The McCain camp is understood to be making tough decisions on where to campaign in the dying days of the race, now regarding Colorado, New Mexico and Iowa as falling out of Senator McCain’s reach. All three states voted for George W.Bush in 2004.
Australian News

McCain is concentrating all his efforts on a last-ditch attempt to win Pennsylvania, in an attempt to squeak by in the election. As 538 notes, his campaign has also stopped allocating money to ads in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Maine and Minnesota. See also the CNN article on giving up on colorado which raises the point:

The McCain campaign is looking at an Electoral College strategy heading into the final two weeks that has virtually no room for error and depends heavily on a dramatic comeback in Pennsylvania, which hasn’t backed a Republican for president in 20 years.

In some ways, I think the big victor of this campaign is the 50 state strategy that the democratic party switched to using in 2006. Howard Dean’s strategy was to campaign in all the states and try to win in all the states rather than to come up with a game plan for winning just slightly more than 50% of the electoral votes (which was the plan of the RNC (Republicans) and the DLC — a splinter group of democrats run by the Clintons distinguished from the DNC (what folks usually think of when they think Democrat.))

McCain, because he had the now traditional² ‘win just enough’ strategy¹, has been acting on following through with winning the key states and not trying hard in the states he didn’t need to win. Palin, perhaps, is symptomatic of this strategy — since you’re only trying to win the states where you need to win (considering anything else as a bonus), you have to concentrate on appealing to and getting out the base and not the country overall. This is also what conceptually drives the idea of ‘real america.’ Those plans are now upset and he’s now struggling with the narrowing alternatives.

Obama benefits by the work that the Democrats generally have been doing over the last several years, and also by his own campaign, which is quickly becoming omnipresent in towns and areas where you wouldn’t expect them. As the tide comes in, you note other things, like McCain using call centers and having trouble getting volunteers to fill its call centers while Obama’s campaign is relying on volunteers.

Obama’s campaign is a return to the idea sloganeered by “democracy is an efficient marketplace of ideas,”⁴ which is why he’s been moving slowly to the center as the general election proceeds while McCain’s “control from the strong position” strategy moves followers of it inexorably further out to the edges.³ This also gets reflected in the rhetoric — while Obama is now comfortably claiming traditional republican talking points like the middle class and taxes, McCain has the wilder route of negative campaigning left because he has to make sure that all his constituents are as motivated as possible to show up by whatever means he can dredge up.

So, I guess we’ll see.

On a lighter note, hilarious hockey advertisement tangentially related to this post.

¹ and also an inheritor of the GOP’s anti-african american Southern Strategy.
² whose recent implementation was the brainchild of Karl Rove.
³ WJ Clinton’s campaign being an exemplar of this, as he would sit on the center and seize on ideas from both sides like they were hot interns.
⁴ I lifted this phrase from Tongodeon.

The decision by the judge, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, is a setback for the Bush administration in its effort to promote a narrow definition of materials that must be safeguarded under the Presidential Records Act.

The Bush administration’s legal position “heightens the court’s concern” that some records might not be preserved, Judge Kollar-Kotelly said.

[...]

Mr. Cheney and the other defendants in the case, Judge Kollar-Kotelly wrote, “were only willing to agree to a preservation order that tracked their narrowed interpretation” of the Presidential Records Act.

The administration, the judge said, wanted any court order on what records are at issue in the suit to cover only the office of the vice president, not Mr. Cheney or the other defendants in the lawsuit..

The Bush administration (and Cheney particularly) has been trying to destroy records of its time in government, in part through the wacky strategem of denying that the Vice President is part of the executive branch. People have been suing the administration to try and keep them from destroying their internal papers and force them to put that into the customary presidential archive.

Why did Palin do state business on her personal email? For about the same reason as the Bush administration wants to be able to destroy records of its time in office — things done on the public time are recoverable and can be viewed by history (and departments of Justice of future administrations.) There’s a parallel scandal of the Bush administration doing their own business through RNC emails that hasn’t gotten a lot of publication in the media.

So, in many ways, it’s virtually guaranteed that the bush administration will destroy the emails, and this set of legal proceedings is more or less determining whether they’ll be held accountable for it later.

Although the Bush administration has been able to refuse to cooperate with various law enforcement agencies, eventually once it’s out of office it will probably end up being held accountable for what it’s done, and may face its own Cadaver Synod.

The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle, helping restore essential services and escorting supply convoys.

Now they’re training for the same mission — with a twist — at home.

Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.

It is not the first time an active-duty unit has been tapped to help at home. In August 2005, for example, when Hurricane Katrina unleashed hell in Mississippi and Louisiana, several active-duty units were pulled from various posts and mobilized to those areas.

But this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities.

This is the most annoying consequence of treating reserve units like front-line army units. The national guard units are being treated like active-duty military (rotation-wise) to keep the numbers deployed overseas up, causing losses both in operational effectiveness and morale and retainment due to the change in mission.

This is not to mention the issues with the national guard’s traditional mission in helping with natural disasters not happening (okay, that last was from the onion, but it’s one of the most tragicomic things i’ve ever read.) The line between reserve and active-duty are shrinking to help keep morale up, but this sort of deployment (where troops help enforce laws on citizens) causes some basic problems:

“Police officers responded to a domestic dispute, accompanied by marines. They had just gone up to the door when two shotgun rounds were fired through the door, hitting the officers. One yelled `cover me!’ to the marines, who then laid down a heavy base of fire. . . . The police officer had not meant `shoot’ when he yelled `cover me’ to the marines. [He] meant . . . point your weapons and be prepared to respond if necessary. However, the marines responded instantly in the precise way they had been trained, where `cover me’ means provide me with cover using firepower. . . . over two hundred bullets [were] fired into that house.”

From “Lessons in Command and Control from the Los Angeles Riots”, underscoring the difference in training between police and active-duty military units.

We’ve now reached the point where more sensible policy is being given on a television show than in real life, in other words the shark is now jumping the government.

Commander Adama, in the episode “Bastille Day”:
“There’s a reason you separate the military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.”

Here’s some comments from Bruce Schneier on a related topic.

Last week, an application turned the iPhone into a megaphone to proclaim: “I Am Rich.” That is the name of a downloadable program that promised to do nothing except signal to the world that its buyer was wealthy enough to have spent $1,000 to download an image of a multifaceted ruby.

It’s almost beautiful as an art piece exposing human vanity, but doesn’t seem to play well in the actual context of the iPhone’s App Store. From the New York Times.

With 91 percent of the state’s precincts counted, Clinton led Obama 51 percent to 49 percent, with about 20,000 votes separating the two U.S. senators, CNN reported. Votes were reported late coming in from Lake County in northwestern Indiana near Chicago.
from this article @ UPI

Clinton’s earlier reported leads were largely based on the fact that Lake County took its sweet time to report polls, and it was a strong supporter of Obama, as prefigured. Clinton is continuing onwards and upwards. Clinton lost ground by about 8 delegates today and appears in no danger of actually catching up any time soon.

Before flying out of Indiana to Washington DC, as the networks were still agonizing over the rustbelt state, Clinton proclaimed victory there and said it was “full speed on to the White House.”
from here

Clinton appears to be pinning her hopes on using the DLC to beat the DNC into submission over the delegates that were ruled out due to election irregularities (and where she won because she ran unopposed.) The DLC is a subgroup of democrats, more conservative, that is pretty much backing her at this point, and has been ominously waving hands to spoil the election if she doesn’t get the ticket, by sponsoring lots of polls saying that Clinton voters wouldn’t vote for Obama.

The DLC is doing a lot of weird marketing crap, like marketing Chicago as the DLC Conversation rather than the Democratic Convention. It’s weird how their goal is to engineer a takeover of the party by near-threat rather than to attempt to win outright. The claim that this is to appeal to centrists, but mostly it just defies logic.

The biggest difference, which seems this time to have shot Clinton in the foot, is the 50 state strategy, which has democratic candidates trying to win in every state, rather than the DLC which aims to leverage victory by just winning a few small states outside of the democratic core.

Basically, to win the primary, Clinton is relying on people who will be voting for McCain in the general election. Because Clinton and McCain are relying on the same groups as their core woters — less educated, largely white counties, she’s got a bigger chance of being Kerry part II in the general election. Here’s a graphic from the New York Times that explains it: obama versus clinton.

Meanwhile, because Obama’s been competing in all 50 states, he’s got a lot more states that are far more securely locked down than Clinton, but that will be the subject of my next post. It appears that Clinton’s going to have to pull some sort of bullshit at the convention to win, and then is well-placed to lose the general election. joy.

[I]t is a maxim of universal application that every man is presumed to know the law, and it would seem inherent that freedom of access to the laws, or the official interpretation of those laws, should be co-extensive with the sweep of the maxim. Knowledge is the only just condition of obedience. The laws of Rome were written on tablets and posted, that all might read, and all were bound to obedience. The act of that emperor who caused his enactments to be written in small letters, on small tablets, and then posted the latter at such height that none could read the letters, and at the same time insisted upon the rule of obedience, outraging as it did the relations of governor and governed under his own system of government, has never been deemed consistent with or possible under ours

It’s funny how the idea of publication of the law on tablets comes back in the idea of publishing the laws. My associate and I went to the Roman Art from the Louvre exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum this weekend, and they actually had one of those tablets. The tablet (in greek) was a declaration by one of the Roman Emperors that a city and its markets were an autonomous city. It was, as stated in the law cite, designed to be published where readable by all and sundry — publish itself comes from a latin verb (publicare) that means to make public.

The other place where this shows up (in books I’ve recently looked at) is in Jaynor Jaynes The Rise of Consciousness in the Decline of the Bicameral Mind, which talked about similar tablets back in Sumeria. The main difference in the conceptualization of the tablets is that the Roman tables were designed to be read as a letter, and the Sumerian tablets were designed as the recording of a narration of a letter that should be read back. However, both of them were mounted in public places. Even if you don’t take Jaynes’ belief that it reflects a different stage of human consciousness, it’s at least a very different conception of people’s literacy.

Yeah, welcome to pointless literary reminiscing, this must be a blog or something

The call is deceptive because the deadline has already passed for mail-in registrations for North Carolina’s May 6 primary. Also, many who have received the calls — like Kevin Farmer in Durham, who made a tape of the call that is available here — are already registered. The call’s suggestion that they’re not registered has caused widespread confusion and drawn hundreds of complaints, including many from African-American voters who received the calls.

The calls are also probably illegal. Farmer and others have told Facing South the calls use a blocked phone number and provided no contact information — a violation of North Carolina rules regulating “robo-calls” (N.C. General Statute 163-104(b)(1)c). N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper further stated in a recent memo that the identifying information must be clear enough to allow the recipient to “complain or seek redress” — something not included in the calls.

It is also a Class I felony in North Carolina “to misrepresent the law to the public through mass mailing or any other means of communication where the intent and the effect is to intimidate or discourage potential voters from exercising their lawful right to vote.”

The calls have been denounced by the N.C. State Board of Elections, as well as by voter advocacy groups including Democracy North Carolina, which called them “another in a long line of deceptive practices used in North Carolina and elsewhere that particularly target African-American voters.

The article has a lot of interesting coverage of the details, and other articles covering similar topics can easily be found. I think that these actions, repeated in apparently 11 states so far, are pretty ham-handed, and since it’s apparently targeting African-Americans and done by her backers, it’s eventually going to cause a lot of trouble for Clinton irrespective of whether she wins or loses.

Now some think that we are made good by nature, others by habituation, others by teaching. Nature’s part evidently does not depend on us, but as a result of some divine causes is present in those who are truly fortunate; while argument and teaching, we may suspect, are not powerful with all men, but the soul of the student must first have been cultivated by means of habits for noble joy and noble hatred, like earth which is to nourish the seed. For he who lives as passion directs will not hear argument that dissuades him, nor understand it if he does; and how can we persuade one in such a state to change his ways? And in general passion seems to yield not to argument but to force. The character, then, must somehow be there already with a kinship to virtue, loving what is noble and hating what is base.

But it is difficult to get from youth up a right training for virtue if one has not been brought up under right laws; for to live temperately and hardily is not pleasant to most people, especially when they are young. For this reason their nurture and occupations should be fixed by law; for they will not be painful when they have become customary. But it is surely not enough that when they are young they should get the right nurture and attention; since they must, even when they are grown up, practise and be habituated to them, we shall need laws for this as well, and generally speaking to cover the whole of life; for most people obey necessity rather than argument, and punishments rather than the sense of what is noble.

This is why some think that legislators ought to stimulate men to virtue and urge them forward by the motive of the noble, on the assumption that those who have been well advanced by the formation of habits will attend to such influences; and that punishments and penalties should be imposed on those who disobey and are of inferior nature, while the incurably bad should be completely banished. A good man (they think), since he lives with his mind fixed on what is noble, will submit to argument, while a bad man, whose desire is for pleasure, is corrected by pain like a beast of burden. This is, too, why they say the pains inflicted should be those that are most opposed to the pleasures such men love.

I’m going to leave you to infer what I mean by this if it isn’t just people who talk about Aristotle on their blog are mental.

In recent years, commentators on game culture and ludology have undertaken the task of analyzing and structuring play. Such work has been strongly influenced by the Dutch researcher Johan Huizinga’s 1938 study of play, Homo Ludens and Roger Callois’s later structuralist elaborations of Huizinga’s research. In this article I want to draw upon a different stream of thought from the mid twentieth century, also informed by Huizinga but not exclusively, that of the Paris Situationist artists and architects [...] A number of important engagements with play and games by the Situationists are newly relevant today. Rather than offer a historical assessment of Situationism’s theories, I will take cues from their writings to reconsider the potential of games in art. I find useful their critique of play within but nevertheless resistant to capitalism (and by extension imperialism and militarism), their architectural proposals for “player” navigation and transformation of urban “psychogeographic” zones (what we might call “ludic architecture”), their analysis of leisure and non-leisure activities, and their repurposing of Dadaist negativity.

It’s by Anne-Marie, and it’s called Dissolving the Magic Circle of Play: Lessons from Situationist Gaming. It moves away from a psychogeographical and Homo Ludens inspired idea of role of play. I don’t see how far it moves away from psychogeography, but it is clear how it moves away from Homo Ludens — it proposes that every place is a play space, and that play can have external messages; thus, breaking ‘the magic circle.’ The magic circle is the space where play is legitimized.

In transgressing the “magic circle,” a Situationist gaming tactic attempts to give transformative potential not just to play but to “normal” life.

It’s very interesting, and I think these sort of ideas will be more useful in the future. One of the things that is missing from people’s lives these days is ritual and wonder. Too many people are bowling alone, not enough are caught up in the tide of community.

By bringing the space that people play games into the every day reality of other people, we can increase people’s sense of ritual and wonder at the world, and increase our audience. By breaking down the circle of play and making it happen everywhere, we can create large scale zones of entertainment where life, play, and ‘reality’ intertwine. I don’t think that BM, for example, is the only zone for that sort of thing, but it’s been interesting to witness it’s evolution.

We are bored with the suburbs, the stale imperialist sexist engineering biased corporate game industry, and with new academic ludology that reifies existing superstructures. We are ready to play reality TV off camera. [...] If big players are intervening in gamespace, then it
is time for Situationist gaming.

I think this is a good thing. I really advise reading this article. Expect the future to contain more play in public spheres. I think as the cost of random things continues to go up and as Hollywood entertainment continues to suck and get progressively more innocuous and violent, the future may be people carrying out entertainment by other means.

Pierce County Sheriff spokesman Ed Troyer said a couple called 911 after returning home Monday evening to find their 26-year-old roommate angry and handling explosives.

When deputies arrived at the house near the intersection of 160th Street and 70th Avenue East, the man ran upstairs with a duffle bag full of explosives and other bomb making materials. Troyer said the man began playing music loudly and deputies backed away from the house.

Within moments of the deputies’ exit around midnight, the top floor of the house exploded.

“He either accidentally or intentionally set the explosion off, which took the whole top floor off of the residence and engulfed the house in flames,” Troyer said.

One of the things about living in the PNW, is that in the winter people get crazy to levels completely inconceivable to the rest of the country.
Because of the omnipresent dark, things can get really grim here by march or so. Things are beginning to get more sane locally, but as this article reveals, a couple of people are still in extreme winter mode — it rained like all bloody hell yesterday.