Saturday, October 15, 2005

Dish Washer Maker

Way cool. Yet oddly retro:

MIT Media Lab’s Counter Intelligence Group, which develops innovative kitchen designs, has created a machine that makes dishes on demand and recycles them after diners have finished a meal. The dishes are made from food-grade, nontoxic acrylic wafers, which are shaped into cups, bowls and plates when heated, then resume their original wafer shape when they are reheated and pressed.

Let’s have a Dem mid-term convention

Brew drew me to it. That the idea comes from the most trusted man in television news, Walter Cronkite, is very attractive:

A suggestion by which the Democratic Party could command the greatest public attention for its positive agenda: It could within weeks call an extraordinary midterm convention to draw up its platform.

The convention would not need to be expensive. The delegates could be those who attended the 2004 convention. Their meeting would be open to the public and of course the press.

The fact that Robert Reich suggested it four years ago only adds legitimacy. Scott Shields likes it. But Political Wire readers point out it’s been done before, in ‘78 and ‘82, to no great end.

Could the idea get traction? SneakySu has a poll. Right now of 3.058 respondents 84% say yes, 14% say more discussion. Only 1% say no.

Morris is a clown

Bill Clinton’s biggest mistake (and that’s saying something). He must really hate Hillary; or is this just his latest crass self-promotion:

There is one, and only one, figure in America who can stop Hillary Clinton: Secretary of State Condoleezza ‘Condi’ Rice. Among all of the possible Republican candidates for President, Condi alone could win the nomination, defeat Hillary and derail a third Clinton administration.

Condoleezza, in fact, poses a mortal threat to Hillary’s success. With her broad-based appeal to voters outside the traditional Republican base, Condi has the potential to cause enough major defections from the Democratic party to create serious erosion among Hillary’s core voters. She attracts the same female, African-American and Hispanic voters who embrace Hillary, while still maintaining the support of conventional Republicans.

I bet Morris would like a Rice and Rosen match-up too. Shame on me for that! Scott Shields talks sense:

There has been a lot of talk about a Condoleezza Rice run for President in 2008, much of it propagated by Dick Morris in an attempt to siphon female support from Hillary Clinton. Rice’s views on domestic issues (read: reproductive rights) are even less known than Miers’, Estrich points out, so the idea of Rice winning the nomination is “wishful thinking.”

Later reaction

Who’s the second source:

...And when the prosecutor in the case asked her to explain how “Valerie Flame” appeared in the same notebook she used in interviewing Mr. Libby, Ms. Miller said she “didn’t think” she heard it from him. “I said I believed the information came from another source [!], whom I could not recall,” [*] she wrote on Friday, recounting her testimony for an article that appears today…

...Ms. Miller is known for her expertise in intelligence and security issues and her ability to cultivate relationships with influential sources [!] in government…

...Mr. Bennett, who by now had carefully reviewed Ms. Miller’s extensive notes taken from two interviews with Mr. Libby, assured Mr. Fitzgerald that Ms. Miller had only one meaningful [!] source. Mr. Fitzgerald agreed to limit his questions to Mr. Libby and the Wilson matter…

* Arianna:

Who told Judy about Valerie Plame (or “Flame” as the name appears in Judy’s notes)? According to these two pieces, the name was immaculately conceived. “As I told Mr. Fitzgerald, I simply could not recall where that came from,” Miller writes.

When the Plame case broke open in July 2003, these notes were presumably no more than a few weeks old. But who had revealed Plame’s name was not seared on Miller’s mind?

This is as believable as Woodward and Bernstein not recalling who Deep Throat was…

Arianna’s on Reliable Sources tomorrow. I’ll be watching.

UPDATE: Kevin Drum’s free form speculation? It was Bolton. reads right to me.

Gut Reaction

Wolcott says the publisher and editor of the New York Times are guilty of negligence for this. I don’t know what they could have done, but whatever they did wasn’t enough:

“W.M.D. - I got it totally wrong,” she said. “The analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them - we were all wrong. If your sources are wrong, you are wrong. I did the best job that I could.”

In two interviews, Ms. Miller generally would not discuss her interactions with editors, elaborate on the written account of her grand jury testimony or allow reporters to review her notes.

[...]

Although criticism of Ms. Miller’s Iraq coverage mounted, Mr. Keller waited until May 26, 2004, to publish an editors’ note that criticized some of the paper’s coverage of the run-up to the war.

The note said the paper’s articles on unconventional weapons were credulous. It did not name any reporters and said the failures were institutional. Five of the six articles called into question were written or co-written by Ms. Miller.

Raines brought down by Blair, now Keller likely to be brought down by Miller. Common thread? Sulzberger. Blair was nothing. This is something. Arianna’s prophecy sounds more right-on every minute:

And this time, the anguish won’t be brought to an end by the kind of ritual bloodletting that followed the Jayson Blair fiasco. Sulzberger sacrificing Keller won’t do the trick. No one doubts for a moment that on all things Miller Keller has been acting as a loyal lieutenant to the publisher.

As a source familiar with the inner working of the Times told me in August: “Every big decision that comes out of the Times comes directly from the top. Nobody does anything there without Arthur Sulzberger’s approval. It’s the larger untold story in all of this—that he now runs the newsroom.”

Or as longtime Times observer Michael Wolff told me: “The distinction between the 3rd floor and the 14th floor used to be real. The editor was always in charge. That’s no longer the case. And it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that while Pinch has been running the paper, it just lurches from crisis to crisis. At some point you have to question the quality of his leadership.”

And that questioning has already begun, leading to the unspeakable being whispered among big media players. As one of them boldly asserted to me: “Mark my words, this will end with Sulzberger’s resignation.”

Oh, and, compare today’s post-testimony Judy’s tale to Matthew Cooper’s.

Idiocy

The DC government has a long history of it. This time, it was the police. They have a “discretionary” zero-tolerance policy for drinking and driving:

D.C. police have said that District law gives them the authority to arrest drivers with blood alcohol levels above .01.

[...]

The Washington Post this week published the story of Debra Bolton, a 45-year-old energy lawyer and single mother of two who was arrested in the District and spent five months fighting a charge of driving under the influence after drinking one glass of wine with dinner. She was stopped, handcuffed and put in a jail cell for several hours after she pulled out of a parking garage in Georgetown without realizing that an attendant had turned off her automatic headlight feature. Her blood alcohol level measured .03.

These laws, and I mean the .08 laws, are outrageous. They are a back door tax; revenue generators for cash starved local governments, and they’re rooted in a punitive shaming attitude that does nothing to solve the real problem.

Who among us can come out in favor of higher alcohol levels? I am! I want better technology, that takes into account women v men, fat v skinny, tolerant v not. For the record, I don’t drink. At all.

I also want the drinking age lowered to 18. It was 18 when I was 18 and I made it through.

Via Richard Gardner at OTB:

What we have here is a discretionary policy, we arrest those whom we wish to. Don’t worry about this new law, it is discretionary, we only arrest those we want to in our superior law enforcement hat, because we (law enforcement) are so much better than you (the proletariat).