The following chart shows the change in income distribution normalized to 1970 dollars across every quintile of our population, with the top quintile expanded into more detail. Income is measured as a share of the nation’s GDP, not tax receipts or stated income. The underlying numbers come from the CBO. Explanation of the data (and the source for the chart) is Afferent Input, and I found this via Kevin Drum, who explains another angle. I don’t have time to say more except to point out that stock market woes seem to affect the folks at the top rather than the folks at the bottom. No wonder we keep talking about dividend tax breaks.

Via Kevin Drum, we find this posting by a college professor:

I have now received three (3) student papers that discuss Iraq’s attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11. All three papers mention it as an aside to another point. I’ve had two papers on the virtue of forgiveness that argue that if we had just forgiven Iraq for the 9/11 attacks, we wouldn’t be at war right now. I just read a paper on the problem of evil which asked why God allowed “the Iraq’s” to attack us on 9/11.

The thing that upsets me most here is that the the students don’t just believe that that Iraq was behind 9/11. This is a big fact in their minds, that leaps out at them, whenever they think about the state of the world.

The biggest single defining event of our time and people don’t know who was behind this. These are college students. The Bush administration has, I guess, done their job by confusing the world.

Do you know anyone who believes Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks? Please tell me this is a limited phenomenon…

Speaking of end of year giving (give via Kiva.org!), another organization I give to every year is the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). I mention this because the entertainment setup I describe below is one that the movie industry would like to outlaw directly and have, with current laws and lobbying, managed to indirectly make very difficult. The EFF fights these laws that are both anti-free-market and anti-consumer (a more common combination than you might think).

In fact, the setup I describe below is really only possible with a little bit of labor and using DVDs as opposed to HD-DVDs or BluRay sources. The movie industry tries to “protect” their movies and music with a technology broadly called DRM, which makes it impossible to view the movies you buy in the ways you want to. New DRM technology is why I’ve sworn off buying HD media. To make this clearer, let’s walk through my new setup.

Here’s what my goal is with the new setup. I want to be able to use my computer as a digital video jukebox with my TV. Basically, I’d like to end up with my movies on my computer so that I don’t need to keep the DVDs in the same room as the TV. This way, I can also copy the movies to my laptop when I travel (again, no discs to break or carry), or put them on my iPhone just in case I’m stuck somewhere.

The first part of getting this working is to get the movies onto my computer. Because of the DRM the studios use, this is more difficult than it ought to be. I’ve written up how I do this on the Mac in an older post, so if you need help, check that out. Please note that I’ve since changed my process a bit, though it involves some commercial software. Specifically, I’ve switched to using a great piece of software called VisualHub. It has presets for every device, including Apple TV, iPhone, PSPs, etc. So, everything from Step 6 onward has been replaced with the simple, “fire up VisualHub, select your device and quality and hit GO.” I typically use the Apple TV settings, with H.264 checked and High quality. I let iTunes cut an iPhone specific version as well when I need one.

Now that I have a version on my computer, I need to get it on the TV. Since I own an Xbox 360, this turned out to be pretty easy. The XBox can connect to a Windows PC and stream videos, photos, and music to the XBox and out to the TV and receiver you have it connected to. It’s not just for playing video games, after all. I assume that the PS3 allows similar functionality, but I don’t own one to try it out.

Now, I don’t own a Windows PC, since I’m a Mac/Unix person and only have Macs in the house. That would be a problem except for a nice little program called Connect 360 made by the fine folks at nullriver. They have a free demo so I downloaded it and fired it up. Within seconds, I was able to fire up the XBox, navigate over to the Media tab in the Dashboard, select Movies and I was thumbing through the films on my laptop on the big screen. These movies are at DVD quality, which is roughly 480p for the HD enthusiasts here. Sure, it’s not as pretty as an HD source, but the XBox does a good job upconverting to 1080p.

I wanted to see if the software and network could keep up with a 1080p video without trouble so I borrowed a 1080p rip of Transformers from a friend because I don’t know how to convert an HD-DVD yet. I’ve streamed that using the above setup with great results. The video is gorgeous and I could still surf the Internet off the same computer. Not a bad setup.

Of course, if the movie industry had their way, I wouldn’t be able to do what I did. Technically, the DRM on the DVDs should prevent me from doing what I did. Because, however, it has been broken by numerous hackers over the years, it merely represents an inconvenience in this process. You could argue that I could easily just buy my movies off of a service like iTunes or Amazon Unbox but that still presents the DRM dilemma.

For example, in my setup, I have devices from 3 different manufacturers and several different movie studios. Microsoft makes the XBox 360 and Apple makes my Mac and OS X and Sony makes my PSP (which I’ve stopped using for video in favor of the iPhone). If I chose iTunes, I would need to buy an Apple TV in order to watch the video on my big TV. In fact, the movies I’ve bought from iTunes don’t work in the setup I’ve described because the XBox doesn’t understand Apple’s DRM. Amazon doesn’t support Macs or my iPhone (yet), so that’s a non-starter as well. The only way to do this is with a DRM-free copy of the movies.

Which brings me to the title of this post. There are two ways to get DRM free copies of your favorite movies. The first is to do what I’ve done, buy DVDs and go through the trouble of stripping the DRM off and encoding them for your computer. It’s a lot of work (takes about 4 hours per DVD on a MacBook Pro).

The other option is to download these movies via a peer-to-peer (P2P) network or BitTorrent or whatever. This is technically both against the law (for the person making the video available) and opens one up to civil lawsuits from the movie studios.

Think about that for a second: To use the devices I own in a way that they all enable, the convenient choice is to download the movies for free. All I want to do is use the hardware I already own with movies I’ve paid for and my choices are to circumvent the DRM on the DVDs or to download them from the Internet.

It’s ridiculous, and really shows the idiocy of the current copyright fight between the studios and their customers. There’s a future here for a nice little video jukebox device with a couple of USB ports for devices like the iPhone or iPod that serves as a nice hub for all your media. My Mac is almost perfect, in fact, but imagine a little $200 device. Believe it or not, they exist already, and the only reason they’re not more popular is because of stupid DRM battles from the studios that do nothing to stop piracy anyway.

Anyway, I’m considering moving my old iMac downstairs so that it’s attached via the wired network to the XBox 360. Leave all the videos on an attached terabyte external drive and I’ll have my video collection available whenever I want.

Also, consider this an thumbs up for Connect 360. The software has made all the videos and music available on my XBox and offers some nice other features that I’ve yet to take advantage of. The software retails for $20 and is worth it if you plan on making use of a setup like this. Enjoy!

Update: PS. HD Podcasts that I download via iTunes look GREAT. No DRM on those, and they look great on the TV. I can recommend the Political Lunch as one to start with. It’s a good rundown of the day’s political news. Good stuff.

Hilarious. Thanks, sis.

So says the latest National Intelligence Estimate according to the New York Times. I like Atrios’s headline better: “CIA To Dick Cheney: Suck. On. This.”

This brings up a something that’s concerned me about how Cheney and Bush have manipulated intelligence over these past 7 years. Specifically, it’s hard to avoid looking at this NIE as anything but a political football rather than a real government report. At the very least, this administration has been so clumsy and heavy handed about enforcing ideological orthodoxy in everything from intelligence reports to Fish & Wildlife studies that it’s entirely within the realm of possibility that the departments themselves might rebel.

In other words, do the writers of the NIE feel pressure to make claims less “flexible” to spin? Do they have to exaggerate certainty toward the status quo based on how they know the White House will likely spin the results of their work?

I’m not claiming this happened here. I’m just pointing out how pernicious interference can be. It’s similar to the concerns about torture, for example. Once you go down this road of messing with the nominal independence of agency reports, can you trust what information you get out of them in the future?

Don’t get me wrong. If this assessment is true, and this pulls back the crazies like Joe Lieberman from their all-war-all-the-time footing, then great. As with anything that seems too good to be true, though, I think it’s healthy to be skeptical. I hope the process is uncorrupted enough to produce good estimates.

Update: As always, I should leave stuff like this to the professional bloggers. Kevin Drum rounds up more background, including tying together some of the history here. Apparently, this estimate was held up for almost a year because of this conclusion. See my point above…

Update 2: Kevin Drum makes the money point in his followup:

This NIE was apparently finished a year ago, and its basic parameters were almost certainly common knowledge in the White House well before that. This means that all the leaks, all the World War III stuff, all the blustering about the IAEA — all of it was approved for public consumption after Cheney/Bush/Rice/etc. knew perfectly well it was mostly baseless.

Yes, exactly. It’s not an exaggeration to say that this story is the most important foreign policy revelation right now because it lays bare both the consensus of our intelligence agencies as well as the complete and utter bullshit being fed to us by our elected leaders. Oh, and Joe Lieberman is a bigger fool than previously realized.

Update 3: Kevin Drum stays on this story, passing on this bit from Matthew Yglesias. Drum’s follow on conclusion is actually better, so read both. The money point:

And now we can add to that one more thing: in the aftermath of our lightning victory in Iraq, Iran really was feeling some pressure and was willing to talk to us about halting their bomb program — and possibly cooperating in other areas as well.

…

But like Matt says, the Bushies couldn’t take yes for an answer. So we are where we are.

Again, skepticism is the order of the day. This is one NIE after years of war cheerleaders telling us otherwise. The implications, however, of this NIE being accurate or even mostly accurate as these things go is, well, stunning and outrageous.

Hilarious because it’s true:

The press is lazy.

(via Atrios)

Call it liberal, call it progressive, go ahead and call me this. Advertising! CAP is running four different types of these ads, including 2 that spoof the Mac/PC ads, in 3 markets.

I’m not fond of the Mac/PC spoofs because they cheapen the message. Love the one above and this second one below.

We won’t use someone like Ann Coulter to get our message out, so these ads will have to do.

They’re designed to generate entertainment, not information… when you can’t tell the difference between American Idol and a Presidential debate, we’re f’d. Seriously.

Then, there’s this:

Maria Luisa, the UNLV student who asked Hillary Clinton whether she preferred “diamonds or pearls” at last night’s debate wrote on her MySpace page this morning that CNN forced her to ask the frilly question instead of a pre-approved query about the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.

“Every single question asked during the debate by the audience had to be approved by CNN,” Luisa writes. “I was asked to submit questions including “lighthearted/fun” questions. I submitted more than five questions on issues important to me. I did a policy memo on Yucca Mountain a year ago and was the finalist for the Truman Scholarship. For sure, I thought I would get to ask the Yucca question that was APPROVED by CNN days in advance.”

Now, Luisa is getting “swamped” with critical e-mails.

Read the whole post, CNN responded. Still, they meant to do this. Lighthearted, fun questions aren’t what I’m tuning in for… which is why I don’t tune in anymore. Does anyone remember the debates from the 80s and even the 90s? They sucked, but they were at least serious…

(via Atrios)

Great video explaining the WGA strike in 3.5 minutes. I’m sympathetic to the WGA position on this one. Sometimes with strikes, unions can go too far, but the AMPTP (movie and TV studios) are being ridiculous. Having just been in that industry, especially since I worked with and around the people that put video online, this is both a big revenue area and a big growth area. To have the studios saying one thing to their investors and another to their employees is dishonest, plain and simple.

The video I posted earlier lays that out pretty plainly, but this one goes into some more history and is shorter.

Just read this on Balloon Juice, a conservative blog, from it’s primary author:

I had intended to register independent, but when I got there to do it, I had a moment of clarity- there seemed to be no point leaving the Republican party in protest and joining the unwashed masses. If I really was going to protest, it made no sense to not commit to the opposition party. Besides, as a Republican all these years, I never had any problem voting for libertarians, Democrats, etc., I don’t see why being a Democrat will change anything. And, the 2008 election really is the most important election of my lifetime- the basic foundation of our country has been under assault for a while, now, and I want to vote in the Democratic primary as a Democrat, not as someone with no party affiliation. I want to send a message, and as small as this gesture (which should appropriately be interpreted as a middle finger to the GOP and not as a sloppy wet kiss to Nancy Pelosi) is, I want it to mean as much as possible. There is now one less Republican in WV, and one more Democrat.

It makes me happy to see that people recognize where we’re at in the country right now. Change is critical, and a restoration of the rule of law paramount. I was pleasantly surprised he’s leaning Dodd right now. Each new person hopefully will shift those poll numbers, and there’s still time to get those numbers up.

Of course, I did like how he ended the post:

Now send me my check from Soros and the 40 virgins.

Wait, there’s a check??

I tend to blast single-issue voters, in large part because I think voters, myself included, tend to magnify negatives over positives. This is probably a topic for another post, so I won’t go into that here.

I bring the single issue up because I’m about to slam Barack Obama’s campaign and suggest that Democratic primary voters vote for a different candidate. Ostensibly, this will seem to be about his campaign’s appalling handling of the McClurkin appearance. So, it’s a single issue, gay rights thing, right?

Wrong. Look, I don’t think Obama is a bigot, nor do I think his campaign is going to suddenly flip-flop on the issue of gay rights. He’s been consistent on that front (in favor of civil unions).

Rather, this violates two of my rules for this election. The first is that liberalism to me is about living and letting live when it comes to private matters. In other words, let people live the lives they choose as long as it doesn’t harm others. Endorsing a “converted” homosexual and giving him a platform upon which to berate the choices of others violates that very core belief.

Even worse, though, is violating the most important rule for the 2008 election: The campaign must demonstrate a minimal competency when it comes to nuanced issues. We have had an Administration to whom every problem is a nail and the only tool they have is a hammer. In Obama’s case, his campaign has made soft bigotry a common element, and this demonstrates an inability to understand their voters and the campaign dynamic. Considering that this is their job, I can’t excuse this. The stupid report making fun of Indian-Americans should’ve said a lot right there, but to wade out into an obviously politically charged issue without an answer ready is naive.

I don’t want to buy into the “he’s naive” narrative (I’m not), but Obama doesn’t get a pass from me anymore. That was a great speech he gave in 2004, perhaps the best political speech I’ve ever heard, but talk doesn’t measure up to actions and so far, Obama has fallen short. I’ll vote for him and support his campaign if he wins the nomination, but until then, I really suggest people look to the other Democrats in the primary. There are too many good choices to simply elect this guy on his character. Substance matters.

Update: Edited out parts of the first paragraph that made no sense.