A virtual shovel for all your B.S. needs

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Nov 092004
 

Found via Josh Marshall, a 2004 election blue-red map weighted for population density to counter all of those “look at all them red states” arguments.

And some Boston Globe debunking of some of the post-election marriage/values debate, which is a pointless discussion. I still want to research the exit poll that everyone’s quoting placed “moral values” as one of the issues in the election. Who conducts the poll? Who decided that was a choice? What were the other choices? Why was it added? You get the idea.

EDIT: More input on the
“moral values”.

 Posted by on November 9, 2004 at 5:14 pm

Trackback

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Nov 092004
 

I’ve been wanting Trackback, something you MT kids take for granted, in phpNuke for quite some time and Dan Macioce was the first one to implement it at the end of last year. I somehow got busy and missed it until this week. Well, life got in the way, he never got very far past alpha with it and then took down what he had completed. I managed to track him down and ask him if he still wanted to maintain it. He’s been gracious enough to send me the code and I added it tonight. I’d appreciate some help testing it out, so feel free to ping this post and we’ll see what happens. I still need to go through the spec for Trackback and trace through what he’s done, but I just might pick up where he left off. Stay tuned…

EDIT: I already found one spot where a template isn’t being replaced correctly in the original story link on the trackback page. I’m not sure if that’s because I’m using an older version of phpNuke or not.

 Posted by on November 9, 2004 at 5:50 am

New feeds

 Geek  No Responses »
Nov 042004
 

Thanks to Brennan, I now have RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 feeds to replace the default RSS 0.91 feed included with my CMS of choice. Check it out and let me know if anything no workee. It looks like someone’s finally gotten around to implementing Trackbacks for this bad boy as well. More to come…

 Posted by on November 4, 2004 at 6:24 pm

Feelin' Blue

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Nov 042004
 

There’s a lot of creative mapmaking going on around the blogosphere today. There are shades of purple maps and maps creating new countries called Progressivia or Jesusland. Thommy Saraceno from the Boston Metblog posted a map from the Boston Globe breaking down the popular vote in the presidential election by county. I just wanted to point out something to everyone outside of Texas (especially you international readers) who are likely to take this week’s decision as an endorsement of the policies of the last four years. Take a look at that map. See that little blue spot sort of in the middle of Texas? That’s us. We’re surrounded and I don’t know how much longer we can hold out. Send us your pr0n, latt

 Posted by on November 4, 2004 at 10:09 am

The aftermath

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Nov 032004
 

Ezra links a few bits of advice. I think the Paul Waldman comments underestimate the characteristics that generally go along with being a candidate from the South. It’s not THE factor, but so many things go with it as a general rule that it’s probably safe to say that type of candidate will fare better.

Locally at least, Lloyd Doggett won fairly handily. I can look forward to his representation for another two years. David Van Os lost his race. It’s somewhat heartening to see that Barack Obama kicked the junk out of Alan Keyes.

 Posted by on November 3, 2004 at 6:01 pm

Deja vu all over again

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Nov 032004
 

Fox News called Ohio for Bush at least 30 minutes before everyone else. Their current headline is “Bush One Electoral Vote From Victory”. CNN’s headline is “Eyes on Ohio”. It looks like MSNBC has now called Ohio for Bush as well. The word on the Democrat sites is that the huge 18-24 voter turnout that was expected, which one would expect to break for Kerry, just isn’t there. Josh Marshall is reporting all kinds of rumored Republican lawyer shenanigans in Ohio, but I guess it isn’t going to matter.

Things are going to look a whole lot worse in the morning. I guess I’d better get out my wallet. I’m really depressed. I didn’t pay nearly as much attention in 2000. When Bush was elected, I gave him the benefit of the doubt and hoped that all of that talk about being a uniter was true. Well, he proved that he wasn’t worthy of my generosity over the last four years. Now that I know with complete certainty what I’m getting, I have to say that I’m very pessimistic about the future for me, my family and the country. Bush is most likely going to appoint several Supreme Court justices over the next four years. The deficit will saddle us and our kids for years to come and there’s not going to be any Social Security waiting for me when I attempt to retire. This is not a good night and it’s not going to get better anytime soon. There’s no way to sugar coat it. We’re all fucked.

EDIT: Perhaps I’m being a little too fatalistic a little too early. I just watched an interview between Wolf Blitzer and Ken Blackwell, Ohio’s Secretary of State. Ohio seems to have their shit together a little better than Florida. There are still all of the Ohio provisional ballots which won’t be counted for up to 11 days from now. The margin in Ohio is still pretty damn small, roughly 100,000 votes. I can’t believe Fox is pulling the same shit this time as 2000. The race is too close to call and they called it over an hour ago before anyone else in favor of Bush. Unfuckingbelievable. On the other hand, why should I be surprised at all?

Good night, Gracie.

EDIT 2: I posted a comment this morning on Russ Beattie’s blog which follows up on some of my rant last night. The 18-24 vote comment needs clarification. The percentage didn’t increase, but the total number did. It just didn’t counteract the opposing increased turnout. I also left a comment on Prentiss’s blog. (There must be an easier way to do this. Trackback perhaps? Too bad it’s not implemented in this CMS.)

 Posted by on November 3, 2004 at 7:26 am

Activist judges

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Nov 022004
 

When I heard this morning that the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had overturned rulings yesterday from two different U.S. District judges, the first thing I wondered was who appointed the judges to overturn the ruling. I have my answer and, unfortunately, it falls along party lines. The two judges who overturned the rulings were appointed by Republican presidents.

Aren’t judges supposed to be impartial? While I’m not familiar with the Ohio law, it seems to me that the polling officials should be the ones to decide whether or not to challenge a voter’s eligbility, not some partisan observer, whether they’re Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Green or whatever. There shouldn’t be any partisan people screwing with the voters in the polling place. Period. Anything else just seems wrong to me. WTF?

 Posted by on November 2, 2004 at 11:30 pm

Vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote

 Politics  No Responses »
Nov 022004
 

I’ll qualify the subject line of this post adding the Trey Parker/Matt Stone rule. If somehow you’re too brain dead to have actually researched the candidates, stay the fuck home.

I’ll be interested to see how the Technorati: Votes page turns out by the end of the day. I oppose Bush and, tentatively, I support Kerry even though I ultimately decided to vote Libertarian this year. I had to defend my self this morning to a co-worker. I’m once again reasoning the same way I did in 2000. I really am not happy with either candidate in the presidential election. While I’m also not thrilled with Michael Badnarik, it’s certain that he won’t win and keeping my vote from Kerry won’t affect the electoral votes for Texas. Those votes are going to Bush. My Libertarian vote is a protest to both the two-party-system and the electoral college. The Libertarians generally have a reputation for being a little too out there for most people and I totally agree. However, I think some of the more moderate viewpoints are legitimate. What I really need is a party that mixes the Libertarians and Democrats.

I voted Libertarian in a few of the local races, but generally went for the Democrats. I withheld my vote from the elections with only one choice. Can anyone explain to me what the point is of including a race with a single choice on the ballot? This always annoys the crap out of me. Do they do this in other states?

My polling place was slightly more crowded than usual, but not too bad. I can’t possibly fathom how you could be, but If you’re registered, are on the fence and need a nudge one way or the other, read this.

Oh yeah and this is just marvelous. I’m hoping there’s some Chicken Little disease going on over there, but I guess you can’t be too safe. Is anyone in charge of the machines actually going to listen to them?

 Posted by on November 2, 2004 at 4:23 pm
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