What Obama said:

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

What the McCain campaign said:

Asked to respond, McCain adviser Steve Schmidt called it a “remarkable statement and extremely revealing.”

“It shows an elitism and condescension towards hardworking Americans that is nothing short of breathtaking,” Schmidt said. “It is hard to imagine someone running for president who is more out of touch with average Americans.”

What Clinton said:

“I saw in the media it’s being reported that my opponent said that the people of Pennsylvania who faced hard times are bitter,” Clinton said this afternoon. “Well, that’s not my experience. As I travel around Pennsylvania, I meet people who are resilient, who are optimistic, who are positive, who are rolling up their sleeves. They are working hard everyday for a better future, for themselves and their children.

“Pennsylvanians don’t need a president who looks down on them, they need a president who stands up for them, who fights for them, who works hard for your futures, your jobs, your families.”

And at the end of the day, Obama responds:

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Thanks to a dogged airline passenger, some zealous security guards and a three-year legal battle, Europe’s travelers will soon find out whether a tennis racket really is a dangerous weapon.

The fight waged by the Austrian passenger, who had been ordered from a plane before takeoff because of his sports equipment, forced the European Commission on Thursday to agree to publish a secret list of banned items for air passengers.

The commission’s pledge followed unusually blunt criticism of EU aviation security laws from a senior legal adviser at the European Union’s top court.

[..]

The list of banned objects was contained in an addendum to a European regulation, which Heinrich was not allowed to see.

No, Citizen - you are not allowed to know what you cannot do. How else would we keep you in line?

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CBS Corp. Chief Executive Leslie Moonves got a 29% bump in his compensation in 2007, reaping a package valued at $36.8 million, according to a proxy filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The compensation package, ranking among the biggest in the media industry, was awarded in a year in which CBS’s stock fell about 13% and its net income tumbled 25%.

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The Bush administration said yesterday that it plans to start using the nation’s most advanced spy technology for domestic purposes soon, rebuffing challenges by House Democrats over the idea’s legal authority.

[..]

Sophisticated overhead sensor data will be used for law enforcement once privacy and civil rights concerns are resolved, he said.

And it will be resolved by ignoring the relevant parts of the constitution, of course.

Feel safer yet?

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A grandmother from Merseyside has applied for planning permission to demolish the home of Tesco chief executive Sir Terry Leahy.

Dot Reid is retaliating against plans to bulldoze her home and 71 others in Kirkby, to make way for Everton’s new stadium and a Tesco supermarket.

The 58-year-old said Sir Terry, who lives in a mansion in Hertfordshire, deserved a taste of his own medicine.

She plans to turn the site of the Tesco boss’s house into a community garden.

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User Account Control is easily one of the most hated features of Windows Vista, according to readers. The seemingly endless stream of UAC pop-ups, asking you to confirm this action or that action, just get in the way (and aren’t particularly zippy, given the screen redraw). Others don’t mind UAC, but there’s no doubt it’s a controversial “feature” of the OS.

At the RSA 2008 confab in San Francisco, Microsoft admitted that UAC was designed, in fact, to annoy. Microsoft’s David Cross came out and said so: “The reason we put UAC into the platform was to annoy users. I’m serious,” said Cross.

This isn’t a total revelation. UAC was designed to get in your face; it’s all about that “hey, you sure about that bauddy?”, second-guessing thing. It’s a less intimidating, less entertaining version of Clint Eastwood saying, “do you feel lucky, punk?” All this because you wanted to do something unimpressive like view all running processes on your system or install GAIM.

The idea was to “force” developers to write their software in a way such that privilege elevations aren’t needed in the first place. And since the end-user doesn’t have much influence on what developers do, it looks they didn’t think their cunning plan through…

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