Incoherent Spluttering

Mitt Romney, at the Republican Presidential debate last night:

I am glad [detainees] are at Guantanamo. I don’t want them on our soil. I want them on Guantanamo, where they don’t get the access to lawyers they get when they’re on our soil. I don’t want them in our prisons, I want them there. Some people have said we ought to close Guantanamo. My view is we ought to double Guantanamo.

That's right, ladies and gentlemen.  This Presidential candidate does not believe in habeas corpus for suspected terrorists.  So watch what you say, lest he pick you to be one of the folks in the new, doubled Guantanamo.  He thinks it's a GREAT THING that you won't get a lawyer.  (Transcript of the quote swiped from Think Progress.)

Video of the question & responses from McCain, Giuliani, and Romney (streaming quicktime) is here, compliments of Crooks and Liars.

10 Years of Couple-dom

This week (we're not entirely clear on the date, but it's probably the 17th), M and I will have been together for ten years.  10 years of ups and downs and being each others' best friends.  I love it that way.  What, you may be asking yourself, does this ten years of couple-dom get you?  It  gets phone calls like the following:

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first forays...

I'm SUPPOSED to start teaching Internet & Society in summer session on Monday.  But as of this moment, there are only 2 students enrolled in the course.  :^/  I need 4 for the class to run - if I don't get that number, I have the option of running it as a tutorial and being paid on a per-student basis (and earning less than I would if it was a formal class).

I asked the registrar & dept. chair about the possibility of running it as an online course, with the same timeline as if it was meeting in the classroom (i.e., starting on the 21st of May and finishing on the 21st of June).  I got a response from the registrar almost immediately saying that he thinks it's an "acceptable option".  If Pat says it's OK, I'll probably run it that way, with some real-time interaction (assuming I can get the blackboard real-time system to work reliably - I need to test it with safari and see if it's more reliable there) and using the discussion boards w/in blackboard.

This could be really exciting, or it could be a total bomb.  We shall see...

AI finals

I haven't been paying superclose attention to AI this season, but I just have this to say about tonight's results:

WHAT THE HELL?