High level pissing match

This was the week that Richard A. Clarke, the President's former anti-terrorism advisor (more specifically, the National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-terrorism under both Clinton and Bush), came out with a new tell-all book entitled "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror". The main premise (paraphrasing others because I have not read it) is that President Bush and his staff were overly focused on Iraq from the time they took office, way before 9/11. He claims that his warnings (and those of many others) about the dangers of Al Qaeda were routinely downplayed because of the preoccupation with Iraq. He wasn't sure that the National Security Advisor, Condoleeza Rice, even knew who/what Al Qaeda was after taking office with the President. After the terrorist attacks on 9/11, he was essentially ordered to find the link between Iraq and Saddam Hussein, and Al Qaeda. Not finding one, he was told to look harder. It seems clear from the accounts of Clarke and of former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill that President Bush was focused on taking out Saddam even before taking office.

Not surprisingly, the personal attacks on Clarke from the administration and other Republican luminaries has been fast and furious. Clarke has definitely struck a nerve with this book. Whatever and whomever you believe, it does make for good entertainment.

Now the campaign begins...

John Kerry all but wrapped up the Democratic nomination by almost sweeping Super Tuesday's primaries last Tuesday. It's been expected for several weeks now, but even before the end of Tuesday, Republican attack ads started. Not that Democrats haven't been doing the same thing (but they're just right).

Pres. Bush and his Dept. of Labor are planning to reclassify mostly minimum wage fast food jobs as manufacturing jobs. that would show a nice bump in the stats for jobs in the manufacturing sector. I know that fast food sometimes tastes like it's made out of wood, but this might be going a little far.

I saw one of the new Bush commercials tonight. The one that uses the images of 9/11. Even before seeing it and only hearing it on the radio, I thought this was disgusting. Tonight I saw it...if I had had a loved family member or a friend lost in that attack, I would be disgusted over the blatant usage of this tragedy for political gain. As it is, while I'm not surprised that the RNC would sink to such a level, I'm sure this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Watch out for the stampede of attack ads.

The color of orange...

I've been meaning to write this since last weekend's Washington State Democratic Caucus.

As we all gathered at the precinct table (one of dozens in a crowded high school gym), I noticed a woman with a Bush/Cheney button, but didn't want to stare too closely at it. I remarked to my wife that maybe she was really a Bush supporter who was there to vote for the least likely candidate to beat Bush (no party registration is required in this state). However later I just had to ask her what it said and got a better look.

The caption read "They look good in orange don't they?" -- and both were dressed in orange prison uniforms. I wish I could find one of these!

Here it comes

It didn't take long for Republican leaders to start taking pot shots at the Democratic nominee front runner John Kerry. From CNN today, Ken Mehlman, Bush's campaign manager, discussed a comment attributed to last April, where he said that that regime change was needed not only in Iraq but also in Washington. This was just days before the U.S. invaded Iraq.

"While our troops were at risk in Iraq, John Kerry compared the commander in chief to Saddam Hussein, calling for regime change in the United States," Mehlman said.

Hmm, it still sounds like a good idea to me.

Very presidential

It's time to start paying attention to the Democratic Party primaries. After Iowa and New Hampshire, John Kerry's the front runner, and I have to admit, I am starting to lean towards him as my preferred candidate. Howard Dean's a smart guy, but he appears to be flaming out. Of the rest, I'd only really feel comfortable with Gen. (ret) Wesley Clark and maybe Joe Lieberman. Whoever it is, I surely hope he can run a strong race against the best president money can buy. The latest information about how the war in Iraq was planned (preordained?) before and by Bush's election should be disturbing to everyone. And still no WMD!

Overheard on NPR....there's a new "campaign" button floating around.

"At least Clinton's lies didn't get anyone killed"

they would be kings

I read somewhere that our current administration doesn't want to govern so much as they want to rule. Our foreign policy and the domestic agenda of the administration surely seems to point this out. It makes following the national news as depressing as the international news.

triplets

I've decided to try to enforce a little self discipline here and only try to write when I have something somewhat intelligent to say. One way to facilitate this is to call this page "Home" that will include anything general (state of the state, politics, general bullshit), along with two side blogs for science or computer-related thougts. Their links will be located at the upper right of the page.

And someday I'll think of a better title for all of this...it's so hard to not make it too generic yet so simple to make it sound totally banal.

Speaking of blogs, an essay on NPR by Scott Simons the other day kind of put blogs into perspective. Inane, sad, whatever. The take home message is that most ordinary days in someone's life does not make great literature. The other is that good writing is really a profession, and not an easy one at that.

So true.

Google--anything it can't find?

In my "private" blog, I noted the very funny story in the Onion written by a guy that said his mom had found his blog...and there are things in people's blogs that you wouldn't want your mother to read. Anyway, mentions of Google searches by nosy moms everywhere made me search my name. Besides the usual links to many work pages (and many for that other Mark Strom that appears to write and lecture about religion), there it was...a link to this very blog.

It really makes me wonder how this search engine even found the page in the first place. After publishing, it's up what, like all of 30 seconds on the Blogger Home page? Amazing technology involved in the search algorithm as well as the server implementation for this search service. I haven't used a different search engine in months.

More Mac OS X 10.3 installs

We've installed 10.3 on two additional computers this week. One, an older iMac DV 400 Mhz G3 and my wife's iBook (800 Mhz G3). The installs went fairly smoothly. No problems really on the older iMac. I'm surprised that it runs as well as it does, considering this computer only has 256 Mb of RAM. I set it up with three users (myself and the two kids), and the fast user switching seems to work fine. The only "disappointing" part of the latter is that the video card doesn't support Quartz Extreme so you don't get to see the cool cube rotation. The only thing that slowed down the installation was having to change permissions on many of their files once they were moved into their own home folders.

On the iBook install, initially every Microsoft application crashed shortly after starting up. I fixed permissions and rebooted and immediately had the flashing finder--which reminded me that I hadn't removed that old Haxie for font smoothing. Zapped that and everything was back to normal. The next morning, MS Entourage wouldn't open any email, but a quick rebuild of the database took care of that problem.