Geriatric Douchebag Indicted

I'm not really one to take joy in the misfortune of others, even when said misfortune is self-inflicted, and well deserved. Having said that, upon hearing that Senator Ted Stevens had been indicted by the justice department, my first thought was that it couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

Senator Stevens is something of a douchebag's douchebag. He's a jackass that stands out, even in the grand cavalcade of jackasses that is the Congress of the United States of America.

The first thing that you should know about Ted Stevens is that he's older than dirt. You know John McCain? Ted Stevens makes him look young and spry. How old is Stevens? Well, the same year that he was born, Vladimir Lenin was the leader of The Soviet Union, Calvin Coolidge became President of the United States, and a scant ten days before Stevens was born, a former corporal in the German army named Adolph Hitler attempted to seize power in Weimar Germany by leading a gang of thugs to a Munich Beer Hall. Stevens served actively in World War II. World War freaking II! Guy flew planes against the Japs, and he's still serving in Congress!

To give you another idea of just how ancient he is, Stevens was a major player in the Alaska statehood movement. After a buddy got him a job as legislative counsel at the Department of the Interior of the EISENHOWER ADMINISTRATION!, his main job became to lobby for Alaskan statehood. I won't bore you with the details, but it was a pretty impressive operation, and the whole thing was run from Stevens' office at the Interior department. Nevermind that lobbying form the executive branch is a serious legal and ethical breech...

In case you're not familiar, Ted Stevens was the grand champion of the Bridge to Nowhere, who pitched a fit when it was suggested that 398 million dollars might be better spent on Hurricane Katrina relief than on a Golden Gate Bridge style pork barrel project connecting the mainland of the most sparsely populated state in the union to an island that nobody has ever heard of. Stevens, God bless him, was also the luminary who, while battling against network neutrality, delivered a staggeringly incoherent speech in which he helpfully explained that the internet was not "a big truck", but was instead a "series of tubes", thus launching one of the great internet memes. Thanks Ted. In the same speech, by the way, he complained that "an internet was sent by my staff", which was delayed by 5 days because of network congestion. Right.

To be fair, Stevens isn't completely without merit. He's a moderate on abortion and global warming, which is to say, he is an occasional believer in science. Sadly, however, his main business seems to be acting as a money funnel to his home state. He's pretty good at it, which isn't a crime in itself, but when there's that much free money sloshing around, there are bound to be problems. A bunch of his friends and former aides are under investigation for enriching themselves on Stevens' pork barrel projects. They got Stevens himself for $250,000 in home improvements that it looks like he never had to pay for.

I Shall Font You A Second Time

I hate to be a link blogging link blogger, but not many internet videos make me laugh out loud:

http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1823766

Sadly, my old friend Palatino is nowhere to be seen. I imagine a sequel in which Comic Sans is revealed to be their dark overlord.

When Morons Are Outlawed Only Outlaws Will Be Morons

I saw this in a parking garage this afternoon:


What exactly would be the point of using a pictorial symbol for something and then printing out in text what the symbol is supposed to represent? Doesn't that pretty much negate the entire point of using a symbol in the first place?

You heart you border collie? Great. You feel the need to memorialize that on your SUV? Fine. But pick a paradigm and stick with it.

NPR Takes You There

After a week and a half of coverage of the China earthquake, you still won't find any better reporting than Melissa Block's work for NPR on the first day. In some sense, you'd call it unprofessional, as Melissa's emotional reaction is palpable, and at times overshadows her reporting, but to the extent that good journalism makes you feel like you're actually there, Ms. Block was an excellent conduit.

Poor Reporting Begets Poor Reporting

I’m guessing that we’ll see this making the rounds of the Apple blogosphere in the next few days and weeks. Environmental advocacy group ClimateCounts.org has released a new report ranking, among other things, the environmental impact of a number of major electronics manufacturers. There are plenty of gritty details to pour over, but what’s going to end up getting reported is that IBM took the top spot with a score of 77, while Apple was ranked last with 11.

Now first, I applaud the effort. Even with all the attention that has been gained for environmental causes over the last few years, big companies still aren’t doing enough to reduce their footprint. Large corporations are slow to change, regardless, and the kind of top to bottom change of outlook that solid environmental awareness requires is especially difficult to inject into a corporate culture that is, by its nature, driven primarily by the bottom line. What progress has been made is due, in part, to the efforts of groups like ClimateCounts to raise awareness and put some pressure on corporations to clean up their act. But...

There are a couple of problems here. First, the scores are frequently subjective and are sometimes dead wrong. Take, for instance, Apple’s score on item number 11. ClimateCounts asks “Is there top level support for climate change action?” That’s pretty subjective, but they at least attempt to break it down, awarding one point if “Senior level executive or Board members designated as responsible for climate issues”, and awarding two points if “Clear, public articulation of company’s views on climate by CEO and/or top management.” I’ll leave aside, for the moment, the question of whether “public articulation” of a company’s position really makes that much difference to real-world environmental impact. Apple scores 0 points in this category, despite a very public, and widely reported open letter from the CEO that specifically addresses the company’s eco-related initiatives. Did they miss that one, or does it not count?

Second, the methodology is seriously flawed here. ClimateCounts uses publicly available information to formulate scores. Where information isn’t available, they simply assign a score of zero. Now, I understand the importance of open reporting to environmental verification, but to assume that there is no effort or action in a particular area just because there hasn’t been a public reporting of it is kind of like assuming that nobody in your office cleans their bathrooms just because they haven’t talked to you about it. The result is a profile by ClimateCounts that doesn’t rate the actual greenness of companies so much as it rates the ability of ClimateCounts to obtain information on their greenness. This is especially important with a company like Apple, where innovation is central to the culture and secrecy has evolved to protect poaching from competitors.

IBM scored 77 in the ClimateCounts report , Nokia 37 and Apple 11. Is Nokia really more than twice as environmentally friendly as Apple? Does anyone really think that Apple is seven times worse for the planet than IBM? No reasoned analysis would come to that conclusion, but some group made a report with numbers and issued it, and the reporting is going to be that Apple scored an abysmal 11 points and is terrible on the environment, when the truth is that Apple is terrible at transparency (except in its products) and terrible at reporting on the environment.

Wii Pii

See, normally you'd want to write this off as an internet hoax, but because it's from Japan, all bets are off.

Lights, Camera, Loss of Faith in Representative Democracy

Today is the unofficial start of baseball spring training in Florida and Arizona, but you’d never know it from the major media outlets. Today is all about Roger Clemens. I’m still going to refrain from direct commentary, but I found verbose blogger Joe Posnanski’s angle on yesterday’s hearings to be interesting. Though he covered a lot of ground (and he always does), his main focus was not on Clemens or McNamee, or even Andy Pettitte, but on the lawmakers who were questioning them. Joe included this particularly apt assessment of questioning by William Lacy Clay (D-Mo):

Ugh. He filled two suck-up roles in this proceedings — first he asked the obligatory, “Roger, what should we tell the kids,” question which did allow Clemens to get on his high horse and talk about how he has always taken very, very seriously the responsibility of being a role model for children, you know, except for that time he threw the bat at Mike Piazza or the time cursed out the umpire or threw the ball at Piazza’s head or the time he whined about carrying his own luggage or made that really hilarious remark about Asians during the World Baseball Classic or was popping Vioxx or whatever. Still, it was touching.

Posnanski points out that Clay followed up by asking what uniform Clemens was planning on wearing into the Hall of Fame. This is the quality of character you get in places like the Missouri 1st District, where elections are about as competitive as they are in Parador.

The whole incident reminded me that aside from Mark McGwire’s evasiveness and Raphael Palmiero’s finger wagging (which was only memorable in light of subsequent events), my lasting memory of the last time that ballplayers appeared before Congress was of just how dumb the Representatives sounded. Lots of grandstanding and posturing and softball questions. Yesterday was more of the same.

Come to think of it, my strongest memory of the Clarence Thomas hearings (salacious details about Coke cans aside) is the hazy blabbering of Howell Heflin and the clueless slurring cue card recitations of Strom Thurmond. I’m having trouble remembering the last time that there were widely televised congressional hearings where members of congress came out looking good. I’ve seen obscure hearings on C-SPAN and in person, and they were much more informed and productive that what we see when the whole world is watching. For the most part, these are really smart people, but they can’t stay away from television cameras to save themselves, and once people are performing for the cameras, something turns them stupid. Little wonder that the Supreme Court continues to exclude cameras from the courtroom under most circumstances.