Scripting News for 12/12/2006

A reprieve until April 

A lot of people are going to say “I told you so.”

So, to those, enjoy!

I’m going to keep this blog going for a while longer, Murphy-willing, at least until April next year, its 10 year anniversary. It’ll be the first blog to make it to 10, and that’s a nice round number. We’ll see then what the plan is.

A few reasons. First, I’m enjoying writing on the web these days. Second, a project I’m working on that needs a rollout via the web, is taking longer than I thought it would (what else is new). And third, well, there’s some other stuff I can’t write about at this time, but I’ll want to have a platform and a pulpit. Someone is picking a pretty ridiculous fight with a guy who buys his ink by the barrel, and I want to be sure I got all the tools I need to fight back.

Do I believe? No! 

Got this email today, a plea for a financial contribution to This I Believe. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

Background: I wrote an essay for the show, and submitted it through their website. This is the first email I got from the show. No acknowledgement of the essay, no rejection or acceptance, just a request for money.

This feels like shit. I poured my heart into the essay, after spending a year thinking about what to write. Now I gotta wonder, if I don’t send the money, will they consider my essay. Or if I do send the money will they run it?

I really want it to be separate from money. If they waited until they decided about my essay to ask for money, that would have felt better. If they had rejected it, I could have been certain there’s no connection. But this way, well, I can’t give them money without retracting the essay.

It’s funny that reporters who care so much about their own ethics have such disregard for those of their contributors. I can’t withdraw the essay, btw, because I agreed to very one-sided terms (as usual) in order to submit it.

Get this guys — user-generated-content is written by people. For a show like This I Believe, you better hope they are people of the highest integrity, not the kind of person who would give you money to increase the odds. This kind of solicitation is off the wall. The answer is no. Emphatically.

Qube me baby 

The Qube 2 arrived today. I’ve set it up and it’s working. I was surprised at how big it is (my first one seemed a lot smaller, but that was probably about 7 years ago) and how noisy it is. First task is to learn how to get it to file-share with a Mac.

Google search for stuff about the Qube on this site.

After a couple of hours fussing with it, I think history has passed the Qube by. I owe the designers of this product so much, without the Qube, I honestly think it might have taken a lot longer for browser-based blogging tools to come along. It showed me how a powerful software system could be entirely configured through a web server. Look at this screen for a clue. One of the very cool things in evidence is that the Web Server can’t be turned off, because that’s the only way to access the system. With that as a core assumption, all the rest of the functionality grew. Error messages come via email. Everything else happens in the browser.

From there, I got the courage to attempt to do a full web content management system in the browser, which led me to Edit This Page, and a list of stories and pictures, and a calendar, and reverse-chronologic blog posts.

That was 1999. First learn from the Qube, then apply the lesson to writing for the web. The result — blogging as we know it today.

Le Web 3 in Paris 

Tom Morris is reporting live from Le Web 3 in Paris.

I watched a bit of the Le Web 3 videocast today, and observed what you always see at non-unconferences — stiff, lifeless discussions, people who normally are quite interesting in conversation, totally in their heads, boring, nervous, too self-aware, no spirit to it. Only David Weinberger, the veteran teacher, shone (as he always does).

3/5/06: “The idea for an unconference came while sitting in the audience of a panel discussion at a conference, waiting for someone to say something intelligent, or not self-serving, or not mind-numbingly boring. The idea came while listening to someone drone endlessly through PowerPoint slides, nodding off, or (in later years) checking email, or posting something to my blog, wondering if it had to be so mind-numbingly boring.”

Two conferences ago I emailed with Loic about how to avoid this, why not adopt the latest in technology conference technology, pioneered by the blogging world itself, at a conference about blogging? He didn’t understand (no fault of his, there’s a language barrier). I asked him to invite me to lead a discussion at the next one, and assumed he would so I didn’t worry. The next conference came, no invitation, and this time I didn’t even ask for one. I got the impression that Loic had not heard of me (just an impression, he didn’t say so.)

I think if ever there was a time when letting the former audience drive the discussion, this was the time to do it. If he’s ever going to understand it, this is the year he will understand it.

Scripting News for 12/11/2006

SuperDuper claims to back up iPods. Does it? Of course, any podcast player should either 1. Allow easy file system-level access to all the data stored on the device, including metadata or 2. Include a reliable, perfect, one-click backup utility (and not too many clicks to restore). #1 is vastly preferable. 

Dave Nanian says that SuperDuper is not an iPod backer upper. But Roger Corbin, via email, sends links to CopyPod, iPod Rip and XPort.  

And they say all the good domains are taken. :-) 

http://www.tomdelay.com/  

http://xml.house.gov/  

David Cohn: “The strength of YouTube isn’t the mass of copyrighted material and television shows, many of which have been purged. Rather, it’s the loyal community of viewers and users who upload content. That’s what Google was buying and what other media companies don’t have.” 

Rivera does rivers 

Gabe Rivera does rivers for each of his news sites.

Here’s the river for Techmeme, for example.

He also explains why rivers can be so useful. “I just got back from a long weekend. Now how do I scan headlines that I’ve missed without plugging in different dates?”

Rivers are also useful if you can’t remember where you saw an article you want to quote in a blog post.

Also, don’t forget the NY Times and BBC rivers. They’re still running strong, although there aren’t many people fishing on their banks.

Scripting News for 12/10/2006

The Scobles are stuck in traffic on the San Mateo Bridge. Can you help them figure out what’s happening? 

My iPod got stuck on an MP3 today, a legally downloaded podcast of a favorite public radio show. It won’t respond to any of the various magic keypresses, at least the ones I know of, and of course there’s no way to do a power cycle. And because of the DRM, there’s no backup, so even if I reformat the iPod, I’ll have to set up everything all over. Meanwhile the music industry says it’s all about piracy, that’s why Apple cripples this $400 (now worthless) piece of high design. 

A portal of Santas. Or is it a platform? I’m soooo confused! 

NY Times: “In the south, if the Americans give the Iraqis weapons, the next day you can buy them here,” said one dealer, who sold groceries in the front of his kiosk and offered weapons in the back. “The Iraqi Army, the Iraqi police — they all sell them right away.” 

Steve Rubel stumbled across a weird connect between Google Base and podcasts. Anyone know what’s going on here? 

Scott Beale’s photos from last night’s wedding. 

Michael Gartenberg: The Lessons of Zune.  

Steven Levy: “Microsoft pays Universal a dollar for each Zune sold.” 

NY Times: “It’s borrowed art that has been warped, wrecked, mocked and sometimes improved. It’s blogs and open-source software and collaborative wikis and personal Web pages. It’s word of mouth that can reach the entire world.” 

I’m using free wifi at gate B6 at Sea-Tac. The router is named “co presidents club.” 

Scripting News for 12/9/2006

Hanging out in the lobby of the Hyatt in Bellevue early this afternoon and I came upon this happy couple getting ready to be married later today.  

Weddings are womens’ affairs. We men are at best props or spectators. The prize is a woman. The judges are women. I look forward to male-bashing from the usual feminazis. :-) 

That said, the women at this wedding, so far, are incredibly beautiful. What a show. Everyone is wondering if there there will be wifi in the hall but I’m not bringing my laptop or camera, just bringing my eyes and ears. I am not wearing a tux either. Just a suede jacket, slacks and a tie, and at that I feel horribly over-dressed. I do admit to trying on a suit at Nordstrom’s, and there was a time believe it or not when I wore a suit to work every day, but that was a long time ago. Now, even at a wedding of two dear friends, I still dress what many would call casual. Much love to Ponzarelli, she’s a real sweetie, and a courageous one at that. Chris is a very very lucky man. Hope he knows it.  

Doc Searls: “I’m far more capable, energetic, optimistic and eager to change the world at 59 than I ever was at any earlier age.” 

Andrew Shebanow illustrates how an apparently open XML-based format can still be fairly proprietary and provide lock-in for the designer. I sent a pointer to this article to Jon Udell, Microsoft’s newest evangelist, asking for comments.  

Scripting News for 12/8/2006

Today’s movie: Happy Feet. B+ 

Jon Udell is leaving Infoworld to work for Microsoft.  

Rex Hammock: “Microsoft has just acquired a media brand.” 

Jeff Sandquist is Udell’s new boss. 

Scripting News for 12/7/2006

UniveRSS is a “3D RSS feed reader for Windows Vista.” 

I’m curious about HDNet. I don’t get it on my Comcast cable system. Is there a website where you can download the shows? A feed I can subscribe to? Any way to sample their offerings, even if it isn’t in HD, even if Comcast doesn’t get on board? 

Ummmm, well, uh, that seems like a problem 

Microsoft: “If you are an enclosure publisher that wants to serve enclosures larger then 15MB to IE7 users, then you should use HTTP servers that support HTTP RANGE requests. Most popular web servers support HTTP RANGE requests.”

I don’t know whether my server supports this feature or not, and I suspect most enclosure publishers (ie people who do podcasting) don’t know either.

Yesterday I did a podcast that was more than 15MB. It’s not at all uncommon for a podcast to be bigger.

It surely seems Microsoft could handle the buffering without requiring a special feature from the server.

How much thought did they put into this?

Is it in the deployed verison of their RSS Engine?

If I were a developer I’d be very careful about using their engine, situations like this are why you should be concerned. It could be a harmless limit (we’ll find out), on the other hand, it might not be harmless.

Let’s discuss.

Scripting News for 12/6/2006

NY Times: “There is no victory to be had in Iraq, and however American troops withdraw, they will leave behind a deadly mess.” 

MCN tutorial on VRM, a concept pioneered by Doc Searls. 

News.com reports that editor James Kim was found dead. 

NY Times: “Mary Cheney, the daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney, is expecting a baby with her partner of 15 years, Heather Poe, Mr. Cheney’s office said today. 

Dan Fost profiles Mike Arrington. 

Ross Mayfield gets Scobleized. 

Cyclists use a magnetic yellow card to let drivers know they got too close.  

Reporters on CNN have copies of the Iraq Study Group report. Sounds like mishmash. The obvious answer is that we maximize safety of Americans, and redeploy them back to the USA to their homes and families. We let Iraq be owned by the Saudis, Iranians, Syrians, whoever steps in to bring order, if anyone can. We get ready for a future where we’re one of many non-superpowers. We have the Bush family to thank for our precipitous decline. The ISG punted, they didn’t want to be the ones to say what’s so obvious. So Americans continue to die in Iraq, for nothing, and the financial bleeding continues.  

Scripting News for 12/5/2006

I spent a couple of hours today with Doc discussing Vendor Relationship Management. There really is something here.  

Note to Terry Semel: Get on board with VRM. Big bucks. Zig to Google’s zag. Doc will explain. :-) 

Robert Gates, the designated Defense Secretary, testifying today in Washington, tells the same lies as Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. Stabilizing Iraq is as hard a problem as stablilizing US cities, where we have the advantage of being locals and having a real reason to care. Yet crime and poverty in our cities haven’t succumbed to various wars (poverty, drugs) and Iraq isn’t going to succumb to the global war on terror, which is bullshit of course, what we’re doing in Iraq is nothing like a war, it’s more like suicide.  

Reorg at Yahoo! 

I give up on Studio 60. It’s dull, childish, plotless, not funny, not heart-grabbing, takes itself far too seriously. Not interesting. Wish they had used the money for this show to buy another season of The West Wing.  

Brier Dudley: “Did Google Maps lead CNET editor astray?” 

Google directions from Grants Pass to Gold Beach, OR. 

Jason Calacanis is getting a job at Sequoia Capital.  

Steve Michel lost a good friend on Sunday, Mike Britten. 

This I Believe 

I’m a regular listener to the NPR radio show, This I Believe. I’ve never met the founder of the show, Jay Allison, but we have many friends in common. I believe in This I Believe, but that’s not what this essay is about. I also believe in voting, The Golden Rule and Murphy’s Law, and commonsense principles like What Goes Around Comes Around. I could write essays about these subjects and easily fill 500 words. I also share Chris Lydon’s belief in the Emersonian Ideal of self-reliance, the power of thought, the power of the individual. In many ways I have dedicated my life to these ideas, but that’s not what this essay is about.

I was listening to Chris’s interview with Jay on my daily walk yesterday. I like to take NPR podcasts with me on my walks. It’s my time every day to fill my mind with new ideas from the brilliant programmers at NPR. The This I Believe essays are frequent companions. Yesterday it was an interview with the man himself. As I settled into my stride, I saw a woman ahead with a dog, the dog was doing his thing and the woman was bending over to pick up the prize. I thought to myself “I’ll just cross the street,” and luckily there was a cross-walk. Berkeley, where I live, is like Cambridge, when it comes to the rules of the road. The law is the same everywhere, the pedestrian has the right of way. As long as the pedestrian is in a crosswalk, the traffic must stop. But in places like New York, New Orleans, St Louis or Denver, the law is ignored, and pedestrians must wait until the traffic clears, whether or not there’s a crosswalk. But Berkeley is one of a handful of places where the pedestrians regularly risk their lives and step out into traffic.

And regularly the drivers keep on coming as if we weren’t there. You then have a fateful choice, stand your ground, don’t run to get out of their way (and risk tripping and getting run over anyway), or chance losing a game of chicken and become righteous roadkill, having stood for your rights, having it become your last stand.

I’ve stared down many a driver, and I’m still here. I’ve actually broken one windshield and one headlight. When the drivers stop, always outraged to have their space invaded, I try to keep my cool, and ask them to think about it. How did I get so close that I could break a piece of your car, if you weren’t breaking the law? And you just lost a headlight, I might have lost my life.

Female friends say they are never challenged this way. Do people think that a strong male body would crumple any less completely when hit by a multi-ton SUV or pickup?

When I end up staring at the grill of a car that didn’t want to stop, but was forced to, being an engineer and inventor, I think for the rest of my walk, how can we solve this problem? Maybe walkers could carry an indelible paint, and mark the car as an offender. Let the person explain to the husband or wife why there’s this mark on the grill of the car. It could lead to some interesting talks at home. Honey, that could have been blood or bone.

Me, when I’m driving, I always stop, and the pedestrians almost always grin with gratitude. Everyone likes to be respected, and this is a very nice way to show respect. A mother crossing the street with a couple of small children deserve your protection no more than an aging man listening to a podcast. We all need to be heard, and the law is there for a good reason, to make walking seem safe. And walking is such a good thing, it saves the atmosphere, protects against disease, and it fosters the kind of thought we need more of.

So this is what I believe, when you see a human body crossing the street, as you approach in your car, don’t treat it as an obstacle or a slalom pole. Remember, this is a person, someone’s son or daughter, husband or wife, aunt or uncle. Obey the law, stop, get a smile. Feel good about yourself.

Scripting News for 12/4/2006

Natali Del Conte: “If I took a shot for every time someone said the words ‘bubble,’ ‘boom,’ or ‘bust’ at Google’s holiday press party tonight, I would probably be wasted.” 

Must-listen-to NPR News story on soldiers returning from Iraq with serious mental health problems.  

Last night’s podcast with Jason Calacanis, Peter Rojas and myself, discussing the new podcast platform we’re contemplating.  

Google puts a lid on new products. “Realizing that its myriad services are confusing users, it will focus on refining what it has.” Bad news for Web 2.0 startups hoping to be acquired by Google. 

A little friendly digging from Microsoft mouthpiece Frank X. Shaw. :-) 

For what it’s worth, I have not sold any UserLand stock, and remain its largest shareholder and a member of its board of directors. I’ve read, on the web, otherwise. Not so. 

Over the weekend, a CNET reporter and his family (wife, two children) were reported missing in Oregon. Earlier today the wife and children were found. This is good news, of course, let’s hope they find the reporter too, safe and sound.  

Remember the Amazon product that I paid extra to have arrive the next day? That was 5 days ago. Well, it looks like today’s the day when it will finally make its arrival, knock wood, Murphy willing, I am not a lawyer, my mother loves me, etc. (Postscript: It arrived. They were a pair of supposedly great headphones. In reality, not so great. A $10 headset from Sony sounds much better, imho.) 

Okay, I didn’t have the Etymotics properly inserted in my ear. Once I did, the sound is great!! Oh yeah. 

Naked Jen: “Maxi Pads are the cherry on their yogurt sundae.” 

AdAge confirms what I’ve been saying for years. Don’t pay to have your “message” hitch a ride on someone else’s flow. Put up your own site, and the people who want the information you provide (including positioning) will find their way to you. Welcome to the new world of commercial information. Goodbye to couch potatoes and eyeballs. This should also be a reminder to anyone still holding Google stock, you need to be thinking about taking profits while the taking is good. :-) 

Making money with ads? Not much longer… 

This piece appeared on Scripting News on 8/3/06. I don’t think too many people understood it then, but now that AdAge has confirmed the basic premise, in practice, maybe the theory will make more sense.

Yes, I have put ads on some of my sites, but never on Scripting News. I didn’t want to interfere with my message by selling rides to hitch-hikers. Frankly they weren’t offering enough money to make it worthwhile to me. In order to get me to share the space with them, they’d have to compensate me for the distraction, and for the bad vibes that comes from trying to distract the people whose attention I value most, the readers of Scripting News.

An example. As you know, I’m in the process of buying a house (the closing is a week from tomorrow), so I do a lot of email with my mortgage broker, accountant, realtor, insurance agents. They’re all using email these days, so there’s less phone tag, and it’s easier to compare offers, juggling details is possible, even while I’m traveling. Last time I bought a house, in 1992, it wouldn’t have been possible to go to NY and Boston in the week before the closing, but you can do it now.

So every time I get an email from one of these people, Google shows me ads for their competitors. I get an email from my accountant, ads from other accountants appear in the margin. My insurance agent sends me a quote, and links to other insurance agents appear. This is per the design of Internet advertising, but it’s pointless. If I wanted information about competitors I know how to use the search engine, and I would go look them up (as I did when I was getting started).

That’s the key point, we are seeking out commercial information all the time, as we live our lives in a material society. All day every day. I have to go into the city in an hour or so, and I used Google to decide to take a bus instead of calling a cab to take me to the subway station. I was able to estimate the cab fare, and since I don’t live in NY and they keep changing the bus fare, I was able to find out how many quarters I needed to get on the bus (eight). It may seem trivial to you, but it wasn’t to me. They require exact change. Now did any of the ads I’ve seen in the last hour get me that information? No.

When they finish the process of better and better targeted advertising, that’s when the whole idea of advertising will go poof, will disappear. If it’s perfectly targeted, it isn’t advertising, it’s information. Information is welcome, advertising is offensive. Who wants to pay to create information that’s discarded? Who wants to pay to be a nuisance? Wouldn’t it be better to pay to get the information to the people who want it? Are you afraid no one wants your information? Then maybe you’d better do some research and make a product that people actually want to know about.

At a meeting yesterday, at a famous media company, to illustrate this point, which can be a little subtle today, but will be making people billions in a couple of years, I pointed to my computer and my Blackberry. I said maybe Apple would provide software that made the Blackberry work as well as the iPod works with a Mac, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Then I pointed to something I noticed, another person in the meeting had a Blackberry and a Mac too. Amazing that we would both be customers for the same product that doesn’t exist, and isn’t likely to exist, the way things are going.

And that’s why things will change. The current product development process, that focuses on a few supposed geniuses and ignores the intelligence that’s in the user’s minds, same as with unconferences, is about to run its course much as the old style conference can’t possibly compete with one that involves the brains of the people formerly known as the audience. Think about it. There’s a big trend here, imho it’s the difference between the 20th and 21st centuries. In the past the flow of ideas for products was heavily centralized, and based on advertising to build demand. In the future, the flow of ideas for products will happen everywhere, all the time, and products with small markets will be worth making because we’ll be able to find the users, or more accurately, they’ll be able to find us. “Targeting” customers is the wrong metaphor for the future. Instead make it easy for the people who lust for what you have to find you. How? 1. Find out what they want, and 2. Make it for them and 3. Go back to where you found out about it, and tell them it’s available.

I’ve been singing this song since 2000. I think we’re almost there. I saw that Microsoft, Google and Yahoo are banding together to fight click-fraud. That’s about as likely to work as the fight in the 80s to stop people from copying copy-protected software. The incentive to defraud is too great. And who’s frauding who, I think it’s the companies that take your money to hitch your message on “content” where it isn’t welcome. Imagine taking people’s money to turn their products into a nuisance. The kids being born today won’t believe it used to work this way.

User-generated content is actually on the road to nirvana, but it’s not a sustainable model in itself. In all that content, which today’s companies view as frankfurter meat, undifferentiated slurry, a medium for unwanted hitch-hikers, is the idea for the next iPod, or the formula for peace in the Middle East, the campaign platform for the President we’ll elect in 2012, perhaps even a solution for global warming. You just have to believe that intelligence isn’t concentrated among the people who rose to the top of the 20th century’s ladders to believe that there are nuggets of wisdom waiting out there for the taking, among the minds that created all that UGC.

Yogi Berra: “You can observe a lot just by watching.”

Scripting News for 12/3/2006

Recorded a podcast this evening with Calacanis and Rojas. How long was it? 40:58. Amazing how all good podcasts are 40 minutes long. :-) 

Titantv.com is a killer TV listing web app. Nicer than the original Yahoo TV grid, without all the Ajaxy slowness. 

Spruce is a killer hill. Once you start going up, it’s just up, up and up. No chance to chill! 

On this day in 1999, MacWEEK (now defunct) covered the introduction of Manila. Believe it or not, Manila is still a product, and UserLand is still operating.  

Al Jazeera: “Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, has said Iraq is in the grips of a civil war and many people are worse off now than under Saddam Hussein.” 

Hipmojo says we’re not in another bubble. 

I’m coming to think of myself as ProtoBlogger. :-) 

Someday you’ll be able to watch a commercial you like over and over and over and over.  

Each segment of On The Media is available separately. For example, the segment I commented on yesterday is broken out on this page.  

Yahoo screwed up 

BTW, I just noticed that Mike’s headline, “Yahoo Gets Trashed by Users,” exposes an insider’s perspective. Companies that see users as adversaries are troubled. And analysts who encourage that aren’t doing anyone a favor. This is why I finally left Silicon Valley, it had become dominated by this distrust of users. This is such a blatant example. The users are saying it so clearly. Yahoo screwed up. Even the people from Yahoo see this (the company used to have performance as a core value).

They all go through this, Apple had the Apple III before they produced the Apple IIe. IBM had the PCjr. Microsoft shipped a version of Word that didn’t work, and at first couldn’t understand what the users were saying. Me, I learned the lesson with Thinktank 128 on the Mac that had less features than the product we had on the IBM PC, which came out earlier. You can’t break users Mike, and that’s what Yahoo did. Explaining it as Users Behaving Badly is totally missing the point.

Postscript: Sometimes I think Radio, which was initially a success, was another example of breaking users. A year after its release I wished instead we had produced a Manila that runs on the desktop. Creating a whole new codebase and design for a blogging CMS wasn’t such a great idea, in the end. Two architectures is one too many for a small company to support. And there were lots of features in Manila that never made it into Radio. It’s totally technically possible to run Manila on the desktop behind a Fractional Horsepower HTTP Server.

If it ain’t broke don’t fix it 

Mike Arrington checks in on the mess with Yahoo TV.

Mike, as a former regular user of their service, I don’t read the comments on their blog as hate, but we are frustrated. If there were an adequate replacement for the service on another site, the frustration level would be nowhere near as high, but while Yahoo’s original service wasn’t all that great, it was the only one out there that actually worked.

There’s nothing theoretical about this frustration. Imagine you went out to your car this morning and found that Lexus had changed the way the accelerator worked, so that you had to restart the engine every time you wanted to press the gas pedal. This is the new modern way for cars to work they’d say to you. Ohh, but I just want to go to Starbucks and pickup a latte, you think. They say they appreciate the feedback, but the car keeps working the same brain-damaged way.

Most of us are accustomed to dealing with big companies that are really dumb about us as customers. All that’s happened here is that Yahoo is now one of those companies. Would you *hate* Lexus for being so dumb (in the example, assuming you drive a Lexus). Nahh. Hate is a very strong word, so please be careful about using it, esp to describe a class of people that I’m in. I don’t hate Yahoo, and if they fixed the service today (bring it back to its former functionality) net-net I’d be happy. I really just want to be able to find out what’s on TV now, a nice movie perhaps, or find a news show when I want to find some news (an increasingly difficult thing to find, btw).

This is an important area btw, video on computers is hot, and this is video on computers. It’s a convergence point, the fact tht Yahoo has the only usable listing service (or had) could have been a big advantage for them. As soon as one of their competitors creates a workalike, I bet news travels quick, and we’ll all forget that Yahoo ever had a listing service.

Jeremy Zawodny and Les Orchard who work at Yahoo, comment.

Postscript: Bad news for Yahoo. TitanTV looks like a workalike to the old Yahoo interface (even a little nicer). I had tried out a bunch of others and none were as good, until this one. I’ll try using it and keep you posted.

How to become a third-rate country in six short years 

Watching Meet the Press this morning interview a Bush advisor lie, lie and lie. This is the guy who wrote the memo that leaked, where he told his boss the truth about Iraq. I look forward to the day when I can run a mashup of Meet The Press, and provide a running commentary. The name of the site would be What They Really Mean, and below the speaker would be a translation, in English, of what the spinmeister is saying.

Listening to these guys I think the US has gone crazy. When did our future become the future of Iraq? It’s insanity. We had the leading economy, military, a great country. Iraq was one of a hundred despotic states, no tradition of freedom or intellect, a mediocre economy. What exactly was in it for us in merging with this third-rate country? We’ve lost our minds.