It was not that long ago that Republicans were set to rule the country for the rest of foreseeable recorded history. The Democrats were being described with lots of adjectives that start with "i" - ineffectual, irrelevant, invisible. Even to think about politics was painful for me - I knew that somewhere out there, a lot of people were claiming a mandate and smugly dismantling all sorts of things that I thought were really good things, things like the Clean Air Act, stability in the Middle East, corporate and government accountability, the public school system, and proper investigative journalism. Nobody was doing much to stop them. It was a difficult time, and it was pretty hard to see how we'd ever see a progressive policy become reality again.

It was easy to be discouraged - the Republicans seemed so well organized. They owned the debate on everything. Things nobody cared about suddenly became battleground issues. It got to where you couldn't even talk about anything without using Republican terminology. How can you mount an effective defense of the separation of church and state when it means you're against family values? They were coming at us from the White House, from Congress, from the talk shows, from the pulpit, from the Justice Department… it felt insurmountable. How could we ever regain control in the face of that?

Of course, we despaired - but we forgot something. A little thing, but an important one - they were still wrong, and we were still right. And wrong-headed policies, no matter how much you plug them on talk shows, eventually fail. Tight media control and similar tactics only get you so far - in the end, if what you're selling turns out to be snake oil, you're going to be run out of town.

Today, the Democrats are organized and motivated. They have a few great candidates. They're showing some spine now that they run Congress (although not as much as they could - they eventually caved on the Iraq timetables, which was unfortunate). Republicans, on the other hand, are running scared. Their use of heavy-handed tactics during Bush's tenure means there's no one else to take the blame now that everything is falling apart - they owned it from the start, and they own it now. The corruption and cronyism hass resulted in a government that is so busy covering its transgressions that it can't even run itself properly. As Jeffrey Goldberg writes in the New Yorker, traditional conservatives (remember the small-government crowd?) are revolting against the Rove/Bush/DeLay camp. And their candidates? A cross-dresser, a Mormon, and a crazy old man walk into a bar…

It would almost be delightful to watch what's happening to the Republicans. Almost - if they hadn't done so much damage before they imploded. It's going to take years to fix it. We need to get the hell out of Iraq so our soldiers stop getting killed in someone else's civil war. We need to remove corporations and churches from the political process. We need to make the workings of the White House more transparent and restore journalistic independence. We need to strengthen, rather than dismantle, environmental regulations, and we need to work with the international community on global warming before it's too late. We need to invest in the public school system and start fixing it for real, so we can produce workers that can compete globally again.

It's going to be a lot of work just to get back to where we were in 2000. Hopefully we'll even be able to pursue an actual agenda as well.

Former deputy attorney general James Comey testified before the Senate on Tuesday about how he and FBI director Robert Mueller prevented Alberto Gonzales (then Bush's lawyer) and former White House chief of staff Andrew Card from ambushing then-AG John Ashcroft to get him to agree to Bush's original domestic wiretapping plan.

Card and Gonzales were on the way over to get his approval for the plan. What the plan was hasn't been revealed yet, but it's clear that it was scary. Comey and Mueller heard Bush's boys were coming, so they "rushed" over to warn Ashcroft, who was hospitalized at the time. That's right, he was sick and in the hospital. Comey and Mueller got there before Card and Gonzales, and when they arrived, Ashcroft refused to endorse the plan. As we now know, a later, more limited version of the plan was approved in collaboration with the Justice Department.

Judging from how scary the actual warrantless wiretapping program turned out to be, imagine if the original plan had gone through.

I couldn't help but notice the similarity here to the hospital scene in the The Godfather, where the ailing Vito Corleone's police guard has disappeared and Michael and Enzo stare down the hit squad sent by Sollozzo and Captain McCluskey. It's unnerving. I can almost imagine the film noir shadows, the darkened street, the trembling hand reaching for the jacket pocket…

When you'd stoop to taking advantage of a sick man to support your illegal activities, are you really any better than a common gangster? At least now the White House doesn't have to intimidate the attorney general to get what they want. They just have to ask.

We almost always watch TV shows online. There are fewer commercials, and the quality has improved a lot since the early days of online offerings. Lately, I heard that NBC would be revamping their online video player to better compete with ABC's. I've used both, and NBC's is a sad caricature of ABC's. Only a few shows are available (not including The Office, which is unforgivable), and the audio and video quality are terrible.

ABC's player, on the other hand, has many more shows plus some online exclusives. The video starts almost immediately, and although it is blurry at first, it transitions smoothly to a very sharp, large image after a few seconds. You quickly forget that the video is streaming at all.

There's only one problem with ABC's player. After every commercial break, you have to click a link to start the next segment. This is aggravating… haven't remote controls been around, oh, I don't know, since I was born? I'm lazy - once I get comfortable, I don't want to get up, dammit. Please don't make me click something every five minutes.

So it was good to hear about NBC stepping up to the plate - I'd like to see what they come up with. But this morning I see that ABC is (to mercilessly mix sports and gambling metaphors) upping the ante. They'll be streaming their shows in high def. That's a bold move, but it's pretty exciting… as long as they don't add more commercials, which is why I watch TV on the Internet to begin with. NBC will probably have to meet the challenge too… who knew providing free TV over the Internet could be so competitive?

This afternoon I tore myself away from work and took a walk. I don't normally take a lunch hour; I'd rather keep working. But today I grabbed the camera and headed out.

There was some live music playing across the street; it was Another Level, a local R&B band. They did a pretty kick-ass rendition of "Papa Was a Rolling Stone" when I stopped to listen (you can listen to it on their website).

After a while I headed up to Capitol Square. They had just finished remodeling the Capitol and the grounds; the Queen of England was there not too long ago. I ran into a co-worker on my way there, and we talked about college graduations and Virginia's environmental policy.

I took some photos on the Capitol grounds, and then headed up to the old Virginia State Library and City Hall buildings, which have both been replaced by larger edifices (the new State Library is beautiful; City Hall is, um, not). Then I headed back to work.

I think I should get out more. For more, check out my downtown Richmond photos on Flickr.

Why are there no services where you can pay to download a movie, burn it to DVD, and watch it on your TV? Ars Technica has a rundown of the problem. It seems that since there is no end-user license for CSS (DVD's copy-protection system), there's no way to legally allow end users to burn CSS-protected DVDs. Without protected DVDs, the movie studios won't buy into any scheme, for fear of people using the system for piracy.

I'm shaking my head as I write this. How ironic that CSS, a copy-protection system, is actually preventing copy-protection measures from being put into place. How ironic that CSS has been trivially circumventable for years, and that anyone who can put a DVD in a drive with the right side up can rip a movie.

These are the kinds of tangles you get into when you become a purveyor of DRM. Eventually, it's going to trip you up somewhere - content that protects itself and limits its own usage is by definition not portable, and DRM schemes can't keep up with people's ideas about how content can be consumed. And you lock yourself in to an ever-escalating battle to create the next generation of "uncrackable" DRM, which is in turn cracked in days, weeks, or months.

How sad that so much mental energy is spent on this dead-end technology. Once a DRM scheme is broken, it may as well not be there at all - it doesn't stop the real, financially damaging commercial piracy, and it doesn't stop the casual pirate either. All it does is artificially limit what the average consumer can do with "their own" content.

When you discover that your $1000 iTunes library won't play on the new shiny brown Zune you bought, you get frustrated. You haven't done anything wrong - you bought the music fair and square. So maybe you return the Zune to the store. Maybe you give up. And maybe, just maybe, you turn to piracy. And that's ironic.

I snapped this photo from my window the other day. I like the way the curves of the window glass, otherwise invisible to the naked eye, radically distort the reflection.

I love downtown. Tomorrow I'm going to grab my (agency's) camera and go take some more pictures.

Lately I've been sending my wife an email every morning with links to various news items, blog posts, or other things I've found.

It occurred to me that it would be nifty to store this somewhere and make it available on the blog. So I'm going to use Google Notebook Furl to keep track of the things I'm reading, and they'll automatically show up on the 'Bits' page.

Update: I sorta stopped doing this.

The New York Times has an opinion piece today about efforts to stop New York City investigators from documenting illegal gun purchases and shady dealers in Virginia. Because of our incredibly weak gun laws, dealers in my home state are "among the most notorious suppliers" of illegal guns to NYC.

The Virginia Assembly and our Attorney General don't care about New York City's gun problems, so long as the money from the gun lobby keeps flowing. Never mind that the investigation might actually prevent gun crime by exposing illegal gun deals. Governor Tim Kaine deserves credit for expanding the background check database in response to the Virginia Tech shootings, but he should do more to stand up to the legislature and the AG on gun issues. When a city in another state is doing more to enforce gun laws in our state than we are, there's only one word for it.

Shameful.

ThinkProgress has a statement from J.C. Watts criticizing Giuliani's position on abortion.

Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani has said that he is personally opposed to abortion, but still supports a woman's right to choose. Today, CNN political contributor J.C. Watts criticized Giuliani's position, stating, "That's the same as saying, I'm personally opposed to slavery, but if somebody else wants to own slaves, it's okay."

Ummmmm, no. It would be the same, if abortion were universally considered to be abhorrent, immoral, and entirely without a place in society. While it is certainly seen that way by many (J.C. Watts, no doubt, among them), there are millions of people that recognize that doctors must retain the right to perform abortions, and that women must retain the right to have them.

See, Giuliani is simply saying that while he has a position on the issue, he believes that he should not force his own opinion on other people. This is an entirely reasonable belief to hold, and it does not deserve to be blasted on cable TV. I personally find abortions incredibly sad, and I wish they were never necessary. But I would fight like hell to keep them legal, because I believe that to ban them is to infringe upon personal liberty, to invade privacy, and to impose deeply patronizing restrictions on women.

It's probably hard for a cable news pundit to imagine holding an opinion without relentlessly attempting to convince others of its exclusive correctness. But this is, in fact, normal. When Watts invokes slavery here, he is implying that abortion is as universally hated as slavery. The implication is false, and Watts knows it. Of course, the real purpose of his statement is to sensationalize Giuliani's position and cast him as some sort of bigot by association. This is called an "appeal to emotion," and it's actually not a good way to win a real argument.

I think Godwin's Law applies in this situation. Instead of invoking Hitler, Watts invokes the institution of slavery, but it's not hard to imagine a slavery-related corollary. Therefore, I declare that the debate is over, and that Watts has lost.

Update: In Giuliani's own words:

"Where people of good faith, people who are equally decent, equally moral and equally religious, when they come to different conclusions about this, about something so very very personal, I believe you have to respect their viewpoint," he said. "You give them a level of choice here."

George W. Bush has a lot of problems lately.

He's got a former administration official self-destructing messily at the World Bank. His attorney general, who presumably had to memorize the occasional piece of information when he was working his way through Harvard Law School, now seems completely unable to remember any conversation or meeting he has ever participated in. And the unprecedented cronyism and incompetence that characterizes all levels of his administration is becoming clearer to the public and to the media every week.

His war isn't going well. Soldiers are coming home in boxes, and there's no end in sight. He's long since lost support for the war effort at home. And it's becoming ever clearer that his legacy, such as it is, will certainly include decades of escalated sectarian violence in the Middle East. It's like he was reading the Road Map upside down.

His party is stumbling around trying to tag someone with the monumental task of bringing home a Republican victory in 2008. They know exactly who they want, but, among other things, there's the small matter of the 22nd amendment. So they have no clear vision, and meanwhile Bush has single-handedly reinvigorated the Democratic Party. It wasn't so long ago that there was no hope for progressives in this country - the Democrats were scattered and there was going to be a "permanent Republican majority." How sad for Bush that he is watching this grand vision crumble before his eyes.

So GWB has problems. And that's just the stuff that he would think is wrong. I could name a few more, but all of this makes me wonder. See, Bush is a guy, a human man. He's the president, but he's also a regular dude. How does he feel about all of this?

We see the swagger, the relentless arrogance unshakable confidence, the decisiveness. But with all of this truly heavy stuff going wrong around him, does a regular dude like Bush maybe, just maybe, have occasional, ahem, doubts about whether he's done the right thing?

Here's the way I see it: Bush is a religious man, or so I'm told. That means that he holds a certain worldview about a man's place in the universe (hint: we're special as a species, but individually we're insignificant). Given that insignificance, can a Christian man truly believe (as Bush would have us believe) that the decisions he makes are infallible? Can a man who believes he is a sinner actually maintain absolute confidence in his own ability to run a country?

I think he can't. And so I think that Bush is privately racked by doubt and guilt. He knows that lots and lots of people are dying because of him. He's not stupid or oblivious. He appears so because of the arrogance of his public persona. But I think he's hurting. I can't point to any particular episode; his public face is as polished as ever, the media machine freshly oiled and humming away. But the man has got to be coming apart on the inside.

I mentioned this to a co-worker and to my wife, and they disagree with me. My wife says that evangelical religions don't encourage doubt or existential questions like this, which I think is true. She says that he believes that he is doing God's work, and that that belief precludes all doubt and self-examination. I see her point, but I don't agree - you can't simply remove doubt from your mind like that, regardless of what religion you are. Even the stories about people who actually were supposed to be real prophets have them questioning themselves once in a while.

My co-worker says that he's spoiled - he's always been privileged and has always been able to avoid responsibility (Air National Guard, anyone?). She says that a life lived like that makes you callous, shallow, and, indeed, callow, and that Bush is simply unable to recognize the consequences of his actions. And I see her point, too.

But in the end I can't believe that religion or lifestyle can free you from normal human emotions like guilt and self-doubt. They don't keep you from soul-searching, or obsessing over hypotheticals, or feeling like you should clean up your own mess. I still think that, behind the Decider costume and underneath the Commander Guy multi-function wristwatch, there has to be some human emotion about all that has been lost.

I guess that makes me an optimist.