A snip at 1.7 billion

A location to suit:

This company perhaps:

The boss waits:

I came from the utter fields / carving shame on the tender shields

"In the aftermath of 9/11 the concern was about a tyrant accused of enormous human rights abuses," but who also possessed weapons of mass destruction, said Rove. "Absent that, I suspect that the administration's course of action would have been to work to find more creative ways to constrain him like in the 90s."

[From Rove: We Wouldn't Have Invaded Iraq If We Knew The Truth About WMDs]

The worm squirms and reinvents..and looks for a rock to hide under.....these pricks don't even have the balls to face up to their past. Manipulate the intelligence? Who us?

One hopes reckoning cometh.

Update:

Joan Walsh, over at Salon comments on a revisionist, arse saving, dishonesty that goes up one more notch than Rove:

Bush made a second stunning admission in his interview with Gibson. "The biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq," he said. "A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn't just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington, D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence. And, you know, that's not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess."

What a cowardly, buck-passing answer. It was his administration that was responsible for the faulty intelligence; his administration that notoriously "stove-piped" the available evidence to make the case for war, ignoring all facts that contradicted the neocons' theories, crushing any dissent in the Pentagon and intelligence establishment. His administration then sold that corrupt evidence to Congress and browbeat members into authorizing the use of military force on the eve of the 2002 midterm election, by depicting them as traitors and sissies if they raised questions. Now Bush is trying to say he was misled by the "failure" of his own intelligence leaders and Cabinet advisors? What a loser.

It's hard to add much to that, except that this President seems determined to finish his presidency on about the same moral plateau he conducted it on over the past eight years. History will not be kind, and I hope, more immediately, that Congress will be even less kind...but I doubt it.

Look what they've done to my song, Ma

he, he, he....

Hat tip to the encyclopedic memory of Jon Cooper

Her final decision is perfection and precision / She's grade A class - number one in her division

Brigid bought me a brand new 17” MacBook Pro, top of the line job. I do love her. After a week or three of living with it I’m thinking (aloud):

Pros:

1. First off and most importantly to some, it’s very pretty. Well, of course Mac acolytes will tell you it’s much more than that, that it’s a design classic and then bore you for an hour worshiping at the Church of Jonathan Ives. And of course it is all that but to restate the obvious over and over again...well it’s as dull as the design of your average Acer. Shut up.

2. It’s so magnificently easy to multi-task and I’m told that OSX 10.5 is a huge leap forwards here. I love the idea and application of Spaces and use the mouse in top right corner to take me to desktop repeatedly. And the wee bar along the top is very very smart, and user friendly.

3. The dock is so much friendlier than the Windows task bar, although I find the way it hides multiple instances of an app, say Word, on the same icon, a royal pain in the butt when one is flicking, as I often do between documents.

4. Installation. Universal is just so damn easy. I hate the Windows installation process which has only got worse with all the permissions and registry fiddling that’s required to install even the simplest program on Windows

5. Start up…it’s fast. Shit…50 seconds and you’re typing or doing silly things with the effects menus in the much easier to navigate, clearly optimized for Mac, Adobe CS programs. Which brings me to:

6. Floating windows….why does an application have to use all the screen real estate including any dead space...answer: it doesn’t. Photoshop and Dreamweaver are a dream on a Mac. This simple thing has made my life so much easier and productive. I put things where they need to go, not where Microsoft tells me it ought to go.

7. Battery life..so far, fingers crossed.

8. USB recognition. In a PC it takes an age and gets confused. I’m sick of crawling around the registry trying to fix a printer that Vista used to recognize but now won’t. Or a camera, or a scanner, or a card reader….

9. The DVD drive..no more groans and waiting, followed by the not so slight chance that one day Windows will fuck up the drivers so that it tells me it no longer has a drive.

10. Neworks and wi-fi. Turn on..they work.

The Cons:

1. The Office programs are a shadow of their Windows counterparts, with half the functionality, and the Mac equivalent is best not mentioned. Still, you can blame Microsoft for at least a part of that.

2. I miss two buttons on the keyboard….the backspace, which in conjunction with the pc delete button is both easier, and more sensibly user friendly than the Mac setup which is very early eighties..and the mighty Windows key which can be used to do a thousand things from navigation to searches to, well, just about anything, including a lot of things that you need a third party add on to do with the Mac modifier keys.

3. Which brings me to navigation. Maybe it’s because I’m a newbie, but the PC and the Windows environment kills the Mac when it comes to getting around. Windows Explorer has a depth of ease and functionality that Finder doesn’t come close to and many of the very simple things I took for granted as long ago as Windows 95 still require third party add ons, like keystrokes to launch programs or documents, or being able to highlight a file and hit delete to, ahh, delete it.

4. Where is the card reader? You pay several thousand dollars for a wonderful piece of hardware and they leave off the $20 cardreader as an economy move?

5. Can someone point me in the direction of a blog editor…a decent WYSIWYG editor that comes within a light year of Windows Livewriter. I’ve tried a bunch of the more highly recommended Mac apps and they all suck badly.

6. Nothing to with Apple but the Windows apps that either don’t exist for Mac or have punitive Mac upgrade paths (MYOB I’m looking at you…$199 for a Windows upgrade, $500 for a Mac upgrade). Or for that matter web sites that refuse to work under anything but IE Explorer in Windows. I have to run BootCamp just for these.

7. And last, and far and away the most irritating: The Mac acolytes that haunt the forums and magazines. I’ve taken to buying Mac mags and wandering around a forum of two and the verbiage is nausea inducing. Take for example something in last months MacWorld:

If you use a Mac you are automatically hip.

Really, so If I use my Mac to plan a terror attack or draw puerile pictures of naked girls to giggle at in class, I’m still hip?

Or this month in MacLife:

Apple is more than just a company that makes computers, gadgets and software- it’s a game changing free-radical that manifests in multiple dimensions.

Piss off you dick…it’s a publicly listed company which exists to take your money like every other one on the board. It just does that very well.

So well in fact that despite my whinges and niggles I love my new MacBook Pro 17” with a gag speed processor and a bucket of ram, very, very much. As I do my generous wife.

We Have No Sheep On Our Farms

One of the reasons I'm often less than nostalgic for the nest are things like this (via Steve Parkes):

The lead story in Campbell Live tonight was about the annoying, unpleasant, but essentially obvious and uninteresting fact that sometimes dodgy stuff gets in our food

Gosh, flies in the food...dear, oh, dear. That this would even come close to making a current affairs show is pretty funny, in a parochial way. Or at least I would've been if it wasn't for the other events in the world that particular day.

This is what the other lot managed to pull together.