Oddly enough, AT&T (or AT&T Wireless, anyway) were clients of mine. Nobody knows de troubles ...

LWM brings up the other side of the equation ... vendors. Vendors are liars. It's embedded in the game; they sell functionality that does not exist, will sometimes never exist, because the technology will leapfrog them and the company will collapse if they do not (or so goes the long-held rationale). They count on things to get sorted in the implementation phase, when the client has too much skin in the game to pull out.

Couple the basic data issues with the lies the vendor tells, and the lies the internal sponsor tells him/herself and their oversight committee, and the misshapen reality the project manager inherits and the lies they have to tell to ever finish the project, and THEN imagine that going on with your national security file ... and tell me it isn't time to start drinking heavily ...

THEN bring in the erosion of print media Cocktailhag has noted with some care here and in many threads (and which brings us back on topic) where one could theoretically investigate and disclose any of this. Forget radio or TV, it's too complex for them to even touch. But in print, where complex issues have been perpetually dumbed down and segmented out by facile notions of who the audience is? Which reporter is going to pitch that story and be given the time and budget to work it through all the necessary angles? And to be fair, how many readers are going to stick with a 12,000 word feature or a series about this ... and whaddawe do (don't ask me, I will have started that heavy drinking)?

Next, on the Gloom Channel ...

PS - LWM, I honestly did not know you were RonPauliac. Is it true you have a son in 1/75?

A sad read by Frank Rich (whom I do not think is a bad columnist at NYT) about covering politics, in this case Norman Mailer's Miami and the Seige of Chicago, about '68.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21411

Just a wild guess, but could be a cookie ... do you have cookies disabled? If not or if you don't want to, you can look in your cookie file for a matching offender, say zedo.com, and delete it. If you have an antivirus program like Norton, you might also have an option to delete those files. Hope that helps.

Posting at length for those who do not have WSJ subs ...

http://online.wsj.com/article/capital_journal.html

At a time when Sen. McCain badly needs to consolidate the support of the Republican base before the general-election campaign begins in earnest, leaders of the party's social conservatives are letting it be known -- quietly, for now -- that they aren't happy with the way their desires are being met.

...

The most telling sign of unhappiness on the right was a letter sent by social-conservative leaders to Mr. Bush last month, complaining that his administration was consistently rejecting federal funding for organizations that run programs promoting sexual abstinence among young Americans. Many social conservatives believe that abstinence training has led to a drop in teen pregnancies and contributed to a decline in abortion rates. But the five-page letter cites a series of cases in which private groups that promote abstinence have had grant requests turned down by the administration, principally by the Department of Health and Human Services.

The letter says those grant decisions are "weakening" the president's policy supporting abstinence training as vigorously as contraception efforts, "with concomitant harm to American youth." It was signed by 50 Republican leaders representing a who's who of social conservatives.

...

Item No. 1 on the list of complaints from Dr. Willke and other conservative leaders is Mr. Bush's failure to compel the Senate to vote on the federal judges he has nominated. If approved, those nominations would put a new set of conservative judges on the federal bench for years to come, regardless of the outcome of this fall's elections. The White House says some 30 judicial nominations are awaiting action in the Senate.

...

Mr. Bush ought to instruct Republicans in the Senate "simply to close up shop until this constitutionally correct set of people is given a shot at a vote," Dr. Willke said. "And he's done nothing."

...

All told, Gary Bauer, president of the advocacy group American Values and a veteran of Republican cultural debates, points to "a certain fatigue factor" among social conservatives that amounts to "a big problem for the Republican Party overall." The danger for Republicans isn't that they will lose social-conservative votes to either Democrats Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton but that they will fail to generate the kind of energy and turnout that put Mr. Bush over the top in, among other places, Ohio in 2004.

More than that, social-conservative fatigue means Republicans are caught in the classic dilemma of needing to simultaneously shore up support on their right while moving toward the center to win over independent moderates -- who might be turned off by harsh messages on social issues.

But Mr. Bauer argues that the California Supreme Court just handed the Republicans the solution to this dilemma, with its decision giving gays the right to marry. Though polls show a gradual increase in support for gay marriage overall in recent years, Mr. Bauer argues that "this is an issue where a lot of those self-described moderates don't want the courts to redefine marriage." Supporting "traditional marriage," in other words, is one of those rare acts that can score big with both the Republican base and key pockets of swing voters, Mr. Bauer argues.