Yearly Archives: 2004

Who’s unfit?

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From Sen. Kerry:

Let me tell you what I think makes someone unfit for duty. Misleading our nation into war in Iraq makes you unfit to lead this nation. Doing nothing while this nation loses millions of jobs makes you unfit to lead this nation. Letting 45 million Americans go without healthcare makes you unfit to lead this nation. Letting the Saudi Royal Family control our energy costs makes you unfit to lead this nation. Handing out billions of government contracts to Halliburton while you’re still on their payroll makes you unfit. That’s the record of George Bush and Dick Cheney. And it’s not going to change. I believe it’s time to move America in a new direction; I believe it’s time to set a new course for America.

Atrios has more, natch.

JWZ gets the best pix

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We recommend you investigate this (“Everybody ready? Okay. Now, you’re walking down into the dungeon — Rummy, pay attention!”), this (“Good God! What is that thing?”), and, if you’re feeling milky, this (“Wait. He shoots what from where? On purpose?”).

Of course, we should remember that whole “justice deferred is justiced denied” thing

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I’m sorry the sanctions against the city and NYPD weren’t harsher, but a NYC judge has ordered the release of more than 500 “demonstrators” (including some juveniles) held too long in legal limbo in what was clearly a ploy to assure a quiet RNC, and never mind the Constitution.

The good news is “the courts still work.” The bad news is it took this long, and the people who ordered this approach — “arrest everydamnbody, and hold ’em until somebody with a lawyer starts squawking” — will see no real consequences.

We’re not sure what to tell you about this, but click it anyway.

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Spider-Man Reviews Crayons:

The cool thing about “Yellow” is that you always end up needing it a lot more than you anticipate. Nobody ever picks yellow out of the box just for the Hell of it, but once you start coloring in whatever coloring book or colored coloring you colored, there’s a 99.9% chance you’ll eventually need the yellow for something. In that I cheerfully liken it to bay leaves.

What more need be said?

Um.

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In the annals of advertising, there are a variety of campaigns that really stand out. “Where’s the Beef” became a national catchphrase; Miller Lite’s initial “Tastes Great/Less Filling” ads lived for a full generation.

We’re not sure, but we think Carl’s Jr. (Quicktime) may be on to something here. But we’re not sure it’s precisely what they’re shooting for.

If they’re going to refute Al Franken’s allegations, they need to stop doing shit like this

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Dennis Hastert — the Speaker of the House, for crying out loud — suggested in an interview with Chris Wallace that progressive patron George Soros was funded by drug lords:

On “Fox News Sunday,” the Illinois Republican insinuated that billionaire financier George Soros, who’s funding an independent media campaign to dislodge President Bush, is getting his big bucks from shady sources. “You know, I don’t know where George Soros gets his money. I don’t know where – if it comes overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from,” Hastert mused. An astonished Chris Wallace asked: “Excuse me?” The Speaker went on: “Well, that’s what he’s been for a number years – George Soros has been for legalizing drugs in this country. So, I mean, he’s got a lot of ancillary interests out there.” Wallace: “You think he may be getting money from the drug cartel?” Hastert: “I’m saying I don’t know where groups – could be people who support this type of thing. I’m saying we don’t know.” Daily News, via TPM

As Josh Marshall put it, there’s literally no depth to which these people won’t sink. Lest you think this is just a case of loose lips, Marshall notes that Hastert has been repeating the charge at the convention this week, a technique we might call the Big Lie, because that’s what it is. Soros, however, isn’t taking this lying down, and has issued a public challenge for Hastert to put up or shut up:

I’ve talked to reporters who’ve asked Hastert this around the convention hall. And he’s been aggressively restating the ‘charge.’ I’m told he even shoved his finger in the chest of one of them when repeating it. Now Soros has written this letter to Hastert, asking him to put up or shut up, or, more specifically “either substantiate these claims — which you canont do because they are false — or publicly apologize for attempting to defame my character and damage my reputation.” Whatever you think of Soros, this is the sort of slur that only comes from a real pig. And to think that the author of it is the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and out in the light of day. TPM

Remember: one side of this race has aggressively mislead the American people at every possible turn, and when they’re not misleading they’re stonewalling (e.g., the 9/11 commission, or GWB’s military records). Their fetish for secrecy is anathema to the freedoms we claim to cherish. They have and will continue to disparage the records of honored veterans with ridiculous insinuations (see Cleland, Max) or outright lies (see Kerry, John). They’ll even recruit other honored veterans who know better (see Dole, Bob). If someone with resources puts his money where his mouth is, they insinuate that he’s up to no good just because he’s against their agenda. They do this because they cannot compete on ideas and merits, and know the only way they can keep power is to keep the debate from every becoming substantive by cultivating a culture of fear and lies. They will keep doing this until someone calls them on their bullshit, and you can be damned sure the lapdog mainstream media won’t do that. Pay attention.

Dept. of Egregious Programming Jokes

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In web development, you’re always working to minimize the amount of intelligence in the web page itself while maximizing user-friendliness. It’s a hard thing to balance, of course, and nowhere is this problem more obvious than in validation of inputs, like dates. Usually, dates are put in using two or three “select” controls, though sometimes the year is a text box. Of course, unless you imbue these controls with a bit of intelligence, you can get dates that make no sense (September 31, for example, but with leap years it’s more complex than that).

For a couple days, I’ve been working with a client on how we might deal with yet-another-date-entry, this time for a birthday. While I’ve coded the fancy Javascript and DHTML stuff required to make one of these work in the past, I’ve come to believe that depending on Javascript is bad juju, and so we were trying to think of ways around it (there aren’t really any; you just have to do your validation on the server). In thinking of options, though, my partner and I jokingly suggested that we could just put in a list of all the birthdays, and have the user pick. This would mean:

  • We’d have no chance of getting invalid input; and
  • We’d have NO client-side scripting involved.

This combination of factors respresents, at first blush, a sort of web programming Holy Grail, but only until you inspect how it’s been accomplished. This particular approach is untenable on its face for lots of reasons, but that doesn’t make it any less funny to deploy just long enough to get a laugh out of the project manager and client, so I set out do just that.

Creating such a select-box involves having a defined list of options; the only difference here is that the list of options would be very, very long. Here some interesting things to note about this particular list of options:

  • It contains every date between January 1, 1900, and August 25, 2004.
  • This means the file — and the resulting select-box on the page — contains some 38,233 entries. Next time you complain about how many entries there are on FedEx.com’s country picker, remember this little experiment.
  • The list took too long to generate on the fly (i.e., every time the page loaded), so I wrote another script to dump the whole long option list to a file that I then included in the HTML template.
  • The file containing the list is 2.1 megabytes all by itself, so the page takes a couple minutes to download even on broadband; best not to try it at all on dial-up.

I put the thing together and called the project manager, mentioning that I’d found a way to solve the date entry problem that (as the list above notes) ensures we’ll only get valid data, but wholly eschews scripting. He was shocked and very pleased, so I told him where he could inspect it and asked him to call me if he had any questions.

Two minutes later, the phone rang. The project manager (whom we’ll call Andy, as that’s his name {unless you’re flying a jet with him [HDANCN?]}) was amused enough that he’s having a hard time talking, and insisted that I leave it live long enough to spring the joke on the actual clients. Heh.

Sometimes, being a geek is fun.

The media aren’t liberal. They’re just idiots.

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And they’re not doing their job. They’re behaving as if giving equal time to both sides of an issue — say, the Swiftie thing — is being “objective,” when in reality we have actual facts on one side and an enormous pile of lies on the other. Any real journalist — are there any on TV anymore? — would actually examine what’s being said, and try to separate the wheat from the rhetorical chaff (read: bullshit).

At least SOME people are noticing this. From the Times’ Alessandra Stanley, quoted at TPM; she referrs to the softball treatment Wolf Blitzer gave Bob “Hatchetman” Dole, who said demonstrably untrue things about Kerry’s war record on his show:

That kind of air-kiss coverage is typical of cable news, where the premium is on speed and spirited banter rather than painstaking accuracy. But it has grown into a lazy habit: anchors do not referee – they act as if their reportage is fair and accurate as long as they have two opposing spokesmen on any issue.

More satirically, The Daily Show made the same point Monday night:

STEWART: Here’s what puzzles me most, Rob. John Kerry’s record in Vietnam is pretty much right there in the official records of the US military, and haven’t been disputed for 35 years? CORDDRY: That’s right, Jon, and that’s certainly the spin you’ll be hearing coming from the Kerry campaign over the next few days. STEWART: Th-that’s not a spin thing, that’s a fact. That’s established. CORDDRY: Exactly, Jon, and that established, incontravertible fact is one side of the story. STEWART: But that should be — isn’t that the end of the story? I mean, you’ve seen the records, haven’t you? What’s your opinion? CORDDRY: I’m sorry, my *opinion*? No, I don’t have ‘o-pin-i-ons’. I’m a reporter, Jon, and my job is to spend half the time repeating what one side says, and half the time repeating the other. Little thing called ‘objectivity’ — might wanna look it up some day. STEWART: Doesn’t objectivity mean objectively weighing the evidence, and calling out what’s credible and what isn’t? CORDDRY: Whoa-ho! Well, well, well — sounds like someone wants the media to act as a filter! [high-pitched, effeminate] ‘Ooh, this allegation is spurious! Upon investigation this claim lacks any basis in reality! Mmm, mmm, mmm.’ Listen buddy: not my job to stand between the people talking to me and the people listening to me. STEWART: So, basically, you’re saying that this back-and-forth is never going to end. CORDDRY: No, Jon — in fact a new group has emerged, this one composed of former Bush colleages, challenging the president’s activities during the Vietnam era. That group: Drunken Stateside Sons of Privilege for Plausible Deniability. They’ve apparently got some things to say about a certain Halloween party in ’71 that involved trashcan punch and a sodomized pi–ata. Jon — they just want to set the record straight. That’s all they’re out for. STEWART: Well, thank you Rob, good luck out there. We’ll be right back. Via Atrios

No wonder mainstream media hates these guys. They’re the only ones still doing any sort of real commentary.

Fafnir and Giblets contemplate the end times

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Fafblog:

“But Giblets!” says me. “We are faced with an eschatological dilemma! If the world ends don’t we end too?” “Never!” says Giblets. “The world may be temporal but Fafnir an Giblets are forever!” “Yes!” says me. “We defy all ends! An middles an beginnings for good measure!” “We defy linearity!” says Giblets. “We are of the internet and embrace its heady disjointed bosom!” “We are hypertextual dispensationalists!” says me. “The endtimes cannot touch us!” “But what will we do after the world ends?” says Giblets. “Dunno,” says me. “We got that ol Yahtzee set.” “An Risk the game of world domination,” says Giblets. “An Fafblog,” says me. “An Fafblog,” says Giblets. “Even after the end of the age.”

New, America ’04, now with Loyalty Oaths!

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By now it’s old news, but we’ve been meaning to put this up for days. Salon’s coverage of the “must sign loyalty pledge to see George” story is pretty spot-on. I mean, What. The. Fuck? Are they just allergic to, you know, the democratic process? Are they afraid he’ll self-destruct if he gets asked hard questions? And can’t they get a fer-crying-out-loud copyeditor? Sheesh.

The headline alone should freak you out

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“U.S. Uses Secret Evidence In Secrecy Fight With ACLU.” Excerpt:

The Justice Department is using secret evidence in its ongoing legal battles over secrecy with the American Civil Liberties Union, submitting material to two federal judges that cannot be seen by the public or even the plaintiffs, according to documents released yesterday. In one of the cases, the government also censored more than a dozen seemingly innocuous passages from court filings on national security grounds, only to be overruled by the judge, according to ACLU documents. Among the phrases originally redacted by the government was a quotation from a 1972 Supreme Court ruling: “The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect ‘domestic security.’ Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent.”

Read that last graf again, just for emphasis. Secrecy is not democratic. This is why sunshine laws exist. Our government — or at least this Justice Department — appears to hate the idea that it is ultimately accountable to you and me.

Atrios Nails It

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As much as the White House has tried to spin it otherwise, there’s a large difference between pro-Kerry/anti-Bush ads financed by organizations like MoveOn and the anti-Kerry ads produced by the Swifties. Atrios has more, but the gist is this:

  • SBVfT is an organization that exists only to slam Kerry with demonstrably untrue allegations from people who did not in fact serve with him in Vietnam, whereas
  • MoveOn has existed for a while now, and has yet to run any ad that’s simply and objectively false.

On a related note, this Boston Glob editorial wonders how it might have played out had Clinton attacked Bob Dole’s record in 1996.

In which we confound those who stereotype us

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Much has been made lately of the soon-to-expire Asault Weapons Ban. Antigun people love this law, and want it extended/renewed; for the most part, people who’ve actually read the law laugh out loud at how ridiculous it it. The big, ugly secret is that “assault weapon” is a meaningless term that has nothing to do with the actual functions of a given rifle; the weapons banned by the AWB are weapons that fail cosmetic, not functional, tests. (Remember that fully-automatic weapons are already illegal, and that semiauto guns must not be easily convertable to full-auto, so the AWB has nothing to do with rate of fire.)

It’s just plain a bad law. People who oppose gun regulation already hate it, but people who support gun control laws ought to hate it, too. For illustration, see if you can tell the illegal ones from the legal ones.

In which we track down bizarre bugs

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One thing that separates real web people from halfasses (and no-asses) is the sheer quality of the code, and its adherence to <a href=””http://w3c.org”>standards. For a variety of reasons, “well, it works” isn’t a very good barometer of whether or not a particular page’s code is correct; some browsers helpfully adjust errors in HTML to produce what they think you meant, for example, which is great for that particular browser, but not so good for the developer, as it gives him or her a false sense of accuracy. Most modern browsers are more meticulous, so this happens less often now, but it’s still an issue.

The only way to make sure you’re doing right, then, is to (a) test in as many browsers you can find and (b) use a validator to ensure syntactic and semantic accuracy in your code. Many, many problems go away if your code validates; in fact, today’s lesson is how important it is to validate even if you think you’re already valid.

Be advised that while we all, I’m sure, are very, very careful about validating our HTML, it is equally important to validate our CSS as well. I spent an hour or so today trying to figure out why my formerly functional, carefully validated layout worked fine in Mozilla, Firefox, and IE, but failed utterly in Safari — frankly, a situation I’ve never seen before.

Only after remembering to validate my CSS did I discover the problem:

This rule had a typo in it:

      div#left h2 {
        color: black;
        padding-bottom: 0;
        margin-bottom: 5px;
        text-align: left;>
        }

The trailing > in the final attribute crept in without my knowledge, doubtless on an inadvertent keystroke. IE and Gecko browsers appear to have been ignoring it as garbage; at the very least, it caused no trouble for me there. In Safari, however, the entire layout was hopelessly broken with all three columns rendering on top of each other, etc — a pretty awful sight, and very discouraging.

Up to now, I’ve not had this particular experience — ie, everyone but Safari working fine. When I code to a compliant browser, I usually find that only minor changes are required to get an optimum presentation in all modern browsers, so this little problem took me completely by surprise.

Once again: validate, validate, validate. Then validate again. The time you save may be your own.

More on the Gluten-Free Host

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Fafblog scores again:

“Giblets is not concerned with the heartless exclusionary legalism of the Catholic hierarchy!” says Giblets. “Giblets is concerned because it clearly states that only unleavened wheat can turn into parts of Jesus! We have been workin with leavened flour!” “But we have to Giblets,” I says pointin at the nicely molded Jesus dough. “Otherwise our Jesus Bread-Golem will not rise when we bake him.”