Posts from — May 2009

Marco Rubio has a problem – supporters can’t remember his name.

My Mother had her TV on tonight and Pat Buchanan was discussing the Republican primary for the Senate race in Florida with the bubble-headed bleach blond [Chris Matthews]. He said that the young guy who was a Hispanic or Cuban or something was more conservative that Crist and Republicans should vote for the young guy in the primary. It might have been a meaningful endorsement for the primary if anyone had managed to remember the candidate’s name.

I have to wait for the transcript to appear for the exact quote which is why all I provided was a paraphrase. I guarantee, no one said “Marco Rubio” on the show. I had to tell my Mother who they were talking about, but she had never heard of him.

Update 5/18/09 : the transcript is finally available:

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The BBC reports on the Obama U-turn on abuse photographs.

The only people who don’t know what those photographs are going to show are the American people. A major portion of what the Hedgemony classified was solely to hide the truth of what they were up to from the American people.

The claim that this will endanger the troops, is unadulterated bovine excrement, as the only “troops” who will be endangered by the release of these photos are those with stars on their shoulders who lied to Congress and the American people about what was going on in their name.

Let people see exactly what “enhanced interrogation techniques” means in human terms. These are crimes, and crimes need to be prosecuted. Low ranking soldiers have been convicted and sent to prison for engaging in conduct that was approved in the Justice Department and White House, so don’t try to say it wasn’t a crime. If it wasn’t crime why were charges filed against these “few bad apples”.

It is time to end the cover-up and come clean. Prosecute the people at the top who approved these crimes and let everyone see what those leaders approved.

The Shrubbery tried to have it killed but public opinion won out and finally, Space shuttle catches up to Hubble for a repair mission. The Hubble, like the Mars Rovers, has exceeded expectations and provides hard science and popular appeal. It is the ability of these types of missions to engage a wide spectrum of the US population that makes the space program possible. Update: Successful capture.

Justice is served: European Commission fines computer chipmaker Intel $1.45B for a continuing pattern of anti-competitive behavior that has been going on for years. Monopolies are inherently inefficient, and they have no reason to improve their products. The lack of innovation generally leads to the conditions that have cost the US its manufacturing base. If you don’t upgrade your factories, you will get leaped-frogged by foreign competitors and die.

One of the major reasons that IT jobs can be outsourced so readily is because of the absurd dominance and stagnation of the Microsoft-Intel model. The older computer infrastructure in the developing world has become irrelevant because there isn’t a significant qualitative difference between a five-year-old Wintel box and a new one.

Since profits are all Intel cares about anymore, maybe they’ll wake up and start innovating, but I doubt it.

A check around the Florida blogtopia™ has produced a not outrageous selection of Democratic candidates for various jobs in 2010:

Governor: Alex Sink Update: Alex is In!

Attorney General: Dan Gelber

Chief Financial Officer: Dave Aronberg

Senate: Kendrick Meek

I’ve already talked about Ms. Sink.

Dan Gelber has been looking at the Senate race, but that was before Charlie declared his run. Gelber has the credentials for Attorney General and it positions him to make his name known statewide.

Dave Aronberg has been looking at the Attorney General race, but he has better credentials for CFO, and nowhere near the experience of Gelber. Again, he will get statewide name recognition.

Kendrick Meek essentially inherited his seat in Congress from his mother, Carrie Meek, and hasn’t faced an opponent in an election in 6 years, but he has a huge war chest and was an early supporter for Obama. Let him have a shot and see if he can campaign. I don’t think the Dems can afford a primary battle at any position and if the Republicans destroy each other in the primary, and he gets Obama’s support for turn out, he could win. It’s a long shot, but no one will know if he doesn’t move beyond his current position.

Charlie Crist probably has the Senate seat sewed up as he remains a very popular governor. Charlie is an archetypal Floridian: the moral fiber of a real estate developer with mental capacity and skin tone of an orange – what’s not to like. Marco Rubio is Rick Santorum on domestic issues and Jessie Helms on foreign policy, and has almost no name recognition outside of South Florida. To be honest, his name is probably a negative for him in the Panhandle [thanks to Lou Dobbs, among others], the most Republican part of the state.

Alex Sink can win the governor’s race. She and Bill Nelson are the only Democrats who have won state-wide races in years. It is important for her to run and to win as there will be redistricting after the 2010 census and people other than Republicans need to be represented in the process to break the 65% stranglehold the Republicans have on the state legislature.

This would open up three statewide offices for competition: Chief Financial Officer, Attorney General, and Agricultural Commissioner, if Bill McCollum and Charlie Bronson join the race, although Bronson is term-limited out of a job in any case.

There is a world of opportunity for the Democrats in 2010 in Florida, if they get their act together, because the Republican bench is pretty lame at the moment.

The Miami Herald reports that at 9:12AM EDT Gov. Charlie Crist announces bid for U.S. Senate

Just 14 minutes after Crist’s news release came out, the National Republican SenatorialCommittee endorsed him over former House Speaker Marco Rubio. It’s rare for a national party to intervene so publicly in a primary.

The McClatchy main site has a background piece that was published in anticipation of this move:

“It’s going to be like a fruit basket overturned,” said Joyce Russell, of the non-partisan Forum of the Palm Beaches, where Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink spoke Monday amid buzz about her potential gubernatorial campaign. “I like consistency. This makes me nervous.”

Besides Crist and Sink, the other statewide elected officials expected to seek new office are Attorney General Bill McCollum and Agriculture Commissioner Charles Bronson, both likely to run for governor.

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For some reason I missed the connection in Ellroon’s Friday Blog Sprinkles. At the end there is a story that seems to trace back to Brian Krebs of the Security Fix blog at the Washington Post site about a crack of the server at the Virginia Department of Health Professionals. A data base of drug prescriptions was stolen, and the original and several back-ups were apparently deleted. The cracker [the computer type, not the cowboy type] is demanding $10 million for the return of the data base.

It finally clicked that at the end of April Virginia’s Secretary of Technology, Aneesh Chopra, was selected as the first Federal Chief Technology Officer [CTO], despite having only public health degrees.

It gets worse. The Washington Examiner reports:

The Virginia agency recently attacked by a hacker has yet to receive a computer security upgrade ordered five years ago, a spokeswoman for Gov. Tim Kaine told The Examiner.
…

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Despite rather checkered results in the past, Rook’s Rant has once again upgraded to a new version of MT without a total meltdown.

Over at Bloggg there is a totally new look, and a switch to WordPress, that went relatively smoothly.

Actually, both actions were probably total hemorrhoids, but people don’t want to go into that after the sucker finally works.

The “medical-industrial complex” has come forth with their latest con: saving $2 trillion in health care costs.

While Krugman thinks it is nice that they have decided to get involved with the process, this paragraph is all I need to know it’s a con [my emphasis]:

The signatories of the letter say that they’re developing proposals to help the administration achieve its goal of shaving 1.5 percentage points off the growth rate of health care spending. That may not sound like much, but it’s actually huge: achieving that goal would save $2 trillion over the next decade.

So, they say that costs were going to grow at $400 billion a year, but they only grew at $200 billion a year, so they saved us $200 billion. Yeah, right.

How are they going to achieve these savings? Why, by screwing around with people’s health care, of course. The Republicans don’t want “government bureaucrats” making health care decisions, but don’t have a problem with insurance company bureaucrats doing it. The problem for the Republicans is that people on Medicare already know that doctors make health care decisions, not “government bureaucrats”.

Single payer saves $350 billion a year by dumping these parasites, so let’s save the additional money.

[More on this from Lambert at Corrente.]

The US Postal Service, a public-private agency with the worst of both worlds, wants you to remember that starting tomorrow it will cost you 44¢ for First Class and 28¢ for a postcard. Unlike a real private company, they can’t exceed the rise in inflation or pay their top management millions per year.

CNN says that Authorities: Body of UGA professor identified

(CNN) — The body of a University of Georgia professor accused of killing three people was found Saturday buried in woods near Athens, Georgia, authorities said.

George Zinkhan, 57, is suspected of fatally shooting his wife and two other people last month outside a community theater in Athens, which is home to the University of Georgia.

Cadaver dogs discovered the body with two guns in a wooded area of northwest Clarke County, about a mile from where Zinkhan’s red Jeep Liberty was found last week, Athens-Clarke Police Chief Joseph Lumpkin said.

Athens-Clarke County police confirmed the identity of the body, citing results from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

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Local TV station, KEYT, is updating this link continuously. The latest update is from 9PM PDT:

•8,733 acres burned
•55% contained
•Damage assessment in progress – initial estimate of 31 homes destroyed, 47 homes damaged, and 2 outbuildings destroyed.
•140 homes remain under mandatory evacuation order, affecting 350 people.
•More than 3,850 properties under evcaution warning, affecting about 9,625 people.
•Residences threatened- 3,500; commercial properties threatened- 100
•4,543 personnel on scene: 509 engines, 109 crews
•11 air tankers and 13 helicopters
•18 firefighter injuries to date
•Cause under investigation: Tip line – 805-686-5074
•Air quality warning downgraded to Air quality watch
•Estimated costs to date $7.4llion
•Expected containment 5/13/09

The LA Times fire map link, the Enplan Wildfire Viewer, and my ash cleanup post.

CNN is now reporting that California fire possibly started by power tool

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After a week of overtime the Florida Legislature finds a way to balance budget, says the Miami Herald, which is technically true, but leaves out the part about how this is dependent on revenue forecasts being accurate and the economy not dropping further, so we are going to see a special session to deal with the shortfall. They raised all of the “fees” they could think of, because paying the state for your license plate isn’t really a tax on your car and as long as it isn’t called a tax, you can raise it. They did raise the tax on cigarettes to pay for additional medical costs of smokers, [except that the cigarette manufacturers already did that as the result of a law suit, and smokers actually cost less than non-smokers due to a shortened life span, but don’t let facts interfere].

They also cut the salaries of some state employees, who haven’t seen a raise in over three years, which might put some of the Federal stimulus money they are counting on in jeopardy.

At least we don’t have to worry about any stupid laws being enacted while they are shut down. The only thing they are required to do is pass a budget. The Republicans have a 65% majority in both houses, and the governor is a Republican, but they needed extra time to pass a budget. When they say “government doesn’t work”, they really mean, “we don’t know how to govern”.

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Darth Cheney continues to appear [in a cloud of sulfurous smoke, no doubt] on the talking heads shows peddling his enhanced interrogation techniques [ Verschärfte Vernehmung in the original German]. As the News Writer notes, too many Americans are buying into the argument about the “ticking bomb”.

Since they keep trying to compare themselves to Churchill and their war of choice to World War II, lets take a look at how Churchill and the British government dealt with intelligence gathering in WWII.

Oops, the GOP is not going to like this. They packed a lot of over educated liberal intellectuals into a place called Bletchley Park to work on the problem. To make matters worse, they let a Post Office employee create one of the world’s first computers, and one of the leaders of the effort was gay. Further they kept their mouths shut about what was going on and never revealed what they knew about sources and methods, even when it might have been politically convenient, or to punish their critics. The details didn’t come out for 50 years.

In case the GOP has forgotten, the “good guys” won that war, even though one of the “good guys” was a murderous bastard who was responsible for the deaths of millions of his own people. Hey, Churchill had Stalin, and Reagan had Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, but “the ends justify the means”, or “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”.

Why do these people continue to push for torture? What part of “suicide bomber” eludes their understanding? Do they not know what “martyr” means?