I recently finished reading “Pigs at the Trough” by Arianna Huffington.  An enjoyable and depressing read.  While she railed against the scandals of the early years of this closing decade (the book was published in 2003) there could be no clearer prediction for the intense economic troubles we are currently facing then those inequities and corrupting influences Huffington outlines in her book.

In the four, five years following her books publication it’s clear that things only became looser between wall street and Washington and the lackadaisical regulation became nearly non-existent.  Yet once more in the face of excessive and dangerous greed that impacted hundreds of millions of people we still have done little to reform the fat cats working environment.

How long will it be till we collapse for real, unable to prop up a rotten system of economic greed and political influence with tax payer bailouts?  Because of the complete failing of our political system as it pan handles to it’s corporate donors, of our public regulatory agencies equally infected with the virus of greed and the very organizations established to benefit shareholders seek only to enrich themselves at the expense of said shareholders, there maybe little to no tax payers left to fork over the money to perform said prop up!

The change has to come with campaign finance reform, yet what initiatives do get passed are worked on tirelessly by those who would seek to punch as many holes in the regulations until they are rendered as ineffective as no regulation at all.  I don’t have the answer to the cesspool of corporate corruption and political whoring other then pitchforks and torches.  Yet our corporate owned press has seen fit to inhibit, criticize, undermine any efforts of the public to make it’s voice known, in some instances it has actually championed the causes of those who would seek to bankrupt us for their own greed.

The sad irony is that those who have the power to actually influence and remove this system of corporate governance through career politicians are so divided and demoralized that the once proud American ideal of individualism and patriotism casting off the chains of oppressive rules has dissolved into a society of meek lambs who march to irrational drum beats.

That’s my rant for today.

So Lou Dobbs has left CNN.  I’m not sure if this is a greater victory for Corrupt Capitalism or the Celebration of News Media.  I’m guessing he’ll show up on fox, he is a conservative and fox has been getting hammered for it’s nutters lately.  Best to sign a veteran moderate nutter to fill out the roster.

I’ve been taking in the late shows more then usual lately and while I should really sit down and pull out a blog entry just on my observations of the three shows on NBC this one is just about an interesting moment during the guest segment on the Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien that I saw tonight. His guests, in case you missed it, were Michael Moore and Seth Macfarlane. Michael was on first and Conan asked him some good questions allowing Michael to expand on some items from his upcoming documentary that he hadn’t been given a chance to on other shows. It showed some good researching and a familiarity with the subject matter on Conan’s and the Tonight Show behind the scenes personnel. Oddly enough, after his segment was over, Moore stuck around. This is where the awkward moment starts.

If you’ve seen as much Family Guy as I have you undoubtedly know the formula where they cut away from the main plot to tell a half related or sometimes totally unrelated joke. Well in the episode I recall and the one recalled by Moore was when Peter of Family guy has a farting contest with Michael Moore in a public bathroom. Clearly just a joke about fat people, low brow but it hit it’s mark by evolving into a musical number composed of farts. Anyway the issue came up when Conan mentioned that Seth had Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh on the show and the two had actually come on to do their own voices and Michael remarked that he was in the show but was never asked to do his “voice”.  There was some brief joking as everybody in the studio seemed to recall the bit I described earlier before Conan pushed the interview forward.

Conan went on to say that everybody wants to be in show biz, regarding Seth’s comments about Rove and Rush, Michael replied (as near a quote as I can remember it) “Sure destroy the country then go into show biz.”. Michael looked agitated and Conan, I thought I heard remark under his breath, said something like “that guy…”. It was bizarre television to say the least. Now I’ve always thought Seth Macfarlane as a person is a little creepy, a little snobby and a little to trying to be hipster, though I must say I don’t know the guy at all it’s just my natural American attitude to judge celebrities on the tiny bits and pieces I’ve seen of them. But it wasn’t his fault here. He was caught in the middle of what looked like a bait by Conan. Have a couple guests with liberal attitudes on then ask one about a gig he worked on with conservatives to get a reaction from the first guest? I’m probably reading to much into it, but it sure was some interesting viewing, abet more then a little awkward.

To end, hind site is twenty twenty but never the less, I’d have some advice to Moore on how to handle that next time.  Perhaps that’s the reason Rove and Rush peruse their feverish rhetoric, because it provides them with that show biz feeling.  An opportunity at the real thing is likely impossible for them to turn down.  They want the spot light, in whatever form it comes.

In President Obama’s address to the joint session of congress he truly delivered an amazing, awe inspiring, goose bump ridden speech that was defiantly energizing.  In it he made several key points one of which I found quite compelling.  He placed blame on both sides of the aisle for the degridation of the debate but also included the media.  The devil’s in the details and despite covering many of key points that the press has been beating like a dead horse the various spokesmen, Biden among others, have slipped back into answering press questions that are already covered.

The White House and the supporting democrats in congress need to stay out of the press trap of dragging the debate back down to the minutia that makes their various commentary panels so entertaining.  He ended his speech by re-framing the debate as a moral one.  Yet the press, even public radio, has gone back to the stance of discussing a cherry picked list of details, most of which, the president already addressed in his speech.  The spokesmen need to turn it around.  Rather then listing off a litany of facts and figures and polls and supporting groups in the industry of healthcare when asked a question already addressed in the speech these supporters need to say simply:  “The President discussed that in his speech on Wednesday, the real issue here is the moral one.”  To re-frame the debate and the questioning of the press into what is correct and right and good, rather then highlighting false information campaigns and rude micky mouse representatives.  Stay on message or it’s going to get away from you again.

So I just started using Google’s new browser “Chrome” on my MSI netbook.  Just for kicks I went through the process of setting Microsoft’s “Bing” as my search engine.  I figured a little role reversal would be good for both of them.  While not as simple as sifting through a list of search engine bar add-ons as Mozilla’s Fire Fox web listings provide, a quick search is all you need to find the simple instructions you need to set it up.

Now I’m a FF user.  I’ve been one since the earliest release and I’m sure anybody out there who is a diehard FF user can tell you a large part of it is the extensive library of great plugins, add-ons and themes.  Google’s Chrome doesn’t have any of this fleshed out yet, granted it’s still in beta.  While there are themes and plug-ins out there (search-able even on Bing) they are all unofficial, unorganized and generally unappealing.  So for right now FF has a solid place on my main machines as the “default” browser.  On the netbook the position isn’t so certain.

Chrome is definitely better suited to dealing with the limiting factors involved with Netbooks.  The resolution on my MSI Wind is 1024×600, while the width is enough for nearly every web application the height can require a significant amount of finger work when reading an article or review.  To accommodate this limitation I have my Application Bar in Windows XP on auto hide granting me a few extra lines of text.  With FF and no tabs open I have four bars at the top, one of which (the standard MS Windows window bar is completely useless until I want to minimize or close), however with chrome it’s only three.  This comes out roughly to a 23px gain for Chrome.  When I open a new tab that number grows to five in FireFox but stays at three in Chrome and the pixel gain grows to roughly 50.  In addition to two more top bars with tabs open firefox also has a permanent bar on the bottom of the window.  This is quite handy for some plugins, particularly web development and debugging plugins, on the Netbook personal browsing environment this takes away an additional 23px.  This brings our total vertical screen space gain to roughly 72px giving you an inch or more of extra vertical viewing in most browsing situations.  Chrome does have a lower bar when a page requires you to scroll horizontally or when you are downloading files (no extra pop-up window) but the latter can be hidden.  For the Netbook screen environment Google’s Chrome has a significant advantage.

Another item that I find heavily effects the Netbook web experience is memory and resources.  How much space and power the browser is using.  With memory (RAM) FF is eating up 67mb with only my blog open, Chrome takes up a much more modest 23mb.  Now I do have two add-ons with FireFox, most notably and another big Netbook browsing factor is a flash blocker, the other is from AVG (which Chrome “seemingly” doesn’t require).  Here I’m a little conflicted.  Chrome is still in beta and it would be expected that add blockers and flash blockers would become common place soon and definitely after the “beta comes off”.  However the advantage of a flash blocker become obvious when you visit a site that uses allot of flash advertising in the vertical column spaces such as Tom’s Hardware Guide or Gamespot.  Because Flash is a processor intensive media, and Netbooks aren’t known for their processors, hitting one of these adds can slow your scroll to a painful crawl.  Having more available RAM doesn’t alleviate this.

SIDE NOTE: Nvidia’s new Ion platform for Netbooks, incorporating (relative to the platform) a robust gpu, and Adobe working with Nvidia to move towards Flash taking advantage of available GPU power may remove this concern, as may faster more powerful CPUs for Netbooks.  Presently it still remains a concern.

Firefox also has another thing going for it, customization.  You can pull in a number of different buttons (history, bookmarks, dividers, etc) onto your main url bar and move them around however you wish.  You can add a number of different search engines to your search bar and select them quickly.  You also get a divider in your bookmarks to better organize them.  These are all small cosmetic things but they add up to quite a bit of flexibility in personalizing the browser to your own way of using it.

All that said, for now at least I’m actually going with Google’s Chrome (beta) browser and the kicker was the extra inch vertical page space.  While the lack of a flash blocker is a significant annoyance, having the 4-6 extra lines of text, image, interface, whatever, is even harder to give up.

He’s a graduate from Harvard! Oh and the first black President of the United States!!  Get a clue ASU.  It’s not about him it’s about you.  This whole bs about not giving a degree because he hasn’t “accomplished a body of work” did you read the first line I just wrote?  Face it your just looking for free press by stirring up a little controversy.  Cheap tricks and a sad state of affairs for a half ass state school that fancies it’s self as something more.  No offense to the alumni of course.