Journalism is not accountable. We can’t impeach the NYT, or remove them from office in the next election. Yet they pretty much determine what we talk about, so much so that Wolf Blitzer on CNN actually negotiates with politicians we do elect, who are accountable.#
I've been catching up on the Chauvin trial every night on the news. The testimony is damning. He is obviously guilty of murder. But, the defense isn't trying to win all the votes of the jurors, they only have to convince one juror, and I'm pretty sure they'll do that.#
One reason Manchin might want to vote to cancel the filibuster is that it would maintain his power to veto non-budget Democratic legislation. With the filibuster in place the only power he has is to keep the filibuster. If he sticks with that he might as well switch parties now. However, if Biden and the Dems sold the voting plan that the Repubs will certainly block, if 90 percent of West Virginians supported the reforms, I would imagine that Manchin could change his mind. It all comes back to the same thing. The campaign never stops.#
- Just for fun I wrote a Drummer script that lists the earlierst Twitter users in an outline. #
- Here's the script:#
- var flfirst = true;#
- op.insert ("Early Twitter signups", down);#
- for (var i = 12; i < 25; i++) {#
- var name = twitter.getScreenname (i);#
- op.insert (name, (flfirst) ? "right" : "down");#
- flfirst = false;#
- }#
- op.go (left, 1);#
- The list it generates#
- How the script works#
- It inserts a headline in the current outline, down from the bar cursor headline, with the text "Early Twitter signups." #
- Then it loops of users whose ids are 12 to 24. I picked 12 because I had figured out from an earlier script that it was the first-listed user. And 24 is a random value I picked out of thin air. ;-)#
- For each user, it calls the Drummer verb twitter.getScreenname, which takes one parameter, the id of the user whose name you want. Then it inserts the name either to the right or down from the cursor depending on whether this is the first user we're inserting. That's how op.insert, an old friend from Frontier, works. #
- When it's done looping, it moves the cursor to the left, onto the "Early Twitter signups" headline we created. #
- It leaves the list expanded. #
- The killer feature#
- It's so humble you might actually miss it. #
- Even though the script makes a dozen asynchronous calls to Twitter, it's written as if it were synchronous. No weird code structures, you just write it as you think of it, and the system translates it into the complicated stuff, for you. Do I have to explain why this is good? Any time you can let the computer do the complex stuff for you is time you save, and errors you don't make. #
