From Pine View Farm

And it runs Opera.

Addendum, 10/28/2007:

er, not any more.

It’s all boxed up and going back to T-Mobile. Seems the Wing touchscreens have issues, and the Tech Support girl was real up front that the issues are not, what do you say? necessarily “isolated.” They are related to memory capacity.

I’ve dragged out my old Samsung (which is, frankly, a damned fine phone–it does everything it promises to do) for the time being, and picked out the replacement phone for the Wing (Why did I pick the Dash? It is capable of running Opera Mobile).

I have to say that one of the things that has always impressed me about T-Mobile is the calibre of their tech support and customer service operations. I spent 60 minutes on the phone with them today (not on the brick Wing–on the land line), and less than five minutes was hold time, as I got forwarded from regular tech support to PDA tech support. The support techs knew what they were doing, ask the right questions in the right order, and, most important, listen to answers.

And that’s fairly typical of my dealings with them since back in the old Voicestream days–quick phone pick-ups, knowledgeable reps, and competent answers.

Hey, I know good support. I worked support for eight years.

Addendum-de-dum-dum, All Hallow’s Eve, 2007:

So I shipped the Wing back to T-Mobile on Monday.

I called Customer Service on Tuesday with the tracking number for the shipment.

I received the new phone today. The Samsung’s back in the drawer.

The Dash is already running Opera Mobile as the default browser.

I really have only praise for that level of customer service.

You can say it, but that doesn’t mean I have to listen.

You can say it, but that doesn’t mean anyone has to publish it (remember, it’s freedom of speech, not freedom to be published by someone else).

You can say it, and the rest of the world is free to decided you are an idiot.

You can say it, and be denied the opportunity to accompany children on a field trip.

Yeah, really.

A blogger says her right to free speech was violated when the school district removed her from a list of approved school volunteers because of content on her Web site.

Lisa Becker, who owns www.thebarnegatpress.com, was removed from the list at the Board of Education’s regular meeting Monday night. After asking why, Becker, who has three children in the district, was told she would be allowed to volunteer in the future once the site was taken down.

“What I do, yes it’s opinionated, but it has nothing to do with my ability to volunteer,” said Becker, whose past volunteering included work with the high school marching band and passing out sandwiches at school picnics.

You can decide for yourself how subversive her website is by clicking here.

Tip to Linda.

My father used to refer to all bird dogs as “useless bird dogs.”

Not only are they useless, they are apparently vindictive.

A hunter is recovering after he was shot in the leg at close range by his dog, who stepped on his shotgun and tripped the trigger, an official said Tuesday.

The New York Times learns from its mistakes on Iraq:

America’s allies and increasingly the American public are playing a ghoulish guessing game: Will President Bush manage to leave office without starting a war with Iran? Mr. Bush is eagerly feeding those anxieties. This month he raised the threat of “World War III” if Iran even figures out how to make a nuclear weapon.

With a different White House, we might dismiss this as posturing — or bank on sanity to carry the day, or the warnings of exhausted generals or a defense secretary more rational than his predecessor. Not this crowd.

Four years after his pointless invasion of Iraq, President Bush still confuses bullying with grand strategy. He refuses to do the hard work of diplomacy — or even acknowledge the disastrous costs of his actions. The Republican presidential candidates have apparently decided that the real commander in chief test is to see who can out-trash talk the White House on Iran.

Endless war.

It’s a Republican thing.

The State Department promised Blackwater USA bodyguards immunity from prosecution in its investigation of last month’s deadly shooting of 17 Iraqi civilians, The Associated Press has learned.

The immunity deal has delayed a criminal inquiry into the Sept. 16 killings and could undermine any effort to prosecute security contractors for their role in the incident that has infuriated the Iraqi government.

“Once you give immunity, you can’t take it away,” said a senior law enforcement official familiar with the investigation.

I was listening to Friday’s Diane Rehm Show today via podcast.

According to one of the guests, one of the recommendations was that State Department investigators made was that mercenaries “contractors” actually take aim before firing!

WHAT THE HELL HAVE THE BUSHIES DONE TO WHAT OUR FOUNDERS SO QUAINTLY CALLED, “OUR SACRED HONOR”?

AND WHY THE HELL ARE YOU PUTTING UP WITH IT?

Addendum, Later That Same Evening:

Dan Froomkin:

Rice agreed that “there is a hole” in U.S. law that has prevented prosecution of contractors.

But did we really need an apparent massacre to point out this giant loophole and its perils?

As it happens, President Bush has been aware of the hole for some time — and deserves some of the blame for not fixing it earlier. Confronted about it in public more than a year ago, Bush literally laughed off the question — and then, tellingly, described his response as a case study in how he does his job.

The setting was a question-and-answer session after Bush spoke at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in April of 2006. (Here’s a video clip.)

One student, a first-year in South Asia studies, told the president: “My question is in regards to private military contractors. Uniform Code of Military Justice does not apply to these contractors in Iraq. I asked your Secretary of Defense a couple months ago what law governs their actions.

Bush: “I was going to ask him. Go ahead. (Laughter.) Help. (Laughter.)”

Student: “I was hoping your answer might be a little more specific. (Laughter.) Mr. Rumsfeld answered that Iraq has its own domestic laws which he assumed applied to those private military contractors. However, Iraq is clearly not currently capable of enforcing its laws, much less against — over our American military contractors. I would submit to you that in this case, this is one case that privatization is not a solution. And, Mr. President, how do you propose to bring private military contractors under a system of law?”

Bush: “I appreciate that very much. I wasn’t kidding — (laughter.) I was going to — I pick up the phone and say, Mr. Secretary, I’ve got an interesting question. (Laughter.) This is what delegation — I don’t mean to be dodging the question, although it’s kind of convenient in this case, but never — (laughter.) I really will — I’m going to call the Secretary and say you brought up a very valid question, and what are we doing about it? That’s how I work. I’m — thanks. (Laughter.)”

Glenn Greenwald speaks:

Do not shield the law breakers.

Via Brendan.

Golly gosh gee, Batman, you can’t believe every email you receive.

Even if it does seem to make sense.

A while ago, I explained how contemporary conservatism is morally and politically bankrupt.

To summarize, it’s bankrupt because it doesn’t work at providing compentent governance; it just makes the rich, richer and the poor, poorer.

But, of course, that’s what it’s for.

Tim F. expands on the idea (while also taking a few well-earned swings at liberalism) at Balloon Juice.

Persons who act in your and my name betray American values.

ASZ.

IEDs via Phillybits.

It ain’t always what you expect.

Andrew Cohen on corporate law-breakers (emphasis added):

An immunity-for-intelligence quid pro quo is “unacceptable,” said Judiciary Committee Chair Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and ranking Republican Arlen Specter (R-Pa.). Meanwhile, Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), who is a member of both committees, told The Post that briefings he received from his Intelligence Committee aide, who had reviewed the documents extensively, suggested that the surveillance program is illegal. “It['s] an executive power grab that is not justified by the statute or by the Constitution,” Feingold said.

Lawmakers must ensure that their new surveillance bill has better judicial and congressional oversight than the previous version. They should also consider whether there is a compelling reason to protect the assets of big corporations at the expense of individual privacy. This story, though, is rapidly becoming a symbol for all that is wrong with the legal war on terror.

Looming Out of the Fog That Same Evening:

Glenn Greenwald, via Atrios.

The introduction to the World Series, with silly actors in stupid scenes spliced into cuts of real ball players doing real things, is one of the most painful piles of pitiful perflufful I’ve ever seen.

But it is typical of an organization that likes to Make Stuff Up.

Had to turn on the heat today.

Second Daughter requested one of these when First Grandson was born.

She says First Grandson seems to like it.

And it says right on the box not to put it anywhere but the floor or the ground (emphasis below added):

Early Show consumer correspondent Susan Koeppen reports the Consumer Product Safety Commission has announced the voluntary recall of about a million Bumbo “Baby Sitter” Seats, made by Bumbo International, of South Africa.

The CPSC says, “If the seat is placed on a table, countertop, chair, or other elevated surface, young children can arch their backs, flip out of the Bumbo seat, and fall onto the floor, posing a risk of serious head injuries.”

I’m going to be the last person to argue that businesses are always virtuous.

They are not.

But in this case, it’s not the chairs that need to be recalled. It’s the parents.

Erik Prince makes a point:

On the mercenary front, Erik Prince uttered a revealing remark the other day. The founder/owner of Blackwater, who says his longstanding family Republican ties have played absolutely no role in his reaping of more than $1.02 billion in private security contracts from the Bush administration, was being quizzed on CNN on the issue of accountability…or, more specifically, about why the Bush team and the Iraqi government have long failed to hold Blackwater accountable for anything (as two new audits have also concluded).

Prince was asked, “Whose laws are you subject to?” And in response, almost in passing, he told CNN: “Well, in the ideal sense, we would be subject to the Iraqi law, but that would mean — that would indicate that there was a functioning Iraqi court system where Westerners could actually get a fair trial. That’s not the case right now.”

Well, that’s not very helpful to the Bush team, is it? The administration has been struggling for many months to put the best spin on the failure of the Iraqi government to meet the benchmarks laid out in Washington…and here is Prince, casually mentioning a failure that is not even addressed in the benchmarks.

So much for the Bushie-installed “government” of Iraq.

Of course, the next inference from the statement is that Swampwater is subject to no laws, but that’s already been discussed here.

Josh Marshall observes Islamofascism Awareness Week.

No, that’s not right.

He doesn’t observe so much as dissect it.

Which fits with this, from Arianna Huffington. As I have observed to a couple of my Republican friends (yes, I do have them, and, yes, we are able to talk with fisticuffs, because they are good and decent persons–I’m the jerk), the Republican Party of Ev Dirksen, Dwight Eisenhower, and even Robert Taft is long gone:

The most significant takeover of the past decade isn’t to be found among the telecoms, the big oil companies, or in Silicon Valley. The reconfigured entity is headquartered in Washington, but we can see and hear the results everyday on your television, radio, and computer screen. And America is much the worse for it. I’m talking about the takeover of the Republican Party by its lunatic fringe.

Reagan’s GOP has been replaced by the dark, moldering, putrefied party of Bush, Cheney, Rove, Limbaugh, Coulter, and Malkin. Morning in America has given way to Midnight in America.

Of course, there the Republican Party has always had it Jesse Helmses, Spiro Agnews, and Lee Atwaters. But they were the minority, far removed from the mainstream of the Party — Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, the first George Bush.

But these days it has become impossible to tell where the mainstream stops and the fanatical fringe begins. Just look at what the so-called “mainstream” of the party is endorsing

We have a mainstream on the right that supports torture, that is backing an Attorney General nominee who is agnostic on torture, and that rallies behind a president who refuses to define what the word “torture” means.

A mainstream that supports — even applauds — the behavior of Blackwater thugs.

A mainstream that continues to back the White House’s delusions about Iraq at the expense of our military, our treasure, our safety, and our standing in the world.

A mainstream that supports the gutting of our civil liberties.

So, it can no longer be denied: the right wing lunatics are running the Republican asylum.

Josh Marshall video via Brendan.

This is beyond words:

A friendly 4-year-old golden retriever, Kelsey’s natural reaction to strangers was to greet them and wait to be petted.

But a man in a white shirt who encountered the dog Monday afternoon didn’t do that, New Castle County police said. He strangled Kelsey beside a tall pine tree outside the Centreville-area home where her owners live.

Phillibits has the details.

Redacted.

Which, of course, they wouldn’t have been if Democrats sank to the civilty level of Republicans, who casually and routinely question the patriotism of patriots.

As I pointed out here.

It’s called history. It’s sort of made up by a lot of facts and some interpretation. But the interpretation has to at least give a passing nod to the facts.

The history tells us where we came from and helps us figure out where we are going.

Lying about the history confuses us about both.

But, then, there are folks who base their way of life, their philosophies, and their politics on lies.

Josh Marshall comments.

Help compensate the lady for a lost career, lost retirement, and betrayal by her employers.

Extraordinary rendition.

Involved being rendered.

Like a horse into glue.

Follow the link for the facts.

1. Rendition is something the Bush administration cooked up.

Nope. George W. Bush was still struggling to coax oil out of the ground when the United States “rendered to justice” its first suspect from abroad. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan authorized an operation that lured Lebanese hijacker Fawaz Younis to a boat off the coast of Cyprus . . . .

Beginning in 1995, the Clinton administration turned up the speed with a full-fledged program to use rendition to disrupt terrorist plotting abroad. According to former director of central intelligence George J. Tenet, about 70 renditions were carried out before Sept. 11, 2001, most of them during the Clinton years.

2. People who are “rendered” inevitably end up in a foreign slammer — or worse.

Actually, that’s not a foregone conclusion.

(snip)

3. Step one of a rendition involves kidnapping the suspect.

The individual may feel as though he’s being kidnapped, but that’s not usually what’s going on.

(snip)

4. Rendition is just a euphemism for outsourcing torture.

Well, not historically.

(snip)

Now, though, the Bush team seems to have dramatically eroded such safeguards (torture is their pornography–ed.).

(snip)

5. Pretty much anyone — including U.S. citizens and green card holders — can be rendered these days.

Not so, . . . .

(snip)

In fairness, though, the ghastly case of Maher Arar — a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who convincingly says he was detained at New York’s JFK Airport, handed off to Syria and tortured — is way too close for comfort.

Proud of your government now?

Tomorrow, Tangier Restaurant, 18th and Lombard, Philadelphia, Pa.

Be there or be square.

Dan Froomkin (emphasis added):

While Cheney’s language was not radically different from what he has used in the past, Stolberg writes that “people at the conference said that, placed in the context of Mr. Bush’s remarks, it represented a significant step toward increasing pressure on Iran. The speech seemed to lay the groundwork for the threat of military action — either because the administration actually intends to use force or because it wants to use the threat of force to prod Europe into action.”

Stolberg continues: “Mr. Bush has repeatedly said the administration would not ‘tolerate’ a nuclear-armed Iran. But during a news conference on Wednesday, the president went further, saying of Iran: ‘If you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.’”

Furthermore, Stolberg notes: “That distinction — having the knowledge to make a nuclear weapon, as opposed to actually having a weapon — is one the administration has not made in the past. David Makovsky, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute who moderated a panel discussion before and after Mr. Cheney’s speech, said the vice president also seemed to draw a new red line when, instead of saying it is ‘not acceptable’ for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, he said the world ‘will not allow’ it.

More to the point, the challenge to keep Iran “from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon” is prima facie absurd. The knowledge of how to make a nuclear weapon is in the public domain and has been so for over 50 years. It’s called “nuclear physics.”

But as an instrument for whipping up emotions among the ignorant and the hysterical, what a wonderful phrase!

Open Source beats pirated. Of course, as far as I am concerned, Linux beats Windows three ways to Sunday, but that’s another story.

By 2009, all computers in Russian schools are to be run on Linux – which means they will not have to pay for a licence for software, such as Microsoft’s Windows.

Alexey Smirnov, Director General of the Company ALTLinux, said that schools formerly tended to run illegal copies of Microsoft operating systems, but after Russia entered the WTO, the laws became much stricter and schools began to be prosecuted for doing so.

“The situation became rather serious, and something had to be done,” he told BBC World Service’s Digital Planet programme.

“One possible decision was to buy licences for all the software being used – but so much software was being used, it proved too expensive… so the decision was taken to use free software, although not immediately, but over three years.”

Via Adrian Bacon.

Tizzy in a teacup:

A do-it-yourself Craftsman-style Sears kit house, painstakingly assembled in 1925 by its owner, is up for grabs in Northwest Washington — not for a price but simply for the taking.

The two-story house, assessed by the District tax office at $813,950, has been boarded up for more than a decade and hardly looks like the showplace depicted in old Sears catalogue drawings. A plumber named Jesse Baltimore put it together — all 10,000 parts — with the help of a 77-page Sears, Roebuck and Co. instruction book. He was among thousands of people across the nation who bought the company’s house kits decades ago.

A plumber built this house in the Palisades neighborhood in 1925 from a kit he purchased from a Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog.

Neighbors advocating demolition declared the house an eyesore years ago. But preservationists hailed it as an important symbol of how Washington’s working-class neighborhoods developed after World War I. The preservationists wanted to keep the house right where it sits in the Palisades neighborhood.

(Aside: Northwest Washington is definitely the high-rent district.)

I grew up on the Sears and Montgomery Ward Catalogs. On Pine View Farm, they were our link to shopping. The nearest cities were 90 miles away (north) or 40 miles and an hour-and-a-half ferry ride (south).

A house in a box is certainly a curiosity, but really not much different from the McMansions being thrown up now (I have seen the kits from a leading McMansion manufacturer heading down the road on the backs of flat-beds–don’t remove the scaffolding until the Ty-Vek is up), but, given that, as the story later points out, “(a)bout 90 percent of the estimated 75,000 Sears houses sold across the country still stand,” this house is hardly a historical site worthy of preservation.

More a historical curiosity.

Or click here.

Via Phillybits.

It was good to see First Son and First Daughter-in-Law.

The campus of my alma mater has not changed much. A few new buildings, a couple of new statues, and co-eds a lot younger than I remember them.

Colonial Disneyland is still as nice as ever.

And the wireless cloud in the hotel did not reach our room, but, in all other ways, the hotel was top-notch.

First Son will be on the way back to Afghanistan early next month, hopefully to end his S(pl)urged ™ tour next spring.

He reckons that, after that, it will be back to Iraq.

I just can’t think of anything more to say.

Time served?