All Things Considered had a story tonight on how Bush rallys are limited to ticketholders, and those ticketholders are card carrying, loyalty oath signing Republicans, guaranteing that there is no voice of dissent to muddy the message or confuse the pinhead candidate and his voters. Unsuprisingly, the republicans interviewed thought that this was just great, and reflected the efficiency with which Bush runs the country.

I view this as absolute bullshit. What kind of political campaign is it if people are cut off from the political process? What kind of democracy do we have if only sworn supporters can hear the president of the United States speak?

The more I think about this, the more pissed off I get. Die-hard Bush supports make up at most 1/3rd of the population, they aren’t going to be swayed by any dissenting voices. That isn’t likely to be enough to get re-elected, so he’s going to need to bring others into the fold. So why isn’t he willing to take the chance on a few hecklers for the chance to win over some undecideds? The presidential campaign is in full swing.

I can imagine a few reasons. Is it that it will ruin the image projected to the TV news, this decreacing the propaganda value of the rallys in the mass media? If so, I’m sure that Goebbels would approve, but as a freedom loving American, I don’t much like it. Perhaps they think they have the election in the bag? But why would they, unless Floriday in 2004 was just a dry run?

Paranoid? Perhaps, but I can’t imagine that anything good lying behind such tactics.

This sort of behavior might be defensible in some sort of contested primary, but the presidential primaries are past, the Democratic convention over, and the Republican convention is a forgone conclusion.

The story notes that the Kerry campaign is much more open.

Alan Keyes, a Maryland resident is running for the Illinois senate as a Republican against Barak Obama, who made his nation debut to wide acclaim at the Democratic National convention.

Doesn’t this seem wrong? The guy doesn’t even have the decency to rent an apartment in Illinois before announcing his candidacy. I know that this has been happing for quite a while, and I wouldn’t be suprised if it were a bi-partisan practice, but how can this guy represent the people of Illinois when the only ones he knows are the ones are probably the ones that recruited him (if they were even local)?

It’s just bullshit. We are working for the politicians. They should be working for us.

Geekable.com: July 2004 Archives

Sounds like Mary Jane is a real bitch….

So, this guy reads something on a high-class gossip site about Kirsten Dunst splitting with her actor boyfriend, because, it is asserted, she’s making more money than he is.

So, what does this blogger go do? He links to it, using not one, but two obscentites to describe the actress.

Maybe next time he’ll do the right thing and 1) treat a rumor as a rumor and 2)worry about something more important, like the skewing of priorities and the lowering of standards of civility on the old World Wide Web.

I’m posting this with a demo copy BlogJet.  BlogJet is a blogging client that supports a variety of weblog systems (including MovableType).  It is commercial software with a price tag in the $20-30 range.

I installed it because I am looking to dramatically streamline the effort of posting images in my blog.  As it is, I haven’t bothered posting any images because I’m lazy.

I was hoping that BlogJet would do the job.  It doesn’t.

First off, if you simply drag a photo off your local disk into the browser window, it gives an error because it is a local file.  This is strange,  because it has a button for inserting a picture that lets you pick a picture from the local filesystem which it will presumably upload to the server when you make the post.

The second annoyance is that it doesn’t seem to do much with the photo.  I can resize it, but its just modifies the size tag, it doesn’t resize the image, so anyone who views the page ends up downloading the full=sized file, which the browser then does a crappy job of resizing.

This is what I think BlogJet and every other rich blogging client should do.

1. Support drag and drop of images from the local filesystem.
2. Automatically resize the image into a preselected thumbnail size using a high quality resizing algorithm.
3. Allow the optional but automatic creation of a larger image linked from the thumbnail.
4. Allow customization of the JPEG quality settings.
5. Allow very basic image editing.  I think cropping should be enough, though one could also make the the case that adjusting levels should be added.  Anything more though should really be the domain of an image editing tool
6. Only generate the resized images when the entry is posted so you can tweak things without degrading things.
7. Automatically upload the images when the entry is posted.

I’ve looked at Zempt, MTClient, Bloggar, BlogJet and Ecto.  None of them really come close.  Most don’t support any image operations beyond embedding and uploading it to the server.  Ecto has a little file-upload tool that creates thumbnails, but it doesn’t have a what-you-see-is-roughly-what-you-get editor for the HTML (in fact, the editor doesn’t even try to do a nice job of formatting the HTML source).

Other than that, BlogJet seems pretty slick. I’d buy it if it just had improved image support.  I think it would appeal to far more people than the “Attach Voice” functionality.

I’ve written before about Oil and our military policy. This article on Slate touches on some of the same points in much more detail.

Namely that both the US economy and the US military feed on a diet heavy in oil, that our policy for securing that oil is in serious trouble, first from the islamic revolution in Iran, and now due to Osama’s attempts to destabilize Saudi Arabia’s government and due to our own success in destabilizing Iraq.

If our oil supply is seriously curtailed both our economy and our military start to falter, one undermining the other in a sort of “death spiral,” further reducing our ability to project influence in the world.

It would seem prudent in these circumstances to pursue means of acheiving greater energy independence. I’m not against approaching this problem on a number of fronts, but drilling in ANWAR is of such minor consequence, energy supply-wise, that it isn’t worth all the distraction and effort. The same goes for nuclear power. We have enough trouble figuring out what to do with the waste that we’ve accumulated over the past 6 decades of nuclear energy, is it really worth the pain to try and actually build more plants, especially when Oil is primarily a transporation fuel these days?

Meanwhile, investments in alternative energy and fuel efficiency are largely ignored, which is a shame, because these are exactly the sorts of things that could do well for american companies as a couple of billion people in China and India are already rushing up the economic ladder, with all the energy demands that brings.