Archive for April, 2008

…and that’s a damn shame. It seems Thomas is the only member of the White House press corps who cares about the truth and holding the administration’s feet to the fire.

Have a look at Thomas’ interaction with Dana Perino at yesterday’s press briefing:

Thomas: The President has said publicly several times, in two consecutive news conferences a few months ago, and you have said over and over again, we do not torture. Now he has admitted that he did sign off on torture, he did know about it. So how do you reconcile this credibility gap?

Perino: Helen, you’re taking liberties with the what the President said. The United States has not, is not torturing any detainees in the global war on terror. And General Hayden, amongst others, have spoken on Capitol Hill fully in this regard, and it is — I’ll leave it where it is. The President is accurate in saying what he said.

Thomas: That’s not my question. My question is, why did he state publicly, we do not torture –

Perino: Because we do not.

Thomas: when he really did know that we do?

Perino: No, that’s what I mean, Helen. We’ve talked about the legal authorities –

Thomas: Are you saying that we did not?

Perino: I am saying we did not, yes.

Thomas: How can you when you have photographs and everything else? I mean, how can you say that when he admits that he knew about it?

Perino: Helen, I think that you’re — again, I think you’re conflating some issues and you’re misconstruing what the President said.

Thomas: I’m asking for the credibility of this country, not just this administration.

Perino: And what I’m telling you is we have — torture has not occurred. And you can go back through all the public record. Just make sure — I would just respectfully ask you not to misconstrue what the President said.

Thomas: You’re denying, in this room, that we torture and we have tortured?

Perino: Yes, I am denying that.

Elaine, did you have one?

[other reporter]: I have one on Zimbabwe, actually.

Thomas: Where is everybody?

The best video I could find doesn’t include Thomas’ last line, but you can see how she feels about the situation:

It’s a sad situation when you not only have the administration simply lying about its crimes, and only a single journalist is willing to challenge them on it. I’m sure Thomas knows she’s right, but I wonder if she knows how much she’s appreciated.

Some of the folks at reddit have come up with the right idea: let’s all send her flowers.

Here’s her office address:
Helen Thomas
c/o Hearst Newspapers, Washington Bureau
700 12th St. NW Suite 1000
Washington, DC 20005

If enough people do this, I think that we’ll not only demonstrate our appreciation, but it might even become a story in and of itself, which will give Thomas the opportunity to tell the rest of the media the background of the story — that the administration continues to lie about torture in spite of the irrefutable evidence that it has happened.

That’s what a former boss of mine used to call it, and he grew up there, in the teeming metropolis of Boiling Springs, so I’m sure he always meant it in a positive way. Well, maybe not.

I’ve got my own slight connections to that other commonwealth: my family lived in Philadelphia in the early 1960s, while my father was working as a civilian at a military hospital, so apparently Philly is (or at least was, at the time) more pleasant than Viet Nam, where he would have been otherwise. As I understand it, we moved back to Brooklyn (the source of all life) a few months before I was born, so while I’ve never lived in Pennsylvania, I did gestate there.

I also attempted to go to college down there, but those snooty snobs at the U of P wait-listed me, then turned me down. Hmph.

I’ve got a good friend who grew up in Pittsburgh, but he got out of there and lives in London now.

Does it seem like I’m in a position to speak objectively about Pennsylvania? Nah. Screw those people.

I won’t get into my thoughts about the results of yesterday’s primary, as it would obviously just be a big, drippy case of sour grapes. But I do want to comment on Clinton’s victory speech:

The Guardian referred to this speech as “defiant” and “passionate.” I guess I missed that. It seems to me the speech is incredibly clumsy. She’s not connecting with the audience, even though they’re clearly on her side. Their cheering seems to get in her way, and she never seems to be comfortable in deciding whether to continue speaking over them, recognize the cheering, or join in.

As the goat said upon finding out he couldn’t afford the lederhosen, “I bet they would have chafed, anyway.”

I’ve written about this weasel before. I guess I find it amusingly ironic that someone with the name “Kristol” would see it as his duty to muddy issues — to make them anything but crystal clear.

Let’s look at the weasel’s latest spray of piss in the Times. Billy boy writes…

Obama was explaining his trouble winning over small-town, working-class voters: “It’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

“It’s not surprising then that they get bitter…” Does that clause seem a little odd to you? What’s the “then” for? Ah, of course. Rule #1 in the mudslinger’s handbook: if you’re going to quote your target, be sure to take it out of context. So maybe we should look at the full quote:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

There’s your “then.” Whether you agree with the statement or not, at least you understand the history that Obama is blaming for the situation. I can see why his opponents and their supporters would jump all over this. It’s incredibly easy to grab that last sentence and claim it’s equivalent to something like, “I need to find a way to tell these simple-minded rednecks that I can help them.”

But you need to think about the source. If I had said this (if I were stupid enough to try to run for elective office), it would be pretty safe to conclude that I meant it the way people are describing it. But that’s because I’m an atheist, I would support an effort to rewrite the second amendment to make it clear that it’s not about private ownership of guns, I feel thoroughly alienated when I’m in the Midwest (and I felt that way for the year and a half that I lived there), and frankly, I’m not particularly patriotic. I don’t personally think of myself as an elitist, but that’s just my opinion. But if I were a politician and I said something like that, I think it’s fair to say that my opponents would be justified in saying about me what they’re saying about Obama.

I’m not Obama. I didn’t lose my father when I was a baby. I didn’t lose my mother when I was a teenager. I wasn’t raised by my grandparents. I didn’t go to school on scholarships. For the most part, my parents paid my way. And I’m not a Christian. He is.

When the weasel compares Obama to Marx, he knows that it’s not applicable.

…[I]t’s one thing for a German thinker to assert that “religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature.” It’s another thing for an American presidential candidate to claim that we “cling to … religion” out of economic frustration.

And it’s a particularly odd claim for Barack Obama to make. After all, in his speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, he emphasized with pride that blue-state Americans, too, “worship an awesome God.”

What’s more, he’s written eloquently in his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” of his own religious awakening upon hearing the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s “Audacity of Hope” sermon, and of the complexity of his religious commitment. You’d think he’d do other believers the courtesy of assuming they’ve also thought about their religious beliefs.

I agree. It doesn’t make sense. If I’d said it, no problem, because you’re not going to find a record of me saying the opposite. If Obama says it, considering his history, you can conclude that either his apparent respect for religion for the past twenty years has been an attempt to fool people, you can conclude that, for some reason, he wasn’t being honest to the people he was speaking with that day, or you can conclude that what Obama’s quoted as saying in California has some meaning other than the easily attacked “elitist” interpretation. See, weasel? More than one easy conclusion, and the one that you, your pals at Fox, McCain and Clinton have chosen, it seems to me, is the one that makes the least sense. Why would a religious person believe that religion is the opiate of the masses?

But whatever you choose to believe, don’t you have to wonder what Obama’s point was in making the statement in question? What does it mean that these people who didn’t experience much if any of the growth of the national economy during good times, and who’ve borne the brunt of bad economic periods more than most others happen to put a lot of reliance in (that is, “cling to”) the elements of their lives about which they feel most secure?

It’s pretty simple, if you ask me. They’re the Reagan Democrats. They’re a big part of the people who’ve been targeted for decades by operatives like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. And what strategy was used on those people? Take the aspects of their lives that these people rely on, and scare them into thinking that your political opponents plan to take them away. Make them believe they’re going to lose their guns, that there’s a plot to seriously weaken their religious freedoms, or that their bitterness is the fault of someone other than the government that’s ignored them and the corporations that used them and then threw them away. In other words, they’re the people who receive nothing more than pandering and lip service from most politicians, who play on their fears to turn them into single-issue voters.

With that in mind, look at how Obama’s opponents and detractors have responded to what he said: they’ve denied that there’s any truth in his statement, and they’ve told the people he spoke of that they’re not bitter at all; that they’re proud, godly people with strong traditions. That is to say, they’ve pandered to them and blamed their troubles on someone else. Clinton in particular has tried to get their votes (most of which she already had) by pretending to be one of them and convincing them that people like Obama (the “elite”) are the enemy. She’s giving them one issue to override any other issue they may have been considering, hoping it will scare them enough to get them to vote for the alternative to the enemy she’s pointed out to them. And who is that alternative?

Atwater would be proud.

When you talk about a URL, what do you say? Actually, before we even get to that, how do you say “URL”? I’ve already given my own answer away by writing “a URL” (yoo-arr-ell) rather than “an URL” (erl). Similarly, I make my living as an SEO (ess-ee-o) rather than a SEO (see-o).

Honestly, this interweb business is young enough that a lot of the terminology isn’t standardized, and similarly, many of the acronyms don’t have a set pronunciation. That will change with time, I’m sure. After all, nobody pronounces “scuba” (ess-see-yoo-bee-ay) — at least I hope not.

So, back to the question at hand: when you say a URL, just what do you say? Do you include all its parts, using the official generic syntax of scheme, authority, path, query, and fragment? Don’t be silly, of course you don’t.

As more and more people go online and become accustomed to these things, it’s become pretty standard to leave out the “http://”. Even the “www” (which really shouldn’t be necessary) is left out most of the time. Just look at an ad in print or on the eye of hell. The web site is usually just represented as domain.com. And you really can, in most cases, just type that into your browser’s location bar. The browser will go with the default protocol of http, and the server, when reached, will add a trailing slash and sometimes the www as well.

Of course, there will always be exceptions, like this guy:

LETTERMAN: Can I just take a second here, Larry — I’m sorry, I don’t mean to interrupt — to give our World Wide Web address. If people want to e-mail us, we’re on the World Wide Web as well.

KING: You are too? What is it?

LETTERMAN: wwwww.comcomcom — comcomdiggitydiggitydiggitydank.com –comdiggitywww.comdave.com. So give us some of that e-mail…

What about the directory or the file name? If you want to send someone to a document other than the home page, you have to go further than just the domain name, right? Nope. There are ways around that too.

CNN keeps their political news in a /politics/ directory, but apparently they were concerned that telling people to go to cnn dot com slash politics (which would end up taking them to http://www.cnn.com/POLITICS/ after the browser and the server had their way with the request) was asking too much of them, so they’ve made it easier. You can simply go to cnnpolitics dot com.

And what happens when you request that URL? Your browser adds the http://, so a request gets sent to the server at http://cnnpolitics.com. From there, you figure the server would tack on the www and the trailing slash, right?

Wrong again. The server responds with a status code of 302 (”found”) and redirects the request to http://www.cnn.com/politics/. So why tell people to go to the cnnpolitics.com domain? I suppose part of the reason is that they registered the domain name in order to keep anyone else from getting it, but I think it’s pretty safe to assume that they chose to use it and redirect it to make things easier for the user. Apparently, it’s easier to communicate cnnpolitics dot com than cnn dot com slash politics, especially when it’s spoken rather than printed.

What can we take away from this? Apparently, it’s that slashes are problematic. Maybe that’s because a standard keyboard has two different kinds of slashes: the forward slash and the backslash. When a person says “slash,” they almost invariably mean the forward slash, but I suppose it could still cause some confusion. When I say “guitar,” do you think of an electric guitar, an acoustic guitar, or what? Certainly, when the electric guitar was new to the world, “guitar” meant acoustic guitar, just like one used to be able to say “television” to mean a black and white television, then at some point one would specify “color television” for the new technology. Eventually, there would be a point at which you couldn’t just say “television” because you might have been referring to either color or black and white. Now, just about every television is color, so one can say “black and white television” and just “television” for color. And we’ll go through this again with digital, high definition, etc.

But with slashes, it seems that despite the fact that there’s a general understanding that “slash” means “forward slash,” it’s not understood widely enough, and some have decided to find ways around it. Hence, if you own enough domains, you don’t mind setting up redirects every time you publish a new document, and you don’t care about how hard your poor defenseless server has to work, you can just feed people domain names to direct them to your pages.

There’s another option out there, but it pretty much relies on people understanding what slashes are for and which ones are kosher on the web. Shell has been running spots on the eye of hell of late, promoting how hard they’re working to clean up the environment and find alternative, clean sources of energy. As if. Basically, it’s one of those “please don’t hate us, we need those enormous profits more than you know” campaigns.

At the end of the spot, they tell you to go to shell.com/us/realenergy for more information. That’s the URL you see on the screen, but the voiceover says, “shell dot com [pause] us [pause] realenergy.” Is that helpful? If you’re not looking at the screen when you hear this, will you know what to make of those pauses?

And what happens when you try to go to shell.com/us/realenergy?

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: Sun-ONE-Web-Server/6.1
Date: Mon, 07 Apr 2008 20:10:07 GMT
Content-length: 0
Content-type: text/html
Location: http://www.shell.com/us/realenergy

You get redirected to the URL with the www. From there…

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: Sun-ONE-Web-Server/6.1
Date: Mon, 07 Apr 2008 20:11:40 GMT
Content-length: 0
Content-type: text/html
Location: http://www.shell.com/us/realenergy/
Connection: close

You get the slash added at the end via a redirect. After that, you get a 200 response at the new URL, hit a bunch of JavaScript and then…

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”1; URL=http://realenergy.shell.com/?lang=en&page=homeFlash”> </meta>

A meta refresh to a subdomain of shell.com, without the www, and with some personalization, based on a flash sniffer and most likely my IP address.

As it turns out, they could have told me to go to realenergy.shell.com (look mom, no slashes!), and I’d have ended up in the same place. But I suppose subdomains are even harder to communicate than any of that other stuff.

It’s true, you kids. After making us wait almost two years, Fafnir an Giblets have returned, and one can only hope the Medium Lobster is right behind them.

And if this is one of those first of April pin-a-fish-on-my-back-and-douse-me-with-mayonnaise tricks, I’ll be very, very upset.