The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Ginger:

I voted based on my moral values. I voted against the admnistration's immoral approval of torture and its immoral abandonment of the Constitutional values that made this country great (e.g., the "enemy combatant" canard, extraordinary rendition). Who Would Jesus Torture? is a question I want an answer for from many people who voted for Bush.

To the extent that Kerry failed to push such items as moral issues, it was a failure in his speaking to certain parts of the country and our failure on the left to define it that way--so bloggers, start defining!

Bush or Kerry being religious doesn't bother me nearly as much as Bush being a Pharisee does. Let him talk with Jesus, but let him also walk with Jesus. I grew up among people who walked with Jesus--he has all of their worse qualities, and none of their better. He should be called on it when he portrays his religious stance as a "moral value".

An English friend of mine says this reminds her of the 1992 election in the UK, when the Tories were prepared for one-party rule. Now they're totally in the crapper.

I'm not a fan of the Nader strategy, and I think we need to organize with our mourning, but Charlie may be right. This may be their high water mark. There are so many things going against them--the long-term economic signs, and the question of how they will fight their war without a draft, for two--that even the "reluctant" Republicans may not be able to stomach them next time.

The question for us is "How do we help make sure it doesn't happen again?" and we just need a few days to think about it.

(And yes, I know we're not done counting, but I am prepared for the worst. I believe in the possibility of miracles, but I don't count on those I can't make my own self.)

Ooh, and here I was just thinking it would be nice to get out some this week!

Since September 2001, entertainment visas are harder to come by in general, entertainers with visas are more likely to be denied admission for overstays in the past, and Cubans in particular are more likely to get their petitions/applications turned down.

I thought about noting this in my blog when I saw it, but it's so common now for me to see these stories (petition/application denial or denial of admission) that I guess I didn't find this particular case discussion-worthy.

There's a tag (MTEntryIfCommentsOpen) in the MT documentation that you put around the comment form to handle this. Check the default comment listing template on the MT site to see the tag in action.

Christopher: Thanks! That's right up my alley.

I don't think the sort of thing Kozolowski is talking about in his last comment is ever going to happen under the Microsoft regime. And I can give you three reasons why: D. R. And M.

Jon: You're dead right about the development environment. I didn't even think about that.

The funny thing is some of what Koslowski seems to want is available in the Mac market, just from third-party vendors. Now, I personally don't give a hoot about TV integration, since I've had my TV on to watch broadcast exactly once in the four-plus years I've owned my house and don't have (or have interest in) cable. I didn't assume my feelings that TV integration is a dead end were universal. I'm interested to see that I'm not alone in that.

I had friends who were working for Enron's broadband division when Enron made that deal with Blockbuster to pipe moves over DSL. I laughed then, and I'd still be laughing if they made that deal today. The cable market has a lock on downloading movies. If a technology company wants to get in on that market, they'd better buy Time Warner. Oh, wait ....

Now the part where I can play my iTunes music through my stereo--*that* I'm interested in. Big time.

I'm looking forward to seeing you and your not-real-people band with my not-real-people husband (who used to do a lot of studio engineering but now only dabbles--on his Mac) in a couple of months, Patrick.

One of my pet peeves about modern American culture is that on many levels it seems designed to induce people to be passive: not to do, but to consume what others do. I *love* that Apple is helping people who want to do--make music, take pictures, narrate home movies, whatever--do their thing. I love that it helps me to do *my* thing.

Theresa's remark about people and technical capacity is dead on.

Based on his comments when I posted about this, the guy's just annoyed that Apple did what it's always done--favored end-users over developers (Java) and creators over consumers (iApps over TV in a box). The TV thing particularly boggles me, since everybody knows that TiVo already owns that market. Why would Apple bother to reinvent that wheel? Wouldn't they just buy TiVo instead?

I saw that on Yahoo this evening and was left with my mouth literally hanging open. It's an amazingly dumb alert: inane at best in its obviousness (terrorists could use information to plan attacks) and/or paranoid in its breadth (anyone interested in anything might be a terrorist).

That the people who are supposed to be protecting us all are morons at best is not reassuring.

The woman who wrote the post about Bush's trip that Kevin Maroney quoted is a friend of mine. I like to keep her in mind when the meme that only "conservatives" are in the armed forces and therefore "conservatives" 0wn patriotism gets shoved in my face.

Because, you know, if people like her had their way, Hitler would never have been stopped.

Count me among the many people who will be sad if you guys quit.

One of the solutions we're currently considering is closing comments on all entries older than [time to be decided]. There's a plug-in or hack that does it if you're using PHP. Another alternative we're considering is a cron job that changes the flag in the database and rebuilds the blog overnight.

This won't solve the problem of spam on current entries, but it will solve the problem of spam on hundreds of older ones.

I got a challenge like that recently from an Earthlink user of my acquaintance. As it happened, she was looking for a dinner partner before a local blogger meet. I was suprised at how angry it made me to have my invitation to dinner greeted with the news that I'd been tossed in the spam hole!

The message I got was more polite, but it still bugged me enough that I blogged about it.

In the better late than never department, I'll offer a couple of comments:

I can't speak to the accuracy of the numbers you googled, Patrick, but they don't sound *wrong* to me. One point I'd like to add is that if you check out the State Department Visa Bulletin, you see that the priority date for family immigration for Mexico goes back pretty far. That's because a lot of Mexicans who come here are trying to immigrate legally. (All the employment preferences are now current, which doesn't surprise me one bit.)

The CIS is definitely anti-immigration, although as Randy points out, they're subtle compared to FAIR.

Anybody who says they can tell who's legal and who's not by looking is blowing smoke or ignorant. Outward signs such as the appearance of poverty are no indication of legal status. The only way to tell who's legal is by looking at documents, and even then someone not in the field may not know. (Unless you understand the difference between authorized period of stay and the expiration date of a visa, and know how these dates appear on assorted immigration documents, *you* couldn't tell.)

And anyone who lives in Texas and thinks that unethical politicians and racists don't play on exactly the slippery slope of assumptions you describe all the damned time is living a sheltered life.

[And, while we're on the subject, I too have Cherokee blood, but since it comes from Texas, I count it as believable. Also, it's within time whereof my family's memory runneth, which is to say my father's grandmother, but that goes a long way when your father was born in 1917.]

In response to the question of when the Right riots (apart from 2000, and the whole Klan thing, neither of which I care to touch), I'm going to point out that the behavior of the nominally right-wing Cuban community in Miami during the Elian Gonzalez business was not all candlelight vigils. And that was in large part about anti-Communism.

And let's talk about which side's fringe has militias and murders people and such. Timothy McVeigh, James Kopp, the militia movement, Christian Identity. If the Left is responsible for one loudmouth fool at a university somewhere, what responsibility does the Right that preaches the illegitimacy of government and the evils of modernity and human freedom have for those guys?

The Right doesn't shut Trent Lott or Pat Buchanan or Ann Coulter up. It ignores their evil oputbursts, and does the minimum possible to placate public opinion when forced. If Trent Lott was just speaking his mind. So was Nicholas de Genova. Both are pretty disgusting.

When Yehudit removes Lott, I'll kick De Genova out of Columbia. Can't do that? Well, neither can I. But pardon me for thinking "reasonable people" should be more concerned about *the freaking Senate Majority Leader* (who kept a senior role even after losing the majority leader job) than one guy at a university somewhere.

I've been staying out of this set of arguments because I don't have much (nice) to say: I'm a Gore voter in a Nader neighborhood in THE Bush state, and I'm pissed off at everybody: Gore, Nader, self-righteous voters of all stripes and especially Bush (not to mention Natalie Maines for taking it back).

Almost nobody talks about the Bush voters in this thread. I know the Bush voters. They're my mother, my in-laws, my friends and (former) coworkers. The last time I was in Dallas, which is more GW Bush country than Houston by a long shot, I attended a dinner party thrown by my husband's parents for a dozen of their well-connected Highland Park friends. They are not just people who vote Bush, they're people who financed his $DEITY-cursed campaign.

When you get them alone (except for the fiery liberal couple who kept me and my husband from falling off the starboard end of the table), they're nervous about the economy, and some of them are worried about the war. But I'll tell you what: they're not going to vote for Gore. They're not going to vote for anyone with a D behind his or her name. Even my own mother, who's a sight more liberal than my in-laws, may well vote for Bush again. And she knows better; we ALL knew better in Texas beforehand.

Right now we in Texas are reaping the bitter harvest of the tax cuts Bush rode into the White House. We're throwing poor kids off CHIP because we don't have a red cent to our name. We used to be Mississippi with good roads, and we many not even have the roads much longer.

Would I vote for a Lieberman or a Nader (both of whom I despise from the depths of my heart, regardless of my feelings about their voters) to keep Bush from wrecking the rest of the country the way he and his cronies have wrecked the National Laboratory for Bad Government? If you made me vote today, yes. I may feel differently in 2004, but from where I sit today, getting Bush out of office is more important than arguing about who is sensible, who is pie in the sky, or who has the better plan for 50 years down the road.

Whoever upthread was talking about working together like in the union: Amen, brother.

Well, I think that's part of the point about NASCAR fascination, Stefan.

The couple I know who race stock cars are a software developer/systems admin and a veterinarian (for ferrrets). That's real life in the "heartland" for you.

(And the one stock car I've seen of theirs did, in fact, have headlights. If that makes a difference.)

I live in a big city in what is supposedly part of the heartland, and I'm impressed with neither heartland fetishism nor coastal city fetishism.

The "heartlanders" in Montgomery Country (motto: "we're not that decadent big city Houston") are busy trying to ban books from the public library system for not describing homosexuality as an abomination. And the sophisticates who want nothing more than to emulate New York and San Francisco are moaning about what Houston can do to get some respect and maybe a shot at the 2016 Olympics. (Hint: start with self-respect.)

Virtue, shmirtue. Most of us are just trying to get by.

I agree with Tapped that some of the "affection" for Bubba culture is a little precious. I'm not a NASCAR fan, but I know people who race stock cars. Anybody who lives with "Bubba", and he lives in the city too, can tell the difference between affection and condescension. The former is welcome; the latter is just annoying.

If the hijackers got their visas since the mid 90s, the State Department had the photos taken for the visas.

I'm iffy on the comprehensive fingerprint/photo database. What I've heard so far hasn't impressed me as more than a PR effort, honestly. The INS doesn't have systems in place to process the information it's getting; witness the failure to crossreference with law enforcement in the Railroad Killer case.

How they'll put huge amounts of additional information to effective use (i.e., in a database) in the next few years is beyond me. The foreign student tracking system that's been kicking around for the last few years comes to mind.

(No trouble with the link here.)

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