More stuff you should be reading instead of this lousy blog…

• Nice smackdown, Kevin Drum. Liberals are more nasty than conservatives? Hah!

• Arianna smacks down the idea that any moderate Republicans will speak at the convention.

• The family of the fellow who blew the whistle on the Abu Ghraib abominations are in federal protective custody. Apparently, the people of Joseph Darby’s hometown feel that sodomizing 14-year-old boys is okay. Digby smacks.

• You know, I was just thinking tonight about how absurd it is that courts and laws should protect business interests over the rights, liberties, and interests of the citizenry, and lo and behold I see this Heinlein quote at Foreword.

• When the reporters covering your press conference start laughing at your justifications for using Microsoft products, you’ve got a problem. Groklaw has the smackdown.

• Damn. Via First Draft, here’s the über-smackdown – Arkhangel, a 22-year-old soldier in Iraq, lays the blame for deaths of the innocent squarely where it belongs.

More stuff you should be reading instead of this lousy blog…

• What Ryan linked to about what Matt Welch said.

• Interesting question from Deane at Gadgetopia. Do you have the right to download a TV show that you couldn’t watch, say due to scheduling, that you didn’t record, but that you otherwise would have watched or recorded?

• PC users, hear this: Norton sucks! Don’t use it. In fact, do not buy anything produced by Symantec at all. I’ve had nothing but endless hours of frustration with Norton Anti-Virus and its Symantec siblings, and I’ve long since given up trying to make them work. This lady’s experience is pretty typical, it seems to me. (via Slashdot)

• This is despicable: In Florida, state police officers are interrogating black voters in their homes. (via Mrs. Atrios)

• The emperor has no clothes. We knew that. Now it’s finally starting to be said out loud. See Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias (via Digby)

Wow. This line from gapingvoid hit me like a ton of bricks:

The old ways are dead. And you need people around you who concur.

Yeah. You know, I don’t think this is something that is just true today. Rather, I think this is always true, has always been true, and the successful people are those who understand and accept this fact. Maybe in part this is because the people who think the world is changing and surround themselves with people who think the world is changing… these people change the world.

Hugh continues:

That means hanging out more with the creative people, the freaks, the real visionaries, than you’re already doing. Thinking more about what their needs are, and responding accordingly. It doesn’t matter what industry we’re talking about- architecture, advertising, petrochemicals- they’re around, they’re easy enough to find if you make the effort, if you’ve got something worthwhile to offer in return. Avoid the dullards; avoid the folk who play it safe. They can’t help you any more. Their stability model no longer offers that much stability. They are extinct, they are extinction.

Yeah. Wow. Good stuff. Remember this.

Low-volume blogging continues. Here’s more stuff you should be reading instead of this lousy blog…

• Excellent post by Brad DeLong on why Pre-emption, Democritization, and other aspects of the Bush Doctrine are lousy foreign policy and bankrupt strategy.

• Wow. Tough words for Dick Cheney from Tom Harkin. (Atrios)

• Ars Technica reminds us that someone got ahold of an al Qaeda hard drive, and the files are pretty interesting.

• Deborah Gauthier ponders what a paranoid society we’ve become.

More stuff you should be reading instead of this lousy blog…

• Nice article in the New York Times today about how the Bush administration has been quietly changing rules, regulations, and initiatives in a very business-friendly way. The authority to change such regulations has its good points, but responsible use of that power depends on having responsible people in charge. This administration’s contempt for Congress and for the general public has been galling.

• I love this takedown of Bush’s revisionist history from Sid the Fish. Of course, I’m just happy anytime someone calls something “Horseshit.” The Fish also passes along a snippet of Bill Maher’s op ed on Bush’s weak-kneed response on the morning of 9/11.

• Fantastic. Via Digby, see the website that outs our gay president.

• Also from Digby, General Wesley Clark puts the screws to Dick Cheney.

• I’m boycotting the Olympics. I guess NBC put its foot down and wants to force everyone in the US to watch its crappy highlights or tape-delayed broadcasts. Well, screw ‘em. I’m not gonna watch any of it. And, I’m gonna hold my breath ‘til my face turns blue and I die, and how will you feel then, NBC? (Kevin Drum has a more mature take)

• The Bushes lie to Larry King, and Holden calls ‘em on it. (First Draft)

• I can’t figure this one out: a major realignment is going to pull 70,000 troops out of Europe and Asia and place them elsewhere. Sending them to Iraq would be the logical thing, but the article doesn’t mention that as a destination. Could they be replacing troops at home, who would then go to Iraq?

More stuff you should be reading… but not much more…

• Via Atrios, Gail Sheehy holds Rumsfeld’s and Bush’s feet to the fire. Damn good excerpted question:

How is it that civilians in a hijacked plane were able to communicate with their loved ones, grasp a totally new kind of enemy and weaponry and act to defend the nation’s Capitol, yet the president had “communication problems” on Air Force One and the nation’s defense chief didn’t know what was going on until the horror was all over?

• Don’t know much about what to make of this article describing the creeping conservatism on PBS lately, but I will say this: you couldn’t create a better plan to whipsaw the media into spouting a conservative agenda than what’s taken place over the last 20 years. After decades of decrying the media as too liberal, conservatives have established their own unfair and unbalanced network and are sneaking their tendrils into NPR and PBS as well. If, as a member of the general public, you’re trained to think of the major media institutions as liberal, then how much thought are you going to give to whether a viewpoint espoused from some media source fits with the liberal party line or not. It’s as if “LIBERAL MEDIA” has been burned into our retinas and the vision of it persists over whatever else we look at. This is a very sneaky form of brainwashing, whether intended or accidental.

• Hurricane Charlie hit the Gulf Coast of Florida and is heading to Orlando. These are places I lived and where I still have friends and family. My thoughts go to them for their safety and well-being.

More stuff you should be reading instead of staying up this late on a school night…

• MaxSpeak, You Listen: to what this election should be about. Focus, people, focus!

• The Poor Man and Digby tag-team to ask, why would a man who served his country with distinction be the subject of a smear, while a deserter who dodged dangerous military duty is lauded as a hero and an upstanding American?

More stuff you should be reading instead of this lousy blog…

• Digby? At Hullabaloo? Rocks.

• John Kerry saved a man’s life in 1988. Bush must be seething. I mean, what do you do to top this guy? Gotta go negative, I guess. (via Atrios)

• I’m loving First Draft, the new blog run by Pie, Athenae, Holden, and the rest of the gang who filled in for Atrios. Athenae has this snippet of a Salt Lake Trip editorial telling the national media to go home and quit covering the Lori Hacking case. Well said.

• Brad DeLong links to a website for “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” Republicans. Nice to see the pendulum swinging back the other way a bit.

• Over at Fanatical Apathy, Adam Felber nicely co-opts his hypothetical spawn into helping him make a point about why the charge against Kerry’s flip-flopping on war support is invalid.

I still have a problem with the senators who supported the war resolution, however, including John Kerry. I understand the political landscape of a post-9/11 world, yet nothing in our history lent any credence to the claim that Congress had to forfeit their oversight in order to keep us safer. I and many of the people I talked to were against the resolution at the time. Other presidents have been able to deal with national crises without Congressional pre-approval, and I expect our representatives to jealously guard the separation of powers outlined under our Constitution. Kerry’s statements during the debate may explain his thinking – and his thinking may even be understandable given the tenor of the times – but they do not excuse his dereliction in his sworn duty to protect the Constitution.

Blogging is going to be spotty to non-existent for the next couple of weeks as I prepare to get myself hitched. Any spare time I’ve got will likely be spent reading the news, and I’ll pass along what I can in bits and pieces. So, for the two of you who have come to depend on this blog for your news-condensing, don’t panic! Life will resume its normal schedule by the end of the month.

That is all…

It’s a late one, but hey… you’re not paying for it.

Here’s more stuff you should be reading instead of this lousy blog.

• I love the Mike Myers line about all of Scottish cuisine being based on a dare. Well, they’ve done it again. The Scots have gone and invented the most dangerous food in Britain. Yep, these are my people. (Boing Boing)

• You should really see this photo of a young George W. playing full-contact rugby. (Tom Tomorrow, via Atrios)

• And this unfortunate snapshot of our Kommandant in Chief.

• The Washington Post mis-reported sworn statements made by witnesses in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in ways that would seem to favor the guilty. Why?

• Nice post by Kevin Drum. You should read the whole thing, but I’ll give you the first two ‘graphs:

STRADDLING AND WAFFLING….Does John Kerry sometimes straddle difficult issues in an effort to please multiple constituencies? Sure. So do all politicians. Kerry’s real problem, though, isn’t that he straddles more than anyone else, but that he does it badly. When he explains his positions, he sounds like he’s straddling.

• Digby sez the Swift Boat veterans charges that Kerry didn’t earn his medals tarnishes all war heroes. You think they care?