photoshop ascending

following up on my earlier post about syntax's wallpaper bends...

syntax had posted the PSD (created in the GIMP) of his "ascent" bend, curious whether it would open and what it might look like if it did. well, it didn't. but something else interesting happened. the following is cross-posted from the comments on syntax's blog:

yeah, the file wouldn't open in either PS7 or PSCS2: i got the dread "not compatible with this version of photoshop" error. so i opened in the gimp and onscreen it looked a little different, so i saved as a JPG, but that JPG was identical to yours.

however, then i opted to re-save the PSD in the gimp. normally, re-saving a bent image within an image editor is a bad idea, as it essentially "fixes" the errors: instead of a corrupted file you get a "normal" file of the corrupted image. this eliminates the possibility of application-sensitive "re-bending" because it's no longer a bent file. but it did allow me to open the file in photoshop.

when i make a JPG out of the newly resaved PSD in the gimp, i still get that same result. but here's the surprising part: when i open the PSD in photoshop and make a JPG from that, it looks different (like it did onscreen in gimp):

maybe someday i'll write a thorough analysis comparing photoshop vs the gimp for opening PSD files, as there are definitely some peculiar differences between how the two render. photoshop usually seems to be the idiosyncratic one. the gimp is usually more straightforward, but not entirely so, at least in this case.¶

flippin' the bird

by now you've surely seen this picture, and maybe even the video it was taken from:



(i could've sworn i blogged about the video, but can't track down that post just now...)

last night leno aired some brand new video footage that appears to be bush yet again flipping off the press as he walks away from him. this morning, john at americablog posted about the video, along with a link. by the end of the day, the white house had called him to say that bush was in fact giving the "thumb's up" gesture.

but weirdly, when reporters asked scotty mcclellan about it, he refused to deny it.

if it's so outrageous that scotty won't even "dignify it with a response", then why did the white house bother to actually contact bloggers about the story? and if it's important enough to contact bloggers about, why can't scotty answer a question about it on the record?

watch it yourself: it's funny. maybe it is his thumb. but it sure as hell looks like a middle finger. and either way, the reactions--from the bile displayed in the onegoodmove comments to the bizarre bipolarity of the white house's response--are interesting. ¶

bending wallpapers

the syntax of things has begun a new image databending experiment: he has started bending windows xp wallpapers!

i've put up this one as the wallpaper on my work machine:



check out this entry and this one too to read more and to download the full-sized versions.

and while you're there, check out this post for a bent photograph of the asheville skyline... that blue-green shift can be pretty effective for skylines (though i suspect a blue-red shift would look even cooler).¶

raises for everybody!

by now, many have noticed that whenever someone in the bush administration fucks up, they get a raise. wolfowitz is now at the world bank. condi is the new national security advisor. and so on. so it's not a big surprise that, now that karl rove and scooter lewis are at the center of a big political scandal, one where they could be indicted and even sent to jail as convicted felons, bush is giving them a raise. (courtesy americablog)

some white house counsels also got raises. so why did bush hire an outside attorney to represent him in the CIA leak case when he has all these top-notch well-paid attorneys already in his administration? john dean, former counsel to the nixon white house and an important player in bringing down that administration, thinks he knows why: the logical conclusion is that bush knows more than he's admitted to knowing, and he can't confess that to white house lawyers becase ken starr destroyed the concept of "attorney-client privelege" in regard to white house counsel.

of course, the real news of the day is this washington post article with lots of new information:

The special prosecutor in the CIA leak probe has interviewed a wider range of administration officials than was previously known, part of an effort to determine whether anyone broke laws during a White House effort two years ago to discredit allegations that President Bush used faulty intelligence to justify the Iraq war, according to several officials familiar with the case.

Prosecutors have questioned former CIA director George J. Tenet and deputy director John E. McLaughlin, former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, State Department officials, and even a stranger who approached columnist Robert D. Novak on the street.

the story does a good job of summarizing what we know about the investigation. and it confirms for the infinity+1th time that plame was indeed undercover and that the CIA explicitly warned novak not to mention plame's name:

Harlow, the former CIA spokesman, said in an interview yesterday that he testified last year before a grand jury about conversations he had with Novak at least three days before the column was published. He said he warned Novak, in the strongest terms he was permitted to use without revealing classified information, that Wilson's wife had not authorized the mission and that if he did write about it, her name should not be revealed.

Harlow said that after Novak's call, he checked Plame's status and confirmed that she was an undercover operative. He said he called Novak back to repeat that the story Novak had related to him was wrong and that Plame's name should not be used. But he did not tell Novak directly that she was undercover because that was classified.

this post by hunter on dkos also very nicely collects some of the biggest revelations in the case that happened while i was AFB (away from blog) last week. ¶

catching up on roberts

so supreme court nominee john roberts is a catholic... and apparently an actively practicing one. as a former catholic myself, that fact in itself doesn't trouble me much... after all, we have some pretty prominent liberal/centrist catholics in US politics, from the kennedys to john kerry. and politically, the majority of american catholics tend to be, like the kennedys and kerry, much more liberal than the church itself.

adam at ITA analyzes the religious breakdown of the supreme court and finds that if/when roberts is confirmed, there will be four catholics on the bench, more than any other faith. this is significant, as an indicator that anti-catholic prejudice has largely subsided in modern times. it wasn't that long ago that anti-catholicism was almost as widespread as antisemitism.

but adam also points out that these supreme catholics are not liberal, like most american catholics are. scalia is even a member of the arch-conservative double-super-secret group opus dei. in global terms, these guys are conservative catholics. in american terms, they (with the possible exception of justice kennedy) are extreme-far-right catholics.

adam thinks that much of the discussion of roberts's faith is simply an excuse to find bad things to say about him. in some cases, maybe, but we don't need to discuss the man's faith to find reasons to criticize him... his record has plenty others. but michael at americablog makes a very strong point about why it might be significant:

As a Supreme Court justice and a Catholic, Roberts will be faced with issues where voting one way could expose him to refusal of Communion and even excommunication from his Church. That is extraordinary and NEW pressure that Catholics have never faced before. In the past, the Church went out of its way to dismiss as absurd any idea that Catholic politicians would be puppets of Rome. Now the Church says very explicitly that politicians MUST do as Rome says or suffer the consequences. This is a BRAND NEW situation that has never been in effect. Roberts is the FIRST Supreme Court nominee who will be put into his lifetime position with this added pressure weighing down on him.

As a Catholic myself, I could state publicly that I see my duty to the American people first and my faith second and that the bishops are wrong to insist faith must trump the Constitution. We live in a democracy, not a theocracy, and I see a great danger in placing any one faith above any other in the public sphere. I would also challenge those bishops publicly on their inconsistency -- threatening to refuse communion over abortion but not over capital punishment; having the Pope condemn a war as unjust but insisting it would be a sin to NOT vote for the president that began it and so on.

indeed, we now live in a world where prominent bishops declared that john kerry (who is in many ways a typical catholic) should be denied communion. and not just that, but the new pope seems to agree. so, would roberts be willing to defy an increasingly belligerently hardline-conservative church? even if they threaten to deny him the eucharist? (keep in mind that eucharist is not symbolic for catholics: it is literally transformed into the body/blood of christ, so denying communion is a pretty big smack in the face.) it's the same problem that ashcroft had: it's fine if you're religious, but to be good at upholding/interpreting the law, you need to choose a master: the law or the church. we know that ashcroft chose poorly, so how would roberts choose? if it's true that "he would recuse himself from cases involving abortion, the death penalty or other subjects where Catholic teaching and civil law can clash", then he will be one sucky justice, as he'll have to recuse him from the bulk of the most-important cases.

anyway, since roberts has only been an actual judge for a couple years, those who want to know a bit about him have to look elsewhere to find his paper trail. unsurprisingly, the bush administration adamantly refuses to release what are probably the most controversial parts of roberts's record. but they have released some documents:

Newly released documents show that John G. Roberts Jr. was a significant backstage player in the legal policy debates of the early Reagan administration, confidently debating older Justice Department officials and supplying them with arguments and information that they used to wage a bureaucratic struggle for the president's agenda.

Roberts presented a defense of bills in Congress that would have stripped the Supreme Court of jurisdiction over abortion, busing and school prayer cases; he argued for a narrow interpretation of Title IX, the landmark law that bars sex discrimination in intercollegiate athletic programs; and he even counseled his boss on how to tell the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s widow that the administration was cutting off federal funding for the Atlanta center that bears his name.
...
In the rare instances revealed in the documents in which Roberts disagreed with his superiors on the proper legal course to take on major social issues of the day, he advocated a more conservative tack.

atrios pulls the most offensive quotes so i don't have to. the released documents paint a picture of a man who passionately despises roe v wade, affirmative action, equal treatment of males and females, and so on.

the docs also show that roberts is no stranger to the supreme court nomination process.

The trusted role Roberts played at the Justice Department was evident from his first day on the job when he began helping prepare Sandra Day O'Connor for her nomination to the Supreme Court. Roberts has now been nominated to succeed her.

In a memo, he outlined a plan for O'Connor not unlike the one now being undertaken on his behalf: "The approach was to avoid giving specific responses to any direct questions on legal issues likely to come before the Court, but demonstrating in the response a firm command of the subject area and awareness of the relevant precedents and arguments."

indeed, roberts and the bush administration are already using this tactic, as atrios eloquently puts it:

It's weird, really, that the Right wants to nominate people to the Supreme Court whose opinions are as unknown as possible and then make it impossible to know them. They've turned Roberts into Schrodinger's cat, locked him in the box, and then argued if we take a peek inside we might find out that he's a dangerous wingnut and the nomination would be killed.¶

payola!

it's been a dirty secret in the music industry for years that practically the only way to get music on corporate radio stations these days is bribe someone. in the business it's known as independent promotion, or by the more scandalous name payola. sometimes they bribe the radio djs, but more often, i think, they bribe the program manager for the station. the practice was supposedly done away with decades ago, the last time someone investigated the practice, but it never really went away; it just transmogrified into a new form.

new york attorney general eliot spitzer has been on the case, investigating these illegal practices, and his first victim has fallen: sony has agreed to stop its payola practices:

"This agreement is a model for breaking the pervasive influence of bribes in the industry," Mr. Spitzer said in a statement. "Contrary to listener expectations that songs are selected for airplay based on artistic merit and popularity, air time is often determined by undisclosed payoffs to radio stations and their employees."

Sony BMG, which represents Jessica Simpson and Jennifer Lopez, among dozens of others, admitted to the misconduct in a statement. "Sony BMG acknowledges that various employees pursued some radio promotion practices on behalf of the company that were wrong and improper, and apologizes for such conduct," the company said. "SONY BMG looks forward to defining a new, higher standard in radio promotion."

It also suggested that such practices were common in the industry, even though state and federal laws bar record labels from paying radio stations for air time. "Such direct and indirect forms of what has been described generically as "payola" for spins has continued to be an unfortunately prevalent aspect of radio promotion," the statement said.
...
The attorney general said that the enticements took several forms. Station programmers received bribes like computer laptops and vacation packages, or the label sponsored contests for a station's listeners. In other cases, Sony BMG paid some of a station's day-to-day expenses, or it hired middlemen known as independent promoters to make illegal payments to radio stations. Some Sony BMG employees also tried to hide payments to station employees by recording them as prizes to non-existent contest winners, the attorney general said.

spitzer's not stopping there, either. he's well on his way to prosecuting the other major labels if they don't also opt to settle.

it's the end of the day so i don't have much time for my own analysis... and as loathe as i am to link to foxnews, this column has some interesting additional details.¶

more precious pub memories

oh crap... i almost forgot to mention this, and it was easily my favorite memory of the night:

the pub has one of those new-fangled jukeboxes (the kind that's a little box on the wall with a small computer monitor, not the old-school kind that has actual cds or records inside). in between acts, the jukebox would play: the usual classic rock + top 40 jukebox fare.

at around 11:10 or so, cher's "believe" came on the jukebox. some tipsy, tanned blond girl in a flower-patterned skirt and a white tube top (or maybe it had spaghetti straps?) decided to jump onstage and sing along while one of her friends snapped a couple photos. she didn't think the mic was on, but i know it was because i had seen the mixing board, and the mic level was potted up fairly high. not that you could hear her very well over the crowd noise, etc, and not that she would've stopped had she known it was in fact on.

she got the bright idea to start swinging the mic around in a circle like a popstar. (not over her head, but in front of her.) naturally, the XLR connection came undone and the mic flew off its cable, into the air, and thumped down on the stage floor.

i laughed for a good three minutes about that one.¶

most hostile audience ever

MMS and NAMM were overall pretty cool. on friday afternoon we walked the floor at the NAMM summer session. that was fun; we saw lots of interesting booths and i picked up so many free magazines that the large roland shopping-style bag i'd picked up broke. we saw one "new" really cool band, the goodhands team on friday night. and we had a bunch of nice meals at various downtown restaurants (as well as the original pancake house in norgate).

saturday night we had a nice dinner at the claddagh, but things didn't go quite so well at the show:

showed up at the pub and was informed that there was no stage manager, no soundman, no monitors, and no backline provided. not too big a deal; my gear is compact and easy to hook up and i don't need a backline (though a couple other acts that needed the backline either had to play solo or didn't play at all). the other musicians i talked to were extremely friendly and helpful.

jennifer appelquist (who was supposed to go on before me) apparently didn't show (or maybe she did and left instead of playing?). so i had plenty of time to load in and set up (which was pretty easy), but i didn't go on until my slotted time of 11:30 because i had a feeling the crowd wouldn't want me to play long.

i had only been playing a couple minutes when some blond boy in a baby blue golf shirt started heckling, to the dismay of his table-mates. a couple minutes later, he came onstage and started asking me "what is this? what are you doing?" unsatisfied with my answers, he went back to his table and continued heckling, yelling things like "check please!"

most people in the crowd were polite enough to just ignore me, but others started heckling too. my favorite line came from a guy who yelled "i'm a professional dj! what the f*ck are you doing?!"

another guy, with curly hair and an MMS badge, came onstage to give me respect for doing "my own thing" in the face of adversity. "this takes balls," he said. "i'll be honest; it doesn't sound that good, but..." he wasn't into it, but he was cool.

clearly this crowd didn't want me to continue, and even without the heckling, hearing what i was doing was tricky without monitors, so i threw on a remix of the teenage mutant ninja turtles theme and ended my set early (after about 15-20 minutes).

when i was walking out to go get my car in order to load out, i heard one or two guys say "that was awesome", but they were sitting suspiciously close to the "professional dj" so i suspect they might not have been sincere.

apparently the band that was supposed to play after me, dark house sweet, didn't play either.

i knew this would be a weird show as i was added at the last minute and everyone else on the bill was a singer/songwriter or light pop-rock act. still, i got my money's worth just from all the free magazines i picked up at the NAMM trade show. free magazines! lots of 'em!

update: i posted most of this story on IMN... some of the comments are entertaining, like this one from derek of lunar event: "next time ask the professional DJ what strip club he works for."¶

out of office

virago comes into town tonight, with cat in tow, for one last visit to wrap up some last-minute stuff before she moves here in a couple weeks. i'll be taking tomorrow & friday off to spend time with her.

also, the midwest music summit is in town (i'm performing 11:30 saturday night at the pub), as well as the NAMM summer session, which is a huge music industry trade show.

so with all that going down this weekend, i don't expect i'll find a lot of time to blog. i could be wrong, but don't count on it.¶

roberts linked to iran-contra

since john roberts has only been a judge for a few years, he could easily wave away a lot of the most controversial parts of his career... like his anti-roe comments. he could just say "i don't believe that shit, but i was working for reagan, and that was the reagan administration's position." kind of a wishy-washy excuse, but a valid one.

however, that excuse probably does not extend to any possible criminal actions he might've taken part in. sherlock google on dkos turns up a naughty nugget from roberts's past:

Channell had years of experience in raising funds for conservative political causes. As a result, he was asked by White House officials early in 1985 to help organize a "Nicaraguan Refugee Fund Dinner" to raise money for the contra cause. Channell became disenchanted with the way the dinner-planning had been conducted, and in April 1985 he approached White House political director Edward Rollins to offer his assistance in promoting President Reagan's contra policies.

He was referred to White House political aide John Roberts, who in turn directed him to Miller, a private public relations consultant who ran a firm known as International Business Communications (IBC).3 According to Channell, Roberts told him that Miller and his partner Frank Gomez "are the White House -- outside the White House."
...
In the spring of 1987 Channell and Miller each pleaded guilty to a felony: conspiracy to defraud the United States. Together they provided extensive information about their fundraising activities. The pleas were based on Channell and Miller's illegal use of a tax-exempt organization to raise funds for non-charitable items, including weapons and other lethal supplies for the contras.

matchmaker, matchmaker... roberts hooked these two aspiring contra-funders up with each other, and they went out to make beautiful felonies together. (congress had passed the boland amendment "to prohibit covert assistance for military operations in Nicaragua", so funding the contras in any capacity was at best quasi-legal and at worst damned illegal.) ¶

the anti-music workshop

meatsock is an electronic musician, bad taste associate, and new member of animals within animals. he also has a radio show on WHUS (hartford CT).

his show, the anti-music workshop features a broad range of electronic musics, from breakcore to experimental to rough&dirty dance music. plus meatsock is known to premiere some of his own work, bring in guests, or just play around with mixing. it's a fun listen. (also, recently he's been including lots of stAllio! material in his shows.)

he now has a blog for the show, featuring mp3s and occasional playlists from past shows. it's not complete, but hell, it's only been there a few days.

i'm not in any of the shows that have playlists that are currently up, but i do know that he mixes in virtually the entirety of my true data 12" on his 6-30 show, archived here, and i've been played in at least a couple other shows that may or may not be included here now or in the future.¶

RIP james doohan

the man beloved to geeks worldwide as "scotty" on star trek has passed away. for some reason, i thought he had already joined deforrest kelley in the final frontier some time ago, but i guess i was mistaken.

James Doohan, the burly chief engineer of the Starship Enterprise in the original "Star Trek" TV series and movies who responded to the command "Beam me up, Scotty," died Wednesday. He was 85.

Doohan died at 5:30 a.m. at his Redmond, Wash., home with his wife of 28 years, Wende, at his side, Los Angeles agent and longtime friend Steve Stevens said. The cause of death was pneumonia and
Alzheimer's disease, he said.

He had said farewell to public life in August 2004, a few months after being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.¶

obstruction of justice

i'm going to ignore john g roberts for the time being, as people are still out there gathering facts and it is yet to be determined whether he is indeed a partisan hack "along the lines of a scalia or a thomas or whether all that partisan hackery in his past is there simply because he used to work for a bunch of partisan hacks.

instead, i want to mention this murray waas piece in the american prospect that has been circulating in the blogs (but somewhat overshadowed by roberts talk).

White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove did not disclose that he had ever discussed CIA officer Valerie Plame with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper during Rove’s first interview with the FBI, according to legal sources with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

The omission by Rove created doubt for federal investigators, almost from the inception of their criminal probe into who leaked Plame's name to columnist Robert Novak, as to whether Rove was withholding crucial information from them, and perhaps even misleading or lying to them, the sources said.

if this is true, it almost certainly means an indictment for rove on charges of perjury or obstruction of justice.¶

john g roberts

when it was announced that bush would announce his supreme court nominee in a prime-time news conference tonight (one conveniently designed to detract attention from the rove scandal), there were a lot of rumors circulating about who bush would nominate for the supreme court. a lot of those rumors centered around the idea that bush would nominate a woman (specifically edith clement), but he didn't.

i just watched tim russert basically gush over how "capable" and "intelligent" roberts is, and how democrats were "holding their fire" to wait & see what his positions are. but dem advocacy have been very quick to issue statements and fact sheets, and these groups sure don't like john g roberts. for example, a quick scan of americablog's front page turns up statements or links to statements from NOW, alliance for justice, NARAL, & people for the american way... and that's just what's been found by one blog, and the news was just leaked a couple hours ago.

abc has a quick list of some controversial positions has taken in the past. (the list is obviously very truncated and i'm sure some of the cases have layers of subtlety not mentioned here.)

Roberts was principal deputy solicitor general under President George H.W. Bush, who first nominated him for the D.C. Circuit Court in 1992. He was opposed by Democrats and never received a vote. He was re-nominated in 2001, and his nomination languished until a third nomination by Bush in 2003, when he won unanimous confirmation.

He also was special assistant to U.S. Attorney General William French Smith and served as associate White House counsel for four years under President Ronald Reagan.

While deputy solicitor general, Roberts co-signed a brief in Rust v. Sullivan that argued for a ban on federal money for clinics that provided abortions, counseled women about the procedure or referred them to a facility for an abortion. The brief went further than the question presented in the case, arguing that "we continue to believe that Roe was wrongly decided and should be overruled."

In a second abortion-related case, Bray v. Alexandria Women's Health Clinic, Roberts signed a "friend of the court" brief arguing that Operation Rescue was not engaged in a conspiracy to deprive women of their constitutional rights.

Roberts co-authored a brief that argued in favor of clergy-led prayer at public school graduations. The case was Lee v. Weisman, and the government lost.

Roberts also co-authored a brief supporting a law that criminalized flag burning. The government lost, and justices including conservative Antonin Scalia voted against the law.

In his role on the Court of Appeals, Roberts wrote the unanimous decision for a three-judge panel rejecting the civil rights claims brought on behalf of a 12-year-old girl who had been handcuffed, arrested and taken away by police for eating one French fry in the D.C. Metro.

He also wrote a dissent from the decision of the full D.C. Circuit not to reconsider a ruling concerning the constitutionality of the Endangered Species Act as it applied to a real estate development project.¶

you stay classy, san diego

trying out the new blogger image layouts...

i have some family history in san diego (my mom is from there; my parents met there; though i don't have any relatives there now), as does my girlfriend, so san diego news interests me more than it might if it were any other city. and some seriously crazy shit has been happening there lately, politically.

first there was last year's mayoral election, where write-in candidate donna frye got more votes than incumbent dick murphy, though in a recognizable pattern, the courts gave the mayoral mantle to the republican (murphy) on a technicality.

then there was the big real-estate scandal involving san diego's congressional representative, randy "duke" cunningham. this is a complex, multifaceted scandal that is hard to describe or summarize (or even find a definitive link to; josh marshall did an excellent job covering the story, so i'll just link to a search for "cunningham" on his blog: as you can see, lots of stuff there)... but basically, duke sold his house to a contractor (who paid a lot more than it was worth, and then later resold it for around half of what he'd bought it from duke for), lived on the contractor's huge yacht while not paying all the rents and fees a normal citizen would, "selling" his own yacht to someone else but never filling out the paperwork for it (and even trying to claim the "sold" yacht as his own for tax purposes), and more similarly shady dealings. it eventually ended in a huge raid where law enforcement raided his home, his office, the yacht, and everywhere else; not long after cunningham announced he wouldn't run for re-election.

not that murphy had happy days in front of him. in fact, he resigned on friday in light of the city's huge financial problems and a federal investigation into a scandal involving the city's use of pension funds.

so murphy picked deputy mayor and councillor michael zucchet to succeed him as acting mayor. but zucchet (a democrat) was able to one-up murphy as far as term length goes: zucchet resigned today over yet another scandal involving yet another federal investigation. remember, he only took office on friday. but this isn't entirely a surprise, as zucchet was already under investigation when he was chosen as the new acting mayor.

Acting Mayor Michael Zucchet and Councilman Ralph Inzunza were convicted Monday of trading political favors for campaign contributions from a strip-club owner — adding to the political turmoil gripping the city where the mayor has resigned and the pension system is under federal investigation.

Prosecutors charged that the two men, both 35-year-old Democrats, took $23,000 from the owner of Cheetahs Totally Nude club and his associates and, in exchange, agreed to work to ease a city law that prohibits nude dancers from touching their customers.
...
Under state law, Zucchet and Inzunza were immediately suspended from office without pay, although they will not be removed until the judge accepts the jury's verdict, set for Nov. 9, or their fellow City Council members oust them.

As the verdicts were read, Inzunza shook his head slowly and turned his gaze toward his wife. Zucchet, who had been sitting ramrod straight, pursed his lips and bowed his head.

"I believe I have done nothing wrong so I'm going to continue to fight this," Inzunza later told reporters. "I will be back."

Within two hours of the verdicts, the City Council named Councilwoman Toni Atkins as mayor pro tem through next week. Atkins promised residents in Zucchet's and Inzunza's districts that other council members would respond to their calls for service.

"The business of the city will continue," Atkins said.

Zucchet and Inzunza, each free on $25,000 bail, were convicted of conspiracy, wire fraud and extortion. Each faces a possible three to four years in federal prison.

now i'm all for getting rid of no-touch laws for strip clubs, but these guys were convicted of taking bribes. zucchet's lawyer tried the "everybody else is doing it" defense, claiming "There isn't a single public official in the country that hasn't done the same thing."

even if that's true (and it could be, though i suspect he's exaggerating), san diego is now on its third mayor in a week.¶

time zones exchange project, indiana chapter

looks like any hope that the recent DST bill was going to make "indiana time" any more logical has been destroyed... thanks mitch!

The way state Rep. Dave Crooks sees it, the federal government is letting Gov. Mitch Daniels skate on whether Indiana should be in the Eastern or Central time zone.

Daniels during his campaign said it made sense that as much of Indiana as possible should be in the Central zone. But he backed off that preference after taking office.

On Monday, the U.S. Department of Transportation said counties must make their own cases for switching time zones before it will consider hearings on boundary changes. That, Crooks says, leaves Daniels conveniently away from the fray and comfortably on the sidelines.
...
In the past, the specific information sought from counties included why a change would help commerce, where businesses get supplies and where TV and radio signals originate.

The agency has said it was unprecedented for a state, county or city to request a change without stating a preference. The only suggestion in an Indiana law enacted earlier this year requested no changes for five counties each in northwestern and southwestern Indiana on Central time and five in southeastern Indiana in the Eastern zone that observe daylight-saving time.

mitch promised us statewide hearings on the time zone issue, but because he didn't do the necessary work, we won't get them. at best, a few scattershot counties might get to switch, but there now appears to be virtually zero change of moving to central time, for example. (not that i was dying for central time, but part of the reason the bill went through was because a lot of hoosiers do want central, and a lot them are now screwed.)

doug at masson's blog has a roundup of pertinent stories and links, as well as an analysis of why doug thinks the whole debacle is mitchs's fault.¶

scooter

so much info keeps coming out about the plame-name scandal that only the most diligent can keep up with it all. and i wasn't the most diligent blogger this weekend: i spent much of the weekend working on a new poster-sized collage to show (and possibly sell) at the collage show on august 12.

matt cooper has written about his grand jury testimony, releasing some new facts:

Time magazine's Matthew Cooper says a 2003 phone call with White House political adviser Karl Rove was the first he heard about the wife of Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson apparently working for the CIA.

Giving a first-person account of his role in a case that nearly landed him in jail, the reporter recalled that Rove told him, "I've already said too much" after revealing that the wife of the former ambassador apparently was with the CIA.

Cooper speculated in the piece, released Sunday, that Rove could have been "worried about being indiscreet, or it could have meant he was late for a meeting or something else."

"I don't know, but that signoff has been in my memory for two years," Cooper wrote.

"i've alreasy said too much" doesn't sound to me like he was late for a meeting. sounds to me like rove knew damn well he shouldn't be talking about plame's agency status.

but that's not all; we also learned that cheney's chief of staff, lewis "scooter" libby, was also one of cooper's sources:

Writing an account of a conversation he had with Libby, Cooper said, ''Libby replied, 'Yeah, I've heard that too' or words to that effect'' when he asked if Libby had heard anything about Wilson's wife sending her husband to Africa to investigate the possible sale of uranium to Iraq for nuclear weapons.

back in 2003 when scott mcclellan and bush were stating that the idea that rove was involved was "ridiculous", they were saying the same thing about scooter. so now we know they've lied about two administration leakers, at the very least.

and it's looking like plame's name wasn't the only classified info that was leaked; there's also been a lot of talk about a june 10, 2003 memo that was apparently circulated around white house circles, documenting how plame allegedly recommended her husband for the fact-finding trip to niger where he discovered that the uranium stories were bunk. some bloggers, like dkos's pollyusa, were on top of this memo story days ago, and as pollyusa points out, the CIA has long disputed the memo's contents:

Sources said the CIA is angry about the circulation of a still-classified document to conservative news outlets suggesting Plame had a role in arranging her husband's trip to Africa for the CIA. The document, written by a State Department official who works for its Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), describes a meeting at the CIA where the Niger trip by Wilson was discussed, said a senior administration official who has seen it.

CIA officials have challenged the accuracy of the INR document, the official said, because the agency officer identified as talking about Plame's alleged role in arranging Wilson's trip could not have attended the meeting.

of course, leaking the memo's contents was illegal regardless of whether its contents were true or false. but if false, that just makes it worse.¶

boat of car

saturday night storms, which means the satellite reception keeps going in & out. actually, it seems to go out whenever a program i want to watch is on, and then comes back when a show i'm less interested in comes on. you might be aware that cartoon network is one of the few channels i watch regularly, and they premiere most of their good shit on saturday nights. fortunately, they'll re-air all the programs again later in the week, so i can still get them recorded. and some of the digital glitches in the video look pretty cool; i'll have to go back & "sample" some of them to my hard drive for later video work. but it's still frustrating.

this afternoon i went down to the big car gallery in fountain square to talk to jim walker about the upcoming collage show on august 12. jim contacted me about it awhile ago and it sounds like it's going to be great. the gallery walls will be stuffed with collage works by 11 different artists, including at least 3 poster-sized pieces by yours truly. there will be live musical performances by three acts, again including yours truly. there will also be video collage (some by me, some by jim walker, and maybe even others) and i'll even be showing my databent art, projected onto the big screen. it promises to be one hell of a gallery showing. here's the blurb from the schedule on the big car website:

August 12 - Latencies: A group collage show. Collages by: Lisa Barton, Doug Calisch, John Clark, Jose Di Gregorio, Penelope Dullaghan, Anna Rae Landsman, Jo Legner, David Mattingly, Kipp Normand, Jason Pierce, Eric Pohlman, Jackie Stover, stAllio!, Jim Walker, and Sue Anne Zollinger. Musical entertainment by: Experimental sound collagist stAllio!, The Hoover, and the Spontaneous Sound Collective. 6-9 p.m. Other video collage and on-the-premises collage making and object-related activities.
Open through Sept. 17¶

2+2

the washington post now has its own variation on the "novak's 2nd leak" story. and this story pretty obviously comes from the same anonymous source as the nytimes and AP stories i blogged this morning. but it adds one crucial piece of information: that the anonymous source is a "lawyer":

White House senior adviser Karl Rove indirectly confirmed the CIA affiliation of an administration critic's wife for Robert D. Novak the week before the columnist named her and revealed her position, a lawyer involved in the case said last night.

The operative, Valerie Plame, is the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador who had publicly disputed the White House's contention that Saddam Hussein had sought to buy uranium from Niger for possible use in a nuclear weapon.

The lawyer, who has knowledge of the conversations between Rove and prosecutors, said President Bush's deputy chief of staff has told investigators that he first learned about the operative from a journalist and that he later learned her name from Novak.

now what "lawyer" who is "working on the case" and even "has knowledge" about rove's testimony (not to mention rove's personal conversations with robert novak) would possibly want to talk to the press about this? and not just one reporter: the lawyer clearly shopped the story to at least three different outlets to ensure that it would be published.

my first post from this morning analyzed all the obvious contradictions in what the source was telling the times. my second post this morning linked to an article that analyzed all the obvious contradictions in statements that robert luskin has given to the press. through the magic of synchnocity, it turns out that if you add my first two posts of the morning together, their sum is this post. and this revelation:

luskin was clearly the source for the "novak's 2nd source" leak. it wasn't 100% obvious at first, because the times and AP articles only referenced their source as a "person". but now that the post has outed the source as a "lawyer", there is only one possible explanation.

hunter at dkos shows he too knows how to add. (in fact, he put it together before i did, as he read the post article first, but i had to post it here and "show my work" so to speak, because i had already laid out most of the proof in my previous two posts.) ¶

luskin

courtesy of josh marshall we find this article in the new republic about karl rove's lawyer, robert luskin.

the article parses luskin's recent comments about the rove scandal and concludes that luskin constantly contradicts himself:

Not since William Ginsburg, Monica Lewinsky's hapless first attorney, has a lawyer had such an inept public debut. Legal veterans of scandals past are scratching their heads. "He's publicized his client more than his client might like," says one of the lawyers central to the Lewinsky drama. "I've been surprised by the disclosures. I don't know of any strategy behind it, and a lot of people are looking at it the same way."

so luskin's completely full of shit, which we already knew, but it is nice to see all his misstatements, lies, and spin compiled into one place like this. very effective.

but wait, there's more! the article also goes into luskin's history, covering the laughably inept "gold bars" incident. you might wonder who first broke the gold bar story. it wasn't josh marshall; he was simply the one to re-discover it in light of the rove scandal. in fact, republicans broke the story themselves because they used to hate luskin. that is, until he took on rove as a client. how wonderfully ironic that republicans gave us all this ammunition...

Over his 25-year legal career, Robert Luskin has defended a colorful cast of characters, including a drug kingpin, several figures on the fringes of the Clinton scandals, and, most recently, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. But scoring Rove was a coup. Luskin is an unlikely choice for a Republican, let alone Rove. In fact, during the 1990s, a wide swath of the conservative movement spent a good chunk of its time trying to destroy his reputation. For the last ten years, Luskin has served as the in-house prosecutor for the Laborers' International Union, where he has been charged with fighting corruption. The right was miffed that the Clinton administration let the Laborers clean house on their own rather than under the tutelage of the Justice Department, as was done with the Teamsters. One gadfly conservative organization, the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC), turned discrediting Luskin into its own personal crusade. They produced a highly unflattering 13-page report that set off a cascade of critical stories and editorials in the conservative press. Under the headline "Luskin's Ties to the New England/Patriarca Crime Family," the report documented a fishy episode wherein Luskin was forced to return $245,000 in legal fees that he received from a client named Stephen A. Saccoccia, who was sentenced to 660 years in prison for laundering South American drug-cartel and mob money. A U.S. attorney, accusing Luskin of "willful blindness," reasoned that, when Luskin started getting paid with solid gold bars (he ultimately received 45 of them, worth $505,125) and wire transfers from Swiss bank accounts, he should have known the payments were from illicit sources, especially since his client's crimes involved gold bars and wire transfers from Swiss bank accounts.¶