Finally

Good For You, Washington. And special thanks to Republican State Senator Bill Finkbeiner for breaking with his party (although he was a former Democrat) to help the bill pass.

The 50 Worst People

This is a damn accurate list. But I think I have to object to me being on the list. :)

The Washington Post's New Look

This is f-ing hilarious. Man, I love The General.

Give The White House Its Porn!

So, the Bush administration wants the big search portals to cough up its records to determine where some people go to get their porn fix. Yet another way to infringe on our privacy in order to "protect us". Yep, screw that whole "war on terror" business. MSN and Yahoo caved, but Google refused.

Eric Schmeltzer has a great idea. But I think we should take it further. Try these keywords:

"George Bush gay threesome"
"Jenna Bush blows frat boys"
"Barbara Bush Bestiality"
"Laura Bush Anal"

Discussing "Conservative" Movies

Jim Emerson, the editor of rogerebert.com (and a Seattle resident), has two entries regarding a recently-published list of "Best Conservative Movies of 2005". Here and here. The first kind of pokes fun of the reasoning behind the selection of each movie. The second explains his own reasoning, after getting some complaints. The second post is the more valuable. It's eloquent, even-handed (at least, in my opinion), not condescending, and it best describes what most "liberals" (myself included) believe:

...What I'd like to make clear is that that although my own beliefs are a mixture of traditional liberal (equal rights and protections under the law for all, with government's primary function as the preserver of those rights), traditional conservative (less intrusive government, fiscal responsibility) and libertarian (individual liberties as paramount)...

(bold emphasis mine)

For you .NET programmers out there

I don't usually make tech posts, but I found this very useful. This is for anyone who needs Win32 API signatures for PInvoke.

Frasier is the Beast

Kelsey Grammar plays the blue and furry Hank McCoy in the latest X-Men movie.

Wal-Mart: Creative Advertising

By now, this incident has been reported on to death.

If you click on the link to the DVD of the Planet Of The Apes TV series, you'll see on the resulting page no link to "Similar Items". It appears that Wal-Mart either fixed the "bug", or it's hiding that link until the categorization and logic behind "similarities" is fixed.

This is what it used to look like. Complete with the "Similar Items".

Okay, this is can't be an intentional racist display on the part of Wal-Mart, right? As someone who does a bit of programming, I know that coding keyword search algorithms can be difficult. And seemingly unassociated items can be linked together with the right set of keywords.

For example, the results set of a search of "Planet Of The Apes" at the walmart.com site includes links to this book and this book, both concerning race. This makes sense, since the titles of the books contain the keywords in the search. However, searches of "similar items" under each book doesn't lead to anything that would seem to link to biographies of prominent black people (there are many items listed, and I didn't have time to do that kind of tedious research).

For more on the technical aspects to this gaffe, I give you this (scroll to the block quoted stuff under the More Walmart post.

Thanks to firedoglake and Steve Gilliard (The NEWS BLOG).

That's Professor RoboCop

So, while waiting for the Orange Bowl game to air yesterday, I checked out Rome: Engineering an Empire on The History Channel. One of the commenting experts in this field was Peter Weller, one of the icons of 1980s B Movies. He's now teaching Roman and Renaissance Art at Syracuse University.

Apparently, I'm not the only one to go whoah, WTF when he appeared on the show.

It's Put Up or Shut Up Time

On this matter, I got nothing else to say. It's a good post, and it should be spread around at Democratic leadership meetings.

And regarding the Abramoff scandal, we all know a bunch of GOPers in Congress will go down. If any Dems are guilty of the same kind of crimes, no mercy for them, too.