Nine More Days?

I don't know if I can take it. The election is only nine days away but I fear they're going to be the longest nine days of the whole darn odyssey. I'm not concerned about the polls so much, both because they're not really changing much and because they may not be measuring a pretty large number of newly-registered voters and cell phone users who could swing the election either way, although they're perhaps more likely to break for Kerry. Still, even if you're not hanging on the polls, there are little bits of news every day that could change the race. For example, how will Wolfpacks for Truth skew the results? ;-) Probably not much, since, according to a new survey, Bush supporters live in a fantasy world. The summary of that survey's results shows that Bush supporters stubbornly refuse to believe findings of the 9/11 Commission or dozens of other experts on issues related to Iraq and terrorism. According to Steven Kull (via Alternet), director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes, which conducted the survey, this is classic cognitive dissidence:

“To support the president and to accept that he took the U.S. to war based on mistaken assumptions likely creates substantial cognitive dissonance and leads Bush supporters to suppress awareness of unsettling information about pre-war Iraq,” Kull says. He added that this “cognitive dissonance” could also help explain other remarkable findings in the survey. The poll also found a major gap between Bush's stated positions on a number of international issues and what his supporters believe Bush's position to be. A strong majority of Bush supporters believe, for example that the president supports a range of international treaties and institutions that the White House has vocally and publicly opposed. In particular, majorities of Bush supporters incorrectly assume that he supports multilateral approaches to various international issues, including the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (69 percent), the land mine treaty (72 percent), and the Kyoto Protocol to curb greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming (51 percent). In August, two-thirds of Bush supporters also believed that Bush supported the International Criminal Court (ICC). Although that figure dropped to a 53 percent majority in the PIPA poll, it's not much of a drop considering that Bush explicitly denounced the ICC in the first, most widely watched presidential debate in late September. In all of these cases, majorities of Bush supporters said they favored the positions that they imputed, incorrectly, to Bush. Large majorities of Kerry supporters, on the other hand, showed they knew both their candidate's and Bush's positions on the same issues.

So there you have it: Kerry supporters are more well-informed and have a more realistic view of the world than do Bush supporters. Isn't “faith-based” government a wonderful thing?

Posted 02:28 PM | Comments (4) | election 2004

RitzPix Needs Work

When I got a new digital camera just over a year ago (a very generous gift from L.), I started taking lots of pictures, some of which I post, but most of which I don't. The great thing about digital pics is you can take as many as you want for virtually no cost; however, the drawback can come when you want to share a photo with someone in real life, someone who is not online or who would like their own copy of a picture. You can always print your own photos on an inkjet printer, but I've never been thrilled with the result/cost ratio there, so I've turned to different online services for prints of digital pics. I've had good luck with Shutterfly, and I just put in an order with Snapfish, which is a little cheaper. With both services, you upload your photos, order prints or enlargements or other items (i.e., coffee mugs, mousepads, and calendars with your photos on them), then they ship the results to you in a few days. But I recently learned of a new service through Fuji Film. It involves Ritz Camera stores and lets you upload your pictures and then choose a local camera store to print them so that you can go pick them up in just a few hours. They call it Ritz Pix, and for a handful of photos, it works great. I uploaded just a couple of photos the other day, then picked up great prints a couple of hours later. Very cool. So I thought I'd try a few more photos, like 70. Bad idea. The RitzPix site just couldn't handle it. It took forever to upload the photos in the first place, and then, no matter what I did, I couldn't get it to complete an order. On Safari, the browser would time out, on Mozilla, I got a little farther, but still reached a point where the website would no longer respond. Maybe the site really isn't compatible with the Mac. I dunno. What I do know is that if you only want to print a couple of photos and you want the prints quickly, RitzPix works well. For larger orders, I'll stick with one of the larger online services.

Posted 01:05 PM | Comments (5) | life generally