Krugman on E-Voting

Posted on December 2, 2003

Paul Krugman is sounding the alarm on electronic voting now too. (Warning — New York Times, requires free registration, yadda yadda you know the drill.)

I’ll discuss what to do in a future column. But let’s be clear: the credibility of U.S. democracy may be at stake.

Couldn’t have put it better myself!

UPDATE: After reading Atrios’ take on Krugman’s article, I thought I should come back and add a note to this. Many people seem to think that the opposition to electronic voting is, at root, a partisan issue, but it’s not, or at least it shouldn’t be. The one thing that every party should be able to agree on is the need for a fair and impartial counting of votes. If that’s not guaranteed — if the system is perceived to be rigged, or just random — then democracy cannot function. Krugman leads his article with the Diebold case, which is relevant, but which also has some partisan overtones (Diebold’s CEO is a leading GOP fundraiser), which could be confusing if you’re new to the issue. Thanks to Atrios for highlighting this important distinction.

The Battle of Samarra, And What it Tells Us

Posted on December 2, 2003

You’ve probably already heard about the clash last weekend between U.S. troops and Iraqi insurgents near the town of Samarra that was provoked when the insurgents ambushed an American convoy. I think, though, that it probably deserves more attention that it’s getting.

Why? Well, Col. David Hackworth’s group, Soldiers for the Truth, is running what they claim is an eyewitness account of the battle from the U.S. side, and it’s a little different than what you’ve been hearing on CNN:

The convoy which was attacked while driving through Samara was not a supply convoy as reported, but was carrying large amounts of new Iraqi currency to stock local Iraqi banks and US greenbacks used to pay for goods and services the US forces need to accomplish their missions in Iraq…
When we received the first incoming rounds, all I could think of was how the hell did the Iraqis (most of these attackers being criminals, not insurgents) find out about this shipment? This was not broadcast on the local news, but Iraqi police knew about it. Bing, Bing Bing, You do the math…
Hack, most of the casualties were civilians, not insurgents or criminals as being reported. During the ambushes the tanks, brads and armored HUMVEES hosed down houses, buildings, and cars while using reflexive fire against the attackers. One of the precepts of “Iron Hammer” is to use an Iron Fist when dealing with the insurgents. As the division spokesman is telling the press, we are responding with overwhelming firepower and are taking the fight to the enemy. The response to these well coordinated ambushes was as a one would expect. The convoy continued to move, shooting at ANY target that appeared to be a threat. RPG fire from a house, the tank destroys the house with main gun fire and hoses the area down with 7.62 and 50cal MG fire. Rifle fire from an alley, the brads fire up the alley and fire up the surrounding buildings with 7.62mm and 25mm HE rounds. This was actually a rolling firefight through the entire town.
The ROE under “Iron Fist” is such that the US soldiers are to consider buildings, homes, cars to be hostile if enemy fire is received from them (regardless of who else is inside. It seems too many of us this is more an act of desperation, rather than a well thought out tactic. We really don’t know if we kill anyone, because we don’t stick around to find out. Since we armored troops and we are not trained to use counter-insurgency tactics; the logic is to respond to attacks using our superior firepower to kill the rebel insurgents. This is done in many cases knowing that there are people inside these buildings or cars who may not be connected to the insurgents.
The belief in superior firepower as a counter-insurgency tactic is then extended down to the average Iraqi, with the hope that the Iraqis will not support the guerillas and turn them in to coalition forces, knowing we will blow the hell out of their homes or towns if they don’t. Of course in too many cases, if the insurgents bait us and goad us into leveling buildings and homes, the people inside will then hate us (even if they did not before) and we have created more recruits for the guerillas.

SFTT is running the letter anonymously, so obviously it’s open to debate as to whether it’s legitmate or not. But Hackworth and SFTT have done a pretty good job of telling truth from fiction up to now, and they’re not given to tossing out incendiary accusations just for fun, so if they’re inclined to publish this letter, I’m inclined to believe it’s at least worth reading.

So, if it is legitimate, it tells us several things about the state of the insurgency:

• They’ve infiltrated the Iraqi police. As the correspondent noted, that’s the vector by which the insurgents would have heard about the convoy. If that’s true, it’s a Very Bad Thing, because our current policy in Iraq is to very quickly hand power over to whatever functioning local institutions we can find — such as the Iraqi police. If the Baathists are silently pulling their strings from a cave somewhere, that could mean the “Iraqification” plan could be doomed before it even gets going.
• They’ve gained confidence in their arms, numbers, and tactics. We can tell this because they have graduated to attacking tanks. A modern main battle tank is a formidable target, wrapped in layers of “composite” armor that’s impenetrable by almost anything foot soldiers can carry. For this reason, guerrillas tend in the early stages of their movements to avoid attacking them, preferring instead to ambush soldiers when they’re out of their vehicles. Eventually, though, as the guerrillas start to succeed, they gain the confidence to take on these imposing targets, and when they do, it’s a clear signal to the other side that the bad guys have taken things up a notch.
• We’re reacting in exactly the way they probably hoped we would. Because tanks aren’t usually targets of guerrilla attacks, they aren’t designed to deal with such things very well; their main armament is typically a huge cannon that’s better at destroying another tank a mile away than it is at killing a guy with an RPG in a window without hurting the little old lady in the next window. If Hack’s correspondent is correct, the new U.S. rules of engagement for Iraq are to basically just fire away and not worry about the little old lady (it’s her fault for living next door to a terrorist). This is incredibly boneheaded, as it just means that every town our tanks roll through will end up with a bunch of folks with new reasons to hate America by the time the tanks are gone.

Once you see all these things, the picture from Samarra starts to get clearer. When I saw the first news reports (“Insurgents attack U.S. convoy, 54 Iraqi dead, no U.S. dead”), I couldn’t figure out what the motivation was. Why risk so many guerrillas on a supply convoy? It made no sense. Now, though, it makes perfect sense. They’ve been living off of their hoard of Saddam cash, but that money is gonna be worthless as soon as the occupation currency takes effect, so they work their informants in the police to find out the route of the convoy. The odds of actually knocking it over are slim, but even if they don’t, they know our rules of engagement well enough by now to know that they could still win a significant propaganda victory if they laid their ambush in a populated area — once the shooting started, we’d level the place, and the people of the town would see the evil of the Great Satan with their own eyes.

Speculation? You bet. But it sure makes more sense to me than the official story does.

UPDATE: Juan Cole is asking some of the same questions I am.

What Blogs Can Do

Posted on December 2, 2003

They can get the ACLU to modify their Web site so that, when you sign up, you can opt out of having your contact information re-sold to their partner organizations. That means you can now contribute to them without having to deal with a truckload of junk mail from other do-gooder groups coming for the rest of your life.

Finally! Good work, ACLU.

(Thanks to Doc Searls for the pointer.)

Bribery on the Floor of the House?

Posted on December 1, 2003

One of the arguments that’s often deployed against campaign finance reform is that the role of money in politics has been overstated: that money follows votes, not the other way around. In other words, interests gravitate towards, and contribute to, candidates who naturally support their positions on key issues. This argument says that, sure, back in the old days, lobbyists would turn up in Congressman Foofoorah’s office with a sack of cash, and walk out with an additional vote their way, but that sort of thing doesn’t happen any more.

If you believe that, you should go ask Rep. Nick Smith (R-MI) how he feels after the way he was treated in the push to get votes for the GOP’s Medicare bill:

During 14 years in the Michigan Legislature and 11 years in Congress, Rep. Nick Smith had never experienced anything like it. House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, in the wee hours last Saturday morning, pressed him to vote for the Medicare bill. But Smith refused. Then things got personal.
Smith, self term-limited, is leaving Congress. His lawyer son Brad is one of five Republicans seeking to replace him from a GOP district in Michigan’s southern tier. On the House floor, Nick Smith was told business interests would give his son $100,000 in return for his father’s vote. When he still declined, fellow Republican House members told him they would make sure Brad Smith never came to Congress. After Nick Smith voted no and the bill passed, Duke Cunningham of California and other Republicans taunted him that his son was dead meat…

And this is from paleo-conservative Bob Novak, so it’s hardly likely to be a liberal fairy tale. (A story from the Associated Press confirms Novak’s account.)

Let’s just make sure we’re all on the same page with this — someone (Smith’s not saying who) offered on the floor of the House to corral $100,000 for Smith’s son’s campaign if only Smith would change his vote; it’s hard to get more quid-pro-quo than that. And, when Smith refused to do so, they essentially told him that his son was a marked man in GOP politics. There’s four other Republicans who want to contend for that district; I wonder which one of them got the $100,000 prize?

Over on Slate, Timothy Noah argues that this case meets the criteria for the Federal crime of attempted bribery. The only question is, who offered the bribe? Who committed the crime? Like I said, Smith’s not telling…

Happy Fun Time Holiday Weekend Roundup

Posted on December 1, 2003

OK, so I’ve been pretty quiet over the holiday weekend; I suppose I should post something to catch y’all up on what’s going down with me at the moment.

I went home to visit family for Thanksgiving; that would have been nice if I hadn’t started showing flu symptoms on Thanksgiving Day. Yuck! That meant I got to spend the rest of the long weekend in bed, sucking down tea, OJ, and over the counter flu medications in a vain attempt to be up and about in time to go to work on Monday.

Then the weekend was over and it was time for me to come back to DC. I was still feeling pretty miserable, so I called my carrier, US Airways, told them I had the flu, and asked if it would be possible for me to fly out on Monday instead of Sunday. They politely told me that anything was possible, as long as I was willing to shell out a couple hundred bucks for the privilege.

So, in other words, I call an airline and say to them “hi, I’m going to be bringing a communicable disease on board with me, which could infect who knows how many other passengers and crew… is there a way to avoid that?” and they expect me to pay for the privilege.

Good to know how much US Airways cares about their passengers’ health!

Oh, and to add insult to injury, the plane was delayed an hour getting to the gate, which meant we didn’t arrive in DC until 11:00 PM. Just the hour you want to be up at when you’re down with the flu! It’s like a party! Yay!

This morning I didn’t feel any better (what a surprise, after that relaxing, therapeutic trip), so I went to the doctor to see what was up. He told me that the flu had already cleared out of my system, but that it had left behind a case of bronchitis for me to grapple with. Hoo-ray.

So, until further notice it’s back to the OJ chugging and so on. What a festive freaking holiday this has been. I can only imagine how Christmas/New Year’s could be any better; my money is on a giant meteor from Dimension X landing on my head. Feel free to start up a pool with your friends with your own ideas, it’s fun for the whole family!

Surely Journalism Can Be Better

Posted on November 26, 2003

David Weinberger has a fascinating deconstruction of a Boston Globe story on Howard Dean, using it as a vehicle to show what’s wrong with so much of American political journalism. I couldn’t agree with him more — and not just about Dean, the coverage of all candidates and all issues is so shoddy and so superficial that it beggars belief. Read it and start to understand why half the fun of reading the daily paper is learning to read between the lines.

This Oughta Give You The Heebie-Jeebies…

Posted on November 25, 2003

Proof that there’s someone for everybody: I Love Karl Rove

Hey there – I just wanted to send out a big ol’ howdy-do to any of the other RoveHos who’ve followed me on over from my old Geocities page. I was just sooooo tired of getting content warnings from the First Amendment hatin’ moderators over there, telling me that some of my Rovey postings were “inappropriate” and violated their terms of service. As my fellow RoveHos will attest, if having sticky, giggly, naughty, tingly bathing suit area fantasies about Karl Rove is wrong, then we don’t wanna be right!

The photos alone are worth your time. This site is a riot.

I Am A “Smacktard”. Who Knew?

Posted on November 24, 2003

So. With the recent release of version 2.0 of the online shooter America’s Army, I decided to dive in and give the game a whirl. I had played the 1.0 version before, but that was a long time ago and I was out of practice, so I decided to create a new profile, play through the training missions, and start from scratch, rather than dive into one of the live-fire missions and get instantly vaporized in a hail of OpFor bullets.

I make it through basic infantry training quickly enough, pass the MOUT McKenna group training exercise, and so I’m qualified to join any of the standard-level online games — you need to pass special training to join Airborne or Special Forces games, which I don’t have — and I choose a scenario that seems simple enough: a raid to destroy three trucks with explosive charges. The trucks are guarded by the other team (the opposing force, or “OpFor”), and my team of 16 or so players has to get past them and blow up the trucks.

Well, the game kicks off and things go downhill quickly. The trucks aren’t all together, you see; they’re spread out in three locations across the map, and there’s a timer running, so you pretty much have to divide your team to hit all three in time. We split up, and before any of our squads can reach the trucks we all stumble across OpFor positions. Firefights break out and the result is that our side is reduced to a smoking hole in the ground… except for me and a couple of other guys, who manage to pull away before we get turned into mulch. Shaken, we regroup and head out to try and reach the trucks again, but this time we’re all on our own.

Amazingly, this time two of us make it. One teammate gets tagged by the enemy right away; another quickly finds a truck, sets the charge, but then has to run and hide as enemy patrols start to chase him down. Since I’m new at this, it takes me a little while to find a truck, but I do it, and miraculously manage to do it without running into any more OpFor patrols. I run up to the truck and hit the “E” key, which is the key that sets the charge…

… and nothing happens.

Now, as you can imagine, this is somewhat confusing, since as I mentioned I’m re-learning the game. Am I pressing the right key? Do I have to be facing a certain part of the truck? I check my control settings and try different locations on the target, but nothing works. The timer, meanwhile, keeps counting down. If I can set a charge here and move out, there’s still time for me to get to the third and final truck and set a charge there, too, so time is of the essence. But I can’t get the ()$&@(&*$ thing to set! Frustrated, I radio my only remaining colleague and ask for help. Am I pressing the right key? Yes. Am I facing the right part of the truck? Shouldn’t matter. I keep trying things, minutes keep passing. Tick, tick, tick…

Finally, with thirty seconds left on the timer, I notice a part of the display I hadn’t seen before, for some reason — an indicator that tells you what objective you are currently closest to. According to that indicator, I’m currently standing next to truck “C” — which is the same truck that my other teammate had already planted charges on earlier. So in other words, the reason I couldn’t plant charges on this truck wasn’t because I was doing it wrong, it was because I was standing next to the wrong truck. And I’d have known that if I had bothered to notice the indicator which was right there on the screen for the five-plus minutes I was futzing around trying to figure out if there was some magic way to press the “E” key that I didn’t know about.

Thirty seconds, I discovered, is just enough time to smack yourself on the forehead and say “Dammit!” before time runs out.

So anyway, for my valor in “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory”, my teammates christened me with the sobriquet that no online gamer wants to have associated with their name — “smacktard“. I suppose I had it coming to me…

Fun With Spam: Holiday Edition

Posted on November 23, 2003

Another actual spam found while I was cleaning out my spam filter:

There are so many neat things about this one:

• It’s from Santa Claus, people! Who knew he was branching out into direct marketing? And right as he’d have to be gearing up for the big holiday season, too — the man is a sales machine.
• Check that sent date: Dec. 31, 1969. Yep, that’s right — not only is it from Santa Claus, the jolly old elf actually went back in freaking time to send it. I can only assume he did this to ensure that it would arrive in time for the holidays; we all know how clogged up the Postal Service gets this time of year.
• I’m impressed by his focus, too — unlike most spammers, who want to sell me generic Viagra or dubious investment schemes, Santa is shilling toys (in this case, remote-control helicopters). So, on top of everything else, Santa must have an MBA — he’s clearly learned the value of sticking to his core competency.

So, congratulations to Santa for some smart diversification! It’s clearly the way to succeed in today’s sluggish economy.

National Weather Service Alerts In Your Newsreader

Posted on November 21, 2003

Check this out — the National Weather Service is providing live, state-by-state feeds of weather watches, warnings, and advisories in RSS format. That means you can get notified of impending severe weather in your area without lifting a finger — the alerts will come in automatically when your newsreading software pulls down the latest headlines from the Web. What a good idea!

Tog on Security Dos and D’ohLTs

Posted on November 20, 2003

Bruce Tognazzini has a great column up this month on what he calls “Security D’ohLTs“: experts who add so many layers of incomprehensible security to a system that they lead users to build circumvention mechanisms. Anyone who’s seen an office where all the users have their network passwords on Post-Its stuck to their monitors knows what Tog is talking about — there can be such a thing as too much security, especially when it’s poorly thought out. (Thanks to Don Park for the pointer.)

Aqua Teens Hit DVD

Posted on November 19, 2003

All right! Finally, Cartoon Network has seen the light and released a DVD collection of episodes of one of the funniest shows around, Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

You know what that means — commence to jigglin’! Or you could just, you know, buy the damn thing.

Joe’s Modest Proposal

Posted on November 18, 2003

(Another piece of prescient genius from Seanbaby)

E-Voting Under Fire In Fairfax

Posted on November 18, 2003

It appears that there is not a complete common sense deficit in Fairfax County’s government — Democrats and Republicans on the county’s Board of Supervisors have joined together to request an investigation from the County Executive into this month’s e-voting election debacle.

Incredibly, though, the head of the board of elections, Margaret Luca, continues to defend the deeply flawed WINVote system:

Electoral board secretary Margaret K. Luca delivered an upbeat assessment in a memo to the supervisors. “Overall, the new voting machines worked well,” she wrote. “We had almost 1,000 new machines involved in an election for the first time, and only 10 of those posed a problem.”

Wow, get me some of what she’s having. Yes, “only” ten machines completely malfunctioned and had to be removed from the polling place for service, in violation of election laws. Oh, and there’s that other issue of the other 990 machines Slashdotting the central servers when they tried to upload the vote counts, leading to huge delays in compiling a final count — which is pretty fricking embarrassing in an off-year election, where turnout is always dismally low — but I guess that doesn’t fall under her definition of “posing a problem”. What a doorknob!

But anyway, with primary elections coming up in February, it looks like Fairfax is moving to try and get its act together in time. Maybe common sense is more common than we usually think!

Clark Calls Out Fox News

Posted on November 18, 2003

Wow… I’m not a Clarkie, but I’ve gotta give the General props for the way he handled this recent appearance on Fox News (Windows Media required). Watch the clip and you’ll see what I mean — it’s a six or seven minute clip and things only start to go off-script around the middle, so make sure to watch the whole thing.

Basically Clark shows that he’s learned a lesson that a lot of Democrats haven’t — that when faced with people who are willing to twist your words, you have to refuse to play along or else you’re letting them run the game. And man, does Clark refuse to play along.

On Hope

Posted on November 17, 2003

“Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.” — Václav Havel

“Battle for the soul” of the Democratic Party

Posted on November 17, 2003

Daily Kos has a great article up today — The New Republic, which generally keeps its Web archives for subscribers only, has given Kos a link into an important article they’re running entitled “Outside In”. It’s the first piece I’ve seen yet that hits the nail precisely on the head about the critical distinction that’s arising in the Democratic Party between the “old guard” (the DNC & DLC crowd, led and installed by the Clintons) and the “reformers” (a loose collection of interests that have coalesced around the Dean campaign). If you’re at all interested in this election, you must read this article.

The division in the party over Dean is less about ideology than about power. Three years after Bill Clinton left office, he and Hillary still control what remains of a Democratic establishment. Terry McAuliffe, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), was installed by Clinton. Most of the powerful new fund-raising groups, known as 527s, and the new think tanks, such as the Center for American Progress, are run by the best and brightest of the Clinton administration. As National Journal noted in a detailed look at what it called “Hillary Inc.,” the senator’s network of fund-raising organizations “has begun to assume a quasi-party status.” And some of the best Clinton talent is heavily invested in non-Dean campaigns, especially Joe Lieberman’s (Mandy Grunwald and Mark Penn), John Edwards’s (Bruce Reed), and Wesley Clark’s (Bruce Lindsey, Eli Segal, and Mickey Kantor).

Dean, by contrast, has come to represent the party’s anti-establishment forces. While the other candidates, especially former self-styled front-runner John Kerry, started the campaign by wooing party leaders, Dean built a grassroots army first–in part by bashing D.C. Democrats and their disastrous 2002 election strategy–and is only now leveraging his fund-raising power to win over establishment types. No Democrats closely associated with the Clintons are working for the Dean campaign. In fact, it’s hard to find a Clintonite who speaks favorably of the former Vermont governor. This evident schism is not just about Dean’s opposition to the war–or even his prospects in the general election. It’s a turf war to decide who will control the future of the party.

This struggle is playing out in several of the party’s organizations and constituencies. Indeed, Dean’s high-profile labor endorsements–the cornerstone of the tipping-point argument–actually emphasize the party’s divisions. Andy Stern, the leader of SEIU, is to the labor movement what Dean is to the Democratic Party–an anti-establishment reformer. When the AFL-CIO failed to adopt reforms recommended by Stern earlier this year, he started a breakaway organization–the New Unity Partnership–with several other unions that is now seen as a major challenge to the AFL-CIO establishment. And SEIU is a lot like the Dean campaign. It’s the fastest-growing union and one of the most democratically run. It’s obsessed with organizing new members to whom it imparts a message of empowerment, unlike the more centralized AFL-CIO. Stern and SEIU, with their emphasis on health care instead of globalization, are the future of the labor movement in the United States, while the industrial unions, which back Dick Gephardt and have been bleeding members for years as they fight an uphill battle against free trade, are the past. SEIU’s backing of Dean isn’t a nod from the establishment–it’s a protest against it.

Note that first sentence: “The division in the party over Dean is less about ideology than about power.” That’s it exactly. Dean’s politics aren’t radically different from Clinton’s — he’s a pragmatic centrist, just as Clinton was on most issues. The difference is where they get their power from. When Clinton became the de facto leader of the Democratic Party in 1992, he inherited an organization that had in many ways ceased to exist except on a symbolic level. He rebuilt the organization into an impressive fund-raising machine by taking a page from the GOP’s playbook: the Clinton-era DNC focused on reaching out to large corporations and wealthy individuals, tapping their wealth for Democratic candidates. However, while this approach was great for the bottom line, it ran against the grain of the Democrats’ traditional strength: the ability to connect people together into a cohesive movement, competing with sweat equity rather than with money. In the ’90s Democratic Party, “grassroots politics” was for suckers and rubes, something you did only when you couldn’t afford to do real politics via slick multi-million dollar media buys.

The end result of all this was a kind of devil’s bargain that Clinton struck with the rest of us who called ourselves Democrats: don’t ask too many questions, let me and my people raise the money and run the campaigns the way we want to, and we’ll keep you at least nominally in power. And, for the most part, we went along — even when it became clear in 1996 that the fundraising tactics had gotten way out of hand.

However, the last few years have seen the Clinton team’s magic touch disappear. It began to unravel in Florida in 2000, and the debacle of the 2002 election further tarnished the “trust us, we know what we’re doing” mystique. So, when people talk about Dean as a “rebel” or a “protest candidate”, you have to understand that this is a big part of what he’s protesting against — the takeover of the Democratic Party by people who essentially sold it to further their own political careers. And candidates like John Kerry are never going to get any traction until they figure out which side of this internal split they come down on. (Kerry talks the talk of a reformer, but all his financing and organization are strictly old-school.)

This fight between big-money and shoe-leather politics really is a fight to determine what the shape of the Democratic Party is going to be. It’ll be interesting to see how it turns out…

All I’d Need Would Be Celebrity Guests…

Posted on November 17, 2003

I wonder if the folks at the new job would mind me installing this in my office:

Yep, Cartoon Network is selling a replica of Space Ghost’s desk and chair from the bizarre and funny show Space Ghost Coast to Coast. The price: a cool $39,995. It’s a good thing they shaved off those last five bucks, that should let me squeeze it right in my budget!

My New Job

Posted on November 14, 2003

Just a note that as of December 8, I’ll no longer be with Forum One Communications; I’ve accepted an offer to join the staff of Oceana, a non-profit advocacy group dedicated to preserving and defending the world’s oceans. They’ve asked me to help them as they build an online advocacy network, and I’m excited to help them do it — it’s a unique opportunity to try something so new that very few people are even doing it yet.

I’ll post more as things start to take shape, but I think it’s safe to say that with a little luck and a lot of hard work we’re going to be able to do some insanely cool stuff at Oceana. You might want to keep an eye on it 🙂

Adventures in Business Stupidity

Posted on November 14, 2003

You know, it’s kind of encouraging that every time you think you’ve seen every kind of bad decision there is, humanity finds a way to invent whole new categories. The latest fad in business stupidity is the Ridiculous Re-Naming — taking a perfectly good business and slapping it with a howlingly ludicrous moniker on the advice of some overpaid “branding consultants” who insist that the name is much more critical to the success of the business than the quality of the service or the price at which you offer it.

The most recent victim of this practice? United Airlines, which just announced their plan to launch a low-cost carrier to compete with Southwest and its like. Now, that in itself is not necessarily a bad idea — Southwest is clearly doing something right, so for United to steal a page from their book might not be a bad idea. But what did United decide to call this little venture of theirs?

“Ted“.

Yes. The new airline will be named Ted. I thought the airlines had scraped the bottom of the naming barrel back when Delta (another victim of Ridiculous Re-Naming) decide to re-name their Delta Express service to “Song“, but “Ted” beats that by a country mile. Just think of the conversations we’ll get to have!

“Sorry I was late — Ted was backed up over O’Hare.”

“I rode Ted all night from New York to LA.”

… and so forth. Of course, the name isn’t the only misguided thing about Ted; it turns out that United hasn’t really done much thinking about how to run a low-cost service at, you know, a lower cost than their traditional service, which doesn’t bode well for Ted’s prospects. The Chicago Tribune has a great story analyzing the Ted launch, and they got a quote that’s laugh-out-loud funny:

Despite the good-natured hype, experts remain skeptical about whether the new discount offshoot, which is intended to mimic the success of such carriers as Southwest Airlines, makes sense for United.
“They can call it Ted; they can call it Trans-Deficit Airlines. It doesn’t make any difference. The concept doesn’t work,” said Michael Boyd, an airline consultant in Colorado.

Trans-Deficit Airlines! Hee. Michael Boyd, whoever you are, I salute you.

Cruel and Unusual

Posted on November 13, 2003

I don’t care what your politics are, you’ve gotta admit, no child deserves this.

Your One-Stop Humility Shop

Posted on November 12, 2003

Feeling a little too big for your britches? Check out “Things Other People Accomplished When They Were Your Age“.

Here’s what it gave me:

At age 28:
The Danish physicist Niels Bohr published his revolutionary theory of the atom.
French novelist George Sand published her first novel, Indiana.
Dr. Ludwig Zamenhof of Warsaw invented the artificial language Esperanto.
British physician Thomas Wakley began publishing The Lancet.
Jamaican reggae composer/performer Bob Marley recorded “I Shot the Sheriff.”
Nuclear plant lab tech Karen Silkwood died in a car crash on her way to meet with a New York Times reporter and a union official to document her allegations about falsified quality control reports.
French naturalist Jean B. Lamarck coined the word biology to encompass the studies of botany and zoology.

Um… wow. I suppose I’d better get crackin’ :-/

E-Voting: Wait, It Gets Better

Posted on November 12, 2003

Apparently Fairfax County isn’t the only jurisdiction that’s been having trouble with implementing electronic voting — officials in Boone County, Indiana, got a bit of a shock in last week’s elections when their shiny new e-voting systems from MicroVote reported approximately 144,000 votes cast from a pool of fewer than 19,000 registered voters.

“I about had a heart attack,” County Clerk Lisa Garofolo said of the breakdown that came as an eager crowd watched computer-generated vote totals being projected onto a wall of the County Courthouse rotunda.
“I’m assuming the glitch was in the software.”
A lengthy collaboration between the county’s information technology director and advisers from the MicroVote software producer fixed the problem. But before that, computer readings of stored voting machine data showed far more votes than registered voters.
“It was like 144,000 votes cast,” said Garofolo, whose corrected accounting showed just 5,352 ballots from a pool of fewer than 19,000 registered voters.
“Believe me, there was nobody more shook up than I was.”

Oh, I believe it, Lisa!

Here’s the big question: is anybody else out there as nervous as I am about the idea of new vote tallies being produced based on undescribed collaborations between a county IT director and a vendor of voting machines? Is there any audit trail to verify this new count? How was it arrived at? Has it been independently verified by a third party? What’s to have prevented them from introducing their own biases into the count?

Veterans’ Day

Posted on November 11, 2003

Out there, we’ve walked quite friendly up to Death,-
Sat down and eaten with him, cool and bland,-
Pardoned his spilling mess-tins in our hand.
We’ve sniffed the green thick odour of his breath,-
Our eyes wept, but our courage didn’t writhe.
He’s spat at us with bullets and he’s coughed
Shrapnel. We chorussed when he sang aloft,
We whistled while he shaved us with his scythe.
Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!
We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.
No soldier’s paid to kick against His powers.
We laughed, -knowing that better men would come,
And greater wars: when each proud fighter brags
He wars on Death, for lives; not men, for flags.

Wilfred Owen, “The Next War“

Today is Veterans’ Day; take a moment and remember all those who risked — and gave — all in your defense.

Yet More Fun With Spam

Posted on November 11, 2003

Another Actual Spam from my inbox:

What’s funny about this one? Check the subject line:

Re: %RNDUCCHAR[2-8], almost followed after

You know how the spammers have taken to throwing in bunches of random letters in their subject lines (“Generic Viagra Cheap xyzza”), to try and throw off your spam filter? It looks like this fellow doesn’t know how to use his spamming software, and he’s included the name of the function (%RNDUCCHAR[2-8]) that generates those random letters in the subject line, rather than the output from that function (between 2 and 8 random characters — “xyzza”, say).

Way to go, fella! I guess we now have an answer to the question “how dumb do you have to be to get into the spam business”…