state of the union

Managed to catch at least part of Kennedy's, Pelosi's, Daschle's and Frist's responses to the speech. I can understand everyone's focus on how and when we're going to war, but thought at least someone would point out how strangely left-leaning Bush's proposals were: billions to fight AIDS in Africa, millions to mentor the children of prisoners (quite likely locked up by the GOP war on drugs, let's remember), and money to research hydrogen-powered cars?!? Now, it seems pretty likely we won't hear the administration mention most of this again. They have so many options, see. There's "the war on terror is our focus now" line, or the "we sent our (totally unworkable) proposal to Congress who we expect will work on it (bury it in committee)" or my bet, "the Democrats are holding these efforts up for partisan gain."

Nevertheless, for the President who resisted the Democrats' Homeland Defense proposal, then acted like it was his idea (a belief strangely continued by the press), these proposals seemed so--well, how else to put it?--liberal.

link

who's your spin daddy?

Wow! You would think in the midst of the Bush propaganda blitzkrieg--Bushkrieg?--that the source of the most egregious verbal summersaults would be obvious. However, nothing has come close to the jaw-dropping rhetorical nonsense Microsoft just used in reponse to the latest assault on their crappy software. To wit:

Microsoft said the damage caused by the "SQL Slammer" worm over the weekend, which targeted the company's corporate database program of the same name, showed it was on the right track with its "Trustworthy Computing" initiative, launched a year and one week earlier by Chairman and founder Bill Gates

Bush, Fleischer et al need to get over and talk to these guys. The potential for this construct is infinite! Imagine 2 months from now... "The bloody civil war in Iraq and terrorist attacks around the globe show we were on the right track when we assassinated Hussein."

In fairness, this is Reuter's explanation of Microsoft's explanation. So let's go straight to the nerd's mouth. Here is their press release, where the text mentions the name of the worm (Slammer) once, and "Trustworthy Computing" three times. Uh huh.

the war on spam continues...

How is it that months after Yahoo added a spam filter, they still can't catch the Nigeria "trapped funds" spam? I just got another one tonight. Come on, guys, can't you just watch for telltale phrases like "all modalities will have to be put in place"? I mean, my friends are a pretty literate bunch, but never have they questioned the placement of my modalities...