Typepad is the least cost-effective blogging platform out there. Excuse me... Typepad is probably the most expensive blogging platform out there. Nobody with any financial sense chooses Typepad.

Typepad Micro, which only exists because Six Apart mismanaged Vox so remarkably badly they had to shut it down, borders on useless. It's so bad, I'd rather be blogging on Geocities where you had to hand-code each page and upload it manually, and... oh yeah, Geocities is dead! Note how they barely mention Typepad Micro on the homepage...

To think, while all of America was losing her mind, Barack Obama and our security team kept calm and carried on.

Win by a 'mudslide'? The idiom is 'win by a landslide'.
The thing that surprises people is that the United States presidency doesn't doesn't confer upon you powers as all encompassing as suggested by this question. There's no ability to unilaterally change much but at the edges, and as Schoolhouse Rock taught me, laws are born in Congress (although the president can 'lobby' for bills he'd like to see introduced).

Now, if I had won by a landslide, I can only presume that the agenda I ran on was popular and would work to implement it as best I could. That said, I doubt my preferred agenda would give me an electoral landslide. (Not even Obama won by a landslide -- counting the popular vote he had a good but not overwhelming 7 point victory. That was augmented by the collapse of the economy on George W. Bush's watch.) I would absolutely raise taxes and close various loopholes that let companies like General Electric pay zero taxes. I would put this money into a program to repair our infrastructure and invest in mass transportation, clean energy, and education. This would be Stimulus 2.0 This would be hard to sell to a population that thinks that the government funds mostly waste and foreign aid. It's not true, but it's a myth that makes people think you can balance the budget and cut taxes and preserve "the stuff I like".

Obama took a crack at reforming healthcare which is a good start, but I would continue pushing toward a universal healthcare system like Medicare for all -- so we aren't the last civilized country in the world where children can die of a rotten tooth because mom couldn't afford insurance. Despite what the Republican Party has been saying, reforming healthcare will save money, and do so without kicking families off heating assistance.

I'd lobby for citizens in the District of Columbia have voting representation in Congress. This is one place where I will not pretend the Constitution is a divinely inspired and perfect document. It is wrong here, and if it needs amending to grant citizens in DC the same representation I get by living just five miles away, I will lobby for that.

I can already see my landslide slipping to a squeaker. If I get a victory at all.

I will support the right of members of the same sex to get married and serve in the military. Yep, there goes the vote of the religious right.

It's nice to know that the spammers haven't forgotten about me and this weblog.



















Frikken pill pushers1

What I find impressive in this statement from Republican Congressman Steve King of Iowa is the sheer number of inaccuracies implicit and explicit are packed into a paragraph.

The framers did not consider the babies of illegals when they framed the 14th amendment because we didn't have immigration law at the time so they could not have wanted to confer automatic citizenship on the babies of people who were unlawfully in the United States.

1. Usually when "Framers" is used in the context of the US Constitution, it refers to the fifty-five delegates who were at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1786-7. None of those people were alive when the 14th Amendment was drafted.

2. Also, these Framers, and generally everybody who lived in the early United States were only a few generations removed from people who immigrated from Europe, if they haven't arrived newly themselves. Everybody pretty much gained citizenship by arriving in America on or before it declared independence. (Slaves excluded.) They all were essentially "anchor babies".

3. The people who did draft the 14th Amendment specifically wrote the amendment in the way so that there would be no political considerations concerning who got citizenship -- they were trying to grant all rights of citizenship to the former slaves. That is why they chose birthright citizenship. You can't contest place of birth.

It's nice to know the former Six Apart kept its promise and did get the redirect working. ( http://sterlingnorth.vox.com → http://sterlingnorth.typepad.com/blog/), but Typepad Micro is not a very good platform. Of course, they want $9/month for their quality blogging platform, which is comparatively a poor deal. Now I'm paying $10 a month already for a domain that I haven't gotten around to using yet. It might be a good idea to migrate to that.

Note: I post a lot of my brief thoughts on Twitter

It will be ironic that LiveJournal -- the redheaded stepchild during its ownership by Six Apart -- will carry on many of the legacies of Vox, which will disappear into the ether on September 30th. Most of the fancy journal designs were commissioned for Vox, including the old penguin design and the new calligraphy pen design which was the design I had for the Vox page.

Originally posted on sterlingnorth.vox.com

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Solemn - Merriam-Webster definition

“I do believe that there are special places on Earth that should have a zone of solemnity around them.”

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn (D) using that word to argue against placing a room of worship somewhat near where a World Trade Center used to stand (but further away than an extant mosque is in relation to the Center).

I wanted to say something for quite some time, but I couldn’t wrap my head around the absurdity. Everybody is giving credence to this parody of an argument that this ground is too sacred to place a house of worship on it. The truth—of course—is that this isn’t the real argument against the community center; it’s the argument that’s acceptable in polite company.

"Are you Muslim?"

Investigators with the New York City Police Department say it all began Monday night when a 21-year-old man hailed a cab at 24th Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan.
Police say the passenger asked the driver, "Are you Muslim?" When the driver said yes the passenger pulled a knife and slashed him in the throat, arm and lip.

This is the monster that was released thanks to people (particularly Pam Geller and Newsmax, and excused by the likes of Ross Douthat and Jonah Goldberg). This is fun times, fun for tribalists everywhere.