Unsigned editorials are terrible. I realize that I should be getting into the habit of dutifully reading the ones on offer from the Post and Times so that, during the dinnerparties of the future, I can cluck my tongue insightfully over the latest institutional outrage (in between lighter conversational fare, e.g. "Preschools Are So Expensive Now" and "We Think The Maid Is Stealing From Us").

But I just can't do it. They're like particularly badly-written blog posts, except without a name to offer accountability or references to back up their bizarre arguments-by-fiat. If newspaper editors had any brains they'd ditch the unsigned editorials (and political endorsements) immediately, before people start laughing in their faces in social settings. But I suppose they're too focused on fomenting the next war (how'd that last one work out for you guys, by the way?).

Today's an exception, though, because the Post's anti-net neutrality editorial is so staggeringly dumb that it deserves to be reprinted everywhere — to ring throughout the online universe as an emphatic testament to the fact that Writing, Editing, and Not Being A Total Fucking Idiot are three distinct disciplines.

Last night I went with Yglesias and most of the folks from work to go see Al Gore's new movie, An Inconvenient Truth. And it was good! The built-in advantage to a movie like this is that , since it consists of Al Gore showing charts for two hours, everyone automatically assumes it has to be "better than you'd think". And, somewhat paradoxically, it is.

At times it's touching; near the end it's inspiring. Above all it's convincing and well-executed. Still, I'm kind of dreading the popular reaction to it. I'd say it's a toss-up at this point — a lot of folks really want to dislike Al Gore, yet they're running out of ways to plausibly say he was wrong about, well, pretty much anything. I think any potential backlash would have to run more on wingnut vitriol than on the doubt-inducing pseudoscience that's been the global warming debate's chief currency up to this point.

We've seen the basic conservative playbook for this applied to Michael Moore. And while I'm sure this movie is more carefully constructed and vetted, the unfair criticisms of Moore worked just as well, if not better, than the substantive ones — and they could work here, too. Potential Gore-belittling strategies: freeze frames of what could be a bald spot; the segment with Gore as leader of the Vice Presidential Action Rangers, in which he gets a phone call and blows this whole oil-company-conspiracy thing wide open; or the fact that he kind of looks like he's wearing somebody else's skin, like that alien cockroach in Men In Black. And of course there are the deadly, deadly snails.

Worst of all would be if somebody found a problem with one of his slides. Climate science is complex, and I have no doubt that some caveats were elided for simplicity's sake (or maybe that's just Exxon's pernicious influence talking). I'm pretty optimistic on this score, though. He's a smart dude, right? Right.

Overall: four carbon-neutral switchgrass farms out of five. Definitely the best-produced educational video that high school science classes will see during the '06/'07 school year.

Former FCC chairman Reed Hundt has responded to Kevin Drum's request that he weigh in on net neutrality. The results are not good. I think. I haven't got time to pore over the thing at the moment, and it's slightly hard to decipher what he's going on about. The man actually uses the word "twas" — perhaps the only blogospheric construction more irritatingly precious than "whilst".

His initial discussion might spiral into complaints about the digital divide and a veiled call for approaching net access as a regulated public utility. I can't really tell. To the extent that he's endorsing that particular pipe dream, consider me on board.

But his primary point seems to be a parrotting of the new line the telcos are taking, now that it's becoming clear that folks aren't falling for the pathetic lies of the Mike McCurrybots that have been deployed. The argument goes something like this: "Waaaaahh! Video-Over-IP is coming! It's going to require new infrastructure to handle its immense traffic! Otherwise internet video won't work, and existing networks will become hopelessly clogged! Grant us an effective monopoly on IP services (via the ability to set the price of competitors' services) so that we can pay for these changes!"

This is a load of crap. First, ISPs are already maintaining service in the face of a high-bandwidth app, and doing so just fine. It's called BitTorrent — maybe you've heard of it? If you have, and you use it, you may be interested to know that your downloads probably don't run as quickly as they theoretically could. Many big ISPs are now throttling BitTorrent traffic in order to ensure other clients' quality of service is uninterrupted (and to save themselves money). This is as it should be. If bandwidth is really in short supply, it could be done for video as well. And there are other things that can be done, too — for instance, caching servers at the ISP level to save bandwidth as a subnet downloads a particularly viral YouTube clip a hundred times in an hour. These things cost money, but it's pocket change compared to building a new infrastructure. And you are currently paying them to do something, right?

So what about the other half of the question — the fantastic new services we'll miss out on if we don't agree to give Comcast a leg up against every .com that doesn't own a cable network? Count me as a skeptic. If there's demand for those services, the networks to support them will get built. I didn't take a lot of econ courses, but this seems pretty obvious.

To the extent that there'll be a holdup translating demand into supply, it'll be the ISPs' own damn fault. Right now their billing policies make no sense. They sell you an all-you-can-eat connection at a set speed, but become very upset if you actually use the bandwidth you've theoretically purchased, like an buffet manager tersely asking a fat guy to leave. Comcast, for example, doesn't publish download limits, but every month it sends out letters to its heaviest users threatening to suspend service if they don't ratchet back their use of the network. They refuse to say what the limit is — all signs indicate that they just print out a set of letters and mail them out to their top downloaders, regardless of how much was actually downloaded. It's a really, really stupid and dishonest way to do things.

If heavy bandwidth use doesn't provide additional revenue that's needed to build the systems to support it, the answer is to make it do so — but NOT by granting a permanent anticompetitive advantage. Instead, meter bandwidth like the water company does. Charge a flat monthly fee for connectivity and account maintenance, plus a reasonable per-gigabyte usage fee. This would end up hurting geeks like myself whose data-sipping neighbors subsidize part of our digital gorging, but it's really the only way to approach the problem that makes sense — and it's how big companies pay for bandwidth.

Do it this way and the market ought to sort everything out. There's no reason to grant Comcast-On-Demand a relative monopoly versus a theoretical TivoIP service. Someone who uses on-demand video from a third party will consume a lot more bandwidth — Comcast can still expect to get paid for the work they do to support these wonderful new services.

What they can't expect is support for their empire-building aspirations. I realize the telecom execs are really excited by their monopolistic dreams, but the rest of us just want them to do their fucking jobs quietly and well. I signed up with Verizon because I needed internet access, not because I wanted to purchase all of my information services from them for the next few decades.

Well, I'm at least glad to see that network neutrality is beginning to garner blogospheric attention. Kevin Drum posted an honest appeal for clarifying commentary on the issue, to which Atrios responded with, um, characteristic pithiness. This is all good; some folks aren't yet clear about what's going on. They want either additional nuance or for someone to explain a few more times that the situation really is as black and white as it seems.

The problem is that the nuance-providers are ready to serve, whether their interjections are justified or not. In the process, they make the issue seem much more complicated than it needs to be. Witness Crooked Timber's fretting that imbalanced service will lead people to dial down their packet timeouts, flooding the net with junk in order to get their message through faster. Abandoning network neutrality would break the internet's tenuous social contract! Gasp!

This is an extremely silly idea. Application developers generally don't handle this stuff — it happens at the level of network libraries, or even lower, at the interface driver or TCP stack. There are fewer different implementations of these pieces of software than you'd think, and their authors are not going to break the internet just because Johnny's upset that YouTube keeps stuttering. These people regularly get into epic, months-long flame wars over differences of opinion about algorithmic implementation that are much smaller than this. Also, they use SpeakEasy. They're not going to break the internet without a reason so incredibly good that it only exists as a Platonic ideal.

Could there be rogues? Yes, of course. And they'd be caught and blocked, the same way that someone running a DoS attack, or voluminous ping scans, or an open SMTP relay on a consumer connection would get caught. Enforcement right now could use some beefing up, but in the unlikely event of abandoned-NN actually endangering the system's network infrastructure (rather that just its societal and economic infrastructure), you can bet there would be remedies. Contrary to Henry's assumed social contract, there are already a lot of jerks on the internet. We have ways of dealing with them.

The other side of the fake-shades-of-gray crowd is nearer and dearer to my heart: check out this lengthy series of posts over at Freedom to Tinker, which inspired the CT post. Call it the Garrulous Geek approach — to understand any technical issue, you have to start by talking about the different energy levels an electron can occupy. By part 36 of the series, we'll have gotten to principles of mass-producing crystalline silicon — almost there!

But I'm being unkind (particularly given my own guilt on this score). Ed Felten's discussion of how traffic shaping policies, inequitably applied, could degrade internet service is interesting and thoughtful. It's also beside the point: we're not talking about different ways of marshalling a limited resource. Is it important and worthwhile to think about how to prioritize traffic when a consumer's data connection is fully utilized? Yes, of course.

But dropped packets are, by and large, not what's at issue. Most of the time, most consumers are only using a fraction of their bandwidth. The average person simply doesn't have a gigantic Bittorrent download going in the background. If they do, then yes, it's good to ensure that VoIP traffic gets priority. But again, that's not what we're facing. Network neutrality is about cases like this one or this one, where Vonage customers lost service or were forced to upgrade their accounts by their predatory ISP, because the ISP didn't want competition to intrude upon its own plans for VoIP domination. They're getting more artful at these shady tactics all the time, too — rumor has it that Vonage customers using Comcast's network experience significantly degraded service shortly before Comcast deploys their own VoIP offering in an area. Ed's attribution of this problem to an architecture that innocently produces jitter problems is, I think, extremely generous — particularly given customers' earlier ability to use Vonage without problems.

We're not talking about preferentially scheduling cable company VoIP packets over Vonage ones when we face a bottleneck (although we should talk about that when we get a chance) — this is about a private firm intentionally crippling the services of another in order to provide an advantage to their own competing product, regardless of whether bandwidth is scarce or not.

So please: stop looking for nuance. It's simpler than you're making it out to be. Here, let's let AT&T chairman Ed Whitacre explain:

"They don't have any fiber out there. They don't have any wires... They use my lines for free — and that's bull... For a Google or a Yahoo or a Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes for free is nuts!"

But of course, they don't use them for free. They pay a broadband wholesaler. You pay the Ed Whitacres of the world for your home connection. And Ed and the broadband wholesalers (he's one, too) have complicated agreements governing how they exchange traffic equitably. Everything's paid for; nobody's getting away with anything.

It's as simple as this: Mr. Whitacre and the other ISP stakeholders have convinced themselves that when someone isn't paying them money, it constitutes an injustice. They're wrong — really wrong. Don't give an inch, don't give equal time, don't pretend there's more to it than this. There isn't.

Ezra's excited about the trailer for Al Gore's new film, An Inconvenient Truth. I can understand his enthusiasm. I'd love to see Gore enter the '08 field, too (who else can save us from a Democrat-sapping Hillary run?), and we should certainly all be paying more attention to global warming. But this hyperbolic trailer makes me wince. "Did the planet betray us... OR DID WE BETRAY THE PLANET!?!?!" Ugh.

Also: "By far, the most terrifying film you will ever see." I donno, trailer guy. Receding glaciers are bad and all, but that one dude used an ice hook. And that leather-winged thing that drove the truck to kill the kid from Ed? He was pretty bad, too.

Sadly, I think you have to decide up front whether you're making an important environmental documentary, a launching pad for a candidacy, or an alarmist blockbuster (pitch: "it's like Deep Impact meets lecture series! The Day After Tomorrow, but even more boring!"). Declaring that it received three standing ovations at Sundance doesn't really help, either — I'm sure the film has also received glowing reviews from PETA and the in-house critic for the American Communist Party, but that may not translate into a big opening weekend.

And really, if you can't sell this to me, you aren't going to be able to sell it to anybody. Hell, I even buy the invented-the-internet bit — and as you might guess, I'm kind of protective about my internet. Recut the trailer, guys. I'm sure you've made a perfectly nice documentary (the footage looks beautiful). But if you think kids are going to start bring Inconvenient Truth lunchboxes to school, you've got another thing coming.

I only caught the last 60 seconds of it or so, but Jon Stewart just cordially demolished John McCain over the issue of his association with Jerry Falwell. Ouch. McCain did a decent job parrying, but was obviously stunned and trapped. I couldn't help but feel sorry for the guy.

UPDATE: Video's up.

Thanks to the insightful commentary of Sommer I know who Yulia Tymoshenko is, if not exactly whether she's one of the good guys or not. Also, I know that I've kind of got a crush on her — one that has only been encouraged by this morning's revelation that she has some of the best campaign posters anywhere.

She's got a pretty strong Buffy aesthetic going on, particularly in the first one. Sure, you might laugh. But keep in mind that there's only a thin barrier of Romanian counties between Ukraine and Transylvania proper. If you lived there, you might also put a high priority on electing somebody who's sold themselves as being tough on vampirism.

Via BoingBoing.

Check out this interview with Rick Falkvidge of Sweden's PiratPartiet, a political party founded around the issue of P2P sharing (and at least loosely affiliated with The Pirate Bay BitTorrent site).

It's not a joke: with just 4% of the vote they'd establish a presence in parliament, and their favorability ratings have been polled as high as 57%. Of course, favorability doesn't necessarily translate into votes — people would probably express basic support for the Free Lollipops For Everyone Party, but perhaps not spend any votes on them. Still, the PiratPartiet folks seem to be going about this process methodically and responsibly, and from the (admittedly biased) sources I've read, IP issues have apparently become a topic of national debate in Sweden. They seem to have a real shot.

I find this pretty encouraging. I have no idea if the IP debate will ever take hold in America, but PiratPartiet's rise makes it seem to be possible, at least.

With all of that said, I can't quite bring myself to endorse Falkvidge's positions. Five year copyrights seem likely to seriously hurt content producers. And his take on the patent system is pretty stupid (his mobile phone industry example is laughable).

It seems pretty clear that some form of patent protection is necessary. It's just the details and extent of the system that needs fixing. Kill off coverage for business processes, algorithms, software methodology and discovered (rather than synthetic) genetic information. Make life harder for patent trolls. Spend more money on examiners and fire those who grant patents to perpetual motion machines.

It'd be a start, anyway. But it seems obvious that eliminating the patent regime entirely would be bad, bad news. Technology companies are going to protect their revenue streams one way or another. If you remove legal protections entirely you'll end up with a world full of epoxied-shut black boxes, all of which will operate on proprietary, closed standards and fail to integrate with one another. The digital world is still just now learning how to speak the same language. It'd be a shame to scare the corporations building it into packing up their toys and going home.

Perhaps PiratPartiet is pushing for more radical reforms than it actually believes in, planning for an inevitable compromise. If so, carry on, fellas. But as things stand I'm not yet quite ready to apply for Swedish citizenship. Better to wait until the EFF seizes the means of conduction at home.

Oh, Howie, Howie, Howie. First you post a picture of Turkey and claim that it's peaceful, kite-flyin', tube-top-wearin' Baghdad. But sadly, people recognize subtle, seemingly impossible-to-notice inconsistencies — things like, oh, say, Turkish writing. Suspicions are raised. And then bloggers find a different photo of the same street corner, taken from another perspective, on PhotosOfTurkeyNotIraq.com (or something similar). The jig is utterly up.

What to do? Damage control. Blame an intern, put up a shot from your REAL Baghdad vacation, and apologize for the misunderstanding. It's a not-very-convincing aerial shot, but hey, it's something.

Except whoops! Looks like you didn't scrub the metadata from the new shot. Turns out the photo was taken on July 13, 2005. Which, it seems safe to say, probably doesn't qualify as occurring during your "recent" trip.

Also, now your website is down. Not the greatest example of an effective online political strategy, I'm afraid.

Metadata, kids. It bit the Post in the ass, too. If you're trying to hide something online, talk to a nerd first.

UPDATE: The date might match up after all. Apparently the guy just has a liberal definition of "recent".

one of the moments that really struck me as absurdly bizarre in last night's SOTU (not that i watched it; just read the transcript) was bush's claim that we need to " to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research -- human cloning in all its forms -- creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids and buying, selling, or patenting human embryos."

yes, those pesky half-cats-half-men. for anyone who was as confused as i was when i read that, there's more info on the phenomenon (chimeras) here and here.

UPDATE: kevin drum addressed this earlier.

i found this washington post article about a small town in utah that supports bush nearly 100% simultaneously highly entertaining and highly condescending. basically, no one comes out of the piece - not the happily ignorant town residents, not the incredibly pompous-sounding author - looking good. i was especially bothered by the author's attitude that seemed to say that these people are not really living worthwhile lives.

how is anyone supposed to make people in a utah town of under 500 care about national and international issues? i'm not even sure that you can. but you probably shouldn't start with articles like this one.

Iraqi cities secured/terrorists killed/votes cast... none of these metrics are such sure signs of western civilization's inevitable dominance as this.

Telecom customers get better services and prices when the industry is more heavily regulated. Via Slashdot.

Right?

The call by Republican congressmen for an investigation into who leaked information about our government's secret prisons is a good thing — anything that shines light on the issue is. But I have to admit that I was a little dismayed to see such an apparently cagey political response coming from the right after Harry Reid's secret session masterstroke. All of a sudden each party appeared to have their own leak investigation to make hay over, effectively neutralizing lingering Plame-Affair fallout.

But now I see this. And it pleases my petty partisan self immensely.

Am I the only one unfamiliar with the Church of Flying Spaghetti Monsterism? Maybe I should start reading those flyers I get handed when I go downtown.

kevin drum is always so good and so widely-read that it's rarely necessary to point out his posts, but i just wanted to say that i really liked this one.

Let's say you and your party have just been thoroughly embarassed by the results of a high profile autopsy. It's now apparent that that your medical theorizing was uninformed bullshit. The "questions that must be answered" -- aka slanders -- about broken bones, strangulation and missed MRI opportunities now have been, and the answers are substantially less scandalous than you expected. An issue that was always a loser has now turned into an embarassment. What do you do?

Why, reopen old wounds, of course! To that end, Jeb's calling for an investigation into whether Michael Schiavo called 911 quickly enough. Did Schiavo rush to the phone like a dutiful husband? Or did he just stand there, laughing and smoking marijuana cigarettes with his activist judge buddies? I don't know. But the question must be answered.

Barbara Walters said, on TV, that she was made "uncomfortable" when a woman seated next to her breastfed her child. Apparently expressing this opinion in a forum as well-respected as The View is TOTALLY unacceptable, and Walters is a bad mother who hates babies. See here for a sample of the insane overreaction.

Can people really not express discomfort about this without prompting "nurse-ins" like the one staged to protest Walters' comment? I'm not opposed to public breastfeeding, but yes, when I see it I do experience a certain "Hey! I didn't expect to see a nipple over there!" reaction. To quote Homer Simpson, "It's not... usual."

I'm easily irritated by rants against ill-defined political correctness, but it really does seem like pro-public-breastfeeding mothers are incredibly easily offended by any opposition to the practice. The only explanation I can come up with is that mothers view this (largely non-existent) debate as an attempt to interfere with their childrearing efforts, which makes something angry and biological kick in. Walters is the hapless camper standing between a grizzly and her cubs.

I realize that this theory is insultingly patronizing, but I really can't come up with a better explanation.

I usually try to keep my mouth shut about abortion issues, but this post over at Kevin Drum's place is horrifying enough that I feel compelled to link to it.

why didn't he just release them earlier?

WASHINGTON -- Senator John F. Kerry, ending at least two years of refusal, has waived privacy restrictions and authorized the release of his full military and medical records.

The records, which the Navy Personnel Command provided to the Globe, are mostly a duplication of what Kerry released during his 2004 campaign for president, including numerous commendations from commanding officers who later criticized Kerry's Vietnam service.

The lack of any substantive new material about Kerry's military career in the documents raises the question of why Kerry refused for so long to waive privacy restrictions. An earlier release of the full record might have helped his campaign because it contains a number of reports lauding his service. Indeed, one of the first actions of the group that came to be known as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was to call on Kerry to sign a privacy waiver and release all of his military and medical records.

But Kerry refused, even though it turned out that the records included commendations from some of the same veterans who were criticizing him.

Go check out this post of Michael's, featuring an unusually totalitarian MARC poster. I'm guessing that the commissioned artist decided to have a little fun with his employers -- but that the employers either failed to notice or care is a little bit frightening.

Those who don't frequent political blogs but maintain an interest in Warriorcentric stories: this one's for you. Yes, you, Jon.

The Ultimate Warrior's in the news because of his homepage being featured on SomethingAwful last week as their Awful Link of the Day. The Legal Counsel of the Warrior issued a C&D letter, which SA ignored.

Oh, and he was recently invited to UConn to speak to the Young Republicans club. It didn't go so well, as you can tell from the statements here, here, here or here. For Warrior's full-length ramble on the subject, see here.

But that's just one incident. You really need to get a broader perspective on the contemporary Warrior phenomenon to fully appreciate it. You might start with his list of key concepts -- among them, "foke" and "destrucity". As far as I can tell he's trying to put together a political movement/cult centered around a wrestling-flavored varietal of the ubermensch concept, sprinkled with generous portions of homophobia and a homoerotic body obsession. It almost makes Adam Yoshida sound reasonable.

remember my post a while back about bush speech set designers going for that inspiring "nazi high school of doom" look during a talk on education?

well, they're back! via lowculture, check out the happy go-lucky look bush has chosen for a speech about the national energy policy.

fo' real, krauthammer? you so crazy:

Last night (3/7) on Special Report, Brit Hume went to great lengths to continue the spin on the shooting incident that killed Italian intel agent Nicola Calipari & wounded Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, with a lot of help from one of the most rabid ideologues on his "All-Star" panel, Charles Krauthammer, who said: "She's lucky she wasn't shot as a collaborator."

[via newshounds.us]

A while ago I wrote about Verizon's efforts to block the city of Philadelphia's plan to offer municipal broadband. Unfortunately this phenomenon seems to be spreading. Legislative enshrinement of private monopolies... catch it!

Alright, the slogan might need to be punched up a little. But the print campaign is coming along nicely: FreePress.net has got a good map showing the progress of this kind of legislation around the country. Hey, Virginia legislators: thanks SO MUCH for saving me from the scourge of cheap internet access. You guys have really been on a roll lately.

Okay, actually the Virginia barriers to municipal broadband are among the least onerous of those of the states with relevant legislation. But still.

Yglesias' observation that the Democrats ought to figure out what they think about globalization got me wondering what I think about it. Allow me to preface this by pointing out that it's a cry for help: honestly, I don't know jack about this stuff and am hoping someone can explain it to me. So here's my thinking.

In the past my intuition has been that globalization will mostly be a race to the bottom -- can global economic growth really occur quickly enough to offset the diffusion of wealth from the first world? Given the gaping divide between American prosperity and the rest of the world's relative poverty, it at least seems like the answer is probably "no". I understand that assuming a zero-sum situation is a classic mistake in economics, but assuming growth will fix everything also seems myopic.

I have no doubt that globalization will increase the planet's net wealth -- to the extent that this is true it seems like we have a moral imperative not to oppose it. But I'm not convinced that everyone will come out a winner; nor am I convinced that protectionism is as futile as some people suggest. I know there are important human rights and environmental considerations to be sorted out, but my thinking generally arrives at the conclusion that Americans have an ethical obligation not to fight globalization, and that we're going to end up mostly getting screwed by it.

Yesterday's adventures with AllOfMP3 has got me thinking that this problem might be worse than I'd imagined. In globalization fans' rosiest storytime fables the US stays healthy and wealthy by virtue of being wise: we export parts of that wonderful Information Economy we've got going and in return the developing world sends us cargo ships full of injection-molded plastic lawn furniture.

The internet seems to be teaching us a couple of important lessons about how this arrangement is going to work, or fail to. First, if you want to sell information it needs to be priced affordably or it'll simply be stolen. Related but separate is the idea that the market in which it's sold needs to prosecute piracy. China's the classic example of these prerequisites not being met -- foreign music and movies are too expensive and enforcement is lax, so piracy occurs on a truly mammoth scale.

But how can you price information elastically across the world when network technology eliminates all trade barriers? Obviously this problem is worst at the consumer level of IP-purchasing, but it seems like the principle will broadly scale: IP owners will be pushed toward using a single price point, and will consequently either be unable to optimally sell their product overseas or will take a huge cut in their domestic revenues. Artificial measures like DVD region codes are feeble stopgaps -- it's easy to find a $40 player that ignores them completely. And so far, intellectual property treaties don't seem to have done much good -- what incentive does the Chinese government have to protect Hollywood?

Maybe I'm too dumb to see the alternative, but I can't figure out a way to sell intellectual property more effectively than manufactured goods. Combined with a rapidly declining monopoly on high-tech innovation -- most chip fabrication happens in Asia, you know -- I'm not feeling too good about America's economic prospects. Maybe we'll invent flying cars or fusion energy generators or an amazing new kitchen utensil that grips, flips, scoops AND strains. But assuming for a moment that such a miracle doesn't occur, what's going to save us?

Well, probably I just don't understand econ and everything will be fine. But so far I haven't been able to understand why that is.

GOD VIRGINIA. WHAT THE FUCKING HELL CRAWLED UP YOUR BUTT?

The Loudoun County students who staged a play over the weekend about a high school football star's homosexuality heard some gasps, along with expressions of support, during their play's two-day, modestly attended run at Ashburn's Stone Bridge High School.

Now, thanks to a high-decibel dust-up over freedom of expression and values, student writer-director Sabrina Audrey Jess's one-act play, "Offsides," has a dramatically expanded audience.

Del. Richard H. Black (R-Loudoun) e-mailed his supporters claiming that, in the play, "two male students engaged in a homosexual kiss onstage" and that public schools were "being used to promote a homosexual lifestyle." His son-in-law, Loudoun County Supervisor Mick Staton Jr. (R-Sugarland Run), followed up with a missive of his own, warning of the play's disturbing "indoctrination." On Sunday, activists blanketed Loudoun churches with fliers decrying the production.

...."Within our public schools, there is a tendency to encourage homosexual activity, to portray it in a cute or favorable light," Black said in an interview yesterday. "This is a considerable health hazard right now. If we encourage just one child to experiment and contract the HIV virus, then we have done an enormous disservice to our children."

YES. public schools, where gay people are traditionally MISERABLE in the face of overt hetereosexuality and jock intolerance, are in fact promoting a homosexual lifestyle and encouraging kids to get HIV. christians are being persecuted in america, so we have to pass laws explicitly defending them. and if you see the waistband of some 16 year-old boy's underwear, the DEVIL WILL START TALKING TO YOU AND MAKE YOU UNPURE AND LUST AFTER SMALL CHILDREN OR SOMETHING OMG WTF?!?!?

walking up wisconsin avenue towards the tenleytown metro stop this evening, i passed a homeless man sitting in a bus stop that he had clearly turned into his ad hoc home. there were three shopping carts full of random books, clothes and bags surrounding him, and as i got nearer, he started frantically waving a newspaper in his hand and shouting nonsensically. he was obviously mentally disturbed. but as i passed by, i heard what he was yelling: "those politicians in southern virginia! they make crazy laws! i want to call them all up and do the donald trump and tell them that THEY'RE FIRED! they deserve to be fired!"

turns out, i couldn't agree with him more. and after seeing in the past few weeks the kind of laws that the virginia house of delegates is spending time and taxpayer money on passing, i'd rather have the crazy homeless man in office than those idiots.

see:

It's been a long while since I visited Michelle Malkin's site. I should do it more often; it rarely fails to entertain. A post from two days ago is particularly good. Now, Malkin can't claim to have created this entertaining nugget of conservative apoplexy, but she is trying to push it -- so credit where it's due. From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

The dispute began Monday, when the Marquette [College Republicans] student group set up a table in the Alumni Memorial Union along with signs mentioning "Adopt a Sniper," a program of the Pulaski-based non-profit Snipersonline. "Adopt a Sniper" raises money to buy special equipment for American snipers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The College Republicans were taking orders for bracelets and other trinkets provided by "Adopt a Sniper" that bore various slogans, some of them well-known in military circles. About an hour after the Republicans set up Monday morning, university officials shut them down. An appeal was denied, and the group has not been allowed to reopen the table.

What could anyone have against well-known military slogans? These young patriots are just trying to buy equipment for our troops! Not that they aren't already perfectly well-supplied, of course.

This is outrageous. Catherine, you go buy some rope at Logan hardware; Charles, warm up the car. I'll just double check on that sloga... Oh. Oh dear. That slogan? Yeah. It's "1 Shot 1 Kill No Remorse I Decide". Hmm. So, this wasn't so much about supporting the troops. Seems like it might have been more about celebrating the merciless slaughter of our enemies. Yeah... that doesn't sit quite as well.

Everyone knows I'm hesitant to generalize*, but in my experience most college-aged activists deserve whatever they get. Safely insulated in their echoing ivory towers, their views tend to self-exaggerate to the most cartoonish extremes possible. Among the Democrats this tends to produce epic levels of dreamy-eyed weenie-hood and an astoundingly low tolerance for debate about Israel, but nothing that can't be easily ignored. On the right, though... well, I've got plenty of Republican friends and relatives whom I deeply respect. But the politically-active college-aged Republicans I've run into have always been best described as "horrifyingly bloodthirsty". Perhaps they're just the ones who make themselves visible through stunts like this one -- although articles like this one imply otherwise. Reagrdless, I have no doubt that there are many, many principled young conservative thinkers out there. But there are also a shockingly large number of furiously angry kids.

So, sorry Michelle. If these kids were really motivated by altruism, you and I could agree on wishing them the best as they quietly went about their laudable work. But that simply isn't the case -- so please, don't act all surprised when the Marquette administration gently discourages psychopathy. It's nothing personal; it's just that it scares away the basketball recruits.

Last night's State of the Union was surprisingly inoffensive. Maybe it's that I was playing with the internet throughout, but the President's delivery was okay, much of the rhetoric seemed reasonable, and even the standing O's weren't any worse than expected.

I did find the dyed fingers pretty irking, but perhaps that's because of my job: after spending a year or two dealing with House of Reps staffers, I find virtually every non-anthrax-receiving activity that congressmen perform intensely irritating.

The renewed support for the FMA was a little surprising, but c'mon now -- our nation's gay citizens should surely have been able to read the writing on the wall by now. They've had months and months to wrap up their committed, loving relationships and begin settling into their new, more patriotic lives of loneliness and psychological repression. No more dilly dallying! And no, that is not a euphemism for anything.

But while there weren't any revelations of the "Mars, bitches!" sort unveiled last night, I did have a personal epiphany: if you're ever going to be on TV, ask to be seated next to the guy who looks like he's about to have a heart attack. I get that the blue fingers were a symbolic reference to the Iraqi election -- but what was Speaker Hastert's skin supposed to symbolize? American Heart Month? Clothing, Mr. Hastert -- it's supposed to be red clothing. But no harm done -- I suppose it still served to raise awareness of cardiac disease. And with that sly, asymmetric grin and healthy pallor, I'm sure Dick Cheney stole a few more schoolgirls' hearts.

god. i really, truly have tried to avoid politics in all forms lately, honestly (i even watched "under the tuscan sun" last night instead of subjecting myself to the SOTU), but stuff like this creates such a visceral reaction that i am basically just puking everywhere:

House Republican leaders tightened their control over the ethics committee yesterday by ousting its independent-minded chairman, appointing a replacement who is close to them and adding two new members who donated to the legal defense fund of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.).

Republican officials have spent months taking steps to ensure DeLay's political survival in case he is indicted by a Texas grand jury investigating political fundraising, and House leadership aides said they needed to have the ethics committee controlled by lawmakers they can trust.

Rep. Joel Hefley (R-Colo.), who clashed with DeLay so often that they barely spoke and was considered wayward by other leaders, was replaced yesterday with Rep. Richard Hastings (R-Wash.). Hastings has carried out other sensitive leadership assignments and is known as a favorite of Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), who made the decision.

Hefley said in an interview yesterday that he believes he was removed because he was too independent. He said there is "a bad perception out there that there was a purge in the committee and that people were put in that would protect our side of the aisle better than I did."

...Republican leaders put on the committee two new members who have donated to a DeLay legal fund: Rep. Lamar S. Smith (R-Tex..) and Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.). Smith gave DeLay $10,000, making him among the seven largest donors among congressional members, and Cole gave $5,000, according to an analysis of disclosure records by the watchdog group Public Citizen.

and here:

As for Hulshof, John Feehery, a spokesman for Hastert, said there was no connection to the DeLay matter and that the speaker simply wanted fresh faces on the panel.

“It wasn’t really removing him,” said Feehery. “It was more like relieving him of his duty. The Speaker doesn’t like to have people who are such talented legislators like him have to spend so much time on ethics.”

...But Hulshof said he had specifically asked Hastert to reappoint him to the panel and noted that two other GOP members who were allowed to stay—Reps. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., and Judy Biggert, R-Ill.—have served on the committee longer than he has.

this desipte the argument from hastert that hulshof "had served the mandatory number of terms allowed without a waiver of House rules."

do they even try to cover up this shit in a believable manner anymore?

i read these articles, then immediately clicked over to bull moose blog, because i knew he'd be on it like a fly to honey. and he is:

"The very same chamber where the President eloquently hailed the virtues of freedom was the site where Republicans were replacing the rule of law with the rule of the Bugman! And those very brave Republicans had the audacity to display their ink stained fingers as if they had risked all to defend the virtues of democracy! Why these courageous warriors would walk across a field of land mines to get a campaign check from a K Street lobbyist."

damn straight.

noted over at the campaign desk blog: a useless post critiquing the fake background from a recent bush speech about education reform.

bush gave the speech at a falls church high school in front of a set that was made to look like a row of lockers (though they didn't do a very good job); the author is concerned that the washington post both wrote an article about the speech and took a picture of bush in front of the fake lockers, but never mentioned that the lockers were in fact fake:

As it turns out, Bush was standing in front of a painted backdrop. The Post's photo doesn't make that clear, but the Associated Press photo featured above -- which shows the whole stage -- does (click on the image for a larger version). This administration is well known for using carefully chosen backdrops to put forth its message, of course. But here they're playing a visual trick -- fabricating a backdrop to make it look as if Bush really is standing in front of a row of lockers, not in a generic hall. And the Washington Post simply plays along.

Now, contrary to suspicions in some quarters, we don't typically ask a lot of our press corps -- simply an accurate recounting of an event would be good, for starters. But by providing a misleading visual to its readers without elaboration, the Post fails even at that very basic task. As one of our readers put it, "if a paper can't run a photo which truthfully captures the nature of an event, it shouldn't run one at all."

i mean, i agree with that. but with all the other fallacies bush feeds to the media, can't we all agree to let the fake locker thing slide and concentrate on important stuff, like, oh, any of the other information in the post article? really. who gives a shit?

If you'd asked me before the election, I would have said that the internet would get less shrill after the presidential election. Clearly I would've been wrong. Turns out we lefties aren't such magnanimous losers after all.

I don't think it's all our fault. I expected the blogs to be sore winners, but between the crowing about a mandate, the confrontational appointments, giving Wolfowitz the Congressional Medal of Freedom... it feels a little like the President's trying to rub our noses in it. At the same time, I know liberal bloggers seem a bit more knee-jerk anti-Bush than before. Partly this is because we've seen how little conciliation gets us. Partly it's because we think the President is foolish and has done a poor job in his first term, leading us to greet anything he does with suspicion. But in large part it's because we genuinely don't like a lot of the administration's proposals. And I'm sad to see online discussions with people I like and respect degenerate into rancor.

So let me offer a tiny, admittedly lame olive branch: I like the President's tort reform proposals.

DCist clues me in to the report that marion barry isn't satisifed with his title of councilman; he wants to be called mayor-councilman, which, for the sake of convenience, would have to be shortened to mayor. additionally, barry said he would also respond to the title Your Supreme Dark Overlord.

Be sure to check out this post over at DailyKos. The Pentagon Defense Science Board's new report shows that we're making Arab opinion of the US worse. Nobody's buying our self-serving democratization rhetoric.

The expected reaction from hawks is that we're not trying to make friends, we're trying to win a war. Well, fine. But if you grant that the threat we face is a function of the hatred felt toward our nation, then our only remedies are elminating the threats militarily, or eliminating the hatred -- it's all a question of where you can most effectively cut the causal chain that ends with dead Americans.

Isn't it clear by now that our military isn't large enough to pacify even Iraq? If the military option isn't really an option, will we ever be able to swallow our pride and pursue a realistic strategy?

(I bet you thought the election had cured us of the preachy political posts.)

If news had a smell, today it would reek of ozone and urine-soaked khakis. That's right -- it's time to be terrified of cyberterrorism. DHS has released its report on cybersecurity, including a rough evaluation of the threat posed by cyberterrorism, the looming explosion of cybercrime, and some cyberrecommendations for expanding the cyberbureacracy to cyberfight these menaces. Sorry; cybermenaces.

But before that, we've got former CIA chief Robert Gates warning about the grave threat of cyberterrorism, saying that it could be the most devastating weapon of mass destruction yet. From the AP story:

"When a teenage hacker in the Philippines overnight can wreak $10 billion in damage to the U.S. economy by implanting a virus, imagine what a sophisticated, well-funded effort to attack the computer base of our economy could accomplish"

...

He said the CIA and National Security Agency conducted an exercise six years ago, assigning 50 computer specialists to see how hard it would be to shut down the nation's electric grid. It took only two days for the group to put itself in a position to do so, he said.

"All you have to do is look at what happened in the northeast when you had a tree fall on a line in rural Ohio," he said of a blackout that affected cities from Detroit to New York last year. "What I am talking about is bringing the U.S. economy to its knees."

The first thing to note about all of this is that it's utter bullshit.

It shames me deeply, but I agree with Michelle Malkin on one thing: Andrew Sullivan is kind of a whore. Sullivan has raised nearly $200,000 in his last two pledge drives to cover "bandwidth costs". Now he's just signed up with blogads, explaining that doing so "will soon provide a real revenue stream for this site". Sure, the guy deserves to earn a living -- which he does through his various print journalism gigs, too. But pretending these drives are for bandwidth is disingenuous. Kos says his site costs him $6000 a year -- and dailykos, being more of a community site, has significantly greater needs in terms of bandwidth and hardware than andrewsullivan.com.

Like I said, I don't begrudge Sullivan his ability to earn a living, but it seems like he's making a very good one while only slightly-smaller bloggers like Atrios or Kos can't make one at all -- which makes me think people are responding to his lame complaints about hosting costs rather than intentionally giving money to provide him with a salary. Misleading people with geekspeak in order to maintain such an arrangement is a little shady -- although I wouldn't hold my breath for Sullivan to see a problem with this or any other income disparity.

As part of our constant efforts to blend in with the blogging masses, here's today's mandatory amateur typographical analysis.

Catherine alerted me to this post at LittleGreenFootballs comparing an image of the new documents from CBS to a version ginned up in MS Word. Astounding! They do match closely. But I think it's a little disingenuous for the author to line the two copies over top of each other in grayscale as proof of the samples' identity. Times New Roman is a specific thing, you know, invented in 1931 by some guys named Lardent & Morison. When word processing software engineers sit down the design spec doesn't say "something that looks newspapery", it says "Times New Roman". Different examples of it are supposed to look the same.

But in this case, that's all they do: look the same. They aren't the perfect match that LGF pretends. Have a look here:

I just put one copy in front of another, changed the color, and lined them up as best as I could. You might expect scaling issues, the rotation of the scan, or antialiasing to account for the red bleed-through. And they do, to some extent -- fortunately the LGF folks have formatted the picture as closely as possible to prove their point, so we don't have to worry too much about making it an even closer match.

Now, like I said, it's close. But notice that it really isn't an identical match, and, more importantly, the offset is not uniform across the document, and does not increase linearly along any direction. Some words and phrases, like "pushing", "obviously pressured" and the date are more offset than other sections. If you bother to zoom in, you'll see there's actually whitespace between some characters and the red bleedthrough (and no, I don't mean the superscripted "th"). To me, this all implies that this isn't just a case of a heavily-xeroxed laser print.

So add one more uninformed partisan jerk on the internet to the "genuine" column. I'm just trying to keep the score even. I've got a sneaking suspicion that CBS's experts aren't as dumb as the blogosphere thinks they are -- and let's not forget, they had access to the original paper stock. And to me, the white house's failure to jump on the forgery bandwagon has got to figure into this debate somewhere.

UPDATE: An expanded, considerably more thorough and overall better version of the above is available over at DailyKos.

Nevada's now has e-voting machines with paper-trails. They're the first to manage this meager feat. The fuss that the e-voting companies have been kicking up about implementing auditable paper records sends chills down my spine -- it's hard to think of a reason for these companies to pretend it's impossible to get computers to print things on paper (unless, of course, they actually were planning on rigging an election). Well, Nevada has developed an actual counterexample to the e-voting companies' ridiculous claims. Good for them! It almost makes you feel guilty about filling their state with nuclear waste.

The electronic voting issue hasn't raised enough eyebrows this year. I think that's probably because people don't understand the grave threat that computer programmers like myself pose to democracy. But to do so, you really only have to know three things about programmers:

• They think they're much, much smarter than everyone else.


• They are much, much smarter than everyone else about technology, but are significantly dumber about most other things.


• And finally, a lot of them are asshole libertarians of the worst sort.

This is a combination that's primed to do clever things to save America from its hopelessly misguided self.

Even more horrifying, the folks at Diebold, one of the biggest vendors (and certainly the one that's gotten the most press thanks to its CEO's status as an outspoken Bush supporter) seems to have substandard engineers who exhibit all of the above negative traits, yet built their system on top of an unsecured version of Windows 98, opening the door to election tampering from an even larger pool of evil nerds.

I have absolutely no doubt that many software engineers would tamper with election software if they had the opportunity. I don't think they'd do this without getting caught, but it's likely that an awful lot of votes would be lost in the process. It looks like Nevada's leading the charge on stopping this, and I for one am grateful. Enough so that I think I'll go lose some money in its casinos at the next available opportunity.

UPDATE: I mistakenly indicated above that Diebold's voting system runs on an unsecured copy of Win 98. Actually, it can run on any variant of Win32 (ie 98 and above). That copy can be secured as well as any vanilla install of the given version of Windows. What's not secured at all is the MS Access database that contains the voting records, or the administrator password of the GEMS system. This url contains a thorough explanation of how to circumvent the system -- it's an obvious exploit that's easy to pull off (in fact, it's tough to call it an exploit -- "using MS Access" is more like it). The authors conclude that these vulnerabilities are so gaping and widespread that they must have been left deliberately. I don't know if I'd go that far (although I could be talked into it), but whatever state election officials paid money for this system -- and yes, it is being used "in the wild" -- ought to be fired. And maybe jailed.

I should note that this vulnerability applies to "GEMS" -- the management software that would be used collect and count votes from individual machines in an election official's office. There are some accounts that claim the voting machines have a backdoor as well, but I have yet to find any thorough documentation on this.