From yesterday's White House Press Briefing.

Q And then, on the judicial nominations, where precisely in the Constitution is the Senate required to hold an up or down vote on every judicial nominee?

MR. FLEISCHER: I said that the Constitution is clear, a majority is required to confirm judicial nominees. The Senate process has now moved to a point where it's becoming almost a matter of routine --

Q You said that they were required to hold an up or down vote.

MR. FLEISCHER: I said, the Constitution is clear, a majority is required to confirm --

Q Just prior to that, you said that they are required to hold an up or down vote.

MR. FLEISCHER: You can check the transcript, but when I cited on the Constitution, I said just what I said verbatim on the Constitution.

Well, let's scroll back to your original statement, Ari, shall we?

The Senate has a constitutional responsibility to hold an up or down vote on all judicial nominees within a reasonable amount of time. But some Democrats have abandoned that responsibility in favor of partisan politics and obstructionism. The Constitution is clear: A majority is required to confirm judicial nominees.

Ari, you said the Constitution requires the Senate to hold an up or down vote AND that a majority is required to confirm nominees. In regular logic, this means that a judicial nominee can't be confirmed without a majority vote. It's silly to say that, should a majority fail to vote on a matter, that somehow the minority is violating the Constitution. And for that matter, you tried to add in some words that clearly aren't there. The constituation says nothing about holding an up or down vote within a "reasonable" amount of time. So there!

That's right kids, it's Loyalty Day here in the free democractic United States of America. Remember: thinking is for suckers! True loyalty demands absolute servitude to our nation's elected officials, regardless of whether they are wrong or right!

In the absence of any meaningful coding, I've gone ahead and made the back-end system look a little more like the front of the website. Yes, of course, you can't notice it. But it does help me to delay any real changes.

I realized the other day that the concept of the website was still valid. The problem (at least from my perspective) was a lack of contribution. While I enjoy linking to articles I've found amusing and/or important to see, I've already read them. So their utility factor is rather low. I'd contribute many more links if the other two members of the triumvirate pitched in. Then it would be as it was intended to be: a collaborative effort with news, politics and homegrown dc information. Plus, it would let me focus less on providing content and more with providing features. As much as I love to link up articles and bust on the current administration, the site itself is long overdue for some needed enhancements. No tweaking of back-end css will fix that.

Every time I'm convinced that things are moving forward, something drags me back to the last century. Consider the following: when Helena departs, the utility bills in her name will be moved over to me. Sounds simple, right? Just a name change...since the address remains the same. My frustration dealing with Verizon led to me to be slightly cynical, but even I was taken aback by the byzantine processes. Let's go down the list.

Pepco. They deliver our electricity. Absurdly, Helena had to cancel her account, and now I have to setup a new one. I've e-mailed them to see if this can be done over e-mail. While I suspect that it cannot, I can at least hope.

Washington Gas. Even more strangely, in addition to cancelling the existing account, they wish to charge me $40 to setup a new account. When Helena explained that nothing was moving, they said it didn't matter, it was a new account. So, craftily, she merely added my name to the existing account. Non-craftily, she informed them of her plans before said change, so the rude account manager stuck a note in that says when I remove Helena's name from the account down the road, I'll be charged $40 for trying to avoid the fee. Now that's service!

I already get the telephone bill (thank God!)...but I now had to take over satellite service. You'd think that DirectTV, capable of putting multi-million dollar marvels of technology into low earth orbit, would be able to let me electronically move from her account to my account. Nope. Again, she had to cancel her account, and I had to setup a new one, and what's worse, I had to get a physically new access card sent to me by snail mail or my service would be cut off. When I attempted to go on the web to order a new access card, the website conveniently informed me that it was broken and that I should call their customer service line. When I did that, I had to re-enter in all the information they already had from the old account, (just with a new name, remember?) and when I failed to produce the SERIAL NUMBER FROM MY BOX they said they couldn't activate the service. They could send the card, but I'd have to activate later. Grr. Why they couldn't read the number off of the old account and simply put it in is beyond me.

None of these had to be time-consuming. All had websites, but none worked properly for this purpose. The gas people, especially, were completely ridiculous about the whole process. I can order pizza online, check my stock prices and my net worth, see the credit-card purchases I made mere hours ago, yet when it comes to changing a single name, the big guys fall flat. What's the point of having all these IT people out of work if they can't get anyone to make the websites run properly? Hiring slump, anyone?

From today's CQ Today, a quote from Tom DeLay regarding Rick Santorum:

Caling Santorum's position "courageous and moral," Delay said, "Frankly, I'm very proud of Rick Santorum for standing on principle."

Just another reason Tom DeLay is pure evil.

Someone once said that we'll know we've arrived in the information age when our desire for news becomes a continuous stream of information. Even now, I feel at the fringe of such an age. Blogs have inspired meta-blogs, and now even campaigns have been invited to participate in abc's new notepad feature. It's all about increased access to information, which has to be a good thing.

On a related note, my karma at slashdot just hit excellent. And, yes, it's a little geeky, but hey...don't knock it till you've tried it, right? Increasingly, news is becoming more and more slashdot oriented: tiny blobs of information coated with a bunch of greasy opinions. In a sense, the political campaigns are much like a slashdot conversation with the journalists as moderators. Now if only you could have meta-moderation in real life everything would be better.

So, yesterday, I finally finished setting up all the computers in my office. It took much longer than I expected, included several annoying bugs (I've knocked out all but one of them now) and ended taking a huge amount of my time away, especially from this site. Now that it's done I keep looking around as if trumpets will suddenly start blaring, or I'll win a prize, or anything.

No dice.

As expressed to a colleague: always have an ulterior motive.

werkz advice: go see it.

After a bit of a hiatus, the reviews are back. First up is the new movie "Identity" starring several people from John Cusack to Amanda Peet to Ray Liotta. The all star cast has been setup to die, unfortunately, in a slasher flick glossed over as a thriller. The twists of the movie are well done, and by the end you'll admit that the ride was worth it and made sense. One tiny note: don't bring your kids. Easily eclipsing my viewing of Blade II, some idiotic parent decided to bring a year-old kid to this movie. Bad idea.

I bought a new mouse for my computer yesterday. I popped it out of its box a few minutes ago and hooked it up to my computer here in the 'werkz. Instant improvement. The old one's ball had grown too ancient for most tasks, inspiring a schizophrenic seizure across the screen, abusive slapping producing more tears instead of the desired response. Combined with a newly washed 3m mousing surface and life once again seems both smooth and under control.

If only reality operated in the same manner.

The illusion of control sits behind it all. Mixed between a bad Nicole Kidman line, Newtonian physics and too many late night matrix viewings lies the empirical fantasy of perfect prediction, of a clock operating without ever missing a beat, of particules and waves being separate objects, of a guiding hand. The next step always was not merely to submit to the hand, but to control it. Free will may have been a contradiction in this realm, but it reigned nonetheless, for whomever could predict the future could rightly say they controlled it.

The finer grains of sand slip through.

Like the new mouse, I remember being a kid and wanting to be able to draw straight lines as they really were. My lack of fine motor control skills, of rendering depth properly, of failing to sketch what sat in my head silently the way I knew I should gnawed at me. A ruler, a computer, an autocad program. All exist to augment the pitiful lack of control humans have. My letters now reflect a drafting class, each one a sad attempt at the enforced perfection reached so many years ago. Each one a sad relic of a distant past. That's how it starts, of course, with small elements first. Crawl before walking, running before flight. Man could see the birds but only dream. Now the birds look up at lights in the sky they can't comprehend were placed there by the ones below them.

It's a poor substitute, to be sure. Yes, my new mouse has made writing and moving around the computer desktop much easier. But it isn't earning me gold, enhancing my 401k, attracting women or spontaneously generating parties. It simply makes life somewhat easier, much like the music being piped into my subcconscious as I type away. Our souls are not corpses, the notes tell me. Music is a far better substitute. A few notes, a haunting melody, a great bass line, a perfect guitar hook and sunlight penetrates shadows, a traffic jam turns golden and a moonlit night becomes spellbinding.

So what if I haven't found a new housemate yet. In time, everything resolves itself. More tao than empirical belief, yes, but I've done a bit of entropy theory and in the end, things do resolve themselves, even if it is pure chaos. For now, I've got my health, my house and social opportunities for the week. Reality has always been sweet and there's no reason to expect things will go south now. After all, that'd make a poor plot line for the movie, right? I haven't even picked out an appropriate soundtrack yet...though I think it'll be various artists. Few single people have the ability to weave a truly perfect song score. Now I've changed my mind, for the great ones are normally from one mind. You've got to roll the dice to win. Just ask God and Einstein.

Time to get back in control.

One of the problems of living in the dredwerkz is that, overall, it's very cool. So cool, in fact, that one is often tempted to think others who've never seen must realize its inherent coolness. This, sadly, is not the case. And so when I advertised that a room would be opening up in the aforementioned social mecca, I thought naively that there would be a flood of applicants willing to shoulder the rather high costs in order to reside in one of the most interesting places around. To date, this has not been the case. One person so far has expressed interest. She seems like she'd be a great housemate, but for some reason (perhaps I'm not the best salesman) Brad felt she wasn't interested. Go figure. Now I'm back at square one.

Wow. A tough morning, all things considered.

First off, the pitch to replace Helena with a new housemate isn't going so well. Or, more obtusely, there's only been one bright spot and said spot might not be illuminating after all.

Second, this town is too small sometimes.

I'll digress later.

Nice.

My new computer is fast enough to have outlook, a big msc console, six different websites open in phoenix/firebird, outlook newsreader, gaim, windows media player (with a nice new visualization and bjork playing) and still have enough memory to setup my exchange 2000 admin console simultaneously. It's got 250 megs of memory that haven't even been used yet and the cpu is only hitting 50% with all this going on.

Sweet.

Okay, back to "work".