Yay Matt!

Not being personally close to any of those disasters -- I'm with FredPete.

re: TiVOs

from their FAQ - " If you currently have a 1-year or 3-year prepay service plan on your older TiVo DVR, it will be automatically transferred to your upgraded TiVo DVR. "

regarding lifetime service - "eligible customers that have Product Lifetime Service (PLS) on their current TiVo DVR can receive $100 off PLS on their upgraded TiVo HD DVR. Since PLS is not being transferred from the customer’s current TiVo DVR to their upgraded TiVo DVR the customer will be able to continue to enjoy their current DVR on another TV and get the benefits of Multi-Room Viewing."

they do try to put the best spin on things, don't they.

Yeah, I'm eligible for either the upgrade pricing OR the discount on service, but they won't combine them.

Still, if I switched to a CableCard, I'd still be saving money in the long run by switching to Tivo. Plus I'd have Tivo again...

As a quick FYI: Referendum 71 made it onto the fall ballot here in Washington.

On the surface, this seems to be a good thing - extend to all domestic partnerships all the rights and responsibilities of marriage.

However, it also EXPRESSLY forbids marriage to be anything except between one man and one woman.

The wording is extremely confusing (so much so that TWICE I've actually voiced my support for it...until a lawyer said, "That's not all it does..." and clarified things for me).

WA-istas, and other political activists: encourage people to educate themselves on this issue. I obviously have a stake in the outcome - but my emphasis here is education not persuasion towards a specific goal.

Looks like the clown car fits 19 now. Yikes.

Get out of my HEAD, Suzi. I was about to say the same exact thing. Down to the "yikes."

In terms of comparing natural disaster to 911. The natural disaster may not be human caused but quite often the deaths are. In Katrina the neglect was at least careless, and in my personal opinion deliberate. Rove was heavily involved in decision making. And I assume that he was thinking "we can drive out and kill a lot of the black people who live in a purple state, on that can go either red or blue, and make it more reliably red." A lot of the Bush very White House Katrina choices can be explained on that basis. And in general how many people a disaster kills depends on a lot on preparation and government response. So if a natural disaster results in a lot of deaths, most of the time it means the public authorities did not do what they should have. And most of the time much of this neglect is done in the face of warnings that they are asking for trouble.

The impression I got from the Bush administration's handling of Katrina was more of incompetence rather than malice.

The impression I got from the Bush administration's handling of Katrina was more of incompetence rather than malice.

At the very least, I can't help feeling like they'd have gotten competent if it were a population they cared about.

Of course, in my darker hours I think the neglect/gutting of the public schools is a deliberate effort to create/maintain an easily manipulated underclass.