LT Saloon

Safari for Windoze

For the first time, Apple has decided to escape platforms and enter the browser wars.

Safari, Apple’s OSX browser is now available for Windows XP and Windows Vista machines — and it is blazing fast.

I was skeptical when I first heard about it a month ago.  I have had issues with websites and Safari for a long time.  Nothing ever seemed to work correctly, it couldn’t read Javascript or it wouldn’t display many of the attributes.  Safari was something I would eventually test a web design in only because there were a tiny number of people who insisted on buying Macs.

But the other day I decided to check it out.  I downloaded a copy and installed it on my Vista machine and was immediately impressed by the blazing speed of things.  It is light weight, sleek, and not full of many frills.

If you have a Vista or XP machine, go read up on this browser.  Heck, download it and try it out for yourself.

Hillary’s Bad Press Trick?

It couldn’t have come at a worse time for Barack Obama. Jeremiah Wright is back in the news cycle “defending” his earlier statements and sermons and acting in such a way that it seems as though he is purposely trying to sabatage Obama’s bid for the presidential nomination.

What gives?

If he was hoping for a black man to obtain the highest office in the free world, then common sense would tell you that he should have remained as quiet as a church mouse.

Unless he has another candidate in mind for that office.

Errol Louis dug up some interesting background about Jeremiah’s sponsor at the National Press Club event on Monday.

Is Jeremiah Wright a colossal disaster for Barack Obama or a press trick?

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright couldn’t have done more damage to Barack Obama’s campaign if he had tried. And you have to wonder if that’s just what one friend of Wright wanted.

Shortly before he rose to deliver his rambling, angry, sarcastic remarks at the National Press Club Monday, Wright sat next to, and chatted with, Barbara Reynolds.

A former editorial board member at USA Today, she runs something called Reynolds News Services and teaches ministry at the Howard University School of Divinity. (She is an ordained minister).

It also turns out that Reynolds – introduced Monday as a member of the National Press Club “who organized” the event – is an enthusiastic Hillary Clinton supporter.

On a blog linked to her Web site- www.reynoldsnews.com- Reynolds said in a February post: “My vote for Hillary in the Maryland primary was my way of saying thank you” to Clinton and her husband for the successes of Bill Clinton’s presidency.

The same post criticized Obama’s “Audacity of Hope” theme: “Hope by definition is not based on facts,” wrote Reynolds. It is an emotional expectation. Things hoped for may or may not come. But help based on experience trumps hope every time.”

In another blog entry, Reynolds gives an ever-sharper critique of Obama: “It is a sad testimony that to protect his credentials as a unifier above the fray, the senator is fueling the media characterization that Rev. Dr. Wright is some retiring old uncle in the church basement.”

I don’t know if Reynolds’ eagerness to help Wright stage a disastrous news conference with the national media was a way of trying to help Clinton – my queries to Reynolds by phone and e-mail weren’t returned yesterday – but it’s safe to say she didn’t see any conflict between promoting Wright and supporting Clinton.

It’s hard to exaggerate how bad the actual news conference was. Wright, steeped in an honorable, fiery tradition of Bible-based social criticism, cheapened his arguments and his movement by mugging for the cameras, rolling his eyes, heaping scorn on his critics and acting as if nobody in the room was learned enough to ask him a question.

Wright has, unquestionably, been caricatured and vilified unfairly. The feeding programs, prison outreach and other social services he has built over more than 30 years are commendable, and his reading of the Judeo-Christian tradition as an epic story of people trying to escape slavery is far more right than wrong – and not something to be caricatured or compressed into a 10-second sound bite.

But Wright should have known – and his friend and ally Reynolds, a media professional, surely knew – that bickering with the press can only harm Wright and, by extension, Obama.

I hope that wasn’t their goal.

It certainly makes you wonder…

Where’s Grouchy?

I know that I have been absent from here for a while, but that’s nothing compared to Grouchy.  

Frank and I were just talking about the fact that nobody has heard from Grouch for a while.  Does anyone know where he is hiding?

Inspection- On Inflation and Plausible Denial

This week… early AM; Sirius news reporting, the price of food has soared “double digits.” Some people may be mad, but still not mad enough to unhook themselves from the imbecilic umbilical cord: TV. Meanwhile, gas prices have exploded. If we could build a combustion engine fueled by the rise and fall in fuel prices we’d have a perpetual motion machine.

Globalization at Work

Received in an email:

What is the truest definition of Globalization?

Just take Princess Diana’s death: An English princess, with an Egyptian boyfriend, crashes in a French tunnel riding in a German car with a Dutch engine driven by a Belgian who was drunk on Scotch whiskey, followed closely by Italian Paparazzi on Japanese motorcycles. Then she was treated by an American doctor using Brazilian medicines.

This was sent to me by an American using Bill Gates’ Microsoft technology, which is developed and produced all over the world. You’re probably processing it on your computer run by Taiwanese microchips and viewing it on a Korean monitor assembled by Bangladeshi workers in a Singapore plant and transported by Indian lorry-drivers, hijacked by Indonesians, unloaded by Sicilian longshoremen, and trucked to you by Mexican illegals!

That, my friends, as McCain would say, is Globalization at work.

From Phil Proctor at Planet Proctor.com

Inspection- Shoe of Brian: a Short Vignette

This edition of Inspection: using a vehicle called fiction instead of some pompous rant, is a commentary on the Pope’s visit and Bush’s comments regarding that visit..

What if the dead icons and deities expressed how they feel about what their followers have done, and said, in their name? This explains one inspiration for the following vignette. Another is a quote from none other than George W. Bush who was speaking to the Pope and those who had gathered to witness his visit: the church hierarchy from the U.S. and other followers…

“When you give your heart and life over to Christ, and accept Christ as a savior; it changes your heart and your life.”

Shoe of Brian

“Did you hear what he said? What changes? What changes? The snippy, sarcastic comments are still there. The willingness to let others be killed with his approval. I wish he would pray to me just to tell me how he thinks I ever approved any of this: even just the using of nicknames to humiliate others… even his closest advisers. I called Peter, ‘The Rock,’ not a ‘Rockette…’ His obvious hatred for anyone who dares to disagree with him… And what about my supposed ‘representative’ and his ‘awesome’ speech? He who spoke with ‘compassion’ about the children whom priests raped, but before he was pope he helped move them around to avoid prosecution, and pushed a rule that nothing could be done to these rapists until after the children turned 28 when the statue of limitations was over? He’s using me. They’re both using me. They’re all using us. We tell them how to lead the best life possible and they use us to excuse the very things we preached against…”

-Jesus; the Lord; YHWH, Joshua, or “he’s not just ‘Josh-ing’”

The Tattlesnake – The Media Elite Highlight Their Own Elitism Edition

The bored and restless Punditrocracy, maintaining their staunch avoidance of relevance or importance, furiously lit like garbage scow flies upon Barack Obama’s alleged ‘elitism’ for pointing out that people in small towns are bitter and angry at being ignored by politicians once they’ve been elected. He added, if one bothered to listen to more than the out-of-context soundbite of his San Francisco comments, that they tend to vote for things such as guns and God and against immigrants because these are issues which the GOP has carefully constructed as distracting vents for their boiling frustrations. Contrary to the Pundicrats gasping shock at such a blunder as telling the truth – they hate that – Obama didn’t seem to rile voters much with his ‘bitter’ talk – many even agreed wholeheartedly.

Of course the Hill People, sensing the nearness of electoral oblivion, had to get what political mileage they could out of Obama’s ‘gaffe,’ but Hillary herself might have left out the prosaic and artificial-sounding anecdote of her father taking her out as a small child and teaching her how to shoot a firearm. Growing up in the same ’50′s America as Hillary, it just doesn’t seem credible to me that Dad Rodham would have grabbed his young daughter and stuck a 30-06 rifle in her tiny hands – more likely he would have told her to go join Mom in the kitchen for pointers on creating the perfect Kraft cheese casserole while he took his sons out hunting. Ah, well, truth is the first casualty of war and political campaigns.

But the stern media consternation over Obama’s remarks, and their desperate flailing in trying to dub him as another hapless, out-of-touch Kerry ‘elitist,’ reached a pinnacle of absurd hilarity yesterday on MSNBC when Norah O’Donnell, as attractive as she is vapid, chuckled and smirked over Obama referring to the high price of arugula when he was campaigning in Iowa earlier this year. “Why,” hooted O’Donnell, “they don’t even have arugula there!” Although she and her pundit guests didn’t catch it, Norah was displaying her own aloof elitism, as if it were a scarlet ‘E’ emblazoned on her forehead. Our six-and-seven figure Nationally Televised Media don’t get out much among the rabble; if they did, they’d realize the rubes in Iowa, as Media Matters has noted, not only know what arugula is, but grow it and eat it, and even occasionally wash it down with cappuccinos and lattes. (Yes, they actually have Starbucks and other gourmet coffee outlets out in the Hawkeye State, as well as many other parts of Fly-Over Country.) Why, even my local little coffee shop, which used to feature only one humble grind poured by a pleasant middle-aged waitress from a glass Cory carafe, now has some foreign-sounding caffeinated drinks on the menu.

Times have changed all over the land, but to the over-compensated and insulated royalty of the Punditrocracy we are still stuck in the ’50s, with their condescending babble of lunch-pail workers (who carries a lunch pail to work anymore?), and ‘Reagan Democrats’ (there aren’t any these days), and anxiousness to tap into the heartfelt concerns of small-town folk they would grandly ignore on the street, unless they happened to be cracking contemptuous ‘in crowd’ jokes at their expense. Like the politicians Obama was talking about, the Big Media quickly forgets the cares of Wal-Mart America once the voting is over.

It’s a given that all three of the presidency-pursuers left standing are among the elite in education and wealth – poor relations with community college educations aren’t allowed to run for president these days – but the spectacle of the Media Upper-Crust taking umbrage on behalf of the Little People, after burying them in years of Washington effluvia and Wall Street bunkum, is enough to inspire an Elvis moment with the .45 drawing a bead on the TV screen.

A shame most of us are too broke these days in Bush’s New World Order Economy to afford replacing the damn thing.

This Day in Hell

April 15, 1913 – Wealthy drownees of the White Star Line’s ‘Titanic’ celebrate their first year in Hell with a gala reenactment of the unsinkable ship’s sinking. Events include Eat Your Fortune in Dollar Bills and Go Chase the Penny, Fool. Finishing off the festivities, the swells are forced to pay Satan 99 percent of their total worth in income taxes! Since they just dined on their money — good luck, guys!

Inspection- Ken’s Neo Con… spiracy Theory

The Neos are up to something…

To paraphrase an over quoted scene from a movie: “Proof? I ain’t got no proof. I don’t need no stinkin proof.”

One of Bill Clinton’s last acts, if I remember the timing right, was to redesign our money. George Bush; with his “I can do everything better than the Clintons and my father did,” fetish: his desire to erase everything done by Bill and outdo his father, redesigned them again… poorly. The day after they were redesigned a warehouse of new, counterfeit, bills were discovered. They just got the color slightly wrong: proving that securing our currency by redesign is probably best left to an occasional effort at best. Of course “securing our currency” is most likely not the goal of the Neo Cons whose mentor: Grover Norquist, has sought to find any possible way to drown the government our forefather’s fought and died for in a bathtub.

And how much tax money was ripped out of our pockets for this useless endeavor?

Dumping the large quantity of new bills that money machines deliver: like the self serve teller machines at grocery stores, would tank the economy very fast if something wasn’t done to quickly dispose of the vast amount of old bills out there. Blaming Bill Clinton, or the Dems, for making the 30′s look more like the 20s in that case would fly about as well as a mafia hit tossed off a bridge, wearing cement shoes. So something has to be done with the old bills, right?

AAR Shoots Self in Ass and Hits Brain Matter

After a week of speculation and wonder, the whole Randi Rhodes story emerges — and it is pretty damn sinister.

We find out today that Randi Rhodes has terminated her contract with Air America and why.

Remember, the “official Air America story” was that Randi was suspended for calling Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro “Fucking Whores” during a comedy monologue at a private fund-raising event for San Fransisco’s “Green 960″ (960 AM)

Well, today we find out that the suspension was a ruse put on by Air America to force Randi into signing a new contract that changed a crucial clause that would allow Air America to fire her for cause if they felt the need.  They literally held her microphone hostage contingent on forcing her to sign a new contract because the new owners didn’t like the contract that they had bought into when they purchased Air America.  She referred to it as “buyer’s remorse”.

Under the terms of the contract, Air America knew that they couldn’t fire her, and by keeping her on suspension she felt that the contract was thereby breeched and so SHE terminated it by quitting, and was immediately picked up by the Nova M Radio Network.

The following is an interview she did this evening with Marc Maron, who is subbing this week for the vacationing Mike Malloy, who like Marc were early departures from the Air America network

So it looks like Air America is starting to eat itself. Randi was one of the two most valuable properties on the Air America lineup and they drove her away by trying to make her sign an unfair contract amendment because the new owners didn’t like the original terms.  They couldn’t wait one more year when her current contract expired to renegotiate the terms, they thought that they could bully her into signing something that she had already spent months negotiating in the first place.

The question is, does this signal the start of a serious brain-drain from Air America to other networks?  Air America was originally set up as a platform to get progressive voices on the air in a Conservative-dominated business — and they have.  But have they outlived their usefulness?  Progressive talkers have proven a viable listener base.  Other Networks have taken notice and newer ones like Nova M have been formed.  Older, more conventional networks have begun putting their own progressive voices on the air.

Randi didn’t lose a damn thing.  She is back on each and every station and time slot that she was when she was at AAR.  Air America lost their number on talent, thereby ripping a whole lotta value out of their company.

Ye Olde Scribe Presents: Interesting, But Rejected, Campaign Jokes, Songs and Slogans

And now, Ye Olde Scribe Fly On the Wall Productions Somewhat Proudly Presents…

Interesting, But Rejected, Campaign Slogans

Scribe’s cloned flies on the wall have been busy bouncing from campaign to campaign to collect these. John McCain seems to have a fly fetish so his headquarters has had to have an extra dose of clone infestation. They’ve been cloned so many times their getting almost as dull as John. Here is what they reported back as slogans and jokes for speeches that have been considered, but rejected…

Slogans

Hillary…

“Vote for the babe with less tact and a whole lot more, “Ack! Ack!”

Barack…

“Our nation: out of the red, into the Black.”

McCain…

“Bringing the Hanoi Hilton experience out of Iraq and into America.”