Anti-War Activists Get their Act Together

With Cyndi Sheehan getting tons of media in Crawford and ANSWER and United for Peace playing nice for their little rally in D.C. at the end of the month (complete with a free concert I’m looking forward to), it seems things are finally coming together.

This Post article from today’s paper seems like a good overview of what’s going on in Crawford.

Conservatives Planning March on Washington

The website RightMarch.com is planning a protest to support John Roberts in September, on the date when his hearing is scheduled to begin:

RightMarch.com is now a leading sponsor of this HUGE counter-protest, which will take place on September 6, 7, 8 and 9, 2005 in our nation’s capital. …

All of these hundreds of far-left, out-of-the-mainstream liberals will be protesting in and around the U.S. Capitol Building during the Senate confirmation hearings on Judge Roberts… but they made a critical mistake. They failed to secure the MAIN area in front of the Senate building along Constitution Avenue where all the media will be, and OUR people now have a permit for the ENTIRE LENGTH of sidewalk there, from corner to corner! Their “Coalition of the Far Left” will be confronted by an entire block of peaceful, hard-working, patriotic Americans holding up various signs and banners promoting a TRULY “fair and independent judiciary” and denouncing the radical leftists’ attempts to smear Judge Roberts, along with their demands for a liberal ACTIVIST court.

When similar protests occurred over the future of the Senate filibuster last spring, the conservatives’ rally (organized through FreeRepublic.com) was quite pathetic, whereas our rally went rather well.

i500 Update

Since I told you I purchased a Samsung i500 cell phone I’ve had a couple weeks to try it out. Here’s what I’ve discovered:

• It’s a tri-band phone, meaning it works on Sprint’s network, but also the other carriers when Sprint is not available - at least Verizon for sure, but possibly others as well, in addition to supporting analog calls. This means that I can make calls on the Metro - even though I have Sprint service (Only Verizon has service in the tunnels). My sprint plan includes all roaming, so it’s for no extra charge.
• Installing a number of Palm applications - including a graphics application and Omniremote - causes the entire OS to crash and requires a hard reset. Since Palm Desktop automatically installs all existing software I had to go behind the scenes to delete the problem application files from the backup folder. I think these programs write to memory reserved for the phone functionality, but I am not sure.
• My phone froze once when I was browsing the web with the included Blazer software, requiring a soft reset.
• One Sprint charger that came with my phone worked but got so hot I burned myself and produced a smell of burning plastic. The other Sprint charger I had for the phone refused to charge the phone at all. Both were “smart” chargers that had an LED that turned red when charging. When I went to both a Sprint store and Radio Shack both said they didn’t carry the charger for th i500. A Samsung brand charger that I purchased on eBay seems to have done the trick the 1 day I have used it.
• The Chapura software included with the phone worked great synchronizing my work Outlook contacts, schedule, and to-do list with the phone.
• I installed Eudora’s free suite of applications for Palm successfully and have no problem connecting to my work email directly with their Palm POP3 client to send and receive email, however apparently Gmail isn’t running a standard POP3 server so I can’t use Eudroa mail, but I can interact directly with the web interface with Blazer.
• The integrated phone application works very well and is seamlessly integrated with Palm’s address book. One of the features I like is that it clearly displays the caller ID for any calls received on call waiting with an arrow next to which call you’re on.

Although the phone is two years old and lacking some of the functionality of a Blackberry, I like that it looks and works something like a regular flip phone with all the additional functionality.

ACLU of Michigan Planning Conference

The ACLU of Michigan, where I worked as an intern in 2001, is planning their first-ever statewide conference in Lansing next April. They held a couple highly successful student conferences, and I attended one, so I was excited to hear the news:

The ACLU of Michigan and friends are planning our first statewide conference for April 14-15, 2006. This conference seeks to bring together people concerned about civil rights and civil liberties from all over the state to connect, learn, teach and get active!

DCist: We Name Pandas

A Bloomberg news service article cites DCist (specifically, Catherine Andrews’ post) as the inventor of the nickname “Butterstick” for the National Zoo’s baby panda:

Web logs, such as dcist.com, nicknamed the cub “Butterstick” because zookeepers described him at birth as being “about the size of a stick of butter.” According to Chinese tradition, the cub won’t be officially named until he’s 100 days old.

Butterstick, born through artificial insemination, now weighs more than four pounds. He no longer resembles a “terrible, furry spaceworm,” as one blogger wrote, but a chubby miniature panda with the trademark black and white markings.

They note this:

One local not caught up in the fuss is the father, Tian Tian. “They don’t play a role” in parenting, Long said. “He’s probably in his air-conditioned grotto, eating bamboo and fruitsicles and sleeping a lot. He’s doing the panda thing.”

More on Roberts

The Post has this today:

Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. consistently opposed legal and legislative attempts to strengthen women’s rights during his years as a legal adviser in the Reagan White House, disparaging what he called “the purported gender gap” and, at one point, questioning “whether encouraging homemakers to become lawyers contributes to the common good.” …

Awesome.

What Should Bush Read?

Dear readers: I need your help. I’ve been asked by the associate editor page editor of the Washington Examiner for a list of a few books I would suggest to George W. Bush to read during his summer vacation. What are your ideas? Drop em in the comments.