American Leftist has produced a very effective and depressing piece of agitprop: a photomontage of GW Bush made up of photos of US service men and women who have died in Iraq.
Viewable in : small, medium, or large.
(found via Boing-Boing, which is on a roll this week).
Update: There's a clickable thumbnail in the right margin above, which I see fine on firefox (and in Movabletype preview mode)…but I don't see it in Explorer.
Via Boing Boing, via Dan Gilmore, a link to How to Opt-Out of email from that horrible Plaxto's email.
Postatem obscuri lateris nescitis. “You do not know the power of the Dark Side.” There are two possibilities: you are a Star Wars geek, or you are unreasoningly scary.
Which Weird Latin Phrase Are You?
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My brother finds and links to a Campaign Desk report that says that CNN is taking the fall for the Letterman Yawning Boy fiasco in which they falsely reported that the White House claimed the tape was doctored.
In yesterday’s coda to the Yawning Boy saga, I forgot to mention an illuminating report from Thomas Lang on the campaigndesk.org Web site on Friday.
Lang
arguably gets to the bottom of the question of why CNN ever reported
that the White House called to cast doubts on the accuracy of the
yawning boy video. This has caused much huffing and puffing amongst
administration critics.Lang quotes CNN spokesman Matt
Furman thusly: “When we aired the Letterman clip Tuesday morning a
producer in the CNN White House unit called our national desk to raise
an issue about the potential authenticity of the tape. That
conversation was relayed among several people in the newsroom and by
the time it made it to [news anchor] Daryn Kagan it had gone through
several people in the news room and unfortunately [the on-air version]
became ‘The White House has said the tape is not authentic.'”And speaking of yawning boy, reader Stephen Stackwick e-mailed me yesterday with this comment:
“Interesting that W. had time to scribble a note to Tyler but families of KIA servicemen get (duplicate) form letters.”
Stackwick was referring to last Tuesday’s Washington Post story by David Maraniss who told of one Iowa family who lost their son getting two identical form letters from Bush.
As a paid-up beliver in what the British call the ‘Cock-up Theory of Life’–the belief that Murphy’s Law explains much more variance than do Evil Conspiracy Theories, I guess I’m prepared to believe this, although it sure seems awful sloppy to have a procedure in place that lets errors like this go on the air.
In “Starve The Beast”, Junior Division, Steve Koppelman brings me the news of three really lousy ballot initiative ideas being promoted in Florida:
One would somehow “protect patient rights” by limiting malpractice suits. I guess doctors and their insurance companies are patients too sometimes.
Another would require the state to further tax gambling operations and earmark the money for schools. If decades of experience with lotteries and gambling taxation nationwide have taught us anything, it's that “earmarking” the proceeds for education means those proceeds quickly become the only source of education funds and that educational spending doesn't budge upward one bit, as the liberated money once put towards education gets redirected to all manner of other things.
So the medical and insurance lobbies are trying an end run around the trial-lawyer and civil-liberties lobbies. All right. That's to be expected. And yet another generation in yet another state thinks that it's found a magical way to double school funding when all it's really found is a way to give the legislature an incentive to deploy slot machines at every gas station, motel and convenience store in the state. Think Nevada. All right again. That's to be expected.
But then there's that other ballot initiative in the trifecta, the one that would increase the homestead property tax exemption from $25,000 to $50,000. At a time when the crush of newcomers to Florida has schools filling their parking lots with mobile classrooms attached to the mobile classrooms, looming water supply problems to address, and ever-growing demand for more police, more firefighters, more roads, more teachers, more, more, more, there's this.
Despite this, I do not support the Governor and gerrymandered Republican legislature's plan to make it harder to pass ballot initiatives. The Republicans are still smarting from the requirement that they shrink class sizes in schools, which may well require a tax increase — something Jeb wants to avoid at all costs in order to further his Presidential ambitions.
This state is not a progressive bastion, but it is more progressive than the regressive legislature. As they say, this is no accident, but a result of the way the Republicans have drawn the legislative districts plus the fact that the liberal elements are often in urban concentrations. So the ballot initiatives, for all that they are sometimes wacky are a Very Good Thing both in principle and often in practice. And if I don't always agree with the outcomes, much less the proposals, well, that's democracy.
I am the very happy user of a Lexar secure Jump Drive. I love not having to carry a zip drive back and forth from work as I kept forgetting to put it in my backpack. (We can't access our office hard disks from home. 
The functionality was promised ages ago, was installed some time ago, but we are not allowed to use it.)
My first beef with the Lexar was that it was so small that I kept misplacing it, but a snap-release keychain from the hardware store fixed that, and now it lives in my pocket when not in use.
But I have a second problem: the thing is too fat for my Tripp-Lite ultra-mini USB hub The hub has two USB ports on each side, very close together, and the short ends of the rectanguar USB ports are almost touching. When I put in the Lexar, there's no room to put anything next to it.
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