It's Time for the Showdown

It's now time for Congress to stand tall and not blink in this face-off with the President. Contrary to what Mr. Bush has to say, the American people will not blame Democrats if the troops don't get funding. Congress has funded the troops all this time through one fiasco after another and lie after lie. It's the President who will be blamed if he vetos the bills that passed both the House and the Senate.

If this is the only way to get the troops home, so be it. Let the President veto the bill. Then send him essentially the same exact bill to veto again. As the funds run out, Congress and the American people finally win out over the tyrant now in office. It's time George W. Bush wakes up to reality. He had to be appointed President in 2000 and had support from the Right only out of a sense of party. Few people were really all that impressed with the man. The best they could say about him is that he's the kind of guy you want to hang out with. That's not exactly the picture I have of solid presidential material. In 2004 we had another close contest with lots of questions and a nation divided like never before. Still this man walked away from that experience speaking about "mandates" and having "earned political capital". No one else saw it but that didn't stop him from thinking it was the case. Then in 2006 the Republicans were run out of Dodge and still this guy acts like nothing has changed.

Congress needs to realize that they're not dealing with a typical administration here. They need to treat this administration as if they're dealing with spoiled children. Let them rant and rave all they want but just deny them them means to do anything and only then will the lesson be learned.

Had this President been truthful about the situation in Iraq and honest with the American people from the start, things would be very different. However, it's clear to everyone but the most fanatical followers that what this President says and does are not related. We are in Iraq for only one reason--money. That was the reason from the start and that's the reason today. To have to leave now before we can fully take over control of oil shipments in the region is what is bothering this President and that's what you're not going to hear from him. He knows we wouldn't have accepted sending our kids into a war over oil so the administration concocted this ridiculous story that had no chance of standing up to scrutiny. He should have known better but his arrogance precluded him from realizing that we're not all as stupid as he thinks we are.

It's time. Congress needs to stand toe-to-toe with this cowboy in the black hat and compel him to draw. Only then will this gun slinger have to face the fact that his pistol has no ammo.

Bush, Cheney and the Rest Need to Go Too.

I have had enough of these buffoons and most people I converse with feel the same way. It's time we run these people out of office any way possible. They are seriously out-of-touch with reality, are guilty of no less than treason and should be brought up on charges equal to that order.

These people seriously act as if they are running a sovereign nation. They act as if anything desire is what we should all just shut up and accept. ENOUGH.

Dick Cheney and George W. Bush have been wrong on just about every single thing they've said regarding the war (and many other things. They have, in my mind, lost their right to lead us any longer based on their record of continually stating things that just are not in any way, shape or form, accurate. Their ability to predict the outcomes of their actions have been close to zero (and that's being nice).

This administration wants us to listen to their council and accept their course of action without question. That is a right that is EARNED and this administration has not earned that privilege at any point.

In 1999 while running for office George W. Bush attacked the Clinton administration (aimed at Al Gore) for getting us involved in a conflict in Kosovo without an exit strategy and made a big deal about there not being a timeline for troop withdrawal. Here we are in his administration and suddenly those things are out of the question.

Cheney has said so many things that have been just ridiculously wrong that I cannot believe he has the balls to show his face in public, let alone open his mouth to utter more garbage.

Most of what comes out of the mouths of this administration is pure, unadulterated bullshit. "We'll be greeted as liberators," said Cheney. Yeah, that didn't happen. "The insurgency is in its final throes," he said a short time later. Uh-huh.

I don't even want to get started on all the garbage the President has thrown our way under the title of "truth".

Again, you need to earn respect from the electorate if you expect us to follow you down the types of paths you want us to follow and you just haven't done that in any way.

The only positive thing I can point to that this President has done was to amend the daylight savings calendar. That's it. That doesn't get you the political capital to keep us in a war few of us want any part of any longer and some of us never wanted in the first place.

I am sick and tired of these charlatans questioning the patriotism and loyalty of anyone who does not immediately bend to their will. I don't give a damn what Dick Cheney thinks the world view or terrorist view of our actions will be if we leave Iraq. The only thing I've seen from this administration is that they do most everything for personal benefit or the benefit of their peers. I have no reason to believe that the ethereal plan of staying in Iraq until they say so is any different in that regard. I firmly believe that either they want us to stay because their friends haven't yet made enough money there to be happy or because they're lunatics. Take your pick.

The only thing this administration will accept from the Congress is complete unquestioned obedience and it's time this Congress realized that and put a stop to it. We did not elect a monarchy or a dictatorship and it's time we show this group the door because they've clearly forgotten that. In fact, I think showing them the door at this point would be far too good for this group.

Gonzales Must Go

I would agree that, overall, this Alberto Gonzales scandal isn't exactly much of a scandal. It's just the way things go when you hire people out of loyalty and not competence.

The bottom line is that the Attorney General stood before Congress and told them he wasn't in any way involved in the process to fire the U.S. attorneys. Now the Justice Department has just released clear evidence that he was indeed involved and at a high level. The head of our legal branch stood before Congress and lied to them. This is the very same thing the Right would have you believe was so reprehensible in what President Clinton did. The difference was the Clinton lied about an infidelity and Gonzales lied about the job itself.

The current President has got to stop hiring people based on their past loyalty and hire people who are clearly up to the tasks presented to them. The sad part is that it appears it's going to take all of his remaining term to realize the gig is up and that Congress is no longer going to just rubber stamp everything he wants to do. In fact, I'm not sure he's ever going to catch on.

I'm in no way surprised by the situation Gonzales finds himself in. It was clear from the start that this was yet another loyalty-based hiring. It's time to end the practice.

Do You Still Believe Them?

Here we are after yet another scandal for this administration. It's getting a bit old to keep blaming all of these issues on everyone but the administration don't you think?

On this scandal we even have a nice solid e-mail trail to show that this group cannot be trusted to tell the truth at any time. It doesn't matter if you believe the administration was just in its firing of the prosecutors or not. That's another issue entirely. That the administration so clearly lied about the entire event tells us that their given reason was entirely a lie as well. Why lie about the reason for these firings if the reason was a just one? The only reason to lie about this would be to keep us from knowing the actual reason. If Karl Rove was responsible for their firing then clearly it could not have been related to job performance. That's why you lie about it. The administration knew this from the beginning. They knew they couldn't tell people these firings were political. They knew they were on thin ice.

What gets me about this administration is that they never, ever learn. They lied and said the Justice Department fired these people over performance issues. Then an e-mail shows that they didn't have anything to do with it and it wasn't done for performance so they say Harriet Miers did it. That'd be just fine if it wasn't for the fact that yet another set of e-mails shows that it came from Rove.

Just how power-hungry do you have to be to be so blinded from it that you forget there's a completely damning set of e-mails out there exposing everything you're telling people as a set of lies?

At this point you really have to be reaching for the smallest of straws in the tiniest of the darkest corners to be able to continue to support this administration.

I am left to wonder just how long it's going to take for future administrations to repair the damage this group has done to this country both here and around the world. That assumes we manage to elect a better bunch for a while. On the plus side, it's hard to imagine any administration being this inept.

Dubious Piracy Views

Today I noticed a story from a European company that says they're going to stop producing traditional "offline" games mainly due to piracy. They claim that for every single copy of game that was sold that 3-10 illegal copies are being played. They go on to say that if they continue doing any sort of traditional game it will require an online connection and will work much the way Steam does.

This sort of thinking I've seen for many years and its just an inaccurate as it was the first time I saw it.

First of all, this sort of statistic can mean anything you want it to mean. For example, there's no way to know if that number is accurate. Second, how do you know if everyone who downloaded the game actually plays the game? Perhaps they downloaded it and decided it was a piece of junk no worthy of purchase? Like it or not, people impose a "forced shareware" concept where possible. We buy a lot of products that simply are not worth it and the industry has made it exceptionally difficult to return products that you find to be inferior. You can return a camera you don't like or even a $5,000 TV but you can't return a $40 game you don't like.

The other thing that is highly suspect is the comment about Steam. If Steam is the wonder solution that so many suggest, why isn't Half-Life 2 and most of the Steam content at the top of the sales charts? If they're selling 10 times the number of products as everyone else that isn't protected like Steam, shouldn't they be running circles around these other top sellers?

They're not and that's for two reasons. The first is that the stat just isn't accurate. The other reason is pretty basic too. As with piracy in any area, some people just aren't going to pay. If they can get the product for free, so be it but it's just not worth it to them to pay for it. Adding a pay-only option doesn't turn these people into instant paying customers. That's been my problem with industry groups that try to sell consumers on this concept. It just doesn't wash. Does a car thief buy a Ferrari if he can't steal one?

Am I advocating theft? No. What I'm saying is that it is a part of the industry and it's something every developer knows about going in. To blame all your troubles on it after the fact is pretty weak. The bottom line is that people generally pay for quality products if the price is right. If the price isn't right or the product isn't quality then more people are apt to not bother with it, either legally or illegally. I've yet to see a product go from openly available to completely locked down suddenly jump up in sales to any degree let alone in numbers that are multiples of their previous sales.

Sean Hannity, Let Me Ask You A Question

Sean Hannity is, to me, one of the main poster boys for everything that's wrong with conservative punditry. This is a guy that simply isn't credible day-in, day-out and yet a decent number of people continue to listen tot his guy's rhetoric.

Mr. Hannity still claims to be a major supporter of the President. This alone should make most people question his intelligence or, more to the point, his motives. It doesn't matter what the President or his administration does--Sean Hannity will find a way to blame it on something else.

What I find most entertaining is his debating tactic. When callers call in and put him in an indefensible position his response is always the same--change the subject. I'll give him credit. He tries to be sneaky about it by making it appear as something else entirely. Most of the time that shift happens when Sean will respond to a guest by saying, "Let me ask you a question." At that moment you know he's out of ammo and you can bet the topic the caller inquired about won't be center stage for the rest of the call.

Lately there have been a slew of callers talking to him about the Attorney General and his actions. This guy is yet another example, in a long line of examples, of George Bush choices that you knew was going to be a failure from the start. Alberto Gonzales stood up the other day and took responsibility for mistakes made in the firing of eight US attorneys last year. Actually it's giving him too much credit to say he took responsibility. He said he did and then went on a long diatribe about how we wasn't actually responsible. However, none of this mattered to Sean Hannity. In his view, it doesn't matter if anyone admits to mistakes. That's not the point. The point is to change the subject. When callers asked about this his response was to say, "Let me ask you a question" and then to ask if they thought there was anything wrong with Bill Clinton's administration (though he, of course, pins this squarely on Bill himself) having let go 93 attorneys at the start of his term.

First, there are dramatic differences between these two events. Clinton did this at the start of his administration just as Presidents have done all along. New President, new party, new people. The scale to which he did it was large but it also followed 12 years of Republican control of that department. What's also different is that Clinton's administration didn't specifically segment their choices into those who played ball and those who didn't. The other major difference is that Clinton didn't re-write the laws to benefit from such a move. This administration stuck a change in the law into the Patriot Act that allows the President to appoint anyone he wants to these jobs without Congressional approval. This thing stinks to the high heavens.

However, none of this matters. The point is that this is the tactic that Sean Hannity uses to try to avoid being pinned down on a no-win situation. There's no defense for what happened here so he has to go back 14 years to invoke Bill Clinton to diffuse the issue and move the discussion.

This guy is a joke. His motives have nothing to do with anything other than making sure he does and says anything he has to in order to keep people listening. The arrogance alone should be enough to enlighten most people. From the opening music to the final moments, the entire show is a choreographed exercise in manipulation. Think about the end of the show. He has a segment where he goes, "rapid fire" to callers to give them 5 seconds to make a statement and move on. If that ever happens let me know. They should call this segment the "Marty" segment. Listeners know what I'm talking about. This listener calls in and has his on mini-show at the end of a huge number of shows. I wonder how many people sit on hold thinking they have a chance to be heard if only that Marty wasn't so fast on the dialer. Then there's the whole "Hannitization" concept. How arrogant do you have to be to refer to something like that? It's one thing to have someone else use the phrase but it's entirely telling that he uses it and advertises around it. I also have to wonder about someone who needs to be told he's a great American every few minutes.

Sean, let me ask you a question. When are you going to admit you're a sham?