Brian Carnell watched a hilarious exchange on Hannity & Colmes where Sean Hannity defended the Easter bunny against leftist religious intolerance:

... if Hannity would use his brain for a second he might stop to wonder why a rabbit is symbolized with Easter. What the hell does a rabbit have to do with the resurrection of Jesus? Nothing, of course -- its a pagan fertility symbol people. If anything, Hannity should be glad that people are starting to dissociate this pagan fertility symbol from Easter.

Politics · 2005/03/20 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Democratic Podcast: Cuts Dishonor Veterans

The Democratic response to the presidential radio address was delivered today by Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, who criticized President Bush's proposed budget cuts to veterans' services and a new $250 "user fee" charged to many veterans to qualify for health care.

His speech:

I'm Ed Rendell, the governor of Pennsylvania.

America's governors are united in our commitment to the troops who put their lives on the line in our global fight to combat terrorism and bring peace to Iraq. In fact, we as governors have a new role that we've never faced before in a major international conflict. Unlike any war in recent history, citizen soldiers are fighting this war -- 40 percent of all the troops are from National Guard units or reservists. We receive painful notice when our citizens die on the battlefield or suffer serious wounds in combat. Among the American servicemen and -women killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan are 69 Pennsylvanians whose sacrifice helped build those new democracies.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, more than 14,000 Pennsylvania National Guard members have left the comfort of their homes to risk their lives for our security. Every American had to be deeply moved at seeing the sense of pride in the Iraqi people as they courageously went to the polls at the end of January. The families of the brave servicemen and -women from all 50 states now know for sure that their loved ones did not die in vain.

This war has reminded us of the solemn pledge our nation makes to our veterans. We ask our soldiers to risk their lives and in return we promise to care for them as veterans -- tending to their injuries, their families and their livelihoods. That seems to be the very least we can do to repay their selfless acts of courage.

This nation is graced with 26 million veterans. We try to do our best by our veterans in Pennsylvania. We provide nursing home care, for some children of veterans we run a terrific public boarding school. We provide financial help to meet real emergencies and to others we provide low-interest loans. We aid our disabled veterans by helping pay for college for their kids. We also help those who serve our nation. Our state employees who are called into active service are given two weeks extra vacation and an additional $500 a month while they are deployed.

All of our governors are continuing to find innovative ways to reach out and help the families of our troops and the soldiers when they return. In New Mexico, Gov. Richardson signed into law the National Guard Insurance Benefit, which will provide every active duty member of the New Mexico National Guard $250,000 in life insurance. In Iowa, Gov. Vilsack signed legislation allowing state employees activated to military service to maintain their state health insurance benefits. In New Hampshire, Gov. Lynch launched Operation Welcome Home. Like a good friend, Operation Welcome Home lends a helping hand to returning guards and reservists -- loaning money to them to meet their emergency financial problems and leading them to good jobs, and when necessary, even locating new apartments.

While we the governors do all we can for our vets and our returning soldiers, our federal government still has the primary responsibility for meeting the needs of our veterans. And that's why I find the president's budget cuts for critical veterans services to be unconscionable. In fact the budget cut includes a $350 million reduction in veterans' home funding, which wipes out at least 5,000 veterans nursing home beds. Pennsylvania has six veterans' homes that house and care for 1,600 proud vets. If the president's proposed budget cuts are enacted, nearly 60 percent of the 1,600 veterans will lose their daily stipend that allows them to stay in our state's nursing homes -- literally forcing them out into the cold.

Two years ago the federal government tripled the veterans' co-pays for prescription drugs. Now the president is proposing to again double those increased co-pays. But in the midst of a war -- when many new men and women will join the legion of veterans -- does it really make sense for the president to increase the cost of vets' prescriptions by 100 percent? The president also proposes an annual $250 fee to be paid by every vet wishing to participate in the Veteran's Administration health care program. There may well be some veterans who can afford to do so, but can all vets come up with an extra $250 a year to pay for health care? I doubt it!

Each and every day the life of a soldier serving overseas is filled with conflict, anxiety and a longing to return home to their families. We as governors do all we can within our limited resources to show our gratitude to the heroes who return home. During this time of war, it is absolutely the wrong time for our federal government to step back from any of its commitment to our veterans. To do so would be penny wise but pound-foolish. In today's parlance -- the cost of health care for these vets may be a half a billion dollars; but their sacrifice for our nation, priceless!

Every patriotic American should take the time to contact their congressman and senators and tell them to just say no to President Bush's budget cuts for services to our veterans. It's a matter of honor and patriotism.

Politics · Podcasts · 2005/03/19 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Linking Plain URLs in Movable Type Comments

I run an active Movable Type-driven site where visitors include hyperlinks in their comments using HTML markup like this:

Read more on <a href="http://ekzemplo.com">Ekzemplo</a>

A lot of people don't know HTML, so they paste URLs:

Read more on http://ekzemplo.com

This is less useful and causes presentation problems when a long URL takes up more space than the site's tables can handle, pushing the right margin off the edge.

I needed to turn plain URLs into hyperlinks without messing up existing links in HTML, so I tried Brad Choate's Regex plug-in, which enables regular expressions to process any Movable Type tag's output.

With a lot of trial-and-error and the help of an online regex tester, I used the plug-in's MTRegexDefine tag to define three find-and-replace regular expressions (in Perl syntax):

A global tag attribute, regex, causes these expressions to be used on its output:

Plain URLs are converted to hyperlinks with their domain as the linked text. The order of the regular expressions is important; the plugin invokes hideanchor, longurl, and then showanchor in that order.

Movable Type · 2005/03/19 · Comment · Link

May Diverse Be With You

The ongoing debate over weblogger diversity leaves me wishing there were better tools to find new voices making their way up the long tail.

I'm too lazy to find them on my own (with the exception of new bloggers in Jacksonville and St. Augustine), so I link to the same people often -- mostly the crowd of plugged-in web technologists who I have read for years.

They are admittedly a largely white and male group, but I assuage my liberal guilt by linking often to Bill Lazar, who as you may not realize is a transgendered teen-aged Cuban-American evangelical whose mother was a notch baby.

In the early days of weblogging, when we had to compose our RSS feeds by hand and walk six miles uphill to and from school, there was a service that highlighted new blogs that were just starting to attract attention. Or maybe it listed new memes just starting to attract blogs. The memory is the second thing to go.

Using the Technorati API, I have written Java code to grab some XML data that quantifies how popular a weblog is, putting together an element like this:

http://noodlepie.typepad.com/
9859
113
145

I'm fomenting plans for a web service built on this data and Weblogs.Com that can find and present new blogs, using a metric that catches them when they start to attract a following.

For instance, the site could display new posts from weblogs that have at least 25 and no more than 50 inbound blog links.

I don't know yet how successful it would be in presenting blogs worth finding, but there can never be too many programmers working on a cure for information obesity.

Publishing · Java · 2005/03/18 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

John Scalzi believes that the real dividing line in this polarized country is not liberal vs. conservative, but rational vs. irrational:

I'm far more comfortable with some conservatives than I am with some liberals, even though my own positions tend more liberal than not. I'm rather more comfortable dealing with someone whose politics I disagree with, but I can see how they got to where they are, than someone who politics are in line with mine but who appear to have arrived at those politics without an intermediary step of, you know, thinking about those politics.

Politics · 2005/03/18 · Comment · Link

Church of the Risen Elvis

Because Atlanta courtroom killer Brian Nichols was read parts of The Purpose-Driven Life by his last hostage, CNN is republishing an interview the book's author did last November on Larry King Live.

The book sounds like 336 pages of merciless flogging, based on the simplistic platitudes that the author, Rev. Rick Warren, inflicts on King ("The middle letter of pride is I, and the middle letter of sin is I"). The middle letter of tripe is I, too, reverend.

But I'm linking to call attention to this comment (emphasis mine):

The problem today, Larry, is not unbelief. The problem is today everyone wants to believe everything. They want to believe it all. I want to believe in reincarnation and heaven. Those are mutually exclusive things. I want to believe in Elvis, and I want to believe in Jesus -- those are mutually exclusive.

One of my favorite science fiction novels, Dreamships by Melissa Scott, is set in a future in which Elvis Presley fandom has shifted from adulation to idolatry. The Church of the Risen Elvis is an established denomination and "Elvis Christ!" a common curse.

As a longtime resident of the South, I could see the King eventually becoming a challenge to the King of Kings, but I didn't know that true believers already had to pick sides.

Science Fiction · Publishing · 2005/03/15 · 6 COMMENTS · Link

All of My Distortions Lack Purpose

Dick Rogers, ombudsman of the San Francisco Chronicle, compares bloggers to the ink-stained wretches in his profession:

Other [bloggers] poke at contemporary issues but toss responsibility out the window. Five minutes with an Internet directory such as www.globeofblogs.com will turn up blogs that don't even bother to guess at the truth. They traffic in falsehood, innuendo and purposeful distortion. Journalism? I sure hope not.

I challenged him in e-mail to name five actual weblogs that run knowingly false and distorted items. I can't think of five, much less find five new ones in a quick skim of a weblog directory.

If he had accused webloggers of being less cautious in their claims than pro journalists, I'd agree. One reason caution flies out the weblog is the ability to learn about and correct mistakes in record time.

I worry less about making errors on Workbench than I did working at a newspaper, because I know people are more likely to call me on them quickly. Every comment thread is an opportunity for a reader to tell the world I'm stupid.

The weblog format also lends itself much better to corrections than a newspaper. All my corrections get exactly as much play as the original gaffe.

Journalism · 2005/03/15 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

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