Burnt, Motherfuckers!

Damn, well, I guess we got told.

I'd have loved to have been surprised by one of the "Jaded, seen it all, SO over it" sites NOT posting the "Biden is SUCH a terrible choice" essays that practically FLEW up as soon as the choice was announced.

But NO, up they went, as predictable as a face-lift on an over-forty sex-kitten.

Every. Single. One.

Not a single one of those Oh-So-Above-It-All Sites bothered to put a moment's thought into the POSSIBILITY of this being a decent choice before posting their "WHAT a Predictable Centrist Sell-Out But What Else Do You Expect From Obama The Corporate Establisment Dream Candidate" Posts.

At once disappointing, annoying, predictable and boring themselves -- and mildly nauseating.

Luckily, we didn't, but I certainly carry a fairly non-impressed opinion of Biden. So instead of charbroiled, I'm singed. But I still love MSOC, and am glad she's posting again regularly.

Biden obviously has a lot of positives, otherwise Obama wouldn't have chosen him. The one thing that truly gets me hopeful is the idea that Biden would be an attack dog - and one that has intimate Senatorial knowledge of how to fuck with John McCain.

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No Text Yet...

But MSNBC and CNN is "Breaking News" that they have confirmed it is

Biden.

Hmmm.

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The Numbers Are Bad!

No, I haven't started watching Lost - Although I admit to a great fondness for the character of Hurley.

What I am talking about is part of Robert Krulwich's commencement speech at the California Institute of Technology, titled "Tell Me A Story". Krulwich is not only blessed with one of those distinctive radio voices that instantly makes you want to like him and what he's telling you, but he is a science and technical reporter for NPR and ABC.

The first link is Krulwich talking about narrative, and how essential it is in science, particularly to those whom are adverse to science because of the C- they got in 11th grade biology or physics. Building a way to communicate real science is absolutely essential to keeping us all more-or-less in reality, and not subscribing to pseudoscience or outright creationism crapola that has us at the mercy of forces imaginary or manipulative. And to do that, science may have to relax its tendencies for focusing on the numbers.

The second link, which you may have heard already, is a fantastic story about how the mortgage crisis occurred. Krulwich and NPR news teamed with This American Life teamed up to describe what they named "The Giant Pool of Money". Again, the numbers can make your eyes cross, but we can move the attention away from the numbers (temporarily) to build a better understanding of world finance, and why it's serious problem beyond what we've seen already.

People ask me how or why I'm cut out for technical support - I usually answer that 1) you fall into shit like this when you have an Art degree and don't paint, and 2) I actually do have a natural gift for helping people understand their computers. It comes from being able to translate "memory error at 0x034bc45d7" into "Your computer has forgotten it's list of things to do and gotten lost - in order for it to find it's way back, it has to be rebooted."

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The Madness

Replace the word Reefer with "VP".



Tell me I'm wrong.

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The Cool Kids

I know that it is so much more fun to be one of the kewl kids and prognosticate about the outcome of the election and spew doom and gloom across the Nets. It is the most fun, apparently, to be one of the many who are screaming "I told you so" and play amateur campaign advisors letting Obama know just exactly what he is doing wrong and tell him why he will lose the election.

Apparently it is not very cool to write posts that compare and contrast Obama and McCain’s positions on the issues. Or highlight McCain’s many disturbing attitudes or views. Or write about the disaster that would be a McCain presidency. Or even to highlight the many lies that McCain tells on a daily basis. McCain is a fraud and a very frightening one at that. It would be easy to catalogue all of his many various flaws.

There is more…

First of all for the Chicken Littles and their cousins nothing has changed. Obama is still ahead. It is a close race, but Obama is in the lead and has been since the Primaries ended. Yes, it is a close race but it is not tied.

For Obama to be this consistently ahead, for this long, a tie it does not make. Remember Bush and Kerry had a tight race – up and down, up and down, but they both shared the top spot. One of them was not consistently ahead…even if it is only by a few points.

The Zogby polls are hardly trustworthy and National polls are not as reliable as State polls right now. And all of the electoral-vote maps are still looking pretty good.

I am not living in denial or have my head in the clouds. I realize that some of the internals in these polls suck for Obama. However, the Obama camp is not very worried about the polls right now.

Wha!?!?

Can’t remember where I heard or read it, but they put less stock in the polls and more stock in the registration numbers. The Obama camp plans to win this by getting new voters to the polls.

I have faith in this because of Obama’s past. As a community organizer he worked for Project Vote. Obama understands the ground game like no one and he knows all about disenfranchisement and the Republican election shenanigans. Obama has lawyers in place and will fight this thing.

CSPAN replayed his 2004 convention speech the other night. I watched with specific intent to capture some key words and to figure out a little bit more about who this guy is. I noticed a special line in his speech. It went something like “in America we have the right to vote and to have those votes counted – sometimes”. The “sometimes” was key…he was not saying it as a matter of resignation, he was stating it as a pre-emptive attack against it.

I believe that Obama has been using this pre-convention time to organize his ground game. He has been spending this primary money on organizing in every state and there is nothing that will ensure a win like a ground game. This ground game is not reflected in any polls. I believe that he will hit hard from convention time on and he will not have to spend a dime of General Election funds on his work on the ground.

I also think that he has been just letting McCain spin out. McCain is reactionary. McCain has not a single proactive bone in his body. Every single one of his policies and positions and actions are reactionary and McCain cannot for the life of him figure Obama out. It is driving McCain nuts that Obama will not react to him.

Obama is starting to hit McCain. And he is hitting him hard.

I realize that we are all damaged and suspicious and terrified after the last 8 years of the disaster that is Bush. I get it. It is enough to turn even the most positive of us into Negative Nellies. No matter the temptation to be one of the kewl kids and cluck about the falling sky – I will resist. I simply cannot afford more depressing days; the front page of any newspaper brings enough. I reserve the right to remain a little hopeful.

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This is just sad

Democratic U.S. Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, the first black woman to represent Ohio in Congress and a strong critic of the Iraq war, died Wednesday after a brain hemorrhage, a hospital spokeswoman said.
...
Tubbs Jones represented the heavily Democratic 11th District and chaired the ethics committee in the House. She was the first black woman to serve on the powerful Ways and Means Committee, where she opposed President Bush's tax cuts and his efforts to create personal accounts within Social Security.

Tubbs Jones was a firm supporter of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton during the primaries until throwing her support behind Sen. Barack Obama in June. She was to have been a superdelegate at next week's Democratic National Convention in Denver.

The Clinton family released a statement saying they shared a friendship with Tubbs Jones that "deepened through every trial and challenge."

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Technical Question

Goddammit.

No matter which site I go to there are friggin' Dino Rossi ads.

Are the ads attached to me? He would not be advertising Nationally. How does this work? It is driving me nuts.

Also, pssst. Today is Primary Day in Washington State. Please vote.

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Suprise! What's Bursting Out Of Your Chest?

How do I know I've gone cynical? When I start comparing the VP announcement to the surprise of a chest burster.

FiveThirtyEight has an interesting view of what both candidates face in nominating and the timing of those nominations.

I got pushed into this frame of mind myself this morning when a family friend from New Mexico called my wife this morning. She was having a fit over the idea that today's campaign schedule had Richardson and Clinton in Albuquerque & Espanola , very obviously mending fences after the primary, and stumping for Obama. She's not a PUMA - She's an ex-pat Labour Brit - and hates Richardson with a cold fury because of his pandering to rural school districts, delaying consolidation and hindering opportunities for students, in the last state election. She's definitely in the minority opinion of Richardson - of course, where she lives, she's lucky her rural neighbors don't take potshots at her house because they swing Democrat in a 4-to-1 Republican district. Her neighbors simply dislike Richardson because he's . . brown. What they think of Obama you might guess.

But I've personally reached the point where my anticipation matches the surprise of seeing Alien for the 23rd time when Kane starts choking and convulsing.

I don't think anyone outside of 1-2 people in each campaign know who the VP picks are for their bosses - that is if there's even been a choice by Obama or McCain.

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