. Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand to replace Hillary Clinton in the U.S. Senate.”

Her district covers the Hudson Valley and North, which means rural, agricultural, and conservative. She get perfect scores from the ACLU, the NRA, and is a Blue Dog fiscal conservative. She is from a long-time capital area [Albany] political family, getting her first political experience working with her activist grandmother.

Please note: contrary to conventional wisdom, New York State as a whole is not liberal or Democratic, it is a centrist swing state. This is an acceptable choice for the state that will help Paterson get elected in his own right. Hillary Clinton busted her butt getting support from upstate, and her replacement would be expected to do the same.

Son of Writer’s Block

Not nice!

[Editor: Income – demonstrating what he learned from his mom.

Friday Ark