Questions for Conservatives

Muslim extremists have adopted random but highly visible violence as an effective means of terrorizing those who would engage with the Islamic religion itself in order to criticize it.

There exists a thin veneer of Christian extremists who have openly embraced this technique (Paul Hill murdered a physician and a clinic nurse), although they couch their words in phrases such as "While my organization would never do such a thing, it is understandable that those who feel deeply yadda yadda yadda."

Questions for conservatives: Since both groups have the same techniques and the same objectives, should the FBI put as much pressure on the finances of anti-abortion activists as it has on Islamic charities?

Why isn't Scott Roeder, the man who murdered Dr. George Tiller, an enemy combatant?

Won't his being tried in a civilian court, as opposed to a military tribunal, embolden those who would emulate him?

If Guantanamo Bay remains the best place to house "the worst of the worst," shouldn't Roeder, who admits to this day that he feels no regret and no remorse, be incarcerated there, along with his fellow terrorists?

Is the First Amendment for Monotheists only?

In their opening arguments to the court, [The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation] argued before the court that Pagans are not deserving of equal civil rights as are provided adherents of the preferred faiths. In one of their first arguments to the court, the defendants said that certain traditional faiths are first tier faiths and that those faiths were meant to have equal rights and protections under the United States Constitution, but that all of the other faiths were second tier faiths, and were not meant to have the same equal rights and protections under the United States Constitution as the first tier faiths.

Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to decide if paganism and witchcraft were ever intended to receive the protections of the Religion Clauses.

Hah. I has succeeded in ripping MSNBC

One of the biggest frustrations I have with watching MSNBC is that their media player sucks at streaming in a timely fashion. I've long wanted to just download the video so I could watch it, but that didn't seem possible.

It took me a while, but I found the secret. First, although the video stream URL isn't immediately apparent, the flash app keeps a list of "upcoming" videos, including the current one, and if you can find where the list is stored in RAM (hint: it's probably in your temp drive) you can copy it off, pull it up in an editor, and make a list. Since it's XML, running things through tidyXML might help a lot.

Then it's just a matter of streaming out-of-realtime and then re-encoding locally. In order to do this now (as of late January, 2010), I used the copy of mplayer/mencoder currently available only through the source code repository, as it supports the x264 encoding. Here's the stream for "Obama vs. The House GOP:"

( It'll blow your margins. So it goes behind a cut. )

p.s. I also just gave you a very high-quality encode optionset for, er, stuff you stick in your computer's DVD player.