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Give Me Liberty or Give Me the FEC
There's a famous quote -- misattributed to Voltaire -- that goes, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." John Kerry and George Bush seem to want to replace that maxim with, "If I don't like your ad, I'll whine to the Federal Elections Commission."
Kerry went from saying "bring it on" in response to questions about his war record to a "please make it stop" complaint with the FEC. Bush isn't much better, trumpeting his signing of the campaign finance reform law and demanding an end to ads that are outside of that framework.
It's amusing to see the two men vying for the most powerful elected office in the world running scared from the likes of MoveOn.Org or Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
This is the best we have to choose from?
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Bob Dole On Kerry's Vietnam Problem
The New York Times has finally noticed the controversy about John Kerry's Vietnam service. A lot of the initial controversy was about Kerry's medals and, frankly, it's one of those things like Bush's National Guard Service that is based largely on the personal memory of events 30+ years ago. Like the Bush National Guard issue, it also features people changing their minds and saying different things over time.
At worst, the military was a bit too quick to give Kerry medals, but the military has a history of dumbing down requirements for medals (especially, as one commentator on Fox noted, for officers).
The bigger issue, as far as I'm concerned, is Kerry's constant zig-zags about the morality of the war. Bob Dole nails this in the New York Times story, saying,
I mean, one day he's saying that we were shooting civilians, cutting off their ears, cutting off their heads, throwing away his medals or his ribbons. The next day he's standing there, 'I want to be president because I'm a Vietnam veteran.'
Exactly. Kerry has went from the 1970s admitting that he took part in activities which he considered war crimes -- including participating in free fire zones -- to the position that he was a war hero and anyone who dares question that is shameless.
Kerry and his advisers seem to have in their minds some mythical run for presidency where being a war hero was all it took to win the election. But rather than run that campaign, they appear to be intent on running a parody of a war hero campaign instead. It's been amusing to watch Bush run ads attacking, say, Kerry's attendance at Senate Intelligence Committee public hearings and see Kerry surrogates immediately act outraged that Bush would question the competency of someone who spent 4 months on a Swift Boat in Vietnam.
Personally, I'd prefer to hear more details about Kerry's secret plan to end the war in Iraq, but Kerry seems content to run out the clock to November with few details, hoping large helpings of "I was a war hero" and "Anybody but Bush" will be enough to put him over the top.
Source:
Kerry TV Ad Pins Veterans' Attack Firmly on Bush. Adam Nagourney and Jim Rutenberg, New York Times, August 23, 2004.
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If I Were the Pope, I Wouldn't Go There
The Pope on Sunday condemned human cloning and made the odd argument that cloning and other efforts to improve human physiology represent human arrogance. According to Reuters,
The pope said medical research should not try to "manipulate" human beings "according to a project considered with arrogance better than that of the Creator himself."
What a strange claim. It reminds me of a commonly proferred claim by creationists that evolution must be wrong because no mere blind, unguided process could lead to something as magnificent as the eye. The other side, of course, is that the eye -- especially the human eye -- is a pretty lousy piece of engineering if it is the direct result of divine design. It is, however, an interesting compromise between competing needs if considered as the result of natural selection.
So it's a bit surprising to see the Pope invoking efforts to improve humans through cloning or genetic research as "a project considered with arrogance better than that of the Creator himself." Well, maybe if He'd taken his time and done things right the first time, His creation would haven't to spend so much time trying to produce better revisions.
Source:
Pope Condemns Human Cloning and Arrogance of Man. Reuters, August 22, 2004.
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Hell Freezes Over
Politics certainly make strange bedfellows. Who would have thought that in 2004 we'd see The Nation defending the combat record of a Vietnam vet?
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Slogger -- Your Own Personal Internet Archive
I am more than a bit jealous of Brester Kahle's Archive.Org and for a long time have wanted a tool that would let me create something along the lines of a personal Internet archive. Since storage is dirt cheap, as I've ranted and raved about, why not just automatically save ever web page I ever visit?
There are some commercial programs that come close, but not close enough and besides they all tend to be IE only.
Last night, however, I decided to see if there might be any extensions for Mozilla Firefox that allow something like this, and lo and behold I ran across Ken Schutte's excellent Slogger extension.
This is exactly what I wanted. I have configured Slogger so that every time I visit a page, it automatically saves that entire page. It also appends the page to a log list that shows the page name, the time I visited it, the original URL, and a link to a local copy. It uses a naming convention that uses the date down to the milliseconds for file names to avoid duplicate file name problems, etc.
You don't have to configure it this way. Slogger can be set up just to keep a detailed history, or it could be configured to save pages at the press of a button rather than automatically.
There are only a couple drawbacks that I noticed in the current version of the software.
First, if you are using tabbed browsing (and if you're using Firefox you'd be crazy not to), Slogger can only save the page in the active tab. So if you have Firefox set up to load new tabs in the background, Slogger can't automatically capture those background tabs (in fact, when you load a new background tab it will simply make another copy of the page in the active tab). I just configured Firefox to load new tabs in the foreground -- a bit of a change, but nothing I can't adapt to.
Second, although storage is certainly cheap, making copies of every single web page visited can still chew through hard drive space very quickly. Today has been a very light web surfing day for me, but Slogger has added about 105mb worth of files. I'd imagine on a typical day I'd be looking at 300-400mb of files. That ends up at about about 146 gigabytes/year. Since I only buy external drives these days, that's an annual storage cost of about $154 at today's hard drive prices. That's still less than $.50/day, as far as I'm concerned it's still incredibly cheap, but, as always, your milage may vary.
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