Fiat Lux

A nice Tuesday morning in May and it's been alomst a week since I've blogged.

In my head there's parts of a post about the godawful mess that is the reports of prison abuses in Iraq at the hand of Americans but I am too drained & disgusted to put the whole thing together into coherence.

Today I am off. Tomorrow & Friday are my last two days at Aerosoles. I'm going out on a high note. The store just finished a second month in a row where it posted double-digit increases in sales over last year. If I weren't so tired & burned out, I'd be really happy about that. But mostly I'm numb.

Current plan is to take a little time - something between an week and a month - to chill out and get my head back together. I can't stay off work forever, so I'll need to get a job again by sometime in June. As yet undecided is whether I'm going to look for a placeholder job to tide me over until I go back to school, or a 'real' job. I have to say, the though of just pulling coffee at Starbucks for a while has some appeal. After all the stress I've been going through, not having much responsibility for a while is more alluring than it used to be.

When key members of the House of Saud stir up anti-Semitic propaganda instead of taking a hard look at why they have a terror problem in their country, you know there's a problem.

To be specific: Crown Prince Abdullah and Prince Saud have both blamed "Zionists" as being the ones pulling the strings behind recent terror attacks in their kingdom.

I've asked it before and I'll ask it again: with 'friends' of America like these, who needs enemies?

Thomas Friedman gets it right again:

That overhaul needs to begin with President Bush firing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld — today, not tomorrow or next month, today. What happened in Abu Ghraib prison was, at best, a fundamental breakdown in the chain of command under Mr. Rumsfeld's authority, or, at worst, part of a deliberate policy somewhere in the military-intelligence command of sexually humiliating prisoners to soften them up for interrogation, a policy that ran amok.

I know that tough interrogations are vital in a war against a merciless enemy, but outright torture, or this sexual-humiliation-for-entertainment, is abhorrent. I also know the sort of abuse that went on in Abu Ghraib prison goes on in prisons all over the Arab world every day, as it did under Saddam — without the Arab League or Al Jazeera ever saying a word about it. I know they are shameful hypocrites, but I want my country to behave better — not only because it is America, but also because the war on terrorism is a war of ideas, and to have any chance of winning we must maintain the credibility of our ideas.

Indeed. But will Bush do it? Odds are, no.

Found over at liberamediaconspiracy. Enjoy!

Truman: The buck stops here.

Bush: The buck stops anywhere but here.

Rumsfeld: The buck never made it to my desk.

Rice: The buck had no silver bullet.

Perle: The buck is the closest thing American politics has to a terrorist.

Ashcroft: The buck is under surveillance and may be seized at any time, without right to an attorney nor the right to hear the evidence against it.

Cheney: The buck is in a secure, undisclosed location.

Hughes: The buck, like the terrorists, does not value human life.

Limbaugh, Hannity, Fox News, et al: The buck stops with Clinton.

Little Green Fascists: Why does the buck hate America?

Ann Coulter: The buck is a traitor.

Michael Kelly: The buck is objectively pro-terrorist.

Ahmad Chalabi: The buck? So what? We are in Baghdad now.

PS - What exactly does 'snarky' mean?

Forgot to plug in the cappuchino maker & then spent 10 minutes wondering why my coffee wasn't brewed yet. This is only the second time in 18 months that I've had 2 days off, in a row, at home. So no wonder I'm a bit discombobulated.

It's looking like a nice day out there. It's probably a nice day back East too - I tried to call Mom & got her answering machine. No idea what she & Dad are doing but I hope they're having fun. I'll try again closer to dinnertime.

I got a nice surprise on my last work paycheck - 9 days of vacation pay. I didn't think I had quite that much vacation built up, but I did. With airfares so low, I am thinking hard about taking a week of R&R back East.

I'm still more or less staying out of the Iraqi prison mess but caught this quote of Ann Coulter's today & thought it worth citing: "this is yet another lesson in why women shouldn't be in the military."

It boggles the mind how of all the lessons that could possibly be drawn from this catastrophic mess, that is the one less Coulter draws? Crazy, I tell you.

Some reports out there include reports of rapes on Iraqi prisoners. Ann will have to figure out how that too is the fault of women in the military.

I went to do a shift at the SF SPCA yesterday for the first time in several months. It was good to be back.

I spent some of the time visiting two mama cats with their litters - one had 4 kittens, the other, 5. A reminder that kitten season is about to begin. One of the mama cats was small and visibly undernourished. She was a little skittish when I first came to her cage but after a few hisses she relaxed and started to enjoy herself. Eventually she climbed onto my lap and lay there purring while a couple of her more adventurous (or more hungry) kittens followed her.

Sometimes the mama cat gets overlooked when you visit & socialize kittens, but she needs love and attention as much as the kittens do. Moreso in some ways, because she's doing all the work. (Perhaps I'm anthropomorphizing here.) At any rate, I came very close to adopting one particularly sweet mama cat I worked with last year. Someone else got her first, and considering we already have 3 cats it's probably for the best.

The kittens, of course, generally find homes quickly.

I'm going to a retail job fair today. I really can't get up much enthusiasm for it, but I feel that I ought to be there, so I'm going. I still can't decide if I'm fed up with retail in general, or just being overworked in specific. Until I make up my mind or a better alternative comes along, I might as well keep looking for a new retail gig.

I'm more enthusiastic about the prospect of taking a week to go back east and hang out with my parents. I feel a bit guilty about taking off and leaving my husband here, but he doesn't seem to mind (lucky me!).

Here's one dedicated to all the schmucks who drive behemoth SUVs:

http://www.daveheinzel.com/suv/parking1.php.

And the job fair was a total waste of time.

Apparently Nick Berg was a Jew. Just like Daniel Pearl. Although his religion seems to have been less of an issue to the people who chopped off his head than his being an American. Still, the subtext is there and concerns me.

Atrios has a good one over on his blog today.

I've frequently said there are three kinds of cities (or colleges or countries or sports teams or insert any similar entity here).

People who live in 1st class cities never feel the need to tell everyone how great their city is. It speaks for itself. Think New York, Paris.

People who live in 2nd class cities feel the need to proclaim their greatness, and to convince you that they really are 1st class cities.

People who live in 3rd class cities just accept their lot and get on with their lives.

Scott and I disagreed whether San Francisco is a first or second class city. I think it's borderline first class, he says definitely second class.

Speaking of first class cities, I'm going home to NYC next week. Unlike my Rome trip, 'net access should be easy there, so I expect no blog interruptions.

Daily Kos has a good one about the job situation and how it will impact the coming election. The bottom line? There are fewer jobs in the United States today than there were in March 2001.

Of course this is not good news to someone who has just quit her job, but I'll worry about that some other time. The really good news is, if the Kerry campaign handles this information correctly it could be a huge help in pushing BushCo out of the White House.

I just hope they don't screw it up. Watching Kerry in the run-up to the convention has not been inspiring.

As a Jew, I freely admit that some aspects of Christianity are alien to me. The recent public debate about whether or not pro-choice Catholics should be allowed to take Communion brings to light one of them.

Here's one example: Catholics who feel so at odds with their church's ideology - who don't they just go worship at some other church? What makes them stay committed to being a Catholic even if they vehemently disagree with what their church is doing? Is it an unwillingness to let go of their tribal identification? Fear of the unknown? Do they sincerely feel that Jesus won't love them if they go to the church across the street? Is it a love of the liturgy they grew up with? Or do they think that if they wait long enough, the church will change and become more in line with their own beliefs? It could be pure politics - nobody wants to be accused of flip-flopping on moral issues. Or something else entirely that I'm overlooking because I'm not Christian.

I've heard the phrase "cafeteria Catholics" and it's a term that could be applied to a lot of other religions, Jews included. I'm guilty of the practice myself. But I do think you have to draw the line somewhere. Not agreeing with every aspect of a religion is one thing. But if you disagree with enough key points, sooner or later I think you have to ask yourself what you're really doing there.

I'm also aware that the Catholic church is not monolithic on this subject. There are bishops who would excommunicate anyone who is pro-choice and there are those who would not. And perhaps that diversity of opinion is enough to give Catholics hope.

It would make for some big headlines if a few high-profile Catholics switched affiliation to other denominations. I doubt it would change what the Catholic church is doing though. If the morass that is the wholesale molestation of children by priests has not overly upset the Vatican, I doubt a few politicians changing affiliations would.

Side note - Andrew Sullivan has a good article on this issue. His focus is partially on Bob Novak and some snarkiness about an Opus Dei priest, but it's worth a read.

Only 6 weeks after the fact, my travelogue of our trip to Rome is now online.

Click here or on the link to your right to enjoy!

That seems to be the overwhelming issue in the Movable Type blogosphere this weekend.

I respect the folks at SixApart, but the way they have mishandled the launch of 3.0 clearly shows that they do not have enough people with communications skills on staff. Not surprising in a tech-oriented startup, of course, but in this case - a startup that creates software used to communicate - it's a big problem. Mena Trott gives some clues to their thinking in her revised announcement about MT 3.0.

I'm willing to bet that SixApart made a few classic mistakes in coming up with their licensing. They trusted their survey results too much, and they didn't talk to enough users at critical stages.

One of the most valid comments we heard is that the personal licenses do not work well for many people who are currently using Movable Type. This surprised us because in a survey of 2500 people, a whopping 85% of respondents had 5 of fewer weblogs or authors. This help educate our final decisions about the weblog and author limits.

The more important question is, who were those 2500 users? Were they self-selected or was any effort put into making sure that a broad cross-section of users, from little bloggers like me to big users like Jason Calacanis, participated? Not balancing your participant base is a very good way to get data that is accurate yet ultimately wrong.

The second question is, did SixApart vet this new licensing package with any customers before launching it? With a level of upset as big as this one, if they had bothered to talk to even a handful of customers before going public with their pricing they would surely have gotten some indication that they needed to rethink things. Instead, they have had to handle a very public firestorm.

Now, to their credit, they are trying to calm the waters, and with some success. But they are at a critical junction. I hope they respond by putting one or more people on staff who are more practiced in the arts of marketing, product management and corporate communications. I'm tempted to send them a resume myself, but I suspect they're already flooded with them.

When I started this blog, I chose Movable Type because several blogger pals (most notably my friend Mashby) were using it and all seemed quite happy with it. I know just enough about HTML, CSS, and configuring software to be able to tweak a package into something that works for me, and the lingering ghost of the techie I once was makes me unwilling to use a hosted service if I can run things myself. MT fit the bill. I gladly sent in a $25 donation last fall to SixApart, and had no expectation that I would want to look elsewhere for blogging software. Movable Type definitely has some annoyances and limitations (rebuilding is an ongoing PITA) but overall it does what I want it to do without getting in the way too much.

I have not yet decided whether or not I am going to stay with MT for the long haul. I'd like to see a clearer product evolution path for one thing - what features are going to be offered in the future, and which of those will not be in the free version? It could well be that MT 3.x is worth paying for, but right now there's not enough information for me to make a decision.

I've invested time and energy getting my blog set up the way I want it. I don't particularly want to have to spend a lot of time starting all over again with a new system if I don't have to. But right now, SixApart is not giving me enough information with which to make an informed decision. That's frustrating, and it's another sign that SixApart badly needs someone on staff who knows how to communicate with customers.

I'm going to wait and see what happens for the next couple of weeks. Hopefully by the time I get back from New York more dust will have settled and I'll be able to make a more informed decision about whether to upgrade or not.

Buzz Machine and Stupid Evil Bastard both have interesting takes on this issue as well. They're worth a read.

To be honest, I couldn't finish reading Seymour Hersh's expose in the New Yorker. It's way too depressing.

One thing that does bother me a little is that in the tradition of Watergate, few sources cited in the article are identified by name. Not surprising, given the subject matter, but it does make me a bit uneasy. I'm going to give Hersh and the New Yorker the benefit of the doubt, though, and assume that if they're going to publish accusations like this, then their sources are multiple and significant.

The DOD, of course, put out a standard denial (thanks to Talking Points for the link). It's interesting, though, that although the spokesperson claims that the article is 'filled with error' she only cites one relatively minor point as an obvious error. One would think that if Hersh had truly made some 'dramatically false assertions' she'd have more specific corrections to make than just that one.

I'm not completely naive. I know that gathering intelligence is a hard business. But I think there are some lines a civilized nation should not cross unless under the most extreme of emergencies - and as far as I can tell, Abu Ghriab was not one of them. It wasn't even close.

Seen in the New York Times today: A Sports Turnaround: the Team Doctors Now Pay the Team.

Apparently there's a new trend in player health care: "In an upside-down scenario spawned by an increasingly competitive health-care market, hospitals and medical practices — eager for any promotional advantage — have begun bidding to pay pro teams as much as $1.5 million annually for the right to treat their high-salaried players."

It's a lengthy article that tries to cover the practice from both sides. On the surface, the teams are probably correct when they say that their players' quality of care is not affected. That's not the real issue, though.

The article claims, and again I'm sure they're right, medical institutions gain paying customers and prestige by being known as 'The official medical group of [insert favorite NFL/NBA/MLB team here]'. "Sports industry experts say that teams for years have had official soft drinks, official beers and official pickup trucks, so why not official health-care providers?" says the article.

I think it demeans the practice of medicine to equate a doctor with a hot dog. But even more than whether or not it's dignified, I find the concept disturbing on an ethical level. We're talking about people in pain, potentially with career threatening injuries. Sponsorship deals should not be a part of the treatment equation.

Years ago, when I was still active in the theater, I had an accident and broke one of my toes. It was three weeks before opening night for a show I was in, and I needed to get my foot fixed, fast and right. I ended up seeing a doctor who, my mother informed me, treated not only members of the New York Mets but also the New York City Ballet. I was impressed, and rightfully so. When I told the doctor that I needed to dance onstage in three weeks, she knew how to help me; in fact, right before opening night I took my dance shoes to her office and she rewrapped my bandaged foot so it would fit inside the shoe.

What impressed me, though, was that those star athletes and dancers had chosen to go to this podiatrist. I would have felt differently if I'd known that the doctor had paid a big fee to the Mets and that the players were contractually obligated to go there. I suppose I can't blame people for thinking that "the players go there, so it must be good". After all, I did too. But that was then.

OK, I'll add my two cents to the list of "How I use MT" trackbacks. I currently have one author and two blogs. I expect to add one more blog every 6 to 12 months within my own personal blog. Plans are in the works to add two more blogs and two more authors for friends/family members.

But I also want to make it very clear that my personal concern is not ultimately about the number of authors and weblogs allocated to each segment of the license. That's a symptom of the bigger problem. Simply put, it's about perceived value for price. The issue is not "I don't want to pay for MT". The issue is, I don't want to pay this particular price for this particular feature set.

I would be quite willing to shell out $ for MT above and beyond what I already paid last fall *if* there were a current and/or future feature set worth paying for. Optimizing existing code is fine but that plus one questionable new feature (spammers have already begun to register over on typekey) is not enough change. Right now there is no compelling reason for the user like me to upgrade except for the fact that if we don't do it now, it may well cost more to upgrade in the future. Maybe you can get away with that if you're Microsoft, but not if you're a startup like SixApart.

Here's a few examples: Give me a CMS that does not require me to rebuild my site because I add one link to my links list. Give me more and better tools for managing comments that does not force me into a 3rd party service. Give me more and better tools for creating and mangaing templates. Make it easier to integrate graphics into posts, or even a whole photo album.

Give me stuff like that and I'll get out my credit card again.

Since Mena said she was going to delete trackbacks that are "commentaries on SixApart" this one probably won't stay in the trackback list for long. But I hope that it at least gets read and the message gets through.

I'm travelling to NYC today. See ya on the flip side!

Greetings from New York City. It's warm and muggy.

Quote of the day, from Senator Joseph Biden by way of the Guardian:

"With at least 82% of the Iraqis saying they oppose American and allied forces, how long do you think it will be before the Iraqi government asks our departure?"

Ouch.

You know it's getting silly when what Dan Brown left OUT of "The Davinci Code" is newsworthy.

Dan Brown said that when he wrote the best seller that dissects the origins of Jesus Christ and disputes long-held beliefs about Catholicism, he considered including material alleging that Jesus Christ survived the crucifixion.

It's a reasonably entertaining novel but it's not going to sit next to "Wuthering Heights" or "I, Claudius" in the annals of classic fiction. I have to assume that it's the subject matter, and that some people are having a hard time having their religion treated as fodder for fiction.

I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised. The amount of traffic my little review of "The Davinci Code" has generated is still regular, more than six months after I posted it.

I'm currently in the middle of a Daniel Silva novel, "The Confessor." It's a decent read so far. I hope he doesn't have the same third-act problems that Dan Brown has.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

A nice flight home. I'm pooped.

Kudos to Atrios (most days, my favorite blog) for pointing me to this Krugman Quote of the Day on jobs:

In April, the economy added 288,000 jobs. If you do the math, you discover that President Bush needs about four years of job growth at last month's rate to reach what his own economists consider full employment.

The bottom line, then, is that Mr. Bush's supporters have no right to complain about the public's failure to appreciate his economic leadership. Three years of lousy performance, followed by two months of good but not great job growth, is not a record to be proud of.

And to end the day, a bit of bad news.

'Babylon 5' actor Richard Biggs dies.

It's sad when talent passes too soon.

I didn't see a single cicada while in NY/CT this past several days, but this is funny as heck anyway (thanks for the link, Craig!). Here's a sample:

Do Cicadas make that loud buzzing sound to attract a mate? No, that is a common myth. Our research indicates that sound is actually a battle cry that roughly translates as Kill the Humans. When you hear that sound, take cover! It means the killing spree is about to begin.

Courtesy of Cicadaville. Now go read the rest and enjoy.

As Yogi Berra might say, "It's deja vu all over again." Remember the spate of articles published in the mid-late 1990s about people who used the then-new medium called the Internet? What did many of them focus on? Obsessive Internet use. So today, The New York Times writes about blogs. And what do they focus on? Obsessive bloggers.

Blogging is a pastime for many, even a livelihood for a few. For some, it becomes an obsession.

Can't the mainstream media come up with something else to write about? There are probably a couple of million blogs out here in the blogosphere. There's got to be something more newsworthy in all that wealth of punditry, rants, raves, personal details, pet and child photos, and general snarkiness. There's got to be at least a few good stories in there somewhere.

The cynic in me suggests that if mainstream media were to take a more realistic look at blogs and blogging, they would have to ask themelves some hard questions about whether they don't have some things to learn about reporting from the blogosphere. (Jeff Jarvis has touched on this subject over at Buzz Machine). So instead, they look at the freakshow aspects.

I certainly don't consider myself to be obsessed with my blog. There are days I post multiple times, there are days I don't post at all. If I don't post for a couple of days, I do start feeling like I ought to get something up here, but it's hardly a compulsion. And I suspect many - dare I say most? - casual bloggers feel the same way.

But of course, that's not newsworthy.

More or less right on schedule. Bush isn't looking too good in the polls, so what happens? The word starts to go out that a vote for Kerry is a vote for the terrorists.

[CNN reporter Kelli] ARENA: Neither John Kerry nor the president has said troops pulled out of Iraq any time soon. But there is some speculation that al Qaeda believes it has a better chance of winning in Iraq if John Kerry is in the White House.

BEN VENZKE, INTELCENTER: Al Qaeda feels that Bush is, even despite casualties, right or wrong for staying there is going to stay much longer than possibly what they might hope a Democratic administration would.

Source: CNN

Arena's quote particularly annoyed me. It would be nice to know who is speculating that sort of thing. Sounds like the kind of thing a Republican operative would say "in confidence" to a reporter, hoping that said shill would repeat it on the air. Heck, it worked for Judith Miller, why not here?

With examples like this happening on a daily basis, small wonder why so few people think the media is trustworthy these days.

Update: I sent an email to Eason Jordan, CNN's chief news exec. Not likely I'm going to get an answer, but at least I feel like I did something.

Dear Mr. Jordan,

During the '91 Iraq war, I had CNN on virtually non-stop. Through most of the 1990s, CNN was what I turned to for my news coverage. Over the last 2 or 3 years though, I've declined my viewership. These days, I scarcely watch CNN at all.

Want to know why? Comments like this one:

"ARENA: Neither John Kerry nor the president has said troops pulled out of Iraq any time soon. But there is some speculation that al Qaeda believes it has a better chance of winning in Iraq if John Kerry is in the White House."

Courtesy of http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0405/27/wbr.01.html

Arena is a CNN reporter, not a guest on that show. When she talks about what Al Qaeda is thinking, it would be nice to know her sources, assuming she actually had any. Who exactly is it that thinks Kerry as POTUS would somehow help Al Qaeda? Sounds like the kind of thing a Republican operative would say "in confidence" to a reporter, hoping that said reporter would repeat it on the air.

Isn't it CNN's job to actually report the news, not shill for the politicos? Oh wait, Judith Miller already answered that one. (Yes, I know she did not work for CNN. The point still stands.)

I wish this were an isolated incident, but it is not. Every day, journalists are doing less and less real reporting and more attending briefings and then parroting back what they're told. Sure, it's easier to get your story in when all you have to do is show up at a press photo op, upload a press release, and do a live intro to the package. But that's not news. It's PR.

You guys need to take a hard look at what you call news these days. If you did, you might actually get viewers like me back in front of the TV.

I found 2 reports online today (here and here) referring to the possibility that Iran is taking an active hand in Iraqi affairs by recruiting suicide bombers to go after US/British targets in Iraq and elsewhere.

I don't know whether the World Tribune is a reliable source, but MEMRI, although they do have a pro-Israel agenda, at least can be trusted to get its translations accurately.

What's disturbing is not that there are more threats being made to recruit and send out suicide bombers. That's hardly news. What I do find disturbing is the direct linkage of the threats to the US occupation of Iraq.

When people ask for proof that Bush's war is in fact not making the world safer for America and Democracy, this is the kind of thing we can point to. But since most of it is not happening in English-language news sources, it's going overlooked.

I frequently find that Atrios's perspective on events is similar to mine, but I think he's a little off base with his latest take on the Allawi situation. This may be one time where dislike of the Bush administration is coloring his analysis.

Looking at the Washington Post article he cited, as well as some of the extensive reporting on the issue over at Talking Points, it seems clear from all accounts that Allawi was a main, if not the top, candidate for the PM slot. Since this was known to the UN, the US, and to the Iraqi Governing Council, it's not so surprising that the Governing Council would use this information in an attempt to look relevant and/or independant by naming Allawi.

In other words, it's not that nobody was at the helm. It's that the Iraqi Governing Council - possibly egged on by Allawi himself - decided to try steering.

Whether Allawi is a good choice, I am undecided. Some of the info coming out about him - like his tie to now-disproven memos about Saddam's WMD capability - is troubling. I'd like to see some more information before making up my mind though.

An art gallery owner is assaulted because someone decided they didn't like some of the art in her gallery - specifically, a painting showing US soldiers torturing naked men. The gallery is now closed.

What's surprising is this happened in San Francisco, not a city know for its quanitity of right wing activists.

Seen on MSNBC's site today:

A handgun that Saddam Hussein was clutching when U.S. forces captured him in a hole in Iraq last December is now kept by President Bush at the White House, Time magazine reported Sunday.

Aside from the obvious phallic subtext, there's nothing particularly bad about that. However, the article goes on to point out that said gun:

is kept in a small study off the Oval Office where Bush displays memorabilia. It is the same room where former President Clinton had some of his encounters with former intern Monica Lewinsky.

It's like some sort of sick reflex. No matter that our economy is shaky, millions of Americans are out of work, and our soldiers are dying in a nearly unwinnable war in Iraq. People just can't stop themselves from slipping in a comment about Clinton getting blowjobs.

I'm going to watch George Stephanopolis on TiVo and see if my mood improves.

Is there anyone left in the Bush administration that is not a proven liar?

Liar of the Day: Dick Cheney.

A Pentagon e-mail said Vice President Dick Cheney coordinated a huge Halliburton government contract for Iraq, despite Cheney's denial of interest in the company he ran until 2000.

In previous administrations, this would be the stuff of resignations and impeachments. Now it's just business as usual.

Morning tip of the hat to Rude Pundit for this followup on Bush's Saddam firearm:

Exactly how may laws, federal and D.C., might the President be breaking with his possession of that firearm? Did he receive a background check for the transfer of ownership? Is Bush licensed to possess a firearm in a federal facility? The District of Columbia prohibits firearms to be gifts. How many people are implicated in Bush's firearm possession?

It's like they think the laws don't apply to them.

It's been pretty well covered in the blogosphere already but I can't resist the Washington Post article on the Bush team's amazing run of negative campaign ads.

Three-quarters of the ads aired by Bush's campaign have been attacks on Kerry. Bush so far has aired 49,050 negative ads in the top 100 markets, or 75 percent of his advertising. Kerry has run 13,336 negative ads -- or 27 percent of his total. The figures were compiled by The Washington Post using data from the Campaign Media Analysis Group of the top 100 U.S. markets. Both campaigns said the figures are accurate.

Pandagon does the math for us (emphasis added):

An interesting thing about that number - if 13,336 is the number of negative ads Kerry has run and it's 27% of his total, then Bush has run about as many negative ads (49,050) as Kerry has ads total (49,392). By any standard, that's just ridiculous.

And it's only Memorial Day. What's the picture going to look like in September?