Blood Socks

So there’s a small flap going on about John McCain’s computer savvy. It actually began at the conference I was just at. I thought I’d do my own quick test of the candidates’ abilities.

Though neither are passing, right now Barack Obama’s XHTML validation is doing much better than John McCain’s.

Neither of them have feeds on their main sites, and no autodiscoverable ones on their blogs. Their blogs do each have RSS feeds you can find on your own though. Barack Obama’s blog has a single RSS feed, which validates just fine, with a few recommendations. John McCain’s blog has several RSS feeds, no overarching one, but the first one fails to validate.

John McCain’s site is written in ASP.NET, and Barack Obama’s is in PHP. You be the judge on which you think better or more modern, but my vote says open-source PHP is superior to the closed-source ASP.NET.

That’s all the evidence I need. John McCain’s website is worse, therefore John McCain knows nothing about horses and the American spirit.

Wow, good on the Huffington Post for somehow tracking this. It’s a bit of an underestimate, and friends have reported that their donations don’t appear on it. Still really cool.

So FiveThirtyEight.com is pretty badass. We’ll all be dead tired of hearing of poll after projection after prediction, but FiveThirtyEight is the only place you need listen to. The guy (Nate Silver) who runs it got some notice after being the only source to accurately predict the North Carolina & Indiana Democratic primary results (everyone else all predicted Hillary would do a lot better). Nate also has an admitted pro-Obama bias, but his math is so detailed, intense, and transparent that I don’t see it bleeding into the numbers. His blog post analyses, optimistic for the Democratic party, are very pleasant to the ears.

I found it pretty shocking to see the party registration numbers for the United states. 72 million Democrats, 55 million Republicans. So how come Republicans have won 7 of the last 10 presidential elections? How do they even compete?

There are tons of reasons. They do better at turnout operations on Election Day. They have the old, who vote reliably, and Democrats have a bunch of young flakes. Then there’s that twice as many Americans identify as conservative than do as liberal. The word ‘liberal’ is a bad word in American politics, and Obama has to spend time foolishly trying to bat the term away from him, even though he is the very definition of the word, and it’s exactly what most of his base likes about him!

One stark reality, that really troubles me, is that males lean Republican, and especially white males, and especially white evangelical males. But even just males alone lean Republican. Practically every other demographic that matters votes Democratic. Blacks, Hispanics, Jews, Asian Americans. Women. So much diversity in America, and just the one racio-gendric contingency that demands strong conservative ideals be taken seriously. It’s easy to understand why the Republican party takes the unforgiving stance on a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants that they do.

If Barack Obama wins this election, it will be a bell tolling that the biggest ingredient in the melting pot has finally melted. And if not, then maybe the oven needs another goddamn 20 years of simmering, and my idealism had better still be around when it’s done.

On this historic night, I can finally break my carefully guarded neutrality, and announce that I support Barack Obama for the president of the United States.

Drudge Report is the site to watch today. It’s all coming to an end.

Watch superdelegate endorsements stream in on the campaign’s blog (more current than the front page).

Today is a big day. I remember when the 2 weeks between Wisconsin and Ohio/Texas day seemed to never end. The days ground on, and March 4th never seemed any closer. I was spending an hour a day on Google News searching for ‘obama’. After that reaffirmed the race as an artifically constructed tie that I would have to endure for another 6 weeks, I made myself calm down, and since then have spent maybe only 20 minutes a day scraping for news.

Still, that’s 20 minutes every day, and though the time has moved a lot faster I can still remember how much has happened. It’s easy to have begun this process intrigued, even excited, and now be at a point of apathy and cynicism. The candidates start to blur together after so long without news. Sure, Obama set himself apart with A More Perfect Union, but that was ages ago, and it had already been ages when he did it. Now things feel more blurry. Even the Obama campaign has done and is now doing some negative campaigning.

But I’m still excited. It’s our country’s future, and very little can diminish my investment in any race deciding it. I’ll be proud to watch Hillary Clinton be sworn in on Inauguration Day, and happy to have ‘taken back’ the country. To see Obama be inaugurated would give me not only that, but an overwhelming sense of awe, at our own people that are capable of such self-renewal after a period of long social degradation and repeated barrages of fear-mongering. That sensation would be utterly new to me, and the allure of its purity keeps me energized to support Barack Obama, and fight this until the knockout punch is delivered, so we can all relax and move on to the next stage of our nation’s healing.

That knockout punch probably won’t happen today, but if Obama keeps it close (close like Texas, not like Ohio) then I expect to seal the deal with North Carolina and Indiana in two weeks’ time. If that’s the case, my sense of time will surely dilate all over again, and I will live in slow turmoil.

Latest in national polls from Gallup Daily
Latest in PA polls, summarized at a USA Today blog
Politweets, a live aggregation of twitters about candidates

I haven’t seemed to muster the energy to write about my experiences at the Personal Democracy Forum last week. This is odd, because I took copious notes during the entire event, tried to lock as much as I could in my memory, and do the very best job I could of meeting people despite not knowing a single solitary person at the conference and not working in any way remotely connected to politics! I owed it to the friends and family who helped pay my way there to make the absolute most of my time at it.

Maybe my lack of posting on it is burnout—from the conference, and all the rest of the stuff I’m doing now as a result of it. Rest assured, I am trying to make sure the conference was concretely worthwhile, and am actively pursuing, every day, a number of ideas and motivations that have arisen recently. I’ll be making a trip to DC later this month to continue my pursuit, and in the meantime I’m paying way more attention to places like OpenCongress and other projects spawned off of the Sunlight Foundation. OpenCongress seems by far to be the most successful project they’ve funded, as searching for any bill number puts them on the first page of Google results, and some of their pages have a simply absurd number of comments. I’m really impressed by the design, scope, and simplicity of the site.

Also, I added ridiculous charts to ohnomymoney, so, you know, go review my financial history since May if you want. See if I care.

All right, this guy is doing it right. A young guy, running for state representative in Kansas, raising the money to do it on the Internet, asking for lots of small donations. He’s only asking for $9, but I just threw him $20 I don’t have, for being so awesome. I particularly like his views on government transparency. Good luck, dude.

Sean Tevis For State Representative

I like your style, Rep. John Culberson.

There’s a dangerous disconnect between people and their elected representatives, here in America. Congress does not seem to be made of people, just politicians. A politician’s behavior can be predicted simply by looking at what will keep him or her elected. They take from so many different sources that it’s hard not to throw your hands in the air and just assume their vote is being bought by some special interest or another for any given bill.

Compounding the problem is that most of the time, there is no reason to assume your Senator or Representative is a human being.

Read the rest…

All right, enough delay! In just a little over a week, I’ll be heading up to Boston with my essentials, and spending the next 2 and 1/2 months there working for the Obama campaign’s website, at a company called Blue State Digital. They’re the primary builders and caretakers for the Obama campaign site, and I’ll be joining in the work. This decision comes at a cost – chiefly, I’m apart from my loved ones, and I’ll pay double rent – but that hasn’t stopped me from being ridiculously excited. This is exactly what I want to do, and I will be doing it. It’s a temporary role, but not a temporary decision; one way or another, I intend on continuing to work in government and the public interest. Caution has been thrown to the winds.

The process that got me here began about 6 weeks ago.

Read the rest…

This presidential election is an epic. The Democrats dominated the news for the last 6 days, from Obama’s VP pick right through the convention. Michelle Obama impressed, Hillary Clinton impressed, Bill Clinton impressed, and finally Barack, who had the highest expectations riding on him, mega-impressed with a mega-speech. The Democratic party is feeling united, and Barack might just have convinced some people. Despite the media’s attempts to squeeze as much angst as they can out of the once-fractured Democratic party, the convention successfully navigated rough waters and presented a united front, while honoring Hillary with every bit that she deserves. She’s ready to move on, so is Bill, and so should we all. The Democrats did a terrific job, Hillary and Barack especially, and Sen. Obama is receiving a well deserved boost in support.

But now, the Democrats have problems.

Sarah Palin is an excellent pick, I don’t care what media outlets or party mouthpieces say. Take a look at her background and you’ll quickly see that she has excellent maverick credentials herself. This will make it more difficult for the Democrats to frame the Republican ticket as four more years of Bush. And of course, it pulls at the heartstrings of women, and thus saps some of the feeling that Obama’s ticket is the one that history has chosen. Yes, it undercuts McCain’s argument that Obama is inexperienced. But did you hear her speak Friday morning? She’s good, and way, way better at it than McCain is. She’s also a strong social conservative and creationist that will reassure the reluctant Republicans out there who find McCain worrisome. It was a great move, and I’m terrified.

I am also deeply troubled about the “Bush-McCain” strategy that the Democrats have feverishly embraced. This will not work. I and my liberal brethren might notice that McCain’s policies have shifted rightward over the last several years, but to the only people who matter, independents, the maverick image fades more slowly. More to the point, McCain does not feel like Bush. It’s as much about attitude as policy. The “voted with George Bush 90% of the time” statistic, putting aside the fact that Bush doesn’t vote and has an entirely different set of considerations when endorsing a bill, is missing the point. It’s not going to come down to policy. The new definition of “Republican” is the callous, smug, backward-thinking persona of George W. Bush, and McCain’s history and personality are far too different for some easy, shallow label like “McBush” to stick. It’s like saying that Joe Lieberman would be another four years of Dennis Kucinich.

Political “message” is about finding the right words to capture something people already feel, strengthening people’s reservations by articulating them. The only people who genuinely feel McCain is the same as Bush are those who see Republicans as all the same, and again – they’re not independents, and so they don’t matter. And now that Sarah Palin is on the ticket, it feels even less like the party of old white men. Those with lingering reservations about Barack Obama, for either good or bad reasons, will now have an easier time dealing with their conscience and pulling the Republican lever on Election Day. The Republican party could not be in better shape for what was supposed to be the year of their doom.

In spite of all that, I believe Barack Obama will win. But if you were at all thinking that he’s got it all wrapped up, that his campaign doesn’t need your phones and feet on Election Day, then for the sake of your own sanity on November 5th, reconsider.

It’s official – the Republicans did a great job with their convention. McCain is rocking some great poll numbers, Palin’s got great favorability ratings, and Obama is getting all huffy and making stupid mistakes. I know that this is a convention bounce that will fade at least partially, and I’m all for treating liberals and conservatives in an intellectually evenhanded manner. But right now, seeing this just pisses me off.

This election is not just about the candidate, it’s about the populace. This is the start of a rough period for liberals like me, who have been watching with surprise and pride as their nation finally showed a clear preference for a fellow liberal. Maybe, we thought, people are finally recognizing the fact that social and foreign policy conservatives are consistently on the wrong side of history. Maybe all it took was someone a little less insipid than John Kerry, and a little less dull than Al Gore. Maybe underneath all the fear and suspicion, America is willing to give the government just enough benefit of the doubt to trust them with the money to administer mercy to the lower class.

So with Democrats holding a 57%-43% edge in party registration, McCain having any appreciable kind of lead is complete garbage. Could independents distrust the Democratic party so much? Was the prosperity under Bill Clinton too much for you guys?

Barack, your campaign needs to get just a little less risk averse, even when you’re ahead in the polls. McCain’s VP pick rocked yours, his ads are more creative and get more attention, and it makes you seem plenty complacent. I wish our country didn’t require it, but you don’t just have to have good ideas and a history of helping people empower themselves – you also have to be the ringmaster of a circus, in a tent full of drunk and hooting fans.

Here are the five URLs I visit on a daily basis for political news:

Gallup Daily – Gallup is a long standing pollster which does a daily national tracker of presidential preferences. Many other analyses and polls appear on the site, which I check out, but this links specifically to the presidential polls. Each day’s polls represent an average of the 3 prior days, and each day they poll at least 1000 people. It has a lot of cred with me for its strong stability, and clear correlation with the national mood.

Rasmussen Reports – This is another pollster who does a respected national tracking poll. Where Gallup emphasizes graphs, charts, and breaking down the numbers, Rasmussen just writes a lot, and works in the results of other related polls into their discussion. They also delineate between results including “leaners” and not. Definitely valuable.

FiveThirtyEight – I’ve discussed these guys before. If you’re either a numbers junkie or a political commentary junkie, you’ll have a ball. It took me a while to figure out that some of their charts are only comprehensible if you understand that the data comes from 10,000 Election Day simulations. The two guys who run it are both huge Obama supporters, and recently, I think that’s gotten in the way of their judgment, and encouraged them to predict the things that they want to be true. I still find it extremely valuable, and their numbers are unrivaled.

CNN Politics – A standby for the mainstream media points, with a clear but mild liberal bias. You gotta check it out if you want to know what the media’s thinking.

Drudge Report – My friend John got me hooked on this. It’s half-news, half-gossip, with a strong conservative bias. But it is extremely current, and big news often breaks there first. Matt Drudge has a great flair for the dramatic, and his word/image choice is often memorable.

Honorable Mention

CNN Breaking News on Twitter – This isn’t run by CNN, just some guy, but it only updates when something truly significant happens. During the primaries, this was exclusively electoral news, and now includes more world events, but it only updates once or twice a day, if that.

That’s it, really. During the primaries, I used to just search Google News for obama, but when the summer hit and things slowed down, I needed to branch out. I still do that, just not as religiously. I definitely find that the things I read significantly impact my personal opinions and talking points, but in recent months I think I’ve finally started to break free from the media narrative and come to my own conclusions. But that could just be what they want me to think. Also go Obama ‘08.

I am hugely disappointed with the left’s response to John McCain and Sarah Palin.

Liberals are not seeing clearly. It should have been obvious that Sarah Palin was the perfect choice for McCain. She’s got what independents want (a sense of authenticity), and she’s got what conservatives want (conservative viewpoints). Also, her gender is exciting. But on the day she was introduced, liberals across the board, including just about all of my friends, wrote her off forcefully and immediately. The next week, liberal blogs went nuts with wild theories about her family, the sort of disgusting, desperate moves you only employ against a genuine threat.

The McCain campaign was quick to accuse the media and bloggers of sexism, and they were right. Some people said Palin shouldn’t accept a VP slot with a Downs’ Syndrome baby to raise—I even had friends say this to me. The left must accept that there was sexism in the media towards Hillary, there is now towards Palin, and that it’s coming from us. And so now, liberals get to look like both elitists and apes. Is it any wonder that independents deserted us in droves?

Let’s face it—we’re now running against a ticket that appeals greatly to both independents and conservatives. A lot of this is because Palin is a powerful choice, but a lot is because the left is acting like a bunch of lunatics. If we keep this up, we are not going to win the election—and if we squeak it out, we will not carry the clear mandate to govern that everyone expected us to.

We must stop acting as if independents think like liberals. I have had more than one friend tell me that “Sarah Palin’s views are too far right to appeal to independents.” How does this make any sense? If socially conservative viewpoints were a dealbreaker for independents, they’d be Democrats. Independents vote for authenticity, something they didn’t get from stilted old Gore, or hesitating old Kerry. Reagan, Clinton, and smug Mr. W all radiate confidence and personality, even if it’s a personality you hate. It has so very little to do with their views. Independents just want their candidate to be themselves, and they wonder if that is truly so hard.

Barack Obama has to ignore the jeers of the right, stop using tricky turns of phrase, and to just start being himself. And we, the speakers of the left, need to realize that we have the GOP totally owned on issues this year, and so to stick with them. Ignore each and every thing that comes out of the National Enquirer—garbage about Palin’s son doing Oxy helps no one, and any Democrat who endorses stories like that one hurts the credibility of all of us.

Most importantly, we need to take John McCain seriously, and acknowledge him not just as the war hero he is, but as the good and honest man that he is. He’s an amazing candidate, and I commend the Republican party for having the guts to nominate him. I rooted for him in the Republican primaries in 2000, and I rooted for him again in 2008. If this weren’t such a terrible year for the Republicans, and he wasn’t facing Barack Obama’s juggernaut machine, he would win this election hands down. It’s too bad for him that he picked this year to run, and gave us a chance to beat him, but that’s just what we’ll do. But only if we can keep our heads high, be honest, and stay true to our principles.

“I just do not trust the American people,” said Eleanor Shavell, 58, a computer programmer, who, along with several others, joked she would move to Canada if Mr Obama loses. “I cannot believe that 80 per cent of this country thinks we’re headed in the wrong direction yet 50 per cent are supporting McCain and Palin. I guess it’s like at school, there’s always got to be a bottom 50 per cent.”

—Obama supporters ready for fight, Financial Times

Sean Tevis’ blog went for months without being updated, but his latest is awesome. I especially like the guy holding up the ”This is Sean Tevis!” sign with the arrow. Also notable is that the people holding up his signs are all Republicans.

Also, he recently had an interview with HDNet World Report, where he got to explain his hugely successful Internet fundraising machine. Especially cool is his voicemail from Kathleen Sebelius, governor of Kansas. Check it:

My bet on tonight’s debate is that McCain is going to make some desperate moves. He’s highly experienced at doing them at this point, and the polls and the electoral map have never looked worse for him. This is not going to be a repeat of the first debate, where both candidates kept their cards close to their vest.

9 pm EST sharp!

I am liking what I am seeing!

Here’s a great article in Technology Review on Obama’s senior economic adviser, Austin Goolsbee. Yes, the same Goolsbee who embarassed Obama on NAFTA back in the primaries. Turns out he’s an awesome guy—I guess he’d have to be to survive a mistake like that with his title intact. So why would Technology Review do an interview with an economist?

The article paints Goolsbee as a “21st century economist”, and discusses his theories that drive Obama’s economic policies. It’s awesome to see how he got his reputation—while others predicted the Internet would make it easier for companies to price highly and make massive profits, he predicted it would be a “great equalizer” and drive prices and profits way down. He turned out to be far more right than the rest, and on that his reputation began.

A couple of my favorite quotes, all emphasis his:

“Economic research hasn’t pointed at globalization as the main culprit…if Americans stopped buying cheap toys from China, the manufacturing jobs would return to nations like Mexico, not the U.S. ... Trade has helped the economy grow. Simultaneously, a sizable number of Americans haven’t shared in that bounty, and if we don’t pay attention to their concerns, all the political favor for open markets will dry up.”

“I could easily see some emerging combination of medical science, biotechnology, and computing as the foundation of much of our economic growth going forward.”

Also, he has a blog on Obama’s website, using the software I work on each day.

A shoutout to my friend Walid Khoury for going out to Nevada to do some canvassing in Washoe County—the results of his work are a big deal. Nevada is going to be huge this year, and now Walid has a stake in it.

Going out to Minnesota in 2006 for Sen. Amy Klobuchar was one of the best things I ever did. It left me with a lasting investment in American politics, and I know I wouldn’t have the job I have now without it. If anybody is thinking of doing any GOTV work or canvassing work, but is on the fence, or doesn’t know what it really entails, or doesn’t know how to sign up to do it, talk to me and I’m sure I can help you out.

This article by Frank Schaeffer speaks what I know to be the truth. Yes, it is hyperbolic, and anybody who has already decided that Obama supporters are a cult will leave that article only more convinced. But if you’re willing to believe that there’s a nugget of truth behind the devotion that Barack Obama inspires, you can find some of it articulated there.

Obama Will Be One of The Greatest (and Most Loved) American Presidents

I don’t usually talk about Barack Obama with such glowing, extreme admiration, because I know it’s not the sort of thing that really wins over people already made nervous about him as a politician, and I try to be sensitive to that. But if I didn’t feel that level of intense personal respect, I wouldn’t be doing the work I’m doing right now.

So how do I know that Obama is authentic, when we have been subject to a long litany of public figures that have let us down?

Read the rest...

I really like that Gen. Powell feels comfortable talking at length about things and doesn’t restrict himself to talking points. Hey, every other politician: this is why he has such immense favorability ratings! You can try it any time you want!

A quick look at the latest Gallup poll shows that Obama is continuing his post-debate upward swing, from 6 to 7 to 8 and now to 10. The race did tighten after that 11-point wildness I posted a couple weeks ago, but it is opening right up again as we go into the last two weeks of the campaign.

The problem is, this is a poll of all registered voters. if you look at “likely voters” under either of two scenarios, Obama’s lead narrows. If you weight the results among voters who say they intend to vote, Obama only has a 7 point lead.

But more harrowing is that if you weight the results by what demographics have actually voted in past elections, Obama’s 10-point lead is really only 3 points. Just 3. And elections tighten – Obama won’t win this election with a 10-point margin in the popular vote. And we still don’t know what kind of tightening or widening effect, if any, Obama’s race will have on Election Day.

This election is dependent on new voters, and that means the young. It means people like me, who despite caring about politics has never yet voted, these people have to actually vote. That’s the only way Obama can be assured of victory, and can win with a clear mandate to govern. This rests on the lazy, flaky young vote, who for once needs to come through.

Now this is the sort of thing I can really get behind. CNN does little microinterviews with decided voters, and asks them to say something nice and sincere about the candidate they aren’t voting for. The key thing is that CNN observes that the people they ask seem in a more pleasant mood afterwards. It’s anecdotal, but it makes gut sense, right?

Bob Greene: If you can’t (or can) say anything nice

Even at the height of the primaries, I made sure to keep my good opinion of Hillary Clinton intact, even if it got overshadowed again and again by her terrible campaign. After the fighting was over, I had no problem giving a bit to her campaign debt, doing my part to heal the rift between two great Democrats. There’s no hard feelings. Giving that bit to her debt made me feel a lot better, too, like things really weren’t so bad, we’re all a family and we’ll send Obama to the White House.

I’ve had a harder time doing that with John McCain, especially in the post-convention era where the campaign he’s in charge of has said one disgusting thing after the other. But, if you look at interviews with random voters in news stories, the people are often just parroting talking points (“socialist”, “politics of fear”, etc.). People get super polarized, and forget their heads. What CNN‘s questions do is shock your emotional center into thinking a little bit more rationally.

Clearly, both candidates have their positive sides, or they wouldn’t each command the support of at least 40% of the country. We’d be a lot better off if everyone kept themselves as thoughtful and levelheaded as the respondees in the above story were helped to become.

Courtesy of 538, and only 3 days until the election:

The best thing you can do today, besides vote, is to volunteer!

BarackObama.com is jacked up with ways to find you the right place to volunteer. Make some time today to find your local office and join the teams going out to knock on doors and bring people to the polls. It’s the meat and bread of winning elections.

And again:

And, I’m home. I spent all last night partying, and got up early to spend all today traveling. I rode my victory train back to Brooklyn, and am now victory tired and ready to collapse into victory sleep. I have so many things to say about the election, the campaign, and what everything means. But right now, I just have to sleep. For now, please enjoy:

This is what a Democratic landslide looks like, county by county.

The dominant color there looks red, but I’d be interested in a version of this map where the brightness of the color was made in proportion to population density. That would look a lot more like a shining light.

UPDATE: Matt helpfully pointed me to a sweet election map results site with cooler pictures like this one:

So, we have a new President. Have you subscribed to his blog yet?

It’s easy to see and feel the election’s effect on America, from dance parties in the streets to foreign journalists begging their own nations to create democracies as sound as America. But it’s had a more particular effect on me.

The Obama campaign has had a direct, positive impact on my life. It thoroughly invigorated my desire to work in politics, so much so that I felt compelled to work every day towards getting there, somehow, until all of a sudden I was. I’ve always had a certain spirit for politics; that’s why I went out to Minnesota in 2006 for GOTV. But I wouldn’t have taken the job that I did, or made the risky choice to go freelance to stay active in e-politics work, without that inspiration.

I was an Obama supporter since way before most people even knew who he was (less than a year ago), and I can remember talking with my skeptical father on the phone, while walking through Union Square, in the fall of ‘07. Though I agreed with my dad that he would likely lose to Hillary, I supported him anyway, and I said that even if he lost, by putting up a good showing, he’d set an important precedent.

So ever since the night that Obama stormed the Iowa caucuses and destroyed the cloud of inevitability surrounding Hillary, I have been hooked. I searched Google News for “obama” every day for five months. Once the summer hit, and things got boring for a long time, I still checked Gallup every day, and began reading FiveThirtyEight every day. By the time October rolled around, I was checking FiveThirtyEight at least a dozen times a day, in spite of the fact that I subscribed to its RSS feed.

The most profound effect Obama’s rise and eventual victory has had on me is that I no longer see politics as a rigid machine. Besides a more solid general faith that voting matters, and that the people decide, I see the American people as less controllable, less sheeplike, and far more trustworthy, than ever before. In general, I try to steer clear of some of the worst epithets I’ve heard liberals cast at the American masses, but I’ve still done my share of populace-bashing.

I do believe I will lay off the American people’s case for a while.

Congratulations to America first, and as well to Barack Obama.

A couple of good articles about the Obama campaign’s use of the Internet, during the campaign and after it. The last one isn’t really an “article”, but it does mention Blue State Digital’s name, and that’s nice.

And did I mention this beast of an article from Newsweek on the campaign, from teams inside all the major campaigns? It’s completely fascinating, and the reading of all 7 parts lasts a long time.

An excellent selection of quotes from the Internet’s biggest Ayn Rand dating site.

I have been successfully disturbed at processed foods and “natural flavors” after reading this excerpt from Fast Food Nation.

The Internet disagrees with you.

I went to Change.gov this morning, and finished my application to the Obama-Biden Transition Team, to be considered for presidential appointments. Obviously I’m a big long shot, but I was specific in my request (to work under the new CTO, whenever that’s set up), and why I wanted a position (to advise on software and format choices, and to push transparency).

It doesn’t take that long, and the whole thing is designed to be accessible—even if you know you’d be way underqualified like me, it doesn’t hurt to try. Go apply!

Two Fridays from now, I’ll be leaving to go to RootsCamp in Washington DC. To quote the description, “RootsCampDC is for anyone who played a role in the 2008 elections and/or working in progressive politics. RootsCampDC 2008 will bring together the best and brightest organizers that were engaged in 2008 campaigns.”

It’s still kind of surreal for me to realize this, but I actually qualify for that. I worked on a campaign, I….“played a role”. That’s awesome. And I’m pretty sure they won’t care if you didn’t participate in the elections, but have a sincere interest in the subject matter. I imagine it’s going to be half “look at what we did, and here’s how!”, and half shameless networking. I intend to participate in both of those activities vigorously.

One of the nice parts about these ”-Camp” events is that you can decide whether or not to give a talk with extremely little notice. MobileBarCamp let you post your talk on the board the day of, whenever you wanted. I don’t know if RootsCamp will be quite so fun and fancy free, but I’m thinking about giving a talk, on…something. I’m sure I’ll think of something.

Also, the registration fee is only $10, so that + Megabus tickets both ways + lodging with a friend = $39 total for the entire affair. That’s a price structure I can believe in. I’m pumped for RootsCamp.

Gov. Rod Blagojevich of Illinois is now under federal custody on some serious charges of corruption, including selling Obama’s Senate seat. He’s been recorded saying some pretty incredible things. Events like this boggle my mind. I know everyone is cynical about politicians, but the actual mechanics of a corrupt mind baffle me. Especially when it belongs to someone working in public service for over a decade, as Gov. Blagojevich has.

At least with Eliot Spitzer, it seemed like he had a genuine interest in serving the public, and making NY State a better place—he just also had sexual vices and a flirtation with self-destruction that ran alongside it. He was unstable, not evil. If these charges hold water, Gov. Blagojevich will further taint politics as the business of the corrupt. Events like this make it more difficult for people to recognize, or care, when genuine public servants do come along and ask for your vote.

I just don’t understand the ethics and decision mechanics that lead to this. It’d be folly to call myself incorruptible, but if I can be bought, it’s not with money. I honestly don’t understand the draw—money doesn’t travel with you into death. The only coin I care about is legacy, and Gov. Blagojevich is about to earn himself the worst kind.

I’m at RootsCamp in Washington, DC, at Trinity College, and it is packed. It’s crazy that a conference with several hundreds of people, the best hot breakfast buffet I’ve ever had at a conference, and a huge selection of talks, could only cost $10. I’m sold on the BarCamp style of conferences. I’ll try to keep this updated with the most interesting things, but I’ll be updating my Twitter feed much more actively.

Right now, I’m in the Trinity Chapel hearing someone from the No on Prop 8 campaign in CA lead a discussion on what went wrong. Many of these talks are discussions, as opposed to somebody with slides. The guy is just up there with a mic, talking about what happened, and getting a lot of awesome contributions from people in the audience, who often have excellent experience and insight from their own work during the campaign cycle.

Some notes and consensus:

• The No messaging was scattered and unmemorable—there were at least 4 different messages, while the Yes campaign had 2 really good ones (gays will teach your kids to be gay, your church will lose tax exempt status when they have to refuse to marry gays). Two false arguments, fucking false, but very effective.

• The campaign never coordinated or engaged local organizations, like labor unions, community outreach, etc. It was central, kept close to the vest, and so failed to reach a lot of places, especially minority communities.

• The statistics do not support the idea that African Americans ruined the proposition. If African Americans had voted at the same ratio as whites, for example, that would have shifted 86,000 votes, whereas No lost by over 400,000. Not to mention, that African Americans under 30 voted No, like every other single demographic under 30.

• The three major factors that influence people’s vote on gay marriage are age, education, and the number of LGBT people that they know. Obvious, but it’s facts like these that reveal that progress on gay marriage and LGBT rights is simply a matter of time.

Written at RootsCamp, on Saturday afternoon:

There was a session here yesterday held by an unofficial emissary of the Obama transition team, to explain their goals and to field questions. A lot of people asked a lot of questions, and generally speaking, the transition team seems sincere. They are committed to a historic level of transparency. We were given answers in as much detail as possible, and every response he gave spoke of a group of people itching to finally do things right.

I asked about the CTO position that Obama pledged to create—what the status was of it, whether it was a Cabinet-level position, and whether it would be a policy-oriented position and department (instead of just making internal tech decisions, as CTOs sometimes do), and what its relationship would be with the FCC. The transition emissary said “Barack said in the campaign he was going to do it, so I expect we’re going to do it.” He went on to say that they were actively looking at people for it, that it would be part of the administration’s commitment to transparency and would very much be a policy position, but the rest of it was contingent on what person they found.

So it is happening, but it seems they never took the time during the campaign to figure out exactly what it would mean, and are figuring it out now. Obviously it’s not as high priority as State, Labor, Health, Energy, Defense, etc., but it’s gonna happen. What they’re definitely not doing is hoping people will forget about it.

I’m real excited about a high level department director, Cabinet or not, with a tech background and representing the Obama administration’s strong support for keeping the Internet a level playing field. Note to any transition official reading my blog: let me work for the CTO!