Anti-ATV People Piss Me Off

I can understand not wanting a bunch of ATV's making noise over near your house. I can understand being worried about safety. I can even understand environmental concerns. What I can't understand is how people who are anti-ATV out on Long Island near my home can sit there and refuse to consider the rider's side of it when confronted with cold, hard facts. Fact - ATV sales outpaced that of street bikes. No matter how many times I tell anti-ATV people this, they refuse to acknowledge it and spout the same crap over and over about how giving a piece of county or state land up for a public ATV park would help out "only a couple thousand people."

Fact - It IS possible to have public riding areas without everybody getting the shit sued out of them. I point to public riding areas in other states like Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Massachusetts that are bringing in tourism dollars from riders all over the place. The anti-ATV people ignore this. I tell them these public riding areas continue to exist despite liability issues. They ignore me and continue to voice their opinion that liability makes it impossible to have a public riding area on Long Island.

Fact - More people are killed by bee stings in the average year than by ATV accidents. I love how the anti-ATV people constantly parrot some figure of over 4,700 people killed by ATVs. Turns out that even the decidedly anti-ATV lobbying group that cites this figure admits that it's a 20-year total.

Fact - The problem with illegal riding is not a recent phenomenon. It's at least 30 years old. Growing up in Wading River, even as a small child I remember hearing about dirt bike riders getting chased by the cops when riding on public land. The anti-ATVers conveniently forget that when they call for increased law enforcement. It's been at least 30 years and nothing's worked. Perhaps it's time for a change in the way we attack the problem.

I can understand people having strong feelings about the issue, but sometimes debating it is like talking to a brick wall. This is why the problem persists.

UPDATE: I've closed comments on this thread because the comment spammers have latched onto it and keep loading it up with ads for boner pills. I've opened another thread for comments here.

Republican Noise Machine Playing the Game Again

One thing I can't stand about how the Republican Party plays the game at the federal level is that they can never seem to take responsibility for what they do, even if they're caught red-handed. It's pretty well understood in the blogging community that Mel Martinez has admitted that his staff authored the Schiavo memo, but the Republican noise machine fires up anyway. Media Matters gives a chronology of what happened as the noise machine went into high gear to discredit the memo and distance themselves from it. So even though we have an admission from Martinez, the noise machine obfuscates the issue by suggesting that the memo could be a fake. It starts with conservative blogs, and then the non-story story bubbles up to Michelle Malkin, The National Review, The American Spectator, The Washington Post and The Washington Times.

This is textbook. It's absolutely typical of how the Republicans have been using the media for the past several years. The impact of what the Democrats have discovered is almost completely blunted because legit sources are now casting doubt on whether or not the memo is a fake, simply by writing stories suggesting there might be something fishy about it.

The worst thing about this is that the issue will die along with everything else that the Democrats have rightly pinned on the Republicans, mostly because the Dems can't mobilize their own counterpoint to what the Republicans have put out there. Efforts to bring this story to completion and establish the responsible parties in the mind of the average American will probably fall short. The average American will either remember nothing about this, or they'll remember that somebody in the Republican party got busted trying to politicize the situation, but it might have just been a dirty trick put into play by the Democrats.

Doubt that the wingnut noise machine is obfuscating the issue? Do a Google search on "Schiavo memo" and look at all the top links. Lessee...there's the Washington Post story headlined "Doubts Raised on Schiavo Memo" as the first link. Then there's two links to Michelle Malkin's blog. The PowerLine blog entry and the American Spectator story are also in the top ten. If you had been some clueless person looking for information on the memo, you would reasonably come to the conclusion there are doubts as to the memo's authenticity. And that's just bullcrap.

I'm not saying that everyone gets their news from Google searches, but I am saying that the noise machine can create as much positive press or water-muddying bullshit stories for the Republicans as is needed to get the job done. And the Dems don't have an asset like that.

You might be thinking that the Schiavo case has gotten its fair share in the press already, but that's a separate issue from what we're dealing with here. The Republicans have been caught trying to politicize a very sensitive situation and using the controversy to position themselves as belonging to a "Culture of Life." In reality, the memo shows the Republicans care less about life and more about finding issues they can use to mobilize the pro-life base to their political advantage. That, to me, is serious. And until the Democrats learn to play the media game as well as the Republicans, they're going to be schooled over and over again.

HD Update #4

Managed to boot from floppies and get an external USB CD-ROM drive working. From there, I got XP Pro installed and all seems to be running fine. The data recovery guys need another 18 hours to scan my old drive platters for the remnants of my old Outlook .pst file, which sucks. But by then, I should be finished loading all the software and whatnot that need to be on the machine. I took the opportunity to install some new applications, including the new Microsoft anti-spyware app. I think I'll also try PC Cillin rather than the usual Norton pigware for anti-virus. This is also a good opportunity to update every app and driver to the latest versions. So far, the formerly dead Toshiba is running like a champ. (Keep fingers crossed.)

Hard Drive Update

Trying desperately to get back to normal... I borrowed the old Toshiba I gave to my Mom a few months ago and have been using that to work on stuff during the day. Most files are on the server, but there are quite a few e-mails and files attached to e-mails that I need to get off the old HD. The recovery folks are working on it, and it's going to cost over $1,000 to retrieve all the data and back it up on DVD-R.

Went to CompUSA today and got a 60GB Western Digital drive. But the DVD drive on the newer Toshiba doesn't work, so I can't boot to CD. Here's the plan:

I put the new drive into the old Toshiba and booted to CD. I'm running Windows setup on the old Toshiba and copying over only a minimum of drivers, etc. once I get the drive partitioned and formatted. Once that's done, I'll swap the drive into the other computer and see if I can install software remotely from a shared CD-ROM drive on the network. This is going to be a giant pain in the ass, if it works at all.

I'm supposed to get the backup DVDs from recovery tomorrow. Then I get to copy all of that stuff over the network. Joy!