My opinion on the Armstrong Williams flap is "Yeah, so?  What did you expect?"  Discovery will not deter further lawlessness.  The boundary of what the regime can do expands and will expand.  From where is deterrent force to come?  The Democrats in Washington?  Don't make me laugh.  The voters?  Decreasingly so.  Other nations?  The regime has the mother of all nuclear weapon arsenals and would use it on anyone.  Business and industry?  These can be bribed, using the people's money;  any company that resists can have its competitors funded, using the people's money, and can expect visits from regulatory officials.

An extremist oligarchy need not make all the laws favorable to its causes, because  it may also simply ignore laws.  Who is going to stop them, and if they deny doing what they obviously are doing, who is going to make an issue of it?

On a related note, I'm having Doug Tipple make me one of these: http://home.earthlink.net/~life2all/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/g_flute_auction_photo.jpg
Not that I can play the thing.  It's more of a music therapy thing, although at least as much a physical therapy (for fibromyalgia and related problems) as a "mental" therapy.  It would be nice if I could get a form of musical teaching in which if I felt relatively comfortable for five or ten minutes I could ask the  tutor to give me five or ten minutes of tutoring, to end immediately if I must, with the understanding that I may do little homework.

On another related note, yes, I'm playing with your head.

Gentoo was one of the first Linux distributions to support AMD64, so of course the fashion in which it is implemented in Gentoo is incompatible with the de facto standard.  The little gentoo penguins mistakenly designed a system that would be 64-bit with a little support for 32-bit 80x86 programs, but other distributions decided on a "multilib" approach where you put some "lib64" directories alongside the usual 80x86 "lib" directories.  The multilib approach is prevailing, I think, because it is better, and in any case Gentoo for AMD64 is going to multilib.

But it is doing so by degrees, and now I have a chance to test the next phase of the transition, with a rescue CD handy.

This could go very, very wrong.  <tt> :) </tt>  Actually it doesn't look to me as if there is anything here I couldn't reverse, if I had trouble early, or work around, if I had trouble afterwards, if I had to.

In case anyone also is a fan of Mike Malloy of Air America Radio, yes,
I am the Barry who called George W. Bush a brain damaged freak who
enjoys killing people.