In a time of political party line votes and divisiveness we need integrity in the Congress, Oklahoma and the United States needs more people such as Brad Carson. Please lend your support by writing your Congressman or Congresswoman and telling them to ask Brad to consider running again, write lettors to the editors of local newspapers about the intiative of this blog and the reasons you want Brad back in Congress, or write to the DNC asking to encourage him to run again.

Oklahoma needs Democrats. Carson doesn't count.

Brad Carson: Meh. Let him prove he's willing to stand up for something other than what might not lose him some votes, then we'll talk.

An odd thing has happened.I've gotten used to being treated as a computer (or at least Apple) "expert" over the years. Of course, to friends and family, I'm still just me, but I'm the one in the family who gets the computer questions. Sister gets the health questions, Mom gets the plant questions, Dad gets the auto-business questions, I get the computer questions.

However, now, I have apparently transcended from mere "expert" into a knowledgebase of such dimensions that my family and friends get upset with me if I cannot divine solutions by pure psychic power.

Two examples from today:

• A colleague at a remote location was tasked with installing Mac OS X 10.4 on a machine with no DVD capabilities. The solution is to boot the target machine in FireWire target disk mode and install upon it from a different computer. However, the machine wasn't responding correctly in target disk mode. The installer paused at the "pick a disk" screen for a long time, spinning its chasing arrows and waiting for who knows what.

  This was relayed to me, and I was asked what it meant, or what to do. I said, shrugging, "I don't know. Maybe it takes a little bit of time for some reason." I got yelled at, and asked again what it was doing and what should be done in return. When I pointed out that I do not know every code path for a program (the installer) that I did not write running on a machine I don't own in a location that I'm not at, I got yelled at even more.

• An unnamed family member (who is married to my dad and is no one's stepmother) had a problem with her Entourage database - it needed to be rebuilt. I got a phone call. I thought I remembered how to do it, but it took a few tries to figure out that you hold down Option during startup (it also took a few tries to realize she's running Office v.X, not Office 2004).

  At this point, the software displayed a dialog box that apparently presented multiple options. I was miles away, did not see the dialog box, had never seen the dialog box, and don't use Entourage myself. This is the description and question I heard on the phone:

  OK, it says "Your computer needs to …" blah blah blah blah blah. What do I pick?

  I helpfully suggested that I actually needed to hear the question before suggesting one of the answers. The sighing on the other end was more like I had just asked the waitress to repeat the salad dressing choices for the fifth time.

I don't know if there's some word for this level of guru-ship, but I would really just appreciate it if they would yell and sigh a little bit less. I didn't corrupt anyone's Entourage database, or make the disks not respond correctly. And I'm good, but not psychic.

This is why I think I can't wear certain T-shirts around people that know me.

Update: Welcome MacSlash readers; you surprise me with your comments and expressions of anguish. I'm used to people being frustrated with computers - I was just making fun of my family and close friends here for thinking I'm so good that I can actually see what they see from remote locations. I think there was a bad TV series about that. It was on Fox. But I repeat myself.

By the way, this blog is just me venting steam. If you're actually interested in Macintosh topics, please check out the absolutely free trial to MDJ or MWJ, my day job, where we occasionally use words like "pudding" and "fragmentation." It's great fun.

The other thing in The Week that caught my eye, so far, is this editorial (the editors only take two paragraphs each week for their own opinions) from managing editor (and former Brill's Content contributor) Eric Effron, on the subject of reporter's privilege and public disdain for the profession.

Journalism’s low standing comes at a bad time for The New York Times’ Judith Miller and Time magazine’s Matt Cooper. The Supreme Court this week let stand a court order demanding that they name their sources, or face 18 months in jail. The sources helped them piece together stories after columnist Robert Novak revealed that the wife of a prominent Bush critic was a CIA agent—a leak apparently intended to punish the critic. A federal prosecutor is trying to smoke out the leaker. It’s a complicated saga that defies ideological pigeonholing, but this much is clear: Miller and Cooper have declined to name names - because they promised their source confidentiality, and because doing so could deter future whistle-blowers from coming forward. This is not a case of the press being too critical, or too soft, or biased, or unethical, or lusting after an audience. Rather, it’s a case of two reporters willing to go to jail to keep their word and stand up for principle. What’s a press-basher to think?

Anyone, not just a press basher, is to think that they're idiots.

As a people, we grant reporters the privilege of not revealing their sources in testimony to protect those who would expose corruption at the highest levels of society. Cooper and Miller are instead abusing this privilege to protect corruption at the highest levels of government. They are ignoring the purpose of the privilege - and, indeed, the entire reason for having a free press - to avoid losing access to Bush administration officials that makes their jobs easier.

No one in this case is anything close to a "whistle-blower," Mr. Effron. The administration outed Valerie Plame to punish her husband for the crime of telling the truth about yellowcake, Nigeria, and Iraq. Cooper, Miller, and dozens of other journalists know who did it but will not tell. They think that the reporter's privilege should be unqualified, as if they were doctors, lawyers, or ministers providing their services to individuals. But unlike those jobs, where ethics require that those people never reveal confidential information, reporters want the right to do so selectively, when they feel it's worthy.

That would put them above the law, with no responsibility to anyone other than themselves, Mr. Effron. It would certainly make their jobs easier, but society has no vested interest in that. You and the other members of the "no reporter must ever go to jail" brigade should remember that there is widespread judicial, legislative, and public support for protecting whistle-blowers - just not for protecting people using the press to commit crimes.

I've mentioned The Week here before - a weekly magazine that condenses news and opinions from hundreds of newspapers and magazines, not just in the US, but around the world. The editors seem to do a decent job of keeping it reflective of actual coverage - if six of eight columns excerpted on a particular issue tilt one way, it's usually because the overall coverage tilted that way.

The Week also doesn't try to connect the dots for you, which removes most possibility of bias, but also leaves you free to miss subtle connections. For example, in the recent Ten Commandments kerfuffle, the "Controversy of the Week" summary coverage starts with two paragraphs of fact-based analysis, followed by one of conservative spin, one of pro-separation of church and state spin, and one of George Will's fatuous argument that people shouldn't be offended by things that don't offend him. You can actually read this feature online, and I recommend doing so to see what I mean about The Week's tone.

Here's the conservative spin summary:

In other words, said John Podhoretz in the New York Post, public displays of religious symbols are fine if they’re not…religious. What kind of “witless” reasoning is that? Taken together, these two decisions are “nonsense on stilts.” They’re also proof that President Bush needs to fill future Supreme Court vacancies with true conservatives, said The Washington Times in an editorial. The current court, dominated by liberal secularists, has taken yet another step “toward the banishing of religion from the public square.” As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his dissent, the majority’s insistence that the Ten Commandments be displayed merely as historical documents is an affront to this country’s Judeo-Christian heritage, and “ratchets up this court’s hostility to religion.”

You can read the pro-separation arguments below that online if you want. What I want to point out, in the sense of not connecting the dots, is a paragraph that appears below this, in the eye-rolling "Only in America" feature, intended to highlight our country's lovable weirdness. It is not online, but the proximity to Justice Scalia's quote about "hostility to religion" makes it worth noting:

A South Carolina couple was pulled over after police noticed a bumper sticker identifying them as Druids. Debra Gainey, 47, a minister in the ancient, nature-centric religion, was issued tickets for license and insurance violations. But during the traffic stop, Gainey and her husband say, reserve officer Tony Stewart asked about their "It's a Druid Thing" bumper sticker, invited them to Bible class, and later sent a proselytizing letter to the couple's home. "God is callign you," the letter said. "If youd eny this, then you are pushing away the hand of God, and that would not be wise." Stewart is now under investigation.

The pro-Commandments forces argue that Officer Stewart must be "free" to pull over couples and proselytize them, or else the government is "hostile" to his religion. What would happen if a Druidic officer tried to do the same thing to a couple with Christian bumper sticker? We already have that answer:

U.S. District Judge Myron H. Thompson asked Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, "Would you acknowledge that Buddhism is a religion?"

Moore replied, "Buddhism was considered a false religion by the forefathers. It is not my definition of religion, no. It was not their definition of religion under the First Amendment of the Constitution."

"I wasn't really asking that," Thompson said. "I was just asking whether religion - within the confines of the First Amendment as you view it historically - [if] the term 'religion' includes Buddhists, the Islamic faith, the Hindus?"

"I don't think so, sir, that Buddhists and other faiths - and I won't speak to all faiths because I'm not a theologian - recognize the Creator, God," Moore replied. "Some might, but if they do, it's not the God of the Holy Scriptures. And that's why the Bible is used for the very foundation upon which we take our oaths."

--Roy Moore, during court testimony over the Ten Commandments monument he installed in the Alabama Judicial Building

They don't want to eliminate "hostility to religion." They want to enshrine hostility to every religion but their own.

Our good friend and Sparky creator Tom Tomorrow is still concerned about the recent Supreme Court Kelo decision:

Personally, I'm glad to see so many of our conservative friends finally beginning to develop a healthy distust of government/corporate collusion (now if only they'd extend it to, say, Halliburton's role in Iraq). I'm just not sure why anyone on my side of the fence would feel anything but disgust. Kelo is essentially a decision in favor of trickle-down economics: clear out the poor folks, bring in some businesses, and if all works according to plan the new tax revenue will make it all worthwhile. But these things often do not work according to plan:

I was also concerned about this when it happened, although my first post was the concurring/controlling opinion that this "may not be quite the unlimited power grab that, quite honestly, it really appears to be." I've become more calm in the intervening fortnight.

The marvelous Zoe Kentucky of Demagogue recently approved of the semi-jokey plan to evict Justice Sourter from his own home to develop the "Lost Liberty Hotel." In the only and unheralded comment to that post, I wrote:

The point of Kelo is that the state, not the federal courts, decide[s] what is "public use" of land. Several states already disallow ue of eminent domain to seize land to give to private concerns unless the property is "blighted", which has a specific legal meaning. We should be pressing the other states to adopt a similar standard, and not cursing the federal courts for telling Connecticut that has no right to decide what "public use" means in its own state.

If this had gone the other way, we would have faced a really dismal prospect: a federal definition of "public use" that, for example, favored Halliburton in every state despite local opinion.

Kelo said that Connecticut gets to decide what "public use" means in Connecticut as long as it's on a rational basis, and the state showed plenty of evidence for the rationality of the condemnations it wanted, even if the majority of us disagree with them. The solution is not dispossessing David Souter, it's getting Connecticut to change its laws.

Nathan Newman, who is at times confrontationally progressive, pointed out back in February that if the federal courts can overturn eminent domain actions as an illegal "taking," even when the property owners are provided market value for their property, then the courts can also overturn rent control, price caps, and similar laws as "illegal takings" from the property holder.

Nathan goes even farther in the comments, pointing out that market value is "weird" for land because any piece of property is "monopoly" access to that portion of the earth. (Nathan, with his strongly urban view, also notes that renters being dispossessed without any of the compensation benefit of eminent domain is a much bigger problem than "this outrage on behalf an incredibly tiny number of homeowners.")

While the specifics in Kelo are still abominable to me, I do have to agree that the decision about whether the government should take the land should be a local one, not a federal one. However, I also strongly support changes in state laws to forbid such seizures for private development unless the land is "blighted."

Oklahoma does not have such a law, but it took only days for one to be proposed. What really amuses me in all this is that the strongly pro-development Republicans are falling all over themselves to write bills that would prohibit the kind of eminent domain seizures that benefit their big donors, but would still permit seizures for "public use" causes they oppose, like public schools, environmental protection, and open spaces.

Under the presumption that they can't really be ignoring the big money, I caution progressives to examine these new bills carefully to make sure they only prohibit eminent specifically to benefit privatey development unless the land is "blighted," and that there be a specific, development-neutral definition of "blighted" in the statute.

The guvmint still might be coming for your house, but if we can get the laws changed, they won't do so unless you've let it go completely to seed - and Halliburton won't be able to go to federal court and get it anyway. That's a win.