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Perplexed by a Bumper Sticker

On the way out do run a few errands, Erci and I noticed this odd bumper sticker on a fairly new Nissan Maxima driven by a young woman along U.S. route 50 in Chantilly, VA. McCain/Palin sticker with McCain taped over or blacked out

Someone had clearly either taped over or blackened out the McCain portion of this McCain/Palin bumper sticker. I am left wondering why? I mean the options are leave your stickers on, or remove them, but to go through the effort to modify them in this manner; it indicates a scary level of rage, misdirected at the wrong loser of the election, and a clueless person to support the worst candidate for the vice presidency I can recall.

My fear is that for 2012 some Republicans will try to nominate Palin to be their presidential candidate. This would make some of my Democratic friends happy, as she’d be pretty easy to beat; but wouldn’t it be better to face a serious candidate who can actually bring something to the table and spur meaningful discussion about the issues?

I am also concerned what sort of mentality goes into deliberately blackening McCain’s name on their bumper sticker. Does the person who did that have guns? Are they healthy? Are they so desperate as to try something foolish? Do they even measure foolishness by the same metrics as the rest of us? Are they more likely to go “postal” or am I (full disclosure: I have something like nine Democratic candidate bumper stickers on my car).

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2008 11 09 snolan Politics Comments (5) Permalink

Grumbles about Solaris

Grumble, the fact that modern day and currently patched Solaris 10 does not support the -maxdepth option in it’s included find command is a real pain. So I spent this morning grabbing the findutils package, which meant grabbing the libintl package (it is one of several dependencies) and checking to make sure our already installed gcc, libiconv, libgcc, and coreutils packages were installed and up to date.

Of course, we manage our server deployments from a build repository, so once these packages are built we can deploy them to dozens of servers with very little effort, and that means doing the build, and setting everything up in the deployment; so I spent several hours getting the silly -maxdepth option working on our Solaris farm of servers. It just works in Linux; so why do we do Solaris again?

Thank you Sunfreeware.com for making all these packages easy to search, dependency check, and grab. As BobP is fond of saying: “Naked UNIX is an ugly thing!”

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2008 11 07 snolan Computers
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Something Wrong with Alaska Election?

I was myself following the extremely close race in Alaska and found it quite odd that so far there are only about 210,000 votes total for both senate candidates in Alaska; and while looking at close congressional races I found most of them have had around 300,000 votes cast… At first I chalked it up to the extremely small population in Alaska that would make a US Senator have a smaller contingent pool than most US Congressmen.

Oh, wait – there may be reason to suspect some other explanation:
Perhaps it was stolen?

This is scary stuff and all the more reason that the new government (or even the current one before it leaves office) should make it a priority to nationalize, rationalize and make more transparent and verifiable our entire election process.

A stolen election in Alaska does not impact who is President, this time; but it does impact who is Senator and who is Congressman from Alaska. Polling there was either way off by a uniform 14.4% for all three offices (it was not off by more than 4% anywhere but Alaska) or thousands of people spontaneously decided just to skip this one (but 11% lower turnout than 2004?!?!?!), or someone is pulling a fast one.

We need to collectively take steps to eliminate all doubts that our votes will be counted.

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2008 11 06 snolan Politics Comments (0) Permalink

Funny picture

I wish I’d come up with something this funny, but this is being shared around right now:

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2008 11 06 snolan Fun Comments (0) Permalink

Every Vote Counts

One of the more frequent excuses I hear from citizens who choose not to vote is that their vote will not matter. Well, if yesterday’s election proved something, it is that that excuse is completely invalid. As it approaches a full day after polls closed we still have:

  • no clear winner of the races for four (yes, 4) United States Senate seats:
    • Alaska where Senator “Tubes” leads by 3,353 votes out of 209,349 votes cast!
    • Georgia where total vote counts seem small for the huge early turnout reported, and Chambliss leads by a very small margin amongst a gigantic sea of votes (this one may go to Georgia’s runoff election rules)
    • Minnesota where less than 500 votes separate the two front runners and nearly three million voted!
    • Oregon where Merkley trails by less than less than 10,000 with over a million cast ballots and many precincts remain uncounted.
  • no clear winner of races for at least four (yes, 4) United States Congress seats:
    • CA-04 where only 451 votes separate Brown v McClintock out of over 300,000 cast
    • MD-01 where Kratovil leads by only 915 votes out of over 300,000 cast
    • WA-08 where the fabulous Darcy Burner (who wears the coolest t-shirts in politics) trails Reichert by only 1500 votes and there are many precincts left to count.
    • VA-05 where Perriello is ahead by only 31 votes out of over 300,000 cast!!!! Thirty-One is such a tiny number, and I’ll wager the undervote (the number of voters who voted for President but left Congress choice blank) is greater than 31 several times over in that district.
  • it remains unclear if California’s Proposition 8 has passed or not; though the Yes voters (who are voting against equal rights) have a clear lead on election day, there are many absentee ballots to be counted, many more than the margin remaining (though that is large). Thanks to Ben for pointing this one out.
  • and though we know who the next President of the United States will be, we are still unable to call the electoral votes for two states (North Carolina and Missouri) and one electoral vote in Nebraska’s 2nd district because the election for president was so close in all of them.

No one can use the excuse that their vote does not count anymore, and we have to do something about verifying our elections; making them more transparent, and easier to validate. We need to nationalize election procedures and rules.

I used information from pollster.com, fivethirtyeight.com, and cnn.com to put this post/diary together; did I miss any other really close races? If so – please let me know.

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2008 11 05 snolan News
Politics
Virginia Politics Comments (3) Permalink

Well this is a first! Evergreen Fire Station polling place full!

Arrived just before 6 am and parking lot is over full (to the point it is a minor safety hazard) and there is a long line.

Line was entirely indoors by 7:15am, but the steady trickle of voters is still impressive in this very rural precinct. Beth Roemmelt and I are greeting voters as they come in to vote.

I was 78th in the N-Z group at 6:36, in and out in about 20 minutes. Held an electronic voter card for about 3 minutes. Largest number of election officers, volunteers outside, poll watchers, and voting machines I’ve yet seen out here.

It’s cold, drizzly, and still the relentless trickle of voters comes in; we’ve sign up new volunteers for future elections as voters come in to vote. It is a tremendous feeling.

Republicans for Wolf set up a rain fly in one of the few parking spaces; though that is no longer the issue it was for the first hour. Suspect it will be an issue again in the late afternoon.

Update: This is in Prince William County, Virginia. I voted in Evergreen Fire Station and worked outside until 2:00pm when my Gainesville Democratic District chair moved me over to Alvey School to finish the day. All the Northwestern Prince William County precincts had very high turnout (75-90%) and all had long lines from 05:30 through 7:15 (some lasted through 09:20). Once the lines died down; they never came back, but the steady trickle of voters never slacked off… and that was quite a surprise. The heavy turnout today, added to high early voting rates got us to 80% voter turnout in Evergreen and 85% at Alvey; simply stunning.

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2008 11 04 snolan Personal Comments (0) Permalink

Go Vote!

Just a reminder.

I could not sleep last night because I was so excited.

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2008 11 04 snolan Personal
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Pro-Life folks, listen up

I keep getting libelous emails from anonymous (cowardly) lie-spreaders trying to stir up fear and uncertainty about Senator Obama. They seem to have a few common themes, but here is one that really annoys me because they are destroying an ally… I am talking about the “Obama is a baby-killer” myth. Barack Obama has made his position very clear; he opposes abortion as much as anyone in the country, but just not on legal grounds. He choses to oppose abortion on moral, ethical, social, and religious grounds.

This is tantamount to a free will argument. The religious argument goes, why would God give mankind the power to chose unless that choice is an important one. By that argument Christians must choose to have Jesus in their life. Likewise, citizens should have the power to choose life for the right reasons, but they need to be free to make that choice for moral, ethical, social, and religious reasons.

Abortions can be stopped, if we eliminate unwanted pregnancies. We must stop rapes, incest, unsafe sex, and foolish abstinence-only sex education (abstinence has a place, amongst other choices, but relying on it alone is just silly). We must improve health care for young and poor mothers so having a child is not a career crippling event. That is the right way to prevent abortions, and I think Americans are waking up to that fact.

Like prohibition, making abortions illegal is an ineffective technique to achieve a worthy goal. People need to be free to choose to do the right thing, or the wrong one; and we need to make it possible to do the right thing by supporting them. The key word in “choose life” is the choice. Obama sees that, and will effectively prevent far more abortions than our stacked supreme court.

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2008 11 03 snolan Politics
Religion
Virginia Politics Comments (4) Permalink

An imperfect man, an imperfect president, but the right path

The reason to vote for Obama, he says:

    “I will open the doors to government and ask you to be involved in your own democracy again.”

If you have not seen his ~28 minute spot yet, you should. Even if you don’t plan to vote for Obama, the spot points out the things our government should be focusing on. McCain, Bush, Clinton, and we all could learn a lot from Barack Obama’s ad and we should all take greater part in our own democracy.

For those who are not flash video enabled:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtREqAmLsoA

Update: Getting involved can positively effect your own life.

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2008 11 02 snolan Economics
Environment
Foreign Policy
Personal
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The Cuteness, it is too much!!!!

This looks like fun!

For those without embedded Flash ability:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPzNl6NKAG0

Hat tip to Johnny Hunter.

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2008 10 31 snolan Fun Comments (1) Permalink