Live from Austin!

Washington Post :

Victoria Switzer, a retired social studies teacher, was on phone-bank duty one night during the Pennsylvania primary campaign. One night was all she could take: "It wasn’t pretty." She made 60 calls to prospective voters in Susquehanna County, her home county, which is 98 percent white. The responses were dispiriting. One caller, Switzer remembers, said he couldn’t possibly vote for Obama and concluded: "Hang that darky from a tree!"

[...]

Karen Seifert, a volunteer from New York, was outside of the largest polling location in Lackawanna County, Pa., on primary day when she was pressed by a Clinton volunteer to explain her backing of Obama. "I trust him," Seifert replied. According to Seifert, the woman pointed to Obama’s face on Seifert’s T-shirt and said: "He’s a half-breed and he’s a Muslim. How can you trust that?"

Stay classy, America!

“The role of the president of the United States is to support the decisions that are made by the people of Israel. It is not up to us to pick and choose from among the political parties.”

—former White House official Ann Lewis, Senior Advisor for Hillary Clinton for President.

[Washington Post]

Further proof that satire is truly obsolete:

Microsoft Corp. mogul Bill Gates and the leader of Ford Motor Co. outlined a future Friday in which software enables cars to fix themselves and never crash.

[...]

Eventually, Gates said, there could be a car that wouldn’t let itself crash.

—Washington Post

Even ignoring the issue of who’s saying it, the scenario of cars that don’t allow themselves to crash is about as realistic as the scenario of fusion powered hover-bikes. Machine vision is decades away from that level of performance. Do it with transcievers, you say? Forget about it, we can’t even get electrical and hydrogen refueling infrastructure deployed.

I know it’s churlish of me to keep harping on about this, but:

…investigators have found no support for the two main fears expressed in London and Washington before the war: that Iraq had a hidden arsenal of old weapons and built advanced programs for new ones. In public statements and unauthorized interviews, investigators said they have discovered no work on former germ-warfare agents such as anthrax bacteria, and no work on a new designer pathogen—combining pox virus and snake venom—that led U.S. scientists on a highly classified hunt for several months. The investigators assess that Iraq did not, as charged in London and Washington, resume production of its most lethal nerve agent, VX, or learn to make it last longer in storage. And they have found the former nuclear weapons program, described as a “grave and gathering danger” by President Bush and a “mortal threat” by Vice President Cheney, in much the same shattered state left by U.N. inspectors in the 1990s.

[…]

The defection of Hussein Kamel was a turning point in the U.N.-imposed disarmament of Iraq in the 1990s. Kamel, who had married one of Saddam Hussein’s daughters, Raghad, and controlled Baghdad’s Military Industrial Commission, told his Western debriefers about major programs in biological and nuclear weaponry that had gone undetected or unconfirmed. Iraq was forced to acknowledge what he exposed, but neither inspectors nor U.S. officials were sure Kamel had told all there was to tell.

A handwritten Iraqi damage report, composed five days after the defection, now suggests that Kamel left little or nothing out.

[…]

The most significant point in [Hossam] Amin’s letter, U.S. and European experts said, is his unambiguous report that Iraq destroyed its entire inventory of biological weapons.

—Washington Post

So Saddam’s brother-in-law, #1 in charge of weapons programs, personally defects and sings like a canary. The story says he told us about “major programs”; what it doesn’t mention is that he told us they were all shut down. However, the government didn’t want to believe him, and we went ahead with the war anyway. Now we discover from the reports of Iraq’s #1 guy in charge of intelligence, that Saddam’s brother-in-law was telling the truth. Well, duh.

John Johnson has forwarded me a pointer to a Washington Post article on Philip K. Dick which explains why everyone—even people who don’t think of themselves as SF fans—should read his work.

The Presidential election results are finally in…

• If you count chads with at least one corner detached as votes, and incompletely-filled optical ovals—the prevailing standard—Gore won by 60 votes.

• If you require at least two corners of the chad to be detached, Gore won by 105 votes.

• If you require only dimpled chads, Gore won by 107 votes.

• If you take the county results instead, for the counties who completed a hand recount, Gore won by 171 votes.

• If you accept dimpled chads only if there are other dimpled chads on the same ballot, Gore won by 42 votes.

But…

• If you count only the counties where the Gore team asked for a recount, Bush won.

• If you don’t count any of the disputed votes, Bush won.

So, how is this being reported by the “liberal media”?

CNN: “A comprehensive study of the 2000 presidential election in Florida suggests that if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed a statewide vote recount to proceed, Republican candidate George W. Bush would still have been elected president.”

Washington Post: “Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush”