kuniform

A good Lou Dobb’s screed on 30 years of US Executive Branch power is worth a read. Use an Andy Rooney voice, and it’s even better. Seriously, he makes good points about this President, the Constitution, and signing statements as well as issues like immigration, NAFTA and more for recent former Presidents.

I don’t know much about Don Hertzfeld, but this video that was forwarded to me made me laugh out loud. It’s entitled “rejected” and is a series of ads, each more bizarre and violent, rejected for a cable TV network. Laugh out loud funny.

I’ve been deleting or readying a few posts I’ve had in draft mode for a long time. After reading Josh Marshall’s first story for Time Magazine, I decided to re-work these links I’d had. Marshall’s story talks about how there is a sudden uptick in terrorist activity, mostly amongst wannabee’s and has beens, including these recent plots in Miami against the Sears Tower and the idea of blowing up train tunnels in New York.

As Marshall notes, the tunnel plot was discovered in April but not made news until July, perhaps to help Republicans in the mid-term election. This report from June states that arrests in Canada cause U.S. officials to predict another terrorist attack coming soon on U.S. soil.

Here’s a Lou Dobbs editorial from a few months ago about the estate tax. You know when someone like Lou Dobbs, hardly a Woodstock attendee or commune member, is going after Bushie’s tax cuts, they’re not good for you. Sebastian Mallory at the Washington Post agrees in a column entitled “Reward for the hereditary elite.” That’s just what we should do—reward our elites, when they take advantage of their position of privilege to provide value to society. When they, like Bush, fail to do that, or, like Kerry or Gore, fumble away their opportunity to do so, our leadership class has failed us.

Talking about earmarks in Congress, the New York Times has a great article (now behind the Times Select wall) about the corruption in our federal government. The money quote comes from Dwight Eisenhower, a man not unfamiliar with the right wing attack machine of his era: “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

So, what is the thread that holds all this together? I think the boys over at talkingpointsmemo.com are right: Representative Hoekstra’s claims of Al-Qaeda’s leaking to the press information about our horrific NSA programs are just another smoke screen before the mid-term elections. The link they provide to the Harper’s article “Stabbed in the Back” is dead on. I believe the next few months will lead to another bunch of terrorist attack announcements with very little substance to them, as well as many more suggestions that the Democrats are traitors for rooting for failure in Iraq.
Now, do not get me wrong. I am not a Democrat. They are too into identity politics for me. I am into progressive politics, meaning that I believe in fairness, justice, and equity for all. It does not seem like either party is interested in ideas like the social contract, or that the rich must bear a portion of the burden just the same as the poor. Oh well, enjoy the links.

The title says it all. When the President of the United States, a former oilman and current snake oil salesman, says we need to focus on the solution, you know it’s on for real. On top of that, 928 scientists believe climate change is caused by human activity.

So, we’ve begun exploring going solar with Solar Service here in Chicago. So far, it does not seem to be very cost effective, so we may call out a salesperson to double check that. Our problem is that we have a boiler, not a furnace, so we only cut down our hot water heater gas usage. We wash most of our clothes with cold water and turn the water heater down, regardless.

There are new federal and Illinois state tax credits that could drop the cost, but we may look at replacing windows around our house or finding other ways in which we can reduce our energy usage before taking that next step, unfortunately. It may be time to call in the Energy Detectives. So, I stand with Hugo Chavez when he says 1 car per person for this planet is lunacy.

In the New York Times today there is this article about Matthew Nagle, a man with a device implanted in his brain to allow him to communicate with a computer. Simply amazing.

In other news, I have been taking notes on making a new, accessible Rails-based version of revizit.com, including screenshots. The new old version was accessible, but the point is to make a Rails tutorial for this. Once I have the first version completed, I plan on using Peter Krantz’s new RAAKT - The Ruby Accessiblity Analysis Kit to do some testing on it. That testing will probably be more for testing Peter’s RAAKT than for testing the site, since his work is still in beta, but it should be cool nonetheless.