Most people disn’t even know he was still running, but in time for the convention, Kucinich has formally pulled out of the race for president. He had no chance, but he ran a classy race – as a Pandagon commenter suggests, the race Nader should have been running.
It would be nice if Kucinich can now be utilized to try to get some of the Nader supporters to come to their senses – but somehow I doubt they’ll listen.
I know the 9/11 report is out today but I am not going to deal with it. The process has become too politicized to even remotely hope for good advice to come out of it; the best we can hope for is some tidbits of useful information.
So Linda Ronstadt got in trouble with the casino who hired her for dedicating a song to Michael Moore. I think that’s pretty lame, frankly. I also think it’s lame that nothing was done about the audience members who reportedly
tore down concert posters and tossed cocktails into the air.
Michael Moore has weighed in on the issue here – offering a personal appearance and a free screening of Fahrenheit 9/11 as a way for the Aladdin casino to make it up to the American public. Think what you want of Moore, but he is an excellent publicist.
I’m kind of annoyed by the whole thing and decided to make a gesture. I went over to iTunes and bought a copy of the song ‘Desperado‘ that was at the core of the whole mess. I know it’s a somewhat meaningless gesture, but it was fun picking which version of the song to buy – there’s at least a dozen of them aside from the Eagles’ original version and Ronstadt’s cover of it.
I wish I were half the writer Billmon is. Whiskey Bar puts the smack down on Ralph Nader. Go read it. It’s even better than the smacking Matt Yglesias laid down on Nader not too long ago.
A sample:
If the robber baron economics, constitutional obscenity and foreign policy lunacies of the past four years haven’t convinced progressives of the need for a united front against Bush and the authoritarian right, then nothing I can say now will, either.
But up until the past few weeks, I’ve never questioned Nader’s motives or his sincerity. As destructive as I think his actions have been, and as much as I detest his stubborness and his increasingly bizarre egoism, I’ve taken it for granted that Ralph’s objectives were exactly what he said they were: to give the voters a progressive alternative to the Republicrat political duopoly.
I may have thought he was wrong – disastrously wrong – but I always assumed Nader was basically an honest person, and a man of the left. And as high as I know the stakes are in this election, it still made me uncomfortable to see the Dems using hardball tactics to try to keep him off the ballot in as many of the key states as they could. In my book, the Democratic Party was (and still is) just an instrument, a tool – a weak one, but the only one we’ve got – for fighting the movement conservatives. Ralph, on the other hand, was more like a crazy uncle – a real pain in the ass, but still, when it comes right down to it, family.
But Nader’s increasingly open and shameless alliance with the GOP – as demonstrated so flagrantly in Michigan – leaves me with the sinking feeling that I’ve misjudged him.
Per Atrios, a reminder of how good The West Wing used to be:
We all need some therapy, because somebody came along and said “liberal” means soft on crime, soft on drugs, soft on Communism, soft on defense, and we’re gonna tax you back to the Stone Age because people shouldn’t have to go to work if they don’t want to. And instead of saying “Well, excuse me, you right-wing, reactionary, xenophobic, homophobic, anti-eductaion, anti-choice, pro-gun, ‘Leave it to Beaver’ trip back to the fifties,” we cowered in the corner and said “Please, don’t hurt me.” No more.
I lost most of this weekend to the ongoing drama of my computer upgrade. On Saturday FedEx delivered not one, but two replacement motherboards. The vendor screwed up again. Now I have to pay to ship yet another piece of hardware I didn’t need.
At any rate, I shut down the old PC and started putting the new PC together. After assembling the old and new parts into the new PC case and powering it up, we experienced exactly the same problem with the secondary IDE controller.
Thinking that one busted mobo was bad luck, but two was not likely, Scott did a little more research and found on person reporting that unplugging the cable that powered the two USB ports on the front of their PC case solved the secondary IDE problem. We tried it and poof! Problem gone. It’s a little annoying to have plugs that can’t be used, but it’s not a deal breaker at this point because I only have 3 USB devices, one of which is rarely used, and there are 4 other working USB plugs on the back of the case. And right now I just want a working PC.
That leaves the next problem — the boot device BSOD we keep getting even though the system is seeing the CD just fine now. Scott fiddles and announces that it must be something relating to the CD drivers. I had trouble following his explanation, frankly. Whatever the problem is, it’s way beyond my level of ability to solve. He thinks that we might be able to fix it if we reinstall Windows 2000. Fine by me. Except when we did so, we discovered that my lovely HDs (the ones with about 40GB of programs and data) were the problem, not the CD. For reasons as yet unknown, the new system does not think they’re bootable, and Windows 2000 wants to reformat them before it will reinstall. This makes no sense to me because they were working perfectly well on the old setup and if you boot to a floppy, you can then CD to the drives and read them just fine. But they cannot be booted to now.
All along, I’ve made life more difficult on this upgrade because I did not want to reinstall my system. But now it seems that the one thing I most did not want to do is what I have to do.
To avoid having to reformat the HDs and totally lose my stuff, Scott pulls out a 70 GB hard drive that’s currently not in use, puts it into the new case, and starts installing Windows XP onto it. I then spend most of the rest of the weekend bit by bit reinstalling and reconfiguring some 30+ applications and deciding whether to reinstall another 20 or so. Some of them I haven’t used in a while but I like to have them just in case.
The only thing that kept me from screaming and throwing things is that I did not lose any data. Between the old HDs, my iPod, the backup CD I burned before starting all this, and my Tungsten C, I have a good copy, if not two copies, of all documents, files, MP3s, photos, fonts, bookmarks, etc.
I’m not quite done yet but the worst is over this Monday morning. My system is more or less looking how I like it and is running noticeably faster; and when I finally reinstalled the game that started this whole mess – City of Heroes – it ran smoothly and looks great. So in that sense I suppose it was all worthwhile. But still, I am not a very happy camper about the whole thing.
Here’s the new configuration, if you’re curious:
Antec case
Asus P4S800 motherboard
Intel P4 2.8 GHz CPU
2 512MB DIMMs
ATI Radeon 9600SE video
Creative SB sound card (old)
FireWire card
70GB Maxtor drive
Windows XP SP2
Hopefully I won’t have to go through this for another couple of years.