Sarah Palin isn't running

Democrats breath a sigh of relief: we will definitely not be subjected to the catastrophe of a Palin presidency.

Country-club Republicans (the few that are still left) breath a sigh of relief: we will definitely not be subjected to the catastrophe of a Palin presidency.

Moderately smart conservative Republicans breath a sigh of relief: the GOP will not nominate a woman who would probably lose even to Obama.

The Religious Right is slightly saddened, but they like Bachmann better anyway.

So good news all around. Not surprising, though. Quitting in the middle of her gubernatorial term was a clear sign that she really wasn't up to it (which most of us knew from the 2008 campaign) and wasn't really interested in running.

No one happy with 9/11 anniversary plans

What a shocker. Considering how badly they screwed up the 9/11 memorial, it is little wonder they can't handle the anniversary. If I had my way, I would have had them rebuild the Twin Towers exactly as they were before with a low-key memorial on the ground floor. That would have been the ultimate defiance.

The Religious Right fails utterly again

New York just democratically enacted gay marriage, the first large state to do so. This is likely the tip of the iceberg and further indication that gay marriage nationwide is only a matter of time. It looks again like the Religious Right has utterly failed in their goals, just like on abortion (we tend to have more liberal abortion laws than Europe, where there is very little controversy over abortion rights).

If they'd been willing to accept Civil Unions in the early 2000s, that may have led to a compromise position. It probably wouldn't have lasted long-term, both because of the pace of societal evolution and because of our countries unique experience with "separate but equal" schemes, at least not unless a constitutional amendment were passed banning gay marriage and establishing nationwide civil unions in one go. It's too late for any compromise now, though. They turned it into a Holy War and lost.

The net result of the Holy Culture Wars is electing Republican presidents who then (fortunately) do uncommonly close to nothing on the Culture Wars issues (only enough to save face and get the polarized liberal groups to condemn them as neanderthals), but do manage to give enormous tax breaks to the rich, make things much cozier for corporations, and make the US more belligerent. Funny how that works out. Nothing will change, though. The Religious Right won't accept defeat or acknowlege that society is moving past them.

The paywall seems to be working for the New York Times

The article-writer's snarky attitude aside, this is an interesting development. I wasn't expecting this to be positive for them any more than anyone else, at least not until I saw how porous the paywall really was. That, I think, is the key to its success: most people will never see the paywall since they barely ever read the Times except for Twitter, Facebook, and blog links, which don't trigger the paywall. The "digerati" themselves are savvy enough to set nytimes.com cookies to be session-only so their article quota resets every time they restart their web browser. I strongly suspect if they locked down the paywall and made it water-tight things would be different.

It is worth noting, though, that the biggest benefit of the paywall is to encourage more print subscriptions. One reason is that the print version comes with digital access. I guess that's okay, but it does feel like promoting obsolete technology because they haven't figured out how to make as much money on the new technology. I don't think it really is, but it feels that way.

The take-home for this is that the New York Times has hit on a winning formula for general interest newspaper paywalls. Let's hope they don't change it.

Ugh. Microsoft to buy Skype

I wonder how long it will take them to kill the Linux version. And quite possibly ruin the product. At least there are alternatives.

Rental store installed spyware on laptop

It even took pictures through the webcam without the renters knowledge and consent. This really is an outrageous invasion of privacy, whatever the justifications offered. Looks like my mother wasn't being excessively cautious when she asked me to physically disable her rented laptop's camera (I cut out a piece of black paper from an envelope and taped it over the camera using transparent tape).

Steve Gibson said a little while ago on Security Now being recorded right now that laptop camera's ought to have a physical shutter that the user must open and close manually. I second that. But what about the microphone? Would a shutter work for that or is that something no one can fix without cracking the laptop case? It doesn't seem that the microphone was used in this case--maybe that would've broken wiretapping laws--but built-in microphones are even more of a privacy risk both inherently and because they are harder to completely thwart.

This should put an end to the birther pseudo-controversy

Of course it won't. They'll point out that the long-form birth certificate is obviously a photocopy (which it says on the document), will demand that the original be released, will ask what was on the other page that the curve in the image indicates is there, will find some clerical error to nitpick about, and in the last analysis will say: "He's the most powerful man in the world. Of course he can forge a birth certificate!"

Obviously the reason that Obama stooped to throw the crazies a bone is because Donald Trump took up their cause and made it mainstream. I strongly suspect that this will not be the end of it. Perhaps it will, though, push it back into the right-wing fringes where it belongs.

Update: See what I mean?

The New York Times doesn't allow comments on letters

I find that strange. Why not allow people to respond to other reader's responses to Times articles. Considering that comments are hidden from readers by default when they are allowed, this seems only reasonable and in no way disruptive.

This was prompted by this letter from a Catholic priest criticizing Gail Collins' recent column on Planned Parenthood funding. The letter itself is representative of how people of his perspective view the matter, but his criticism of Collins' is unjust. I actually think that both the column and the letter are right, to a certain degree. Undoubtedly, the first and foremost reason for the crusade to defund Planned Parenthood is because the anti-abortion activists view it as morally equivalent to the Third Reich (seriously, Godwin's Law is fulfilled every five minutes, or less, in that world). Giving money to Hitler is naturally unacceptable whatever Hitler wants to do with it.

Second is the dubious claim the writer mentions about how giving Planned Parenthood money for contraceptives, etc., increases subsidy for abortion (which assumes that the federal money will not be replaced with increased donations and that PP or donors would subsidize abortion less rather than let contraception and other things be subsidizes less, which contradicts their own demonization of the organization). Ironically, this contradicts the way the good Monsignor's own Church's organizations get money from the government without violating the establishment clause.Third, though, is the Catholic prohibition on contraception and the Evangelical opposition to anything that makes what they deem to be sexual immorality easier.

That's for the activists. For establishment Republican politicians, they pick fights on things like this to keep pro-lifers on the reservation after more than 30 years of doing uncommonly close to nothing on the issue (including thirty-three years of having seven or more Republican justices on the Supreme Court). Even if they didn't get even the Planned Parenthood funding cut, they can at least use the Democrat's fighting to defend it as a means of renewed demonization of them on this issue.

How do you know a mainstream media article is on Drudge?

When all, or nearly all, of the comments attached to said article are contentless right-wing boilerplate. That just doesn't happen normally.

And yes, Biden was asleep.

U.N. Torture Investigator Denied Unsupervised Access to Manning

This story just won't go away. President Obama really needs to do more than just take the military's word for it. I was never uncynical enough to expect him to expose himself to the charge of weakness on National Security--he hasn't done a single thing like that after his first few months in office. But there's doing nothing and then there's blatantly doing nothing. This is the latter and it's incredibly stupid.

Ironically, Manning might have been treated better had he been caught in 2007 or 2008. Bush, buffeted by criticism over his official torture program enhanced interrogation program would have been a colossal idiot to let this sort of thing go on with a non-Muslim white American citizen. Wait, never mind. I take it back: Manning's lucky he wasn't caught back then.

I was right about the stopgap

The Democrats aren't accepting it. If they did, they would be enabling the Republicans to survive in a government shutdown longer by funding the Department of Defence, especially if it were followed by another stopgap funding, say, the DHS and/or the Justice Department. The Tea Party considers those three departments as practically the only legitimate ones in the government, after all.

Is this the sexual equivalent of the one-drop rule?

Leading with "The dead keep getting outed:" Andrew Sullivan quotes a New York Times article speaking of an "early homosexual relationship with a white businessman." This comes after Andrew just had to walk back his absolute certainty that Gandhi was gay and take the position that we'll probably never know his sexual orientation.

The problem, as I see it, is first that Andrew doesn't really believe in male bisexuality, and second that he always favors evidence of homosexuality over evidence of heterosexuality (at least in famous people). In Malcolm's case, his six children (two of which, twins, were posthumous) were a little too much for Andrew (possibly in a more cautious mood after the Gandhi experience), but he still led with "outing" and held it open. Come on, the sexual relationship, if it happened, was when he was young with someone who was apparently powerful (meaning the relationship could have been a power relationship, or done for mercenary reasons, etc.). It is utterly unreasonable, given the weight of evidence against his being gay, to think it's really an open question. Unless one bit of gayness makes you gay as one drop of African blood made you black back in the era of Jim Crow (obviously with the reverse intent).

That Terry Jones is suffering financially...

gives me hope for this country. I would have thought there'd be enough violently anti-Islamic nutbags out there to make sure he and his Church were rolling in dough for being willing to burn a Koran. Fortunately, that appears not to be the case.

GOP 2012 Budget outline leaked, dead on arrival

Yeah, a budget that institutes a phase out of Medicare, the gutting of Medicaid, the permanent extension of all the Bush tax cuts, and the cutting of the corporate tax rate is really going to fly. Nor do I think it will be a starting point for negotiations. The Republicans will never, ever agree to tax increases and Obama and the Dems aren't going to approve such drastic cuts when it won't even balance the budget for many years.

No doubt when they did in a non-existent hypothetical future, the GOP would take us back into mega deficits with more tax breaks for the wealthy.

Rumor claims, everyone denies EPA power is on the block

I hope that the denials are true. The White House would be much better off giving them the whole $61 billion in cuts, or more, than capitulating to policy riders, and giving up what little power they have to combat global warming is the last policy rider to capitulate to.

Budget Agreement Near

I always figured that it would be at least half of what the Republicans want and would be free of the ideological defunding measures that the right wing wants. The problem is that there are numerous Republican congressman who are fanatics in one way or another (beyond the subject of taxes, where pretty much all Republicans are irrational fanatics, or pretend to be) and many are new and haven't gotten the memo that "deficits don't matter." And no, that idea isn't dead. It's just dormant until the next Republican president wants to cut taxes, create new departments, expand programs, and launch wars. Which is to say, until the next Republican president takes office.

Bradley Manning isn't the only American in solitary confinement

This article brings to light the overuse of solitary confinement in the United States.

Clearly there are cases where the prisoner is so incorrigibly violent that your only choices are to lock them up in solitary confinement, subject them to summary execution, or let them try to rape, murder, and torture their guards and fellow prisoners until one of those kills the prisoner in self-defense. Of those options, the first seems like the least bad.

I just tested out the new New York Times paywall

You can reset your count by clearing out the nytimes.com cookies. Really. You can clear those cookies in 15-20 seconds tops in Firefox. They supposedly spent millions to erect this thing? I'd heard that was the case, but couldn't believe it. Good grief.

Still, I'm not sure how they'd do it otherwise. Keeping track of how many articles you've viewed serverside would probably have to involve going by IP address, and they'd end up getting tons and tons of false positives that way (especially in office buildings and other institutions where they'd be most likely to get paying customers; they aren't going to piss those people off). De facto nagware might be the best they could come up with.

Update: If you set up a cookie exception for nytimes.com that only allows cookies for the current session, then the 20 articles will reset automatically with each restart of your browser. That way, most people will really never see the paywall, unless they change it of course.

Shocker: New York Times tries to shutter @FreeNYT

They're taking the curious tack of claiming Trademark violation. What happens when an identical account is opened, possibly by the same guy, under a handle that doesn't include NYT in it?

Details of New York Times paywall announced

$15 per month. Ugh. There's no way in hell I'm going to subscribe, yet I'm sure I'll bump into the 20 article a month limit. I expect them to lose a lot of traffic, and ad revenue, from this move.

If they want to do this right, they need to something more along the lines of 60 or 90 articles a month free. That way all the casual readers who might click on a couple articles every day in their RSS feed would be okay, but people who really read the paper would have to pay.

They will, like the Wall Street Journal, allow Google News clicks through to the article in question. They are capping it at five a day, though. Interestingly, they are also letting Facebook and Twitter links through and don't seem to be capping those. Someone has already created the @FreeNYT Twitter account which promises to tweet everything on the Times website. How much you want to bet they figure out a way to block those and only those Twitter links.

A thought just occurred to me: how are they going to let Twitter links pass through when virtually all Twitter links go through an intermediary URL shortening service? Would all such services work, or would only nyti.ms (and presumably other bit.ly links) work?