Powerless

 Politics  No Responses »
Nov 162004
 

I’ve been trying really hard not to blog so much about politics, but I’m finding it hard to do. A line has been forming at the figurative door of W’s cabinet. I’m surprised that no one has been trampled on the way out.

It appears that Condi Rice will, in fact, be Colin Powell’s replacement. The Washington Post has a take on her appointment which is all but certain to be announced today. Jesse hits another issue with her taking the job. Between her taking the top job at the State Department and the chopping that Porter Goss, the new director of the CIA is perpetrating over there, I think we’re in for a lot more of what we saw over the last four years. While it’s clear that there need to be a shakeup in the intelligence community, it sounds like the people getting the axe are the ones that have tended to disagree with the Bush administration in the past. Once again, the Washington Post has quite a bit to say about Goss and Rice.

EDIT: It’s official. (*shudder*)

 Posted by on November 16, 2004 at 5:30 pm

Fool me once, shame on any parent who trusts this woman

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Nov 162004
 

Two different businesses charged with caring for Austin youth have gone out of business this year under shady circumstances. Both times, those businesses were run by Dolores Hillyer. First, there was the Texas Academy of Excellence, a charter school whose biggest claim to fame is that it’s the first one in Texas to file for bankruptcy. Now, there’s the Capital City Creative School-Capitol Complex, a daycare for state workers which shut down abruptly last week.

As a parent who has one child in daycare and another in a charter school, this pattern concerns me. We’re trusting that the people running those businesses have the best interests of our children and our families at heart and we’re trusting that they are competent enough to run their business. I don’t know how this woman keeps getting in a position of trust with the track record that she’s had over the past year (and even before that according to the Statesman story on the charter school). Since she already had control of the daycare when the charter school shenanigans came to light, I can understand how this might have been missed until now. I wonder if any parents at the daycare had suspicions once the charter school story broke earlier this year?

Bottom line: If you’re a parent in Austin, you’d do well to check out who’s running your daycare or charter school. If you hear the name Dolores Hillyer, run. Run very far away.

 Posted by on November 16, 2004 at 4:54 pm

Popularity breeds theft

 Uncategorized  2 Responses »
Nov 152004
 

I heard about this story (see my standard Statesman link disclaimer at the bottom of this post) on 101X this morning. I’ll resist the obvious puns about Hold ‘Em and hold-up that The Statesman couldn’t seem to resist.

It’s amazing how much interest in poker and Texas Hold ‘Em in particular has grown over the past couple of years. We’ve got a local blogger, transplanted Aussie JK, who dedicates much of his blog to poker. I’m all for his objective of allowing more legal games around the U.S., especially here in Texas (and close to Austin). It’d certainly cut down on the chance of robberies more informal games like the one mentioned in the story. Of course, the likelihood of legalizing poker gambling in a state that doesn’t allow you to buy beer/wine/liquor before noon on a Sunday, an endlessly irritating law that thwarted my beer buying once again yesterday morning, is probably pretty slim.

Standard Statesman Link Disclaimer: The Statesman’s annoying 7 day archive policy will break the first link in this post a week from today. After that, if you’re an Austin Library card holder, you can get to it from their reference databases.

 Posted by on November 15, 2004 at 1:12 pm

The proverbial straw

 Politics  No Responses »
Nov 102004
 

I was listening to Howard Stern this morning just before I got to work when he mentioned a USA Today article about pharmacists refusing to fill birth control prescriptions for religious reasons. DazeReader has a bunch of related stuff today (unfortunately I can’t link directly to the post).

I don’t have time right now to write a decent post about this, so I’ll use abbreviated profanity. WTF? No word in the article about what CVS thinks about the possibility of losing a bunch of business because of this. Are we now going to have to have pharmacies for those who believe in birth control and those who don’t? I think everyone should vote with their wallet. I’m not going to patronize a pharmacy whose pharmacist decides not to sell me something based on their own morals. They’re entitled to them, but if it’s going to make a hassle for me to fill a fucking prescription, then that’s not right. If they don’t want to do it, then find another fucking job.

Beyond just the inconvenience of it all, where is this going to lead? I’m married with two kids. As of now, my wife and I have made the decision not to have any more kids. The reasons for making such a decision are personal and unique to each family. Is that pharmacist going to raise and provide for the extra kids that I have because I can’t get birth control? Some of the women in the article missed days because of the pharmacists decision. They could end up pregnant. It only takes one day. Damn.

 Posted by on November 10, 2004 at 4:44 pm

Some exit poll answers that bring more questions

 Politics  No Responses »
Nov 092004
 

Lawrence Lessig points us to a few answers to my last post. I knew that Voter News Service was out of the picture after the 2002 election. Apparently, it’s replacement is National Election Pool. It was those six news organizations (AP, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News) who came up with the questions. I still can’t seem to find the questionnaire. I suspect that you have to pay for the subscription to get it along with the data. Because some of the exit polling was so far off, there’s wild speculation from both sides. Mr. Lessig is right. If Edison/Mitofsky want to maintain their credibility, they may have to open the data to an independent third party for scrutiny.

 Posted by on November 9, 2004 at 10:01 pm

A virtual shovel for all your B.S. needs

 Politics  No Responses »
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
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