Barry Ritholtz has a very interesting write up on why financial markets like coalition governments so much over at The Big Picture, it makes an interesting read if you are into relationships between capitol markets and politics.
Decided to revise the blogger template for a prettier design taken from Point of Focus. I am curious what various readers think of it. I know – the comments stopped working (update: they work on new posts, but not old ones), I have to figure out why. My good friend Anthony helped me out by drawing up some dragonflies to replace the default butterflies – because dragonflies are cool, and there are lots of them by our pool every summer.
My Mom, her boyfriend, and two of my nieces are visiting from New York State this weekend and for Veteran’s Day. It is going to be a hectic and fun-filled weekend. My the nieces have grown… they are lovely young ladies now, and it is harder and harder to call them by the pet nicknames I dubbed them when they were babies: Squishy-fish and Snuggle-bunch (Silly-stinkpot and Cutie-pie are not visiting me at this time). I gather Ikea and the Container Store are on the list of pilgrimages this trip, as are some of the monuments in Washington because of Veteran’s Day.
It has been a fabulous experience working so hard on the Bruce Roemmelt campaign for the past 6 months. My only regret is that I did not discover Bruce’s candidacy earlier and work that much more. We got close, very close for a first time challenger running against a 13 year incumbent in a district that normally votes for the incumbent’s party by a 25% margin. The State Board of Elections, with all precincts reporting is giving Delegate Bob Marshall by only 11.3% – so I am encouraged that we can beat him next time. Interestingly, in Loudon county, Roemmelt won by a narrow margin. I firmly believe that by working so hard in the districts that we lost, we helped put Tim Kaine over the top, and that is great news. Even more good news: several wing-nut idealogues have been beaten in other house races!I did the numbers reporting on the Sudley North precinct, where Democrats won all races handily with 554 ballots cast (one was provisional). The machines at both my district and Sudley North were those horrible touch screen machines with no paper trail (grrrrr), but aside from that the election officials were professional an honest and the election looked well run in the two districts I saw personally. Erci said there were lines outside the voting place in Claude Moore park.
I knocked on about 140 doors today (election day) and put flyers on them trying to get people out to vote. That brings me to about 60 hours volunteering, $1300 donated to various campaigns, and one fund-raising/meet-the-candidate party hosted with Erci and help from Steve, Jeannie, and Kate (thanks guys!). If I start now, I can probably get hundreds of hours in trying to point out to voters of the mighty 13th district how silly their Delegate is now and how much we need to change. I am also going to fight to get any future debates televised, everyone who saw the debate between Marshall and Roemmelt agrees that Marshall is a wing-nut and Roemmelt is a decent man trying to work to reduce our problems. Easy choice.
Last night Erci took me to see Cavalia which is playing for one more week next to Pentagon City Mall. It is a magical combination of horses (a lot of stallions), horsemanship, dressage, trapeze, gymnastics, tumbling, art, fantasy, and hauntingly beautiful music. It is perhaps not quite as impressive as many of the Cirque du Soleil shows I have seen, but in other ways, even more impressive. To get the focus and cooperation of so many fine horses is amazing. So where a Cirque show broadens my definition of humanity, this show broadens my understanding of how well humans can work with horses. If you like either Cirque style shows or horses, you should consider trying to get to your local showing of Cavalia.
Words cannot adequately display how disgusted I am with Virginia Delegates Bob Marshall and Dick Black. I just saw a commercial on Newschannel8 paid for by the Delegate Black campaign where he took credit for road improvements that he voted against. This is exactly the same pattern the Delegate Marshall campaign has taken; taking credit in his mailed flyers for road improvements he voted against! The sad truth is that both campaigns know that people are unlikely to look up their public legislature records, which make it clear exactly what this pair of cretins have been working on, and it certainly is not improving our roads nor public safety. Please look for yourselves:Marshall’s Legislation
Thomas Frank writes it so eloquently in his book “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” when he writes:
American conservatism depends for its continued dominance and even for its very existence on people never making certain mental connections about the world, connections that until recently were treated as obvious or self-evident everywhere on the planet. For example, the connection between mass culture, most of which conservatives hate, and lassez-faire capitolism, which they adore without reservation. Or between the small towns they profess to love and the market forces that are slowly grinding those small towns back into the red-state dust — which forces they praise in the most exalted terms.
Pages later, from the same source:
Kansas is ready to lead us singing into the apocalypse. It invites us all to join in, to lay doen our lives so that others might cash out at the top; to renouce forever our middle-American prosperity in pursuit of a crimson fantasy of middle-American righteousness.
On the surface it appears that this all has nothing to do with the local battle between Marshall/Black/Craddock (with their neo-conservative supporters) and Roemmelt/Poisson (with most rational and aware voters); but it is exactly that same sort of self-righteous blindness that brought neo-cons to power in Kansas that we are seeing here in Virginia. My hope is that the difference is that Virginia, with it’s proximity to other, more advanced public forums (like West Virginia, Maryland, and Washington DC) will be reminded of those connections that the rest of the world holds as self-evident: that Black and Marshall get elected every two years based on their anti-abortion stands, and that every term in office they fleece middle-class Virginians of more and more of those same things we all love (slow, managed growth; local small businesses; communities that care about their members).
There is an interesting new story about Sony’s new DRM online, and it illustrates another of the many deceptions the big media companies use to skew perception. Just like piracy had nothing to do with the RIAA’s fear of digital audio tape (they were really afraid musicians would be able to create their own masters without the studios), Sony’s new DRM on their music compact disks has nothing to do with piracy either; it appears to have more to do with competition from Apple.
Sony/Columbia – this is disgusting. Get over it, you made the wrong call in the portable digital music market. Take your lumps and focus on what you do well, screens and video cameras. The age of the Walkman(tm) has been replaced with the age of the iPod(tm). Many of us have never been in the market for either device, but we collect compact disks from our favorite music artists; but only those disks without your crappy DRM inhibitions (I do play my cds on my Mac frequently, using iTunes).
Update: the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has an excellent web page on how to determine if your computer is impacted by the Sony XCP rootkit exploit, read more here (includes list of infected CDs).
Campaign financing scandal alert! The Bob McDonnell campaign has been getting huge donations from the RLSC. The RLSC is not revealing who, in turn, it’s own doners are until well after the Virginia Election is over. This violates the intent, if not the letter of Virginia’s laws requiring full and solid disclosures of all contributions over $100. So what is Bob McDonnell hiding?Waldo Jaquith has an excellent and detailed investigation reported here. As of today, candidate McDonnell has reported nothing about who these mystery contributers are, and his campaign site is full of lies about candidate Creigh Deeds, who has an excellent record working to strengthen our laws agaist offenders of all types. Mr Deeds’s own campaign site has an appeal to the McDonnell campaign to abide by the intent of Virginia’s laws and show us where the money is coming from here. Who’s contributions are so tainted that McDonnell does not want us to know who is contributing until after the election?
More importantly, how important is it to Virginian voters that their next Attorney General actually abide by the laws he or she is supposed to enforce? I guess we’ll find out November 8th.
In case anyone still had doubts that the recent Kilgore advertizing blitz was nothing but a pack of lies, factcheck.org has a detailed exposure of the facts here. Basically it is nothing but a smear campaign. Tim Kaine would use the death penalty to enforce the law, even though he has misgivings about it. The truth about the Rosenbluth case was exposed by factcheck.org as well:
“In fact, Kaine didn’t volunteer to represent the killer; an attorney in Kaine’s law firm was routinely appointed by the court to handle the appeal. Kaine says he had almost no personal involvement in the case.”
Sadly, with a few weeks still remaning until the November 8th election, Virginia voters are likely to get bombarded with a few more rounds of smear tactics and deception before this is all over with. Gotta go retch now.
About two weeks ago a brochure arrived in my mailbox from a political candidate. This brochure made me very mad because of the very misleading statements sprinkled all over it. I have been speechless because I was so angry I wanted to settle down before posting about it, and someone far more eloquent than myself beat me to the punch in this past weekend’s Washington Post. Thank you William E. Henry of Bristow, whomever you are, for an excellent and eloquent statement (2nd letter: “Taking Credit Not Due”) of the feelings I share about the deceptions and hypocrisy of Delegate Robert G. Marshall.
Taking Credit Not Due
The epitome of hypocrisy arrived in my mailbox Tuesday! It was a four-color brochure extolling the virtues of Del. Robert G. Marshall (R-Prince William) in meeting the transportation needs in our area.
Surely this can’t be the same Mr. Marshall who voted no on the recent bipartisan tax increase enacted by the General Assembly to keep Virginia solvent and its highly valued triple-A bond rating. Surely this can’t be the Del. Marshall who has offered little or no leadership in meeting the fiscal needs of the state. Surely this must be the same Mr. Marshall whose main mission in Richmond has been to attempt to write Catholic dogma concerning abortion into state law. That, of course, would mandate that every woman of childbearing age in Virginia would have to follow the dictates of the Vatican concerning her own body!
His brochure is cleverly presented. It features four-color photographs of transportation work in action, as if he had anything to do with any of it. The accompanying letter features such phrases as “we directed” and “we designated” such and such. What he is saying, however, is the General Assembly enacted the enabling road legislation. The record clearly shows that Del. Marshall voted no on the GOP-Democrat-sponsored tax increase and appropriations measure that provides the money to make such road work possible!
It is obvious that his generally extremist political stance is causing him a bit of trouble in running for reelection. He even cites Gov. Mark R. Warner (D) and Sen. Charles J. Colgan (D-Prince William) in his mailing. He even mentions Del. Harry J. Parrish (R-Manassas), who was the only member of the Prince William delegation to vote for the tax increase and appropriations bill. (Parrish quickly became the target of ultra-conservative Republicans to defeat in the upcoming election.) The whole Del. Marshal mailing is a cleverly conceived campaign piece that flies in the face of reality, if not ethics.
Nice try, Mr. Marshall. But I suspect Prince William voters are too smart and sophisticated to be taken in by such not-so-subtle trickery.
Beautifully said, Mr. Henry! I hope to be as well spoken (or written) someday. I’d like to add a more detailed list of my specific objections to Delegate Marshalls deceptive letter and brochure. Let’s start with the letter, in which Delegate Marshall attempts to discredit his challenger, Bruce Roemmelt (though neither Delegate Marshall, nor Mr. Henry actually mentions the name of the challenger in this race for the Delegate seat in the legislature):
So far he has raised $116,000, much of it from out of state.
According to VPAP only $6,016 of the $107,526 recorded so far is from out of state. My little calculator says that is a smidge under 5.6% of the challenger’s contributions. How does that constitute “much of” unless Delegate Marshall is deliberately and unethically attempting to mislead us about his opponent?
Delegate Marshall’s brochure goes on to cite many road projects that he did not have anything to do with, aside from being a member of the legislature when the project was underway! Sorry Delegate Marshall, but as Mr. Henry stated in his letter to the editor, this Prince William County (and district 13) voter is too smart to be taken in by your deceptive and misleading brochure. A quick comparison of what you will do compared to what Mr. Roemmelt will do is online at ReduceTraffic.org now, and the choice is pretty clear. It is time for change.
Wow – yesterday brought the amazing news that transparent aluminum, as depicted in Star Trek IV (aka: Save the Whales) is close to reality, sort of (they are actually talking about super-strong, transparent ceramics).Topping that, today brings us the news that flexible electronic paper displays, like those described in Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” is closer to reality. That’s really cool!
Is this Sci-Fi becomes Sci-Fact week or something?
