Friday, January 30, 2009

Problem with the GOP's image is that it's dead on

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says the GOP is in danger of becoming a regional party if they don't market themselves better.

McConnell called on the GOP to push back against labels that have hurt the party in the past — anti-immigrant, anti-union and anti-environment — and to regain taxpayers’ trust that they support limited government spending.

“Too often we’ve let others define us,” McConnell said. “And the image they’ve painted isn’t very pretty.”

No, Mitch, your actions have defined you. And you need to change more than your sales pitch to become relevant again. You need to change your behavior. You're labeled anti-immigrant, anti-union and anti-environment because you are anti-immigrant, anti-union and anti-environment. To the extent that you have an image problem, it's because the image is accurate. The right wing has pulled the wool over the eyes of too many people for too long; but as famously said the great man on whose coattails your party still tries to ride, you can't fool all the people all the time.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

The Fourth Estate awakens

"Right on cue," writes Eric Boehlert, "the White House press awakens from its Bush slumber."

Having hammered Bill Clinton for eight years over everything from haircuts to blowjobs, the press handled George W. Bush with kid gloves from day one. Pundits at the time noted that it was about time the press gave the new guy a break.

Then, having slept through eight years of outrageous deceit and secrecy, not to mention open contempt of the press, on the part of the Republican regime, the press has suddenly reawakened and decided to play hardball with the Obama administration. ABC News' executive producer says he doesn't think there is a honeymoon, and the Daily Beast exults "Game on!"

Some of the issues that have the press in such an uproar include misspelled names of press staffers and phone lines that weren't properly connected on the first day, and - gasp! - the White House handing out official photos of the Presidential Oath of Office do-over rather than letting the AP photogs in to snap their own pix. This was deemed such a slight that the AP, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse refused to move the images, and CNN's Ed Henry complained to Wolf Blitzer that on the very same day Obama was talking about transparency, "we were not let in."

Politico noted how the Clinton administration had also run into trouble with the press over issues of access. Noticeably absent from the Politico article was any mention of how the Bush administration dramatically limited media access, regularly cordoned off information from the press, and warned reporters that edgy questions posed at the daily sessions were "noted in the building." That's all been tossed down the memory hole. It's only new Democratic presidents who are asked to play nice with the press and get badgered when they do not.

That's the damned liberal media for you.

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Living history

Two words. President Obama.

Make that three words. President Obama: YES!

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Reason number 4,731 why I'm glad I have a Mac

At the office, we've had a spate of user complaints about a particular application giving an error message that goes something like this:

"Sorry, we were unable to process your request at this time. If you are unable to continue working, please dismiss this warning and then select View, Refresh from your browser's menu."

Someone associated with the product in question produced the following list of "possible solutions":

- Disable Pop-Up blocker
- Clean up spyware (use application such as Spybot and/or AdAware)
- Add [webapp] server to Internet Explorer's Trusted Sites zone (this may be a good idea for any other intranet servers or via an Active Directory policy)
- Clear out Java Cache by running
C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.5.0_0X\bin\javacpl.exe
---Click “Delete Files” then click “OK”.
---*if there are different versions, do this for each version or uninstall older versions and leave only the newest copy.
- Clear out Windows temp folders.
--- C:\Temp
--- C:\Documents and Settings\USER PROFILE\Local Settings\Temp
--- C:\Documents and Settings\USER PROFILE\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files
--- C:\Winnt\Temp
--- *Clear out the Temp/Temp. Internet Files for each user listed in the Documents and Settings folder.
- Reset IE to default settings.
--- Right Click on the Internet Explorer icon on the desktop or go to Control Panel and open Internet Options.
--- Click on the Programs Tab. Then click the Reset Web Settings button. Uncheck “Also reset my home page” then click “OK”.
- Tools > Internet Options > Advanced > Disable "Use HTTP 1.1" (you may need to enable it because sometimes IE just doesn't like the setting. I have actually seen it start working by enabling this option.)
- Tools > Internet Options > Advanced > Disable "Do not save encrypted pages to disk"
- Download the MSXML 4.0 SP2. This link will get you to the download. I selected the msxml.msi.
- Clear Browser Cache
- Delete [product A] or [product B] class file
- If one is currently installed, upgrade to the latest Sun JVM
- Windows Update (also verify that a recent Windows Update has not broken this!)
- Reboot
- Defrag
- Run a tool such as Symantec/Norton WinDoctor


I was going to rant about it, but this list speaks for itself. I'm glad my Mac just works.