I'm going to Denver!

As many of you know, I'm going out to Denver as a Convention volunteer and plan to take advantage of as many offerings as possible.

I just posted this schedule on Blue Mass Group, where there's a discussion started by Charlie, who has asked for suggestions about what he should focus on and cover in Denver. Please visit there to read the discussion and add your imput.

I'm taking my computer and camera (with 2 batteries and three memory cards=8GB) and am ready to be involved to the max and totally sleep-deprived!

I'm signed up to attend the following workshops:

• Sunday: From Fannie Lou Hamer to Barack Obama and PDA's Progressive Welcome to Denver
• Monday: Rocky Mountain Roundtable Unconventional Women
• Tuesday: Rocky Mountain Roundtable Energy and Climate Crisis and the National Women's Political Caucus reception
• Wednesday: Rocky Mountain Roundtable International Relations
• Thursday: PDA's Constitutional Law and Congress

That doesn't include the volunteering time, convention or parties, all of which is up in the air.

Lot's more about the convention soon!

This may be moot by morning

I just finished watching Countdown, in which Keith Olbermann predicted Obama's pick for VP will be Joe Biden. He narrowed down the widely-reported short list of three by eliminating:

• Virginia's Governor Tim Kaine, because of the announcement that former VA Governor and current US Senate nominee, Mark Warner, will deliver the keynote address to the convention, therefore negating the possibility of featuring another Virginian in the same venue the next night; and,

• Indiana Senator Evan Bayh, because if elected there's a high probability his democratic senate seat would become republican. His replacement would be appointed by Indiana's governor, who is currently republican Mitch Daniels. Daniels is running for re-election; he has a democratic opponent, but he holds a substantial lead and the power and money of an incumbent, so in all likelihood, the appointment would be his to make. The person appointed would remain senator until a special election, which, if I understand this correctly, would be during the next election cycle, two years from now. (This is different from the House, which requires members to run every two years, and for which a replacement of a member is not done by appointment, but rather is the winning candidate of a special election held as soon as possible.)

Olbermann concludes that the choice must be Biden and says of that choice, "it certainly would make the covering of campaign speeches a lot more interesting."

You can watch the segment from Olbermann here.

Oh, and if you have a couple of minutes, check out the "Bushed" segment and be sure to listen to the rant for #1 about the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Unit (ICE). Chilling.

Candidate for WORST PERSON (company) IN THE WORLD: CLEAR

First, let me say that I’m a card-carrying member of the ACLU and take my right to privacy very seriously.

Sometime this past spring, I accepted an invitation through my Marriott membership for a free, one-year membership to Clear, a company offering pre-authorized airport security. After a lengthy internal debate about whether I wanted to be in their system, I decided, what the hell, and filled out an online application. I knew I wouldn’t be traveling more than once or twice over the year, but wanted to experience “fly[ing] through airport security" before my privileges expired.

There are a handful of airports currently operational (my home port, Boston, is not among them), and in order to activate the account, I have to present myself at one of the participating airports to supply my biometrics—consisting of fingerprints and an iris scan. Denver is one of the airports in which Clear is up and running, and since I’m signed up to volunteer at the Democratic convention, I thought I’d complete the process in August.

Last Wed, August 7th, I received an email from Clear. I assumed it was going to be information about my enrollment: there were more airports online where I could report to complete the process; or they’d decided I wasn’t qualified to be among the elite to whom they cater; or too much time had passed between my internet application and showing up at the airport. I don't have a good enough imagination to have come up with the actual reason for their email.

This, from a company dedicated to helping keep our airports secure:

From: Clearsupport@flyclear.com
Subject: Information About Your Clear Enrollment
Date: August 6, 2008 4:47:28 PM EDT
To: (ME)
Reply-To: Clearsupport@flyclear.com

ABOUT YOUR CLEAR ACCOUNT

Dear (ME),

We take the protection of your privacy extremely seriously at Clear. That's why we announced yesterday that a laptop from our office at the San Francisco Airport containing a small portion of your pre-enrollment information (but not your Social Security number or credit card information) recently went missing. And we were prepared to send you the appropriate notice yesterday morning detailing that situation.

However, the laptop was recovered yesterday just before that email went out. And, we have determined from a preliminary investigation that no one logged into the computer from the time it went missing in the office until the time it was found. Therefore no unauthorized person has obtained any personal information.

We are sorry that this theft of a computer containing a limited amount of your personal information occurred, and we apologize for the concern that the publicity surrounding our public announcement might have caused. But in an abundance of caution, both we and the Transportation Security Administration treated this unaccounted-for laptop as a serious potential breach. We have learned from this incident and we have suspended enrollment processes temporarily until all pre-enrollment information is encrypted for further protection, which means you cannot complete in-person enrollment at this time. We will let you know as soon as you can. The personal information on the enrollment system was protected by two levels of password protection, but Clear is in the process of completing a software fix - and other security enhancements - to encrypt the data, which is what we should have done all along, just the way we encrypt all of your other data. Clear now expects that the fix will be in place within days. Meantime, all airport Clear lane operations continue as normal.

The data in question included a limited amount of your personal information, but did not include any credit information, including credit card numbers. And it did not include your Social Security number. And of course, it did not include any biometric information, such as your fingerprint or iris images which are only supplied during the second, in-person enrollment process that takes place at the airport. All of that data is already encrypted and not stored locally at any enrollment center or Clear lane.

As you may know, our Privacy Policy states that we will notify you of any compromise of your personal information regardless of whether any state statute requires it. This letter is a good example of our policy: no law requires that we notify you of this incident because our investigation of the recovered laptop revealed no breach. But we think it's good practice to err on the side of good communication, especially when, in this case, we did make a mistake by not making sure that limited portion of information was encrypted.

Please call us toll-free with any questions at 866-398-8151. Again, we apologize for the confusion. We look forward to welcoming you to a Clear enrollment center just as soon as we've reopened enrollment.

Sincerely, 
Steven Brill
Clear CEO

P.S. A reminder: One of Clear's unique privacy features is that all members and applicants are given an identity theft protection warranty which provides that, in the unlikely event you become a victim of identity theft as a result of any unauthorized dissemination of your private information by - or theft from - Clear or its subcontractors, we will reimburse you for any otherwise unreimbursable monetary costs directly resulting from the identity theft. In addition, Clear will, at its own expense, offer you assistance in restoring the integrity of your financial or other accounts. So had there been any actual compromise of your personal information, you would have been additionally protected.

I felt compelled to visit the CLEAR website for more wise words from the CEO.

This is the second of three points in a mission statement on a page-long venue for the CEO to espouse his altruistic reasons for starting his company. (The same person who wrote, or at least, signed, the email. Nah, what am I saying? Of course he wrote it! That email certainly was not the product of a PR firm!)

Second, we think we have a special responsibility to protect your privacy. Yes, we are using biometric identifiers such as fingerprints and iris images. Yes, your enrollment application will be submitted to the government for a basic security threat assessment before we can issue you a Clear card. But we do not believe the process and the questions stop there. We know that this kind of new idea and new process is bound to make many people uneasy about what we are doing with their personal information, especially at a time when every day seems to bring new headlines about identity theft. I started this company because I thought there was a right way to do something like this - a way that confronted privacy issues head on and embraced uncompromising dedication to privacy protection.

So, there you have it. I suppose by broadcasting this on the web, I can probably kiss my clearance goodbye.

Of course, when it comes to protecting my right to write about this, there’s always the ACLU!

Five hundred, thirty-eight

Five hundred, thirty-eight. That's the number of electors in the electoral college.

And, FiveThirtyEight.com is the name of a website, whose creator, Nate Silver, appeared on Countdown with Keith Olbermann tonight.

Earn the admiration and gratitude of the number-crunchers, political junkies and geeks in your life by passing on this link to them.

It all about the numbers and the polls that capture their moment in time. And, wow, is it impressive.

A New Tag

For about six months, I have been using tags instead of bookmarks; instead of drilling down through files and folders, I just assign key words to what I want to save. It's really changed the way I organize everything. Actually, "organize" is the wrong word. That was the problem with the old way--it depended on me filing things where I could find them again. (Not!) Now, I can search for it by whatever obvious words come to mind when I save it. And I can save something in as many different catagories as there are words to describe it. I could tag what I've written so far in this piece with: files; folders; bookmarking; organize; tags; reference....whatever. And whichever word comes to mind when I search for it, will point me in the right direction.

I have about 500 tags in my cache, and it isn't all that uncommon that I tag something with a word I haven't used previously. But I gotta tell ya, when I went to tag this piece, I was blown away that I'd never used the word before.

So, now I've added two new tags: liberal and The"L"word. I'll try to put them to good use. In this piece posted on Politico though, the word has a bit of a right wing edge to it.

Liberals to warn potential GOP third-party organizers

Greg Palast

I don't know if any of you have had a chance to visit any of the links I've provided to websites and blogs over to your right, but let me direct you now to Greg Palast's blog. His new entry is about the evils of nuke plants and how McCain's and Obama's proposed nuclear energy policies differ.

Once you've read that, click on Greg's home page and look around. He's an investigative reporter who is passionate about election protection, knows a great deal about election fraud and writes about it for the BBC. Note: he's an American, but writes for the BBC, because the American MSM won't hire such a blatant truth-teller.

If you read my post from July 28 (the link from Common Dreams) about the role of the DOJ in the firing of U.S. Attorneys, you'll be interested to know that it was largely due to the investigative work of Palast that the practice of caging voters came to light, an issue on which he collaborates with Robert Kennedy, Jr. They are currently investigating why thousands of democrats have found their names missing from the voter rolls during this year's primary.

FACT: On Super-Tuesday, the number of Democrats missing from voter rolls in New Mexico exceeded George Bush’s 2004 ‘victory’ total by 300%. No wonder McCain’s campaign says, New Mexico is “in play.” The question is who’s playing with it?

I hope you will comment about what you read there.

Btw, I've had a request from a friend that I remove the restriction that requires one to sign up on blogger before making a comment, and I've done that. So, let the conversation begin! (You can go back to any of the previous posts on this blog and comment. It's never too late!)

Paris (not France) and the (not Hanoi) Hilton

h/t to Conrad...
OK. I got sucked in. These are links to the videos you've likely already seen.
First, the ad about Paris Hilton:
here's the ad the created the uproar (posted on the McCain campaign site);
here's Paris Hilton's response;
and this fantastic commentary from Seth Grahame-Smith of Huffington Post.

Now, the video around the Sturgis "beauty contest" speech. In case you're not aware, Sturgis is the town in South Dakota that once a year is overtaken by bikers from all over the US. My guess is McCain is trying to claim the title of candidate-you'd-most-like-to-have-a -beer-with from GW by speaking there. Unfortunately, it comes off (no pun intended) more as, "Let's have a beer and humiliate my wife."
Here's the video of the speech;
And here's a link to the video of the beauty contest, known as Buffalo Chip, via the TPM website, which will allow you to read a bit more before deciding whether or not to venture on.

Yankee Homecoming Parade with Congressman JohnTierney

The 2008 Yankee Homecoming Parade will be remembered as "wet!" It started to sprinkle about half way through, followed a few minutes later by vivid lightning and booming thunder, accompanied by rain that can only be called a deluge.
You can find pictures taken along the route here. (Try watching it as a slideshow.)

These pictures demonstrate the progression.













DRY


















WET












SOAKED

Happy Saturday, everyone!

Here are links to some weekend reading:

Glenn Greenwald on this week's news with an excellent chronology and updates about the anthrax scare.

There is a move to promote the idea of Wes Clark for VP here and here.

China parks 1.5 million cars, closes factories and spends 18 billion dollars (yup, that's B for billion and $ for dollars) to turn dirty gray skies to blue in time for the Olympic games.

Have you noticed McCain's recently-flipped stance on squeaky clean campaigning? It's because there's been a change of personnel. Here's a piece about the nasty campaign tactics being used against Obama by Steve Schmidt, who ran "Karl Rove's war room" against Kerry in 2004.

What Schmidt and his associates have apparently concluded is that McCain’s weaknesses—on the election’s most salient issues and as a candidate—are so pronounced and Obama’s vulnerabilities so glaring that the low road is their guy’s best, and maybe only, route to the White House.

More later (maybe)...

Kerry v. Lieberman on this Sunday's Meet the Press

This Sunday on Meet the Press (10:30 a.m. ET), Tom Brokaw will moderate as John Kerry, for Obama, goes head to head with Joe Lieberman, for McCain. (How odd to feel compelled to remind readers who is advocating for whom.)

If you're as angry with Lieberman as most Dems, and if you have a propensity for throwing things, you might want to watch it on an old TV.

We in Newbury/Newburyport had hoped that Senator Kerry might find time to march in the Yankee Homecoming parade this Sunday. I guess this news establishes his alibi! ;-)

UPDATE: For a preview of what we might expect from Kerry on Sunday, take a look at his appearance on Friday evening's Race for the White House, in a segment called "Face Off," in which he blew Arizona Senator John Kyl out of the water.


Speaking of Sunday, after you kill your TV, you'll have just enough time to get to Newburyport to support Congressman John Tierney by marching with him in the Yankee Homecoming parade! (Details to the right.)