CNN: Military Sources Respond To McCain’s Escalation Remark With ‘Laughter Down The Line’

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Yesterday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) told radio host Bill Bennett that President Bush’s escalation is working. “There are neighborhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk through those neighborhoods, today,” he said. Today, when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked McCain why Americans still aren’t able to safely leave the Green Zone in Iraq, the senator replied that Blitzer was giving three-month-old talking points:


General Petraeus goes out there almost every day in an unarmed humvee. I think you oughta catch up. You are giving the old line of three months ago. I understand it. We certainly don’t get it through the filter of some of the media.


But according to CNN reporter Michael Ware, who has been in Iraq for four years, McCain is “way off base.” He stated, “To suggest that there’s any neighborhood in this city where an American can walk freely is beyond ludicrous. I’d love Sen. McCain to tell me where that neighborhood is and he and I can go for a stroll.”


Ware also rebutted McCain’s assertion that Petaeus travels in an unarmed humvee: “[I]n the hour since Sen. McCain’s said this, I’ve spoken to military sources and there was laughter down the line. I mean, certainly the general travels in a humvee. There’s multiple humvees around it, heavily armed.” Watch it:



Screenshot


(Crooks and Liars has more.)

(Via Think Progress.)

Web Services Coming To Twitter

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twitter.pngEarlier this year we talked about the usefulness of a simple command line to query multiple web services via a set syntax. Yubnub, one of the web services we discussed, does just that. Enter “Weather 90210″ into Yubnub and get the weather from Weather.com. Or query thousands of other services with that single command line.


A subtle upcoming change to Twitter’s API will allow this kind of functionality, too. Twitter, which is a kind of social network around sms/text messages, has a rapidly growing community of users that spend hours each day sending text messages about what they are doing or thinking. To post a message, a user simply texts the message they want to post to “40404.” Anyone who cares to follow the meanderings of another user can do so. All messages from people you follow can be seen on your Twitter page and, optionally, delivered to your mobile device via SMS.


A popular feature with Twitter is a “direct” message that you send to just a single friend. The syntax is simple - you type “d [username] [your message].”


Until now, Twitter’s API hasn’t allowed you to access those direct messages though. With today’s API addition, you can now retrieve Twitter direct messages. What does that mean? A lot, quite frankly.


Users can now send a command (”direct message”) to a username which is just a name for a web service like weather.com. For example, there could be a Twitter username “weather”, which I could send a Twitter message of “d weather 14202″ by text, web, or IM. The Twitter username “weather” could get this command (er, Twitter “direct message”) via the API, run a process on a web server to retrieve the current weather forecast for 14202, and send that as a direct message back to me ( i.e. “d TechCrunch Currently: Partly Cloudy, 50F. Tomorrow’s Forecast: AM Clouds/PM Sun. High: 55 Low: 40″).


Or there could be a username “score”, which you could send “d score Yankees”, to immediately request the score of the Yankees game. Or another example could be “d 411 Starbucks 14202″ to retrieve the phone number of the closest Starbucks to zip code 14202.


Currently, it costs a lot of money to launch a start-up in the SMS/mobile space — you have to license a shortcode monthly ($500-$1000/mo), pay a SMS gateway provider, and then pay anywhere from $0.03 - $0.05 per inbound or outbound text message. It adds up. But now, if a start-up chooses to use Twitter as a command line to their web service, it’s free (until Twitter starts charging for it).


As you can tell, the one thing that is kind of annoying is prefacing messages with “d”, but Twitter is internally discussing use of “@” as possibly becoming the equivalent of “d” — I hope they do this. Currently, people are using “@(username)” to publicly reply to other Twitter messages — which can be annoying if you’re a friend of a user that is replying to what another user said (and you don’t even know what was originally said).


The updated Twitter API code should be posting live by morning and accompanying API documentation should be posted by the end of today as well.

(Via TechCrunch.)

The Filter: Instant Playlists for iTunes

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The Filter

The Filter, an ‘instant playlist generator plugin for iTunes’, just launched today. This little plugin, backed by Peter Gabriel, is a great way to build playlists of music on the fly.


The Filter

You can create playlists in a number of ways, but what seems the most intuitive and accurate for me is selecting a few songs that you’re in the “mood” for and then hitting the “F” on The Filter. The Filter then immediately creates a playlist for you with around two dozen songs based on factors such as your listening habits and the listening habits of other users.


This thing is freakishly good at creating playlists you’d like. I’m not kidding.


Setup was a bit clunky at first and it still seems to have a couple of moments where it feels slow, but otherwise this really is one of my favorite new gadgets for consuming music.


Be sure to check out the screencast that covers a lot of the functionality of it.


Oh, and did I mention it’s free?

(Via The Apple Blog.)

Impeach Gonzales

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The ongoing pledges of support for Gonzales from the White House are mind-boggling in their lack of political sensibility, lending some credence to the idea that Bush might just be losing it. Any sane person would have to look at this situation and see Alberto Gonzales as an anchor.  That includes Republicans:

"We have to have an attorney general who is candid, truthful. And if we find out he has not been candid and truthful, that's a very compelling reason for him not to stay on," said Specter, R-Pa....

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Gonzales has been "wounded" by the firings. "He has said some things that just don't add up," said Graham, who also is on the Senate Judiciary panel. And Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., said the Justice Department has continually changed its story about the dismissals.

"You cannot have the nation's chief law enforcement officer with a cloud hanging over his credibility," Hagel said.

The White House certainly isn't going bow to pressure from the likes of these three, but given any rational observer can see how damaging this situation is, and that it's only getting worse, what could be going on in their heads? Only two possibilities come to mind, and I suspect only one is really the answer. First, Bush truly is so stubborn, so willful, and so stupid as to not see the danger that Gonzales poses to the already damaged presidency, and he isn't going to let his Fredo go. But what is much more likely, Karl Rove needs the distraction, the deflection that Gonzales provides. As long as he's catching much of the heat, the White House stays out of the focus.

But that game is unlikely to work for long. That Gonzales didn't cook up this whole scheme on his own is clear to everyone. As Froomkin writes:

It's no secret in Washington that Gonzales is not an autonomous player. His entire career has been as an enabler of George Bush. He does what he's told.... It's not as obvious who has been his minder since he became attorney general two years ago. But presumably either he or, more to the point, the staffers who write his speeches and draw up his talking points still get their marching orders directly from the West Wing.

And now, with his central talking point exposed as clumsy dishonesty, it's clear that whoever prepped Gonzales and sent him out to face the media was more focused on White House interests than on telling the truth.

Josh reinforces that:

This isn't a case where Alberto Gonzales has fallen short of the president's standards or bungled some process. This is the standard. The Attorney General has done and is doing precisely what is expected of him.... None of this is about Alberto Gonzales. This is about the president and the White House, which is where this entire plan was hatched. Gonzales was just following orders, executing the president's plans. This is about this president and this White House, which ... let's be honest, everyone on both sides of the aisle already knows.

Gonzales's refusal to resign and Bush's refusal to force it are part and parcel of the effort to protect Rove, Miers, and ultimately Bush. Which is precisely why Alberto Gonzales must be impeached. It reflects why Gonzales is not and never was fit to serve as Attorney General of the United States. He has never been and never will be anything other than Bush's lackey, even as it means the complete and total destruction of his professional life.

That he is willing to put protecting Bush ahead of protecting himself isn't the issue. That he is willing to put protecting Bush ahead of his duties as the chief law enforcement officer in the nation, ahead of the Constitution, ahead of the rule of law makes him unfit to serve.

(Via Daily Kos.)

Seth Roberts: Why College is Usually a Waste of Time

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According to Bryan Caplan, "our [higher] educational system is a big waste of time and money." He is writing a book about this -- yay! He attended college at the place I know the most about -- UC Berkeley. Here is why it is a big waste of time. Professors can only teach what they know. All they truly know how to do is how to be a professor. At a research university, that mainly involves doing research. Berkeley professors can teach how to do research, sure, but that has little to do with what most Berkeley students will do after they graduate. So a lot of time is wasted. It is most unfortunate to (a) require all students to imitate professors and (b) to rank them according to how well they do so.

In response to Caplan, Catherine Johnson says her undergraduate education was useful. But she became a nonfiction writer -- very close, in the big world of work, to what professors do. That's one of those exceptions that prove the rule.

I think practically everyone learns well if any of three conditions are met:

1. Apprenticeship. You want to be good at doing X, you will learn by watching someone skillful do X. Effortlessly.

2. Guru. If you think of so-and-so as a guru, you will learn from him or her. Effortlessly.

3. Stories. Stories teach values. Things associated with the hero become considered good and desirable; things associated with the villain become considered bad and to be avoided. Effortlessly.

Most university classes, however, fulfill none of these conditions. On the face of it, university classes teach; but crucial details are missing. It's like butter and margarine. Margarine is supposed to be as good as butter but it's not. There is a superficial resemblance but margarine lacks crucial vitamins that butter contains. Because university classes lack crucial elements, they are forced to use grades, tests, and fear of failure as motivation. These motivators don't work very well, as Alfie Kohn among others has pointed out. Sort of for the same reason Humpty-Dumpty couldn't be put back together again.

(Via The Huffington Post | Raw Feed.)