It really is a shame that after such an ass-kicking, Tucker couldn’t have just looked the other way- but his article is absolutely missing the point.  It truly is a sad state of affairs when a marginal comedian hosting a fake news show actually asks the hard questions that Jim Cramer should have, and Tucker certainly should have back when he got his own dressing-down.  It’s not about Jon Stewart and his liberal bias – which he wears on his sleeve, and it’s not even remotely Jon blaming the recent financial meltdown on Jim Cramer personally (which of course he didn’t) – it’s the fact that supposedly objective journalists like Cramer were really in the tank for gasbags Bear-Stearns and AIG- KNOWING they were operating in the shady realms of finance, yet still softballed them on his show to pretend the sky wasn’t falling.  But Tucker misses the point entirely, and the entire article comes off as a whiny, revenge-based potshot.  Sad.

Tucker should really take a lesson from Jim Cramer, who at least had the sack to stand up and take his lumps like a man, admitting he could have done much better.  Denial really doesn’t suit you, Tucker.   But more importantly- read the comment threads at your own article, see what people are saying about you now, and face the facts that your 15 minutes of fame ended quite a while ago, when a comedian showed you how to do your own job.  You really should have left well enough alone.

A few charts have arisen which visualize the rather sobering truth here.

First, the Washington Post broke down how each candidate’s plan would play out across the gross income brackets in the US.
Secondly, Viveka Weiley provided a scaled version of that graph (shown below), reflecting the real weight of this distribution- i.e. with the size of each bracket drawn to scale in order to see how the cuts (and/or raises) really spread out across the entire spectrum. This graph is in my opinion the most accurate and telling, particularly when you note exactly where US median incomes fall on the scale (hint- it’s not in the high range).

Looking at how both Obama and McCain’s proposed tax plans pan out, it’s a very different story.  Obama is proposing tax cuts for 99% of the population, with the upper 1% income bracket (i.e. those making over $600k annually) footing the bill – which to me makes sense as they’re the ones profiting most from the economy. McCain’s graph, however, runs in reverse- granting his biggest tax cuts to that same abundantly-wealthy 1%, with the 60% of the country in the lower income brackets getting the shaft.

Now tax cuts should not be the measure of this election, there are a lot of other important issues to address – but this is a really sobering look at how our adopting McCain’s tax policy really would be like a third Bush term in that respect. The corporate fatcats and their cronies skate by with monstrous tax cuts, while the people in this country that scrape by on far, far less have to shoulder their tax burden.  The fact that the Republicans have been calling Obama an ‘out of touch elitist’ is  insultingly ironic given the contrast in their tax distribution plans.

I was about 85% in the Obama camp already, but add this to the disaster that is Sarah Palin (don’t even get me started), and the door just shut on McCain, at least for me.  Despite McCain’s ‘straight talk’ for change and reform, he’s really just spouting the same policy we’ve had to bear for the last 8 years.  Enough is enough.

(disclosure: For the record, given this information I would pay higher taxes in an Obama presidency, so there’s really no tax incentive for me to support him this election.  It’s just the right thing to do.  And if you wish to repost/use this graph, please respect Viveka’s licensing terms – just click the graph above to visit her original post and get details.)

I love my MT, but have to admit the dynamic/PHP nature of WordPress’ siren song has pulled me in for a closer look. Let’s see where this all goes?

Update: so far it seems OK, but I’m still getting random 404s/errors when clicking into individual post pages, and unfortunately the tags did not transfer, as I’d feared. 9 years of tagging down the drain is a bit hard to swallow, honestly- that may end up being a deal-breaker honestly. If you stumble across this site – and post – please feel free to bang around a bit, and let me know if you see any other weirdnesses (aside from the dismal default template I’ve got applied right now)?

Update: screw that- I’m testing out WordPress right now to see if it’ll work better for me.  So far, the import in WP 2.5 is working like a champ, and aside from losing my tags seems to have migrated everything pretty well.  We may be moving to WordPress in short order.

But now, they’ve gone and placed themselves strictly in asshat territory by deciding to finally go DRM-free with a ‘select’ group of their repertoire, and of course bypassing doing so on the iTunes Music Store (the #1 online music retailer), again, ostensibly out of spite for Jobs’ resistance to UMG’s intended ‘variable pricing’ for MP3s in favor of a flat rate across the board. Sure, a ‘variable pricing’ scheme for UMG lets them price-gouge consumers at will, but ignore that. What they’re doing is a disservice to their own artists- by ignoring the best venue and channel for their music in the DRM-free distribution models.

Edgar Bronfman Jr and Doug Morris- f@#k you and your merry band of thieves. My best wishes for a swift and agonizing demise to the UMG empire as a result of your mismanagement and idiocy. And of course, that you pull your collective heads out of said collective asses long enough to actually watch it coming. It’s been vicarous fun watching you scurry about trying to protect your paper empire for the last few years, but given your collossal stupidity over the last 12 months it’s high time for you to come down screaming in flames. I’ll bring marshmallows to roast and a long stick to poke you with.

Thanks, and my sincere apologies in advance for any strange behavior you may run across as I spruce up the ‘ol codebase.

Update – I’m now back to feature parity with my old installation, with the captcha gone from comments and the updated spam filter holding resiliency like a champ (knock wood) in it’s place. Expectations are that everything works as expected now, so please ping me if it does not, as I’m going to start updating individual features/templates one by one now. Thanks in advance.

I have no plans to move to the Mac platform for my personal use. That said, I have noticed that I’ve been recommending the machine to friends and neighbors when they want to know what kind of system they should buy.

I can see why the Mac is gaining market share, because the rationale for using one is simple. Do you want to deal with the agony of antivirus, firewall, antispyware, and other touchy software subsystems, many of which do not work well? Or do you want to boot Microsoft Word and write a document and be done with it?

Whoa. I’m stunned. Where’s the Mac-hatin’ Dvorak of old?

I tend to agree with Fake Steve in his post here – for a long time I’ve used the Dvorak Apple-bashings as a contrarian indicator – a false negative, so to speak – and considered anything he bashed as something I’d likely love. Now I’m all torn. What’s a Mac lover to do if all the Apple haters are drying up one-by-one?

Now I didn’t mind the CS3 icons after an initial adjustment period, but this may be taking it a bit too far… I can’t even guess at most of those applications in there.