brainrow

Here’s one web page with some good quotes from Abraham Lincoln, and here’s another. (Unfortunately, they don’t often give the source of the quotes. Some things attributed to Lincoln are things he never said.)

Here are a few that seem timely, somehow:

It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.

I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.

Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.

Force is all-conquering, but its victories are short-lived.

I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crises. The great point is to bring them the real facts.

No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent.

On Countdown Wednesday night, Keith Olbermann had some comments on Donald Rumsfeld’s Tuesday speech to the American Legion convention. By Thursday, it was all over the blogs. (Full transcript here.)

That about which Mr. Rumsfeld is confused is simply this: This is a democracy. Still. Sometimes just barely.

And, as such, all voices count — not just his.

Had he or his president perhaps proven any of their prior claims of omniscience — about Osama Bin Laden’s plans five years ago, about Saddam Hussein’s weapons four years ago, about Hurricane Katrina’s impact one year ago — we all might be able to swallow hard, and accept their “omniscience” as a bearable, even useful recipe, of fact, plus ego.

But, to date, this government has proved little besides its own arrogance, and its own hubris.

Mr. Rumsfeld is also personally confused, morally or intellectually, about his own standing in this matter. From Iraq to Katrina, to flu vaccine shortages, to the entire “Fog of Fear” which continues to envelop this nation, he, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their cronies have — inadvertently or intentionally — profited and benefited, both personally, and politically.

And yet he can stand up, in public, and question the morality and the intellect of those of us who dare ask just for the receipt for the Emperor’s New Clothes?

Olbermann ended with an extended quote from Edward R. Murrow:

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty,” he said, in 1954. “We must remember always that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law.

“We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were for the moment unpopular.”

Oh… my… God.

Via Crooks and Liars, a new way to cope with the losses imposed by war: Flat Daddies:

Maine National Guard members in Iraq and Afghanistan are never far from the thoughts of their loved ones.

But now, thanks to a popular family-support program, they’re even closer.

Welcome to the “Flat Daddy” and “Flat Mommy” phenomenon, in which life-size cutouts of deployed service members are given by the Maine National Guard to spouses, children, and relatives back home.

The Flat Daddies ride in cars, sit at the dinner table, visit the dentist, and even are brought to confession, according to their significant others on the home front.

I’m sure this program is well-intentioned. Maybe it even helps families cope. But, oh, my God… what are we doing to these people?

Jesus’ General thinks this is just the thing for George W. Bush:

I’m wondering if Our Leader should consider doing something similar. A lot of people think he doesn’t care about the men and women who are defending us against Islamic enslavement. They wonder why he has time for vacations (a whole year’s worth of vacation time in the first five years of his presidency) but is unable to free himself for a few hours to attend a soldier’s funeral a stones’s throw across the Potomac at Arlington.

It doesn’t have to be that way. With a dozen or so Flat Deciders™, he could attend nearly every soldier’s funeral. I doubt most people would even notice that he’s only a cardboard cut-out. Indeed, the fact that the Flat Decider™ is merely a cold, heartless, two-dimensional rendition of a real human being is what makes it so realistic.

Speaking to the American Legion Convention yesterday in Salt Lake City, George W. Bush said this:

On one side are those who believe in the values of freedom and moderation — the right of all people to speak, and worship, and live in liberty. And on the other side are those driven by the values of tyranny and extremism — the right of a self-appointed few to impose their fanatical views on all the rest.

I’m no fan of Mr. Bush, but this is one of the most forthright and incisive descriptions of this country’s current political environment that I’ve heard from anyone. For the first time, Bush acknowledges — what? Are you sure about that?

I’m sorry. My mistake. He — he was talking about the U.S. vs. the terrorists. The terrorists are the “self-appointed few,” see, and Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and that lot are the “freedom and moderation” guys. Seriously. Now, I can see the terrorist part — the guys who want to impose fundamentalist religious governments, with themselves saying what God’s will really is — that part totally works. But the other part? It seems to help if you squint a little and look at it really quickly out the corner of your eye.

Atrios has a chart of housing prices going back to 1890. The values are all adjusted for inflation, of course. Take a look, and then tell me: do you think the housing boom of recent years is likely to continue?

Electoral-vote.com is following this year’s Senate races. Democratic prospects for a Senate takeover aren’t looking good right now. I’d really like to blue-ify some of those pink-edged states, but my mission right now is to turn Ohio deep blue.

Republican Mike DeWine has a lot more campaign money than Democrat Sherrod Brown. Click here to contribute to Brown’s campaign.

My youth is long gone, but I’m holding onto my immaturity, by gosh. Just like Lakehead University:

A small Canadian university has sparked controversy with its recruitment drive by using posters and a website mocking US President George W Bush.

Lakehead University in northern Ontario set up www.yaleshmale.com in a bid to attract potential new students.

It shows a picture of Yale graduate Mr Bush with the caption: “Graduating from an Ivy League university doesn’t necessarily mean you’re smart.”

…

“Lakehead is different. We believe the person you become after you graduate is even more important than the person you were when you enrolled.”

…

Student union president Isabelle Poniatowski told Reuters the campaign was low-brow and lacked class.

“It still strikes me as being very repugnant,” she said. “Lakehead has so many positive attributes that you could really sell to people that live down south.”

And what does a university have if it doesn’t have class?

Sure, this recruitment campaign is immature and inappropriate. Here’s to immaturity and inappropriateness.

In the New York Times, Virginia Heffernan tracks down a web guitar wizard:

Eight months ago a mysterious image showed up on YouTube, the video-sharing site that now shows more than 100 million videos a day. A sinewy figure in a swimming-pool-blue T-shirt, his eyes obscured by a beige baseball cap, was playing electric guitar. Sun poured through the window behind him; he played in a yellow haze. The video was called simply “guitar.” A black-and-white title card gave the performer’s name as funtwo.

…

Like a celebrity sex tape or a Virgin Mary sighting, the video drew hordes of seekers with diverse interests and attitudes. Guitar sites, MySpace pages and a Polish video site called Smog linked to it, and viewers thundered to YouTube to watch it. If individual viewings were shipped records, “guitar” would have gone gold almost instantly. Now, with nearly 7.35 million views — and a spot in the site’s 10 most-viewed videos of all time — funtwo’s performance would be platinum many times over. From the perch it’s occupied for months on YouTube’s “most discussed” list, it generates a seemingly endless stream of praise (riveting, sick, better than Hendrix), exegesis, criticism, footnotes, skepticism, anger and awe.

The most basic comment is a question: Who is this guy?

Heffernan tracks down funtwo, a 23-year-old Korean named Jeong-Hyun Lim. On the way, she introduces us to Jerry Chang, who created this guitar arrangement, and takes us into a half-hidden world of spectacular talent, creativity, skill and dedication outside fame’s spotlight.

Online guitar performances seem to carry a modesty clause, in the same way that hip-hop comes with a boast. Many of the guitarists, like Mr. Chang and Mr. Lim, exhibit a kind of anti-showmanship that seems distinctly Asian. They often praise other musicians, denigrate their own skills and talk about how much more they have to practice. Sometimes an element of flat-out abjection even enters into this act, as though the chief reason to play guitar is to be excoriated by others. As Mr. Lim said, “I am always thinking that I’m not that good player and must improve more than now.”

…

Mr. Lim’s fans said they watch his “Canon Rock” video daily, as it inspires them to work hard. When I watch, I feel moved by Mr. Lim’s virtuosity to do as he does: find beauty in the speed and accuracy that the new Internet world demands.

I’m not terribly concerned that our popular culture values swagger and denigrates competence. But I do worry that our political culture does that, too.

My congress-being, Deborah Pryce, is at it again. This is the second campaign flyer she’s sent me at taxpayer expense. This one purports to be a “newsletter” to help her “stay in touch.” Apparently she only wants to stay in touch right around election time.

This is my favorite part of this mailing: Deb is “Spending Taxpayer Dollars Wisely”. I’ll bet she got a really good volume printing rate for this flyer.

Katherine Harris became famous in 2000, when, as Florida’s top election official, she did everything in her power to throw the presidential election to George W. Bush. (Her best efforts weren’t enough, and the Supreme Court had to step in to stop the counting of actual votes cast by actual voters lest Bush fall behind.)

Now she is a member of Congress and a candidate for U.S. Senate. From the Orlando Sentinal:

U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris said this week that the separation of church and state is “a lie,” that God did not intend for the United States to be a “nation of secular laws” and that a failure to elect Christians to political office will allow lawmaking bodies to “legislate sin.”

…

Separating religion and politics is “so wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers,” Harris said.

We know it’s not the voters who choose them in Katherine Harris’ world.

“Our rulers” may seem like strange terminology in a democracy, but it just flows off the tongue if you don’t believe in democracy.

Harris isn’t the only right-winger to believe there’s no separation of church and state. Here’s Jan LaRue, Chief Counsel of Concerned Women for America:

Well, you know, the interesting thing is, at the founding of our country, there were state churches. That’s what it’s all about in a country where the people get to rule, and if you’re in a state you don’t like, you get to move to another state.

And Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia:

government — however you want to limit that concept — derives its moral authority from God. It is the “minister of God” with powers to “revenge,” to “execute wrath,” including even wrath by the sword

And Thomas Jefferson:

governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

Wait a second! How’d he get in here?

Via Crooks and Liars: Bruce Schneier on what the terrorists want:

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want.

…

[O]ur job is to remain steadfast in the face of terror, to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to not panic every time two Muslims stand together checking their watches. There are approximately 1 billion Muslims in the world, a large percentage of them not Arab, and about 320 million Arabs in the Middle East, the overwhelming majority of them not terrorists. Our job is to think critically and rationally, and to ignore the cacophony of other interests trying to use terrorism to advance political careers or increase a television show’s viewership.

The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn’t make us any safer.

George W. Bush said this week that we’re not leaving Iraq, “so long as I’m the President”. Could this old cartoon (the top one) hold the explanation? Is Iraq payback for something that never happened?

Ah, this is my kind of cell phone.

The phone’s makers warn that the Port-O-Rotary is for entertainment purposes only, and that the audio is not quite as clear as with a modern phone. At $400 for a black phone and $500 for the red version, this is some pricey entertainment.

Or maybe not.

The conservative movement is not monolithic. It has many branches, each with its own ideas of the right way — the far-right way — to run the world.

A Florida school board wants to ban a children’s book about Cuba from its school libraries. The book isn’t harsh enough on the Cuban government. And there’s no better way to fuel the mind of a child than to deny him access to ideas you disagree with.

A coalition of conservative groups is pushing for an FBI to crackdown on in-room adult movies in hotels. Adults, unlike children, can make their own decisions. But sometimes they choose incorrectly, and we have to put a stop to that.

A church in Watertown, New York dismissed a Sunday School teacher who had taught there for 54 years. Why? Because she was female. In a letter, the minister quoted the Bible as saying: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent.” Over in Afghanistan, the Taliban are thinking, “This is the kind of American we can work with!”

Wired has the Bush Power-Grab Scorecard with details and status information about extraordinary rendition, torture, detention without trial, and warrantless surveillance.

Another Wired story lists ten privacy screw-ups in the Privacy Debacle Hall of Fame.

Between accidental breaches and deliberate ones, privacy’s been having a tough time lately.