But you've got to include the intangible benefits!

As I've mentioned earlier, for the past couple of years, I've been an election poll worker in my district.  For those who may not be aware of the details, this isn't a volunteer position. There is a time commitment  - training and, obviously, sitting around all day at the polls - so, in addition to the dubious pleasure of acting as a civil servant for a day, there is also an element of purely financial remuneration involved.

I'm both unsurprised and amused to note that, given the amount of time I spent at the polls this year, said compensation in my county ends up being just slightly less than the Federal minimum wage.

"One does not simply walk into Tampa."

The Lieutenant of the Tower of Barad-dur she was, and her name is remembered in no tale; for she herself had forgotten it, and she said: “I am the Mouth of Romney. . ."

Yet another reason to dislike the oatmeal candidate.  Bland and slimy.

Bland, insipid, uninspiring...

... all synonyms for Mitt Romney.  In a comment seen over on Althouse:

The underwhelmingness of Mitt Romney is a wonder to behold.

Indeed.  Oatmeal, anyone?

horn->toot();

Ahem.

I happen to be one of the folks who helped build the FXT 3500 from Avere Systems.

Which is - as of today - sitting pretty at the top of the SPEC NFS benchmarks, clocking in at 1.56 million ops/sec with a 0.99 ms overall response time.  Oh, and with half the hardware - and at half the cost - of the previous two record holders.

Faster, better, cheaper... choose any three.

/me does his happy dance :-)

Ahem.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled political ranting...

Printer Drivers

Hey, HP?  I'm willing to leave my current job and take over your printer software division.  I may be the first VP of yours that has to list tar & feathers as a monthly budgetary requirement, though.  At least until I can get y'all straightened out.

See, you supply printers.  Which are devices for taking ink, and applying it to paper.  For the vast majority of your customers, you are not - I repeat, not - in the business of supplying printing experiences.  I'd suspect that at least 90% of your customers would describe a "printing experience" as something in the vicinity of "When I tell it to print, it prints.  At which point I can get on with my life."

I'm just sayin'.

Go ahead, give me a holler.  I have quite reasonable rates.  Aside from the tar & feathers, that is.

Quaker Oats, Cream of Wheat, Or...

Herman or Newt?

The way things are starting to shake out in the Republican primaries, it's starting to look like that's the choice we're going to be presented with, unless Perry suddenly learns how to talk on national TV. Both Cain and Gingrich have their personal flaws, but as Scott M. points out over at American Digest:

You can't pick a candidate that will preempt liberal smears, so pick a candidate that will fight and win. Romney isn't electable. Romney is the man that lost to the man that lost to Obama. Conservatives are so afraid of a fight they hope to find a candidate that hits all the check marks so nobody will attack him. The desire for a candidate the libs can't attack should be proof your worldview is dysfunctional.

Emphasis mine.  I'd agree with this evaluation of Romney.  Erik Erickson recently opined that if Mitt wins the Republican nomination, conservatism dies and Barack Obama wins:

Mitt Romney is going to be the Republican nominee. And his general election campaign will be an utter disaster for conservatives as he takes the GOP down with him and burns up what it means to be a conservative in the process.

By any measure, nominating Romney is the "safe" option.  He's got steady numbers, after all - one in four Republicans support him!  And the rest, we're promised, will hold their noses and support him, too, because compared to our current train wreck of an administration and incompetent-in-chief, he'd be a marginally better choice!  Yay, Mitt!

In other words, he's political oatmeal.  Bland, tasteless, and what all the Grown Ups (TM) insist you should choose because it's good for you.

I... hate... oatmeal.

Insanity is often defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.  Mitt's just the same old soggy bowl of oats.  He's being peddled in a marginally attractive package in the hopes you'll think he's somehow different from all the bowls of mush you've choked down in the past.

No thank you.

There's still some time to go.  Miracles do happen, after all.  We could end up with a dark horse, come-from-behind front runner that is the perfect, personable, unsmearable conservative candidate we can all support.  I'd argue that expecting that to happen is just a slightly different form of insanity, though.

So... realistically.  Who's it going to be, folks?  Herman, or Newt?

Or are you going to be good boys and girls and eat your yummy, yummy Romney brand oatmeal?

Wiki Games

Via dustbury:

Go to your browser’s address bar and start typing en.wikipedia and report the five top results.

Hmmm.  Easy enough.  My five:

• Susan B. Anthony
• DCE/RPC
• Pittsburgh Mills
• Rifts (role-playing game)
• Burned (Hopkins novel)

I leave the presumed connections between these topics to your fevered imagination.

Election Observations, 2011

Just got back from working the polls for our local election.  Out of 15 hours (from prep to cleanup), it feels like 13 of those were on my feet.  Urgh.  Some anecdotal observations from southwestern PA:

• Turnout was about 26%.  Not great, but not particularly un-spetacular, either.  It was more or less what is expected for a local election.
• Democrats were generally winning, with most (minor) races falling into a 55%-45% margin.
• Which is a bit surprising, in that the precinct registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by about 4:1, as far as I can tell.
• Given that we had the same number of straight-ticket voters for the Democrats and Republicans, and that the races weren't obviously horrible blowouts in favor of the Democrats, I'm going to guess that Republicans were more motivated than Democrats, and so more likely to vote.
• An alternative explanation is that, for some unfathomable reason, a lot of Democrats decided that they were going to vote Republican.
• There were a number of folks who asked for help with a comment along the lines of "I don't care about (some random race), they told me who to vote for."  This was always the older voters.
• Speaking of which, the average age of voters was... uhm.  In the 60+ area, I'd guess.  The ratio of retired to otherwise was very high, and the number of obviously under 30 voters was very, very low.   We had a sum total of two (2) children accompanying parents today.

The last lead me to some interesting thinking.  What was the age of radical liberalism in the US?  Right - the 1960's.  So say you're 20 years old in the mid-1960s, and those years have left their mark on you.  You're a liberal, by George, and - while you may have some qualms about who you've been asked to vote for, here and there - you know, deep down, that "liberal" means "Democrat".

Fast forward to 2011.  You were 20 in 1966, so now you're... wait, what?

Seventy five.

Those old people who were willing to vote for whoever "they" told them to vote for?  They're the children of the 60s.  Flower power, all we are saying is give peace a chance, hey hey ho ho, western civ has got to go.

Yeah... they're old now.

And by old, I mean dying.

Which brings me to OWS.

I'm starting to look at OWS and wonder if it's real purpose is to help raise up another generation of voters who were convinced that "compassionate == liberal == Democrat".  If they can mobilize some voters, or get some safe issues into the headlines, fine... but the real motivation is to re-create enough of the basic elements of 1960s counter-culture to grow a new generation of hardcore Democratic voters, since the old crop is starting to get a bit manky, if you know what I mean.

All right, enough random thoughts.  Time to relax.

What was the title of that Al Franken book again?

I've seen this photo of Susan B. Anthony showing up on Facebook recently, along with various messages of support for a woman's right to choose (to kill her unborn child, just in case you were wondering which choice we were talking about here).  Said "right" is one which a particular major political party endorses whole-heartedly, while another major political party generally does not.

The obvious implication is that, like Ms. Anothony, all Right Thinking (TM) people will choose the proper political party.  You know, the one Susan B. would have chosen - the Democrat party.

Except...

At the time the photo was taken, Susan B. Anthony - abolitionist, temperance movement activist, and women's suffrage activist - had found her home in the Republican party.  When she was arrested in 1872 for voting in the Presidential election, she reported that she had "positively voted the Republican ticket—straight..."  She apparently campaigned for Republican candidates who supported her ideals, at least until she became disillusioned with political parties in general later in life.

Even more signifiant is that fact that her position on abortion was... well, let's be charitable - inconsistent with the message that people are trying to use her name to endorse:

In her writings, Susan B. Anthony occasionally mentioned abortion. Susan B. Anthony opposed abortion which at the time was an unsafe medical procedure for women, endangering their health and life. She blamed men, laws and the "double standard" for driving women to abortion because they had no other options. ("When a woman destroys the life of her unborn child, it is a sign that, by education or circumstances, she has been greatly wronged." 1869) She believed, as did many of the feminists of her era, that only the achievement of women's equality and freedom would end the need for abortion. Anthony used her anti-abortion writings as yet another argument for women's rights.

Lies, half-truths, and deception.  Well, at least you've got to give the "progressive" left credit for being consistent.  Even if it is only consistently wrong, consistently misleading, and consistently on the side of death over life.

Aretae: "Where there is competition, there is no power. Where there is no competition, there is power."

Hmmm.  And if you can convince someone to cede power to you, for some reason... doesn't that logically result in a death of competition?  It seems like it would be so much easier to go that route, after all, especially in politics.  Skip the whole "getting everyone to agree" step, just jump straight to the grant of power with a "trust me, I know what I'm doing" and voilà! - goodbye competition.

I'm sure that's never happened, though.