The girlfriend had the local evening news on tonight, and John McCain's idiotic (and arguably racist, as it was obviously photoshopped to make Obama look blacker than he is) ad came on. Perhaps it was a quirk of national ad buys, but this one appeared in the bluest of blue states, during a San Francisco-based newscast. Talk about a waste of dollars...
From Matt T today:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/9/23/17555/0985/283/607893
A portion of the 2008 Republican Platform:
We do not support government bailouts of private institutions. Government interference in the markets exacerbates problems in the marketplace and causes the free market to take longer to correct itself."
So as Republicans in the Administration and Republicans in Congress want to hand $700 billion of taxpayer money over to Wall Street executives, without limits on executive pay and without any oversight or relief for homeowners, we'd do well to remember their party's own words.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
You Can See Russia From There
Caribou Barbie got her first lesson in diplomacy today. McCain campaign operatives shuttled her around Manhattan to meet with GOP-friendly leaders like Hamid Karzai and Alvaro Uribe. Said Karzai:
"I found her quite a capable woman," Karzai said later. "She asked the right questions on Afghanistan."
What...you mean the scripted questions? Of course they're the right questions...you probably wrote them, Hamid. Or maybe your former employers at Unocal did.
Palin's living in a bit of a glass house these days, being sheltered from anything but softball questions:
John McCain's presidential campaign has shielded the first-term Alaska governor for weeks from spontaneous questions from voters and reporters, and went to striking lengths Tuesday to maintain that distance as Palin made her diplomatic debut.
The GOP campaign, applying more restrictive rules on access than even President Bush uses in the White House, banned reporters from the start of the meetings, so as not to risk a question being asked of Palin.
Control the media environment, only let supporters into your "town hall" meetings, and cut off the mic of anyone who dares ask a difficult or unflattering question? Yeah, sounds like the Gestap-O-Party to me. This next one's just plain embarrasing:
But Palin, who got a passport only last year, no longer has to own up to a blank slate when asked about heads of state she has met.
No longer? My ass. She's met two heads of state...after she was picked by the Senile Senator from Arizona...and under completely scripted and controlled circumstances. But she's got George W Bush beaten...he didn't get a passport until he became president.
McCain/Palin 2008: Incompetence, Lies, and Graft...but Country First!
"I found her quite a capable woman," Karzai said later. "She asked the right questions on Afghanistan."
What...you mean the scripted questions? Of course they're the right questions...you probably wrote them, Hamid. Or maybe your former employers at Unocal did.
Palin's living in a bit of a glass house these days, being sheltered from anything but softball questions:
John McCain's presidential campaign has shielded the first-term Alaska governor for weeks from spontaneous questions from voters and reporters, and went to striking lengths Tuesday to maintain that distance as Palin made her diplomatic debut.
The GOP campaign, applying more restrictive rules on access than even President Bush uses in the White House, banned reporters from the start of the meetings, so as not to risk a question being asked of Palin.
Control the media environment, only let supporters into your "town hall" meetings, and cut off the mic of anyone who dares ask a difficult or unflattering question? Yeah, sounds like the Gestap-O-Party to me. This next one's just plain embarrasing:
But Palin, who got a passport only last year, no longer has to own up to a blank slate when asked about heads of state she has met.
No longer? My ass. She's met two heads of state...after she was picked by the Senile Senator from Arizona...and under completely scripted and controlled circumstances. But she's got George W Bush beaten...he didn't get a passport until he became president.
McCain/Palin 2008: Incompetence, Lies, and Graft...but Country First!
Trust Your Congresscritter?
Representative Spencer Bachus (R-Alabama) is an important man. He's the top Republican on the House Financial Services Comittee and, apparently, he's very good at timing the markets:
In a single transaction on Dec. 10, Rep. Spencer Bachus of Alabama made up to $15,000 off an investment he had held for just two weeks, according to his congressional financial disclosure statement. He sold on the same day that the company, Focus Media Holding Ltd., got a market bounce off its announcement that it would acquire a competitor.
The trade was among dozens made in 2007 by the powerful congressman, whose public statements alone can influence markets. Most of his trades were short-term options in which Bachus bet that a stock price would rise or fall and made a quick profit or loss accordingly. Sometimes, he made several trades in the same week, supplementing his $165,200 annual congressional salary with up to $160,000 for the year.
So Bachus is trading puts & calls while "representing" the people of Alabama...and he made some suspicious trades, possibly with insider information. Should we chalk this up to bad personal decisions by a Washington insider? Or perhaps it's yet more evidence of the Republicans' ideology of corruption. You decide.
In a single transaction on Dec. 10, Rep. Spencer Bachus of Alabama made up to $15,000 off an investment he had held for just two weeks, according to his congressional financial disclosure statement. He sold on the same day that the company, Focus Media Holding Ltd., got a market bounce off its announcement that it would acquire a competitor.
The trade was among dozens made in 2007 by the powerful congressman, whose public statements alone can influence markets. Most of his trades were short-term options in which Bachus bet that a stock price would rise or fall and made a quick profit or loss accordingly. Sometimes, he made several trades in the same week, supplementing his $165,200 annual congressional salary with up to $160,000 for the year.
So Bachus is trading puts & calls while "representing" the people of Alabama...and he made some suspicious trades, possibly with insider information. Should we chalk this up to bad personal decisions by a Washington insider? Or perhaps it's yet more evidence of the Republicans' ideology of corruption. You decide.
Jonesing for a Hit...
It's been 26 hours since IT ordered my iPhone 3G, and it's still not here. I don't know what I'm going to do: I still don't have that glorious touch screen, the visual voicemail, the maps and positioning features, or even the digital level. I can't get push email with my crappy KRZR, guys. How do I even get out of bed in the morning?
Hellooooooo? Mr. UPS man? Hurry up and ring the bell. That's not a mere package, it's a sea change in my life.
Maybe I can go by the store and play with their display model...that might tide me over...
Hellooooooo? Mr. UPS man? Hurry up and ring the bell. That's not a mere package, it's a sea change in my life.
Maybe I can go by the store and play with their display model...that might tide me over...
Monday, September 22, 2008
So Much for Usability
Like many, I think some of Apple's consumer products are fairly slick. The iPod is an undeniable boon to my entertainment...and I'll hopefully have an iPhone 3G in the next couple of weeks. Apple is renown for its products' slick form factors and, more importantly, their usability. They made the iPod dead-simple, and following in the long tradition of the idon-driven MacOS, the iPhone's interface is simple for a smartphone. I recently lost my beloved Belkin travel router, and replaced it with an Apple Airport Express. The results have been severely disappointing.
Like many technologists, I'm fairly well-versed in setting up home and travel networking equipment. Linksys products, for all their flaws, helped revolutionize home networking by providing a fairly intuitive web interface to routers, hubs, and access points. Along the way, a fairly standard set of terminology developed. I understand terms like SSID, 802.11, bridge, hub, etc, and I've become accustomed to using them when setting up my equipment. So it's not surprise that I was in for a bit of a shock when I installed and tried to use the Airport Express configuration utility. Apple has tried to dumb down networking, hiding the important details from the person configuring the router. After 3 days of trying, I still can't get the Airport Express to work. Reading the manual doesn't help: it doesn't go into nearly enough detail. That's another pet peeve of mine: manuals that were written by marketers, instead of technical people with writing skills.
Worse yet, Apple's configuration usility seems to have taken over control of the computer's wireless card, and is preventing it from connecting to non-Apple 802.11 networks...I guess it's all rosy in the world of Steve Jobs until you decide to mix platforms...
Like many technologists, I'm fairly well-versed in setting up home and travel networking equipment. Linksys products, for all their flaws, helped revolutionize home networking by providing a fairly intuitive web interface to routers, hubs, and access points. Along the way, a fairly standard set of terminology developed. I understand terms like SSID, 802.11, bridge, hub, etc, and I've become accustomed to using them when setting up my equipment. So it's not surprise that I was in for a bit of a shock when I installed and tried to use the Airport Express configuration utility. Apple has tried to dumb down networking, hiding the important details from the person configuring the router. After 3 days of trying, I still can't get the Airport Express to work. Reading the manual doesn't help: it doesn't go into nearly enough detail. That's another pet peeve of mine: manuals that were written by marketers, instead of technical people with writing skills.
Worse yet, Apple's configuration usility seems to have taken over control of the computer's wireless card, and is preventing it from connecting to non-Apple 802.11 networks...I guess it's all rosy in the world of Steve Jobs until you decide to mix platforms...
Kettle, Pot, Black...McCain Style
I think the Senile Senator from Arizona doth complain too much when it comes to Fanne Mae and Freddie Mac. After accusing Barack Obama of being in the mortgage firms' pocket, we found that McCain had taken twice the amount Obama did from the companies' employees. And now an even uglier truth comes out: McCain's campaign manager used to lobby for both Fanne Mae and Freddie Mac, and received nearly $2 million from them over five years:Senator John McCain’s campaign manager was paid more than $30,000 a month for five years as president of an advocacy group set up by the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to defend them against stricter regulations, current and former officials say.
That's $30,000 per month. But by McCain's standards, that doesn't make you rich...no, you need at least $5 million for that. And seven houses.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Robbing Peter to Pay Paul
John McCain wants you to buy health insurance. If your employer doesn't provide health insurance, McCain would like to give you a $2500 (and perhaps $5000) tax credit to buy your own...money McCain would pay directly to the insurance companies. And he wants to pay for it by eliminating the tax break employers take for providing health insurance.
Yes, that's right...McCain wants to dis-incent your employer from providing health insurance in order to pay for the transfer of individuals' tax money directly to insurance companies. Talk about a bad idea...and completely inadequate to address the growing health care crisis in America. But I suppose it's to be expected from a campaign that's being advised by market fundamentalist free marketeers and failed CEOs...like Carly Fiorina, who was fired from HP for mismanaging the company:
"We know competition and choice drive down costs," said Carly Fiorina, a former Hewlett-Packard CEO who is advising the McCain campaign.
That's a tired old canard, Carly. McCain and his Republican ilk (plus a great number of Democrats) have been telling us for 30 years that the magic of competition on the free market will solve all that ails us. But 30 years of these policies applied to health care have resulted in 46 million uninsured, millions more underinsured, drastically increased out-of-pocket expenditures for most, and thousands of medical-related bankruptcies every year. 30 years of those same policies applied to credit and equity markets have given us the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression (which, by the way, was also the result of insufficient regulation and laissez-faire economic policies combined with government inaction). It's time our nation stopped buying into that kind of bullshit.
Yes, that's right...McCain wants to dis-incent your employer from providing health insurance in order to pay for the transfer of individuals' tax money directly to insurance companies. Talk about a bad idea...and completely inadequate to address the growing health care crisis in America. But I suppose it's to be expected from a campaign that's being advised by market fundamentalist free marketeers and failed CEOs...like Carly Fiorina, who was fired from HP for mismanaging the company:
"We know competition and choice drive down costs," said Carly Fiorina, a former Hewlett-Packard CEO who is advising the McCain campaign.
That's a tired old canard, Carly. McCain and his Republican ilk (plus a great number of Democrats) have been telling us for 30 years that the magic of competition on the free market will solve all that ails us. But 30 years of these policies applied to health care have resulted in 46 million uninsured, millions more underinsured, drastically increased out-of-pocket expenditures for most, and thousands of medical-related bankruptcies every year. 30 years of those same policies applied to credit and equity markets have given us the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression (which, by the way, was also the result of insufficient regulation and laissez-faire economic policies combined with government inaction). It's time our nation stopped buying into that kind of bullshit.
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