From “Why conservatives feel free to cast the first stone“:

if Jesus were around today and a woman taken in adultery ran to him for protection and he said to the crowd, Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone, forty-six Republican adulterers would bean her with rocks.

Welcome Lance Mannion. You are the first person on my blogroll. Everybody else: go read the whole article.

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Apparently Bush flipped off the media recently. The comments section from that page led me to this older clip of Bush doing the same thing. I found the older one to be much funnier. Note how he can stop giggling like a schoolgirl at how amusing he finds himself. (I often do the same thing although I do not profess it to be one of my finer points.)

That video would have made a great campaign ad in the last election. Unedited, with no text or voice overs of any kind. Just raw footage with a tag at the end about “restoring dignity” to the White House.

Once again, the best stuff is found in the comments section.

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I’m not a big fan of AOL and I never visit their website. (Why would I? I’m not a subscriber.) An article in Wired (which I visit daily) led me to their site, and in turn led me to this page on global warming: “Now You Know… Global Warming.”

It looks like your typical National Geographic tutorial for students but I wanted to link to it because it isn’t just a single article. It’s an entire mini-site with lots of information that can be easily understood by anybody.

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Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has a funny, tongue-in-cheeck article about the upcoming Microsoft Vista OS (formerly Longhorn) over at eWeek titled “I’m So Excited by Microsoft Vista. Not.” Here is an excerpt:

Like, wow, Microsoft’s Vista, the former Longhorn, is now only more than a year away.

With this latest beta, we’re finally going to see lots of really new, cool features.

For example, it’s going to have speech recognition! How cool is that!?

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Ambivablog has a post titled Here’s Why Dems Will Lose Again. More interesting than the article (sorry amba) was a comment by Rob from Roborant:

The Dems have maneuvered themselves into an odd position. They used campaign finance reform as a weapon and plank in their campaigns. This made individual contributions extremely important. It also made third-party loophole organizations like moveon.org extremely important.

Then they found out that the disturbed fringe of the party was the best source of individual donations - both to the party and to the other organizations. So, now they have to play to the fringe for money, but appeal to the center for enough votes to win.

I think they keep losing until this problem is solved. Imagine how screwed the Repubs would be if all of their money was coming from the religious right…

I’m not sure how this all came to be, but I certainly blame Karl Rove.

Not only is it insightful, but the last line made me laugh out loud.

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Thanks to Kottke for pointing me to this diversion, which effectively prevented me from getting work done this morning. It’s a step-by-step tutorial for teaching your Bayesian spam filter to play chess with analysis on how well it performs. It’s written in plain English (except for the code snippets) so you don’t have to have much programming knowledge to follow along.

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Senator McCain,

I’m writing you because of my disappointment, which peaked during your recent Hardball appearance. As a liberal (formerly Green, now Democrat) I have always felt that you were one of the few Republicans that I trusted and could vote for.

I’ve understood the reasons why you’ve chosen to stand by Bush, particularly since 2003 and his reelection campaign. I can only assume the greater goal here is to get the nomination for your party in 2008. Putting aside my doubts that Bush will show you anywhere near the same loyalty that you’ve shown him, there is a greater issue here.

Until now, your endorsements have still maintained an edge of truth. You’ve stuck by your man and your party but you avoided crossing over into blatant politicizing and outright lying. Until Hardball. I’m sorry I can’t use a softer word, but I know that you know that Joseph Wilson did not claim he was sent to Niger by Dick Cheney. And to claim otherwise on national television IS a lie. There was more that you said during that interview, parroting the misleading talking points put out by your party, but I’m going to bother discussing them.

I just want to relay a short, simple message: even if you get the nomination in 2008, I no longer have the trust in you that I once did. I have grave doubts as to whether or not I would be able to support and vote for you.

Sincerely,

A Concerned Citizen

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According to pretty much everybody, the numbers add up that John Roberts will be confirmed no matter what. He doesn’t stand up as an extraordinary candidate, at least according to two Republican members of the Gang of 14. That means no filibuster. Even if the Democrats tried, the Republicans would almost certainly have the 50 votes to override the filibuster (the 48 Republicans who were not part of the Gang of 14 and two of those who were, plus a tiebreaker by the V.P.).

Ok, putting aside math, most people agree that his ideology is somewhere between an O’Connor and a Rehnquist. That means there were plenty of candidates who would have been worse. Considering that the Republicans control the White House and both chambers of Congress, it’s about the best we could have hoped for. If Rehnquist was retiring too, it might have been a different ballgame. The Dems would have had more ground to argue for at least one moderate since they knew there were going to get at least one more just like Rehnquist. They would have had more bargaining room too, since the more right-wing nominee would have been easier to classify as an “extraordinary circumstance” to filibuster.

So, there really isn’t anything left to do but put on a show, confirm the man, and move on. It’s in the interest of the Left to do that as quickly as possible. Why? So we can get back to the Plame scandal. The White House is trying to put an end to that before it gains any more traction in the minds of the American public. I’m tired of the right-wingers controlling the media like this. We need to make sure this issue stays front and center.

Nevermind that crime(s) were most likely committed. These people outed a CIA operative and endangered national interests. Rather than disavowing such behavior, the Republican party has been busy circling the wagons to protect their own. Proving, once again, that they care more about power than anything else. Including national security.

So let’s get Roberts into his shiny new black robe just as fast as we can.

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Must be something in the air this morning. The left is incensed about the moral decay in America while the right is incensed about Sen. Rick Santorum’s comments that liberalism is responsible for priests molesting children.

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I just read an article over at Forbes.com titled “The Lonely Apple Repairman?” that detailed the recent travails of the author, David A. Andelman, who had to wait 60 hours for his Mac to be repaired at the Apple store in NY. I can sympathize with his angst over the temporary loss of his ‘Net umbilical cord, even if I thought the article was a bit overdramatic.

The end of the article posed a question that routinely pops up from tech writers: shouldn’t computers be more stable by now? He points to one of the usual (straw man) suspects for comparison: the modern automobile. I have two arguments or comments for Mr. Andelman in response to his story:

First, cars haven’t changed all that much since they showed up a century ago. Every piece that has been added went through years of research and careful integration into the car. For safety reasons most people would argue that is a good thing. But from the standpoint of innovation, it really sucks. Computers, on the other hand, are all about innovation. Not only does the hardware continue to develop at an amazing rate, but the software may actually be outpacing the hardware.

I’m sure if we were to just stop making new bits and pieces for our computers and just spent all of our time refining what we currently have that we would have much more stable machines. But what a waste that would be. Stability is great, don’t get me wrong. And the software and hardware industries (but especially software) could certainly do a better job of creating more stable products, but there will always be a balancing act with innovation.

Second, knowing how to take care of my computer much better than I know how to take care of my car, I tend to experience more problems and sink more money into my automobile than I ever will on my computers. So it’s a spurious analogy at best.

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