I'm just back from Philly; wedding was real nice, good to see family, lots of stuff to write after I find a way to decompress a little. I'm catching up on what's out there, and this rolled across my screen:

An Iraqi Judge Issues an Arrest Warrant for Ahmad Chalabi. The charge? Counterfitting. Fitting, given Chalabi was a main source for info about Iraq to many White House and Pentagon Bigwigs (read: Cheny, Rummy, Wolfie, and by proxy the CinC).

As Frank and I remarked back in 2002, he played them like a Jordanian Bank.

So I'm trying to get to Philly this weekend to see my cousin get married, and life being what it is -- can you say 60-hour work week? -- I've left my travel arrangements to the last minute. I'm looking around for a flight, and everything's looking expensive, so I go search travelocity (which I haven't used in ages) and lo and behold there's a last minute deal that's comparatively pretty sweet.

I jump on it. Only problem is, when I get the confirmation email back, I realize the dates of travel are two weeks too late. Oh man. So I call the 800 number, which instructs me to send an email.

That's annoying, but I send it. I get a response back in a couple hours giving the standard line about terms & conditions and all payments being final, and it's impossible for the system to switch the dates and blah blah blah. In the mean time, I've looked around and found no other deals, so I go back through travelocity and watch the whole thing like a hawk and I get the deal I want for close to the times I want, so at least I'm going to the wedding.

Still, I don't want to pay for travel I'm not going to use, and the line that "it's impossible for the system to switch dates" seemed a little suspect. I send them another email explaining and asking for a refund on the first purchase.

I also decide to do some investigating, and I come up with two interesting cached browser pages, which I take screenshots of:

Step 1:

Step 2:

Step 3:

Can you spot where it went wrong? In hindsight I can too, but in the moment, I trusted the travelocity web application, and I didn't painstakingly review my itinerary before clicking confirm. I looked and made sure the times were right as I was booking an overnight flight, but since I have no reason to even suspect that the travel dates had changed I didn't think to closely examine them.

You see, I trusted the machine. I had no reason to believe it was programmed to screw me, and no reason to believe a major player like Travelocity would deploy buggy software. I now have reasons to believe.

And so it comes out that they'll cancel my order, but they're going to stiff me on $100 penalty they pass on from the airline and the car rental place. There's an unsatisfying call with their customer service department, but no movement on this fee. Bottom line: because of a bug in their software (pretty clear something's fucked with their system), I got a switcharoo put on me, and because I didn't catch it, I'm out $100.

Ok, allright, fine. Legally, I think they're probably in the clear. Their customer service people need an attitude tune-up, but what else is new. The point is, if this is standard operating procedure for corporations getting online, this has pretty bad implications for the future of e-commerce. Essentially it means that the user (me) can place no trust in the systems put in place by the service provider, and that I should assume that even though I'm dealing with a machine, that the machine will attempt to screw me over.

That's not good mojo to be spreading around the net. The ultimate irony being that I just watched Terminator 3 the other day, and I aught to know better than to trust a fucking machine.

I love America.

That guy is SO HAPPY!!!. Go Kerry!

The New York Times: Reports That Led to Terror Alert Were Years Old, Officials Say:

Much of the information that led the authorities to raise the terror alert at several large financial institutions in the New York City and Washington areas was three or four years old, intelligence and law enforcement officials said on Monday. They reported that they had not yet found concrete evidence that a terrorist plot or preparatory surveillance operations were still under way.

But the announcement couldn't have any political ramifications to its timing, right?

Fucking wrong. This is just like the captured Al-Quaeda operative during the convention. The White House is blatantly abusing the release of terror-related information to... terrorize the populace, and influence the news cycle for political gain.

This isn't new news. We did a partisan jab on it more than a six weeks ago at MfA. What's troubling is they keep doing the same thing, and the newsmedia keeps going along. I don't know which is worse, that the media keeps falling for it, or that the White House is burning so much future credibility.

Fucking depressing. And criminal too, if you ask me.

Update: My old man Dean is on it, and the Republicans are calling him nuts, and Judy "how's my hair" Woodruff is spinning their talking points. It's campaign season again folks, in all its rage and glory.

Update Update: Wonder of wonders, the NYT Editorial Page is backing this up too. And of course, Krugman is spot on as per usual.

The Question looming large in the air above Washington DC these days is "what do we do?" People are rapidly coming round to the conclusion that George W. Bush doesn't have a damn clue how to help anyone but his cronies prosper. Worse, it's beginning to seem like they're just going to squeeze the nation for what its got and go back to living in gated communities, privatized world without end. This generally gets the thumbs-down from most thinking people. However, in spite of this, or maybe because of it, there remains a great deal of uncertainty about what kinds of policies should be pursued.

I think total war is a bad idea, and I'm not the only one. Matt Yglesias, who I haven't read much before, but since I met in DC I felt I should check out, neatly skewers the Jingoistic vision of Imperial Hubris.

September 11 was a terrible thing, but preventing a future 3,000 casualty incident doesn't come close to justifying the sort of large-scale civilian-killing that the author is advocating. The only sort of threat sufficiently grave to contemplate these sorts of measures is the risk of nuclear terrorism. But a brutal total war hardly seems like the optimum means of avoiding this.

I find the prospect of a nuclear 9-11 literally terrifying (I lived in New York through the original), but the course of action it pushes me towards is to make peace, a strategy you won't hear many pundits or talking heads discussing. Peace is how we won the cold-war incidentally, but it seems inconceivable to most of the political class that we might actually have the will to go about the work of doing it again.

One of the reasons peace seems so, well, outlandish these days is that our modern way of life rests heavily on many root causes of current (and larger brewing) conflicts around the world. We can't really go for peace without some degree of sacrifice and hard work, and that's not what a consumer society likes to do. Yet if we do not sacrifice and work hard, if this "clash of civilizations" is allowed to occur, based on the current fragmentary distribution of power among our supposed enemy it seems impossible to avoid at least one or more incidents of mass death over the course of a multi-year larger conflict.

This larger conflict must be avoided. That means bringing our role in the current conflict (Iraq) to a swift conclusion and rapidly, tangibly, working to address the larger root causes of our beef with the people of the middle east.

So we have to change our modern way of life. We have to wean ourself from their oil so we can withdraw our military footprint. They don't hate us because we're free. They hate us because they believe we prevent them from being so as well, because they believe we prop up corrupt and unresponsive governments, intimidate others, and generally oppress their part of the world. While some of this is a product of propaganda, a lot of it is true too. We don't have the trust of very many people in the Islamic world, and it's not terribly difficult to see why.

The only way to truly demonstrate our good faith is to remove our garrisons and the acrid smell of imperialism they bring with them. We can still maintain our alliances and obligations; there's no need for bases in Saudi Arabia (or any long-term presence in Iraq) to insure the safety of the region.

More importantly, there's no need to coddle dictators in Uzbeckistan and no need to turn our backs on a growing pro-democracy movement in Iran. As much as we need to get our guys with guns out of there, we also need the diplomatic mobility to do what's right.

Changing our way of life will allow us to take the economic, military and diplomatic steps we need for peace, but that's not all we have to do. We must re-engage the world in a rigorous attempt to spread the actually valuable values people have associated with our nation in the past, things like the equality of the sexes and races and the belief in the right of people to determine what they believe and how they live their lives.

We must engage the Muslim world culturally. From what I hear, the only thing popping with the youth (which means the young men, essentially) is radical Islam. That's bad. The Taliban started as a student movement. Osama bin Laden's face appears on cell phone screens in the hand of teenagers in Morocco. This is us heading face first into a clash of civilizations.

What do we do? I think all of the above is a good idea, and I think taking exclusive power out of the hands of men is a great guerilla tactic. As Barbara Erinreich suggests, the killer app for dealing with Al-Qaeda is probably feminism.

If you have iTunes and you click here you can get a lot of the better speeches from the DNC, including Kerry if you missed it. If you missed it, I suggest you give it a listen.

One of the things I'm going to do with my tape of the thing (taken from the peanut gallery) is match up the best lines with the crowd response, which Kerry often talked over in order to finish on time for the Talking Heads to do their thing at 11. There were a few lines in particular where I think the energy in the hall speaks volumes for what this campaign is going to be like, and I don't think it's something that's come across in the TV coverage.

Discovered the audio record of Thursday night. It's spotty, but there are some winners. Here's the first definite hit:

Post-Speech, Walking to the T: John Kerry Will Heal You. (0:46)

UNIDENTIFIED GIRL: So I was hanging out with the Virginia delegation tonight...

CROWD: Woo-hoo!

GIRL: And the wheelchair people. Who stood up when Kerry came in.

OJ: Wow...

GIRL: The wheelchair people...

KREBS: Faith!

STOLLER: And he says he [doesn't] wear his faith on his sleeve...

I know that "wheelchair people" is about as far from PC as you can get, yet I find this simply irresistable.

More coming. And something completely different now. If you're still interested in interesting things, check this little price chart out. I don't know what to make of it, but the implication seems to be that low gas prices are communist. Someone tell Bush.

I'm ready to go anywhere, I'm ready for the fade. At about 8:40pm, it's humid. Lot of water will be needed. And I must say that this place certainly is a trip. Where else could you see Willie Nelson and Joe Lieberman on the same stage within a few minutes of one another, and what does that mean? To be honest I can't tell you.

Veterans are big in the message, but it's not really reading at the moment. Platitudes. Too many plattitudes. Why should we honor veterans, and how? These are not simple questions, especially in the contextual reality that vets wars we feel really good about are in shorter and shorter supply. The Democratic party of 2004 is largely run and staffed by people who either got into the game post-60s, were on the inside in 68, or laughed from the outside in 72. Sometimes I really wonder if these people have throught it through.

The populist sheen of the modern party doesn't read to me either. Here's a highly produced media event, where even getting anywhere near the action requires a laminated pass, where you're not allowed to bring your own sign, and we're clapping and singing along to "you've got a friend."

I want to believe it. I want to, but it's difficult. My hands are huge. Eyes wide open, and it still doesn't come through as real to me.

But I think it is real for the people on the floor. These people are on a trip, and they did come from around the country, from all sorts of states and surprisingly diverse walks of life. They've choreographed little dances to do, and done their best to personalize their delegations. There's pride in the room down on the floor tonight. The inner stratigest in me worries about Hubris, an old nemesis of mine, but Pride can be a good thing too, especially when it comes with such a hometown flavor.

And here, where the political thresher meets the grasroots, the mix still isn't quite where I'd have it, but there's promise.

I have to say Kerry gave me a lot more than I thought he would. He's not my man, but I won't be holding my nose when I vote for him this fall.

More to come as I deal with the fallout and realizations. Expect now a feature-length piece comparing massive rituals like the DNC and the OCF, because I've done them both now, and there are a surprising number of paralells.

I made it into the Fleet Center.

That's sean hannity behind me by the way. I'm blogging more at mfa.

I'm blogging about my life and times at the convention over here.

Personally, this whole thing is making me re-evaluate a lot. It's a shake-up and it's good, but it's taking a lot more energy than I anticipated.

Plus, it's national barbie in a blender day. Tell all your friends.