Off the Cuff

Cynical & Shallow

If this is an accurate paraphrase the Palin pick shows just how cynical the right has become and how shallow they think the rest of are.

Real Clear Politics

And McCain senior advisor Nancy Pfotenhauer just said on Fox - and I'm paraphrasing: I think the Obama campaign would have learned not to belittle women.

Palin

This really summarizes McCain's pick of Palin.

McCain Said to Choose Alaska’s Palin

The pick, confirmed by Republicans familiar with the decision, amounted to a roll of the dice, a gamble that an infusion of new leadership — and the novelty of the Republican party’s first female candidate for vice president — would more than compensate for the risk that Ms. Palin could undercut one of the McCain campaign’s central arguments, their claim that Mr. Obama is too inexperienced to be president.

It's not necessarily an all nothing question.

FP Passport

Judging from the interview, Shevardnadze seems to believe that it should have been possible to move Georgia toward greater cooperation with the U.S. and Europe while simultaneously improving relations with Russia and peacefully resolving the seperatist conflicts. While Saakashvili certainly deserves much of the criticism that has come his way in recent weeks, it's hard to imagine that any Georgian leader -- and certainly not Shevardnadze -- could have pulled all that off.

Whether Shevardnadze could pulled it all of is questionable but the conversation would be vastly different if even a portion of what he said had been accomplished.

The one down side to moving to Linux on my desktop is that there are really no good blog editors for Linux. I have no problem using Scribefire but there are those times when I want to write a post but don't want to open my browser.

Poll Watching. Taking the temperture of the electorate with a rec

Yesterday I saw a post on FriendFeed about a national poll showing
McCain 5% points ahead of Obama. With that story came a lot of hand
wringing and arm waving. But there are several points to be here about
national polls.

1. National polls on or
near the margin error are for the most part meaningless. Remember Bush
won the 2000 election and lost the popular vote.

2.
It's August. National polls prior to Labor Day are somewhat suspect.
Many people a) aren't really paying that much attention and b) many
people tend to be away on vacation.

3. The
more polls are the state polls. Since it's the electoral college vote
that matters not necessarily the total popular vote (see point #1).

4. The most important polls are those polls in the battleground states.

5.
One should also look at the polls of states that are close that have in
the past several election have gone consistently for one party but now
seem to leaning or creeping towards the other party (Virginia, Ohio and
Indiana which have been in the margin of error and have been states
that in the last several presidential election cycles have gone
Republican by decent margins).

Why I now use Mac and Ubuntu.

Over the past few months I have been slowly moving away from Windows.
The reasons are not all that unfamiliar to anyone that has followed
tech or whose pc is an integral part of their lives (other then work
related). but I thought explain my reasons for the change.

First
let point out that I have a Mac Book which I purchased a couple of
months ago. Then from Amazon on Friday of last week I purchased a copy
of Ubuntu
which I installed on my desktop. Prior to that installation I was
running Windows XP (Microsoft's most stable and reliable OS to date).
Let me also point out that my computer skills can be summarized by
saying: I know just enough to screw up my computer but not enough to
fix it. So then why the change:

1. Despite
the fact that XP is the most reliable Microsoft OS to date it still has
many of the old problems in the area of security.

2.
For that reason you spend a great deal of time installing and
maintaining software needed to protect one self from those threats.

3. After having installed the much needed security the next problem is that they tend to be memory hogs.



4. Then there is the continual onslaught of windows updates which tend to be security fixes.



5.,Windows is just bloated.



6. All of these issues leads to one very important issue. Your pc
getting slower and slower despite doing the requisite maintenance of
disk cleaning and defragging.



Finally, there is one final point I should make. There are always going
to be security regardless of what OS you use. My basic problem is that
my computer resources should not be overwhelmingly devoted to security
software because the OS is has holes in it big enough to drive a truck
through.

WTF?

Why does this figure? Rupert Murdoch and the people that work for are just a bunch of wack jobs. I know Murdoch has made lots of money but if you look at how you realize he has done by appealing to the lowest common denominator.

Fox News Joins a Social Network, but Not Its Parent’s Site

Fox News Channel wants more friends. But instead of reaching out on the News Corporation’s own social network, MySpace, the cable news channel is choosing to network on the site’s chief rival, Facebook.

Testing out my new toy....

Well this makes sense.......well not really

How to lose friends.....

McCain should check to see who his friends are.......

Paris Hilton's mother Kathy Hilton -- who has donated $2,300 to John McCain -- has responded to McCain's new ad using her daughter as a means of attacking Barack Obama. "It is a complete waste of the money John McCain's contributors have donated to his campaign," Mrs. Hilton writes for the Huffington Post. TPM: Election Central