Hey Lar Crow--
A word of advice:
Don't use Registry cleaners. You may be a very very smart guy, but no one
knows what the hell they are really accomplishing in the registry and it's
highly unlikely that you have 11 "illegal" or corrupt registry entries or
strings let alone LOL 1100. All the so-called reg cleaners hype how much
they did, but not one of them explains how they work--even the ones by very
serious registry afficiandos like
www.winguides.com (now bought by another
company).
I always pass on this article by Ed Bott the author of 3 great blogs and
Windows Vista (and XP) Inside Out MSFT Press:
Why I Don't Use Registry Cleaners by Ed Bott
http://www.edbott.com/weblog/?p=643
Good luck,
CH
Bonus: Frank Rich's column in the Sunday Times and Maureen Dowd's:
FRANK RICH: Scooter’s Sopranos Go to the Mattresses
AS a weary nation awaited the fade-out of "The Sopranos" last Sunday, the
widow of the actual Mafia don John Gotti visited his tomb in Queens to
observe the fifth anniversary of his death. Victoria Gotti was not pleased
to find reporters lying in wait.
"It's disgusting that people are still obsessed with Gotti and the mob," she
told The Daily News. "They should be obsessed with that mob in Washington.
They have 3,000 deaths on their hands." She demanded to know if the
president and vice president have relatives on the front lines. "Every time
I watch the news and I hear of another death," she said, "it sickens me."
Far be it from me to cross any member of the Gotti family, but there's
nothing wrong with being obsessed with both mobs. Now that the approval
rating for the entire Washington franchise, the president and Congress
alike, has plummeted into the 20s, we need any distraction we can get; the
Mafia is a welcome nostalgic escape from a gridlocked government at home and
epic violence abroad.
But unlikely moral arbiter that Mrs. Gotti may be, she does have a point. As
the Iraq war careens toward a denouement as black, unresolved and terrifying
as David Chase's inspired "Sopranos" finale, the mob in the capital deserves
at least equal attention. John Gotti, the last don, is dead. Mr. Chase's
series is over. But the deaths on the nightly news are coming as fast as
ever.
True, the Washington mob isn't as sexy as the Gotti or Soprano clans, but
there is now a gripping nonfiction dramatization of its machinations
available gratis on the Internet, no HBO subscription required. For this we
can thank U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton, who presided over the Scooter
Libby trial. Judge Walton's greatest move was not the 30-month sentence he
gave Mr. Libby, a fall guy for higher-ups (and certain to be pardoned to
protect their secrets). It was instead the judge's decision to make public
the testimonials written to the court by members of the Washington
establishment pleading that a criminal convicted on four felony counts be
set free.
Mr. Libby's lawyers argued that these letters should remain locked away on
the hilarious grounds that they might be "discussed, even mocked, by
bloggers." And apparently many of the correspondents assumed that their
missives would remain private, just like all other documents pertaining to
Mr. Libby's former boss, Dick Cheney. The result is very little
self-censorship among the authors and an epistolary gold mine for readers.
Among those contributing to the 373 pages of what thesmokinggun.com calls
"Scooter Libby Love Letters" are self-identified liberals and Democrats, a
few journalists (including a contributing writer to The New York Times
Magazine) and a goodly sample of those who presided over the Iraq
catastrophe or cheered it on. This is a documentary snapshot of the elite
Washington mob of our time.
Like the scripts for "The Sopranos," the letters are not without mordant
laughs. Henry Kissinger writes a perfunctory two paragraphs, of which the
one about Mr. Libby rather than himself seems an afterthought. James
Carville co-signs a letter by Mary Matalin tediously detailing Mr. Libby's
devotion to organizing trick-or-treat festivities for administration
children spending a post-9/11 Halloween at an "undisclosed location." One
correspondent writes in astonishment that Mr. Libby once helped "a neighbor
who is a staunch Democrat" dig his car out of the snow, and another is in
awe that Mr. Libby would "personally buy his son a gift rather than passing
the task on to his wife." Many praise Mr. Libby's novel, "The Apprentice,"
apparently on the principle that an overwritten slab of published fiction
might legitimize the short stories he fabricated freelance for a grand jury.
But what makes these letters rise above inanity is the portrait they provide
of a wartime capital cut adrift from moral bearings. As the political
historian Rick Perlstein has written, one of the recurrent themes of these
pleas for mercy is that Mr. Libby perjured himself "only because he was so
busy protecting us from Armageddon." Has there ever been a government leader
convicted of a crime — and I don't mean only Americans — who didn't see
himself as saving the world from the enemy?
The Libby supporters never acknowledge the undisputed fact that their hero,
a lawyer by profession, leaked classified information about a covert C.I.A.
officer. And that he did so not accidentally but to try to silence an
administration critic who called attention to the White House's prewar lies
about W.M.D. intelligence. And that he compounded the original lies by lying
repeatedly to investigators pursuing an inquiry that without his
interference might have nailed others now known to have also leaked Valerie
Wilson's identity (Richard Armitage, Karl Rove, Ari Fleischer).
Much has been said about the hypocrisy of those on the right, champions both
of Bill Clinton's impeachment and of unflinching immigration enforcement,
who call for legal amnesty in Mr. Libby's case. To thicken their exquisite
bind, these selective sticklers for strict justice have been foiled in their
usual drill of attacking the judge in the case as "liberal." Judge Walton
was initially appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan and was elevated to
his present job by the current President Bush; he was assigned as well to
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court by the Bush-appointed chief
justice, John Roberts. Such credentials notwithstanding, Judge Walton told
the court on Thursday that he was alarmed by new correspondence and phone
calls from the Libby mob since the sentencing "wishing bad things" on him
and his family.
In Washington, however, hypocrisy is a perennial crime in both parties; if
all the city's hypocrites were put in jail, there would be no one left to
run the government. What is more striking about the Libby love letters is
how nearly all of them ignore the reality that the crime of lying under oath
is at the heart of the case. That issue simply isn't on these letter
writers' radar screen; the criminal act of perjury isn't addressed (unless
it's ascribed to memory loss because Mr. Libby was so darn busy saving the
world). Given that Mr. Libby expressed no contrition in court after being
convicted, you'd think some of his defenders might step into that moral
vacuum to speak for him. But there's been so much lying surrounding this war
from the start that everyone is inured to it by now. In Washington, lying no
longer registers as an offense against the rule of law.
Instead the letter writers repeat tirelessly that Mr. Libby is a victim,
suffering "permanent damage" to his reputation, family and career in the
typical judgment of Kenneth Adelman, the foreign-policy thinker who
predicted a "cakewalk" for America in Iraq. There's a whole lot of
projection going on, because to judge from these letters, those who drummed
up this war think of themselves as victims too. In his letter, the disgraced
Paul Wolfowitz sees his friend's case as an excuse to deflect his own
culpability for the fiasco. He writes that "during the spring and summer of
2003, when some others were envisioning a prolonged American occupation,"
Mr. Libby "was a strong advocate for a more rapid build-up of the Iraqi Army
and a more rapid transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqis, points on which
history will prove him to have been prescient."
History will prove no such thing; a "rapid" buildup of the Iraqi Army was
and is a mirage, and the neocons' chosen leader for an instant sovereign
Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi, had no political following. But Mr. Wolfowitz's real
point is to pin his own catastrophic blundering on L. Paul Bremer, the
neocons' chosen scapegoat for a policy that was doomed with or without Mr.
Bremer's incompetent execution of the American occupation.
Of all the Libby worshipers, the one most mocked in the blogosphere and
beyond is Fouad Ajami, the Lebanese-American academic and war proponent who
fantasized that a liberated Iraq would have a (positive) "contagion effect"
on the region and that Americans would be greeted "in Baghdad and Basra with
kites and boom boxes." (I guess it all depends on your definition of "boom
boxes.") In an open letter to President Bush for The Wall Street Journal
op-ed page on June 8, he embroidered his initial letter to Judge Walton,
likening Mr. Libby to a "fallen soldier" in the Iraq war. In Mr. Ajami's
view, Tim Russert (whose testimony contradicted Mr. Libby's) and the
American system of justice are untrustworthy, and "the 'covertness' of Mrs.
Wilson was never convincingly and fully established." (The C.I.A. confirmed
her covert status in court documents filed in May.)
Mr. Ajami notes, accurately, that the trial was "about the Iraq war and its
legitimacy" — an argument that could also be mustered by defenders of Alger
Hiss who felt his perjury trial was about the cold war. But it's even more
revealing that the only "casualty of a war" Mr. Ajami's conscience prompts
him to mention is Mr. Libby, a figurative casualty rather than a literal
one.
No wonder Victoria Gotti denigrated "that mob in Washington." When the
godfathers of this war speak of never leaving "a fallen comrade" on the
battlefield in Iraq, as Mr. Ajami writes of Mr. Libby, they are speaking
first and foremost of one another. The soldiers still making the ultimate
sacrifice for this gang's hubristic folly will just have to fend for
themselves.
_____________________________________
MAUREEN DOWD: Can He Crush Hillary?
WASHINGTON
The busty brunette wriggles around in her pink bikini beside a picture of
Barack Obama frolicking in the Hawaiian surf. She continues undulating in
red underwear emblazoned with the word “Obama.†And, next to a picture of
the senator in a suit, she stands proudly, wearing her own dark suit and a
political-helpmate smile.
“Does Barack Obama’s wife have something to worry about?†John Gibson teased
on Fox News.
Michelle doesn’t have to worry about “Obama Girl,†the model Amber Lee
Ettinger, who stars in the music video sweeping the Web, in which she
lip-syncs a song called “I Got a Crush on Obama.†The sultry-catchy lyrics
include “You’re into border security/let’s break this border between you and
me/universal health care reform/it makes me warm.â€
But Obama may have to worry about Obama Girl. For one thing, Amber — whose
résumé boasts that she was a “featured cage dancer†in the movie “Uptown
Girls†— isn’t even sure she’s going to vote for her video dreamboy. “We’ll
see,†she told ABC’s Jake Tapper. “Maybe.â€
And for another, Obama has been trying to beef up his image for months —
including writing a platitudinous manifesto in the new Foreign Affairs — but
the buzz is still about his beefcake side. The Democrat who’s so afraid of
looking like a pretty boy is once more drawing attention for his more
superficial charms.
When I stopped in a Ralph Lauren shop the other day, the sales staff had
just sent off some clothes for an Obama photo shoot for a GQ cover.
At his first news conference after he announced last February, Obama
chastised reporters for writing about how good he looked in a swimsuit, and
he defended hiring oppo-researchers, saying that it was “essential to
democracy†to compare and contrast the candidates on the issues.
So why would his aides send two sneering memos about the Clintons’ finances
to reporters this week, on a not-for-attribution condition?
That’s not sleazy so much as stupid.
First of all, they didn’t need to do anything. Other Democratic campaigns
were already pelting reporters with e-mail pointing out the possible juicy
conflicts in the Clinton filings.
If the Obama Boys were determined to whack the Clintons on greed, they
should have done so openly. Their clumsy attempt at cloak-and-dagger was
bound to fail.
A reporter gave their “classified†memos to the Clinton camp, and the
Clinton camp gleefully spread them around to other reporters.
The Obama Boys’ inept leaking was compounded by over-the-top writing. They
angered Indian-Americans, who accused them of stereotyping, and the campaign
had to apologize. Under a flippant headline referring to “Hillary Clinton
(D-Punjab),†one memo reported that Bill Clinton collected $300,000 for two
speeches from Cisco in 2006 and Hillary accepted almost $60,000 in
contributions from Cisco employees, even though the company was outsourcing
jobs to India.
The critique also stressed how rich Bill Clinton has grown from his
friendship with the California supermarket mogul Ron Burkle. Ron lets his
pal Bill fly on his plane and brought him into his Yucaipa fund, which, the
Obama memo tut-tuts, has investments in astrological software and the
distribution of Playboy.
One question I’d like to ask the Leo who would be First Lad: When you rake
in $10 million a year from speeches, do you really need that $150,000 for
speaking to the Boys and Girls Club of L.A.?
Hillaryland was panting for an opportunity to paint Obama as a hypocrite for
saying he was different and above it all, while acting the same. And its
best ally in undermining Obama is Obama, who hoists his pedestal so high he’s
bound to fall off. He seems more intent on proving he’s pure than proving he’s
tough.
The Clintons act high-minded and do-gooding, while employing a staff of hit
men. Obama is tangled in contradictions of high and low, saint and killer,
while Hillary moves like a shark.
“She’d lean over and bite his ear off if that’s what it takes,†says Charlie
Cook, the political analyst. “The question is, will he do what it takes to
win? This is a guy who did not have to deal with a single negative ad being
run against him in the primary and general campaigns for the Senate. It was
almost an immaculate conception.â€
Obama is too busy modeling to make this point, but the Clinton financial
disclosures raise a big question: Do we want the country run again by a
couple who get so easily wrapped around the fingers of anyone who is rich?
As long as a guy was willing to give them millions, would it matter if his
name were Al Capone?
___________________________
