“incidentally, it’s amazing how the rule of law, the Fourth Amendment and accountability for Bush lawbreaking have now — in service of defending Obama — all been instantaneously reduced to nothing more than quirky, self-absorbed, petty blogger “dictates,” and Obama’s disregarding of those core political values is a bold demonstration that he won’t be held hostage to anyone’s narrow partisan demands”
—Obama advisor Greg Craig: Adding insult to injury - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com
July 2008
June 2008
“Anybody who claims this is an okay bill, I really question if they’ve even read it.”
—Russ Feingold on FISA “compromise”
“[N]o more illegal wire-tapping of American citizens… No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient. That is not who we are. And it is not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists. The FISA court works…”
—Sen. Barack Obama, August 1, 2007
my.barackobama.com | Senator Obama - Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity - Get FISA Right →
my.barackobama.com
Using Barack’s own social network against him! Or at least at him…
“[D]espite all the talk about “change,” we’re once again stuck in the same dumb flashback that has been prodigiously wasting our time for the last four or five decades — the seemingly endless quest to crush the mythical leftist revolution, which for some reason has spent most of the last half-century cleverly disguised as a bunch of ineffectual bourgeois New Yorkers sitting around watching Stanley Kubrick movies and eating whole foods while conservatives took over the world.”
—Full Metal McCain : Rolling Stone
“Some of us who have been mesmerized by the Obama-Clinton cage match during the past six months may have developed certain delusions about the state of American politics, in two areas in particular. One is the idea, much pushed by wishful-thinking media commentators like myself, that the abject failure and unpopularity of the Bush administration somehow means the Republican revolution is over, and the mean-ass hate-radio conservatism of Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh is finally dead. The other is the even more quaint notion that the historic, groundbreakingly successful candidacies of a black man and a woman have ushered in a futuristic era of political tolerance and open-mindedness. It’s bunk, all of it, and nobody understands this better than John McCain.”
—Full Metal McCain : Rolling Stone
Watchmen Should(n't) Be A Movie
Here’s an interesting (well, interesting to drooling fanboys) blog post enumerating a bunch of reasons why Watchmen Shouldn’t Be A Movie. She’s wrong, of course — movies are good for different reasons than comics are good, but if you consider the comic to be the draft script and storyboard then assuming the acting and directing and editing are good then there’s no reason why it shouldn’t work. But it’s an interesting read, and especially interesting are the interview quotes from Alan Moore, like
With a comic you can stare at the page for as long as you want and check back to see if this line of dialogue really does echo something four pages earlier, whether this picture is really the same as that one, and wonder if there is some connection there… Watchmen was designed to be read four or five times.
which is, of course, exactly how I read it at the time it came out. Actually, I would read every issue four or five times, savoring the cadence of the prose, crossreferencing clues from previous issues, playing out the choreography of the infrequent fight scenes in my mind.
Oh, and the point about “Watchmen is of its time” is just asinine. As if people watching Saving Private Ryan couldn’t identify with a movie set in 1944.
More Watchmeat from io9:
“Hence, the nightmarish violence of 2006 has subsided into merely horrible because most of the potential victims of new sectarian violence have been pushed into new parts of the country, fled to Syria and Jordan or elsewhere or were killed in the first waves. And this is dubbed success.”
—Eunomia » On The “Surge” (Again) (via Andrew Sullivan)
Jill Bolte Taylor's powerful stroke of insight | Video on TED.com →
ted.com
Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: She had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions — motion, speech, self-awareness –- shut down one by one. An astonishing story.
The Mightiest Superhero Tournament Begins! →
blogs.amctv.com
This poll was remarkably amusing, especially the “recent comments” feature
“So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.”
—Bill Gates, informing a Microsoft PM of his technical difficulties in downloading a Microsoft product (from “An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant”)
Fluid - Free Site Specific Browser for Mac OS X Leopard →
fluidapp.com
Using Fluid, you can create SSBs to run each of your favorite WebApps as a separate Cocoa desktop application. Fluid gives any WebApp a home on your Mac OS X desktop complete with Dock icon, standard menu bar, logical separation from your other web browsing activity, and many, many other goodies.
“The bill legalizes many of the warrantless eavesdropping activities George Bush secretly and illegally ordered in 2001. Those warrantless eavesdropping powers violate core Fourth Amendment protections. And Barack Obama now supports all of it, and will vote it into law. Those are just facts. The ACLU specifically identifies the ways in which this bill destroys meaningful limits on the President’s power to spy on our international calls and emails. Sen. Russ Feingold condemned the bill on the ground that it “fails to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans at home” because “the government can still sweep up and keep the international communications of innocent Americans in the U.S. with no connection to suspected terrorists, with very few safeguards to protect against abuse of this power.” Rep. Rush Holt — who was actually denied time to speak by bill-supporter Silvestre Reyes only to be given time by bill-opponent John Conyers — condemned the bill because it vests the power to decide who are the “bad guys” in the very people who do the spying. This bill doesn’t legalize every part of Bush’s illegal warrantless eavesdropping program but it takes a large step beyond FISA towards what Bush did. There was absolutely no reason to destroy the FISA framework, which is already an extraordinarily pro-Executive instrument that vests vast eavesdropping powers in the President, in order to empower the President to spy on large parts of our international communications with no warrants at all. This was all done by invoking the scary spectre of Terrorism — “you must give up your privacy and constitutional rights to us if you want us to keep you safe” — and it is Obama’s willingness to embrace that rancid framework, the defining mindset of the Bush years, that is most deserving of intense criticism here.”
—Obama’s support for the FISA “compromise” - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com
“Barack Obama has the DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE tattooed on his stomach. It’s upside-down, so he can read it while doing sit-ups.”
—Rumors Barack Obama’s campaign shouldn’t try to correct. - By Christopher Beam - Slate Magazine
“Someone with my exact same name died in the Iraq war. Did he die because I didn’t work hard enough to make sure he didn’t have to go to Iraq? Yes.”
—Spocko’s Brain: Pelosi Honors California Vets who Died
“Aero looks like Microsoft was jealous of Apple’s beautiful design and tried to mimic it but hired the same designers who build the $99 boomboxes with shiny black plastic, fake chrome trim, and giant useless VU meters.”
—Nelson’s Weblog: tech / good / new-vista-box
Use a Smart Album to find iPhoto movies →
macosxhints.com
Summary: make a Smart Album with “Keyword contains movie”. Also note that movies do not show up in folders shared over the network :-(
