Making minor deities disappear in a puff of logic since 1972
Sun, 31 Aug 2008
New Project: ImageGetter
I put together a little project that attempts to gather the "zeitgeist" image from a particular web site, and returns it.
Here's how it might work... Imagine a message boards application, like PHPBB, for example. As you type in a URL to share, a little bit of javascript gets executed which loads an image from a remote page for you to include with the link.
Here's a Web 1.0 way of illustrating it (I need to get a nice AJAX library installed on my blog, so the 2.0 version is forthcoming). Just type in a URL into the box and click "Go". A new window will open with the "zeitgeist image", if there is an image that seems suitable. Works on sites like flickr, but not so much on google, although I suspect I could tweak it to work.
Palin Will Either Resign or Sabotage McCain's Campaign
From time to time, I'm known to make some kind of outrageous prediction, and the one for today is Palin's resignation. Here are the top reasons I think that she'll either sink the McCain presidency, or have to step down:
Scandal Already the blogosphere is buzzing about a conflict of interest in her dismissal of a public safety commissioner, and the potential that her teenage daughter is the real mother of her latest child (mark that one up as top ten material for story of the decade if it's true)
UPDATE: Google News is reporting that Bristol Palin, 17 and unwed, is pregnant. So the scandals have already started. Sarah Palin portrays herself as a "tough as nails" conservative who can both run a governorship and raise a family, but apparently not well enough to reflect conservative social values like abstinence, and certainly not smart enough to use birth control. Of course, the hypocritical social conservatives will likely just give her a pass, but the onslaught has begun.
She's older than McCain Well not physically, there aren't many politicians alive that are older than John McCain, but philosophically, she's in the 19th century. She clings to the Republican dogma that global warming isn't caused by human factors (note to Palin: "An Inconvenient Truth" is out on DVD, even if you missed it on one of Juneau's 8 screens), and opposes abortion even in cases of incest and rape (Cue music: "Every sperm is sacred").
She's a major Flip-Flopper, not a "Maverick" Take her supposedly principled stand against the Senator Ted Stevens memorial bridge, aka "the bridge to nowhere". McCain's website claims, " She put a stop to the 'bridge to nowhere' that would have cost taxpayers $400 million dollars." Really? It turns out she was for it before she was against it.
She's not a principled fiscal conservative But, at least she cut $400 million in pork out of the federal budget, right? While it's true that as governor she nixed plans for the bridge that Palin's friend and supporter Ted Stevens petitioned congress for, what actually happened to the $400 million dollars that came out of your and my pocket? Was it returned to the Federal Government to help pay for Iraq, or to provide funding for No Child Left Behind, or to bury news from the EPA about global warming?
No, although that would have been yet another quaint use of our tax dollars... Instead, they used the funds for other transportation projects "because the money would otherwise have to be returned to the federal government." There goes the image of the principled fiscal conservative.
I've got more foreign policy experience than she does Seriously. Her spokeswoman states that she's been out of the US twice. Once on a trip to Ireland, and once to Germany and Kuwait. She supposedly got her first passport last year. It's so bad, the republicans are resorting to using the fact that right across the Bering Strait is Russia!
Russia, eh? The closest this could get to being "foreign policy experience" would be if a wayward Eskimo resident of Little Diomede Island (population 170) had wandered over to Russian territory on Big Diomede Island, and the Russians end up calling the Alaska Governor's office, if they hadn't called the State Department first. (read more about the Diomede Islands).
The largest two population centers over 10,000 residents in the vicinity are the Russian town of Anadyr (population 11K) and Fairbanks (population 31K). These two towns are over a thousand miles away. By equivalent logic, Barack Obama has foreign policy experience with Cuba since Marion, Illinois, a city of 27K residents and within his constituency, is about 1000 miles away from Havana, Cuba.
Experience Matters Here Barack Obama would be the second youngest President ever. McCain would be the oldest President ever, beating Reagan by 3 years. Actuarial tables show that Obama has less than one percent probability of death (by age) by the end of his second term. Compare this to McCain, who has a 6.8% probability of death. Mathematically, McCain is 8.5 times more likely to leave Palin as commander in chief than Obama is likely to leave Biden in the same position... Not to mention that Biden's foreign policy advantage over Palin will likely become evident during the vice presidential debates...
Let's face it, McCain's pick of Palin is the best evidence to question the fitness of his judgement, and her lack of experience given his age puts a fine point on it.
Be generous, share: Digg This! | Add to Del.icio.us | Have you Reddit?| Stumble It!
Tony C. -- writes:
John W. Dean, former White House Counsel under President Nixon, has his own take on Palin's lack of qualifications, this time based on her inability to meet implicit constitutional and statutory requirements for the office of VP: http://writ.lp.findlaw.com/dean/20080905.html
Khan -- writes:
Cool article, thanks for sharing.
All content and photography under khan.org is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
