…to Tony Pierce for the birthday shout-out. Go check out Tony’s site, and flow him a buck or 10 while you’re at it.

Also, leave some reassuring messages about his book travails (or just pre-order a copy). Publishing is a vale of tears. Or something. (Not that I’ve tried, but just about everything else worth doing is.)

The Northwest has a wealth of small independent breweries, and each seems to be in the holiday spirit with the production of holiday ales. (For those who haven’t had the pleasure, a holiday (also known as Christmas ale, winter ale, or seasonal ale) is a one-off ale, usually dark, brewed with various spices.

I had resolved to make notes on each of the holiday ales I’ve tried this season; alas, I’ve let the Pyramid Snowcap and one other whose name escapes me by without taking notes. But Orchard Street Jingle Ale is far too good not to review. Dark and sweet almost but not quite to the point of heaviness, apparently spiced with ginger and cinnamon, complex and satisfying. If you’re in the small distribution area of this beer, you’re lucky. I’m going to try to get up to the brewpub to check this stuff out from the tap (they’re in Bellingham, so it might have to wait a while; no official web page that I can find).

Tony reminded me: it isn’t just my birthday today. Yep, today is Britney Spears’s 21st.

(I hesitate to file this one under Music, but hell, why not? As I understand it, Britney does occasionally sing.)

Reading over the previous post, I realized that I was a little harsh on Dave for not making RSS redirect from Manila easier. After all, his dad is in the hospital recovering from a very near brush with death. Hope your dad recovers completely, Dave.

I wouldn’t have thought that moving this blog to a new server would take so long. On one level, it’s done: all my old data is on the new server, happily cooking along, and I’m directing all the new content to the new site. So what’s the problem?

The problem is that there are a lot of blogging infrastructure tools out there that have a long memory. Google is one of them. There are about 7,270 search results for me at my old address (which still has a page rank of 6), compared with only 184 at my new one. Bear in mind that both sites have the same content. Google just hasn’t finished spidering the new site.

This is partly because very few people have updated their links to my site. Most people’s blogrolls have been updated, but links like my blog of the Apple keynote have not.

And, of course, despite my plea, there are still a ton of people hitting the old site’s RSS feed with aggregators--Radio, Frontier, and NetNewsWire. Sigh. I appreciate the attention, folks, but you’d actually get fresh content if you came here.

The irony is that Dave Winer was one of the folks who worked to design and implement RSS redirection, the “I’ve Moved” notice for RSS subscriptions, but it hasn’t been implemented in Manila yet.

I should post a link to the other article that set me off this morning, also in the Washington Post: “In Terror War, 2nd Track for Suspects: Those Designated 'Combatants' Lose Legal Protections.” The Post is coming around to points that I started making last year:

...under authority it already has or is asserting in court cases, the administration, with approval of the special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, could order a clandestine search of a U.S. citizen's home and, based on the information gathered, secretly declare the citizen an enemy combatant, to be held indefinitely at a U.S. military base. Courts would have very limited authority to second-guess the detention, to the extent that they were aware of it.

The article says that part of the debate is about who gets to declare someone an enemy combatant. The administration wants the power to reside solely in the president, with no checks save re-election. Says Solicitor General Theodore Olson: “Who will finally decide [whether the decision to designate someone an enemy combatant is a right or just decision]? Will it be a judge, or will it be the president of the United States, elected by the people, specifically to perform that function, with the capacity to have the information at his disposal with the assistance of those who work for him?”

Personally I think the Constitution has been pretty clear from the start that the job of the judiciary is to make the decision that the executive branch is acting rightly and justly. But then, what do I know? I’m just a Grouchy Blogger.

I have been deliberately not blogging about matters political, including our charming Attorney General Singin’ John Ashcroft, for a while. But the latest report in the Washington Post, that Ashcroft urged his staffers to deny FOIA requests, tipped me over the edge.

The story is bad enough. The Justice Department has in the past withheld data that it knew made its positions untenable, including enforcement of gun laws (Reno) and failure to prosecute terrorism cases (Ashcroft); now it’s implicitly promising its staffers that they will be shielded and supported if they decide to deny a FOIA request in part or whole, thus institutionalizing the denial of access to data that could prove it acted in error. The subtext is scarier. It is emblematic of the Bush Administration’s, and Ashcroft’s blatant disregard of the laws and Constitutional framing that they have sworn to uphold that Ashcroft has reversed the direction of the previous administration to consider all government information public unless there is a pressing need to keep the information secret. The author of the article, James Grimaldi, writes, “Justice Department bureaucrats, with Ashcroft's blessing, are trying to muzzle the watchdogs.” It seems to me that that’s not all they’re trying to do.

John Ashcroft is conspiring, with the complicity of the Bush administration, to draw a dark cloak of secrecy over the workings of government. At the same time, he is lifting all the restraints that have kept our government from trampling the rights that our founding fathers fought for.

Now is the time to act. Write your congressman. If they’re a member of the Republican majority, maybe they’ll stop serving in Bush’s chorus long enough to think about what they’re signing up the country for. If they’re in the Democratic minority, maybe they’ll have an awakening of conscience and start acting like a principled, visionary opposition party.

But act. Before Bush and Ashcroft succeed in making dissent illegal.

Good morning! Thirty years is far too short a time with all of you. As Bilbo Baggins once said, I feel I know less than half of you as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as I should.

And thanks to Esta for the technicolor reminder of my mortality. Never fear, dear, I’ve got September 20 circled in my calendar for a few years hence...