I just caught the 1957 movie A Face In The Crowd on Turner Classic Movies the other day.

A female radio reporter turns a folk-singing drifter into a powerful media star.

Was it amazing foresight that Budd Schulberg used to write this story that could be about Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, or others of their ilk?

Perhaps extrapolating from Father Charles Edward Coughlin or Arthur Godfrey was enough to get this close to the modern day demagogues.

The article Windows DLL Load Hijacking Exploits Go Wild starts off with:

Less than 24 hours after Microsoft said it couldn’t patch Windows to fix a systemic problem, attack code appeared Tuesday to exploit the company’s software.

Ever since I have used Linux/Unix starting in the early 1980s, I have been aware that it is possible to create a similar hazard by setting your search path variable to search the current director.  There were always warnings that though convenient to do this, it was a security hazard.

Of course, back in the 80s there was not the widespread use of the internet.  In the more closed environments back then, one wasn’t hearing about attacks using this vulnerability. (That doesn’t mean it wasn’t happening.) Back then I didn’t pay much attention to the warning.

Since I have had the Unix emulator Cygwin installed on my PC, I have avoided setting my search path in Cygwin to have this vulnerability.  I have been avoiding this on the Cygwin part of my PC for at least 10 years or more.

Little did I think that Microsoft had built this security hole into Windows in a way that was not even optional.  I don’t know why I shouldn’t have considered it, since Microsoft seems to have had just about every security hole that is imaginable, even the ones that were well advertised before Microsoft adopted them. Don’t get me wrong, this is not a vulnerability that Microsoft just introduced.  It has been in Windows ever since there have been DLLs (dynamic link libraries).  The need for backward compatibility is one of the reasons Microsoft won’t fix the problem.

The op-ed piece Why We Need a Second Stimulus by Laura Tyson spells out in very simple terms what the government’s fiscal plan should be.

Laura Tyson, a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, was chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers and the National Economic Council in the Clinton administration. She is a member of President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.

SPOILER ALERT: Here is the summary of her prescription:

Faced with these risks, as long as the economy is operating far below potential, policy makers should do two seemingly contradictory things. First, they should provide additional fiscal support for job creation and growth. And, second, they should enact a credible multiyear plan now to stabilize the ratio of federal debt to gross domestic product gradually as the economy recovers.

By easing capital market concerns about the government’s future borrowing needs, such a plan would permit larger deficits and slower debt reduction while unemployment is still high. The long-run debt problem — the result of imprudent fiscal decisions before the recession, escalating health care costs and an aging population — must be addressed once the economy has recovered. But for now the priorities of fiscal policy should be jobs and investment.

Please take careful notice of the proviso that she states, as long as the economy is operating far below potential. In case I still have not conveyed the point strongly enough, the implication is that when the economy starts operating at its potential, then the prescription changes.

The article Building a Nation of Know-Nothings by Timothy Egan is a partial explanation of what my political blog is trying to fight.

SPOILER ALERT: The quotes below give away the punchline to the article.

It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, the price of having such a large, messy democracy. Plenty of hate-filled partisans swore that Abraham Lincoln was a Catholic and Franklin Roosevelt was a Jew. So what if one-in-five believe the sun revolves around the earth, or aren’t sure from which country the United States gained its independence?

But false belief in weapons of mass-destruction led the United States to a trillion-dollar war. And trust in rising home value as a truism as reliable as a sunrise was a major contributor to the catastrophic collapse of the economy. At its worst extreme, a culture of misinformation can produce something like Iran, which is run by a Holocaust denier.

It’s one thing to forget the past, with predictable consequences, as the favorite aphorism goes. But what about those who refuse to comprehend the present?