JaBbA's Hut

It blows my mind that right-wing water carriers keep on spouting the Republican talking points, even when they directly contradict last month's Republican talking points. Don't they realize that people actually SAVE the old video?

And why are these idiots allowed to spout their obvious bullsh*t over and over again?

It's true that most residents of Wasilla support Sarah Palin, and that she's very popular in those parts. But not universally so - and her record from Wasilla doesn't seem to match her image.

Anne Kilkenny, a Wasilla homemaker and activist, has apparently been butting heads with Palin for years. But her indictment of Palin's image is full of facts that seem hard to refute.

During her mayoral administration, most of the actual work of running this small city was turned over to an administrator. ... Sarah campaigned in Wasilla as a "fiscal conservative." During her six years as mayor, she increased general government expenditures by more than 33 percent. ... She inherited a city with zero debt but left it with indebtedness of more than $22 million. ... While Mayor, City Hall was extensively remodeled and her office redecorated more than once.

[...]
Claim vs. Fact

- "Hockey mom": True for a few years
- "PTA mom": True years ago when her first-born was in elementary school, not since
- "NRA supporter": Absolutely true
- Social conservative: mixed. Opposes gay marriage, but vetoed a bill that would have denied benefits to employees in same-sex relationships (said she did this because it was unconsitutional).
- Pro-creationism: Mixed. Supports it, but did nothing as governor to promote it.
- "Pro-life": Mixed. Knowingly gave birth to a Down's syndrome baby but declined to call a special legislative session on some pro-life legislation.
- "Experienced": Some high schools have more students than Wasilla has residents. Many cities have more residents than the state of Alaska. No legislative experience other than City Council. Little hands-on supervisory or managerial experience; needed help of a city administrator to run town of about 5,000.
- Political maverick: Not at all.
- Gutsy: Absolutely!
- Open and transparent: ??? Good at keeping secrets. Not good at explaining actions.
- Has a developed philosophy of public policy: No.
- "A Greenie": No. Turned Wasilla into a wasteland of big box stores and disconnected parking lots. Is pro-drilling off-shore and in ANWR.
- Fiscal conservative: Not by my definition!
- Pro-infrastructure: No. Promoted a sports complex and park in a city without a sewage treatment plant or storm drainage system. Built streets to early 20th century standards.
- Pro-tax relief: Lowered taxes for businesses, increased tax burden on residents
- Pro-small government: No. Oversaw greatest expansion of city government in Wasilla's history.
- Pro-labor/pro-union: No. Just because her husband works union doesn't make her pro-labor. I have seen nothing to support any claim that she is pro-labor/pro-union.

JaBbA says check it out.

"Caging" is the process of stopping certain voters from voting based upon some demographic attribute. Often, we find people caging the black vote - dropping voters from the rolls in Florida in 2000 and 2004 because their names were similar to a list of convicted felons from Texas, or sending letters to black voters and dropping them from the voting rolls if the letters come back.

This year, however, the voting block that's going to make a difference is 18-to-24-year-olds, who overwhelmingly support Obama. And the more likely voters in the block are college students, who often are registered on campus, rather than in their hometowns.

According to a press release from Montgomery County, VA (home of Virginia Tech), students are risking a lot by registering to vote at school [emphasis added]:

The Code of Virginia states that a student must declare a legal residence in order to register. A legal residence can be either a student’s permanent address from home or their current college residence. By making Montgomery County your permanent residence, you have declared your independence from your parents and can no longer be claimed as a dependent on their income tax filings — check with your tax professional. If you have a scholarship attached to your former residence, you could lose this funding. And, if you change your registration to Montgomery County, Virginia Code requires you to change your driver’s license and car registration to your present address within 30 days.

There's only one problem - there doesn't seem to be any substantiation of this warning. Nobody has ever lost their dependency status, health insurance, scholarship or right to drive as a result of registering to vote.

The scare tactics have just begun. We have 60+ days to make sure that every American citizen with the right to vote is able to exercise that franchise. Keep your eyes open!

Apparently, a lot of people want to know. A website called FelonSpy.com has become very popular due to a large email-forwarding campaign.

There's a problem, however.

The "data" on the site isn't from the police. Or the courts.

It's completely random and made-up.

Don't believe me? Well, you signed their terms of service before you used the site.

What? You didn't READ the terms of service? You agreed to abide by a contract without reading it?

Perhaps you should look it over. I've provided it below, and highlighted some extra-special bits:

The news that the 17-year-old daughter of V.P. Candidate Sarah Palin is pregnant was very quickly calmed by Barack Obama's immediate expression of support for Mrs. Palin and her family, and the fact that the Democrats, taking their marching orders from Obama, have pretty much left it alone. It's the right thing to do - the story is the vetting process of the McCain camp, and although there is probably an important point to be made about the failure of abstinence education, keeping a 17-year-old girl from becoming the subject of political attacks is taking the high road.

I have to wonder, though - what if the teenage pregnancy were on the Democratic side?

It doesn't take much to figure out what the right-wing smear machine would be doing with this. Limbaugh and his ilk would be having a field day with this, painting all Democrats as immoral hippies who encourage their children to have sex by teaching them how to do it.

I'm completely torn. I'm glad that my guy is taking the high road. I think it's the right thing to do. But I want to stand up and shout "see what your STUPID policies and your IDIOTIC ideals create? Maybe with a little more realistic education this high school student gets to enjoy some time as a twenty-something, not as a young mother! And most importantly, HOW CAN THIS PARTY CLAIM THE RIGHTEOUS MORAL GROUND?????

Arg.

---

*UPDATES*

Some really nasty stuff is being thrown around as if it were truth. As I find them, I'll try posting them here.

- The baby's father is an 18-year old high school student, and seems like a pretty typical high-school hockey player - not a man 9 years older that started dating the girl when she was 14.

- The right has begun eating its own. Specifically, Robert Stacy McCain (no apparent relation) in The American Spectator somehow feeling that the teenager should be subject to questioning by the press because she has "caused a crisis of global significance". I'm sure that the global significance of her act was no closer to her mind than was the significance of her abstinence education in the heat of the moment.

The news has finally broken that Diebold (now Premier Election Systems) has admitted that a software bug caused undercounting of votes. Bruce Schneier has a good wrap-up of the news articles. In his article, he states

It's unclear if this error is random or systematic. If it's random -- a small percentage of all votes are dropped -- then it is highly unlikely that this affected the outcome of any election. If it's systematic -- a small percentage of votes for a particular candidate are dropped -- then it is much more problematic.

IF the results are systemic?

It's virtually guaranteed that the results are systemic in Ohio. Here's why.

Ohio is generally a red state, except in the Northeast corner, which is heavily blue. Cleveland itself is VERY blue. Cuyahoga county, ground zero in the 2004 election, contains Cleveland and is itself very blue.

The bug introduces itself in larger counties, and is pretty much never going to be seen in smaller counties. Therefore, votes in larger counties are going to be undercounted.

Large counties = more blue votes
Large counties = more undercounting
therefore
Blue votes = more undercounting.

Viola! Electoral votes delivered to the president, as promised.

Althrough there seemed to be definitive proof that the Gold Medal winner of the uneven bars was underage, there won't be any kind of investigation into the matter:

The International Olympic Committee opened up an investigation into the age of two of China's gold-medal-winning Olympic gymnasts this weekend -- and closed it a day later, following a security consultant's discovery of online documents listing the competitors as too young to compete.

The security consultant, Mike Walker of the Intrepidus Group, used tailored searches of Google and Baidu to find excel spreadsheets that appeared to show the ages of Chinese gymnastic competitors at meets prior to the Olympics. If the competitors are found to be too young, as many as four of China's medals could be affected. On Sunday, the IOC reportedly indicated that an initial review of documentation has not found any issues and that the medals will not likely change hands.

Last week, China blamed the entire issue on paperwork errors, according to the New York Times.

The spreadsheets, on a Chinese government website, that showed the gymnast to be 2 years younger than claimed simply disappeared, and the Chinese govenrment claims that it was all a misunderstanding.

OK, so that sucks for Nastia, but what does that have to do with the U.S. election?

Soon after Walker, who blogs under the name Stryder Hax, found each document, the evidence quickly disappeared. The lesson, he said, is that -- while it is difficult to delete documents from the Internet -- an entity with the power and reach of China seems to be able to make information about He Kexin disappear quickly.

"I think I'm going to grab a beer and watch this young woman's life vanish into thin air," Walker wrote on Sunday. "If you're watching it with me, think about our upcoming American elections, which are going to be decided by voting machines which generate only electronic documents. Think about the permanence and weight of electronic documents. And think about a future in which our identities are purely electronic. Cheers!"

Cheers, indeed.

Stolen, in it's entirety, from Woot! - One Day, One Deal

• 200,000 pizzas sent to "Chinese Taipei"
  
• Ceremonial lighting of the Tibetan monk
  
• Entire crowd replaced by more photogenic stand-ins
  
• New technology allows the "completely live" fireworks display to run backward
  
• Everyone looks under their seat to find a gift bag containing a DVD copy of Watchmen, one of those cans of Coke in a different language, and a female child
  
• Numerous mistakes by Chinese dancers (but no points deducted by judges)
  
• Bela Karolyi given Andy Rooney's old spot on 60 Minutes
  
• One more silver medal awarded to Shawn Johnson, just to rub it in
  
• Olympic hostesses return to their docking stations and power down
  
• Everyone leaves satisfied but then somehow want another Olympics about fifteen minutes later
  

My wife was forwarded an email telling people what horrible things would happen to your taxes if Obama is elected. Here's the email:

This should scare everyone.


Subject: Fw: INTERESTING DATA JUST RECEIVED ON TAXES
I*NTERESTING DATA JUST RECEIVED ON TAXES*

Spread the word.....


This is something you should be aware of so you don't get blind-sided.
This is really going to catch a lot of families off guard. It should
make you worry.

_Proposed changes in taxes after 2008 General election:
_

CAPITAL GAINS TAX*

MCCAIN*
0% on home sales up to $500,000 per home (couples) McCain does not
propose any change in existing home sales income tax.

OBAMA*
28% on profit from ALL home sales

How does this affect you? If you sell your home and make a profit, you
will pay 28% of your gain on taxes.
If you are heading toward retirement and would like to down-size your
home or move into a retirement community, 28% of the money you
make from your home will go to taxes. This proposal will adversely affect the
elderly who are counting on the income from their homes as part of their retirement income.

DIVIDEND TAX*

MCCAIN 15% (no change)

OBAMA 39.6%

How will this affect you? If you have any money invested in stock market, IRA, mutu al funds,
college funds, life insurance, retirement accounts, or anything that pays or reinvests dividends, you will now be paying nearly 40% of the money earned on t a xes if Obama become president. The experts predict that 'higher tax rates on dividends and capital gains
would crash the stock market yet do absolutely nothing to cut the deficit.

INCOME TAX*

MCCAIN (no changes)

Single making 30K - tax $4,500
Single making 50K - tax $12,500
Single making 75K - tax $18,750
Married making 60K- tax $9,000
Married making 75K - tax $18,750
Married making 125K - tax $31,250

OBAMA*
(reversion to pre-Bush tax cuts)
Single making 30K - tax $8,400
Single making 50K - tax $14,000
Single making 75K - tax $23,250
Married making 60K - tax $16,800
Married making 75K - tax $21,000
Married making 125K - tax $38,750


Under Obama your taxes will more than double!
How does this affect you? No explanation needed. This is pretty straight forward.

*INHERITANCE TAX*
_
_MCCAIN 0% (No change, Bush repealed this tax)

OBAMA Restore the inheritance tax

How does this affect you? Many families have lost businesses, farms and ranches, and homes that have< S PAN class=apple-converted-space> been in their families for generations because they could not afford the inheritance tax. Those willing their assets to loved ones will only lose them to
these taxes.

NEW TAXES BEING PROPOSED BY OBAMA*

New government taxes proposed on homes that are more than 2400 square feet

New gasoline taxes (as if gas weren't high enough already)

New taxes on natural resources consumption (heating gas, water, electricity)

New taxes on retirement accounts and last but not least....

New taxes to pay for socialized medicine so we can receive the same level of medical care as other third-world countries!!!

Wow, that's scary. That scary man that you're trying to find a reason to vote against is some kind of communist who will raise your taxes to create socialized medicine!

Of course, it came from the Internet, so we better check the facts....

(This is from Snopes. Read it there...or after the jump... Snopes )

I've been using rsync over ssh to copy changed files from one linux host to a backup. This works fine for moving files in one direction, but not to synchronize files that may be changed on either host. It also required that I be logged on so my ssh-agent would provide the password for the ssh connection. This prevented automated synchronization. So I wanted to find a solution that would:

- Allow me to make changes on either host
- Run automatically
- Maintain security

The solution was unison and a few tricks with OpenSSH public key authentication. More after the break....

Arthur C. Clark, Scientist, Author, Visionary, died in Sri Lanka at the age of 90.

Rendezvous with Rama was the first "real" science fiction book I ever read. My mother had picked it up in an airport and I found it on a table. That was it, I was a science fiction fan from then on.

Later, I discovered Clarke's laws:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
   
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
   
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
   

The world lost a great light today.

Bruce Schneier posted an article today on the false dichotomy between Security vs. Privacy:

If you set up the false dichotomy, of course people will choose security over privacy -- especially if you scare them first. But it's still a false dichotomy. There is no security without privacy. And liberty requires both security and privacy. The famous quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin reads: "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." It's also true that those who would give up privacy for security are likely to end up with neither.

The American people have been bombarded with so much fear and anxiety that they have stopped thinking. And, unfortunately, for many people that's the way they like it. But I take some heart from the freefall of Rudy "9-11" Guiliani in the Polls - given enough time, people finally started looking at something other than his constant fear speech, and didn't like what they saw. He miscalculated, thinking that the security message could last almost 2 years. It's not that people are beginning to wake up - I think it's more that they have become habituated to the constant drumbeat that they are able to look past it.

But Schneier's right - security comes before social issues like privacy on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. We have to get over the fear before we can worry about civil liberties - and that's what the government is counting on. But there is a way - and that is to get people to fear the loss of privacy. Unfortunately, balancing fear of government intrusion against complete paranoia is difficult - and it's much easier to make people fear a violent attack.

This may be why I'm attracted do Obama's message of hope. If we can look forward to a future where we don't see enemies all around us, we can be more cognizant of the importance of personal liberty. I am beginning to believe that Obama sees that future and wants to lead the country there.

JaBbA says check it out.

I don't know why it struck me, but if I could find a radio station that had a playlist like the random play function on my MP3 player, I'd probably listen to radio more. I just didn't feel like listening to NPR this morning on my ride in, so I set the player to random play, and it came up with this soundtrack for my morning:

(Nothing But) Flowers, Talking Heads
Now That I Can Dance, Funk Brothers
Hot Fun In The Summertime, Sly And The Family Stone
Little Wing, Stevie Ray Vaughan
Baba O'Reilly, The Who
She's A Rainbow, The Rolling Stones
Manic Depression, Jimi Hendrix
Anybody Seen My Baby, The Rolling Stones
Traveling Riverside Blues, Eric Clapton
Dead Flowers, The Rolling Stones

The newly-rebranded TruTV (nee CourtTV) is starting a new reality series, but instead of following Police Detectives, or Ghost Hunters, this time it's following a team of penentration testers!

This verite action series follows Tiger Team "a group of elite professionals hired to infiltrate major business and corporate interests with the objective of exposing weaknesses in the world's most sophisticated security systems, defeating criminals at their own game. Tiger Team is comprised of Security Audit Specialists Chris Nickerson, Luke McOmie and Ryan Jones who employ a variety of covert techniques - electronic, psychological and tactical - as they take on a new assignment in each episode."

The first show is December 25th at 11:30pm.


UPDATE TruTV now says it was a special, and will not be made into a series. I heard from someone who was working with the team that there was a lot they just couldn't show, so it was probably too difficult to make it a series. Nevertheless, the Car Dealership break-in is online at TruTV's website (important point - it's amazing what a skilled researcher can find out from someone's trash), and if you can find the Jewelry dealer show, it's a fantastic example of how social engineering and lack of user security awareness can lead to trouble.

Andrew Meyers, the UF student who was tasered while making a scene at a John Kerry speech, was holding a copy of Greg Palast's book Armed Madhouse, which he was using as his reference while challenging Kerry.

Palast's book makes a lot of people uncomfortable. It should, because it blows the lid off the American Political scene and it's refusal to deal with reality.

Apparently, however, there are people in a lot of places that don't want you to read Greg Palast. Including Websense, the web filtering company.

When you are on Palast's mailing list, links go to http://mailings.gregpalast.com. However, click on that link at work, and you get the following:




Illegal or Questionable? Is this censorship?