Video archive

Apropros of this, there's this. I can't tell if the video link works here at the office, so I'll check it when I get home. This whole thing finally explains the link between Fred Armisen and Wilco, as demonstrated in I Am Trying to Break Your Heart.

As an aside, I was the Jeff Tweedy solo gig at Great American Music Hall. An awesome show and the Great American Music Hall is absolutely the best venue ever. I've seen all kinds of shows in all kinds of places and nothing touches this place for beauty, sound quality, comfort, and intimacy with the performer. Doc Watson at GAMH was quite epic, also. It's not restricted to "smart" or nutritious music though. Spacehog ripped the place up and I saw Cake and Dieselhed there on more than one occasion, as well as the Mofessionals, Mother Hips, and tons of other local and touring rock bands. If you ever get a chance to see a band you like there, it's worth the travel!

Republicans are criminals

They don't even bother to hide it any more.

[W]ould-be government contractors [met] in the Hart Senate Office Building to figure out how to get a share of the money [Me: IN THE SENATE OFFICE BUILDING!!]. A "Katrina Reconstruction Summit," hosted by Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) and sponsored by Halliburton, among others, brought some 200 lobbyists, corporate representatives and government staffers to a room overlooking the Capitol for a five-hour conference that included time for a "networking break" and advice on "opportunities for private sector involvement."

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) sent his budget director, Bill Hoagland, who cautioned that federal Katrina spending might not exceed $100 billion. But John Clerici, from a law firm that helped sponsor the event, told the group that spending would "probably be larger" than $200 billion. "It's going to be spent in a fast and furious way," Clerici said.

But all that money's covered, right? The fiscally conservative GOP is covering it, right? Tax hikes, spending cuts, or something?

[A] member of the Republican Study Committee [which proposes to pay for hurricane relief spending through budget "offsets", essentially budget cuts in other areas, and not through tax increases]... accepted that Congress would not find cuts to pay for the $62 billion spent so far on Katrina -- much less the $250 billion more that Louisiana wants from the feds. If "we find $20 billion in offsets, we'll probably declare victory," said the congressman, who spoke on the condition that he not be named.

Let's see... that's at least $42 billion not covered in offsets, meaning that, in the BEST case scenario, "fiscal conservatives" are going into hock on over 66% of the funds, and more likely more than 90% of the funds.

I always said that Republicans would destroy this country if they got their way, and they're doing it in full effect. If you're a Republican, you can argue, blah blah blah, all day long, about that's not how you'd do it, these are RINOs, but your party is in control of every... single... branch... of... government. And it was Republican voters that nominated them and overwhelmingly voted for them to put them in office. It's your fault that Bush, who has not vetoed a single spending bill during his administration and has spearheaded enormous tax cuts, is the President (well, yours and the Supreme Court's). It's your fault that an unrepentant band of thieves runs Congress. It's your fault that wing nuts from such divergent extremes as Grover Norquist, Jamse Dobson, and their bastard son Rick Santorum have such pull in this country in spite of the fact that an overwhelming majority of Americans agree with them about just about nothing.

If you're a Republican, it's your fault and you are an unindicted co-conspirator in the looting and destruction of America. Congratulations.

XMLSpy integration with Eclipse sucks

So I'm a pretty die-hard fan of JetBrains' IntelliJ IDEA. But for various reasons, among them a new job, I'm using Eclipse now. OK, fine, I can learn to live with this. But there are a lot of capabilities in IntelliJ that aren't available in Eclipse, such as editing XML (you can edit it, but there are no special tools). So I thought, ah HA! I'll use Altova's XMLSpy Home Edition (which is free) and it will even integrate directly into Eclipse! Awesome!

Well, it's awesome with a couple of tiny drawbacks, with the primary one being, I guess, the fact that it completely destroys your ability to do anything in Eclipse, up to and including working with XML! I'll provide some examples later today, after I finish toting them all up...

Well, that didn't work

So much for that bright idea. It actually would have been fine, except that I ended up hung over for the first time in a while. We had a party for the U.S.-Mexico World Cup qualifier last night and I overindulged a bit. It was less that, even, except that I'm off my pace. We started the South Beach Diet last week, which involves no drinking at all in Phase I. So... I had had no beers all week, then just went ape shit yesterday (yes, it was cheating; no, I don't care). That hurt, it really did.

Oh, well, I've not read any news or feedback on Chertoff's performance on Meet the Press yet today and we've still got it on Tivo, so I'll "live blog" by tape delay later on anyways...

Knowing when to talk shit is really key....

Man, well I guess Mexico's totally pissed. What a fucking sore loser Ricardo Lavolpe is: "The U.S. is a small team," he said. "They play like my sister, my aunt and my grandmother." Well, Dickie, your team must really suck then, because you just got owned by your sister, aunt, and grandmother, bitch. Wow, the nerve of that dick. It's one thing to belittle your opponent when you beat them, but to belittle them when they beat you? Even when the Tricolores resorted to throwing body blocks across the field (I thought the game was pretty poorly officiated, in Mexico's favor), they never really threatened the U.S. With Keller in the goal and a thorough defense controlling and disrupting the flow of most of the Mexican attack, they never really seemed to generate real fear. And then he wants to go talking about how much the U.S. team sucks? Dude, you lost, pretty thoroughly to a (in your opinion) pretty shite team. But...

"'The first team to make a mistake would not win, and Mexico made the mistake,' Lavolpe said."

OK...

Live blogging Meet the Press

If anyone's interested, I'm going to try to live-blog Meet the Press tomorrow morning as an exercise. Michael Chertoff's on and I'm very interested in his excuses and explanations for DHS's response to Katrina. I'm also interested in how Russert will press Chertoff, given the press's recent awakening from obsequiescence.

Well, we're on at 8:00 AM PDT tomorrow, so we'll see how this goes.