Kerim's Lifelog

THE IRAQ ALBATROSS....Scott Lemieux on Hillary Clinton:

Admittedly, this is the kind of counterfactual that's impossible to prove, but my guess is that if she had voted against the war Clinton would be the Democratic candidate. Given the closeness of the race, her inherent advantages going in, and that the war had to be a liability it's hard to imagine that she wouldn't have prevailed without the Iraq albatross. Whether or not Clinton's support was sincere — I don't think it really matters — sometimes getting big policies wrong really is politically damaging.

I agree. Barack Obama is highly likely to be the next president of the United States because he opposed a dumb war. Democrats should take notice.

Shared by kerim
The transition to the third version of the license left many in the open source community upset and intent on sticking with its earlier incarnations. And an increasing number of very high profile projects, like Mozilla, Apache and Open Office, have seen fit to create their own licenses or employ the less restrictive LGPL. The raw numbers bear out the idea of a slight decline in the GPL's prominence, too: Wikipedia lists the percentage of GPLed projects on Sourceforge.net and Freshmeat.net, two large open source software repositories, as 68% and 65%, respectively, as of November '03 and January '06. Today, the most recently available numbers show that Sourceforge's share has fallen to 65%, and Freshmeat's share has fallen to to 62%.

While each news organization's super-delegate count varies, Barack Obama has reached a new milestone: According to ABC News, the first news outlet to declare this, he has overtaken Hillary Clinton in support among super-delegates by a score of 267-265.

In a further sign of political decline for Hillary Clinton, African-American Congressman Donald Payne of New Jersey has now switched his allegiance from Clinton over to Barack Obama. "It's time now for us to pull our party together," Payne told the Newark Star-Ledger.

Obama has also picked up Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR), while Hillary has gotten freshman Rep. Chris Carney (D-PA).

The score so far for today: Obama +2, Hillary net +0.

Late Update: Obama has just been endorsed by Maryland DNC member John Gage, bringing Obama to +3 so far today.

Late Update: Just to clarify a certain point, Payne's switch does beg the question of whether Hillary's statement about winning more white voters has alienated her in any way from black supporters.

McCAIN CRAVENNESS WATCH....Speaking of craven pandering, Mother Jones and Brave New films have released a pretty good short video about one of John McCain's newest homies, the Rev. Rod Parsley. Compare and contrast. First, here's McCain on a stage in Cincinnati a few weeks ago:

"I am very honoured today to have one of the truly great leaders in America, a moral compass, a spiritual guide, Pastor Rod Parsley....I am very grateful you are here."

And now, the great moral compass himself:

"I do not believe that our nation can truly fulfill its divine purpose until we understand our historical conflict with Islam....I know that this statement sounds extreme. But I am not shrinking back from its implications The fact is that...America was founded in part with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed."

We have, of course, all gotten inured to this over the past few decades. Frothing at the mouth about Muslims and gays and baby killers and Hurricane Katrina just seems like normal stuff from crazy right-wing white preachers. But it's not normal. It's crazy, and John McCain used to agree that it was crazy. But now there's an election coming up, so he's delighted to cozy up with lunatics like Parsley and John Hagee.

This isn't just some dumb campaign gotcha, either. Unlike Jeremiah Wright's egocentric blatherings, which got truckloads of attention but don't, in the end, really matter, this does. That's why I chose to link to al Jazeera's report about McCain's appearance with Parsley in Cincinnati even though lots of other news outlets covered it too. One of the biggest foreign policy challenges Barack Obama will face if he wins in November is the fact that a very large number of Muslims believe that the United States is not merely fighting terrorism, but is engaged in a war against Islam. And why wouldn't they? Rod Parsley says so, and one of our presidential candidates is willing to get up on a stage, shake his hand, and call him a "moral compass." Andrew Sullivan, who is occasionally still readable when he takes a break from his 24/7 Hillary hatefest, gets it right:

And the truth is: the GOP is far, far more influenced by its religious fanatics than the Democrats by theirs'. And yet the right-wing extremist ranters are given a pass, as mainstream Republicans like McCain feel obliged to suck up to them. After what the right has done with Wright, they don't get a pass any more. The GOP needs to be held accountable for every religious extremist it panders to, especially when their sectarian rhetoric could impact the work of American foreign policy.

If McCain were serious about the war on terror, he'd stay a million miles away from a guy like Parsley. Instead he begs for his endorsement. It's an election year, after all.

Remember the two men who were exhibiting "unusual behavior" on a Washington-state ferry last summer?

The agency's Seattle field office, along with the Washington Joint Analytical Center, was still seeking the men's identities and whereabouts Wednesday as ferry service was temporarily shutdown when a suspicious package was found in a ferry bathroom and taken away by authorities.

"We had various independent reports from passengers and ferry employees that these two guys were engaging in what they described as unusual activities on the ferries," Special Agent Robbie Burroughs, a spokeswoman for the FBI in Washington state, told FOXNews.com.

"They felt that these guys were showing an undue interest in the boat itself, in the layout, the workers and the terminal, and it caused them enough concern that they contacted law enforcement about it," she told FOXNews.com.

The two were photographed by a ferry employee about a month ago, and those photographs were distributed to ferry employees three weeks ago by local law enforcement.

Turns out they were tourists, not terrorists:

Turns out the men, both citizens of a European Union nation, were captivated by the car-carrying capacity of local ferries.

"Where these gentlemen live, they don't have vehicle ferries. They were fascinated that a ferry could hold that many cars and wanted to show folks back home," FBI Special Agent Robbie Burroughs said Monday.

[...]

Two weeks ago, the men appeared at a U.S. Embassy and identified themselves as the men in the photo released to the media in August, a couple of weeks after they took a ferry from Seattle to Vashon Island during a business trip, Burroughs said.

They came forward because they worried they'd be arrested if they traveled to the U.S. and so provided proof of their identities, employment and the reason for their July trip to Seattle, according to the FBI.