I can’t help it: I love shadow-boxing with the California CMCE fight.  It’s just good practice on the off chance that we can get something done in this state (c’mon, Elliot!).  Here is an interesting take on the whole CMCE public campaign financing idea:

Times-Standard Online - Clean money, or election welfare?

”The question to ask is, what are the legitimate roles of government? What should government do that individuals or businesses can’t reasonably do for themselves?” Crawford said. “Personally, I don’t think that government should go so far as to finance Advertisement campaigns.”

With due respect, the problem is precisely that there are a few people far more capable of financing an election than the rest of us, and that’s exactly what they are doing. . .  at our expense.  Moreover, consider this: you pay a representative’s salary, you pay for his/her staff, you pay for his office and you even pay for his trips (albeit to a limited degree and assuming you don’t find out about the rest).  The one thing you do not pay for ~  the one thing that you relinquish all financial control over ~ is the part where you elect them.  How does that make any sense at all?

Face it: if you can’t raise $100-large to run a half-assed primary campaign in most states, you’re already out of the running.  If you can’t follow that up with a few more hundreds of thousands of dollars, you’re not going to win the primary, and a few more hundreds of thousands of dollars *might* win you the general election.  If money ~ not ideas, not character, not “values” ~ determines whom you get to vote for before you get a chance to vote, do you really live in a democracy?  Or do you live in a plutocracy?

Technorati Tags: Clean Money Clean Elections, Elections, Election reform

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A sign of a person who doesn’t use drugs anymore: I’ve gotten organized enough to have a white board.

But, honestly, the new site isn’t going to write itself, and I need to be able to be sure that important things don’t get overlooked. There are so many moving parts to a well-designed website, and a large number of them need to be working when you put the site up or the whole thing collapses. Meanwhile, I am of course getting married in two and a half weeks (holy crap!), and there’s a bunch of last minute things and details we need to have ironed out. » Continue Reading…

Another in the series of “Pole-a-Palooza” concerts at the Liberty Pole downtown, Grace Potter and the Nocturnals comes to Rochester.

When: July 26th at 5:00pm
Where: The Liberty Pole, downtown Rochester

RocTurn had the original post, and Zinnian Democracy follows up on the apparently hasty campaigning that Kuhl and the Gang have been doing in the last week. It’s as though someone just checked thier email at campaign headquarters and realized they’d better get Randy back to the district, quick. No time to carry Washington Republican water when you’ve got a campaign to run.

But for me, it was the Zinn peice that really gets me. Or rather, what he discovered: three letters to the editor of the Star Gazette all in praise of Randy Kuhl, all in the same week as he’s suddenly found on the campaign trail, and all hitting his favourite bullet points.

Even more amazing: they’re practically the same letter. It’s as though your third-grade teacher asked you to complete an assignment, writing an essay on why you think Randy Kuhl is the bestest Representative ever. In this essay you must:

1. Write at least two sentences (but no more than three) in the first paragraph explaining a a service Randy has performed that made your life better, or a problem for which Randy offered a solution.
2. Write at least three sentences (but no more than four) explaining what Randy did and how your situation was made better.
3. Write at least one (but no more than two) sentences thanking Randy for his efforts and praising him to your fellow readers.

The best essays will be judged by your teacher, and winners will recieve a gold star and an extra juice box.

I shouldn’t make fun: the people who actually wrote the letters were most likely quite sincere in thier desire to help out a representative that they support.  Moreover, I’ve been a part of a letter writing campaign for causes in which I believe, so I’m not criticizing the simple act of mobilizing your base to support you publicly.  What is pathetic is how obviously staged the letter writing is and how collosally bad the timing was.  It isn’t exactly like the Star Gazette is being flooded with letters to the editor, you should probably have staged them out a bit more.  Next time, guys, keep the requirements a little loose and the timeline a little more staggered. . . .

I’ve been looking all over the place to try to find a picture of Randy Kuhl at the podium during the vote that ultimately upheld the president’s veto on stem-cells.  Well, lo and behold, I just happened to catch one of the sample cells for this video of Mellisa Hart (R-PA)’s pathetic rant on the subject.  Guess who I saw?  Randy Kuhl.  God, I love the Internet.

I sent a note off to the maker of this video, hoping that they can supply me with a nice-resolution picture of Randy’s ugly mug, let’s hope they’re in the mood to deliver!!

I’m plugging away at the new version of the site, though in actual fact, surprisingly little has been done with the actual code.  So, what has been done?  Well, I’ve been checking out a few new options for the site, most of which rely on services and APIs provided by other sites.  Yep.  DFE4.0 is going *fully* Web2.0 on your ass.  Among the recent developments:

1. Comments on Articles by HaloScan!  In the current version of DFE, you are able to comment on blog posts (obviously), but you are not able to comment on the full articles in the main sections.  In retrospect, it seems obvious enough to have had HaloScan do the comments, but for some reason this is only just now happening.  The new version will have comment- and trackback-ready articles, which I am hoping to have some fun with.
2. Feeds by FeedBurner!  I’ve had feeds available for a while now, anyway.  However, the difference is what FeedBurner adds to the mix: “email this” links, del.icio.us links, application-aware feeds that provide just the right format for just the right application, and lots more.  All I need to do is provide a feed which will at least validate with an XML parser, and FeedBurner will do the rest.  Plus, if I can get some readership, I can advertise on the feeds as well.
3. Blog Info by Technorati!  If you’ve been at the WaPo in the last six months or so (or a goodly number of other websites), you’ve no doubt noticed the “who’s commenting” boxes that show you blogs that have commented on a given article.  Well, Technorati has provided several methods in an API for the rest of us to do just such types of things!  I had to have it.

Yep, I’m gettin’ pretty ‘cited over here!  Beyond this, I am still continuing to work on an Upcoming.org events calendar and hopefully a combined “Prog Roc” RSS feed.  Anyway, the fiancee is out getting her hair done as a trial for the wedding (three weeks away, holy crap!), and I was supposed to be writing more stuff for the site and not blogging on writing stuff for the site!

Woot!

I’ll just let this one stand on it’s own merits:

TheDenverChannel.com - News - Marshals: Innocent People Placed On ‘Watch List’ To Meet Quota

You could be on a secret government database or watch list for simply taking a picture on an airplane. Some federal air marshals say they’re reporting your actions to meet a quota, even though some top officials deny it.The air marshals, whose identities are being concealed, told 7NEWS that they’re required to submit at least one report a month. If they don’t, there’s no raise, no bonus, no awards and no special assignments.

Technorati Tags: Homeland Security, DHS, National, Terrorism

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Yep, if you want insulting, look no further than the ever-dismissive William F. Buckley:

Buckley: Bush Not A True Conservative, CBS News Exclusive: Buckley Criticizes President For Interventionist Policies - CBS News

Asked what President Bush’s foreign policy legacy will be to his successor, Buckley says “There will be no legacy for Mr. Bush. I don’t believe his successor would re-enunciate the words he used in his second inaugural address because they were too ambitious. So therefore I think his legacy is indecipherable”

Ouch!

Technorati Tags: Bush, Conservative, Buckley, Legacy

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After having been at the Massa campaign headquarters, I decided that, rather than working on the site like i should be doing, I’d go ahead and look up Randy Kuhl’s voting record. The Washington Post has an outstanding database for such things, and here’s a great list of some of the bigger issues Randy’s involved himself in. Suffice it to say, the man has not bothered to vote outside the Republican Party line once. He strikes me as a man too interested in sucking up to the Republican leadership to have given much thought to his constituency’s needs or desires.

The whole thing is worth reading, for sure, but some of the votes that get me the most are:

• Vote 6: H RES 5: Remember that vote to allow Tom Delay to remain Majority Leader whist under indictment? You betcha, not a single Republican voted against that.
• Vote 90: S 686: Remember Terri Schiavo? Your man Kuhl voted for it.
• Vote 258: H R 2862: Here’s one that said that law enforcement couldn’t snag library and bookstore records without a judge or grand jury’s warrant, whereas the original law required only FISA approval. Randy voted against it.

You could go on (and by all means, do that!), but for now it’s enough to say that every single majority opinion in the Republican Party has been the vote of our Representative Kuhl. Wait. . . whose representative is he, exactly?