The Democrats make their situation more difficult

The Republicans should be wiped slick in November, and would be if they were not competing with the current crop of Democrats and their leftist-activist buddies. That phenomenon is what has part of the Conservative movement thinking that a third party might be successful. The problem is that where we currently stand, such an attempt would simply make the atrocious Democrats winners, despite them being so sorry. Kos and his buddies must be living in cocoons, as they miss the fact that outside of the cocoon, ordinary people, at least in Texas (not a valid comparison, to be sure), are more conservative than even moderate Democrats in the Northeast and West Coast. Even the mainstream Black community, where a high proportion of people are religious and oppose things like Gay rights, much less Gay marriage. They also are not fond of abortion or illegal drugs. I picture our lefty buddies and sitting around, smoking dope, and plotting how to lower the age of consent so that men can do bad things with boys, which is pretty incompatible with "ordinary" people.

The Republicans we have

Many of the Republicans who have been elected from the upper Midwest and the Northeast are not liked by Conservatives. You could lump John McCain and Linsey Graham in with them. The reality is that many senators and congressmen who can get elected are not much different from moderate Democrats, for a reason. Many are also long-term politicians who are interested in constituancy service, doing things for their buddies and supporters, and who care about how they are characterized by the Press. Hardcore Conservatives like Mark Tapscott and Michelle Malkin do not like them. I do not much like them, either. Their main saving grace is that they vote to organize the House and Senate for Republicans, not Democrats. They keep us from having Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House and Harry Reid as Senate Majority Leader. If you decide to not vote in November, you might as well be voting for them. If you agree with them, then there is no harm done. If you don't, you are making a mistake, and we will all live to regret it.

Iraq

Even though our enemies in Iraq are close to being defeated militarily, they sense that our will to fight is close to being broken. Because of that, they are pushing their terror offensive with what resources remain to them. If they can break our national will, then they will have a big win. They have nothing to lose, at this point, if they fail, as they were already losing the military battle. They may be right about our "National Will", I am sorry to say. That is how North Vietnam won the war that they had lost, militarily.

A late comment about "United 93"

My wife tells me that our daughter saw United 93 last night with her boyfriend, shortly after midnight. She found the movie very upsetting, and she described herself as only able to cry. United 93 was one of the opening shots in this round of fighting terrorism. I was sitting in Brooklyn Center, MN in the morning of September 11, 2001, and we followed events over the Internet, from sites such as CNN. Flight 93 had a great deal of meaning for people in Minnesota, as Tom Burnett grew up in Bloomington. I heard that they had gotten into the cockpit but the plane was too low to pull it up in time. Any normal man would have joined in to make the attempt.

Spam blogs

I had never heard of the concept of a spam blog until yesterday, when I investigated why Blogger had turned on the obnoxious word verification on one of my blogs. Wikipedia has an entry on the subject, and they essentially say that a spam blog is simply created for having links to promote other sites. In any case, Blogger did not appreciate what I was doing when I was working on cross-browser compatibility on my two blogs where there is special formatting. I was working on the template from both Firefox and from IE6 at the same time. It is unclear why word verification was enabled, simply from that work. I asked about the word verification, and that was where I found out why it would be enabled and what to do ask for it to be removed.

The Ford Fusion reminds me of the Tempo

I saw a gold Ford Fusion parked near the restaurant, this morning, and my first thought was that it looked like a Tempo of the original body style. The Fusion is nicer, obviously, and very "2006", while the Tempo is very "1984". This is what the Fusion looks like, thanks to FamilyCar.com:

while this is a Tempo, thanks to Tim Holtan:

A WBAP poll about the 25 year old teacher

WBAP has a poll on their website. Today's poll is about the 25 year old teacher, a young woman, who had an affair with an 18-year old boy. The polls results were:

What is your reaction?
This is a crime, but that is way too harsh.  23%
She should be fired, but this is not a crime.  50%  
This is perfectly appropriate.  27%

Only 23% thought it was a crime, unlike the recently passed Texas law. I voted for the "She should be fired, but this is not a crime" option.

More Governent Run Amok: Lawrence, Kansas

Drudge linked to this story about a cell phone ban while driving in Lawrence, Kansas. This is just another case of government excess, solving a non-existent problem. I suspect that "researchers" are leftist, anti-techonology loonies.

I'm tired of big government types on the left and right running amok

I flipped out when I heard about this young woman who was in serious trouble for having an affair with an 18-year old boy. She is 25, but the boy is "of age". Her sin is being a teacher at the school he attends. Remember that Newt Gingrich's first marriage was to his high school geometry teacher. Would they want to put her in jail? I suspect that this sort of relationship between what are essentially peers was not uncommon in the past, and many got married, eventually. The big government types who like to demogogue issues such as this have jimmied the system to cause this particular miscarriage of justice (in my opinion). This is NOT like some 45-year old man taking liberties with a 9-year old girl. That is clearly a problem. This case is not. Remember that if the young woman had not been a teacher, what she did was not a crime. I suspect that is a clear case of over-legislation for political grandstanding.

Another case of running amok is what Alberto Gonzales wants from ISP's and Google. There are forces afoot that want to eliminate Internet anonymity and peak at everything you do. They can use the war against Islamic terrorists and the law enforcement efforts to combat child pornography as an excuse for the sort of excesses proposed. Part of the problem is that the Government wants to use anti-terrorist measures for ordinary law enforcement. It is similar in concept to the bad things that were done in the name of the war on drugs during the Clinton administration and before, such as knocking down doors, and then finding that they had the wrong house. I don't have a dog in this hunt, but I don't have to like what I see, either. You can see, though that my libertarian/anarchist tendancies are showing.

Our lefty buddies' hands are not clean on this issue. They are perfectly willing to commit atrocities such as Ruby Ridge, Waco, and grabbing Elian Gonzales and sending him back to Communist Cuba. As long as someone on the right is involved, watch out!

Animated GIFs continue to be bad

I hate Firefox, but I use it exclusively, unless a site demands that I use IE6. I must admit that Firefox 1.5.0.3 is much better than its predecessors. One feature of Firefox is that it will remember form data, such as passwords. Passwords are a special case beyond even the normal form data, as passwords are stored and can be viewed.

I use Sitemeter for monitoring web site traffic on all eight web sites and blogs. Sitemeter has usernames and passwords to login, and I always do that, even though I am running open to the world. I do that so that my web sites and blogs can be included in The Truth Laid Bear's Blogosphere Ecosystem. That requires open sitemeter access.

A feature of the password memory is that they can accidentally be changed, if you are in the middle of doing something and the browser form data is captured. A feature of animated GIFs is that they both hog computer resources by making the browser work quite hard to render them and they also can cause altered form data to be captured by Firefox. I keep a text file with my Sitemeter IDs and passwords just so that if Firefox alters the password to not work, I can reset it back to the correct value. That can easily happen where there are animated GIFs on the Sitemeter pages.

The workaround is to cover up the animated GIFs (often top and bottom), so that the browser is not repainting them. That gets rid of the accidental form data capture problem. I scroll the page so that the top animated GIF is hidden, and then move the page down so that the lower animated GIF is off the visible page. The problem is caused by the presence of animated GIFs on the page with HTML forms while using Firefox. I am stuck using the pages with the animated GIFs and I am not going to stop using Firefox, until something better comes along, so I will have to continue playing games.