Rep. Rangel's bill to reinstate the draft
WASHINGTON - Rep. Charles Rangel plans to resurrect a bill to reinstate the draft when Democrats take power in January, but the idea got a chilly reception yesterday in the heart of his Harlem district.From New York Daily News - Politics - Rangel feelin' a draft
Last time he brought this up, Mr. Rangel joined 400 other congressmen to vote against it. And this will fail once more. Sorry, but this is just like Terri Schiavo. The absolute worst in partisan political grandstanding. If Mr. Rangel was really concerned with who is being sent off to war, there are better things to spend your time on. Start with looking at funding health care for reservists and their families. Or expanding money available funding educational benefits under the GI-Bill.
Robert D. Steele
If you're like me, you don't have enough time to read all the important new books on Economics, Political Science, Diplomacy, War and Culture. That's why I make it a point to see what Robert D. Steele has to say. His one line capsule of Culture Warrior by Bill O'Reilly is both funny and brutal. Right Up There With Mein Kampf, But Less Sensible.
Mr Steele is a retired Intelligence professional and an Amazon TOP100 reviewer. While he comes off as an old-school conservative pragmatist of the Bush-41 school, He has given both Andrew Sullivan and Barack Obama five star reviews. Sometimes I feel smarter after just reading his reviews.
Ex-Quarterback Thrives as Lobbyist
Now as a lobbyist, he has shown a similar deftness — as the case of John Deere suggests — for turning his lobbying assignments into business deals for himself and his clients.From Ex-Quarterback Thrives as Lobbyist - New York Times
Few people demonstrate the revolving door between Congress and K-Street as well as JC Watts. It used to be that people went to congress after they've had a career. Now Congress is seen as a steeping stone to a career as a lobbyist.
Snap Circuits Electronic Educational Kits
The Snap Circuits Electronic Educational Kits reminds me of the old Radio Shack Science Fair kits.
I loved those old Radio Shack kits. My uncle bought me one every Christmas. I have many fond memories of burning my fingers with a soldering iron, adjusting the little snap-springs and searching for the tiny bits of electronic debris that would trail from room to room. Oh, and I build a radio that used a coat hanger as an antenna and my radiator for ground. Sadly, radio shack at the mall doesn't seem to carry these kits any more.
Chuck Reid Quote
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; In practice, there is."
- Chuck Reid
Spring 2.0 Final Released
More here: Spring 2.0 Final Released!
I took longer to download Spring than to port my Springframework 1.2.8 App to use Spring 2.0. No performance changes to report, but I can now try rebuilding it as a JDK1.5 App. Once I update my code to use the new Generics + Collections idioms, I should see a few gains by reducing a lot of the clutter that goes with using pre-JDK1.5 collections.
I've managed to get other developers here to use Spring to manage their applications. The selling point was the way I added confirmation email support to a set of forms in one mid-size app. I defined an interface called EmailService and implemented an a type for each of the three forms to add. I then added one line of code for each form in application-Context.xml and a whopping five lines of code in Formhandler. Now when an edit in one of those three form is saved, and the server agrees that the edit was successful; the user and his manager gets a summery email. Doing this without Spring would have resulted in at least five times more code.
Punchscan.org
Punchscan is an optical scan voting system invented by David Chaum that allows voters to take a piece of the ballot home with them as a receipt. This receipt does not allow voters to prove how they voted to others, but it does permit them to:More here Punchscan.org
- Verify that they have properly indicated their votes to election officials (cast-as-intended)
- Verify with extremely high assurance that all votes were counted properly (counted-as-cast).
I saw the demo video and am impressed. This is a really good method of solving all the major issues in voting. Pre-vote tamper proof, verifiable and post-vote tamper proof. My big complaint about paper receipts is that it could be used by fanatical pastors, union bosses or other unethical individuals to enforce a voting agenda on subordinates.
Darwin at the Zoo
Our own species has been talking, volubly and passionately, for at least 50,000 years, and it's a fair guess that arguments about right and wrong were prominent in our conversation pretty much from the beginning. We started writing things down 5,000 years ago, and some of our first texts were codes of ethics. Our innumerable volumes of scripture and law, our Departments of Justice, High Courts, Low Courts, and Courts of Common Pleas are unique in the living world. But did we human beings invent our feeling for justice, or is it part of the package of primal emotions that we inherited from our ancestors? In other words: Did morality evolve?From Scientific American
This is a really fascinating area. Now that we know we aren't alone in tool-making, counting, abstract thinking and other trademarks of humanity, what is left after ethics? What makes us human? Is it all down to faith and reason?
the end of caveman-style conservativism
As pathetic, desperate efforts to spin an electoral loss of historic proportions go, this line of thinking makes the kind of faux intuitive sense that is pure talking point gold. The concocters of this poppycock deserve some credit. They were ready and waiting to unleash the conservative Democratic mandate and we'll hear no end of pontificating about the new zeitgeist in the months ahead. Never mind, as the left-wing blogs have been pointing out with alacrity all morning, that the theory doesn't hold up when you look at who actually won the majority of the Democratic takeaways from Republicans. If anything, the Northeast, with the possible exception of new Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey, is sending a more solid block of liberal Democrats to Congress than has been seen in generations, if ever. New Hampshire's utter transformation into the bluest of blue states has nothing to do with any purported rise of social conservatism. And even in Pennsylvania, it's hard not to look at the humiliating annihilation of the Senate's third most powerful leader, Rick Santorum, as anything other than a triumph over the most backward, homophobic, caveman-style conservativism this country has to offer.From How the World Works - Salon.com
Will people please stop buying the spin that this Republican loss is actually a conservative mandate. This is just plain wrong. The Dems that won buy the biggest margins are the ones like Brown, Whitehouse and Klobuchar who ran the furthest to the left. Heck, Klobuchar and Brown are to the left of me on most issues. Even the ones that ran to the center, Blue-Dogs like Ellsworth and Shuler; ran on Lou-Dobbs meat and potato progressive economic populism. Head over to Media Matters for a point by point analysis.
Second, will those who claim that the democrats don't have any plans please go over to Google and type in "The Democratic Plan"? Just click here if you can't be bothered. It's the first few links.
Lastly, Nancy Pelosi is reading the election mandate correctly. There is a very strong desire for a return to progressive economic policies, a broad consensus for a change in national security policies and a strong desire to return to fiscal responsibility. And if you head over to her web site, you'll see that her first 100 hours as speaker are to be devoted to those three big issues.
Republicans Blame Election Losses On Democrats
Republican officials are blaming tonight's GOP losses on Democrats, who they claim have engaged in a wide variety of "aggressive, premeditated, anti-Republican campaigns" over the past six-to-18 months.From Republicans Blame Election Losses On Democrats | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
Best. Headline. Ever.
wing nut spin
I have two words for the wing-nuts that are claiming that America Rolls Over To Al-Qaeda or that Olberman and Bin Laden Are Celebrating: Please continue.
If the election shows us anything it is that linking a democratic victory to a victory for the terrorists isn't working. Linking the fiasco in Iraq to Al-Qaeda isn't working. So please continue wasting your breath on a failed tactic. At least until mid-November 2008.
get out the non-vote
It has started. YouTube - George Allen's Campaign Attempts to Suppress Democratic Votes.
Lets hope that Nancy can add election reform to the already packed agenda. I don't see it in the The Book, the Democratic Plan for '07.
Hacking Democracy
"Hacking Democracy" follows Harris -- a middle-aged writer and literary publicist from Seattle who first became interested in voting difficulties shortly before the 2002 race -- as she travels the country to sound the alarm about what has become the most talked-about problem in elections, the dangers posed by the paperless electronic voting machines. Harris makes a grand subject for a documentary: Not only is she responsible for discovering some of the greatest vulnerabilities in touch-screen systems, she's a firecracker who's got Michael Moore's flair for sarcastic confrontation. The film captures Harris and a band of fellow muckrakers engaged in a spate of guerrilla media spectacles -- they spar with voting company representatives at official hearings, they storm into elections offices and demand evidence of electoral accuracy, they dig through garbage cans for proof of official malfeasance, they stage mock elections to show how quickly you can break into the nation's voting equipment.From Salon.com
And yet there are people who think that no one is cynical enough to use technology to tamper with the elections. While I am really skeptical of most of the Diebold conspiracy theories, I am really displeased with the way the company has refused to cooperate any oversight and has dragged its feet in dealing with voter concerns.
What's a SQL Injection Bug?
Joel explains what a SQL Injection Bug is in a way I could take to my users.
I see this all the time at work. I've gotten into the habit of using %1%, OR 1 == 1, and other nasty bits of SQL to test the applications I have to work with.
Bushenfreude
And yet Bushenfreude—the phenomenon whereby high-income beneficiaries of the Bush tax cuts use their windfalls to fund Democratic candidates—is still raging this election season. If anything, it's more intense than in 2004. Around the country, high earners with million-dollar homes, foreign cars, and fancy jobs, people who have won the meritocratic race, are furious at what's happening to their country. You've seen the Pissed-Off Yuppies, weighing $5-per-pound heirloom tomatoes at the farmer's market in one hand while gesticulating wildly against the government with the other.From Slate
This sounds like my neighborhood. One thing that comes to mind is that many of the Yupwardly mobile just dislike the incompetence of this administration. They are used to working in environments where poor performance has negative consciences. That seems not to be the case in the current administration.