Posts tagged #politics

Pygmy Patriotism –None

Has something interesting to say about just about everything...

This is worth looking at: The apparent beheading of American journalist James Foley by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) is a stark reminder of the group’s terrible brutality and the seriousness required to counter them.

““No one has offered a plausible strategy to defeat ISIL that does not include a major U.S. commitment on the ground and the renewal of functional governance on both sides of the Iraqi-Syrian border. And no one will, because none exists. But that has not prevented a slew of hacks and wonks from suggesting grandiose policy goals without paying serious attention to the costs of implementation and the fragility of the U.S. political consensus for achieving those goals. “”

— War on the rocks: Don’t BS the American People about Iraq and Isil

This is worth looking at: President Obama has long ridiculed the idea that the U.S., early in the Syrian civil war, could have shaped the forces fighting the Assad regime, thereby stopping al Qaeda-inspired groups—like the one rampaging across Syria and Iraq today—from seizing control of the rebellion. Link: http://ift.tt/1A5bEuv My Blog

“We’re kickstarting a Super PAC big enough to make it possible to win a Congress committed to fundamental reform by 2016. We set fundraising goals and then crowdfund those goals.”

Lofty goal but so vague I can’t tell which way is up!

I remember something that sounded similar, a few years ago: It was calledAmericans Elect. They had awesome goals, and they even got Thomas Friedman to endorse them. Like Lawrence Lessig. (See I don’t say “Larry” because we aren’t really on a first name basis 🙂 The problem is that Americans Elect failed miserably, and there was even some buzz that it was some kind of a front for less savory operators who I would not have supported if I had known them. I honestly don’t remember the details anymore but it did make me less willing to jump in an support positive but vague sounding causes.

So I am not ready to jump in with both feet into Mayday.Us.

I came across this video by Armando Fox with his views of what went wrong with the Obamacare website, from a deep technical perspective. It’s part of a University of California at Berkley course on SAAS Software Engineering. It’s very very good!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl5WFz6Gi28&w=854&h=480]

I am reading a really cool book right now: Review & Outlook: Loose Lips on Syria – WSJ.com:

It’s always possible that all of this leaking about when, how and for how long the U.S. will attack Syria is an elaborate head-fake, like Patton’s ghost army on the eve of D-Day, poised for the assault on Calais. But based on this Administration’s past behavior, such as the leaked bin Laden raid details, chances are most of this really is the war plan.

I feel really bad for President Obama and I am still a big fan. But. As we all know now, this is a total disaster, on a lot of levels. For first hand experience, I tried to create an account on Healthcare.gov about the middle of October. After several tries I managed to do it. Yesterday I tried to log into the site to see how things were going, and after several tries and I managed to log in. But I didn’t get too far before I got a 404 error.

Those of us who have worked on, or seen close up how a complex “web site” is built have a feeling of how complicated this is. And coupled with other factors and complications (like politics and buareaucratic ineptitude) we can’t say this is not a movie...

Really, this is NO JOKING MATTER

Rep. Upton said that “looking serious and nodding our heads a lot” contributed to the illusion that committee members had even scant comprehension of what was being discussed. “At the end of the day, a lot of it came down to not asking the questions you really wanted to ask,” he said. “Like, ‘What exactly is a Web site?’” (from Congress Spends Several Hours Pretending to Understand Internet : The New Yorker)

Pretty amazing that the govt is actually placing all the code for healthcare.gov on github for all of us to inspect. There’s only one commit, and it’s 3 months old. Also there’s a reasonable amount of developer information available.

Somehow I suspect that it is not all there or how fast it will be updated, but still whatever’s there is a big step forward from the SOP of the past!

...

Zegart joins scholars at NSA for rare briefing on spy agency’s woes – CISAC:

CISAC Co-Director Amy Zegart and nine other national security and intelligence scholars were recently invited to the headquarters of the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Md., for unprecedented talks with high-ranking officials. They discussed cybersecurity, the plummeting public trust in the agency, its relationship with Congress and how to rebuild the agency’s reputation and rethink its program operations.

How much do you want to bet that somewhere someone in this country a malware or other attack is being launched against the new “Obamacare” Web site?

I have great sympathy for the team(s) that put up that web site, back end and other support infrastructure for this site. And in the best of possible conditions there will be hiccups in deploying such a complex system. Add to that that at 8:00am today everyone on earth knew that the site was up and that they could start playing with it, and you are facing a real challenge. So don’t be surprised if there’s a small or big hiccup in the first few weeks and months.

But it occurred to me that over and above that, there ...

You should read this book: Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. It’s shocking and insightful.

Basically the book explains and teaches that when you hear, for example, that Egypt is getting a billion US$ in military aid, that’s not what it sounds like. We are not sending them a check for a million bucks. We are actually sending the million bucks to US millitary corporations.

Why? Because the funds that Egypt gets can only be spent with specific US companies on sp...

What Did Edward Snowden Get Wrong? Everything | RAND:

Incidents like the Snowden affair put my former colleagues in the intelligence community in an impossible position. Yes, the official explanations about the virtues of data-collection efforts can sound self-justifying and vague. But they’re still right. I know firsthand that Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA director, is telling the truth when he talks about plots that have been preempted and attacks that have been foiled because of intelligence his agency collected. I know because I was on the inside, I have long held security clearances, and I participated in many of the activities he describes.

An interesting post from my pal Peter Miller about how we all view the world through our own biases and it’s hard to disentangle those from what might feel like clear eyed reasoning. (See Peter, I summarized your article in one sentence 🙂

Politics and the Soul | ZeitgeistSurfer:

Every thoughtful conservative believes that liberals see the world through a distorting lens whose inner structure has been formed by their desire for a better, fairer, more just, more equal, more peaceful, less polluted world. (Or perhaps it’s not that at all, but simply envy and the lust for revenge on those who have won life’s lottery.) Mo...

I have to do a little research. It seems to be a favorite talking point by politicians on all sides of a debate to criticize or dismiss a piece of legislation based on the number of pages it has. It’s an odd bit of criticism: how long is too long, how long is too short, doesn’t it depend on how many laws the bills are enacting? doesn’t it depend on the number of amendments? Watch this space. I am going to find some answers. If you know some of the data, please post a response or send me an email!

I saw this in the Boston Globe this morning and I jotted it down because yet again a bit of totally counterintuitive and confusing info:

“It is not like we have Soviet tank divisions at the German border poised to launch a sneak ­attack,” said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an independent research group in Alexandria, Va. “It is not a question of readiness. It is a question of readiness to do what? The ­defense budget is twice what it was before Sept. 11th and we have half as many enemies. A lot of this is theater. Let them sequester and they will see that nothing happens.” (from ...

An interesting international perspective on politics:

“…So, believe me, US politics don’t have a Left. Looking at the presidential candidates, I am frankly appalled. None of them would be a viable politician in Sweden. They all support the death penalty, none advocates strict gun control and all make frequent mention of their religious beliefs in public. These are extremist stances. Not even the tiny Christian Democrat party mentions God publicly in Sweden, for fear of alienating the pragmatic rationalist majority….” (from Aardvarchaeology)

I was a volunteer for the Democratic Committee in Arlington Mass. They have an impressive operation, just like what you’ve heard. For example, the systems they used to deploy us volunteers.

I walked in the campaign office, untrained and unschooled. Within minutes I was assigned my very own ‘turf’. What is a turf? A turf is a neighborhood of about two to four streets assigned to me and only me.

I was handed a clipboard with a sheaf of sheets describing my turf. The clipboard included:

A map of a nearby neighborhood, with a series of dots on certain, but not all houses A list of addresses in street order, first one side and then the other With each address a list of ...

Over the last year I mentioned “Americans Elect” several times: Americans Elect: Another Opinion, Field Of Dreams: Americans Elect, and ...

Another conspiracy story claiming that Romney through several levels of company, controls a company that makes a type of voting machine that is used in many parts of the country:

“Through a closely held equity fund called Solamere, Mitt Romney and his wife, son and brother are major investors in an investment firm called H.I.G. Capital. H.I.G. in turn holds a majority share and three out of five board members in Hart Intercivic, a company that owns the notoriously faulty electronic voting machines that will count the ballots in swing state Ohio November 7. Hart machines will also be used elsewhere in the Unit...

I am looking forward to watching the Presidential debates tonight. But for all the wrong reasons.

I believe I know pretty clearly what each side’s positions are and what they points will be. So, like when I watch a car race (which is rarely) secretly I have to admit that I will enjoy the suspense of seeing the big crash: the screwup, mistake or unscripted moment.

Here’s an article that pulls out a bunch of revealing details of the arrangement between the two sides and the moderator about what can and cannot be done during the debates. It’s pretty revealing and interesting, for example:

“The candidates may not ask each other direct questions during any of the four debates.” “Th...

From the New York Times, an article by Nick Kristof, describing a real-life story of a friend of his and health care.

Whenever I hear, “We have the best health care in the world”, I think of stories like this. It is a travesty that in a wealthy country like the USA, there are 48 million Americans uninsured. Some 27,000 Americans between the ages of 25 and 65 die prematurely every year because they don’t have health insurance. From the article:

“Let’s just stipulate up front that Scott blew it. Other people are so...

An interesting question, and an expert answer from a friend of mine. If you are interested in elections and voting and how they can and cannot be bought, you might find this intriguing. By the way, this scheme would never work in the US as we have many mechanisms that would prevent that, but these might apply in other countries that are not as sophisticated.

Scenario:

Say a bad guy made an offer secretly to the population that he would give each voter $100 for a vote cast for himself. Say they are using optical scan ballots. Say that cell phone cameras are easily snuck into the polling booth.

If you were the bad guy, what proof would you ask for so that people couldn’t trick you and colle...

Just from today’s New York Times:

“Voters in New York State use a vote-scanning system that can tally votes swiftly and, in most cases, correctly. Not New York City. The city’s Board of Elections uses a creaky system of counting by hand that is prone to embarrassing errors on election night.” (from Why Can’t NYC Count Votes?)

Americans Elect got Tom Friedman to endorse their effort to get a third party presidential ballot in November. He wrote about it and convinced me too that it was a good idea. A month or two ago I started having misgivings and now, it seems like things are really turning sour for Americans Elect.

An article in Techpresident.Compaints a pretty bleak picture:

“Americans Elect is the best example of the Field of Dreams Fallacy I have ever observed. The organization spent a reported $9 million building a cutting edge platform, assuming that high-priced technology and a mainstream med...

David Brooks of the New York Times, in an article about (my interpretation) the limits of idealism:

“It’s hard not to feel inspired by all these idealists, but their service religion does have some shortcomings. In the first place, many of these social entrepreneurs think they can evade politics. They have little faith in the political process and believe that real change happens on the ground beneath it.

That’s a delusion. You can cram all the nongovernmental organizations you want into a country, but if there is no rule of law and if the ruling class is predatory then your achievem...

A month or two ago I read an article by Thomas Friedman introducing Americans Elect, an innovative concept for bringing a third major presidential candidate to the table for this year’s Presidential contest. I liked it so much I wrote about in on my blog.

So it is with great interest that I came across this recent article by Gail Collins totally hating the Americans Elect concept:

“But it’s too dangerous. History suggests that this election could be decided by a small number of votes in a few closely contested states. You do no...

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlRC0nsjtKQ&w=420&h=315]

In the Sunday Times (of London, I gather, but they don’t feel the need to include that in their name) I saw this outstanding article about what’s going on in Syria. (No I don’t regularly read the Sunday Times, I got this through a link.

Here’s a little from the article by Marie Colvin:

“Our house was hit by a rocket so 17 of us were staying in one room,” she recalls as Mimi, her three-year-old daughter, and Mohamed, her five-year-old son, cling to her abaya.

“We had had nothing but sugar and water for two days and my husband went to try to find food.” It was the las...

Have you ever heard a politician or pundit say, with self-assurance, America is a Right of Center country. Think Newt Gingrich.

Right of Center. How do we determine the center?

Isn’t this a lot like Lake Wobegon, “Where all our children are above average“?

I’m just sayin’…

There is always a good deal of controversy surrounding elections and in particular, whether an election is ‘fair’ or not. As I have been working on a project with the Open Source Digital Voting FoundationI’ve been exposed to this from time to time.

This controversy arises in many different guises. There is a group that is absolutely against using computers in any way shape or form to run elections. Given that we need to count the votes of some 200 Million people in this country alone, it seems far fetched to try to do that without a computer involved anywhere.

Others say that the act of looking at a ballot and determining the votes cast should only done ...

Here’s an interesting article “Modernizing Conservatism”, yes, not my typical subject matter. Written from a Conservative’s viewpoint it critiques some of the pillars of American Conservatism that might not be effective or useful anymore.

The part I found the most interesting is the argument against the popular Starve The Beast concept in our current political discourse. As I understand it (a big caveat) the Starve The Beast idea is that the only way to shrink the size of government is by cutting budgets severely. Because, while everyone agrees that government is too big (!) congress does not hav...

Do you agree that prohibiting texting while driving is contradictory to texting as a way to deliver of major emergency messages?

“This week I noted a couple of different items that are a good example of the right hand of the Government not knowing what the left hand of the Government is doing, in the headlines this week. The first being that the Government is establishing a system to push Emergency Broadcast Alerts to our Cell Phones and other electronic widgets. The second is the banning of using Cell Phones while in a vehicle, so we could not get them while moving.” (from Software Safety Net)

I am...

Here’s a topic I have never written about before… Nation Building. I just want to point you to a great article I read in the Globe yesterday that puts some meat on the question of “Nation Building,” when has it happened before? How long does it take? What is really happening? How does it start and how does it finish?

Here’s the crux of the argument in “How to build a nation” – The Boston Globe

“Identities are chosen strategically, they evolve over time, and people make decisions about what identities to prioritize,” said Jeremy Weinstein, a political science professor at Stanford University who...

Continuing my linking to Election related news, check out this post Diebold Touch-Screen Voting Machine Hacked by Remote Control With $26 in Computer Parts from The BRAD BLOG: "What makes this hack so troubling — and different from those which have come before it — is that it doesn’t require any actual changes to, or even knowledge of, the voting system software or its memory card programming. It’s not a cyberattack. It’s a "Man-in-the-middle" attack where a tiny, $10.50 piece of electronics is inserted into the system between the voter and the main circuit board of the voting system allowing for complete control over the touch-screen system and the entire voting process along with it."

Andrew Appelis one of the best known academics studying and commenting on elections and computer science and technology related to elections. He wrote a really interesting report, “New Jersey Elections Coverup“, going into great detail about a specific incident during the June 2011 New Jersey primary election where the reported outcome of a particular race was demonstrated to be incorrect.

It was a small election and so they could literally get affidavits from voters to prove this. Mr. Apple was hired as an expert (apparently he does a lot of this, which for me colors his words to...

I am assuming that you’ve followed the nonsense that has been going on in Washington D.C. about our so-called debt ceiling. If not this post will be meaninless and boring to you.

The deal stipulates that a new super-commision will be formed to sort out the additional 1+ Trillion in defecit reduction. A majority of the commission has to agree on the particular program which will then be sent to the Congress for a “simple” up or down vote.

The famous triggers are designed to force this commision to come to a recommendation and the congress to accept them, because if they don’t the...

“Dear Congressman,

I implore you to PLEASE do all you can to break the deadlock and the impasse. I am not saying what proposal I would like you to back. What I want is that you compromise and get others to compromise so that this thing is solved TODAY.

It’s way passed midnight and the spectacle that we are seeing in DC is embarrassing and shameful.

There are no good guys anymore. All of you are acting badly. Compromise already. It takes two to tango, so it’s not ‘the other guys’ it’s just us chickens.

Please I beg you ALL to get along!

Pito Salas”

It’s unusual to see Thomas Friedman to throw his weight this thoroughly behind an outside organization:

“The goal of Americans Elect is to take a presidential nominating process now monopolized by the Republican and Democratic parties, which are beholden to their special interests, and blow it wide open — guaranteeing that a credible third choice, nominated independently, will not only be on the ballot in every state but be able to take part in every presidential debate and challenge both parties from the middle with the best ideas on how deal with the debt, education and jobs.” (from The New York TImes)

I am not sure this is for real, but it sure sounds interesting. I am signing up.

Another on the mark article by David Brooks: the mother of all no brainers.

I can’t help it but I am riveted by this debt ceiling debacle. Like many I want them to stop bickering and reach and agreement. I know there will be parts of it that I hate, but I know that overall I will be thrilled that this particular soap opera/drama/crisis is over, and that our leaders have stopped acting like children:

The struggles of the next few weeks are about what sort of party the G.O.P. is — a normal conservative party or an odd protest movement that has separated itself from normal governance, the normal rules of evi...

It’s hard to comprehend people who feel that it is reasonable (let alone ethical, let alone bankers) to get paid on the order of $50 MILLION a year.

You should watch the documentary Inside Job. It’s nauseating.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFfTcAcGjcU]

The U.S. government is helping create parallel internetsand cell phone networks in countries where the government is suppressing free communications between their citizens. The idea makes sense and is, “pretty cool”: “The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.” (from The New York Times)

Read more about it in the New York Times: US Underwrites Detour Around Sensors.

Mike Taibi writes in Rolling Stone about some fairly outrageous doings between Washington D.C. and Wall Street during the various ‘bailouts‘: “Christy is the wife of John Mack, the chairman of Morgan Stanley. Susan is the widow of Peter Karches, a close friend of the Macks who served as president of Morgan Stanley’s investment-banking division. Neither woman appears to have any serious history in business, apart from a few philanthropic experiences. Yet the Federal Reserve handed them both low-interest loans of nearly a quarter of a billion dollars through a complicated bailout program that virtually guaranteed them millions in risk-free income.” (from The Real Housewives of Wall Street)

A theme that I have followed in this blog is the question of whether it’s a good idea to require a picture ID of some kind before permitting a citizen to vote. In another article in the New York Times called “Republican Legislators Push to TIghten Voting Rules”, Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina had this quote:

***“If you have to show a picture ID to buy Sudafed, if you have to show a picture ID to get on an airplane, you should show a picture ID when you vote,” ***

Which is pretty convincing comment, on the face of it, isn’t it? Except:

Voting is far more importa...

Every time there’s an election it seems like someone brings up the odd fact that you are not asked for ID here in Massachusetts before being allowed to cast your ballot. It seems to me that this is especially surprising to people from other countries. Here’s a good article that explores some of the reasons and arguments for and against requiring identification at the polling place.

The gist of it is here:

“In many states, an ID is required to vote. The ostensible purpose is to prevent people from casting a ballot for someone else – dead or alive. Historically, it was also used to prevent poor and minori...

This New York Times Op-Ed piece by Bob Herbert really hits home:

“The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.” (from Losing Our Way)

It’s called “Losing Our Way”. You should read it.

I know it’s a provocative title, and sadly I suspect that many of the ‘intended audience’ will agree with much of what he says, but then also feel like there’s nothing that can be done about it.

I am a waning fan of the Sunday TV news shows. Nowadays it is so easy if you are inclined to keep up with the news, moment by moment that it’s hard to find much more than the usual platitudes and repetition.

Fareed Zakaria’s GPS program on Sundays for me is now easily the best. He has interesting, thoughtful segments that don’t fall into that boring greyness that the rest of TV news has become. Nowadays, I only tune in to TV news for the visuals.

So ...

I’ve seen several interviews with Scott Walker, the Governor of Wisconsin, about his efforts to ‘balance the budget’. I put that in scare quotes because there’s a good case to be made that his agenda is different or at least well beyond that.

He’s very articulate about his position, and quite convincing. None of the interviewers had anything to add to the debate other than, “gee aren’t you union busting?” and “gee, how come isn’t it good enough that the unions have agreed to the financial concessions?” And the Governor has very good answers to each of the ob...

I continue to be fascinated by this. Is WikiLeaks a good guy or a bad guy? I don’t know how I feel yet, so I continue to read. Here are more articles that have impressed me: From Jeremy Wagstaff’s Loose Wire Blog:

“Asked why he chose to work with three major news outlets to release the Afghan data, he said it was the only way to get heard. He pointed out that he’d put out masses of interesting leaks on spending on the Afghan war previously and hardly a single journalist had picked it up.

Hence the — inspired — notion of creating a bit of noise around the material this time around. After all, any journalist can tell you the value of the material is less intrinsic than extrinsic: Who else is looking for it, who else has got it, and if so can we publish it before them.” (from Loose Wire Blog)

Like many, I don’t know yet whether I support or condemn the Wikileaks action that has been discussed and debated at length on all fora. You have to agree that it has yielded some interesting insights about the way the world works.

First of all: as far as a diplomat making snide comments about one world leader or another, big deal! I mean it’s embarrassing (like someone hacking your email account or finding your personal diary) but certainly no one is surprised — gossiping and show boating is human nature, yes?

A friend of mine who has been in the foreign service for a long time read the cables with gusto and said if nothing else, it shows that the US foreign servic...

David Weinberger has, as usual, an interesting take, and some interesting links relevant to our perception and the defense or offense of Wikileaks. From his post: “I here just want to comment on a particular theory of truth that many are using to justify Wikileaks. This ideas says that “the truth” is a neutral and accurate depiction of how the world is. One is thus always justified in stating the truth.

That definition may be true, or it may be true as stipulated, but it’s not useful. In fact, it’s the opposite of useful because it misses truth’s value. Someone who babbles an endless series of true statements is insane. Kierkegaard talked about this as “o...

I work at the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation, where we are creating new, modern, open source, and publicly owned technology for operating all aspects of voting in the US.

By the way, do not assume this means ‘internet voting’ — it does not. There is a lot of old technology use to run elections today, a lot of it developed and sold (expensive) by for profit companies. And there’s a lot more to running an election than how a voter casts a vote. We aim to develop tools and technology that is made available for free to anyone who wants it.

It’s important and exciting work. I came across this bit as ...

Check out ‘Like a Full-Body Massage’: Thinking About the TSA(from James Fallows :: The Atlantic: “3) The ‘zero-risk’ mentality vs ‘acceptable’ risk. Every society accepts some risks as part of its overall social contract. People die when they drive cars, they die when they drink, they die from crime, they die when planes go down, they die on bikes. The only way to eliminate the risk would be to eliminate the activities — no driving, no drinking, no weapons of any kind, no planes or bikes. While risk/reward tradeoffs vary between, say, Sweden and China, no nation...

I tend to agree with this writer that: “With respect to airport security, it is remarkable how we have come to place Sept. 11, 2001, as the fulcrum upon which we balance almost all of our decisions. As if deadly terrorism didn’t exist prior to that day, when really we’ve been dealing with the same old threats for decades. What have we learned? What have we done?” (from News Flash: Deadly Terrorism Existed before 9/11)

I remember how just after 9/11 I was totally shocked, like everyone else, and fully supported the steps that were taken, the wars even, and continued to feel that way for a while…

Not ...

Two very contrasting ways of looking at our relationship with Pakistan. I don’t know where I stand, to be honest. If you are interested in the topic you owe it to yourself to read both articles, because I had a hard time finding an appropriate section to quote in each case.

Here is Johann Hari in The Independent, “Obama’s Robot Wars”:

“David Kilcullen is a counter-insurgency expert who worked for General Petraeus in Iraq and now advises the State Department. He has shown that two per cent of the people killed by the robot-planes in Pakistan are jihadis. The r...

This article by David Brooks in the New York Times addresses a problem that I was wondering about too. New Jersey cancelled the building of a multi-billion tunnel into downtown New York City. Everyone without exception says that the tunnel is crucially needed and will benefit New Jersey citizens enormously. Clearly, New Jersey cancelled the project because it could not afford it. I assumed that their position would be something like, we’ve already laid off tons of teachers, policemen and so forth, we cannot possibly pay for this, no matter how important, which seems on the face of it to be a hard to argue with position. So given that...

You may not follow the news, but Curaçao is undergoing major constitutional changes, as are all the Netherlands Antilles. In fact, as of this Sunday, Oct 10, (“10-10-10”) the Netherlands Antilles will cease to exist as a legal entity. The easiest way to explain this to Americans that I have come up with is, that it’s as if all the islands of the State of Hawaii decided that they should all be their own state, the state of Oahu, of Maui, etc.

This is from an article in the BBC Caribean:

“A series of negotiations, with Holland in the role of part partner/part arbiter, resulted in an agreement in which Curacao and St Maarten will become ‘separate countries’ with direct ties to Holland.

The t...

A BBC Headline says: “Leaked list suggests 180 quangos to be abolished” (from BBC Web Site)

Inquiring minds want to know, what the heck is a quango? Before you look it up, can you guess? First I thought it was a derogatory word for some ethnic group. Then I thought it might be a currency. Who knows?

I bet many of you didn’t realize that Roger Ebert is still writing a fantastic column, with movie reviews yes, but also some excellent written commentary. For example, check this fine post Ten things I know about the mosque from Roger Ebert’s Journal: 1. America missed a golden opportunity to showcase its Constitutional freedoms. The instinctive response of Americans should have been the same as President Obama’s: Muslims have every right to build there. Where one religion can build a church, so can all religions. (from: Ten things I know about the mosque)

Continuing the post from the other day about Wikileaks, I found some excellent further links that might interest you:

The Afghanistan War Logs Released by Wikileaks, the World’s First Stateless News Organization – Article in PressThink

No Secrets – Profile in the New Yorker Magazine

There’s a lot of buzz right now about the leaked documents related to the war in Afghanistan. I am not clear myself whether they teach us anything new– they may or may not. Also I have not seen any reports claiming that they were fake or not authentic. However in view of the very recent flap about our credulity of anything we see online (see Sherrod, Shirley) I am interested that I have not yet seen any deep exposé or reporting about the reliability of Wikileaks, whatever or whoever that is. This thought came to be because, by coincidence, a few weeks ag...

You can’t have missed the whole General Stanley McChrystal affair, where a decorated general who has spent his career in special operations and has been running the war in Afganistan in a moment of spectacular bad judgement let’s a young Rolling Stone magazine reporter witness McChrystal and his team bad-mouthing their civilian leadership, which ends up in the magazine under the headline “The Runaway General“

Now from what I understand about special operations, these guys work behind enemy lines, operate in small super secretive groups, need to...

I stopped posting thoughts about the mess that all of congress has made of health care reform. There are daily articles in the news to confirm the dysfunction in government today. Here are key quotes two from today which again hit home. I recommend that you read both articles in full:Health Care Letdown in the New York Times and The Spirit of Sympathy in The New York Times ...

“I am so disappointed in the government” “Are we driving off a cliff with two sets of hands on the steering wheel?” “What is wrong with those people!” You can pick your own headline, depending on your political leaning. I remember my father, living in Curaçao 30 years ago, would admire the US Congress noting that it was the ‘worlds greatest deliberative body'” No more. No more.

...

An excellent article in the Wall Street Journal about the way the media and politicians want us to react to the recent Christmas Day attempted terrorist attack. “No amount of statistical evidence, however, will make any difference to those who give themselves over to almost completely irrational fears. Such people, and there are apparently a lot of them in America right now, are in fact real victims of terrorism. They also make possible the current ascendancy of the politics of cowardice—the cynical exploitation of fear for political gain.” (from ...

Ok, I am on a Frank Rich binge, but he does have one thought provoking article after another. In his column recently he wrote about The Other Plot to Wreck America: “If they all skate away yet again by deflecting blame or mouthing pro forma mea culpas, it will be a sign that this inquiry, like so many other promises of reform since 9/15, is likely to leave Wall Street’s status quo largely intact. That’s the ticking-bomb scenario that truly imperils us all.” (from “The Other Plot to Wreck America”)

I just just finished reading the rare business/economics book (I usually skip them) called ...

Thomas Geoghegan has a fantastic column in the New York Times explaining the mess we are in because of the perversion of the fillibuster rule. I don’t know how we are going to get out of it, but… come on! You should definitely read the whole thing. Here’s a key quote. Doesn’t it make your blood boil? ...

Another great column from Frank Rich — Tiger Woods, Person of The Year. I recommend reading the whole thing. Here’s a telling quote: ...

An article from Canadian Healthcare Technology notes that US Healthcare wastes up to $800 billion a year. I don’t disbelieve this article but it doesn’t make me not want to start with healthreform now that it seems possible that it might happen this year, warts and all. One might even say that that it shows how from the perspective of the Canadian health system, the US system ‘has problems.’ The Massachusetts experience as covered in the press here is that the majority of the public like it; that it was consciously designed originally to try to tackle universal coverage and get to cost containment in future revs; oddly enough I have also heard some s...

Check out Schwarzenegger Gives California Legislature A Hidden Finger(from TechCrunch: ...

As David W. says, there’s a lot that’s been written in response to the provocative article by Larry Lessig. I haven’t yet read all of it, but what I’ve seen is very provocative (in a good sense.)All the pointers you might need can be found here: Larry Lessig: Beyond Transparency, and Net Triumphalism from Joho the Blog: "Plenty is being written already trying to parse, understand, and come to terms with Larry Lessig’s article “Against Transparency” in the New Republic. Ethan Zuckerman does his usual outstanding job in clarifying ideas sympathetically. ...

Check out Premature Evaluation?: Obama Wins Nobel Prize(from The BRAD BLOG: “The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.” (from: Premature Evaluation?: Obama Wins Nobel Prize)

I say, hooray for us! Hooray for the USA. Why can’t we just be proud that our president was given this hono...

Sunlight Foundation is a very cool organization that I’ve been close to. They are involved with many efforts to further government transparency and accountability, often using technology, but not only. Recently they ran their second competition looking for interesting and useful applications and tools to be built using or leveraging data published by government.

It’s a clever model: offer $10,000 or so to a winner who creates and submits the most interesting entry. Give applicants encouragement, publicity and assistance. I have to believe that this creates a groundswell of energy and hacking that furthers the foundations goals and uses the prize money in a highly leveraged way.

*““By setti...

I agree with this point from the post My Take On The Healthcare Debate from Daily Dish (Andrew Sullivan): "If you have to strip out of a bill a mere conversation with seniors about powers-of-attorney for end-of-life decisions, you are not interested in a serious conversation about curtailing healthcare costs."

More stuff that I learned at Transparency camp. Every city has their own way of talking. In New York, I guess you talk about wall street and finance and so on. In L.A. you talk about movies and moviestars. In D.C. you talk about all things politics. (In Boston you talk about the Red Sox 🙂

The President’s limousine, is known as “The Beast“

You’ve heard the expression: “It’s easier to apologize than to ask permission.” In DC it’s “Proceed until apprehended.”

You mark yourself as an out-of-towner if you don’t know what CQ stands for.

Originally posted on Mar 03, 2009. Reprinted courtesy of ReRuns plug-in.

Peggy Noonan is always a favorite of mine. Here’s another good op-ed piece, and this time, showing that I am fair and balanced, it’s not positive about Barack Obama and contains some useful insights 🙂 “They are all now busy planning and strategizing his congressional address on health care [Pito: which will happen later this week]. It will be hard to pull off well. The president will be talking, essentially, to three groups: the political elites of both parties and the media, his supporters on the ground, and highly informed citizens who are already either for or against the plan but want to hear, ponder and form an opinion on the speech.” (from Peggy Noonan)

Sure, one isolated story doesn’t prove anything, but then our health care debate often seems to be carried on the basis of isolated stories, so here’s an article about the British Health Care system that I came across this morning. From that article: ...

Check out this insightful editorial in Sunday’s New York by Frank Rich. I thought it was really good. Here’s an excerpt: ...

It strikes me that the way speakers are being shouted down at these (now) famous town hall meetings on health care reform is a form on human ‘denial of service’ attack. They are taking advantage of a permitted communication (asking a question) to totally shut down a service (the speaker) by overwhelming the service with communications, thereby denying service to others in the audience.

By doing it ‘loudly’ they end up denying service further by drowning out legitimate requests, by noise and intimidation.

Just a random geek thought…

A while ago I wrote about weapons of civic mass destruction. I think it is very disturbing to see and hear the way Town Hall meetings being disrupted by enraged people aggressively questioning speakers in public forums. It’s not about agreeing with one side or another. But a community or a society or a nation fundamentally rests on basic conventions of civility and human interaction, and I am not sure exactly where it leaves us when those go out the window. I don’t know really what ...

Leaving aside what exactly an Electronic Voting Machine is, the New York Times weighed in with this editorial the other day: “Electronic voting machines that do not produce a paper record of every vote cast cannot be trusted. In 2008, more than one-third of the states, including New Jersey and Texas, still did not require all votes to be recorded on paper. Representative Rush Holt has introduced a good bill that would ban paperless electronic voting in all federal elections. Congress should pass it while there is still time to get ready for 2010 ...

With what’s going on in Iran right now, many commentators are wondering whether the elections were fair. That is to say, do the reported results correspond to reality, to how people actually voted? “In Washington, a State Department spokesman, Ian Kelly, said the United States is “deeply troubled” by the unrest in Iran and is concerned about allegations of ballot fraud. But he stopped short of condemning the Iran security forces for cracking down on demonstrators and said Washington does not know whether the allegations of fraud are, in fact, true.” (from “...

My post about Barack Obama’s election was getting a bit long, so I thought I’d break it up and get some more blog miles out of the story. First of all, check out this election map from Google. A few things to notice. First of all,the outcome shows (as I said in the previous post) that Obama got a mere 9 votes less than McCain.

Given the comment that ‘this is McCain country’ we were pretty surprised and really gratified to see this.

There were other signs though. One of the poll workers offered to hold our sign while we went inside to get off our feet ...

I found this article to be a good primer on what’s going on with open government data. Remixing Government Data: Through mashups and Web apps, third parties are making innovative use of agencies’ information… This is part of the impetus and inspiration for two projects I am working on, “Decentralized Data Discovery” and “Government SDK“.

You’ve heard about (or maybe you haven’t) President Obama’s turn as a comedian at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. I was looking for, and I found the full video of his remarks. In fact, pretty funny. (Who writes for him?)

I am struck by how broken our political process is. I’m not the first nor the last to make this observation, How did we get here and what are the underlying reasons? Here’s one way I have started to look at it: we have perfected the science of persuasion to such a point that it is now destroying us. Here’s what I mean:

In the world of CNN and YouTube, all questions, answers, comments and remarks are all very carefully honed with an eye towards what it would look like out of context, or as a soundbite in a commercial.

Each candidate has top notch advisers and trainers, the best in the business. They are like world class athletes at the olympics. Every move is rehearsed and practiced to ...

Recently of course, because of the ‘torture memos’, the topic is all over the papers and cable ‘news’ programs. It’s brought back to mind a discussion that was raging hot and heavy, starting back in 2001, about the idea of allowing the issuance of ‘Torture Warrants‘. Alan Dershowitz, famous Harvard Law Professor first espoused that in 2001 (as best I can determine) in this article in the LA Times. If you search google you will see lots of ...

Check out this post Redesigning the Government: Data.gov: “One thing we’ve been most excited about here at the Sunlight Foundation is the concept of Data.gov. Due later this year, new federal CIO Vivek Kundra will release a new central repository for government data and research.

And while in this series we traditionally re-design federal websit...

This is probably not high on your radar, but if you have interest in the island of Curaçao you may have heard about the big referendum issue that is being hotly debated these days. I won’t even try to capture the sides of the argument, rather I want to refer you to this outstanding paper written by people from Harvard Law School that cover the issues and sides thoroughly. It is, by the way, extremely well written.

The paper is called “A Look Through the Constitutional Prism” and it was written by Jeremias Prassl and Ben Gardner.

Here’s a taste:

“These issues were counterbalanced by a major advantage we brought to this ...

Check out this post If you think stronger regulation is a good answer, heed Buffett: “Warren Buffett gave a three-hour interview in August. Here’s an interesting bit from the transcript:

QUICK: If you imagine where things will go with Fannie and Freddie, and you think about the regulators, where were the regulators for what was happening, and can something like this be prevented from happening again?

Mr. BUFFETT: Well, it’s really an incredible case study in regulation because something called OFHEO was set up in 1992 by Congress,...

I recently saw the movie Hacking Democracy. It’s absolutely fascinating and basic background for anyone interested in election reform. In it you learn about some of the heroes of election reform, including Harri Hursti who demonstrates in a pretty dramatic manner some of the weaknesses of commonly used election technology. This is from the wikipedia article:

“Seven participants made out their ballots using the opti-scan paper sheets (Hursti remaining outside the test area). Sancho then went to Hursti and gave him a ballot which Hursti filled out. Hursti then gave Sancho the memory card to insert in to the machi...

I’ve gotten very interested in Election Reform lately, and I’ve delved into how the overall voting system works, technically but also politically and procedurally. There are so many simple and not so simple ways in which election results can be manipulated that it makes my head spin. I was at FooCamp this weekend and told this story to many people, so I thought I’d give some pointers to this particular example of how voters using touch screen devices could be cheated out of their vote.

“But evidently there’s another version of the iVotronic interface in which pressing the VOTE button is only the second to last step. In those machines, pressing VOTE invokes an extra “confirmation” screen. ...

Check out this post The Stimulus Gets Its Own Logo: "From now on, all projects associated with the simulus will be adorned with the following logo. Whatcha think? Whatever you think about Obama, you can’t argue that his team has some good graphic design skills.

Of course, this isn’t the first stimulus plan to have a logo. FDR had his own for the National Recovery Administration. Obama’s is far less fascist."

There are people in our government who are strongly pushing for more openness and who are very focused on delivering better, more modern, service to citizens. They operate under some severe constraints, in some cases from rules and regulations that seem to have become obsolete. Yet you can see where these rules came from and also see the difficulty in just deciding not to follow them. This paper, “Barriers and Solutions to Implementing Social Media in Government” is lauded by many at Transparency Camp is a very important contribution. Here’s the kind of thing it covers:

“As the ne...

“Each morning when he arrives at the Oval Office, President Obama asks his staff to deliver him a package containing 10 letters. It is a mere sampling of the 40,000 or so that Americans send to the White House every day — a barrage of advice from students and teachers, small-business owners and the unemployed.” (from Washington Post)

The President has quite a life and quite a schedule. I couldn’t decide on the title of this post. Enjoyable article? Cool article? Interesting article? It’s worth reading, it made me feel good about what’s going on.

Everything’s a camp today, Foo Camp, Bar Camp and now Transparency Camp. I am attending this gathering in Washington D.C. to get closer to what’s going on in the open government movement. This is a pretty succinct summary of what it’s about: “Convening a trans-partisan tribe of open government advocates from all walks — government representatives, technologists, developers, ngos, wonks & activists — to share knowledge on how to use new technologies to make our government transparent and meaningfully accessible to the public.” (from Transparency Camp)

What a new world! The degree of penetration of web 2.0, ...

Check out this post How Corrupt is Our Language in Economic Discourse?: "And as Deirdre McCloskey has put it, when your intellectual range is from M-N you think you are being open minded when you look at M and you look at N, but you certainly don’t see A or Z. " (from: from The Austrian Economists)

So now that I made a point about my skepticism about whatever politicians say about the economy (see "Who Can I believe about the economy") here’s some more.One pal told me, nicely, that my appreciation for Paul Krugman was misguided, that Krugman’s a socialist (whatever that means) and that Krugman’s way off base and extremely partisan. Whoops. Now I am even more confused.

The problems in our economy right now are real, I believe. Tons of people have lost jobs, and my investment accounts also prove it. I guess there’s no debate about that. But the question is, what to do about it. My observations:

Politicians on both sides are equally passionate yet totally contradict each other about what they claim to be ‘facts’.

The most glaring one is, for me, “are tax breaks stimulative or is government spending stimulative?

I mean this is a case where apparently intelligent adults are calling the sky red and the grass blue.

It’s not like they say, “well experts have trouble understanding this but I really believe that the sky is red and the grass is blue”. It’s more ...

I’ve been discovering the mass of information that is created by the government and is very slowly making its way online. I will be posting my discoveries from time to time. The process of making public information available online seems to go something like this:

Law requires that information be collected and disseminated

People submit forms etc recording such information

Others then scan or otherwise process this information and puts it into a database “silo”

The database is put online onto a “silo” web site

Other NGOs or agencies then somehow get that data (often by scraping the web sites) and make it API accessible

It seems like there may be one or more years between each of these ...

From Bob Herbert, in today’s New York Times: “… [we’ve witnessed] the almost desperate hunger in this country for mature leadership, for someone who is not recless and clownish, shortsighted and self-absorbed.” (from The New York Times)

Someone asked said to me the other day, ‘you’re really political aren’t you?’ I don’t consider myself very political at all, never have been. One a scale of 1 to 10, I’d rate myself a 3. So in a way I have surprised myself in the last 12 months.

I have to say that when I read it, the thought expressed in the quote above really resonated.

There’s been some back and forth silliness about whether Barack Obama can keep his Blackberry. All the pundits said “no way” but I thought, geez, the guy is President (did you hear?) all he has to do is say: ‘make it so’: “On Monday, a government agency that the Obama administration — but that is probably the National Security Agency — added to a standard blackberry a super-encryption package…. and Obama WILL be able to use it … still for routine and personal messages.” (from Marc Ambinder inAtlantic)

But, he won’t be allowed to use IM 🙂

Chris and I, this morning, looking forward to a great day. We’ve waited and worked for this. And now the day has come.

I saw the inauguration communally on a big screen at the Regent Theater in Arlington with hundreds of other cheering folks. It was a fun and exciting event. People even stood up for the actual oath of office.

Quite something!

Thomas Friedman with another thought provoking column. I know not everyone likes his perspective but I find myself in violent agreement more often than not: “All I could think to myself was: If we’re so smart, why are other people living so much better than us? What has become of our infrastructure, which is so crucial to productivity? Back home, I was greeted by the news that General Motors was being bailed out — that’s the G.M. that Fortune magazine just noted “lost more than $72 billion in the past four years, and yet you can count on one hand the number of executives who have been reassigned or lost their job.” (from New York Times, Time To Reboot America?)

Time To Reboot? Read the whole article, please.

A neat article in Salon, by Garrison Keillor – America is cool: “The world expects us to elect pompous yahoos and instead we have us a 47-year-old prince from the prairie who cheerfully ran the race, and when his opponents threw sand at him, he just smiled back.

He’ll be the first president in history to look really good making a jump shot. He loves his classy wife and his sweet little daughters. He looks good in the kitchen. He can cook Indian or Chinese but for his girls he will do mac and cheese. At the same time, he knows pop music, American lit and constitutional law. I just can’t imagine anybody cooler.

Look at a photo of the latest pooh-bah conference —...

Jim Manzi (of Lotus fame) has an interesting article in “The Nation” about our need, as a nation, to invest just a little bit more in innovation: “But with only a little bit of extra funding, foresight and determination, it may be possible to kick-start an innovation revival. Especially at the federal level, we see an opportunity for a modest investment to create a whole new generation of idea-growing, job-creating technology hubs all across the country–perhaps even an “automotive Silicon Valley” in otherwise moribund Detroit.” (from Invest in Innovation)

A good article, with several me...

On Tuesday, Chris and I volunteered for Barack Obama. I got a very interesting perspective on the election process in the US, and to tell you the truth, it was impressive. We drove up to New Hampshire, and checked into the Plymouth democratic campaign headquarters. They promptly dispatched us to Benton, NH, apparently half an hour from the Canadian border.

We arrived at around 11:00am...

I am not at all sure what to make of this. But a friend of mine pointed me to some of the following postings and reports which are interesting, and if true, highly disturbing.

Attorney Cliff Arnebeck on how the Ohio Election was/might have been stolen

Security expert Stephen Spoonamore’s personal legal affidavit on the technical architecture that might have been used to achieve this

Cliff Arnebeck about his personal experience with election irregularities in Ohio

If...

I’ve been a Peggy Noonan fan for a while. Yes she is politically more conservative than I am, but she is such a literate writer it is always a pleasure to read her stuff. Here are some recent good ones: Palin’s Failin’ – “At any rate, come and get me, copper.”

...

Maybe this is one more of the futile petitions that we send around and to each other, but the goal rings true to me: “It is critical that our policymakers turn their attention to our deteriorating financial health which, if not addressed responsibly and quickly, will cause severe economic hardship for our nation and its citizens, especially the young and future generations.” (from “Letter to Candidates”)

Read the whole thing here, and if you like, sign it!

I read the New York Times, and magazines like The Atlantic and The New Yorker, and web sites like Salon. Each of these, IMO are relatively thoughtful and interesting and a good way to keep up with what’s going on. And I tend to agree with them often. I guess my liberal bias matches their liberal bias. I feel like I am not hearing ‘the other side’.

What are the counterparts to for example The Atlantic or Salon for the right? Whatever commentary I come across that leans more conservative tends to be shrill, partisan and impossible to take seriously. I’ve been looking at the Wall Street Journal’s political coverage which qualifies.

But can someone point me to the conservative equivalent of The Atlantic or New Yorker or Salon?

Who said “your TSA don’t dance and your USPTO don’t rock and roll?” (One free copy of BlogBridge for all of you who get the reference without using Wikipedia) Here are two cool examples. First up, the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) now has a blog that seems to be much more than a bunch of pre-digested PR drivel, but instead posts from actual people with actual knowledge about TSA and their mission.

From their blurb:

“This blog is sponsored by the Transportation Security Administration to facilitate an ongoing dialogue on innovations in security, technology and the checkpoint screening process.” (from The ...

I wonder about this. Why is it considered a slur to use Democrat as an adjective? For example, “The Democrat plan is to …” vs. “The Democratic plan is to…”

Oddly enough, do my ear or my mind, Democrat does sound harsh and evil, but I can’t put my finger on why.

Just wondering…

Came across this interesting article. You may agree or not, but it’s definitely interesting: “So now the process can be fully diagrammed, and the cast of characters is stunning. The torture system involves the operations division of the CIA on the implementation side. They rely heavily on contractors, it seems, in torturing people. And a special role is apparently played by a couple of psychologists. (from Harper’s Magazine)

p.s. Happy Valentine’s Day 🙂

Originally posted on Feb 14, 2008. Reprinted courtesy of ReRuns plug-in.

Ok this is a bit irreverent. There’s been a spat relating to the note that Barack Obama wrote and left in the stones of the Western Wall (the “wailing wall”). This tradition goes way back.

The spat is about the fact that someone pulled it out and photographed it and it’s been all over the papers.

I agree that this was an awful invasion of privacy and inappropriate, which is why I resist the strong temptation of putting a copy of the letter.

But how my weird mind works: the letter was a very nice generous and humble statement. But I found myself looking to the end to see how Mr. Obama ‘signed’ the letter. Well it was unsigned, which struck me for some reason as funny.

I mean I guess the intended recipient of the letter would know who wrote it. I guess that’s the difference between a letter and a prayer.

I recently saw a Nova episode about Hany Farid about so called “Digital Forensics”, that is how to detect and discover photos manipulated digitally. Here are some useful links if you are interested: www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/research/

www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0802/digital-forensics-an-interview-with-dr-hany-farid.html

www.wired.com/gadgets/digitalcameras/news/2007/03/72883

Check ou...

How lame and do-nothing can you get when the best you can do is to set a goal to be met in 2050, when probably most of the signatories will be dead and gone? Do you think it has any effect on anything real? “RUSUTSU, Japan – The Group of Eight leading industrial nations on Tuesday endorsed halving world emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050, edging forward in the battle against global warming but stopping short of tough, nearer-term targets.” (from Associated Press)

Lame-o?

He’s been saying something like this since a week after 9/11. I agreed with him then, and I still agree with him: “Oil is poisoning our climate and our geopolitics, and here is how we’re going to break our addiction: We’re going to set a floor price of $4.50 a gallon for gasoline and $100 a barrel for oil. And that floor price is going to trigger massive investments in renewable energy — particularly wind, solar panels and solar thermal. And we’re also going to go on a crash program to dramatica...

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfWsfDweeM4&hl=en]I found my way onto Robin Chase’s blog, Network Musings. She writes about lots of stuff I am interested in. Starting with the top post right now, “Should Casinos Subsidize Car Travel?” where she says: “The Governor of Massachusetts has asked state legislators to seriously consider encouraging the building of several new large casinos in the state in order to raise revenues, the majority of which will be used for transportation shortfalls.” (from Network Musings)

In the Youtube video, which is short and worth a listen, the bon mot:

“Legalizing Casinos in Massachusetts […] is introducing a second addiction to pay for our first addiction: low cost driving”

List of Lists is an entertaining blog. He doesn’t post that often but when he does it’s usually interesting. Check out this post from A List of Lists: “[….]in keeping with A List of Lists factual theme I’ll try to shy away from United States government and The Bush Administration, and instead focus on George W Bush himself and so here are 25 facts about George W. Bush.[…snip]

[…snip] Fact #16. In the days immediately following the Hurricane Katrina disaster, Bush denied having received warnings about the possibility of floodwaters breaching the levees protecting New Orleans. However, the presidential videoconference briefing of August 28 shows Max Mayfield warning the president that overflowing the levees was “obviously a very, very grave concern.”

(from: 25 George W. Bush Facts)

No less an authority as the Freakonomics dudes offer an article about “A Call Girl’s View of the Spitzer Affair” Read this Q & A and many more like it. “Q. Have you ever had a client as powerful or well-known as Eliot Spitzer? (You haven’t had Spitzer himself as a client, have you?)

A. I have clients that are professional athletes,artists, and entertainers. They are probably better known, but obviously not as powerful. I don’t believe I have ever seen Eliot, or as I like to call him, Number 9.” (from A Call Girl’s View of the Spitzer Affair)

Sorry, but for some reason it seems that the cynics win out once more: “I have acted in a way that violates my obligation to my family and violates my or any sense of right or wrong,” said Mr. Spitzer…” (from The New York Times)

People wring their hands about the possibility of having Bill Clinton back in the white house as the first ever First Spouse, working mano-a-mano with Hillary. I like Bill Clinton a lot – I did when he was president and I still do. Yet I can understand the misgivings. In today’s New York times:

“Which raises an important matter. Do we really want a plural presidency?

This is not a new question. It was intensely debated in the convention that formulated our Constitution. The Virginia Plan for the new document submitted by Edmund Randolph and the New Jersey Plan submitted by William Paterson left open the ...

A lot has been written about electronic voting machines and their vulnerabilities. There is indeed something very primitive about the way we vote today, with markers on sheets of cardboards. You’ve got to believe that we will not always be using physical means, and that sooner or later it will be computerized.

When we vote in 2050, we won’t be manipulating pieces of paper. Or will we? (Will be still be voting?)

At any rate, computer security experts continue to demonstrate all the different flaws in the ATM-like machines that have been proposed (and sold, and used) to automate and modernize voting. There are lots of schemes which would allow major, undetected, vote tampering with those mac...

Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic with a interesting article about torture.

Tom Friedman recently had a good column about global warming (“global climate change”) and what is, or should be being done about it, where he quotes the Onion: ““Fall, the long-running series of shorter days and cooler nights, was canceled earlier this week after nearly 3 billion seasons on Earth, sources reported Tuesday.”

Anyway, read the whole thing.

Also while you are at it, take a look at the referenced MIT Project, the Vehicle Design Summit.

And while you are at it, here is a collection of the best blogs on Green Tech, from BlogBridge topic expert Al Tepper

Very interesting article in the New York Times discussing whether the death penalty saves lives, “According to roughly a dozen recent studies, executions save lives. For each inmate put to death, the studies say, 3 to 18 murders are prevented.

The effect is most pronounced, according to some studies, in Texas and other states that execute condemned inmates relatively often and relatively quickly.

The studies, performed by economists in the past decade, compare the number of executions in different jurisdictions with homicide rates over time — while trying to eliminate the effects of crime rates, conviction rates and other factors — and s...

In New Scientist Tech, an interesting article about hackers and the elections: “The web may not deserve its reputation as a great democratic tool, security experts say. They predict voters will increasingly be targeted by internet-based dirty tricks campaigns, and that the perpetrators will find it easier to cover their tracks.” (from Hackers could skew US elections”)

Read the whole thing here.

Apparently the US State Department has a team of bloggers who get into discussions on boards and blogs around the world, taking an interesting alternative approach to the usual formal, high level diplomacy:

“…The State Department team members themselves said they thought they would be immediately flamed, or insulted and blocked from posting….”

This is pretty interesting, and yet another sign of how blogs are infiltrating all aspects of life. Read the whole article: “At State Dept. Blog Team Joins Debate”, from the New York Times.

You know that I follow what’s going on in Venezuela. Here’s an interesting article from the Washington Post about the latest developments: “For years defenders of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez have harped on what they described as the domination of the country’s independent media by his opponents — proof, it was said, that Ch?vez was no dictator. Two weeks from today that argument will lose all credibility. By then, Radio Caracas Television, or RCTV, Venezuela’s most popular television network, will almost certainly be off the air — on Chavez’s personal order.” (from Dead Air in Caracas – Washington Post)

Check out this post from BuzzMachine: ** "[snip…]At the Online Politics conference a few weeks ago, Joe Trippi said, “Every one of these candidates is going to get caught in a macaca moment.” They will mess up. They will say something in an unguarded moment. Yet we want them to be unguarded. We want them to be human. So when they are human and they do mess up, we can’t demand their scalp for every screwup. We have to judge whether this was merely a mistake or whether it revealed a fatal flaw in their character. And we need to be make that judgment ourselves, not under the threat and deadline of the press-conference piranha. We cannot run politics and the nation by the tyranny of the gotcha moment. I will also warn of the danger of life in the age of offense.[snip…]"

(from**: On Imus)

Here are some random goodies that caught my eye this morning. Don’ t count on my being your clipping service from now on, — these just caught my eye 🙂

NYT Editorial about the Rutgers team and Imus The best commentary that I’ve seen yet about the Imus comment Interesting juxtaposition of the Cold War with Global Warming

Is this a sign of the times? President Bush is on TV right now giving a speech about why he’s right about Iraq. To bolster his case, he quotes two bloggers located in Baghdad! (Jokingly: “yeah, they have bloggers in Baghdad too, heh, heh”) Of course he doesn’t cite the sources or the links so I can’t tell anything about where the flowery quotes come from. Still it’s a sign of the stature that blogs are getting in the public discourse.

Check out this post from John Edwards ’08 Blog: News: ** "Shortly before midnight (CST) on Monday, February 26, a group of republican Second Life users, some sporting "Bush ’08" tags, vandalized the John Edwards Second Life HQ [snip..]

… I witnessed this event, taking names and photos, including the owners of the pictures."

(from**: John Edwards Second Life HQ vandalized.)

Yeah a weird thought. So when I came across an analysis called The Dutch Defend Their World Empire, I was fascinated, in a sick sort of way. “[snip…]The Dutch problem can best be described with the words, “not enough”. Not enough forces to successfully repel an invasion of Aruba, Curacao, and Bonaire; not enough naval power to carry out operations to retake the islands; their fighters do not have enough range; and not enough logistical support to support an operation.[snip…] (from The Dutch Defend Their Empire)

Also, from the comments:

“[snip…]The United...

If you keep up with what’s going on in Venezuela, you might want to check out this post from The Devil’s Excrement: The New York Times looks at the Chavez Royal family

Really interesting article about what is going on in Venezuela and the impact of Hugo Chavez’ policies…

“Our gain is Venezuela’s loss. These newcomers represent the human capital of Venezuela, something that Chavez, grounded in Marxist materialism, can’t understand. He views these talented people as political pawns — traitors.” (from Investors Business Daily)

Read the whole thing.

For those of you who avidly follow Curaçao politics, yes, all two of you, and I know who you are, do you think this is a good thing? I am not so sure… “The Dutch government has signed an agreement granting qualified autonomy to the territories of Curacao and St. Maarten, paving the way for the formal end of the Netherlands Antilles.” (from Radio Jamaica)

We’ll see how it develops.

From ZDNet: Federal judge orders halt to NSA spy program | Tech News on ZDNet “The warrantless Internet and telephone surveillance program authorized by the Bush administration violates the U.S. Constitution and must cease immediately, a federal judge ruled Thursday.”

Another great article in The Atlantic, James Fallows: “Declaring Victory“

“The United States is succeeding in its struggle against terrorism. The time has come to declare the war on terror over, so that an even more effective military and diplomatic campaign can begin.” (James Fallows, from Declaring Victory)

Yes it sounds very strange given today’s occurrences, but it’s an excellent article that is kind of persuasive. It doesn’t go in the direction that the blurb above might make you think.

“But ...

Guy Kawasaki — Bona tempora volvantu

Guy Kawasaki’s blog always has good stuff!

(tags: feed soflow interesting)

TIME.com Print Page: Nation — Exclusive Book Excerpt: How an Al-Qaeda Cell Planned a Poison-gasAttack on the N.Y. Subway

Pretty amazing! Worth a quick read

(tags: politics terrorism nyc)

I just finished reading an excellent book called Confessions of an Econmonic Hit Man. Quite amazing really. Tells about the machinations of american foreign aid, and how all foreign aid is not as benevolent as you might think. Also kind of hints at why there are so many Texas oil men and huge construction contractors represented in the government. A fascinating read. Recommended.

Technorati Tags: book

This is just silly-funny. Here are whatour VP expects to have in Hotel suites (known, aparently, as “downtime suites”)

“And, of course, all the televisions need to be preset to the Fox News Channel (what, you thought he was a Lifetime devotee?).” (from Smoking Gun)

Read the whole thing, it’s kinda funny.

Wikipedia appears to have banned all contributions and edits coming from the US Congress!

“I am opening this RFC in order to centralise discussion concerning actions to be taken against US Congressional staffers who repeatedly revert wars, blank content, engage in libelous behaviour, violate WP:NPOV, WP:CIV. The editors from this IP are rude and abrasive, immature, and show no understanding of Wikipedia policy. The editors also frequently try to whitewash the actions of frequent politicians.

They treat Wikipedia articles about politicians as though they own it, replacing articles with their sanctioned biographies and engaging in revert wars when other users dispute this sudden change. They...

I know that this blog (Power Line) is pretty hard-core conservative, but I found their analysis of the legal questions around the NSA electronic intercept program fairly convincing.

“The only constitutional limitation on the President’s power to intercept communications by Americans for national security purposes is that such intercepts be “reasonable.”

Is it reasonable for the administration to do all it can to identify the people who are communicating with known terrorists overseas, via the terrorists’ cell phones and computers, and to learn what terrorist plots are being hatched by those persons? Is it reasonable to do so even wh...

I don’t know how I missed this article, but it sure is an interesting and significant development for one, like me, who was born and grew up in Curacao.

“Under the new structure, the Netherlands Antilles will be dissolved and Curacao and St. Maarten will become separate, autonomous members of the kingdom, according to the agreement signed by the leaders Saturday night in Curacao.” (from Miami Herald)

Technorati Tags: curacao, netherlandsantilles

Zarqawi probably killed! according to Iraq the Model.

“According to these two sources, Iraqi and US military forces in Mosul think that Zarqawi, al-Qaeda leader in Iraq was possibly killed in a raid on a house where members of al-Qaeda were holding a meeting.” (from Iraq the Model)

And I can remember, not that long ago, that it would offend our sense of propriety or at least political correctness to write “X probably Killed!” We, didn’t do that kind of thing, kill someone on purpose. The world has changed…

Technorati Tags: iraq

According to Dilbert (or is it Scott Adams) we are approaching the whole question of torture in the wrong way:

“The objective is to think up a form of torture that’s effective but doesn’t sound so bad when the rest of the world finds out you did it. ” (from Dilbert.Blog)

So here’s what he’s thought up:

“It occurred to me recently after having surgery for my deviated septum that lots of Al Qaeda members must need that same procedure. When Amnesty International finds out that we gave free medical care to prisoners, that won’t sou...

**

**Click here for more hilarity! (Thanks Larry)

Technorati Tags: funny

I came across this a little while ago in Wired about War Blogs. Pretty amazing stuff:

“Strong opinions throughout the military ranks in and out of wartime are nothing new. But online technology in the combat zone has suddenly given those opinions a mass audience and an instantaneous forum for the first time in the history of warfare. On the 21st-century battlefield, the campfire glow comes from a laptop computer, and it’s visible around the world.” (from Wired)

Read the whole thing – it’s interesting.

Technorati Tags: corantessa

Even though this is from the National Enquirer, which has no credibility, it’s a scary scary thought

Technorati Tags: georgebush

If you are interested in the Intelligent Design debate, this is an fascinating and somewhat surprising article about a survey done by the Pew Research Center for the People. As usual with this kind of thing it is useful to know the bias of the folks doing the survey, which I have not looked into at all.

“Despite these fundamental differences, most Americans (64%) say they are open to the idea of teaching creationism along with evolution in the public schools, and a substantial minority (38%) favors replacing evolution with creationism in public school curricula.” (from “Religion: A Strength and Weakness for Both Parties“)

Interesting reading.

Technorati Tags: intelligentdesign, science

I don’t have anything to add, but here are some incredible bits that I came across:

Daily Kos: “Left Behind”

Andreson Cooper: Transcript

Durham Intdependent Weekly, 9/22/2004!, “Disaster in the making”

Dave Winer: Scientific American Article in 2001

There’s lots more but just read those and follow their links. And our President said: “No one could have foreseen this”. Huh?

“What, me worry?”

Technorati Tags: katrina

“But I am compelled to do this. And other than that, that’s as far as I’m going to talk about my family’s — another personal tragedy due to this war.”

Technorati Tags: iraq

Another excellent Peggy Noonan column:

“How exactly does it work? How does legitimate self-confidence become wildly inflated self-regard? How does self respect become unblinking conceit? How exactly does one’s character become destabilized in Washington? …”

“…What is wrong with them? This is not a rhetorical question. I think it is unspoken question No. 1 as Americans look at so many of the individuals in our government. What is wrong with them? “ (from Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal)

I always love her stuff!

Here are two practical examples of how mainstream media (“MSM”) sometimes overlooks really interesting or engaging stories which are well covered online (and I don’t mean just blogs.) Have you seen these?

Here’s a really touching set of photos of Pope John Paul II shooing away some doves who were released as a peace symbol at some event. I bet you never saw that one. And wouldn’t you have liked to see it somewhere, on TV, in the newspaper?

How about this article? It...

Peggy Noonan is a great, albeit a little on the conservative side, columnist that I read whenever I can. Here’s a good article she wrote on the Main Stream Media. Blogs and Dan Rather.

I really love her major novels although I haven’t looked at them in years. You know how you remember a novel to be great, but upon looking at it again 20 years later, you just don’t know what you saw in it? So, as I say, I remember really loving her major novels, but, thismakes me think again:

The United States government, however, should not give any money to help the tsunami victims. Why? Because the money is not the government’s to give.

From the Ayn Rand Institute. Link.

I never was a fan of Tommy Thomson – what a name! I am no expert on terrorism, but it seems to me that saying this in his goodbye speechcan’t be a very good idea: “For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply because it is so easy to do,” Thompson said as announced his departure before department employees. “We are importing a lot of food from the Middle East, and it would be easy to tamper with that.”

For the life of me, I can’t understand why he’d let himself be quoting saying that!

Have you seen this map before? Yes? Actually it’s the map of states where the Cosi Restaurantchain has stores. I don’t know what it means, but I thought it must mean something. Amusing.

(from a private mailing list I am on)

[Note to those who don’t obsessively follow US Politics and culture: the map above looks a lot like the map showing U.S. states where the Democratic candidate for president won in blue and where the Republican candidate for president won in red. However the map actually shows where a certain sandwhich restaurant chain has stores. The relation between the two is a mystery to me too.]

Ok, I am adjusting to the new reality of the lost election. The amount of coverage in the blogs I frequent is huge so I won’t add to the noise, except to offer a few graphics that I found interesting.

I’m a huge fan of Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall’s blog. In fact it’s my exhibit #1 for people who ask me for a good blog to read (assuming they are “liberal.” If they are not I point them to Instapundit.) Anyway just a few words about Josh Marshall’s complaint about how the spinmeisters positioned Kerry’s comment about Cheney’s daughter the other night. They called it “A crass, below-the-belt political strategy to attach the president’s daughter.”

Well, my reaction was the same as Mr. Marshall’s – how can they call what Kerry said an attack? You can call it a lot of thin...

Hard to believe what we are hearing these days, isn’t it? The link is to an summary about the Prison scandal, with lots of links to other reputable publications, putting the pieces of the puzzle together.

Remember when the Berlin wall came down and the Soviet Union ended up breaking up? People talked about the power of decentralizaiton, about how simple faxes were used by individual Soviet citizens to tell the world what was going on and topple the ultimate centralized power?

Or the impact of the television coverage of the Vietnam war had such an effect on the way things turned out? Or Tiananmen Square? Or the impact of consumer camcorders on the impact of the Rodney King trial and subsequent riots in L.A.?

The shameful and shocking scandal of prisoner abuse and torture follows the same pattern. Who can imagine what was going through the minds of these people as they were co...

Feeling like a Red Sox Fan. Kerry seems to have won the Democratic nomination, and convincingly. I’m rooting for him in the Big Show in November, right along many others, but, why do I feel like a Red Sox Fan?

The two Howards: Dean and Stern. Everyone is wringing their hands about the way Howard Dean acted out on the night of the Iowa Caucuses. I heard well known pundits talk about ‘the defining moment of Dean’s campaign.’ What a bunch of nonsense. This was a non-event, a crazy moment at the end of a long day with a huge crowd of revved up supporters. And indeed some of my friends who support Dean have commented, more eloquently than this, in his defense as well.

Forgive me to mention the other Howard in the same breath, but the best came on Howard Stern’s show, wh...

Channel Dean: “An RSS feed that’s like a clipping service for people interested in US politics.” Dave Winer and some co-conspiritors have created something really cool: a new feed which brings together a series of feeds that all relate to US Politics. As I’ve said before, hats off to these kinds of innovation. I’m just loving it! Here’s the RSS (XML) link if you want to try it.This development raises some interesting questions/ideas:

What is the Dean-bias of ...

Did you hear this one? (via some talkshow.) “President George Bush, trying to lay to rest concerns about our supply of beef: ‘Our beef supply is safe. I tell you, do not be concerned about eating beef. If we see a reduction in the consumption of beef in this country, then, the cows have won!’ “

Well, is it Dr. Dean or Governor Dean? It’s funny to me when people try to build up Howard Dean’s stature by using one or the other title, depending I guess on what the speaker thinks sounds more impressive. I’d say given the job he’s applying for, the only relevant qualification is Governor Howard Dean.