From CNN’s Political Ticker blog: Major cash haul for conservative third-party candidate in NY

(CNN) – Doug Hoffman – the conservative third party candidate running in upstate New York’s closely watched special congressional election – raked in $116,000 in the last 24 hours, a campaign spokesman confirmed to CNN.

The cash haul came the same day former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin made a surprise endorsement in the race, voicing her support of Hoffman over the Republican Party’s nominee, Dede Scozzafava.

…Other conservatives have also recently aligned behind Hoffman, including former Rep. Dick Armey, former Sen. Rick Santorum, and Rep. Michele Bachmann.

For Crazy Conservatives ideology trumps even Party. I guess the Republican Party of New York isn’t whacko enough for them.

The Democrat in the special election for the 23^rd district is Bill Owens, who is probably a Blue Dog. The district is a Republican stronghold, but things have been shifting. McCain lost it in 2008, and the Republican Congresscritter resigned to become Army Secretary.

The BBC reports that Rich Germans demand higher taxes

A group of rich Germans has launched a petition calling for the government to make wealthy people pay higher taxes.

The group say they have more money than they need, and the extra revenue could fund economic and social programmes to aid Germany’s economic recovery.

Germany could raise 100bn euros (£91bn) [$150 billion] if the richest people paid a 5% wealth tax for two years, they say.

They note that they could donate to charities, but that isn’t as efficient as having the government do it. These people obviously don’t think that having a lot of poor, homeless, sick people is good for the economy, and think that everyone should pay a fair share.

Germany’s existing safety net means that the pain is nowhere near as bad as the US, but wealthy people in Germany are bothered by it.

It has just been released and the early reports are in: get it on a new box, because attempting to upgrade will probably not work if you are moving up from Vista, and definitely won’t work if you have XP. The reason is simple, they actually attempted to fix some of the worst of Vista, and that required throwing backwards compatibility down the toilet.

As expected, bigger and faster hardware is required. Most people put 2 gigabytes of RAM as the minimum, and the fastest processor you can afford. That’s for the low end version. Your older peripherals probably won’t work.

This is 7.0. Never buy anything from Microsoft that ends in .0. Wait until Service Pack 1, and then it should be reasonably stable. Installing this on an old machine, even if it has the power to accept it, means reinstalling all of your software, and then upgrading all of that software once again. You are probably looking at days of upgrading.

Save yourself the aggravation and wait until you need a new machine, and it must have Windows on it.

Let’s all have a moment of silence for all of the network administrators in the land who are looking at this mess and the possibility of having to update their systems. Based on what is known, I can’t see many of them thinking that this is a good idea in this economy. This is more of the world class thinking from the business wizards at Microsoft.

Ignore Him

When does the next course arrive?

[Editor: Originally there were others on my neighbor’s patio, but these are the remnants. From the left: Adolf, KT-2 & her kitten, then Spot, the Lone Ranger, and Lucrezia on the left. My neighbor eats early and often puts out scraps. I made a noise to get them to look at me, but that caused the others to bolt, and these guys to turn away by the time the shutter actually worked.]

Friday Ark