Didn’t Bill Richardson already “betray” Hillary Clinton by running for president himself?

Yes, that’s right. If you are yourself running for president, by that very act you are manifesting your preference for yourself over any competitors for the job. You are endorsing yourself and simultaneously withholding your endorsement from the other candidates.

After New Mexico Bill Richardson dropped out of the presidential race, he spent several weeks mulling the question of whom he might endorse. Finally, following a “tense” conversation with U.S. Senator and former First Lady Hillary Clinton, Richardson endorsed the bid of guru and U.S. Senator Barack Obama. According to the New York Times:

“Let me tell you: we’ve [Hillary and I have] had better conversations,” Mr. Richardson said.

The decision by Mr. Richardson, who ended his own presidential campaign on Jan. 10, to support Mr. Obama was a belt of bad news for Mrs. Clinton. It was a stinging rejection of her candidacy by a man who had served in two senior positions in President Bill Clinton’s administration, and who is one of the nation’s most prominent elected Hispanics….

“An act of betrayal,” said James Carville, an adviser to Mrs. Clinton and a friend of Mr. Clinton.

“Mr. Richardson’s endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic,” Mr. Carville said, referring to Holy Week.

A later story quotes Carville pointedly refusing to apologize for the comparison, which is not too surprising given the modus operandi to date of that particular political hit man.

Does it need to be argued that, in reason, one cannot base support for a candidate for the presidency (or even any lesser office) on any considerations except the candidate’s ideas, character, qualifications for the job and such-like? Personal loyalty might reasonably tip the balance all other things being equal, but how can it be a primary desideratum?

One must also wonder, of course, whether Carville would castigate as a Judas every person associated with the Bill Clinton administration who decided to support someone not-Hillary for president… Surely there are many other instances of such “betrayal” given the growing support for Obama since the primaries began. Or is it only “important” endorsements that are supposed to be based on anything other than the endorser’s honest best judgment?

Richardson’s endorsement is, however, unjustified, especially considering that he points to Obama’s recent speech tepidly disavowing and dishonestly rationalizing the bigoted pulpit-speak of Jeremiah Wright as a major example of what draws him to Obama.

WHAT landed on a wiretap?

According to the New York Post, “New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer has been implicated in a federal prostitution probe after it was discovered he had a tryst with a young high-class hooker the day before Valentine’s Day that landed on an FBI wiretap, sources said today.” Don’t try this at home.

Should Eliot Spitzer resign?

Yes. Not because Governor Spitzer had sex with a prostitute or had dealings with a “prostitution ring,” but because he’s a hypocritical bastard. But he should have resigned before this anyway.

P.S. Prostitution should be legal.

What is the benefit of having an anchor ask reporters a follow-up about the story?

On the “CBS Evening News” this Sunday, Russ Mitchell asked what the University of North Carolina is doing to assist the investigation of the murder of student body president Eve Carson. The reporter answered that the university is offering a reward of $25,000 for information leading to the arrest of the killer.

Perhaps the single-exchange symposium is supposed to demonstrate the anchor’s engagement, or engage the viewer, or some such. But it becomes so obviously staged that it is absurd. When was the last time an anchorman asked the obvious of a reporter in the field and the reporter replied, “Uh, gee, not sure about that…let me look it up?” The solution is to either drop such wrap-up Q&A or switch to a genuinely extemporaneous inquiry into the implications of a story. Skip the requests for recitation of a glaringly relevant fact that would not have been omitted but to permit the addendum.

However, this is small potatoes as far as the deficiencies of network news go.

Is the 1996 film version of “Romeo and Juliet” dreadful or delightful?

If Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of “Romeo and Juliet,” starring Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio, has any enduring interest, it’s thanks to the scraps of Shakespeare allowed to survive the bum’s-rush treatment.

My distaste for the effort isn’t just about all the unkind cuts. It’s also about what’s done with what’s left.

Cuz, sure, it’s Shakespeare, but don’t worry, we’re going to SUPER-FAST-CUT from this part of the scene to the other, and Juliet’s mom and nurse are really going to SCREAM for her attention, and the camera is going to LURCH and ZOOM as they LURCH and ZOOM across the room, and the guns are going to TWIRL, and things are going to go SLO-MO and FAST-MO and ZAP and FLASH and CORUSCATE and…obfuscate.

Isn’t the actual play a bit more inviting and developed than this? Sweeter? If we’re so afraid of Shakespeare’s poetic imaginings that we can’t have Romeo speak of baptism without his being illustratively dunked in a pool—if every other phrase that would in life be uttered soft must be histrionically howled, just to make sure we GET it (a practice thankfully not followed in the tender if too-brief courtship)—if even the balcony scene must be reduced to a few cut-and-spliced nubs—why not skip altogether the homage to consternating if eloquent turns of phrase and just retool the plot? Call it “West Side Story” or something like that. Modernize away.

This “Romeo and Juliet” is relentlessly off-putting. Even so, it includes a number of engaging bits, in which the actors are effectively if briefly silly or sarcastic, anguished or playful, loving or hateful—in short, expressive of the full range of emotion from A to J that you would expect in the sort of collation of scattered select bits of the Bard. The actors do help us realize and feel the meaning of the words. But even their best delivery is drowned in cinematic sludge.

I’m all in favor of adapting stage to screen, and taking into account modern sensibilities and knowledge. I’m not eager to see the five-hour version of “Hamlet,” or to be assailed by every impenetrable archaism still not solved in the glosses.

But Luhrmann isn’t just solving a time problem, or a translation problem. He isn’t just eschewing piety in accommodating the fact that we’re living four centuries later than Shakespeare. For Luhrmann, the biggest hurdle is how to get viewers to swallow ambrosia when he believes we believe it’s castor oil. The method of the dissembling abominable varlet is to let Shakespeare shine only sporadically, and to disguise the flavor of Will’s words with a saccharine surfeit of jumping and jagged, clanging and cloying production values. Instead of skillfully helping viewers enter Shakespeare’s lyric world, Luhrmann insists on dissonantly distracting us from it. It’s a lot of fardels to bear. And it’s an insult.

How was Charles Free caught?

“ABC News” tonight had an interesting story about an escaped convict, real name Jack Hazen, assumed name Charles Free, who managed to live undiscovered in Las Vegas for the past 31 years. In 1975 he had been convicted of armed robbery, then ten months later escaped. He has not gotten in trouble with the law in all the years since. His wife and two daughters apparently knew nothing of his secret, are shocked, but say he’s reformed and are appealing for leniency. Extradition proceedings are pending. He may have to serve the rest of his original sentence in Florida, as well as additional time.

“ABC News” did not address the most interesting question: How was Hazen/Free’s cover blown? The kvbc.com site briefly addresses this:

The newly formed DOC Cold Case Fugitive Unit in Florida connected the dots by comparing electronic databases to known fugitives. They tipped off local officers and Hazen was arrested again.

Oddly enough, for the last three years Hazen has been living just two doors down from a Clark County Marshall’s house.

That’s something, but I’d still like to know what in Hazen’s Free-era info tipped off authorities to his real identity. Probably he got a little too sloppy, feeling the trail had grown cold. The data in computers doesn’t grow cold, it just gets passed around and passed around and mixed and matched and analyzed and re-analyzed.

So, what’s the skinny on those browsers, anyway?

The complete text of our reader’s question was a little too long for the Deepest Sender grid. To wit: “In recent months, you’ve said, ‘More soon on the browsers and other software’ and ‘if you’ve got links on your desktop to 11 Internet browsers (yes; 11, about which more later)….” So, what’s the skinny on those browsers, anyway?”

Did I say 11? I currently have icon-links to 14 browsers on my desktop. The browsers I use at least somewhat regularly are Internet Explorer, Firefox, Crazy Browser, K-Meleon, OffByOne, and iRider. I also click into Deepnet Explorer now and then. I still have a set-up project going with Deepnet.

Until I switched to the new laptop several months ago, IE, Firefox, K-Meleon and Navigator were the browsers I typically resorted to. I knew about Opera, but didn’t realize it was now free and somewhat more robust than when I had last checked it out.

A big discovery was iRider, which allows the user to open many links simultaneously (or seriatim very quickly) and to “pin” open pages so that they’re retained in permanent memory to be opened each time the browser is opened. IRider is fast and versatile, and the only browser I’ve ever paid money for. However, after I bought it I learned a lot more about Firefox add-ons and also the “group” feature that Firefox and many browsers now have, including Crazy Browser, K-Meleon, and Internet Explorer 7. This feature allows the user to save a bunch of related pages under an assigned name in the browser’s permanent memory. That’s helpful for quickly starting up research within a particular category of web pages, for example the portal pages of a major client’s web site, or the home pages of major newspapers. Or say you’re a film buff, you could make a group of all the sites you like to visit for movie news and reviews. It’s a more efficient kind of bookmarking.

OffByOne is the most stripped-down browser for windows. If you don’t care about a web page’s format, just want a bare-bones page for reading text and prefer to use as little memory  as possible, give OffByOne a try. I’d install it on my Asus eee if the eee had an XP instead of a Linux OS. If you have a clunky old PC with not a lot of RAM, try OffByOne. The makers call it “the world’s smallest and fastest web browser with full HTML 3.2 support. It is a  completely self-contained, stand-alone 1.2 MB application with no dependencies  on any other browser or browser component. For Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows  ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP.”

K-Meleon and Crazy Browser are both pretty nimble. Crazy Browser will list the groups you save so that you can just click on the collection of web pages you want to work with, whereas K-Meleon asks you to type in the name of the group.

Firefox tends to be my default browser, and it’s what came pre-installed in my mini-laptop, the Asus eee. I’ve installed most of the same add-ons in both the eee’s Firefox and the Dell Vostro 1000’s Firefox.

Internet Explorer 7 is a pretty good browser, but seems a little slow to me. It has tabbed browsing, but I think every major browser has tabbed browsing these days. I need IE7 to view Netflix movies online, and to most efficiently send pages to Microsoft’s OneNote notetaking software (pages can be sent to OneNote using the print function in other browsers).

Deepnet Explorer combines a browser and a news reader. I haven’t yet explored this browser as deeply as I’d like to (get it? a pun!) but I like what I’ve seen so far.

Other browsers on my Dell, which have been praised by partisans but which I use only occasionally:

Safari - The Apple browser, now available in a Windows version.

Opera - Supposed to be very customizable with widgets, but these widgets don’t seem to be as easy to install as the Firefox add-ons.

Netscape Navigator - Owned by AOL now. They’ve thrown in the towel and will no longer be publishing new versions or supporting the latest one. Navigator was of course the first big browser to give Internet Explorer a run for its money.

Wyzo - Supposed to be especially good at downloading media.

Avant and Maxthon - Two of the browsers based on the Internet Explorer “core.” Crazy Browser is another. I don’t know quite how this works. Does Microsoft have to give them permission? Anyway, I gather that these shell-browsers won’t function if you don’t have IE also installed.

Flock, based like Firefox on something called Mozilla, had me at hello and then lost me shortly thereafter. Flock is a so-called “social” browser that helps the hipsters stay plugged into Facebook and YouTube and whatnot. I liked that it includes a blogging utility compatible with WordPress. But it seemed to be impossible to choose the right category for a blog being posted (unless it was among the first few categories listed in the scrollbar), which meant I had to log in to WordPress directly anyway to pick the category… I’ve had better luck with the Deepest Sender add-on for Firefox. Perhaps the problem with Flock’s blogging feature is easily solved.  But if you’re giving somebody a utility to do something faster and better, and it doesn’t work perfectly immediately, you risk losing the user to another utility that does work perfectly immediately. That is the way market competition goes sometimes, especially in the lickety-split world of software. (Yes, even freeware is in a market.)

I was a bit surprised to learn about all these browsers. I could have found out about many of them a few years ago with a Google search or two. There are many more out there in addition to the ones I’ve mentioned, some of them very specialized. If you want a sports-themed browser geared to guiding you quickly to all things sporty, there’s something called Sportsbrowser.

The next question to ask me is what Firefox add-ons I’ve installed.