Month: September 2008

Paul Hodes, John Sununu and Judd Gregg sure make it tough to find their e-mail addresses and try to drive constituents to use web forms, which makes it hard to e-mail multiple representatives at once. I suspect this barrier to participation is intentional.

That said, I found this page which appears to be the only one on the Internet that actually lists an address for all three.

So the other night I was at a dinner and sat next to a nice fellow who asked me, “what do you think of this Sarah Palin?”

“She’s interesting,” I began, “what do you think of her?”

“Oh, she’s terrible!” came the reply. So, I asked, intending to learn something and continue the conversation, “which of her positions positions do you dislike?”

“All of them!” was the what-don’t-you-get reply. “Oh,” I said with some fascination, “which one do you think is the worst?” At this point I was suspecting this could be fun.

“Just all of them,” was the only answer I received, and the conversation turned.

So, the rhetorical question of the day is how many of Sarah Palin’s positions do you think this hater actually knew anything about? It amazes me how people can take strong political positions without knowing anything about the subject. I get this over and over on nuclear energy especially. I think I err on the other side too much, only weighing in on a topic after I’ve researched it extensively. Well, at least feeling embarrassed in retrospect when I do otherwise.

In reference to the Gawker post of Gov. Palin’s e-mail excerpts, photos, etc:

First, the Gawker people are complete crap for posting the e-mail addresses of Gov. Palin’s friends and family. If nothing else, this is unmistakably over the top – several dozen people will now effectively have to start all new e-mail accounts and endure the difficulties associated with that. Inexcusable.

As to conducting government business, yeah, there’s a point to be made here. However, I’ll bet that the most likely reason is that the sender typed ‘sarah palin’ in their mailer, and having two addresses for her picked the wrong one. Many mailers hide the actual address after choosing, so this is an easy mistake to make.

The governor could have at that point chosen to scold the sender, but instead she just replied. The former would have been the pedantically correct thing to do – whether the latter was inexcusable or pragmatic is a matter of perspective.

The important thing to do here to implicate Gov. Palin would be to establish a pattern of certain types of mails, certain correspondents, certain policies, specific projects that she only used her Yahoo! account for. This doesn’t seem to exist – the contents appear to be random and mundane. Even the guy who broke into her account and read all of her mails looking for something ‘juicy’ concurs. So, the conspiracy hypothesis fails, leaving random technology farts as the likely cause.

There’s still a technical case to be made here, but good luck getting anybody who has a work and home account themselves to actually care.

Due to the order of a judge in Florida against Echostar I don’t get any major network programming at home, save a PBS national feed. So, when “The Path to 9/11” came out, I wanted to see it, but figured I’d wait until the DVD came out (it wasn’t urgent).

I haven’t paid any attention to the film since then, but today I heard the director of the show on Dennis Miller’s radio show talking about how there would be no DVD release, and how the Clinton machine and Disney collaborated to edit the film for airing and then finally kill all future availability. Apparently they didn’t like the way Bill Clinton was portrayed. The director says the miniseries was the #1 mini-series of the year and attracted 28 million viewers. There’s simply no argument that there’s not a DVD market for the product. He plans a documentary about the attempts to bury the film.

So, while I’m in favor of rewarding artists for their work as part of our social contract under copyright terms, their end of the contract implies availability for the term of protection. Since they’ve violated the agreement, for political expediency no less, I have no trouble reminding folks that the bittorrent tracker sites are searchable and the people are likely to be routing around this kind of censorship.

With so many folks swooning for Sarah Palin and deciding to hold their nose and vote for McCain just to get her into office, I figured we needed some merchandise to reflect the sentiment. And so Old Man-Palin was born.

Somehow I got on Jennifer Horn’s spam list. I opened one accidentally today and it contained this nugget:

every $750 donated will buy us one more spot on WMUR; every $150 donated will buy us one more spot on Fox News.

Wow, $750 for, I’m guessing, 30 seconds of airtime. If somebody wants to get rid of ‘money in politics’ they need to stop paying these kind of advertising rates. Hint: Internet. If there needs to be a transition period, buy 10 second TV ads that say, “I’m getting rid of money in politics, visit billmcgonigle.com” or the like.