Stupid Internet Explorer!

Okay, I fixed the problem with all the sidebar content being pushed to the bottom of the page, which was due to (as usual) IE not rendering CSS correctly. Big surprise there. Now there appears to be a problem with the calendar style in IE. I probably will not get to that today, as I have a couple of work-related deadlines I need to meet.

I will get this problem fixed, but I would still take this opportunity to encourage any of you using IE as your primary browser to give Firefox a try. It really is quite a lot better, if for no other reason than that it is much more compliant with web standards and doesn’t require silly CSS hacks to fix layout problems.

Also on the schedule for this weekend is to get the issue with scrollbars (the lack thereof, actually) in the comment form fixed (thanks Matt).

Despite my sort-of promise last night that everything would be back to normal by morning, clearly, everything is not back to normal.

Or, perhaps a better way of thinking of it is that this is the new normal. Come to think of it, maybe I should start taking that approach to news and politics as well—”WHAT?! Since when is it okay for the government to tap peoples’ phones and search their homes without warrants?” “Relax, man… this is the new normal.”

Anyway, while I am not completely settled on the new stylesheet, I have to say that I kinda like it. The change is something I have been meaning to do for quite some time, as I was getting rather tired of the old skin, both seeing it on my site and seeing the same one on other sites. However, there were two obstacles holding me back: A) I hate fiddling with stylesheets and trying to figure out what looks good, and B) unlike WordPress, NucleusCMS doesn’t have a ton of skins available.

While this one did require a fair amount of fiddling, it seems relatively non-offensive. The one big thing I did not get around to changing last night was the banner image. Actually, I remain unconvinced by the whole banner section, but I would at least like to get rid of the boring green stripe. I may be changing other odds and ends as I run across them, so please let me know if you run into anything weird or broken. I have tested the site in Firefox and IE on XP, Firefox on Linux, and Safari on OS X. If you run into problems using Netscape or Opera, please take this opportunity to go get a real browser.

I’m playing around with alternate skins on the site this evening, so bear with me if formatting is screwed up, or if things don’t look the way they usually do.

All should most likely be back to normal come Friday morning.

Fortunately, most of my family, friends, and acquaintances know better at this point than to send me forwarded chain emails. However, in the interest of “you have to check this out,” I was sent one recently, and several other people I know have reported receiving it as well.

The gist of the email is that we can combat high gas prices by refusing to buy gas from certain gas stations (Mobil and Exxon) for one year. Similar to previous schemes asking people to not buy any gas at all for a day, this ploy purports to exploit the workings of the market against the profiteering oil companies. Buying no gas from these specific companies for a year, the author claims, will force them to keep lowering their prices:

For the rest of this year, DON’T purchase ANY gasoline from the two biggest companies (which now are one), EXXON and MOBIL. If they are not selling any gas, they will be inclined to reduce their prices. If they reduce their prices, the other companies will have to follow suit.

Presumably, we are to assume that this plan will work because it was concocted by a retired Coca Cola executive and/or one of his “engineer buddies who retired from Haliburton.”

I would point out that all oil companies buy and sell oil amongst themselves. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that we all boycotted Exxon and Mobil stations for a year (a scenario that is highly unlikely), these two companies would simply sell their oil to Shell, Citgo, and all the other oil companies and independent retailers.

What’s more, there would be increased demand in the meantime at these other outlets due to all the customers who would otherwise be buying from Exxon and Mobil suddenly descending on them. This increased demand would drive the price of gas up, not down, so the scheme advocated by the nameless originator of this email does not even fall into the “at least it can’t hurt” category.

While reading an analysis piece in this morning’s Washington Post about the recent staffing shake-ups at the White House, I ran across this little gem:

Despite his power, Rove has not been immune to criticism. Inside the White House, some aides were unhappy that he had sent McClellan out to say inaccurately that Rove had no involvement in the CIA leak case. Outside allies feared that Rove was so invested in the policies he had helped to shape and sell to Bush that he lost his ability to see where the administration had gotten off track.

“Say inaccurately”? In theory, I suppose that Rove did not technically send McClellan out to lie, so long as we assume that McClellan did not know that what Rove had told him was not, in fact, true. However, given that Rove himself knew at the time exactly what his role in the Plame leak was, a more clear way of stating the situation might be “some aides were unhappy that he [Rove] had lied to McClellan.”

I would have hoped that by this point, with Bush’s approval ratings hovering in the high thirties, news outlets such as the Post would start working up the nerve to call these sorts of affairs for what they are. However, apparently old habits die hard.

Despite my griping this past weekend about the lukewarm criticism of the administration’s war policies by a group of retired generals, the affair has not been without its entertaining moments. For instance, this exchange yesterday, which ended the President’s announcement of Rob Portman as the new head of the Office of Management and Budget:

Q Mr. President, you’ve made it a practice of not commenting on potential personnel moves –THE PRESIDENT: Of course I did.

Q — of calling it speculation –

THE PRESIDENT: You can understand why, because we’ve got people’s reputations at stake. And on Friday I stood up and said, I don’t appreciate the speculation about Don Rumsfeld; he’s doing a fine job, I strongly support him.

Q But what do you say to critics who believe that you’re ignoring the advice of retired generals, military commanders, who say that there needs to be a change?

THE PRESIDENT: I say, I listen to all voices, but mine is the final decision. And Don Rumsfeld is doing a fine job. He’s not only transforming the military, he’s fighting a war on terror. He’s helping us fight a war on terror. I have strong confidence in Don Rumsfeld. I hear the voices, and I read the front page, and I know the speculation. But I’m the decider, and I decide what is best. And what’s best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the Secretary of Defense.

I want to thank you all very much.

I say “ended” because immediately following the President’s “thank you all very much,” he storms off in something of a huff (you can watch the video courtesy of Crooks & Liars). This press conference was followed a few hours later by another featuring Rumsfeld himself. As described by this Times article, it was just one in a series of hastily-arranged public events this week designed to bolster the Defense Secretary’s image.

Pity the poor White House, having to devote so much time and energy to defending the beleaguered Rumsfeld from all this “wild speculation,” when what it would really rather be doing is trumpetting all of it successful policies and initiatives…

Oh wait. There aren’t any of those.

Every year around this time, the web becomes littered with Tax Day posts, wherein pundits and average citizens alike bemoan the complexity of the tax code, celebrate the size of their refunds, complain about government waste, and countless other variations on the “I just paid my taxes and now I want to talk about it” theme.

In that vein, I ran across this “Tax Day Vent Thread” at conservative site RedState.org, which quickly turned into a debate over the competing merits of the Flat Tax and the Fair Tax. The Flat Tax is a scheme whereby the current system of taxation would be replaced by a single tax rate paid by everyone. The “Fair Tax,” on the other hand, is a system that would involve, among other things, a national sales tax, the repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment, various tax rebates, and the elimination of taxes on corporations.

Judging from the ensuing discussion, both systems have their fans, while everyone agrees that the existing system of taxation is burdensome, overly complicated, and most likely a scheme by evil, greedy, and corrupt Democratic politicians to make average Americans’ lives difficult and to line their pockets with ill-gotten gains.

I have stated before my firm belief that while conservative cries for a simpler, more equitable tax code might sound great in principle, they would never work in practice. It is, after all, not the nature of the current tax code that makes it complicated in principle, but rather the application of the code in practice to a nation of 300 million people and countless businesses and other entities. I would wager that any tax code, no matter how simple it sounds when described on RedState.org or by the Limbaugh/Hannity/Boortz crowd, would become just as byzantine as the current system if it were actually put into practice.

The constant, hectoring calls from the Right for “tax reform” fit a larger pattern, though. Go down the list of conservative talking points (I’m not going to sully the term “policies” by applying it here), and one after the other, they pretty much all fall into the category of simple ideas that sound great in paper but do not actually fit with anything in the real world:

• People should be able to manage their own retirement funds, so let’s privatize Social Security.
• Illegal immigration is out of control, so let’s make it a felony and build a wall across the border with Mexico.
• Saddam Hussein is evil, so let’s invade Iraq and make them democratic.
• Iran is evil, so let’s invade them and make them democratic.
• Government regulation is bad, so let’s eliminate it.
• Abortion is evil, so let’s outlaw it.

Each makes for a good soundbyte, but try to put it into practice in a complicated world filled with shades of gray, and its limitations quickly become evident.

While perusing the paper this morning, my eye was attracted by one of the flashing, animated ads that the Times runs in the right-hand column, presumably to make up for cheapskates like myself who read but never subscribe.

The ad consisted of a middle-aged white guy dressed in a hoody and sideways baseball cap, sporting a diamond-encrusted necklace in the shape of a six-inch dollar sign (“bling”) and flashing what I assumed are supposed to be gang signs, but were actually heavy-metal-style devil horns. “It’s Kool Dad!” read the copy, “And he’s too cool to make any rules! R U A KOOL DAD? Click to find out!”

A combination of amusement and disgust prompted me to click through the ad, at which point I discovered that it was the work of the good people at the Office of National Drug Control Policy. I suppose it is somewhat original to paint parents who try to “relate” to their kids by “just being their friends” (and therefore, if we are to believe the government’s PR campaign, encourage rampant drug use) as painfully unhip.

However, I really think it’s best for everyone involved if no government or adult-run non-profit ever tries to depict any element of hip-hop culture, or, for that matter, anything else that it perceives to be “hip” or “cool.”

The latest trend in tepid criticism seems to be retired generals announcing that they disagree with the Secretary of Defense over his handling of the war in Iraq. So shaken is the military establishment by this wet-noodle-lashing that, according to this morning’s Times, the Pentagon has released a memo to other retired military brass and experts advising them how to respond to criticism of the Secretary, who is, presumably, closeted away somewhere with a severe case of the vapors.

Generally, one welcomes any admission from the Right that maybe the Bush administration is not endowed with godlike infallibility. However, it is difficult to get too excited about this particular affair.

Considering the lifetime of service these guys have put in, and the level to which military discipline and the chain of command have probably been ingrained in their lives, I suppose it is probably unreasonable to expect any greater level of criticism of the administration’s war-planning than that which we are seeing. Nonetheless, it would have been nice had they not waited until they were retired to start complaining, when it was too late for them to have any real impact on the situation.

It is also disappointing that they have aimed their criticism at Rumsfeld, rather than at the President. Since the downfall of Ken Lay, Bernie Ebbers, and countless other corporate icons, it seems the President’s boosters no longer want to advertise him as “the first CEO president.” However, Bush can clearly still delegate with the best of them, as evidenced by this exchange at a Q&A session earlier this week:

QUESTION: …Mr. President, how do you propose to bring private military contractors under a system of law?THE PRESIDENT: I appreciate that very much. I wasn’t kidding — (laughter.) I was going to — I pick up the phone and say, Mr. Secretary, I’ve got an interesting question. (Laughter.) This is what delegation — I don’t mean to be dodging the question, although it’s kind of convenient in this case, but never — (laughter.) I really will — I’m going to call the Secretary and say you brought up a very valid question, and what are we doing about it? That’s how I work. I’m — thanks. (Laughter.)

It’s worth watching the video just to get the full effect. Clearly, the “pile on Don” brigade is stopping a few steps short of the real problem.

I have been playing around with the newly-released Google Calendar, and so far, it’s pretty cool. While I can’t say how it compares to 30Boxes and other online calendaring apps, it is easy to use, seems to have a fairly reasonable batch of features (given that it’s free), and the design is straightforward and simple.

The idea of public shared calendars is nifty, and while Google is obviously not the company to come up with the idea, they have done a decent (although not stellar) job of implementing it. Since each calendar is tied to a single Google account, there really is not “group” calendar, as such—rather a user can choose to share her/his calendar with one or more friends. That works well enough if all my friends have Gmail accounts, but otherwise, now I am left with the prospect of hassling my mom to sign up with Google if I want her to be able to see my calendar.

Clearly, me hassling my mom (and everyone else I know, for that matter) to sign up with Google is in Google’s best interest. I most likely will not be doing that, since I do not generally like hassling people. However, if I did, what I would then end up with is a group of calendars I can look at, and, depending on what rights their owners have granted to me, maybe add events to.

Currently, I have one calendar besides my own personal one that I can see and add events to. Frankly, I alread find it confusing, and inevitably end up adding events to the wrong calendar. I can only imagine the consequences if I had more calendars to worry about.