Later On

Interesting:

The Missing Manuals series, published by O’Reilly Media, today announced the migration of its book about Wikipedia to Wikipedia. As of today, the entire contents of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual (O’Reilly, $29.99) by John Broughton is available for free online for editing and updating just like any other Wikipedia entry.

"What makes this project different than any of the other zillion books online today is the format we’ve chosen–a wiki," explains Peter Meyers, Missing Manuals’ managing editor. "Book viewers will be able to do all the same things they do on any other wiki: view the document, edit it, add to it–in short, whatever they want. The book is going to reside in the site’s Help area, naturally, since the book is all about helping people edit and navigate their way around Wikipedia."

Adds Meyers: "Once it’s live, our hope is that the Wikipedia community will flock to the book and ‘curate’ it by adding tips, tricks, and by updating the material to reflect changes to Wikipedia since we’ve published the original edition. Down the road, when it comes time for us to consider publishing a second edition of the print book, we’ll think about whether to incorporate some of the community’s changes into the new edition."

The drive to post "Wikipedia: The Missing Manual" to Wikipedia was spearheaded by …

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Andrew Sullivan has a very good post on Obama’s first TV interview as president:

It popped up on television last night and I had two reactions. The first was a sense of met expectation. Part of the rationale for Obama’s presidency from a foreign policy perspective was always his unique capacity to rebrand America in the eyes of the Muslim world. Since even the hardest core neocons agree that wooing the Muslim center is critical to winning the long war against Jihadism, Obama’s outreach is unremarkable and should be utterly uncontroversial. Bush tried for a while to do the same. But Karen Hughes is not exactly Barack Obama. And the simple gesture of choosing an Arab media outlet for his first televised interview as president is extremely powerful. It has the elegance of a minimalist move with maximalist aims. It is about the same thing as inviting Rick Warren or supping with George Will: it’s about R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

This respect came with the following astonishing words: …

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UPDATE: Also read what John Cole has to say. Sullivan is a conservative today, and John Cole was a conservative until the Bush Administration made him a Democrat.

The new sheriff resembles the old sheriff in his bringing lobbyists in to monitor the industries they lobbied for. Mary Kane in the Washington Independent:

Well, this doesn’t look too good, does it? A recent lobbyist for Goldman Sachs, Mark Patterson, is in line to become chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, ABC news reports. And more former lobbyists also are expected to be filling some key administration jobs as well. All this seems to fly in the face of those new ethics rules President Obama recently announced, to limit the influence of lobbyists in his administration.

From ABC:

Patterson first began lobbying for Goldman Sachs in 2005, after working as policy director for then-Senate majority leader Tom Daschle. According to publicly filed lobbying disclosure records, he worked on issues related to the banking committee, climate change and carbon trading and immigration reform, among others.

Patterson’s lobbying was first noted by the National Journal magazine.

Patterson is one of over a dozen recent lobbyists in line for important posts in the Obama administration, despite a presidential order severely restricting the role of lobbyists in his administration, the magazine reported.

Steve Ellis, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, isn’t happy: …

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Mary Kane of the Washington Independent:

That was fast: The Obama administration told Citigroup to get rid of its $50 million jet, just one day after reports about the expenditure made their way into the public eye, ABC News reports.

From ABC:

The high-flying execs at Citigroup caved under pressure from President Obama and decided today to abandon plans for a luxurious new $50 million corporate jet from France.

The bank used TARP funds to purchase a new corporate jet for executives.

The decision came 24 hours after the banking giant, which was rescued by a $45 billion taxpayer lifeline, defended buying the state-of-the-art Dassault Falcon 7X — one of nine to be flying in U.S. skies — as a smart business deal.

The jet, the epitome of corporate prestige and privilege, can carry 12 passengers in elegant comfort.

ABC News has learned that on Monday officials of the Obama administration called Citigroup about the company’s new $50 million corporate jet and told execs to “fix it.”

I’ll bet Citigroup and other banks aren’t quite used to this. They used to get away with this sort of thing all the time, and I can bet the Bush Administration never picked up the phone. Nothing like moving quickly to correct something that clearly was becoming a symbol of corporate irresponsibility. Now, if the administration could only take back that $4 billion spent on executive bonuses at Merrill Lynch …

Read the excellent post by John Aravosis. It begins:

His name is James Clyburn’s (D-S.C.), he’s a senior member of Speaker Pelosi’s leadership, and he’s trying to kill health care reform this year.

Clyburn, for no apparent reason, went on TV (twice) in the past few days and said we likely won’t be doing anything on health care reform this year – even though Obama has said otherwise, and it was a key promise in the campaign. You see, Clyburn says he still feels burned by the 1994 health reform fiasco, so he’d rather have us bite off a few small pieces of reform and then we can revisit the issue later. I guess "later" means the next time the Democrats hold the White House, House and Senate after winning a massive mandate. I’m sure we’ll have another Barack Obama type candidate some time in the next generation or two.

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Glenn Greenwald shows in detail (through brief extracts) why Richard Cohen is not worth reading.

From the Associated Press:

House Republican leaders are urging their rank and file to oppose the economic stimulus bill heading for a vote on Wednesday, delivering their appeal hours before President Obama heads to the Capitol to seek bipartisan support.

Two officials say the top House Republican leaders — Rep. John Boehner and Eric Cantor — made the request.

In a gesture of bipartisanship, Obama on Monday urged Democrats to delete money from the bill for family planning funds for the low-income.

The House bill includes about $825 billion in tax cuts and spending. Republicans say much of the spending is wasteful and will not stimulate the economy.

Very good news. From Download Squad:

The National Film Board of Canada has decide to share its archive with the world, posting nearly 500 short films on their web site, www.nfb.ca.

Videos cover a wide range of subject matter, from war documentaries to offbeat animation. There are even four feature-length films to watch in their entirety.

Keep in mind that the site is new – the NFB is still learning how to cope with the increased traffic and you may experience the occasional hiccup. As backup, you can visit their YouTube channel.
For more information, check the NFB.ca blog.

Via email from the Drug Policy Alliance:

Less than two days. That’s how long it took ex-President Bush’s cronies inside the federal government to strike out at President Obama and use taxpayer money to undermine him.

Last Thursday the DEA raided a medical marijuana dispensary in California, putting the lives of cancer, HIV/AIDS and other patients at risk.

But we can show President Obama that the American people will stand with him in this fight and hold him accountable for his campaign promise to end these raids.

As you may know, President Obama promised to end the Bush administration’s cruel and costly raids on medical marijuana patients and caregivers in states where marijuana is legal for medical use. He’s in the process of replacing Bush officials who are the source of the problem, but that takes time.

Quite frankly, what the Bush loyalists inside the DEA did in South Lake Tahoe is the equivalent of giving President Obama the finger.

Now is our chance to urge President Obama to protect at-risk patients. If he doesn’t stand up forcefully to Bush’s cronies, they will continue to undermine his presidency. And terminally ill patients will suffer.

Via Kate Hopkins and the Accidental Hedonist, this story:

That much-debated sweetener, high-fructose corn syrup, is going to need more than a pricey PR campaign to fix this one.

After one set of scientists found mercury — yes, everyone’s favorite brain-impairing element — in almost half of commercial HFCS, another bunch of scientists decided to get specific and tested 55 common consumer products that use HFCS. And guess what? Almost a third of them contain mercury.

How did the heavy metal get in there? In making HFCS — that “natural” sweetener, as the Corn Refiners Association likes to call it — caustic soda is one ingredient used to separate corn starch from the corn kernel. Apparently most caustic soda for years has been produced in industrial chlorine (chlor-alkali) plants, where it can be contaminated with mercury that it passes on to the HFCS, and then to consumers.

David Wallinga, M.D., and his co-authors of “Not So Sweet: Missing Mercury and High Fructose Corn Syrup,” are naming brand names in their report from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. At the top of the list: Quaker Oatmeal to Go, Jack Daniel’s Barbecue Sauce from Heinz, Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup, Kraft Original Barbecue Sauce, and Nutri-Grain Strawberry Cereal Bars. Oy!

And, although soft drinks, the über-users of HFCS, surprisingly weren’t the worst offenders, I’m betting Coca-Cola Classic (coming in at 12th) gets consumed in far higher dietary quantities than Oatmeal to Go.

That’s all bad enough, especially considering no level of mercury is considered safe and that it’s especially toxic to growing brains — that is, the brains of the people consuming the highest levels of HFCS (children) and the brains of babies in utero. (See the figures in the report.) Worse: People at the FDA and USDA knew about the presence of mercury in HFCS and did nothing about it…

Continue reading. I assume that the last statement refers to the agencies under the Bush Administration, when the direction was to do whatever industry wanted and to hell with consumers.

It’s worth noting that Israel itself has its origins in terrorism and terrorist acts, so it’s a little rich that the country is so offended by terrorism from the Palestinians: the Palestinians are following the Israel example. This news story from ten days ago describes the situation:

A veteran British-Jewish parliamentarian has compared the latest Gaza conflict to the Nazi Holocaust and said Israel too was created out of Jewish terrorism, IRNA reported Friday.

‘Israel was born out of Jewish terrorism. Jewish terrorists hanged two British sergeants and massacred 254 Palestinians in Deir Yassin village in 1948,’ Sir Gerald Kaufman said.

‘The present Israeli government’s ruthless and cynical exploits are due to its continuing guilt over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust,’ he told the British parliament during a debate on Gaza attacks Thursday.

Referring to his ancestors, who were killed by the Nazis in Poland, he said: ‘My grandmother did not die to protect Israeli soldiers killing Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza.’

The toll in Gaza shows Jewish lives are more precious than the lives of Palestinians, he said in condemnation.

Responding to Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni’s claim that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, Kaufman said, her (Livni’s) father was a ‘chief operations officer of the Jewish terrorist group Irgun Zvai Leumi’.

He added that the group was responsible for the bomb blast in King David Hotel in al-Quds that killed 91 people, including four Jews.

No matter how many Palestinians they (Israel) kill in Gaza, there won’t be an end to the conflict, as it cannot be solved through the military might, he warned.

Continue reading. To be perfectly clear: I oppose terrorism from any party. But when a country has embraced terrorism, it should acknowledge, I think, its own earlier guilt in its condemnation of terrorism today. The US can oppose racism, for example, but it still must acknowledge the racism that once was so strong in our own country.

Wow. This story astounds me. It begins:

In more than 80 years as a publicly financed broadcaster with an audience of millions at home and around the world, the BBC has rarely been buffeted as severely as it has in recent days over its decision not to broadcast a television appeal by aid agencies for victims of Israel’s recent military actions in Gaza.

BBC executives made the decision late last week and defiantly reaffirmed it on Monday, citing their concern with protecting the corporation’s impartiality in the Arab-Israeli dispute.

The dispute stirs high passions here, and the BBC, like other news organizations, has struggled uneasily for years to strike a balance, even as some critics claim it has tilted heavily toward Israel and others claim it has favored the Palestinians.

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The goals discussed in this post are “resolutions,” but really the tips apply to meeting any goals. Take a look.

I don’t think the GOP really wants to cooperate—Rush Limbaugh spoke, I think, for many on the Right when he said, “I hope Barack Obama fails.” So Obama’s compromises in order to gain GOP support may well lead to the failure that the GOP wants. If so, Obama deserves the blame: he has a mandate, the country is in a crisis, and he (and we) can ill afford to try to placate the GOP Right. Mike Lillis reports in the Washington Independent:

Congressional Democrats hoping to use the economic stimulus package to force lenders to refinance troubled mortgages have met an unlikely opponent: President Barack Obama.

Many Democrats, including Obama, have long-supported the strategy of empowering bankruptcy judges to alter the terms of primary mortgages to prevent foreclosures. But White House officials have said they don’t want the bankruptcy provision in the stimulus bill for fear of alienating Republicans, most of whom oppose the change.

Bipartisan cooperation was a central theme of Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, and he wants his first legislative victory to hinge on something other than a party-line vote. Last week, Obama and Democratic leaders agreed instead to attach the bankruptcy provision to a large spending bill that Congress is expected to consider later this year, according to reports.

That stance has piqued some Democrats, who are beginning to wonder if the push for bipartisan agreement is worth the cost of waiting. For each day that Congress dallies, these lawmakers say, thousands of Americans lose their homes to foreclosure.

“I believe the ‘fierce urgency of now,’ requires us not only to pass this out of committee, but to pass it in the stimulus,” Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) said last week, according to The Hill. “Because we know the stimulus is going to pass.”

The debate arrives as the nation’s economy continues to sink and Washington lawmakers are growing bolder in their efforts to intervene. Yet, while lawmakers have stepped in to provide enormous bailouts to the finance and auto industries, they’ve done almost nothing to tackle the foreclosure crisis that was the root of the turmoil. A $300 billion program enacted in July offered lenders government guarantees on troubled mortgages if the lenders agreed to absorb a 10 percent loss. Only a few hundred homeowners have benefited.

House Democrats, with much input from the Obama administration, introduced legislation this month to spend roughly $550 billion on infrastructure projects and aid to states over the next two years, while providing another $275 billion in tax credits to individuals and businesses.

The proposal also contains provisions addressing the housing crisis, including $4.2 billion to help hard-hit communities buy up foreclosed homes “and reduce neighborhood blight.” But the proposal leaves out the changes in bankruptcy law.

The House is expected to vote on the stimulus bill Wednesday. The measure is likely to pass easily, though Republicans continue to criticize the plan for what they consider to be a dearth of tax cuts.

Housing advocates have long-pushed to empower bankruptcy judges to reduce, or “cram down,” the balance of primary mortgages, as well as …

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You know that the Republicans are simply stirring up trouble when they get all hot and excited denouncing a program that is, in fact, a Republican program. Elana Schor has the story at TPM-DC:

The Drudge Report and Politico are breathlessly repeating Republican talking points that accuse House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) of hijacking the stimulus bill to promote contraceptive use.

At the risk of giving this ridiculous non-issue still more exposure today, I thought I’d point out a couple of basic facts.

First of all, the family-planning program that Pelosi supports expanding in the stimulus bill was created in 1972 under the leadership of Republican president Richard Nixon.

What’s being proposed is …

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UPDATE: Looks like the GOP will have its way—Obama needs soon to show some steel rather than handing away the store to the GOP. From the Center for American Progress in an email:

At President Obama’s behest, House Democrats are “nearly certain” to strike funding for family planning and programs battling the spread of sexually transmitted diseases from the economic stimulus package, according to press reports. “The principles of what he [Obama] thought should be in the package — that wasn’t part of that,” said White House Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton. Conservatives have been pushing the lie that progressives think birth control is the answer to the country’s economic crisis, and Obama is “eager” to knock out this potential conservative attack line. Like less controversial measures to the bill, this funding allocation supports states and will promote a healthier, more productive workforce by providing women access to services to prevent unplanned pregnancies and promote maternal and infant health — not abortion. No one would be forcing states to pay for family planning services. States can now cover low-income women if they get a state waiver, but approval can take a long time. Despite these bureaucratic hassles, 27 states have already “obtained federal approval to extend Medicaid eligibility for family planning services to individuals who would otherwise not be eligible.” This bill would simply allow states to skip the administrative delays.

Jonathan Zasloff has a very interesting post on a possible approach to tamping down the boiling anger of the Mideast in order to achieve peace. His post begins:

If there is ever going to be an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, then the parties will have to agree on what to do about the Palestinian refugees and their descendants. The issue is in my view the most difficult of the conflict, as Israelis refuse to grant a right of return, which could turn Israel demographically into an Arab state, and Palestinians refuse to relinquish what they consider to be a sacred principle.

Closely related to all of this is the search for a narrative of the problem: what exactly caused the Palestinian refugee problem? Of course, thousands of gallons of ink have been spilled on the issue (with Benny Morris’ book being by far the best work on the issue). But Morris’ work, like all great history, is too subtle and nuanced for a usable past. The Palestinians say that they were the victims of premeditated ethnic cleansing; the Israelis deny it, and point to the Arab rejection of the UN Partition and the subsequent Arab invasion of the infant Jewish state. The long and short of it is that the Israelis cannot accept that their country was born through original sin, and the Palestinians cannot accept an end to the conflict unless the Israelis plead guilty to such a sin.

As a practical matter, it seems impossible to square this circle. But I’m wondering whether, strangely enough, the language of the law might assist here.

Anglo-American law has long known the concept of responsibility without blame…

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A very interesting video. I think we must have had a substandard haggis. I want to try it again. Via Slashfood:

A really exceptional shave today. The QED Chocolate shave stick in combination with the Rooney Style 1 Size 1 Super produced a wonderfully thick lather redolent with the fragrance of chocolate. Then the Futur with a previously used Swedish Gillette blade left my face almost smooth after the first pass—accompanied, of course, by the sounds of stubble being mowed down: the Futur has great acoustics. Three passes to smooth perfection with no sign of a nick. Jade East to finish.

Vanilla yesterday, chocolate today… what tomorrow, I wonder?

The Kitchn [sic] has the method illustrated. I just tried it on six cloves of garlic, some small, some large, some in-between. It worked like a charm on all of them. I’m convinced.

Got a quick haircut at Supercuts. I regularly use competitor coupons, so this haircut cost me $8.95—not bad, considering what I used to pay. I wondered whether others were abandoning more expensive salons, so I asked how business at Supercuts had been. It’s up.

Then to Whole Foods to buy some squid for the squid in red-wine sauce recipe. Also got more bunches of greens and a couple of fillets of sockeye salmon that were reasonably priced. And they had fresh Fresno peppers, so another batch of pepper sauce is coming up.

Now some reading is in order, but first I’ll cook the squid for lunch.

UPDATE–SQUID REPORT

Truly delicious. I was surprised. I made it out of curiosity about how it would taste. I was open to a range of possibilities, including some negative ones, but it was really excellent. Go figure.