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July 22, 2003
“The…picture of a disengaged, incurious, passive receptacle for his adviser’s machination is so widely accepted around here [Washington] that even the administration officials desperately defending themselves over the crude manipulation of prewar intelligence have in the process depicted Bush himself as little more than a ventriloquist’s dummy.”
Thomas Oliphant, The Boston Globe today.
July 21, 2003
Give this four seconds and it will make you laugh.
Kath Dewar writes from New Zealand, pointing to a local blog, written by Russell Brown. A quick scan shows that topics range from in-depth discussions of NZ politics to a disquisition on the Japanese and Korean insistence on topping their pizzas with corn.
Kath also points to “our best independent news site here in nz”: Scoop. Maybe I visited it on an atypical day, but the two lead stories are on the scandalous truth behind the death of David Kelly and the scandalous truth behind the death of Vince Foster. Also: “Breast feeding mum sells sex legally.” It’d be unfair to generalize…
Linuxman Greg points us to scans of the forged documents about the uranium from Niger.
Ken asks eight questions of the candidates with regard to their Internet and telco policies. The questions are excellent, each wrapped in a paragraph of exposition. I doubt he’ll get answers at the same level of detail since his questions are the type of things campaign staffs (staves?) write policy papers about, and it’s still early in the campaign.
I am sorely tempted to allow my Windows instinct to take over and do a clean reinstall of linux. I know it’s the wrong impulse. I just don’t know what the alternative is.
My linux desktop continues to lock up, rejecting mouse and keyboard input. This is reproducible. Switching to Ximian hasn’t helped. It’s clearly a software issue because the system responds to ctl-alt-f3, so it’s still getting keyboard input. And the mouse cursor moves; none of the buttons work, however.
So, last night I thought I’d try the kde desktop instead. But I seem to be stuck in a loop. If I use redhat-config-packages and select “kde,” it tells me that I need two “cups” apps. I know Ximian installed cups stuff, and printing to a printer hanging off an XP machine actually works. (Cups has something to do with printing.) If I then deselect kde from the package manager and try to install the cups stuff from the RedHat CD, it fails because it conflicts with the Ximian cups stuff. I suppose I could uninstall the Ximian cups stuff by hand and then hope that cups reinstalls from the CD, but I am just about certain to miss some files and miss some file that keeps track of the files because I Don’t Know What I’m Doing™.So, just starting over seems like a good idea
Someone stop me before I get all windowsy on linux’s ass.
July 20, 2003
I wrote about how remarkable it is that a presidential candidate has found himself thrown into the wildest sort of Internet melee, which led to my blogging about how much is contained in a simple statement by Joe Trippi, Howard Dean’s campaign manager, in his totally human comment on that fray.
So, now it’s been continued on my own discussion board. Ken Camp criticizes Dean for “walking the fence” on issues. “All I really want is for him to stand up and say something.” Seems like an odd complaint addressed to Howard Dean. In any case, Joe Trippi, Howard Dean’s campaign manager, has responded. He says, in part:
The easiest thing in the world would have been to tell people on the Lessig blog exactly what they wanted to hear — so I think your criticism of playing the Internet audience is a little off-base. We really were and are trying to open a dialog to help us formulate our policies as we move forward — and to do it from the bottom up.
Ken replies. But I think he’s missing the bigger point: Whether you agree with Ken that Dean’s blogging at Lessig’s site should have had more detailed proposals (and, fwiw, I do not agree) this has never happened before. Here’s what’s new or at least unusual:
A first-tier — even front-running — presidential candidate has written his own stuff and posted it for the world to see with no focus groups and little or no staff review.
The candidate did not pretend to know more than he does and did not rely on the in-depth knowledge available to him via the policy folks on his campaign staff. He instead asked his readers for help understanding the issues.
A completely open discussion was enabled for the world to see, with no filtering to exclude crazies, political opponents and political operatives.
The candidate and his campaign manager read and responded to that open discussion.
The conversation is now spilling over onto other sites.
Before this, what would you have had to do to get the ear of a potential president of the United States? You could have a column in a national newspaper or you could get a hernia toting sacks of cash to the campaign headquarters.
Can we at least pause for a moment of delight before we become blasé?
Dan Bricklin points to an Appeals Court’s opinion on fair use. The court found that it was indeed fair use for a search engine to display thumbnails of copyrighted images in its search results.
The Village Voice reports on Invisiblog, a site for anonymous blogging. It uses as its example dissidents within the Hasidic community. (Thanks to Bill Koslosky for the link.)
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