Earth has a third moon, maybe. Did you know we had two? I didn’t.

If you ever had an Atari 2600, you must see this site. Adventure mapped into Quake 3.

Eliot Weinberg:

One cannot, as is usual, personify and refer to an administration by the name of its leader, for George W. Bush has exactly the same relationship to the policies of his government as Britney Spears does to the operations of the Coca-Cola corporation.

Henry Kissinger, about Donald Rumsfeld:

“The scariest man I have ever met.”

From InfoWorld, Brian Valentine, SVP of Microsoft Windows development:

“I’m not proud. We really haven’t done everything we could to protect our customers. Our products just aren’t engineered for security.”

In an otherwise boring article about Intel revenues, SVP Sean Maloney is quoted as saying that the Internet is headed for brownouts in 2003 as traffic increases. Sure wish there were more details reported on that.

Joshua Micah Marshall, in the Washington Monthly, writes Confidence Men, subtitled “Why the myth of Republican competence persists, despite all the evidence to the contrary”:

“While no one bats a thousand in politics, it’s actually difficult to think of one thing the vice president has been responsible for that has not ended in muddle or disaster. Yet his reputation for competence has survived. The same applies to the Bush administration generally.”

Wired News, Gary Bass of OMB Watch:

“We’re nearing one year since the attacks and we have yet to see any coherent policy from the government on what [web-based] information should come down and what information should go back up.”

Ultrawideband (UWB) frequencies—one of the hot new ideas in wireless computing—runs the risk of shutting down airline systems. Which means that all laptops might be banned if this tech, ahem, takes off.

Optics.org reports that a patent application has been filed for an “invisibility cloak” that uses lighting effects to turn objects and people invisible.

The Onion, 8/28/02:

“Even Brent Scowcroft is against [invading Iraq], and that guy spends his weekends pipebombing puppy kennels.”

Washington Post, 8/30/02, A5:

President Bush asked Congress yesterday to come up with $825 million in emergency funds to help the nation recover from one of its worst fire seasons.

The request came two weeks after Bush, citing the need for spending restraint, blocked $5.1 billion in emergency funds…. Among the money held up was $50 million in disaster assistance for fires and $150 million to help the nation’s fire departments.

The thing that I fundamentally just don’t get about W’s popularity was brought home by his speech on Thursday on the recent fires out west. The quote below is a complete transcript of the snippet on NPR:

We need to thin. We need to make our forests healthy by using some common sense. We need to understand if you let kindling build up and there’s a lightning strike, you’re goin’ to get yourself a big fire, that’s what we got to understand. We gotta understand that it makes sense to clear brush, we gotta make sense… make sense to encourage people to ensure that the forest is not only healthy from disease, but healthy from fire. That’s what we gotta do here in America, we haven’t done that in the past. We just haven’t done it, and we’re now paying the price.

This is one of those few cases when I’ve got no disagreement with what GWB is saying; I’m not a forest policy expert, but I’ve been hearing this for years. US policy for generations has been to stop every fire, every time, as quickly as possible. Which lets all sorts of kindling build up, and so instead of dozens of manageable fires, you get annual Armageddons. For this reason, the Forest Service actually sets more fires than it puts out, in order to thin down the kindling. It was one of these “managed fires” that got out of control and threatened Los Alamos.

But the speech wasn’t lauding existing forest policy, it was an introduction of the new Bush plan to thin the forests by shredding hunks of regulations and handing timberland over to industry. “Clear out the underbrush,” the new policy goes, “and you can keep that timber as well as some other trees you feel like picking up.” (Differing reports are saying different things about what the policy hands over to the timber industry that isn’t underbrush.)

Which leads to the first thing I don’t get about W’s approval. This entire administration is marked by rampant political opportunism that would make Bill Clinton blush, and only leftwing nutcases like myself seem to notice. The tax cut, originally proposed as a return of the “people’s money” when times were good and revenues were high, first become “necessary due to the recession”, and then a matter of “economic security.” September 11th is the retroactive justification for dozens of pet projects on the Bush 2001 agenda.

And now the west is burning, people are scared, and Bush promises to do something, on the assumption that no one’s going to notice the dispatch of US property to private interests. Based on past experience, he’s probably right.

What makes this even more interesting is that for the first time, a coalition of western state governments and environmental groups have already hammered out a plan to thin underbrush without corporate giveaways. This is a region that is spectacularly suspicious of federal government intrusion. Bush and many of the western governors are Republicans, the “state’s rights” and “get the feds outta my business” party. It will be interesting to see how many of them conveniently ignore that aspect of their philosophy.

But the thing that really nails me is how happy people are with the Dr. Seussization of domestic and international politics. Our enemies are all evil. Terrorists hate freedom. We just gotta clear underbrush. To hell with how. Apparently, if you serve up complex issues in an oversimplified fashion, and deliver them in a folksy, downhome, aw-shucks fashion, you too can be a popular president.

Albert Einstein is quoted as saying, “We should make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler.” The only things missing from current political debate are bright illustrations in primary colors.

The Scene: Atlantic City, New Jersey. Noon. Jeff and his father leaving the apartment, Jeff still recovering from a massively sleep-deprived trip to Italy.

Jeff (squinting and shielding his eyes): Damn, it’s bright.

Jeff’s dad: Yes, that’s called “daylight.”

John Gilmore, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation among other virtues, has filed a lawsuit against the US government challenging as unconstitutional the requirement to show ID before boarding a US domestic plane.

At issue is a series of secret security directives issued by the Federal Aviation Administration and/or the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), in consultation with the Department of Justice and the Office of Homeland Security.  The directives appear to require US airlines to demand identification before allowing customers to travel.  Because the directives are secret, no citizen actually knows what they require.

Such regulations are unconstitutional because they are unpublished; require government agents to search and seize citizens who are not suspected of crimes; burden the rights to travel, associate, and petition the government; and discriminate against those who choose anonymity.

I’m a die-hard civil libertarian, but even I found this a bit to hard to swallow. If you do as well, I urge you to read the FAQ, which spells out what was news to me: flying without ID isn’t against the law. No law from Congress, no Executive Order. What forbids it are various secret rules promulgated by—well, no one’s quite sure. And what the Supreme Court has stated in no uncertain terms is that Americans have the right to anonymity, and the right to travel.

I thought this was an interesting case. Don’t dismiss it before you’ve read the site.

Returning to the US after a trip overseas—in this case a nine-day trip to England—always brings with it a mild readjustment factor. Remembering which way to look when crossing the street. Pulling out greenbacks instead of queenbacks at Starbucks, and not having to do conversion math on the dollar-seventy price. At least for my trip to Italy in two weeks, I’ll be able to continue thinking one-to-one thanks to the weakness of the dollar, which will be an advantage over dividing by 1,850.

But the biggest shift is coming back to US political philosophy. The radical left-wing fringe here is comfortably center-left over there, so once again I must don the persona of the marginalized lunatic.

I left with the SEC scandal in early full swing, and was hoping to return to at least a debate on whether the foxes are guarding our henhouses. But W’s teflon suit, inherited from Reagan with tailoring by Bill, shows few signs of hand-me-down wear. Yesterday’s Washington Post reports Bush approval ratings still in the 72 percent zone, and W is handily beating most Democratic contenders in their home states in fictitious one-on-one matchups. In the face of an issue that is perhaps the best of all possible tailor-made scandals against the administration for the Democrats, the polls show only ineffectual peeping rather than full-blown resonance.

A Brit asked me last week, “If Gore had been President during 9/11 and the aftermath, the Republicans would have utterly eviscerated him. Why is your left so ineffectual?” My best response was complete political incompetence. It is one thing to form coalitions for national unity and interests of security; it is another to be cowed into silence.

So what is causing the silence? Michael Kelly offers the obvious answer in yesterday’s Post op-ed, titled “Two-Edged Weapon”. After an interesting summary of Bush’s actions involving Harken—including some follow-on shenanigans with the Texas Rangers that I hadn’t previously heard—Kelly suggests that the Democrats are also tarred by this scandal. Terry McAuliffe, current chair of the DNC, was offered $100,000 in Global Crossing pre-IPO stock, which he cashed out for approximately $10 million. Democracy 21 reports corporate donations over ten years to the Republicans at $636 million; to the Democrats, $449 million. Therefore, we are led to conclude, the Democrats have no moral standing to question whether the Republicans are too much in bed with the corporate sector.

Which, of course, is very convenient for the perpetrators of abuse. We are systemically ensured of never having a moral paragon on this issue come to the fore—only a statesman who is not affiliated with the major parties and who never accepts money from corporations (or those employed by them) could say such. These people are comfortably mired at the local dogcatcher level; it is not possible to became a US representative or senator without a few million dollars at your disposal.

So we the people should stop affecting our comfortable black-and-white opinions and sound bites and start firing up some neurons on this. There is more than a semantic issue at stake when comparing a recipient of a sweetheart deal to a former member of the audit committee of a corporate board of directors. If we can all agree that the Republicans are more disposed to the unfettered and unregulated free actions of corporations than the Democrats, we should not then conclude that all politicians are alike when those free actions result in scandal and economic repercussions.

Those who benefit most from the status quo maintain their power when the rank-and-file meekly accept the system. Those in power benefit most from the presumption that there is no credible opposition or alternative. 2002 is an abnormally good year for the voters to be heard, with great shifts of power possible in key elections across the country. Make some noise.

The last thing I saw when I read the Sunday paper was the Alfred E. Newman grin of George W. Bush, his arms around a demographically-proper mix of cute tykes, as a cover story in Parademagazine touting Bush’s call for more volunteerism.

In Bush’s State of the Union, or, um, speech to the nation, whatever you want to call it, W called for 4,000 years hours of volunteer service over the rest of your life. So it was wonderful seeing him speaking to the weekend’s marchers on Washington for Palestinian rights and against the IMF, lauding them for their volunteer principles and their commitment to a cause.

No, sorry, just joking. Bush would more rapidly be buried alive at Yucca Flats than do anything so radioactive as speak to a peace march.

I’m trying to give W the benefit of the doubt, but he just makes it so damned hard. On the face of it, volunteerism is great stuff; I used to be an organizer of a nonprofit network, and the fact that it’s still going today and has generated hundreds of volunteer projects makes it one my proudest achievements in Washington.

I’m just convinced that the world will be a better place if you get off your butt to work for your beliefs, even if those beliefs are diametrically opposed to mine. There’s a net gain if we’re both working to undermine everything the other stands for, when taken against the status quo of both of us sitting on our couches watching the tube. (For reasons of cardiovascular fitness, if nothing else.)

But now the Republican hierarchy wants to take credit for volunteerism, despite the fact that America already has the highest incidence of volunteerism in the world. So if I go out and do my thing, and contribute to some GAO statistic next year that shows N hours given over the year, you just know the Bushies will say that it was motivated by dedication to Republican ideas.

Here’s why I don’t trust it. The activist loves volunteerism because we ascribe morality to action: you don’t like the world, go out and make your difference! That difference can be on-the-ground, the “getting your hands dirty” part, or it could be motivating government, corporations, or communities to do the right thing on their own.

But the obvious subtext of Bush volunteerism is, “get out and do stuff so the government can walk away from it.” You know, hold a bake sale for your school, but don’t question why the school so desperately needs cookie money. (And absolutely don’t question why school monies are indexed to property values, ensuring that the schools most likely to hold bake sales are the ones least desperate for funds.) Add in the utter hypocrisy that the Republicans are now supporting and expanding AmeriCorps after spending years trying to shut it down utterly.

The Republican mantra is “the government can do nothing well, therefore it should do as little as possible.” We’ll ignore Reagan-Bush-Bush spending increases and the current Ashcroft attacks on privacy and freedom in the name of freedom and give them the benefit of the doubt that the less cynical members of the party actually believe this. Is there no room in that philosophy for the thought that every political and social action has a “natural” best place to be, and that some of those places are in the local, state, and federal government?

In other words, if you want to reduce hunger in your town, by all means, give money to your church. If you want to end hunger in your country—where do you go? The status quo answer, which the Republicans (and many Democrats) are satisfied with, is: “You know, we’d love to, but we just can’t. Sorry.”

So, please, by all means, get out there and do your thing. And if you’re so inclined, tell your government that there are things that you can handle on your own or with your community, but really, some things just need government, and laws, and leaders. That’s why we put them there.