Hey, check it out: Seymour Hersh’s ‘stovepipe’ narrative turns out to have been true. At least according to Senator Carl Levin, (D-MI) Ranking Member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who investigated this claim.

‘Stovepipe’ refers to the the Office of Special Plans created in the Dept. of Defense, headed up by Doug Feith. They ‘stovepiped’ intelligence from the DoD to the white house based on how well it could be used to support policy, without the usual vetting that takes place to find out if it’s actually worth anything. In other words, the administration stuck a guy into the DoD intelligence system to pluck out intel that would make it look like Iraq was involved in 9/11, or had connections to Al Qaeda. That’s the ‘intelligence failure’ you hear so much about.

Some call it cognitive dissonance, I call it willful ignorance.

Similarly, 75% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda, and 63% believe that clear evidence of this support has been found. Sixty percent of Bush supporters assume that this is also the conclusion of most experts, and 55% assume, incorrectly, that this was the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission. Here again, large majorities of Kerry supporters have exactly opposite perceptions.

These are some of the findings of a new study of the differing perceptions of Bush and Kerry supporters, conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes and Knowledge Networks, based on polls conducted in September and October.

The usual suspects are getting worked up about NaNoWriMo, which I’d be considering except for the fact that the month in question is November, which is always a big travel month for me. I can’t do 6 pages a day while road tripping…

Speaking of which, this will be HoRoTriPhoMo, Homer’s Road Trip Photo Month.

Democracy? Oh yeah, I remember that…

[..]

Going to school full-time and working nights, the single mother says that the last time she tried to vote she left much of the ballot incomplete because she was terrified her unminded toddler would fall off the stage upon which the booths sat. So with three other working moms, Alejandre sued in federal court to order the state legislature to revisit its horse-and-buggy absentee statute to make reasonable provisions — whether by extending voting hours, changing absentee requirements, or instituting a universal vote-by-mail system like the one that’s worked well in Oregon.

This past Friday, Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit, a prominent conservative intellectual and vocal Bush supporter, handed down a capricious, flippant dismissal of the complaint, ignoring key portions of its argument and simply inventing others.

[..]

For his alternative, “Concept 2 democracy,” Posner draws on the work of Joseph Schumpeter. This is a brazenly unromantic vision of democracy – one that treats politics “as a competition among self-interested politicians, constituting a ruling class, for the support of the people, also assumed to be self-interested, and to be none too interested in or well informed about politics.”

Not surprisingly, Posner’s model of democracy looks not to ancient Athens but to the market, Posner’s favorite model. It divides our democracy into two distinct classes: the class of voters-as-consumers, and the “sellers” – the elite class of elected officials and their appointees. These elite rulers market their views to the voters and so compete for electoral advantage.

What Posner advocates is not democracy. It is plutocracy. And if the anti-democratic forces behind Team Bush have their way, they will be able to point to Posner’s ruling as the roadmap for installing it.

Our only hope, really, is a massive tide of Americans coming out to the polls on Nov. 2 in such numbers that they overpower the Republican strategy. Democracy itself is at stake.

And on a lighter note: Lie Girls. Phone sex for Republicans. “These girls pose a grave and gathering threat… to your pants!”

The ‘Constitution Restoration Act of 2004.’ Yes, it’s as scary as it sounds. Federalism and God, together again.

For even now, the ignorant barbarians in Washington are pushing a law through Congress that would “acknowledge God as the sovereign source of law, liberty [and] government” in the United States. What’s more, it would forbid all legal challenges to government officials who use the power of the state to enforce their own view of “God’s sovereign authority.” Any judge who dared even hear such a challenge could be removed from office.

This from the party of Lincoln. And if you doubt how polarized and violent the political right really is, you might consider reading this followup editorial from The Lone Star Iconoclast, the Crawford newspaper that endorsed Kerry.

Fascism on the rise. Seriously.

iPhoto Library Manager. You’d think iPhoto would manage its own libraries, but no. You need this freeware to do it properly.

I’m a sucker for stuff like this: Stellarium. If the sky weren’t blocked by clouds right now, I wouldn’t need this thing. It shows the sky in lovely 3D rendered splendor, with constellation outlines and artwork. Works on a lot of different platforms, including Windows.

The only problem is that my iBook has an 8MB ATI graphics card built in, so I’m seeing text and garbled graphics flashing across the sky. Time to fill out a bug report, I suppose… (That’s one of the nice things about open source software. You can tell them it doesn’t work, and they might just fix it.)

Sometimes he does this:

He sits alone in a booth at a restaurant. The waiter takes his order, he sips his Coke, he fidgets a little while, and then he closes his eyes.

First comes hearing. Pre-teens in the booth behind him, talking about downloading ring tones for their cell phones.

A man at a table to his left is studiously avoiding talking to his wife about work. It sounds bad… She doesn’t bring it up, he doesn’t volunteer anything. She gossips about the neighbors, he rants about politics. What he’s been doing for the past eight hours is a conspicuous black hole in their relationship.

Waitress taking order at the booth opposite him from the girls. An elderly man and his wife both want the salmon fettucini. They laugh about having ordered the same thing.

He’s listening to all these people, and somehow he’s holding the conversations in his head. It’s like opera, when all the characters are singing different narratives and you can barely keep up. Keeping up, in fact, is what’s interesting about it; the stories themselves are pretty boring.

Boring like the music. Cover band versions of ABBA and Corey Hart songs, re-performed to sound like the original, but also to shave a few pennies off royalties owed. Bad music performed badly, for bad reasons. He thinks: ‘Sunglasses At Night’ is not a good companion for a seafood sampler platter and a margarita.

Whenever he performs this exercise, he can watch his mind struggle for visual input. Much is imagined visually, like a dream. The pre-teens, the troubled relationship, the elderly couple… All have faces and postures and attitudes and clothing. Every gap in the scene is filled in, like taking light to every corner of a shadow. The visual scene glows in his mind. And then, when the mind is done struggling, the scene disappears and is replaced by… something else.

It changes from seen to scene. He thinks: This is how bats feel about their environment – they hear it. They know it by hearing it. Blind people don’t see by hearing, they know by hearing. He thinks about wearing sunglasses in order to pretend to be blind. Sunglasses at night. He laughs.

“I’m glad you think it’s funny.”

He opens his eyes. A plate full of fried shrimp, moving across the table right to him. He looks up at the waiter, motions him closer, to share a secret.

“I once was blind, but now I see.”

“Hallelujah. Enjoy your shrimp.”

I’m watching a streaming video of Al Gore’s speech at Georgetown on 10/18. You can look at it by going to CSpan.org and look under ‘recent programs.’

And I’m consistently amazed by Gore, both good and bad forms of amazement. He’s a really good speaker, his rhetoric is sharp, and he’s a good thinker. On the other hand, he’s saying things now that he should have said four years ago.

Thrift stores are interesting places to buy photographic equipment. They usually have some sort of jewelry case, where the gear you’re interested in is located under glass. Nothing is price marked where you can see it, and it’s really hard to discern the quality. So you argue with yourself about whether you should trouble a cashier to come over and show you something you probably won’t buy because it’s either too broken or overpriced.

There’s one thrift store that has like a million 8-inch long or so hunks of zoom lens. That is, it looks like a little forest of black trees with numbers on the side on that one shelf. Of course the price tags are away from the glass, and the protective caps are on the ends, so you can’t tell what kind of mount it is. Not that I need a zoom lens or anything, though.

Last time I was at this store, though, I saw something in the corner of the case, something I instantly knew would require harassing a cashier into letting me look.

Praktica! The East German camera manufacturer! It’s like a little piece of the Berlin wall was in that jewelry case. Naturally, after testing it out and finding it in working order, I bought it. (I used to buy old computers on a whim. Cameras, at least, retain their usefulness and don’t take up as much space.)

A big part of what I love about this camera is its case. It looks like fetish gear. This is the camera you take to bondage night for a few quick snapshots.

Once Mistress Dominatrix has given you permission to open the case, you see the camera that Kyle McLaughlin would be, if he were a camera: Tall, thin, quirky.

It’s big. In fact, to look at it, one might think it’s ungainly and heavy, not ideal for East German Taas spying-on-your-neighbor work. But pick it up, and its heft and weight is reassuring. It’s not too large for my smallish hands, and is balanced nicely.

But the most endearing thing about this camera is the satisfying sound it makes when you trip the shutter. The mechanism for setting the shutter speed is a poor design from a usability standpoint, but an acceptable tradeoff for mechanical simplicity. And boy does it make a cool sound.

Also, the Pentaflex SL was manufactured between 1965 and 1968, meaning this camera is as old as I am.