The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Dan Lewis:

Almost OT, but this video of pretend tough guy George Allen calling a 20-year-old Jim Webb staffer "macaca" in a crowd full of white Republicans has been making the rounds.

Matt Austern said, Like Patrick, I think it's an example of a would-be Democratic leader advancing his own career at the expense of his party. It has made me think less of Obama, just as the same kind of stunt has made me think less of Lieberman.

His first sentence got a lot of play about the pathologies of the Democrat Party. The second sentence was good too. I was reminded of the Lieberman situation again when Josh Jasper defended Obama by telling us to look at among other things, his voting record.

The political victories the Democrats can muster now are mostly symbolic victories (the stem-cell vote was an exception, I suppose, although you could say that a firm Democrat caucus dividing the Republican caucus on this issue won a symbolic victory too). One that comes to mind is when Harry Reid shut down the Senate last fall to get the Phase II report on Iraq, so we could all find out whether the Bush Administration and its cronies misused the pre-war intelligence on Iraq. Where is the report?

Voting records provide a smallish defense for both Lieberman and Obama when votes are so partisan and the Republican majority writes all the legislation. The court of public opinion is what counts at the moment, especially as a means of regaining a divided government in November. And Lieberman just kills the Democrats in the court of public opinion, BS rating and endorsement from national NARAL or not.

Obama may have a certain interfaith or ecumenical streak in his own thinking, but he gave a symbolic victory to the right by criticizing secularists from the middle. Seems I once heard a proverb about a plank, a speck, and an eye that is germane. Earnest or not, Obama's aim was off here.

I find myself wondering where to begin and end hyperlinks in much the same way that I think about using quotation marks. When I worked for a textbook company, the punctuation in our texts matched the face of the word that preceded it (such as bold comma after bold word; the major exception was roman punctuation after italic math). I suppose I know a rule, but it grates against my sensibilities. Incidentally, that's a microcosm of the debate between prescriptivists and descriptivists.

Here's the fun Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on quotation. Quotation, as it happens, is a live, wriggling, slippery topic in the philosophy of language.

Joe married once, then twice, then thrice
As God had said he should
Restored celestial paradise
And saw that it was good

Emily Dickinson
Denied the public's auctions--
She spurned-- a famous splash--
Mixed poetic concoctions
And-- kept-- in-- every-- dash--

The Book and Movie Recommendations link should be http://www.sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/UncleJim.html, right?

Gabriele:

Here's the way I back up on Blogger (easier than copying all the posts from Edit one by one). Every month of your blog is backed up into an archive page, e.g. "http://lostfort.blogspot.com/2005_05_01_lostfort_archive.html".

Just open the pages month by month in the web browser of your choice and save the complete web page. I've tried it with Firefox in Windows and Linux. In both operating systems, Firefox saves a separate directory with the images on the page if you choose "Save As..." and then "Web Page (complete)" as the format in the next dialog box. Then you can open the page from your hard drive, images and all (useful for my wife, who has a family photo blog). There are also options to save as HTML-only or text, but the pages are probably so small that you might as well just save the whole thing.

You'll have to save once for every month your blog has been in existence (so that might take a while), but after you've done it once, on the first of each month, just save the archive page for the just-completed month before, and you're done.

Not as automatic as a site ripper, but much better than handling every individual post.

To decide where to keep the archives you save, take a leaf from Linus Torvalds: "(Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)"

Beinart: "Sorry. Sorry. You see what I mean? I just get carried away. I'm really most awfully sorry. Sorry! Sorry, everyone."

Drum: "Please! Please! This is supposed to be a happy occasion! Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who."

(In this scene, Kevin Drum admires the huge... tracts of land in the political center)

Falsifying numbers is only science fiction if you can find a vantage point from which they add up. Ergo, this is fantasy.

Maybe it's the Non-Euclidean Bookscan they are after. If Republicans are disguised manifestations of pan-dimensional space authors, I suppose it could stay science fiction.

Also, do Republican authors have talking horses or robot servants? That would clear things up.

I just went to Amazon and How Would a Patriot Act? is the top book on the right column of the front page. Way cool.

This link should take you to the top sellers in books. To get there from a book's page, look under Product Details, subhead Amazon.com Sales Rank.

Amazon's Look Inside feature marks excerpt pages "Copyrighted Material", so I found it quite amusing that the first page of Ms. Jareo's novel consisted of the opening crawl from Episode IV.

Dante's character is much more complex than a Gary Stu. The poem is written by the real Dante from the point of view of a Dante-narrator reminiscing about a Dante-wayfarer's trip through fantastic realms. And that's just in the first nine lines.

But I’m the decider and I decide what’s best.

I think this is Bush's version of "The buck stops here." It's a pretty twisted reworking, more like "the buck starts here" or "Scott McClellan, I want you to eat that buck".

I for one hope the press and the Democrats hang Rumsfeld and this whole dirty war around Bush's neck. High time for the CEO president to get the new earnings reports.

The real point of "I hear the voices, and I read the front page, and I know the speculation" is that Bush is trying to talk according to a template he has heard elsewhere, "brave politician standing up for his friend being crucified in the press, no matter the fallout, because it's the right thing to do dammit". It comes out like a parody, clipped and uninviting. It doesn't flow. It betrays no deeper integrity. It provides no explanations.

If Bill Clinton had said it, it would've been about a paragraph longer, and it would make you feel all warm inside, like watching a movie.

Dictionopolis has never been at war with Digitopolis. Dictionopolis has always been at war with Silent Hill.

Here's another blogger from their hit parade, banned at Pandagon:

"I’m banning shoelimpy. He/she is probably a parody, but he/she isn’t very funny. More importantly, he/she is a huge troll and blog whore, and not the kind of blog whore I think is cute. So he/she is going."

My sentiments exactly: it's very disorienting to try to triplethink your way to the humor. Pass.

Cheney is definitely Sauron. Saruman.... Hmm. Condi?

This Bush shipwreck has seemed a little too adrift and captainless to give Cheney this kind of credit. Wouldn't it be awful if Frodo got to Mordor and it was deserted? If the rampaging hordes of Orcs and the Nazgul had long since been cut loose of their moorings to independent acts of mayhem? Because then it would mean we couldn't win it all in one battle; we'd just have a long, wearying war of attrition against the forces of chaos. There is no Sauron.

I think Cheney is Saruman. His exploitation of natural resources, associations with inhuman creatures, and willingness to harm old men were the most obvious tip-offs. I also like Addington and Libby for Wormtongues 1 and 2.

Bush would probably then be Lotho Sackville-Baggins.

Some more open thread weirdness:

Snakes on a Plane, starring Samuel L. Jackson. Saw it on Eschaton.

I should have said two million civilian deaths, not casualties. The line from the Agence France Presse is "Selon Hanoi, il y a eu pres de deux millions de morts dans la population civile du Nord et deux autres millions dans celle du Sud." According to Hanoi, there were nearly two million deaths in the civilian population of the North and two million more in the South.

From what I read, this is the highest estimate among the many that are out there.

Here's a Google Answers thread that puts civilian casualties of the Vietnam War at 2 million each for North and South. Including Cambodia and Laos would put it even higher. It quotes Agence France Presse from 1995. Apparently the civilian casualty totals in the North were obscured for morale reasons.

I poked around more, but the main things I found out are that the numbers are difficult to pin down, and it's hard to know which conflicts to include in the count.

There's an elephant in the room if we do invade Iran: the Persian Gulf oil supply.

From iranbodycount.org, "Iran: Consequences of a War" (Feb 2006):

Straits of Hormuz. While one major aim of any US military action would be to forestall Iranian interference with Gulf oil exports, this would have to be near total in its effect on Iranian capabilities. This would be difficult if not impossible to achieve, leading to a fear of attack which alone would have a formidable impact on oil markets.

Iran is sitting on top of the narrow entrance to the Persian Gulf. If you poke around a little, you'll see reports that Iran threatens to mine the strait in the event of an attack. Here's one:

However, the $300+ oil and $10+ gasoline that will result from taking out Ras Tanura and shutting down the Straits of Hormuz will most definitely and very effectively accomplish that goal of crippling the economies of the US and the West (as well as that of China and the most of the rest of the world, the latter of which being what Ahmedinajad would probably call ‘collateral damage’, to borrow one of the Pentagon's infamous euphemisms). With its key geostrategic location straddling the Straits of Hormuz and the entire Persian Gulf, with its Russian and Chinese advanced missile systems, and with its large, well-trained, highly-disciplined armed forces and Revolutionary Guards, Iran is uniquely positioned and poised to accomplish this feat quite readily and easily, and there's not a whole lot the US military can do to prevent it short of nuking the entire country with large, strategic nuclear weapons (or alternatively, making sure that Israel doesn’t attack Iran in the first place!).

Also, contra Rove and his permanent Republican majority, the base is at about 33%, certainly under 40%. The censure resolution doesn't say a word about Republicans as a party, just that Mr. Bush broke the law.

If the Republicans want to rally around Mr. Bush and hang that albatross around their necks by voting down censure, fine by me. Why the Democrats don't want to distance themselves from Bush in every way is completely beyond me.

What I really don't get is where the Senate Judiciary Committee is. Gonzales came out and scrubbed his spy-program testimony post facto, and the Democrats on the Committee won't sign up with Feingold. I just don't know what they're thinking.

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