Amazing. Simply amazing. In an episode that is the perfect example of what is wrong with this administration, President Bush delivered a speech in St. Louis about his tax package. The problem? Let's go to the article to see why:

Addressing employees at JS Logistics, a trucking and warehouse firm in St. Louis, Bush appealed to Congress to quickly pass his $674 billion tax cut package, including benefits for cash-strapped small businesses, "for the sake of economic vitality and growth."

"There's still uncertainty about the economic future of this country," Bush said. But he added: "I'm confident they (lawmakers) will hear the voices of the people ... to immediately get money in your pockets and into the economy."

Bush delivered his message in front of a fake wall of cardboard boxes stamped "Made in U.S.A." The real boxes, set to Bush's side, had their "Made in China" stamps blotted out.

The White House said it did not intend to cover up the markings on the boxes. "It appears it was an overzealous volunteer. We'll take it up with the appropriate channels," White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said.

An overzealous volunteer? The tax cut package, like the boxes themselves, is merely a sleight-of-hand designed to trick people into thinking that tax relief is on its way. The real tax relief, pushed to the side, benefits the wealthy who own plenty of stocks that aren't in retirement packages. This is far more egregious than the flag-factory episode a few weeks ago.

Be sure to keep checking out updates at unblinking for more astroturf related news. A quick thought though, from Gary Stock himself: (I'd take credit for this but that would be wrong, right?) why not use the automatic e-mail engine built into the gopteamleader website to deliver a cold dish of astroturf deception revenge? It's simple to do and you'll feel much better afterwards. Just follow the directions from the previous post and log into the gopteamleader website. Go ahead and choose a newspaper (or a few!) to send a message to, but instead of sending the form letter, write your own. Be sure to mention that the paper in question has been an unwilling victim of gopteamleader's predatory e-mail astroturf campaign. There's nothing like stealing the enemy's thunder to make him dance around...we'll shut these suckers down for good!

So, the definitive page on the astroturf menace threatening our democracy appears to have been created by Gary Stock over at his unblinking website. The site is quite exhaustive, detailing the multiple transmissions that have occurred over the past few months. Evidently this practice is in widespread use. I was going to attempt to locate the source of all this madness, but it appeared that someone already did!

Here's the evil source of all the craziness. Evidently, the gop team leader site is actually encouraging sending astroturf to newspapers. Much like the famed marlboro adventure prizes, which encouraged people to smoke by offering them gifts that ranged from cigarette lighters to the awesome marlboro adventure raft, (It only required 7200 cigarettes to win!) GOP TeamLeader will give gifts to people based on the amount of astroturf they send out. Talk about disingenuous. Want to see for yourself? It's easy. First go to: http://www.gopteamleader.com/index.asp.

Next, log in. Use the username: gop@dredwerkz.com and the password gopgop. Got it so far?

After logging in, go to the action center and then click on the "contact print and television outlets". This will take you to a screen where you can search for newspapers to astroturf. Let's try the washington post, shall we? Just click this if you're too lazy. Then select the Post and click "compose message". You'll be presented with multiple copies of astroturf letters. Choose the one you want and you're all set.

This is sick. Trust me. Try it yourself. And tell everyone you know how pathetic this is.

So I'm out last night, feeling good and enjoying some choice conversation with the regular triumvirate (a group which hasn't actually hung out as a single entity for quite some time) at Old Ebbitt Grill. Stories are passed around (some better than others), complex conundrums are batted back and forth, the lyrics to Disney's Gummybears are examined and a good time is had by all. It's almost as if I've never come down from the weekend, as if a continuous streak of good fortune has decided to blow my way. And hey, if lady luck's blowing on your dice, you better keep rolling, right? So we move to a new location, meet up with another person, and keep things going. Eventually, as the evening wore on, one of our party bowed to the pressures of work and headed home. At short amount of time later, the rest of us decide to pack it in and call it a night.

After an uneventful cab ride home, I walk up to the door and see a small note taped on the entry to the dredwerkz. The note says that the water heater has exploded and that rapidly cooling water is now all over the washer/dryer room of the house. Damn. I go inside and find, sure enough, that the hot water heater has apparently rusted from the inside out, reducing its usefulness to zero, and letting water stream out through the opening until the entire hot water is shut down. (Thankfully one of us went home early, right?) After some brief discussion, the body politic elects to call our landlord in the morning (due to the fact that, though technically "morning" already, it's far too early for civilized phone calls) and deal with the problem then.

I didn't really need any hot water that night, and I figured that I'd make do the next morning, and that things weren't actually all that bad. (It's the landlord's problem, right? Not mine!) So the streak, though tempered, didn't appear to have ended.

At six o'clock in the morning, when for some absurd reason my alarm goes off (I really should reset it to the proper time one of these days), I wake up and notice that the house is cold. Really cold. Normally, the dredwerkz is kept at a icy temperature throughout the house, in order to save money. But one of the odd flukes of the building is that if I keep my door closed, the temperature gauge which sits right outside it will stay much colder than my room. The radiator in my room will continue to pump warm energy into the air (aided by a properly placed fan) so that I typically sleep in an environment 15-20 degrees warmer than the rest of the house. If it's sixty degrees in the hall, it's probably 75 degrees in my room. Nice, eh? But this morning was different.

You see, although we were fortunate to have someone arrive early at the house to shut off the flow of water, same said person was slightly confused about how the heating system functioned in our house. Believing that the radiators were tied into the water heater system (as opposed to the gas furnace nearby), this individual shut the heat off for the entire house, thinking he was doing us all a favor. I didn't think to check at the time, but someone else did, placing her hand on a radiator shortly after we arrived home and concluding, incorrectly, that the heat was still on because the radiator was still warm. (In fact, the radiator was probably already beginning to cool down and just hadn't had enough time yet.)

And so, at six in the morning, a scant hour and a half before I'm supposed to wake up, I walked out of my freezing room into the even colder hall to discover that the temperature was below 45 degrees and falling. I immediately turned the heat back on, retreated to my room and attempted to get some fitful rest. By the time I got to sleep, almost an hour later, it was time to wake up again. The house had warmed up only 10 degrees during the duration, to a cozy 55. Nicely, though, my room had gotten much warmer as usual, so things seemed to be looking up.

Not so fast.

After getting up, brushing my teeth and other stuff, it's determined that someone will call the landlord. Helena picks up the phone and calls his number (we'd procured it the night before after finding the flooded room) to ask him to come by and help. She's already agreed to work from home during the day in case things need to be helped along. So after calling the landlord, she speaks to him for a few minutes. I can only hear one side of the conversation, which goes something like this:

"Yes."
"I understand."
"No, I'm really sorry."
"Of course, I understand."
"Well, I'll be here if you get a chance. You have our number."

Thinking that somehow our landlord had made it appear to be our fault, I'm slightly miffed. Then she explains: apparently during the night, while we were out cavorting, our landlord was in his house, enjoying a roaring fire with his family. Just as they're about to call it a night themselves, he notices the smell of burning pine that isn't coming from the fire. Apparently, the old house's chimney has a problem: the fire has escaped from the chimney and caught his office on fire. In minutes, the ceiling is alight and at the end of it all, his entire office has burned down to the ground. So he is a little bit distracted when one of his tenants calls to complain about a burst water heater.

End streak. Right there. Our landlord said he'd try to be up and running again within twenty-four hours. (Although, what he actually does it beyond me, other than make money off of us and others. It's not like he runs an assembly line producing cars or anything.) He hopefully will have time to send someone by to repair our water heater. I wouldn't count on it. If I were in his shoes, we'd be the last people I'd be worrying about. Which is what worries me.

So I drag my tired, cold, improperly cleaned body into work, only to discover that my metro stop entrance into the building has been flooded out. So I'm forced to take another exit and walk through the freezing wind to get to my building. Nail in the coffin. It has to get better from here, right? It can only go up, right?

Absurdly, I'm still in a good mood. It's almost comical, the series of events that have been going on.

I wanted to wait until some solid numbers came my way before weighing in on the whole University of Michican affirmative action imbroglio. But now the numbers are in and they reflect my feeling about colleges in general: the system is suspect, yes, but race is just one of many factors that students don't know about heading into the scheme of things. College admissions, whether regular or graduate or law school, tend to be murky. Here's how the UMich system works, courtesy CalPundit.

This, of course, is exactly what the University of Michigan does: it considers race as one factor out of many. Here's the whole dreary list:

• 80 points - GPA
• 12 points - SAT scores
• 10 points - Academic strength of high school
• 8 points - Strength of high school curriculum
• 10 points - Michigan resident
• 6 points - Underrepresented Michigan county
• 2 points - Underrepresented state
• 4 points - Legacy admission
• 3 points - Essay
• 5 points - Personal achievement
• 5 points - Leadership and service
• 20 points - Socio-economic disadvantage
• 20 points - Underrepresented racial-ethnic minority
• 5 points - Men in nursing
• 20 points - Scholarship athlete
• 20 points - Provost's discretion

Okay, so let me get this straight. Race shouldn't be a factor but male nursing should? And how about scholarship athletes or the nebulour "provost's discretion" line? This is the sort of chicanery that exists all across colleges from coast to coast. To single out race as an example seems silly, especially given the history of affirmative action. (I for one, believe that affirmative action is a good thing, but I can explain this at another time.)

Even more absurdly, the 20 point number pales in comparison to GPA, or the multitude of other factors. Yet it is this number that is constantly harped on, even by the White House itself. Scandalous. Many other op-ed people have fixated on the twenty points, comparing it to the SAT score number. (A white kid going to a good school in the Upper Peninsula, meanwhile, would probably receive 24 points for his trouble.) While I find fault with the point system in general, it's not as if people didn't know this was how things worked. How else would legacy students (who were underqualified) get in save for the "provost's discretion"? Solid numbers don't lie.

What can make me feel even better, post three-day no-holds-barred weekend? How about falling snow? Buckets of it. I awoke this morning to some light flurries. By the time I made it outside it was coming down harder and sticking. Therefore, I decided to walk to work to enjoy the newly whitened district. It was amazing. After Helena and I parted ways, I walked the rest of the way to work as the snow grew harder. There I was, shiny briefcase in hand, a new warm scarf around my neck, top surfaces deluged in snow like some sort of human frosted flake. Even now, as I'm staring outside my window things seem somewhat lighter, almost as if whatever I have to do today is secondary to the frozen concotion being brewed outside in my absence. Man, I feel great.

Imagine a long vacation, in the middle of which you're sitting on a becah under a blue sky. An entire day goes by and you move only to go into the waves or to roll over. As the sun begins to drop below the horizon, the air grows slightly colder but your ray-drenched skin remains warm. Without even trying, you hold onto that feeling even as night descends and you find yourself elsewhere. That day of sloth stays with you, even as you drive back, even as you drag yourself up in the morning. It can be recalled with a simple smell, a subtle glance or the hue of the sky reflected in an office building.

I haven't taken a real vacation in over two years. It paid off, financially, in the end. It wasn't the best psychological decision, to be sure. Why the long intro? Well, I made it up to New York City this weekend, for a rare spot of R&R. I didn't actually have any expectations, which made the ensuing experience all the more rewarding when I turned out to have a great time. In a nutshell, I sampled several cuisines, met several interesting people, caught a show, visited a couple of museums, enjoyed a party, had some great conversations and hit the NYC nightlife at a variety of different locations. All in sub-freezing temperatures. All with witty companions, who managed to stay upbeat despite any stray monkey wrenches thrown in our path.

Few things make me feel quite so good as spontaneously adapting to odd situations, whether it be a closed restaurant, museum, or subway line. We managed to avoid getting in the wrong metro car, paying too much money for a small exhibit (well, some of us, anyway), found parking a block away from our desired destination on two separate occasions and upgraded our seats on-the-fly in the theatre after the fortuitous egress of half the balcony section a scant ten minutes into 'Chicago'. (An excellent musical I'd recommend to anyone!) If there were any negatives, the largest would probably be the height the bar will reside at the next time I'm invited back. But high expectations are good, no?

Which brings me back, full circle, to the intro. Much like my fictional day at the beach, I still feel really good, for no rational reason, hours after my absence from fun. I hope I feel this good tomorrow. For some reason my regular routine seems somewhat ruttish in comparison: I get up, work, do something silly in the afternoon and have dinner shortly thereafter. If it's a weekend, I might try to hang out with some friends. Perhaps the superiority of this weekend was simply a good mix of activities. I've now seen Jesus as a Mongol, enjoyed a mango-yogurt beverage (a lassi? perhaps?) from southern India, and decided that if I ever run a Moroccan themed lounge, I'd keep the music lower and the service quicker. Then again, maybe it was the mixed company, rather than activities. Sometimes it's nice to just get out of town and find a new locale to enjoy, new people to converse with. It's amazing how many times one can go out and hit a happy hour only to talk about the same old problems in shiny new boxes. It's nice to change up the topic, even if it means merely rotating from one person to another. Everyone likes to talk about themselves, right? Hell, this blog itself is like some sort of weird writer's crutch allowing me to voice opinions that I'd otherwise let silently lapse or bore someone to tears with at a social event.

The curious matter of this medium though, is that it's not really a personal or a public matter. Unlike a diary, I'm not going to list lots of names and provide specific times and places. I'm not going to share innermost secrets (how tiresome, eh?) or merely add my voice to an already loud chorus of people with too much time on their hands. Instead, I try to find some middle ground, some area where my personal experiences are indicative of larger trends, some original thoughts not already echoed by a million other monkeys with keyboards. I'm not searching for Shakespeare or the poor roman poets he ripped off: I'm just trying to let some steam off without picking sides. It would be easy, to be sure, to simply let loose on everyone and everything. I could name names, say what I really felt about certain people and policies, in much the way I do about our current administration.

Being a self-confessed hypocrite, I have no problem squaring my desire to talk about people I know behind their backs and yet display reluctance to do so online. Why the logical disconnect? There isn't any: I don't like evidence to link my opinions to myself. If I talk about someone behind their back, I don't expect it to get around. (And let's not kid ourselves, I hardly ever hold my opinions back, but in the end, all personal criticisms are slightly petty in nature, right?) But should someone I know peruse this page and read a point of view straight from the horse's mouth, it would be a little more inappropriate. I prefer the Jamesian method of talking around and around about a problem, especially with people who are not the subject, but rather close friends. If I hate the way T. does something, and T. is friends with S., U. and V., I'll simply talk to S., U. & V. and express my opinion. If they choose to pass it along in a discreet manner, so be it.

This has very little to do with my weekend. It feels cathartic, though. There are never enough people with enough time and enough space to have tons of really good conversations. Instead, we have to squeeze them into the available moments we have, even if those occur as infrequently as...well, let's just say that they're more infrequent than they used to be.

But that's going to change. This weekend was fun, and reminded me that I have things pretty good. I'm basically happy. But I'm not content. Contentment is for suckers. I hope I stay happy and grateful forever, but god help me if I ever become content. Things can always get better, in my mind, or I'm not aiming high enough. So if I had a good weekend this weekend, that's great, but next weekend should be better. If it's not, I'm not trying hard enough. Everything's overcomeable with enough effort.

Anyway, thanks for the chance to have a fantastic three days. Those involved rocked.

So after I was clued into this by atrios, I went to google and ran a quick+dirty search on google for astroturf. What is astroturf? It's simple: someone writes a letter to the editor extolling a particular viewpoint. In this particular case, it was the President's decision to cut the dividend tax for investors. Next, said letter is sent all over the world to newspapers, only the name and address are changed to reflect a person living within the delivery range of the paper in question. Small papers (with little time to do internet fact-checking) are perfect targets. Altering a word or two between revisions will also stymie basic searches, although too much modification defeats the primary purpose of Astroturf: to reiterate talking points ad nauseum across the nation. It's kind of like getting a free advertisement in every paper's opinion section. But let's get back to the facts.

If you go to google and search for the phrase Bush is demonstrating genuine leadership, you'll get a number of hits, even if the entire statement is within quotes. This should be the first sign that something's fishy. Having such a length sentence in quotes still return multiple hits is a red flag that something has been copied. I found this one at the Boston Globe:

WHEN IT COMES to the economy, President Bush has demonstrating genuine leadership. The growth package he has proposed takes us in the right direction by accelerating the successful tax cuts of 2001, providing marriage penalty relief, and providing incentives for individuals and small businesses to save and invest.

Contrary to the class warfare rhetoric attacking Bush's plan, the proposal helps everyone who pays taxes and especially the middle class. This year alone, 92 million taxpayers will receive an immediate tax cut averaging $1,083 - and 46 million married couples will get back an average of $1,714. That's not pocket change for a family struggling through uncertain economic times. Combined with the president's new initiatives to help the unemployed, this plan gets people back to work and helps every sector of our economy.

STEPHANIE JOHNSON

Milton

Silly, but it gets the point across. Here's a sentiment from Honolulu:

When it comes to the economy, President Bush is demonstrating genuine leadership. His economic growth package will take us in the right direction by accelerating the successful tax cuts of 2001, providing marriage penalty relief, and incentives for individuals and small businesses to save and invest.

The president's plan helps everyone who pays taxes -- especially the middle class. This year alone, 92 million taxpayers will receive an immediate tax cut averaging $1,083 -- and 46 million married couples will get back an average of $1,714.

That's not pocket change for a family struggling through uncertain economic times. Combined with the president's new initiatives to help the unemployed, this plan gets people back to work and helps every sector of our economy.

Dirk M. Maurins
Hawaii Kai

Odd that two people so far apart would use such similar language, right? When you begin to add up the numbers though, the technique is truly frightening. Most internet-centric devices to muster support have always relied upon the power to rally thousands to a cause with a simple mouse click or keyboard button. Want to flood the USDA with complaints about a particular policy? Just blog about it and the masses will oblige. Despite the unruly nature of such a technique, at the back of it all is a democratic freedom where everyone gets a voice. Astroturf is the opposite: it is the move of a few people (using technology for a bad purpose) to pretend to be thousands, to pretend to be voicing a "popular" sentiment through deception. Fortunately, the same technology that allows someone to fire off a thousand e-mails to a thousand newspapers also allows us to track them, and, if possible, nail them to rights. So I e-mailed the Globe about the issue, and they informed me that they're looking into it. I'll keep the fans updated.

Okay, you may not think it is, but SVG 1.1 becoming a W3C Recommendation is actually important. This marks the beginning of the end for Flash, as far as I'm concerned. Why? Because the new specs will be adopted into cell-phones, and adoption by major cell-phone players will force browsers to incorporate SVG into mini-browsers (for Pocket PC, Palm, Blackberry, etc.) which will then force the major browsers to embed SVG support. The end result? Free, open, text-based vector graphics for all. Which is a very good thing. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, just disregard it.

As usual the weathermen were totally wrong. The snow was very light, and easily melted with the massive amounts of salt on the road. I remember that the goal of weather prediction was stymied by advances in chaos theory, preventing the sort of long term weather prognostication that many believed was possible even in the 1970s. However, that problem always revolved around long term trends, like a week or more. The inability to predict the correct amount of snowfall or even the duration of the storm (it was predicted to start in the afternoon but didn't begin until well after dark) is odd, given the increase in sensors scattered around the region.

Much like the inability to accurately predict the weather, the odd logic in our president's head is explained somewhat today in a piece by Michael Kinsley. It's like explaining a snowstorm after the fact: it's easy to do so in hindsight (though Kinsley, as usual, does it better than most) but there's no way to predict the next one. Unless that next one involves invading Iraq.

In preparation for the upcoming snowstorm here in the district, I switched the default style to my personal favorite, white and modified it slightly. Tell me what you think! I'm still waiting for a restaurant review from one of the triumvirate, but I suppose she'll come through sooner or later. And as far as that storm is concerned, it probably won't happen at all. The weathermen tend to be pretty bad down here at predicting snowfall. Everything else they're quite good at but for some reason snow always gets them mixed up.

I remember with longing the days of surpluses as far as the eye could see and the looming baby-boomer-induced deficits far off. Now, though, things have changed. As Glenn Hubbard himself can attest, rising deficits cause an increase in long-term interest rates, which drag the economy down. So why the continued craziness when we may still be in a recession?. It makes no sense. At this rate, once war breaks out, the markets will sink further, which could cause another financial meltdown, which could increase the size of the hole we're already in. The current ten-year prediction forecasts, even from the Administration, predict that we'll be in the red for the entire decade. That means an ever growing national debt. Way to go guys!