October 2004 Archives

This is a twofer for the Republicans. Not only do they get to disqualify liberal voters, but they get to discourage people from signing petitions about medical marijuana.

The following is from a BBC documentary on efforts to disenfanchise voters. [Video here]

GREG PALAST: Back in Tallahassee, another election scam surfaced which could sabotage thousands of voter registrations. It targeted students with liberal views. Election supervisor Ion Sancho discovered the scam struck close to home.

ION SANCHO: This, for example, is a copy of my step-daughter's voter registration from Orlando; and it is clear that her own handwriting filled in blocks two through fifteen. Apparently, a petition form was placed over the top of a voter registration form. It purported to tell the citizen they were signing a petition to legalize medical marijuana. The citizen filled it in, thinking that's what they were doing, and then after the voter had left, the individual fraudulently filled out lines one, the party change, making them a Republican now, and then fraudulently signed it, and then turned the application over to the election administrator. This form changed the voter's registration from Tallahassee to Orlando. And if this voter had not known me, and turned this information over to me, she may have been -- she may have been disenfranchised when she attempted to vote.

GREG PALAST: Is it a crime to misregister someone in that way?

ION SANCHO: It is a third degree felony to do this. It is an illegal act.

GREG PALAST: And the Republicans now admit it was their operatives who collected these thousands of suspect registrations, though the party denies it committed fraud. Civil rights experts in Washington fear the threat to a free and fair election is severe, and unprecedented. Ralph Neas is commander-in-chief of an army of 6,000 lawyers who will take up battle stations on election day, to protect voters from dirty tricks.

Another possible cause of delay is the counting of military ballots. A number of states, including the battlegrounds of Florida, Iowa, Colorado and Washington, will count military ballots that arrive after Election Day as long as they were postmarked on or before Nov. 2. Florida will count military ballots received through Nov. 12.

Yesterday, in hotly contested Pennsylvania, Gov. Edward G. Rendell (D) agreed to a seven-day extension to settle a federal lawsuit in that state after initially resisting the idea. As a result, military ballots there may be received through Nov. 10. Republican officials are considering a new lawsuit to push back that extension further.
[WaPo]

In many states absentee ballots aren't even counted unless the number received is more than the margin of victory. The problem I see in FL and PA is that we wont even know how many absentee ballots there are until November 12th. Can't they look at the number of absentee ballots they issued? Nope, because of the online version of the federal absentee ballot. This is a blank absentee ballot that you can download and write in all the candidate names. Basically, the only way you can know for sure on election day would be if the margin of victory was larger than the number of military personnel in each state. That's unlikely.

Anybody see any problems with my math?

"I intimidated them with my car," Seltzer told police. "I was exercising my political expression." [via YAAKE]

Dude speakin' to my Ida-homies. We were born in the same town!

All the more reason to take my vote on the road! Or to the sea?

That said, and given that Hawaii is the only state with an Asian and Pacific Islander majority population, Asian Americans have even more opportunity to make their voice heard in this election.

angryasianman has made it public he will be voting for Kerry, as has the man Greg Pak, who has a new site up: Swing Hawaii for Kerry!

As for me, I've got my DOTWHO shirt on. I don't care if I live in a red state, let's rock this vote.

I'll see your rap video and raise you a salsa ad!

Via eyebeam.

Oh, and NYC is getting new LED streetlamps.

Remember Cheney's factcheck.org problem, when he mistakenly misdirected thousands of debate viewers -- only to have the left-leaning domain squatters redirect them to George Soros' site?

Well, the GOP has a new TLD problem. This time, several campaign staffers have accidentally sent emails to georgewbush.org instead of .com. Ooops. Only the real problem is that the .org site is run by the resolutely anti-Bush crowd behind Landover Baptist Church and Whitehouse.org.

And they decided to release them all to the public. Double oops. There's not a lot of juicy stuff there -- ok, well there's some. Jennifer Williams doesn't know that crack is supposed to be smoked. Donald Povia thinks Barbara Bush (the daughter) is the hotness. Ardean A. Anvik of Mason County Republicans worries that the county has improperly used its resources to help federal candidates: "God help us if the Democrats find out."

The Landover Baptists also find a couple of spreadsheets with names and addresses of Florida voters, and forward it to Greg Palast. The GOP in Florida evidently sent out letters to registered voters in Democratic (and largely black) counties, then collected the list of returned letters so they can challenge those voters. And then accidentally forwarded those lists into the hands of their enemies.

Triple oops! The internets is confusing!

And finally, if you're overseas, forget about looking at George Bush's website. Boing Boing reports (and aren't you glad you live in a time when I can write "Boing Boing reports" in a political post?) that georgewbush.com is now blocked from non-US servers. Maybe they're trying to prevent a DOS attack? Who knows. Well, you can always check out georgewbush.org!

Oh, and it looks like Bush has lost the critical Eminem demographic. (I've actually seen the video on iFilm, it's an pretty extraordinary piece of juice.)

I had heard the "one wooden bomb" story from WWII before.

"For months, Berlin has been camouflaging its streets, squares , parks and lakes to confuse Allied fliers," reported Donovan. "All of Unter der Linden is now covered with giant colored nets under which the traffic moves... A simulated village has been erected in the center of the lake, of painted canvas on thin laths. To show contempt for this German effort at camouflage , a single RAF plane flew over the 'village' last night and dropped one wooden bomb."

This got me thinking a bit (not much more than a bit, so don't expect any revelations here) about information and the War on Terror. Once the battle for information becomes more important the physical battle (cf. Cryptonomicon, etc.), how then do we fight against guerillas? Doesn't the very presence of our large army in Iraq necessarily mean that the enemy will know more about us than we know about them?

Take this electoral issue quiz. You can agree or disagree with all six candidates' statements on 20 issues. If you want to vote on the issues, that is. My results after the jump.

You need to graph something for your pre-calculus class -- yet you are fresh out of graph paper! Fortunately, you have a computer, connected to the Internet, and a laser printer. Go to Free Online Graph Paper. Problem solved! (Note: turn "Fit to page" off on Acrobat or the lines will be all wonky.) Also includes hex grids for making your own strategy board games!

This belongs in the collection of EEUTROCI ("expensive equipment used to replace ordinary cheap items"), my personal favorite being the use of a $1000 laptop to replace a $1.59 deck of cards for playing Solitaire. Please leave other examples in the handy comment box below.

I promised an update if it ever happened - a quid pro quo for my pessimism. Thus, I now report, as a full-fledged stand-alone post: I HAVE RECEIVED MY IPOD!

It took over two months from the "completion" of the offer, but it really and truly showed up. As promised, I shall take a picture of it and post it on this post (not that means much, but I did say I would do it, and I am a lout of my word).

Many of you know me in the flesh-and-blood, so this ain't just some guy saying it works - I swear on my tushie I have an iPod sitting in my office. So go get those flat screens, people! Go! Go! Go!

Funny answers here and here.

ishbadiddle: i'm sorry, but does the latest Iraq foulup have to be in a place called "al Qa Qaa"?
thudfactor: Kaka?
ishbadiddle: so says the third-grader in my brain.
thudfactor: I am glad you have stayed in touch with your inner child
ishbadiddle: actually i just want to hear Bush say it
thudfactor: It would be appropriate if this administration, so full of shit, is finally brought down by al Qa Qaa.

Someone needs to make a real-time map of this. Link brought to you by happyrobot.

Beautifully shot, gorgeous use of color as only Zhang Yimou can do, fantastic (literally!) action sequences, thought-provoking Borgeisan structure. But deeply nationalist, the kind of movie the Chinese Army would screen for its soldiers just before they invade Taiwan; as the credits rolled, Debbie, who is a hugh Zhang fan, turned to me with a stricken look and said, "I feel like I just watched a film by Leni Riefenstahl."

How about the Glowing Plague? Aaaaagh!

OK, that was really frickin' scary. Still, instead of a nagging sense of dread, it left me with a nagging sense that I really had to clean the hair out of my bathtub.

Yet they still can't find a Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher to serve for more than a year. Via lfros.

So, I've finally done it. I've turned Ishbadiddle into a semantic web, of sorts. 3.75 years of blogging, 2,341 posts, have all been imported, categorized, and coded. (With help from our posters of course!) There are now 1,385 keywords in our subject index, covering everything from Abu Ghraib to Zombies.

Why bother? Wouldn't it just be easier to leave all the old posts alone? Well, of course it would be easier. But I wanted to fix what I see as a fundamental problem with blogs.

At heart, a blog is just a database. (I am indebted to Sun for our many conversations on this topic that helped push my thinking on blog organization.) URLs, post text, authors, comments -- it's all just data, and in theory we can slice it any way we want to. But most blogs only divide up the information by time. Which is useful, perhaps, for a personal diary -- what was I thinking about last June? -- but for a reader, it's probably the least interesting way of reading. When was the last time you casually read a blog's archives? Generally, if it's not on the front page, it's gone.

Worse yet, everything is in reverse chronological order, leading to what Eric Meyer calls the Memento effect: "Reading a weblog is like watching Memento, which I agree was a cool movie, except all weblogs are like that so it's as if every single movie released in the past seven or eight years was structured exactly like Memento."

This is one reason why we moved Ish over to Movable Type. With the old Blogger system, we were restricted to the reverse-chronlogy diary mode by default. MT lets us slice up Ishbadiddle by Author, by Category, and yes, by Month.

The category system is an essential organizational tool -- if you're just interested in current events, or to catch up on your friends, or read our peculiar cultural views, or our thoughts on technology, or just want to read the wacky stuff -- you can narrow down Ishbadiddle into these thematic chunks. Useful? Sure. But at best, it's only creating "sub-blogs" (sublogs?). These still don't get at the fundamental problem with blogs.

In a fight between Neal Stephenson and William Gibson, who would win?

Neal answers the question in this /. interview

You don't have to settle for mere idle speculation. Let me tell you how it came out on the three occasions when we did fight.

The first time was a year or two after SNOW CRASH came out. I was doing a reading/signing at White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. Gibson stopped by to say hello and extended his hand as if to shake. But I remembered something Bruce Sterling had told me. For, at the time, Sterling and I had formed a pact to fight Gibson. Gibson had been regrown in a vat from scraps of DNA after Sterling had crashed an LNG tanker into Gibson's Stealth pleasure barge in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. During the regeneration process, telescoping Carbonite stilettos had been incorporated into Gibson's arms. Remembering this in the nick of time, I grabbed the signing table and flipped it up between us. Of course the Carbonite stilettos pierced it as if it were cork board, but this spoiled his aim long enough for me to whip my wakizashi out from between my shoulder blades and swing at his head. He deflected the blow with a force blast that sprained my wrist. The falling table knocked over a space heater and set fire to the store. Everyone else fled. Gibson and I dueled among blazing stacks of books for a while. Slowly I gained the upper hand, for, on defense, his Praying Mantis style was no match for my Flying Cloud technique. But I lost him behind a cloud of smoke. Then I had to get out of the place. The streets were crowded with his black-suited minions and I had to turn into a swarm of locusts and fly back to Seattle.

Apart from more fighting-William-Gibson hilarity, there's actually a good bit in there (see question 2) about "commercial" vs. "literary" writers, what he calls Beowulf and Dante writers.

Oh, and having read Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, what Stephenson book would you recommend next?

Black Sabbath songs covered by medieval music band Rondellus

“Sabbatum” is a tribute album like no other – 12 Black Sabbath classic songs played by early music band Rondellus and sung in Latin language.

Can you imagine what Black Sabbath would have sounded like if Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward would have formed the band in the 14th century? Would “War Pigs” or “The Wizard” have been as powerful if played on medieval instruments like lute, fiddle and harp?

No, actually, I can't imagine. Thanks to Frank for the tip.

The RSS Feed for whole posts has now relocated to http://triptronix.net/ishbadiddle/index2.xml. If you're in a skimming mood, Excerpts are still feeding through http://triptronix.net/ishbadiddle/excerpts.xml. Recently Clicked, our memestream, is a separate feed available at http://triptronix.net/ishbadiddle/recently_clicked.xml. And LiveJournalers can now read the full posts (not just titles anymore!) by subscribing to our LiveJournal feed, thanks to Emily. Gwan, make Ish your friend.

MTV's PRElection results. Oh, if only MTV were the Real World...

Language Logger Mark Liberman challenges you to try your hand at field linguistics. Can't wait to do this in grad school.

I now own every Greg Pak comic book ever printed by Marvel. Both of them! And one of them's signed!

Yes, Warlock #2 is out, and it's a doozy. I really like where this is going. More reviews of #2 here (warning: spoilers!). Go to your local comic store and pick it up! Get #1 too if you haven't already!

Lots of spooooky MP3 treats.

A couple days ago I was all gleeful because Kerry had won the endorsement of America's novelists and Joss Whedon. But Bush has countered with an international endorsement. Not content with being endorsed by the Al Qaeda group responsible for the Madrid bombings, today Bush picked up the endorsement of Iran. And Russia.

And, for those of you watching at home, you can get a pointy-headed intellectual's electoral prediction using, like, statistics and stuff. Current probability of a Kerry win: 58.286%.

Sure, there's evidence of vote fraud all over. But shredding cards of registered Democrats? How crude. In my home state of Pennsylvania, the GOP is trying to make last-minute changes to polling places in Philadelphia. Because, if you're white, you might get killed just by trying to vote:

Race played a role in at least five of the requests, according to Matt Robb, the Republican leader of the 48th ward in South Philadelphia. Robb said he allowed his name to be used because those polling places are in neighborhoods he doesn’t wish to visit.

"It’s predominantly, 100 percent black,” said Robb, who is white. “I’m just not going in there to get a knife in my back."

A bit further north and west, at Montgomery County Community College, some enterprising folks came up with a way to increase the number of registered Republican voters on campus: tell them they're actually signing a petition to legalize marijuana!:

Students, who last month signed a petition that was being circulated on the Blue Bell campus to legalize marijuana for primarily medicinal purposes, now are finding out that they are registered Republicans.
"This is just very disheartening," said Plymouth resident Jennifer Fugo, a 24-year-old continuing education student who describes herself as a "victim of voter registration manipulation."
"Everyone is encouraging young people to register and vote and then they experience something like this," Fugo said Monday. "This is just outrageous."

Update: Fair's fair, and I really should mention this man in Toledo who, instead of taking cash for registrations, accepted payment in crack. Election officials were tipped off when Dick Tracy, Mary Poppins, Michael Jordan and George Foreman registered as Democrats. (Really!)

Toshiba TV sends out distress signal

You exposed RatherGate by proving the CBS documents were fake -- nice work! But now the liberals have found a bunch more documents so our work is not done.
Let's get to work proving that these are fake, too!

The way keyboards *should* be! HDHH.

Kerry's got this one wrapped up.

How do I know?

Well, he's captured the highly influential novelist vote.

And, more importantly, the crucial Buffy demographic.

(Oh, yeah, and a bunch of foreign policy experts, too.)

What are your house p0rn rules?. Via randomWalks.

Via URLDJ

Schadenfreude. That's it. Warning: contains lewd language, Bill O'Reilly, and falafel.

FDA Approves Use of Chip in Patients. Price? A low $6.66!

I thought Kerry didn't quite knock Bush out of the park like he did in the first two. Lots of more of the same rhetoric from both sides, and Bush looked more relaxed, connected to the audience than he did before. But Kerry really got him on assault weapons. (The line that should have come: "You're ceding moral leadership on this issue to Tom DeLay?!?") And Bush kept coming back to No Child Left Behind as the answer for just about everything. One would think it was his only domestic policy. Atrios notes, on Bush's use of NCLB in an unemployment question,:

Let's outline this. Bush said you lost your job because you're stupid. Then he said you're stupid because elementary and secondary schools failed you. Then he said he's going to help young people go to college. And, then he said we're going to send you to community college to learn some new things.

I'm all for providing funds to try to help retrain workers, but telling 50 year olds that they're supposed to go back to community college and start a new career shows what's wrong with this kind of thing. It's what's wrong with most welfare analysis of the effects of changing terms of trade on jobs.

Bush, I think, connected the best in the last (fuzzball) question about his wife. Laugh lines and all. I thought, how will Kerry up that one? I love my wife even more? Why, with his dead mother, that's how. Well, whatever works.

Some other linkage:

• Bush really did say that he wasn't that concerned about OBL. Thudfactor's got the tape.
• Keith Olbermann gives the debate to Kerry by a wide margin. But then, Olbermann was cranky.
• CNN does some fact checking.
• As of today, Bush is ahead in EC votes 284 to 228. Taking out the tossups, he's ahead 228 to 181. Anything can happen, folks.

I had never heard of this fantasy novel by William Morris (yes, that William Morris) until I found (on LmdH's book club) John Cartan's list of 20 Strange Books. (Also where I discovered Gormenghast. ) According to the intro by Lin Carter it's the first real fantasy novel, that is, one set in an imagined land. The land will feel familiar to you, partially because it draws heavily on Le Mort D'Arthur et al., and partially because it's at the head of a long lineage of fantasy novels. Ralph of Upmeads is blazing a trail followed by Bilbo, Taran, Prince Caspian, and a host of others. It's standard medieval fare -- 4 sons of small kingdom go their own ways, the youngest ends up on a long quest for THE WELL AT WORLD'S END. (It's always in caps.) And Morris wrote it in the archiac language of centuries before, so be prepared for "dost," "wroth," "trow," etc. But once you get into the rhythm of it, it's a great story.

And there's something very, well, modern about it as well. Morris wrote it in 1896, and while the language harkens back several centuries, the characters seem more complicated than I remember Malory's knights being. Morris hints at the internal life of Ralph of Upmeads and those around him, and they seem, well, human. Not only that: there's an ambiguity that I don't remember from Malory. Sometimes two good knights might fight each other by accident, while wearing the wrong armor or what have you, but it seemed always clear who was good and who was bad. (Admittedly, it's been a couple of decades [!] since I read Malory so I may not have picked up on things then.)

But when Ralph begins his wanderings, he's not sure quite what to do. He gets all sorts of conflicting advice, about which cities are good and which are bad, and what he should do to advance his fortune. He rescues a woman from a couple of knights, only to hear later that she's an evil witch. Yet he's fallen in love with her, and it's unclear for a long time if he's been duped by her or if the reports of her character are just political propaganda. (I won't ruin things by telling you which.)

I was struck by this passage in particular. Ralph and his friend Ursula approach a great volcanic plain they must cross on their quest, and Ursula says:

She put her hand upon the hand and said: "Three months ago I lay on my bed at Bourton Abbas, and all the while here was this huge manless waste lying under the bare heavens and threatened by the storehouse of the fires of the earth: and I had not seen it, nor thee either, O friend; and now it hath become a part of me for ever."

So if you're looking for a good fantasy read, don't mind some archaic language (did you know that "neat" also means "cattle"?), I'd recommend this. Heck you can even download it royalty-free!

A thermos bottle. A cracker in the shape of a 3 million yen note. A lost pearl. A crumpled newspaper used as swaddling. Yukio Mishima gives these objects great symbolic weight in this collection of short stories -- but the writing is anything but ponderous. Especially good: the title story, "Patriotism," "Onnagata." There were a few I didn't enjoy, but this slim volume is worth picking up.

You tell me.

I don't know if this is what it puports to be or not. There are a lot of ways this could have been assembled after the fact. But he does seem to scratch, wiggle, or adjust something in, on, or around his ear, right before the voice tells him who to call on.

Per an expert in Salon:

"There's no question about it. It's a pretty obvious one -- larger than most because it probably has descrambling capability," said Alex Darbut, technical and business development vice president for Resistance Technology in Arden Hills, Minn. Darbut examined photographs of the president's back taken from the Fox News video feed at the first presidential debate in Coral Gables, Fla., as well as 2002 photos of the president driving and working in a T-shirt on his Crawford ranch, which were posted on the White House Web site.

Update from ME-L:

Clearly, Bush is a secret adulterer!

RNC sponsored get out the vote (GOTV) effort is accused of only registering Republicans and throwing out the paperwork for Democrats in Nevada.

The out-of-state firm has been in Las Vegas for the past few months, registering voters. It employed up to 300 part-time workers and collected hundreds of registrations per day, but former employees of the company say that Voters Outreach of America only wanted Republican registrations.

Two former workers say they personally witnessed company supervisors rip up and trash registration forms signed by Democrats.

Hardly airtight, right? A democratic dirty trick would be to accuse the RNC of trying to disenfranchise voters. However, there is some evidence beyond the accusations of these employees:

Eric Russell managed to retrieve a pile of shredded paperwork including signed voter registration forms, all from Democrats. We took them to the Clark County Election Department and confirmed that they had not, in fact, been filed with the county as required by law.

It didn't take me that long to figure out Petals Around The Roses, but then I think strangely to begin with. Via Cardhouse.

From the halls of science (well, the University of Rochester anyway), comes this:

"Roughly 80 percent of our cognitive power may be cranking away on tasks completely unknown to us. Curiously, this clandestine activity does not exist in the youngest brains, leading scientists to speculate that the mysterious goings-on that absorb the majority of our grey-matter are dedicated to subconsciously reprocessing our initial thoughts and experiences. The research, which may have profound implications for our very basis of understanding reality, appears in the journal Nature.

And one group of ferrets watch The Matrix, over and over and over again.

Whoah.

The findings themselves -- basically, that infant ferrets see the world entirely differently from adult ferrets, and that our (adult) brains are full of background processing even when we're not "perceiving" anything -- are pretty interesting, and we really need Alex to explain them for us. But you've got to love this guy's outlook:

"The basic findings are exciting enough, but you can't help but speculate on what they might mean in a deeper context," says Weliky. "It's one thing to say a ferret's understanding of reality is being reproduced inside his brain, but there's nothing to say that our understanding of the world is accurate. In a way, our neural structure imposes a certain structure on the outside world, and all we know is that at least one other mammalian brain seems to impose the same structure. Either that or The Matrix freaked out the ferrets the way it did everyone else."

It seems that Grover Norquist isn't the only Republican who makes inappropriate Holocaust comparisons. The internets are all abuzz over the decision of Sinclair Broadcasting (the same folks who didn't want their viewers to hear the names of fallen soldiers in Iraq) to air Stolen Honor, an "attackumentary" on Kerry's post-Vietnam activities, brought to you by the same folks as the Swift Vets for Truth. (A few news pieces on Sinclair: CBS, Daily News.) Trading is currently down, and there have been efforts to challenge the local licenses and organize a boycott of their local and national advertisers.

Now TPM reports that Sinclair corporate relations veep Mark Hyman made the following comparison on CNN:

This is news. I can't change the fact that these people decided to come forward today. The networks had this opportunity over a month ago to speak with these people. They chose to suppress them. They chose to ignore them. They are acting like Holocaust deniers, pretending these men don't exist.

My Jewish grandparents were big supporters of the GOP. I wish I could ask them today what they make of all this.

Well, we can hope that the good folks at Operation Bubbe will put this to good use. (Thanks to LmdH for the tip on that.) They are organizing Get Out The Vote trips in Florida, where, as they note, "a slight increase in turnout among Jewish retirees could decide the election." Right now, according to the indispensible electoral-vote, Bush is leading Kerry by 4 points in Florida. It will take a lot of Bubbes and blacks to give Bush bupkis!

Okla. man staged home invasion to impress wife

Funny!

Literally. There goes $110,360 of your tax dollars.

Welcome to Dot, our newest poster! She'll be covering linguistics, student life in Idaho, Ghanaian culture, and of course much good random blogging goodness. You can read her own blog or her Ghana blog if you want to get acquainted.

The CIA: "A powerful "old guard" faction in the Central Intelligence Agency has launched an unprecedented campaign to undermine the Bush administration with a battery of damaging leaks and briefings about Iraq."

And the infinitely more powerful U.S. Commission on Civil Rights: "In an assessment of the civil rights record of the Bush administration, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights released a draft report that concludes the administration has failed to exhibit leadership or define a clear focus, relegating civil rights to a low priority."

Chris Reeve is dead.

I remember thinking, when I saw first the film as a kid, that he looked almost perfect in both roles, the nerd and the hero. I've come to like a harder edge in my comic book heroes, but obviously Reeve will always be one of the main icons of the Man of Steel for many of us. (I had a six-foot cardboard cutout of him that was completely awesome.)

Another cool thing he did: he told the story about the first few days after his accident. He was ready to die right then, couldn't imagine living like that. He wanted to let go. But he and his wife decided, together, to fight, as long and as hard as they had to. So he did. Faced down some pretty f*cked up kryptonite. I don't know if I could do that. He set quite an example.

So. Hats off to the man in the red cape.

May all beings be free of suffering and its causes.

"Blogs" as a category on Jeopardy! [via thousand robots].

374 different accented samples of English, including native speakers of Afrikaans, Basque, Chamorro, Dari, Ebira, Fanti... You get the idea.

This guy ran the 2nd debate transcripts through Microsoft Word's autosummarizer. Here's how Word boiled down Kerry's statements to 100 words:

The president says I've changed my mind. The first president in 72 years to lose jobs. Believed it in 1998 when Clinton was president. This president rushed to war, pushed our allies aside. This president hasn't listened. A president's job is to win the peace. Mr. President, countries are leaving the coalition, not joining. Ladies and gentlemen, it's his tax plan. This president chose a tax cut over homeland security. The president blocked it. Five million people have lost their health insurance under this president. Mr. President, you're batting 0 for 2. People's rights have been abused.

Our plan is working. We've already 75 percent of his people. I -- listen, I -- we've got a great country. People love America. Thanks. My opponent's right, we need good intelligence. Right, thank you for that. We've got to pay our troops more. You can save tax-free. Less regulations if we want jobs here; legal reform if we want jobs here; and we've got to keep taxes low. It was the right decision. On the tax cut, it's a big decision. I did the right decision. Charlie, thanks. Tomorrow, Afghanistan will be voting for a president.

I almost forgot two other debate highlights: When Bush actually forgot Kerry's name and called him "Kennedy". And Bush's claim that he had increased wetlands by "3 million." 3 million what? we wondered. Acres? Inches? "3 million wetlands," Debbie said. That must be it.

And finally, here's how Bush really felt after the debate:

My impressions from last night? Bush still mad. Kerry even-keeled. Bush did better than the first debate -- but could he really have done worse? The three responses I'll remember:

• Bush is against the Dred Scott decision and slavery! Glad we cleared that one up.
• "Need some wood?" One of several Bush jokes that flopped ("that made me want to scowl"?) Also he does have an interest in a timber company. Go figure.
• The last question -- we both gasped when Bush was asked (yet again) to list some mistakes. Fer gosh sakes, man, talk about your youthful indiscretions, or something. But W refuses. Remember Reagan's "mistakes were made"? Bush is the "mistakes weren't made" president.

More linkage below!

Was Bush wearing a wire during his debate with Kerry?

"Bush is my shepherd, I shall be in want...."

So I just read the Duelfer Report -- the "key findings," not all 1000 pages. And I can totally see how both sides are spinning this to their advantage. More to the point, I can see how they are reading it to confirm what they already believe about Saddam's Iraq.

Namely, that there were no extant WMDs, no imminent threat, and that with sanctions in place, it was well nigh impossible for him to get more. That his primary intent was to have sanctions lifted, and so was avoiding all WMD-related activities so that he could get rid of the sanctions that were suffocating his country and his regime. That he was not harboring Zarqawi. And that he was bluffing about his WMDs so that Iran would think that he had them. And that he likes Hemingway.

OR:

Namely, that Saddam was a brutal dictator who was bent on regaining his WMD capacity as soon as sanctions were lifted. Who was holding on to as much WMD intellectual capital as he could. Who was willing to bribe his way out of sanctions. Who tested bioweapons on human subjects, and was developing their use for assassinations.

So I seriously doubt that anyone's mind is going to be made up by this report. There's plenty in there for anyone to seize on as their own personal truth.

And, in the interest of completeness, you should probably know that there's a rumored 42 pages of Iraqi Intelligence data that aren't in the CIA report but were "leaked" to CNSNews.com, who won't release the pages but happily report that they prove that Saddam had WMD, ties to terrorists, etc.

MetaFilter considers concepts that are untranslatable into English.

From Newsweek and (irony!) Factcheck.org.

Oh, and some profs from other business schools too. Open Letter to President.

Some are what you would expect, completely opposites and wish fulfillment. Others are not, which makes the mix intriguing. [Article and a subset of photos]

A cool Get Out The Vote PSA targeting young Asians.

It's hard work! It's hard work!

[via]

A very cool aerial photo with superimposed map of Buckingham Palace. UK-only for this feature, sadly. Via ibrb.

We saw Cheek by Jowl's production of Othello last night at BAM. Greatly disappointed, mostly because we hated Iago. Not in the good way you are supposed to hate Iago, but in the bad, I really don't like this actor's interpretation way of hating Iago. He brought so little nuance to the role, it seemed that he had just stepped out of a Guy Ritchie movie. Raw emotion trampled out the meaning of the words. Not until the always-pivotal III.iii was there a scene where he was really worth watching. Othello was good, but not great. So we left during intermission.

So I came in on the debate just as Edwards was nailing Cheney on Halliburton. Nice shot, John.

Also, I thought the tactics on gay marriage were right on -- with Edwards saying how much Cheney loves his gay daughter. Get the word out that there's something about Mary, but back Cheney into a rhetorical corner, where pretty much the only thing he could say was what he did: thanks for the kind words.

Here's some other stuff about the debate:

It's not just Nader! The New York Sun reports that the Election Spoiler May Turn Out to Be a Libertarian, saying that Michael Badnarik is actually polling 1% to 3%. And it may be higher, since most polls don't even ask about him. And he's on the ballot in 48 states, while Nader is only (so far) on the ballot in 35.

Did we mention that Bush passed the PATRIOT Act, pushed deficits way up, and has heavily intervened in foreign affairs?

John Woo directs live-action He-Man movie? [via]

What an extraordinary book. I picked it up at a used table, purely on the title. It was written by Jean-Dominique Bauby, who was the French editor of Elle before he suffered a stroke that left him almost entirely paralyzed, yet able to think clearly. He dictated this entire book by blinking his left eye. Don't be put off by the After-School Special sound of it, it's really very moving and beautiful.

Added two new sites to the Friends section of the links: welcome to Amardeep Singh ("Like nothing else in Tennesse") and This Blog Sits At The ("Intersection of Anthropology & Economics"). Both are friends of Ennis. Thanks for linking to Ish!

I also updated the "Feeds" section with some feeds I've subscribed to: 43 Folders, Cool Tools, F Train, Harpers, Snopes, and Spinsanity. I can't tell you what a difference it makes using Bloglines to catch up on dozens of websites at once. It may sound silly, but being able to see all the sites in one place, and being notified when they are updated, and being able to skim through quickly, is an order-of-magnitude difference when it comes to time spent. If there are sites without feeds, I just don't read them, unless I remind myself to check them out.

Are there other feeds you read and we should include? Leave suggestions in the handy comment box.

Oh, and while on the site admin tip, I've received zero submissions to the masthead design request. Maybe I need to make it a contest? With celebrity judges? We could see if Moby is still available...

1) This New York Times article on our pre-war intelligence on Iraq's nuclear capabilities.

2) Baghdad Year Zero, an account of the failure of the neocon's "laissez-faire reconstruction" strategy.

Comments?

A non-sf novel from Philip K. Dick. The main character, Jack Isidore, is certainly the most intriguing -- I think today he would be diagnosed with Asperger's, but inside his head is a fascinating place, surrounded as he is by moral monsters, especially his sister.

What's all the fuss about? I turned the pages, but it's basically watered-down Eco which is itself watered-down Robert Anton Wilson.

In the first debate. Mean? Unfair? Hilarious? Accurate? Yes. Thanks DJCJ for the link.

red | blue is a GPS or Java-fueled app that tells you whether you're near Democratic donors or GOP donors. And the MIT Media Lab has come up with a handheld version of iSee, the surveillance-avoidance map of Manhattan.

Alex Joseph writes:

I've always loved masks, and when I found this one at a party store during the convention, I thought it might be put to a satirical use. I scared a few friends with it, and put it away. One night, I experienced a very powerful dream in which Dick Cheney was walking through the forest, reaching out for something. I became obsessed with re-creating this image, and I began to see how Dick Cheney belonged to what Freud called the 'manifest content' of the dream--the surface layer, which only masks the true, latent content. As for what the latent content is here, I couldn't say, but it feels deeply, weirdly personal.

Click on pictures for full-sized versions. All pictures were taken by Kurt Conklin, except for cheney.alt.route which was taken by Darleen Lev, and fall under this site's Creative Commons License.

I don't like talking much about politics or media or current events because I honestly don't think I can articulate myself very well on such subjects, in good argumentative fashion. Though I'm a fairly rational person, I tend to be led by my intuition and emotion, so I avoid these topics for fear of sounding like a nut. But Michelle's a special case.

I remember the first time I saw Michelle Malkin's young Filipina face on C-SPAN -- I thought, sweet, she looks like me! I mean, I'm fully Japanese, but I tend more on the brown side than the yellow, so when I flipped the channel and saw for the first time a face that I could easily replace with my own, I admittedly got a little excited.

I started listening to her arguments about protecting our daughters and whatnot, reeeaaally wanting to be able to agree with my Asian sister, but starting to feel a little distant. After a while I gave up, but was still excited about having more representation, another face, even if the persuAsian was a little more right-leaning than I liked.

And then that book came out.

So what did you all think? Both the polls and the pols seemed to give the debate to Kerry, and I'd agree. Hard to take off the partisan lens (as I sit and type in my Kerry t-shirt) but I thought the Senator came across forcefully. OK, here come the links: