New Look

It all started with a simple redesign, but after a little extra tinkering, it ended up being very little about the design, and much more about the backend database.

So give me a little time to work out the look and feel, but in the mean time, I now have comments enabled for this site. Not to say I won't turn them off later — I've never been a real fan of comments on blogs — but for now, what the hell.

Another Reason to Take Mondays Off

For the good of the company, of course:

Development staff are now a bigger threat to website uptime than hackers and viruses combined, according to data taken from 70 leading sites over a nine-week period.

'Manic Monday' syndrome often arises when web developers tinker with the site after 'weekend inspiration'.

"Works" for me.

Broken Record

It doesn't seem to matter to the Administration that the claims are false; Bush just keeps repeating them anyways. In his weekly radio address yesterday, Bush said:

With the liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan, we have removed allies of al Qaeda, cut off sources of terrorist funding and made certain that no terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from Saddam Hussein's regime.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, we are slowly coming to understand the real nature of Saddam's threat to the world:

Smashing padlocks and deadbolts, the men checked for booby traps as they felt their way by flashlight from room to room. They reached a murky stone passage, smelling of mold. Cement covered its windows. Steel doors, a dull orange, lined the hall.

Interrogation cells? Munitions vaults?

One last bolt snapped. The door creaked open and Deal stepped through. There, in the innermost chamber, he found a cache of vacuum cleaners.

Just Say It

E.J. Dionne is moving in the right direction today, pointing out that the Bush administration routinely lies to the American public about almost everything. Then he expresses his suprise that the media doesn't pay more attention to this phenomenon, given that reporters pilloried Clinton and Gore for their dissembling.

Perhaps Dionne should read his own column once more, take his own advice, and then rewrite it. If he can't bring himself to call the President a liar, how can he blame others for not doing the same? Instead, Dionne uses a series of euphamisms to talk about those lying liars' lies:

• wasn't exactly true
• misled
• not exactly honest
• say anything
• a rather flexible definition of what it means to level with the American people

To be fair, Dionne does use the L-word a total of five times in his column: twice about Clinton, and three times about Gore. It is extremely unfortunate that Dionne feels the need to bring out the big guns for statements by Clinton and Gore that were either lies about personal matters or not lies at all, when he gives a rhetorical pass to statements by Bush & Co. that truly are lies about the most important public policy issues of the day.

Bush AWOL

For those of you who have yet to read the definite account of Bush's National Guard service (or lack thereof), now is the time. While this story first appeared during the 2000 campaign, the media as a whole pretty much ignored it. But now that Bush has put his flight suit back on and has decided that he will use the military for partisan political purposes, it's a good time to review the 12 month hole in his service record.

Punk

It looks like SC's Lt. Governor has got himself in a little bit of trouble:

Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, rushing to the State House Tuesday, was ticketed for reckless driving after police say he drove 60 mph and ran two red lights in downtown Columbia.

Four blocks after an officer tried to stop him, Bauer, 34, pulled over on Assembly Street at about noon, police said.

He was so aggressive, officer Jon Vanhouten drew his gun and ordered Bauer to raise his hands, a police report said.

Bauer was driving with "total disregard for public safety," wrote Vanhouten, who didn't immediately recognize the lieutenant governor.

Now, most people in such a situation would apologize profusely for such stupid and dangerous behavior. Some of them might even be sincere. But Bauer isn't even attempting to sound contrite. Instead, according to Police Chief Austin, Bauer might even invoke legislative immunity to get out of this legal mess. What a punk.

PS: This isn't the first time Bauer has been, er, aggressive, either:

During last fall's campaign, he broke a bone in his right hand at the State House.

Bauer would only say he slammed a "stationary object." At the time, he said he was aggravated, not angry.

Definitely the kind of public official that everyone can look up to and admire.

One Less Thing To Think About

According to the AP, Cheney will be on the ticket in 2004. Given Cheney's obvious power in this administration, and his lack of obvious health problems for the last couple of years, I'm not really surprised. And I'm also a little relieved. Condi Rice taking Cheney's place was my nightmare scenario — she would have really cut into some segments of the Democratic base. But then I suspect a good chunk of the Republican base would be rather uncomfortable with that choice. And if Bush has learned one thing from his father, it's that you don't diss the base.

Wish I Could Have Been There

Along with the Presidential debate, there were some other things brewing in SC Democratic Party politics. That's right, if it's the first weekend in May, it's also time for the State Convention. The State has the full story, but I'm happy to learn that Dick Harpootlian is no longer the chairman. I'm all for having a "fighting spirit", but Harpootlian often let his desire for hard-hitting rhetoric hit all the wrong people. Harpootlian thought himself to be bigger than the party, and he often picked fights based on perceived slights rather than for sound strategic and tactical reasons. I hope that the new chair, Joe Erwin, keeps his predecessor's failings in mind and does a smarter job of running the show. Good luck, Joe!

WTF?

This is absolutely incredible:

A specially trained Defense Department team, dispatched after a month of official indecision to survey a major Iraqi radioactive waste repository, today found the site heavily looted and said it was impossible to tell whether nuclear materials were missing.

The discovery at the Baghdad Nuclear Research Facility was the second since the end of the war in which a known nuclear cache was plundered extensively enough that authorities could not rule out the possibility that deadly materials had been stolen.

It was no secret that Iraq had nuclear materials, and with all the talk about terrorists with dirty bombs, a lot of military and intelligence resources should have gone toward securing these sites as soon as possible. We had Special Forces operating in Iraq even before the war "officially" begun, so maybe we should have had a few keep watch on the radioactives. Why the war planners ignored this threat, I can't say, but it smacks of incompetence of the worst kind.

One more thing: the irony, the irony…

First Time for Everything

I don't think I've ever referenced here anything William Saletan has written. I'm not really sure why, but I should do a little research. I say this because his latest piece on Slate quickly and clearly debunks the two central claims made by Bush in his May 1 "victory speech": 1) we fought the war because Iraq had banned weapons; and 2) we fought the war because Iraq had links to al-Qaida. My favorite bit:

What does Bush have to say about the absence of evidence on these two points? "This much is certain," he observed in his victory address. "No terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime, because the regime is no more."

Well, that's true. No terrorist network will get weapons from Pat Moynihan, either. That doesn't make his death essential to the war on terror.

Be sure to read the whole piece. There are some good supporting links there.

Progress

According to the Charlotte Observer, the NC House has voted unanimously to rename a few geographical locations throughout the state that happen to include a racial slur. You would assume that most people would be more than happy to say goodbye to N—head Creek and N— Skull Mountain, but not everyone is embracing this change:

"If it's there, it's there," said Moore, a former Clay County manager who can trace his family back to the region's first white settlers. "We've got to the point where you can't say anything that's not politically correct."

Clay County resident Joyce Battle said the area doesn't have any discrimination, so the name shouldn't be a problem.

"We don't have a lot of black people in our county," she said. "But the ones who are here are very much a part of the county."

Fortunately, my home state has a much more enlightened attitude than its northern neighbor:

South Carolina doesn't have any places officially named after the slur, but four streams and a reservoir include the word Negro in their names.

Silver Lining

This is just funny:

Scientists have found thousands of worms alive in an experiment container that was aboard the space shuttle Columbia when it broke apart over Texas on Feb. 1. …

"I'm blown away by this," said Fred Sack, a biologist at Ohio State University, whose moss experiment shared a nine-pound locker with the worms during the flight and was also recovered in relatively good shape. "We thought obviously it was a write-off. Now it looks like we may actually recover data."

And science marches on…