We’ve heard a lot of chest-thumping Bravado from Saint Senator Barack Obama, mostly focused around how he’ll bring the country together and make those pesky right wingers stop scaring everyone. He’s going to make the tough calls and level with us. Like adults. And he won’t use politics. Like adults.

In yesterday’s debate, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards both ripped into the Senator for his use of “present” voting, effectively calling him impotent. The Obama campaign immediately jumped to their site to tell the world, in the words of the Chicago Tribune, that if you criticize the process of voting “present,” you don’t have a good understanding of the process.

Except that apparently, the NY Times and some people cited there don’t “understand” this mystical process either. Here’s one example of the NY Times apparently not understanding the process just like most normal people wouldn’t…

In Illinois, political experts say voting present is a relatively common way for lawmakers to express disapproval of a measure. It can at times help avoid running the risks of voting no, they add.

“If you are worried about your next election, the present vote gives you political cover,” said Kent D. Redfield, a professor of political studies at the University of Illinois at Springfield. “This is an option that does not exist in every state and reflects Illinois political culture.”

The vote on the juvenile-justice bill appears to be a case when Mr. Obama, who represented a racially mixed district on the South Side of Chicago, faced pressure. It also occurred about six months before he announced an ultimately unsuccessful campaign against a popular black congressman, Bobby L. Rush.

State Senator Christine Radogno, a Republican, was a co-sponsor of the bill to let children as young as 15 be prosecuted as adults if charged with committing a crime with a firearm on or near school grounds.

The measure passed both houses overwhelmingly. In explaining his present vote on the floor of the Senate, Mr. Obama said there was no proof that increasing penalties for young offenders reduced crime, though he acknowledged that the bill had fairly unanimous support.

“Voting present was a way to satisfy those two competing interests,” Ms. Radogno said in a telephone interview.

Thom Mannard, director of the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence, said political calculation could have figured in that vote.

“If he voted a flat-out no,” Mr. Mannard said, “somebody down the road could say Obama took this vote and was soft on crime.”

Mr. Obama’s aides said he was more concerned about whether the bill would be effective rather than with its political consequences. They did not explain why he did not just vote no.

So, in other words, the great candidate of change did exactly what every other politician does… Make a political calculation based on how it would affect him in an election.

That’s exactly the kind of leadership we need in Washington. A guy who votes “I’m here!”

John Kerry, 2004:

I can choose only one running mate, and this morning I have done so.

I have chosen a man who understands and defends the values of America; a man who has shown courage and conviction, as a champion for middle class Americans, and for those struggling to reach the middle class; a man who has shown guts and determination and political skill in his own race for the presidency of the United States; a man whose life has prepared him for leadership and whose character brings him to exercise it.

I am pleased to announce that, with your help, the next vice president of the United States of America will be Senator John Edwards from North Carolina.

[...]

This campaign for the presidency really began — this campaign — now, wait, we’ve got plenty of those. Don’t worry. We’ve got four months for you to get a hold of those things. We’re going to get them around.

This campaign for the presidency really began two years ago, and throughout those two years, as well as for four years before that, I have worked with John Edwards, side by side and sometimes head to head.

I’ve seen John Edwards think, argue, advocate, legislate and lead for six years now. I know his skill. I know his passion. I know his strength. I know his conscience. I know his faith.

He has honored the lessons of home and family that he learned in North Carolina. And he brings those values to shape a better America together with all of us.

John Edwards is ready for this job. He is ready for this job.

Oh wow. Gushy. He really liked John back then. He was really “ready.”

Either he was full of shit then (most likely) or John Edwards has completely gone off the reservation (not likely considering he’s still spouting off the same tired stories as he did in 2004, the only difference being he’s doing it now on top of the bodies of Katrina victims instead of on top of the bodies of dead girls he channels while suing doctors)…

Barack Obama is being endorsed by fellow Sen. John Kerry, the Democrats’ 2004 presidential nominee who lost to George W. Bush that year with John Edwards as his running mate and gave up his own plans for a 2008 run a year ago.

Kerry, a senator from Massachusetts, planned to announce his support Thursday at a rally with Obama at the College of Charleston, arguing that the Illinois senator can best unite the country, said a Democrat familiar with the decision. Kerry was timing his announcement before South Carolina’s Jan. 26 primary, a contest that has taken on extra importance for Obama after Hillary Rodham Clinton beat him in New Hampshire.

So you run with the guy in 2004, and in the announcement you say this:

As so many of you know, throughout this campaign, John talked about the great divide in America, the two Americas that exists between those who are doing very well and those who are struggling to make ends meet in our country.

That concern is at the center of this campaign. It is what it is all about. It is what the 35 years of my struggle have been about. And I am so proud that together John Edwards and I are now going to fight to build one America for all Americans.

And now in 2008 you tell us that someone else entirely is the best person to do that?

This brings two things to mind immediately…

1. John Edwards never really was that good a choice for Vice President.

2. John Kerry has no integrity and loyalty whatsoever and he’s just as slimy as I thought he was back in 2004.

It’ll be interesting to see, when his office gets around to releasing a press release, exactly what his rationale is and how it conflicts with his rationale for choosing Edwards in 2004.

I can’t wait.

Now, a lot of you are probably watching this and laughing at it, but there is a certain reality contained therein.

Florists, bakers, DJ’s, and all the others, simply don’t care what the guy has to say. In fact, they all believe that men are just sitting there to agree to something and hand over a credit card or cash. How do I know this? Because I was there, and it wasn’t that long ago.

While I can honestly say that our “people” weren’t terrible, the bias toward Beth was very obvious every time we met with someone. When we met with the florist, the nice young gentleman barely looked at me the entire time. When we met with the studio that was going to do the photography, they pretty much ignored me and asked her what kind of pictures / video she wanted. At the end of our appointments, the hand flew forth across the desk and in it, I placed a stack of hundreds. That was how our wedding was conducted.

I don’t hold any bitter feelings about it, but it may not be a bad idea for wedding planners and the associated service providers to stop treating men like ATM’s and at least acting like we have an opinion and that it actually matters. It may actually make men want to have an active role in the planning of one of the biggest events of their lives.

Just a suggestion.

Click To Play

As usual, Loren simplifies the unbearably complex.

There’s an idiot suing God. What, you didn’t hear? Of course you didn’t. I mean, if you looked at the weirdo sites I do, you did, and maybe if you caught the “strange news” blurbs on the major sites you did, but chances are you missed it.

Here’s the case in a nutshell:

LINCOLN, Neb. - The defendant in a state senator’s lawsuit is accused of causing untold death and horror and threatening to cause more still. He can be sued in Douglas County, the legislator claims, because He’s everywhere.

State Sen. Ernie Chambers sued God last week. Angered by another lawsuit he considers frivolous, Chambers says he’s trying to make the point that anybody can file a lawsuit against anybody.
Chambers says in his lawsuit that God has made terrorist threats against the senator and his constituents, inspired fear and caused “widespread death, destruction and terrorization of millions upon millions of the Earth’s inhabitants.”

The Omaha senator, who skips morning prayers during the legislative session and often criticizes Christians, also says God has caused “fearsome floods … horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornadoes.”
He’s seeking a permanent injunction against the Almighty.

So while on the taxpayer’s dollar, Mr. Chambers tries desperately to get some attention for himself by suing God. That’s fine, I guess if you aren’t being paid to, you know, legislate, but hey… It’s Ernie Chambers.

But just who is Ernie Chambers? I had never heard of the guy before, so I decided to do some research seeing as aside from the lawsuit and the fact that he’s a “fixture” in Nebraska politics, details of the guy are just not there. Turns out, the guy is a certifiable kook with some great ideas if you’re a white southerner in the era of Jim Crow (Ernie Chambers is black):

In April 2006, Chambers introduced an amendment to a bill (LB 1024) that would divide the Omaha Public Schools district into three different districts. Supporters say this would help provide more localized control for African Americans and Hispanics. This issue has divided the state. Chambers states that the issue has “thrown white people into a tizzy.” The bill has received national attention and critics refer to it as “state-sponsored segregation”

Critics refer to it as “state sponsored segregation?” Er, if you aren’t a critic what would you call racially dividing schools? Diversity divestment?

I guess if this crazy old man suddenly has a coronary (and no, that’s not a Julianne Malveaux reference) we’ll know just how God felt about this whole lawsuit.

Fred Thompson, so far, has struck me as a candidate running more on the ideal of who people think he is than who he actually is or what he actually believes. Apparently, George Will (a brilliant writer as far as I’m concerned) agrees, and cites numerous examples of how Thompson, who sat on the sidelines for months before finally announcing on Leno, is not really “up” on what’s even going on in the political world.

Sean Hannity, who is no Torquemada conducting inquisitions of conservatives, asked Thompson: “When you look at the other current crop of candidates — Republicans — where is the distinction between your positions and what you view as theirs?” Thompson replied: “Well, to tell you the truth, I haven’t spent a whole lot of time going into the details of their positions.”

Wait, what? As a candidate, that’s usually what makes you enter in the first place. You enter because you see a void not being filled by another candidate. Even if you don’t have a precise idea and inventory of all their positions, you still know where you fit into the mix. Not Fred. Fred hasn’t spent a whole lot of time getting into the details of the other candidates’ positions. Despite numerous videos released after the debates he was too cowardly to get into, he has no details on the people whose positions he attacked.

Sounds like a hell of a guy. Get him into the oval office!

Will continues:

Thompson, contrary to his current memories, was deeply involved in expanding government restrictions on political speech generally and the ban on issue ads specifically. Yet he told Ingraham “I voted for all of it,” meaning McCain-Feingold, but said “I don’t support that” provision of it.

Oh? Why, then, did he file his own brief urging the Supreme Court to uphold McCain-Feingold, stressing Congress’ especially “compelling interest” in squelching issue ads that “influence” elections?

Most lamely, Thompson takes credit for McCain-Feingold doubling the amount of “hard money” an individual can give to a candidate, which he says reduces the advantages of incumbency. But that is absurd: Most hard money flows to incumbents.

If you’ve ever noticed, most supporters and advocates for the horrifically anti-American McCain-Feingold bill never really have a good solid grip on the facts. None of them really have a strong grasp on what the bill prevents or decreases, and none of them ever seem to know exactly what was going on beforehand. It’s not only, as George Will points out, the hard money flowing to incumbents. It’s the soft money. Money in the form of candidate endorsement ads that are run by unions, charities, etc., for example. Or money coming from various 527 groups. The ironic part of the 527 provision is that those same people who couldn’t make donations to the candidate as individuals can filter hundreds of thousands of dollars to the exact same candidate as part of a 527. In other words, the flow of soft money is not affected in any way.

I won’t even get into the free speech issues associated with this bill. The Supreme Court has already held that the law’s provisions about issue ads are grossly unconstitutional. In fact, anyone with a brain should realize that aside from the PATRIOT Act and PATRIOT Act II, this is probably the worst piece of legislation ever written.

Will finally closes his article with a scathing attack on the hypocrisy of someone who championed this mishmosh of bad ideas trying to get into a presidential race this late.

So he believes, as zealous regulators of political speech do, that political contributions are incipient bribes — but that bribery begins with contributions larger than $2,300. Which brings us to the financial implausibility of his late-starting campaign.

Suppose he does something unprecedented — gets 100 people a day, from now until Jan. 1, to contribute the permitted maximum of $2,300. After subtracting normal fundraising costs and campaign overhead, he would still enter 2008 vulnerable to being outspent at least three-to-one by his major rivals.

So… Barring some shifty fundraising, he can’t stand up against the other Republicans who are already in full-tilt campaign spending mode. In other words, he’ll have to go directly against the law he so strongly believes in and helped to co-write so that he can actually survive a presidential election.

Or somehow turn roughly 10,500 people into $2,300 contributors and make $24,150,000 all in 105 days.

Good luck with that one, Fred. As your campaign falls flat on its face, you’ll have yourself to thank for it, which might actually be the sweetest irony of it all; undone by his own bill.

Technorati Tags: fred thompson, bcra, campaign finance reform, mccain-feingold

Scott Adams muses on what your perception model is. Are you a rounder or an accumulator?

ROUNDERS: This group rounds things off. A problem that’s a two on a scale of one to ten gets rounded to zero. If a rounder has five problems that are all about a two on a scale of one to ten, he’ll tell you he has no problems.

ACCUMULATORS: Accumulators add up all the little problems until they equal one big problem. If an accumulator has five problems that are each a two on a scale of one to ten, that feels like having one problem that’s a ten.

Rounders are generally happy, because they perceive their lives to be mostly problem-free. Accumulators are often miserable because “nothing is going right.”

Readers of this blog will recognize this as closely related to the 80-20 rule about a job well done. Rounders are pleased with a job that’s 80% right because that rounds to 100%. Accumulators take the 20% that’s wrong and add it to the other things that are wrong and suddenly their world is falling apart.

Well, my wife and I had this discussion. I am 100% a rounder. She is 100% an accumulator. Neither of us have any gray area. Makes for interesting discussion when she yells at me for not taking something seriously.

Where do you fall on that scale?

The most recent blur around these here interwebs is that Sprint cut off legitimate paying customers because, well, they stopped legitimately paying.

Consumerist had a conversation with a Sprint insider and here’s what he/she had to say about the issue:

CONSUMERIST: How frequently did someone have to call to get terminated for calling customer service too much?

SPRINT INSIDER: 90 times in a 6 month period was the standard I think.

CONSUMERIST: Were they calling about the same service problem?

SPRINT INSIDER: These were the customers that had nothing to do but call us every single day demanding credit. And they were getting it because customer care was getting exhausted from arguing with them. So a nickel at a time these customers were collecting literally thousands of dollars in credit balances.

We were targeting people that were just outright defrauding the company. These customers will probably eventually force their future service providers to take similar action if they do not change their ways.

CONSUMERIST: One reader said he got canceled because he kept calling you because you were charging him for text messages he shouldn’t have been charged for.

SPRINT INSIDER: I can’t really get into specifics on an account, BUT… I will re-direct to what I mentioned earlier…These customers were for the most part literally defrauding our company. Not just a courtesy credit or two… We’re talking customers that haven’t made a payment since 2005 and still have active service. Customers who were getting better deals than our own employees get for their own personal accounts. These weren’t the customer care horror stories we’ve heard where a billing issue drags on for 8 months. This was just unrealistic amounts of credits and at the end of the year we were LITERALLY paying these customers to use our service.

Sorry, but that’s just wrong. I have two things to add to this.

1. Last summer, during my AOL-induced fame, many people told me I should’ve just kept taking their retention offers time and time again to get free service, so I’m sure this was happening in some if not all of the cases of Sprint terminating customers.

2. A long time ago, I was a frequenter of alt.cellular.sprintpcs and this was going on quite regularly. I railed against it then, and I still think it’s wrong today. Here’s what I posted way back on January 27th of 2002…

I’m not saying Sprint should not have retention deals, but all of a sudden I notice everyone is “cancelling” or at least saying they are to get a better deal out of Sprint PCS. People bitch about service and cost, and everything else, but they spend tons of time trying to “beat the man.” It’s a little disheartening, at best, to see this going on in the scale it’s going on at in the group.

Why?

Well, frankly, if everyone is wondering why plan prices are up, but features are being trimmed (FIMF, 8pm nights) just look at how much Sprint’s shelling out for retention groupies who weren’t cancelling anyway! One guy on this group said in the same message he was unhappy with the call capacity issues, and took a retention deal for another 150 minutes added to his plan! Are you kidding me?

I’m not the moral police, but it’s people like this who make people who pay their bill every month and do things the right way have to pay more for no real reason. It would probably be in Sprint’s best interest to do what they did to me. Let me cancel and disappear. 8 months down the road, they sent me a post card to come back and made a great deal as far as rebates went so I took it. I was really cancelling, at least, and they got me back with a retention style deal. If Sprint PCS just told all these “potential cancellers” to fuck off and cancel anyway, I’m sure most of them would change their mind.

Just my two cents
Your results may vary.

I’d bet quite a bit of cashola that most of the people who got cut off, seeing as this is what the “insider” claims, were doing similar style deals. If you want to see why I believe this was happening, just read the responses in that thread. I was ripped into numerous times and saw numerous specious explanations, justifications, and rationalizations.

I hope they were all in the lot of people who got their comeuppance.

You have to wonder what the Senate has to hide with this immigration bill. I mean, why in God’s name would anyone object to amendments to a bill being read before they’re voted on? Hell, they can’t even write the bill before it’s voted on!

Just watch this and prepare to lose your lunch.

This is simply disgusting, reprehensible, and wrong.

And Jim DeMint is an obstructionist?

Video courtesy of Slobokan.

Ho.

Lee.

Shit.

While it isn’t a full-fledged success, I’d definitely call it progress. Thank God someone in the US is finally doing some research instead of some bitching:

Primates with severe Parkinson’s disease were able to walk, move, and eat better, and had diminished tremors after being injected with human neural stem cells, a research team from Yale, Harvard, the University of Colorado, and the Burnham Institute reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

These results are promising, but it will be years before it is known whether a similar procedure would have therapeutic value for humans, said the lead author, D. Eugene Redmond Jr., professor of psychiatry and neurosurgery at Yale.

“Not only are stem cells a potential source of replacement cells, they also seem to have a whole variety of effects that normalize other abnormalities,” Redmond said. “The human neural stem cells implanted into the primates survived, migrated, and had a functional impact. It’s an important step, but there are a number of studies that need to be done before determining if this would be of any value in clinical settings.”

It’s a start, and one that didn’t require the destruction of embryos. Funny how that works.

Privacy International laid into Google for their practices. Danny Sullivan, guru of all things search looks into the much-ballyhoo’ed report and finds, well, nothing really…

I eagerly opened the report. At last, someone was finally doing the very hard drill-down and a decent under-the-hood comparative look at how private data is handled, right?

Wrong. Looking at the report (PDF), I was pretty shocked that it appeared to be a mishmash of details that can’t be properly weighted against each other.

Read on for the details including how a Microsoft employee is actually on Privacy International’s International Advisory Board.

Technorati Tags: privacy international, google, nbd

Heh… Someone should write a book about that…

via Jason

Apparently, Ampd’s bankruptcy is related, at least in part, to bad debt from subscribers:

Apparently, those free-spending youths don’t care much for paying their cell-phone bills. A court motion filed on June 4 explains that Amp’d “experienced an unprecedented growth of subscribers” between November, 2006, and February after running ads on MTV (VIA) about the wireless phone company’s lineup of mobile music and video content.

Collecting payments from these subscribers proved to be a challenge, however. “Approximately 90% of the debtor’s customers were on 18-month service contracts,” according to the filing. “The debtor began to find a host of credit and collections problems (that) contributed ultimately to a liquidity crisis.” By May, the number of nonpaying customers reached 80,000. That’s nearly half of Amp’d’s current customer base of 175,000 subscribers.

That’s what happens when you target the low-end “cool” market. Not that it’s an excuse, but it does explain a lot.

Technorati Tags: amp’d, mtv, viacom

If I could stand up and cheer, I would. Wait, what am I talking about. Of course I can stand up and cheer. In response to a takedown by Six Apart, the parent company of LiveJournal of various incest/pedophilia fiction (disgusting, I know, stay with me folks), they said the following:

While there are stories, essays, and discussions that include discussion of these issues in an effort to understand and prevent them, others use a pretext to promote these activities. It’s often very hard to tell the difference.

One reader took issue with that quote, and rightly nailed a perfectly worded response:

Well, yeah. That’s the entire reason ideals like freedom of speech exist: because it’s not just *hard* to tell the difference between good and bad speech — it’s *impossible* to set an objective standard that everyone agrees on. So the only policy that’s safe from turning into tyranny is to allow all speech, no matter how uncomfortable it makes you. Yes, people could be harmed; yes, even children. Freedom is more important.

Well said, Dan. That is 100% correct.

Yes there’s all kinds of stuff that kids shouldn’t see, but what if I like my kids to see porn and you don’t? Whose standards do we abide by? You can’t just reflexively say the most restrictive one because who are you to make standards for everyone?

Yes, sometimes your kids will see something that hurts them. You can try and shield your kids and I will help you do that. I’m all for parents controlling their own destinies, but I’m also all about you keeping your standards inside your four walls and behind your front door. Once your standards start impeding my right to view content I want, then your standards are oppressive and tyrannical, content notwithstanding.

It really is that simple.

via Boing Boing

The Democrats and the most ethical congress in history march on. You may remember this as the fight that got Murtha in a bit of hot water with no one and had him threatening to remove all earmarks from Mike Rogers’ future bills (a clear violation of House rules that warranted zero response or reprimand from the impotent and uneffective Speaker, Nancy Pelosi).

Here’s CNN on where $39,000,000 almost went (hint: Murtha’s back yard) and how Rogers caught this “oversight.”

Naturally, Murtha’s response is that he won’t do a CNN interview about it and that he won’t share his other earmark requests. Guess he doesn’t want anyone finding any more “oversights.”

via Hotair.com

Not that all politicians don’t do this, but it’s interesting that it’s still happening because we heard in November about what a change we would be seeing with Democrats in charge.

The only thing that has changed, apparently, are party lines.

via Hotair.com

Dyslexia is a social fig leaf used by middle-class parents who fear their children will be labelled as low achievers, a professor has claimed.

Julian Elliott, a leading educational psychologist at Durham University, says he has found no evidence to identify dyslexia as a medical condition after more than 30 years of research.

“There is a huge stigma attached to low intelligence,” he said.

“After years of working with parents, I have seen how they don’t want their child to be considered lazy, thick or stupid.

“If they get called this medically diagnosed term, dyslexic, then it is a signal to all that it’s not to do with intelligence.”

I tend to feel the same way about ADD or ADHD or whatever condition they’ve assigned to being a kid these days.

Supporters of the condition argue that dyslexics are intelligent people who have difficulties processing information and need extra help and time than others who are poor readers.

But Professor Elliott has claimed that the symptoms of dyslexia - such as clumsiness and letter reversal - are similar to those seen in those who simply cannot read.

He argues that the condition should be rediagnosed as a reading difficulty.

Difficulties processing information?

I’m not bagging on people but no one seems to have ever proven that dyslexia actually exists as anything more than an excuse for people not being able to read. Something tells me if you held a book up to someone known to be illiterate and someone who’s been “diagnosed” as dyslexic, the number of similarities would be startling.

However, other experts have suggested that parents are putting their children forward for reading ability assessments to “get them off the hook”.

Dr Michael Rice, a dyslexia and literacy expert at Cambridge University, said: “There is a sense of justification when children are diagnosed.

“It gets them off the hook of great embarrassment and personal inadequacy.”

Again, it sounds like ADD / ADHD. If your kid is a chronic misbehavor or an antsy hyperactive kid, you can name it a condition, get a drug to sedate them, and call yourself a great parent. I think these guys are right on, frankly.

Finally, this stat…

“On one degree course I teach, about one quarter of the students get help with their coursework and other assistance because they have this label. You become quite cynical.”

The number of students who receive disability allowances at university has risen to a record 35,500 at a cost of £78.4million a year.

Nice.

One more quote from a commenter on the story who really nails it:

I can recall only one person from my schooldays, at both Junior and Grammar, who had difficulty with their reading. During my working life I encountered one or two - so why are there so many now? I could read a little and write my name when I started school at four, so perhaps parents no longer read with their children. Everything now has to have a name or, worse, a syndrome which excuses everything from poor reading to bad behaviour.

- Jill, Valencia, Spain

Maybe it’s all the homework

Technorati Tags: dyslexia, bullshit

An enhancement to the FOIA is stuck in Congress. Once again, some boneheaded Senator thinks they can get around the power of the people. In the end, he’ll get found out just like hte last one to put a hold on a bill…

Anyway, here’s the link. If one of these folks are in your neighborhood, ask them flat out if they put a hold on the bill. Get them to commit to a yes or no answer and don’t take “no comment” for an answer.

via The Seminal

Technorati Tags: secrecy, foia, freedom of information act

Yep… Another politician who’s against the XM/Sirius merger and has some kind of vested interest in the outcome of the merger…

Congressman Mike Doyle (R-Pa.), who is also a member of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, has recently written the FCC and the Justice Department, opposing the Sirius-XM merger.

[...]

Mike Doyle also said that the resulting company would be a monopoly in the satellite radio market, and he complained that the two companies had not produced an interoperable receiver. Statements that seemingly echo the NAB’s stance on the merger.

Now why is that important?

Well, Mike Mullen, Doyle’s former senior legislative assistant is now part of the NAB and is the NAB’s Director of Government Relations now.

Oh yeah, and the NAB puts lots of campaign money in Doyle’s pockets.

I guess that would get you to parrot the talking points, huh?

Other fine upstanding souls:
Mike Hubbard
Herb Kohl