Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

I don’t see why Dean should have to refuse big donors for “moral” reasons–Bush won’t refuse them. What I’d like to see Dean do on moral grounds is refuse special favors to donors–which Bush has not. I worry more about the techinical problem: If Dean limits donations, he gets matching funds. If Dean foregoes matching funds, will big donors give enough to make up for the lost matching funds? OK, I’m an engineer, that’s how I see it.

http://www.deanforamerica.com/

I have heard Dean talk about the guys with Confederate flags and their kids with no health insurance since February at least. I knew what he was talking about, and so did everybody else.

Did Dean offend the black community or southern whites–way back when he first started saying expressing his “big-tent” ideal in this colorful way?

Hell, no. And that’s not what the ruckus at last night’s debate was about.

So now, Dean has apologized for any pain he might have caused to black people or southern whites. That is all the apology he owes anybody, IMO.

But I sure would like to hear some other apologies–from the candidates who tried to twist Dean’s words in a way that is sure to hurt us in 2004–no matter which one of them runs.

Who owes America an apology?

• I’d like to hear an apology from Kerry, for saying that Dean’s ‘pandering’ to the National Rifle Association gave him an inroad to ‘pander to lovers of the Confederate flag.’.
• I’d like to hear an apology from Edwards (“The last thing we need in the South is somebody like you coming down and telling us what we need to do”).
• I’d like to hear an apology from Sharpton (“Imagine if I said that I wanted to be the candidate of people with helmets and swastikas.”).

Those are the apologies I’d like to hear.

Who’s watching out for our $87 billion? Hey, I’m in favor of helping to rebuild Iraq, but I’d like some government oversight of how its spent.

Republicans disagree. According to
Klaus Marre in The Hill

A decision by the House Republicans to strip the Iraq supplemental bill of an anti-profiteering provision has outraged the Democrats…

The provision — included during the Senate Appropriations Committee markup with unanimous support but removed in conference — would …slap penalties on those who “materially [overvalue] any good or service with the specific intent to excessively profit from the war, military action, or relief or reconstruction activities in Iraq.”

OK, call me suspicious, but this missing provision sounded good to me. Why? For a number of reasons….

• Last week, the Center for Public Integrity reported that Halliburton, Bechtel, and other big winners so far of Iraq reconstruction contracts got billions in contracts after giving mere millions in campaign contributions.
• Last week, even conservatives like David Brooks expressed outrage that a cushy lease deal for Boeing in Iraq, on the fast track thanks to Republican intervention, would cost taxpayers $5.6 BILLION more than just buying the airplanes we need.
• Last week, Halliburton had to reply to charges that it was charging the US three times the going price for gasoline in Iraq.

But, as the old joke says, “Who’s counting?”

Not our Republican leadership, that’s for sure.

The SCO Group intensified its war against Linux today, issuing this public  statement:

The “law of gravity”, for which Isaac Newton claimed credit, is in serious violation of our rights. Secret details hidden deep in our  software will, if we ever choose to reveal them, prove that we own prior rights to this so-called “law.”

Therefore, all parties making use of said “law of gravity” without  paying compensation to SCO, are violating the US Constitution, as well as copyright, antitrust and export control laws.

Lawsuits against Isaac Newton and his heirs are in progress.

City officials in Newton, Massachusetts, and attorneys for Nabisco’s  Fig Newton division, acknowledged receipt for demands from SCO for  unspecified damages.

Slashdot readers chose to look on the bright side. Said EnlightenmentFan, “If the law of gravity is uneforceable, I won’t have to shell out money for airplane tickets.”

Campaign Contributions and Post-War Contracts

Why does anyone waste money on stocks? Check out the fantastic returns being paid on campaign donations.

The Center for Public Integrity just released figures showing that Halliburton pulled in more that $2 billion in bid-free contracts for a measly $2 million campaign donations. OK, this doesn’t include the $1,000,000 a year Halliburton pays our Vice-President, but it’s still a good rate of return.

Poor Bechtel got only $1 billion dollars in post-war contracts, despite $3 million in donations –but before you pity this mere 33,333% return on investment, you should realize that their total government windfall since 1990 is some $11 billion. Here’s hoping they do better work abroad than they did for the Big Dig in Boston.

And what about General Electric? They gave more money in campaign donations than any other company, and the CPI figures suggest they got less than they put in. GE’s $5,927,870 is just for work in Afghanistan–so far they’ve managed to block access to info about their contracts in Iraq, where it is known to be supplying generators and cooling equipment. They also have lots of other lobbying goals.

I don’t think Campaign Finance Reform did much to fix things like this. But if you want to fix it, send money to Howard Dean. Let’s get rid of Bush/Cheney and their Axis of Looters.

I never saw a purple frog,
I never thought I’d see one.
But over in my daughter’s blog
Good grief! A BBC one!

The BBC says Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis looks “more like a squat, grumpy blob than a living creature.”

What, you thought Brits were polite?

I’m still figuring out how it’s supposed to work–now that I’m working.

You know I think Feedster’s ultra-enormously-cool. (Would I go to work for them otherwise?) So do the Scobleizer and Search Visibility Report and a bunch of other people.

Still, for propriety’s sake, I plan to make Feedstery comments mainly at the Feedster blog.

If I get it wrong, I’m counting on you guys to tell me.

In other news? Look for me in this picture–perhaps as an extra angel–when I have time.

Feedster power-users–can you help?

Gary Wolf needs help with a Wired story he’s writing about Howard Dean. Wolf lays out some hypothetical rules for the Dean campaign, and asks his blog readers to send him

… examples and counter-examples – confirmation and correction. Are these really the principles that underlay the architecture of the campaign? Are there concrete examples you can suggest?

So how can Wolf find examples of first-hand reports from the Dean grassroots? Feedster, of course! Instead of asking the few hundred people who read his blog today, Wolf could be querying millions and millions of blog posts by thousands of bloggers.

This is where Feedster’s many power users come into the picture. Figuring out what to ask isn’t always simple.

The Rafester, the Scottster, and I were IMing about this.
I thought that “I met Dean” would find first-hand reports. That worked surprisingly badly–somebody dreamed about meeting actor Dean Cain, that’s the top result of 11. Hmmmm.

Then, remembering how I actually met Dean at a houseparty in somebody’s NH back yard, I tried “Howard Dean” + “back yard”. That turns up 10 posts, one of them mine. “Howard Dean” + “living room” turns up 21.
Feedster found people, not all of them fans of Dean, talking in blogs about their own experience.

If you can find better searches, and help Wolf illustrate other points about Dean’s grassroots outreach, please add your suggestion to his list of comments.

I do like Scott Johnson’s suggestion–do a Feedster search on Howard Dean changed my life.

Corporate heavyweights like Disney and RIAA have been gaming copyright law for years. Congress played along, giving the big guys one “feature” after another. Now the whole system is an ugly mess.

Two MIT students, Keith Winstein and Josh Mandel, just set up a music-sharing network that deftly dodges every copyright bullet, or do I mean bully?

“The students say the system, which they plan to officially announce today, falls within the time-honored licensing and royalty system under which the music industry allows broadcasters and others to play recordings for a public audience. Major music industry groups are reserving comment, while some legal experts say the M.I.T. system mainly demonstrates how unwieldy copyright laws have become.”

NYTimes, October 27, 2003

“It’s almost an act of performance art,” said Jonathan Zittrain, one of the Berkman Center’s gurus of Internet law.

Sensible rules–like “Thou shalt not kill” or Sergey Brin’s “Don’t be evil”–are simple. Simple rules are easy to obey and hard to dodge.

“More isn’t always better, Linus. Sometimes it’s just more.”

When I learn a new UI, which you can assume I DO NOT WANT TO LEARN BECAUSE MY LIFE IS COMPLICATED ENOUGH, why do I have to spend any time learning it, why isn’t it learning ME … in other words, as I start using TypePad and I keep hitting certain buttons on a regular basis, or stroking certain keys, why doesn’t it make those keys grow larger? Just like WORD remembers the last documents I was working on and has them in the bottom of the file menu — can’t a good UI learn me and remember what I do? Come on UI guys and gals, take a cue from the natural world. God’s a fine designer. He came up with a great piece of hardware that gets bigger when you stroke it.