OneMind

The total discussion and voting time at today’s meeting of the Democratic Party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee devoted to the “dilemma” of the Florida and Michigan primaries ought to be on the order of 30 minutes. Here’s how simple it really is:

1. Both state party organizations broke the national organization’s rules by moving their primaries ahead of deadlines set by the national committee.
2. Party rules already define what to do in such cases: delegates get half votes and the whole delegation is seated.
3. That’s it.

Sen. Hillary “Don’t Bother ME With Your Stupid Rules Unless They Benefit Me” Clinton wants both states to get full credit for their primaries. This despite the fact that in Michigan, every single Democratic candidate except her followed DNC rules and withdrew from the ballot. By appearing on the ballot, she drew most of the votes. She also is the only candidate to break the rules. Instead of benefiting from that dishonesty, the national party simply looked the other way.

This is all so silly and moot. Sen. Barack Obama is the next President of the United States. Hillary and Bill need to deal with it and just “move on.” Hmmm. Where have I heard that phrase before?

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been investigating the new state of the art with respect to the Web as an application development platform, focused on Web applications rather than on desktop apps with Web connections. This is all part of my renewed interest in the “Zero-Pound Computer”. If we can store our personal data in the Cloud and if we can run applications that run in the Cloud, we can (or so I claim) look to the day when we won’t take computers with us when we move, we will simply move to a new computer and our software and data will follow us.

The five major online services who have opened their APIs to developers to encourage the creation of applications that run in the Cloud are Google, Amazon, Microsoft, eBay, and Yahoo. Together they are often referred to as the GAMeY players. A good friend and colleague, Laurence Rozier of Meshverse Journal fame, has been buzzing a bit lately about Amazon’s interesting array of Web Services. Of course, I have been aware for some time of Google’s offerings, being, as I am, a Googlite. I was aware, too, of Yahoo’s efforts to create JavaScript UI technologies and scripting libraries and overall impressed with their efforts. These three (dare I suggest the acronym GAY or might something like GoogazonY be more appropriate?) are getting the bulk of developer attention, with Google leading the charge by a considerable margin and Amazon coming in a fairly distant third behind it and Yahoo.

But Amazon may have The Secret Weapon in all of this in its unique combination of SS3 (Simple Storage Service), EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and AMI (Amazon Machine Images). Couple those with its less known DevPay service and you have a platform that can effectively become your company’s server farm and micropayment management system. None of the other players have these tools, and that has some important implications for who can and will use these Web APIs.

I just purchased James Murty’s Programming Amazon Web Services from O’Reilly and while I’m just starting to delve into it, I am already fairly impressed by the breadth of the Amazon offering, a breadth which doesn’t come through in checklists of API comparisons like this one. (Don’t get me wrong, though; that checklist is quite handy in its own way.)

Interesting side note. The example code in Murty’s book is almost all in Ruby. Python samples are available via download, but it is surprising to me that Ruby got the front-row seat here. Without Rails, Ruby is a very interesting language but not nearly as mature as, e.g., Python. Strange choice by the author and O’Reilly. I’ll have more to say about the Ruby Surge in another post some time soon. Unless I lose interest.

I’ve been a member of moveon.org from its inception as a group dedicated to championing the cause of the country moving on after the despicable rightwing witch hunt aimed at President Bill Clinton and his family. For most of those years, I’ve found myself supporting almost every action the group has encouraged. Even when I’ve questioned a decision, I’ve tended simply to sit on the sidelines rather than criticize.

But today, they went too far for me.

In circulating a petition to demand that former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan donate all of his book profits to a charitable group, the organization illogically extended a legal principle that a criminal shouldn’t benefit from his crime. Certainly McClellan participated in the lying that led to America’s illegal, unprovoked and unilateral invasion of Iraq. Certainly he bears some moral responsibility for what has happened as a result. But if we extend the no-benefit-from-crime principle into the realm of whistle-blowing as moveon.org wishes, we will effectively stifle the authoring and publishing of potentially important documents.

While a murderer or a kidnapper or a terrorist might, in telling his or her story, inadvertently reveal a helpful factoid or two, the overall purpose and intent of criminals who publish memoirs and true stories of their dastardly deeds is not to inform but to explain or justify or simply to gain further notoriety. In books such as McClellan’s (and those by other ex-Bush Regime officials including Richard Clarke), the intent is to inform and expose in ways that might prove extremely beneficial in preventing future misdeeds of a similar nature and perhaps to provide key pointers to evidence that could result in the conviction of the higher-ups who are truly responsible — criminally — for their conduct and its consequences.

I won’t join this moveon.org effort. I hope they see the error of their ways and back off this ill-advised plan. To paraphrase their favorite Democratic candidate and mine, it’s the wrong battle in the wrong place at the wrong time for the wrong reasons.

Columnist Mike Troiano of Adotas takes Google to task as a search engine because it falls short of some marks he’s set for what makes for good search, principally it appears from an advertiser’s limited world view.

Specifically, Troiano says Google sucks because:

• It fails to personalize search results for him based on his long history of Web search.
• It doesn’t recognize where he is in the context of his Web travels, what he has evidenced interest in.
• It doesn’t quite understand the meaning of terms (i.e., it is semantically weak).
• It hasn’t changed its basic User Experience from the beginning, so it lacks doodads like dropdown lists and radio buttons.
• It doesn’t even show up in the process of indexing the “stuff we’re really interested in.” As he says, “For the streaming video, music files, flash thingys and AJAX widgets that comprise a larger and larger share of our online media consumption, Google.com isn’t even in the game.”

I find the first four items above relatively unimportant in my search experience and while I’d like to see Google do more with things like Troiano lists, he doesn’t seem to want to give Google credit for other things it does that people obviously care a lot about, like maps and images, to mention just two.

I suspect Troiano was more intersted in trolling than in serious commentary and I don’t agree with him on most points but he does end his column with a very good list of other approaches to search that you might find quite intriguing.

But you’ll still likely default to Google. Because whether this guy thinks it sucks or not, it’s way the heck ahead of whoever’s second.

I haven’t commented on the San Francisco Giants this season. As I find myself with less time to write on this blog and more interested in other topics, my observations have fallen off.

But a story in a paper I read this morning brought this to mind. Back in the late 1960′s when I was a sports writer in Michigan, the Detroit Tigers had two amazing pitchers: Mickey Lolich and Denny McClain. The rest of the staff was, well, suspect is a polite word. Local writers and fans took up the saying, “Lolich, McClain and Pray for Rain.”

The Giants find themselves in a similar situation with the same rhyme. Linceum and Cain and Pray for Rain.

I just thought that was funny.

I’m no big fan of the Republican Right, George W. Bush and John McCain (aka Bush III). And I am a big fan of Keith Olbermann’s nightly news show on MSNBC, “Countdown.” But sometimes, Keith goes too far even for my taste.

First, while it’s obviously true that McCain is a flip-flopper to end all flip-floppers, making John Kerry look like a steady Ship of State, not everything he says that seems to contradict a previous position is either a flip-flop or necessarily even a real shift. Case in point is the recent attacks on McCain’s statement a couple of years ago about Hammas being “part of the new reality of the Middle East” contrasted with his attacks on Sen. Barack Obama’s stance that he would be willing, under some circumstances, to talk with Hammas leaders. McCain did not say he would be willing to sit down and talk with Hamas; he said they were a new force that would have to be reckoned with “one way or another.” He could well mean attacks as far as that goes. So it’s unfair of Keith to hammer McCain for this inconsistency; it’s really only partly inconsistent. And, as McCain often says, if the facts on the ground change, you have to be willing to change your opinion.

Second, whle it was patently ridiculous for President Bush to say in all seriousness (and as it turned out in all untruthfulness as well) that he gave up golf fairly early in his unprovoked war on Iraq, out of concern that the widows and mothers of servicemen being killed in Iraq might find his playing golf unseemly, that shouldn’t have provoked the nasty attack Olbermann launched one night last week. He showed a series of clips in which Bush was engaging in various bits of playful behavior. And the question he asked, essentially, was, “Is it OK then for the President to do this…or this …or this… in time of war?” And while I got his point, I think it was way over the top.

Keith, your special comments are powerful and insightful and right on. You don’t need to stoop to silly and off-target attacks to make your point to the Left. We’re capable of thinking these things through.

Periodically, someone generally of the Republican persuasion opens up his or her yap and dogs the Democrats for disciplining the state parties in Michigan and Florida for their failure to follow national party rules to which they had previously agreed. The general tenor of the criticism is that the Democrats act in a way that is strangely undemocratic, disenfranchising millions of members of the party in the Presidential nominee selection process.

This morning the editorial cartoonist of the local rag, the Monterey County Herald, drew a completely inaccurate parallel between the Democratic voters of those two misbehaving states and the Iraqi elections. Besides being an inept comparison, it was simply wrong-headed.

The Clinton camp now wants Michigan and Florida results reinstated even though they agreed not to campaign in or count those votes as a part of pledging their commitment to the Democratic party’s nominating process. As it turns out, allowing those two states representation at the national convention would probably not help Hillary anyway, but that won’t stop her from continuing her hopeless and irrational campaign.

But what really has my dander up is the fact that the Democrats at least attempt to conduct fair and equitable primaries where delegates to the convention are chosen on a proportional-vote basis. The Republican Party, meanwhile, plays winner-take-all with its primary and never suffers a word of criticism. In the Magical Mystery World of Republican Politics, a candidate who wins a state’s primary by one vote gets all of that state’s delegates to the national convention. The thousands and millions of people who voted against their current presumptive nominee John McCain might as well have been dead. In the North Carolina primary this week, I noticed that three McCain rivals — long since out of the race — collectively drew almost one-fourth of the GOP vote!. This is after McCain has the nomination locked up. And they call the Democrats undemocratic?

Pure unadulterated bull puckey.

When the race for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination began over a year ago, I surveyed the field and found it, for the most part, of good quality. I indicated at the beginning that my favorite candidate would be Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, the only candidate who not only opposed the Iraq War but opposed war as a strategy, violence as an answer, conflict as a solution. Of course the mainstream media, in collusion with a party less interested in global change than in petty partisanship, got rid of him early.

At that point, I switched my allegiance to Sen. John Edwards, the only candidate who clearly understood the issues of poverty and global warming that are the one-two punch that could someday sink our nation. Eventually, he failed to win a sufficient number of people to his way of thinking and dropped out.

My third choice then was Sen. Barack Obama. I liked Obama better than Hillary — the only candidate to whom I felt any measure of real opposition (other than the Quixotic Sen. Mike Gravel, whom I never did understand) — but not enough to declare myself ready to support him financially, to work for his campaign, to get excited about.

Well, I’ve come around. I’ve decided after watching Sen. Obama these last many months, listening carefully to what he says (rather than to the sound bites and the political punditry about what he says) that this is a man about whom I can become excited, inspired and passionate. It is now clear to me that he was the best candidate the Democrats could offer — again with the possible exception of Kucinich — from the very beginning. He was just too much of an unknown.

Now I see Obama as battle tested, forthright, intelligent, articulate, compassionate, and capable. He is a man of unexpected integrity, unexpected not because of anything to do with him but because of everything the current political situation in our country causes me to expect of political leaders.

I am now fully on board the Obama bandwagon. He’ll get my money. He’ll get my time. He’ll get my enthusiasm. And he’ll get my sincere admiration and appreciation, regardless of the outcome of the primary season or the general election.