Democrats: Make the Pie Higher!

In my political adulthood, I have voted for one presidential candidate who won: Bill Clinton in 1996. From Dukakis to Kerry, I know what it feels like to wake up on the first Wednesday in November and clean the tire treads off my back.

Everywhere but the Electoral College, Bush and the Republicans ran us over. They gained four seats in the Senate, four in the House, and might have gained one governorship, depending on the results of a Florida-close race in Washington.

This isn't the time for Democrats to follow our normal procedure and form the circular firing squad. We have a solid base that was 150,000 votes -- perhaps much less -- from turning Republican Ohio blue and winning the White House. The with-us-or-agin-us Bush gang pushes secular, tolerant, reality-based blue America further away with each passing day. We have to take advantage of that in Congress and state capitols, electing more Barack Obamas in the home-field half of the map.

The first step is to elect a Senate Minority Leader with a solid seat in a blue state. We can't have another Tom Daschle stabbing his own back with every effort he took to fight Bush, and it appears we're about to make that mistake again.

Before Harry Reid of Nevada wins the post when Senate Democrats convene on Nov. 16, we have to bang on our senators to choose Dick Durbin, a strong Democrat and the next-most-likely contender.

Durbin, in line to succeed Reid as Minority Whip, runs next in 2008 in Illinois. His state has such an inept GOP they imported the oddball Alan Keyes, who became the biggest loser in state history. Durbin can represent his party with as little fear of electoral payback as Bill Frist in Tennessee.

We only have 12 days. Here's some contact information for Democratic senators to bang on.

Politics · 2004/11/04 · 49 COMMENTS · Link

Handling 18.5 Janets of Web Traffic

The Drudge Retort was hammered yesterday, serving 10 gigabytes of traffic as thousands of people looked for exit polls and early election returns.

The unit of measurement for traffic here is Janet Jackson's right breast, the exposure of which maxed out the shared SDSL connection on my old server. For seventeen straight hours, it served 144 kilobytes per second of traffic (1 Janet) to people on a fruitless search for celebrity mammary.

Since that time, I have moved to dedicated server hosting with ServerMatrix. Yesterday between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. EST, traffic hit a high of 2.61 megabytes per second.

That's 18.5 Janets, so by that metric the move to ServerMatrix has been successful, especially at the $59 monthly rate I'm paying (plus a $299 setup fee). I could serve 10 gigabytes a day in traffic for the rest of the month without running excess bandwidth charges, which begin at 1,200 gigabytes.

However, the software running my sites failed to handle the traffic. Users compared the performance of my hand-coded MySQL/PHP software to a 14.4K AOL dialup line circa 1997, and I spent the afternoon turning off template rendering in Movable Type 3.11 to keep the Drudge Retort online. The only software that could handle all those Janets without breaking down or dropping to glacial speed was Apache 2.0.46.

Clearly, I'm not being smart about caching dynamic database content so that most Web requests can be served statically by Apache. I'm going to work towards this goal in my LAMP software, Movable Type, and Manila.

I don't want to be caught unprepared on Nov. 4, 2008, when Howard Stern runs against Pat Robertson.

Wordzilla · Php · Movable Type · Manila · 2004/11/03 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Florida: The Election is In Your Hands

I voted in St. Johns County, Florida, this morning, a reliably Republican area that uses optical voting machines which spit mismarked paper ballots back at voters, giving you a chance to mark up a new one and try again. Few ballots were spoiled here in 2000 and the same process is in place this year.

Much to my amazement, the "A-C" precinct worker checking my identification hesitated before giving me a ballot, challenging my signature. My penmanship has been in steady decline since I began waging war against my wrists as a code monkey in the '80s. The signature they had on file for me had to be 20 years old, which is inexplicable because I moved to Florida in 1997, so the two scribblings barely resembled each other. Fortunately, because my driver's license signature matched and my license photo looks like the deranged loner you see here on Workbench, worker "D-F" talked him into giving me my damn ballot.

I don't know what's going on here, but I'm hoping it's just an overzealous precinct worker. If Florida election supervisors are encouraging workers to pass judgment on voter signatures, this is going to be a long day.

Florida · Politics · 2004/11/02 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Google News search: "If Kerry wins", 1,450 results; "if Bush wins", 1,140 results; "if Nader wins", 1 result.

Politics · 2004/11/02 · Comment · Link

Weblogger, Love Thyself

The New York Times asked several webloggers today to identify the most important moment in the 2004 presidential campaign. I love the answer given by attorneys John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson, publishers of Power Line:

The most important event of the campaign was the exposure of documents cited by 60 Minutes in its report on President Bush's Air National Guard service as fraudulent. We participated in this exposure by asking our readers for information relevant to the documents' authenticity, and then by organizing and disseminating the information we received on topics like the typewriters of the early 1970's and arcane points of military protocol in the same era.

We posted our observations about the 60 Minutes documents on the morning of Sept. 9, the day after Dan Rather's report was broadcast. We updated the posting through the day as new information came in from readers. Within 12 hours, more than 500 other Web sites had linked to ours, millions of people were aware of the serious questions that had been raised about CBS's documents, and CBS News executives were on the defensive.

When it became clear within a few days that the documents were indeed fake, it was widely recognized that journalism had changed forever. Never again will the mainstream news media be able to dictate the flow of information to the American people.

Given three paragraphs of prime real estate in the Times op-ed section, these guys made them count, taking credit for revolutionizing politics, journalism, and typewriters of the 1970s.

Journalism · Politics · 2004/11/02 · Comment · Link

At Least the Opposition is Still Loyal

Because this is primarily a technical weblog, I know there are right-wing readers who could leap to the defense of the Bush/Cheney campaign. Pretend for a moment I'm not a hopeless yellow-dog Democrat. Help me understand the logic of demanding loyalty oaths to attend Bush rallies, even to the point of driving away and alienating supporters.

In Pennsylvania, a GOP backer was refused tickets to a rally and harassed by campaign staffers. Her offense: Getting a ride from a coworker with a Kerry/Edwards sticker on her car.

... a man wearing a Bush-Cheney T-shirt confronted [Simi] Nischal in the parking lot and told her to leave.

"He was so rude, he made me feel like a criminal," Nischal said. "I said, 'That's not fair, you are losing a supporter.' [And he said], 'We don't care about your support.' "

Nischal said onlookers cheered and laughed at her as she left the property.

In Florida, a state senator led a crowd of 2,000 waiting for President Bush to say a pledge of allegiance, but not one to the country. To Bush.

"I want you to stand, raise your right hands," and recite "the Bush Pledge," said Florida state Sen. Ken Pruitt. The assembled mass of about 2,000 in this Treasure Coast town about an hour north of West Palm Beach dutifully rose, arms aloft, and repeated after Pruitt: "I care about freedom and liberty. I care about my family. I care about my country. Because I care, I promise to work hard to re-elect, re-elect George W. Bush as president of the United States."

I can understand cultivating a healthy amount of suspicion among campaign apparatchiks to ferret out people who are only attending a rally to raise hell. But there are a lot more Americans who would eagerly attend an event to respectfully hear the president make his case, even a partisan like me. Reading Joe Dougherty's report from Bush's recent Jacksonville rally at Alltel Stadium made me wish I had been there.

How can this Dear Leader Kim Jong-il stuff possibly help Bush? If John Kerry demanded proof of my loyalty, I'd vote for Pat Paulsen.

Politics · 2004/10/29 · 6 COMMENTS · Link

Newsday columnist Ellis Hedican asks a good question: If we can trust banks to get millions of ATM transactions correct with a paper receipt every single time, why can't we trust the process of counting our votes?

A big computer somewhere in the bowels of Citibank recorded my every twitch. I am sure of it. One hundred dollars is gone from my checking account. The date, time and place of my transaction are recorded for eternity. And when the monthly statement is mailed to my apartment, every last detail will be right there in black and white. I know this from experience.

Politics · 2004/10/29 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

Read More Entries