a sensible heckling for the hecklers

I was quite amazed to read this article on cnn about Republican misbehavior during a congressional speech.  It makes me wonder why it is not the case that the sensible Republicans in the Republican party standby and let their party be hijacked by the extremists within it now.  It is somewhat ironic that a mainstay of the current right wing in America is fighting extremism elsewhere when it is, in fact, suffering from the same disease.  Sensible governing bodies govern from the center.  Let’s hurry up and get back there.

Republicans move to steal another election

It’s disappointing to see it happening again.  Al Franken is locked in a court battle with losing Republican Senator Norm Coleman for a US Senate seat in Minnesota.  CNN’s political ticker reports that the Coleman campaign has sued to stop the recount.

Sound familiar?

Despite the fact that Norm Coleman stated, while he was in the lead, of course, that he would in fact concede if he was in Franken’s position.  Well guess what, Norm?  You’re in his position.

So this thing is going to drag on and on.  The kicker is that even once the Secretary of State has certified the results, they’re not official until the Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty signs off on it; something that is not likely “until all legal battles are exhausted.”  So the Republicans will hold the senate seat hostage until they can manipulate the legal system in their favor… oh… I dunno like in 2000.

And you’ve got nitwits like Republican Senator John Coryn (from Texas, of course) threatening a filibuster of seating Franken if Pawlenty hasn’t christened it with his almighty pen.

Unfortunately, Franken is somewhat akin to Hillary Clinton and is demonized in an irrational fashion by those typically loaded with faux outrage and very little knowledge of issues.  You know, the kind of people who are more inclined to follow Hollywood gossip than political issues and those that are so enraptured with their own religion and insecurity that they fail to look beyond the little bubble they live in.  What are these people called again?  Oh yeah, I remember: “Republicans”.

Franken would no doubt be a great Senator.  I’ve got three of his books on the bookcase behind me and they’re humorous, of course, but also pretty thoughtful and incredibly pragmatic.  We need more people like Franken in the Congress, not fewer.  We need to throw out all of these ideologues and install representatives who make government work for people instead of trying to legislate what you do in your bedroom.

But, alas, I have little faith in our system such that it won’t be manipulated by the Grand Ol’ Party yet again.

Obama front and center

There’s been a lot of hullabaloo going around for the past week or so about Obama’s staffing picks.  There’s a lot of press on how he’s building a “team of rivals” (Lincoln reference # 29,384,132) and how many of his would-be appointees are clear centrists.  CNN’s political ticker notes that Obama will be unveiling his national security team tomorrow and that, surprise, surprise, Hillary Clinton is expected to be his nominee for US Secretary of State.

It’s an all too well-known formula to run in the primaries pandering to your party’s base and then move to the center after you’ve secured the nomination.  So it’s not surprising to me at all to see Obama move drastically to the center after he won the election.  He’s smart in that he’s acting just like the Clintons.

The big difference here is that Hillary Clinton’s campaign proffered this platform from the outset.  The reason why I was/am such a big Hillary supporter is because I know exactly what I’m going to get.  She’s a centrist and a pragmatist, just like her husband.  That’s not to liken her let’s-get-shit-done attitude to his, but rather that’s just how they work.  They’re results driven.  Emotions have no place on the national stage.  (Most of the time.)  The world has problems.  Let’s solve them.  What a novel approach.  Democrats aren’t “liberals”  they’re progressive.  Let’s drop the term the right-wingnuts love so much here and now.

So the NY times runs this piece on Obama “tilting” to the center.  Interesting to note that, according to the author:

But the names racing through the ether in Washington about the choies to follow also suggest that Mr. Obama continues to place a premium on deep experience.

Hmmm.  I seem to remember someone’s campaign who emphasized just that quality.

I’m tickled to death to see many-a Obama supporter upset about his centrist choices.  My response to them would be:

What did you expect?  Change??

The fact of the matter is that he’s moved to the center for a reason.  Because that’s where the world belongs.  Hoity-toity idealogues, right or left, are typically problematic and only serve to polarize any given electorate and the world at large.

What hopefully this portends is a decent administration with enough knowledge of hubris to not commit the atrocities of the Bush administration.  A keen eye on the here and now with a practical approach to solving problems is what we need.  This and enough foresight to realize the future and America will lead the world stage once again.  There’s enough calamity to go around to all the problem solvers after the current knuckle-head finally gets the fuck out.

Has Obama duped you?

Let’s face it. Barack Hussein Obama will be the next president of the United States. I feel kinda sorry for McCain, actually. His party left him out in the cold. At the same time, however, he sold himself out from the man he was in 2000. He pandered to the right wing and abandoned the very independent streak that made him alluring to many individuals.  He should have known better.

That’s not the point of this, however.  The point of this post is how unnervingly hypocritical Obama and his supporters are running on some dreamy premise of change.

Obama has raised more money than any candidate in history.  His beaming white teeth have been showing up on the politics page of CNN for the past several months.  He has had the funding to submit a 30 minute advertisement to the American people on the major networks, funneling money into the pockets of those whom he challenges to retain their grip of power over American democracy.

He outright lied about accepting public funding when it became readily apparent that he would not have to suffer from the shackles of having no money in current-day politics.  It was a safe bet.  It was a bet like .com’s going “beta” and Mountain Dew announcing “only-for-this-summer” flavors.  If it’s a success, all the more power to ‘em.  If it’s a failure, we chalk it up as an experiment.

Barack Obama is nothing different than what we have come to expect in American politics.  He has shoveled money into duping the American people from a far-left (or right) perspective, only to join a centrist methodology.  You know, the pragmatic one offered by Hillary Clinton.  (Full disclosure, I am a Hillary supporter.)

What amazes me is this nouveau crowd that thinks he is going to change things in Washington!  He’s merely going to come to the center and accommodate the process.  For it’s the process that must be accommodated, not individuals.  That’s fine and dandy and almost anyone is an improvement over the bone head George W. Bush, but who ran on this platform initially?  Hillary Clinton.

It’s quite interesting to see Obama supporters attack McCain’s choice of Palin as a running mate based on “inexperience.”  Hello.  Your candidate is a first-term senator with a great smile, a temperate complexion, and as much accent as experience.  Who’s being duped here?  You’ve sold your souls to an individual that made you believe he was different.  You, Obama supporter, are, in fact, completely myopic.  You have been duped.

Yes, he’ll be an improvement.  But he won’t have the statesmanship and command of policy that Hillary Clinton would have.  You, Obama supporter, merely support the policies of the Clintons from day one.

I hope your bet pans out.  As for me?  I won’t abandon my principles.  I’ll write-in Hillary.

Bloated Bailout

Q: How do you make a $700+ billion dollar bailout even better?

A: Make it an $810+ billion dollar bailout!

Yes, that’s what our Dear Leaders appear to have done in Congress according to this article on Forbes.  Quite frankly, I’m both ashamed and outraged at the Democratic leadership in the Senate.  Now, I’m as staunch a Democrat as they come, but Henry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have served as nothing but spineless enablers for the Bush Administration, having abdicated their responsibility to check the power of he and his lackeys long ago.

So what sort of pork have they managed to cram into a plan designed to keep prices inflated and fervently disallow a market correction?  Hmmm… let’s see.  Let’s start with the “good” stuff first:

  • “$64 billion for a provision that keeps the AMT from ensaring an additional 22 million taxpayers in 2008″
  • “$11.5 billion for tuition and property tax deductions”.

Yeah, there’s only two bullets.  I guess I didn’t need bullets.  Nope, they didn’t solve the AMT in a sane fashion, they just put it off — again.  C’mon folks.  Either get rid of the damn thing or add “adjusted for inflation” to the law.  Whew, that sure was tough.  And isn’t it startling that the one major tax deduction (mortgage interest) a large portion of the middle class claims is always on the chopping block?  The answer to that question is, of course, “no, it’s not startling” because it’s the responsibility of the middle class to pay the taxes.  After all, “Only the little people pay taxes.”

Now for some of the pork:

  • $36.8 billion for R&D business tax incentives
  • $344 million for tax breaks for films and TV programs
  • $140 million for “motorsports racing track facilities”
  • $5.8 billion for restaurant and retail improvements
  • $624 million to accelerate depreciation on business property == tax break
  • $132 million in tax incentives to attract businesses to D.C.

Interestingly enough, there is also an $8.8 billion energy extension “for wind and solar energy tax credits, incentives for carbon sequestration projects [read: plant trees] and a credit for owners of plug-in electric vehicles.”  And, according to Forbes, “The energy provisions of the bill actually raise government revenue by $61 million”.  At least there is a glint of sanity in there somewhere.

So what do Congressional “leaders” have to say about all this fiscal flotsam?

“I am very, very happy with this vote tonight,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. “I think it shows that when we work together we can accomplish great things.” Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ken. said: “This has been the Senate at its finest.”

These people need to be stripped of their offices, plain and simple.

House of Representatives’ web infrastructure not scalable

With all of the madness of the markets and the Bush Administration’s $700 billion (bare minimum, of course) bailout fiasco, CNN reports that the website of the House of Representatives has been overwhelmed.  This is slightly amusing because I actually used the site this past Friday on 20080926 and noticed the abysmal performance.  And by “abysmal” I mean the page for Jay Inslee, representative for the Seattle area, took about 8 tries and 4 minutes to load.

I was, of course, doing what many others were doing at the time and emailing my representatives to vote a big, fat NO on more of Bush’s big, fat failed policies.

Bush: This is a grave situation and requires that you, the American people, give me and my administration more power.

But I digress.  More to the point of this post, the House of Representatives must have a pretty crappy web infrastructure.  Check out this graph from Alexa showing two sites: house.gov and kodak.com over the past year.  You can see what is probably Kodak’s Christmas bump but other than the huge spike from the past few days on the House’s site, they’re pretty close.  And c’mon who goes to Kodak’s website?

From the Alexa graph, you can see that maybe the House’s traffic tripled or quadrupled.  Hell even if you’re generous and say it peaked at 10 times normal load, that’s a pretty sad infrastructure that can’t handle 10 times your average load.  Ten times normal load and you’d have a graph like this; more like if you threw woot.com into the picture.  And Woot’s users are religious who by definition are driven to visit the site once a day.

Alexa’s data is by no means perfect, but it’s close enough for these purposes.  The CNN article linked above has some funny gems:

“This is unprecedented,” said Jeff Ventura, communications director for the House’s chief administrator.

…

Ventura compared the situation to the “old days, when you listened to a radio show and the 10th caller got a toaster. Then everyone calls the same 1-800 number at the same time and all you got was a busy signal.”

“This was a massive digital busy signal,” he said.

Thanks for that explanation and, no, it’s not “unprecedented.”  Websites get overwhelmed all the time.  What is kinda unprecedented is constituents actually giving a shit about what’s going on in the world.  The massive signal here is that your website sucks and can’t handle any load.  Now in all fairness, this could simply be a function of bandwidth, but I doubt it.  By the time you’re sustaining reasonable traffic, the load on your systems is already higher.  Hire some engineers to fix your site :(

I’m also particularly tickled by their solution:

“This morning, our engineers sounded the alarms … and we have installed a digital version of a traffic cop. We enacted stopgaps that we planned for last night. We had hoped we didn’t have to.”

Now, when House.gov or individual members’ sites begin to get overloaded, a message will come up on the computer screen saying, in effect, “try back later,” Ventura said.

Now that is innovation.  At least they don’t appear to be running crappy, bloated Microsoft software:
Server: "USHR Webserver Ver 5.4.1"
Date: Wed, 01 Oct 2008 11:10:16 GMT
Content-length: 13429
Content-type: text/html
WWW-authenticate: Basic realm="Sun ONE Web Server"

McCain’s 13 Poor Quality American Cars

CNN’s political ticker reports that McCain has 13 cars and that Democrats are seizing on the opportunity to create much ado about nothing.  By no means construe that sentence to mean that the Republican offal of the world isn’t wont to do the same thing.

So the “facts” are allegedly that McCain:

  • Owns 13 cars.
  • 1 is a Honda
  • 1 is a Volkswagen
  • His wife drives a Lexus
  • His daughter drives a Prius
  • The last two aren’t “registered to the McCain’s”
  • The all-time master at duping hoardes of Americans into blindly consuming morsels of sound bites with no substance, Barak Obama has one car: a Ford Escape hybrid.

Beyond the wanton spin of the piece, I did find this amusing:

In a quickly-arranged conference call organized by the Democratic National Committee, United Auto Worker Union President Ron Gettelfinger — an Obama supporter — said the registration records show McCain is not being truthful with Americans and undermining autoworkers.

“The last thing we need is a presidential candidate who undermines autoworkers, and these days it seems that John McCain is doing just exactly that,” he said. “When he’s in the Midwest, he tells voters he supports the industry, when he is in other states he brags about buying a foreign car, as he did with the Prius.” (It is not clear if McCain or his daughter bought the Prius)

I’ve got one thing to say to Mr. Ron Gettelfinger:

If American auto companies stopped making over-priced, fuel inefficient, feature lacking pieces of crap maybe more of us would buy them.

If these “unions” would get their heads out of their asses and let their companies succeed rather than trying to leach pensions and healthcare for their families with 14 children, American auto companies might actually be able to innovate and compete with the likes of Honda and Toyota.

Me?  I’ll take the economic health of HMC and TM any day of the week.  And while I’m holding their stocks and reaping their dividends, I’ll buy their cars until we can make something better.

another electoral college debacle

Today we see yet again the effects of undemocratic institutions like pledged delegates and the electoral college akin to the elections of 2000. Caucuses even more so.

We do not need these antiquated, obfuscated mechanisms.

It’s time to move to a popular vote system.

Evan Bayh is spot on

I think this might be my last post on politics, although one can’t be certain of something like that.  I’d like to focus the blog more on what drove me to create it: giving back to the Internet community with useful technology posts.  I think that’s a laudible goal and I think a ton of great information comes out of blogs.

The world is well aware of Obama’s somewhat nasty comments about rural, working-class Americans.  Read all about the vitriol Obama spewed here:

“So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” Mr. Obama said, according to a transcript that appeared Friday on the Hufington Post Web site.

I just had to post about this piece in the New York Times Caucus Blog about Senator Evan Bayh’s comments on Obama’s “bitterness” fiasco.  Here’s what he had to say:

“I’m concerned that statements like this, even if they’re taken out of context, can be used very effectively by the other side to keep us from getting the change that we need. Look at John Kerry – served in Vietnam, won medals. Look at what they ended up doing to him by the end of that campaign. Look at Al Gore, won the Nobel Peace Prize now, you know, an Oscar. They made him look like he was a serial fibber and so forth. So the important point here is that they can use this politically to damage Barack.”

Wow.  He is spot on.

The Republican spin machine can work veritable miracles in duping the American people into fiction versus fact. Hillary Clinton has stood up to this crap for years.  She can take it and she can deal with it.   She can beat the Republicans at their own game.  And that’s why it’s so important that we elect a President that can play the Republicans’ own game.

Hillary for President!

McCain over Obama

I thought this was a very interesting poll by the New York Times regarding Democrats who will vote McCain if their candidate isn’t the nominee. I’m beginning to wonder if I will lump myself in this category. Some of the comments are particularly interesting. Take for example this one from an Obama supporter who clearly can’t make a intelligent policy argument/discussion:

Thanks for wrecking our party, Hillary. Then again, anyone who believes your bs should vote for McCain. He’s a liar, just like you, only older, and better looking.

— Posted by jeffp

Or this one from a Hillary supporter:

Not surprising. I am a non-democrat (ie, independent) Hillary supporter that would never pull the lever for Obama. It started with his lack of credentials, moved on to his hypocrisy and inability to take responsibility for his own actions and culminated in his racism (”typical white person”).

I’ll be voting for McCain if Hillary is not the democratic nominee in November.

— Posted by Ann

Why do I think Hillary should be President of the United States? Look at the “leadership” Obama has exhibited on the disenfranchisement of the Florida and Michigan voters? He is running the clock. What a crock. And yet he is praised by both the media and his supporters for being a ray of hope amid a tumultuous world. That, my friends, is a farce. America is in the gutter because of the cronyism of George W. Bush and crew and we need someone to lead this country and the rest of the world. This man Barack Obama is nothing but talk.

Nope… as a long time Democrat, I can proudly proclaim that I’m going to vote for the person I think would be the best leader. This is the first step for all American voters to take. Get over the crap the media feeds to you, get over wedge issues, and vote for a good leader.

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