Centerfield

Rev. Wright

Am I missing something, or has this guy decided to try to take Obama down?

Is Google Neglecting Blogger?

An interesting question from slashdot.

Open Thread: Travelblogging From LA

We're here for a conference and to see some in-laws.

I don't like the hotel, the Long Beach Westin - I feel nickel-and-dimed. They charge too much for everything but the oxygen And plenty of things don't work so well. The service is MOSTLY good, though - the only bit that does so well. Given that the in-laws are close to here, they're probably losing some repeat business with us.

But I'm enjoying the neighborhood around it. We've had some good food, had a good dinner with my father-in-law (we're lucky - we both have in-laws we like and get along with fine) (yep, really!).

The trip's been hard on the Profesora, though - it's hard to write a paper when the kid takes forever to go to sleep. And she decided to celebrate her paper being given by falling off a curb.

I've decided I don't like this trip - too many things are going wrong.

Blogging's been VERY hard, between the kid (three teeth coming in NOW) and the hotel having a terribly dicey Internet service. I lost 99% of my outgoing packets from my room, and got my $10 (!) for one days' service back.

What'll Hill Use As Her Reason For SDs to Vote For Her Now?

Now that the last big state's past that Clinton has any kind of chance in, and she's failed to get a big enough margin to win the natl popular vote, what's the campaign gonna hand out as the reason for SuperDelegates to vote for her?

As many of we Obamoids From Space projected, she won PA by an Ohiolike margin, which is nothing like enough.

Patent Office Director's Head In Sand

Sigh.

Esp see comment #20 in the thread. That says it all.

Corruption I: The Man In Office

This is the first of what I hope is a short series of posts about one of my more important issues, corruption. OK, I'm starting too easy. Too true.

Most Presidents seem to need awhile to become corrupt. IMHO, it took Bush one year; yeah, it was a bad crisis, but we try and choose our leaders to see the nation through these kinds of things calmy, and to only take needed powers. That's so fast, I've been wondering if Bush' earlier White House experience and having a presidential Daddy started the corruption clock on him early; now I'm worried about Hillary, too, on the same account.

Bush' thing is a little unusual - not sex or money, nor even quite the usual kind of need for power. No, I conclude Bush has an unaccountability fetish. Yep! Yeah. I'll give some evidence below, so just be patient.

Before 9/11, interestingly, Bush' behavior on civil rights was pretty good; better than Clinton on privacy, for example. Yes, it's true. I was paying attention to a couple of early nasty Administration proposals that were straightened out with respect to freedoms when they hit the White House. It's hard to believe in light of the rest of his time in office.

Since 9/11, Bush' pattern has been to claim that we NEED thing after thing for America to be secure, with no immediate justification of WHY beyond that. This went from claims of needing citizens to keep watch on each other (shades of KGB!), to claims he NEEDED the NSA to collect all kinds of info, to warrantless financial data access, to claims judges would be too slow (in a system with retroactive warrant grants????). Now we have him claiming we NEED Colombia FTA for security (oooh, way to convince Pelosi and other Dems).

This is hardly the Civil War or one of the World Wars, where we faced existential threats, and really had good reasons for most of the restrictions.

In fact, exactly ONE domestic measure has performed well - the bank transaction checkpoint - al'Qaeda has clearly become deglobalized, with its global reach down to small, weak cells that have done little. There's no reason that judicial permission couldn't've been made a requirement for such usage early and quickly.

Yeah, I know some people LIKE this game. I wouldn't dream of making it illegal for people to voluntarily engage in bondage/dominance. But it's evil to FORCE it on a free people. Especially where there's no reason. We HAVE lost freedoms of privacy, habeas corpus, and travel (been on the terror watchlist recently?). I miss them.

During earlier Administrations, we've seen more scandals come to light by Federal mechanisms. Only Congress seems to be investigating wrongdoing in Iraq. And Bush feels only he can be unaccountable for running deficits and paying for what he wants.

The most black-and-white evidence for his unaccountability fetish is the unccountable Blackwater contract terms. No matter what bad stuff a Blackwater guard does, he gets a get-out-of-jail-free card. If Bush wanted to maximize his power (or our security), he would've made them accountable.

Accountability is a basic ethical requirement of all democratic officials.

Open Truth Or Consequences Thread

I'm off to make some Truth Or Consequences chile soup/stew.

Next week we're off to see some in-laws in LA.

What's up with you guys?

Beginning of End Of Crisis?

This week's Economist that private equity, and some professional bottom-dredgers, are finally moving to save some troubled firms. The postcard deal of the article is private equity going into Washington Mutual, one of the more troubled firms (when we were house-hunting, they had the best listed deals in the paper's Real Estate section, apparently too risky for them) (no, we went with a mortgage broker who found somebody else).

Since the basic problem has been a lack of capital to snap up or help losers, and WaMu was one of the ones with most questions about its capital status at the explosion of the subprime crisis trigger, this is to me a very encouraging sign.

The Economist itself isn't quite so optimistic, though.

There's also an article pointing out that it's getting near to being a recession.

If you're in construction, you should maybe ignore this post, because the results, IMHO, gonna be rolling in for a nice, long while. You're gonna be seeing bad times way too long yet.

Obama's Turn At Coalition-Burning

In his case he lost alot of bitter and regular Americans who felt described by Obama's remarks. Obama was tightening the numbers alot in PA, and coming pretty close, like he did in TX, and now that's gone backwards a bit.

I don't think this is big enough to change the (D) race. He's still small beer coalition-burning-wise compared to Clinton. It could lose a close November race, though. Obama needs to put some serious thought, time, and effort into getting through to the regular guy.

Mark Blumenthal on the PA result, on Pollster;

...the survey does show a significant nine-point drop (from 60% to 51%) in his favorable rating among white men with no college degree. Notice that this change brings Obama's current rating among non-college men (51% favorable, 27% unfavorable) back to more or less where it was two weeks ago (53% favorable, 29% unfavorable)....

Bill Bradley has an interesting post about how the news got out. He makes the interesting point that the event at which Obama said his thing would formerly have been, effective, a private event. In this blogworld there is no private for politicians outside your door.

For some honesty in blogging here, I'd used the term "bitter state" (on this very blog, even) to describe states like MI, PA, and Ohio, that were leaders during the Industrial Revolution, but that have failed to use their earlier advantages to develop the kinds of higher education strength to keep up in the new economy. My wife thought Obama's comment was right, too.

But, of course, we aren't running for office, and it's a great example of why professors and engineers rarely make good politicians; today I read that famous Victorian engineer Charles Babbage lost three MP elections despite his success at engineering. I guess Obama needed to make it clearer somehow that he cared about them, bitterness and all.

UPDATE: We're in our very own bitter state as well now. I just dropped some yummy spaghetti quasi-Carbonara.

Why Kissingeresque Realism Is Unreal

Kissinger-style realism seems awfully unreal to me because it's bad at explaining, er, real events in the world. It can't, for example, even explain why the United States is on top. Realism dictates that taking ethical concerns and government type into account in foreign policy only hinder governments. If that's so, then, we should be doing pretty badly, since we keep wasting our time with warm relations with small democracies, and do make a point at least at times of caring about ethics in our foreign policy (see our human rights reports).

China should be the top country according to realism, since it has the most people and good resources, but we see it ain't so.

Some other notable facts that run contrary:

What Hitch'd Ask The Pope

What Hitch sez.

Friday open thread

Anything interesting happen to you lately? Personally, I crossed an item off of my "bucket list" this week when I attended a practice round at the Masters on Tuesday. It was way cool. And the sandwiches were only $1.50.

Shouldn't It Be The Adults Who Are Enrolled In This?

Slashdot has a story on new, mandatory Internet safety lessons for kids in Virginia This seems backwards to me - shouldn't It Be the adults who are enrolled in this?

I mean, looking around at what's happening on the ground, I see mostly adults getting hurt. It's mostly adults who grew up before the Internet and don't understand the new dangers or whom've failed to adapt to the new ways of doing things (hi, NYT and RIAA member companies!). For them, the Internet really is dangerous.

The actual numbers on successful Intenet predation of kids are quite small, indeed. After all, their parents and their guts told them to be careful with strangers, and of course of course people on the Internet are people, and of course the warnings apply to all people. And, fooling adults is easier and offers better return to most of the evil population.

Of course, adults who grew up pre-Internet rule our legislatures and lobbyists, so no surprise we see plenty of legislation panicing about the Internet. Well, except for the younger ones who deliberately keep their voters afraid to hang onto their jobs.

Mike Malone On American Competitiveness Problems

He talks about some issues that need to be addressed for us to stay competitive. My highest priorities are patent and civil suit reform. Remember what happened to two of recent years' better innovators, Vonage and Blackberry - patent suits got em. I verified personally that the patents that got Vonage shouldn't've been issued.

Rove Update

Here's a sighting of Rove apparently supporting a local (D) DA candidate in a runoff.

This particular DA office issued Delay's indictment, and generally handles most Texas political corruption cases. I'm a little annoyed with the choice I get - evil donors on both sides, IMHO. There was originally a 4-way race, but the two with the least money got trimmed.

And, while we're on the topic, here's a Rove interview in GQ(!!!). Didn't know he's a GQ kinda man....

Open Thread: The Missing Middle

I loved William Swann's The Missing Middle. It's a pageturner, a very fast read. I don't know if I've read a book that I agreed with so much of. And I learned alot.

I learned Biden was right about Iraq. At the time, from my view outside, I thought he was wrong, But now that I've read Fiasco, I can see, now that Swann's made me think about it, that Biden was right on the money.

And I learned alot about the centrist movement.

It is, itself, alas, a sort of illustration of its own point. It's #1,753,554 in Amazon rankings, while Goldberg's Liberal Fascism is #81.

So, why don't we centrists buy so many centrist politics books?

John McCain: One Tough SOB

From Politics 1:

John McCain is continuing to resist having Secret Service protection as the presumptive GOP Presidential nominee. In fact, according to The Hill, he's not sure he really wants a full Secret Service detail is he's elected President. "McCain has acknowledged that a modern American president must have some sort of protection, but he said he would like to pare down the size of motorcades that he has noted can tie up traffic in a large American city," reported the newspaper. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both already have full Secret Service protective details.

It is pretty cheap, but an effective political move. I know in Seattle, the President gets a lot of guff for plugging up I-5 during rush hour.

He may not be faster than a speeding bullet, but something tells me the war hero doesn't spend much time thinking about it.

John McCain: One Tough SOB

From Politics 1:

John McCain is continuing to resist having Secret Service protection as the presumptive GOP Presidential nominee. In fact, according to The Hill, he's not sure he really wants a full Secret Service detail is he's elected President. "McCain has acknowledged that a modern American president must have some sort of protection, but he said he would like to pare down the size of motorcades that he has noted can tie up traffic in a large American city," reported the newspaper. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both already have full Secret Service protective details.

It is pretty cheap, but an effective political move. I know in Seattle, the President gets a lot of guff for plugging up I-5 during rush hour.

He may not be faster than a speeding bullet, but something tells me the war hero doesn't spend much time thinking about it.

Texas County Convention HELL, Part III And, Yes, Final

About 10 minutes after the signs apparently dooming my precinct to eternal nonservice went up, another window opened just behind me. They started with somebody in my precinct (!!!), and calls went out that they were going to do the whole precinct right then. I slowly stuffed my jaw back up near where it belongs. You know, when this kind of thing happens in fiction, my disbelief comes way unstuck, and I wish the author was around to look over my glasses at. Fifteen minutes later, we were all headed back for our, er, home on the floor.

When I got back, I took my turn pushing the kid around the floor. HE got to eat - we were afraid he'd be shy of using his new eating-solids skill. He's been eating Cheerios. But it's alot easier to bring enough food to feed a baby than two adults.

When everybody was finally done upgrading (another hour or so), a handful of precincts with over-high delegate numbers had to shed extra delegates (not us).

Then came the credential committee reports. I'd seen typed-up reports on every challenge while in the credential committee digs, no doubt in case of lawsuits, and was afraid the entire things would be read. They just read an officialese summary (whew!). That's when they said a GOP caucus chief had been tossed out of the convention (!). They didn't say how they'd caught him.

Finally came the good part. Voting-time! We got together in precincts, started talking, and then had our conversations stopped in their tracks by the Railroad Commissioner (the office is about oil, not railroads...) candidates saying their spiels over the speakers. They were awfully slow to take the hints of zillions of people booing and yelling and waving. FINALLY they let us talk.

We immediately nominated every delegate from our precinct for state delegate, so we'd all have a (equal) chance of being alternates to state. Then our chair moved for the Clinton candidates to be voted on first, so we could use their voting pattern to maximize our delegate wins. The delegates with the most votes would become state delegates. We had five state delegates and two alternates to vote on. The Clinton delegates all bloc-voted for one guy, the long-term precinct chair (I guess he figured they didn't have enough delegates present to win more than one seat under the circumstances). We divvied up our votes up three ways with four votes each, except for one vote cast for one person.

The precinct failed Counting 101. We kept coming up with different number of vote totals and counted delegates. It took three times before we finally got it right.

That meant 4 Obama votes and 1 Clinton vote, in a precinct where the original primary and caucus results had been both about 2:1 Obama:Clinton. The caucus state delegate allotment results for Austin were 313:144. There are more at-large delegates that have yet to be selected, with diversity goals in mind. Texas' state delegate caucuses overall seem to be almost 56% Obama, while I believe the original guess from caucus results was closer to even.

Finally, came the lottery for alternate. The rules said any equal system could be used. I was afraid we'd be tossing a coin a bunch and be there forever, but the old hand knew better and had brought a deck of cards. I would've just numbered the delegates and pulled two cards to choose the two positions, but the way he chose was probabaly more fun - we all drew cards, and the highest two cards got to go be alternates. It came to one of each of us.

The permanent precinct chair we elected was a perennial, and a Clinton supporter. But he treated everybody utterly fairly, and was a class act, and a good man to deal with. If everybody involved in politics was like that, our democracy would be tons safer and pleasanter. I was proud of my precinct for being classy in the caucus, and now I'm even prouder of it for continuing that classiness in the county convention. We supported each other, right across the lines.

And the Profesora, the kid, and I were too tired and hungry to even think about the after party, Or cooking. We went home and got two Singapore Noodles dishes from Fire Bowl on the way, which are comfort itself. Then we slept eleven hours.

Govt Contract Protests Are Too Typical

I'm taking a break from convention-blogging tonight. Besides, I'm sure you don't care if my kid starves.

So we'll talk contract protests. You've probably heard about the big Air Force tanker contract being awarded recently to the non-Boeing coalition. You might also've heard that Boeing's been formally protesting and arranging for a stink, So what's that you asked? What's best for the Air Force? Who cares?

What you're NOT hearing about enough is that this is utterly typical. MOST US gummint contracts big enough to pay for the legal fees are appealed and/or see lawsuits filed by the losers, no matter what kind of case they have. There are huge lawyer and detective industries in DC specializing in losing contract bids.

At least one innovative company, Sun Microsystems, was very nervous about selling their products for many years until they were big enough to afford a Federal Systems Division and pay lawyers and lobbyists so they wouldn't be unarmed. I know because my bosses at NIST told me a tale about the difficulties in government labs acquiring Sun's goodies. When I did a startup, my bizplans called for being very cautious about selling to the gummint at first.

Texas County Convention HELL, Part II

We walked up to the collected, tired-looking, credentials committee, squishing between two tables set up to separate from them. I let the two Clinton women go first, because they'd been there first. They pleaded their case. A silver-haired woman, who turned out to be Ann Kitchen, a Clinton supporter and former Lege rep, asked if they had the Clinton campaign's version of their delegates for our precinct. One of them produced a sheet, and Kitchen tiredly but happily moved for the rest of the credentials committee to accept it, which they did. Then, after some havering, they asked to fill an additional alternate not on the list. Everybody agreed. Then Ann Kitchen asked to close my precinct's business, completely ignoring the man almost in front of her and right in sight.

"HEY! I'M NOT DONE! There's still an Obama side!" I yelled. She didn't even look at me, but at least she stopped trying to make the precinct go away. A little later, a Clinton credential guy ran a special meeting about it. They agreed to do what they'd already decided to do for our Clinton delegates, then another woman, another rooked Obama supporter from my precinct, showed up. The guy running our case felt the Obama side in our precinct should've submitted a formal delegate list of its own, but our chair hadn't known about that. I asked if the Obama delegate pool was full, and on being told it was, asked to become an alternate. After more consideration, it was decided to ask to make the woman an alternate, too, since there was plenty of space in the alternates.

We took our case back to the committee. Both Kitchen and the other Clinton credentials woman acted like we were lawbreakers brought up before them as judges, and looked unhappy. The guy who'd run our special meeting said he didn't see how this could work, since our chair hadn't submitted a change list the night before. At that point, an amazingly patient Obama-side voice pointed out that we'd been seeing messes all morning, and he thought some consideration was called for. After a pause, we were allowed as alternates to join our families.

Can somebody explain what's the REAL difference between having a formal delegate form and changing it later vs not having one? Looks like just excuses to treat your side better to me. All in all, I felt badly treated by the Clinton side of the delegate committee, though at least they were willing to listen in the end, the bottom line, I guess. The Obaman side of the credentials committee raised no objection to anybody while I was there, and just were tracking what was going on. They understood the score.

We Obamans chose to bring somebody new in to run our caucus, a janitor in the school were the elections were held who stood up to run. He ended up with an extra Obama delegate vote, because he got the strategy of making THEM go first, so he did great in the important bit of his job. He didn't know about sending said piece of paper with our ideas of the delegates in beforehand, though. And that says it all to me about such small-minded requirement

A screen showing the convention said "Let's hear it for the Travis Democratic PARTY!" I wanted to boo. Yes, Tully, Rogers had it right in one. Most days I like it that way, but a little GOP organization might've been better here.

Our (Obama-side) precinct chair said he thought the Travis County Democratic Party's first goal in getting delegates had been speed in filling the numbers, and the results spoke for themselves to agree with that. Our precinct, alone, had five delegates with problems.

The credentialling was FAR too random and, above all, slow. Given the appearance of so many messed-up cases, IMHO they should've quickly accepted anybody in my situation as an alternate whom other caucusers from that precinct remembered as long as slots hold out (which they always did, no doubt because the actual delegates were more like those who showed up than the official choices, and either not needed a formal check or stated them in loud voices and only taken them back in the case of objections. This is not a place for Robert's Rules.

When I FINALLY got back together with the Profesora and the kid, I was too tired to make us get lunch. I was almost too tired to find them atall.

My precinct was one of the last credentials cases. Not much later, they started upgrading alternate delegates to replace absent permanent ones. The moment of truth: would I get to vote? They started handing missing credentials out to alternates, one by one. They were still going on Obamas when I came up. Then we had to take them to a window somewhere for upgrade. Somebody clueful led us. There were just a few precinct signs up, but I figured they had to be left from the morning, and stood in the shortest-looking line. It was in no danger of being the fastest line I've ever stood in. They were taking either five or ten minutes per case, and it was a LONG line. An ex-military man compared it to the military - hurry and wait. I was nearish the front, but it was still going to take 45-60 minutes. Then they opened two more lines, and started putting up precinct numbers. Even with the new lines, my precinct was nowhere to be found.

Will I be stuck forever in this line? Will my family and I starve? Come back tomorrow for the horrifying conclusion!