Dear Mr. President

Posted on April 10, 2004

Rick Heller has an interesting idea. He’s created a petition urging President Bush to follow Lyndon Johnson’s precedent and decline nomination for re-election to the Presidency. He explains his motivations for creating the petition on his blog.

It’s definitely something I’d encourage you to take a look at. I didn’t sign it because it’s oriented more towards independents and GOP voters than Dems; but if you’re in those categories and are troubled by the direction Bush has taken the GOP, give it a read.

Apologies

Posted on April 9, 2004

Sorry for the light blogging this week… I’ve been heads-down on a big project at work (that I will be able to reveal to you shortly — and it’s Way Cool!), and it hasn’t left me much energy at the end of the day to write. Which kind of sucks because there has been so much going on in Iraq that I want to talk about, but time stops for no man, so I’ll have to get to it later.

Until then, amuse yourselves with this.

Trapped in a Heart-Shaped Box

Posted on April 5, 2004

Ten years ago today, Kurt Cobain killed himself.

I’m not like them
But I can pretend
The sun is gone
But I have a light
The day is done
But I’m having fun
I think I’m dumb
Or maybe just happy…
My heart is broke
But I have some glue
Help me inhale
And mend it with you
We’ll float around
And hang out on clouds
Then we’ll come down
And have a hangover…
Skin the sun
Fall asleep
Wish away
The soul is cheap
Lesson learned
Wish me luck
Soothe the burn
Wake me up

— Kurt Cobain, “Dumb“

I’m so happy ’cause today
I’ve found my friends …
They’re in my head

— Kurt Cobain, “Lithium“

Monkey see, monkey do
I don’t know why I’d – rather be dead than cool

— Kurt Cobain, “Stay Away“

AOL Opens IMAP Mail Access Today

Posted on April 5, 2004

Today’s a big day over at AOL — they’ve finally seen the light and, as of today, they are allowing users full access to their AOL mail via IMAP. That’s right, no more requiring the AOL client to get your mail — you can pull it down into any IMAP client you like, over any ISP. (They’re not trumpeting this very loudly, but people on AOL’s beta-testers list like me got an e-mail about this late last week.) I’m reading my AOL mail in Mozilla Thunderbird right now.

Nice! And about time. Providing full IMAP support is pretty forward-looking when you consider that competitors like Earthlink are still stuck on POP3.

For the record, if you’re one of the people who can make use of this, the servers to point to are imap.aol.com and smtp.aol.com.

Joy!

Posted on April 2, 2004

Neal Pollack is back.

What is Going On In Fallujah?

Posted on April 1, 2004

After yesterday’s attack on four civilian security personnel (i.e. mercenaries), the Pentagon is insisting that it has not lost control of the city of Fallujah. Except it’s doing it in language that sure sounds like it has:

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, a U.S. Army spokesman, said “we will be back in Fallujah. It will be at the time and place of our choosing. We will hunt down the criminals.”
“Quite simply, we will respond,” Kimmitt said.
“We are not going to do a pell-mell rush into the city,” Kimmitt said. “It’s going to be deliberate. It will be precise and it will be overwhelming. We will not rush in to make things worse. We will plan our way through this and we will re-establish control of that city — and we will pacify that city.”…
He also said it is “unfair to characterize a tragic incident as a loss of control to the city” and said Marines, who have set up traffic stops outside the city, handled Wednesday’s flare-up prudently.

We haven’t lost control, but “we will be back”, and we are not going to “rush in”? Does that mean our troops been driven out of Fallujah completely? What the hell is going on over there?

The Fight Back Home

Posted on March 30, 2004

Over on Daily Kos, Kos has written up a great in-depth look at the dynamics of the House race in Ohio’s 3rd district, which is where I grew up. Back then our Congressman was Tony Hall, who is really one of the most remarkable men I’ve ever seen in politics. How many Midwestern Congressmen do you know who have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times?

Now, though, Tony Hall has stepped out of the fray and the GOP used the 2000 redistricting to chop up the 3rd so it would be more Republican-friendly, and — surprise, surprise — now the rep from Dayton is Mike Turner, a good little GoOPer. Democrat Jane Mitakides is running all out to send him home, though. Read Kos’ piece for the details.

Netscape 7: Apparently, It Was Only Pining For the Fjords

Posted on March 30, 2004

The Inquirer is reporting that AOL has reversed itself and will release a new version of Netscape 7.x, based on the latest Mozilla.org code base. Which would be good since Netscape 7 hasn’t seen an update since mid-2003 or so.

Has AOL confirmed this anywhere?

It Is Disrespectful of KFC! Can You See I Am Serious!

Posted on March 30, 2004

This Korean ad for Popeye’s Fried Chicken may very well have put me off fried chicken forever.

I Wish I Had Thought Of This

Posted on March 25, 2004

‘Cause it’s brilliant!

(Thanks to Oscar Merida for pointing this out to me.)

Sleep Well, World!

Posted on March 25, 2004

BBC News — Ukrainian missiles ‘gone missing’:

Ukrainian Defence Minister Yevhen Marchuk has said that several hundred of his country’s missiles are unaccounted for.
The weapons were supposed to have been decommissioned in the years that followed the break-up of the USSR.
But it is now being claimed that there is no record of them being destroyed.
This is being blamed on accounting problems during the period of transition that followed the country’s independence in 1991.
“Unfortunately strange things happen,” Mr Marchuk said in an interview for the Ukrainian newspaper Den.

Strange things happen. Indeed!

Girl Power Starts With A Big $(&@#ing Gun

Posted on March 22, 2004

This Wednesday evening at the National Air and Space Museum (tix are free):

Capt. Kim Campbell, USAF, offers a first hand account of recent air operations conducted by the U.S. Air Force’s 23rd Fighter Group while deployed in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom…
While flying a mission over Baghdad on April 7, 2003, her A-10 was hit by enemy anti-aircraft fire, rolled left, and pointed toward the ground. The A-10 sustained damage to one engine and to the redundant hydraulic systems, disabling the flight controls, landing gear and brakes, and horizontal stabilizer. However, Captain Campbell found that the manual flight controls still worked and she was able to fly her crippled A-10 back to base, 100 miles away. On the ground, an inspection of the aircraft revealed hundreds of holes in the airframe and that large sections of the stabilizer and hydraulic controls were missing.

The full story of Capt. Campbell’s rough day in Iraq is a tribute both to her skill as a pilot and to the durability of the A-10. I hope whoever decided that the regular Air Force didn’t need A-10s anymore (only the National Guard and Reserves still fly them) got a swift kick in the brass for that dumb decision.

Tycho’s Take on Battlefield: Vietnam

Posted on March 17, 2004

Tycho at Penny Arcade has a great review up of the just-released Battlefield: Vietnam, the long-awaited sequel to the superlative Battlefield 1942.

[T]he helicopters I mentioned are fairly significant – particularly if you have not played Desert Combat. They may surprise you even if you have played the popular modern combat modification, because controlling them is a far more humane procedure in Battlefield Vietnam than you might be familiar with. The Gamespot review refers to the difficulty of managing these craft, and while they might be difficult compared to jeeps, I only had to crash one or two before I got the hang of it. To compare, flying helicopters in DC is like bending a spoon with your mind or trying to walk a tyrannosaur. To say they are unwieldy is to have a good shot at Understatement Of The Year.

Does This Work, Do You Think?

Posted on March 16, 2004

The latest in the annals of “weird Craigslist ads” is a doozy from New York:

Hi, I’m having my parents come visit me sometime in the next two weeks and have lied and told them I am dating someone I am in love with. You will only have to come to one dinner. In exchange for this I will buy you an IPOD – yes new – we walk into the store together and buy a new IPOD.

Way to just get all that “finding someone with shared values and interests” BS out of the way up front, dude.

Getting It Wrong, Revisited

Posted on March 15, 2004

Wow, that was fast 🙂

In a demonstration of what’s so cool about blogging, my previous post on Alex Tabarrok’s analysis of Paul Krugman’s employment chart was only live for a couple of hours before I got two responses — one from George Davis in the comments, the other from Tabarrok himself by e-mail — arguing that I’d overlooked some key information in my critique of Tabarrok’s argument.

Their primary contention was that I was off base in claiming that Tabarrok’s choice of baseline year for his chart (1995) reflected an intent to bias the results by including only the boom years of the 1990s. It turns out that the chart Tabarrok showed wasn’t one he produced himself — it is a stock graphic churned out by a nifty online tool provided by the St. Louis Fed to track this precise statistic. 1995 was the baseline just because the tool only gives reports for a few ranges of time (5, 10, and 40 years), and Tabarrok chose to use the 10-year range. But both my correspondents point out that if you use the tool to calculate the 40-year trend, it too is generally upward.

This is a fair point insofar as my charges of “spin” were predicated on the assumption that Tabarrok had some flexibility in picking the timeframe for the chart. Since that’s not correct, there was not an opportunity for Tabarrok to inject spin into the chart. My apologies.

However, I do believe that on the larger question — Krugman’s charge that there is reason to wonder whether the CEA has been politically manipulated — my earlier post was substantively correct. I don’t think Tabarrok has turned that charge aside.

Here’s why. After my correspondents directed me to the St. Louis Fed site, I got curious and started poking around. It turns out that the online charting tool only lets you use those predefined timespans I mentioned above, but you can download the entire data series going back to 1939 and do the analysis for any old timespan you wish, if you’re so inclined. So, being a bit of a data geek, I did.

First, a caveat. I am not an economist, though my undergraduate work included substantial amounts of economics (I studied in an interdisciplinary program). So what follows may be wildly mistaken; consider it a conversation starter 🙂

(more…)

Getting It Wrong

Posted on March 15, 2004

Over at the usually pretty insightful Marginal Revolution, there’s a post today by Alex Tabarrok that attempts to take Paul Krugman out to the woodshed over his much-blogged-about graph showing the Bush administration’s consistently rosy job growth projections:

Tabarrok’s basic claim is that Krugman’s assertion that the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) has been fluffing the numbers for political reasons is off-base, because Krugman didn’t show the whole picture in his graph. By only showing data going back to 1999, Tabarrok claims, Krugman skews the picture, making it look like the CEA’s projections were rosier than they should have been. Tabarrok says that Krugman should have gone back to 1995:

He claims that this explains the CEA’s projections, as simply a “return to trend”.

Quite frankly, I think this is more obvious spin than anything in Krugman’s piece. The reason is because of Tabarrok’s choice of years for his chart. He starts with 1995 — the start of the ’90s boom! Of course jobs grew enormously from 1995-2000. The economy was going like gangbusters. But why would anyone in their right mind, in 2002 or 2003 or 2004, predict a “return” to this trend, when the economic fundamentals had so clearly changed?

The CEA was predicting boom-like job growth, and it didn’t materialize — and Tabarrok claims that we need to put the predictions in perspective by looking back to the way things were before the bust. Hey, I wish I could; my investments were sure doing better! But that economy is gone, gone, gone, swept away by the popping of the tech bubble and the September 11 attacks. Anyone who made a prediction in 2002 that by 2004 it would “return” deserves whatever scorn Krugman sends their way.

A better comparison, if Tabarrok really wanted to provide perspective (and not spin), would have been a chart that went back to the last recession — say, one that started in 1990 or so. It would be instructive to see how CEA’s predictions hold up when compared to the U.S. economy’s actual performance in recovering from a recession. But since those years aren’t on the chart, I imagine the answer is that they don’t hold up very well…

Like I said, Marginal Revolution is a smart site, and usually does better analysis than this. Let’s hope they aren’t going to be spending much time in the future making weak excuses for political hackery like these job projections.

UPDATE: This discussion is continued at Getting It Wrong, Revisited.

Put Your Words in Kerry’s Mouth

Posted on March 15, 2004

This is fun: Over at Big, Left, Outside, Al Giordano has launched the “John Kerry Speechwriting Tournament”.

Kerry’s stump speech is not refreshed often enough (he’s still using some of the same one-liners he used in Iowa… oh, please, how many times must we “bring it on!”)…
Twenty years ago (full disclosure) I wrote some speeches for John Kerry, and it was a huge pleasure to see someone deliver them as few are capable of doing… when he’s “on,” he’s really on… We’ve seen some of those moments already in this campaign…
[I]t occurs to me that so many very articulate BigLeftOutside readers and commenters could do a splendid job writing speech material for Kerry.
So, therefore, I am:
…Announcing the John Kerry Speechwriting Tournament!
Serious entries only, please (parodies or insincere entries will be screened out)… What do you think John Kerry should be saying on the stump, on TV, in his ads, to the people?
You can attempt an entire speech or just a few paragraphs.
I am not offering any material prize; only this: If I think your submission should be part of Kerry’s stump speech (or the whole thing) I will personally see to it that Kerry himself gets a copy of it… So your ultimate prize could be that one day you turn on the TV and hear your words spoken by the presumptive Democratic nominee.

Anyone out there up for it?

A Victory for al Qaeda?

Posted on March 14, 2004

Since my last post on the Madrid bombings, there’s been some evidence that’s come to light that the attacks may have been carried out not by ETA, but by al Qaeda.

There was widespread speculation when the attacks took place that they were meant to influence the outcome of today’s national elections in that country. Well, they seem to have done the trick — the ruling Popular Party, which was leading in most polls before the attacks (and which is the party of Spanish president Jose Maria Aznar, who led the country into the war in Iraq as one of the leading members of the “Coalition of the Willing”) appears to have been decisively defeated by the opposition Socialist Party, which advocates immediate withdrawal from Iraq.

If these results hold (there’s still about 10% of the votes being counted as I write this), and if al Qaeda was behind the Madrid bombings, then John Robb is absolutely right when he calls this a clear victory for that terrorist organization. If both those “ifs” are true, then they managed to terrorize a not-insignificant nation into a decisive change in foreign policy with a single, dramatic, well-timed act of violence.

Robb is also right when he says that such a situation would be “blood in the water” for other terrorists. If democracies can be decisively defeated this easily just by striking just before an election, watch for other groups (al Qaeda cells, or just unaffiliated nutcases) to try and see if they can do as well themselves. And don’t be surprised if we see a major act of violence on U.S. soil in the two weeks before Election Day this year…

Fun With Spam: Spizzam in the Hizzouse Edition

Posted on March 14, 2004

Another actual spam found while I was cleaning out my spam filter:

It looks like the spammers are getting creative to try and get around Bayesian filtering — but putting a little shizzle in the hizzle wasn’t enough to fool the ever-vigilant Mozilla Thunderbird.

Roh Impeachment

Posted on March 12, 2004

Don Park has fascinating coverage of the ongoing drama in South Korea over the impeachment of President Roh Moo-Hyun.

A man drove through a gate leading to the Assembly building and, when stopped by security, set the car on fire. Another man tried to set himself on fire on the roof of a police station in Choongbook, a state south of Seoul. Koreans are, if anything, very passionate people.

Wow. I’ll say!

Is Chris There?

Posted on March 11, 2004

Here is a story that shows why number portability is a very good thing…

Bombs in Madrid Kill 173

Posted on March 11, 2004

This just in: 173 killed in Madrid rail bombings.

The attacks were apparently carried out by the Basque separatist group, ETA (though they haven’t claimed responsibility yet). It’s a fairly astounding act of terrorism: three coordinated bombings of commuter trains, going off at the peak of rush hour. CNN reports at least 10 bombs detonated in the three locations, with authorities managing to detect and safely detonated in a contained fashion an unspecified number of additional bombs. Besides the 173 killed, at least 600 are reported wounded.

My employer, Oceana, has an office and many staff in Madrid, so as you can imagine this has come as a bit of a shock to all of us. Thankfully all our people and their families are OK. But it certainly takes what may seem to you to be a distant story and brings it home.

E-Voting Fouls Up AGAIN

Posted on March 9, 2004

Yet another e-voting snafu — this time it’s in Orange County, California, where bad ballots resulted in several races polling more than 100% turnout.

The bad news from my perspective? The vendor behind the faulty systems in this case was Hart InterCivic, who you may recall I noted was also behind the e-voting system in Alexandria, VA. So these yutzes could lose my vote, too. Huzzah!

(Thanks to Sandy Smith for the pointer.)

The Google Ad Flap Hits the Business Press

Posted on March 9, 2004

There’s an excellent article in BusinessWeek about the controversy that ensued when my employer, Oceana, made the mistake of trying to buy some Google AdWords.

[T]he tactic of giving people information they didn’t seek is a time-honored form of protest and dissent that has helped fan the flames of democracy in the U.S and elsewhere. In other media, refusing advertisements on policy grounds is extremely rare unless those ads are clearly lewd, gross, or otherwise a public nuisance. Oceana’s ads hardly qualify. Further, readers of a site such as the The New York Times almost certainly aren’t clicking away with the explicit understanding they could be seeing a somewhat sanitized version of the dead-tree edition.
At the very least, Google and other Web companies owe their surfers more information about what they do and why they do it. “The general rule should be one of transparency — that someone should know what they don’t know,” says Palfrey. He thinks a good start might be some type of disclosure system whereby Google or other Web search engines list the organizations they have refused to sell ads to.

Dance Dance Navy

Posted on March 9, 2004

It’s good to see that the Japanese Navy (sorry, “Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force”) doesn’t look nearly as threatening these days as it did in, say, 1940.

Somewhere, Isoruku Yamamoto is looking on in disbelief…