Month: May 2004

And Bernstein speaks

POTUS gives his latest speech in about 2 hours. I’ll be out to dinner with some family members & will thankfully miss it. Given what’s been proposed to the UN today, it’s pretty easy to guess what will be in the speech tonight anyway.

Instead, here’s a nice article by Carl Bernstein about why Bush must go, and why the GOP need to get off their collective butts and do the kicking. Not that they’re likely to do so.

Is it pathological?

Daily Kos catches the Bush team in another lie – this time, about why Bush did a face plant while out on a bicycle ride.

In short, when asked why Bush fell, White House spin control droid Trent Duffy said: “It’s been raining a lot and the topsoil is loose.”

There hasn’t been significant rain in Crawford TX in 10 days.

It’s so stupid and trivial, that on the one hand, you might think, ‘Who cares?’. On the other hand, why would you lie about something so trivial, and so easy to catch as a lie, unless you have no respect whatsoever for the truth?

I know there’s a war on and that there’s a lot more to get upset about in this country than why our presidnet fell off his bicycle. But this is symptomatic of the crisis our country is in. If you can’t trust the White House Press Office to tell the truth about something so trivial as this, how can you trust them about anything they say?

Is Graffiti not dead after all?

Longtime aficionados of the Palm OS were very displeased when the entity now known as PalmOne lost a patent infringement suit to Xerox over their single-stroke text entry system called Graffiti.

This time, the good guys finally won one. The suit has been invalidated.

I sincerely hope that PalmOne will now bring back Graffiti as an option in their operating system. The new version, created because of that dratted lawsuit, sucks.

A Weekend in the Country

Spent a lovely weekend more or less offline with my parents at their summer home CT. Today, I helped them move their sailboat from its winter home in Mamaroneck, NY to its summer slip in Rowayton, CT.

It took about 7 hours, because although there was a reasonable amount of wind, it was blowing from the wrong direction and we had to beat all over Long Island Sound to get where we were going. I hadn’t been on a boat in more than 4 years and was a bit nervous that I’d be no help, but to my pleasure discovered that I can still stand a trick at the wheel and trim a sail, although I had to think a lot harder about whether what I was doing was right than I used to.

The last hour was a little stressful, as we started sailing right towards a fairly powerful thunderstorm. It was a warm day, and I had some spare dry clothes with me, so getting wet wasn’t that big a deal, but the frequent bolts of lighting were a little scary to watch when you’re out on the water with a really tall metal mast inviting the lightening to come pay a visit. I saw one particularly brilliant lighting strike hit a flagpole right on the edge of the shore. That got me nervous. However, the lighting decided to steer clear of our boat and we made it back to shore drenched but otherwise unharmed.

Tomorrow, I get together with a few more family members in NYC and Tuesday I’m back in SF.

This is just WRONG

Thought I was done with blogging for this day but found one last headline that makes me feel sick: Son mistreated to make father talk.

The analyst said the teenager was stripped naked, thrown in the back of an open truck, driven around in the cold night air, splattered with mud and then presented to his father at Abu Ghraib, the prison at the center of the scandal over abuse of Iraqi detainees.

Upon seeing his frail and frightened son, the prisoner broke down and cried and told interrogators he would tell them whatever they wanted, the analyst said.

And what would have happened to the son if the father had not broken down? We’re supposed to be better than this.