Category: General

Electoral-vote.com is slashdotted or being DOS’ed (six of one…) but today its mysterious maintainer revealed his identity — it’s Andy Tannenbaum, author of Minix, after which Linux was modeled! Tannenbaum’s been in the news a bit of late because some Microsoft shills have been trying hard to make him say that Linux is a ripoff of Minix, which annoys him, because he thinks (with some justification) that Minix is much better designed than Linux and the idea that Linux is a close imitation of Minix insults him.

Anyway, hats off to Professor Tanenbaum.

Jim’s Brain Online: Dirty Robocalls? reports a fake campaign call that’s going around Michigan (I’ve heard about it from one other friend today) calling people up and asking them to vote John Kerry so he will “protect our right to gay marriage.” Jim goes into a lot of detail as to why the call is transparently fake. It was pointed out by another friend on a mailing list where this was being discussed that this is a classic Karl Rove style attack, comparable to the “push polling” that was done in the primary that helped Bush defeat McCain in South Carolina, by falsely insinuating that he had fathered a child on a black woman out of marriage. (In actual fact, he had adopted a daughter with somewhat dark skin; the fake push polls were playing off that fact.)

You know, I was just about going to vote Bush this year, but thanks to this I’m gonna change my mind and vote a straight Democratic ticket.

BTW, if you do vote a straight democratic ticket, double check your results, mm-kay?

UPDATE: Made abcnews.com. The ABC article includes rumors provided by the Michigan GOP of bogus pro-Bush calls, in order to be “fair and balanced.” Of course, the bogus Kerry calls are so widespread that two people I know happen to have received them and they’re documented in a large number of Michigan cities, while I haven’t heard of anybody actually receiving the bogus pro-Bush calls; they’re just rumored to exist by the GOP. It’s one of those “hey, both sides are using dirty tricks!” things, where one side can get away with anything, no matter how egregious, because they point to something done by somebody on the other side and insist it’s equivalent. Classic media logic.

MC Frontalot brings us, for the election, a lovely new “Mission Accomplished” remix of his classic Special Delivery.

Interesting how the song has aged. It was written, I believe, in anticipation of the Iraq War, and its original version was a protest against what the war would have been if it went a lot better than it actually has.