Peter Krupa

I try to deny it sometimes, but the truth is I love gadgets, and my new Asus EEE laptop is just too sweet for words. Tiny, light, cheap, useful, robable… so far I have nothing bad to say.

The keyboard is a little small, but that’s only a problem when transitioning from a different laptop. I love this little thing. If someone were to invent a machine specifically designed to be a poor, traveling journalist’s best friend, this would be it.

I give it an A, for Awesome.

Does anybody else find it weird that Hillary Clinton is running as the Rudy Guilianni of the Democratic Party? I mean, 3 a.m. phone calls, can’t-stand-the-heat, “totally obliterate” Iran: I thought trying to scare the shit out of the electorate was a Republican gambit.

Plus, the pundit wisdom seems to be that Obama didn’t win Pennsylvania/Ohio/Texas because he doesn’t get the un-educated, white, clinging-to-guns-and-religion vote. Like, darn, the Democrats better nominate someone who can snake the idiot vote from Republicans.

The only thing sillier than that argument is this idea that Hillary Clinton, of all people - Hillary Clinton! - would somehow fare better than Obama in a jaw-clenching contest with John McCain. Except that while McCain was being tortured, Hillary was in Moscow. She’d have to explain that one again. Promise.

I mean, Hillary? More electable? Wait till the right dusts off Vince Foster’s skeleton, and God knows what else. The main curiosity, though, is that one would think that this year, of all years for as long as I can remember, would be a good year to run as a Democrat, on Democrat issues.

Instead, Hillary flashes Osama bid Laden’s face in campaign ads. Focus group must have liked that one.

This morning my wife and I drove our SUV to the gym, so we could exercise our bodies using electronic machines. Then we drove back, I dropping her off at work and passing through San José in our SUV so I could meet someone on the other side.  Afterwards, I drove the SUV to lunch with a friend, where I ate tuna. Then I drove home, through crushing traffic, and when I arrived, I turned on all our incandescent light bulbs. After a little while, I drove back into the city to pick up Ona, then we drove home, turned on all the lights again, turned on the stove, and watched a documentary about global warming.

That’s to say, it has not been a very good Earth Day.

And the award for cringe-inducing investigative journalism piece of the week goes to the New York Times, for a fascinating piece revealing that the “military analysts” regularly trotted out for public consumption by TV news programs are, on one level or another, Pentagon shills:

Five years into the Iraq war, most details of the architecture and execution of the Pentagon’s campaign have never been disclosed. But The Times successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation.

…

Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions.”

Three thoughts come to mind. First, TV “news” appears to be as trustworthy as I always thought it was. Second, I’m a little annoyed that the Pentagon can use tax dollars to coordinate such expensive and creepy efforts at propaganda. Isn’t that illegal on some level?

And third, I’m really going to miss this sort of thing once the New York Times goes out of business.

Hillary Clinton, from the debate tonight, via the New York Times:

“On a couple of occasions in the last weeks, I just said some things that were not in keeping with what I knew to be the case.”

I used to get quite a few giggles out of Diario Extra, Costa Rica’s yellowest tabloid and, coincidentally, also the newspaper with the highest circulation in the country at over 350,000 (this in a country of 3.5 million). Oh, they’re wacky alright. Today’s front page features a picture of a deceased stabbing victim, which is more or less par for the course.

The paper really jumped the shark last July when it ran a front-page photo of a crackhead eating a live cat. Nice.

I guess I still chuckle at Diario Extra, but no longer in that “oh-this-poor-underdeveloped-country” kind of way. That’s because I now have cable, and I can turn on Fox News or CNN and watch the idiocy that passes for “news” in the United States - ie, car chases, shootings in strange little towns, terrifying tales of chemicals that might probably but not really but could - could - give you cancer, and horrible, horrible sexual things that were in all likelihood done to the pretty 18-year-old blond girl in this grainy photograph taken during happier times.

One time - I’m not making this up - CNN featured, in its killer storm coverage, a live ticker keeping a real-time count of how many lightning bolts had struck the ground. Scary shit.

That is to say, the more you look, the more it looks the same, and one can only imagine what the 24-hour news cycle would be like without the FCC.

If I had a vote (which I’m pretty sure I don’t, as our electoral system makes use of an ingenious system of winches, pulleys, “electoral college” contraptions, and obscure paperwork to disenfranchise expatriates) I would vote for Barack Obama.

Or John McCain.

I mean, why not John McCain? As much as I’m not really a fan of some of his crazier war-like policies and spousal recipe theft, he wouldn’t be able to do much damage if an overwhelmingly-Democratic Congress hiked up its knickers and started checking and balancing things.

On the other hand, if Barack decided to do something crazy - say, the Democratic equivalent of the Iraq War, whatever that might be - Congress would pass it on through in about five minutes.

It’s something to think about, this idea that political head-knocking is important for good governance, since, as the delectable Jack Shafer pointed out, “Writing slavery into the Constitution was perhaps the greatest triumph of nonpartisan compromise in U.S. history.”

And as George W. Bush roundly demonstrated, having one party in charge of everything is not so healthy either.

Anyway, I imagine I would still vote for Barack Obama, if I could find the U.S. embassy and register to vote in the state of San José. Although after paying $1,950 to the U.S. government on my meager income of $12,500 (self employed! I’m fucked!), I’m wondering if I can still write in Steve Forbes.

Due to the pressures of a normal job, I fell silent on this blog. Fortunately, my normal job is now over, meaning I’m sort of an independent contractor, meaning I work from home and set my own hours and will blog here whenever I damn well please. It will be blogging into the void, since I can’t imagine anyone checks here anymore for updates , but whatever.

Forward!