Yearly Archives: 2005

Shrub’s brain to lead NOLA rebuilding effort

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Over on talking points memo Josh Marshall has an item about shrub assigning Karl Rove to assemble the team to determine how to rebuild New Orleans.

Priorities on display, from the Post …

Bush already has dispatched his top strategist, Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, and other aides to assemble ideas from agencies, conservative think tanks, GOP lawmakers and state officials to guide the rebuilding of New Orleans and relocation of flood victims. The idea, aides said, is twofold: provide a quick federal response that comports with Bush’s governing philosophy, and prevent Katrina from swamping his second-term ambitions on Social Security, taxes and Middle East democracy-building.

Head of effort, Karl Rove.
Sources of ideas, Agencies, conservative think tanks, GOP lawmakers.
The aim, quick response that squares with conservatism.
Aim, part II, not getting distracted from real priorities.

Anybody with 2 brain cells to rub together would problably gather some urban planning experts and architects and maybe sociologists to figure out how best to rebuild a devestated city. But shrub gets his main political strategist and conservative activists to decide how the city should be reconstructed. As usual everything comes down to the republican political agenda and how to move it forward. This is yet another display of shrub’s atrocious judgement. Why would anyone trust anything this man says or does?

Great idea from Dave Slusher

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Listening to the Sept 11 edition of Evil Genius Chronicles this morning Dave had the following tag lines for haliburton:

Haliburton, We’re # 1 in the misery business

This show sponsered by Haliburton. If you’re fucked, we’ll make money on it

Dave Slusher, Sept 11 2005

Dave had a great suggestion for a protest on his Sept 11 podcast. Anyone who finds themself within earshot of dick cheney should yell “Go fuck yourself!!” and anyone within earshot of shrub should yell out “Major League Asshole”. Just a little way of demonstrating the lack of support for these bozos.

Bombs, gunmen kill over 150 in Baghdad

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BAGHDAD (Reuters) – A suicide bomber lured a crowd of Shi’ite day laborers to his minivan and blew it up in Baghdad on Wednesday, killing 114 people and wounding more than 156 in
Iraq’s second deadliest bombing since the war began.

Is this what nearly 2000 american troops and countless 10s of thousands of Iraqi’s have died for? Why does Don Rumsfeld still have a job? Why does Shrub still have a job? Why does anyone trust this asshole to do anything right? Call your senators now and usrge them to reject John Roberts and any other bush judicial nominees!! It is really critical that we not trust shrub to nominate anyone, especially lifetime appointments like the federal courts.

Microsoft uses invalid code on website in order to make it work with IE

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Here is another reason not to use Internet Explorer and better yet not to use any Micorsoft product. IE is so badly broken and not compliant with internet standards that MS has to use invalid html code to make pages look right in IE. This means that it won’t render properly in other browsers. In Firefox it looks like this:
ms html in firefox

MS does this on purpose because they don’t want users to use other browsers. If people use other browsers MS can’t control what they see and do. Non-IE browsers don’t work with most microsoft support and download pages either. It wasn’t always that way. Until a few months ago almost all ms pages were accessible from firefox but ms changed them so that now you get an error message that you must use IE to view this page. Fortunately someone came up with an alternate page where you can download windows updates from firefox. Just go to windizupdate.com.

Microsoft web site building tools also generate invalid html. My son’s school site doesn’t work properly in firefox either. Someone built it using a microsoft tool and it only works in IE. The school district web site used to be that way too but I managed to get in touch with someone responsible for the site and got them to fix it. I still have to figure out is responsible for the school site. This kind of behavior is part of why I refuse to support Microsoft with my money (not to mention many other reasons). Microsoft is a very poor corporate citizen, and generally does not do things that are good for the overall internet community.

BTW I found this item on digg.com, a very cool tech news site.

CapitolBuzz: Santorum Blames National Weather Service For Katrina

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Rick Santorum should be confined to House Arrest in what was the ninth ward of New Orleans for the rest of his life. This evil scumbag earlier this year introduced a bill in the US Senate that would prohibit the National Weather Service from providing weather information free to the public if any private company is also providing that information.

Do you want a seven-day weather forecast for your ZIP code? Or hour-by-hour predictions of the temperature, wind speed, humidity and chance of rain? Or weather data beamed to your cellphone?

That information is available for free from the National Weather Service

But under a bill pending in the U.S. Senate, it might all disappear.

The bill, introduced last week by Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., would prohibit federal meteorologists from competing with companies such as AccuWeather and The Weather Channel, which offer their own forecasts through paid services and free ad-supported Web sites.

Accuweather is a company based in Pennsylvania that has contributed substantial sums to Santorums campaigns. Of course Accuweather and Weather Channel and other outlets get all their weather data from the NWS, for free. They of course do not provide that information to people for free. You have to pay in some way, either advertising or your cable bill, etc to get that information from the “private” sector. Of course we have already paid for theis information through our taxes that fund the NWS, so we have a right to get this data for “free” since we paid to compile it in the first place. So scumbags like Santorum would have people pay to generate the information and then pay some company again to actually see it. Welfare for poor people is bad, but welfare for wealthy corporate contributors is just fine.

And now Santorum has the gall to say in an interview that National Weather Service warnings were not sufficient. I posted the following warning from the NWS the day before the storm hit

URGENT – WEATHER MESSAGE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE NEW ORLEANS LA
413 PM CDT SUN AUG 28 2005

EXTREMELY DANGEROUS HURRICANE KATRINA CONTINUES TO APPROACH THE
MISSISSIPPI RIVER DELTA

DEVASTATING DAMAGE EXPECTED

MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS…PERHAPS LONGER. AT
LEAST ONE HALF OF WELL CONSTRUCTED HOMES WILL HAVE ROOF AND WALL
FAILURE. ALL GABLED ROOFS WILL FAIL…LEAVING THOSE HOMES SEVERELY
DAMAGED OR DESTROYED.

He is just like all the other republican leaders, an evil, corrupt, hypocritcal liar. If that warning is not sufficient, I don’t know what is. He is all for savings unborn fetuses but once you are out, Fuck You if you actually need any help from society. Unless you of course you are big contributor to the campaign, then belly right up to the pork bar!

Dvorak Uncensored » How many members of the Bush Administration are needed to change a light bulb? 4

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I found this on John C. Dvorak’s blog. The only one I would question is #9. for that you would use the entire staff of Fox News.

How many members of the Bush Administration are needed to change a light bulb?

The Answer is TEN…

1. One to deny that a light bulb needs to be changed,

2. One to attack the patriotism of anyone who says the light bulb needs to be changed,

3. One to blame Clinton for burning out the light bulb,

4. One to tell the nations of the world that they are either for changing the light bulb or for eternal darkness,

5. One to give a billion dollar no-bid contract to Halliburton for the newlight bulb,

6. One to arrange a photograph of Bush, dressed as a janitor, standing on a step ladder under the banner “Bulb Accomplished”,

7. One administration insider to resign and in detail reveal how Bush was literally “in the dark” the whole time,

8. One to viciously smear #7,

9. One surrogate to campaign on TV and at rallies on how George Bush has had a strong light-bulb-changing policy all along,

10. And finally, one to confuse Americans about the difference between screwing a light bulb and screwing the country.

The Republicans are at it again.

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The current republican white house and congress are the the most secretive in history. Now in the wake of the collosal fuck-up the department of homeland insecurity and federal emergency mis-management agency have perpetrated on the people of the gulf coast, they are at it again. The republicans are trying to push through a nearly $52 billion aid bill. But they are refusing to allow any debate or ammendments on the bill. In fact they wont even let democrats read the text of the bill that they are expected to vote on. Clearly they are trying to hide something. Where is Tom Delay trying to send all this money? To Iraq? To Haliburton?

In the wake of what the Wall Street Journal projected may be the most expensive natural disaster in American history, the Republican Leadership in the House of Representatives limited floor consideration of the $52 billion Katrina relief bill proposed by President Bush and voted to reject any Democratic efforts to amend the bill to include a wider array of relief measures, RAW STORY has learned.

Democrats said no one had even seen a copy of the legislation.

Voting along party lines, Republicans denied a measure that would have allowed for two hours of discussion and opened up the measure to be amended.

Library wants to offer books people can’t listen to 8

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Do you use an Apple computer? Do you use a Linux based computer? Do you use an Ipod? Do you still use an older version of windows (pre-xp)? Do you only have a cd player? Well if you answered yes to any of these then the Ypsilanti library doesn’t seem to care about you. The Ypsilanti Public Library currently plans to offer a downloadable audio book service to there customers begining next year. Unfortunately they are getting this service from a company called netlibrary.com. All of netlibrary’s offerings are encoded with Windows media drm (their “plays for sure” tech). Unfortunately if you don’t have xp and don’t have one of the handful of digital audio players (mp3 players) that support this copy protection scheme you are SOL. You can’t listen to these books on a mac or linux machine. You can’t listen to them on an Ipod and you can’t burn them to a cd to listen to in your car. Oh sure there are ways around the protection. No one has ever come up with a copy protection scheme that actually prevents stuff from being copied. But that is a hassle. And since we are paying taxes to support the library, why should we have to deal with that? Approximately 70-80% of all the mp3 players sold to date are ipods (and they are quite inexpensive now starting at $99 for a shuffle). Itunes has about 75-80% of the legit downloadable music market. Clearly the market has spoken and largely rejected devices that use window media. And even if you have a windows media device that is more than about 8 months old or is one of the cheap ones they sell at Target, Wal-mart etc, you are also out of luck because they don’t support plays for sure either.

I would urge all Ypsilanti residents to contact Christy Havens at the library at

Christy Havens
Ypsilanti District Library
5577 Whittaker Road
Ypsilanti, Michigan 48197
734-482-4110 ext. 1375
havens@ypsilibrary.org

Voice your displeasure with this plan before it is too late.

Put a stop to all Bush nominee’s

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I just called the offices of Senators Carl Levin, Debbie Stabenow and Arlen Spector. I urged of all them to do whatever is necessary to stop all further Bush nominees, particularly Supreme Court nominees. There is no rule that the Supreme Court must have 9 sitting justices. The court can move forward with only 7 justices. The actions and words of George Bush himself and his appointees over the past week have clearly demonstrated that he has such poor judgement when it comes to his choices that he cannot be trusted to put anyone on the supreme court. The supreme court is far too important to let this fool mess with it. I urge anyone reading this to call there senators and also Sen Spector (he is the chairman of the judiciary comitee) and urge them to reject all Bush judicial nominees especially supreme court nominees. Here is the page where you can find the phone number of your senator’s office in Washington. Please call today. Urge them to filibuster or do whatever is necessary to stop bush nominees. After look at what his previous appointees have done in Iraq, Gauntanamo Bay, New Orleans and elsewhere.