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Nice rant

Friday, August 8, 2008

The following rant (and I don’t use that word pejoratively, good rants are valuable things) was passed on to me by a correspondent, and I eventually got permission from the author (who shall remain unnamed) to reprint it. I thought it was good. I’ve modified it slightly by adding some introductory words and embedding the referenced videos:

Regarding the Celebrity Commercial:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHXYsw_ZDXg[/youtube]

Leadership can pretty much be aptly defined as the ability to make people follow voluntarily. The charge that Obama is not a leader, but rather a celebrity is coming from a man who has been having trouble filling high school gymnasiums for town hall meetings while his opponent has been speaking in front of crowds upwards of 70,000. McCain also,……also has appeared on more (non-political or apolitical )TV shows such as The View, SNL and Jay Leno since 2000 than any other politician (over 50 times). Not to mention, Kathy Hilton, the woman who spawned that demon seed known as Paris and raised her with those values donated $4600.00 (max. amount) to the McCain campaign.

Shouldn’t the question be turned back towards McCain in a manner of “Hey asshole, after 10 appearances on Leno, 2 hosting duties on SNL, 2 times on The View and 2 times on Entertainment Tonight, plus 8 stops at Letterman, and 3 at Conan O’Brien, and one stop on the fucking Tony Danza Show since the year 2000 alone, plus 26 years in the United States Senate why is it you’re having such a difficult time leading more than a few dozen blue hairs together at one time and place all over this great land to hear you speak? Does that say something about your leadership abilities?”

The One Commercial:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUpM42X-DCs[/youtube]

You know something, I’ve never understood the American aversion to certain types of elitism. A large percentage of Americans hate people like Liam Gallagher, Bill Hicks and Bill Maher (whom all I love strictly for their elitism alone) but love the late Jerry Fallwell or Sean Hannity (whom I hate primarily due to their elitist attitudes of defining what is and is not American)? I tend to consider myself a fairly well tuned armchair psychologist/sociologist and I’ve never even come close to understanding this phenomena in our culture.

Elitism can be defined as the belief that certain persons or members of certain classes or groups deserve favored treatment by virtue of their perceived superiority. I don’t know about you, but to me that sounds like every single hyper religious, close minded, extreme right wing assclown I’ve ever met. And it is the bitters of Nebrahoma to whom this commercial is geared. The people who believe in the rapture for instance (which I don’t think can be debated as anything but the most elitist belief ever held) are the people he’s speaking to.

Then,……factor in Obama lost like 9 points in the polls after both of these insanely transparently hypocritical commercials aired. As in they kind of worked (who knows about polls, it’s August and most young people only use cell phones now.), but still?

Then,…..factor in the real kicker, many of the delusional liberal talking heads and columnists have criticized the commercials for their ‘subliminal messages’ of race and white women/black man sexual connotations. As if face value bullshit was too hard or easy to call, let’s go for the black hawk helicopter subliminal theories. Brilliant.

November can’t come soon enough.

Filed in Presidential Politics, Rants | | Comments (0)

Sweatshop at Apple

Thursday, August 7, 2008

Steve, say it ain’t so (and what does Al Gore, Apple Board Member have to say about this?):

On Monday, a group of Apple technical staffers filed suit against Apple alleging that the company denied them overtime pay and meal compensation. Both the pay and meal compensation are required by California state law. The suit also claims that many Apple employees are subjected to working conditions that are similar to indentured servitude.

The lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, David Walsh, was an Apple network engineer from 1995 to 2007. He stated that he was often required to work more than 40 hours a week, miss meals, and spend evenings and weekends on call without any overtime pay or meal compensation.

I’m not quite sure about the indentured servitude analogy. I think they could best be described as slaves for a term of years, but still this doesn’t sound good.

Nonetheless, I’m not ready to give up my Mac. For those who might wonder why, get a load of this email written by Bill Gates, complaining about the difficulty he had trying to do a simple download:

I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack … so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there.

The first 5 times I used the site it timed out while trying to bring up the download page. Then after an 8 second delay I got it to come up.

This site is so slow it is unusable.

It wasn’t in the top 5 so I expanded the other 45.

These 45 names are totally confusing. These names make stuff like: C:\Documents and Settings\billg\My Documents\My Pictures seem clear.

They are not filtered by the system … and so many of the things are strange.

I tried scoping to Media stuff. Still no moviemaker. I typed in movie. Nothing. I typed in movie maker. Nothing.

So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying – where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist?

So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.

They told me to go to the main page search button and type movie maker (not moviemaker!).

I tried that. The site was pathetically slow but after 6 seconds of waiting up it came.

I thought for sure now I would see a button to just go do the download.

In fact it is more like a puzzle that you get to solve. It told me to go to Windows Update and do a bunch of incantations.

This struck me as completely odd. Why should I have to go somewhere else and do a scan to download moviemaker?

So I went to Windows update. Windows Update decides I need to download a bunch of controls. (Not) just once but multiple times where I get to see weird dialog boxes.

Doesn’t Windows update know some key to talk to Windows?

Then I did the scan. This took quite some time and I was told it was critical for me to download 17megs of stuff.

This is after I was told we were doing delta patches to things but instead just to get 6 things that are labeled in the SCARIEST possible way I had to download 17meg.

So I did the download. That part was fast. Then it wanted to do an install. This took 6 minutes and the machine was so slow I couldn’t use it for anything else during this time.

What the heck is going on during those 6 minutes? That is crazy. This is after the download was finished.

Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night — why should I reboot at that time?

So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it. Of course that meant completely getting rid of all my Outlook state.

So I got back up and running and went to Windows Update again. I forgot why I was in Windows Update at all since all I wanted was to get Moviemaker.

So I went back to Microsoft.com and looked at the instructions. I have to click on a folder called WindowsXP. Why should I do that? Windows Update knows I am on Windows XP.

What does it mean to have to click on that folder? So I get a bunch of confusing stuff but sure enough one of them is Moviemaker.

So I do the download. The download is fast but the Install takes many minutes. Amazing how slow this thing is.

At some point I get told I need to go get Windows Media Series 9 to download.

So I decide I will go do that. This time I get dialogs saying things like “Open” or “Save”. No guidance in the instructions which to do. I have no clue which to do.

The download is fast and the install takes 7 minutes for this thing.

So now I think I am going to have Moviemaker. I go to my add/remove programs place to make sure it is there.

It is not there.

What is there? The following garbage is there. Microsoft Autoupdate Exclusive test package, Microsoft Autoupdate Reboot test package, Microsoft Autoupdate testpackage1. Microsoft AUtoupdate testpackage2, Microsoft Autoupdate Test package3.
(Emphasis added)

It goes on. The slaves at Apple have managed to design a system where a download like that would take a few minutes at most.

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What’s up with this?

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

I spent a good deal of time this morning searching the New York Times for coverage of Ron Suskind’s new book. After all, it still isn’t every day that we hear about a new impeachable offense coming out of this administration, though I have to agree we hear about them with depressing regularity. Nonetheless, Suskind’s charges are big even for this administration.

Well, I couldn’t find a mention. Nada. Not even the he said/she said coverage from in the Courant (it is actually an article from the Washington Post). Well, no one’s perfect and I could have missed it, so I went to the Times Reader, which I now have on my computer, and did a little search. The Times on the web, by the way, is updated during the day. Anyway, here’s what I found (click on the image for a larger view):

The Times Reader covers the last seven days, which is why it didn’t retrieve articles from the distant past. Suskind is not the National Enquirer. He’s won the Pulitzer Prize, and he’s uncovered stories that have, consistently, turned out to be “reality based”. If his story on Bush/Cheney’s criminality isn’t news, it’s hard to say what is.

By the way, out of an excess of caution, I assumed the search engine was case sensitive and typed in “Suskind”, with the same results.

Filed in Media | | Comments (0)

Yawn! Another impeachable offense. I’ve lost count

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Is anyone surprised at the news that Bush told the CIA to forge a letter linking Saddam to Al Qaeda? I’d be more suprised if someone had established as fact that he hadn’t done it.

Here’s another surprise. The Democrats will tut-tut and do nothing. I suppose an argument can be made that, at this point, Bush would merely run out the clock.

So let me make a suggestion. Other countries that have thrown off dictatorial regimes have established Truth Commissions to get the facts out before memories fade. We need to do that too, assuming we can throw the bums out. And I mean a real commission, composed of people interested in ferreting out the truth, not a “bi-partisan” commission dedicated to continuing the coverup. We either lance this boil or let it continue to infect the body politic.

Hats off to Ron Suskind, by the way, who is among the two or three reporters in this country who has consistently committed journalism during the Bush years. I’m proud to say that my firstborn was his principal assistant when Suskind was writing The Price of Loyalty, the first big Bush bashing book. If we had 10 more like him maybe we wouldn’t be in our current straits.

Filed in Bush, Creeping Totalitarianism | | Comments (0)

Very generous McCain Supporters

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Remember when John McCain was in favor of campaign finance reform, before he became the biggest campaign finance cheater. First there was his gaming of the public finance system, now his supporters are engaged in blatant money laundering:

Alice Rocchio is an office manager at the New York headquarters of the Hess Corp., drives a 1993 Chevy Cavalier and lives in an apartment in Queens, N.Y., with her husband, Pasquale, an Amtrak foreman.

Despite what appears to be a middle-class lifestyle, the couple has written $61,600 in checks to John McCain’s presidential campaign and the Republican National Committee, most of it within days of McCain’s decision to endorse offshore oil drilling.

At a June fundraiser, the Rocchios joined top executives at Hess Corp. — Chairman and Chief Executive Officer John Hess, his wife, Susan, his mother, Norma Hess, and six other officials in giving a total of $313,500 to a joint McCain-RNC fundraising committee, Federal Election Commission records show.

…

Alice Rocchio, reached at the office, confirmed that she registered her ’93 Chevy in February, but said that she “absolutely” used her own money to make the donations.

But of course. It’s a measure of how broken the system is that this obvious sham will not be investigated, though it should be fairly easy to get to the bottom of it. If she wrote a check the money had to be in an account. When did it go in, and when did it come out.

Filed in The Real McCain | | Comments (0)

Good riddance, but what symbolism

Monday, August 4, 2008

From the Moscow Times:

U.S. auto giant General Motors is negotiating with Russian automakers on a possible sale of the Hummer brand, Vedomosti reported Monday.

Among potential Russian buyers are Oleg Deripaska’s Russian Machines, Vadim Shvetsov’s Sollers and Kaliningrad-based automaker Avtotor, the newspaper said.

GM already has a Hummer assembly plant in Kaliningrad.

GM is also in talks with Indian carmaker Mahindra & Mahindra and automakers in China about selling the Hummer brand, Reuters reported last week.

I’ve always thought it would be cheaper for the Hummer owners if they just responded to those penis enlargement emails everyone gets. Neither technique actually works, but the email approach isn’t quite so obvious.

But still, one must ask, does this mean that America is no longer the land of excess for its own sake, or will the market for these monstrosities still be mainly American?

Filed in Economics | | Comments (0)

Reminder-Drinking Liberally Thursday

Monday, August 4, 2008

As always, the First Thursday of the month brings yet another edition of Drinking Liberally, Southeastern Connecticut version. The fun starts at 6:30 at the Bulkeley House, in New London at 111 Bank Street.

We can all obsess about our various anxieties about the campaign. There’s sure to be some good old fashioned Lieberman bashing mixed with hearty condemnations of the spineless Democrats. Join the fun!

Filed in Local issues | | Comments (1)

Who put Barack on the currency?

Monday, August 4, 2008

One of my most frequent commenters pointed out that John McCain put Obama on a dollar bill some time ago. So it would appear that Obama wasn’t just speculating when he said they’d be pointing out that he doesn’t look like other presidents on the currency:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDTJDv4hevU&eurl[/youtube]

This line of attack would be truly baffling it it weren’t for the obvious subtext. The corporate media has done its best to ignore it, but David Gergen broke the code of silence on this on one of the Sunday shows:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfXvK84MPqQ[/youtube]

Funny thing. George Bush was a Texas governor who knew nothing about foreign affairs and was an obvious dunce. He had been picked for the job by a bunch of Republican hotshots who figured they could successfully sell him. He was a certifiable chickenhawk. Had his last name not been Bush, he’d have done time for insider trading, if not for going AWOL. He had no obvious qualifications, and in fact had a history of failure at almost everything he did. No one ever called him presumptuous. No one ever called him arrogant, though he is in fact both of those things. No one even called him unqualified, or at least no one in the national press.

The fact is that you have to be a little bit presumptuous and a little bit arrogant to run for president. I have been following politics since I was a kid. I can’t recall a presidential candidate that was attacked for being either presumptuous or arrogant. I’m sure it’s just coincidence that the first one is a black man.

On the other hand, not many have been senile, although some have been dolts. We will not hear about McCain’s problem unless he demonstrates it in a very public forum, such as, let us fervently hope, the debates.

It’s going to be a long campaign. It was in late July and early August that John Kerry lost his race. Obama has to start hitting back. The McCain sleaze machine is driving the narrative. The media is used to letting the Republicans frame the issues. Unfortunately, Obama is going it alone. The Democrats are, as usual, AWOL themselves and are not pushing a counter-narrative. On the other hand, after Obama sort of threw Wes Clark under the bus, you can understand why they might be a little shy about going on the attack.

Filed in Presidential Politics, The Real McCain | | Comments (0)

Losing it

Sunday, August 3, 2008

It’s pretty clear that this is going to be a dirty election. Obama has the choice of getting dirty, or losing. Just like Kerry. A modest suggestion. Suggest ever so subtly that McCain is, shall we say, losing it. At this point he appears to be already as senile as Reagan was when he left office. Videos like this ought to help make the case. Of course, they should be as selectively edited as McCain’s attack ads. And another thing, ever so politely tell the media to kiss your ass when they accuse you of going dirty.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVgT__TZNdQ[/youtube]

McCain is arguing that Obama isn’t ready to lead. It’s a natural response to say that McCain isn’t capable of doing so.

Filed in Presidential Politics, The Real McCain | | Comments (1)

And it wasn’t so nice to call her a trollop, either

Sunday, August 3, 2008

So far as the mainstream press is concerned, this incident never happened, except apparently it did. Anyway, it’s a funny video (via Suburban Guerilla):

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFCl3EUMHSc[/youtube]

Filed in The Real McCain | | Comments (0)