Political

So maybe in my last post, I was a bit hard on Louisiana because it’s the state I’ve left. It’s not like we don’t have our own wackos in NC. Two examples: One of NC’s representatives, Patrick McHenry (R) has proposed that we put Reagan’s face on the $50 bill. Maybe for his work on voodootinkle on trickle down economics? Although there is some appropriate irony to giving Reagan the $50… it’s a bill that most people don’t use. Personally, I’m not rich enough to deal in $50s, $20s maybe. Hey, if we’re redesigning money, why don’t we give more important presidents more prominent spots. Jefferson definitely outranks Reagan and he’s on the never used $2 bill. What about Madison? The dude practically wrote the Constitution. Shouldn’t those of who don’t use $5,000 bills get a chance to see him? And closer to home, the newly minted republican majority on the Wake county school board has succeeded in rolling back a nationally recognized program to improve educational outcomes by ensuring socio-economic diversity. Sure, I was bussed in elementary school. It wasn’t the most enjoyable experience of my life, but at the same time, I think that it was good for me as a person to be exposed to other socio-economic groups at school. Moreover, the program in Wake has demonstrated that it reduces the achievement gap between poor/minority students and rich/white students. That’s gotta be worth a little time on the bus. Music for the evening: Danger Mouse’s and Sparklehorse’s Dark Night of the Soul and Titus Andronicus’s The Airing of Grievances. They seem to capture the mood.

Every once in a while, something from Louisiana will catch the national attention, or at least the political bits that I care about, and I’m once again reminded of why I’m happy to have left. The latest? Apparently, the Bossier Parish sheriff is creating himself a militia. No really. It’s called “Operation Exodus,” which according to the sheriff’s press release is an allusion to the biblical Book of Exodus. I’m not certain if that worries me or makes me happy that it’s not a reference to secession. I think I’ll go with worry since it’s a biblical reference to secession. ...

Speaking of Festivus, I should note a recent sighting of a genuine Festivus miracle… they still had a quart of Maple View Farms eggnog at the grocery store! Er, actually, a better Festivus miracle is that today the senate democratic caucus reached the 60 votes needed for their final cloture vote and will vote on healthcare reform tomorrow. FWIW, the vote could have been held today, but Vitter (R-LA) objected. The bill also could have been held up until 8pm tomorrow, but republicans couldn’t quite bring themselves to wait that long to get out of town. So instead, the vote (needing only 50 ayes plus Biden) will happen at 7am tomorrow morning. ...

In the most awesome [1] display of legislative ineptitude since they presented a budget with no numbers on April Fool’s Day, the republicans have released their plan for health care reform. Now, keep in mind that as scored by the CBO, the democratic plan will increase coverage from 83% to 96% of the legal population in the U.S. by 2019 and will reduce the deficit by $104 billion over the same ten years. Of course, the republican plan was going to be “much better.” And was it? Not so much. Under the republican plan, coverage will increase from, wait for it, drum roll please 83% to a whopping, um, 83% by 2019. Well, hey, at least it’ll do more to improve the deficit, right? Well, not exactly. According to the CBO’s initial analysis, there would be a $68 billion dollar reduction in the deficit over the next ten years. ...

In computer security, one of the most difficult and annoying problems is the distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). The idea behind a DDoS attack is straight forward: the attacker tries to prevent legitimate use of the service by using a large number of other computers. Usually these other computers have been compromised (hacked) and are following the commands of the attacker. Such computers are usually called “zombies.” There are a number of ways to conduct a DDoS attack, but they are typically variations on the following theme. The attacker instructs the zombies to request access to the service. But the zombies have no intention of actually using the service, instead, they often forge network traffic so that it’s impossible to tell who is making the request. Because the zombies don’t want to use the service, they can make thousands of requests without slowing down. The poor computer hosting the service then sees tens of thousands of requests for access, tries to fulfill the requests and eventually becomes overloaded and dies. The zombies win. ...

:-( also, I’m glad I’m not the only one who went there

I haven’t paid much attention to Sarah Palin in the year since I first heard of her. Okay, periodically I’ve laughed at her. And Palin As President was pretty funny. But last night I was commenting to K that this line from her resignation speech was pure Zen: “In the winter time it’s the frozen road that is competing with the view of ice fogged frigid beauty, the cold though, doesn’t it split the Cheechakos from the Sourdoughs?” ...

It looks like the average IQ of democratic senators and the average IQ of republican senators have both declined today. Hopefully there will be a 2010 challenger in the PA democratic primaries.

Tomorrow is April 15th, tax day. And in case you’ve missed it, republicans, flat taxers, gold fetishists, racists, defense nuts and other extreme conservatives are planning to host tea parties tomorrow. Tea parties? Yep. Protests, harkening back to the days of the Boston Tea Party when proto-American patriots dumped tea into Boston harbor to protest taxation without representation. Tomorrow’s tea parties appear to be a bit less principaled. Some protestors are objecting to the Bush tax cuts on the top 2% expiring in 2010… as they were scheduled to do by republican law makers. Some protestors seem to object to having lost the election in 2008. Others object to bailouts of home owners… or is it bailouts of banks… or is it bailouts that don’t help their bottom line? Some seem to object to having a black president. Others are Ron Paulites who seek to restore the gold standard?! ...

I wasn’t originally going to write about the Michael Gerson piece from the other week where he talks about the “hidden virtues” of a recession. Leaving aside the irony of a relatively well off speech writer for George W. Bush telling us how the recession caused by his boss’s policies will be good for us, I just assumed that the idea of a virtuous recession was self-obviously wrong and wouldn’t be taken seriously. But since then, I’ve heard other people, even more liberal people, make the same arguments. In several of those cases, the argument is that a recession will help (force?) Americans to lead simpler lives, to save more and to focus on what is really important. I’m offended by that sentiment because, while I have often thought, and said, that people need to focus on what’s important and that they should save more, there is a huge difference between doing so as a choice and being forced into it due to scarcity. ...