This appeared as a comment to my previous post about Dick Cheney and Mitch McConnell. In my heart I know he is right.

"They don't have the guts to actually do anything. They just want to make enough noise that they can hold it up as banner during the next election. Hopefully they can make enough noise to get everyone to forget that they caused this problem as much as anyone.

"The world economy is already trash, the US is already insolvent, the system now only runs on debt. Everyone knows this which is why no one calls our bluff.

"But this is only about getting re-elected so they can stuff their pockets more. No one is going to try and fix things because things are unfixable."

 5/13/2011; 6:55:27 PM.   .

There's so much to despise about Mitch McConnell, it's hard to know where to start. It's a little overwhelming. So let's start with something small.

One little savory sleight-of-hand...

Remember when Dick Cheney went on Meet the Press and said that the NY Times was reporting (that very morning) that there were WMDs in Iraq (they were importing "aluminum tubes" supposedly used in centrifuges to create nuclear weapons). The story was leaked to the Times by Cheney. And published just in time for him to quote them on NBC.

Yesterday Mitch McConnell cited Standard & Poor's lowering its rating of US debt as a sign we're headed for trouble. Even if you took their report seriously (the market didn't), isn't it funny that the reason they cite for the lower rating is the hostage-taking of the Republcans. I mean if McConnell would just STFU and act like he's the minority leader of the Senate for crying out loud, there wouldn't be a crisis and there would be nothing for S&P to get nervous about.

What the Republicans are doing shouldn't work. They are being so open about their willingness to sacrifice the world economy so they can gut Medicare. It's sooo insane. It's enough to cause another country to declare war, don't you think? Justifiably. I mean what's our excuse? Isn't the Republican Party part of the US? If the US government trashes the world economy, isn't the US responsible?

We expect we'll muddle through, I guess. What will we be expected to muddle through next year?

 5/13/2011; 1:10:20 PM.   .

A couple of thoughts.

1. I'm revitalizing my scripts that backup Flickr. I had them working a few years ago and then for some reason let them fall into disrepair. Not good. When I upload a picture to Flickr it should automatically be backed up within the hour to a local hard drive and to my S3 archive.

2. Whenever I start this thread (I've been doing it for years) someone asks about my Disqus comments. They're right. That's a Web 2.0 service. I don't have a backup of the comments people post.

If I wanted to switch I could probably manage it so that the old posts keep their Disqus comments and the new ones get the new brand. But that doesn't help in the event that Disqus shuts down, or adds a new term to the user agreement that I can't abide by, or is bought by a company I don't trust.

However, we would be totally covered if Disqus had the option to store the text of the comments in a structured format (XML or JSON, I don't care) in an S3 archive that I give it permission to write to. That way I don't have to do anything to be backed up. Such a simple idea, and what a marketing advantage they would offer over every other way of writing for the web.

Lock-in always becomes a big issue for users, in every cycle. We're approaching that point in Web 2.0. Imho.

 5/13/2011; 8:22:49 AM.   .