Who says peace campaigners have no sense of humour?

Who says peace campaigners have no sense of humour?

Here are a few of the signs that appeared at the Washington Rally.

1) These colors don’t run the world.
2) One nation under surveillance.
3) How did our oil get under their sand?
4) Go Solar, not Ballistic.
5) Who would Jesus bomb?
6) Start Drafting SUV Drivers Now.
7) Don’t blame me, I voted with the majority.
8) Buck Fush!
9) It’s NUCLEAR, not NUCULAR, you idiot!
10) Patriots are idiots – Matriarchy Now!
11) Resistance is Fertile.
12) (Pictures of sheep carrying flags) Stop Mad Sheep Disease Now.
13) (UFW sign) Pick Fruit, not Fights.
14) (On a five year old) More Candy Less War.
15) Say can you see my democracy?
16) (With pictures of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld) Asses of Evil.
17) It’s the oil, stupid.
18) War is expensive, Peace is priceless.
19) Read between the Pipelines
20) No More BuShit.
21) Smart weapons, Dumb president.
22) The only thing we have to fear is Bush himself.
23) How many Lives per Gallon?
24) Peace Takes Brains
25) Anything War can do, Peace can do better.
26) Negotiation Not Annihilation.
27) Make touchdowns, not war – Go Raiders!
28) Another patriot for peace.
29) Oh Say can You Cease?
30) Star Spangled Bummer
31) Don’t Arm a Son of a Bush
32) Don’t do it George, Dad will still love you.
33) Power to the Peaceful
34) The last time we listened to a Bush, we wandered in the desert for 40 years.

plus these two:

Empty Warheads Found (pictures of Bush and Cheney below)
Drunken Frat Boy Drives Nation into Ditch. Uses War as Coverup

Thanks to Kathleen Shepherd for these. I particularly like the idea of drafting SUV drivers.

Would you buy a used lover from, well, a car salesman?

Would you buy a used lover from, well, a car salesman?

Well, apparently Edward VIII did. According to secret official documents which were released yesterday, at the same time that Wallis Simpson was pleasuring Eddie she was also having it off with one Guy Marcus Trundle, described by Inspector Knacker as “a motor engineer and a salesman and is said to be employed by the Ford Motor Company. It is not known what salary he gets … “. According to the tireless sleuths who dogged Wallis’s every move, “secret meetings are made when intimate relations take place”… Still, knowing what little we do about Edward’s infantile tastes, maybe Wallis needed some stronger medicine. But a car salesman! No wonder the Royals couldn’t stand the woman.

Dubya’s arithmetic

Dubya’s arithmetic

For my money, Paul Krugman of MIT is the best writer on economics currently appearing in the public prints. Here are the opening paras of his analysis of Dubya’s tax-cutting proposals:

“A liberal and a conservative were sitting in a bar. Then Bill Gates walked in. “Hey, we’re rich!” shouted the conservative. “The average person in this bar is now worth more than a billion!” “That’s silly,” replied the liberal. “Bill Gates raises the average, but that doesn’t make you or me any richer.” “Hah!” said the conservative, “I see you’re still practicing the discredited politics of class warfare.”

Am I caricaturing the debate? Alas, not at all. Whenever anyone points out the systematic tilt of the Bush administration toward the rich, the administration and its defenders immediately raise the cry of “class warfare.” Yet when you look at the arguments the administration actually makes on behalf of its policy, they are as silly as that of the conservative in the bar. The difference is that the administration knows exactly what it’s doing. …”

How low can you go?
Andrew Sullivan is outraged at how personal the vitriol against President Bush can be:

  I’m not saying that opposition to Bush and the war policy is illegitimate. Of course not. Much of it is important and helpful. But the coarseness of some of it is truly awful. In some conversations I’ve had with people who strongly oppose war, I keep hearing this personal demonization of Bush…

Those of us with memories that stretch back to the 1990s will remember that we first descended into the trenches of “coarseness” and “personal demonization” when Bill Clinton took office. Here at Salon we took years of unbelievably “coarse” and vicious e-mails from Clinton-haters: They dreamed up elaborate fates for us, the president and most particularly his wife, deranged fantasies of four-letter-word-driven vitriol, detailing sexually explicit and bloody scenarios that would make a drill sergeant blanch. The anti-Clintonites took the politics of “personal demonization” to incredible new lows in American life, and, fueled by the rise of the Net and right-wing media, made it the norm.

Two wrongs don’t make a right, and I’m sure that the fringe of the opposition to Bush uses rhetoric and imagery that goes overboard in unpleasant and unjustifiable ways. But it was the Clinton-haters — outraged first at a supposed financial scandal that never amounted to anything and then at a sex scandal involving consenting adults — who rolled us into this gutter. The people who are mad at Bush, by contrast are upset about, first, an election that was arguably stolen, and now a likely war that has yet to be justified. There may be no excuse for “personal demonization,” and I won’t defend it, but at least there’s some substance behind what Bush-haters are mad about. [Scott Rosenberg’s Links & Comment]

Guess who didn’t install the Microsoft security patch to combat SQL Slammer?

Guess who didn’t install the Microsoft security patch to combat SQL Slammer?

NYT story reads, in part: The frantic message came from the corporation’s information technology workers: “HELP NEEDED: If you have servers that are nonessential, please shut down.”

The computer system was under attack by a rogue program called SQL Slammer, which affected servers running Microsoft software that had not been updated with a patch — issued months ago — to fix the vulnerability. The worm hindered the operations of hundreds of thousands of computers, slowed Internet traffic and even disrupted thousands of A.T.M. terminals.

But this wasn’t happening at just any company. It was occurring at Microsoft itself. Some internal servers were affected, and service to users of the Microsoft Network was significantly slowed.

The disruption was particularly embarrassing for Microsoft, which has been preaching the gospel of secure computing. On Jan. 23, the company’s chairman, Bill Gates, sent a memo to customers describing progress in improving its products since he announced a “trustworthy computing” initiative a year ago.

“While we’ve accomplished a lot in the past year, there is still more to do,” he wrote. He cited the hundreds of millions spent to shore up Microsoft’s products, and its plans to deliver more secure products in the future. He also listed “things customers can do to help.” The first item was “stay up to date on patches.”

More on Slammer — Wired story.