OneMind

California voters will be asked on May 19 to approve a half-dozen propositions placed on the ballot by the members of the state legislature. These propositions are designed, in a tangled collective web, to deal with the fiscal crisis in which the state — like all 49 other states — finds itself. My Democratic Party has endorsed all of the propositions. i am not so sure.

No doubt the failure of most or all of these propositions will deal a serious blow to the state’s economy. I am not in favor of such chaos and so I may end up voting for all or most of these notions. But I’m more than a little pissed that the legislators had such a lack of backbone that they couldn’t or wouldn’t make the difficult decisions themselves, choosing instead to dump the problem back into the laps of the citizens.

If the people elected and paid to do the job don’t or won’t do it, they ought to resign or be impeached and replaced by leaders who will make those tough choices. It is unfair — to say nothing of very expensive — to evade your duty just because it might cost you a few votes.

So do we penalize the people of the state by turning down all of these proposals, thus forcing the lawmakers to do their jobs? Or do we cover their butts, vote for the recovery propositions and then unseat them next time we get a chance?

So I log into Twitter this afternoon and what greets me but a cutesy graphic telling me their servers are overloaded. Great. Build a service that absolutely depends on real-time access to servers and then fail to keep up with user demand. Great recipe for success.

In an era of instant cloud server creation, there’s really no excuse for this.

Well I went out and bought a new dual-band Airport Extreme yesterday and installed it this evening. Wow. Download speeds are more than twice as fast and upload on the order of four times as fast as before.

It’s nice to have blazing speed again. I feel like my productivity is up a good bit already.

I have very little account activity at GoDaddy.com. One or two of my clients use the site — which I’m told is the largest domain name registrar by far at the moment — so I have an account there for convenience sake. This morning, I was notified via email of a policy change with respect to security of my GoDaddy information. You can read the entire new section of the “agreement” (which, of course, is really a policy imposition that I’m never consulted about or asked to sign) by clicking the “Read More” link at the bottom of this post.

In essence, it says not only and I solely and totally responsible for anything done on my account with or without my knowledge, but I have to compensate GoDaddy for any damages it incurs by the illegal or other use of my account but they can’t be held liable for any damages if someone breaks into their machine, steals my account access information, and then wreaks havoc on their system.

Bullshit, if you’ll pardon my language. Bull puckey if you won’t.

It is entirely possible for some cracker, vandal, spam thief or other nefarious individual to break into GoDaddy’s system and swipe this information. If that happens and I’m not aware of it, how in the world can these guys even think they can hold me accountable for those actions? Under what theory of criminal or contract law can they fictionalize such a thing? It’s patently absurd and they and their lawyers know it. This is a “policy” designed to do one thing: instill fear in their customers. Good marketing move, people. Yeesh.

Here’s the entirety of the provision in question as provided by GoDaddy this morning:

You agree You are entirely responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of Your customer number/login, password, credit card number, and shopper PIN (collectively, the “Account Access Information”). You agree You are entirely responsible for any and all activities that occur under Your account. You agree to notify Go Daddy immediately of any unauthorized use of Your account or any other breach of security. You agree Go Daddy will not be liable for any loss that You may incur as a result of someone else using Your Account Access Information, either with or without Your knowledge. You further agree You could be held liable for losses incurred by Go Daddy or another party due to someone else using Your Account Access Information. For security purposes, You will be required to change Your password and shopper PIN every six (6) months, for every Go Daddy account, subject to Go Daddy’s password and PIN guidelines. You should keep Account Access Information in a secure location and take precautions to prevent others from gaining access to Your Account Access Information. You agree that You will be responsible for all activity in Your account, whether initiated by You, or by others on Your behalf, or by any other means. Go Daddy specifically disclaims liability for any activity in Your account, whether authorized by You or not.

Today’s Republican Party has no legitimate claim to being the party of Abraham Lincoln and it’s high time the media recognized this. It is time reporters and commentators stopped impugning the name of one of this nation’s great leaders by associating him with the ramshackle bunch of clowns that constitute the GOP.

When Lincoln became the first candidate of the Republican Party in 1860, the party was a progressive anti-slavery organization. In its early platforms, it endorsed such policies as greater support for higher education and free homesteads to farmers.

The election of 1896 was one that realigned the American political landscape as the Republican Party became the clear champion of big business, though it would have to agree to some small-business legislation (particularly the Sherman Anti-Trust Act) to hold its loosening coalition in place.

If Lincoln were alive today there seems little doubt he’d be a liberal, at least as liberalism was defined in his day. The crossing of the liberal-conservaitve dividing line that took place during the latter decades of the 19th Century led directly to the dominance of the Democrats in the 1930s and beyond.

So come on, Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann and company: enough echoing the GOP’s only claim to credibility and historic value by attempting to associate itself with a man whose stomach would turn at the practices of the modern-day Republicans.

Yesterday President Obama indicated that he does not expect the White House to make the final decisions about the investigation or prosecution of members of the Bush Regime who authorized torture. This decision, specifically with respect to the leaders and decision makers rather than the field personnel who actually engaged in torture, appears to reverse an earlier position he had taken as reported by his Chief of Staff and Press Secretary.

Whether you view this position as a change or a clarification — pundits and politicians alike used both terms Tuesday — it seems to me to reveal something about the way the President makes decisions and deals with controversial issues.

First, Obama will not be rushed to judgment. He will deliberate, listen to input, think things through, and then make a clear policy decision explained in a statement that everyone can understand. While he had been clear that the field operatives of the FBI and CIA who conducted the torture sessions would not be sought out and prosecuted, he had left the issue of their overseers open for several days. Even when Rahm Emanuel said on TV Sunday that there would be no prosecution of any Bush officials over the issue of torture, the President did not rush to agree or support that statement.

Second, this President has an appreciation for the subtleties of deep and complex issues that the White House has lacked for some years. Even those like George Washington Law Professor Jonathan Turley who have been loudly advocating for investigation and possible prosecution of those who played any role in this disgusting chapter of our history admit that the legal issues that arise and how they can and should be dealt with are murky at best. There are legal distinctions to be made between torturers and their bosses. There are a number of legal thickets to be negotiated here. That’s why it is entirely right and appropriate that Obama, completely unlike his predecessor, keep the White House and its influence as far from the Justice Department process as possible.

Third, Obama listens. Although it is true that in being deliberative, Obama can seem to come off as either indecisive or driven by public opinion, the fact is that after he indicated last week that he had no appetite for pursuing Bush Regime officials over this issue, he heard from members of his party, the press, and people like Prof. Turley that he ought to re-think that position. My sense is that Emanuel, who came out of the Congress, may have jumped the gun a bit in taking Obama’s statements as far as he did. He may have done so as the launcher of a trial balloon for Obama or he may just have been saying what he thought the President would say. In any case, Obama clearly heard the hue and cry over the horrific picture of the Bush Regime’s torture policy and its perpetrators, and saw that this was in any case just not a proper role for his White House.

All that said, I think the President has to take one more step, one he feinted toward yesterday. Field operatives of the Bush Regime who carried out orders to torture detainees and prisoners should not get an automatic free pass from investigation or prosecution. Tuesday, Obama said that those who did so and “operated within the four corners” of their understanding of their authority ought not to be held accountable. I don’t agree. But certainly any who exceeded the sham authority purportedly provided by the White House Office of Legal Counsel’s “opinions on demand” need to be closely reviewed for possible criminal liability. “I was just following orders” has not been a viable defense since the Nuremberg Trials which we held.

Even though Obama — whom I supported at first reluctantly but ultimately with great enthusiasm — has made a number of decisions that I strongly disagree with, his style and his approach to the process of governing is such a breath of fresh air after eight years of fetid closed-door policymaking that I remain a strong supporter despite those occasional disagreements. It is, as my daughter Krista likes to exclaim from time to time, nice that “We have a President with a brain!”

Here are my planned speaking dates for May-June. All events are at Unity of Montery Bay, 601 Madison St., Monterey, CA unless otherwise indicated.

May 2- Half-day workshop, “Meeting A Course in Miracles Again for the First Time” – 11-2. $20 suggested Love Offering includes light lunch
May 3 – “Remembering Who We Are” based on Marianne Williamson’s “The Gift of Change”, 10 a.m. service and informal group Q&A to follow
May 6 – And continuing for eight weeks, “I Need Do Nothing: A Course in Miracles and Enlightenment” – 7-8:30 p.m. at Unity. $5/class suggested Love Offering + $10 one-time materials fee. NOTE: These classes will be downloadable as MP3 files within a day or two of the class completion. Email me if you’re interested in being notified.
May 17 – “The Gift of Atonement” based on Marianne Williamson’s “The Gift of Change”, 10 a.m. service and informal group Q&A to follow
May 24 – “The Universe, Numbers and Mother” at Gavilan Hills Unity Church, 13085 Monterey Rd., San Martin, CA (just south of San Jose), 10:30 a.m.
June 7 – “Focus on Innocence” based on Marianne Williamson’s “The Gift of Change”, 10 a.m. service and informal group Q&A to follow

My Airport Extreme network hub has been causing me fits lately. It gets slower and slower and slower until finally it becomes unacceptable. I power cycle it and when it comes back, it’s blazing fast. Then it starts its decline all over again in a short period of time (hours, perhaps a day).

Time to replace it? I do have a Belkin Wireless G Plus MIMO rouer I’m not using but I”m not sure I won’t end up spending a lot more time configing it than I have to with my Airport, which is at least quite easy to manage?

Any ideas, pointers, experiences?

Tonight Rachel Maddow played a very brief clip of an interview by Arab TV network Aljazeera with former Bush Administration official Richard Armitage. In it Armitage said he probably should have resigned when it came to light that he and his bosses were engaged in activity that violated the Geneva Convention. At the end of the clip, she warned her viewers not to expect to see Aljazeera on their local cable outlets because the network is all but banned from American cable. She suggested that the entire interview was really interesting.

Yeah but if you really want to see what Aljazeera is saying and offering you can always go to the Net. Why she didn’t point out that the entire clip of the Armitage interview is available on the Web. Interestingly, the rest of the interview puts Armitage far more closely in the Obama “let’s not do this again but not punish the perpetrators” position on this whole subject. He also denied he knew of any torture but he did acknowledge that he and his boss, then Secretary of State Colin Powell, lost more than one battle over the issue of whether the U.S. had to abide by the Geneva Convention when it came to treatment of so-called “enemy combatants.”

Yeah, it’s early. But last year we waited for the season to get better. And waited. And waited. And then it was over.

So far, this year the San Francisco Giants, who figured to have solid pitching but weak offense are showing weakness in both departments. They’ve lost five games by a total of 24 runs, an average of 4.8 runs per game. To be fair, the two games they won, they’ve averaged winning by 5 runs per game.

All the data samples are too small to be meaningful, but the fact that the aces of the staff are off to horrible starts doesn’t bode well. Tim Lincecum is 0-1 and should be 0-2 but he got a no-decision in his very rocky opener. Randy Johnson got rocked today by the Dodgers after a lousy first game himself.

I’m not giving up yet by any stretch, but this is a pitiful start. Just pitiful.