On the same day it earned an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary, I finished watching Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room on DVD.

Everybody needs to run out and rent this now. Seriously. In a sense, it tells the story of the age we’re living in — economically, politically, and culturally. Afterwards I wanted to smash things like Jesus in the temple with the moneychangers, full of self-righteous violence.

It will, of course, lose the Oscar to March of the Penguins, because penguins are cuuuuuute.

The Onion’s AV Club interviews Stephen Colbert about “truthiness” and being a huge D&D nerd.

Some new changes to the blog today after thinking about them for a while.

The new fonts and blockquote style will hopefully make it easier on the eyes, especially the short story entries, which tend to be longer. I’m not sold on the new noir-ish banner, though… I threw that together in an hour or so this morning.

Better? Worse?

UPDATE: Okay, I altered the new banner already. The lack of color was bothering me.

See that Amazon.com search box on the left? Keep using it, or start using it if you haven’t yet. I just got an $11.99 Amazon gift certificate for Associate referrals from that search box, which came as a total surprise to me.

Going through last year’s records, 15 of the 16 items ordered through my site were purchased by me, either for myself or as gifts for others. But the biggest-ticket item — a $100 blender — was ordered by someone else. Who was it? Whoever it was, thank you, because at a 5% referral rate, that netted me an extra five bucks.

I’m not sure how $15.37 in referrals translates into an $11.99 gift certificate, but that is for Amazon to know and for me to wonder.

DailyKos occasionally hosts diaries that qualify as not just polemic but good writing as well. My favorite diarist, as I’ve noted before, is AdvisorJim, whose first book Confessions of a Former Dittohead is due out this April. Another good one is Hunter, who occasionally comes up with a doozy like this one.

Hunter’s entry is about the Abramoff scandal, and on Friday I realized that even liberal-leaning political junkies aren’t sure what to make of it. It’s not an easy story to follow — Josh Marshall has been on it for months with posts in such mind-numbing detail that my eyes water and skip over them. But I’ll try to explain the scandal, as I understand it, specifically regarding its relationship to the two parties.

Jack Abramoff is a longtime Republican activist. All of his personal donations went to Republicans.

He is also a lobbyist who represents tribal gambling interests. Native American tribes are traditionally Democratic contributors. As this study shows, Abramoff directed them to give more money to Republicans.

Of course, Abramoff took some of that tribal money, laundered it through fake charities, and gave it to Republicans, some of whom were hostile to tribal interests. This is where the scandal comes in — this, plus the array of gifts to Congressmen that constitute bribes.

Since the tribes gave money to both parties, the RNC has blasted one press release after another labelling it a bi-partisan scandal. Democrats started returning legally-contributed tribal money. Why? Because quite frankly they don’t understand the Abramoff scandal, either.

I don’t blame RNC, even though they are intentionally obfuscating the truth, because it’s their job to spin, spin, spin whenever a Republican scandal emerges. I blame the mainstream press, such as Matthews, Couric, Russert, Blitzer, and the Washington Post, for repeating RNC talking points without doing their homework.

Howard Dean (a political hero of mine) has been going from show to show stating that Democrats received “not one dime” from Abramoff. Dean’s message has been received with hostility from such “journalists” as Blitzer and Couric. Is the media intentionally skewing Republican, or are they just lazy and uninformed? I don’t know.

I’m glad to see liberals finally mounting a concerted effort at taking on the media, though. The firestorm over the Washington Post’s coverage has been well-documented, and Chris Matthews is at the center of a boycott effort.

You know what the weirdest part of this Abramoff scandal is? He used to be a Hollywood writer/producer. His big project before becoming a full-time lobbyist was the violent, typically homorerotic right-wing fantasy Red Scorpion, featuring Dolph Lundgren and other shirtless, sweaty, muscular men shooting guns at each other.

First via Reuters:

New planet-hunting method could find more Earths

A new planet-hunting technique has detected the most Earth-like planet yet around a star other than our sun, raising hopes of finding a space rock that might support life, astronomers reported on Wednesday.

[...]

In the last decade, astronomers have detected more than 160 planets orbiting stars outside our solar system. The vast majority of these have been gas giant planets like Jupiter, which are hostile to life as it is known on Earth.

But an international team has detected a cold planet about 5-1/2 times more massive than Earth — still small enough to be considered Earth-like — orbiting a star about 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius (The Archer), close to the center of the Milky Way.

The press release announcing the new planet-finding technique can be found here.

Meanwhile, from Agence France-Presse:

Russia to open moonbase mine

Russia is planning to mine a rare fuel on the moon by 2020 with a permanent base and a heavy-cargo transport link, a Russian space official says.

“We are planning to build a permanent base on the moon by 2015 and by 2020 we can begin the industrial-scale delivery … of the rare isotope Helium-3,” Nikolai Sevastyanov, head of the Energia space corporation, was quoted by ITAR-TASS news agency as saying at an academic conference.

I’ll believe it when I see it, but still… yay future!

Everybody and their liberal-blogger grandmother has already linked to this, but it deserves another mention: Fafblog’s FAQ about the wiretapping scandal is some of the funniest political satire this side of a Stephen Colbert “Formidable Opponent” segment.

Q. Can the president eat a baby?
A. If that baby has suspected ties to al Qaeda, then it’s the president’s duty to eat it – for the sake of national security.

Why yes, I AM referencing this entry from almost exactly one year ago.

I’m moving back to Tucson.

I know, I know. I said I hated living there. But I have a good reason:

Wuv. Twue wuv.

Beyond that, I’m not really going to talk about it, because I try not to discuss deeply personal matters in a public forum.

I’m moving back when my lease is up at the end of March. Rather than renting an expensive U-Haul truck, I’m going to give most of my furniture to my brother, fill my Corolla as much as I can, and rent a furnished apartment once I arrive.

For all I know, this may not work out, in which case I’ll be back in Seattle before the end of the year, tail between my legs. But I feel like I have to try. Otherwise I’ll always wonder what could have been.

We are the sum of our experiences. Do I want to be the sort of person who would trade his time and money for a chance at happiness? Or the sort who plays it safe for fear of getting hurt?

I choose the former.

To put it another way, in the words of someone else who finally discovered something to believe in: “I aim to misbehave.”

Shaenon Garrity is quoted in a feature about webcomics in the latest Publisher’s Weekly. The article was written by Heidi MacDonald. The notable paragraph:

Most of the Web comics people PW spoke with say that the online and print audiences are just very different beasts. Shaenon Garrity, whose Narbonic is both a Web comic and a series of books from Blueshift Studios, points out that the audience for Web comics is much larger than the one for print comics. “But, at the same time, there are 10 or fewer cartoonists who are making a good living off their Web comics,” she says. “It’s a huge phenomenon, but in many ways it’s a worse market than printed comics.”

Is there such a thing as comic book journalism? Yes, and it’s most notable practitioner is Joe Sacco. The Guardian hosts this eight-page Sacco story of two former Iraqi prisoners who are suing Donald Rumsfeld.