OneMind

Open letter to Keith Olbermann of MSNBC “Countdown”:

My wife says your show is becoming trite compared to your newly arrived follow-up hostess, Rachel Maddow. She’s right.

Some advice:

First, stop using the same guys as “Worst Person in the World” candidates night after night. It’s boring.

Second, stop publicizing “Comedian Rush Limbaugh” and Bill O’Reilly. We know you guys hate each other’s guts. We just don’t care. We don’t listen to those guys. We listen to you. Stop telling us about them. It’s like “Inside Baseball” stuff and it’s not interesting.

Third, stop using comedians on your show in place of serious commentary. You overdo that bit. Once in a while is fine, especially if it’s George Carlin or someone of his talent. But week in and week out guys from VH1? Gimme a break.

We’re getting to the point where if we can only watch one of our evening political newscasts, it’s increasingly Rachel.

In my post earlier today about switching my PHP development environment back from Aptana to TextMate and Transmit, I made the observation that as far as I could tell, TextMate didn’t support remote projects.

I was wrong. And if I’d read the TextMate documentation more clearly, I’d have known I was wrong.

The fact that I couldn’t get TextMate to add a file opened via FTP client in a project window was a red herring. Rather than a simple FTP client, all I had to do was switch to a remote disk-mounting app. I fired up ExpanDrive and opened my project over that connection. Voila!

Very nice. So now it’s one program instead of two. I’m feeling a bit more comfortable.

As an ardent Leftie, I frequently find myself having to bite my tongue when it comes to criticizing Democratic political leaders who continually seek the center in an effort to be more broadly appealing and, in many cases, to keep their jobs. Very few politicians over the years have behaved in consistently liberal ways and those who have, have not been particularly successful nationally. As a nation, we seem to want to gravitate to a center, wobbling to either side from time to time in a fit of pique or a flirtation with experiment but never really wanting to engage the extremes of either side fully.

So when President Obama deviates from my solid-Left agenda, I am generally inclined to be quiet and remain deeply grateful for a thoughtful, intelligent and articulate President who really does seem to have the interests of the broadest possible swath of the American citizenry foremost in his mind. In recent days, however, President Obama has made some decisions that seem to me to be all but indefensible and that signal a need for us to be supremely vigilant in monitoring this White House.

I refer specifically to:

1. His decision to continue to deny prisoners at the notorious prison camp in Bagram, Afghanistan, the right to appeal their detention
2. His administration siding with the Bush Regime in seeking dismissal of lawsuits over millions and millions of missing and illegal White Hosue emails that my friend David Gewirtz has written a cogent and scary book about
3. His decision (which at least fulfills a campaign warning/promise) to increase troop strength in Afghanistan even though he spins it as part of a strategy that includes diplomacy for dealing with the most volatile region on the planet today

Each of these positions is contrary to the principles of liberals and the Democratic Party’s fundamental beliefs. Each of these involves principle more than policy. And in each of them, President Obama has not chosen the high road, the better ground, the difficult choice. I had come to expect that of him and therefore these decisions result in major disappointment on my part.

I have written my senators and my congressman and emailed the White House on these topics and I hope that in Congress, saner and more liberally oriented heads will prevail. Meanwhile, it is clear I can’t let this president simply rest on his laurels, powerful as they may already be.

Well, I’ve decided to abandon my experimental use of Aptana Studio for my PHP programming projects for the moment. I understand they plan a new release soon that may address some of my concerns, but for right now, it’s just not quite ready for my personal day-to-day usage.

I like the environment a lot. A good deal of it is well designed and clearly thought out. Coding can be very efficient. The PHP editor is first rate. Its performance is just fine. The problem is it has a few too many flaws for me to gain confidence in its use. Four in particular come to mind.

First, as I pointed out the other day, it occasionally hangs or crashes and ends up wiping out code files on the server completely. That can be disastrous. No development tool ought to be able to be delivered that has that capability. Safeguarding against that eventuality is critical. No tool is perfect, of course, but that is a huge flaw.

Second, the awkwardness of its synchronization process between a local repository and a server-based repository is disruptive to my coding practice which involves extremely frequent save-and-test steps. Open the file from the project, which is on my local drive. Edit the file. Save it. Sync it with the server version (a three- or four-step process). Wait. Close the sync window. Test it. Repeat. Just too cumbersome.

Third, I had at least two occasions last night where a change I’d made locally, saved locally and synced didn’t “take” for some reason. I carefully watched all of my steps three times, examining the files after each part of the process. And still the file on the server remained stubbornly unchanged. It wasn’t a permissions issue; I had successfully saved that same file many times.

Fourth, the inability (as far as I can tell, anyway) to tell Aptana which apps to use to edit which files is annoying at best. For example, in my app I use data stored in CSV files a good bit. Those files could be perfectly well edited right in Aptana Studio but every time I double-click one, I end up in the spreadsheet program that I use to create those files. Inconvenient and inefficient.

So I’m back to using Transmit and TextMate even though I am now spoiled by the PHP editor in Aptana and miss its programmer assists a lot already. I am more fluid and fluent with this approach and I’m sure I’ll get my work done faster. I wish TextMate allowed me to create and manage remote projects but as far as I can at least it doesn’t. I wish its PHP support were deeper but at least it handles most of the basics. And if I find a better stand-alone PHP editor, I can swap it into my process easily enough.

When the new Aptana Studio comes out, I’ll take another look because having a nicely integrated editing world would be nice but Aptana falls just far enough short to make it unproductive for me in its present state.

My buddy Clay Cotton, who has MS and one of the most cheerful attitudes on the planet, sent me an article from SF Gate advocating legalizing and taxing the hell out of marijuana as a way to deal with the state and possibly national fiscal crisis.

Cool idea, I say. I’ve long been an advocate of legalizing not just marijuana but a few other drugs that are certainly no more harmful than alcohol and that are illegal only for hysterically historical reasons having little or nothing to do with health or safety. For years I’ve supported the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP). If pot were not illegal, there have been times in my life when I’d have been a regular if infrequent user. Like most of you, I’ve tried pot. I liked it. I’ve reached an age where my life is mellow and lovely enough without it but I just don’t see any real harm in it beyond the sloth that arises from its overuse. But, as the SF Gate article points out, a six-pack of Dr. Pepper and six hours of TV will have the same effect if repeated daily.

The article is a good read. The idea is almost certainly worth trying. It won’t get a shot because our lawmakers are far too in the pockets of the lobbies interested in not allowing it. But think of the money we could raise. Quickly. And maybe you’ll get behind it, too. You don’t have to smoke it to benefit from it as a taxpayer.

Let’s light(en) up.

Continuing my exploration and use of Aptana Studio for PHP development in NOLOH, I’ve encountered a few problems that have tarnished what was rapidly becoming my favorite development tool in recent memory.

First, its support for FTP turns out to be problematic at best. And I mean “at best.” It turns out that creating a new file on the remote server via Aptana Studio works but crashes Studio in the process. Whether you actually attempt to create the file on the server or copy a file from your local drive to the server, you get the same result. A hang, then a long wait, then you finally give up and force-quit the application at which point you see an error message that says the file can’t be opened because it doesn’t exist.

Second, I had a near catastrophe this evening when Aptana Studio replaced one of my key files with an empty file of the same name. I have no idea how it happened. Only because Asher Snyder of NOLOH is so careful and helpful was I able to recover any of that file. And even then I lost a whole day’s work. Granting that I should have had a local backup copy of these files (I do now), there was, I thought, a good reason not to do that in this case. That reason was obviously erroneous. But a server slamming a file? Borderline unforgivable. We’ve been doing this for a while, folks.

After all of this happened, I took the time to learn how to create a project in Aptana that would connect and synchronize a local file set with one on the FTP server. I have that working now (though I am not confident it will actually keep me out of trouble) and Ill let you know as things develop.

So while I remain something of an Aptana fan, I’m a good bit more cautious and skeptical than I had been. I have about two weeks remaining on my trial and I’m told that Aptana will have a new version of the product out soon so I decided against replacing it with my old Transmit-to-TextMate connection. But if I have many more of these kinds of serious issues with it, I’ll have to revert.

Keith Olbermann sometimes — too often, in fact — picks on petty misstatements and missteps by conservatives as a way of branding the Right as stupid and ignorant. Tonight he singled out former Sen. Rick Santorum characterizing the Koran as being written in “Islamic.” Keith pointed out that the language is called Arabic, not Islamic, which is an adjective that describes the people or the theology of Muslims.

I was just commenting on that to my wife when Rachel Maddow came on and blew it way, way out of proportion. She had a guest — one of my favorites — Rev. Dr. C. Welton Gaddy of the Interfaith Alliance go on and on about it besides her own petty attack.

Both of them have to learn to pick on the Right for real things it does and says wrong. There’s no shortage of same. On any given evening, both Keith and Rachel trip over words, make obviously wrong statements and otherwise make themselves look less educated and informed than they clearly are.

Can we get serious?

Oh, and while we’re at it, Rachel. Please stop quoting stories from the Washington Times as the basis for an attack on the Right. The Times is a useless, bigoted right-wing rag for which no respectable journalist would go to work on a bet. Owned by Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the paper has one agenda: promote the ultra-conservative cause by any means at all, the truth (which they wouldn’t recognize anyway) be damned.

So our very own State Senator Abel Moldando, a Republican characterized by the media as a moderate, finally got enough clout for his decisive vote and the state has a budget after months of logjam in Sacramento.

Maldonado won concessions that had absolutely nothing to do with the budget but were connected to his allegedly moderate agenda in return for his “principled” opposition to the budget over the past few weeks and months. His “principles” clearly consist in grabbing as much personal power and attention as he can get along with promises to make changes in the election process and other situations for which he cannot demonstrate significant popular support.

It is now time for the public — which has been absolutely powerless throughout this embarrassing and demeaning experience — to clean house. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger today pointed out that the state legislature is composed largely of politicians on the extremes of both political parties. I’m all for principled positions on both sides of the aisle but when these nimrods hold the entire state hostage over demagoguery, they need to be called to account.

Every single legislator of either party and either house who voted consistently against passage of this budget over the past few weeks should be recalled. Now. Those who are up for re-election should be given a choice: sign a pledge to eliminate the ridiculous super-majority provision of the state’s Constitution or face strong and well-funded opposition.

In fact, I think it would be good social policy to ferret out and eliminate every single super-majority law in the state…perhaps the nation. Every single one of those laws is designed to do one thing: allow a stubborn, selfish and self-important minority to prevent the will of the majority from prevailing. It’s downright freaking unAmerican.

Bill Moyers’ Journal this week featured an interview with Simon Johnson of baselinescenario.com about what we need to do to clean up the economic mess in which we find ourselves. I’m impressed. This is a smart guy who makes eminent sense.

He sees the banking and financial industries in this country as constituting an oligarchy that has established rule by the elite, a rule that is so entrenched that they can afford to be arrogant and do such mind-numbingly insensitive and stupid things as give themselves a collective $18 billion in bonuses at a time when every one of them is taking taxpayer money and Federal Reserve relief that is the only thing keeping them in business at all.

I’m going to be following Johnson’s blog closely from now on. You might wish to do the same.

I posted the following review (slightly edited here for context) on amazon.com this morning after finally finishing Wally Lamb’s massive (700+ pages) novel “The Hour I First Believed.”

I have become something of a fan of Wally Lamb. I found both of his previous works to be impressive literary accomplishments containing gems of truth and wisdom in the tradition of the great writers in the history of world literature. I have compared him favorably to one of my favorite authors of all time, Fyodor Dostoevsky. When “The Hour I First Believed” was published, I was delighted to buy it in hard-cover and not wait for the paperback.

Reading Lamb is an adventure. In this case, the adventure was marked, as Washington Post reviewer Ron Charles said, by too many side trips, diversions and distractions that continually threatened to bury the main story line and message of this otherwise amazing novel. I got a slightly different twist on the main message from what I’ve read here and elsewhere. While the book is clearly “about” violence — human and natural — and the toll it takes, I found that its focus on what we euphemistically refer to as “collateral damage” was what was most moving and telling. The female protagonist, Mo Quirk, survives the Columbine massacre but pays a horrific psychological toll for having done so. Her husband and the narrator, Caelum Quirk, is a walking case study in collateral damage. The mixed-race couple he befriends are collateral damage victims of Katrina and the government neglect that storm revealed. On one level, this novel treats violence as an unavoidable outgrowth of social forces and all of its victims as collateral damage of some form or another, an outcome which is neither accurate nor entirely satisfying but which brings into stark relief the main discussion of the violence of our times.

There can be no doubt of Lamb’s writing skill. He handles the language deftly, even when he morphs his style to that of a fictional 19th Century woman crusader. And his storytelling abilities are quite strong and well-developed. The problem with this novel — and it is a problem that I suspect others will find a strength — is that he tells too many stories and fails to intertwine or connect them in reasonably meaningful ways. The book needed an editor who could say to a brilliant mind like Lamb’s, “This whole story goes nowhere and adds nothing. Let’s cut it.” If that saner notion had prevailed in two or three places, this would be Nobel Prize material.

As it is, it remains a thoroughly readable and enlightening exploration of human weakness, violence and the collateral damage that flows from the nature of our culture.