Ya know what? I don’t think that getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down in and of itself qualifies anyone to be president either. I’m of the opinion that one’s shoddy service in the Air National Guard, barely limping through one’s tour, possibly going AWOL, drinking and snorting your way through to the end while your cohort fights and dies halfway around the world is a far superior benchmark of judgment and true grit. Haven’t we learned anything from the last 7 years?

Also, a little note to the media: up yours. Take your collective faces out of McCain’s taint long enough to do your fucking jobs. With a press corp like this, it’s amazing that we’re not already irrigating our fields with Gatorade.

[Update]: An astute commenter takes Joe Klein to task for his tut-tutting at Time’s Swampland, and notes:

Republican Congressman Duke Cunningham was a vastly superior fighter pilot in Vietnam than John McCain becoming the first Ace of the war.

Where is Duke Cunningham right now? Sitting in prison for taking bribes as a congressman.

George H. W. Bush was trained as a pilot, was shot down and then had a largely ineffective presidency.

George W. Bush was trained as a jet fighter pilot and he’s the consensus choice for the most incompetent president in American history.

Seems to me that being a fighter pilot ain’t such a great thing to put on your resume these days, eh? Perhaps some intrepid reporter will note these facts. Yeah, no I don’t think so either.

[Update Again]: Wes Clark isn’t going to back off, renounce, denounce, or reject a got-damn thing. Broadcast punditude, go ahead and invite him on your show to talk about it, but don’t be surprised if you get more than you bargained for. He’s whip smart, he’s got some service experience of his own, and he ain’t rollin’ over. Democratic leadership, please take notes as this unfolds, this is how it’s done. Take special note of the exceptional display of conviction, confidence, and spine.

[Update Yet Again]: In case there’s any confusion about what it means to attack someone’s service record:

• Wes Clark stated that McCain’s service was exemplary, and stated unequivocally that McCain was a hero. He then stated that McCain’s military experience, in particular flying an aircraft and being shot down, does not necessarily qualify him to handle presidential foreign policy decisions. Got that so far?
• Here’s McCain surrogate, on the other hand, saying on a conference call with the press:
  

  …we all know that General Clark, as high-ranking as he is, his record in his last command I think was somewhat less than stellar.

That’s what it looks like when someone attacks and demeans someone else’s service record.

So, to review: Wes Clark’s comments bring up a point of discussion, about what actually qualifies someone to be president, and argues that even exemplary, heroic military service by itself doesn’t cover all the bases. McCain’s surrogate trashing General Clark’s service as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO is just flinging shit at a political opponent.

What in the hell do people actually do at journalism school?

I’m back at it, workin’ that is, and I’m delighted to say that I’m part of a real, honest-to-god tech department again. I’d felt like I was done with code and the internet, but a couple folks I listen to told me to hold off making that decision until I’d spent some time somewhere that didn’t suck (since, ya know, the suckage can color those decisions). This one doesn’t, and my enthusiasm for coding has returned and is blossoming. Joy.

Also, the old job prohibited supporting or contributing to primary candidates, even displaying a bumper sticker was considered over the line. That shit is over, and I’ve got some lost time to make up for.

And I’ve been thinking lately that, despite how much I despise Grover Norquist personally, and loathe his vision of the American Dream, I’ve gained respect for his tactics when it comes to holding his congress critters accountable. He didn’t complain about how the Republican Party didn’t appeal to him anymore, and he didn’t threaten to give his vote to the Libertarian Party. He organized, and let every Republican know that if they crossed the aisle to raise taxes in any way, shape, or form, that they’d face a primary challenge and get spanked. Say what you will about his politics and policies (no really, say it, use profanity if it helps), but the guy put Republican turncoats on notice, and he took action towards making the GOP his party again.

With that in mind, I just gave $100 to Glenn Greenwald’s effort to hold the Democratic leadership accountable for supporting the latest iteration of the FISA Bill (specifically the provisions providing telecom immunity and giving the Executive branch warrantless wiretapping authority). I’m hoping that Glenn’s campaign to punish these capitulating shitbags is an acorn from which a mighty oak will grow. We need an organization dedicated to protecting our Constitutional rights, that will support Democrats who are likewise committed, that will make sure they know we’re paying attention, and that’s willing and able to support primary challengers when promises are broken. If you’re of a like mind, consider throwing a few bucks in that direction.

That’s right Hoyer, you’re on fuckin’ notice.

So, I’m in the mood for a beer and some Pogues. Howzat sound, yeah?

Have the best weekend ya can.

“America is so addicted to oil that it will take years to wean ourselves from it, to look for new ways to feed our addiction is not the answer. Anyone who tells you this would bring down gas prices anytime soon is blowing smoke”

It may surprise you, it sure surprised me.

Can you think of why would a bike store would put a bunch of items that they won’t ship on their website for sale? Yeah, me neither. Thanks for nothing, Alfred E. Bike.

The commute is about to get more interesting, as cyclists and motorists are told they can tool up by the Supremes.

It’s George Carlin Week for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people, and I’m one of them. As I strolled the halls of YouTube gathering bits and pieces of old performances to savor and be grateful for, I ran across this one. Let’s enjoy a little bit of the master, and then talk about it after, shall we?

That is some nutrient-dense food for thought there, isn’t it? So why’s this commanding any more of my attention than any other particular 4 minutes of Professor Carlin’s insights?

It’s partly because I’m having a difficult time reconciling my optimism and excitement over the potential tectonic shift that an Obama presidency could affect in American politics with my bitter disappointment that only Senators Feingold and Dodd seem to give enough of a shit about the Constitution to stand on the floor of the Senate and fight like hell to stop this ass barnacle of a FISA bill. It’s depressing and disconcerting to watch so many Democrats cave on this issue. I mean, shit, there’s not even a significant political upside to giving the telecoms and the Bush administration a pass. The American people had their Constitutional rights systematically violated by Bush and the telcos, by some accounts as many as 7 months before 9/11, which sure seems like something that sits pretty squarely on the bad side of a bright line.

I also know that this would be a non-starter if our Senators knew for a fact that the American people wouldn’t stand for it. But the only real resistance is coming from a small (yet very vocal and surprisingly effective) minority of citizens who pay close enough attention to know what this fight’s about. If we thought of ourselves as citizens responsible for our government instead of consumers entitled to crazy low prices, or an audience craving entertainment, this wouldn’t be happening. But it is.

To put it another way, James Inhofe didn’t get to the Senate by accident. He is Oklahoma. To put it yet another way, we got an administration run by 4 year olds because we wanted it, and we got it good and hard.

The other chord this bit strikes in me relates to a conversation I had with someone about the late Tim Russert. I was chatting with a woman at a toddler birthday party last weekend, a D.C. local whose family has been involved in liberal Democratic politics for years and years. In the course of our discussion, she brought up that she was pretty broken up about Tim Russert, and what a great journalist she thought he was. I replied that, with respect, I wasn’t a fan of his “gotcha” style interview, and that I didn’t think much of him as a journalist after his testimony at the Libby trial, in which he admitted that discussions with government officials were off the record unless they said they wanted to be on the record. I also brought up the Mary Matalin note from Scooter Libby’s trial where she claimed that the best way for Cheney to get his message out and control it was to go on Meet The Press.

She gave a standard sort of apology for this kind of journalism, saying that they all do that, otherwise they lose their access to those officials. I countered that real journalists, like Sy Hersh for example, don’t need or want that kind of access, that real journalism is the result of doing real investigation. Tim Russert, I concluded, was a member of the court, and was primarily a performer.

This woman then gave me a knowing kind of smile, and remarked to me how great she thought it was that I’m so idealistic about journalism. I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised if she’d pinched my fucking cheeks. And this was coming from a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat.

So there it is, garbage in, garbage out. If 95% of the American public doesn’t know anything about the fight over the FISA bill, then their Reps and Senators will pay no penalty for not caring about it either. Garbage in, garbage out. If the ones who do know something about it just don’t think that telcos sharing private information about our communications with an illegal government spying program is that big of a deal, then why would our elected officials oppose it? Garbage in, garbage out.

And though I miss the full hour, commercial free McNeil/Lehrer Report on PBS, I can’t blame any organization for its demise. They simply got out-competed by a trend toward celebrity journalism that’s seeped into every aspect of our media. There was no cabal that killed real broadcast journalism, we did that. One of the aspects of the whole open-society, free-market of ideas thing is that it’s up to us whether we want real analysis and policy discussions, or a dazzling theatrical performance with romance, fireworks, and buffoonery. We’ve chosen to be entertained, and both the performers and the audience are us.

So the next time you see one of those factoids about how we’re falling behind the the rest of the developed world in education, civil rights, and quality of life, remember this. Our government is made of us. Our media is made of us. And we suck.

Note: I’ve made several little edits for grammar and clarity. I suck too.

The new job began yesterday, and so far I’m delighted. Here’s a few observations contrasting the old job and the new one after the first day.

The old job was south of the Capitol, with a commanding view of the Capitol Power Plant, and a couple government buildings done in the 70’s “Brutalist” style. There was one place to score food within short walking distance, the coffee sucked, and when the half-and-half thimble packets ran out at 9:50 a.m., that was it for the day.

The new job is around Farragut Square, a few blocks from the White House and smack in the middle of DC’s bustling downtown. There’s pedestrian traffic everywhere, more eateries than my appetite could index in a day, urban cyclists of many varieties, and plenty of coffee (some of which doesn’t suck at all). Additionally, I saw several hundred people not wearing gray suits. Neat.

At the old job, trying to find so much as a BicStic and a legal pad was a pain. The new job has plenty of supplies, but there’s also a Staples right around the corner. I now have 4 gel pens with comfort grips and two brand spankin’ new spiral bound graph paper notebooks. I’d have gotten more, but there’s no need to hoard. I can just go back, it’s right there.

Code at the old job was a series of hacks on top of hacks. The main platform was PHP, and had no discernable architecture. Occasionally, I’d find SQL queries in the goddam templates. With the exception of one valiant team’s efforts, coding style, revision control, and release schedules were foreign concepts. One Tuesday morning after a 3-day weekend, we came in to find the site broken, because a couple cowboys decided to push some untested code into our production environment the night before (yep, on a holiday!) without telling anyone. Yeehaw!

The new gig is all about Perl. An initial survey of one application I’ll be working on revealed a solid architecture almost immediately, and the first few modules I opened up featured well commented code. I’m not talking about “this does that thing to the whatsit” kind of comments, I mean a paragraph in plain English explaining what a method does, how it’s meant to be used, caveats, and exceptions. I saw a copy of Damien Conway’s Perl Best Practices out on one developer’s desk. Aw yeah, that’s it.

The new gig has a wiki, and it’s useful. Besides a section of Perl coding practices they cleave to, there’s a Perl Cookbook section that gives real examples of how to use the various utilities and how to subclass important superclasses. This isn’t the kind of documentation you wring out of unwilling developers, this is the kind created by people who believe documenting code is important.

Here’s the kicker: we have a system that can configure and deploy a complete development environment from a code branch auto-magically by way of a web-based application. Very slick. Releases are once a week, assuming that the release passes a battery of automated regression tests. Sexy? You bet.

It’s hard to predict accurately how things are going to work out, even dream jobs are capable of turning sour, but the indicators are excellent so far. I was looking out the third-floor window, behind my desk, and the world was lookin’ pretty good. Best of all, I think there’s a solid possibility I’m going to enjoy coding again.

Now, I don’t believe in signs or omens or messages from the universe, other than obvious ones like a funnel cloud being a message from the sky meaning, “get in your basement and get away from windows”, or “fuck you, Shady Glen Mobile Home Park”. But this view off the back porch last night sure seemed to put a nice finish on the day.

Double rainbow for the win! WOOOOO!

Oh man, this is a hell of a thing to wake up to. George Carlin is dead. I’d say that he passed away, but he’d have thought that was a bullshit ideom. He’s dead.

Thank you George, for the laughs and the ponderings and the parts of me that you built. I miss you already.