The Al Franken Show, the flagship program on Air America Radio since the network’s inception, will end its landmark three year run February 14th. I was fond of the program, more for the host of well informed and articulate guests Al assembled, than for any other reason. They are who I will miss most. Tom Oliphant in particular. He’s great.

Listen to Al’s announcement here:

Al’s Announcement on AAR’s Future

Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows Vista, goes on sale today. I would buy it myself, but it is $250 and and I don’t have as much money as Bill Gates. Here is a link to a really good article about the launch, the software, and Microsoft’s place in the market.

No huge crowds for midnight Vista launch

We are at a point in the political cycle that I find incredibly draining. Bush has a little under two years left, and I think both he and I are ready for his presidency to end. His countless daily missteps and grand ideological errors have left us both damaged and exhausted. His attempts to repair the damage is weak and half hearted, and my attention is spotty at best.

All eyes are looking to November 2008, which is at this point 22 months or so away. Most of the media’s energy will be put into the presidential speculation business until then, and there will be a lot of aimless rumination until any real news materializes. Names will be cast around, people with no shot at the big chair will declare their hopeless candidacies, and no one will get anywhere for at least a year. It is, at the moment, a little tiring. At least organized sports have an off season. A time when lovers of the sport can rest and reflect, look back on past victories and plan for the future, so that when the next pre-season come around they can approach it with renewed vigor and optimism, ready for any challenges the upcoming battles might provide. There is no off season in politics.

I’ll check back in about four months to see how things are, but until then I must find something else to occupy myself, or else I will never make it to election night 2008.

It’s all about pacing.

It’s Friday, and that means another game. This week I give you HELL OF SAND. I can make no explanations of this game, and can only encourage you to check it out for yourself.

CLICK HERE TO PLAY

This just in: Dick Cheney is an Asshole. From CNN:

Cheney: Talk of blunders in Iraq is ‘hogwash’

Vice President Dick Cheney on Wednesday dismissed as “hogwash” the suggestion that blunders may have hurt the administration’s credibility on Iraq and led members of Congress on both sides of the aisle to question President Bush’s plan to send more troops to Baghdad.

In an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, conducted a day after Bush delivered his State of the Union address, Cheney was asked to respond to some Republicans in Congress who “are now seriously questioning your credibility, because of the blunders and the failures.”

To that, Cheney answered, “Wolf, Wolf, I simply don’t accept the premise of your question. I just think it’s hogwash.”

So Cheney doesn’t believe in the premise that there have been blunders in Iraq, and that those blunders may have hurt them politically. What does he think has been GOING ON for the last 8 months? What is HIS theory for why he and Bush haven’t seen consistant approval rating poll numbers above 40 in over two years? Does it frighten anyone else that a man so powerful can be so totally clueless and/or deluded? Does he think this weak attempt to obfuscate the issue will work? That would be a gross underestimation of the intelligence of the American People.

On the other hand, underestimating the American people’s intelligence has managed to get them elected twice, so maybe I’m not giving the strategy enough credit.

A full transcript of Cheney’s interview with Wolf Blitzer cam be found here.

Wow. The State of the Union address last night was a mess. Bush was a wreck, pale and old looking, finally showing the physical stress of the world’s toughest job. Stress that hadn’t come from the trials of leadership, which he wouldn’t know anything about, but from the collapse of his own house of cards. It was the face of a man who has made his bed, lied a while in it, and isn’t getting a very good night’s sleep.

Bush took the dais and tried to lighten the mood by kissing Nancy Pelosi’s ass, going on and on about what a pleasure it was to call her “Madam Speaker”, but the speech itself was whiny and lacked energy. He delivered his new policy proposals as if he didn’t believe in them himself, which he probably doesn’t. When not obligatorily plodding through the paces of his new domestic platform like a high school senior mumbling through a hastily prepared book report, he was marching out the golden oldies of his glory years: Terrorism, 911, Vigilance, Iraq Is Center of The War On Terror, We have Accomplished Much But Nevertheless Be Very Very Afraid, etc, but his heart wasn’t in it. Global terrorism is an issue that is profoundly important, but is one that has been hammered so many times by the President, for so many disingenuous reasons, that his words ring hollow. He has given the same speech so many times that even he looked bored by it, and nobody believes him anymore.

The strangest part came at the end. Everything was trucking along normally. Bush was patting himself on the back about giving money to Africa, (as part of a plan that funnels much of the money to faith based organizations for use in abstinence only sexual prevention programs, though he didn’t mention that part), and everyone was bored and ready go. All of a sudden, for no discernible reason, Bush starts rattling off the biographies of the people sitting with his wife, an African born NBA all star, the lady that founded Baby Einstein, a guy who saved the life of a man who had fallen in front of a subway train, and a decorated war hero. I kept waiting for the thread, the central theme that tied these admittedly brave and/or successful individuals into the people’s business, but it never came. It was just sort of a list of people more valuable and philanthropic than the President. Strange moment.

All in all it was the worst State of the Union performance by this President. It was so bad that I almost would have felt sorry for him, if I didn’t know that he was such a terrible human being and that it was his own questionable, self interested and irresponsible judgment that had brought him to this sad, sorry condition. A rabid dog is still dangerous, even when dead.

Have you ever woken up and known, KNOWN, that you were going to have a bad day? Bush must feel like that today. His war is an horrifically unpopular shambles and has entirely consumed his presidency. His inability to effectively lead or even to adequately respond to the failures of that leadership have been partially responsible for his party’s loss of power, and he has been further weakened as a result. His public perception has gone from one of a strong wartime leader, to a mediocre Nixon/Johnson/Harding style legacy of corruption, ineffectual and irresponsible leadership, intellectual laziness, arrogance and, when confronted with these realities, pathetic defensive posturing. To wake up to all that on the morning of your State Of The Union address, the first you will give to a completely Democratic Congress, must be hard.

But to also see this:

Poll: Bush Approval Rating At New Low

Mr. Bush’s overall approval rating has fallen to just 28 percent, a new low, while more than twice as many (64 percent) disapprove of the way he’s handling his job.

Two-thirds of Americans remain opposed to the president’s plan for sending more than 20,000 additional U.S. troops to Iraq — roughly the same number as after Mr. Bush announced the plan. And 72 percent believe he should seek congressional approval for the troop increase.

That can’t help his morale. Especially since his address is to focus largely on domestic issues, onces his has been notoriously unsuccessful at selling, instead of Iraq, which is pretty much all anybody wants to hear him talk about.

The most recent Smoke Screen of the Moment will be twofold. First, he will call for a 20% reduction in Gasoline consumption, stressing tightened fuel standards for automobile manufacturers and will do a little more half-assed cheerleading for the hybrid car, both things he should have done years ago, neither of which he will actually do.

Next he will trot out this little nugget, which I will leave to Jim Rutenberg and Robert Pear of the NY Times to explain in their brilliant article. (italics mine):

Among Mr. Bush’s proposals would be a plan to help states provide health care coverage to people who lack insurance by diverting federal aid from hospitals, especially public institutions. The provision is likely to draw loud criticism from municipalities across the nation and will significantly affect the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, the nation’s largest municipal health care system.

The initial response to Mr. Bush’s health care plans has not been positive, on Capitol Hill or among constituencies including employers and labor unions.

Here is my favorite bit, it’s long but totally worth it:

This weekend, the administration sketched out a proposal under which people whose health care programs exceed a certain value would face a higher tax bill, with the revenue going to tax incentives to encourage the purchase of health coverage by lower-income people.

Labor leaders were outspoken in opposing the plan. “This is a wrongheaded, crazy proposal,” said Gerald M. Shea, assistant to the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. “It would throw into turmoil the employment-based system of health insurance, and it would impose a new tax on the middle class.”

Several public health officials reacted with alarm to Mr. Bush’s plan to encourage states to take Medicaid money now earmarked for public hospitals and use it for state programs to cover the uninsured. The Bush administration proposes cutting Medicaid payments to public hospitals and other “safety net” providers by $3.9 billion over the next five years. Preliminary estimates suggest that 40 percent of the savings would come at the expense of the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, which operates 11 hospitals, 4 nursing homes and more than 80 community clinics.

Kenneth E. Raske, president of the Greater New York Hospital Association, called the proposal “an absolute disaster for New York.”

Deborah Bachrach, a deputy commissioner in the New York State Health Department, said it would affect hospitals “that serve some of the lowest-income, most vulnerable patients.”

Whatever. He will never, ever, get this passed. This is, like I said, smoke screen. It exists only to give the press something to talk about for a news cycle or two, other than the nightmarish situation in Iraq,and Bush’s upcoming, wildly unpopular Surge. The theme of the speech, in the words of White House Council Dan Bartlett, will be “divided government does not mean we cannot govern.”

No explanation is given for Bush’s sudden interest in governing, though in my opinion the hour is a little late. Why start now?

What do you know about the Vatican? I know very little. I know the pope lives there. I know it is the smallest country in the world. I know that it is the only country completely surrounded by another country, in this case Italy. All pretty dry facts. What I didn’t know was this:

Vatican City has the largest crime rate on Earth.

492 people live in Vatican city and in 2006 there were 341 civil and 486 criminal cases. A pretty staggering figure. This article explains the number this way:

[The Vatican's attorney general Nicola Picardi] did say that most criminal cases were matters of pickpocketing or purse-snatching. The rest amounted to other petty crimes like fraud and forgery — committed not by kleptomaniacal nuns but by a handful of black sheep among the 18 million pilgrims and tourists who visit St. Peter’s Cathedral, St. Peter’s Square and the Vatican Museums every year. About 90 percent of these crimes go unpunished, which is not a measure of Christian mercy but a sign of the perpetrators’ favorite method of escape. They can break for the border — a few meters away — to Italy.

Still though, watch your ass. The pope has a tough neighborhood.

Video games, as it turns out, will not rot your brain. Quite the contrary. From Reuters (Abridged):

Video game playing may fulfill innate human need

Playing video games can satisfy deep psychological needs and, at least in the short term, improve people’s well-being, new research shows.

The more a game fulfilled a player’s sense of independence, achievement and connectedness to others, the more likely he or she was to keep playing, Dr. Scott Rigby of Immersyve, a Florida-based virtual environment think tank, and colleagues from the University of Rochester in New York found. And the more fully a player’s needs were satisfied, the better he felt after playing.

“We think this is really one of the first validated models of what is going on psychologically when people are playing video games,” Rigby told Reuters Health in an interview. To date, he noted, research on video games has focused on their potentially harmful effects, such as promoting social isolation, addiction, and violence.

“Video games we think have tremendous potential to impact people, particularly today’s video games which are incredibly rich and complex,” Rigby said. “This creates very fertile ground psychologically.”

Mastering challenges in video games can be a healthy way of coping when opportunities for feeling independent or competent are scarce in the real world, he argued.

“Video games in some ways are very good at satisfying these psychological needs,” Rigby noted. “Often times real life is not as clear…real life often can make you feel ineffective.”

For this reason, as a public service, I bring you Line Rider. I can’t host it here, by request of the author, but go check it out anyway. You draw a line and a guy sleds down it. Awesome.

During Monday night’s telecast of the Golden Globes, Sacha Baron Cohen won an award for his portrayal of Borat, in the supposedly hilarious Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. I haven’t seen Borat, and so cannot comment on it’s contents, but I do know that he gave one of the funniest acceptance speeches I have ever seen.

It can be found here, courtesy of Google Video. Go look at it now, as the Dick Clark Stormtroopers have already gotten it taken down from You Tube.