The Democratic presidential candidates debate at 8 PM on MSNBC tonight. If only we could set up windmills to collect the hot air...

All right, I have to admit that I sort of like watching the presidential debates, as long as I can drink or do something else alongside the spectacle. Every time Ron Paul lays into the "war propaganda" of the military-industrial complex, or Kucinich floats his dreamy utopia stuff, at least that's interesting.

The 2008 presidential campaign itself is a doom-laden spectacle of horror, and has pretty much sucked all around so far. McCain and Giuliani compete to sound the most maniacal, and even aw-shucks Huckabee plots foreign wars of obliteration. Tancredo still refuses to go back to Italy where "his type" infest us from.

The best recent news was when McCain visited the Smith & Wesson manufacturers and promised to chase Bin Laden to the gates of hell, and kill him with their product. Stephen Colbert called that a 720° Triple Bank Shot, and I have to agree.

McCain personally requested the stop at the Smith and Wesson-owned Thompson-Center Arms factory, where he scrutinized hunting rifles, watched workers cast parts from molten steel and enjoyed a closed-door session with executives seated around a table with an AR-15 military-style rifle on top.

During a talk with more than 100 of the company's employees, the Republican presidential candidate promised to "bring Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell and shoot him with one of your products." The line got a big round of applause.

Obama's campaign has been an extreme disappointment. Somehow the last 8 to 10 weeks have slid by without Obama daring to point out that Hillary Clinton Sucks All Around, and so he's viewed as weak, in the all-important frame of the Bitchslap Theory of Electoral Politics. As Josh Marshall explained, as we saw with SwiftBoats in the summer of 2004, you keep slapping them with stupid shit, and when they don't fight back, you look too weak for the American public:

One way -- perhaps the best way -- to demonstrate someone's lack of toughness or strength is to attack them and show they are either unwilling or unable to defend themselves -- thus the rough slang I used above. And that I think is a big part of what is happening here. Someone who can't or won't defend themselves certainly isn't someone you can depend upon to defend you.

Demonstrating Kerry's unwillingness to defend himself (if Bush can do that) is a far more tangible sign of what he's made of than wartime experiences of thirty years ago.

Hitting someone and not having them hit back hurts the morale of that person's supporters, buoys the confidence of your own backers (particularly if many tend toward an authoritarian mindset) and tends to make the person who's receiving the hits into an object of contempt (even if also possibly also one of sympathy) in the eyes of the uncommitted.

This is certainly what Bush's father did to Michael Dukakis and, sadly, it is what Bush himself did, to a great degree, to Al Gore.

It worked against Kerry, and so far against Obama. Hillary's campaign has resisted sniping a lot at Obama directly, but they've gone the next level up to set the Frame of Polls and other assorted Voodoo Chicken Guts to create a Conventional Wisdom that she can't be touched.

Then there is the ready victim gender language thing, wherein such ideas as "a Conventional Wisdom that she can't be touched" flips around to represent domestic violence and sexism and other stuff. Any Hillary assault is sort of like hitting your wife. This seems to be working, and it's kind of surprising no one has ever tried it before at the national level. I guess it wouldn't have helped much with Geraldine Ferraro in '84.

New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, who I have always thought of as a Basically Good Guy and also Very Experienced with the Wily World Out There - a diplomatic Grandmaster - has basically run an invisible campaign. He was hobbled for early 2007 by having to spend all his time finishing the session of the New Mexico legislature. This kept him off the radar while the HillaryBots locked up the entire Democratic Party hierarchy.

******

The conventional wisdom of the race depresses me. The media sucks and they follow Baby Boomer rules of sugarcoating all awkward realities of 2007. The media is just horrible and only care about these dumb polls. The left of the alternative media is letting everything slide, pretty much, with few results. This Iran shit getting ginned up is seriously their responsibility to deal with.

One other thing on the media, though: MSNBC does a unique job covering the stuff, and I have to give them some credit for the effort. Right now David Schuster, the Hardball correspondent, is grilling some pols and doing a decent enough job by today's standards. Schuster really has done better than anyone else on television covering the Valerie Plame / CIA leak / Scooter Libby scandal. When Plame was on Hardball, Plame complemented Schuster's rapidfire summary of the extremely convoluted case.

******

The Rundown:

• Bill Richardson: Shooting for VP. Wish he was doing better. Usually focuses on speaking against paranoid warmongering and conveys a positive attitude.
• Hillary Clinton: Playing an impressive game at every level, as long as the other candidates always pull their punches. If the Teflon ain't fried tonight, we are fucked.
• Chris Dodd: Polling behind Colbert in South Carolina. Has been principled in his foreign policy and responsive to the blogger netroots, but has had no influence.
• Joe Biden: Breaking up Iraq is a shitty idea, smart guy. Watch no one really care, but then again, I hope he'll probably pounce on Hillary for the Iran thing (she voted for recent Kyl-Lieberman war hawk insanity bill)
• Dennis Kucinich: Still not making himself relevant, but I wish he would.
• Mike Gravel: They don't give him any time of course. I gave him $15 early on when he said the Military-Industrial Complex dominates our culture. I wish he'd keep injecting that hard-core antiwar idea. He probably will, but it won't get any bounce unless he really goes after Hillary specifically.
• John Edwards: He seems to be floating away or something. I'm glad he called out Hillary's cash vacuum cleaner with Beltway lobbyists and the military-industrial complex.
• Barack Obama: Dude you gotta git 'em. Seriously. Americans don't want a freaggin' Harvard lecturer, they need something of a pit bull. Obama needs a little more Nixon, if you will.

So my order of preference for Dem nomination, the proper combo of principles and electibility: 1) Richardson. 2) Obama. 3) Edwards. 4) everyone else. 8) HillaryCorp International.

Latin American political commentary from Nicolas:

cristina kirchner:nobody in downtown baires voted for her
she was totally el pais interior
and Lavagna carried Cordoba

That is all.

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Ok, so finally yesterday Zacharias demanded that I bring the Xbox 360 back to their house because they purchased some used games for it. I - and more skilled visitors over here - accumulated a whopping 50 Xp (xperience points) on his Xbox user name. We are at about 123 XP, which is 27 short of the threshold to become an 'officer' on the bungie.net system. It has military ranks to encourage social structure, or mark competence, or whatever.

I seriously can't believe these users who have already logged 400 games (or more!) since the game was released a couple weeks ago. Although of course, it could be several people using the same User to build up points - a heavily used account for a whole frat, or whatever.

When I got it unhooked and out of here, it dawned on me that very little has been accomplished lately, my apartment is a complete mess (mostly papers and such though, not too much groady rotting foodstuffs). I moved in a month and a half ago, and really a lot of things are still in their original boxes and locations. My bedroom is a complete afterthought. The dirty dishes have been rotting away for more than two weeks.

So when you play Halo 3 to the exclusion of virtually everything else, then yes, everything does screech to a halt. That's why I'm calling today the day of the Halo Hangover.

On the upside, I spent about 90 minutes setting up a new website for a friend of mine using my hosting account. For now, the site is secret since the whole concept is under development, but it is a good progressive kind of thing, and I pointed him towards trying Drupal as a platform.

These days I am quite the Drupal advocate, but that's all right since it is open source and extremely versatile for content presentation. When updates come out for Drupal and its modules, i can do a kind of roundhouse kick across numerous sites to update all of them at once. It is easier to build up expertise for one Content Management System then get splintered among Wordpress, Mambo/Joomla and the others, although I have enough working knowledge of them to customize their look without a huge amount of hassle.

Update aboot 6 hrs later: Beta 4 just came out, now thats what i call a quick dev cycle. should be at same URL

You can download it here: http://infinite-sushi.com/ecto.zip. I am using it now and it certainly ain't glitch-free, but it has been a long time in coming, and I purchased the last version, so I'm happy to see this in action. There's a new Bookmarklet which you can drop into an existing browser:

ectoize

"After installing the bookmarklet, you can create weblog entries from any webpage you are visiting. When viewing a page that you want to write about, select some text you want to quote, and then choose or click the "ectoize" item from the browser's Bookmarks Bar. This will open a new draft window in ecto with text from and details about the current webpage."

Not bad. It was able to download all the tags from Drupal quite nicely, and should rock on Wordpress and MovableType as well. They have a new website at infinite-sushi.com. Inserting hyperlinks from the clipboard is now command-shift-U . It has a little trouble styling the text, but likely this is related to a dependency on which Safari version you have.

It uses the WebKit, the Gecko-derived engine for rendering web pages, and upon launch, Ecto begs you to install Safari 3 Beta in order to make this gizmo render stuff more reliably. WebKit is provided by / is the kernel of Safari's innards. I have avoided Safari 3 Beta because I heard it was kinda hairy, and i am not really happy with Safari. But for this, I will probably bite.

The Ecto beta will work for a few weeks, then you'll have to grab the new one. I am impressed and will try to offer useful info to the developers about it, because this new Ecto has been rewritten from scratch and should provide a much better way for plugins and add-ons to push data out through the back end of Content Management Systems.

They have also released 'endo' for RSS aggregation and '1001' for Flickr stuff.

All this talk reminds me I have a very late email response owed to send to a friend who needed tips on this stuff...

Yeah I had to take the site offline for quite a while because Drupal 5.3 came out last week, replacing dire security holes in Drupal 5.2. These things have to be taken seriously, so I shut it off until I got around to upping the version.

There's plenty of stuff built up that I wanted to post about, but right now I'm just gonna watch Valerie Plame appearing on MSNBC Countdown with Keith Olbermann ... then George Carlin. Not too bad.

Other than that, also someone known as alias 'Zacharias' left his XBOX 360 with Halo 3 here, thus I've been building up big points on that. I'm better at driving the Warthog than up-close combat.

There is good news with OS X 10.5 coming out, with much improved Securitay, and also with Drupal 6 already reaching Beta 2 stage, which is going to turn out fantastic.

A lot of stuff going on, trying to help friends with web developments, etc... Fortunately a lot of Drupal overlap has been engineered, some by me, some by an emerging consensus. Sweet.

People are asking me if the war in Iran is going to start on the 15th of October. Well, I answer, in the 4th generation warfare sense, it already has started..... Seymour Hersh's latest missive must be read. Now it's 'counterterrorism' with the Republican Guard. Joe Lieberman practically tried to start the war last week. Fuckin A. The new war messaging. The whole bit... Goddamn... Goddamn...

Daily dimension of Minnesota conspiratoria: Jesse Ventura questions 9/11 and compares it to the JFK assassination:

Fourth dimension of power: your partisan bickering, removed: This Modern World. Obvious statements: Boondocks is teh awesome. Doonesbury too.

OpenCircuit, a new Twin Cities tech collective concept. Related: MinneDemo: DemoCamp Minnesota.

Yong Ho from the Macalester days has a sweet trilingual website.

AIR is a new Adobe app platform (Like Java). You can do your GoogleAnalytics through it. Didn't seem to have much advantage over the web way though.

OpenDNS is a nifty new DNS management service. Get rid of those "looking up website....." delays by getting better DNS! Bonus for businesses and fundies: it can filter porn too!

The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. This is a great long summary, the major sectors of the book distilled so you can better understand the IMF/Pinochet/supercapitalist doom mode, seen everywhere from Katrina to Iraq. And how are people are building "shock absorbers" into their local societies in order to thrive once more. A powerful argument against the dying 'Washington consensus' of exploitative trade and debt slavery economics. Much more useful as an analytic frame than most things these days.

Alternatives to the conventional 'crazy talk': Icarus, community alternatives for mental illness.

Cool stuff: Free Speech TV and Keynote: Jeremy Scahill on his new "Blackwater" book, and something called Conspiracy Theory Rock.

Wall Street Journal fantasyland, convinced $100 barrels of oil wouldn't kill the economy. Dangerous groupthink from on high, and Mr. Murdoch's property working nicely: How Economy Could Survive $100 Oil.

Good for secrets and such: cryptogon.com.

Retired CIA analysts spell out the mideast gig: The Teflon Alliance with Israel. (Counterpunch rules)

A selection of interesting stuff from the Agonist, one of my favorite sites:

The Hope In Weakness (Morality II) | The Agonist

The Land of Cotton: Uzbekist@n, Not Dixie and East Germany on the Amu Darya: Ubzekist@n.

Blackwater Woes: More Elite than Our Military? and Blackwater, The Privatization of War And Public Enemy Number One.

Old Folks In the US Unhealthier Than Europeans. A LOT Unhealthier.

Morality | The Agonist

Air War: Target Iran! | The Agonist

That's all for now kiddos. Go read Hersh if you didn't already.

Cracked.com has five kick-ass action movies that are pure Propaganda. Both Shooter and Kurtlar Vadisi Irak (Valley of the Wolves: Iraq) are on there, and indeed, both are pretty damn sweet political propaganda. Kurtlar Vadisi: "Let's face it, this is a fucking jihad of awesome." I had one of the first reviews of Kurtlar Vadisi out there, made from a crappy screener that didn't even have English. It was that awesome.

Shooter Trailer: The best Oswald-vs-the-conspiracy movie conceivable.



More clips from Shooter:

Good news all around. Nothing too special that you'd see from the outside, but now HongPong.com is on PHP5, which means that it has a much more modern engine running underneath.

I am involved in some other stuff right now: going to SPNN to get a little bit into community television, and other stuff.

Best to everyone, I'll try to explain later.