This has been one of those nights where I sat down to do several things, a lot of file management on my computer, adding missing cover art in iTunes and watching Prince of the City, a three hour Sydney Lumet classic that I hadn’t seen since its original release (the DVD includes a nice new making-of documentary).

The end result is that I just noticed it’s almost 1:30 in the morning and I haven’t eaten since around 2 PM. There’s not a lot of food in the house tonight, but I don’t think I’m in much of a going out mood at this point.

I’ve been checking out some of the articles on the new iPod line over at ilounge.com and the news isn’t good. Initial impressions of the iPod Touch seem to veer towards the negative side of the tracks (though PC Mag rates it 5 stars out of 5). And worse news for the iPod Classic, which apparently is using a new digital-to-analogue converter chip which is much less accurate than the old one. Just the latest in a line of unexpected mis-steps from Apple.

The announcement of a Led Zeppelin “reunion” concert (is it really Zep without Bonzo?) has caused an unprecedented frenzy in the UK. Just 18,000 tickets are available, and the web site which people are supposed to go to in order to enter the ticket lottery has been inundated – 89.5 million attempts to connect in a 12 hour period.

Another article that caught my attention is a NY Times review of Alan Greenspan’s new book, The Age of Turbulence. Some excerpts from the review:

Alan Greenspan, who was chairman of the Federal Reserve for nearly two decades, in a long-awaited memoir, is harshly critical of President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and the Republican-controlled Congress, as abandoning their party’s principles on spending and deficits.

In the 500-page book, “The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World,” Mr. Greenspan describes the Bush administration as so captive to its own political operation that it paid little attention to fiscal discipline, and he described Mr. Bush’s first two Treasury secretaries, Paul H. O’Neill and John W. Snow, as essentially powerless.

Mr. Bush, he writes, was never willing to contain spending or veto bills that drove the country into deeper and deeper deficits, as Congress abandoned rules that required that the cost of tax cuts be offset by savings elsewhere. “The Republicans in Congress lost their way,” writes Mr. Greenspan, a self-described “libertarian Republican.”

“They swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose” in the 2006 election, when they lost control of the House and Senate.

He praises President Bush for letting the Fed stay independent of political pressure, saying he was scrupulous in not trying to interfere with monetary policy — which he contrasts sharply with the pressure exerted by his father, George H. W. Bush, in the early 1990s. For years, the first President Bush has blamed Mr. Greenspan for contributing to his defeat in 1992 by failing to prevent a recession by cutting interest rates.

Of the presidents he worked with, Mr. Greenspan reserves his highest praise for Bill Clinton, whom he described in his book as a sponge for economic data who maintained “a consistent, disciplined focus on long-term economic growth.”

By contrast, Mr. Greenspan paints a picture of Mr. Bush as a man driven more by ideology and the desire to fulfill campaign promises made in 2000, incurious about the effects of his economic policy, and an administration incapable of executing policy.

Mr. Greenspan has critics as well, and they are likely to weigh in as soon as the book is published. Though he publicly disagreed with Mr. Bush’s supply-side approach to tax cuts, urging Congress to offset the cost with savings elsewhere, he refrained from public criticism that could have shifted the debate. His willingness to criticize now, 18 months after leaving office, may open him to the accusation of failing to speak out when it could have affected policy.

My opinion is that one hundred years from now, when historians are writing the history of the early years of the 21st century (assuming mankind survives that long), one thing that they will leave them stumped will be why more people in a position of authority did not speak up against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld sooner. Why was Bush allowed to waste billions of dollars, enrich his friends, radically increase the deficit, illegally wiretap, torture, lie and, oh, yeah, kill a million people? But better late than never and the flow of criticism is rapidly turning into a flood:

In October 2003 Jack Goldsmith, a legal scholar with sterling conservative credentials, was hired to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the president and the attorney general about the legality of presidential actions. As he was briefed on counterterrorism measures the Bush administration had adopted in the wake of 9/11, Mr. Goldsmith says he was alarmed to discover that many of those policies “rested on severely damaged legal foundations,” that the legal opinions that supported these counterterrorism operations were, in his view, “sloppily reasoned, overbroad, and incautious in asserting extraordinary constitutional authorities on behalf of the president.”

As Mr. Goldsmith recounts in his chilling new book, “The Terror Presidency,” he and his Justice Department colleagues (in consultation with lawyers from the State Department, the Defense Department, the C.I.A. and the National Security Council) reached a consensus in 2003 that the Fourth Geneva Convention (which governs the duties of an occupying power and the treatment of civilians) affords protection to all Iraqis, including those who are terrorists. When he delivered this decision to the White House, he recalls, Mr. Addington exploded: “ ‘The president has already decided that terrorists do not receive Geneva Convention protections,’ he barked. ‘You cannot question his decision.’ ”

The portrait of the Bush administration that Mr. Goldsmith — who resigned from the Office of Legal Counsel in June 2004, only nine months after assuming the post — draws in this book is a devastating one. It is a portrait of a highly insular White House obsessively focused on expanding presidential power and loathe to consult with Congress, a White House that frequently made up its mind about a course of action before consulting with experts, a White House that sidelined Congress in its policymaking and willfully pursued a “go-it-alone approach” based on “minimal deliberation, unilateral action, and legalistic defense.”

Similar portraits, of course, have been drawn by reporters and other former administration insiders, but Mr. Goldsmith’s account stands out by virtue that he was privy to internal White House debates about explosive matters like secret surveillance, coercive interrogation and the detention and trial of enemy combatants. It is also distinguished by Mr. Goldsmith’s writing from the point of view of a conservative who shared many of the Bush White House’s objectives (and who was an ideological ally of John Yoo, one of the main architects of the administration’s legal responses to a post-9/11 world and the author of some of the very opinions Mr. Goldsmith would later call into question). But he found himself alarmed by the Bush White House’s obsession with expanding presidential power, its arrogant unilateralism and its willingness to use what he regarded as careless and overly expansive legal arguments in an effort to buttress its policies.

And this is why the Democrats are in trouble in 2008. They have squandered the mandate from the 2006 election through squabbling and inaction.

On the lighter side, BoingBoing notes that a number of magazines are following in National Geographic’s steps by releasing their full back issue archives on DVD-ROM. These include National Lampoon, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker – the latter can also be purchased pre-installed on an 80 gig portable hard drive.

I missed Nine Inch Nails when they played in HK but I see Reznor has done an interesting interview in Beijing. He claims that once his current contract is up, he will release his albums on his own via the internet. He also urges Chinese fans who cannot find legal copies of his albums to download them via the internet for free rather than pay money to pirates for them. “If you cannot find it, I think that downloading from the Internet is a more acceptable option than buying pirated CDs. Our music is easy to find on the Internet, and you might not need to spend much effort to find most of our songs. If you like our songs after you’ve heard them, please feel free to share it with your friends.”

Does this surprise anyone?

Workers at a Chinese factory making Disney toys are overworked, underpaid, exposed to dangerous toxins and forced to live in filthy conditions, a labour rights group said in a report Wednesday.

The study, released on the second anniversary of the opening of Hong Kong Disneyland, said factory workers complained they were forced to work 28 days a month and up to 15 hours a day.

Last but not least, I came across a “democracy index” somewhere, I thought Newsweek, in which it said that in the past year the US had fallen from #23 to #35. Can’t seem to find it tonight. But in this press freedom index for 2006 in Reporters Without Borders, the US ranks #53. (China is #163, no big shock there. Singapore 146. Hong Kong 58. #1 is a tie between Finland, Iceland, Ireland and Netherlands.) And the Economist recently did their annual “democracy index” – #1 is Sweden, the US is #17, Hong Kong ranks 78, China 138.

Well, it’s almost 2:30 AM now, I’m definitely not going out. Time to rummage through the cupboards – could be frozen mac and cheese or a pb&j sandwich at this point.