KN@PPSTER

Why Hasn't Universal Commenting/Discussion Caught On?

2012-02-02T11:12:00.000-06:00

It really does seem like the next leap in social networking: Instead of (or in addition to) each site maintaining its own comment or forum setup, you could comment at or on any URL, and have your comments aggregated and threaded with everyone else's, all through the same service.

But no: We've got competing commenting systems (IntenseDebate, Disqus, et. al), in-house systems for WordPress and Blogger and so forth, all fighting for market share from the site operator side instead of the user side, and "universal commenting/discussion" doesn't seem to catch on.

A couple of years ago, I came across a site called Buzzbot. It appears to be defunct now -- not surprising since it was set up as a multi-level-marketing opportunity. It was one of those "operating system in your browser" projects, among other things. The only thing special about it was its "browser within your browser." You could point that browser at any URL, and there would be a sidebar tab for discussion and commenting.

There was also a service call coComment -- also defunct, but from what I can tell it appeared to be a similar idea, implemented as a Firefox extension.

I think the idea is sound. In fact, I think it could be the next Twitter in terms of adoption. If I were rolling it out (and no, I won't -- I've got neither the capital nor the technical ability), it would look something like this:

A web site, a Firefox add-on, a Chrome extension, etc.
Multiple account setup/login options ("connect with Facebook," "log in with Twitter," "use your Google account," "set up an account with us").
When you go to a web page -- any web page -- with the add-on or extension running, or in an iframe or whatever from the service's site, you have a little tab on the side of your browser (for extra credit, let the user decide where the tab appears, maybe make it on of those that pops up when you move your mouse to the lower right of the screen, etc.).
Click on the tab, a comment window opens. Bam, threaded discussion, and it's not dependent on, or controlled by, the site you're commenting on ... or is it?

That last question leaves open the possibility of a "premium" service that site operators can buy, which lets them exercise various sorts of moderation and control over the service as it's used vis a vis their sites. Or maybe not even premium. Maybe there's a default service, but any site creator can create a file along the lines of robots.txt that specifies certain parameters like excluded words, bans, moderation, etc.

Ad revenue seems like the obvious profit center.

What's the fly in the ointment? What am I missing? Too much overhead required to moderate from the commenting provider's side or something?

To me, this seems like exactly the direction I'd take Disqus if I ran that service. Why compete for site owners to implement your service when you could just offer it directly to users?

Tent Living Update

2012-02-01T13:49:00.000-06:00

Image via Wikipedia

I started 2012 with the goal of "camping out" every night for the entire year.

I've already had to modify that goal: Last weekend's trip entailed a family hotel stay, and I doubted the innkeepers would tolerate a tent in their backyard (Tamara rejected the idea of everyone staying at a rental tent camp site; can't say I blame her).

So in January, I went 30 for 31 days.

I'm thinking that I should probably allow myself one day a month for such things, sort of in the spirit of people trying to set world records for pole-sitting or roller-coaster-riding or whatever getting five minutes off per day or hour to use the bathroom and whatnot.

Other than that, nothing of note to report, really; just asides:

I've definitely become acclimated to lower temperatures -- these days, I don't bother zipping up the sleeping bag unless it's below freezing.
The cheap Ozark Trail tent has been a real champ in terms of weather resistance, especially since I sheltered its north face with a tarp lean-to. Any tent will admit a little moisture if there's stuff pressing against its inside walls, and there's some condensation on cold days, but apart from that the thing has been nicely dry, and surprisingly un-drafty.
Consequently, I'm kind of planning to just stick with this tent all year (or until disaster of some kind falls upon it) rather than buy or build something else come spring. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. I must admit that the FieldCandy outfits look pretty cool, but they also appear to start at something like 25 times the cost of what I'm using now.
Based on past summer sleepouts, though, I think I'll try to figure out a reasonable way to mount a fan in front of one of the mesh windows once the temperature creeps up above 80 or so.

Adventures in Browser Organization: Symbaloo

2012-02-01T10:52:00.000-06:00

Since my forcible repatriation from Chrome to Firefox (I've tried everything, including multiple nukings/reinstallations, and Chrome just won't run correctly any more), I've been looking for a replacement for NewsSquares, the one Chrome extension which had most revolutionized my daily browsing routine.

I haven't found anything quite as useful yet, but this LifeHacker article on useful start pages by Whitson Gordon turned me on to Symbaloo.

No, Symbaloo doesn't do everything that NewsSquares does (integrate with Google Reader, let me preview articles and keep track of read/unread stuff, etc.). Not even close. But it does at least let me organize my "daily routine" URLs into pretty clickable squares that open in new tabs. It also has some nice built-in news tracking features. Both of those things are big time-savers in my 100+ site daily grind.

Symbaloo is also web-based and browser-independent, so I don't lose it if I switch to Safari, Camino, Opera, or even eventually back to Chrome. That's obviously a major plus.

Here's hoping that Symbaloo steps up its game and adds NewsSquares-like features, or that Rocket-in-Bottle or some eager beaver clones NewsSquares as a Firefox add-on, or better yet a web-based, browser-independent hangamajigger.

Well

2012-01-31T21:21:00.001-06:00

That's a deep subject, isn't it?

Yes, I blew the Florida primary prediction, big-time -- looks like by about 23 points or so. Hey, it happens.

Mitt Romney needed to win by 10 points or more to really get back in this race. It looks like he won by 14.

BUT! Lookit:

I grabbed that graphic from Fox News, on the supposition that a generic state map with colored counties reflecting public information probably is probably fair game for fair use. Red is for Romney, green is for Newt Gingrich.

Yes, Romney won the state fair and square. But if you take a gander at the geography there, it doesn't look very good for Romney in future GOP primaries or for the GOP itself in the general election.

In the panhandle, where the GOP primary electorate looks a lot more like most of Republican America and especially southern Republican America, Gingrich whipped Romney's ass. If he has the money/backing to stick with this, Gingrich probably has North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Lousiana, Kentucky, Tennessee and Arkansas in pocket. And, of course, his home state of Georgia.

In southern Florida, where the GOP primary electorate is more moderate, Romney proved that he can beat candidates perceived as more conservative. But in November even Romney, if he's the nominee, will be the putative conservative. And the GOP is unlikely to win the White House if it can't win Florida.

This is Romney's fourth time out in this cycle. He's 2 for 4, and has yet to break 50% anywhere. The majority of Republican primary voters keep saying "not Mitt." By Super Tuesday, I predict that that "not Mitt" vote will have largely coalesced to "yes Newt."

Contra Epstein

2012-01-31T10:47:00.000-06:00

Reid J. Epstein @Politico:

Gingrich needs a close race more than Romney needs a blowout victory.

I disagree. Anything but a blowout for Romney today is effectively the end of his campaign.

If Gingrich wins Florida, "prohibitive frontrunner" and biggest spender Mitt Romney will be 1 for 4, and that one an underwhelming win in the smallest contest thus far.

If Romney wins but it's close, he continues to be what he's been since Iowa -- "the walking dead." He may hold on until Super Tuesday before going down, but down he shall go.

He needs to win by at least 10 points to really get back in the race.

With the polls now open, I'm still calling Florida for Gingrich.

I Feel Jonathan Franzen's Pain ...

2012-01-30T18:50:00.001-06:00

Image via Wikipedia

... but only a little. One of America's most highly-regarded novelists (by the kind of people who fancy themselves qualified to highly, or not highly, regard novelists), author of The Twenty-Seventh City, thinks e-books rob literature of a needed sense of permanence.

Like most of those critiquing Franzen's viewpoint (Lance Ulanoff at Mashable, for example), I'll open with the disclaimer that I am a (dead tree type) book lover. I've been a dedicated reader for 40 of my 45 years, and have sometimes found myself in competition with my library for living space. Some volumes bring back associated memories every time I pick them up: "I accidentally left my last copy of this (The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman) on the airplane when I flew back from my speech to the New York Junto against the Iraq war in 2003;" "I was reading this one (Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand) the day my daughter was born in 1990;" etc. There's just something about a physical book.

But look at what e-readers are doing! Like other technological advancements (Brad has them pretty well-covered here), they're making a lot of people's lives a lot richer.

For the cost of 10-15 paperbacks (and the cost is falling), you can get a device that instantly puts thousands of classics in front of you "free" (courtesy of The Gutenberg Project, et. al) and lets you get the newer stuff with a click. The instant I bought my e-reader, my library got about 10,000 times larger, maybe more, without taking up any more space.

Ten years from now, I expect that every school kid will have an e-reader device of some sort, connected to a library much, much, much larger than any room in the government schools I went to as a child (no, I'm not putting those libraries down -- they, and their keepers, influenced me a lot; but still ...).

On this last weekend's trip, I took about 70 books with me (I actually read from four or five of them), and they didn't fill up the back seat of the mini-van. They all fit in the glove compartment, on my Cruz Reader.

I hope that dead-tree and electronic formats achieve some kind of coexistence ... but if we can only have one of the two, the latter just makes more sense. It makes more art and more knowledge available to more people, less expensively.

More at memeorandum

80 proof

2012-01-30T17:05:00.000-06:00

I've never managed to get a good picture of the old Bourbon, Missouri water tower. So, for this post, I'm using Daniel Woodrum's photo from takemytrip.com.

When I was a kid and we would drive past on I-44 (still fairly new at the time!), I fancied that the tower was actually full of bourbon whiskey. Later, I outsmarted myself. This being the middle of Missouri wine country, it was obvious to me that the reference went back to French settler times and alluded to the Bourbon dynasty.

The French presence extended west and south from St. Louis at least as far as the Springfield, Missouri area, where there's still a small town called Bois d'Arc ("Bo-Dark" in the Missouri dialect; there's also a Versailles, Missouri, pronounced "Vur-Sayles").

Anyhoo, I was wrong both ways. The tower wasn't full of bourbon whiskey, but that's what the reference was, in fact, to. The town of Bourbon sprang up around Irish work camps building a railroad through the area. The railroad workers liked their whiskey, and local storekeeper Richard Turner was eager to please, buying the newly popular Kentucky variant in quantity. His store became known as "the bourbon store," and the town that sprang up nearby just rolled with that name.

On this last weekend's trip down to Marshfield/Springfield, we took a little time to get off the freeway and drive a few portions of old Route 66. I do that as often as possible, just to show the kids that there's always some cool history and beautiful country to see if you're willing to spare the time.

The Bourbon tower is visible from I-44, of course. So why am I writing about it? Well, I'm having an Old Crow and RC to celebrate my 80th KN@PPSTER post this month -- one more than I managed in all of 2005. So it just seemed apropos (see how I worked some French lingo in there?).

The Sticking Point

2012-01-30T00:35:00.003-06:00

Image via Wikipedia

Eric Dondero over at Libertarian [sic] Republican thinks I'm crazy for still predicting a Newt Gingrich win in tomorrow's Florida primary.

Maybe he's right. I do have a bad habit of over-estimating the aggregate intelligence of the Republican Party. I'm betting that Republican primary voters have enough gray matter between them to have figured out that Gingrich is the only candidate for their nomination who stands a chance in hell of both getting that nomination and beating Barack Obama in November.

A small chance, true, but a chance nonetheless. And he's the only one who even might manage both.

Ron Paul could conceivably beat Obama, but he can't sell the GOP on foreign policy sanity and get the nomination.

Mitt Romney or even Rick Santorum (just barely plausibly) could get the nomination, but neither one has a chance in hell of hitting 270 electoral votes for the win. In fact, either one would be over-performing at 100 electoral votes.

So the question is: Are the Republicans interested, or are they not interested, in at least a slim possibility of taking the White House for the 2013-2017 presidential term? If yes, Gingrich is the nominee. If no, he isn't. It's really just that simple.

I'm sticking with my earlier prediction: Gingrich by 9 points, plus or minus 2, tomorrow, for the simple reason that any GOP primary electorate dumb enough to return a different result is arguably also too damn dumb to work those complicated knobs on their doors and get out of their houses to the polling places to vote any other way.

But I could be wrong. Perhaps the Democratic Party has an "Open Those Complicated Door Thingies for Romney Voters and Drive Them to the Polls" effort set up.

And just to be clear here, no, I'm not a Gingrich fan. I don't really care one way or another whom the Republicans nominate, or who wins in November, except from the "horse race" angle. There's just no real betting to be done on Obama versus Romney or Santorum. That would be like an exhibition football game between the New England Patriots and your local Mighty Mite champions. Obama versus Gingrich would at least be more akin to the Patriots versus the Kansas City Chiefs' second string or something.

Reaching Across History

2012-01-29T19:33:00.000-06:00

One of last week's "fun political stories" was about the grandson of US President John Tyler calling Newt Gingrich a jerk.

Quite a spread of time there -- Tyler was born in 1790, fathered children late as did his son, etc. One blog post on the story (which I can't find now) remarks on Oliver Wendell Holmes having shaken the hands of both John Quincy Adams and John F. Kennedy -- the 18th century connecting to the 20th.

Nothing as dramatic for me, but I got to connect the 19th and 21st centuries this weekend when I went to visit my parents.

As KN@PPSTER readers will recall me mentioning, I often use a cane to walk these days. I haven't been that happy with the one I have (a thrift store pickup), and took the opportunity to look at replacements everywhere we stopped (found a nice one I may buy, as a matter of fact).

Anyway, my dad had an old cane that turned out to be precisely the right height. It's still in great shape, too.

I never knew its owner, as he died two or three years before I was born. His name was Simon Peter Decker and he was born in 1885 (if I recall correctly) in Knoxville, Tennessee.

I did know his wife, Minnie Elsie Crabtree Decker, who was born (once again, IIRC) in 1889, also in Knoxville. She died when I was in my early teens and she was in her early 90s.

Simon and Minnie Decker were the parents of my father's mother, Eva Knapp.

Coincidentally, on the way down to see my parents, I showed the kids the place where Minnie Decker's house once stood. There's a pavilion there now, on the grounds of the church next door. One of my dad's brothers is the pastor of that church, which I'm pretty sure great-grandma Decker attended most of her life. If I have my family history right, it was once a Methodist church, but a traveling revival preacher converted its congregation (including my grandmother and great-grandmother) to Pentecostalism in the early 20th century.

So anyway, the cane is probably 50 years old or more, and its owner, were he still alive, would be coming up on 127. I expect I'll keep set it aside and only use it as a walking aid on special occasions.

A Funded Journalism Idea

2012-01-28T10:14:00.000-06:00

I'm considering doing some investigative reporting.

I can't discuss the topic publicly (that has to do with the "investigative" part). That pretty much means that I can't seek funding for the project via something like spot.us or kickstarter.com. The topic isn't strictly political, but I suspect many of my political friends would find it interesting. It's certainly controversial.

If I do pursue this, I may self-fund. Or I may seek a sponsor. My guess at bare-bones expenses is about $200. My guess at research (including at least 24 hours of time on the ground completely "inside" the target entity) is about 50 hours.

If I do hook up with a sponsor, the commitment on my part will be:

To use the money in the ways I explain in advance (naturally I'll identify the subject of the reporting and how I plan to approach that subject);
To produce a report of my experiences and conclusions for the sponsor's eyes;
To accept the sponsor's decision on whether to turn that report into a feature article, or to continue the research with additional funding and an eye toward a longer work.

I know I'm not giving potential sponsors a lot to go on here, but if what I have said is interesting enough that you want to know more, drop me a line via the contact form.

Another Mormon Practice, Briefly Explained

2012-01-28T07:21:00.003-06:00

Image via Wikipedia

Gawker puts the worst possible face on it: "Yes, the Romneys Converted Mitt's Dead Atheist Father-in-Law to Mormonism." But as religious practices go, it's actually pretty cool. Here's the skinny:

Like many (not all, but many) churches, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints claims to be the One Truth Faith. That is, through apostolic succession (in LDS's case, through a "restoration" of same after the Catholics and Protestants broke it), the church claims to act as God's authority on Earth.

That entails certain responsibilities. In order to get into heaven, certain things have to have happened. For example, you need to have been baptized. And not just dunked in any random body of water by any random person, but baptized by someone duly and properly exercising the aforementioned authority.

Where most churches making such claims fall down is on the issue of "what happens to the guy who never heard the truth?" Or, in LDS's case, even someone who heard it but didn't "get" it in time.

In some sects, well, that guy just gets a one-way ticket to Ye Aulde Lake of Fire.

In Mormonism, there's a sort of post-mortality "holding pen" for such people, where they have a chance to accept the true gospel and get into heaven. But they do still have to be baptized and so forth.

The LDS church spends quite a bit of time and money on conducting baptisms by proxy -- "baptism for the dead." One reason Mormons are so well known in the area of genealogy is that they're constantly working to identify people for these proxy baptisms, so that as many people as possible can get into heaven.

What could be more humane or pious than that? Mormons believe you have to be a Mormon to get into heaven. They also know that even their extensive missionary efforts aren't going to reach everyone. But you get a second chance after death, and they make an effort to help you out even beyond the grave.

And yes, there's a biblical hook to hand the practice on: 1st Corinthians 15:29. Baptism for the dead does appear to have been a Christian practice for 300 years or so before the emerging Catholic order suppressed it.

The Gawker headline isn't, strictly speaking, correct. If Edward Davies converted to Mormonism posthumously, he did it himself. All his daughter and son-in-law's family did was make sure that if he did so, he was equipped with the requisite certifications and such to make that conversion all proper and legal in God's eyes.

There are a lot of reasons not to support Mitt Romney for President. Depending on your religious beliefs, his Mormonism may even be one of them. But this baptism stuff is surely a minor thing within that other thing, and not nearly as creepy as Gawker makes it sound.

Winner, Winner, Chicken Din ... er, Gift Certificate!

2012-01-28T00:04:00.001-06:00

Thanks to everyone who retweeted the #followfriday message! It's the stroke of midnight right now, and I'm at random.org to pick a winner.

Drumroll, please ... and the winner of the Powell Books gift certificate is intoxicologist! I'll DM to confirm her email address and get that gift certificate out ASAP. In the meantime, check out her great cocktail blog.

UPDATE! A twist ... intoxicologists says thanks for the prize, but give it to someone else! Back to random.org, and lessee ... our new winner is Jake Porter! Jake's an Iowa Libertarian who's done more in his 20-some years than most of us will do in our lives, from publishing newspapers to running political campaigns. Hopefully he has some time to read as well. I'll get that gift certificate on the way ASAP.

Yes, a Recipe

2012-01-27T17:14:00.001-06:00

I just got roped in by one of those "chain letter" things -- send the person at the top of the list a recipe, any recipe, then hit up a bunch of your friends to do the same thing. Since I just inflicted the request on 20 people, I figure I should share the recipe with more than just one.

As most KN@PPSTER readers probably know, I'm a fan of great barbecue. By definition, great barbecue is of the variety produced between Memphis, Tennessee (e.g. Corky's) to the east, Hot Springs, Arkansas (e.g. McLard's) to the west, and Springfield, Missouri (e.g. Crosstown) to the north.

Anyway, for when I can't go out for barbecue, and when the weather's not conducive to eight hours or so of tending my brick in-ground pit outdoors, I've discovered a crockpot/slow cooker recipe that produces quite good smoky pulled pork for sammiches. I've messed with it through trial and error for some time, modifying ideas I found on the Internet, and here's the final recipe:

INGREDIENTS

A rolled/tied pork loin roast
1 cup apple juice
1/2 cup water
1 cup brown sugar
1 cap full of hickory-flavored "liquid smoke"
Your favorite barbecue sauce

Place the roast in your crockpot or slow cooker. Pour the apple juice and water over it, so that the surface of the pork is wet. Dump the brown sugar on top of the roast and spread/pack it over the surface of the roast with a spatula or your (clean!) hands. Pour the liquid smoke into the liquid in the bottom of the pot (NOT directly on the roast).

Cook the roast on "high" for one hour to "shock" it. Then turn the cooker to "low" and cook for 5-7 hours (depending on the size of the roast; if bigger, cook longer). The roast is done when it tries to come apart when lifted with a fork.

Remove the roast from the pot, put it on a plate or in a large bowl, cut the strings, and hand-pull the pork to small pieces. You'll also want to get any remaining small pieces that fell off during cooking out of the pot with a slotted spoon.

Season with your favorite sauce and serve on sandwiches. Then write to tell me how great it was.

Twitter: What's It Good For?

2012-01-27T02:46:00.000-06:00

Since I'm on the subject of Twitter anyway, might as well riff on it a little. And I see that Carl Bussjaeger poses the question (in non-question form):

@CarlBussjaeger
Carl BussjaegerOK, I've tried Twitter. Still don't see point. Boring, limited. Sticking to my blog & website:
http://t.co/O3abV6hP
http://t.co/iQNiDf8P 12 days ago via web · powered by @socialditto

The short answer to the title question is "it depends."

First, a bit of heresy: Twitter is good for attracting an audience to content. That's not what it was supposed to be about, and quite a few people complain about it, but hey ... it does work. A link to every post here at KN@PPSTER gets tweeted to my nearly 2,000 "followers," and any given post will get a few visits from that tweet, and perhaps from "retweets." Over at RRND, same thing -- if my analytics are correct, our Twitter feed brings about 100 visitors a day to the site.

As an information consumer, I find Twitter extremely useful, too. I see content every day that I'd never have known about if someone hadn't tweeted a link.

Using Twitter that way does have its down sides, of course. It limits the utility of Twitter for other things.

Things like conducting a continuous, short-burst, informal conversation with a group of friends. Since I follow those who follow me, I'm following close to 2k people as well, which means that unless (or even if) I do nothing all day but watch Twitter, I'm probably only going to catch the high points.

And things like using Twitter in an office setting. A few years back, Tamara worked in a (very computerized) office where it was important to know where everyone was at all times (and where any given person might be as far afield as, say, Nepal). I suggested (the suggestion was not adopted) that the office personnel set up Twitter accounts linked to their work emails, keep their statuses updated on said accounts, and follow each other. That way, when X needed to know where Y was, it would be as easy as looking at Y's latest tweet ("gone to lunch, be back about 1;" "back from lunch, at my desk;" "gone home for the day;" etc.). And as a bonus, since most people in the office carried cell phones, they could update even while out of the office ("stranded in Nepal; someone get a sherpa out here, stat").

As the political establishment worldwide is learning (and responding to), Twitter's also a good way to coordinate protests and other actions, or even just to get a large conversation going on a topic of shared interest. Just set up a hashtag, and everyone who wants to be involved keeps an eye on it (of course, those who want to surveil you can too, which is why some new and different tools are coming into use).

You can set up multiple Twitter accounts to do different things, and there are apps that handle those multiple accounts for you. And there are other tools that can do some of the same things, perhaps better for your purposes.

But, overall, Twitter can be useful for any purpose that requires (or just benefits from) the ability to quickly and easily communicate with multiple people in short text message format across multiple device types (desktop computer, cell phone, Blackberry, what have you).

Prize Drawing!

2012-01-26T23:30:00.001-06:00

It's been awhile since I've given away a prize. Heck, I don't know if I've ever done a prize drawing here at KN@PPSTER specifically. But I've got a bee in my bonnet to increase my number of Twitter friends (okay, technically "followers," but I prefer "friends"). I'm just shy of 2,000 "followers," and want to get past that bump. I also want to increase Rational Review News Digest's "followers" (pushing toward 4,000 there).

So, anyway, I'm giving away a $10 gift certificate at Powell's Books. Here's how to win:

Between Midnight US Central Time Friday morning and Midnight US Central Time Friday evening (that is, any time Friday, January 27th, 2012);
Tweet "#followfriday @thomaslknapp @rationalreview" or "#ff @thomaslknapp @rationalreview" -- either one will do, and you can throw in additional people to follow if you like.

That's all you have to do. Since my Twitter handles are included in the message, I'll see it (probably in my Hootsuite dashboard, 'cause I'm cool like that). To award the prize, I will:

Count the number of people who tweeted the message;
Go to random.org and generate a random number between 1 and that number of people;
Count down from the top (last, chronologically) of the list of people who tweeted it to that random number; and
Announce the winner, and send a direct message to the winner to get his or her email address so I can send the gift certificate.

I'll try to do that early Saturday morning, but in case my Internet is down or whatever, let's say it might be as late as Monday just to cover all bases.

I'll also try to remember to #followfriday everyone who participates this Friday, next Friday, myself. So even if you don't win the gift certificate, you may still get something out of it. So, half an hour until go-time ...

Is Rick Santorum Serious About Advancing the Social Conservative Agenda?

2012-01-26T15:11:00.000-06:00

Image via Wikipedia

On the evidence, I have to conclude "no."

That evidence is that, as of a few hours before the final pre-Florida-primary debate, he has failed to do what Rick Perry did last week in South Carolina -- end his campaign and endorse Newt Gingrich.

The math isn't that complicated:

Santorum isn't going to be the GOP nominee, and if his IQ is larger than his shoe size he knows he's not going to be the nominee.
After Gingrich wins Florida, he'll run the table. He won't need Santorum's endorsement or support, and he won't owe Santorum's social conservative supporters anything at all.
However, as of today, it is just barely, possibly plausible -- if we stretch things quite a bit -- that Santorum's support could make, or his non-support break, Gingrich's Florida prospects, and that Newt as POTUS would look benevolently upon, and seek to repay the support of, Santorum's social conservative supporters if Santorum delivered said supporters into Gingrich's column. Offer good today only, of course.

So, is Santorum in this thing to advance his supposed agenda, or is his campaign just a personal ego altar on which he'll happily sacrifice that agenda in return for a few more days of adoring rope lines and increased face time on the idiot tube?

I guess we'll find out one way or another within about four hours.

A Couple of Missing, But Pertinent, Factoids

2012-01-26T12:06:00.000-06:00

Sez R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. in The American Spectator: Newt Gingrich is "Our [the GOP's] Bill Clinton." Followed by a recitation of Gingrich's character flaws.

Two things that Tyrrell leaves out:

Bill Clinton was elected POTUS.
Bill Clinton was elected POTUS. Twice.

Just sayin' ...

"Dead heat in Florida ahead of debate"

2012-01-26T00:56:00.000-06:00

Image via Wikipedia

That's not the headline you want to see if you're Mitt Romney and guy you're within the margin of error of and about to debate is Newt Gingrich.

A lot of people, especially pundits, have been giving themselves whiplash from watching the polls jump around this campaign season.

Rest that neck. Put on a cervical collar and stick with me here. I predicted Newt would be the nominee right after Iowa. I predicted his performance, and Romney's, in South Carolina to within 2 points each. And I'm sticking by my Florida prediction:

Gingrich: 42%
Romney: 33%
Santorum: 13%
Paul 12%

And frankly I think I may be over-predicting Santorum at Gingrich's expense, and under-estimating Paul a bit.

Here's why Gingrich is going to pull off a clear win in Florida:

The debate: When Romney comes under attack, he falls to pieces. He stutters, he stammers, he looks evasive, he comes off as distinctly un-"presidential." When Gingrich comes under attack, he goes on the offensive and doesn't ease up until the floor is soaked in his opponents' blood. Romney will take a 5-10% hit from tomorrow's debate. Gingrich will get a 5-10% bump.
Another Adelson soft money check is fueling a $6 million Newt SuperPAC media offensive between now and the primary. That's not as much money as Mitt's spending, but it's enough.
Romney is not as belligerently pro-Israel as Gingrich (Florida has the largest Jewish community of any southern state, and it is politically organized).
Romney is not as belligerently anti-Castro as Gingrich (Florida has the largest Cuban exile community of any state, and it is politically organized).
Florida has a large population of immigrants and first-generation Americans. Gingrich has aggressively positioned himself as the least insanely anti-freedom Republican candidate on immigration policy.
The top two religious demographics in Florida are Roman Catholics (Gingrich and Santorum are Catholic) and evangelical Christians (many, if not most, of whom distrust Romney's religion, Mormonism).

The worse news for Romney is that even if I'm wrong, he's still probably screwed. He doesn't just need to win Florida, he needs to break out a major ass-whipping.

He entered the GOP nomination race as the prohibitive front-runner. He's now won only one of three primaries/caucuses, and that one the smallest, and he only pulled 40% of the vote there when he should have easily cruised past 50%. He's limping. He's bleeding. Barely squeaking by is not going to be enough to get him back in this race for real.

Gingrich, on the other hand, came from double digits back to win in South Carolina, and has now pulled up by double digits to contest a state that was supposed to be a Romney cakewalk. He's got the momentum of a runaway truck. As everyone who's contested an election with him since 1976 can attest, he is not someone you want to see bearing down on you in this kind of fight.

So, I still say Gingrich by nine points, give or take two. But, as always, I could be wrong.

Quote of the Day

2012-01-25T22:06:00.000-06:00

Image via Wikipedia

In a comment on an RRND blurb that links to a Downsize DC article about Ron Paul being booed by a (presumably largely evangelical Christian) South Carolina debate audience after invoking the Golden Rule, my friend Rocky Frisco quotes his friend Beth:

What do you expect from people whose whole way of life depends on letting somebody else pay for their mistakes?

The whole comment is worth a thorough read, but that part in particular really makes me think of the popular American edit of Christianity in a way I never have before.

File Under Ironic ...

2012-01-25T14:14:00.004-06:00

From the UK's Daily Mail:

A woman who defied a driving ban on female motorists in Saudi Arabia has died in a car crash. ... They were in a four-wheel drive on Saturday evening in the northern Hael province when the accident happened. ... Manal al-Sherif was arrested and detained for 10 days in May after posting a video of herself on YouTube as she drover around Khobar, a city to the east of the country.

No comments about women drivers, please. I've driven in Saudi Arabia (rough estimate, 2,000 or so road and off-road miles, plus many as a passenger, including in the Khobar area, but not the province where the lady died), and doing so ranks high on my list of terrifying lifetime experiences.

The Abu Hadriyah Highway, which connects Jubail to Khafji, induces a pucker factor greatly exceeding any roller coaster I've been on.

Like this:

I'm driving north in a Jeep Grand Cherokee (for some reason a number of non-military-issue vehicles had worked their way into my unit's table of equipment).

The posted speed limit is 120 kilometers (about 70 miles) per hour. I'm pushing 100 miles per hour and barely keeping up with traffic.

Up ahead, I see two large military trucks abreast (The road at this particular point is four lanes wide), pulling flatbed trailers with tanks on them. They can't move as fast as everyone else.

The traffic ahead of me splits. Two cars pass the military trucks in the oncoming lanes, which are not empty. Lots of honking and skidding-tire noise ensues.

Another car and a pickup pass as well -- one off-road to the right, one to the left, and a guy in the back of the pickup is waving an AK-47 in the air and screaming ("Allahu Akbar!" would be my guess, but it's impossible to hear over the engine noises and horns). There's no shoulder, per se, just packed sand and the crumpled remains of vehicles which have unsuccessfully attempted this same maneuver in the past.

Imagine something like this happening every two or three minutes for 100 miles or more. Imagine it continuing after dark with half the drivers not bothering to turn on their headlights. Oh, and imagine that every 20 miles or so a herd of camels wanders across the road, heedless of all the other stuff going on.

Finally, imagine that once you get off this endless ribbon of carnage, you can't even find a stiff drink unless you thought ahead and buried a two-liter jug full of Kool-Aid, extra sugar and yeast in the desert for a few days. Trying to thread a big-ass stolen German army truck between anti-tank mines and burning oil wells up north in post-war Kuwait was relaxing by comparison.

That's my version. But don't take my word for it. Here's PJ O'Rourke's, from Give War A Chance:

The road was two-laned here and the driving was, as it is everywhere in Saudi Arabia, horrific -- conducted at absolute top speed with no thought for consequences. Though there were plenty of consequences to be seen. Amazing car wrecks lay beside the road, sometimes a dozen of them in a mile, things you would never know had been cars if a couple of car wheels weren't sticking up out of them. Whole Chevrolets were crumpled like gum wrappers. And these wrecks had taken place without collision on a perfectly straight and level road that is absolutely free of obstructions.

There's just no comparison in the US, unless maybe it's the Kansas City area.

Fun Facts of the Day

2012-01-24T17:31:00.000-06:00

My latest C4SS piece got picked up by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel almost as soon as I sent it out for publication today. Cool.

That got me t'wonderin' just how many newspapers my stuff's been in over the last year-and-a-half since I started flogging C4SS material for op-ed publication, and where those newspapers are located.

The answer: 23 newspapers, in 12 US states (Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Washington), and in ten countries (Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, Estonia, Germany, India, the Republic of Korea, Latvia, Lithuania and the US) on four continents (Asia, Australia, Europe and North America). Further gory details at the C4SS press room.

Pretty cool. And that's just my C4SS stuff, and just the "mainstream media pickups." I guess I get around OK, for a guy my age.

NO GOP Debate LiveBlog Tonight

2012-01-23T20:06:00.000-06:00

Maybe you can watch the thing here, if you're interested.

MSNBC's proprietary video embed doesn't seem to like me very much -- freezes up in the middle of the opening commercial every time. So I can't watch it sitting at my computer, and I don't feel like running back and forth between computer and TV to post updates.

You're on your own this time, at least moment-to-moment. If I bother to watch it on the television set (probably not), I may throw some comments up here about it afterward.

ClickBleg: Help me get on Wavii ASAP

2012-01-23T16:22:00.001-06:00

It's like this: Wavii is a news aggregation hangamajigger, and we all know I'm way into that kind of thing (my day job is niche aggregation "by hand").

They're still in one of those "limited access" timeframes.

How does one move up the latter toward actually getting to use it?

Why, by referring other people, of course.

I need 10 referrals to get in ... 20 referrals and I get a t-shirt. Which means you no longer have to look at my naked torso. Surely that's worth a click to you, right?

Best as I can tell, it's not anything to download or buy -- it looks at your Facebook "likes" and then throws stuff at you that it thinks you'll find interesting.

Thanks in advance.

[Update: One referral so far, which got me a "sneak peek." Thanks! It looks pretty cool. I'm always looking for tools that call the good stuff to my attention. The less time I spend finding it, the more time I get to spend reading it, summarizing it, linking it and otherwise adding value to it for my own readers. Nine more referrals and I'm in! - TLK]

Twilight of the Gops?

2012-01-23T11:45:00.000-06:00

Quoth Doug Mataconis:

[W]hen I look at the results of the South Carolina primary, all I can ask myself is, "Has the Republican Party jumped the shark?"

That's actually a tougher question than it looks like. The GOP has gone from "on top" to "in the wilderness" more than once, including 40 years without a majority in either house of Congress. So positing that it's finally reached the "all downhill from here" point is, well, risky from a predictive standpoint.

But I'm going to take a flyer here and answer Mataconis's question "yes."

The GOP, the original party of big government, spent 30 years -- from Barry Goldwater's failed 1964 presidential campaign to Newt Gingrich's 1994 "Republican Revolution/Contract With America" -- vrooming its sparkly new "party of smaller government" pick'em up truck to the top of the political mesa, spent another six years doing donuts up there without much follow-through ... then drove right off the cliff face under George W. Bush, hitting bottom with a loud smack in 2006.

As PJ O'Rourke wrote in 1991's Parliament of Whores:

The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it.

The "GOP as party of smaller government" engine doesn't run any more. They got it to turn over and pump a couple of backfires through the tailpipe in 2010, but flooded the carburetor with the 2011 debt ceiling and budget debacles, when they made it clear yet again that when they say "smaller government" they mean government that gets bigger a little less quickly than the Democrats want.

The Republicans refuse to be the party of "smaller government" for real, and they're just never going to be as convincing as the Democrats at being the party of "bigger government."

The only cards left in their hand are "bellicose government," "competent government" and "moral government," and those cards won't hold their traditional constituencies together.

Ron Paul stands at the head of a fairly large GOP bloc that's done with the Buckleyite "bellicose government" stuff. They're trying to take over the party, but they're failing, and sooner or later they'll go their own way.

The "competent government" bloc's frontman, Mitt Romney, is coming up for rejection a second time in a row, and sooner or later that bloc will likewise blow away on the political winds, to the Democrats or to a new party.

And the religious right has always understood that "moral government," on their terms, means "bigger government" to protect them from TEH GAYZ!!! and TEH FURRINERS!!! and so on (FOR TEH CHILLLLLLLDRENZ!!!, of course). After having their factotums rejected twice in a row (Mike Huckabee in 2008, Rick Santorum this year) they're also on the lookout for a new bandwagon.

The only things holding the Republican Party together at this point are 1) hatred of the Democrats and 2) Newt Gingrich's ambition. Those two things aren't sufficient for the long term. They aren't nuts and bolts, they're chewing gum and baling wire.

The real $64,000 question, of course, is not what happens to the GOP. It's what, if anything, replaces the GOP. My guess is: Nothing. We're on our way from de facto one-party state to de jure one-party state.

Concerning Mitt Romney's "Mormon Problem"

2012-01-23T00:04:00.000-06:00

Yes, he has one.

America's come a long way since JFK's uphill slog to prove that a Catholic could get elected president, but not so far that Mitt Romney's affiliation with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints isn't a problem for him, with respect to both the Republican Party's presidential nomination and the general election.

Evangelical Christians -- who constitute a big bloc within the GOP's primary electorate -- don't like Mormonism. They don't consider it a real version of Christianity, and some of them consider it a cult. They're not on board with Romney.

And, as this article from the Palm Beach Post explains, African-American voters aren't likely to be very positive about Romney when they learn about his church's historical treatment of blacks.

Now, it's true that a Republican presidential candidate has a hard time getting black votes anyway, and that it's even harder when he's running against a black sitting president. But the Mormon angle certainly doesn't help with those voters, and it's not likely to sit that well with non-Mormon white voters who have moved past identity politics, either.

I might as well trot out my fairly basic knowledge of Mormon doctrine (I joined the LDS church at 18, and left it a few years later) on this issue, as it bears explanation.

Per Mormon doctrine, we are all literally children of God, with the potential to "grow up" to be gods ourselves. Jesus is our eldest brother. That war between in heaven, in which Satan and the rebellious angels were expelled? They were our errant brothers and sisters, too. We were all angels in the "pre-existence," and took part in that war before coming to Earth to "gain a body" and learn some important lessons on our paths to godhood.

In that war, some angels fought bravely on the side of God. When they came to Earth, they got light skin.

And there were the bad guys, Satan's legions, who were "cast into the Outer Darkness."

A third group was the angels who were on the right side but cowered, hid, or cut and ran ... and, well, they got dark skin. Oh, and they were banned by God from the priesthood (which includes all adult males, btw) of the one true church.

Until 1978, that is, when the church got sued and its president (whose titles include "prophet, seer and revelator") got a memo from God -- I'm sure the timing was coincidental, just as it was with the church's abandonment of polygamy, in 1890, under federal government pressure -- that he'd changed his mind about the whole "black people as priests" thing.

So you can see why African-Americans, and those who think that African-Americans probably weren't angelic cowards in the pre-existence, might not be thrilled with the idea of a Mormon president. Especially one who was serious enough about his religion to serve as a missionary for two years and then as a local bishop and a stake president (stakes are area-based groups of Mormon congregations).

In actuality, American voters generally don't seem to like the idea of a president who takes his religion extra-seriously regardless of what that religion is. That's why we haven't seen a President Pat Robertson, President Gary Bauer, etc. yet.

Sure, a presidential candidate is expected to attend church. "I sleep in on Sundays" doesn't work when that question gets asked. It's less about religion per se than it is about energetic "community involvement." It's probably a plus if he's a deacon, or heads up a local ministry to the poor, or whatever.

But if he's been in the pulpit on a regular basis as a preacher, chances are he's said some things that will come back to haunt him. And if his religion is even a bit out of the mainstream (voters seem to prefer Baptists and Methodists), he starts looking a little too weird to trust with Ye Aulde Nuclear Footeball.

Romney's Mormonism is not the only killer of his presidential ambitions. But it isn't helping him, that's for sure.

Post-South Carolina Primary Thoughts

2012-01-22T02:47:00.000-06:00

Fortified by a few Old Crow and RC nightcaps, my take on what's happened and what's next in the GOP nomination race:

Mitt Romney's chief strength going into this race was his putative front-runner status and the attendant "inevitability" of that status. So, three contests in ... he's won one of the three. The smallest of the three. The one in a state where he maintains a home. The one in the state next to the state he used to govern. The one where he should have easily exceeded 50%, but instead barely managed to notch up 40%.

Rick Santorum earned his Iowa victory with hard, dedicated, on-the-ground campaigning. But in addition to earning it, he had the advantage of being a pro-life Catholic running in a state with a large (23%) Catholic population and a large evangelical pro-life population. If that evangelical support had stuck with him, he might have a shot at the nomination ... but it didn't stick with him in South Carolina. Apparently Tarheel voters are more interested in actually winning the White House than they are in making a strong statement.

Ron Paul's supporters are more enthusiastic and dedicated than any, bar none. That makes a huge difference in states with small populations. But the populations of the primary states are growing as we go, and the bulk of the GOP base just isn't ready to give up on the Bushevik foreign policy line. He's not going to be the nominee.

Perry's out. Huntsman's out. Bachmann's out. Cain's out.

That leaves Gingrich.

Two weeks ago, I had people telling me I was crazy for saying he'd win South Carolina. Even as little as a day ago, I had people saying I was way high on my 9-point win prediction for him. As it turns out, I was low -- he won by 12%.

Ten days until Florida. That means eight or nine days of people telling me I'm crazy when I say Gingrich will win there, and one or two days of people telling me I'm over-predicting the margin of his win. Here's my initial prediction:

Gingrich: 42%
Romney: 33%
Santorum: 13%
Paul 12%

And frankly I think I may be over-predicting Santorum at Gingrich's expense, and under-estimating Paul a bit.

Paul, of course, will hold out to the end and use what support he garners to advance his agenda rather than his personal ambition. Good on him for that.

My guess is that Santorum exits the race after Florida. As much as I disagree with him on pretty much everything, he strikes me as a reasonably honest and honorable man who wants his party to succeed. He took his best shot. He did well in Iowa. He tried to parlay that into further successes. Once he's sure that didn't work, he'll cut bait and get behind the party's choice.

Romney will probably hold on until Super Tuesday. After Gingrich humiliates him, winning at least eight of the ten primaries that day, the GOP will move forward into the general election cycle with a clear nominee apparent.

That's how I'm seeing it, anyway. But you know, I'm a little tipsy at the moment.

Too Bad He Didn't Shoot a Few of Them

2012-01-21T23:52:00.001-06:00

From the Boston Herald, on the abduction of Kim Dotcom:

Police had to cut their way through electronic locks to a safe room, where they discovered Dotcom -- also known as Kim Schmitz -- with a firearm.

“Despite our staff clearly identifying themselves, Mr. Dotcom retreated into the house and activated a number of electronic-locking mechanisms,” Detective Inspector Grant Wormald from the Organized and Financial Crime Agency New Zealand told Reuters.

So he knew -- they admitted! -- that they were organized and financial criminals, on his property, probably armed, and there to kidnap him for having the gall and temerity to run a web site without Christopher Dodd's permission ... and they expected him to what? Roll out the red carpet or something?

Yeah, what Brad Said

2012-01-21T10:06:00.000-06:00

At WendyMcElroy.com:

Sites like MegaUpload are great if you want to share a really large file that you have (and that you keep on your own computer). But they're a bad way to store your files ...

As usual, I'll put in a word for Dropbox (or other sync services, but it's the one I like best, and yes that is an affiliate link that gets me more free storage when people sign up using it). It keeps your data on all your computers and a copy "in the cloud."

I set up two new (actually old -- laptop and netbook -- but unused for awhile) computers yesterday, anticipating an out-of-town trip). Getting my work stuff (RRND email templates, browser bookmarks, etc.) onto those machines was as simple as installing Dropbox and logging in. I did it at home, where my other computers were handy, but if I'd done it in Cairo or Vladivostok, same thing.

Data that needs to remain confidential/uncompromised? Stays on my hard drive (not in my Dropbox folder) and gets backed up to thumb drive or optical media. In addition to possible data loss, there's security to think of when contemplating "the cloud."

Hey, Zemanta tells me there's a new player in SyncTown; I'll be checking it out:

Final South Carolina Predictions

2012-01-21T08:41:00.001-06:00

The recent polls have Gingrich up on Romney by anywhere from 2% (in other words, tied within the margin of error) to 9%.

I'm leaning toward the higher number, not because of where it comes from (PPP -- not the most reliable polling service), but because Gingrich and Paul's supporters are energized and Romney's aren't.

Prediction as South Carolinians head to the real polls, +/- 2% on each candidate:

Gingrich: 38%
Romney: 29%
Paul: 18%
Santorum: 15%

Actual Outcome:

Gingrich: 40%
Romney: 28%
Santorum: 17%
Paul: 13%

Hey, I predicted three of the four candidates to within 2% of their actual performance! I'm surprised Paul didn't make third place.

Old Favorite Springfield Restaurant Oh Noes!

2012-01-20T12:15:00.001-06:00

I'm planning a trip to back to my home area -- the I-44 corridor running between Lebanon, Missouri and Springfield, Missouri. I grew up in Lebanon, my parents have retired in Marshfield, and my brother lives in Springfield (I used to as well).

Part of any old home trip is deciding what restaurants to go to (the ones without equivalents in St. Louis, that is -- I've got a good cashew chicken source up here).

The one I've been missing most is Melter's, formerly known as Mighty Melt Sandwich and Spud Shop. they make the most killer sandwich ever. It's hard to describe.

The bread is sort of muffaletta-like, but not exactly (one legend I heard was that the place was founded by an unemployed Schlotzsky's crew after that chain went under). It comes in squares -- a small is two squares, a medium is four, a large is nine, or something like that. I'm a big eater, but I've never finished a large in one sitting, I'll put it that way. Anyway, it's a sort of spongy bread, and quite good.

In the middle, they put your choice of meats (sometimes I go with pastrami, sometimes a "combo" of three meats), lettuce, onions, mustard, cheese, then they melt the whole thing in an oven.

So anyway, I am not finding Melter's on the Internet, and I'm only finding Mighty Melt listed in Sedalia and Warrensburg, far away from where it used to be, and from where I'm going. Sad face! Anyone know if the restaurant or a successor is still in Springfield?

I am not, of course, entirely without options. A place in Lebanon called Mr. Ed's used to make similar sandwiches. It appears to be gone as well, but it looks like there's still a sandwich shop in that location called Ollie's. So maybe it's the same food and just a different name.

And if I can't get my Melter's sammich, well, there's always Crosstown Barbecue. Or McSalty's Pizza. Or George's Steakhouse, which used to be the go-to place after the bars closed. Or hell, I've been telling the kids about Lambert's for years, so maybe we'll have ourselves some throwed rolls.

I'll put Crosstown and McSalty's up against restaurants of their kind almost anywhere. And I doubt I'll be going hungry. But just in case, refresh my memory concerning other great places to eat in the general area..

Which Part of "No SOPA for You" Did You Not Understand?

2012-01-20T01:39:00.001-06:00

Curious snippet from a New York Times article about the bust of MegaUpload, in particular the allegations in the indictment:

It quotes extensively from correspondence among the defendants, who work for Megaupload and its related sites. The correspondence, the indictment says, shows that the operators knew the site contained unauthorized content.

The indictment cites an e-mail from last February, for example, in which three members of the group discussed an article about how to stop the government from seizing domain names.

How is a discussion on how to protect yourself from domain theft, by a gang notorious for same, evidence that "the operators knew the site contained unauthorized content?"

And how is it a crime for the operators of a "locker service" to mind their own damn business, anyway? Banks not pawing through their customers' safe deposit boxes, etc., used to be considered a virtue, not a vice.

Oh, and keep in mind that the feds didn't just seize "unauthorized" content -- they stole all of it. That's like saying "we think there may be stolen diamonds in one of the bank's safe deposit boxes, so we're taking everything in all the boxes, including the one with your birth certificate and your grandma's wedding ring in it. And the cash in the vault, too, if we can get to to that."

Al Capone and John Dillinger couldn't hold a candle to Christopher Dodd. Hell, at least they hired their own gangs instead of billing the taxpayer for crew rental. And they didn't accuse their victims of "abuse of power" for not wanting to buy them new Tommy guns (all the better to rob you with, my dear).

In honor of this action, I'm canceling my tentative plans to take the family out to a movie this weekend (Daniel wants to see Red Tails; I was thinking about the new Sherlock Holmes flick, or the American remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo).

Between a pre- or post-flick meal at the food court, tickets, in-theater snacks, and probably some post-flick impulse shopping the kids would want to do with their Christmas money (probably for "intellectual property" in the form of video games or music), I'm guessing the St. Louis Galleria Mall can thank the Motion Picture Association of America for a loss of $100+ in gross revenues. We'll order out Chinese food and pop an old DVD (bought used, of course) in the player instead.

Anonymous is taking a more ... direct ... tack:

Good for them.

Liveblog, GOP Debate

2012-01-19T19:07:00.030-06:00

Image via Wikipedia

The usual -- comment when I feel like it, quit when I get bored.

Sticking the wrap-up here, for those who don't want the blow-by-blow. I'm pretty sure Gingrich won. I'm absolutely sure Romney lost. But the whole thing was pretty ugly and boring.

[7:05 CST] Candidates introduced. All of them stand and smile except for Santorum, who waves and grins like he's on "Hee Haw." Someone probably fed him amphetamines this afternoon.

[7:06] National anthem, debate rules, opening "if you don't know who I am yet" statements.

[7:09] Gingrich is appalled at being asked if he's a swingin' dude as the opener to a presidential debate.

[7:12] This is why Gingrich will be the nominee. He's got his blood up and is ready to fight any sumbitch what gets in his way.

[7:13] Santorum calms it down with a pretty positive statement about forgiveness, etc. Romney: Let's get on to the real issues. Paul: Too often we're all on the receiving ends of personal attacks, etc.

Image via Wikipedia[7:15] Three programs to put people back to work. Paul: Get the government out of the way, sound currency, reduced regulation, reduce income tax, get rid of debt, no bailouts, get government out of the way. Gingrich: Repeal Dodd-Frank, energy independence (natural gas especially), overhaul the Corps of Engineers so they can improve ports -- takes them eight years to do studies, WWII was only 3 1/2 years.

[7:17] What did Bain do wrong? Gingrich: Underlying model of Bain kind of investment ought to be looked at. Romney: Get rid of crony capitalism to improve economy, Obama is a crony capitalist.

[7:19] Back to Bain. Romney: I know the left will attack it, but capitalism works, free enterprise works, and why the hell are REPUBLICANS attacking me? Businesses I invested in with Bain have survived, some have failed, but overall created 110,000 new jobs. Domino's Pizza (so if you were for Cain, pick me). Nothing wrong with profit, it went to pension funds, charities, profitable enterprises can hire more people.

[7:22] Santorum believes in capitalism that works for everybody. Obama wants everybody to be dependent. Need a party that talks about more than cutting top tax rate, putting people back to work. I've talked about that. Cut manufacturing tax to zero. Get the Reagan Democrats back.

[7:24] What to do about unemployment among veterans? Should feds target that? Paul: To some degree, but should make economy healthy for everybody. After WWII, budget was cut by 60%, taxes by 30%, people went back to work. Veterans deserve better health care from the VA. Santorum: Supports continuing veterans' preferences, grew up at a VA hospital, saw veterans coming back from Vietnam. Obama wants to cut military by increasing its budget by 10%, and that's disgusting. Romney: State level should help veterans. Also thinks a 10% increase is a cut. Gingrich: Attacks Paul on post-WWII claim, cites GI Bill; also tax cuts. Transition process for veterans, and cut tax and regulation on energy to get veterans back to work.

[7:31] Audience question: Do any of you sincerely believe that ObamaCare can be repealed in its entirety? Romney: Would waive ObamaCare for states, but would also go after complete repeal. But would replace it with RomneyCare II, which is market free enterprise because it's called RomneyCare instead of ObamaCare. Gingrich: Elect a House, Senate, President committed to repeal. Santorum: Romney and Gingrich aren't credible on ObamaCare. Romney invented it and it is a disaster, Gingrich supported individual mandate. Santorum just gave Romney a sucking chest wound with RomneyCare states. Santorum claims he invented HSAs.

[7:37] Romney stumbling and stammering trying to defend RomneyCare. This may be the moment that is remembered as destroying him in South Carolina. Golf claps for his attempt to defend himself, and Santorum tears into him again. Romney is starting to whine ... says Medicaid isn't a state program, a federal one, wants that money back so they can do their own kind of socialism. Gingrich: I led the charge against HillaryCare, I ran the congressional conference that implemented HSAs, I have written books on health care reform. I can debate Obama Lincoln-Douglass style and whip his ass. Santorum: Gingrich was for individual mandate, and that's the core of ObamaCare, and Gingrich will lose any debate. Gingrich: I can say I was wrong and figured it out, he was wrong and he didn't. Paul: I'm a doctor. Hard to get ObamaCare repealed, so let's talk about government involvement in healthcare entirely. Santorum supported Medicare Part D. Get rid of overseas spending to float the wind-down of government healthcare. Stand back, everyone, he's on the antiwarpath.

Commercial break ... Zemanta doesn't seem to want to feed me pictures of Romney and Paul.

Image via Wikipedia

[7:50] Q to Santorum: Gingrich says you should quit. Should you? Santorum: Grandiosity has never been a problem for Newt. I beat Gingrich in Iowa and New Hampshire. Screw Newt, he's a friend but he's a gasbag. Gingrich: I started working with Reagan in 1974, developed supply side with Kemp, beat the Russians with the Gipper, created Republican majority in 1994, reformed welfare, cut taxes, balanced the budget. Damn right I am grandiose, and Santorum's my bitch. Santorum: Saw Gingrich in the House, no discipline, did nothing about scandals. Gingrich: I led the way on kicking out the corrupt and building a Republican majority. Romney: Gingrich is a DC careerist, I've lived on the real streets of America. Gingrich: Worked with Reagan, suck it.

[7:59] Romney is well off his game. Audience question: When will you release your tax returns. Gingrich: An hour ago. Paul: Probably won't, I'm not very rich, but heck, I may do it, we'll see. N o conflict, don't talk to lobbyists. Romney: When my taxes are complete for this year, if I'm the nominee, in April. Stammering again. Gingrich: It's his decision, but if there's anything bad in there we should know it before the nomination, not after. Santorum: I do my own taxes, they're on my computer and I'm not home. When I get home, you can have them.

[8:03] Back in 1969, Romney's dad set the precedent by releasing 12 years of tax returns. Will you? Romney: Maybe. Plays the one nation under God card.

[8:05] Apple employs 500k in China. What do you do about that. Santorum: I'll bring manufacturing back to the US with my plan to cut corporate tax to zero for manufacturing, by half for everyone else. Too many regulations. Cut'em. Paul: Not worried about people overseas having jobs. If we send dollars overseas, those dollars come back, and the cheaper good saves us money. We shouldn't be fighting about trade. Slams unions, supports anti-libertarian "right to work" laws. Santorum says he does support anti-libertarian "right to work," just not federal.

[8:11] SOPA. What do you think? Gingrich: You're asking a conservative about the economic interests of Hollywood. Google et. al say it will kill the Internet. It's censorship. I favor freedom. Government censoring Internet on behalf of giant corporations is bullshit. Romney: I agree with Gingrich. But I do favor intellectual property and want to destroy people who don't. Paul: I was the first Republican to oppose SOPA. Glad these guys up here are starting to get it right. Santorum: I don't support SOPA, but think that intellectual property needs to be protected. I hate freedom, and don't want the Internet to be free.

Easting dinner. Softballs anyway.

[8:24] The Know-Nothings are heard from. None of the candidates have responded correctly -- that the Constitution gives the federal government zero power to regulate immigration. But Paul at least notices that employer sanction laws are conscription of people as unpaid police officers. Would bring the troops home and militarize the border.

[8:36] Abortion. Gingrich goes after Romney. Romney stutters. Santorum goes after Romney and Gingrich. Romney stutters. Gingrich recites his pro-life record. Paul cites morality, pleads states' rights.

Commercial break. Disappointing that Gingrich has backed away a bit from being the least anti-libertarian candidate on immigration. That could have helped him in Florida, but I guess he's staking everything on North Carolina.

[8:51] Make your case to South Carolina. Paul: South Carolina is known for its love of liberty. And we need to get rid of the debt. Gingrich: Barack Obama is under your bed, oogabooga! Let's debate! Namechecks Alinsky. Romney: Stammers through parts of the Declaration of Independence and tells us how America was just like that until Barack Obama came along and ruined it. He's the reason we can't have nice things. Santorum: I'm a clear contrast to ... well, pretty much everyone else on earth.

Finis.

Ronald Reagan was Once a Democrat

2012-01-19T17:24:00.000-06:00

And Karen Santorum once dated a doctor who performed abortions.

A long time ago, in her 20s, Republican presidential aspirant Rick Santorum's future wife was live-in girlfriend for several years to the 60-something doctor who had delivered her. OK, so, yeah, that's kind of creepy.

But really, so what? Half of us in the 40+ category barely remember our 20s, and the ones who do would almost certainly cringe at the idea of some asshole conducting a forensic audit of our love lives back then for retrospective purposes.

They broke up. She met her future husband. They both became devout, practicing Catholics who oppose abortion. Judging by the number of children they have, there's no hypocrisy involved in that position, agree with it or not. Whether or not I agree with their particular values, I respect the fact that they apparently have values and try to live by them.

You know I'm the furthest thing possible from a Rick Santorum fanboy, people, but this just isn't a campaign issue. Shame on anybody who tries to make it one.

How Low Will They Go? This Low. (theothermccain.com)

No War, No Sanctions, No Intervention, No Assassinations

2012-01-19T16:30:00.002-06:00

Image via Wikipedia

Clear, simple, to the point. A nice, simple set of values that all kinds of people should be able to get behind.

It's the platform, manifesto, talking points, everything of No War on Iran: National Day of Action, February 4th.

A lot of anti-war activities get bogged down in lengthy laundry lists of talking points and arguments from the "top," before they ever reach the larger numbers of people they're supposed to recruit or inflluence. They end up having something for everyone to disagree with.

This thing leaves everyone free to make their own arguments and not have to answer for someone else's stupid ideas. No war, no sanctions, no intervention, no assassinations. Anything else you want, bring yourself.

"Radical anarchist KN@PPSTER" and "sane policy advocate KN@PPSTER" are both down with the four points, for different but not really incompatible reasons.

From a policy standpoint, screwing with Iran is the silliest damn idea I've heard in a decade characterized by silly ideas.

The US has fought and lost two full-blown wars in Asia (and smaller ones in Asia and elsewhere) over the last ten years, draining its treasury and degrading its military (in both the moral and practical senses).

Launching a third major war, against an opponent three times as populous, with much greater regional support, and much more militarily advanced than either Iraq or Afghanistan ... well, if you were looking for proof that the assorted War Colleges of the US armed forces have "special needs" classes, just check out the number of different crayon colors used in drafting that contingency plan.

Image via WikipediaFrom an anarchist standpoint, war (and preparation for war) is one of the primary instruments which the political class of every country, and their "transnational" partners, use to savage the freedoms and empty the pocketbooks of their subjects for their own benefit. 99% of the time, that's its only purpose. The other 1% of the time is when one particular clique of the political class is in real existential danger from another clique or cliques, and wants their subjects to bail them out.

So, get back to me if the war you're selling is revolutionary class struggle, productive (us) vs. political (them). Otherwise, I'm not buying. And this ain't that.

But that's all just me. I'm sure you have your own reasons. On February 4th, let's set those other reasons aside and stand together for no war, no sanctions, no intervention, no assassinations.

Why I Keep Telling You to Expect Newt

2012-01-19T10:43:00.003-06:00

Image via Wikipedia

We're three days and change from learning the results of the 2012 South Carolina Republican presidential primary.

As I write this, Texas governor Rick Perry is taking his final bow, withdrawing from the campaign and endorsing Newt Gingrich.

Yesterday, Sarah Palin came as close as she's probably going to get to endorsing a candidate until the outcome is absolutely certain: "If I had to vote in South Carolina, in order to keep this thing going, I'd vote for Newt ..."

Why do I keep pointing to Gingrich as the obvious GOP nominee? It's certainly not because I prefer him or support him. Even if I voted, and even if I voted Republican, I wouldn't vote for Newt.

But, here's the thing: This is a street fight, and Gingrich is a street fightin' man. There's no attack he won't use if he thinks it will work, and there's no blow he can't absorb standing up. That's how he's going to beat Romney, and that's how he's going to try to beat Obama.

Mitt Romney is the kind of candidate who does quite well, as long as he's floating forward on a carefully crafted narrative of "inevitability." He sounds plausible to everyone, as long as the problems of governance are presented as simple matters of managerial tweaking. But he falls right to pieces when it comes time to take the gloves off and throw down.

Ron Paul is certainly a fighter. If the GOP -- Establishment and rank-and-file alike -- hadn't let themselves get so entrenched and besieged in their crackpipe post-9/11 foreign policy errors, he'd stand a chance. Unfortunately, mistakes of that size and scope tend to self-reinforce; they're so big, ugly and stupid that people can't bring themselves to admit they were mistakes at all. And most of them just won't support a candidate who's urging them to get their heads out of their asses instead of patting them on the back and telling them they're smart.

That leaves Rick Santorum, whose positions on virtually everything are simply too extremely opposed to virtually every majority voting constituency for him to be elected president, and who failed of re-election to the US Senate in 2006 with less than 42% of the Pennsylvania vote; and Newt, who hasn't lost an election since the mid-1970s.

I'm confident in my prediction that Gingrich will at least de facto tie, and probably beat, Romney on Saturday in South Carolina.

Furthermore, I think that he will win, and probably comfortably, in Florida on the 31st. Yes, he's behind Romney in Florida right now, but South Carolina will give him momentum, and he will spend 10 days hammering Romney in ways that maximize the Latino vote. Remember, now that Perry's out, Gingrich is the GOP's voice of nominal sanity on immigration.

If he can maul Romney in Florida and South Carolina, he will be running the table by Super Tuesday.

Tempus Fugit!

2012-01-18T15:39:00.000-06:00

Image via Wikipedia

Wow! Has it really been more than a year since Wikileaks released the "Cablegate" documents?

I guess so. At least that's what the front matter of the new Rolling Stone interview with Julian Assange says.

Tone conveyance teaser:

At 40, the WikiLeaks founder comes across more like an embattled rebel commander than a hacker or journalist. He's become better at handling the media - more willing to answer questions than he used to be, less likely to storm off during interviews - but the protracted legal battle has left him isolated, broke and vulnerable. Assange recently spoke to someone he calls a Western "intelligence source," and he asked the official about his fate. Will he ever be a free man again, allowed to return to his native Australia, to come and go as he pleases? "He told me I was fucked," Assange says.

Non illegitimi carborundum, Julian. You'll get through this, and so will we. The folks in DC, not so much.

Anyone Having Problems with Chrome?

2012-01-18T12:16:00.001-06:00

OK, I gave the SOPA blackout four hours. Now I need to be back in communication with my friends.

Is anyone else suddenly having problems with the Google Chrome browser?

I'm running Chrome 16.0.912.75 on MacOS 10.5.x.

Or rather I'm not running it, because suddenly it doesn't want to run.

As soon as I try to do anything (enter text in a form, for example, or clear the cache -- it did let me disable my various and sundry extensions, of which I assumed one might be the problem), it becomes unresponsive and stays that way until I force quit it.

This happened suddenly, mid-stream in using the browser. I thought an extension I installed last night (Weatherbug) might be the culprit, but 86ing changed nothing.

No other applications are acting this way, nor do various diagnostics reveal anything wrong with the machine (early model Mac Mini, Core Duo/2Gb RAM).

I do not want to return to Firefox permanently.

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Update: I've disabled all extenstions, removed Chrome, reinstalled it from the Google site, deleted temp/cache files, etc. ... it's still not working. To me, that means it's either something defective in Chrome (trying to find out when it auto-updated, possibly with a bug, right now) or something wrong with my machine. No other applications seem to be misbehaving, so that narrows it down to Chrome itself, IMO. So, I am resigned to Firefox, at least temporarily (I may revisit Safari and Camino and Opera ... but damn ... my Chrome setup was getting so comfortably lived in).

SOPA the Undead

2012-01-17T15:02:00.000-06:00

In theory, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and probably its Senate counterpart, the Protect IP Act (PIPA) are dead on arrival. US president Barack Obama has declined to endorse the parts of SOPA that require US ISPs to block web sites affected by the legislation, and congressional leaders are "shelving" the bills rather than try to pass them without that stuff.

But no, it ain't over. We've seen this movie before.

First of all, keep in mind that Obama sacrificed nothing here -- the parts of SOPA he objected to were the unenforceable parts. Even if every ISP in the US could be forced to cooperate in removing outlawed web sites from its DNS tables, tools like the Firefox "DeSopa" extension were already in the field to make sure American users could reach those sites (using offshore DNS tables). Passing the legislation without those parts would have been worthless. Passing it with them would have been ... toothless. Obama racked up a few cheap political points by being on the right side when it mattered not at all which side he was on.

So, what we'll see over the next year or so is bits and pieces of SOPA/PIPA -- the "enabling" bits and pieces that make this or that "agin the law" -- inserted into other legislation, so as to avoid, as much as possible, public debate and political damage.

Implementation will occur at the executive level, prepared behind the scenes at DoJ and/or DHS and rolled out in the middle of the night as some kind of "one swell foop" coup: A mashup of all the federal government's previous IP-blocking and domain-seizure tricks, with some new twists added.

We can only guess at what those new twists might be, but my guess is they will look something like this:

The federal government publishes a list of verboten web sites per the criteria in the various pieces of enabling legislation.
In tandem with publication of the list, the government announces that the act of routing traffic to, or facilitating the routing of traffic to, any of those sites will be treated as a "cyber attack" on the United States and responded to accordingly.
Domestically, a couple of raids on large ISPs to shut them down until they promise to update their copy of the list daily and remove all sites on the list from their DNS tables (the smaller players will fall into line ASAP); and a couple of high-profile arrests of people ("cyber-terrorists") offering tools or advice for getting around the government blockade.
Internationally, a similarly two-pronged approach: US-government-backed (probably with wink, nudge denials) cyber attacks on verboten sites, extradition requests for the sites' operators, pressure on other governments to implement the US blacklist themselves.
Co-option of the already-existing DMCA apparatus to target users who access the verboten sites -- you'll get a nastygram from your ISP, just like you do if your kid got noticed sharing a torrent of an old episode of Full House, threatening to cut off your service if you don't cease and desist.

Will it work? Well, if by "work" you mean "stop unauthorized online sharing of copyrighted materials," no, it won't "work." There might be a temporary, partial slowdown until new tools can be deployed, but in the long term, no, not even a noticeable dent. And probably not even that if the tool developers are working on new stuff before this even comes to pass.

But it will give the regime a few new tools to torment us with, and to slightly more effectively keep stuff it doesn't want seen away from the average Internet user's eyes. Which was the whole point in the first place.

If you're one of those developers making the tools of freedom, I hope you'll be working overtime over the next year or so to improve them and especially to make them more intuitive and user-friendly.

If you're one of those "a little more techy than the average bear" users, I hope you'll spend the next year encouraging and helping your "average user" friends to install and familiarize themselves with things like the DeSopa extension, Tor and so forth.

The bad guys aren't ever going to beat us, but it would be better if we didn't even let them slow us down.

How to Vote (If You Must)

2012-01-17T11:33:00.004-06:00

Yes, I am on record as having arrived at the conclusion that voting changes not much at all and nothing for the better.

But I'm also aware that some of my readers disagree, and that they will, after some ritualistic hand-wringing, choose to once again reprise their participation in the perennial performances of Democracy®.

OK, fine ... but if you're going to do that, please do it right. Vote for what you want, not just against what you fear.

The Republicans are already playing that tedious old game again -- "a vote for anyone but X is a vote for Y" -- with respect to both their primaries ("a vote for anyone but Gingrich is a vote for Romney") and the general election ("a vote for anyone other than the GOP nominee is a vote for Obama").

Horseapples.

It does not follow from your friend's insistence that Candidate X is better than Candidate Y, that your vote for Candidate Z helps Y at the expense of X. Your vote doesn't belong to any of those candidates, nor does it belong to your friend. It belongs to you, and it is owed to no one.

There's a very good chance that Mitt Romney will receive the Republican presidential nomination this year, even though he has yet to demonstrate the support of more than 40% of his party -- and that much only in his de facto home state.

In South Carolina, somewhere in the neighborhood of 2/3 to 3/4 of the Republican primary electorate wants no part of Romney.

I've suggested jokingly (mainly because this is a meaningless horse race to me), and others seriously (mainly because they've hypnotized themselves with that "Obama's is the most left-wing administration EVAH and the NUMBER ONE PRIORITY is to get rid of him" crap) that Rick Santorum and/or Rick Perry and/or Newt Gingrich should drop out and unify behind one of the three to swamp Romney.

But why should they?

And why should any voter engage in the same calculus?

If you really think that Rick Santorum is Da Bomb ... well, okay, you should probably seek psychiatric treatment ... but you probably think so for specific reasons, and don't believe that Perry or Gingrich measure up to those reasons any better than Romney does.

Compromising in support of the "lesser evil" -- voting for someone you despise just because that candidate's supporters claim you should despise him less than a common opponent -- gains you nothing. It merely sets you up for more demands to continue doing so in perpetuity. The people who make such demands never reciprocate. It's all downhill from the first surrender. Ron Paul's main strength is that his supporters understand that, deep down in their guts where it counts.

Ditto in the general election. If R. Lee Wrights, or whomever Americans Elect saddles up, are more to your liking than the major party horses, why should you sacrifice your values in order to ensure victory for the "possibly slightly less objectionable" Republican or Democrat?

The only way (if there is any way) to get what you actually want in electoral politics is to vote for it, not against the least nauseating alternative to it. Sure, you may not win this time, but if you surrender this time the demands will just be more strident, and the alternatives you're presented with more nauseating, next time.

A Note on the Tag Line

2012-01-16T18:03:00.001-06:00

Just had an anonymous email, apparently from someone at least moderately competent in Latin, inquiring as to the intended meaning of the current KN@PPSTER tag line, "Ceterum autem censeo, status esse delendam." Since I can't reply by email, I'll reply here.

I am not competent in Latin. I did quite a bit of futzing around trying to figure out the best way to drop something meaning "the state," as opposed to "Carthage," into the old saying attributed to Cato the Elder ...

"Carthago delenda est" (English: "Carthage must be destroyed") or the fuller "Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam" or "Ceterum autem censeo, Carthaginem esse delendam" (English: "Furthermore, I think Carthage must be destroyed") are Latin political phrases which were popular in the Roman Republic during the latter years of the Punic Wars against Carthage.

Image via Wikipedia... and came up with "status," although there were other possibilities.

Per the Wikipedia article linked above, Cato would end every speech, no matter the topic, with that admonition to put an end to Carthage. I'm using the tag line to remind my readers (and myself) that no matter what else I may be writing about, one should imagine invisibly tacked onto the end: "Furthermore, I think the state must be destroyed."

But, it's just an uneducated language hack, and I'm the first to admit to the possibility that I'm actually just ordering the Cobb salad or asking directions to the bathroom or something.

"Permission to Come Aboard"

2012-01-16T12:12:00.002-06:00

Image via WikipediaThat's what the Commodore line of personal computers was in the early 1980s. Inexpensive and, for the time, quite advanced. You no longer had to be a toff to participate in the computer revolution.

The Apple II, TRS-80 Model III, etc., were still well out of the lower-middle-class price range.

Cheap clones of the IBM PC weren't really on the market yet.

The Sinclair ZX81/Timex-Sinclair 1000 was "the first computer under $100," but its testy membrane keyboard and use of single-key BASIC syntax entry probably put at least as many people off personal computing as on it.

Brad over at WendyMcElroy.com celebrates the 30th anniversary of the Commodore 64 (several days ago -- just got around to linking).

My first computer was the Commodore VIC-20, and it was a dream machine. I'd spent the summer of 1983 in a quick BASIC programming course on the Model III, but couldn't afford one. Here comes the VIC-20. Only 4.5k of RAM, but you could get a cartridge to expand it to 16k, like the basic Model III. Real keyboard. Embedded Commmodore BASIC, which was a pretty nice version of the language. Passable graphics (although not the sprites available on the C-64).

It's the childhood Christmas present I remember most vividly and gratefully. With Commodore, you didn't have to be one of the rich kids to have a real computer on your desk at home. Neither the VIC-20 nor the Commodore 64 were trivial expenditures on a working class budget, but they were doable. I'm sure my parents sacrificed a few things to hook me up (the cost of the machine, digital tape recorder, some manuals, etc. was more than 1% of the cost of our house and more than I paid for my first car!), but plugging the thing into a $10 garage sale TV opened up a whole new world for me; they knew it and I appreciated it. Even more so today than then.

I spent my junior year in high school writing BASIC programs all the time. If I couldn't be in front of a computer (the school had some Model IIIs, some Model 4Ps, and a Tandy IBM PC knockoff -- Radio Shack was the only electronics store in town), I was coding in a notebook -- or, when stuff got more complicated, flowcharting, even though I had initially snorted at that as a waste of time in the "data processing" class I took that year (our final assignment was to write a BASIC program that "actually does something;" a friend of mine and I worked up a routine to break the 8-character-maximum passwords on Model III floppy disks by brute force; the teacher hated it, but had to give it an "A").

I wrote a pretty decent "Breakout" clone, and rigorously slimmed it down until it fit well within the VIC's base 4.5k (I think it bottomed out at about 1.8k). Every day at school, I'd sit in class working on how to get this or that subroutine to the minimum necessary instructions. Then I'd go home and key the stuff in by hand from my notebook and test it. I think I sold about eight copies of it at $5 a pop on consignment at a new local hobby shop (I was hoping to earn $125 to buy an old Burroughs minicomputer they had sitting there, but no dice).

I sometimes wonder today's student programmers even get talked to about efficient coding to minimize memory requirements and maximize speed. My (older) Mac Mini is more than a thousand times faster than the VIC (1.6GHz Core Duo vs. 1.1MHz 6502), with about ~~444,000~~ 466,000 times as much RAM (2Gb vs. 4.5Kb), and of course that's on the very low end of what's available these days (I remember thinking in 1994, when I grabbed an original Mac at a junk shop and got back into using computers, "who could ever need 128k?"). I also paid a good deal less for it, not even accounting for inflation, than a Commodore 64 would have cost me on release day.

If I Trotted Out an Internet Poll ...

2012-01-15T15:12:00.004-06:00

... showing Ron Paul eight, nine or 14 points up from where "regular" polling says he is over the same period, and 25 points up on where "regular" polling says his nearest opponent is relative to him, I'd get laughed out of the room.

But when Reuters does that, well, it must be news.

I guess Reuters/Ipsos could be right, but my money's on the traditional polls being a truer picture of reality.

Traffic Bump, or Traffic Measurement Bump?

2012-01-15T12:37:00.000-06:00

Over the last couple of days, KN@PPSTER's traffic has jumped by about 70 visits a day (average as of right now, per Sitemeter, 319 visits and 516 page views; as you can see, 70 visits is a non-trivial percentage of the total).

I'm not sure how much, if any, of that is a real increase in traffic, though. I've made a change in how I measure traffic, and given the now-larger proportion of traffic that lists the referrer as "unknown," I suspect that measurement change is largely responsible for the increase.

The change? I added the Sitemeter button to the site's RSS feeds.

I don't consider that dishonest, or a "trick." The traffic is real; I've just never measured it before. Apart from the Feedburner chiclet that says how many people subscribe via that particular burn, I've never had any idea how many people are reading KN@PPSTER via RSS instead of direct.

It finally occurred to me to fix that measurement gap when I created the KN@PPSTER Android app, which uses RSS as its source. I'm just now getting comfortable with RSS myself, or it would probably have occurred to me to do that before.

Reminder: Getcher KN@PPSTER for Android Here

2012-01-15T12:04:00.000-06:00

Finally had a chance to test the app personally -- ran it on a couple of display tablets at a local electronics store yesterday. Looks pretty good, IMO! But definitely hit me with feedback if your mileage varies (or doesn't).

I haven't put the app in Android Market ... yet. For one thing, I figure it's enough of a "niche" app that it probably wouldn't do great things there, so why waste $25? For another, since the package I bought from Publish5 only supports 1,000 users, I definitely want to give KN@PPSTER's existing readership dibs on it before handing it out like candy elsewhere.

So anyway, click here, or on the screen shot, to download the .apk files and install KN@PPSTER for Android to your device.

What Henry Farrell Said!

2012-01-14T12:31:00.000-06:00

About the "new" gmail.

It's user-unfriendly and aesthetically revolting. It looks and acts like someone handed their four-year-old a C++ manual and the source code of Yahoo! Mail circa 1998 and said "go to town."

I was a fairly early adopter and endorser of gmail. I've been using it since mid-2004, and apart from some early trouble keeping my machines/browsers up to snuff to take advantage of the latest version without bogging down, I've never had any serious complaints about it until now.

But this just sucks.

It's All in the Crosstabs

2012-01-13T21:34:00.001-06:00

Image via WikipediaA new South Carolina GOP primary poll has Mitt Romney performing better than in the last one -- but with Newt Gingrich still within the margin of error, albeit a little less close. The top line is Romney 29%, Gingrich 25%.

And remember, the top line only tells us so much. It's Romney 29%, Gingrich 25% among "likely GOP primary voters," but take a look at the crosstabs:

Among self-described Tea Party supporters, Gingrich leads Romney 28-24.
Among self-described evangelical Christians, Gingrich leads Romney 40-13.
Even among self-described Republicans, as opposed to independents, it's 29-29 (and among independents, Ron Paul leads Romney 29-27).

Among the groups very likely to vote next Saturday, Gingrich is either even with, or ahead of, Romney.

Rasmussen has new data, too, but they're only showing the top line to non-subscribers.

2012-01-13T17:26:00.001-06:00

Testing Blogger's "post from phone" whatsit. I wonder what the post title will be?

Duh, Winning! (Hearts and Minds Edition)

2012-01-13T14:16:00.003-06:00

From Three Against Hitler, by Rudi Wobbe and Jerry Borrowman:

Near our home was a shoe store, owned and run by a Jew. Even before 1933 his store windows and swastikas had been painted on the walls and door. But, after the "takeover," the Nazis demolished his store in broad daylight. They broke all the windows, threw the merchandise onto the sidewalk, and dragged the proprietor and his wife and two children into the street. They started beating and cursing them, all the while calling them dirty names and shouting that they weren't fit to live among the exalted German, Aryan people. The greatest indignity of all is that after the family was lying in the gutter in agony, the Nazis urinated on them. I was only seven years of age when this took place, but I remember it vividly.

From Afghanistan:

From Pamela Geller, quoted in the Houston Chronicle [h/t -- Eric Dondero]:

I love these Marines. Perhaps this is the infidel interpretation of the Islamic ritual of washing and preparing the body for burial.

In future dictionaries, a "geller" will be defined as "a near-perfect intersection of abject stupidity and irredeemable evil."

Flattry Will Get You Everywhere

2012-01-13T12:42:00.001-06:00

Now appearing at KN@PPSTER -- at the bottom of each post, and in the sidebar -- is a "Flattr Button."

And what, pray tell, is a "Flattr Button?"

Flattr is a micropayment service. Or, really, a "tip jar" for cheapskates.

On the "paying" side, it allows people to make small contributions to sites they like by taking a larger payment and splitting it up. For example, you might decide to fund your Flattr account to the tune of a dollar a month. At the end of each month, Flattr splits that dollar evenly between all the sites you've "flattred." If you only clicked the button at one site, that site gets a buck. If you did it at two sites, each gets 50 cents. A hundred sites, everyone's a penny richer. That's the basic idea, anyway. You actually have to pay a little more than your funding level. That's one way Flattr makes its money.

On the "receiving" side, Flattr stores the collected money from flattry and lets the recipient withdraw it once it's reached a reasonable minimum (10 euros). They take a 10% cut on that end too, I think.

So anyway, if you've ever thought to yourself "I like KN@PPSTER sooooooo much that I'd like to pay him something ... but the transaction fees on a dime would just make that silly," here's a solution (especially if you've thought the same thing about a bunch of other bloggers).

The Bain of Romney's Existence

2012-01-13T11:11:00.001-06:00

Image via WikipediaIt's hard to predict how the attacks on Mitt Romney's career with Bain & Co./Bain Capital will really play out, especially in South Carolina.

Inside the GOP, the whole thing seems to be bouncing back and forth between "it's vulture capitalism!" and "no, stop being such a commie, it's just capitalism!" with the latter take seemingly ahead.

From the limited research I've done, the attacks are somewhat overblown.

Per Kevin D. Williamson at National Review, Bain hasn't been the recipient of extra-special levels of state privilege, and it was an unforced error on Romney's part to compare the FDIC/PBGC stuff to Government Motors and such. The state privilege it advantaged itself of seems to have been the long-embedded kind available to pretty much any entity with "Inc." its name. While I oppose that kind of privilege, I don't generally condemn any specific company for not eschewing it.

Yes, Bain took over companies, ran them through "management efficiency" routines and did its level best to wring profits out of them, sometimes leading to workforce reductions. But the evidence doesn't suggest that it took the "corporate cannibal" approach -- swoop in, buy cheap, sell off everything that a quick profit can be turned on, shitcan everything else -- as such.

Is Mitt's Bain resume a weakness? Well, it could, and probably should, be. It exposes him as a managerial tweaker type -- maybe even a technocrat -- in a year when pretty much everyone on all points of the political spectrum, from Tea Partier to Occupier, thinks that "the system" needs more than just a tweak.

But who can exploit that weakness? The obvious counter to it is a populist approach, and Romney's Republican rivals (with the exception of Ron Paul) are clearly part of the "power elite" (or at least consiglieri thereunto) themselves. Obama's tried playing the populist card, but it just doesn't work for him. He's a Romney-type tweaker himself, only without real-world proof of his expertise at it.

Which, I think, is why the Bain attacks are hurting Romney but not helping any of his opponents in particular. They don't point the way to a clear alternative (once again, with the exception of Paul, who has problems of his own).

The KN@PPSTER Android App is Here!

2012-01-13T08:01:00.001-06:00

Maybe. I can't get it to run properly on my device ("closed unexpectedly"), but that's not unusual, as my device is an older, modified/semi-proprietary Android 2.0 ("Eclair") ereader that does seem to have problems with some apps.

If necessary, I'll download the SDK, set up the emulator, create a virtual device, etc. ... but IMO I'd then really only know as much as I do now. Probably simpler to put the thing out for download and ask y'all to let me know if it works. Click the screen shot or click here for direct download (this is not through Android Market, it's a direct download of the APK file):

... and let me know how it goes. It's not a complicated app -- just this blog, packaged up for Android.

One request: Please don't download the app unless you plan to actually use it. The development package I bought from Publish5 supports up to 1,000 users for a very reasonable one-time fee of $19. More than that, and I have to upgrade to a $15/month plan to keep growing the user base. Which I don't mind doing if they're real users. If it's 1,001 people who download the app and then forget about it, not so much.

Brief "Tent Living" Update

2012-01-13T00:13:00.000-06:00

When last we spoke of this, I had slept the better part of two months outdoors, and was taking New Year's Eve off, then planning to get back to it and see if I could manage an uninterrupted year.

So far, so good! But I woke up this morning with snow on the tent, and tonight will be the first big test of "cold AND snowy."

I've slept out down to 13 degrees but dry, and I've slept out 30 degrees but with precipitation.

Tonight it's snowy, 18 degrees, with 8mph winds out of the west/southwest (perfect -- the house shields the tent most fully from exactly that direction).

I don't expect any big problems. Hell, last night I didn't even bother to zip up the sleeping bag.

I'm still trying to decide whether or not to allow myself a break from outside/tent sleeping when I travel. Not that I do that a lot, but I do have a weekend trip in mind soon.

It's Way Too Early to Say I Told You So ...

2012-01-12T21:36:00.001-06:00

... but instead of getting a New Hampshire bump, Mitt Romney's taking a South Carolina dump.
Image by DonkeyHotey via Flickr
The first post-Granite-State-primary poll [PDF] in South Carolina shows Romney tumbling seven points from his pre-New-Hampshire 30%, to 23.1%. I don't see a margin of error listed, but it looks like Newt Gingrich would be well within said margin at 21.3% (not because he's gaining -- he isn't -- but because Romney's nosediving).

In freefall instead of rising the day after his second putative victory in this race, and the target is on nobody's back but his for the next eight days. The Republican Establishment is trying to gin up a "backlash" on the Bain attacks, but that would at best likely be a holding action. Things aren't looking very good for Mitt.

Absent some kind of game-changer, I (still) expect Gingrich to at least de facto tie Romney in South Carolina, and possibly beat him; to knock him on his ass in Florida after Perry and possibly Santorum drop out; and to romp on Super Tuesday.

Update, 01/13/12: Just got a campaign email from Newt.

Subject line? "Poll: Newt surging in SC -- we can still stop Romney."

First graf: "The InsiderAdvantage poll of South Carolina likely Republican primary voters shows Newt Gingrich surging, coming within a statistical tie of Mitt Romney."

Like I said above, yes, Gingrich is probably within the margin of error ... but it's not due to a Newt "surge." The last pre-New-Hampshire poll, by PPP, had Gingrich at 23%. He's not gaining ground on Romney, Romney's losing voters to Santorum and Perry. Here's the South Carolina poll track at Real Clear Politics.

Not that it matters in the grand scheme of things -- whatever gets him even with or ahead of Romney will do, and of course a purported surge is better advertising than "sittin' here, watching my opponent fall past me." But it's our job to notice what's really what. We are, after all, professionals.

Regarding "rising tensions in the Gulf"

2012-01-12T08:42:00.000-06:00

Pearl of wisdom from a Union private crossing the Rappahannock into Fredericksburg, December 1862:

Shit! They want us to get in. Getting out won't be quite so smart and easy. You'll see.

Apparently Shelby Foote's The Civil War: A Narrative hasn't worked its way into US naval doctrine yet.

Albatross Watch, GOP Primary Edition

2012-01-12T01:55:00.003-06:00

After topping out at an embarrassing 40% in New Hampshire Tuesday, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney absorbed another campaign body blow Wednesday as the UN ambassador voted "most likely to be cast as Dr. Strangelove in the remake" tried to hitch himself to the former Massachusetts governor's star. Read all about it at Politico.

Somewhere tonight, Newt Gingrich is smiling, having managed not only to remove that incredibly unfortunate piece of campaign stump improv from around his neck but to hang it on Romney's.

Grrrphone

2012-01-11T13:24:00.002-06:00

The phone saga:

I mentioned awhile back that we had decided to cut loose the land line and port the number to a cell phone.

It all went swimmingly at first. Net 10 took the information, did their jiggery-pokery, and within a few hours BAM! The new cell phone said it was active, showed the right phone number, etc. I could call out using it, and caller ID would show that the call was, indeed, coming from the right number.

But, calls INTO that number went to voice mail at the old land line provider (Charter). I gave it a day to see if that was just a thing to wait on. No. So I called Net10, they did some more jiggery-pokery, and told me it was all good on their end, but that Charter hadn't released its end of the number yet. Could take a few days, just give it time.

So today, a little over a week later, I call Charter. Their answer: The thing didn't go through, Net10 didn't take possession of the number yet, the request expired yesterday, the whole process has to be re-started.

Except that Net10 obviously HAS taken possession of the number, ma'am. Look at your caller ID -- I'm calling you from it. It's you we're waiting on.

No, no, you have to call Net10, nothing we can do.

Sigh. Back to the drawing board.

In other phone news, I'm also in the middle of transferring my previous Net10 cell number to a new phone. I've done that before and it's always been easy. This time, after the usual jiggery-pokery, they told me they have to send me a new SIM. It'll be here tomorrow, via FedEx.

No biggie. If I had thought about it, I just would have activated the new phone with a new number. That phone is the C4SS batphone, and C4SS's number is a Google Voice number that I can forward to any phone. Probably five people on earth have the actual old cell number, and I could have just communicated the change to them. But I'm assuming the SIM problem would still have been a SIM problem, so I guess it's all the same, really.

I've always had good, reliable and courteous service from both Net10 and Charter. I'm inclined to blame the land line transfer snafu on Charter. And yes, I've been a little irritable with them about the whole phone thing.

In terms of communication, Net10's call centers are scattered around the world and sometimes the accents make it a little harder to communicate, but not so much that it's really troublesome (there are worse things than spending half an hour on the phone with a Filipino lady). Charter's call center (at least the one I've talked with and asked the location of) is in Louisville, Kentucky, where the accents would be just as much a factor if I didn't speak Southern.

Update, 01/12: OK, the C4SS bat phone is back up. Net10 FedEx overnighted that new SIM (for a $30 phone!). Plugged it in and that was the end of the problem. Great service.

On the Free Will vs. Predestination Debate

2012-01-11T12:03:00.000-06:00

It drives me bugfuck. But maybe there's not a thing I can do about that, right?

To be perfectly candid (or perhaps just to fulfill my destiny), I'm amazed that it keeps rearing its ugly head after at least hundreds of years of organized debate in the English language, and presumably thousands of years of individual and collective mulling over. But maybe all of that is unavoidable.

In my opinion -- which I may have arrived at independently and volitionally, or may have just had implanted in my brain by God, the programmers of an artificial reality we live in, what have you -- the whole debate is irrelevant:

Either we do have free will, or we live in a reality in which our programmed destinies damn near perfectly mimic free will, i.e. we not only do what we're "supposed" to do, but can't help believing that we decided for ourselves to do it.

If the former, huzzah.

If the latter, it's not like there's anything we can do about it -- or for that matter even want to do about it, unless we're predestined to such a desire.

Carry on (if you want to, or are compelled to).

Something Old, Something New

2012-01-11T00:26:00.000-06:00

In his New Hampshire primary day piece for The American Spectator, Robert Stacy McCain takes note of some interesting numbers:

Polls in Iowa showed that [Ron] Paul got 48 percent among caucus voters under 30, which might suggest that his libertarian-tinged anti-war message represents the future of the Republican Party. But that youth vote was only good enough for 21.4 percent of the total, because fully 60 percent of Iowa GOP caucus-goers were 50 or older. So the oldest candidate in the race, dismissed as a crackpot by most mainstream Republicans, is almost uniquely capable of attracting young voters to a party dominated by the gray-hair-and-bifocals set. However one attempts to explain this situation, it does not bode well for the GOP. And perhaps it doesn't bode well for America, either.

Image via WikipediaEven if (as seems likely) he fails of presidential triumph in person, Paul's campaign presages a massive realignment in American politics just over yon horizon, and the near certain doom of a Republican Party ill-equipped to survive that realignment.

It's that old bogeyman, the "generation gap," in spades. America is separating along the age demographic.

Older voters refuse to let go of their Cold War "national security" fetishes or their Social Security checks so long as they can have both (if they could only have one, it would be the latter, but the GOP establishment lacks the intestinal fortitude to force that choice upon them).

Younger voters are getting less and less willing to continue paying through the nose -- in blood, in treasure, in debt -- to shield either of the oldsters' treasured houses of cards from the whipping winds of economic reality.

The Republican Party isn't willing to give up the larger demographic for the smaller. That, at least, makes sense. If you can't have both voting blocs, you go for the larger one, right?

But neither is the GOP well-equipped to compete with the Democrats for that larger demographic. The Democrats are just as good as the Republicans at playing the jingo card when they have to (if George W. Bush was a tin-horn Napoleon, Barack Obama does at least a passable impression of Genghis Khan), and much, much better at catching geezers by hiding in the bushes and imitating the mating call of a benefit check.

The Republicans will continue to pine ceaselessly for oldster love, but the Democrats will be the ones who, more and more, actually get that affection. And the youngsters will eventually abandon a party that has nothing to offer them for some new vehicle. GOP, finis.

Apart from strictly partisan concerns, it is social conservatives who are also set to lose big in the coming recombobulation. As the GOP disintegrates around them, they'll find themselves forced to choose between moving en masse into the Democratic Party as a minor voting bloc, or seeking lodgings in the third party ghetto. The youngsters aren't supporting Paul because they agree with him on abortion, immigration or marriage. They're supporting him in spite of his positions on those issues, and because he's got their backs on foreign policy, fiscal policy and monetary policy.

GOP Primaries: Colbert outpolls Huntsman in South Carolina

2012-01-10T17:11:00.000-06:00

Nothing for this but a Reynolds-like "heh."

Google +1 WTF

2012-01-10T16:55:00.000-06:00

I've not been using Google +1 very much, or for very long, but I just ran into something I haven't seen before: "Cannot +1 this page."

That's using my Google +1 Chrome extension button, which sits next to my address bar so that I don't have to look around for a button actually on whatever page I'm reading and want to bump that way.

As it happens, there's a +1 button on the page in question, and it worked. But I'm wondering why the extension didn't.

Eess Not a Gang, Eess a Bleg

2012-01-10T15:30:00.000-06:00

I've been working with the Center for a Stateless Society for several years now, first as a News Analyst and for the last year-and-a-half as Media Coordinator (and "Senior News Analyst," which means I write occasional, rather than twice-weekly, op-eds).

Like most of the operations I work with, it's a shoestring kind of deal that does a lot with what money it raises. The Center's financial nut at present is somewhere below $1,500 a month.

What do we accomplish with that money?

For starters, an average of one "mainstream media published" market anarchist op-ed every weekday -- 445 of'em since we started keeping track in June of 2010.

That's right -- for about the pay of one minimum wage worker, C4SS gets market anarchism into newspapers big (the Republic of Korea's Joongang Ilbo has a circulation of 2.2 million -- more than the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post combined), small (Florida's Hernando Today has been showing our stuff to a few tens of thousands of readers on a regular basis), left-wing (Counterpunch and the Canadian), right-wing (Arizona's Sonoran News and the Carroll County, Maryland Standard), you name it. We've been published on every currently above-sea Earth continent except Antarctica (and I recently started submitting the Center's material to McMurdo Station's Antarctic Sun).

We also produce (primarily through the efforts of our Research Associate, the estimable Kevin Carson) academic studies, and have been involved in various ways with the publication of important books (Gary Chartier's The Conscience of an Anarchist; Markets Not Capitalism, a collection edited by Chartier and Charles W. Johnson; and of course Carson's oeuvre).

Oh, and there's our Wikileaks mirror, launched to keep that vital information source available when the US government tried to suppress it. And our Tor node, which facilitates communications from and among revolutionaries and dissidents worldwide even when governments try to interdict or censor those communications.

And so on, and so forth. How much do we accomplish for the movement with that $1,500 a month? A lot, and there's no two ways about that.

Now for a sad story: As much as we do for a notional $1,500 a month or so, we're just not bringing in that amount.

Not being the money dude (our finances run through the Molinari Institute), I don't have the exact figures at hand, but IIRC we're bringing in about $800 per month in recurring donations (i.e. people sign up to send us $X every month). Based on our last fundraiser, I guesstimate we've been doing another $100-$150 a month in "one-time" donations.

Some costs like domain renewals, hosting for the sites and the Tor node, phone service (yes, phone service -- newspaper editors still expect to be able to pick up a phone and hear it answered "professionally" when the piece they're looking at claims to be from an "institution," so we spend $15 a month to make that happen), and so on and so forth, can't be deferred. We pay, or the stuff gets turned off.

What gets deferred is our workers' minimal (see that total above? One minimum wage worker's pay covers everything) pay, which pretty much always runs at least a couple of months behind schedule.

We don't complain. Much. And we keep working, trusting that the whole financial thing will get better over time. And it will ... if you decide that it should.

Another hundred anarchists ponying up $5 a month, or another 50 coughing up $10 a month, would put us on something like a stable financial footing, so that we can not only keep up the work we've been doing, but start looking for even more work that needs doing.

So pretty please, with sugar on top, support the Center for a Stateless Society.

Romney, Huntsman tied at 33% in Early New Hampshire Returns

2012-01-10T00:20:00.000-06:00

OK, so it's a very small sample: Six GOP primary ballots cast in Dixville Notch, breaking out to two each for Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, one each for Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul.

The town is not necessarily a bellwether. In 1992, ten Dixville Notch voters cast their ballots in the Libertarian Party's presidential primary for Andre Marrou, while only nine cast ballots for GOP incumbent George HW Bush.

Paul Slams Santorum for Supporting Freedom to Contract, Associate

2012-01-09T23:54:00.001-06:00

Ron Paul's new South Carolina ad:

Starting at about 32 seconds in:

Santorum promised to stand with workers, then sided with big-money union bosses and opposed the Right to Work Act.

That's the National Right to Work Act of 1995, an evil, anti-liberty bill that would have (in mimicry of similar laws in some states since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act allowed it) forbidden employers to choose to hire exclusively through a union, and required unions to represent non-members as if they were dues-paying members.

There's nothing even remotely libertarian about the dishonestly named "Right to Work" laws, which Paul's son Rand has also promoted since his election to the US Senate. They're exactly as evil as the National Labor Relations Act -- just the flip side of the same "government will decide who must or must not contract with whom, and how" coin.

There's a lot to dislike about Rick Santorum. Shame on Ron Paul for coming out against freedom of association and the right to contract just to pander to the anti-union vote.

Marriage: The State vs. Contract and Religion

2012-01-09T13:19:00.000-06:00

From my latest piece at the Center for a Stateless Society:

The same-sex marriage debate is a perfect showcase for the anarchist argument against political government itself. For marriage is two things, neither of which require a monopoly state to enact, support, preserve or regulate.

Read the rest here.

A Libertarian Strategery Note

2012-01-09T09:19:00.000-06:00

Image via Wikipedia
To the extent that the Libertarian Party has a "conventional wisdom," that wisdom says former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson has the party's 2012 presidential nomination pretty much nailed down just by throwing his name in the hat.

I'm not so sure that's true -- Johnson does have some weak points when it comes to campaigning internally in the LP, such as his support for the "Fair" Tax, and I suspect my friend R. Lee Wrights, who's been running an aggressive internal ground game for the nomination, will force a debate that highlights those weaknesses -- but just supposing it is, high on the "next question?" list is the choice of vice-presidential nominee.

Unlike the "major" parties, the LP doesn't just ratify its presidential nominee's choice of running mate. The presidential nominee is given speaking time to offer his thoughts on the VP nomination, but it's a competitive race of its own.

So, who's the ideal second half of Johnson/? 2012?

Some have suggested that Johnson may already have a pick in mind. Perhaps a wealthy running mate who can pump millions into advertising for the ticket, or a "big name" that Americans will recognize. If so, that could make things even more interesting. But if not, I have a suggestion.

Two more bits of conventional wisdom: First, that Johnson will put at least some emphasis on campaigning in New Mexico, where he served two terms as governor and can probably rack up an abnormally high vote percentage for a Libertarian presidential candidate. Second, that Johnson's position on marijuana legalization will be a big part -- perhaps too big, if the media decides it wants to use it to caricature him -- of his campaign.

With those two things in mind, I'd like to suggest that the ideal Johnson running mate would be a prominent marijuana legalization advocate from a large, non-"swing," state which is likely to have a big vote gap between President Obama and whomever the Republicans nominate, and where some sort of popular marijuana-related initiative is also on the ballot.

A state like, perhaps, California.

In polling so far, Obama beats the pants off any likely GOP presidential nominee in California. That minimizes "wasted vote" considerations: Libertarian-leaning Republicans are free to vote for Johnson, knowing that the GOP candidate doesn't have a chance anyway; Libertarian-leaning Democrats know that their party's candidate has it nailed down, so they're free to register a third party "protest vote" as well.

California is also likely to have a sweeping marijuana legalization bill, the Regulate Marijuana Like Wine initiative, on its November ballot.

A prominent California legalization advocate on the ballot next to Johnson, campaigning up and down the state all summer and fall, could increase turnout for both that initiative and the LP's presidential ticket. The voters who come out for one or the other would tend to support both.

So, do we know anyone like that? Why yes ... yes, we do.

Image via Wikipedia

Steve Kubby came within about 30 votes of the Libertarian Party's vice-presidential nomination last time, even against presidential nominee Bob Barr's endorsement of his opponent, Wayne Allyn Root (a mistake which probably put a five or six digit dent in Barr's November vote total; every time Root opened his mouth, the LP ticket hemorrhaged votes).

Internally to the LP, Kubby enjoys even more goodwill today than he did at that 2008 convention, if for no other reason than that he went balls-out to stop a convention walkout by the party's radical faction and hold the party together at a tough time. He could play a similar role this time. The radicals are suspicious of Johnson's more "centrist libertarian" orientation. One of their own in the second slot would go a long way toward allaying that suspicion.

Externally to the LP, Kubby's well-known in California and positively associated with the issue of marijuana legalization. His presence on the ticket would boost both the issue and the candidate, not only in California but elsewhere ... and since some of the legalization spotlight would be on him, that would free up Johnson to get his licks in on other issues.

Just something to think about.

Disclosures: Wow, where to start?

I'm no longer an LP member, no longer vote (I'm an anarchist) and have not endorsed any candidate for the LP's 2012 presidential or vice-presidential nomination. However, I've worked with R. Lee Wrights for more than a decade, consider him nothing short of a brother, think he's the candidate most properly reflective of what the LP supposedly stands for, and have done a little (very little) back-office consulting for his campaign.

Also, I was Steve Kubby's presidential campaign manager in 2008 and still believe the LP made a huge mistake in not nominating him to either position on its ticket. I've worked with Kubby on both business and political projects since then as well. And yes, I have discussed a vice-presidential candidacy with him, and would not be writing this post if his answer had been "not only no, but f&%k no."

BUT: Kubby himself had no input on this post; he won't even know it's coming until it's up; he has not "approved this message," as it were. Nobody paid me or otherwise enticed me to release this idea into the wild, nor do I expect, if Kubby decides to throw in for VP, to make any money from having suggested it. Any pre-nomination VP campaign work I might do for him would almost certainly be unpaid and volunteer, as has been the case for everyone else I've done little things for so far this election cycle.

It's a Hard Knock Blogging Life ...

2012-01-08T16:59:00.001-06:00

... but you can make it just a little bit easier.

Back in early December, when I decided to buckle down and start blogging regularly again, KN@PPSTER was averaging about 80 visits a day. That's crept up to about 240 visits a day (actually about 270, but about 30 of them are "traffic exchange" hits that I'm using for a specific purpose unrelated to my regular traffic). The low end of my goal is 1,000 visits a day. I'd actually like to get it up to 1,429 visits a day (10,000 visits a week).

And so, in my best Sally Struthers voice, I ask, "will you please help?" It's fast, it's easy, and it shouldn't add more than 30 seconds to the time you spend visiting KN@PPSTER.

Behold, a screen shot:

See the arrow labeled "1?" That little "share" whatsit it's pointing at appears at the bottom of every post here on KN@PPSTER. Hover over it, and you get a list of places to show off the post. Click on it, and you get an even long list a la the box indicated by arrow number "2."

Pick one and let'er rip. Tweet it. Digg it. Share it on Facebook. Bookmark it on Reddit. Give it some Google + juice.

Any or all of the above will help me get the word out. Your reward? Well, the more people seem to be interested in this blog, the more interested I'll remain in keeping it active. So it's really a question of whether or like reading KN@PPSTER enough to help me keep up my own enthusiasm for it. If so, thanks in advance.

Inadvertent Source Deprecation?

2012-01-08T12:49:00.001-06:00

NewsSquares is dramatically changing the way I hand-aggregate content for Rational Review News Digest.

I've tried using RSS readers and such in the past, but always ended up abandoning them because they just weren't very intuitive. I was always worried I'd missed something. So I just stuck with the method I've been using for more than a decade now (at RRND and before that at Freedom News Daily): Keeping folders full of bookmarks and making sure I directly visit every site I cover (about 90 of them), every day.

NewsSquares is a Chrome app (at least the version of it I use is) which interacts, I think, with Google Reader. For the sites it works with (which is most of the sites I cover), it seems to work flawlessly. With one glance, I can tell which sites have new content since my last visit. A click pulls up a list of the new stuff, after which I can have a closer look and, if warranted, break it open at the source in a new tab. I haven't been running a stopwatch, but I suspect it's saving me an hour a day or so.

The rub, though, is that "for the sites it works with" part. There are only a few, but some of them are sites I classify as very important in the "libertarian commentary roundup" scheme of things.

These sites fall into two distinct groups: Sites that just don't have RSS feeds, and sites that have RSS feeds which are incorrectly formatted or something, such that they either generate garbage, or throw a bunch of unrelated stuff at me, in NewsSquares.

Two of them are among the most popular libertarian sites on the Internet. In theory, they have separate RSS feeds for commentary, multimedia, events, etc., but in practice no matter which feed I choose, I get everything (and they have a lot of everything). That makes it harder than just visiting the sites, where the stuff I want is clearly segregated.

I can already feel those sites slipping just a little out of focus. When something gets harder to do relative to other things, people tend to do it less. I guess I'm going to have to go through those folders full of bookmarks, put all the "rogue" sites in one folder, and train myself to visit that folder every day, so that I'm not reducing the value of my publication to my readers by taking it easy.

I have to wonder how big a factor similar effects are elsewhere. Are web sites that don't work and play well with RSS losing a lot of traffic -- not just from direct readers, but from journalists who never notice them in research, etc. and therefore never link them -- because they don't work their way into various "feed reader" schemes?

And speaking of such schemes, a question for KN@PPSTER readers: If this blog was available as a nicely pre-formatted Android or iOS app, would you read it more? I'm asking because Rocket-in-Bottle, the same company that make NewsSquares, has a neat thing in beta -- Publish5 -- that I just used to make a KN@PPSTER Android app. It seems pretty cool, but I'm not interested in popping $25 to put it in the Android market (where I can't imagine making it anything but a "free download") if nobody wants it. Talk at me in comments about that.

[Update: As you were on the app thing. I misunderstood the procedure -- I will be getting the app directly, which means I can just make the apk files downloadable and not have to pay an Android Market fee. I did have to pay $19 for the app itself, but that seems a reasonable price, especially since I can update it even after it's in the field, and Publish5 will serve new versions to people who have the old ones. So -- KN@PPSTER on Android, coming in a week or so!]

The Exact Instant The Santorum "Surge" Ended ...

2012-01-08T01:00:00.001-06:00

Rick Santorum [h/t Donald Douglas @ American Power -- I tuned in late to the debate and missed this part]:

We have to have one law. We can't have someone married in one state and not married in another.

Problem solved:

Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. ... No State shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Any questions?

As of mid-2011, 53% of American voters supported ending marriage apartheid, and six states and the District of Columbia have now done so.

That trend will not reverse.

Within the lifetimes of most people my age (45), same-sex marriage will not only have been fully legally implemented by all 50 states and recognized by the federal government for tax purposes and such, but advocacy of turning back the clock on the matter will enjoy (and rightfully so) the same political cachet and public support as proposals to re-institute segregation of public water fountains by race or to accord US Senators the privilege of jus primae noctis in their home states.

Some of the other Republican candidates -- like most Democratic candidates -- can probably get away with pretending to oppose same-sex marriage in order to give the dwindling social conservative bloc a plausible excuse for voting for them. This year, anyway. By 2020, taking that side of the issue will be political cyanide for any presidential candidate, period.

Rick Santorum, on the other hand, obviously does oppose same-sex marriage, which means he has zero chance of winning independents, and therefore zero chance of being elected president. And enough Republican voters will figure that out in time to know that they have to pick someone else if they don't want to have zero chance at the White House too.

Desultory In-Progress Debate Notes

2012-01-07T21:02:00.019-06:00

9:01pm Central Time: Jesus Tap-Dancing Christ ... there are "major party" presidential candidates running on a platform of sending troops back into Iraq?

9:05pm: Obama wrapped up Iraq on the Bush timetable. He "surged" Afghanistan, amped up the drone war in Pakistan, launched a renewed covert war in Somalia, honchoed the takedown of bin Laden ... there's just no way to get around his "national security" flank from the hawk direction. But a bunch of these bozos are trying. As usual, the only one talking a lick of sense on foreign policy is Ron Paul.

9:07pm: Santorum notices that the Iranian people think America is cool -- then says what we need to do is keep trying to change that. Because the best way to overthrow an unfriendly regime is to do everything you can to keep its popular support level at the highest level possible.

9:13pm: Riffing on break commentary -- 53% of Americans support ending marriage apartheid. Republican candidates: "Fuck'em."

9:15pm: Newt Gingrich thinks that every issue is a "very big, very important topic." Ask him about his bunions and he'll roll out a plan for massive revisioning of NIH.

9:17pm: Mitt wants to get rid of all the "loopholes and deductions" that keep the poor politicians so destitute. Santorum wants to get rid of all the deductions except the ones that are actually there, so that it can be 1955 in Pennsylvania's factories again.

9:20pm: Mitt and taxes, sittin' in a tree ... Says we're "inches from not being a free economy any more." Because, you know, back in the days of Nixon's wage and price controls, things were so much freer.

9:21pm: Oh, shit, Paul's giving an economics lecture. Everything he's saying is absolutely right. He also sounds like he's about to scream "get off my lawn!" at any second.

9:23pm: That one guy from Texas, the other one, Rick somethin' or other, is flapping his gums. He's got the whole "get off my lawn" tone thing going, too. Someone plug in the shrill-meter.

9:24pm: Huntsman's glad someone's actually letting him speak this time. Mitt's rambling. He seems very much off his game tonight. He's worried he'll fall below 40% next Tuesday. He's right to be worried.

9:27pm: Newt thinks that Obama is a radical European socialist now. Quite a transformation from Kenyan anti-colonialist, huh? But now he's trying to make Romney into Obama, and I admit Romney looks more like Switzerland than Swaziland. Santorum looks ... lost.

9:28pm: Santorum will "use the language of bringing people together." As long as they're heterosexual and there's no contraception involved, of course.

9:30pm: Anonymous is ... China.

9:35pm: Huntsman: A trade war is a bad idea. Mitt: China will swerve first.

My partial impression (I came in way late): So far I'd say that Huntsman is picking up some points (that break into Chinese was gold), Santorum and Romney are cratering, Newt and Paul are holding their own, and Perry should have gone ahead and dropped out last Tuesday.

OK, wow, it's over. Or are there closing statements still to come? If that's it, I'm thinking the bloom came off Santorum's rose in a pretty big way already, but that the big loser was Romney. He sounded shrill and defensive, the whole time I was watching. Yes, it's over. Talking heads now. Buh bye.

A Question for Gary Johnson

2012-01-07T12:48:00.001-06:00

Image via WikipediaFollowers of third party political news are probably aware that on December 28, former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson abandoned his campaign for the Republican Party's 2012 presidential nomination and announced that he'll instead be seeking the nomination of the Libertarian Party.

Libertarian activists seem, for the most part, excited about this development, as well they should be. Cavils about carpet-bagging and bad branding ("the party of Republicans who can't find support in their own party") and such aside, it's probably a net plus that a former two-term governor thinks of the LP as a worthy vehicle for a presidential campaign.

But I have a question -- a question that Libertarian Party members and prospective campaign donors should be asking.

Johnson's presidential campaign committee ("Gary Johnson 2012 Inc."), like all other presidential campaign committees that have raised or spent more than $5,000, files quarterly reports with the Federal Elections Commission. The report for the 4th quarter of 2011 isn't due until the 15th, but the report for the 3rd quarter -- covering the period through the end of September -- shows the campaign with only $10,882 dollars on hand ... and debts of $240,067.

I'm just guessing here, but I suspect that the campaign's financial situation got worse, not better, in the 4th quarter. If I'm right, then we're looking at a campaign somewhere in the general neighborhood of $250k in the red.

Who's going to pay off that debt?

If Johnson (who's independently wealthy) is willing to get his campaign back to the zero point out of his own pocket, well, that's great.

If not, then Libertarians are being asked to dig their presumptive front-runner out of a campaign finance hole he dug over in GOP-land, before they even begin to finance things like television advertising and putting the candidate on the road to get his message out.

$250k may not be huge over on the "major party" side of things, where presidential campaign expenses are now running into the hundreds of millions of dollars. The Libertarian Party's recent presidential candidates, on the other hand, have run campaigns in the $1-2 million dollar range, against which $250k is a pretty big deal.

I've seen some snarky remarks around the blogosphere about the fact that the rest of the Libertarian presidential field hasn't raised a whole lot of money. But I suspect that each and every one of those others has a better bottom line than Johnson does at the moment.

Raising money's important. Spending money's important too. But especially important is doing more of the former than the latter.

Something to think about, Libertarians.

Today's Inquiry into English Usage and Basic Mathematics ...

2012-01-07T09:14:00.000-06:00

This one's from the New York Times ...

And as the Pentagon confronts the prospect of cutting its budget by about 10 percent over the next decade ...

... but you can probably find it in just about any newspaper article discussing the upcoming "budget cuts."

So, just how deep are these horrendous, army-killing cuts?

Well, if "sequestration" goes as forecast, the federal government's non-war military spending will only increase by 10% instead of by 18% between 2013 and 2021.

No, that is not a typo. The "cuts" are not cuts in actual spending, they're cuts in the previously projected growth rate of that spending.

Most federal government spending proceeds on rails due to something called "baseline budgeting." The "baseline" is the previous year's spending. Under "baseline budgeting," that previous year's "baseline," plus an increase based on a formula, happens automatically unless Congress decides to tinker with it.

This "sequestration" thing -- triggered by Congress's inability to agree on "deficit reduction" targets last year -- imposes across-the-board reductions in that rate of automatic growth of spending, not in spending as such.

Neat trick, huh? Your congressman can brag to you that he's cutting spending at this morning's town hall, then -- this afternoon, over cognac and cigars -- brag to your local defense contractor or other corporate welfarist that he's increasing that same spending.

Hint: He's lying to one of you. And it's not the guy pouring the cognac and lighting the cigars.

Newt the Inevitable

2012-01-06T11:38:00.002-06:00

Image via WikipediaYes, the Senator from United Health Services is still "surging" [hat tip -- Politico]. Rick Santorum raised $2 million in the two days following his Iowa caucus victory (and it was a victory, even if he came up a few votes shorter than the presumptive GOP front-runner who's been relentlessly pursuing the presidency for six years now). He's on the hustings in New Hampshire, launching TV ad buys and direct mail in South Carolina, doubling down on the hardcore social conservative message that endeared him to Catholic and evangelical Christian voters in Iowa, even at college events he committed to when nobody gave him a snowball's chance in hell, where it doesn't play well.

But it's all for nought. He's unelectable, and even his biggest fans know it. Independents can't stomach his Torquemada approach to social issues, and even the most hardened "values voters" will blanch as the record of his K Street hijinks continues to roll out.

The only real impact the "Santorum surge" will have on this race is hastening the doom of Mitt Romney, who at this point looks set to leave South Carolina with an 0-for-3 record of convincing victories, possibly even dipping below 40% in New Hampshire, where he should have had a shot at an outright majority.

Image via Wikipedia

Enter Newt Gingrich.

What's that you say? Gingrich hasn't won anything so far either? But no one expected him to, my dear. And yet he hangs on like a bulldog, absorbing every blow without a blink and tearing relentlessly at Romney's bleeding flanks as the contest lurches south toward his lifelong stomping grounds.

Oh, yes, he's an ethics-challenged, revolving door, ward-heeling grifter too. But we've known that for a long time, and we're used to it -- it's just now coming out on Santorum, who still possesses a reputation of moral rectitude subject to shattering with recitations of his venality. Not only is Gingrich's record not a big deal any more -- rivers under the bridge, so to speak -- it may even be a strength.

Accompany me on a short journey to the days of yesteryear, when the "failed governor of a small southern state" got himself elected President -- twice! -- in the face of morals accusations that made him out to be little short of a modern-day Caligula. Remember that guy? The one who laughed off Gennifer Flowers and went with "it's the economy, stupid?"

You may remember another guy, too. A guy who worked his way up from backbencher to House Minority Whip by "nationalizing" his reputation as a partisan fighter, and who, two years after that "failed governor's" first presidential victory, honchoed a successful "national campaign" to garner the GOP its first House majority in 40 years (he's the only GOP contender who can plausibly claim to have run a successful national campaign). A guy who hasn't lost an election since 1976. Who walked out of Congress on his own after a bout of backstabbing by his co-partisans ("I'm willing to lead but I'm not willing to preside over people who are cannibals") instead of being sent home by his state's voters like Rick Santorum was in 2006.

Gingrich is teflon. He's immunized. Everyone already knows he's a sonofabitch. That frees him to relentlessly focus on making himself our sonofabitch.

So far, the GOP nomination race has been a desultory bar fight. Now it's developing into a serious boxing match, and Gingrich is the only man in the ring who can absorb body blows early, then turn around and keep delivering them as the thing drags on, until he's the only one left standing.

The polls aren't showing that yet, but they will. Once Romney's been dispatched, Gingrich runs the GOP primary table. You can write it down.

They See Netflix Rollin', They Hatin'

2012-01-06T01:42:00.002-06:00

Sigh ... here we go again.

Those of us old enough to remember the debut of the VRC also remember that In The Beginning, moviemakers tried to get a hundred bucks or so per tape. Thus was born the video rental industry, which they weren't able to kill even by bringing the sell price down into the $20 range.

Now we've got streaming video -- not just Netflix, but Amazon, et. al -- and the boneheads still think they can find a way to force us to keep buying pieces of Kevlar at $19.99 a pop. They push the streaming license dates back further and further, they put up barriers to rental services getting the DVDs, etc.

They'll keep doing this until it starts costing them money and market share -- quite possibly when Netflix et. al say "screw you guys -- we're going into the content creation business ourselves in a big way."

Then the polarity will reverse, and they'll be bidding the price down to see who can get their blockbuster pictures on Netflix first, because the eyeballs tend to shift toward the newest stuff. With trailers for their upcoming releases attached, because the big screen will always put a certain number of asses in a certain number of seats and that's still where they hope to make the nut.

I hope Netflix drives a hard bargain with them, too. "Sure, Mr. Sony guy, we'll stream your little movie thingie, with your ads ... if the price is right."
Image via Wikipedia
When Netflix forked their business into separate streaming and DVD plans, we reassessed our watching habits, kept the streaming and dropped the DVD. If we absolutely, positively must have something that isn't available on Netflix streaming yet, we hit a nearby Redbox or Blockbuster kiosk, or occasionally use iTunes. It's quicker than waiting on the US Snail. I'm guessing Netflix drops physical media entirely in the next couple of years or so.

Buy a DVD? Only if it's something we know we'll watch over and over and we happen across it in the $5 bin. Otherwise, it's just so ... 2001.

Breaking: Obama Loses New Hampshire Democratic Primary

2012-01-05T10:11:00.002-06:00

Yes, really.

New Hampshire election law required presidential primary candidates to submit delegate slates to the Secretary of State last November. President Barack Obama didn't bother.

Oops -- no backsies!

The beneficiary? Darcy G. Richardson.

Irony meter: Richardson managed the 1988 campaign of US Senator Eugene McCarthy, who brought President Lyondon Baines Johnson to grief in New Hampshire in 1968.

Here's the Richardson campaign's press release:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 5, 2012
Contact: Darcy G. Richardson
(904) 874-2855
darcyrichardson@comcast.net

HAS OBAMA ALREADY LOST NEW HAMPSHIRE?

For obvious reasons, most news coverage of the 2012 New Hampshire presidential primaries focuses on the Republican contest. With rare exceptions, incumbent presidents seeking re-election enjoy a nearly insuperable advantage in their party's nomination process.

So it's business as usual in the Granite State, with only one candidate in the Democratic running. Or maybe not quite so usual -- because that one candidate isn't President Barack Obama.

Wait ... what?

Section 655:51 of the New Hampshire Election Code required candidates for their party's presidential nomination to submit slates of national convention delegates to the Secretary of State no later than November 18th, 2011. Only two Democrats did so, and one -- Aldous C. Tyler -- has since dropped out and endorsed the other, author and political historian Darcy Richardson.

At first blush, that means Obama appears to have surrendered New Hampshire's national convention votes for his re-nomination.

Unlike the incumbent Democrat, fifteen of the thirty candidates running in New Hampshire's crowded Republican primary on Tuesday, including all of the major GOP candidates, filed full or nearly complete slates of delegates and alternate delegates.

"I'm sure this was merely an oversight by President Obama's re-election team," says Richardson. "Like a bloated bureaucracy, in a billion-dollar campaign like President Obama's -- one that's literally drenched in Wall Street money -- it's easy to imagine that the left hand doesn't always know what the right hand is doing."

Not that he's complaining, mind you. Richardson, 56, of Jacksonville, Florida, launched his anti-war, anti-Wall-Street, pro-Occupy campaign last fall after his pleas to more well-known progressives to run -- former Labor Secretary Robert Reich topped his list -- fell on deaf ears.

"The President has very obviously forgotten what the Democratic Party stands for," he says. "So I can't say I'm really surprised that he forgot he needs the help of real flesh-and-blood Democrats to get re-elected as well. I haven't."

Richardson is on the Democratic primary ballot in several other states, including Missouri, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Texas. "I'm happy to take all the delegates he wants to leave on the table," says the long-shot challenger. "We'll be waiting to have a talk with him when he gets to Charlotte next September."

-30-
about 375 words

Darcy Richardson 2012 campaign web site:
http://darcy2012.com

Four Chrome Tools for Bloggers

2012-01-04T19:37:00.001-06:00

Image via WikipediaI write this post advisedly, knowing that each blogger has a different style, different needs, and different tolerance for different gizmos. Over the years I've test-driven various apps and add-ons, and frankly most of them are more trouble than they're worth. Here are four -- formatted, not necessarily exclusively, as Chrome extensions or apps -- that I'm finding useful now that I do most of my web work in Chrome.

Zemanta

Third party blog editors are usually a pain in the keister. I've tried editors like ScribeFire and always end up abandoning them, not least because I use customized fields, etc. in WordPress over at Rational Review News Digest. Zemanta isn't an editor, precisely. It's an add-on that (relatively unobtrusively) improves your default blog post editor (in Blogger and Wordpress, and perhaps others) with several useful tools -- related images, complete with usage/license information, related stories from around the web or from a database of sources you can specify yourself, and so forth. It's not just for Chrome -- it works with your browser of choice.

My only complaint with Zemanta is that it requires you to use the WYSIWYG editing mode, and I prefer to just hand-code my HTML as I go. Which is why this is the first blog post that I'm doing completely in Zemanta. It takes some getting used to. But it's worth it. I think.

After The Deadline

From the folks at Automattic (the guys who brought us Wordpress!), After the Deadline is an extensive spelling, grammar and composition checker. Invoke it with a (user-configurable) keyboard macro and it finds and highlights not only spelling mistakes but double negatives, passive voice and other writing no-nos that you may or may not want to correct. I don't always take its advice, but I'm always glad to have it. Once again, not Chrome-only, but that's where I use it.

Word and Character Count

Bhagwad Jal Park wrote Word and Character Count -- his first Chrome extension -- specifically so that he could give up Firefox and move to Chrome. And I'm very glad he did! That cool little "W" sitting next to my address bar saves me a trip to wordcounttool.com, and a bunch of of copying and pasting, whenever I'm editing something to length (C4SS op-eds, for example). Indispensable.

NewsSquares

It's still in beta, but Rocket-in-Bottle's NewsSquares is already changing the way I keep up with news and commentary sources for fun and profit -- at RRND, here at KN@PPSTER, and just in general.

Instead of folders full of bookmarks to open in tabs, I've got a screen (launched as a Chrome app) full of little squares, one per site I need to keep up with. Each square has a number representing the unread articles since my last visit. Click on the square and the article titles scroll across the bottom of my screen so that I can click'em, check'em out in summary, and launch the ones that bear further inspection in new tabs.

It isn't perfect -- some sites don't play well with it, presumably due to its reliance on RSS and integration with Google Reader -- but it's definitely a time-saver. I get to spend more time reading and less time finding things to read.

Talk About Kicking a Man While He's Down ...

2012-01-04T13:52:00.002-06:00

Romney receives the kiss of death:

Republican Senator John McCain, who lost the White House race to President Barack Obama in 2008, endorsed Mitt Romney on Wednesday to take on the embattled incumbent in November.

The idea is that it helps Romney in New Hampshire. But if Romney needs help in New Hampshire -- right next door to the state he governed for four years -- well, he's beyond help. And nationally, McCain's endorsement is an albatross.

Loser by Beck on Grooveshark

Meanwhile, it looks like Romney isn't going to catch a break from Newt Gingrich either. Contra the conventional wisdom that he should perhaps abandon the Granite State field to Romney and focus on South Carolina, the Manchester Union Leader's endorsed candidate is apparently opting for the scorched earth strategy.

Coming Soon: The Second Ascent of Newt Gingrich

2012-01-04T11:18:00.002-06:00

This looks like it was captured with a webcam in front of a TV set or something, but it was the only YouTube clip I could find of the scene I want to use to set up this post:

The situation isn't precisely analogous, but it's a good start. The thing to take away from it is that Mitt Romney can't win the New Hampshire primary next week. By "can't win," I mean that even the most crushing victory there will get him a yawn, but failing to pull away from the pack will just highlight his vulnerability.

As I noted in my Iowa wrap-up last night, Romney is the wounded gazelle. He entered this presidential race as the presumptive GOP frontrunner, and after six years of campaigning in Iowa, he "won" that state's caucus -- if the returns from Iowa really are finally final -- by a whopping eight votes, polling almost exactly as well in first place this year as he did in second place four years ago.

There's a smidgen of a chance that he'll take his big fall in New Hampshire: Instead of romping, or even credibly edging out his opponents, ending up in a three-way dogpile like he just did with Rick Santorum and Ron Paul in Iowa. If that happens, Newt Gingrich is more likely than Santorum to be the third guy in the mix.

The more likely scenario is that he ekes out a barely credible New Hampshire victory (anything less than 40%), then comes to grief in South Carolina (I know just the town for his primary night party there).

Who's going to bring him to a halt in South Carolina?

I know a lot of my readers want very much for Ron Paul to win the GOP presidential nomination. Sorry, I still don't see it happening. Like it or not, the bulk of Republicans still aren't with him on foreign policy, and the social conservatives don't trust his "states' rights" approach to issues they agree with him on. He does best in smaller states where a grass roots ground game and dedicated activist base pump him up versus turnout ... and even in those states, he's not winning outright. He's not going to win South Carolina. He's not going to win Florida. Dream of a deep enough split to get to a brokered convention if you want, but he's certainly not going to arrive in Tampa Bay with a majority of delegates.

Rick Santorum ran a hell of a campaign in Iowa (contrary to the claims of some Paulistinians who are screaming "fraud!"). He spent most of his time there, and most of his money there. He visited all 99 counties, and he had 250 volunteer county and precinct workers. And as a 100% Catholic candidate, he had the advantage of an electorate that's 23% Catholic. South Carolina is 7% Catholic. Absent a miracle of some sort, it's all downhill from here for Santorum. He doesn't have the money to buy South Carolina, and he doesn't have time to build the kind of ground game there that he ran in Iowa.

Michele Bachmann "suspended" her campaign about the time I started writing this post, and after her Iowa finish she didn't have the gas to get to South Carolina in fighting shape anyway.

It looks like Rick Perry's still in, but he's run a lackluster campaign so far, so much so that the pundit buzz continues to be that he's just basically burning money to make work for a raft of consultants who weren't able to get on payroll with other campaigns.

I'm not ready to write Perry off completely just yet, but the "Mitt is too moderate but I can't stomach Paul" vote is about to start coalescing either around Perry or around Gingrich, and Gingrich has the advantage.

The next two big primaries are in South Carolina and Florida, southern states adjacent to Gingrich's native Georgia. If he shuts Perry down there, it's going to be tough for the Texan to catch a break -- next comes the Nevada caucus, where Romney and Paul (and maybe Jon Huntsman, if he's still playing at this) will suck any anti-Gingrich air out of Perry's efforts.

By Super Tuesday, I expect the three remaining candidates who remain in the contest in anything but name to be Gingrich, Romney and Paul, with Gingrich in a clear lead for the nomination.

Iowa Caucus Predictions: Hot Washup

2012-01-04T00:39:00.001-06:00

Well, there you have it: My caucus predictions were off in key respects.

I got the top three (Santorum, Romney, Paul) right, but not in the right order, or within 3 percentage points of each candidate's actual performance. It looks at the moment like I just about pegged Gingrich and Perry, and gave Bachmann and Huntsman more than their due (I did get everything below the top three in the right order as well).

Tonight's big winner, of course, is Rick Santorum. Last time I looked, he was five votes ahead of Mitt Romney. Even if that changes, and even if he ends up technically placing second, he radically outperformed the expectations, as of a month ago, of all but his most devoted supporters.

Ron Paul's a winner in an important sense too. He held the lead at one point, he carried 17 of Iowa's 99 counties (the same number of counties as Mitt Romney), he finished in the top tier, he outperformed his 2008 run, and he did it all in a record high turnout caucus in good weather (both of those factors tend to diminish the "my supporters are dedicated activists" advantage). His campaign and his supporters will be nearly as energized by this outcome as they would have been by a win, and he may be able to manage it again, or even move up a notch to second place, in New Hampshire.

The huge loser -- even if he makes good that five-vote difference and technically beats Santorum -- is Mitt Romney. He's been campaigning in Iowa for six years, he's been the presumptive national front-runner thus far ... and yet he wasn't able to improve on his 2008 Iowa performance as a percentage of the vote. He is a limping gazelle, and there are lions waiting to take him down for good in South Carolina.

The 25-delegate question, of course, is which lion will gorge on him. I've got some thoughts on that (okay, okay, it's Gingrich) but they'll wait for another post.

Hot Corn, Cold Corn, Bring Along That Dummy Jon

2012-01-03T10:33:00.000-06:00

"They pick corn in Iowa," said Republican presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman from the Granite State, dismissing his anticipated single-digit performance in Iowa's caucus on Tuesday, "and pick presidents here in New Hampshire."

Iowans may take that bon mot as an insult, but it's really a compliment of the highest order.

From Iowa's 92,600 farms (according to the US Department of Agriculture) springs forth 19% of America's corn, 17% of its soybeans, 30% of its pork, and 14% of its eggs.

Laid alongside such bounty, of what conceivable worth are the political aspirations of a sniveling little grifter like Jon Huntsman?

He's spent his entire life, apart from seven years holding down a sinecure in his family's corporation to burnish his image as a "businessman," in politics. While Iowans keep themselves busy producing 19% of America's corn, Huntsman's life revolves around schemes to seize and dispose of 19% -- or more -- of everything those Iowans, and other Americans, create or earn.

They say politics is a dirty business. They're wrong. It's dirty, but it's not a business. At least not a legitimate one, like picking corn.

They say politics is a blood sport, but that's not true either (unless you consider professional "wrestling" a sport). Huntsman's really no different than the other presidential candidates glad-handing their way across Iowa and New Hampshire this week. Every one of them thinks exactly the same way as Huntsman about the yokels in "fly-over country." They just won't say it, because they're not at 2% in the Iowa presidential polls.

Politics is a scheme, a scam, a con, a fraud. It's the mechanism through which men like Jon Huntsman hope to convince you that they can handle your affairs for you better than you can handle those affairs yourself -- for a price, which they'll extract at gunpoint and spend on chains to wrap around you, the better to keep you locked into that rotten deal forever after.

As we find ourselves engulfed in yet another quadrennial presidential contest, keep a couple of things in mind:

Every cab driver, every janitor, every burger-flipper, every corn or cotton picker across the fruited plain does more, every day, to make the lives of everyone around them better, happier, more rewarding than the whole raft of politicians hectoring them for their votes will do in a thousand lifetimes.

Every creator, every investor, every entrepreneur, every businessman who actually makes the things we need and offers the services we use -- as opposed to those sorry specimens who plot with politicians to get over through government privilege instead of honest effort -- is a walking rebuke to the Jon Huntsmans of the world.

Think about that while you watch the 10-month "wrestling" match to come. Ask yourself if watching these scoundrels work each other with folding chairs and spit fake blood all over each other for most of another year is really worth the price of the ticket.

This is not a Sponsored Post

2012-01-03T09:58:00.000-06:00

Apparently Google pranged its own Chrome browser's SEO by paying for promotional posts that fell under its own "low-quality content" guidelines.

Well, hey, I'm here to help. Google's not paying me anything to tell you that Chrome is da bomb.

It's fast, it has a very nice "store" for native or linkable apps, and its "isolated tabs" feature -- if one site crashes it doesn't take your whole browser down -- probably saves me two hours a month in restart/restore time.

Chrome hasn't completely caught up with Firefox yet in terms of extensions and such, but hey, Firefox had a long head start.

It's my default browser. I sometimes keep Firefox open for a couple of things I want to have handy but don't want in my face, but 99% of what I do on the web, I do in Chrome. I suspect I'll use the Chrome OS eventually, too.

Liam runs Chrome in Windoze, and likes it too.

You can download Chrome at this link.

So there ya go, Google. No charge.

Gingrich Begins Positioning Himself for Veep

2012-01-03T02:07:00.000-06:00

Gingrich punches up at Ron Paul, more gently poking -- even tacitly endorsing -- Mitt Romney:

I think if you really stop and say to yourself, can you imagine [Paul] as president given his beliefs and his system, I think the answer is no. You couldn't imagine the American people doing that. ... Mitt Romney is a serious person and as a serious person he has some responsibility to set a decent standard ...

If you've followed Gingrich's career, you know there's nothing he takes more seriously than being "a serious person," unless maybe it's being "the idea guy" (the conflict between the two aspirations has been a problem for him). If he throws that word your way, he's either grooming you as a protege, or pitching himself to you as one. Saying that about Romney right before the Iowa caucus is essentially saying "we both know I'm out of the running; let's do lunch and talk about our future together -- soon."

New Sync Option: SugarSync

2012-01-02T11:38:00.001-06:00

I don't think I'll ever stop singing the praises of Dropbox, my go-to sync application. If you don't have it, get it.

But, Dropbox isn't the only sync option out there. I'm trying out SugarSync right now, and it seems to work well. I'll never give up my Dropbox, but having more storage space and more backup redundancy can't hurt, right?

Same basic principle: Any files you save in designated folders on your hard drive are automagically backed up online and ported to analogous folders on all other computers that you register with the service.

So if, for example, you're working on a document on your desktop (and save it in your SugarSync folder), you can get up, walk out the door with your laptop bag, and have that document available as soon as you start your machine elsewhere ... instead of having to email it to yourself, burn it to a CD, save it on a thumb drive, whatever.

And, of course, if one of your hard drives takes a dirt nap and has to be replaced, getting your important files back is as simple as setting up SugarSync on the new drive. Got a new computer? Same deal (I used Dropbox to pretty much instantly port a bunch of my files from the old Mac to the new Mac; easy peasy).

SugarSync gives you five gigabytes free, and more for referring new users (ahem). Paid plans available for those of you with really big data sync needs.

Iowa Caucus Predictions

2012-01-02T02:00:00.001-06:00

Because it would just be chicken to wait until any closer to make them.

My predictions:

Paul -- 24%
Santorum -- 22%
Romney -- 20%
Gingrich -- 13%
Perry -- 9%
Bachmann -- 9%
Huntsman -- 3%

Plus or minus 1% on each, of course, with the minuses more likely toward the bottom half of the field.

The RealClearPolitics polling averages for the last 10 days show Mitt Romney and Ron Paul in tight -- within 1.1% of each other and closing in around 20% each -- and Paul gaining (with Rick Santorum surging up toward them). That can only be bad news for Romney.

The caucus rules for Republicans aren't as beneficial toward "activist-enthusing" candidates as the Democratic rules are (I thought they were, but Jake Porter corrected me on that awhile back), but it's still not just "walk up and fill out a ballot." You have to listen to some speechifying, etc. before voting. That benefits Paul (and Santorum) as well. Their supporters would walk six miles in the snow, uphill both ways, then wait in line for a month, to support them. A large portion of the Romney crowd will have trouble deciding whether to spend the evening at home with some popcorn, watching Lifetime^® movies or hang out for more than 20 minutes or so for their guy.

Unfortunately for Paul and Santorum, it's not supposed to snow in Iowa on Tuesday. Matter of fact, after starting cold in the morning, it's supposed to pop above freezing for awhile. That reduces the "my supporters are like those bare-chested, purple-painted guys you see at every one of their teams' football games, even the exhibition games in Angkor Wat" advantage some, but doesn't eliminate it.

Of course, I could have this all wrong. It's happened before. The only thing I'm reasonably sure of is that Mitt Romney isn't going to come out of Iowa with anything that looks like a convincing victory. And hell, I could be wrong about that too.

Addendum: Could anyone have possibly predicted the "Santorum surge" a month ago? No? Actually, The Other McCain did ... and he's a little miffed that nobody writing about it now is acknowledging that. Thought I'd mention it both by way of "credit where credit is due" and because at my level of blog traffic a link back here from there is a sort of scale model "Instalanche" (which I like to encourage).

But Doesn't the Federal Government Do This About Every Second and a Half?

2012-01-02T00:06:00.000-06:00

North Carolina: Lexington man charged with making a fake $1 million bill and trying to spend it.

Just sayin' ...

Is Obama Campaigning for Paul in Iowa?

2012-01-01T14:52:00.002-06:00

US president Barack Obama signed the Police State Enabling Act ... er, "National Defense Authorization Act" ... on ~~Friday~~ Saturday (thanks to Mark Laythorpe for catching that).

Um ... why?

Per the White House web site, the bill was presented to the president on December 21.

From that date, he had 10 days, excluding Sundays, to either sign it or "pocket veto" it (since Congress is not in session, not signing it within 10 days is an "automatic" veto; if they were in session, it would become law without his signature if he didn't actively veto it).

I could see him signing it immediately, to get it done and have it over with.

I could also see him waiting the full 10 days to express displeasure, but not displeasure strong enough to warrant a veto.

Instead, he signed it on ~~Friday~~ Saturday -- more than a week after passage but with ~~three~~ two days left before the deadline.

One obvious reason to sign it on ~~Friday~~ Saturday was to insert it into the weekend news cycle. But is there any particular reason why he would want to do that?

My pet theory is that he thinks the news coverage will benefit Ron Paul -- the only Republican candidate whom anyone really believes has a problem with the "indefinite detention" language in the NDAA -- in Tuesday's Iowa GOP caucus, and that he also thinks Paul doing well in Iowa helps Obama himself defeat the eventual Republican nominee next November.

The Obligatory First Post of 2012

2012-01-01T13:51:00.000-06:00

Missing the first day of January would be a bad start toward fulfilling my resolution of averaging a blog post a day in 2012, wouldn't it?

Unfortunately, I'm just not seeing that much exciting to blog about today. So I guess I'll just throw out a few trivialities.

The Iowa Republican caucus? Yawn. I won't be surprised if Ron Paul finishes first, second, third or fourth. I won't be surprised if Gingrich finishes second, third or lower, or if Santorum finishes as high as third. I will be surprised if Romney doesn't make at least second place, if Gingrich wins, if Santorum lands first or second place, or if Paul places worse than fourth. As you can tell, none of these surprise/non-surprise markers resolve into real predictions of note. Frankly, I'm already bored to tears with this election. Maybe that will change.

Last night was the first night in nearly two months that I didn't sleep outdoors in a tent (click on the "tent living" label if you're interested in why). New Year celebrations kept me up until the wee hours, and in an altered mental state to boot. Also while it's not quite a "resolution," my intent is to see if I can sleep outdoors every night in 2012, so I figured one last hurrah on an indoor bed made sense at this juncture.

For New Year's Eve family movie night, the first selection was Cowboys and Aliens. Not bad. I didn't expect to like it much, but I always enjoy Daniel Craig. Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde, Clancy Brown et. al didn't disappoint either. Doesn't go on my "favorites" shelf or anything, but I'd watch it again. After that, we tried Across the Universe. I lost interest maybe a third of the way through. Interesting concept, but just didn't hold together well. We also rented R.E.D., but never got to it.

OK, you can go back to being bored with something else now.

Happy New Year

2011-12-31T18:05:00.001-06:00

My demeanor may alter during tonight's celebrations, such that blogging would be contra-indicated. Or maybe not -- hard to know in advance, but you know how these party scenarios go. Sorry I can't proffer more details (monition dictates mere allusion), but I just wanted to get my "Happy New Year!" out atcha while it's still safe (relatively speaking) for me to approach a keyboard. Enjoy it, and be safe.

[update: It went very well -- an ecstatic New Year, to all of you - TLK]

A Weakness in the "Small Batch" Manufacturing Paradigm?

2011-12-31T11:25:00.001-06:00

I'm a huge fan of the changes described in Kevin Carson's The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto.

I love the fact that technology is enabling things like the re-localization of manufacture and a "small batch" ethos that lets people get something a lot closer to what they want instead of just having to settle for whatever one-size-fits-all model some megacorp produced a billion of.

If there's a weakness there, I think it looks something like this [hat tip -- Judy Morris].

Fisker has built only 239 units of its 2012 Karma hybrid car, and is recalling them all because of a possible fire risk from coolant leaks.

Yes, the advantages of product continuity, economies of scale, etc. are over-rated in some important respects. But producing large quantities of a product that's altered incrementally does lend itself to gathering more data from which problems can be detected and predicted.

Just as a ferinstance, as of 2010, Ford had sold more than 2.3 million Focuses over a 12-year period. Presumably real-world-experience information gathered from each previous year's model (and over the history of its predecessor, the Escort) was used to improve the current one.

When you've only made 239 of a car, and only put 50 of those on the road, there's a lot less specific data to generalize and improve from.

And what if the actual build of the car is done not by "repeat the same action over and over" assembly line workers, but by the actual customers; and not at one facility, but at one of a number of "micro-factories," as with the ultra-cool Local Motors Rally Fighter? It seems that would make it a lot harder to reach a determination along the lines of "ah, that's what's causing those breakdowns -- we should change the design to call for x pounds, instead of y pounds, of torque on that bolt." Because you really have no way of knowing if your customer who built his car from your kit actually put x pounds of torque on the bolt, do you?

Then again, if you only produce 239 cars, I guess you don't have to worry about recalling 3.8 million at one whack, do you? So if problems are more likely to go undetected/unpredicted in early design/testing, they're also less widespread and easier to correct when you do detect them.

And the smaller the batch and/or more bespoke the final product, the more it's a case of people getting what they actually want instead of what some bureaucratic suitie in Detroit decided they should have. Which, I think, goes a long way toward balancing out increased risk of undetected/unpredicted flaws. Especially since the Big Guys haven't actually eliminated that risk, and in at least some cases seem to have just factored it in as a risk worth taking versus the bottom line.

Dropbox gets even more useful

2011-12-31T10:33:00.002-06:00

I remain a fan of Dropbox. It's the sync tool that's never failed me yet. Save stuff in my Dropbox folder on any computer ... BAM! ... it's there on any other computer when I'm looking for it.

Now there's a new tool for Dropbox that looks pretty cool: Dropbox Automator [hat tip -- TechCrunch].

Dropbox Automator lets you set up "recipes" for handling files you save in your Dropbox folders. For example, you could tell it that any file saved in a folder labeled "documents" should be converted to PDF or uploaded to your Google Docs account. Or that any picture you save in a folder labeled "pix" should be uploaded to your Flickr account.

Not sure how I'll use it myself, but if you have tasks of that sort as part of a regular routine, it should be a time-saver.

Cool

2011-12-31T08:51:00.000-06:00

Cold, even.

Two guys are trying to cross Antarctica without a support team, dragging everything they need with them. They're halfway there.

On their last outing, they kayaked from Australia to New Zealand.

What's next? Scale Everest, hang-glide from that summit to the summit of K2, and kick Chuck Norris's ass?

When Facebook Hands You Lemons ...

2011-12-30T20:34:00.001-06:00

... HootSuite makes for pretty good lemonade (yes, that is an affiliate link -- I get a commission if you decide to go with their "pro" options, which may be the case if you're all about analytics and such, or use your social networks in a team setting; I'm using the free version and it does what I need it to do).

So, have you been caught in Facebook's "Timeline" hell yet? I got sucked into it myself. Don't like it much. Prettier in some ways than the last iteration of Facebook, but also more complicated and apparently it zapped my existing display/privacy settings in favor of some random hash. And while I've found some theoretical ways of backing out and getting back to "Old Facebook," they're complicated and I can't seem to find the stuff they tell me to look for.

That's what pushed me to take a second look at HootSuite. I registered there awhile back and it looked pretty cool, but I usually don't adopt multi-tool "dashboards" without some kind of compelling reason. My Facebook profile suddenly and irreversibly looking like MySpace on a bad day is a compelling reason.

HootSuite lets you put all your social media streams on one page (and in one browser tab), organized the way you like, with internal (and very arrangeable/configurable) tabbing to keep things straight. You can post to any or all of those streams, and even schedule posts in advance.

Right now I've got Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn plugged into the dashboard. Very nice. I haven't used LinkedIn much before; maybe I will now that it's sort of in my face a bit. Everything's neat, organized, accessible. I can tell what's on my damn Facebook wall, which is nice. The main network that's missing (from my perspective) is Diaspora. A little Googling tells me that they're working on that.

Anyway, give it a try. If you use social networks very much, this will probably make it easier. If nothing else, you're not running three or more apps or browser tabs to keep up with the various sites.

[Update: Ooh, I just noticed another cool thing in Hootsuite. I can turn any Facebook thread into its own stream/tab, so that I don't have to hunt for it when I want to catch up with it a little later. That's nice - TLK]

English! Do You Speak it, M#!)%er?!?

2011-12-30T14:24:00.000-06:00

Nick Gillespie brings up the question of state-to-state "reciprocity" in victim disarmament arrangements at Hit & Run.

The instant case involves a Tennessee woman, licensed to carry concealed in Tennessee, who made a good-faith effort to check her gun at the 9/11 Memorial in New York and got dragged off in handcuffs.

Here's where Gillespie goes off the rails:

Assuming New York's and the city's laws pass constitutional muster ...

But there's simply no reasonable argument that they do pass constitutional muster.

Other people have done grammatical breakdowns and other analyses of the US Constitution's Second Amendment, and I'm not claiming mine is original. But I do claim that it conforms to both the original intent of the amendment's authors, and to anything resembling a common sense reading.

To wit:

The money shot clause in the Second Amendment reads "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

That clause was not casually written. It is clearly and beyond any reasonable doubt universal in application to all levels of government.

If the framers had intended only to forbid the US Congress to pass "gun control" laws, they'd have phrased it the same way as they did in the First Amendment ("Congress shall make no law ...").

If the framers had intended to leave open the question of whether gun rights inhere in "the people" or powers to regulate the keeping and bearing of arms devolved to "the states," they'd have done exactly that (just as they did in the Tenth Amendment).

The Second Amendment clearly recognizes the right to keep and bear arms as a right of "the people."

The Second Amendment clearly forbids any infringement of that right. Not just infringement from Washington. Not just infringement from Albany. Not just infringement from New York City Hall. Any infringement, period. With whipped cream and a cherry on top.

Nor do bizarre arguments that the US Constitution generally binds only the federal, and not the state, governments hold any water. Article I, Section 10 imposes a raft of restrictions on the states, and Article IV imposes a number of requirements on same.

Speaking of Article IV, if the US government took sections 2 ("The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States") and 4 ("The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government"), New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg would be busy making big rocks into little rocks at Fort Leavenworth -- or perhaps offering a bodily demonstration of pendulum action -- right now.

But what really bugs me to no end is that anyone writing for Reason needs to be told any of this.

For a Limited Time ...

2011-12-30T11:01:00.004-06:00

... probably 24 hours ...

I'm selling my ebook, Roulette for the Leisure Gambler, 3rd edition (normally $4.97), for the low, low price of one tweet.

[Promotion Has Ended]

Note: Depending on how your web browser is set up to handle PDF files, it may just open up in a browser window, meaning you may have to do some kind of "save as" routine to actually get the book onto your hard drive.

Q: Book? What?

A: See here for more information. But if the "pay with a tweet" button is still up there, use it instead of sending me $4.97.

Q: Why?

A: To promote the book. And to test out the whole "pay with a tweet" concept.

Q: Why for a limited time?

A: Well, I want to sell some books too, you know. For, like, money. Those who "pay with a tweet" ASAP get the book for the low, low price of a tweet. Those who wait until the offer is over may still be interested in the book, and they can get it too. For the low, low price of $4.97.

KN@PPSTER

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