Posted on by lhl
6/1 Yo La Tengo w/ Antietam Henry Fonda $15
6/4 Shins Wiltern $19
6/4 Tortoise + Autolux/Beans Henry Fonda $18.50
6/8, 8PM The Stills & See Ray Henry Fonda $17.50
6/9, 8PM The Fire Theft Troubadour $15
6/9 Franz Ferdinand Wiltern $18.50
6/10, 8PM Mission of Burma + Kinski Henry Fonda $22
6/11, 7:30 The Thermals and Things Explode, Low Skies Knitting Factory $10
6/17, 8PM Piebald, The Jealous Sound Troubadour $10
6/26, 8PM Mike Doughty’s Band Troubadour $15
6/26 Decemberists El Rey $15
Posted on by lhl

Fmr. Vice Pres. Al Gore Speech on Iraq Policy [Real] – Gore speaking at NYU MoveOn.org event. Transcript here.

Gore asks (and spends almost an hour discussing):

How did we get from September 12th , 2001, when a leading French newspaper ran a giant headline with the words “We Are All Americans Now” and when we had the good will and empathy of all the world — to the horror that we all felt in witnessing the pictures of torture in Abu Ghraib.

[this is superb] Here’s what Gore ends with:

President Bush offered a brief and half-hearted apology to the Arab world – but he should apologize to the American people for abandoning the Geneva Conventions. He also owes an apology to the U.S. Army for cavalierly sending them into harm’s way while ignoring the best advice of their commanders. Perhaps most importantly of all, he should apologize to all those men and women throughout our world who have held the ideal of the United States of America as a shining goal, to inspire their hopeful efforts to bring about justice under a rule of law in their own lands. Of course, the problem with all these legitimate requests is that a sincere apology requires an admission of error, a willingness to accept responsibility and to hold people accountable. And President Bush is not only unwilling to acknowledge error. He has thus far been unwilling to hold anyone in his administration accountable for the worst strategic and military miscalculations and mistakes in the history of the United States of America.

He is willing only to apologize for the alleged erratic behavior of a few low-ranking enlisted people, who he is scapegoating for his policy fiasco.

In December of 2000, even though I strongly disagreed with the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to order a halt to the counting of legally cast ballots, I saw it as my duty to reaffirm my own strong belief that we are a nation of laws and not only accept the decision, but do what I could to prevent efforts to delegitimize George Bush as he took the oath of office as president.

I did not at that moment imagine that Bush would, in the presidency that ensued, demonstrate utter contempt for the rule of law and work at every turn to frustrate accountability…

So today, I want to speak on behalf of those Americans who feel that President Bush has betrayed our nation’s trust, those who are horrified at what has been done in our name, and all those who want the rest of the world to know that we Americans see the abuses that occurred in the prisons of Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and secret locations as yet undisclosed as completely out of keeping with the character and basic nature of the American people and at odds with the principles on which America stands.

I believe we have a duty to hold President Bush accountable – and I believe we will. As Lincoln said at our time of greatest trial, “We – even we here – hold the power, and bear the responsibility.”

Posted on by lhl

Russ Feingold was the lone vote against the Patriot Act two years ago. He’s currently soliciting funds, apparently to fend off attacks on this and the rest of his voting record. Now, I don’t live in Wisconsin, and his Patriot Act vote and campaign finance reform bill are all I knew about him, but after doing some reading, he seems like a real stand-up guy. So yeah, I contributed some bucks. Consider doing the same if you think he’s done right.

  • Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, Council for a Livable World Candidate Fund

    Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold is a profile in courage who defied the political consensus during the Bush Administration’s rush to war. Feingold was the only United States Senator to vote against the USA Patriot Act after September 11 because he felt that many of the provisions threatened our constitutional civil liberties. Feingold was one of only 23 Senators to vote against authorizing the President to attack Iraq. When the Senate approved a large increase in the military budget in 2002 by a vote of 93 – 1, he was the lone holdout. He was the sole Senator willing to launch a lawsuit to block President Bush’s withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

  • Russ Feingold: Mr. Good Government

    Citizens Against Government Waste, a Washington, D.C.-based watchdog, rates Feingold higher than all other current Democratic senators over a career, except for one – the senior senator from Wisconsin, Herb Kohl.

  • ACLU Score Card
  • Public Citizen Score Card (hey, they use the same software, Capwiz)
  • More from his site:
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  • MailBucket – MailBucket is an experiment in alternative methods of email management. For now its only feature is a public email-to-RSS gateway: forward your email to slurp@mailbucket.org and have your news reader pick it up at mailbucket.org/slurp.xml (where you choose slurp, having checked that it’s not already in use) – wonder when Gmane‘s gonna add RSS
  • @lab – Group blog on Internet2 development projects at the University of Alabama Birmingham; using Drupal; A group blog/KB would be a really interesting thing to have at work. Sortable by person, category, etc…
  • Coca-Cola C2 – one of my co-worker’s fiance works at Coca-Cola. They’re doing a huge marketing campaign for C2, one part of it which involves giving sample 6-packs to employees to give to friends. We staged an ad-hoc taste test, and it’s pretty close to Coke. Much less harsh than Diet Coke
  • I took a few minutes yesterday night to write up a script to track my ‘billed’ time at work (reads off my iCal hours calendar). My dual goals are try to spend as much of my at-work time as possible actually working, and to work as close to a regular work week (officially 37.5hrs/wk at USC) as possible. As you can see, I’m not doing too well considering I’m past that w/ Friday still left to go:

  • The Effects of a Global Thermonuclear War
Posted on by lhl

Perl variable funkiness: default package scoping ($main::, $::) doesn’t play nice w/ strict (‘vars’). Lexically scoped variables don’t cross files, even if they should be within the same block (ie, if you use require() — doesn’t work the same as includes in PHP). This took longer than it should have to figure out what was going on. I’ve gotten too used to sane languages. 😉