This looks useful. PureText is a free tool that removes RTF cruft (fonts, etc.) from stuff in your clipboard.
I can already do that via the wonderful wonderful Clipmate, but PureText looks as if it takes even fewer keystrokes.
Spotted via Lifehacker just before I was about to stop reading it on grounds of obviousness.
Susan Crawford has been having way too much fun. (Note: I had to open IE to view it.)
The Frederick K. Cox International Law Center at Case-Western has an enthusiastic publicist.
To promote a new blog Case-Western are running, the publicist compiled a list of law professor emails, put them into mailing list software, and sent out a long email…that amounts to spam. Every colleague I’ve asked so far seems to have received it — it didn’t, for example, just go to bloggers (who might, I suppose, be considered fair game for such things). Like many spams, it came from mailing list software, described itself as a mailing list. Like all mail from well-behaved mailing lists, it included both header and text information about how to get off the mailing list.
Trouble is, smart users know you should never click on the opt-out info, it just encourages the spammers.
I wonder if the very fine people associated with this project — which I am purposefully not naming or linking to in order to spare them the shame, and especially to avoid creating another link that could be cited as a success metric — are aware of the ill will likely to be created by this form of promotion.
The The Carpetbagger Report notes that the GOP has scored what I like to call a sleaze hatrick:
The Republican White House is under a criminal investigation.
The Republican House leader is under a criminal investigation.
And as of this week, the Republican Senate leader is under a criminal investigation.
If this report is true — Bush plea for cash to rebuild Iraq raises $600 — it certainly suggests that the Bush family is not leading by example. You would think that somewhere they could find a four-figure sum to donate to this cause for which GW is shilling?
Related post: Just Wondering. And, AFAIK, we still don’t know how much if anything the Bush family has given to hurricane relief.
In the wake of Yet Another Torture Allegation (YATA), this time that soldiers in the 82nd Airborne were torturing Iraqis for the fun of it (and — more seriously — that senior officers refused to investigate when put on notice by a junior officer) Senator John McCain, himself a victim of vicious torture at the hands of the North Vietnamese, a conservative Republican Senator with unique moral authority to speak out against this evil, and a man who so far has said remarkably little on the subject, speaks.
And pretty much all he can bring himself to say is Prisoner Abuse Hurts U.S. Image:
Sen. John McCain said Sunday that abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers, alleged anew in a report and under investigation again by the Army, is hurting the nation’s image abroad.
OK, yes, he also said,
“We’ve got to make it clear to the world that American doesn’t do it. It’s not about prisoners. It’s about us,” he said.
…but if the AP is to be trusted, that’s in the context of our image, not any moral imperative.
McCain is a co-author of a bill that seeks to put greater limits on torture by our armed forces, but carefully avoids making the prohibition apply to the CIA’s world-wide torture centers, and also fails to address the CIA’s organized complicity with foreign torturers.
McCain’s near-silence on this issue is highly likely to be related to his Presidential ambitions in 2008 — ambitions that would be severely damaged by seeming to undercut a GOP president on a military issue, not to mention any hint of being “soft on terror”.
It is hard to accuse a man who obviously displayed great physical and moral courage as a young man of being a moral coward now that he’s considerably older. But there it is.
This man does not deserve to be President.
Neither, of course, does the current occupant of the White House. That man is not only presiding over this moral atrocity, but also over the conversion of the doctrine of military command responsibility into a doctrine of corporate responsibility diffusion in which executives seek personal deniability while assuring themselves that no one is to blame.
Jotwell Blenderlaw