The Blog From Another Dimension

Update on Web Hosting Search

Just received a reply to an information request made to Surpass: they define "high server load" as one account taking up 25% of the CPU's workload. Seems quite reasonable.

Scaramouche asked about streaming video; Surpass simply advertises "audio/video streaming," Jaguar has "Real Media HTTP Streaming."

It should be pointed out to the more budget-oriented readers out there that Surpass offers a low-priced plan (Pketh mentioned the plan in general terms), a one-year deal at $40 (roughly $3.33/mo.) which offers 1 GB of disk space, 15 GB bandwidth, and all the other features of the other plans, except it allows no add-on domains. The 2-for-1 sale would double all the numbers, though, in addition to allowing a second domain.

One very pleased review of Surpass posted to the WebHostingTalk forums came from someone with 1,809 posts--meaning the person had been on the boards a very long time, and did not just sign up so they could post nice things about someone they work for. They claimed to have been with Surpass for 16 months; that long at one host and still a positive attitude is a good sign.

Again, they say that deal is only good between June 5-7.

News Bits 5-30-2004

It turns out that Michael Moore has footage of Nick Berg at an Iraqi business conference in the U.S. 6 months before before he was killed, stating concerns over security in his upcoming trip, which eventually led to his death. Moore, however, decided that it would not be responsible or considerate to Berg's family to use the footage; instead, he sent the footage to the Bergs for them to view as they wished, and made the decision not to use the interview--which could have been a sensational and dramatic addition to the film.

David Berg, Nick's father said Moore handled the situation with "dignity, respect and discipline"; "Michael Moore has really been a total class act with this whole thing. He could have sold this to the media or stuck it in his movie."

In the meantime, the Weinsteins have bought "Fahrenheit 9/11" from Disney and talks are ongoing between them and several distributors, Lion's Gate and Focus Features being among the forefront. At this, I am ending my own personal boycott of Disney goods, but my opinion about the company has taken a palpable hit even so.

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The hostage event at Khobar Towers (that place really seems to draw attacks, you gotta wonder if people have the choice of moving to another place or not) has ended, and the Saudis say that "most" of the 50 foreign hostages are now safe, suggesting that some died in the dramatic storming of the towers. The group has not yet been identified as al Qaeda, though that is what most suspect. The hostage-taking is seen as an act of desperation, as it involved the killing of Saudi security guards, and while killing Westerners is not seen as being critical, many people in the Middle East see the killing of other Arabs as crossing the line.

This crisis is yet another development in the ongoing disruption in the Middle East. As Bush tries to worm his way out without giving up anything, he is missing chance after chance of any hope of return to even the days of regular Middle East instability.

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While the dramatically sudden climate shift and drastic temperature drops illustrated in the film The Day After Tomorrow are more fiction than science, it has been observed that some gradual and yet dramatic trends are taking place and could remake the world climate into something significantly different for our descendants. This story shows that "global dimming" is responsible for less and less sunlight hitting the ground, that the skies have darkened by 10% over the last 50 years, and it may be a natural phenomena, though some contend it is a result of pollution.

And then there is the Earth's magnetic field shift, which many scientists believe is now underway--though it may not be complete for thousands of years. Our magnetic field is dropping in strength by about 5% every century, and has been waning for perhaps 2,000 years now, and the decline is accelerating. The north magnetic pole is also not static even now--it has moved 1,100 km in the past 200 years, and most of the movement has happened in the past century. The north magnetic pole now travels at the rate of 40km per year.

The previous magnetic pole flip was 730,000 to 790,000 years ago, and scientists say that a flip every 200,000 or 300,000 years is average--so we seem to be due for one. Reversals can last between 1,000 and 28,000 years. During that time, it has been believed that the Earth would be open to solar and galactic radiation, and we would get a higher dose, increasing the incidence of cancer--though not by so much as to be cataclysmic. One positive side effect thought to be possible is the occurrence of the Aurora Borealis just about every where on Earth, most of the time, fantastic light displays on a regular basis.

A new study, however, indicates that there may be a backup system: the solar wind, which would wrap itself around the Earth and create a new magnetic field which would do about as good a job in protecting us from radiation as the Earth's present magnetic field accomplishes.

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Smoking, it seems, is even more dangerous than we've thought. The Surgeon General released a report that says smoking "significantly harms almost every major organ of the body and has been directly linked to a new series of diseases including leukemia, cataracts, pneumonia and cancers of the kidney, cervix, pancreas and stomach."

Me, I just hat the smell. It gives me headaches, a sore throat, and makes me nauseous--and more than that, it gets into your clothes and hair after a short time and you have to shower and change just to get rid of it. So if they find that it is more dangerous and that dissuades more people from smoking, it is not a result I would mind at all.

Supersize Con--but who's doing the conning?

Long-time friend Tom pointed me to a web site called Tech Central Station, which is hosting a page which is practically a web site on its own called The Super Size Con, which goes all out in blasting and deriding the film "Super-size Me," a film about a man who eats nothing but super-sized McDonalds meals for a whole month and becomes dangerously obese and unhealthy. The film won the Sundance Film Festival, and is receiving a lot of attention. Some say it is an important warning about the dangerously unhealthy fare served at fast-food restaurants; others say that it is a super-sized "Jackass"-style stunt--after all, if you eat nothing but huge amounts of McDonalds' food every day for a month and get no exercise, what the hell do you expect will happen? My own feeling--not having seen the film--is that there is some truth in both.

But what Tom pointed out to me about this site which more or less wages war on the film is that if you look at the site's "About" page, you will note something interesting:

Tech Central Station is supported by sponsoring corporations that share our faith in technology and free markets. Smart application of technology - combined with pro free market, science-based public policy - has the ability to help us solve many of the world's problems, and so we are grateful to AT&T, Avue Technologies, The Coca-Cola Company, ExxonMobil, General Motors Corporation, Intel, McDonalds, Merck, Microsoft, Nasdaq, PhRMA, and Qualcomm for their support. All of these corporations are industry leaders that have made great strides in using technology for our betterment, and we are proud to have them as sponsors. However, the opinions expressed on these pages are solely those of the writers and not necessarily of any corporation or other organization.

Not only is the site a shill for just about every other megacorp you can think of (who really buys that "opinions solely those of the writers" garbage?), but McDonalds--the target of "Super-size Me"--is right there in the middle of them. Despite the site's stated mission of having concern for the dangers of technology and solving many of the world's problems and yadda yadda yadda, one detects more than just a whiff of the idea that this site is more about protecting corporate interests than in serving you, the peon consumer.

It really does pay off to take the time to check out who is paying the bills....

Settling on a Web Host

In my current search for an upgraded hosting package, it came down to two finalists: JaguarPC and Surpass Hosting (the latter of which was called to my attention by the graphically talented Pketh).

My first inclination has been towards Jaguar, as I have had a site hosted with them for one year and 9 months, and in that time there has been only one rather limited disruption of service (ironically it occurred as I was writing about them recently). My thoughts of changing hosts came as I heard that Jaguar had a new offer, called the "Gigadeal," which offers a gigabyte of disk space, 45 GB of bandwidth, 30 MySQL databases and 5 add-on domains for $10/mo.--a leap above standard offers. Usually I would take such offers with a grain of salt--many less-than-reliable web hosts entice people with grand offers but then boot anyone who tries to take full advantage of them--but since I had been with Jaguar for almost two years, I felt I could trust them on it, to a certain extent.

Then when Pketh suggested Surpass, I took a look--and though initially cautious about a service I'd never heard of before, was interested in what they had to offer. They start with a GB disk space deal at $40 a year (about $3.33/mo.), but for the same price as the Gigadeal ($10), they offer 7 GB of disk space, 75 GB bandwidth, 3 add-on domains, and "unmetered" MySQL databases. The Jaguar deal only does better in add-on domains, and only by 2. But there is no doubt that Surpass lives up to its name and offers much better features.

More study found that Surpass offered more in other areas too--for instance, something called Scripta, which allows installation of open source or freeware scripts for the site. That's a normal feature, but the list of additions in Scripta is much more fleshed-out. They also offer something called Xoops, a site development tool, which I do not yet know the value of but looks interesting.

I emailed Surpass to check out a few of their unmentioned policies--for example, database usage. They replied: "We do not have a specific set limit on SQL usage, but it cannot use a high server load. If the server starts running slow or if there is packet loss due to the script, we would have to disable it." Which brings up a bit of a doubt about what they consider to be "high server load." This seems to fall in line with what the less scrupulous web hosts do--offer unlimited use but then cut you off when you reach an unspoken limit. Not knowing exactly where the limit is is the problem.

A check on WebHostingTalk's forums uncovered a few bad reviews, but fewer than normal and mostly in the range that I would consider acceptable. In fact, they received fewer poor reviews than Jaguar. Some veterans also spoke of it as being a reliable service. (Pketh, what's your experience so far? Or have you signed up with them yet?) So in that area they seem to check out OK.

Something that has in a way sealed the deal with me, however, is a new promotion they will be offering from June 5 to June 7: a 2-for-1 deal. Buy one account, and receive another at equal or lower value for free. If I read that correctly, it means that if I pay $10 per month for the "Deluxe" account (7GB disk space, 75GB transfer, etc.), I can get two of that account and pay for just one, indefinitely. Effectively, 14GB of disk space, 150GB bandwidth, and 6 add-on domains for $10 a month. That sounds spectacular--and trips some of my too-good-to-be-true alarms. Still, there is a 90-day money-back guarantee, and I would opt for the monthly payment so I could get out of Dodge should things become dodgy. So I figure I'll start getting geared up for the switch on June 5th--though that comes very close to the billing deadline for my current host.

I'll keep you notified of any new information, and would appreciate your comments and advice on the matter!

Yaki~imo!

In Japan, there are sales trucks all over the place. Most are just plain noisy and annoying--the secondhand shop truck, the kerosene truck, lunch and snack trucks, and so on. Annoying because they drive at 5 kph and wander through all the driveways and small roads in the neighborhood, all the time blaring annoying announcements and mind-numbing repeating electronic tunes at full blast. Their slow and winding path keeps them well within earshot for perhaps half an hour each, and it's impossible to shut out unless your listening to headphones with the volume way up.

One truck selling stuff that regularly wanders by is a bit less annoying: the sweet potato truck. A traditional standard in Japan, a small truck (in older times, a cart) with a small oven furnace and sweet potatoes ("yaki-imo," or baked potatoes" in Japanese) hot and ready to eat. Hard to miss when it comes, there is always a musical call, a voice singing, "yakiiiiiiii... imooooooo!"

This is a bit less annoying than the others because it is (a) an organic sound, and (b) not shouted at blaring volumes--they seem to be aware of the annoyance factor and keep it down to a reasonable blast.

Not only that, they even emit a nice smell--a product of the wood-burning stove in the back of the truck, a kind of fireplace/campfire smell.

I'm not a big fan of sweet potatoes, though, so I can't review the taste. But I'd have to say that if these were the only trucks going around selling stuff in the neighborhood, I wouldn't mind quite so much. Well, at least the weather is warmer and that blasted kerosene truck no longer comes by Wednesday and Saturday evenings.

1 Down, 9,999 to Go

"Buffalo Spammer, Don't you come home tonight..."

Mastering Your Domain, Part II

This a continuation of "How to Be the Master of Your Domain" from four days back. In the prior post, I explained how to get a domain name and some of the basics about getting a web host. What I left unsaid was the features offered by web hosts.

Disk Space: This is the amount of disk space you may fill up with your web site. If you have a simple site with few graphics, maybe a primarily-text blog, for instance, then disk space is not a big issue. But if you plan to have a lot of photos or even video on your site, then a lower disk space allotment of 50MB, for example, can get filled up fast. For $5-$10 a month, you should get at least 200 MB of space.

Data Transfer / Bandwidth: This is how much data can be sent to your site and downloaded by visitors (the latter being the major drain, of course). For example, if you have a photo page that weighs in at 500 KB total, and 100 people view it, that would use up 50 MB of bandwidth--plus the 500 KB you used to put the photo page up in the first place. Bandwidth can be crucial if your site is popular or if you have photos and/or audio/video media that people download a lot. Perhaps you have heard about a site that has a great video on it, and you go there and the site is off-line, perhaps with a "Bandwidth Exceeded" note in place; that's because too many people came to view, and the web site operator did not pay for extra bandwidth.

I myself am just grazing the ceiling with this blog--my current account has 5 GB of bandwidth alloted, and is going to end the month just under that amount, so I'm going to have to graduate the site from the $9/mo. "beginner" account to the $13/mo. "homestead" account (as my current web host titles them).

So more bandwidth is better, but people who run web sites often talk about how one must beware of web hosts who offer "unlimited" bandwidth. Such offers are usually scams, they report; when you start using up more bandwidth than they really want you to, they find a way to cut you back or cut you off.

Domain Pointing / Add-on Domains: let's say you have many domains (as I do) but you would rather not pay, say, $10 a month for each one of them. Instead, you can put all of them into one web hosting account. Get the account with the web host for a primary domain (let's say in my case, blogd.com), and then you can add new domains as subsets of that account (for example, I could add xpat.org and teach-japan.com).

Each added domain would be 'hosted' within something called a 'subdirectory,' which is a folder inside your main account. So in my main blogd.com account, I would create a folder called 'xpat,' and in that folder I would put all the files for xpat.org. I would then direct my site (through a control panel they give you) to point the domain 'xpat.org' to that folder. When you go to www.xpat.org in a browser, the folder acts as its own web site, with the correct URL and everything. Currently, I do this with teach-japan.com, which is the primary domain; another of my domains, lcjapan.com, is an added domain. You can see this by going to the address http://www.teach-japan.com/lcjapan/; it displays exactly the same as http://www.lcjapan.com.

This is a bit similar to something called 'sub-domains,' which are subdirectories just like the add-on domains, but do not have a completely different domain name associated with them. For example, in this site, I could create a folder called 'luis,' and by assigning that as a 'subdomain,' people could access it by going to http://luis.blogd.com. The subdomain name replaces the "www" you usually see in URLs. That's how 'blogger' works, giving each person with a blog a distinct subdomain, e.g. http://blogd.blogger.com (if I did my blog with them).

Each web host offers a different number of add-on domains, but the number is often no less than 2 and no more than 5.

Email: When you have a hosted site, you get the works, including the ability to create your own email accounts as you see fit. Usually you would want POP3 accounts, email which you can access with programs like Eudora, Mail (on Mac OS X), or Outlook Express. These accounts can usually be accessed via 'webmail' as well--that is, through using a browser, in the same way you would with Hotmail or Yahoo Mail.

Some web hosts limit the number of email addresses to 5 or 20 or 50. Many give you an 'unlimited' number, though of course each account takes up hard disk space, so that is a real limit that must be dealt with--though you'd need to have a lot of accounts all loaded with email in order to really infringe on the disk space limit.

Email accounts you can make will of course end with you domain name (e.g., '@blogd.com'). Creating one is trivial: go to the control panel, select the email manager, click 'add account,' and then give the account a name and password. You can also set the space limit on the account to however many megabytes, or just leave the option blank for unlimited space.

Email is usually accompanied by auto-forwarding (forward email sent to address X to address Y), autoresponders (pre-written messages automatically sent out to anyone who sends email to a certain address), a catch-all account (any email with your domain name but without a correct account name will pile up here, usually spam), mailing lists (so you can send one email and have it go to multiple addresses), and filters (for filtering out spam before email gets to your screen).

Databases: This is important for running blogs or forums; each entity uses one database. I prefer MySQL databases, of which you are often alloted up to 5, maybe 10, or more if you pay more. However, you have to read the web hosts' policies before planning to set up many blogs or forums--some hosts do not allow more than one of either or each because they create more work for the server's CPU. Some hosts may even ban the use of some blog or forum software due to processor strain. So check that out before signing up for a hosting plan.

Scripting Languages: Usually cgi and php; these allow you to run simple programs on your web site. A very common example is the hit counter, which acts like a site odometer, adding a tick each time someone visits. Another is a clock or count-down for some event or another. One that I often use is formmail, which allows you to create a form (with pull-down menus, buttons, and text boxes) that visitors fill out; when they click on the 'submit' or 'send' button, it generates an email to be sent to you.

You have to be careful, though--some scripts can be hijacked by hackers. On more than one occasion I have noted my formmail script being accessed thousands of times, and it turned out a spammer had somehow access my script and used it to send truckloads of spam to people, using my domain as the point of origin. More reason to despise that scum.

Statistics: a boon to the vain, but also an extremely useful tool. AwStats is the best stat arranger. Webalizer is as common or more common, but is less attractively done and much less useful in how it adds numbers and displays things. For example, in listing sites and pages which send visitors to your site, Webalizer includes people who move from one of your pages to another, so outside link-ins are lost among a sea of 'referrals' from your own pages; AwStats handles it much better, omitting internal transfers.

AwStats also tells you the total number of unique IP Addresses that visited your site (also lacking in Webalizer), and gives totals for the hour, day, month and year; which country visitors came from, the ISPs that handled the requests, visits by spiders and bots, how long your visitors stayed (average for this site: 5.5 minutes), what file types they downloaded, what pages they visited and how many times, their browser and operating system versions, which search engines sent visitors your way and how many, and what searches they performed that led them to your site. Quite an impressive array of information that tells you not just how many people visit your site, but all kinds of information about them. The main drawback is that the stats are never a running tally; they get revised only once every 24 hours or so, which means that if you get a sudden spike, you won't know it for another day.

From this I know that 74% of my visitors type in my address directly, or use a bookmark or have me on an RSS feed application; 23% come from search engines (fully half from Google), and 3% come from links from other web sites. I know that visitors wane during weekends and near midnight California time, that most people view my site with an RSS feeder; that fully three quarters of my visitors use Windows (17% Mac) and 70% use Explorer (when will people learn?!). If a web host does not offer AwStats, I usually look elsewhere.

Another useful stat utility is "Recent visitors," which gives you a long list of the people who visited your site most recently. This is useful if your site is getting hotlinked--you would otherwise not be aware that your photos are being accessed (AwStats does not track specific image downloads). That's how I caught the guy who copied my post and hotlinked to my photos.

Other features include hotlink protection, customized error pages, password-protected directories, pre-set blogs, forums, counters, guestbooks and the like, as well as a variety of professional tools which I have yet to understand.

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Recently I stumbled upon a new plan at a web host I have long used. The company started as one called "Aletia," which I used after I left the dreaded AIT debacle. Aletia ran OK for a while, but then started messing up big-time. Just as I was ready to move my primary domain away from there, they told me that because of the screw-ups, they would host my site indefinitely at no charge. So I figured, why not, and after that, their service was pretty good. Not too long after, they were bought out by JaguarPC, which was kind enough to carry the gratis account, which I still enjoy today. Jaguar had been too expensive for me so I did not do any paid hosting there, but recently I discovered that they are now offering a new deal: 1 GB of disk space, 45 GB bandwidth, 5 Domain pointers, 30 MySQL databases, unlimited POP3 email and email resources, and an otherwise fully-loaded package--including AwStats--for $10 a month, or $95 a year. Compare that to my present $9/mo. package, which gives me 200 MB hard disk space, 5 GB bandwidth, 10 MySQLs, and 2 Domain pointers. Not too shabby.

But the best thing is that I have used Jaguar with that gratis account for a few years, so I know I can trust these guys, and that their service is usually good--except for that hiccup last week, the first I experienced with them.

So I will probably get two accounts, one for my blogs and another for the rest of my domains (now hosted between 4 different accounts averaging $8 a month or so). But first I will get a single account, put my non-blog stuff there and do a lot of experimenting to make sure the account is all it is cracked up to be, then move this blog and The Expat to a second account when I'm more sure-footed.

Oh, By the Way...

Yesterday, May 27th, was my 300th consecutive day of blogging.

The Ratings Are In: Air America Radio Rocks

Despite the constant right-wing rants about how AAR is due for an untimely demise, the first ratings have come in, and they are stellar: Air America Radio even beat out Rush Limbaugh in New York among target audiences. In Chicago, it shot the local station's ratings up 2000%, despite being pulled off the air after 28 days due to a billing dispute.

"If this is how we're doing now, imagine what things will be like when we actually know what we're doing," Franken said.

The ratings are preliminary, but prove one thing that conservatives will hate to hear: AAR is popular and has a good future in radio. So much for the naysaying and death knells from the right.

Nibbled to Death by Spammers

Well, I am coming much, much closer now to switching to a blog type which requires registration. And I hate doing it. However, I just don't see as how I've got the choice here.

I was hoping to be able to stay with what is tried and true, good ol' Movable Type v. 2.6. Up until now I've been doing OK, but the spammers have been getting out of hand. At the end of last August, I got my first blog comment spam, something that had been new to me. At first I was OK with just deleting each comment, but then the spammers started hitting me more often, and then with multiple spams. By early December, some jerk put spam in the comments of 50 different posts--and I found MT Blacklist, thank God in heaven. It caught most of the worst spammers, and best of all, if somebody hit me on many different posts' comments, I could use MT-Blacklist and zap them all in one go, as opposed to slowly and deliberately going through the steps to eliminate them one at a time.

Well, now I'm facing a new tide. When spammers hit, they are now using different IP addresses and different new URLs every time, and they are hitting me daily. Now, I face between 4 and 10 spam comments each day that get by the blacklist (that's after MT-Blacklist stopped the majority of them already!), and I usually have to take them out one by one, as Blacklist can't connect the IP addresses or URLs found within them. It's really getting intolerable.

I hate comment registration systems. I hate them because it means people have to jump through hoops when they want to leave a comment, it makes the site less accessible. But there comes a point where it's just not worth it. Still, you really want to find out where those spammers live, and then hire a dozen homeless people to camp out in their backyard and ring their doorbell every five minutes. Or rig a software program to autodial their business phone incessantly and play a recording of Van Halen at full blast when they answer.

I've found a great hosting plan that I might take, loads of bandwidth, 5 add-on domains, and 20 MySQL databases plus lots else for $10 a month, I'll probably get that account and then install every type of blog software I can find, see how they each compare, then make a decision about which one to go with...

Stealing Bandwidth

Here's where the value lies in checking your stats.

There's something called "netiquette," a kind of Emily Post for the Internet. Certain rules you shouldn't break. One of them is plagiarism, a universal breach of etiquette. If you take someone else's words and reprint them, you give credit--and with blogs, you link to the source, so that the person who originally wrote something not only gets the credit deserved, but also possibly more traffic from the link.

Just as bad is something called "hotlinking." If you use an image from somewhere else, the least you can do is save the image on your own site. But some people don't do that; instead, they link directly to the image on the other site. So that when someone visits the hotlinker's page, they see the photos as if they were native to the site. But each time a visitor views the hotlinker's page, the images are loaded from the original site. This results in the content being displayed on the hotlinker's site but the original site does the heavy lifting--the original site has to do the sending of the photos, which takes up bandwidth, which is a resource that people pay for.

Let me put it this way. Let's say you write software, you create a program. Another person comes along, steals the program and publishes it under their own name. And then they add your home phone number as the tech support line, and tell people to call collect. That's kind of like what this is.

When I checked my stats this morning, I noticed that some guy had done that to one of my blog posts. He had taken my blog entry verbatim, and had hotlinked to the two photos in it. No credit, no link, nothing. As if he'd written it and he was hosting the photos.

So I played a little trick on him. The danger in hotlinking is that the original images are not under your control, but are controlled by the person who owns the originating site. If that person changes the photos, then your site changes without you knowing it. So I replaced the photos on my own site with blank cards announcing what this guy did. For my own site, I re-uploaded the original images under new names and edited the posts accordingly so the images display correctly on my site. But the hontlinker gets busted--on his own page.

Yeah, I'm a vindictive stinker. But it is a little piece of justice, and I do so enjoy it. When the guy eventually finds out what happened and changes his post, I'm turning the hotlink protection feature of my site on. Until then, this guy's page will look like this:

Update: this guy's not paying attention to his site. I even sent him a blog comment, and still he hasn't edited the post. I have had emails of interest about it, so what the heck--here's his site's URL and the URL for the specific post. Let's see if we can't give him some business.

Tama-Cats

On a nice saunter down to the Tama River today--the weather has been beautiful lately, I couldn't pass up the chance--I found something which is quite rare in Japan: friendly cats.

By "friendly," I mean ones that you can walk up to and pet. Living in Japan for a while, you tend to get used to the fact that neighborhood cats never let you get near them; they get skittish at anything less than 20 feet at least. I used to wonder why this was, and I think I found the answer some years back. There was a cat once I saw in the street, and was having some success approaching it. But then, about 100 feet down the road, a child darted out into the street. Despite the distance, the cat bolted. Ah. In addition, I've seen cats getting treatment not exactly in line with cat protocol, for instance people picking up poor felines by their front legs.

So when I saw two cats lazing in the grass on the banks of the Tama River, I did not expect to be able to get close. Instead, I got out my camera so I could take some pictures. To my surprise, when I looked up, I found that both cats were approaching me. I let them sniff my hand, let them see where I was going to pet and scratch, and both cats were cool to it. As a number of adults walked by, the cats paid no heed. But as I expected, when a group of young boys walked by, both cats ran for cover--not too far though, and they came back. So I snapped my pics and enjoyed some tame, friendly cats for a bit in the warm, late afternoon.

To see some of the photos, I've posted them here.

Polling Trends and Politicizing Terror

After Andrew asked about an updated Bush approval polling chart, I went back to Pollkatz, and sure enough, they have an updated chart available (pictured at right, link here). Looking at this chart answered some concerns that I'd had.

Until just last week, I had been worried by the fact that Bush seemed to be unmovable at around 50%, despite all the crises, not to mention the fact that his numbers have always followed a steady downwards trend. So what was with the long hovering at 50%?

The Pollkatz chart, an amalgam of 14 different polls, shows something that I'd been missing: the telescoping of time, and the disorientation of seeing different polls at unpredictable times. The Pollkatz chart demonstrates that Bush's "hover" was less a hover and more of an early drop and steadiness, and that the three or so months Bush hovered do not really break the trends so clearly demonstrated on the chart. Save a major event between now and November, Bush's trend should take him below 40%--though he might get a fair bump at convention time; question is, how much, and will it do him any good?

The next question is, as Bush and his people are no doubt painfully aware of these numbers and Bush's usual trend, what will they try to do in order to get Bush's numbers up? There are a number of October surprise scenarios, but they seem to be off to an early start with a tried and true strategy: scare the sh*t out of the American people.

Ashcroft--excuse me, "federal officials" have leaked news that al Qaeda is planning some kind of major attack on U.S. soil between now and September. What kind of attack? We don't know, apparently. But there's "chatter" out there again.

Why is this most likely a political move rather than one of national security? First, Ashcroft is not raising the alert level. Why not? This is one of the strongest warnings of terrorist action in the past few years, and we've gone to "Orange" or "Burnt Umber," or whatever it is, over less than this in the past. The lack of alert level change seems to belie the seriousness of the warning.

Second, the time span--between now and the election. Bush's people know full well that Bush's highest numbers are in his dealings with terrorism--though even they are falling. But playing to this strength would be an obvious move for them to make. Which ties into point number three: how they're phrasing this. "They saw that an attack of that nature can have economic and political consequences and have some impact on the electoral process," said a Bush administration official.

The translation: if there is an al Qaeda attack, it is because, like in Spain, they will be trying to make Bush lose. If this impression is successfully implanted into the American psyche, then Bush would automatically benefit from such an attack rather than be blamed for it--after all, if the terrorists are trying to affect the elections to make Bush lose, that would be great publicity for Bush--he could run against al Qaeda rather than John Kerry.

The claim is bogus, of course; if al Qaeda attacks, history seems to show that Bush would be the obvious beneficiary--he has always gotten a boost in popularity in times of crisis (see the above graph for the obvious proof), and the Spain election did not go to the Socialists because the people were shaken by the attack--quite the contrary, they were brought together by it and emboldened--the election was lost by the ruling party because they screwed around with the bombing investigation, lying by saying it was Basque separatists instead of al Qaeda, and they were caught red-handed. They lost the election because the people were ticked off by that improper manipulation of the attack for political purposes.

But by making this terror warning, Bush & Co. are covering their bets: if there is no attack, they benefit by people being afraid and believing that Bush is better at fighting terror; if al Qaeda does strike, then they can say that they tried to warn everyone and did the best they did, and then they can campaign as if the choices are Bush vs. al Qaeda.

Restricted

Doubt the claim that Bush events are carefully screened so that only fervent Bush backers get in, and no one else is allowed to see the president? Check out this article, with a number of eyewitness accounts of organizers tossing out people who want to see the president speak if they even look like they might not support him--even if they have valid tickets to the event.

Do not doubt for a moment why the president is always greeted by cheering, adoring crowds: no one but the most fervent true believers are allowed within miles of the president, even when driving by in a motorcade.

Electoral Polls

Update: for those of you looking for electoral vote maps showing recent polling information, two reasonable ones (as far as such things can be reasonable) can be found at electoral-vote.com and RealClearPolitics.com. USElectionAtlas.org has some good electoral vote map stuff as well.

* * *

Other new poll information coming in now, this one from Zogby, published in the Wall Street Journal in a very nicely done Flash page.

The poll covers 16 battleground states and includes Nader in the poll. Even so, Kerry stands out markedly well. Of the states listed, Bush leads in only four: Iowa, Arkansas, Tennessee and West Virginia. In two of the four states--Tennessee and West Virginia--Bush's lead is only within the margin of error.

In contrast, Kerry leads in the other 13 battleground states (Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin), with only three of those (Florida, Missouri and Nevada) being within the margin of error. In all other states, Kerry has leads of up to 9.6%.

According to the count made by Daily Kos (who keep good track of polling info), if the election were held today, Kerry would win the electoral college by 102 electoral votes, 320-218. Even this conservative guy has Kerry winning by an even larger margin, though he points out in his blog that Dukakis was leading by more at this time (though he ignores the fact that Bush Sr. was not an incumbent then and was not post-war).

While Kerry holds only a few percentage points' lead in national polls, it has always been the case that the electoral situation has favored Kerry, as Bush's lead is much bolstered by a very large (and useless) concentration of support in "red" states, whereas Kerry's support is more broad.

Down and Down He Goes, Where He'll Stop....

Bush is now at a record low of 41%, according to a CBS News poll. This follows a recent trend--other polls put him at 46%, 44%, 46%, 44%, 42%, 42% and 41%, in time order starting from the first week of the month. But two other polls just out (Washington Post/ABC and CNN/Gallup/USA Today) put him at 47%, so it is hard to say.

And so Bush goes on TV tonight to try to sell us on how rosy things are. This is a campaign speech coming up, folks, centering on what will be a key issue in the elections. Watch for Bush to try to make it sound like (a) he's pulling our forces out of Iraq as we hand over power, and (b) U.N. forces will be coming in to share the burden. The irony is that this is Kerry's strategy, and of course Bush will do no such thing. He'll talk about the handover of power (he might even have decided to whom the power will be given) and make it sound like our troops will be leaving, but he's planned for them to stay there for a decade at least, and with things going so badly--and with troops being taken from other posts around the world and sent to Iraq--don't count on July to be a time when we reduce the number of troops by any real number.

And as far as U.N. involvement goes, don't count on that too much, either. Even "coalition" countries are pulling out troops or threatening to do so; and with Bush unwilling to be humble, to allow any substantial foreign influence or command, or to give up any of the control over oil or juicy contracts for rebuilding, don't buy into the fiction that U.N. troops will be pouring in anytime soon.

Expect smoke-and-mirrors, folks. Expect nice-sounding words. But count your change, and believe nothing until it actually materializes. Remember that Africa is still waiting for Bush's AIDS assistance, and your kids are still waiting for funding for the No Child Left Behind scam.

How to Be the Master of Your Domain

If you want to have your own domain on the Internet (such as www.yourname.com), you need two things: the domain name, and a web host. The domain name is easy: just go to a registration service and buy one, the price usually ranging from $9 to $35 per year. Of course, you have to find one which hasn't been taken yet, and most of the good ones already have (I still can't believe I snagged blogd.com and xpat.org). You can choose the root domain name (in my case, "blogd") and the three- or four-letter suffix (.com, .net, and .org being the most common).

Register.com is a classic registrar service, but they charge top dollar. If I use them, it's just for the search feature to see if a particular name is still available; but since they charge the highest price possible, I never get a domain from them. I use RegisterFly.com, which sells domains for $10 per year, and many use GoDaddy.com, which charges $9. Bulk registrations of say, over 1000 domains, will usually get you rock-bottom prices--but mostly businesses and cybersquatters do that (like the scumballs who got my surname-plus-.com--some Korean outfit which wants me to cough up $3,500 for it!).

The domain registrar does more than just sell you the name; they then give you a control panel, and you use that to (a) point the domain at the web host, and (b) do other stuff, like pay them every year or two for renewals.

The web host is the real meat-and-bones; they provide the computer which hosts your actual web site. They run servers which are connected to the Internet 24/7, do maintenance, install and keep running the software required to make your place on their hard drives a functioning web site, and take care of problems when they arise.

When you choose and pay for a web host, they essentially give you a folder on one of the hard disks on their computers. The folder you get has everything set up--a matrix of directories with programs and documents all set up which house your web page area, email, logs and statistics and more. They also give you something called DNS (Domain Name Server) information, which you then take to your domain host (like RegisterFly) and input; within 48 hours after that, your domain name will be associated with the folder on your web host which contains your web site, and you're on line.

Good web hosts are tricky to get, though. It is such a finicky business, both technically and in terms of trust--not to mention features. Maintaining web sites requires a good and reliable bunch of people in a business which often has very little profit margin, which means skimping is not uncommon. If you cannot get 99.9% uptime (meaning your site is down 0.1% of the time), that could be trouble. 99.9% sounds like a lot, but that means your site will not function for 10 minutes each week on average. Uptime of only 99% means you're off for one hour and forty minutes each week, and that can be frustrating. And if anything goes wrong, how long will it take tech support to get back to you? 24 hours used to be standard (I've had situations where email or the whole site is down for days, and it can be highly aggravating), but today, 8 hours or less of considered more reliable.

And then there's the trustworthiness. The web hosting business can be very fly-by-night. It can be hard to find a host who will not rob you or shut down and disappear overnight. Look here to read about my dealings with one spectacularly awful host.

One example is happening as I type this: just as I was trying to figure out the address for the above page, I noticed my site was not loading. Then I checked the email, and it had stopped for that domain. Which is not unusual, it happens--but talk about bad timing, just as I was going to tell you about their smooth service! But even with the best host, occasional outages are the status quo.

One way to find out more about a potential host is to see what other people say about them. A good watering hole to get that kind of info is WebHostingTalk.com, where you'll find a lot of people with experience with hosting outfits, plus a lot of people who represent those outfits. Before you start asking any questions--general or specific--do a search of the forums first. people there are willing to help you out, but do not have too much patience for people who ask questions that can be answered with a search first.

You have to watch out there, however. First, a lot of "people" who post their opinions are nothing more than accounts created by the sales reps for less scrupulous web hosts, talking about how great their service is while pretending to be an impartial customer. One way to check is to look at how many posts they've made at the forums (listed under their name at left). If they're relatively new, they may be sales people. Better than seeing how many good things have been said about a potential web host, instead see how many bad things are being said. That tends to be more honest. Also you have to be aware that not all of the bad reviews are due to the web host--sometimes go-betweens (like PayPal) and even the customer have screwed things up. Look for comments by the veteran posters to see how they react.

Finally, you have to look for good terms--but it is getting late, I have classes tomorrow, and that's a whole other ball of wax. there are a lot of things you have to look for. I'll get to that in the next post.

Bush Fall Down Go Boom. Again.

Maybe Bush is getting desperate and is trying to take on attributes of the fictional president Josiah Bartlet. In the pilot episode of "The West Wing," Bartlet crashes his bike into a tree. Today, Bush fell off his bike, injuring his chin, upper lip, nose, right hand and both knees. Of course, it wasn't because he was so mad because fundamentalists sent a doll with a knife through its throat to his daughter, as happened in the fictional version. But it does involve his daughter, as he is attending a party tonight for her graduation.

But probably it's just because he's a klutz. In 2002, he suffered from the dreaded Pretzel Attack, and in 2003, he dropped his dog and then managed to fall off his Segway (images and background on the Barney Conspiracy here).

His staff tried to make the accident seem as macho as possible. A White House spokesman reported that Bush "likes to go all out. Suffice it to say he wasn't whistling show tunes."

Update: the same spokesman claimed that Bush fell off his bike because "It's been raining a lot and the topsoil is loose." However, Kos took the trouble of looking up precipitation for Crawford and discovered that it had not rained there for an entire week. Oops.

This comes, by the way, after the Bushes declined to attend their daughter Jenna's graduation, a move most presume is due to their not wanting to appear at a function where the audience is not hand-picked from Republican loyalty lists, Bush's audience of choice. Heaven forbid someone who disagrees with him should be allowed with a mile's distance. (He did, however, give a commencement address at Concordia University, a Lutheran school in Wisconsin, where he managed to stick in a sound bite against reproductive rights.) Later, it was revealed that even Jenna did not attend the ceremony in Texas.

Another fun fact about Bush: he has spent about a quarter of his term in office so far on vacation, mostly in Crawford, Texas, having visited the ranch at least 34 times now. Before September 11, Bush spent fully 42% of his time in office on vacation. And even at that, he still has not beaten out his father, who spent wholly 543 days on holiday, or 37% of his term. The two Bushes hold the #1 and #2 spot for most-vacationing presidents in U.S. history, with Reagan coming in close after them.

Fahrenheit 9/11 Wins Cannes

This just in, and a bit of a shocker: Moore's film has won the Palme d'Or best film award at Cannes, the first documentary to win the award in nearly half a century. While Farenheit 9/11 was popularly received, it was not so much expected to win.

Moore noted, I think rather correctly, that "you will ensure that the American people will see this movie...You have put a huge light on this." With the predominantly glowing reviews and the top honor at Cannes, the film is practically certain to find a distributor and see the light of projectors in the U.S. before election day.

Naturally, some will use the French film prize to smear the film and its maker as pro-French and anti-American. But the truth of the matter is, the film is not anti-American, it is anti-Bush--there is a huge difference--and it's not just the French who hate Bush, it is pretty much the entire world. Don't mistake that--they like us. Just not him.

Right-Wing Words of Vitriol

It is astounding sometimes what the right wing punditry spews out. You may recall Ann Coulter, on the day after 9/11, saying that:

We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now.

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.

That followed by the suggestion that we go in to Middle East countries and kill civilians. Not only did she say that, but she still has it up on her web site.

Not to be outdone, Michael Savage is now saying:

...Christianity has been one of the great salvations on planet Earth. It's what's necessary in the Middle East. Others have written about it, I think these people need to be forcibly converted to Christianity but I'll get here a little later, I'll move up to that. It's the only thing that can probably turn them into human beings. ...

Smallpox in a blanket, which the U.S. Army gave to the Cherokee Indians on their long march to the West, was nothing compared to what I'd like to see done to these people, just so you understand that I'm not going to be too intellectual about my analysis here in terms of what I would recommend, what Doc Savage recommends as an antidote to this kind of poison coming out of the Middle East from these non-humans.

Rush Limbaugh has also garnered attention by saying about the prisoner abuse scandal:

This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we're going to ruin people's lives over it and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You of heard of need to blow some steam off? ...

Even this latest picture of a dog and a nude Iraqi -- you seen that one? A couple of Americans are holding -- it looks like German Shepherd, some kind of vicious big dogs, the dogs are barking, bow wow arf arf arf, this big dog -- you know and the Iraqi prisoner is cowering there in fear, he's all nude. And the picture caption "Dog attacks Iraqi." No, the dog isn't attacking anyone, the dog's on a leash. The dog is scaring an Iraqi prisoner. [gasp] "No! We're scaring them, too? Is that allowed in the Geneva Convention?! We're scaring then with dogs?" Yes, my friends we are. The dog didn't attack anybody. The dog's not attacking anybody. The dog's on a leash. Both of them are. I've seen the pictures. ... (35 minutes later, Limbaugh had to correct himself, as the article which Limbaugh referred to also showed the dog having bitten the prisoner.) ...

All right, so we're at war with these people. And they're in a prison where they're being softened up for interrogation. And we hear that the most humiliating thing you can do is make one Arab male disrobe in front of another. Sounds to me like it's pretty thoughtful. Sounds to me in the context of war this is pretty good intimidation -- and especially if you put a woman in front of them and then spread those pictures around the Arab world. And we're sitting here, 'Oh my God, they're gonna hate us! Oh no! What are they gonna think of us?' I think maybe the other perspective needs to be at least considered. Maybe they're gonna think we are serious. Maybe they're gonna think we mean it this time. Maybe they're gonna think we're not gonna kowtow to them. Maybe the people who ordered this are pretty smart. Maybe the people who executed this pulled off a brilliant maneuver.

Media Matters offers this look at 77 recent comments made by Rush that are offensive and/or outrageous. In fact, they launched a media campaign to highlight some of these comments, but have had some problems--like in Washington D.C. where WMAL refused to air the ads. The president and general manager explained, "Rush Limbaugh is the top-rated show on my station… I’m not going to run something that screws him." WBAP-AM in Dallas also refused to accept the commercials.

Not to be left out of this high-minded discourse, Coulter is on the air calling Clinton a "scumbag" and "rapist," Ted Kennedy and Michael Moore "treasonous," and Nancy Pelosi "stupid."

Right-wing news rag News Max says that George Soros "hates America," is delusional, a cult-like self-fashioned messiah, an anti-semite Jew, anti-Christian, out to destroy God, plotting to undermine the U.S. economy, and to spread the evils of "abortion, atheism, drug legalization, sex education, gay marriage, globalization and other radical causes." And let's not forget his secret "Project on Death" program.

There is so much more, this is just the start, the result of just a half hour of searching. The sad point is that millions read and hear this and are not disgusted by it, but rather seem to think it is right-minded dialog. That is positively horrifying.

Bush Administration's Attacks on Soldiers and Vets Continue

The Bush administration is still looking for ways to send people to Iraq. As the living hell people have gone through there, and the administration's massive mistreatment of soldiers and vets has led to falling recruitment and retention numbers. The administration needs warm bodies, and badly; recently a decision was made to pull 4,000 troops out of Korea and send them to Iraq--that's more than 10% of all U.S. troops in South Korea, which has angered South Korea, whose leaders claim this will leave them vulnerable. Other ways they're trying to scrape up recruits is--as part of the unfunded "No Child Left Behind" sham--by requiring schools to give military recruiters students' names, addresses and phone numbers. But even with all of this, the Bush administration is having trouble finding the soldiers they need to fuel the war they've started.

How to solve the problem? Lie to reservists and trick them into re-enlisting.

Now, there are about 118,000 IRR ("Individual Ready Reserves"), people who finished their 4-year service but who could be called upon to serve during another 4-year period.

Army recruiters started calling reservists and telling them that if they did not voluntarily re-enlist and choose an assignment in the Army Reserve or the National Guard, they might well be called up involuntarily and be placed in a unit they did not want or were not familiar with. More than 1000 reservists signed up for service under this threat.

The problem? It was a lie. No involuntary assignments are forthcoming.

Now there is a movement to allow those who felt they were Shanghaied into re-enlistment to appeal and, hopefully, be allowed to retract their decision--but there are no guarantees as of yet.

This article in the Oregonian does an excellent job of summing up the situation.

Introducing Blogs to my Class

Every semester, I have at least one section of an Introduction to Computers class. For the past year or so, I have added blogging to the curriculum as a way of giving students a real-world connection to Internet use as well as, I hope, an integrative motivation tool. This semester we are using Blogger (instead of Movable Type on our private site) as the tool of choice--I figure that'll be the tool of choice if they decide to blog personally, in any case.

One question I usually ask, to demonstrate to the classes how any person's blog can reach a wide number of people, is how many visitors per day they think my blog draws in. The first student I asked said "three." Okay. So I asked a second student what she thought. She looked up in thought, then counted on her fingers a bit, and finally replied, "ten thousand."

Needless to say, the actual number is somewhere in between....

This post was first generated in-class--originally much shorter due to time constraints--to demonstrate what a fully-equipped blog could do (complete with a demo of Ecto). Below is the photo of this semester's class (a small one, Spring is always light) taken so I could show everyone how to take an image from digital camera to blog site.

News Bits, 5-19-2004

A few new stories out there: ABC News reports on a Military Intelligence source who claims that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were far more extensive than reported, and that the Army has been covering up. He said that MPs were taking orders from interrogators, and details some of the torture involved.

Meanwhile, Newsweek reports on how a factory closure which would eliminate 1,300 high-paying jobs could be a critical blow to Bush--because it's in Ohio, a key battleground state. Hard to sell an economic recovery based upon a growth in McJobs when people are losing the truly important core jobs in the heartland.

And in a case which echoes the recent travesty of "Free-Speech zones," here is a story of a man who was arrested... for holding up a sign. What did the sign say? "FUGW." Apparently, someone in the crowd figured it represented an obscenity, so the Secret Service asked him not to show the sign (even though such an obscenity has been judged to be constitutionally protected). He then wrote in on the sign to change it to read, (F)ree (U)s GW. They still told him not to show it. And when he did, as Bush's motorcade passed by, they arrested him for disorderly conduct. For showing a sign? "It seemed to annoy and disturb others," says Lieutenant Schmid, "and when you have conduct that tends to annoy or disturb others, that's disorderly conduct." Oh. Well then, that's OK, right? It would appear that, when we weren't looking, making any protest within sight or earshot of the president or VP has become officially illegal.

Moore Reviews

Here are reviews by Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian, David Germain of the Associated Press, and a less enthusiatic, more politicized review by Kirk Honeycutt of Reuters.

Update: New reviews available from Desson Thomson of the Washington Post, Geoff Pevere at the Toronto Star, Mary Corliss at TIME Magazine, a review with strange factual errors by Meenakshi Shedde at IndiaTimes, another from Liam Lacey at the Globe and Mail, and a collection of one-graf excerpts from various reviews on the BBC site.

Fahrenheit 9/11 Reviews

So far Moore's new film is getting outstanding reviews, after receiving a 20-minute standing ovation at Cannes--the longest a film has ever received there, according to some. All the comments I have found of people who saw the film are positive, even from critics of Moore.

TIME Magazine's positive though not ecstatic review says: "...Moore is such a clever assembler of huge accusations and minor peccadillos (as with a shot of Wolfowitz sticking his pocket comb in his mouth and sucking on it to slick down his hair before a TV interview) that the film should engage audiences of all political persuasions," and concludes, "In sum, it’s an appalling, enthralling primer of what Moore sees as the Bush Administration’s crimes and misdemeanors."

From the short but enthusiastic review from A. O. Scott from The New York Times:

Its bill of particulars against Mr. Bush can be found in a number of recently published books, and it is unapologetically polemical. It is also the best film Mr. Moore has made so far, a powerful and passionate expression of outraged patriotism, leavened with humor and freighted with sorrow. Yes, I said patriotism, though there will inevitably be those, pointing to the film's enthusiastic reception in France, who will insist that it is the opposite. They should (unlike Disney's board of directors) see it first. ...

"Fahrenheit 9/11," his most disciplined and powerful movie to date, suggests that he is also, arguably, a great filmmaker. Using interviews and archival video clips (including a tape made by the staff at the Florida elementary school Mr. Bush was visiting on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001), he has assembled a moving and invigorating documentary. Is it partisan? Of course. But there are not many important films that haven't been.

The Herald has just now come out with this review, titled "Unexpectedly bold and moving piece of work.

"Fahrenheit 9/11 is a baggy, eccentric, unashamedly partisan animal, which makes its many points with broad strokes and even broader humour.
However, it's also an audacious, angry, and unexpectedly moving piece of work, the boldness and relevance of which few could deny.

Not that the movie didn't have its detractors, albeit ones who have not seen and do not care to see the film at all. The vehemently right-wing news rag News Max more than once compared Moore with Adolf Hitler and said he "screeched" at the audience, then hinted in a variety of ways that this was a left-wing conspiracy, whose members are "aligned with America's enemies"--while managing to sneak in references to Ann Coulter as "brilliant" and Bush as being strong and having "guts." Now, there's an objective review!

Fahrenheit 911 and Patriotism

Well, Fahrenheit 911 opens today at Cannes, and Moore has let a bit of a cat out of the bag: the film is not completely about what he said it would be about. Yes, much of the film deals with Bush's ties to the Saudis and the bin Laden family, as has long been reported. But at least half the film, Moore says, is about Iraq. With very unexpected footage: "we were able to get film crews embedded with American troops without them knowing that it was Michael Moore."

This should be interesting, and the timing more than just a little bit spot-on, considering how Iraq is now dragging Bush down more than anything else in his three and a half years. "The film is only partly to do with the Bin Ladens and Bush," Moore added. "I was able to send three different freelance film crews to Iraq. Soldiers had written to me to express their disillusionment with the war. It's a case of our own troops not being in support of their commander-in-chief." Moore has been printing letters from soldiers on his web site since last October.

One should also not miss the New York Times article on Moore and his film, which adds details about the films content, and does a very balanced job reporting on the issues involved and public views on the film.

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One columnist points out that Moore is often seen as less than a patriotic American, a theme which is more often implied and hinted at than stated outright, but it does bring up a point that I think a great many people would agree with, but an ideal that is far from universally observed in the U.S. these days: one can be no more patriotic than to point out what is wrong with one's own country.

Many people have a skewed perspective on patriotism. They think that "my country, right or wrong" means that whatever terrible things happen in their country, or is done by their country worldwide, the patriotic thing to do is to deny they happen, zealously attack anyone pointing out these faults, and wave the flag while singing the national anthem at the top of their lungs. They have mistaken patriotism for idiocy.

Patriotism means that one will do whatever is necessary--sacrifice your life, your fortune, your sacred honor if needed--to ensure that your country is safe, sound and secure. And ignoring, even denying its faults will not accomplish any of those. Protesting what we believe is wrong is not just simply a right, it is a vital mechanism required to keep this country from destroying itself from within.

Some times good countries come under the control of bad people, some times people with base and selfish motives subvert the mechanisms of government. And some times even well-meaning leaders and administrators do things that are wrong despite their good intentions. Were we never to criticize these things, the results would be disastrous. Bad policies would not be reversed. Wrongdoings would not be corrected, and wrongdoers would know that all they have to do is get elected and they could abuse and undermine the system as much as they wanted, without fear of challenge from the people.

No, it's the ones who are mindlessly and blindly patriotic who are dangerous, those are the ones who the wrongdoers will prevail upon to hide and legitimize their misdeeds. Those are the people who attack the real patriots, who have the courage and will to stand up and criticize their own country, not because they hate it, but because they love it, because they know that however painful it might be, criticizing their own country is sometimes the only way to keep it whole and true.

If a family member became an alcoholic or other kind of drug user, went driving while under the influence and displayed other self-destructive behavior, would the measure of a loyal family member be to quiet their conscience and their criticism, and tell their kin nothing but positive things? Of course not--you would only be helping to destroy them if you did such a thing. A true parent, sibling or child would take that person aside and tell them what was wrong, and would do everything possible to help them make it right.

The same applies to one's country. Right now, Bush and his people are driving this country into the ground. We do our country no favors if we simply stand by, put our fingers in our ears, and hum the national anthem real loud. Public criticism, at times like these, is the highest and truest form of patriotism.

Rumsfeld OK'd Torture, Bush Was Informed

A breaking news story originates from an article in the New Yorker magazine by Seymour M. Hersh, in which CIA officials leak the fact that Rumsfeld created a policy that led to the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, and that Bush was informed of the creation of the program and was told of the investigation into Abu Ghraib in January, at least three months before Bush claims to have known anything at all about it. The Bush administration is falling over itself to deny the story, but someone at the CIA seems rather miffed with Bush and is spilling the beans:

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.

And the CIA is not taking kindly to it, apparently. The source Hersh quotes is a "senior official" at the CIA, who says that "Any suggestion that there is not a full, deep awareness of what has happened, and the damage it has done, I think, would be a misunderstanding."

The story, apparently, began in Afghanistan when Rumsfeld was extremely angry over the fact that legal clearances and authorizations slowed down attack times and sometimes caused our forces to miss their targets. Rumsfeld is described as "kicking a lot of glass and breaking doors." His reactions was to create a "highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate 'high value' targets in the Bush Administration’s war on terror." This program, called an SAP, or "special access program," allowed operatives to work without any authorization; in short, "Grab whom you must. Do what you want."

Stephen Cambone, the new Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in March 2003, was a strong advocate for war in Iraq, and his assistant was none other than Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, the same religious nut who commonly speaks in fundamentalist religious terms, and who stated publicly that the U.S. is a "Christian nation" and in the war on terror, we are fighting "Satan." So already we have a great cast of characters here.

When things started going badly in Iraq, with insurgents killing our troops and causing chaos in the streets, Rumsfeld oversaw an effort to "get tough" with captured guerillas. Major General Geoffrey Miller, who had been in charge of Gitmo (an early effort to declassify and displace captured prisoners so the Bush administration could evade any U.S. or international law concerning their treatment), came to Iraq to “Gitmoize” the prisons in Iraq.

He also briefed military commanders in Iraq on the interrogation methods used in Cuba—methods that could, with special approval, include sleep deprivation, exposure to extremes of cold and heat, and placing prisoners in “stress positions” for agonizing lengths of time. (The Bush Administration had unilaterally declared Al Qaeda and other captured members of international terrorist networks to be illegal combatants, and not eligible for the protection of the Geneva Conventions.)

Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step further, however: they expanded the scope of the SAP, bringing its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. The commandos were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan. The male prisoners could be treated roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation.

Hersh's intelligence source claims Cambone was "tired of working through the normal chain of command," and so in Iraq, used the program initiated by Rumsfeld in Afghanistan. But more than that, he brought in military intelligence people to the prisons like Abu Ghraib and told them that "no rules apply." But the CIA was none too enamored of the idea:

By fall, according to the former intelligence official, the senior leadership of the C.I.A. had had enough. “They said, ‘No way. We signed up for the core program in Afghanistan—pre-approved for operations against high-value terrorist targets—and now you want to use it for cabdrivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets’”—the sort of prisoners who populate the Iraqi jails. “The C.I.A.’s legal people objected,” and the agency ended its sap involvement in Abu Ghraib, the former official said.

What's more, a Pentagon consultant claimed that the responsibility went higher than Cambone: “The White House subcontracted this to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon subcontracted it to Cambone. This is Cambone’s deal, but Rumsfeld and Myers approved the program.”

Then the cat got let out of the bag on January 13th when an Abu Ghraib MP reported what was going on to the Army’s Criminal Investigations Division, giving them a CD filled with images. Rumsfeld and the Pentagon figured they could try to cover it up, and it would go away. But an important piece of information is that not only did Rumsfeld know everything here, he also informed Bush about it. This directly contradicts Bush's own claim that he did not hear about the matter until April 28th.

Hersh's article is very well written and is highly informative; I would suggest that you read it in full.

What the...

For some strange reason, BlogD.com just got a big surge in visitors. Standard numbers have been about 550 per day on average, and yesterday we get 1177. Usually when that kind of surge comes there is a clear indication of the source in my stats, and usually it is when a popular web site links to this one, and the link shows up in my stats, showing which site the traffic came from.

But the stats show no one site as the contributor, although links in from Yahoo Search did jump by a certain amount. Sometimes my site does appear at the top of a specific search at a search engine, and that brings in more traffic until other sites crowd it out--but usually such jumps are not so sudden, and they almost always point to a specific entry, not the main page of the site. But the current stats show that most or all of the increase this time came to traffic directly to the main page of BlogD. Furthermore, the search engine stats for my site only show "Nick Berg" as being a commonly searched-for term, and a search on Yahoo for that does not show my page anywhere near the top.

So I am kind of at a loss this time--I always like to see people coming to visit, but this one's a head-scratcher....

Newsweek: Bush at 42%

In one of our international phone calls this morning, my father pointed me to the fact that a new poll from Newsweek has Bush at a all-time low of 42%, his lowest number ever in any poll I have seen (Bush was momentarily at 43% in a Pew poll some time back, but that was a blip). Continuing evidence that Bush's drop is still going.

Still, when the poll looks at Bush vs. Kerry, it has Bush down by only 1 percent--Kerry gets 46%, Bush 45%, and 9% are undecided. But as Zogby points out, most of the undecideds go to the challenger and against the incumbent. Further, Andrew Kohut has an editorial in the May 12 New York Times that gives a possible explanation as to why Kerry is not yet taking off:

The real reason that Mr. Kerry is making so little progress is that voters are now focused almost exclusively on the president. This is typical: as an election approaches, voters first decide whether the incumbent deserves re-election; only later do they think about whether it is worth taking a chance on the challenger. There is no reason to expect a one-to-one relationship between public disaffection with the incumbent and an immediate surge in public support for his challenger.

Which makes sense and is in line with the coverage in the press, which is all about Bush these days, with Kerry stories much fewer and far-between.

Bush Drop Confirmed by Pew, CNN

In addition to Bush's dismal approval numbers recently reported by Gallup (46%) and CBS (44%), those numbers have been mirrored by a new CNN/Time poll which has Bush at 46%, and a Pew Poll that has him at 44%. That leaves no doubt that Bush's popularity has taken a real hit, and leaves open the possibility that his numbers could continue to drop.

The New York Times has a good article on Bush's recent drop. It quotes even conservatives as saying that Kerry's new lines of attack are hitting home and worrying the Bush administration. "And it should," the right-wing commentator added.

Kerry has become somewhat more vocal in his criticisms of Bush's handling of Iraq, partly due to his viewing of the prisoner abuse photos in Congress. He notes how badly Bush has handled the war, and insists that a true international effort in Iraq is the only real hope for succeeding there. With Bush's history of insulting our allies, both traditional and new, suddenly Kerry's noted internationalism--until now scoffed at and ridiculed by Bush and the GOP--is looking better and better.

But Kerry is still not speaking too much about Iraq, not nearly as much as he could be; obviously, he does not want to appear like he is taking advantage of the war for political reasons. Instead, he is highlighting health care on a swing through the south, and has just picked up the endorsement of a police union that supported Bush in 2000, but now feels let down by Bush.

In the meantime, Bush is trying yet again to pretend that only a few malcontents are against him. "We're being tested," he said. "People are testing our mettle. And I will not yield to the whims of the few."

How about yielding to the whims of 49% of the American people?

A Few Recent Shots

A small break from politics... a few shots I've taken recently.

and one taken shortly after I noticed the moon rising tonight

Bush Continues Poll Fall: CBS Puts him at 44%

The dam seems to have finally burst. The veneer of the presidency, which in my opinion was the primary factor holding Bush's numbers artificially high, has worn to less than paper-thin by the errors and misdeeds of him and his administration--and Abu Ghraib seems to have finally broken the floor in the president's numbers. After

Perp Walk?

holding steady around 50% for months, Bush has, in a single week, free-fallen down to 44%, and it is highly unlikely that he has hit bottom yet.

According to the fresh CBS News poll, despite two months of fair (though not stellar) jobs reports, his numbers on the economy are as dismal as ever: 34% approval, 60% disapproval. Only 39% approve of his handling of the war in Iraq, and his approval rate for handling the campaign against terrorism has plummeted to 51% after being at 60% just two weeks ago.

Only 29% of Americans now believe that the war in Iraq was "worth it"; a growing number of Americans feel that we are no longer in control in Iraq (57%, up from 50% two weeks ago) and that we should get the hell out of Dodge (55%, up from 46%). The same dichotomy that Gallup found exists here as well: despite the above-mentioned lack of support for the war, still 49% feel that it was "the right thing"--actually 2% more than two weeks ago. But the numbers are close, 45% think we should have stayed out. Some of the same disenchantment we saw in Spain following the bombings has shown up here, with 43% of respondents saying the government tried to cover up the prisoner scandal, and 61% believe the military is upset only because the public found out.

More as it comes in.

Using the Death of an Innocent

Not that this surprises me, but the Bush administration--very likely enjoying a great deal of relief--has been using the death of civilian Nick Berg in Iraq to its greatest advantage.

In recent days everyone was focused sharply on the administration concerning the growing Abu Ghraib scandal, with harsh criticism hitting them from every direction. But then, yesterday, when the news came out that there was a videotape of the beheading of American Nick Berg at the hands of an apparent al Qaeda group, administration officials likely high-fived each other: they had a possible 'out.'

Everybody had been looking at the U.S. as the bad guy, the aggressor, the barbarian. The story itself was not that damaging, after all it had been out for some time without people noticing, but the damning part was the artwork. The photos of the prisoner abuse, so graphic and shocking, were what made the story move. But then here came al Qaeda to the rescue, with a videotape even more graphic and barbaric. Nick Berg was suddenly the administration's man. All they had to do was say, "this guy is us," and they could absorb his victimhood and make the prisoner abuse (which they had known about for many months but had hidden) seem to be, if not justified, then at least less bad.

Republican Senator Jon Kyl said it succinctly: "As bad as some of the things were that were done to Iraqi prisoners, it didn't involve beheading. ... That doesn't justify it, but it does to some extent put it in context and show you what you're dealing with in terms of the enemy." Translation: we're going to use this murder to take the pressure off of ourselves. Isn't that sweet?

The administration not only enjoyed the distraction of the press from Abu Ghraib and used the story to excuse their own wrongs, but it even tried to use the killing to justify the war in general, trying to use Berg's death to the greatest possible advantage to further their political agenda at home.

What's worse, the administration is actually indirectly responsible for Berg's death. Although the administration is now in the process of denying it as forcefully as possible, Berg's family is being inconveniently unquiet in laying some of the blame at their door. Berg was in Iraq voluntarily to do reconstruction work--not as a contractor, nor as a soldier, but on his own. On March 24th, Berg was arrested by the Iraqi police. The U.S. knew he had been arrested from the beginning, of course, and says that the FBI visited him three times. Berg's family say that the FBI informed them that Berg had been turned over to U.S. custody, and tried everything they could to get him released, even to the point of going to court and suing the U.S. government to let him go.

The Bush administration, then and now, feebly argue that they didn't have him, the Iraqis did--but even if it is true and he was never turned over to the U.S., since the Iraqi police are still under U.S. control that is a razor-thin distinction, and even then only in legal terms and most certainly not in fact. Had they wanted him released immediately, they could have done it. Only when his family filed suit did they let him go--the next day--and Berg's attempt to then leave the country on his own is what put him into the hands of the terrorist cell that soon executed him. He had planned to leave the country March 30, but could not when he was jailed; he left Baghdad April 10, and was likely captured soon thereafter. He was killed on Saturday, May 8, and his body found the same day.

Berg's father spells out how he sees the government as responsible: "I think that they caused his death indirectly by detaining him without any rights. Even after detaining him I think they at least had an obligation to get him safely out of the country." The administration is now claiming through an anonymous source that Berg had been told to leave the country--when and by whom, the source "refused to elaborate." Just after he was released, handed his hat, and left to his own devices? Or before he was arrested--which would suggest that maybe his arrest was not a random or coincidental act?

Whatever the case, the administration's handling of this affair is despicable. Despite their shoddy treatment of Berg, their arrest and dismissal of the American, when he was murdered they shamelessly exploited his graphic murder to their best advantage. One can be certain that if it were not for the fact that the family is now grieving, their pointing out the administration's faults would have by now resulted in a now-familiar Bush smear campaign by the administration to besmirch their son's reputation and call the family liars and publicity hounds. You can even see that much happening at a very subdued level, knowing they cannot go too far, but the echoes of it are there--the family is not telling it right, Nick Berg was arrested for "suspicious activities," we told him to get out or Iraq, and even an ominous-sounding "more on him is coming next week" from an unnamed source in the administration.

So chalk one up for the administration's spin team, they've been working overtime lately.

Zogby Calls the Election for Kerry

John Zogby, president and CEO of the Zogby International polling organization, is taking a "bungee jump" and predicting that Kerry will win the election this year. He calls the election "Kerry's to lose." The reasons?

First, Bush's numbers are not high enough for an incumbent to get re-elected.

His second reason I don't follow as well: there are "very few undecided voters for this early in a campaign," and "historically, the majority of undecideds break to the challenger against an incumbent." That would seem to go against Kerry, but Zogby sees it as saying that "voters have probably made a judgment about the better-known incumbent and are looking for an alternative."

Third, the economy and the war in Iraq are the top issues for 50% of people polled, and good economic news may not help Bush so much, as there is a lag time between recovery and a change in people's attitudes; even though the economy was in full recovery in 1992, Bush Sr. lost on the classic "it's the economy, stupid" tack.

And finally, Zogby points out that Kerry is a strong closer, and does his best in the final weeks of a campaign.

Let's hope the man knows what he's talking about.

Googling

Google has for some time been my favorite search engine, as it has been for a lot of people. It also helps this blog out quite a bit, being the chief referrer among all the search engines; last month, for example, Google sent 1214 people to my site, as opposed to 589 from Yahoo, 375 from MSN, and 48 from AOL.

In addition, Google seems to have a much more human face. Just a few days ago, they started a Google Blog, which discusses Google and other search engine issues in a straightforward, personal style (even comical sometimes--their advice for young people who want to clean up their blogs for Mom-viewing sagely suggests using "more Mom-friendly vocabulary," e.g. "I got really drunk last night" to "I got really marshmallow last night.") Another example is that, as an expected artifact of linking to all content--even offensive content--searches for the word "Jew" resulted in links to a great many anti-Semitic and supremacist web sites; Google has made very public an explanation and apology that tells why this happens and how to avoid such results.

Google also has some good secondary services, including Blogger, which allows anyone to make their own blog for free. It is actually very, very good. It only takes a minute or two to set up, and there you go. It allows access with the excellent Mac blogging app "Ecto" (wBloggar on Windows also will work). Photos cannot be uploaded, but can be added to the blog if they exist elsewhere on the web. You are given the choice of 25 design templates (with a link to more), and are given access to the HTML template so you can make custom changes. It also allows for comments, RSS feed, and a fair amount of customization through the site settings. The downsides are no categories, a banner ad at the top ("Ads by Google," so not too obnoxious), and no direct stats (although they do point you to sitemeter.com). Blogger's BlogSpot Plus service allows for photo uploads, statistics and more, but they are presently not accepting new accounts for that service.

Google also is starting a new service--not yet widely available--called "G-Mail," a free web-based email service like Hotmail or Yahoo, but with a full gigabyte of mailbox space. Google gets its money back by adding their less-than-intrusive text ads.

Listening to Air America Radio: Archives

The long-promised Air America Radio archives are still not up and running (no reason given as to why and no hint as to when they will be). Fortunately, other people are more on the ball. Here are the archive sites I have found so far:

Air America Place

• All shows since the beginning, listed by date, with guest information; MP3 format
• Free registration required; allows access to a post with a username and password and links to the password-protected archive with the shows.
• Great bandwidth--I got speeds up to 192.8 KB/sec.

Ogg Vorbis Archive

• Last one week of programming in one-hour chunks
• All spots in Ogg Vorbis audio format only (will play OK on Windows, may need software added to play on a Mac).

The Randi Rhodes Archive

• Last two weeks' programming for this show only; MP3 format
• Individual interviews from the show dating back to well before the show moved to Air America.

If you want to listen to the show live, here is a URL which will activate a Real Player live stream.

Bush Numbers Falling as Abu Ghraib Scandal Grows

Just a few days ago I blogged on how Bush's numbers were falling, especially in terms of his specific performance on key issue such as national defense and the war on terror. At that time, his Gallup numbers on the issues were falling, but his overalls were not much different than has been usual.

Bush's popularity numbers over the past few months

Gallup did a new poll released today, and Bush's numbers have dropped to a new low: 46% approval, 51% disapproval; that's lower than he's ever been at Gallup.

The poll focused mostly the public's reaction to the Abu Ghraib scandal, and found that 54% said it bothered them a great amount, 25% a fair amount; 73% said no circumstances justified the abuse; 56% said they felt the soldiers were "acting on their own," while 34% said they were following orders; and that while 83% and 85% felt that the soldiers and their superior officers (respectively) were a "great deal" or "fair amount" to blame, 48% said the same about Rumsfeld, and 42% about Bush. Rumsfeld's popularity dropped to 46% from a high of 71% last April when the war was starting. About half felt that it was a major setback for both the war in Iraq and against terror.

And for the first time, a majority of Americans--54% vs. 44%--believe that it was not worth going to war in Iraq. By the exact same numbers, a majority feel it was not a mistake sending troops (go figure that one out when considering the prior number), but that stat also is on the drop.

On the less reassuring side of things, 79% saw this as a breach of "Accepted U.S. Military Policy," meaning that most will see this as less a structural problem and more of a "bad apple" problem, which is highly unlikely. And 56% feel that the soldiers were "acting on their own," which also seems incredibly unlikely--how could such widespread abuse occur without their supervisors knowing it? Along the same track, 64% see the abuse as "isolated incidents."

And while those who saw this as a major setback to the Iraq and terrorism efforts were high (48% and 49%), the number of those who saw this as a minor setback or no setback at all numbered a combined 50% in both areas.

All of this seems to say that while everyone is shocked and demoralized by the issue, it is seen as a fluke more than a pattern. This story is not going away anytime soon, however, and as more information comes out--especially about the contractors, and how much abuse was going on.

Then there is the fact that Bush, Cheney and others in the administration seem to be spending half their time mentioning to everyone in earshot about what a swell guy and terrific Defense secretary Rumsfeld is. One thing I will say for hardcore Republicans, they are very often loyal to their own to a fault. And this may very well be to a fault indeed if the images get worse and public opinion darkens.

Meanwhile, the military is wasting no time getting the court-martials started, with the first "streamlined" judgment coming up next week in Baghdad. One wonders if this is SOP, or if we're beginning to see some show trials in a likely useless attempt to placate the Arab world.

The trials will not be televised (no surprise there), but reporters will be allowed, and the soldiers and their families have made it pretty clear that they are not willing to take the fall for this.

Slanted Attack on Moore Spreads

It seems only natural that this would happen. There is a story going around the web news sites that claim a "gotcha" on Michael Moore. They say, more or less in synch:

Michael Moore said during an interview with CNN on Thursday that he was aware shortly after he began shooting Fahrenheit 9/11 that Disney chief Michael Eisner had told his agent that "he was upset Miramax had made the film and he will not distribute it." Moore's remarks appeared to be at odds with a statement that he had posted the previous day on his website saying that he had learned only on Monday that Disney intended to bar Miramax from distributing the movie, and they raised the question of whether Moore was bringing up the issue now in order to manufacture controversy over the film in order to promote it.

This story appeared on Disney's own "Mickey News," and has been reprinted, either verbatim or very close to that, in many places. Indeed, Moore did say that Eisner had made that statement:

A month later, after shooting started, Michael Eisner insisted on meeting with my agent, Ari Emanuel. Eisner was furious that Miramax signed this deal with me. According to Mr. Emanuel, Eisner said he would never let my film be distributed through Disney even though Mr. Eisner had not seen any footage or even read the outline of the film. Eisner told my agent that he did not want to anger Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida. The movie, he believed, would complicate an already complicated situation with current and future Disney projects in Florida, and that many millions of dollars of tax breaks and incentives were at stake.

But what all of these thinly-veiled attack stories have in common is that they all conveniently ignore his next paragraph:

But Michael Eisner did not call Miramax and tell them to stop my film. Not only that, for the next year, SIX MILLION dollars of DISNEY money continued to flow into the production of making my movie. Miramax assured me that there were no distribution problems with my film.

In other words, Moore had every reason to believe that things had been smoothed out. After all, would Disney spend six million dollars on a film they never planned to release?

But stories that are circulating completely ignore that part of Moore's statement, or dismiss it casually as "spin." This is either widespread yellow journalism, or just one case of yellow journalism followed by a plethora of news outlets being lazy and just taking the original smear at face value without bothering to check the facts.

Chalk one more up for the "liberal media." Those guys....

In the News

The media has been covering the Abu Ghraib scandal pretty much 24-7. As it should be, considering the impact it will have on (a) our soldiers, (b) the Democratization of Iraq, (c) our relations with Middle Eastern nations, (d) our relations with the people of the region, (e) our credibility and standing overall internationally, and (f) the current political election process. Although there have been many scandals and debacles (Valerie Plame, medicare, lies about WMD, etc.) that should have been enough to cause nationwide outrage, this one is certainly as appropriate as any other, as it highlights the total lack of morality in the administration. It doesn't care about the rights of people, nor does it see the value of a system where one presumes innocence before guilt. In this war, to this administration, everyone is guilty until proven innocent, and if we destroy some innocent lives in the process, well, you can't make an omelet and all that stuff. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the American population stands by and watches, or not, in the exact same way that a herd of antelope grazes nearby as a lion tears apart one of their numbers (Jose Padilla): it's OK, they didn't get me, so I can relax now.

Guantanamo, for example, was always just a way to avoid pesky human rights issues, as was the non-classification of the prisoners so as to avoid conventions and treaties, and the hiring of "civilian contractors" has always been an uneasy, unspoken-of corner of the war, essentially mercenaries outside the purview of any system of law or justice.

One case of fallout over Abu Ghraib is that soldiers have fallen under blackout. No more free communication back home, no more emails. Not because of any direct security concerns, but because they don't want those pesky G.I.'s sending out any more disturbing images, and as the situation gets worse, they don't want their people to be telling any more stories if they can help it. Retrospectively, just as news cameras helped turn public opinion in Vietnam, the G.I. with a digital camera will be seen as the modern version of that news camera in the Iraq conflict. The sad thing is, because of political fallout, the troops will be cut off from a major source of positive morale. But if it's inconvenient for Bush....

Rush Limbaugh's usually disturbing rhetoric has become even more disturbing than usual in his defense of the humiliation, rape, torture and killing or Iraqi prisoners. He has called it no worse than " fraternity hazings" which are "no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation" (I didn't know that Bush had been sodomized with a plunger), and that the tactics used by interrogators were "emotional release," "having a good time," "blow[ing] some steam off," "like anything you'd see Madonna, or Britney Spears do on stage," "pretty thoughtful," and "a brilliant maneuver." He adds that "Nobody got hurt. Nobody got physically injured." Good lord, do people actually take him seriously in light of what's been released, what has been shown to be true so publicly? If so, then his listeners of that persuasion must be the most feeble-minded pushovers that you would have the misfortune of encountering.

Counterspin Central makes the very salient point that Thomas Hamill, the truck driver who was kidnaped in Iraq, was treated better by his captors than Iraqi prisoners have been treated by the U.S. Counterspin also points to this historical legal decision on the matter. I gotta add this site to my regular reading list, it's a good one.

Bush, meanwhile, has been doing poorly in the polls, and may dip even more deeply in the weeks to come as the Abu Ghraib scandal continues to grow. The newest Gallup poll, taken before the prison scandal was full-blown, shows that 62% of the American people are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the U.S., with only 36% satisfied. While Bush's approval polls stay floating near 50%, every specific area people were asked about Bush shows greater dissatisfaction: economy (41% approve, 56% disapprove), foreign affairs (42% approve, 53% disapprove), the situation in Iraq (42% approve, 55% disapprove). The only item where Bush got better than 50% was on his handling of the war on terror (52% approve, 45% disapprove), but if you look at the chart, you'll see that his approval numbers are sharply dropping on that and will likely fall into the "disapprove" majority within the next two months.

This evidence is exactly what I've been talking about: that Bush's overall approval ratings are not a true indicator of how people feel about Bush, but rather how much they support the presidency in general, and how they have not yet seen Kerry enough to be interested yet. But as Kerry starts speaking out more, and as the press starts covering him more--and as his new positive-tone ad campaign gets rolling--we might see Bush's overalls dropping as Kerry's rise.

That probably only strengthens Chickenhawk Bush's resolve to smear Kerry's war record, as he did McCain's and as the GOP did Cleland's. Here's a post by Kevin Drum which shows how blatantly the Washington Times tried to mislead its readers into thinking that John O'Neill served with Kerry in Vietnam. The large-print quote reads, "I was on Kerry's boat in Vietnam. He doesn't deserve to be commander in chief" (O'Neill served on the same boat after Kerry left Vietnam, and never met him); Drum points out many things, among them that the large-print quote never actually appears anywhere in the article.

Intervention Magazine online also has good writing on the topic, starting off with a quote by Kerry: "I think a lot of veterans are going to be very angry at a president who can't account for his own service in the National Guard, and a vice president who got every deferment in the world and decided he had better things to do, criticizing somebody who fought for their country and served."

You might note, in a by-the-way fashion, that on a sidebar of the Intervention article, there is the following quote: " If Bush had demanded the same level of proof of WMDs that he demands for global warming, there would be no war in Iraq." Good one.

Moore Responds to Critics and to Disney

Michael Moore has written an open letter responding to many of the criticisms that have come out against him, as well as Disney's excuses for why they are doing this:

Disney told him a year ago they would never distribute the film. Moore points out that Eisner did not stop the film a year ago, as he could have, that Miramax promised it would be distributed by them, and that Disney itself spent $6 million on the film in that past year--hardly the actions a company would take if they had always planned on not distributing the film.

Disney stopped distribution because the film is political, and Disney is not. Moore points out that they distribute Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh regularly, and that they even distributed one of Moore's films, one with a political edge, in 1998, and election year.

Disney only distributes family fare. True, Moore concedes--but only under the Disney label; one of the reasons they have Miramax is to distribute more adult films, like Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill, two films that are most decidedly not "family fare."

Moore is really behind all this as a publicity stunt. Moore points out that films which switch distributors at the last minute have often failed. And let's not forget that this film hardly needed something new to be controversial; this film is a giant controversy all in itself, and needs no help from something like this. Moore does not touch on a more blatant fault in accusations I have seen--that Disney is as often being targeted as complicit in this, that it is all a publicity scheme plotted by Disney and Moore. Which, of course, is absolute BS, as Disney is getting a huge black eye from this, not to mention the fact that the film will almost certainly be distributed by someone else; how will Disney profit from that?

As usual, Moore's critics have tried to smear, ridicule and marginalize the filmmaker, and as usual, they do it by making extremely limited claims, making them sound bad while they are actually full of holes, and then pretend they are iron-clad and somehow represent the entirety of Moore's work. The most common example is the job his critics did on "Bowling for Columbine." Critics claimed that Moore was lying when he claimed that the Lockheed-Martin plant in Littleton, near Columbine, did not manufacture arms (they did), or that Moore portrayed Charlton Heston as speaking in Colorado 10 days after the Columbine shootings when he "actually" gave the speech 900 miles away and a year later (which is false--Moore's account was accurate). Moore refutes these false claims on his site, but when you find yourself speaking to conservatives, they always proclaim that Moore's films are "full of lies" and point to the fake attacks.

So these new claims are not really all that new, but unfortunately, they have possibly helped convince a lot of people that Moore is less than reputable. He's not slick, like his critics are, I'll give you that, but he is honest, and is far, far more accurate than the right-wingers. It is sad that a few people at the Academy Awards in 2003 (not the whole audience, not even a sizable part, but a few people up in the upper tiers) booing Moore when he gave his speech have somehow given conservatives a form of traction to discount him in the eyes of many people. The truth is, Moore is like a film version of 60 Minutes, but with wit, passion, and humanity. I may not always agree with him on everything, but I do respect him.

Bits and Pieces, 5-7-2004

Again, things have kind of been overwhelming lately in the What's Up In Politics department, and with my new classes starting (two courses, each a more or less brand new prep), I've been a bit pressed for time. So let's take a look at just a few of the things that have been happening lately, aside from the Moore film being yanked by Disney.

There is of course the Iraq prisoner debacle. It's really gone beyond just "scandal." The Arab world is outraged, of course. The world community is disgusted with us now. What little moral high ground we occupied is shattered. There is the hiring of "contractors," who operated in Iraq under no law--military, U.S., nor Iraqi law applied to them--and tortured, humiliated, and killed God knows how many prisoners.

Bush and Rumsfeld apologizing may have a little currency at home, but pretty much zero overseas--not that they really care too much about that--especially when Rumsfeld refuses to step down over the matter, even after he withheld the evidence in the case, failing to notify Congress. He claimed he takes "full responsibility," just like Bush did for his lie about the Niger uranium in his State of the Union speech. It is clear that in this administration, the claim of responsibility is a fake-out, a hollow promise.

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Kerry is getting Gored. It comes as no surprise that the fourth estate is doing this; they savaged Al Gore in 2000, where they massed on him and labeled him a liar because he mixed up exactly which of 17 trips he had gone on with James Lee Witt, thinking he had visited a specific forest fire in Texas with him when in fact Witt was not on that trip--and yet Bush was selling whoppers right and left, like claiming that "the vast majority of my tax cuts go to the bottom end of the spectrum," a blatant and easily-checked lie, and the press stood back and failed to take him to task for it. Gore got flamed in the media for trivial stuff, whereas Bush was telling lies that affected the entire nation; but to read about it in the press, Gore was a pathological liar and Bush was "plainspoken."

Well, here we go again. We have Bush telling lies at a fervently increasing pace, and yet the press is jumping onto all sorts of Republican smear campaign bandwagons, like the one which is trying to claim that Kerry's Vietnam service was nothing big, that he has no bragging rights because he only got "minor wounds," and BS like that. Like they did with John McCain and Max Cleland, these Chickenhawks who have hardly any service time at all between them are trying to smear their opponent's honorable service record--and the press is licking it up. The GOP produced a man who they misleadingly labeled as someone who had served on Kerry's swift boat (making sound like he had served with Kerry, when he actually served after Kerry and had never been with him one moment in Vietnam), who they tried to seel as impartial (he is clearly biased), and the press sold it to the people.

The liberal media strikes again.

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Fortunately, Kerry is finally gearing up to present himself in his own words. Kerry's failure to counter Bush's smear campaign may have allowed him to save money while Bush spent his pile, but Kerry may be coming in to the "Who Is John Kerry" game a bit too late--people seem to see him as a tax-raising, flip-flopping liberal. Kerry's $25 million commercial spurt will hopefully help undo some of that, but one gets the uneasy feeling that it might be harder than it would have been a few months ago.

Boycott Disney

Democrats.com has announced a boycott of Disney, a move I heartily approve in light of Disney's current attempt to prevent Moore's new film from coming out (see previous post below). Disney has no right taking such a partisan stand on this issue--if they do not like the film, they can hand over distribution to someone else. If they truly fear "alienating viewers," then they made a huge mistake--banning the film will alienate far more liberals than letting a subsidiary release a Moore film would alienate conservatives.

At this time, the Democrats.com web site is not responding, for what reason I do not know (too many visitors? Or a malicious denial-of-service attack? Or just maintenance?).

Update from Mark at VuDeja: FAIR has the email address of a Disney bigwig, Chairman George Mitchell: george.mitchell@piperrudnick.com. Working for Change has a page with a pre-written, editable message to Mitchell where you add your personal information and send it from there.

I'll edit this post to add more information as it comes out, but make your position known to Disney, as I am doing: I will not buy any Disney DVD, CD, video, or movie ticket. Around the World in 80 Days looked like it might be entertaining, but I will not go to see it. Every Disney associate and subsidiary should also be boycotted: ABC, ESPN, A&E, Lifetime, The Disney Channel, Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures, Caravan Pictures, Discover Magazine, and many more; here's a list of Disney's holdings.

Do not boycott Miramax films, however--Miramax is the good guy here, taking Moore's film when Gibson dumped it, and standing by Moore, so go see Kill Bill, Vol. II, Jersey Girl, or Ella Enchanted if that is to your tastes. Steer clear of Around the World in 80 Days, Haunted Mansion, or The Incredibles (even though Steve Jobs' Pixar made the film, it's still Disney). Don't buy the Finding Nemo or Pirates of the Caribbean DVDs or videos.

More later.

Update: a new AP article with a definite right-wing spin has appeared that nonetheless seems to have some reassuring news: apparently Moore is free to find a new distributor, and Disney is not able or willing to shelve it; Eisner reportedly told CNBC, "That film will get a distributor easily." I'll take a wait-and-see attitude on that one.

Disney Forbids Release of "Fahrenheit 911"

This is a pretty big one. Michael Moore's new film, Fahrenheit 911, is being distributed by Miramax. The Disney Corporation owns Miramax. And Disney is telling Miramax that it will forbid the distribution of Moore's film. In other words, if Disney has its way, you will never see Moore's new film. This is the newest censorship play by media elements, after Clear Channel disconnected Howard Stern and Sinclair Media forbade its stations to show the Nightline broadcast which listed the names of American soldiers who have died in Iraq. Not surprisingly, all instances of recent censorship have favored Bush.

For those of you who are not aware, Moore's film centers on President Bush's relationship with the bin Laden family, and likely will also focus on the Bush-Saud connections and other Bush scandals related to 9/11. Originally, Mel Gibson's film company was to distribute the film, but Gibson dropped it, and Miramax stepped in. Moore has been working on this film for a long time, and is only one week away from finishing it. The film has been selected to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.

So Disney's decision, essentially, is to tell the American people that they are not allowed to see the film. Period. End of sentence. The reason? Moore claims that Disney CEO Eisner asked Moore not to distribute the film last spring because it might anger Florida governor Jeb Bush and cause him to yank away tax breaks that Disney enjoys in Florida, home of a great many Disney properties. Disney denies this, but offers no alternate explanation except to say that "the film is against the interests of the company because it would alienate viewers."

Disney is using a contract clause which allows it to axe a film "under certain circumstances, like an excessive budget or an NC-17 rating." Disney and Miramax are talking, but Disney says it will not budge--which could lead to arbitration. Moore himself says that "if I have anything to say about it, you'll see it this summer -- because, after all, it is a free country." Irony noted.

Personally, I can see no legitimate reason for Disney's actions, and the fact that Jeb Bush holds an incredible amount of influence over Disney in Florida makes Moore's claim all the more believable. Moore is finishing work on the film, just before it is released at Cannes; fortunately, the Disney censorship move will not prevent the film from showing at the festival.

But it may mean that you won't get to see it anytime soon. Miramax's chairman Harvey Weinstein stands behind Moore, but that may not be enough. Still, the furor caused by this may be enough to reverse Disney's stand. After Harper Collins threatened to destroy Moore's already-printed book "Stupid White Men" in the wake of 9/11, a campaign headed by librarians changed their minds and the book became a huge No. 1 bestseller.

I would ask that all readers who want Disney to stop this to call or send email/letters to Disney. Alas, Disney makes it incredibly hard to find any way to contact them directly, but I have gleaned possible addresses from the Internet:

Disney's Corporate Offices in Burbank: 1-818-560- 1000
Disney's corporate address: 500 South Buena Vista Street, Burbank, California, 91521
Michael Eisner's email address (possibly changed by now, but it still goes to Disney): meistb@go.com or michael.d.eisner@disney.com

Talk to them, and speak loudly!

Clueless in Michigan

Campaigning in Michigan, Bush told crowds of carefully filtered and vouched-for Republicans that "Peace and freedom depend upon this election. Prosperity for the people depend (sic) upon this election."

In other words, Bush claimed that if Kerry becomes president, we will go to war, lose our freedoms, and have economic bad times.

Do I really need to spell out the burning irony here?

A Talk with Joseph Wilson

Salon.com has an excellent piece by Joe Conason about former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, entitled "I Accuse," upon the release of Wilson's new book, "The Politics of Truth." The article, as with the book, deals with Wilson's revealing the Bush administration's willful untruthfulness regarding the "16 Words," in effect, Bush's lie to the American people about the Iraq-Niger yellowcake uranium hoax--and the following smear campaign against Wilson, in which his wife was outed by the Bush administration as a CIA operative. Which, of course, is a federal felony.

Wilson reports on having been provided with a great deal of information by many people close to power, working out a timeline of when the Bush administration planned to attack him. Interestingly, it goes back before he wrote his now famous July 8th New York Times piece which signaled the greater public outrage against Bush. Earlier, on March 8th, he had said on CNN, "I think it's safe to say that the U.S. government should have or did know that this report was a fake before Dr. ElBaradei mentioned it in his report at the U.N. yesterday." That apparently prompted Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, to start investigating Wilson so they could be ready to smear him when the time came:

Gleaned from all those crosscurrents of information, the most plausible scenario, and the one that I've heard most frequently from different sources, has been that there was a meeting in the middle of March 2003, chaired by either Scooter or the vice president -- but more frequently I've heard chaired by Scooter -- at which a decision was made to get a "work-up" on me. That meant getting as much information about me as they could: about my past, about my life, about my family. This, in and of itself, is abominable. Then that information was passed at the appropriate time to the White House Communications Office, and at some point a decision was made to go ahead and start to smear me, after my opinion piece appeared in the New York Times.

That smear campaign included the more-than-willing cooperation of well-known right-wing pundits and publications, for example Robert Novak and The Washington Times. If you look at the Washington Times article I just linked to, you'll see how many of the smears were aimed at painting Wilson as a rabid left-wing Democrat with a partisan grudge--a common tactic used against most Republicans who formerly worked for Bush but later came out to tell the truth about him. But as with others in that group, such as Richard Clarke, the accusations of liberal affiliations are ludicrous--Wilson was a life-long Republican, from a long line of Republicans; Conason remarks on how Former Assistant Secretary of State Chester Crocker, Wilson's superior in the Reagan administration, was "shocked" that Wilson was being painted as a leftist.

But just as the current Bush administration pushed Jim Jeffords out of the party, it--as well as Congressional Republicans--has made Joe Wilson doubt his party:

If you're fiscally responsible, this is not your party. If you believe in a moderate foreign policy characterized by alliances, free trade and the ability to operate in an international environment, this is not your party. If you believe in limited federal government, this is not your party. If you believe that the government should stay out of your bedroom, this is very definitely not your party. In fact, I would argue that unless you believe in the American imperium, imposed on the world by force, or unless you believe in the literal interpretation of the Book of Revelations, this is not your party.

Even at that, Wilson still does not harbor that great a grudge against Bush himself--rather he faults the people surrounding him. After all, Bush did say during the 2000 election that he would surround himself with people who would tell him what to do; Bush got into office with few if any Americans knowing any of the people who would truly be leading the country. And it has been evident from many sources of information that Bush is commonly led around by the nose by his senior staff, one example being his initial reaction to giving a third major tax giveaway to the wealthy: "Haven't we already given money to rich people? This second tax cut's gonna do it again."

The only thing I can suggest is that this is a different crowd that surrounds this president. As most people know, the president is a captive of his team. People whom his father didn't employ, or kept far away from the center of power, are now right at the center of power -- including, of course, one of his father's great rivals, Don Rumsfeld.

Another problem, of course, is the lapdog media. What isn't right-wing and eagerly willing to help Bush, is apparently intimidated:

By and large the press, in reporting on this case, felt a genuine fear about this White House.

"Guantánamo" is now a metaphor for being cut off completely from access and sources. I've had any number of reporters who have talked to me about how even the most minor criticism of the administration led to phone calls to their editors from senior officials in the government. I think that's a clear pattern of intimidation.

Overall, a very interesting interview, and a reminder that people very high up in the administration are not much more than immoral felons. The Plame affair may or may not come out before the election--it should, of course, as the administration should be judged by its actions, all of them. But it is also a reminder that Bush is not the only one wielding power in this administration; he is chiefly responsible, of course, but it is the people who surround him--Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Rice, Card, Rove, and their top staff who would also be "re-elected" in November. You vote for Bush, you vote for them as well.

Viruses, Scams and Spam

Has anyone else out there been getting hammered with viral emails lately? I hardly ever used to get them, and then with the advent of the MyDoom virus, I got loads and loads of emails pretending to be mail-transaction-failed and message-sent-as-binary-attachment fake-outs. That lasted from late January to the end of February. Then some came in a flurry from late March to early April, then a few every week or so.

But now they're coming hot and heavy again, three or four a day. Many come with the false disclaimer of "+++ Attachment: No Virus found," as if they'd been checked already. I don't know, maybe that's fooling some people. But my guess is that these fakes are becoming the new Nigeria emails, in that everyone has gotten so many that only newbies could be caught by them.

Speaking of Nigeria, I rarely get any now--in my main account. But I've been getting interesting results from my spam experimentation for my Computer class next semester. I knew, for example, that posting your email address on a web page would get you picked up by the spammers--but not to the degree that I'm seeing. I put up a phony email address (a throwaway account) on my blog site's main page--the address being invisible to the eye, but existing as text as part of the page. Sure enough, a few days later, I start getting spam--and it has been quickly accelerating. It's been two weeks now, and the account has gathered 33 spams. What's interesting is that fully 1/3 are not standard spams, but Nigeria "419" scam letters, fake lottery emails, and a virus posing as a love letter (complete with a photo).

Just as interesting is the ratio--fully 25% of all the emails to the account are Nigerian scams ("To show my preparedness and appreciation to conduct this business with you,I shall give you 20% of the total funds and 5% commission on any profit that we might realise in the process of investing the funds"). I did not expect the ratio to be so high, and in fact had thought the Nigerian thing had more or less died because of how much a joke it has become. But it seems that they have simply moved on to other pastures. Still, it is amusing to get emails offering me millions of dollars because they "got your contact from an email directory" just a few weeks after I made up the email address and hid it on my web site. Or that I was entered into a lottery "held on the 23th March 2004" with my "email address attached to the ticket number" when I created the email address in April. Now that's an amazing lottery!

What has been most surprising, however, is the complete lack of spam from the opt-out sites. I entered a fake address into no fewer than 26 opt-out directories for major spam sites--and not a single email has come back. I'm almost disappointed, but if this comes through, I might even take the dive and enter my real email address into them, and see if they actually do stop sending me spam. Wouldn't that be a kick in the rear?

Kerry Takes the High Road; Bush Weasels

Hardly a surprise, is it? But that's what happened yesterday, according to this article. Kerry spoke at Westminster College, about a week after Dick Cheney appeared; Kerry, as you will remember, was invited to speak after Cheney gave a speech filled with partisan, election year attacks on Kerry despite his promise to give a major foreign policy address.

And Kerry's speech was by far the better, leaving out campaign rhetoric, and instead focusing on the issues--and saying pretty much what I said in my last post, that we have to hand over real control of Iraq to the U.N.:

Mr. Kerry urged the appointment of a United Nations high commissioner to oversee Iraq's reconstruction and political transformation. He said such a high commissioner, modeled on the role of the United Nations representative deployed to Bosnia, would be authorized by the Security Council to organize elections, draft a constitution and work with both Iraq's interim government and the United States ambassador.

Kerry went on to point out that "This may be our last chance to get this right. We need to put pride aside to build a stable Iraq." This could be an unpopular idea with many Americans, but it is the right and necessary tack to take.

My feeling is that he didn't go quite as far as I did, but he is absolutely in the right direction. This is a feeling that many Democrats have in regard to Kerry's public positions--many of us feel he should be taking a much bolder stance--but it also must be understood that this election could stand on the edge of a knife, and as distasteful as it might be sometimes, candidates cannot always go too far out on a limb.

Of course, there is a difference between going out on a limb and being a complete weenie. Which, naturally, Bush was up to today. It was the one-year anniversary of Bush's aircraft carrier PR stunt. They wanted to get him out there in a jet so he could wear the suit and look like he was a military man. They made the claim that the carrier was too far out for the helicopter to reach, and even turned the carrier around so that none of the media's cameras would be able to see the San Diego skyline close by. They also claimed that another reason Bush went by plane was because they did not want to "wait until the ship was in helicopter range to avoid delaying the troops' homecoming," which is not only the opposite of the truth--Bush delayed their homecoming by turning the ship--but doesn't even make any sense, when you look at the statement carefully. And then there was the "Mission Accomplished" banner, which Bush later tried to blame the carrier's sailors for, but later had to fess up was his own people's work.

Well, those were the lies of a year ago. Today, he tried to smooth things over with a whole new batch of lies and obfuscations. "A year ago," he said, "I did give the speech from the carrier, saying that we had achieved an important objective, that we had accomplished a mission, which was the removal of Saddam Hussein." Um, yeah, right. Actually, what he said was, "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended." But I guess he has no choice but to lie about it, with more Americans dying now at a much faster rate than before. But perhaps we can cut him some slack on that one, as he might not have foreseen how horribly he would botch the occupation so as to create an even greater combat situation than was experienced in the actual invasion.

Bush went on: "As a result, there are no longer torture chambers or mass graves or rape rooms in Iraq." Holy moley, George, can you not go ten seconds without putting your foot in your mouth? Bush made this statement even as the top story was how American soldiers had run torture chambers and rape rooms in Iraq! He may be right about "mass graves," but is it really so much better that we bury them individually instead?

Correction: There are mass graves. My mistake.