Clips

Friday's clips

I'm a couple days behind the curve on the Daily Kos poll of Republicans, but it's still worth a look. My favorite factoid is the 33 percent support for secession in the South, which brings back memories of the Jesusland map and the site with the NSFW name of 2004.

As always I'm a sucker for the Top Ten list, which New York magazine provides.

It's not known whether Kos polled Ted Nugent, but they could have:

I think that Barack Hussein Obama should be put in jail. It is clear that Barack Hussein Obama is a communist. Mao Tse Tung lives and his name is Barack Hussein Obama. This country should be ashamed. I wanna throw up.

The whole thing is full of such wangoriffic rhetoric.

Maybe the Motor City Madman (now relocated to Texas, "where I can keep a machine gun in the front seat of my vehicle") can go helicoptor moose hunting with Sarah Palin. And at the NYT, Timothy Egan draws the common thread between Palin and John Edwards:

Palin and Edwards are two of an American archetype, opportunists playing to outrage while taking care of themselves. They are both attractive, with that lucky combination of genes that rarely lands on more than one member of an extended family. They can both hold an audience without saying anything of substance, or even making sense.

So who gets the Edwards TV movie: Lifetime or Oxygen?

The Iowa Republican has a piece on Boswell retirement speculation (which would be fine by me) and notes some phone polling re: a couple possible replacement Dems. Christie Vilsack would be an improvement; Geri Huser not so much.

And in a polarized America, even Super Bowl preferences break out on party lines: "Democrats prefer the Saints by a 36-21 margin while Republicans say they want the Colts to be victorious by a closer 26-25 spread. Independents lean toward the Saints as well, 33-20."

February Johnson County Dems

February Johnson County Dems

The folks elected on Caucus Saturday take office, amidst some introducing around the room. No electeds in the house tonight (except one stray township trustee).

The Guv will be in town next week:

Event: Coffee and Conversation with Iowa Governor Chet Culver
What: Informational Meeting
Start Time: Friday, February 12 at 8:00am
End Time: Friday, February 12 at 9:15am
Where: Hamburg Inn

While the intros go on, I see Roxanne Conlin at #2 on the Daily Kos rec list with "Chuck Grassley: I’m for Fewer Jobs and More Corporate Profits". She also has about a 100 to 1 fundraising edge over primary rival Bob Krause, and about 1000 to 1 over Tom Fiegen.

One of our newcomers: former city council candidate Dan Tallon.

Ed Flaherty gets up on behalf of Krause, the staffer gets up on behalf of the Guv. And that's about all, I'll be home in time for Perry the Platypus.

Iowa Governor Update

Governor Developments

Larry Sabato takes a doom and gloom look at governors this morning and rates Iowa as Leans Republican. His list of leading candidates includes Rants, but does not include Rod Roberts.

Nor, for that matter, does it list Jonathan Narcisse, who's filed campaign finance papers to run as an independent. That, of course, is not the same as filing nomination papers, which independents don't do till July and August. The party candidates' papers are due next month. So Narcisse has the luxury of assessing the lay of the land before making the final decision.

So does Bob Vander Plaats... who declined to take the Linn County GOP's "loyalty oath" to back the Republican nominee, but says he has "given no thought" to a third party bid. (Again, that deadline is post-primary, and Iowa has no "sore loser" law preventing a primary candidate from running independent in the general.)

What Vander Plaats has done is get 2008 caucus winner Mike Huckabee to come in for him on Feb. 24. There's still the prospect of this primary turning into a presidential proxy war. Will we see the Mitt make a visit for Branstad? And would that help or hurt?

BVP also has that all-important Chuck Norris endorsement, and this piece from "Paliban Daily" has been making the national rounds.

Chet, for his part, spent the first part of the week mending his labor fences, backing project-labor agreements (I'm not hearing much about open scope or Fair Share this session...) "Think Hancher II in Iowa City," writes O. Kay. Wherever that will be...

Illinois Squeakers

Wacky Illinois Results

The Illinois governor's race looks like it's headed to a recount in BOTH parties.

The Democratic side is a two way race. Semi-incumbent Pat Quinn, the guy who took over from the infamous Rod Blagojevich, has a tiny lead over challenger Dan Hynes.

But where things are really interesting is on the Republican side. As I write here are the numbers:

Governor - GOP Primary
Illinois - 11118 of 11215 Precincts Reporting - 99%

Brady , Bill 154,646 (20.3%)
Dillard , Kirk 154,143 (20.2%)
McKenna , Andy 146,614 (19.3%)
Ryan , Jim 129,686 (17.0%)
Andrzejewski , Adam 109,954 (14.4)%
Proft , Dan 58,861 (8%)
Schillerstrom , Bob 7,343 (1%)

Three guys within one percent, and the top FIVE (!) all within six percent.

More thoughts on this at the Register.

Selective Enforcement in Iowa City

Selective Law Enforcement in Downtown Iowa City

The Iowa City council and cops are at it again. Just a week after targeting Mike Porter for fire safety when the stairway is already in the process of being fixed, they haul Leah Cohen's license in front of the council for failing a sting operation that involved two 20 year old adults sneaking past the BoJames bouncer.



What do these two have in common? Their leadership in the No on 21 campaign in the fall of 2007. The council was counting on Rick Dobyns and the do-gooders to do the dirty work for them and pass the 21 only ordinance, but Porter and Cohen bankrolled the Student Health Initiative Taskforce (I still love that name) that actually got the students out to vote in a city election. And the two have been on the cop's S.H.I.T. list ever since.

You can insert my standard rant here. Short version: when you're 18 you're an adult. I'm not arguing for a form of civic disobedience here. The law is the law, even if it's a really, really bad law, and there's too much dark history of standing in the schoolhouse door for me to argue for that level of defiance. (However, if I were on the council, I'd have no problem funding the enforcement of that really, really bad law at zero.)

But the police have some choices here. If a 19 year old is peeing in the alley with a beer in his hand, then the principle of sheer stupidity argues he should get busted.

On the other hand, deliberately sending a pair of 20 year old adults into a specific bar, known to be owned by a political opponent of the police agenda, with marching orders to sneak around the bouncer? That's deliberate and needs to stop. Meanwhile, council, the legislature's in session, and I'm not seeing any of you up in Des Moines arguing for realistic alcohol and drug laws.

Groundhog Droppings

Groundhog Droppings

I don't see my shadow this morning, which can only be good news for Smallest Farm 2010. (I assume my own personal groundhog, gopher, or whatever it is is still hibernating.)

What's up today:

Over at the Register I look at how Republicans are (rather, aren't) choosing their battles.

A couple revealing lines in Craig Robinson's Iowa Republican piece on the constitutional convention as a way to dump marriage equality:
"Unfortunately, time and patience is not on our side, and English and (the Iowa Family Policy Center) know this." Correct. Because those overall numbers opposing marriage equality are driven by heavy opposition from pre-baby boom seniors. Below retirement age, people are supportive. To be blunt, opposition to marriage equality is literally dying off.

"When Vander Plaats mentions his executive order, he is greeted by cheers from the conservative activists supporting his campaign. Yet, authorization for this option can’t be found anywhere in the state’s constitution... The fact that two principled conservatives would advocate for such expanded executive powers is troubling." Constitutional strict constructionists clashing with social conservatives; a crack in the teapot.

More proof that the doom and gloomers are getting it wrong: Gallup polls party ID and finds, despite some slips, that Democrats still have a strong lead.



Caveat: Iowa shows a six point drop for Dems--but that still leaves us with a 12 point edge.

Illinois primary day: previews in CQ and Swing State Project.

Despite the iPad it's still Linux Monday

Despite the iPad it's still Linux Monday

No, I haven't bought an iPad yet; still clunking along in Linux.



Trivia: the Lene Lovich classic "New Toy" was written by Thomas (Science!) Dolby.

A new toy, but nothing too demanding: Jason McC. Smith writes at Seattlepi (remember last year when the print Post-Intelligencer died?) thinks the iPad is just enough computer for a lot of folks:

Nearly everything we geeks love and adore about a general-purpose computer is a pain point for the average consumer.

Average consumers don't care about multitasking if it means they get lost in the UI. They don't care about browsable flexible file systems with redundancy, journaling and distributed storage if it means they can't find their data. They not only don't care about these things, they dread them.

Windows and the Mac are, really, just two variants of the same theme: a geek machine. Consumers recognize they don't need a pro-level machine, so they buy something cheap – but it's just a badly hobbled pro machine, not a consumer machine. It's like recognizing you don't need an SUV, but your cheapest option is an SUV body with a 1.2-liter, 4-cylinder engine. Kind of stupid.

I guess average user isn't looking for help compiling a kernel, but here's some anyway.

Steven Vaughn-Nichols (his name keeps popping up) reviews the leading desktop distributions and the winner is... several, depending on your wants and needs. Which is really what it's all about.

Early test versions of the next Ubuntu ("Lucid Lynx") promise a 15 second boot time. Which would be nice; frankly I've been disappointed in the boot time on 9.10 and left my older machines running 9,04.

Dj Walker-Morgan looks at Google Android smart phones and asks: when is it worth saying it's Linux?

The one word brand is a useful tool for consumers; when an average consumer sees the word "Windows", they know that the operating system will run programs written for Windows. When they see "MacOS" they similarly know it will run programs for Mac. When it comes to "Linux", things are different. Most of you reading this will, of course, know that what the general public have running on their desktop systems is, in fact, a combination of a windows manager and various applications, such as OpenOffice, GIMP, Firefox or Thunderbird, with a system kernel and that Linux refers to the kernel of the operating system, a distinction that is lost on consumers. But the new generation of devices lauded as "being Linux" aren't like that.

On the down side, Melee Island (great name) tries to install a program and sees too many confusing choices.