Brokekid.net

Dean Still Has the Most Delegates: He’s beating Kerry by 19

Despite winning both the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary, John Kerry trails Howard Dean on the delegate scorecard. How can Kerry have fewer delegates than the man he’s twice trounced at the polls?

The discrepancy is due to the early whims of some unpledged delegates, colloquially known as superdelegates. Of the 4,964 delegates who will attend the Democratic convention in Boston this July, the majority are obliged to support specific candidates in accordance with how their respective states voted during primary season. But there are 801 delegates who won’t be bound by such customs. These superdelegates—typically congressmen, party leaders, and other political bigwigs—can support whomever they please at the convention. The delegate scorecard so far, then, takes into account that just more than a quarter of the superdelegates have already expressed a public preference for one candidate or another, and Dean has been the more popular choice than Kerry among this elite.

(Slate.com)

Scandal! Illegal Vouchers for Oil, for Pro – Saddam Factions Discoverd in Iraq

The issuing of vouchers by Saddam’s regime may have served two primary purposes:

A: Payments in the form of bribes to individuals and organizations for their support of the regime.

B: Vouchers may have been issued to pay for goods and services that fell under U.N. Security Council sanctions and could not be financed under the “Oil for Food” program. Goods may have included military equipment or military parts, luxury automobiles that Saddam distributed as gifts inside and outside Iraq, and general luxury goods for the benefit of high-ranking officials in the Ba’ath party and government.

The voucher recipients sold the vouchers to oil traders, who then collected the oil against the vouchers from the Kirkuk-Banias (Syria) pipeline terminal, which was operating in contravention of the Security Council sanctions. The pipeline carried 200,000 barrels per day of Iraqi oil, which benefited Syria greatly.

The list of recipients:

Canada: Arthur Millholland

United States: Samir Vincent, Shaker Al-Khafaji

Great Britain: George Galloway, Fawwaz Zreiqat, Mujahideen Khalq

France: The French-Arab Friendship Association, Former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, Patrick Maugein of the Trafigura Company, Michel Grimard, founder of the French-Iraqi Export Club

Switzerland: Glenco Reand, Taurus, Petrogas, Rosneftegazetroy, Alcon, Finar Holdings

the list goes on…

(MEMRI.org)

TAKE ACTION! Keep Facts Free!

We’re surrounded by free factual information, but there’s a bill in Congress that would lock it all up. The Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act (DCIMA, H.R. 3261) extends extremely broad copyright-like protections to collections of factual data – data like the price of a TV, the temperature in Arizona or information collected during scientific research. DCIMA would allow companies to sue anyone who interferes with their ability to profit from data that they collect. In other words, academic researchers, public libraries, Internet innovators and other database users would have to pay up if someone else claimed to have assembled the data first. This is not only unnecessary, it’s bad policy.

(EFF.org)

The Presidential Market Game

Presidential Market 2004 is an online game in which players build virtual “portfolios” by trading shares of “stock” in the major 2004 presidential candidates.

The object of the game is to finish — on Election Day, Nov. 2, 2004 — with the highest value portfolio by executing savvy, calculated trades throughout the Democratic primaries and the general election campaign, by betting on the likelihood that a candidate’s “share price” will go up or down at any given time as a result of campaign developments or other events. In other words, Presidential Market 2004 is not a poll or a popularity contest — this is not the place to pump your favorite candidate — it is a simulated futures market in which only the shrewdest political analysts, and the shrewdest traders, will come out ahead.

(PresidentialMarket.org)

Pics from the inside of Your Head

This guy has an entire collection of pinhole camera shotsfrom the inside of his mouth. Intersting shots.

(PinholePhotography.com)

Quarantining Dissent: How the Secret Service Protects Bush from Free Speech

When President Bush travels around the United States, the Secret Service visits the location ahead of time and orders local police to set up “free speech zones” or “protest zones,” where people opposed to Bush policies (and sometimes sign-carrying supporters) are quarantined. These zones routinely succeed in keeping protesters out of presidential sight and outside the view of media covering the event.

When Bush went to the Pittsburgh area on Labor Day 2002, 65-year-old retired steel worker Bill Neel was there to greet him with a sign proclaiming, “The Bush family must surely love the poor, they made so many of us.”

The local police, at the Secret Service’s behest, set up a “designated free-speech zone” on a baseball field surrounded by a chain-link fence a third of a mile from the location of Bush’s speech.

(SFGate.com)

Are Parallels To Nazi Germany Crazy?

The customers always write.

I get about 400 e-mails in response to my columns every week, which might explain why I didn’t answer yours. Here, slightly edited, is one of the more interesting ones from last week. It’s from Herr Moellers in Germany:

“Dear Mr. Sorensen,

“I have many American friends and used to go on business travel to the U.S. a lot (I stopped doing that after even our European governments have given in to Uncle Sam’s appetite for information about individuals traveling to God’s Own Country), and I am shocked by the deterioration of democracy in a country that I used to love. This administration is a shame and the destabilization they have brought to the world is scaring the s** out of me…

(SFGate.com)

A Corporation Doesn’t Make for a Very Well-Adjusted Individual

The Corporation, which just won an audience award at the Sundance Film Festival, is a film that explores the following question:

In law, the corporation is a “person”. But what kind of person is it?
Unsurprisingly, a corporation doesn’t make for a very well-adjusted individual (emphasis mine):

Considering the odd legal fiction that deems a corporation a “person” in the eyes of the law, the feature documentary employees a checklist, based on actual diagnostic criteria of the World Health Organization and DSM IV, the standard tool of psychiatrists and psychologists. What emerges is a disturbing diagnosis.

Self-interested, amoral, callous and deceitful, a corporation’s operational principles make it anti-social. It breaches social and legal standards to get its way even while it mimics the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism. It suffers no guilt. Diagnosis: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath.

(Kottke.org)