Pundit humor

Pat Robertson on MSNBC tonight:

"I think the administration dodged a bullet today."

I assume that this is similar to how New Orleans dodged the bullet...

Do you ever get the feeling that God's in it for all of the wrong reasons?

I want

A program that let's me tag my music a la flickr or del.icio.us, so that I can create tag based playlists.

iTunes only offers five stars ( an arbitrary rating axis) and a genre for each song.

iTunes 6 seems to let you select individual songs and let you add a "do not add to playlist" tag. Unfortunately, you can not add this tag to multiple tracks at once.

Do I really want my guilty pleasure tracks showing up on a party shuffle playlist?

Also, private/protected tags would also be nice.

F Train View

F Train View
Originally uploaded by satmandu.

Brooklyn: Just before the Smith/9th St Station on the F/G, looking north.

What Democrats Believe

WHAT DEMOCRATS BELIEVE: Earlier this week I partic...: "

WHAT DEMOCRATS BELIEVE: Earlier this week I participated in a sort of focus group for Democratic activists designed to clarify the party's core beliefs. Not that I am a Democratic activist, but I took part because the participants in the focus group consisted specifically of moderate/DLC types committed to restoring the party's credibility on national security issues.


Liberal commentators, including OxBlog favorites such as Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias , often observe that Democrats, unlike Republicans, don't have a simple set of core beliefs that can be summarized in an 'elevator pitch', i.e. a 30 second speech that you could give to someone while riding in an elevator.


With this shortcoming in mind, the leader of our focus group asked the ten or so participants to write down in three sentences or less what the Democratic party stands for. A few months ago, Kos wrote:

Ask 10 people what the Democrats stand for, and you'll get 10 different answers. Ask me what the Democrats stand for, and I'll stare back speechless.

Yet in our focus group, almost every answer was exactly the same. The purpose of the Democratic party is to help the poor and the disadvantaged.


Most participants added that the federal government is the Democrats' preferred mechanism for helping the disadvantaged. More than one participant justified this focus on the disadvantaged by arguing that the free market structure of American society ensures that there will always be a significant numebr of Americans who are disadvantaged.


The organizer's response to this unexpected consensus was both sympathetic and devastating. On the one hand, this consensus suggested that there is a foundational commitment on which Democrats can build. On the other hand, if the purpose of the Democratic party is to help the disadvantaged, what can the party possibly offer to the overwhelming majority of Americans who see themeslves as middle class?


Adding insult to injury, I said that no one at the table had listed either national security or defending the United States as one of the core purposes of the Democratic party. Thus, how could anyone expect undecided voters to think of the Democrats as the party strongest on security issues if even the most committed Democrats don't define security as one of the party's most important missions?


(To be fair, one or two participants sought to extend the principle of helping the disadvantaged to the international arena. Of course, calling for more foreign aid is hardly the way to win middle class votes.)


After identifying why the party's core message failed to resonate with more voters, the discussion turned to the question of whether the answer to this problem is to 'frame' its agenda differently or whether the substance of the party's agenda had to change. On this point, there wasn't much of a consensus.


Take the issue of being pro-market, for example. Not one person at the table listed a commitment to either entrepreneurs or free markets as a core part of the Democratic agenda. Yet everyone at the table was basically pro-market and pro-business BUT believed that America must pay more attention to those left behind by markets and businesses.


Given that Republicans always identify themselves as the party of markets and entrepreneurs, could Democrats make any headway with this kind of 'yes, but' approach to the subject? But if framing isn't enough, how can Democrats alter the substance of their agenda without simply becoming more like Republicans?


In the final analysis, there was no answer to this question. Even a table full of Ivy League-educated Democratic activists couldn't come up with an answer to the question of what the Democrats want to offer America as a whole, and not just the disadvantaged. But the question itself is important, because it has the potential to force the Democrats to approach every major policy debate from a fresh perspective.

"

(Via OxBlog.)

New device detected: Boeing 747: "

Once again,

airplane manufacturers have been giving serious consideration to
offering Internet access in the skies.
Back in 1994, Boeing considered equipping each seat
with a serial modem.
Laptop users could hook up to the modem and dial out.
(Dial-up was the primary means of connecting to the Internet
back in those days.)

We chuckled at the though of attaching the serial cable
and getting a Plug-and-Play pop-up message:

New device detected: Boeing 747

"

(Via The Old New Thing.)

Monetize me

Incredibly cheesy, and worthless, but fun, like many a Vin Diesel movie.

My blog is worth $2,258.16.
How much is your blog worth?

POLITICS: I Still Take You, and You, and You...: "Colorado City, Arizona and Hildale, Utah are not typical of small town America. In these bizarre neighboring communities, men have multiple wives, women are reassigned to new husbands all the time, and teenage girls are forced to marry men twice their age. They make up a place that operates entirely under Warren Jeffs, despite the fact that he no longer goes there and is a federal fugitive, wanted for sexual abuse charges. And, as the New York Times reports, even the constant presence of Arizona state law enforcement officials for over a year hasn't changed a damn thing.

[T]he twin towns of Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah, continue to defy the law, the authorities say and dissidents say: under the direction of leaders of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, women are still being removed from their husbands and assigned to other men, and girls under 18 are ordered to become brides of older men on a day's notice, all despite the presence of full-time outside law enforcement.



DeLoy Bateman, a high school science teacher here who left the church several years ago, says his daughter's marriage was recently broken up by church leaders. She was ordered to become the bride of her father-in-law, a man twice her age, Mr. Bateman says.



'This just makes me want to cry,' said Mr. Bateman, a lifetime resident of Colorado City. 'They tore up this marriage and ordered her to have sex with this older man. I've lost my daughter and her children to this church. I have to stand outside on the sidewalk and beg if I want to see my grandchildren.'

The Police Department, the school board, and the mayor's office are all run entirely by Jeffs followers. One third of the residents are on food stamps and the towns are completely impoverished.

The Arizona attorney general, Terry Goddard, whose own office is already active here, has asked the Justice Department to investigate the local police, saying they 'seem to be aiding and abetting' criminal behavior by discouraging witnesses in sexual abuse cases from testifying; a third of the force has been decertified by Utah and Arizona for criminal conduct.



In a recent letter to the United States attorney general, Alberto R. Gonzales, Mr. Goddard wrote, 'I believe that the officers of the Colorado City Police Department have engaged in a pattern of conduct that deprives individuals of their constitutional and civil rights.'



The Justice Department has not decided whether to intervene.

Such a place is almost unimaginable, though one state investigator offers a depressing description in an effort to capture the towns' reality:

'If you can visualize a 90-year-old frail woman who has given everything she owns to the cause and has been left penniless - that is the condition of the town right now,' said Jim Hill, an investigator with the office of the Utah attorney general. 'It's been sucked dry by these people.'

(Written by: MissTyrios)

"

(Via SuicideGirls: News Wire.)

Rosa Parks is Dead

IN MEMORIAM: ROSA PARKS.: "

IN MEMORIAM: ROSA PARKS.

"

(Via OxBlog.)

"New Features"

Translation: Apple Laptops finally have hibernation support. I can't remember the last time that I opened my laptop up after using it for several days, and had to reboot because it had completely run out of the juice needed to keep the RAM charged up.

Nevertheless, this is old hat on the PC side, and actually allows the computer to use even less power when sleeping, so I say about time...

Safe Sleep for new 15 and 17 inch Powerbooks: "

Filed under: Hardware, PowerBook

When the new Powerbook announcement was made we missed the fact that the two larger models (15 and 17 inch) include a new 'Safe Sleep' feature. Macbidouille even had a chance to test this new feature. They report that the feature does indeed work well and takes about ten seconds to fully wake up.

What's behind the magic?

Basically, a snapshot of your system is saved to the harddrive before you or the Powerbook sets itself to sleep. When you put in a new battery or reconnect it to a power source, the system wakes from deep slumber exactly to where you left it. Crazy cryogenic technology? Nah, but it will save you from losing that last bit of work you were doing before your battery fizzled out.

Read	Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

"

(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog.)

Sweeet.

If you remember the CRISP lady, and also love LEGOs & James Bond, you simply have to watch LEGOs are not enough.

Also, blogspot is undergoing heavy spammer attack at the moment... It looks like Blogger API tools are currently disabled for this reason... grrr.

TURING TEST

I am hu-man.

That is all.

Fwd: [IP] The vote is in: Evolution loses!

Thus proving that god hates america.

Begin forwarded message:

> From: David Farber <dave@farber.net>
> Date: October 24, 2005 6:47:51 AM EDT
> To: Ip Ip <ip@v2.listbox.com>
> Subject: [IP] The vote is in: Evolution loses!
> Reply-To: dave@farber.net
>
>
>
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@warpspeed.com>
> Date: October 24, 2005 5:11:49 AM EDT
> To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net@warpspeed.com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The vote is in: Evolution loses!
> Reply-To: dewayne@warpspeed.com
>
>
> [Note: The item from friend Janos Gereben. Yup, we're truly at
> the 'end of days'. DLH]
>
> The vote is in: evolution loses
>
> Poll: Majority Reject Evolution
>
> NEW YORK, Oct. 23, 2005
>
> (CBS) Most Americans do not accept the theory of evolution.
> Instead, 51
> percent of Americans say God created humans in their present form, and
> another three in 10 say that while humans evolved, God guided the
> process.
> Just 15 percent say humans evolved, and that God was not involved.
>
> <http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/10/22/opinion/polls/
> main965223.shtml>
>
> Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com>
>
>
>
> -------------------------------------