Heard about this one from Atrios, but here's a link to the original article. This is one of those stories that makes me think I've stumbled across some sort of interdimensional rift and woken up in Bizarro America:
The play praises patriotism, but the judges only saw teens cutting up an American flag.It was enough to disqualify Archbishop McCarthy High students from a competition early this week for their performance of The Children's Story. In the play, first published in 1963 by Shogun author James Clavell, third-graders in a classroom in a United States that has been defeated by a powerful enemy, presumably Communist, cut the flag into pieces. Their new teacher tells them if the flag is so good, everyone should get a piece and tells them to hand out the shreds. It's a message about the dangers of mindless political indoctrination.
You know, I always used to wonder what it would have been like to live in the times of the House Un-American Activities Committee, McCarthy, and rabid anti-Communism. The Russians may not be the bogeyman anymore, but I think in some ways I'm getting my answer. It's one thing for someone to get upset over the flag being destroyed. In a way, I can understand that. Not having seen the play, I suppose that it's even possible that the message being delivered could easily be misunderstood. What is inexcusable is that someone's displeasure got to the point of disqualifying these poor kids. Surely the people running the contest could see the play for what it was, but rather than have the balls to stand up to those the play was offending, they caved citing a law that is patently unconstitutional.
Welcome to America, land of double-plus good.
Here's an eye-opener, from Daily Kos:
The best story of the night? The one that should unite us all? From the Republican primary results:Bush 57,670That's over 2,500 registered Republicans who wrote in a Democrat in their ballot.
Kerry 835
Dean 633
Clark 545
Edwards 541That's got to scare the shit out of Rove.
I checked the original site for comparison purposes, and on the Democrat side there were 169 total write-in votes. 115 for George W. Bush, and 54 for Hillary Rodham Clinton. There were also some write-ins on the Republican side that Kos left out-- for Kucinich (28), Mosley-Braun (15), Gephardt (14), and Sharpton (11).
I don't know if Rove needs to reach for the Charmin or not, but that does make about 7.5% total votes in the Republican primary for Democratic candidates. I'm sure some of those are from confused voters and pranksters, but 7.5% seems high enough that there must be a significant protest vote being registered...
"Freaking-lunatic of a browser"
Referring to, of course, Internet Explorer. Having just wrestled with trying to get a particular CSS layout to behave properly cross-browser, I have to say that I agree. I could get it to work fine in Safari, Mozilla, and Netscape (6+), but Internet Explorer (Mac, Windows, 5, 6, whatever) always did something bizarre. So, while I was hoping to use more CSS and less frames, it turns out I'll have to go the other way.
Funny thing is, it wasn't that long ago when IE was the best of the bunch. I guess this is what stagnation looks like.
From US News:
There are no reporters on the tarmac at Dover Air Force Base. The public is not allowed to witness the military tradition of "receiving the remains." Instead, there are soldiers, roused at dark hours to stand in the confines of what seems like a secret as the dead are brought home.I am one of the soldiers. Nearly every day we learn of another death in Iraq. In our collective consciousness, we tally the statistics of dead and wounded. The number is over 500 now. But none of our conjurings are as real and tangible as the Stars and Stripes folded perfectly over a coffin cradling one of those statistics on his or her way home.
...and that's why the Bush Administration doesn't want you to see them.
Check this out-- a whole messa remixes featuring Dean's yell. Some of these are pretty cool. I have to say that given the right push, that yell of Dean's could turn from something that freaks people out (or giggle uncontrollably, in the case of my wife) to something of a rallying cry for everyone who supports him. Hey, doesn't Dubya make you want to scream?
Captain Kangaroo has left the building. To be honest, I was surprised that he was even still around, but there you go. Anyway, he had a cool show. I'll always remember that bit they used to do with the painters revealing some picture or another. At the time I wondered what kind of magic paint they had that you could just roll a picture with. Unfortunately, now I know how that's done. *sigh*
So I hear that apparently Dean let out a holler out west in Iowa. Everyone seems to be talking about it, including Dave Winer, who offers this bit of information:
I was at Dean headquarters on the night of the Iowa caucuses, and I watched the Dean rant on TV in the office, with the other Web programmers. A few minutes before the speech they had a staff meeting in the conference room. Everyone was there except me and another guest. Not being a staffer, I didn't belong in the staff meeting. Several times during the meeting a loud crazy-sounding scream came from the room, everyone was doing it, and it was really frightening. The stuff of nightmares. This was before Howard Dean's rant. I asked Jim Moore what that was about, he said it's an Indian war yell or something like that, they used to do it in United Farm Workers rallies, and they adopted it at Dean For America. A few minutes later Dean let out the famous scream, it was the same scream I heard in the conference room.
Interesting, no? Suppose anyone will talk about this in regular media? Probably not. Anyway, I don't know how bad any of this is for Dean, but I was disheartened to hear about his appearance on Letterman last night. He's essentially playing along with the "Dean is a wild and crazy guy" image that's out there, in much the same way that Gore joked (jokes?) about having invented the internet. In my view he's just reinforcing that image when instead he should fight it. You never saw W go on Leno doing schtick about his mangled syntax, or Clinton on Letterman doing jokes about his love of the ladies, right? It's fine to laugh about our human frailties, but playing into the frenzy seems like a mistake to me.
Republicans have been sniffing through Democratic computers for months:
Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe.From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics.
Yes, they play dirty. This may also be illegal.
There's a pair of editorials in the NY Times worth checking out this morning. The first looks at the domestic part of the SOTU:
When the president delivers his State of the Union address, we like to listen respectfully and respond politely. It is always easy to find things worth applauding. Last night, for instance, President Bush mentioned job retraining, immigration law reform and programs to help newly released prisoners re-enter society. The impulse is always to split the difference � to decry the ideas we disagree with and then note the ones we like. This time, such evenhandedness seems impossible. The president's domestic policy comes down to one disastrous fact: his insistence on huge tax cuts for the wealthy has robbed the country of the money it needs to address its problems and has threatened its long-term economic security. Everything else is beside the point.
The second looks at the foreign policy part of the SOTU:
Last night President Bush surveyed the state of his foreign policy over the past year and, unsurprisingly, gave himself high marks. In truth, while there have been achievements, the last year of war in Iraq and stubborn unilateralism on issues ranging from the use of military force to environmental policy and trade have dominated and strained America's relationships with most of the rest of the world.
As for my thoughts, well...
Anyway, with any luck that was the last SOTU Dubya will ever give...
Okay, State of the Union's tonight. It won't interfere with Gilmore Girls, so we'll probably be watching it. Not so much to hear what is said, since that's most likely going to be a pile of crap, but to watch for Dubya's "tell".
Looks like the IA caucuses turned out a little different than what folks were expecting. I suppose now we'll see a rash of articles proclaiming John Kerry the new front runner, and folks will paint a fresh bulls-eye on his back. Fine. Let's find out more about the Man With the Long Face. Personally, I'm of the opinion that a half-wit monkey on crack could beat W, so whoever wins the Democratic nomination is fine by me.
Speaking of campaign ads, here's one you might want to check out.
At risk of giving away the punchline, here's a badge you can have for your website, inspired by said ad and Kurt Vonnegut's inimitable illustrations:
Is it really a smart thing for someone facing child molestation charges to show up for court wearing what appears to be a school-boy uniform?
They've posted the winners over at Bush in 30 Seconds. For what it's worth, I'd like to offer my congratulations. I hope that MoveOn.org will do more with them now than just broadcast them once or twice...
So apparently the Bush administration is going to propose returning to the moon and eventually sending someone to Mars. I can summarize my thoughts on this in two words. Horse. Puckey.
Here's a little anecdote that might help explain what I think is happening here. When my sister and I were kids, her spot at the dinner table was right in front of a window. When dessert time came around, my parents would sometimes look out the window and say, "Ooh, look at the birdie!" My sister would then turn around to see, and when she did my parents would grab her cookie. She would then turn around and be alarmed that her cookie had disappeared. (Now, before you get all alarmed and call the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, she always got the cookie back and everyone chuckled at the gag.)
We're not going to Mars. I doubt we'll even get back to the Moon anytime soon, as cool as that would be. This is just a ploy to get people to talk about something besides the stuff that makes Dubya look bad:
From a piece in Wired (emphasis added):
Of course, no company in the Mac universe is as reviled as Microsoft. The company is hated for its apparent desire to brutishly dominate every business it touches. Where Apple is seen by Mac enthusiasts as creative and individualistic, Microsoft is corporate and conformist; Apple is elegant and easy to use, while Microsoft is ugly and buggy.
This may not be 100% true. Certainly more Mac users hate Microsoft than any other company, but if you could bottle up hatred for a company, I would bet that antipathy towards Quark would turn out to be a much purer intense hatred than what Microsoft engenders. Quark may have screwed fewer people, but man do they do it with gusto.
As Josh Marshall points out, apparently the new tactic from conservatives is to call anyone criticizing neoconservatives anti-Semitic.
We�ve now gone from arguments where anti-Semitism is perceived at the margins of critiques of neoconservative intellectuals to the current practice in which it is treated as a given that 'neoconservative' is simply a code word for Jew and criticisms of the same are one shade or another of anti-Semitism.Let�s be clear on what�s going on here.
Pressure groups exist in politics. The loose association of people generally termed 'neoconservative' use the term to describe themselves. And while no group is monolithic in its thinking, they generally think of themselves as a group and act in that fashion. We can get into a discussion at some other point about the fine points of intellectual history and note that intellectual or ideological movements are as much social constructs tethered to specific institutions as they are coherent and consistent textbook philosophies which remain the same over time. But let�s not get ahead of ourselves.
The point is that this is an ideological group in American politics. The people who are a part of it see it as such, as do its critics and opponents. And yet many now want to use blanket criticisms of anti-Semitism to stigmatize and ward off any and all criticism.
You really have to go read the article(s) he's talking about to get a sense of just how nasty some of this stuff being written is. Personally, I find the whole thing beyond baffling. Until I started seeing some of these charges, I had no idea what any of the neocon's ethnic or religious backgrounds were. I just thought they were nuts.
Aside from shock and bafflement, however, my other reaction is that the neocons must have lost the argument. Call it a corollary to Godwin's Law-- as soon as someone resorts to charges that their opponent is racist (in whatever form that takes), they have lost the argument.
Well, my entry didn't make it into the final cut. I don't know where it's final ranking was, but the average rating last I saw was 3.1. It looks like they're going to run a couple of additional competitions, though, with ads organized in the categories Funniest Ad, Best Youth Ad, and Best Animation. Voting in these categories will start on the 8th, so stay tuned. My entry should appear in the animation category, which I'm guessing will be a fairly small group. Too bad they don't have a "3D animation" category...heh.
From notes about the new features in Director MX 2004:
Publish content with the click of a button to Mac OS and Windows platforms from either version of the application, creating projects as stand-alone applications or web-based Shockwave content. The new Projector Publishing Panel eliminates extraneous dialog boxes, saves projector settings on a per-project basis, and eliminates redundancies, making it easier than ever to create Director applications.
It's about fucking time.
Ted Rall has a list of predictions for 2004. Among them is this:
Riots in New York: It won't disintegrate into Chicago '68-style anarchy but the Republican convention, scheduled for early September at Madison Square Garden in order to coincide with 9/11 anniversary ceremonies at Ground Zero, will be a singularly ugly affair. More than 200,000 protesters are expected to converge on the capital of American liberalism to scream at delegates wearing those silly elephant hats. The NYPD will deploy shock-and-awe tactics to stop them, bloodying nightsticks and claiming a few lives.
...and George W. Bush will respond with his typically fatuous statement: "I love free speech."