politics category archive

Down in the Caucus, Out in the Street

Went to the Minnesota Democratic caucuses tonight. What a madhouse. What a zoo. There must have been five hundred or more people at the middle school. (Updated, 10 February 2008: Just learned that there were 2,600 attendees in my Senate District, where there had only been 233 in 2004, and 95 in 2006. Wow!)

Across the street, the Republican caucuses were being held at a high school. The parking lot of the middle school was jam-packed when we arrived just before 7pm. There were lines out the door. We made a slow loop through the lot, waiting in line behind many other cars, before parking across the street at the high school. Where the lot was also full but not as many cars trolling for spots. Walked …

Decriminalizing non-commercial file sharing

via QuestionCopyright.org:

Decriminalizing all non-commercial file sharing and forcing the market to adapt is not just the best solution. It’s the only solution, unless we want an ever more extensive control of what citizens do on the Internet. Politicians who play for the antipiracy team should be aware that they have allied themselves with a special interest that is never satisfied and that will always demand that we take additional steps toward the ultimate control state. Today they want to transform the Internet Service Providers into an online police force, and the Antipiracy Bureau wants the authority for themselves to extract the identities of file sharers. Then they can drag the 15-year-old girl who downloaded a Britney Spears song to civil court and sue her.

Will the Antipiracy Bureau be satisfied with this? Probably not, because

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The 35W Bridge Collapse

Living in the northwest suburbs of Minneapolis, I’ve occasionally taken the 35W bridge over the Mississippi River in to Minneapolis. I read this comment on buzz.mn that holds true for me also (except for the regular use):

When I heard the 35W bridge collapsed, I couldn’t immediately place it, though I use it regularly. It’s not a landmark by any means. It hardly seems to be a “bridge” at all. When you’re on it, you can’t see the water and you have no sense of where the bridge ends or where it begins. It’s just a stretch on the Interstate with a good skyline view. In order to mentally place the bridge, I could not call the structure to mind–rather I had to think about where 35W crosses the Mississippi. In a way, it makes it all the more

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What if the emperor has no secrets?

Maybe the administration’s problem is that they don’t really have any good secrets but want us to think they do. They were just a little over-zealous faking it in this case:

On Monday, the Washington Post ran a fascinating story based on a report from the National Security Archive, a research library at George Washington University. According to the report, the Bush administration has been blacking out of previously public documents information on the nation’s strategic military capabilities. It is doing this, it says, in the name of national security. Got a question on the Minuteman missile? Tough. Curious about the Titan II? Too bad.

Now maybe you wonder what the problem is. This is sensitive information we’re talking about, right? Can’t have that falling into just anybody’s hands, right?

The thing is, it’s already in “anybody’s” hands: it dates back

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