ryan.freebern.org

If it isn’t blindingly obvious to my dozen faithful readers, I’m fairly liberal in my political leanings. It should come as no surprise, then, that I endorse John Kerry for President. Now it’s on the record.

If Kerry wins next Tuesday (as I fully expect him to), in the upcoming years, I will try and be a fair observer of his performance, and judge him no more or less harshly than I have Bush. I want you, my readers, to help keep me honest. I thank you all for challenging my opinions in the past few months that this blog has been operational, and I hope that you will continue to do so in the future.

That said, when I started this blog, I didn’t mean for it to be entirely political. That’s just been the main issue on my mind for months, so it’s been mainly what I’ve been posting about. From here on out, I’ll try harder to shift my mind away from politics to other topics occasionally, and make thoughtful and entertaining posts about them.

I’ve been busy with the transition between jobs for the past few weeks, so updates have been scarce. My life will probably be settling into a more regular pattern in the next couple weeks, and there ought to be more regular updates soon thereafter. Thank you all for your patience.

In the third Presidential debate, John Kerry said this:

I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney’s daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she’s being who she was, she’s being who she was born as.

In response, Dick Cheney said:

You saw a man who will do and say anything to get elected. And I am not just speaking as a father here, although I am a pretty angry father.

Lynne Cheney said:

This is not a good man. Of course, I am speaking as a mom, and a pretty indignant mom. This is not a good man. What a cheap and tawdry political trick.

A spokeswoman for the Bush/Cheney campaign said that Kerry is

backpedaling from what is a crass, below-the-belt political strategy to attack the vice president’s daughter.

Political trick? Attack Mary Cheney? What on earth are these people talking about?

Go read Kerry’s statement again. He says two things: one is the fact that Mary Cheney is a lesbian. This is indisputable, has been discussed many times by many different people, including her parents. It is not a trick to state the fact, since it is well-known, and it is not an attack, since being homosexual is not a bad thing. He also says that, in his opinion, she would tell you that she is who she is. This is an opinion, but it’s a pretty harmless one: he’s saying she’s herself, no more and no less. This is also not a trick, nor is it an attack.

So what on earth are the Cheneys talking about? Well, they’re trying to claim that merely bringing up Mary Cheney’s sexuality is a “trick” and an “attack” in and of itself. If this is true, why did Dick Cheney thank John Edwards for his “kind words” about Mary Cheney?

If the Cheneys want to get mad about an attack, why not direct their anger towards Alan Keyes, who infamously said that homosexuality is based on “selfish hedonism,” and that “of course” that assessment applies to Mary Cheney? That is an attack, pure and direct. It’s despicable and low, and ought to have enraged the Cheneys. But did they respond? Not at all.

(This strategy, of choosing the path of greatest political gain over the one that is actually right, is the same thing that drove Bush and Cheney to attack Iraq because they could paint it as possibly a threat while ignoring North Korea’s actual threat. This is a dangerous way to run a country or to live a life.)

So what’s really going on here? Well, it’s two weeks until the election, and the Bush/Cheney campaign has realized that they can’t let the voters actually spend their time thinking about actual political issues, because the Bush/Cheney record on those issues is so incredibly dismal that they’d lose the election without a doubt. So instead, they have to stoop to making up ridiculous, absurd, and patently false accusations in an attempt to paint Kerry as “cheap,” “tawdry,” and “crass” in the hopes that people won’t have the chance to pay attention to anything substantive until the election is over.

Who would want dishonest, manipulative jerks like this running our country?

Via BoingBoing: Sinclair Broadcast Group, one of the country’s largest television broadcasting companies, is letting its bias hang out by ordering its affiliates to broadcast an anti-Kerry documentary during prime time two weeks before the election. I don’t have a Sinclair affiliate in my area, but if I did, I’d use this page to locate their website, then send them an email expressing my displeasure at this smear tactic.

I just read this post on John Scalzi’s blog about how pathetic it would be if John Kerry managed to lose this election. Despite Scalzi’s wonderful writing, something about his reasoning just struck me as a little bit off. It took me a bit of thought, but I think I’ve come up with the answer: taking a cue from the President himself, Bush’s supporters think that changing their minds about voting for him is a sign of weakness.

Bush has pulled off a fantastic bit of legerdemain here: he’s managed to convince about half of the nation that reconsidering their options, that taking a second look at the facts, that changing course at all is foolish. And they’ve swallowed it, hook, line, and sinker. It’s been pointed out numerous times that in real life, people who carefully consider new evidence and change their minds are considered wise and careful, while in politics according to Bush, they’re “flip-floppers.” And now, he’s managed to cow these poor folks into not even considering new facts, much less changing their minds based on them.

I might be wrong here. I might be way off base. But what else can explain this behaviour? What else would drive so many people, who quite possibly are intelligent and thoughtful people in other areas of their lives, to vote for a person so obviously incompetent? A person whose record includes so many utter failures and lies?

I think they’re just embarassed, and hope if they plug their ears, close their eyes, and walk blindly into the polling booths, perhaps Bush will redeem their faith in the next go-round. Here’s your wake-up call: he’ll only get worse.

If any Bush supporters would like to enlighten me, I’d love to know how you reconcile his utter incompetence in so many areas to the point where you feel it’s a good idea to support him. You and I have been looking at the same things for the past four years, and I just don’t see how, given all that, any logical, rational, or reasonable person can decide that voting for Bush is the right thing to do.

I just learned about presidential candidates David Cobb and Michael Badnarik getting arrested. They were attempting to serve papers to the Commission on Presidential Debates, which is the supposedly independent organization that organizes the Presidential debates. The papers charged the CPD with breaking campaign finance laws by inviting Bush and Kerry to debate but not Cobb or Badnarik. The two candidates crossed the police line outside the debate last night and were summarily arrested.

Why can’t the CPD include third-party candidates in the debates? Because the CPD’s arbitrary rules state that they only include candidates who “have a level of support of at least 15% (fifteen percent) of the national electorate as determined by five selected national public opinion polling organizations”. There are so many things wrong with this approach that it’s hard to know where to begin.

It’s both wrong and stupid to disallow third-party candidates from debating. The public has a right to know the positions of all the candidates, and these candidates who are already afforded very little media coverage and who have relatively tiny campaign funds need all the support they can get. So when a supposedly independent organization claims to hold debates between the presidential candidates, it should include all of them.

In my opinion, John Kerry should take this opportunity to declare that, if elected, he’ll work to lower the bar for qualification in the debates. Not only will this potentially win him some of those third-party voters, but if he does manage to lower that bar, will strengthen the state of democracy in this country.

One of the handiest features in Mozilla Firefox (for me) is the Quicksearch bookmark function. This lets me create a special bookmark with a keyword associated, so when I want to search Amazon for John Scalzi’s latest books, I can type “amazon john scalzi” in my browser’s location bar and automatically get taken to the search results.

How it works: a Quicksearch bookmark has, somewhere in its URL, the string %s. When you type the bookmark’s keyword followed by some search terms, Firefox automatically replaces the %s with the search terms and then takes you to that URL. For instance, my Google bookmarklet has the following URL: http://www.google.com/search?&q=%s. When I type “google blue rondo” it actually sends me to http://www.google.com/search?&q=blue%20rondo which brings up Google’s search results for the term “blue rondo.”

I use this feature constantly, and I have several dozen Quicksearch bookmarks defined for the sites I use regularly: IMDB, AllMusic, TVTome, etc. But constructing each one of these bookmarks was tedious: I had to read through the HTML source code of each site, find the relevant URLs and search-form field names, construct the proper search URL by hand, and put it into a bookmark.

Today, I brushed off my Javascript skills and threw together a bookmarklet that automatically scans the page you’re looking at and builds potential Quicksearch URLs for any form on the page. It’s still up to you to decide which of the URLs built looks like the correct one (a single page may have several forms, only one of which is probably the search form), copy it into a bookmark in your Bookmarks Manager, and make sure it works correctly.

If you want to have access to this bookmarklet, simply click and drag this link to your Bookmarks Toolbar: Build Quicksearch. Then visit a page with a search form and click the bookmarklet button. The page you’re viewing will be replaced by a list of possible Quicksearch URLs. Turn the one you want into a bookmark, give it a memorable keyword, and voilá: you’ve simplified your life.