Molly Ivins tells it like it is:

I’d like to make it clear to the people who run the Democratic Party that I will not support Hillary Clinton for president.

Enough. Enough triangulation, calculation and equivocation. Enough clever straddling, enough not offending anyone. This is not a Dick Morris election. Sen. Clinton is apparently incapable of taking a clear stand on the war in Iraq, and that alone is enough to disqualify her. Her failure to speak out on Terri Schiavo, not to mention that gross pandering on flag-burning, are just contemptible little dodges.

I could not agree more emphatically. There are a lot of other names you could add to that list as well. As I have repeatedly said, I have no idea what a successful political strategy for the Democratic party would look like, and I’ll say again that I don’t care. I only know for sure what appeals to me and what doesn’t. What doesn’t appeal to me is more of the same.

The one way conduit of links from here to Freedom to Tinker continues as I point you at an article pondering the economics of DRM.

MSN Search general manager Ken Moss reports via the MSN Search Weblog that MSN responded to the porn-related subpoena from the Department of Justice with aggregated data. No personally identifiable information was supplied to the government. I expect Yahoo and AOL to weigh in on what, exactly, they provided at some point as well.

I’ve been wanting to write more about lying memoirist James Frey, but I haven’t gotten around to it. In the meantime, some other people have written outstanding pieces on Frey, including the New York Observer’s Tom Socca, who says everything I would have said much more eloquently — and a lot of insightful things that didn’t occur to me as well. He even makes an interesting comparison of James Frey to George W Bush.

One thing I have noticed in this controversy is that opinions are divided very neatly along gender lines. Men seem to be much more outraged than the whole thing than women — I’m not sure exactly why. That’s not to say that women are excusing his lies, it’s just that they’re less likely to be worked up about it.

I’ve mentioned the truly boneheaded and potentially disastrous idea put forth by bandwidth providers to offer some kind of tiered access scheme to companies wherein they would not only offer connectivity but also the right to have their data delivered to the customer faster by paying more. Of course, as I explained, what this would really mean is slowing down everyone else’s traffic just a little bit. Anyway, Tim Bray has caught Washington Post writer Christopher Stern parroting the spurious arguments of the telcos.

I have to acknowledge that a Marginal Revolution article on fair trade coffee shaped my thinking on this matter. His explanation of how price discrimination works in the coffee market works perfectly well for bandwidth as well.

Universal Pictures has put up a Web site to get an idea how many people would pay to watch season 2 of Firefly. Obviously it’s good news to Firefly fans that the show isn’t just dead in the water, but it’s also an interesting experiment. Can a huge online fan base provide enough revenue to support a television series? I guess we’ll find out.

Update: In answer to a question in the comments, I said Universal Pictures put up the Web site based on the whois entry for fireflyseason2.com. It may turn out that I spoke too hastily — I’m not sure what “UP.BSE” means exactly, but I guess it has something to do with the brilliantscreen.com email addresses associated with the domain registration.

Ed Felten has posted a review of Google’s DRM scheme over at Freedom to Tinker. Bottom line:

Google’s DRM, like everybody else’s, can be defeated without great difficulty. Like all DRM schemes that rely on encrypting files, it is vulnerable to capture of the decrypted file, or to capture of the keying information, either of which will let an adversary rip the video into unprotected form. My guess is that Google’s decision to use DRM was driven by the insistence of copyright owners, not by any illusion that the DRM would stop infringement.

The article also includes a good explanation of the tradeoffs involved in building the kind of system Google has constructed.

Next time I need a lawn mower, I’m buying a Snapper.

Rebecca Blood has actually started using Movable Type to edit her blog and comments on how moving to a new tool may change how she works. I think that the degree to which the writing tool matters in terms of how one writes is almost always underestimated. Every time I made changes to my own blogging tool, it changed how I wrote, and moving to Movable Type changed things as well. The biggest change came when I inserted markers between each entry on my weblog — that freed me to start writing posts of more than one paragraph. What a bad day that was for my readers. I’m probably better when I’m more succinct.

For what it’s worth, I’m actually hating the design of the site right now. I have big plans — new host, new look and feel, etc etc but I am insanely busy these days. I’ll get to it.

The Bush administration tells us that adding a few dings and scratches to our civil liberties is an inevitable side effect of effectively fighting the war on terror(ism). But when you see that they’re just as willing to trash our privacy to fight the war on pornography, you realize that perhaps they don’t take our civil liberties as seriously as we do.