Sleep Spent

Happy Halloween from Clarus.

I got increasingly annoyed by the amount of comment spam I was getting. Today my comment numbers topped 1000, and I knew I had to take action.

I needed a way to quickly ferret out and erase all the spam comments. The solution, which I found six months late, was MT-Blacklist. I have nothing but glowing good things to say about this program. Install was a breeze, running it was dead simple, and it successfully deleted 860 spam comments in a minute.

Behold, the power of regular expressions!

Way to turn Republican talking points back around! This is a brilliant set of pictures set up in the style of a clothing catalog.

Have a look

UPDATE: Larger images available at this address.

I didn’t think the debate was a slam-dunk in either direction. More of a slight Edwards win. Maybe I have some skewed opinion of how the average person thinks, but I knew some of Cheney’s lies and I didn’t feel Edwards addressed them rapidly or completely enough. Of course, when there are so many distortions, it can be tough not to let a few slip through the cracks.

I DID think that Gwen Ifill asked some terrible questions. Why couldn’t they use their running mates’ names? D-U-M-B. And maybe she was trying to make up for some supposed liberal bias (coming from PBS) by being tougher on Edwards, but it seemed like there were more “anti-Kerry” questions than there were “anti-Bush” questions.

So now that it’s over, I am more convinced than ever that Cheney is a deceptive man who should not be in office. (OK, so The Price Of Loyalty helped quite a bit on that score.) Case in point:

Source: The Kerry blog... not exactly a neutral source. But let’s hope, even so, that Kerry’s people wouldn’t stoop to photo-manipulation.

On the positive side, however, I was very pleased with the candidates’ conduct on the two gay marriage questions. Cheney clearly explained his position, I thought, and pinned the FMA on his boss, as he had every right to do. And Edwards, far from attacking Cheney on this point, praised the VP for his willingness to head an inclusive family.

I thought this was a bit of a turning point in the debate, actually—Cheney seemed to avoid taking Edwards to task at least once or twice afterwards when I felt he would have before. It was masterful the way Edwards handled that, and Cheney continued in that spirit, using his followup time simply to thank Edwards for his words.

Nicely done all around.

I went looking for The Plan after my dad complained he didn’t get a clear idea of what Kerry would do in Iraq from the first debate. Kerry’s website was, sadly, no more forthcoming.

But then I found the Kerry On Iraq War website, which concisely explained everything. The flip-flopping charges are explained, as is Kerry’s consistent position on Iraq and Saddam.

I’m more behind this candidate than ever. People voted for him in the primaries because they considered him the most “electable.” Let’s hope that sticks in the runup to the actual election.