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Thursday, February 15, 2007 - 09:56:40
Blogging Libby
Though rare, every medium has its first moment of being well done. With apologies to the late late Fred Allen, I turn his phrase about something new that has taken place at the I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby trial. Along with the 100 reporters given entrance to cover the trial proceedings, this time around seats were set aside for 5 to 10 bloggers. The best of this new breed is the team from Firedoglake.com, led by the wonderfully attractive and currently cancerous again, Jane Hamsher, creator of Firedoglake and organizer of its trial team.
With an irreverence not possible on NBC, the bloggers from Firedoglake.com call VP Dick Cheney, "Shooter". And doesn't that just sum up the worst VP in US history very nicely. Score another point for bloggers, as they, in most cases, have no corporate sponsor to faint when their blogger goes "all Dixie Chick" on some evil-doer. Another great thing about the bloggers at the Libby trial is that their live reporting doesn't have to wait for the hour or the half hour, they're live as the action's popping and we can hear that Tim Russert is sweating up a storm at the same moment his bosses do.
But the main thing that grooves my hoover is that blogging has shown that brilliance, intelligence and the ability to use past knowledge retained shows the bloggers at the Libby trial are often 2 or 3 steps ahead of the professional talking heads we've been trusting all these years to give us our daily news. No longer do the professionals get to filter the facts they give to us like so much grain thru a goose.
Some professionals cooked the books when they presented us with George W. Bush back in the late 90s. Anyone within a hundred feet of him back then must have known what a walking joke is was. Yet the traditional media stood by as an election was stolen, a stooge for Cheney was made the most powerful man in the world. And what about the past 7 years of misery? Where was the professional media? How about that war for oil? We should ask not only where were the Democrats, but also were the hell was the media? What did they not tell us then what we all know now and which Firedoglake.com summed up so concisely in these words today, "The Republican Party and the Bush Administration are two peas in a greedy little malignant pod." Hell will freeze over the day such comes from the mouth of Katie Couric!
Warwick Sabin is blazing new trails in Arkansas with his video camera. Sure his camera work is jumpy and blurry, but we've come to put too much importance in the delivery and next to no importance in the accuracy and content of what's being delivered. Way too much style, way little substance. It's high school all over again with everything run by the beautiful and physically gifted and how is that working out for us these days?
Blogging is not a cure for cancer, though we may hear about the cure from a blogger first. But I'm willing to predict if we make it out of our current mess inflicted upon us by the "greedy little malignant pod", it will be with the help of a posse of nerds with laptops.
Hail! Hail! The American blogger! Long may they blog!
Tuesday, February 06, 2007 - 11:12:30
Hard Drive Hard Luck
Focusing on Cost, we have implemented a new methodology for managing our IT assets which will result in savings for our customers and the State of Arkansas." Claire BaileyThis morning I decided to try to wrap my mind around the Arkansas Department of Information Systems or DIS. Most of us have never heard of this department until the Huckabee Hard Drive Crushing Scandal broke a couple of weeks ago. After spending several minutes gawking at the picture of the comely Ms Claire Bailey I started working my way through the DIS website. Nothing really stood out except the comely Ms Bailey until I got to the Information Technology Procurement Contracts page. Just one quick search of a run of the mill Dell workstation made me think I understood why the State of Arkansas paid $335,000 for a handful of computers. In order to get an idea of the fantasyland prices the State paid under WSCA Contract A63307, I did a little comparison shopping.
This link is for the first Dell workstation computer on the list. It's pretty actioned packed with a duo core Intel processor, probably about 10 times the computer most State workers would ever need. It comes with a standard flat panel monitor, though surely Huck didn't crush the monitors too? Also a keyboard and a mouse and an 80 gig hard drive. It comes with no sound card or speakers. It is a Cadilliac of a workstation computer and the cost is a whopping $2,641.09.
This link is for comparable Dell office computer which in it's standard configuration comes with a 250 gig hard drive, way bigger than the one above. It comes with the same flat panel monitor included in the price. It comes with no floppy drive, but one can be had for another 30 dollars. This one comes with 15 free months of Norton Anti-virus and 6 months free AOL (oh joy). In case the link doesn't work this hunk of computer comes in at $999.00. This is the price regular folks would pay for a good office computer just picking up the phone and ordering from Dell.
Let's review the case at hand. 83 hard drives were crush, and those from 4 servers. Since the DIS vendor site isn't broken down into components, I'll have to go shopping elsewhere for 22, 100 gig hard drives. Below you'll see that though 87 hard drives were crushed, only 22 were replaced. I chose to shop at tigerdirect.com which sells the fire out of computer components all across the nation. The Seagate I picked out can be bought all day long for 50 bucks each. That comes to $1,099.78.
It's stated in the Computer World article that the State now has 22 refurbished computers with new hard drives, so that implies to me 22 computers were not replace, just got a new hard drive. So the money spent above should put them in good shape.
For reasons unknown at the moment 27 new desktop computers were purchased, when and by who is not known at this time. Here's the math. If the State bought the new computers thru WSCA Contract A63307 for Dell, like the one listed above, they would have spent roughly, $71,309.73.
If they sent pretended to be Mary Lee Orsini and ordered the second computer I listed, directly from Dell like you or I, the price would have been $26,973.00.
The State of Arkansas, by whose hand we are yet to know, purchased 22 new laptop computers and I have come up with 2 price scenarios for them. First I chose a middle of the line laptop ordered from Dell thru WSCA Contract A63307 at a cost of $1,479.23 times 22 equals $32,543.06.
Letting Mary Lee order online from Dell, this laptop also came out costing $999.00. Order up 22 of them and you've spent, $21,978. 00
Let's see what we've spent! For hard drives, desktops, and laptop ordered thru DIS under WSCA Contract A63307
$104,952.63 a very long way from $335,000.00....like $230,047.37 away.
Mary Lee, just your average dead felon, would have to write out a check for $50,050.78.....even farther away from $335,000.00. $284,949.22 less than we're told the State had to pay because of Huckabee's fit.
Now I know I am not an expert at state finances, I know these computers are slightly apples and oranges, but the figure is so off...this research makes me sure the people of Arkansas are getting royally screwed right in front of our eyes. If I was into S/M, I'd spend all day researching and calling and gathering information...but I gots chores to do. As I've said before....there is an Ethiopian in the woodpile somewhere and everyone of those folks meeting in LR this week should be asking why. If someone is not a crook, someone needs to be S'painin all this to us before we get our panties in more of a wad.
Thursday, February 01, 2007 - 20:01:20
Big Pussy America
America was once such a bad ass that we squared off and attacked ourselves back in the 1860s. We were so damn mean we killed over 600,000 of us..of US. Then Mexico flipped us off in the 1840s and we spanked their butts and got Texas out of the deal. William Randolf Hearst took a dislike to Spain and we spanked their butts in 1898. We had to rescue old Europe in WWI and after eating dust for 10 years in the Depression we still had enough spunk left to save the world from the Japs and the Germans in WWII.
I've been privileged to meet and get to know over 30 old grizzled veterans of the Great Depression and WWII. Several have told me how over the top manly, tough, forceful, and fearless General George Patton was, they saw him in action with their own eyes. Sure he was egotistical, theatrical, and vain, but no one ever called him a coward. In his lifetime no one called him a pussy!Events of the last 2 days have confirmed my worst suspicions! Our once great country, in the past filled with magnificent manly men and pioneer women who could birth a baby in the morning and be hoeing corn rows that afternoon, has turned yellow. Since 9-11 many have lived every moment paralyzed by fear. A large part of our population sees terror around every corner, every day. Our leaders have squandered the world-wide goodwill shown to us after that terrible September while at the same time creating the greatest boondoggle in modern history...the obscenely obese Department of Homeland Security with it's yellow and orange terror alerts that sends the blue hairs flying under their own beds.
On Wednesday of this week the City of Boston became the latest victim of mass hysteria when after 2 weeks some pin-head looked up and saw this little refugee from Lite-Brite stuck up on the underbelly of a bridge. Next they spotted them up on hard to reach portions of building scattered around Boston. BOMB the dim wits shouted! Osama's handiwork! Al Qaeda's back! We're all gonna die! The city ground to a stop and every kind of bomb squad, FBI, and Homeland Security geek in the land descended on a city once unafraid of the entire British Empire. I once fondled the shoulder of a girl in a darkened movie theater and thought it was her boob, but how could any adult look at silly, blinking Mr.Mooninites (that thing pictured above) and think BOMB? What do they smoke in Boston these days? Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis threatened hard jail time for whoever planted these bombs. Assistant Attorney General John Grossman called the light boards "bomb-like" devices and said that if they had been explosive they could have damaged transportation infrastructure in the city. Well...sure and if doughnuts were land mines America would explode into space tomorrow morning....with coffee. In the end one of our leading cities freaked out like a 10 year old girl because of a lame promotion of Turner Broadcasting System new TV cartoon, Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
The City of Boston arrested the 2 men they believe responsible for installing the harmless Mooninites. The 2 quite properly laughed their way to jail and gave a news conference today when they were bailed out only answering questions on 1970s hair styles. But from the Mayor to the Governor's chair lots of humorless old white guys still have their panties in a wad and wants someone to pay back the $750,000 the city paid to have bomb squads "disarm" these flashing cartoon characters flipping the bird to the public. What a bunch of pussies!
Take my hero John Wayne, though I didn't like his politics after I grew up, he was.....not a pussy. The Duke fought and shot and kicked and smacked about every ethnic group on the planet in the 172 movies he made. He killed the Apaches in droves, yet they respected him. In one of his sorriest movies he hounded red pinko commies, even kicked an old commie lady down the stairs. He kicked and he didn't blink! John lived life to the fullest, beat cancer once, and stood face to face with his critics. He was no pussy!
Jesus was called a lot of names as he carried his own cross to the top of the hill, but even those spitting on him never thought to call him a pussy. According to the Bible Jesus wasn't afraid to consort with whores or tax collectors. He very carefully shook the hands of lepers. He hung with the poor, the outsiders, the losers and never batted an eye. He made water his bitch by walking on it in a storm. He walked into the middle of the Payday Lenders of his time and threw their asses out in the street. He looked at his Rat Pack and knew which one would sell him out for 30 pieces of silver, like an Arkansas PSC board member laying in bed with CenterPoint Energy. And when the jig was up and he was marched up that hill to get the most extreme piecing of all time, he didn't cry for his Mommy, he didn't call out the bomb squad or the swat team or dial up Michael Chertoff, he inhaled real big and took it like a man!America's a big pussy. Bush worries what message we're sending to the troops by not goose-stepping behind his big plan that really isn't a plan. He says we embolden our enemies by openly speculating if he's gay or retarded or if Cheney recharges his heart by eating a mound of fresh fetuses every morning with his eggs. I think that's hogwash....as Cheney says. What would embolden our enemies more than find out the 24th largest city in the United States is scared to death by a dozen blinking hunks of plastic powered by a couple of D size batteries? Blinking cartoon figures! What a flaming bunch of pussies! How far we have fallen. Where is my country?
The Founders Fumbled
Excuse me for not writing my own stuff. I'm totally covered up with moving my old sick Ma back home from the rest home. I do think Mr. Kaplan's words are worth reading. I will be back with my own drivel very soon. Keep up the good fight! |
Marty Kaplan | |
The Founders Fumbled
"The system worked" is what so many of us breathed with relief when Nixon fled Washington in disgrace. No matter that it was Nixon's own paranoia -- in the form of secret White House tape recordings -- that did him in, not just the majesty of a Senate investigation; no matter that it took the luck of Barry Goldwater's it's-time-for-you-to-go statesmanship, and the offended ego of a Deep Throat, not just the splendor of the Fourth Estate, to get him to quit.
What we told ourselves was that the country escaped its worst constitutional crisis ever because the Constitution contained within itself the mechanisms needed to overcome catastrophe.Looking at what's happening in Washington today, I can't help thinking that it's time to revisit that awe. We treat the Constitution like fundamentalists treat the Bible; we treat the Founders like Deities; we hold an unshakable faith in the inherent perfection of our system, believing it no less exquisitely wrought than the finely balanced network of our veins and arteries, no less miraculous than the workings of our cells and organs. But cells can go screwy, and sometimes no immune system can save us from cancer. Genes can make mistakes, and sometimes no homeostatic mechanism, however ingenious its feedback loops, can restore our equilibrium. The Founders were awe-inspiring craftsmen, but they weren't magicians, they weren't prophets, and they weren't gods. Is it so unreasonable to wonder whether the charter they wrote more than two centuries ago isn't insurance enough against the madmen who now rule us?
Sure, it's encouraging to see Congress rouse itself from its six-year slumber and begin to push back. But will it really change anything?
Bush is certifiably delusional, but impeachment is off the table, because Democrats can't muster the kind of political will and outrage at a tragically misconceived war that Republicans could summon for a blowjob.
Cheney is an outlaw, a Rasputin, a tyrant, a liar, but there is no check to check him, no balance to balance him.
Throughout the executive branch, secrecy reigns, laws are violated, scholarly whackballs formulate doctrines like the "unitary executive," but neither the courts nor the Congress have the cojones or the clout to intervene.
Citizen-statesmen were supposed to govern us. Farmer-legislators were supposed to lead us. Where are our wise men today? Colin Powell, instead of blowing the whistle, sulks in his tent; Rumsfeld rants on the moor; George Tenet takes a bullet for The Man and gets the Presidential Medal of Freedom; Condi Rice appears as oblivious of her humiliation as any of the pathetic victims on American Idol; Paul Wolfowitz, the stain of our neocon nightmare on his hands, plays not Lady Macbeth, but Mother Teresa.
Sweet reason, the faith of our rationalist Founders, has been supplanted by strategic pseudo-science. Contested facts are adjudicated not by evidence, but by polling, and by mud-wrestling. Swift Boating is the new epistemology. Propaganda -- the breathtakingly big "big lie" -- is triumphant, its practitioners on the federal payroll, but Washington's courtier culture precludes calling a Goebbels a Goebbels. Though protected by the First Amendment, the media are less a Fourth Estate than a Fifth Column, a source of narcotizing infotainment. The Murdoch-Moonie axis has become the MSM.
George W. Bush, the oligarchs' tax-cutting choice for the 2000 nomination, loses the election, but no Supreme Court rescues the nation. The largest transfer of wealth from the middle to the top in the history of the industrial world occurs, but the politico-media culture calls it sour grapes to recall the origin of that silent coup, and class warfare to assess its consequences.
The harpies of hate -- the Coulters, the Limbaughs, the O'Reillys -- spew bile, but the free marketplace of ideas beloved of Jefferson and Madison is incapable of marginalizing them, because Satan is vastly more entertaining than Socrates.
The Republican Party is the puppet of right-wing fundamentalists, witch-hunters, Armageddonists, Father Coughlins, Elmer Gantrys, Cotton Mathers, but no constitutional bar to established religion protects us from theocratic fascism.
A robust democracy depends on an educated citizenry, said the Founders, but the majority view that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 proves how effective a bulwark our educational system is, against the onslaught of relentless mendacity by our leaders.
I wonder what we will say, looking back at 2000-2008. "The system worked"? No matter what this Democratic Congress does, how can we call the generations of broken crockery these ideologues have bequeathed us a sign of a healthy system? However this war ends, how can we call its existence anything but a megalomaniacal abuse of power?
Whatever vermin the oversight committees at long last uncover; whatever the prosecutions and trials of apparachiks may finally reveal and punish; however historians diagnose our good-German complicity with demagogues, our Stockholm-syndrome affection for the bullies, our frog-in-a-warming-cauldron capacity for denial -- no matter how we ultimately awaken from this madness, it will not be with the comfort that our Constitution alone was enough to prevent us from spending this long season in hell.
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