Early this year, I switched from DSL to a cable modem. My local provider, Charter Cable, had cut its rates and better yet, dropped their requirement that internet users also have their cable TV service. Until this month, I had no complaints.

Then I get the bill for September. It's $10 higher, no explaination. So I call Charter. Apparently they have suddenly re-instated a $10 extortion fee if you don't have their TV serrvice (I switched to satellite in 1997, and I will never have cable TV again). Customer service agreed to drop the fee for the first month, but said they couldn't do anything about the succeeding months. I explained that I switched from DSL to Charter specifically because Charter had dropped the additional fee, and that the next month I saw that fee on a bill, I would cut them off entirely.

I was transferred from there to the retention department, where the rep first tried to sell me on a 10-times slower speed service for the same rate I've been paying since January. I refused flat-out. She then said she would give me a $10 service credit every month for the next six months at my current service level. I agreed, but told her that "we'll have another talk in six months."

I will never pay an extortion fee to a cable company for not agreeing to a bundle with their crappy TV service (ditto for monopoly phone companies). If I can't get the $10 waved again at the end of six months, I'll tell Charter to go piss up a rope. This kind of arbitrary Mickey-Mouse fee nonsense is exactly why I haven't had cable TV for nearly seven years, and reminds me of the fact that cable companies are peopled by the lowest forms of life.

I suspect this fee is going to go away anyway sometime next year, accompanied by considerable rate cuts. Once the wireless broadband network (scroll to third item) gets a foothold, the old monopoly cable and telco companies are going to be forced to cut their rates substantially. My guess would be that Charter's double-game with the $10 extortion fee is their attempt to make a few extra bucks before they have to compete with wireless broadband.

Writing about the long-distance controllers NASA's various robotic probes, George Will notes that

people here know that all their marvels -- JPL's deep-space control center is monitoring 35 space ventures -- are performed against a backdrop of deepening public indifference.

That's as good as argument as any in favor of manned space exploration.

Google, which owns Blogger, is going to pay people to blog:

Google plans to revert to contextual ads powered by its AdSense program, which was launched last June, with a major twist.

"We are going to start paying bloggers. Soon you will be blogging for dollars. That's right people, chocolate is to peanut butter like AdSense is to blogs. Or is it the other way around? Either way, we've got something big here folks," the company said in a note posted online.

It's usually a sign that a blogger has "made it," when they get off of Blogger and get their own domain. Are we about to see the movement reverse direction?

Personal business to attend to the next couple of days, so blogging will be light at best.

My latest column for Tech Central Station is up.

Claudia Rosett has some suggestions on how to entertain yourself with something other than John Kerry's Vietnam record. One item stands out:

Get your hands on an old black-and-white movie, Fritz Lang's "M," filmed in Berlin in 1931, which has more to say about terror, and the stopping of it, than just about anything produced in the 73 years since. It is the story of a child-killer, a murderer of innocents, stalking a terrorized city. The police finally rid the city of this monster by making life so unbearable for the ordinary criminals that the lords of the criminal underworld run him down themselves. It's a terrific blueprint for dealing with terrorists and the regimes with which they consort, such as Syria and Iran.

I bought a copy three or four years ago, when the Critereon Collection DVD came out. Haven't watched it since it first arrived in the months or year before September 11. It's sitting in the Classics section of the DVD racks (yes, our movies are arranged alphabetically by genre), and I've thumbed past it more times than I can count, usually on my way to grabbing something with Kate or Bogart.

Time to make up for some lost time and watch "M" again.

Robert Bidinotto finally weighs in on John Kerry's war record, but wishes he didn't have to:

Rather than dwell on 1/3 of one year in his 60-year life, voters should be asking him instead: Okay, Mr. Kerry, so what have you done with the other 59 3/4's years of your life? What have you done, for example, during 20 years in the U. S. Senate, except to compile what the National Journal describes as the most liberal voting record of any senator? Or do you, in fact, focus everyone's attention on those 17 weeks in Vietnam precisely because you don't want anyone to pay much attention to the rest of your career?

I only wish that John Kerry's philosophical courage had been equal to his physical courage. His political career has been characterized by the lowest sort of opportunism--a pragmatic choreography that has led him, step by calculated step, to serially marry two future campaign war chests, and to take a Heinz-like 57 varieties of positions on every conceivable issue.

Read the whole thing here.

Found a couple news items from important swing states. First, from Ohio:

The mayor of a Democratic stronghold in Ohio known for its steel industry job losses endorsed the Republican president Monday.

George M. McKelvey, a Democrat in his second term, said he had no intention of becoming a Republican but might accept an invitation from Ohio Republicans to attend the Republican National Convention in New York.

In the 2000 presidential election, Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic nominee, received 69,212 votes to 40,460 for Bush in Mahoning County, which includes Youngstown. Democrats outnumber Republicans by a 5-1 ratio, according to the Mahoning County Board of Elections,

“What has our community received in return for the past loyal support for Democratic presidential candidates? Dare I speak the answer? Nothing,” McKelvey said.

And new polling data from Arizona:

President Bush was narrowly ahead of Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry in a new Arizona poll released Tuesday. Results of a telephone survey conducted by the Behavior Research Center in Phoenix showed Bush leading Kerry 46% to 41% with 13% of the respondents undecided.

The latest poll was conducted Aug. 13-17 from interviews with 452 voters throughout Maricopa County, the state's most populous. It had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.7 percentage points.

To sum it up -- nobody knows much of anything yet. It's a long, long race.

Just -- whoa.

David Brooks is a far better columnist than I'll ever be, but he screwed up today. It's not that he's wrong -- he makes excellent points, and in an endlessly-debatable way. (And really, isn't that what a good column should do?) It's not that it isn't well-written -- the New York Times doesn't hire many bad writers, even the ones you disagree with.

Strangely though, he made his points in the wrong order, minimizing their impact. So here is today's first-ever Revised David Brooks Excerpt. Second point first:

Kerry's speeches in the 1990's read nothing like that 1971 [Congresional] testimony. The passion is gone. The pompous prevaricator is in. You read them and you see a man so cautiously calculating not to put a foot wrong that he envelops himself in a fog of caveats and equivocations. You see a man losing the ability to think like a normal human being and starting instead to think like an embassy.

Tough decisions are evaded through the construction of pointless distinctions. Hard questions are verbosely straddled. Kerry issued statements endorsing the use of force in the Balkans so full of backdoor caveats you couldn't tell if he was coming or going. He delivered a tough-sounding speech on urban poverty filled with escape clauses he then exploited when the criticism came.

Most people take a certain pride in their own opinions. They feel attached to them as part of who they are. But Kerry can be coldly detached from his views, willing to use, flip or hide them depending on the exigencies of the moment.

And now the first point:

If voters see that [1971] testimony [in the Swift Boat ads], they will see a young man arguing passionately for a cause. They will see a young man willing to take risks and boldly state his beliefs. Whether they agree or not, they will see in John Kerry a man of conviction.

Many young people, who don't have an emotional investment in endlessly refighting the conflicts of the late 1960's, might take a look at that man and decide they like him. They might not realize that man no longer exists.

Brooks's version of Brooks can be found here.

This is refreshing:

The very idea of dismantling the Central Intelligence Agency, Senator Pat Roberts concedes, is one that he could not have conceived of proposing even a year ago.

But the overhaul now being pressed by him and seven other Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee is very much the product of accumulated frustrations, Mr. Roberts said. On the issue of Iraq in particular, but also Sept. 11 and other setbacks, repeated intelligence failures have transformed even Mr. Roberts, a Kansan long regarded as a dependable defender of the C.I.A and a loyal ally of President Bush, into a vociferous critic of intelligence agencies and an impatient second-guesser of the White House's own overhaul plan.

Among the factors that Mr. Roberts, a droll former marine, cited in a conversation with reporters in his office on Monday afternoon as those that prompted his call for urgent action were a succession of "Oh my God hearings'' in which senators asked in response to one intelligence failure after another: "Oh my God, why did that happen?''

Two words, Senator: Bureaucratic inertia. And there's no cure for it short of something drastic. Getting rid of the CIA might just be drastic enough.

Reminds me of an article written by David Hackworth for Playboy ten or twelve years ago. It was called "Nuke the Pentagon." Hackworth argued that the only way to get the ruinous politics out of the military was to drop the Big One on the five-sided headquarters -- and move the military HQ somewhere far, far away from Washington. If I remember correctly, Hack suggested Ft. Leavensworth, Kansas.

Not that you could ever get the Navy or Air Force to relocate to an Army base, but you get the point.

So, it seems does Senator Roberts.

Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures -- it only sounds like fun. Read:

Emergency Sex also deals with the subject of UN corruption. One UN ambassador in Liberia was removed for taking fifteen percent kickbacks on everything the UN purchased. His successor tapped the phones, began sexually harassing vulnerable secretaries, and continued taking the same kickbacks. One thing that this book makes clear is that even with more military clout, the effectiveness of the UN would still be hampered by the low caliber of the people it employs.

Now go read the entire review.

"No way to run a campaign. . ."

All of Kerry's August follies in one link-filled post.

Well, the Kerry Camp got what they wanted:

President Bush denounced TV ads by outside groups attacking both John Kerry and himself on Monday and called for a halt to all such political efforts. "I think they're bad for the system," he said.

That's called a win-win -- and not for Kerry. Bush gets to appear above the fray, while the Swift Boat Vets continue to run their ads.

(Big hat tip to Newsfeed.)

QUESTION: Kerry's people are also demanding that Bush put a stop to the attack ads. But would that be legal, given that campaigns and 527 groups aren't allowed to coordinate?

Hanson to Europe: Grow Up!

Our European allies continue to lead the fight against anti-Semitic terror:

Fire swept through a Jewish community center in eastern Paris in the early morning hours today after arsonists broke into the building and scrawled swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans inside. It was the latest in a wave of neo-Nazi acts sweeping the country.

The center, which prepares kosher food for needy Jews, occupies the ground floor of a five-story residential building. There were no casualties.

President Jacques Chirac and other politicians were quick to issue statements condemning the attack and vowing to find and punish the perpetrators. Mayor Bertrand Delanoe, visited the site today and said he felt "shock and horror."

Of course, when I say "lead the fight," I mean "frown seriously and get back to tenaciously ignoring the problem."

Bob Dole wasn't the only victim of the Democrat's anti-veteran attack machine -- Jim Geraghty reveals they went after George H W Bush, too.

'Tis but a flesh wound!

Jay Caruso looks at the John Kerry campaign and the 527s:

The New York Times hit piece on the Swift Boat Vets and their ‘ties’ to President Bush came off like it was Woodward and Bernstein again, digging through request slips at the Library of Congress. What did they come up with? Look at this graphic for the results. It’s a joke. A total of $225,000 from two men, one of whom, Bob Perry, knows Karl Rove. The other, Harlan Crow, is the trustee of the foundation for President George Bush’s library.

Meanwhile, the “conservative media” has given John Kerry a free pass on the ties he has to the various liberal 527’s that are out pimping his bid for the Presidency by attacking President Bush. Well, I looked into it a little, and used OpenSecrets.org to get some interesting results. . .

Read the whole thing to find out what Jay discovered.

. . .and then I really am going to bed.

As an old radio guy who left the business before the computer-generated playlists took over completely, this story warms my snobby little heart.

OK, I finished up the column, and -- who knows? -- it might even be suitable for publishing. But before I go to bed, here's a little Compare & Contrast game suggested by reader Gregory Schreiber.

First, we have a Boston Globe story from last year:

Kerry had been wounded three times and received three Purple Hearts. Asked about the severity of the wounds, Kerry said that one of them cost him about two days of service, and that the other two did not interrupt his duty. "Walking wounded," as Kerry put it. A shrapnel wound in his left arm gave Kerry pain for years. Kerry declined a request from the Globe to sign a waiver authorizing the release of military documents that are covered under the Privacy Act and that might shed more light on the extent of the treatment Kerry needed as a result of the wounds.

"There were an awful lot of Purple Hearts -- from shrapnel, some of those might have been M-40 grenades," said Elliott, Kerry's commanding officer. "The Purple Hearts were coming down in boxes. Kerry, he had three Purple Hearts. None of them took him off duty. Not to belittle it, that was more the rule than the exception."

But Kerry thought he had seen and done enough. The rules, he said, allowed a thrice-wounded soldier to return to the United States immediately. So Kerry went to talk to Commodore Charles F. Horne, an administrative official and commander of the coastal squadron in which Kerry served. Horne filled out a document on March 17, 1969, that said Kerry "has been thrice wounded in action while on duty incountry Vietnam. Reassignment is requested ... as a personal aide in Boston, New York, or Wash., D.C. area."

Then there's Colin Powell, speaking last week to the VFW:

I also went to Walter Reed last week to see some of the troops who have been injured. I went to the orthopedic ward and met a number of these wonderful, wonderful, young men and women who have been injured. And you just can't help but be enormously proud of them. One young man who had lost his leg, the only thing he wanted to talk to me about was not his injury, not how it happened, but what he said to me was, "General, how soon do you think they can get me back up on my new leg so I can get back into the Army and get back into the fight?" That's the kind of kids we have. (Applause.) With that kind of spirit, you can be sure we will prevail.

'Nuff said.

UPDATE

Bill writes:

I'm a battalion commander currently serving in Baghdad, and have been around alot of purple heart winners like the one that Sec Powell encountered.

I think the purple heart issue as it relates to Sen Kerrey speaks volumns about him as a leader. He was not a private, but a Lieutenant, a small unit leader. He was taught that as a leader his two critical tasks were; accomplish the mission, and welfare of his soldiers. No leader I know would ever dream of leaving their troops behind especially not on a technicality. 3 medals equals ticket home. A leader should represent Army values of duty, honor, and most importantly selfless service. His actions seem more selfish than selfless.


Secondly, a person who truly earned a purple heart, and had been part of a band of brothers would never disrespect the award by throwing it away. No matter what he thought about the war, he or she would understand they had joined an honored group going back to the revolutionary war. This causes me to doubt he truly has an appreciation for what the award represents because as Bod Dole said, "he didnt bleed".

Working on another Tech Central Station column. Hopefully, I'll have it done in time to do some blogging tonight.