Glenn Hauman: View From Above

For Auntie Esther comes MEng project: lil2

For a long time, I was of the belief that I missed out on being an Internet millionaire three times in the last decade or so.

Now, it’s been pointed out to me that it was probably four times.

Sigh…

Because they are ignorant fools.

It has been said that editors get a bad rap from authors, because they can’t see good stuff in front of them and they piss on talent.

They have nothing on venture capitalists.

In my day, I’ve gone to VCs with four major business proposals. Now, my track record is certainly not undistinguished– after all, my company conducted the first e-commerce transaction over the Internet. There are those who believe that me and mine may have also invented the internet shopping cart. We can also mention the first e-book publisher on the net, and I ran a heck of a lot longer than companies founded and funded by traditional publishers.

And what does this get me? Bupkis. Can’t even get my phone calls returned.

Register to vote. Heck, just go and check to see if you’re still on the registration rolls.

Hard drive receipts

56K line receipts

Internet commerce is just over a decade old.

So much to write about. Let’s do the quickie with CSI: Miami first. Spoilers after the break. Continue reading Sidekick Glenn’s TV Roundup

…post something, go away for a week, and watch how the world has changed.

So the documents ain’t real. And the blame, of course, is clearly on CBS.

STEPHEN COLBERT, Daily Show Senior Media Correspondent: Jon, there’s got to be some accountability. Dan Rather is the head, the commander in chief if you will of his organization. He’s someone in the ultimate position of power who made a harmful decision based upon questionable evidence. Then, to make things worse, he stubbornly refused to admit his mistake, choosing instead to stay the course and essentially occupy this story for too long. This man has got to go!

STEWART: Uh … we’re talking about Dan Rather…?

COLBERT: Yes Jon, Dan Rather. CBS is in chaos, it’s unsafe, riven by internal rivalries. If you ask me, respected, reputable outsiders need to be brought in to help the rebuilding effort.

STEWART: … at CBS News?

COLBERT: Yeah, at CBS news! What possible other unrelated situation could my words be equally applicable to?! Now people need to be held accountable. The commander in chief, the vice president, the secretary of defense, the national security adviser — everyone at CBS News needs to go!

Yet somehow, we still don’t know what Bush was doing during all that time. And it’s not like it would be hard for Bush to clear this up and say what he was doing during that time.

But, Glenn, I hear you cry, Bush’s service was 30 years ago. Why should we care if he showed up then?

Well, there’s this: 40 percent of Army reservists fail to report to Fort Jackson

And really, why should they? After all, if GWB can blow off his commitments to the armed forces when he’s not at risk of being sent overseas for a year and shot at, why shouldn’t these folks do it when they are at definite risk for that?

Bush has a hard time showing moral authority on this one. Why, it would be like GWB advocating tougher sentences for drug offenders after it was shown that he used drugs and his wife sold them. Or if you were revealed to be gay after advocating against gay marriages. Or… wait, you don’t think I’m implying anything there, do you?

Another request from comments: this time, asking “Would love to hear what you think about the CBS forged documents scandal”.

This story has taken many twists and turns in the ten days (yes, just ten days) this story has existed. First, the letters and allegations, then “experts” claiming the letters were forged, then Killian’s secretary saying they’re recreations but the sentiment is accurate, and now hearing that the original questioner of the documents is a Republican operative who helped get Clinton disbarred.

Yeesh.

I hate repeating what other folks have said on the topic, so I’ll point you to Mark Kleiman and Josh Marshall and Tim Noah have said on the subject. But I will add these things to the debate.

* It certainly is possible to frame a guilty man. And just because someone may have been framed doesn’t mean that he’s innocent of the crime in question. Doesn’t ANYBODY remember O.J.?

* Every so often, bad guys try a fake frame of themselves to divert suspicion from themselves later.

* The White House, upon initial release, either thought the memos were genuine, implying that they thought all the charges in them were accurate; or were in on the gag, and were setting people up for a later takedown.

* Why would the White House think they were genuine? Because George W. Bush knows what happened during his tenure in the National Guard. Even though he has yet to come clean about it. If he filled in the missing gaps in his time period, this entire mess would go away. Which implies that either the mess is a useful distraction or that he/they thinks there’s something worth hiding.

* George W. Bush has a known prediliction for going after guys “who tried to get my daddy”. Exhibit A: the guy who had nothing to do with 9/11, but ran Iraq instead. I point people back about 12 years ago and the famous on-air confrantation between Bush I and Dan Rather, and remind people that CBS was also the news organization that broke the Abu Gharib prison scandal photos.

Oh yeah– is the document a forgery? Maybe. I don’t have enough evidence; and neither do most of the folks commenting on it, they haven’t examined the document in question, certainly not to the standards of even a civil trial. Let’s go on to another question then: is what is contained true? After all, whether a book is a first edition or a reprint that someone’s trying to sell as a first edition doesn’t affect the words on the page. I would dearly love for THAT to be a focus of investigation.

In mail, someone wondered where the secret messages were.

But I don’t have any “secret messages”.
Unless you count coded messages to liberals–
Really, what would those say?
In case of Bush
Election in 2004,
Depart country immediately?

Perhaps I should start that up,
A sort of “Early Warning System”…
Unless, of course, it’s already too late.
Let’s just stick with silly secret messages, and see who notices.

Fnord.

Here’s what you call a lousy choice:

* Have brain surgery to remove a tumor the size of a golfball. They should be able to remove between 75% to 90% of the tumor, but getting to it will involve cutting through areas of the brain that control speech and language. This will increase your life span to maybe a year or two.

OR:

* Don’t have the surgery and get to live in pain for the next 30 days or so.

Andrew’s surgery is scheduled for five and a half hours from now. Good luck, big guy.