Rants and Revelations

Went to see Al Franken last night. Sure, if you’d read his “Lies and the Lying Liars” book and seen his interview on the Daily Show the other day, there wouldn’t have been all that much new material, but man it felt good. It’s good to allow yourself to think, if even for an evening, that there are a few thousand people in your own city who are as mad about the Bush administration as you are, and (being citizens and voters) are in a better situation than you to do something about it. Hey, all I can do is give money to candidates and organizations like moveon.org and the ACLU, and give moral support to guys like Al Franken, and so that is exactly what I do.

Tomorrow I’m going to set up AudioHijack on the G4 to capture his new radio show to disk. If and when I have a working iPod, I can load the previous days show and listen to it at work.

Boston.com / News / Politics / Money / Bush-Cheney ‘04 gear reads ‘Made in Burma’

How can one item so perfectly encapsulate Bush-Cheney’s attitude towards American workers, sanctions, and human rights?

“Rumsfeld was saying, we need to bomb Iraq, and we were all saying no, no, al Queda is in Afganistan, we need to bomb Afganistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren’t any good targets in Afganistan, and there are lots of good targets in Iraq”
- Richard Clark on the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

I’m really torn about the controversy about the Bush campaign ad using an image from the World Trade Center.
Continue reading ‘I know I shouldn’t get political, but…’ »

Reuters | Latest Financial News / Full News Coverage

Early days in the campaign, and the Bush campaign is already going to their strengths - telling all out bold face lies about their opponents. What a surprise. I don’t know which is sadder - that they have so much contempt for their supporters that they think nobody will see through the lies, or that their supporters are so contemptably stupid that the lies work.

ajc.com | News | President Bush to visit N.C. celebration of flight centennial

I think it would really suck if a couple of F-16s had to shoot down the Wright Flyer for violating the 30 mile Temporary Flight Restriction that surrounds the president at all times.

Especially since they probably wouldn’t be able to get a Sidewinder lock and have to go to guns.

FOXNews.com - Business - Dell to Stop Using Indian Call Center for Corporate Customers

Dell has finally realized that outsourcing isn’t such a great money saver if the lousy service drives away your customers. I’ve emailed for customer support from three different companies recently, and in each case I got back a response that indicated that the person responding didn’t read or understand the question, and merely copied whatever chunks of the FAQ used the same nouns that I did, and in all cases it was signed with an Indian name.

I’m not saying that non-Indians are incapable of bad customer support, quite the contrary, but my experience with non-Indians has only been mostly bad, compared to totally bad experience with Indians.

Legislators Protest Beer Logos on Museum Exhibit (washingtonpost.com)

Oh oh, what about the Spirit of St. Louis? Doesn’t “spirit” mean hard liquor? Oh, and then there’s Vin Fiz. That’s blatant commercialization!

I always wondered how George Bush planned to totally eliminate democracy in this country. Now we know.

Gen. Franks Doubts Constitution Will Survive WMD Attack

I just read this article about the US and how they keep slighting if not deliberately rebuffing Canada and Mexico.

U.N. Wire | 2003.10.14 | Crossette

One thing the article doesn’t mention, but something that my parents and other Canadians mention a lot is that with 60,000 Americans being given extremely generous hospitality on Canadian soil when their planes were grounded on 11Sep01, Canadian police, firefighters and avalance rescue workers pouring across the border in any transportation they could scrounge (often paid out of their own pocket), the Canadian government offering troops and financial aid, George Bush gave a speech at Ground Zero praising the nations that had rushed to aid the US, but didn’t mention Canada even once.

And meanwhile, Hillary Clinton is still beating the drums about how lax Canadian borders let the terrorists in, in spite of the fact that not one of the terrorists did come through Canada, and that cross border trade should be stopped or curtailed until Canada beefs up her border security.

I’m on a couple of mailing lists for pilots, but there is one that is one of the best and one of the worst. I believe I’ve ranted about it before, if not here then on my original Slashdot journal.
Continue reading ‘Well, that was weird’ »

Ok, I said I wasn’t going to make political rants on this blog. I lied.

Here are questions that I, as a nominally liberal person, ask myself, and which I don’t like the answers I come up with.
Continue reading ‘Questions that make me uneasy’ »

Vicki asks me why I don’t post much political stuff, since I have strong political opinions. I’ll tell you why.
Continue reading ‘Political Rants’ »