In Every Voter, A ’Microtarget’  Read more 

Her op-ed piece in the NY Times tells it like it is. Go read.

and because I found this at the 527 formerly known as DailyKos, it took a minute for the shock to wear off.

The Senate Commerce Committee is holding a hearing on the future of the Internet, and a big part of that equation is net neutrality. I know net neutrality is important to a lot of you here, but Senators haven’t heard from you in a while on the issue, and I want to make sure we keep this front and center - it’s that important.

Go read John Kerry’s Diary

John Edwards *nails* what it’s going to take to get my vote (except for the jet ski — make mine a BD-10, please.)

Survey: Most auto execs support McCain

Automotive executives overwhelmingly support Sen. John McCain for president and have a negative outlook for the industry, according to a survey released today by the law firm Dykema Gossett PLLC.

The people who ran their industry into the ground want McCain, because they know a failed executive when they see one.

“Aid does not work” is a meme we often hear when it comes to development. Actually, it is a pronouncement made by people who would like foreign aid to stop and see it as “one of these failed government projects.” Aid does work under proper conditions, but quite often, as Jeffrey Sachs has demonstrated, aid does not work because of the donor countries who either do not live up to their commitment or actually set up aid to benefit themselves without much consideration for the people that are supposed to be helped. Two stories in the news highlight these problems.  Read more 

H/t MS. Just for shits and giggles, check this out. Heh, it seems Corrente isn’t the only place to go for naughty, spicy language about today’s economy:

GMAC Bank is suing mortgage company HTFC for selling improperly secured loans, which lead to the hilariously blue and aggressive deposition from HTFC CEO Aron Wider. Wider dropped the f-bomb 73 times, frustrating the opposing counsel’s attempts to get him to answer difficult questions like “Where are you currently employed?” Some of the more colorful and creative expletives from the testimony of Mr. Wider, who, according to his company website, serves as company Coprorate Information [sic], CEO / Senior Underwriter, and Radio Engineer, inside…

Q: My question is where are you currently employed.
A: I’ m not. I just told [you] I work for free.
Q: OK. You’re not employed by the HTFC Corporation?
A: Hit That Fuckin’ Clown. That’s what it means.  Read more 

So I’ll spare you the photos. But: I went to the local “asian grocery,” and I bought this pan. A wok, actually. It looked nice and wasn’t completely the ’cheap choice.’ The food and service in this place were good, all the times I’d been there. I live in a university town; lots of Asian seeming folks were shopping there, and all the stuff sold there was labeled in a different language than English. So my thought was: this could be a good place to shop for “asian” cooking supplies.

I wanted to make a beef and water chestnut dish tonight. I used the new wok. It had been oiled, gently washed clean from store-born ick, and heated for the first time to a reasonable temp. I even used a plastic spatula.

Just as the meat cooking was getting done, I noticed something. A long, shiny, two-inch scrape on the floor of the wok. One that left edges of paint, turned back and ready to work into the meat or food cooking in the wok. I was horrified. All I could think of was “poisoned lead paint” and dying children. I also hated myself for the racist reaction I had to pans and kitchen stuff made abroad; I confess that I had one.

What should I do? I’m taking the wok back to the grocer from whom I bought it tomorrow. Should I report it? Them? To whom? How? Again, I keep thinking, “how many of these were sold to the unsuspecting?” What creeped me out was that I realized, had I not been closely paying attention, I could’ve cooked the scraped paint right into the meat and veggies and never noticed (you know how sometimes you only put half the pan of food onto the serving bowl for the table; the rest covers the cooking pan bottom) that the paint had mixed and flaked into the food, and was almost invisible in the dark sauce.

This, by the way, is life in the post-strong dollar economy. A friend of mine who is fluent in the languages of modern China, and who does regular biz in Sh and Bg, told me thusly: “they are keeping the good stuff for sale at home now; America gets the crap.” That seems more or less true to me. You?  Read more 

E-voting vendor blocks security audit with legal threats

New Jersey election officials have scrapped plans for an independent audit of Union County voting machines because the vendor, Sequoia Voting Systems, says that unauthorized third-party security reviews would violate the county’s license agreement. Sequoia threatened the county with legal action when it learned that election officials were planning to send the machines to a respected Princeton University computer scientist for analysis.

California to recertify insecure voting machines
Sequoia voting machines used in five counties in New Jersey during the recent primaries exhibited unusual errors and emitted electronic tallies that were inconsistent with the total counts from the paper trail. Sequoia claims that the contradicting numbers are the result of operator error rather than a technical flaw. Election officials viewed Sequoia’s explanation with skepticism and decided that the irregularity justified an independent review of the machines.  Read more 

I don’t have an educated opinion about this class of drugs, and I haven’t read the first part of this series, but most of it sounds about right to me. Mixing for-profit economic models and health care lead to things on the ’market’ of people’s health needs that aren’t actually needed. That’s consumerism, baby! Anyway, this is the part that caught my eye:

Finally — and here is the stunner — it turns out we don’t have any clear evidence that statins help the first group by lowering cholesterol levels. It’s true that they do lower cholesterol, but many researchers are no longer convinced that this is what helps patients avoid a second heart attack. It now seems likely that they work by reducing inflammation. In other words, these very expensive drugs seem to do the same thing that aspirin does. (Are they more effective than the humble aspirin? We’ll need head-to-head studies to find out.)

So I have two questions:  Read more 

Okay, maybe not in electronics sales…or patio furniture…or for that matter Cheetos(tm).

But in blogging? We kick their wussy, Rand-reading, ass, baby. As the Sitemeter stat will show, by the most conservative (ahem) reading possible we get 3,000 hits a day. Now let’s go look at their stats.

Per today’s NYT piece on how Enlightened the Wart has become after their previous attempts to manipulate public opinion flopped miserably, their latest effort is something called CheckOutBlog. Written by the buyers, those folks who determine day in and day out What You Will Have Available To Purchase if you live in a small enough town where all the other stores have been run out by now.

CheckOutBlog, we are told gets

So far, the Check Out receives about 1,000 hits a day, a relatively small figure.

We sneer at these feeble efforts, note that their fathers smelt of elderberries, and will taunt them again as necessary.

Although i’m not sure it would do much good. Of the “Bentonville Blogging Buyers” cited in the story,  Read more 

The Zucchini of Chastisement is one of the longstanding traditions here at Corrente (“longstanding” meaning from at least the year before last, and proven by the fact that it remains No. 1 at Google for this search topic) and was always meant as something of a joke.

The Chastisement of Zucchini on the other hand is a real problem, along with chastisement of tomatoes, watermelons, turnips and those who want to grow them to support the exploding movement to “eat locally.” Turns out—I know this will come as a shock to you—that there are Forces of Edible Evil who do not want you to do this, so they’re—again, brace for a shock—using Congress to tweak the farm subsidy rules to keep farmers from supplying the demand.

Very consise explanation in today’s NYT. The key words are “Farm Flex,” it is a Good Thing and needs to pass.  Read more 

You prolly saw this already but it pissed me off and I need to blog on it. Goodwin can suck it; isn’t this how the SA got started? Or at least, there’s some rhyming going on here. It’s never a good thing when an entrenched power rounds up bored, underemployed young men and stands them up in opposition to populists and progressives.

Comcast Blocking: First the Internet — Now the Public
February 25th, 2008 by jstearns
There was huge turnout at today’s public hearing in Boston on the future of the Internet. Hundreds of concerned citizens arrived to speak out on the importance of an open Internet. Many took the day off from work — standing outside in the Boston cold — to see the FCC Commissioners. But when they reach the door, they’re told they couldn’t come in.

The size of the crowd is evidence that many Americans don’t want giant corporations like Comcast and Verzion to decide what we can do and where we can go on the Internet.
But will the FCC hear these voices? For many people who showed up on time for the hearing, apparently not.

Comcast — or someone who really, really likes Comcast — evidently bused in its own crowd. These seat-warmers, were paid to fill the room, a move that kept others from taking part.

[Update: Comcast admits to paying people to stack the room in their favor. Read the report.]  Read more 

SP is doing his best to sound like a cranky 30something bitching about how much Kidz today suck. But this struck me:

I was scrolling around iTunes today just listening to some of the new ’alternative’ (never mind the irony that they are all mainstream) artists and it occurred to me that there is very, very little original music therein. Most of it is either a cross of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Green Day and Sarah MacLachlan. I guess when there are but a few companies that dominate the mainstream music publishing business pathbreakers and innovators aren’t marketable. In the past there seemed to be, at least once every decade, a breakthrough band—or town—that changed the calculus. But music today and for the last several years has remained very stale.

I was in the car the other day on a long drive with no CDs, and I wasn’t in the mood for Newz. Skipping around metro area stations (I was near the airport) I was sort of shocked by how much the stations I knew sounded, well, exactly the same as they did over 10 years ago, when I last lived in the area. Not just alike, but really, the same. It was sort of creepy.  Read more 

Aetna thinks it’s better for their company not to pay for an anesthetist/anasthesiologist’s service during a colonoscopy — and while colon cancer mortality rates have dropped over the past 4-5 years, colonoscopies are the only way of catching this killer early. Can you imagine  Read more 

Not when the Republicans do it.  Read more 

This post isn’t about Obama. But I sincerely hope his supporters read it. Not this post per se, but the links contained. First, watch this video, courtesy of Skippy:

Wow, that’s the only word I could come up with, other than a sudden need to vomit into my mouth a little. How do you spell “soulless schmaltz?” Or perhaps better “utterly fake feeling.” How quickly if goes from having “The Feeling!” to the need to express “oh my god, where is the pepto-bismol?” How quickly indeed…

Now, I urge you to take some time to read the following. Each are well worth it, and balanced. Start with Gossip from the Village. For once, it turned out to be useful and somewhat prescient (it was written last month).  Read more 

When party invites become more important than ’the story,’ you’ve lost it. We’ll see how extending the magic blanket of Seriousness to “citizen journalists” corrupts some of our voices:

The National Press Club, a 100-year-old professional club for journalists, aims to recruit new online-media members through a partnership with Helium.com, a hub for citizen journalists. The deal is expected to be announced on Tuesday.  Read more 

“This is our time now. It falls to us to redeem our democracy, reclaim our government and relight the promise of America for our children.” ~ John Edwards

What happens when Shane doesn’t ride away, after all?

I suspect it looks a lot like this photograph, which as Plush Life and Got Pitchfork? blogger fourlegsgood has pointed out elsewhere, is one of those truth-capturing images we rarely see, and can’t forget once we have seen them.  Read more 

Typical toll tower on Rhine in Bingen

Finally—we’re nothing if not open-minded here at The Mighty Corrente Buiding—a solid reason to vote for Obama—a dogwhistle I can hear.

Via Ezra, this from XKCD:

Obama has shown a real commitment to open government. When putting together tech policy (to take an example close to home for xkcd) others might have gone to industry lobbyists. Obama went to Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons (under which xkcd is published) and longtime white knight in the struggle with a broken system over internet and copyright policy. Lessig was impressed by Obama’s commitment to open systems — for example, his support of machine-readable government information standards that allow citizens’ groups to monitor what our government is up to. Right now, the only group that can effectively police the government is the government itself, and as a result, it’s corrupt to the core. Through these excellent and long-overdue measures, Obama is working to fight this corruption.

Obama stands against bad governing not only in his support of specific practices like open data standards and basic network neutrality, but in his work against corruption from day one.

The Mighty Corrente Building, and the blogosphere in general, could not run and would not even exist without open standards, so Obama’s embrace of them is good news. For example:  Read more 

All your social networking belong to us:

DAVOS, Switzerland - AT&T Inc. is still evaluating whether to examine traffic on its Internet lines to stop illegal sharing of copyright material, its chief executive said Wednesday.

CEO Randall Stephenson told a conference at the World Economic Forum that the company is looking at monitoring peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, one of the largest drivers of online traffic but also a common way to illegally exchange copyright files.  Read more 

“Phat” is a great word, you can use it in so many fun ways, even little kids can say it (that’s actually really cute when it happens). Many fine things are Phat: blunts, cars, clothes, people’s backsides. But what comes to your mind when I say heavy?

Company spokesman Alex Dudley said the trial was aimed at improving the network performance goddess don’t you just want to barf? when have they ever ’improved’ service? by making it more costly for heavy users of large downloads. Dudley said that a small group of super-heavy users of downloads, around 5 percent of the customer base, can account for up to 50 percent of network capacity.
Dudley said he did not know what the pricing tiers would be nor the download limits. He said the heavy users were likely using the network to download large amounts of video, most likely in high definition.

I was just looking at some photos of two people that we talk about here all the time. And I thought, “no, those are too good.” But perhaps I was wrong, and they really did suggest what I thought they were suggesting. Time will tell. Either way, “hi res” and “heavy” downloading serve more purposes than just getting instant copies of “The Green Door.”

“Heavy” is one of those evil corporate terms and we should squash it now.  Read more 

If you didn’t see this coming, I have no idea where your head has been stuck up for the last few years. I guess Great Economic Minds and corporate types just don’t mingle enough with us Po Folk. Too bad they supported Republican policies that killed the middle class golden consumerist goose:

By Martinne Geller

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. chain stores, reeling from the slowest holiday shopping season in five years, got some more bad news on Sunday: 2008 will not be any better and could see changes that may shift the retail playing field forever.

As the National Retail Federation kicked off its annual convention in New York, two retail consultants offered negative outlooks for the U.S. retail industry, which has seen consumers pull back amid higher gasoline and food prices, a credit crunch and a prolonged housing market decline.

“It’s anarchy,” said Wendy Liebmann, chief executive of WSL Strategic Retail, frequently repeating the word she used to sum up the latest results of her company’s bi-annual shopper study.  Read more 

Go on over and read her firsthand.

I just lurv the tagline in this post:

Average American Owes Average Chinese $4000

It sums up everything that is problematic about “our” economy. Did you sign a promisary to Yueh T’en-Chih, resident of south side Beijing? I sure didn’t. And yet, you and I will pay, and pay, and pay…and Ms. Yueh is unlikely to see that money, if she’s a Bad Han and reads Chinese blogs.

Seriously, what’s going on here? How did we get to the point where you and I “owe” people on the other side of the planet four grand, and rising? Um, does that include my 3 year old nephew? Cause I’m fairly sure he isn’t legally resposible for any debt yet. We buy him toys without lead, usually made in the US or Yurp.

Sometimes, I just can’t wrap my brain around it- why do people accept this? I’m not trying to be racist and pick on the Chinese, this same sort of post could be made for any of the larger foreign debt-holders who’ve propped up the Bush regime’s irresponsible spending habits these last eight years. Still, I do wonder- what is the breaking point? What will “we” sacrifice, in order to make good on promises made by people who have essentially run this country into the ground…for nothing?  Read more