Run baby, run

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Photograph of Palin as Miss Wasilla by Timroff. From Daily Kos.

Most people think that Saturday Night Live has terminated Sarah Palin’s political ambitions. I wouldn’t be too sure about that. The McCain campaign is probably doomed, but I’d put money on the proposition that Ms Palin sees herself as succeeding where Hillary Clinton failed. After all, she’s probably now the most famous woman in America. This hunch is confirmed by a fascinating New Yorker piece by Jane Mayer on the background to McCain’s ‘choice’ of Palin as running mate, and by this Guardian piece. Mayer writes that

Palin’s sudden rise to prominence … owes more to members of the Washington élite than her rhetoric has suggested. Paulette Simpson, the head of the Alaska Federation of Republican Women, who has known Palin since 2002, said, “From the beginning, she’s been underestimated. She’s very smart. She’s ambitious.” John Bitney, a top policy adviser on Palin’s 2006 gubernatorial campaign, said, “Sarah’s very conscientious about crafting the story of Sarah. She’s all about the hockey mom and Mrs. Palin Goes to Washington—the anti-politician politician.” Bitney is from Wasilla, Palin’s home town, and has known her since junior high school, where they both played in the band. He considers Palin a friend, even though after becoming governor, in December, 2006, she dismissed him. He is now the chief of staff to the speaker of the Alaska House.

Upon being elected governor, Palin began developing relationships with Washington insiders, who later championed the idea of putting her on the 2008 ticket. “There’s some political opportunism on her part,” Bitney said. For years, “she’s had D.C. in mind.” He added, “She’s not interested in being on the junior-varsity team.”

The article has fascinating detail of how Palin wooed a whole clique of right-wing commentators, some of who were as moved by her shapely legs as much as they were impressed by her, er, ideas. Rush Limbaugh’s first reaction was to say that she was a “babe”. And of course there’s nothing quite like a “gun-toting hottie” to turn on your average member of the National Rifle Association.

I’m not impressed by Palin in her current role. She’s way out of her depth at the moment. But on the other hand there is something deeply suspicious about media groupthink. Palin is probably smarter and more cunning than she has been made to appear so far by her Republican handlers. Her fellow-Alaskans know her as someone who is ambitious, organised and determined/ruthless (depending on your point of view). She has had the kind of media exposure and name recognition that money simply cannot buy. And she has four years to build on that base.

So what price Palin as the Republican candidate in 2012?

Remembering Barry

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The Observer had the great idea of asking people who had known Barack Obama in earlier times for their recollections. Here’s Terry Link, who was a fellow State Senator with him in Illinois.

I don’t drink at all, Barack would have a beer once in a while, so we didn’t carouse the bars like lots of the others. You could say that we were both measured personalities. So I said: ‘Why don’t we have a card game?’ We called it the ‘Committee Meeting’ but there was no shop talk allowed. We had seven or eight Republicans and Democrats and it was a time to get to know one another out of the shadows of the Capitol. We’d take the suits and ties off, sit back and have a night of relaxing. It was low-stakes poker: a dollar stake, three dollar top raise. No one was going to lose their mortgage or house. Barack wore sweat pants and a baseball cap, drank a beer and would cadge a few cigarettes.

If his style of poker is like how he’ll run the White House I’ll sleep well at night. He is very conscious of the odds. If he thought he had a chance of winning he’d stay in the game; if he thought not he’d fold straight away. He read and played the field very well. He was serious at it.

There was another player, Larry Walsh, a relatively conservative Democrat. Barack trumped his four of a kind with a higher four of a kind to take the pot and Walsh threw his cards down. ‘Doggone it, Barack,’ he said. ‘If you were more liberal in your card playing and more conservative in your politics, we’d get along much better.’

There’s an interesting epistemological problem here, in that people’s memories of someone are inevitably coloured by what they know of his or her subsequent career. If Obama had turned out to be a moderately successful academic lawyer or a community organiser, would people have the same kinds of memories of him? I suspect not.

Another Observer correspondent was Larry Tribe, a law professor at Harvard. Here’s part of his reminiscence:

Barack came to see me during his first year at Harvard. It was 31 March 1989. I found my desk calendar and I’d written his name with an exclamation point. From the late 1960s, when I began teaching as a professor at Harvard Law School, until the present, there has been no other student whose name I’ve noted in that way.

He impressed me from the beginning as an extraordinary young man. He was obviously brilliant, driven and interested in pursuing ideas with a clear sense that his reasons for being in law school were not to climb some corporate ladder, nor simply to broaden his opportunities, but to go back to the community.

He had a combination of intellectual acumen, open-mindedness, resistance to stereotypical thinking and conventional presuppositions. He also had a willingness to change his mind when new evidence appeared, confidence in his own moral compass and a maturity that obviously came from some combination of his upbringing and earlier experience.

[…]

We used to take long walks on the Charles River in Boston. Our conversations were enormously wide-ranging and enjoyable, about life in general, not just about work. I had no doubt as I got to know him that he had an unlimited future. I didn’t have a clear sense of what direction it would take, but I thought it would be political and I thought the sky was the limit.

He had a personal quality which was transcendent and I continued to feel that way about him each time we met. And the quality he demonstrated that I’ve always been left with more than any other is authenticity. There isn’t a fibre of phoniness about this guy.

New kind of suit available on eBay

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From The Register.

An eBay shopper may face libel charges after posting negative feedback about a seller on the auction site.

Chris Read, a 42-year-old mechanic from Kent, wasn’t satisfied with the Samsung phone he purchased on eBay, reports the Daily Telegraph. For one thing, it wasn’t the right phone. It was also described to be in “good” condition and arrived rather worse for wear, he claims.

He returned the phone to the seller, Joel Jones, 26, of Suffolk, and requested a refund. Read then posted negative feedback for him, writing the “item was scratched, chipped, and not the model advertised on Mr. Jone’s eBay account.”

Read did get a refund, but also received an email from Jones claiming the negative feedback was damaging his business. Jones threatened to sue unless the comment was removed.

“Obviously I was shocked,” Read told the Daily Telegraph. “I replied saying I stood by my comment and would go to court if necessary.”

Hmmm…. Much as I love m’learned friends, I don’t think there’s much fee income here.

Palin’s local newspaper endorses Obama!

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From the Anchorage Daily News

Obama for president

Palin’s rise captivates us but nation needs a steady hand

Alaska enters its 50th-anniversary year in the glow of an improbable and highly memorable event: the nomination of Gov. Sarah Palin as the Republican vice presidential candidate. For the first time ever, an Alaskan is making a serious bid for national office, and in doing so she brings broad attention and recognition not only to herself, but also to the state she leads.

[…]

Gov. Palin’s nomination clearly alters the landscape for Alaskans as we survey this race for the presidency — but it does not overwhelm all other judgment. The election, after all is said and done, is not about Sarah Palin, and our sober view is that her running mate, Sen. John McCain, is the wrong choice for president at this critical time for our nation.

Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, brings far more promise to the office. In a time of grave economic crisis, he displays thoughtful analysis, enlists wise counsel and operates with a cool, steady hand. The same cannot be said of Sen. McCain.
[…]

Yet despite her formidable gifts, few who have worked closely with the governor would argue she is truly ready to assume command of the most important, powerful nation on earth. To step in and juggle the demands of an economic meltdown, two deadly wars and a deteriorating climate crisis would stretch the governor beyond her range. Like picking Sen. McCain for president, putting her one 72-year-old heartbeat from the leadership of the free world is just too risky at this time.

Amen!

Wikipedia offline

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Wikipedia produces a downloadable version of the encyclopedia aimed at the schools, with content relevant to the national curriculum. Great idea, and one that could have some serious applications in developing countries where schools have difficulty getting a workable internet connection. The blurb describes it as

a free, hand-checked, non-commercial selection from Wikipedia, targeted around the UK National Curriculum and useful for much of the English speaking world. It has about 5500 articles (as much as can be fitted on a DVD with good size images) and is about the size of a twenty volume encyclopaedia (34,000 images and 20 million words). Articles were chosen from a list ranked by importance and quality generated by project members. This list of articles was then manually sorted for relevance to children, and adult topics were removed. Compared to the 2007 version some six hundred articles were removed and two thousand more relevant articles (of now adequate quality) were added. SOS Children volunteers then checked and tidied up the contents, first by selecting historical versions of articles free from vandalism and then by removing unsuitable sections. External links and references are also not included since it was infeasible to check all of these.

The project is a joint venture with SOS Children’s Villages.

Thanks to BoingBoing for the link.

A cloudy future?

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This morning’s Observer column…

Google Trends reveals that ‘cloud computing’ first starts to figure in queries in 2007. Interest grew slowly until April this year, when Salesforce.com announced a deal with Google. There’s another peak in July, when Yahoo, Intel and HP announced they were collaborating with several universities to set up cloud computing labs. This week’s news from Amazon will doubtless produce an even bigger spike in Google searches by people wondering what’s going on.

If you believe the enthusiasts, it’s nothing less than our old friend, the paradigm shift…

What’s at stake on November 4

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It’s not just about the economy or the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan. It’s also about the Supreme Court. Here’s Gary Wills writing in the New York Review of Books.

When Charles Gibson was questioning Governor Palin, he should not have asked about the Bush Doctrine (a wavering concept, and touching only one matter, war). He should have asked for her views on the unitary executive—the question Cheney asked the Court nominees. That is what matters most to the Bush people. It affects all the executive usurpations of the last seven years—not only the right of the president to wage undeclared wars, but his right to create military courts, to authorize extraordinary renditions, secret prisons, more severely coercive interrogation, trials with undisclosed evidence, domestic surveillance, and the overriding of congressional oversight in every aspect of government from energy policy to health services.

All these policies were driven by the unitary executive theory of the Constitution, which emanated from David Addington in Vice President Cheney’s office. Charlie Savage has documented that four Supreme Court justices are already enthusiastic supporters of the unitary theory—Roberts, Alito, Scalia, and Thomas.[16] It takes only a fifth justice to solder that theory into place for the foreseeable future. This would be the most thorough reworking and distortion of the Constitution in all our history.

The stakes are staggering. That is why the Republicans are so desperate to win this year. If they fail, not only will their previous encroachments be endangered, but the investigation of illegal acts will be removed from protection by presidential veto. Nothing short of wholesale pardons by the outgoing president can give many people cover for acts they undertook on the assurance that the unitary executive was exempt from congressional action. This prospect is so terrifying that John McCain has taken over the thuggish tactics that defeated him in 2000. The Republicans have everything to lose.

The unitary executive theory was elaborated in Edwin Meese’s Justice Department under Ronald Reagan. In its first form, it asserted that Congress can have nothing to do with an agency once it has set it up. Everything after that is an executive task, and only the president can determine executive personnel and conduct.

Wills thinks that “There is something terrifying in the fact that a sweeping presidential power … is now accepted by four of the nine Supreme Court justices. Add a fifth justice to them, and the Constitution will be under the severest siege in its history. There can be no higher stakes.”

He’s right.

Netbooks

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Quentin’s got a netbook. So has Dave Winer, who is not impressed by the way Steve Jobs poured cold water on the whole netbook concept. So here’s Dave’s definition of the essence of the netbook.

1. Small size.
2. Low price.
3. Battery life of 4 hours. Battery can be replaced by user. Atom processor seems to be a requirement, those that aren’t Atom aren’t selling (and are apparently being discontinued).
4. Rugged.
5. Built-in wifi, 3 USB ports, SD card reader. It seems it must have 802.11n to be taken seriously.
6. Runs my software.
7. Runs any software I want (no platform vendor to decide what’s appropriate).
8. Competition (users have choice and can switch vendors at any time).

I’ve had an Asus EeePC for just under a year, and have found it impressive and useful. It has some annoyances (battery life not great, forgets WEP passwords when hibernating, undersized trackpad and screen slightly too small for serious browsing). But on the other hand, it came configured with great applications (including Skype and all major flavours of webmail out of the box), is delightfully small and light and fits in anywhere. I took it away on holiday once to see what was lacking — and found that the only thing I really missed was the ability to upload and edit photographs from my digital camera.

I also bought an HP MiniNote for research purposes — and to see what an established computer manufacturer would do with the netbook idea. The HP machine is beautifully made, has a bigger, nicer screen, a 160GB hard drive and a much better keyboard. But it’s also over-engineered and heavy, has unimpressive battery life and came with the worst Linux distro I’ve ever seen. The machine was effectively unusable until my colleague Michael installed Ubuntu on it.

So… The Netbook genre is still in its early days. The big challenge for the manufacturers is how to resist the temptation of feature-creep. That’s one of the problems of the HP machine — it’s edging back into small laptop territory. And that’s a mistake. The motto for the genre should be KISS — Keep It Simple, Stoopid.

As Dave Winer says, Steve Jobs may be dissing netbooks in public but behind the scenes he’s probably hassling his designers to come up with Apple’s distinctive take on the genre.

LATER: Bang on cue, here’s TechCrunch in speculative form:

This week saw an interesting story come out of the New York Times. The Times reported seeing traffic from an Apple product which has a screen resolution greater than that of an iPhone but less than that of a MacBook. This seems to correlate very well with reports of Apple building something that is akin to a new Newton, although whether it is a bigger iPhone or a MacBook Tablet is still any one’s guess.